The Fantastic Imagination

We have been enjoying George Macdonald's Princess and Curdie stories. Here is an excerpt from his wonderful essay on The Fantastic Imagination:

"One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is a layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of that thought: it is God's things, his embodied thoughts, which 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 things that came from thoughts beyond his own."

There are certainly many sublime moments in George Macdonald's books, and their highest moments have nothing to do with his writing ability, which is quite cumbersome at times.

For the discovery of George MacDonald, I have to thank C.S. Lewis, who said he had always considered GM his master.

Princess and the Goblins at Google Books