Liu Yiush reads the experience of Phantastes

C. S. Lewis’s encounter with George MacDonald’s Phantastes began with an unremarkable purchase and became a turning point in how he understood imagination, Joy, and the ordinary world. Reading the book in his room after an October visit to Leatherhead, he recognized in its familiar woodland romance a new quality he later named holiness. The experience did not simply intensify his earlier longing for an ideal elsewhere: it changed the direction of that longing, as the book’s light seemed to enter daily life rather than make daily life disappear.

The journey to the book

Lewis sometimes walked to Leatherhead to look for books and have his hair cut, and in summer he went for the small swimming bath. On the October evening he later recalled, he and a porter were alone on the station’s long, timbered platform as daylight faded. At the bookstall Lewis chose a worn Everyman edition of Phantastes, its jacket dirty. The train’s call announced the Bookham, Effingham, Horsley route; that evening, back from the station, he began to read.

The purchase came within a literary life already formed by poetry, myth, and romance. At Campbell, reading Sohrab and Rustum with a master the boys called Octie, Lewis had been captivated by its cool distance and melancholy, and by such images as the cypress in the queen’s garden and the hushed Chorasmian waste. Later he read the Odyssey repeatedly, including the whole poem, and recalled its music and brightness becoming part of him. He also read The Faerie Queene and The Earthly Paradise. These encounters help explain why the woodland journeys and other traditional romance elements in Phantastes initially felt familiar: MacDonald’s book met an imagination already shaped by older poetic worlds.

Recognition and difference

Lewis says the story’s woodland journeys, ghostly enemies, and good and evil ladies drew him onward without his first noticing that anything had changed. In one sense, the new country resembled the old: it contained what had already charmed him in Malory, Spenser, Morris, and Yeats. In another sense, the experience was different. Lewis later identified the new quality resting on the travels of Anodos as holiness, a name he did not yet possess while reading.

The distinction mattered because the book did not ask him to confuse its imagined woods with a literal destination. Lewis found no temptation to treat the tale’s scenes as real or to suppose that reaching such a landscape would bring him closer to his desire. Yet the Joy moving through the story was also inseparable from the story’s particulars. Its effect lay in the relation between the imagined world and the light he perceived in it, not in abandoning the narrative for a separate, bodiless ideal.

From distant longing to the present

Lewis contrasts this reading with earlier visitations of Joy, which had left the common world seeming like a desert when they passed. In the experience of Phantastes, the light instead extended beyond the book. He describes it as gradually illuminating the woods and cottages in the story, his own past, the quiet room where he read, and his old teacher nodding over a small Tacitus. The movement is from fiction into life: ordinary surroundings are not dismissed as obstacles to desire but drawn into the quality that the story has disclosed.

That change also clarified what the new experience did not do. Lewis says the book’s atmosphere made his earlier erotic and magical distortions of Joy seem tawdry, yet it did not disenchant bread on the table or coals in the grate. The familiar objects remained themselves while acquiring a different relation to the radiance he had found in the story. He described the change not merely as a light cast onto common things, but as those things being drawn into the light. This is the central reversal of the episode: the old pattern made Joy seem to require departure from ordinary existence; this reading allowed the everyday world to participate in it.

Literary context and lasting significance

Phantastes appeared against the background of Lewis’s earlier literary and musical enthusiasms. A moment at Chartres, when his eye fell on a headline and picture in a literary periodical, had abruptly broken what he describes as a long winter and renewed his imaginative life. Though he had not yet heard Wagner, the printed form of the composer’s name had become a magical symbol; later, hearing the Ride of the Valkyries on a record at T. Edens Osborne’s shop turned Wagnerian recordings—especially music from the Ring, as well as Lohengrin and Parsifal—into a frequent use of his pocket money and requested gifts. These were distinct stages in the formation of his imagination, not the same experience as reading MacDonald. Phantastes gave the familiar imaginative inheritance a further, religiously consequential dimension.

Lewis’s memoir presents the reading as an unasked-for gift, received while he still lacked understanding and consent. That night, he says, his imagination was in a certain sense baptized; the rest of him took longer. He did not then know what buying the book would mean. The lasting significance of the episode lies in that gap between immediate imaginative change and later belief: Phantastes did not itself complete a religious conversion, but it gave Lewis a way to perceive holiness within romance and to see ordinary life as capable of bearing, rather than excluding, the light of Joy.