The Wise Imagination

George MacDonald was profoundly influenced by German Romanticism, particularly through the Idealism and creative imagination of Novalis. Novalis sought to shift the reader’s understanding of truth from an objective “expelling” of data to a subjective “inward” understanding. MacDonald often paraphrased Novalis in his personal correspondence, writing: “The Realist is an Idealist who knows nothing of himself. Realism is crude Idealism at first hand.” MacDonald felt a closer affinity to Novalis than to Coleridge, largely due to the German Romantic willingness to explore the explicitly spiritual. MacDonald found “life in the Spirit” through this Romantic lens; consequently, his fiction testifies to a form of Christianity that is vibrantly spiritual yet largely non-doctrinal.

With this understanding of MacDonald’s view of freedom, it is clear how his faith and conception of truth permeate his fiction. MacDonald relied heavily on his desire to lead readers into a genuine encounter with God; his characters and stories served as the vehicles through which he “preached.” The effectiveness of his writing is due, in part, to his ability to encompass the spirit of a message through metaphor rather than a didactic, static lecture. It is this metaphorical message—a truth received and realized within the reader—that primarily concerned him.

A quintessential example of this is found in The Princess and Curdie. Curdie is a young man sent by the “Wise Great-Great-Grandmother” on a quest to test his spirit. Before Curdie can begin, he must thrust his hands into the magical fiery roses in her hearth to burn away his calluses and impurities. Upon pulling his hands from the fire, Curdie discovers a supernatural ability: he can perceive a person’s true character simply by shaking their hand. The Grandmother advises him that people are rarely what they seem, noting a distinction found in one’s ability to trust:

“One of the latter sort comes at length to know at once whether a thing is true the moment it comes before him; one of the former class grows more and more afraid of being taken in, so afraid to believe in nothing but his dinner: to be sure of a thing with him is to have it between his teeth.”

For MacDonald, this image suggests that true life stems from an intuitive experience beyond the planes of rationalism. Rather than allowing rationalism to shake his belief in a God he could not “explain,” he accepted the unseen as a cosmic metaphor to be explored, even if it could never be fully understood. This is the heart of MacDonald’s Idealism: lack of understanding arises from deficient human reasoning, not from divine impotence. He went so far as to claim that “the bringing forth into sight of the things that are invisible [is] the end of all Art.”

MacDonald’s fiction thrives on the symbolic because he believed his writing mirrored the creativity of God. He argued that “hidden meanings are all around us” and that nature itself represents God’s character. “The meanings are in those forms already,” he wrote, explaining that mystery and metaphor are a “divine utterance.” This mystery was intentionally embedded in his fiction, supporting his belief that meaning can be relative yet substantive. As scholar David S. Robb explains, MacDonald believed literature should have as much conscious meaning “crammed into it” as possible, while still containing depths of meaning “far beyond what the author was conscious of devising.” This is seen in the recurring symbol of the fiery roses—handled only by the wise Grandmother—representing a purging and healing power available only to those ready for sanctification.

This symbolic view of nature extends beyond the fictional world. In his essay “A Dish of Orts,” MacDonald draws comparisons between Biography and Fiction. He writes that when fiction is of the “highest order and written in love,” it is beheld with reverence even by the writer. MacDonald famously called biography “God’s fiction,” suggesting that human life is the “shadowing forth” of an inward struggle.

In other words, fiction is man’s exploration of God’s more cosmic story—a wrestling with mysteries to “arrive at something greater than what now [we] can project and behold.” MacDonald rejected the notion that a biography should merely contain dates and facts. Instead, he believed biography, like fiction, must bear the burden of representing the symbolic. Quoting T.T. Lynch, MacDonald notes: “One biography may help conjecture or satisfy reason concerning the story of a thousand unrecorded lives… the milky luster that runs through midheaven is composed of a million lights, which are not the less separate because seen indistinguishably.” For MacDonald, a biography is not just the story of an individual; it is the story of how that individual’s spirit connects with the million other “lights” of humanity.