George MacDonald: Divine Carelessness and Fairytale Levity

7. Space: Fairyland’s Ecstatic Cosmology

143 s Fairyland’s Ecstatic Cosmology Space 7 Dome up, O heaven, yet higher o’er my head! Back, Back horizon; widen out my world! —“A Story of the Sea-Shore” Tolkien defines a fairy story as anything which deals with “the nature of Faerie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country,” but, with the humility of an anchorite, he warns against speaking directly about this realm: “I will not attempt to define [Faerie], nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faerie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable , though not imperceptible. It has many ingredients, but analysis will not necessarily discover the secret of the whole.”1 Tolkien here indulges in a little occultism: Faerie is a “secret” for the initiated who can only gesture toward its qualities.2 Perhaps, then, a discussion of this world is doomed from the outset.3 However, even if one of the qualities of Faerie is ineffability, Chesterton would be quick to rebut: It is perfectly true that there is something in all good things that is beyond all speech or figure of speech. But it is also true that there is in all good things a perpetual desire for expression and concrete embodiment; and though the attempt to embody it is always inadequate, the attempt is always made. If the idea does not seek to be the word, the chances are that it is an evil idea. If the word is not made flesh it is a bad word.4 144 George MacDonald s It is thus with boldness and humility that this chapter embarks upon a journey into the fairy cosmos of George MacDonald. The Quest for the Home-Centre Between the two smaller stories that make up “The Carasoyn” (the first telling how Colin rescues and then marries the girl Fairy, and the second how Colin rescues their son), MacDonald describes the fate of the fairies after their queen’s unfortunate decision to drink the Carasoyn. Being only “for really good people,” the magic wine—which seems to be a kind of true-form-revealing potion—instantly changes the fairies into “old men and women fairies” and drives them out of their native country. MacDonald explains: For when the wickedness of any fairy tribe reaches its climax, the punishment that falls upon them is, that they are compelled to leave that part of the country where they and their ancestors have lived for more years than they can count, and wander away, driven by an inward restlessness, ever longing after the country they have left.5 MacDonald then compares this agony with our human situation: “a torture quite analogous to which many human beings undergo from their birth to their death, and some of them longer, for anything I can tell.”6 Fairies, unlike humans, are naturally “at home” within their environment , but these fairies through their wickedness have entered into a condition analogous to humanity: they restlessly long for their home. Homeward desire is for MacDonald essential to human existence on earth. In his aforementioned essay “Browning’s ‘Christmas Eve,’” MacDonald, translating Novalis, goes so far as to equate the impulse to philosophize with the longing for home: “Philosophy is really homesickness , an impulse to be at home everywhere.” He continues: The life of a man here, if life it be, and not the vain image of what might be a life, is a continual attempt to find his place, his centre of recipiency, and active agency. [. . .] It is a climbing and striving to reach that point of vision where the multiplex crossings and apparent intertwistings of the lines of fact and feeling and duty shall manifest themselves as a regular and symmetrical design. A contradiction, or a thing unrelated, is foreign and painful to him, even as the rocky particle in the gelatinous substance of the oyster; and, like the latter, he can only rid himself of it by encasing it in the pearl-like s Space 145 enclosure of faith; believing that hidden there lies the necessity for a higher theory of the universe than has yet been generated in his soul. The quest for this home-centre, in the man who has faith, is calm and ceaseless [. . .] In all relations of life, in all the parts of the great whole of existence, the true man is...