The evening that I now speak of was in
October. I and one porter had the long, timbered platform of Leatherhead
station to ourselves. It was getting just dark enough for the smoke of an
engine to glow red on the underside with the reflection of the furnace. The
hills beyond the Dorking Valley were of a blue so intense as to be nearly
violet and the sky was green with frost. My ears tingled with the cold. The
glorious week-end of reading was before me. Turning to the bookstall, I picked
out an Everyman in a dirty jacket, Phantastes, a Faerie
Romance, George MacDonald. Then the train came in. I can still remember the
voice of the porter calling out the village names, Saxon and sweet as a
nut—‘Bookham, Effingham, Horsley train.’ That evening I began to read my new
book.
The woodland journeyings in that story, the ghostly enemies, the
ladies both good and evil, were close enough to my habitual imagery to lure me
on without the perceptions of a change. It is as if I were carried sleeping
across the frontier, or as if I had died in the old country and could never
remember how I came alive in the new. For in one sense the new country was
exactly like the old. I met there all that had already charmed me in Malory,
Spenser, Morris, and Yeats. But in another sense all was changed. I did not yet
know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright
shadow, that rested on the travels of Anodos. I do now. It was Holiness. For
the first time the song of the sirens sounded like the voice of my mother of my
nurse. Here we’re old wives’ tales; there was nothing to be proud of in
enjoying them. It was as though the voice which had called to me from the
world’s end were now speaking at my side. It was with me in the room, or in my
own body, or behind me. If it had once eluded me by its distance, it now eluded
me by proximity—something too near to see, too plain to be understood, on this
side of knowledge. It seemed to have been always with me; if I could ever have
turned my head quick enough I should have seized it. Now for the first time I
felt that it was out of reach not because of something I could not do but
because of something I could not stop doing. If I could only leave off, let go,
unmake myself, it would be there. Meanwhile, in this new region all the confusions
that had hitherto perplexed my search for Joy were disarmed. There was no
temptation to confuse the scenes of the tale with the light that rested upon
them, or to suppose that they were put forward as realities, or even to dream
that if they had been realities and I could reach the woods where Anodos
journeyed I should thereby come a step nearer to my desire. Yet, at the same
time, never had the wind of Joy blowing through any story been less separable
from the story itself. Where the gif and the idolon were most
nearly one there was least danger of confusing them. Thus, when the great
moments came I did not break away from the woods and cottages that I read of to
seek some bodiless light shining beyond them, but gradually, with a swelling
continuity (like the sun at mid-morning burning through a fog) I found the
light shining on those woods and cottages, and then on my own past life, and on
the quiet room where I sat and in my old teacher where he nodded above his
little Tacitus. For I now perceived that while the air of the new
region made all my erotic and magical perversions of Joy look like sordid
trumpery, it had no such disenchanting power over the bread upon the table or
the coals in the grate. That was the marvel. Up till now each visitation of Joy
had left the common world momentarily a desert—‘The first touch of the earth
went night to kill.’ Even when real clouds or trees had been the material of
the vision, they had been so only by reminding me of another world; and I did
not like the return to ours. But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of the
book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and
yet itself unchanged. Or, more accurately, I saw the common things drawn into
the bright shadow. Unde hoc mihi? In the depth of my
disgraces, in the then invincible ignorance of my intellect, all this was given
me without asking, even without consent. That night my imagination was, in a
certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer. I had
not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.
