Liu Yiushu's experience of reading Phantastes

C. S. Lewis’s reading of Phantastes was a turning point in his imaginative life. The book gathered familiar elements of romance into a new kind of experience: what he had pursued as distant Joy seemed to come close, and the light of the story appeared to rest on ordinary life rather than draw him away from it. He later identified that quality as holiness and described the reading as the baptism of his imagination, a change that preceded his wider religious development.

The Book and the Encounter

The reading began on an October evening after one of Lewis’s regular journeys to Leatherhead, where he went in winter to look for books and have his hair cut. At Leatherhead station, with only one porter on the long platform, he chose a worn Everyman edition of Phantastes by George MacDonald from the bookstall. The weekend of reading lay ahead; the train was announced as the Bookham, Effingham, Horsley service, and Lewis began the book that evening. The remembered particulars place the encounter within an ordinary routine, not a formal search for religious instruction.

The story’s woodland journeys, ghostly opponents, and good and evil ladies drew him in through images already familiar from Malory, Spenser, William Morris, and W. B. Yeats. At first, the new book seemed to belong to the imaginative country he knew. Yet Lewis later stressed that something had changed. He had not then learned the name of the quality he sensed in the travels of Anodos; in retrospect, he called it holiness. The recognition was not that the tale’s imagined places were real locations to be reached, but that the experience of reading carried a significance distinct from the story’s literal events.

Joy Comes Near

Before Phantastes, Lewis’s experiences of Joy had tended to point beyond the present world. Even when clouds or trees furnished the occasion, they mattered because they recalled another world, and returning to ordinary surroundings could feel like a loss. In MacDonald’s book, Lewis found a different relation between longing and its object: he did not need to leave the story’s woods and cottages in pursuit of some separate, bodiless light. The light seemed instead to shine upon the imagined landscape and, by degrees, upon the room where he read, his past life, and his old teacher nodding over a small Tacitus.

Lewis described the change as a reversal of distance. What had seemed to call from the world’s end now felt close at hand, even too near to see clearly. The longing remained elusive, but he understood its obstacle differently: it was not simply beyond his reach; he would have to let go of himself. This account connects the experience to his established search for Joy while distinguishing the new encounter from the earlier pursuit of remote or magical sources of desire.

The book also altered how the ordinary world appeared. Earlier visitations of Joy had, in his description, made common life seem temporarily barren. This time, the imaginative light did not strip value from everyday things. Lewis saw it resting on, or drawing into itself, the room and familiar objects such as bread on the table and coals in the grate. The common world was changed in significance without being replaced. That distinction is central to his account: the story did not function merely as an escape from reality, because the quality awakened by reading seemed to extend into reality while remaining more than any single object in it.

What the Experience Changed—and Did Not

Lewis contrasted the holiness he found in Phantastes with what he called his earlier erotic and magical distortions of Joy. The story did not tempt him to confuse its scenes with literal reality or to believe that reaching Anodos’s woods would itself satisfy his desire. Instead, the narrative and the light experienced through it came unusually close without becoming interchangeable. Lewis later expressed the paradox as a closeness between the god and the idolon—the reality and its image—that made confusion less likely, not more.

He called the episode an imaginative baptism, but carefully limited what that meant. The experience was given without his seeking it and even without his consent; it did not amount to an immediate conversion of his whole self. His own account says that the rest of him took longer to change, and that at the time he had no notion of what buying the book would involve. The event therefore marks a beginning in his retrospective spiritual history, not a sudden, complete resolution of belief.

Place in Lewis’s Reading Life

The importance Lewis assigned to Phantastes belongs to a longer sequence in which books, poems, and music redirected his imagination. At Campbell, reading Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum introduced him to a mood of distance, calm, and grave melancholy. Later, a headline and picture in a literary periodical abruptly broke the long winter he associated with his time at Chartres; Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries then struck him as a powerful expression of Northernness. These earlier encounters help clarify the distinctive role he gave MacDonald: Phantastes did not merely intensify an established imaginative atmosphere but changed how he understood the relation between imaginative longing and everyday existence.

His later reading also shows how receptive experience could be revised rather than discarded. He recalled approaching Homer through a romanticized taste shaped by William Morris, then growing able to enjoy the Odyssey in a more mature way. He found a different kind of belief in W. B. Yeats’s prose and poetry, where supernatural beings were treated as more than invented figures or desired possibilities. Against that wider background, Phantastes stands out because its effect was neither simply aesthetic enchantment nor an argument that resolved religious uncertainty. It gave Lewis a new way to perceive the ordinary world, while leaving the longer work of belief unfinished.