The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy Page 7

  Henry and his Adeline forgot in this delicious vale all their former sufferings, and giving up their minds to the pleasing influence of curiosity and wonder, they determined to explore the place by tracing the windings of the stream. Scarcely had they entered upon this plan, when music of the most ravishing sweetness filled the air, sometimes it seemed to float along the valley, sometimes it stole along the surface of the water, now it died away among the woods, and now, with deep and mellow symphony, it swelled upon the gale. Fixed in astonishment, they scarce ventured to breathe, every sense, save that of hearing, seemed absorbed; and when the last faint warblings melted on the air, they started from the spot, solicitous to know from what being those more than human strains had parted; but nothing appeared in view; the moon, full and unclouded, shone with unusual lustre; and filled with hope, they again pursued the windings of the water, which, conducting to the narrowest part of the valley, continued their course through the wood. This they entered by a path smooth, but narrow and perplexed, where, although its branches were so numerous that no preference could be given, or any direct route long persisted in, yet every turn presented something to amuse, something to sharpen the edge of research. The beauty of the trees, through whose interstices the moon gleamed in the most picturesque manner, the glimpses of the water, and the notes of the nightingale, who now began to fill the valley with her song, were more than sufficient to take off the sense of fatigue, and they wandered on, still eager to explore, still ardent for further discovery.

  The wood now became more thick and obscure, and at length almost dark, when, the path taking suddenly an oblique direction, they found themselves on the edge of a circular lawn, whose tint and softness were beyond compare, and which seemed to have been lightly brushed by fairy feet. A number of fine old trees, around whose boles crept the ivy and the woodbine, rose at irregular distances, here they mingled into groves, and there, separate and emulous of each other, vied in spiral elegance, or magnitude of form. The water which had been for some time concealed, now murmured through a thousand beds, and visiting each little flower, added vigour to its vegetation, and poignancy to its fragrance. Along the edges of the wood, and beneath the shadows of the trees, an innumerable host of glow-worms lighted their innocuous fires, lustrous as the gems of Golconda; and, desirous yet longer to enjoy the scene, they went forward with light footsteps on the lawn; all was calm, and, except the breeze of night, that sighed soft and sweetly through the world of leaves, a perfect silence prevailed. Not many minutes, however, had elapsed, before the same enchanting music, to which they had listened with so much rapture in the vale, again arrested their attention, and presently they discovered on the border of the lawn, just rising above the wood, and floating on the bosom of the air, a being of the most delicate form; from his shoulders streamed a tunic of tenderest blue, his wings and feet were clothed in downy silver, and in his grasp he had a wand white as the mountain-snow. He rose swiftly in the air, his brilliance became excessive from the lunar rays, his song echoed through the vault of night, but having quickly diminished to the size and appearance of the evening star, it died away, and the next moment he was lost in ether. The lovers still fixed their view on that part of the heavens where the vision had disappeared, and shortly had the pleasure of again seeing the star-like radiance, which in an instant unfolded itself into the full and fine dimensions of the beauteous being, who, having collected dew from the cold vales of Saturn, now descended rapidly towards the earth, and waving his wand as he passed athwart the woods, a number of like form and garb flew round him, and all alighting on the lawn, separated at equal distances on its circumference, and then shaking their wings, which spread a perfume through the air, burst into one general song.

  Henry and Adeline, who, apprehensive of being discovered, had retreated within the shadow of some mossy oaks, now waited with eager expectation the event of so singular a scene. In a few moments a bevy of elegant nymphs, dancing two by two, issued from the wood on the right, and an equal number of warlike knights, accompanied by a band of minstrels, from that on the left. The knights were clothed in green; on their bosoms shone a plate of burnished steel, and in their hands they grasped a golden targe, and lance of beamy lustre. The nymphs, whose form and symmetry were beyond the youthful poet’s dream, were dressed in robes of white, their zones were azure dropt with diamonds, and their light brown hair decked with roses, hung in ample ringlets. So quick, so light and airy, was their motion, that the turf, the flowers, shrunk not beneath the gentle pressure, and each smiling on her favourite knight, he flung his brilliant arms aside, and mingled in the dance.

  Whilst they thus flew in rapid measures over the lawn, the lovers, forgetting their situation, and impatient to salute the assembly, involuntarily stept forward, and instantaneously, a shrill and hollow gust of wind murmured through the woods, the moon dipt into a cloud, and the knights, the nymphs, and aerial spirits, vanished from the view, leaving the astonished pair to repent at leisure their precipitate intrusion; scarce, however, had they time to determine what plan they should pursue, when a gleam of light flashed suddenly along the horizon, and the beauteous being whom they first beheld in the air, stood before them; he waved his snow-white wand, and pointing to the wood, which now appeared sparkling with a thousand fires, moved gently on. Henry and his amiable companion felt an irresistible impulse which compelled them to follow, and having penetrated the wood, they perceived many bright rays of light, which darting like the beams of the sun through every part of it, most beautifully illumined the shafts of the trees. As they advanced forward, the radiance became more intense, and converged towards a centre, and the fairy being turning quickly round, commanded them to kneel down, and having squeezed the juice of an herb into their eyes, bade then now proceed, but that no mortal eye, unless its powers of vision were adapted to the scene, could endure the glory that would shortly burst upon them. Scarcely had he uttered these words when they entered an amphitheatre; in its centre was a throne of ivory inlaid with sapphires, on which sate a female form of exquisite beauty, a plain coronet of gold obliquely crossed her flowing hair, and her robe of white satin hung negligent in ample folds. Around her stood five-and-twenty nymphs clothed in white and gold, and holding lighted tapers; beyond these were fifty of the aerial beings, their wings of downy silver stretched for flight, and each a burning taper in his hand; and lastly, on the circumference of the amphitheatre, shone one hundred knights in mail of tempered steel; in one hand they shook aloft a targe of massy diamond, and in the other flashed a taper. So excessive was the reflection, that the targes had the lustre of an hundred suns, and, when shaken, sent forth streams of vivid lightning: from the gold, the silver, and the sapphires, rushed a flood of tinted light, that mingling, threw upon the eye a series of revolving hues.

  Henry and Adeline, impressed with awe, with wonder and delight, fell prostrate on the ground, whilst the fairy spirit, advancing, knelt and presented to the queen a crystal vase. She rose, she waved her hand, and smiling, bade them to approach. “Gentle strangers,” she exclaimed, “let not fear appal your hearts, for to them whom courage, truth, and piety have distinguished, our friendship and our love are given. Spirits of the blest we are, our sweet employment to befriend the wretched and the weary, to lull the torture of anguish, and the horror of despair. Ah! never shall the tear of innocence, or the plaint of sorrow, the pang of injured merit, or the sigh of hopeless love, implore our aid in vain. Upon the moon-beam do we float, and, light as air, pervade the habitations of men: and hearken, O favoured mortals! I tell you spirits pure from vice are present to your inmost thoughts; when terror, and when madness, when spectres, and when death surrounded you, our influence put to flight the ministers of darkness; we placed you in the moon-light vale, and now upon your heads we pour the planetary dew: go, happy pair! from Hecate’s dread agents we have freed you, from wildering fear and gloomy superstition.”——

  She ended, and the lovers, impatient to express their gratitude, were about to spe
ak, when suddenly the light turned pale, and died away, the spirits fled, and music soft and sweet was heard remotely in the air. They started, and, in place of the refulgent scene of magic, beheld a public road, Fitzowen’s horse cropping the grass which grew upon its edge, and a village at a little distance, on whose spire the rising sun had shed his earliest beams.

  SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834) made his first significant contribution to fantastic literature in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, the first item in the book of Lyrical Ballads which he issued with William Wordsworth in 1798. The collection was a significant departure from the habits and modes of eighteenth century poetry and became a key document of the English Romantic Movement. Coleridge had been taking laudanum for some time for medicinal reasons, and eventually because he became heavily addicted to it. His most famous poems were written under its influence, including the phantasmagoric account of unnatural lust “Christabel” (1816), which he never finished, and the celebrated “Kubla Khan” (1816) whose ornate exoticism struck a new note in English poetry.

  Under the influence of the German transcendentalist philosophers Coleridge developed his own philosophical theory of art, based in a novel theory of the imagination. This theory distinguishes between the “primary imagination”, which filters and organises sensory perception, and the “secondary imagination”, which interprets and creates, but imagines the two working in harness to unify experience and render it meaningful. It makes a further distinction between this unifying imagination and “fancy”, whose function is to elaborate and decorate particular imaginative products. The theory was never fully extrapolated, although a fragmentary version of it appears in Biographia Literaria (1817); it was in those pages that he made use of the notion of the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief for that moment, which constitutes poetic faith”. It was also Coleridge who first posed (in Anima Poetae, 1816) a question which has remained at the heart of fantasy fiction ever since, extrapolated in dozens of stories: “If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he woke - Aye, and what then?”

  KUBLA KHAN

  by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree:

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

  Through caverns measureless to man

  Down to a sunless sea.

  So twice five miles of fertile ground

  With walls and towers were girdled round:

  And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

  Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

  And here were forests as ancient as the hills,

  Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

  But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

  Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

  A savage place! as holy and enchanted

  As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

  By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

  And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

  As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

  A mighty fountain momently was forced:

  Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

  Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

  Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

  And’ mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

  It flung up momently the sacred river.

  Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

  Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

  Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

  And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

  And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

  Ancestral voices prophesying war!

  The shadow of the dome of pleasure

  Floated midway on the waves;

  Where was heard the mingled measure

  From the fountain and the caves.

  It was a miracle of rare device,

  A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

  A damsel with a dulcimer

  In a vision once I saw:

  It was an Abyssinian maid,

  And on her dulcimer she played,

  Singing of Mount Abora.

  Could I revive within me

  Her symphony and song,

  To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

  That with music loud and long,

  I would build that dome in air,

  That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

  And all who heard should see them there,

  And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

  His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

  Weave a circle round him thrice,

  And close your eyes with holy dread,

  For he on honey-dew hath fed,

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

  JOHN KEATS (1795-1821) died young but nevertheless established himself as a central figure of the British Romantic Movement, and was considered by many to be the leading poet of his day. His poems aim to employ the alchemy of art to transmute sensation, thought and emotion into Beauty. He drew extensively on classical and folkloristic sources for his themes, habitually using the supernatural as a part of his allegorical apparatus. His best poems were issued in a collection published in 1820; they include “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”, based on a gruesome vignette from Boccaccio’s Decameron; “Lamia”, borrowed from Philostratus via Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy; “The Eve of St. Agnes”, which redevelops a Medieval legend; and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, a blend of chivalric romance and the more sinister legends featuring the Queen of Faerie.

  Elaborate and eccentric homage to Keats’ unique status within the history of fantasy has recently been paid by a group of novels in which he features as a character as well as an inspiration: The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers and Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons; the latter novels are named after the two attempts which Keats made - but never brought to perfection - to produce a literary masterpiece allegorising his ideas about the nature and virtue of art.

  LAMIA

  by John Keats

  Part I

  Upon a time, before the faery broods

  Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods,

  Before king Oberon’s bright diadem,

  Sceptre, and mantle, clasp’d with dewy gem,

  Frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns

  From rushes green, and brakes, and cowslip’d lawns,

  The ever-smitten Hermes empty left

  His golden throne, bent warm on amorous theft:

  From high Olympus had he stolen light,

  On this side of Jove’s clouds, to escape the sight

  Of his great summoner, and made retreat

  Into a forest on the shores of Crete.

  For somewhere in that sacred island dwelt

  A nymph, to whom all hoofed Satyrs knelt;

  At whose white feet the languid Tritons poured

  Pearls, while on land they wither’d and adored.

  Fast by the springs where she to bathe was wont,

  And in those meads where sometime she might haunt,

  Were strewn rich gifts, unknown to any Muse,

  Though Fancy’s casket were unlock’d to choose.

  Ah, what a world of love was at her feet!

  So Hermes thought, and a celestial heat

  Burnt from his winged heels to either ear,

  That from a whiteness, as the lilly clear,

  Blush’d into roses ’mid his golden hair,

  Fallen in jealous curls about his shoulders bare.

  From vale to vale, from wood to wood, he flew,

  Breathing upon the flowers his passion new,

  And wound with many a river to its head,

  To find where this sweet nymph prepar’d her secret bed:

  In vain; the sweet nymph mi
ght nowhere be found,

  And so he rested, on the lonely ground,

  Pensive, and full of painful jealousies

  Of the Wood-Gods, and even the very trees.

  There as he stood, he heard a mournful voice,

  Such as once heard, in gentle heart, destroys

  All pain but pity: thus the lone voice spake:

  “When from this wreathed tomb shall I awake!

  When move in a sweet body fit for life,

  And love, and pleasure, and the ruddy strife

  Of hearts and lips! Ah, miserable me!”

  The God, dove-footed, glided silently

  Round bush and tree, soft-brushing, in his speed,

  The taller grasses and full-flowering weed,

  Until he found a palpitating snake,

  Bright, and cirque-couchant in a dusky brake.

  She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,

  Vermilion -spotted, golden, green, and blue;

  Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,

  Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d;

  And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed,

  Dissolv’d, or brighter shone, or interwreathed

  Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries-

  So rainbow-sided, touch’d with miseries,

  She seem’d, at once, some penanced lady elf,

  Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self.

  Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire

  Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne’s tiar:

  Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet!

  She had a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete:

  And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there

  But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?

  As Proserpine still weeps for her Sicilian air.

  Her throat was serpent, but the words she spake

  Came, as through bubbling honey, for Love’s sake,