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, 0 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 speak, 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 e
laborate 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?"
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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.
by John Keats
Part I
PART II
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON (1803-1873), who eventually became the first Baron Lytton of Knebworth, was for a while the best-selling Victorian novelist. His novels were many and various, but he is today best-remembered for the much-filmed The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and for his classic haunted house story "The Haunted and the Haunters" (1859; also know as 'The House and the Brain"). In later years he involved himself with the occult fads of the day; although it is difficult to ascertain how credulous he was he wrote two notable occult romances, Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (1861), and produced a curious quasiUtopian fantasy in The Coming Race (1871; initially issued anonymously) in which the inhabitants of a secret Underworld have achieved complete mastery of their environment by harnessing the omnipotent occult force vril.
Many of Lytton's earliest works appeared in The New Monthly Magazine, whose editor he was for twenty months in 1832-1833. He wrote several allegorical fantasies for the magazine, including "The Nymph of the Lurlei Berg"; others can be found, with a number of essays, in The Student (1835). He also serialised his satirical fantasy novel modelled on Alain Rene le Sage's The Devil on Two Sticks (1707), Asmodeus at Large (1833). More allegorical tales are embedded in The Pilgrim of the Rhine (1834), which is a highly eccentric combination of travel book and fairy romance.
Like Coleridge before him Lytton was strongly infected by the aesthetic theories of the German Romantic philosophers, and he became an enthusiastic champion of a theory of art which exalted the supernatural and derided conventional realism, claiming that literary works require some kind of metaphysical framework if they are to be deemed whole and complete. Whether these theories (laid out in a series of articles in Blackwood's in mid-century) functioned as an inspiration to others it is difficult to judge, but Lytton was an important defender of fantastic elements in literature in a period when the more fashionable view derided their use.
by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
A group of armed men were sitting cheerlessly round a naked and ill-furnished board in one of those rugged castles that overhang the Rhine - they looked at the empty bowl, and they looked at the untempting platter - then they shrugged their shoulders, and looked foolishly at each other. A young Knight, of a better presence than the rest, stalked gloomily into the hall.
"Well, comrades," said he, pausing in the centre of the room, and leaning on his sword, "I grieve to entertain ye no better - my father's gold is long gone - it bought your services while it lasted, and with these services, I, Rupert the Fearnought, won this castle from its Lord - levied tolls on the river - plundered the Burgesses of Bingen - and played the chieftain as nobly as a robber may. But alas! wealth flies - luck deserts us - we can no longer extract a doit from traveller or citizen. We must separate."
The armed men muttered something unintelligible - then they looked again at the dishes - then they shook their heads very dismally, and Rupert the Fearnought continued -
"For my part I love every thing wealth purchases - I cannot live in poverty, and when you have all gone, I propose to drown myself in the Rhine."
The armed men shouted out very noisily their notions on the folly of such a project of relief; but Rupert sank on a stone seat, folded his arms, and scarcely listened to them.
"Ah, if one could get some of the wealth that lies in the Rhine!" said an old marauder, " that would be worth diving for!"
"There cannot be much gold among the fishes I fancy," growled out another marauder, as he played with his dagger.
"Thou art a fool," quoth the old man; "gold there is, for I heard my father say so, and it may be won too by a handsome man, if he be brave enough.":
Rupert lifted his head - " And how?" said he.
"The Water Spirits have the key to the treasure, and he who wins their love, may perhaps win their gold."
Rupert rose and took the old robber aside; they conversed long and secretly, and Rupert, returning to the hall, called for the last hogshead of wine the cellar contained.
"Comrades," said he, as he quaffed off a bumper, "Comrades, pledge to my safe return; I shall leave ye for a single month, since one element can yield no more, to try the beings of another; I may perish - I may return not. Tarry for me, therefore, but the time I have mentioned, if ye then see me not, depart in peace. Meanwhile, ye may manage to starve on, and if the worst comes to the worst, ye can eat one another."
So saying, the young spendthrift (by birth a Knight, by necessity a Robber, and by name and nature, Rupert the Fearnought) threw down the cup, and walking forth from the hall, left his companions to digest his last words with what appetite they might.
Among the Spirits of the Water, none were like Lurline; she was gentle as the gentlest breeze that floats from the realms of Spring over the bosom of the Rhine, and wherever at night she glided along the waves, there the beams of the love-star lingered, and lit up her path with their tenderest ray. Her eyes were of the softest azure of a southern heaven, and her hair like its setting sun. But above all her charms was the melody of her voice, and often when she sat upon the Lurlei Rock by the lonely moonlight, and sent her wild song above the silent waters, the nightingale paused from her wail to listen, and the winds crept humbled round her feet, as at a Sorcerer's spell.
One night as she thus sat, and poured forth her charmed strains, she saw a boat put from the opposite shore, and as it approached nearer and nearer towards her, she perceived it was guided by one solitary mariner; the moonlight rested upon his upward face, and it was the face of manhood's first dawn - beautiful, yet stern, and daring in its beauty - the light curls, surmounted by a plumed semicasque, danced above a brow that was already marked by thought; and something keen and proud in the mien and air of the stranger, designated one who had learnt to act no less than to meditate. The Water Spirit paused as he approached, and gazed admiringly upon the fairest form that had ever yet chanced upon her solitude; she noted that the stranger too kept his eyes fixed upon her, and steered his boat to the rock on which she sat. And the shoals then as now were fraught with danger, but she laid
her spell upon the wave and upon the rock, and the boat glided securely over them, - and the bold stranger was within but a few paces of her seat, when she forbade the waters to admit his nearer approach. The stranger stood erect in the boat, as it rocked tremulously to and fro, and still gazing upon the Water Nymph, he said -
"Who art thou, 0 beautiful maiden ! and whence is thine art? Night after night I have kept watch among the wild rocks that tenanted the sacred Goar, and listened enamoured to thy lay. Never before on earth was such minstrelsy heard. Art thou a daughter of the river? and dost thou - as the greybeards say - lure us to destruction? Behold, I render myself up to thee! Sweet is Death if it cradle me in thine arms! Welcome the whirlpool, if it entomb me in thy home!"
The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy: 19th Century (European Literary Fantasy Anthologies) Page 7