The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy

by Brian Stableford

  Plato, one of the first great champions of reason, imagined the human soul to be purely rational, but when embedded in its material shell it had perforce to be associated with irrational impulses. Even in Plato’s view this was not entirely unfortunate, for there were some impulses which were noble ones - ambition; the desire for power; righteous wrath - but the rest of these passionate forces were “lower” in kind, to be feared, despised and disciplined. Their temptations ought, in Plato’s view, to be subject to a ruthless tyranny of the intellect. From the ideal society outlined (without irony) in the Republic, poets were to be cast out, because their work “nourished the well of the emotions” while the true aim of a civilised society should be to dry it up.

  Few of Plato’s successors were as ruthless as this in their opposition to the emotions, but their more moderate views were usually aligned on the same side. Aristotle felt that emotions and the vulgar passions connected with basic bodily processes, which constituted the “animal part” of man. Among later Greek philosophers the Stoics shared Plato’s suspicions to the full, regarding the passions as perturbations of the mind, almost as a kind of mental disease. Their rivals the Epicureans took a different view, insisting on the naturalness of pleasure and preaching a kind of hedonism but their search was for a purified, rather cerebral species of joy, fit for connoisseurs, and one of their mottoes was “Nothing to Excess”.

  For Christian philosophers of a later period the passions were temptations of the devil, and giving way to them was the very essence of sin. True godliness was based in asceticism, and those emotions suited to life in Heaven would be very stringently purified, consisting mainly of love of God and a joyful knowledge of that Divine Love which would be returned. When rationalist philosophers set to work again within the Christian tradition they tended to do little more than secularise this view. Descartes considered the passions as excitations of the soul caused by the movement of “animal spirits”; Spinoza, in laying down the foundation stones of his system of Ethics, accepted it as axiomatic that human freedom was based in the rational power of the intellect, while the opposing power of the emotions must be reckoned a burdensome kind of servitude.

  Many writers of the nineteenth century proposed new terminologies which pretended to be more scientific, but the dualistic story which most of them told was much the same. Darwin, meditating upon The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), considered our appetites and passions to be part of our evolutionary heritage, operating independently of the will, as an “undirected flow of nerve-force”. The psychologist Havelock Ellis, in Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897), identified two “great fundamental impulses” supplying the “dynamic energy” of all behaviour: hunger and sexual desire; like Freud he was to become preoccupied with the idea that the latter might easily be transformed by “sublimation” into other kinds of creative endeavour, including literary work.

  Some other nineteenth century writers tried to make fundamental connections between the divided nature of man and the exercise of artistic creativity. Notable among them was Nietzsche, whose account of The Birth of Tragedy (1872) contrasted the “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” elements which, in fusion, formulated the world-view of tragedy (whose subsequent death was procured by the victory of rationalism). Later writers were to borrow this dialectical pair to describe phases throughout which whole cultures might pass, in the one striving for the rule of calm reason, in the other for the wild abandonment of ecstasy.

  Throughout the history of these dualistic accounts of human being there emerged only a handful of true champions of the passions. The most prestigious was probably the eighteenth century French philosopher Rousseau, who firmly believed in the nobility of savagery, and became the father figure of the cult of sensibilité. In his later writings, though, Nietzsche remade his image of Dionysus, making him a symbol of a healthy reconciliation of the Apollonian and the Dionysian: passion sublimated into creative endeavour. In this view reason is a counterpart to rather than an enemy of the passions, and the real contrast is between the harshly repressive dominion of ascetiscism and a benevolent quasi-Epicurean acceptance of passionate purpose and rational method.

  The principal process of ideological evolution which is visible in the fantasy genre as it moves from the nineteenth into the twentieth century is perhaps best summed up (though any summing up is bound to be an oversimplification) as the discovery and championship of an essentially Nietzschean position. We can find the earliest evidence of this evolution in the lushness of nineteenth century French fantasy, but we can see its emergency in some of the British fin de siecle writers - most notably Richard Garnett, Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee.

  In the Sartrean theory of emotion - which is itself an unmistakable product of twentieth century thought, and might well be reckoned another of its scholarly fantasies - passion ceases to be defined in quasi-mechanical terms. The ideas of “animal spirits” and “nerve-force” are consigned to the same dustbin. Sartre urges us instead to view emotional experience as a kind of perception, characterised by a “magical” world view which contrasts with, but also complements, the “instrumental” world-view which underlies our scientific understanding.

  In this view we see the world in two ways, which overlap but never quite come into perfect focus: we see a world of objects to be manipulated, and a world of objects of desire. These two worlds are differently conceptualised and differently evaluated, but we live simultaneously in both. We can no more force our experience into a repressive existential straitjacket which recognises only one form of perception than we can separate ourselves into two distinct individuals. Our task instead - and this is what mature fantasy fiction also asserts, both in its most interesting fictions and in its theory as articulated by Tolkien - is to reach the most life-enhancing compromise we can. The Nietzschean image of the reformulated Dionysus is as apt a symbol as any for that goal.

  This is the zeitgeist of modern fantasy literature, within which many and various writers are trying to find their moral bearings. The writers of the twentieth century inherited this task along with the tradition from their nineteenth century forebears, and there is little among their materials that is authentically new. Twentieth century usage of these materials is different because it is far more self-conscious, but the essential mission of twentieth century writers remains the same as the mission of their nineteenth century forebears, which was - whether they knew it or not - to reconcile more intimately and more cleverly the two modes of our experience: the emotional and the rational; the magical and the instrumental; the fantastic and the mundane.

  THE DEDALUS BOOK

  of

  BRITISH FANTASY

  NATHAN DRAKE (1766-1836) was a country doctor and literary scholar whose works include two notable studies of Shakespeare and a curious patchwork of essays, poems, tales and meditations called Literary Hours (1798). The last named includes an essay in which Drake appointed himself an early apologist for the Gothic imagination. This item is almost exactly contemporary with Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and their publication was quickly followed by Matthew Gregory Lewis’s two collections of ballads mingling elements of chivalric romance and Gothic horror - Tales of Terror (1799) and Tales of Wonder (1800) - the latter of which featured the earliest published poems by Walter Scott.

  In his apologetic essay Drake observes that Gothic literature has two distinct strands, which move in different directions; he calls them the “terrible” and the “sportive”. The former, he argues, is organised around the central motif of the spectre, the latter around the fairy. He also notes that the recent resurgency of the Gothic in literature had been supplemented by a similar resurgence of the Celtic imagination, by virtue of the publication of James MacPherson’s Ossian (whose authenticity Drake had no reason to doubt).

  Having called attention to certain faults which he deemed to be present in recently published works, Drake boldly set out to demonstrate how the job ought to be done, conscientiousl
y attempting to practise what he had preached. His essay on the Gothic is followed immediately by an “Ode to Superstition”, and then by “Henry Fitzowen”, in which he set out to find a proper balance between the terrible and the sportive. He was to write other tales and verses of the same type, but this first attempt remained his most interesting exercise in leavening the tale of terror with the charm of fantasy.

  HENRY FITZOWEN

  by

  Nathan Drake

  I

  But when he reach’d his castle-gate,

  His gate was hung with black

  Percy’s Reliques, Vol iii

  In the north of England, toward the commencement of the reign of Edward the Fourth, lived Henry Fitzowen. He had lost his parents early in life, and had been educated with an only sister under the care of his guardian. Henry was the heir of considerable property which had been under his sole management for near four years, having arrived at that period of life when the character of the man fully unfolds itself, when at five-and-twenty he had gratified the wishes and fulfilled the predictions of his friends. Possessed of an active and liberal mind, of a tender and grateful heart, he was equally an object of love and esteem to his companions and his tenants; and combined, likewise, the energies of youth, its vigour and vivacity, with, what were rare attainments in that age of anarchy and ignorance, the elegant accomplishments of the scholar and the poet. In his person he was rather athletic, yet was it gracefully formed, and had much of that chivalric air so highly prized at that time when warfare and civil discord still raged throughout the island. When rushing into the field, no hero in the army of the youthful Edward burnt with superior ardour, or managed his horse and arms with equal ease and spirit; when seated mid the circle of his peaceful friends, none could rival his power of intellect and sweetness of manner, the courtesy of his demeanour to the men, the gallantry of his attentions to the fair.

  With his sister, who superintended the economy of his household, and a few friends, he spent the major part of the year at his paternal castle in Yorkshire, a piece of fine old Gothic architecture, and seated in the bosom of a romantic glen. Here, in his great hall, hung round with the arms and trophies of his ancestors, and presiding at his ancient, oaken, and hospitable table, he delighted to accumulate his neighbours, and view the smile of satisfaction and pleasure play mid the charms of innocence and beauty, or gladden the features of industrious dependence. Here, also, on a visit to his sister, and usually accompanied by her mother, would frequently appear Adeline De Montfort. Adeline was the only daughter of an officer of great worth and bravery, and who fell contending for the Yorkists at the dreadful battle of Towton. Dying, however, in embarrassed circumstances, his widow was unable to support the establishment they had hitherto maintained, and therefore took a small but elegant house on the skirts of the forest adjoining to the Fitzowen estate. A short time sufficed to produce an intimacy between the two families, and from similarity of disposition and pursuits. Adeline and Clara Fitzowen soon became almost inseparable companions. The daughter of Montfort was in her twentieth year, and had been gifted by nature with more than common charms, her person was elegantly formed, her eyes blue as the sky of summer, her hair of a nut brown, and her cheeks

  The roses white and red resembled well

  Whereon the hoary May-dew sprinkled lies,

  When the fair Morn first blusheth from her cell,

  And breatheth balm from opened Paradise.

  The most unaffected modesty, too, and a disposition peculiarly sweet, united to the graces of a mind polished by unusual taste, rendered her personal beauties doubly interesting; and there were few of the opposite sex who, having once witnessed her attractions, did not sigh to appropriate them. That Henry, therefore, who had such frequent opportunities of conversing with this amiable girl, should admire and love her, was an event to be expected; indeed, such was his affection for her, that, deprived of his beloved Adeline, existence would have lost all its allurement.

  To love thus ardent and sincere, and professed by a youth of the most winning manners, and superior accomplishments, no woman could long be insensible, and in the bosom of Adeline glowed the sweet emotions of reciprocal passion. Amid the wild and picturesque beauties of Ruydvellin, where the vast solitude and repose of nature, or the luxuriant and softened features of the secluded landscape, awoke the mind to awful or to tender feelings, the sensations of mutual attachment were for some time cherished undisturbed, and an union that would, probably, fix for life the felicity of the lovers, had been projected and determined upon; when an incident, accompanied with circumstances of the most singular kind, threw a bar in the way of its completion.

  At the distance of about twelve miles from the castle of Ruydvellin, resided Walleran Earl of Meulant, a nobleman of Norman descent, and of great hauteur and family pride. He had reached the age of forty, was unmarried, and though, from motives of ostentation, supporting a considerable and even splendid establishment, his disposition was gloomy and unsocial. In his person he was gigantic and disproportioned, and his features betrayed a stern and unrelenting severity, whilst from his eyes usually darted so wild and malignant an expression, that the object on which they fell, involuntarily shrank from their notice. His habits of life too were such as to excite much wonder and very horrid reports; he constantly inhabited one turret of his extensive castle, where, all night long, for many years, the glare of torches had been visible, yet his servants declared that, notwithstanding this perpetual illumination, his agitation and terror were, frequently, as the twilight closed, so dreadful, that they fled his presence, and often at midnight from his chamber, in which he always locked himself up and forbade interruption, half-stifled groans and wailing sounds were heard, as from a person under torture. At stated periods he visited a forest of very antique oak, which stood about a mile from the castle; such was the massy size of these trees that they were generally esteemed coeval with the druidic times, and the gloom of their foliage was so dense and impenetrable, that the country people feared to approach the wood, and believed it to be haunted by preternatural beings; for often at the dead noon of night, shrill and demoniacal shrieks, and appearances of the most ghastly and tremendous kind, had terrified the belated traveller, and once, it is said, when one of the servants of Walleran, from motives of curiosity, had traced the footsteps of his master to this enchanted forest, he dared to enter its infernal shade, and since that hour no eye has witnessed his return.

  Though Walleran was thus an object of dread and awful surmise to all around him, yet, from being possessed of very large property, and having numerous relations whose interest it was to pay him every respect, his castle was occasionally filled with the first ranks of society, who were banqueted in a sumptuous manner, and amused with the most splendid diversions of the age, such as tournaments, mysteries, the chase, etc. On these occasions the neighbouring families were invited to the castle, and Henry Fitzowen, with his sister and Adeline, usually graced the festival. Henry was one of the most expert and elegant tilters in the school of chivalry; and when Adeline’s Champion, and, according to etiquette, by her conducted into the lists, he performed prodigies of valour, and unhorsed almost every opponent. Adeline had then to bestow the envied prize on the object of her affections, and in these moments her features were lighted up with peculiar animation, and her form displayed the most fascinating allurements. None beheld her without emotion; but in the breast of Walleran burnt the most intense desire, and, accustomed to overcome every opposition in his amours by open force, or insidious stratagem, he had long determined, and without the smallest scruple or compunction, to get possession of the person of Adeline, for in her heart, such was the brutality of his appetite, he had neither wish nor hope to find a place. Indeed, he was well acquainted with the connection, and had heard of the approaching union between her and Henry, and the latter, on this account, became an object of the most malignant hatred. Frequently had he meditated on the means of conveying her from her own villa, or the cas
tle of Ruydvellin, and one attempt through the medium of his servants the vigilance of Henry had already rendered abortive, who suspected, though he could not prove, for the villains were disguised, the machinations of his infamous and too potent neighbour.

  Apprehensive, at length, he should for ever lose her, if the nuptials, the day for which was fixed, should take place, the Earl became resolved, whilst Adeline was now at Ruydvellin, to seize the earliest opportunity, and to employ all the resources of his art in effecting his diabolical purposes. It was not long ere the opportunity he had so anxiously awaited was given; for, in about a week after, Henry, with a large party of his friends, the nobility and gentry of the neighbourhood, met together for the stag-hunt, and were, as usual, joined by Walleran. The morning chase afforded the finest diversion, but was very long, and carried them to such a distance from home, that they agreed to dine in the forest upon the provisions which they had providently brought with them, and endeavour to start fresh game after their meal. Walleran, it was observed, had retired before dinner; but as this was no extraordinary occurrence, little attention was paid to it, and, a stag being shortly after roused, the chase was resumed with fresh vigour and alacrity. Nothing could exceed the spirit and swiftness of the animal, and Henry, who was generally foremost on these occasions, so far outstript his companions, that, having pushed into an intricate part of the forest with a view to reach the stag in a more direct line, and being led farther into its recesses than he was aware, at length neither the sound of hounds, horses, nor men, any longer reached his ear, and perceiving his path more difficult as he proceeded, he paused, and listened with deep attention, but nothing, save the sighing of the evening breeze, as it rustled through the branches of the oak was heard. The sun was now approaching the horizon, and had shot his fiery beams into the forest, when Henry, reflecting on the distance he was, probably, from home, and on the impending gloom of night, immediately determined to retrace his steps, and regain, if possible, the open country. With this intention, therefore, he turned his steed, and carefully pursuing the path he came, at length reached the plain, when, to his great surprise, he once more beheld, and in a direction directly contrary to what he could have expected, or thought possible, the very stag he had been chasing so long in vain. He appeared lightly bounding at a distance, and as the sun shone upon his dappled sides made a pleasing and conspicuous figure. Neither dogs, nor horses, nor a single human being, were in view, and Fitzowen, more from curiosity than any other motive, put spurs to his horse, and pursued him. The animal seemed perfectly at his ease, and went on gently, as if holding his chaser in contempt, when, crossing the dale, he turned into a narrow road, with Henry almost at his heels, who followed him in this manner, between three and four miles through a series of winding and intricate lanes, and had just reached him, as he conceived, when he suddenly struck to the left, and, the lane closing, a vast and apparently interminable heath rushed upon his view, but to his utter astonishment, for no shelter, or cover of any kind was present for concealment, not the least vestige of the animal he had so closely pursued could now be seen. All was nearly silent and sunk in repose; twilight had spread her grey tint over the plain, and scarce a breath of air moved the thistle down. Some clouds, however, gathered dark in the west, and were tinged with a dusky red, whilst a few large drops of rain were, now and then, heard, as they fell sullen and heavy on the heath, or shook the withered broom.