The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy

by Brian Stableford

  Now stooping over the well, that he might have sight of his own face, was a most wretched man. He was pale and very meagre; he had black rings under his eyes, and his hair was long, limp, and greasy, falling over his shoulders. He was clad somewhat after the manner of the old Greeks, but his raiment was woefully ill-made and ill-girt upon him, nor did he ever seem at his ease. As soon as I beheld his sallow face I knew him for one I had seen and mocked at in the world of the living. He was a certain Figgins, and he had been honestly apprenticed to a photographer; but, being a weak and vain young fellow, he had picked up modern notions about art, the nude, plasticity, and the like, in the photographer’s workroom, whereby he became a weariness to the photographer and to them that sat unto him. Being dismissed from his honest employment, this chitterling must needs become a model to some painters that were near as ignorant as himself. They talked to him about the Greeks, about the antique, about Paganism, about the Renaissance, till they made him as much the child of folly as themselves. And they painted him as Antinous, as Eros, as Sleep, and I know not what, but whatever name they called him he was always the same lank-haired, dowdy, effeminate, pasty-faced photographer’s young man. Then he must needs take to writing poems all about Greece, and the free ways of the old Greeks, and Lais, and Phryne, and therein he made “Aeolus” rhyme to “control us.” For of Greek this fellow knew not a word, and any Greek that met him had called him a and bidden him begone to the crows for a cursed fellow, and one that made false quantities in every Greek name he uttered. But his little poems were much liked by young men of his own sort, and by some of the young women. Now death had come to Figgins, and here he was in the Fortunate Islands, the very paradise of those Greeks about whom he had always been prating while he was alive. And yet he was not happy. A little lyre lay beside him in the grass, and now and again he twanged on it dolorously, and he tried to weave himself garlands from the flowers that grew around him; but he knew not the art, and ever and anon he felt for his button-hole, wherein to stick a lily or the like. But he had no button-hole. Then he would look at himself in the well, and yawn and wish himself back in his friends’ studios in London. I almost pitied the wretch, and, going up to him, I asked him how he did. He said he had never been more wretched. “Why,” I asked “was your mouth not always full of the ‘Greek spirit,’ and did you not mock the Christians and their religion? And, as to their heaven, did you not say that it was tedious place, full of pious old ladies and Philistines? And are you not got to the paradise of the Greeks? What, then, ails you with your lot?” “Sir,” said he, “to be plain with you, I do not understand a word the fellows about me say, and I feel as I did the first time I went to Paris, before I knew enough French to read the Master’s poems*. Again, every one here is mirthful and gay, and there is no man with a divinely passionate potentiality of pain. When I first came here they were always asking me to run with them or jump against them, and one fellow insisted I should box with him, and hurt me very much. My potentiality of pain is considerable. Or they would have me drive with them in these dangerous open chariots, - me, that never rode in a hansom cab without feeling nervous. And after dinner they sing songs of which I do not catch the meaning of one syllable, and the music is like nothing I ever heard in my life. And they are all abominably active and healthy. And such of their poets as I admired - in Bohn’s cribs, of course - the poets of the Anthology, are not here at all, and the poets who are here are tremendous proud toffs” (here Figgins relapsed into his natural style as it was before he became a Neopagan poet), “and won’t say a word to a cove. And I’m sick of the Greeks, and the Fortunate Islands are a blooming fraud, and oh, for paradise, give me Pentonville.” With these words, perhaps the only unaffected expression of genuine sentiment poor Figgins had ever uttered, he relapsed into a gloomy silence. I advised him to cultivate the society of the authors whose selected words are in the Greek Delectus, and to try to make friends with Xenophon, whose Greek is about as easy as that of any ancient. But I fear that Figgins, like the Rev. Peter McSnadden, is really suffering a kind of punishment in the disguise of a reward, and all through having accidentally found his way into what he foolishly thought would be the right paradise for him.

  Now I might have stayed long in the Fortunate Islands, yet, beautiful as they were, I ever felt like Odysseus in the island of fair Circe. The country was lovely and the land desirable, but the Christian souls were not there without whom heaven itself were no paradise to me. And it chanced that as we sat at the feast a maiden came to me with a pomegranate on a plate of silver, and said, “Sir thou hast now been here for the course of a whole moon, yet hast neither eaten nor drunk of what is set before thee. Now it is commanded that thou must taste if it were but a seed of this pomegranate, or depart from among us.” Then, making such excuses as I might, I was constrained to refuse to eat, for no soul can leave a paradise wherein it has tasted food. And as I spoke the walls of the fair hall wherein we sat, which were painted with the effigies of them that fell at Thermopylae and in Arcadion, wavered and grew dim, and darkness came upon me.

  The first of my senses which returned to me was that of smell, and I seemed almost drowned in the spicy perfumes of Araby. Then my eyes became aware of a green soft fluttering, as of the leaves of a great forest, but quickly I perceived that the fluttering was caused by the green scarfs of a countless multitude of women. They were “fine women” in the popular sense of the term, and were of the school of beauty admired by the Faithful of Islam, and known to Mr Bailey, in “Martin Chuzzlewit,” as “crumby”. These fond attendant nymphs carried me into gardens twain, in each two gushing springs, in each fruit, and palms, and pomegranates. There were the blessed reclining, precisely as the Prophet has declared, “on beds the linings whereof are brocade, and the fruit of the two gardens within reach to cull.” There also were the “maids of modest glances,” previously indifferent to the wooing “of man or ginn.” “Bright and large-eyed maids kept in their tents, reclining on green cushions and beautiful carpets. About the golden couches went eternal youths with goblets and ewers, and a cup of flowing wine. No headache shall they feel therefrom,” says the compassionate Prophet, “nor shall their wits be dimmed.” And all that land is misty and fragrant with the perfume of the softest Latakia, and the gardens are musical with the bubbling of countless narghilés; and I must say that to the Christian soul which enters that paradise the whole place has, certainly, a rather curious air, as of a highly transcendental Cremorne. There could be no doubt, however, that the Faithful were enjoying themselves amazingly - “right lucky fellows,” as we read in the new translation of the Koran. Yet even here all was not peace and pleasantness, for I heard my name called by a small voice, in a tone of patient subdued querulousness. Looking hastily round, I with some difficulty recognized, in a green turban and silk gown to match, my old college tutor and professor of Arabic. Poor old Jones had been the best and the most shy of university men. As there was never any undergraduate in his time (it is different now) who wished to learn Arabic, his place had been a sinecure, and he had chiefly devoted his leisure to “drawing” pupils who were too late for college chapel. The sight of a lady of his acquaintance in the streets had at all times been alarming enough to drive him into a shop or up a lane, and he had not survived the creation of the first batch of married fellows. How he had got into this thoroughly wrong paradise was a mystery which he made no attempt to explain. “A nice place this, eh?” he said to me. “Nice gardens; remind me of Magdalene a good deal. It seems, however, to be decidedly rather gay just now; don’t you think so? Commemoration week, perhaps. A great many young ladies up, certainly; a good deal of cup drunk in the gardens too. I always did prefer to go down in Commemoration week, myself; never was a dancing man. There is a great deal of dancing here, but the young ladies dance alone, rather like what is called the ballet, I believe, at the opera. I must say the young persons are a little forward; a little embarrassing it is to be alone here, especially as I have forgotten a good deal of
my Arabic. Don’t you think, my dear fellow, you and I could manage to give them the slip? Run away from them, eh?” He uttered a timid little chuckle, and at that moment an innumerable host of houris began a ballet d’action illustrative of a series of events in the career of the prophet. It was obvious that my poor uncomplaining old friend was really very miserable. The “thornless loto trees” were all thorny to him, and the “tal’h trees with piles of fruit, the outspread shade, and water outpoured” could not comfort him in his really very natural shyness. A happy thought occurred to me. In my early and credulous youth I had studied the works of Cornelius Agrippa and Petrus de Abano. Their lessons, which had not hitherto been of much practical service, recurred to my mind. Stooping down, I drew a circle round myself and my old friend in the fragrant white blossoms which were strewn so thick that they quite hid the grass. This circle I fortified by the usual signs employed, as Benvenuto Cellini tells us, in the conjuration of evil spirits. I then proceeded to utter one of the common forms of exorcism. Instantly the myriad houris assumed the forms of irritated demons; the smoke from the uncounted narghilés burned thick and black; the cries of the frustrated ginns, who were no better than they should be, rang wildly in our ears; the palm-trees shook beneath a mighty wind; the distant summits of the minarets rocked and wavered, and, with a tremendous crash, the paradise of the Faithful disappeared.

  As I rang the bell, and requested the club-waiter to carry away the smoking fragments of the moderator-lamp which I had accidentally knocked over in awakening from my nightmare, I reflected on the vanity of men and the unsubstantial character of the future homes that their fancy has fashioned. The ideal heavens of modern poets and novelists, and of ancient priests, come no nearer than the drugged dreams of the angekok and the biraark of Greenland and Queensland to that rest and peace whereof it has not entered into the mind of man to conceive. To the wrong man each of our pictured heavens would be a hell, and even to the appropriate devotee each would become a tedious purgatory.

  OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900) was, of course, Irish by birth and homosexual by nature, and his attempts to take English society by storm were doomed to fail. There is, however, every reason to include him in a history of British fantasy; although he was aided and abetted by Richard Garnett, Vernon Lee and Laurence Housman it was he who conspicuously brought to rebellious fruition the covert moral unease which fantasy had contrived to preserve throughout the long years when the British Isles were tyrannised by that appalling species of sanctimonious puritanism which was symbolised and enacted by its unhappy and unfortunate queen.

  Wilde published three classic volumes in a single year (1891). Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime contains two fine comic fantasies: the title story, which deals with an ironically self-fulfilling prophecy; and the best of the many Victorian parodies of ghost stories, “The Canterville Ghost”. The Picture of Dorian Gray, though conventionally regarded as a horror story, is actually an allegory revealing and regretting the folly of trying to live one’s life as a work of art; it unwittingly prefigures the eventual fall of its creator, crucified by forces of repression which he had finally driven to vengeful outrage. The House of Pomegranates follows Wilde’s earlier collection of unorthodoxly-moralistic children’s stories, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) with four longer and more sophisticated parables, each of which combines consummate stylistic elegance with considerable depth of feeling; all four are bitter parables in which human folly, vanity and infidelity cause considerable misery.

  “The House of Judgement” is one of a series of poems in prose which appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1894.

  Note

  *Poor Figgins always called M. Baudeláire “the Master.”

  THE HOUSE OF JUDGEMENT

  By Oscar Wilde

  And there was silence in the House of Judgement, and the Man came naked before God.

  And God opened the Book of the Life of the Man.

  And God said to the Man, “Thy life hath been evil, and thou hast shown cruelty to those who were in need of succour, and to those who lacked help thou hast been bitter and hard of heart. The poor called to thee and thou did’st not hearken, and thine ears were closed to the cry of My afflicted. The inheritance of the fatherless thou did’st take unto thyself, and thou did’st send the foxes into the vineyard of thy neighbour’s field. Thou did’st take the bread of the children and give it to the dogs to eat, and my lepers who lived in the marshes, and were at peace and praised Me, thou did’st drive forth on to the highways, and on Mine earth out of which I made thee thou did’st spill innocent blood.”

  And the Man made answer and said, “Even so did I.”

  And again God opened the Book of the Life of the Man.

  And God said to the Man, “Thy life hath been evil, and the Beauty I have shown thou hast sought for, and the Good I have hidden thou did’st pass by. The walls of thy chamber were painted with images, and from the bed of thine abominations thou did’st rise up to the sound of flutes. Thou did’st build seven altars to the sins I have suffered, and did’st eat of the thing that may not be eaten, and the purple of thy raiment was broidered with the three signs of shame. Thine idols were neither of gold nor of silver that endure, but of flesh that dieth. Thou did’st stain their hair with perfumes and put pomegranates in their hands. Thou did’st stain their feet with saffron and spread carpets before them. With antimony thou did’st stain their eyelids and their bodies thou did’st smear with myrrh. Thou did’st bow thyself to the ground before them, and the thrones of thine idols were set in the sun. Thou did’st show to the sun thy shame and to the moon thy madness.”

  And the Man made answer and said, “Even so did I.”

  And a third time God opened the Book of the Life of the Man.

  And God said to the Man, “Evil hath been thy life, and with evil did’st thou requite good, and with wrongdoing kindness. The hands that fed thee thou did’st wound, and the breasts that gave thee suck thou did’st despise. He who came to thee with water went away thirsting, and the outlawed men who hid thee in their tents at night thou did’st betray before dawn. Thine enemy who spared thee thou did’st snare in an ambush, and the friend who walked with thee thou did’st sell for a price, and to those who brought thee Love thou did’st ever give Lust in thy turn.”

  And the Man made answer and said, “Even so did I.”

  And God closed the Book of the Life of the Man, and said,

  “Surely I will send thee into Hell. Even into Hell will I send thee.”

  And the Man cried out, “Thou canst not.”

  And God said to the Man, “Wherefore can I not send thee to Hell, and for what reason?”

  “Because in Hell have I always lived,” answered the Man.

  And there was silence in the House of Judgment.

  And after a space God spake, and said to the Man, “Seeing that I may not send thee into Hell, surely I will send thee unto Heaven. Even unto Heaven will I send thee.”

  And the man cried out, “Thou canst not.”