The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy: 19th Century (European Literary Fantasy Anthologies)

by Brian Stableford

  "And therefore your Holiness has brought these rats upon us, enlisted, I nothing doubt, in the infernal regions?"

  "Precisely so: Plutonic, necromantic, Lemurian rats, kindly lent by the Prince of Darkness for the occasion, and come dripping from Styx to squeak and gibber in the Capitol. But I note your Holiness's admission that they belong to a region exempt from your jurisdiction, and that, therefore, your measures against them, except as regards their status as belligerents, are for the most part illegitimate and ultra vires."

  "I would argue that point," replied Alexander the Eighth, "if my lungs were as tough as when I pleaded before the Rota in Pope Urban's time. For the present I confine myself to formally protesting against your Holiness's unprecedented and parricidal conduct in invading your country at the head of an army of loathsome vermin."

  "Unprecedented!" exclaimed Borgia. "Am I not the modern Coriolanus? Did Narses experience blacker ingratitude than I? Where would the temporal power be but for me? Who smote the Colonna? Who squashed the Orsini? Who gave the Popes to dwell quietly in their own house? Monsters of unthankfulness!"

  "I am sure, " said Alexander the Eighth soothingly, "that my predecessors' inability to comply with your Holiness's request must have cost them many inward tears, not the less genuine because entirely invisible and completely inaudible. A wise Pope will, before all things, consider the spirit of his age. The force of public opinion, which your Holiness lately appeared to disparage, was, in fact, as operative upon yourself as upon any of your successors. If you achieved great things in your lifetime, it was because the world was with you. Did you pursue the same methods now, you would soon discover that you had become an offensive anachronism. It will not have escaped your holiness's penetration that what moralists will persist in terming the elevation of the standard of the Church, is the result of the so-called improvement of the world."

  "There is a measure of truth in this," admitted Alexander the Sixth, " and the spirit of this age is a very poor spirit. It was my felicity to be a Pope of the Renaissance. Blest dispensation! when men's view of life was large and liberal; when the fair humanities flourished; when the earth yielded up her hoards of chiselled marble and breathing bronze, and new-found agate urns as fresh as day; when painters and sculptors vied with antiquity, and poets and historians followed in their path; when every benign deity was worshipped save Diana and Vesta; when the arts of courtship and cosmetics were expounded by archbishops; when the beauteous Imperia was of more account than the eleven thousand virgins; when obnoxious persons glided imperceptibly from the world; and no one marvelled if he met the Pope arm in arm with the Devil. How miserable, in comparison, is the present sapless age, with its prudery and its pedantry, and its periwigs and its painted coaches, and its urban Arcadias and the florid impotence and ostentatious inanity of what it calls its art! Pope Alexander! I see in the spirit the sepulchre destined for you, and I swear to you that my soul shivers in my ratskins! Come, now , I do not not expect you to emulate the Popes of my time, but show that your virtues are your own, and your faults those of your epoch. Pluck up a spirit! Take bulls by the horns! Look facts in the face! Think upon the images of Brutus and Cassius! Recognise that you cannot get rid of me, and that the only safe course is to rehabilitate me. I am not a candidate for canonisation just now; but repair past neglect and appease my injured shade in the way you wot of. If this is done, I pledge my word that every rat shall forthwith evacuate Rome. Is it a bargain? I see it is; you are one of the good old sort, though fallen on evil days."

  Renaissance or Rats, Alexander the Eighth yielded.

  "I promise," he declared.

  "Your hand upon it!"

  Subduing his repugnance and apprehension by a strong effort, Alexander laid his hand within the spectre's clammy paw. An icy thrill ran through his veins, and he sank back senseless into his chair.

  III

  When the Pope recovered consciousness he found himself in bed, with slight symptoms of fever. His first care was to summon Cardinal Barbadico, and confer with him respecting the surprising adventures which had recently befallen them. To his amazement, the Cardinal's mind seemed an entire blank on the subject. He admitted having made his customary report to his Holiness the preceding night, but knew nothing of any supernatural ratcatcher, and nothing of any midnight rendezvous at the Appartamento Borgia. Investigation seemed to justify his nescience; no vestige of the man of rats or of his shop could be discovered; and the Borgian apartments, opened and carefully searched through, revealed no trace of having been visited for many years. The Pope's book of exorcisms was in its proper place, his vial of holy water stood unbroken upon his table; and his chamberlains deposed that they had consigned him to Morpheus at the usual hour. His allusion was at first explained as the effect of a peculiarly vivid dream; but when he declared his intention of actually holding a service and conducting a procession for the weal of his namesake and predecessor, the conviction became universal that the rats had effected a -lodgment in his Holiness's upper storeys.

  Alexander, notwithstanding, was resolute, and so it came to pass that on the same day two mighty processions encountered within the walls of Rome. As the assembled clergy, drawn from all the churches and monasteries in the city, the Pope in his litter in their midst, marched, carrying candles, intoning chants, and, with many a secret shrug and sneer, imploring Heaven for the repose of Alexander the Sixth, they were suddenly brought to bay by another procession precipitated athwart their track, disorderly, repulsive, but more grateful to the sight of the citizens than all the pomps and pageants of the palmiest days of the Papacy. Black, brown, white, grey; fat and lean; old and young; strident or silent; the whiskered legions tore and galloped along; thronging from every part of the city, they united in single column into an endless host that appeared to stretch from the rising to the setting of the sun. They seemed making for the Tiber, which they would have speedily choked; but ere they could arrive there a huge rift opened in the earth, down which they madly precipitated themselves. Their descent, it is affirmed, lasted as many hours as Vulcan occupied in falling from Heaven to Lemnos; but when the last tail was over the brink, the gulf closed as effectually as the gulf in the Forum closed over Marcus Curtius, not leaving the slightest inequality by which any could detect it.

  Long ere this consummation had been attained, the Pope, looking forth from his litter, observed a venerable personage clad in ratskins, who appeared desirous of attracting his notice. Glances of recognition were exchanged, and instantly in place of the ratcatcher stood a tall, swarthy, corpulent, elderly man, with the majestic yet sensual features of Alexander the Sixth, accoutred with the official habiliments and insignia of a Pope, who rose slowly into the air as though he had been inflated with hydrogen.

  "To your prayers!" cried Alexander the Eighth, and gave the example. The priesthood resumed its chants, the multitude dropped upon their knees. Their orisons seemed to speed the ascending figure, which was rising rapidly, when suddenly appeared in the air Luxury, Simony, and Cruelty, contending which should receive the Holy Father into her bosom. Borgia struck at them with his crozier, and seemed to be keeping them at bay, when a cloud wrapped the group from the sight of men. Thunder roared, lightning glared, the rush of waters blended with the ejaculations of the people and the yet more tempestuous rushing of the rats. Accompanied as he was, it is not probable that Alexander passed, like Dante's sigh, "beyond the sphere that doth all spheres enfold"; but, as he was never again seen on earth, it is not doubted that he attained at least as far as the moon.

  Notes on authors not represented in the Anthology.

  RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM (1788-1845) was a clergyman who adopted the pseudonym Thomas Ingoldsby in order to write The Ingoldsby Legends: or, Mirth and Marvels. These began to appear piecemeal in the early issues of Bentley's Miscellany in 1837, and were eventually collected in three volumes in 1840, 1842 and 1847. The prose tales are in much the same vein as the comic fantasies included in Dickens', Pickwick Papers; they
include "The Spectre of Tappington", about a trouser-stealing ghost, and "The Leech of Folkestone"' about a murder unsuccessfully attempted by magical means. The witty verses, rich in overblown wordplay, carry forward a tradition of humorous poetry whose fashionability was renewed by the more light-hearted works of THOMAS HOOD (1799-1845); some of the Ingoldsby legends appeared in the New Monthly Magazine during the period of Hood's editorship (1841-43).

  MARIE CORELLI was the name adopted by Minnie Mackay (1855-1924) for her literary endeavours, which included several best-selling occult novels. A Romance of Two Worlds (1886) describes the revitalization of an effete young woman by a Chaldean magician. Ardath (1889) is a fantasy of reincarnation mostly set in the fabulous prehistoric city of Al-Kyris. The Soul of Lilith (1892) features a girl whose soul is imprisoned in her body after death so that she may be used as an instrument of occult enlightenment. The Sorrows of Satan is a Faustian parable in which Satan, depressed by the ease with which men fall prey to his wiles, finally meets his match in a saintly novelist called Mavis Clare. Marie Corelli was the perfect embodiment of late Victorian values: her unorthodox piety, moralistic fervour and monumental vanity combined to preserve in her the illusion that she was far too good for this world, much more suited to life among the angels.

  F. MARION CRAWFORD (1854-1909) produced a rather rough-hewn Arabian Nights fantasy, Khaled (1891), and a number of romances containing occult elements, including a long and somewhat laborious femme fatale story, The Witch of Prague (1891).

  JAMES DALTON (dates unknown) is credited by various bibliographers with having produce a number of anonymous works, including an early comic fantasy about an incautious deal with the devil, The Gentleman in Black (1831) and other items with some fantasy content. These other items include one of the very few fantasy novels to be produced in the three-decker format which dominated Victorian publishing - a remarkable moralistic comedy called The Invisible Gentleman (1833). This stands at the head of a rich Victorian tradition of cautionary tales of invisibility, which also includes Charles Wentworth Lisle's The Ring of Gyges (1886), James Payne's The Eavesdropper (1888), C. H. Hinton's Stella (1895) and H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man (1897). The British Museum Catalogue gives separate listings to "James Dalton, novelist" and the Blackwood's writer James Forbes Dalton, but the latter was active in the same period and his story "The Beauty Draught" (1840) has exactly the same moral as The Invisible Gentleman, so he may well be the same person. The bibliographical confusion is further compounded by the fact that some sources identify the author of The Gentleman in Black etc. simply as "Dalton", a signature which was also used by Richard Harris Barham's son Richard Harris Dalton Barham on various pieces published in Bentley's Miscellany in the late 1830s.

  LADY EMILIA FRANCES DILKE (1840-1904) wrote two volumes of allegorical prose poems, The Shrine of Death and Other Stories (1886) and The Shrine of Love and Other Stories (1891). The stylistically ornate and distinctly morbid stories are among the more curious fin de siecle fantasies produced in Britain.

  GEORGE DU MAURIER (1834-1896) produced three eccentric sentimental fantasies, of which the best is Peter Ibbetson (1891), whose eponymous hero, condemned to life imprisonment, achieves a kind of escape by sharing his dreams with a girl he knew in childhood. Trilby (1894) is more famous because of the sub-plot involving the heroine's subjugation by the mesmerist Svengali. The Martian (1897) is a moralistic fantasy of reincarnation.

  HENRY RIDER HAGGARD (1856-1925) wrote numerous lost race stories set in Africa, many of which have fantasy elements - most conspicuously the best-selling She (1886), whose unlucky heroine loses her immortality but is conveniently reincarnated in Ayesha (1905) and other sequels. Haggard also wrote a mock-Icelandic saga, Eric Brighteyes (1891) and several other romances of reincarnation. In collaboration with Andrew Lang he wrote The World's Desire, in which Odysseus goes in search of Helen of Troy.

  JAMES HOGG (1770-1835) was a prolific contributor to Blackwood's Magazine, and a leading member of its editorial coterie, within which he was affectionately nicknamed "The Ettrick Shepherd"; his aggressiveness and hard drinking were continually caricatured in the magazine's "Noctes Ambrosianae" section. He is bestremembered today for his phantasmagoric study in paranoia The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), but he also wrote a number of historical novels (which were virtually eclipsed by Scott's ) and he became one of the leading conservationists of Scottish folklore by means of his various supernatural tales and the anecdotes and legends which he recorded in his regular Blackwood's column "The Shepherd's Calendar".

  LAURENCE HOUSMAN (1865-1959) produced several books of sophisticated children's fantasies in the same quasi-allegorical vein as George MacDonald and Oscar Wilde, including A Farm in Fairyland (1894), The House of Joy, (1895), and The Field of Clover (1898). His early fantasies for adults include the highly unusual Gods and their Makers (1897), whose young protagonist belongs to a tribe where every man must make his own personal deity, and is eventually banished to the realm where those gods come to life following the deaths of their creators. His carefully reverent Christian fantasies, collected in All Fellows: Seven Legends of Lower Redemption (1896) and The Cloak of Friendship (1905) are the best examples of their kind, and though they refuse to flirt deliberately with heresy after the fashion of the anti-clerical fantasies of Vernon Lee and Richard Garnett they are nevertheless drawn by degrees towards a warm Epicurean liberalism. Housman met Oscar Wilde in Paris shortly before Wilde's death, and his memoir of their conversation, Echo de Paris (1923), includes two brief fantasy parables which Wilde recited to his listeners. His sister CLEMENCE HOUSMAN (1861-1955) wrote the fine erotic fantasy The Were-Wolf (1890) and a more languid femme fatale story The Unknown Sea (1898).

  DOUGLAS JERROLD (1803-1857) was a noted humourist who produced for the satirical magazine Punch a bizarre moralistic comedy, A Man Made of Money (1848-9), in which a man with a spendthrift wife wishes he were made of money, and finds himself able to peel banknotes from his heart - but his substance dwindles away as he spends himself. The story was presumably inspired by Balzac's La Peau de Chagrin (1831; tr. as The Magic Skin).

  CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819-1875) produced one of the classic Victorian children's fantasies in The Water-Babies (1863), a very peculiar story in which a chimney sweep's boy succeeds in learning after death the moral lessons which he never had a chance to absorb in life. The book displays the author's interest in evolutionary theory as well as his evangelistic fervour, and is said by some Freudian critics to feature an extended (but presumably unconscious) extrapolation of Victorian anxieties regarding the perils of masturbation.

  RUDYARD KIPLING (1865-1936) wrote several notable children's fantasies, including a series of stories featuring the feral child Mowgli, raised by wolves and educated by a panther and a bear, which first appeared in The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895). Kipling's Just So Stories (1902) boldly carry forward the Victorian tradition of sensible nonsense, offering fanciful fabular explanations of "How the Leopard Got His Spots", "How the Camel Got His Hump" and so on.