THE FANTASTIC IMAGINATION.

GEORGE MACDONALD.

That we have no English word corresponding to the German Mährchen,

drives us to use the word Fairytale, regardless of the fact that the tale may
have nothing to do with any sort of fairy. The old use of the word Fairy, by
Spenser at least, might, however, well be adduced, were justification or
excuse necessary where need must.
Were I asked, what is fairytale? I should reply, Read Undine1: that is
a fairytale; then read this and that as well, and you will see what is a
fairytale. Were I further begged to describe the Fairytale, or define what it
is, I would make answer, that I should as soon think of describing the
abstract human face, or stating what must go to constitute a human being.
A fairytale is just a fairytale, as a face is just a face; and of all fairytales I
know, I think Undine the most beautiful.
Many a man, however, who would not attempt to define a man,
might venture to say something as to what a man ought to be: even so much
I will not in this place venture with regard to the fairytale, for my long past
work in that kind might but poorly instance or illustrate my now more
matured judgment. I will but say some things helpful for the reading, in
right-minded fashion, of such fairytales as I would wish to write, or care to
read.
Some thinkers would fell sorely hampered if at liberty to use no
forms but such as existed in nature, or to invent nothing save in accordance
with the laws of the world of senses; but it must not therefore be imagined
that they desire escape from the region of law. Nothing lawless can show

1
Undinne: 1811 romance by the German writer Friederich, Baron de la motte Fouqué.
the last reason why it should exist, or could at best have more than an
appearance of life.
The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them
in the way of presentment any more than in the way of use; but they
themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases,
invent a little world of his own, with its own laws; for there is that in him
which delights in calling up new forms ―which is the nearest, perhaps, he
can come to creation. When such forms are new embodiments of old truths,
we call them products of the Imagination; when there are mere inventions,
however lovely, I should call them the work of the Fancy: either case, Law
has been diligently at work2.
His world once invented, the highest law that comes next into play is,
that there shall be harmony between the laws by which the new world has
begun to exist; and in the process of his creation, the inventor must hold by
those laws. The moment he forgets one of them, he makes the story, by its
own postulates, incredible. To be able to live a moment in an imagined
world, we must see the laws of its existence obeyed. Those broken, we fall
out of it. The imagination in us, whose exercise is essential to the most
temporary submission to the imagination of another, immediately, with the
disappearance of Law, ceases to act. Suppose the gracious creatures of
some childlike region of Fairyland talking either cockney or Gascon3!
Would not the tale, however lovely begun, sink at once to the level of
Burlesque ―of all forms of literature the least worthy? A man’s invention
may be stupid or jar with another, he contradicts himself as an inventor, he
is no artist. He does not rightly consort his instruments, or he tunes them in
different keys. The mind of man is the product of live Law; it thinks by
law, it dwells in the midst of law, it gathers from law its growth; with law,
therefore, can it alone work to any result. Inharmonious, unconsorting ideas
2
Imagination… Fancy: see Coleridge, Biographia literaria, chapter 13.
3
cockney or Gascon: dialects of urban London and provincial France.
will come to a man, but if he try to use one of such, his work will grow
dull, and he will drop it from mere lack of interest. Law is the soil in which
beauty will grow; beauty is the only stuff in which Truth can be clothed;
and you may, if you will, call Imagination the tailor that cuts her garments
to fit her, and Fancy his journeyman that puts the pieces of them together,
or perhaps at most embroiders their button-holes. Obeying laws, the maker
works like his creator; not obeying law, he is such a fool as heaps a pile of
stones and calls it a church.
In the moral world it is different: there a man may clothe in new
forms and for this employ his imagination freely, but he must invent
nothing. He may not, for any purpose, turn its laws upside down. He must
not meddle with the relations of live souls. The laws of the spirit of man
must hold, alike in this world and in any world he may invent. It were no
offence to suppose a world in which everything repelled instead of
attracting the things around it; it would be wicked to write a tale
representing a man it called good as always doing bad things, or a man it
called bad as always doing good things: the notion itself is absolutely
lawless. In physical things a man may invent; in moral things he must obey
―and take their laws with him into his invented world as well.
“You write as if a fairytale were a thing of importance: must it have a
meaning?”
It cannot help having some meaning; if it have proportion and
harmony it has vitality, and vitality is truth. The beauty may be plainer in it
than the truth, but without the truth the beauty could not be, and the
fairytale would give no delight. Everyone, however, who feels the story,
will read its meaning after his own nature and development: one man will
read one meaning in it, another will read another.
“If so, how am I to assure myself that I am not reading my own
meaning into it, but yours out of it?”
 Why should you be so assured? It may be better that you should read
your meaning into it. That may be a higher operation of your intellect than
the mere reading of mine out of it: your meaning may be superior to mine.
“Suppose my child asks me what the fairytale means, what am I to
say?”
If you do not know what it means, what is easier than to say so? If
you do see a meaning in it, there it is for you to give him. A genuine work
of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.
If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it
needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither
you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to
convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it does not even wake an
interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If,
again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it
will not serve you much. At all events, the business of the painter is not to
teach zoology4.
But indeed your children are not likely to trouble you about the
meaning. They find what they are capable of finding, and more would be to
much. For my part, I do not write for children, but for the childlike,
whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.
A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is
not an allegory. He must be an artist indeed who can, in any mode, produce
a strict allegory that it is not a weariness to the spirit. An allegory must be
Mastery or Moorditch5.
A fairytale, like a butterfly or a bee, helps itself on all sides, sips at
every wholesome flower, and spoils not one. The true fairytale is, to my
mind, very like the sonata. We all know that the sonata means something:

4
Not to teach zoology: see the opening chapter of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) with its similar
attack on materialist definition of a horse.
5
Mastery or Moorditch: i.e., either perfection or a total chaos.
and where there is the faculty of talking with suitable vagueness, and
choosing metaphor sufficiently loose, mind approach mind, in the
interpretation of a sonata, with the result of a more or less contenting
consciousness of sympathy. But if two or three men sat down to write each
what the sonata meant to him, what approximation to definite idea would
be the result? Little enough ―and that little more than needful. We should
fid it had roused related, if not identical, feelings, but probably not one
common thought. Has the sonata therefore failed? Had it undertaken to
convey, or ought it to be expected to impart anything defined, anything
notionally recognizable?
“But words are not music; words are least meant and fitted to carry
precise meaning!”
It is very seldom indeed that they carry the exact meaning of any
user of them! And if they can be so used as to convey definite meaning, it
does not follow that they ought never to carry anything else. Words are live
things that may be variously employed to various ends. They can convey a
scientific fact, or throw a shadow of her child’s dream on the heart of a
mother. They are things to put together like the pieces of a dissected map,
or to arrange like the notes on a stave. Is the music in them to go for
nothing? It can hardly help the definiteness of a meaning: is it therefore to
be disregarded? They have length, and breadth, and outline: Have they
nothing to with depth? Have they only to describe, never to impress? Has
nothing any claim to their use but the definite? The cause of a child’s tears
may be altogether undefinable: has the mother therefore no antidote for his
vague misery? That may be strong in colour which has no evident outline.
A fairytale, a sonata, a gathering storm, a limitless night, seizes you and
sweeps you away: do you begin at once to wrestle with it and ask whence
his power over you, whither it is carrying you? The law of each is in the
mind of the composer; that law makes one man feel this way, another man
feel that way. To one the sonata is a world of odour and beauty, to another
of soothing only and sweetness. To one, the cloudy rendezvous is a wild
dance, with terror at its heart; to another, a majestic march of heavenly
hosts, with Truth in their centre pointing their course, but as yet restraining
her voice. The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.
I will go farther. The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to
rousing his conscience, is ―not to give him things to think about, but to
wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for
himself. The best Nature does for us is to work in us such moods in which
thoughts of high importance arouse. Does any respect of Nature wake but
one thought? Does she ever suggest only one definite thing? Does she
make any two men in the same place at the same moment think the same
thing? Is she therefore a failure, because she is no definite? Is it nothing
that she rouses the something deeper than the understanding ―the power
that underline thoughts? Does she not set feeling, and so thinking at work?
Would it be better that she did this after one fashion and not after many
fashions? Nature is mood-engendering, thought-provoking: such ought the
sonata, such ought the fairytale to be.
“But a man may then, imagine in your work what he pleases, what
you never meant!”
Not what he pleases, but what he can. If he be not a true man, he will
draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art!
If he be a true man, he will imagine true things; what matter whether I
meant them or not? They are there none the less that I cannot claim putting
them there” One difference between God’s work and man’s is, that, while
God’s work cannot men more than he meant, man’s must mean more than
he meant. For everything that God has made, there is layer upon layer of
ascending significance; also he expresses the thought in higher and higher
of that thought; it is God’s things, his embodied thoughts, which only alone
a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the
expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures
falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not
foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many
are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every
symbol. A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he
was dealing all the time with things that came from thoughts beyond his
own.
“But surely you would explain your idea to one who asked you?”
I say again, if I cannot draw a horse, I will not write THIS IS A
HORSE under what I foolishly meant for one. Any key to a work of
imagination would be nearly, if not quite as absurd. The tale is there, not to
hide, but to show: if it show nothing at your window, do not open your
door to it; leave it out in the cold. To ask me to explain, is to say, “Roses!
Boil them, or we won’t have them!” Ma tales may not be roses, but I will
not boil them.
So long as I think my dog can bark, I will not sit up to bark for him.
If a writer’s aim be logical conviction, he must spare no logical
pains, not merely to be understood, but to escape being misunderstood;
where his object is to move suggestion, to cause to imagine, the let him
assail the soul of his reader as the wind assails an Aeolian harp. If there be
music in my reader, I would gladly wake it. Let fairytale of mine go for a
firefly that now flashes, now is dark, but may flash again. Caught in a hand
which does not love its kind, it will turn to an insignificant, ugly thing, that
can neither flash nor fly.
The best way with music, I imagine, is not to bring the forces of our
intellect to bear upon it, but to be still and let it work on that part of us for
whose sake it exists. We spoil countless precious things by intellectual
greed. He who will be a man, and will be not a child must ―He cannot
help himself― become a little man, that is, a dwarf. He will, however, need
no consolation, for he is sure to think himself a very large creature indeed.
If any strain of my “broken music6” make a child’s eyes flash, or his
mother’s grow for a moment dim, my labour will not have been in vain.

6
Broken music: a phrase used by the jester Dagonet in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1872 “The Last
Tournament” in Idylls of the King.