Aspects of the novel
retired in despair after hearing the omitted details of his son's birth,
should come alive like Belinda's toilette in _The Rape of the Lock_, or
that Uncle Toby's drawbridge should lead into Lilliput? There is a
charmed stagnation about the whole epic--the more the characters do the
less gets done, the less they have to say the more they talk, the harder
they think the softer they get, facts have an unholy tendency to unwind
and trip up the past instead of begetting the future, as in
well-conducted books, and the obstinacy of inanimate objects, like Dr.
Slop's bag, is most suspicious. Obviously a god is hidden in _Tristram
Shandy_, his name is Muddle, and some readers cannot accept him. Muddle
is almost incarnate--quite to reveal his awful features was not Sterne's
intention; that is the deity that lurks behind his masterpiece--the army
of unutterable muddle, the universe as a hot chestnut. Small wonder that
another divine muddler, Dr. Johnson, writing in 1776, should remark,
"Nothing odd will do long: _Tristram Shandy_ did not last!" Doctor
Johnson was not always happy in his literary judgments, but the
appropriateness of this one passes belief.
Well, that must serve as our definition of fantasy. It implies the
supernatural, but need not express it. Often it does express it, and
were that type of classification helpful, we could make a list of the
devices which writers of a fantastic turn have used--such as the
introduction of a god, ghost, angel, monkey, monster, midget, witch into
ordinary life; or the introduction of ordinary men into no man's land,
the future, the past, the interior of the earth, the fourth dimension;
or divings into and dividings of personality; or finally the device of
parody or adaptation. These devices need never grow stale; they will
occur naturally to writers of a certain temperament, and be put to fresh
use; but the fact that their number is strictly limited is of interest;
and suggests that the beam of light can only be manipulated in certain
ways.
I will select, as a typical example, a recent book about a witch:
_Flecker's Magic_, by Norman Matson. It seemed to me good and I
recommended it to a friend whose judgment I respect. He thought it poor.
That is what is so tiresome about new books; they never give us that
restful feeling which we have when perusing the classics. _Flecker's
Magic_ contains scarcely anything that is new--fantasies cannot: only
the old old story of the wishing ring which brings either misery or
nothing at all. Flecker, an American boy who is learning to paint in
Paris, is given the ring by a girl in a café; she is a witch, she tells
him; he has only to be sure what he wants and he will get it. To prove
her power, a motor-bus rises slowly from the street and turns upside
down in the air. The passengers, who do not fall out, try to look as if
nothing was happening. The driver, who is standing on the pavement at
the moment, cannot conceal his surprise, but when his bus returns safe
to earth again he thinks it wiser to get into his seat and drive off as
usual. Motor-buses do not revolve slowly through the air--so they do
not. Flecker now accepts the ring. His character, though slightly
sketched, is individual, and this definiteness causes the book to grip.
It proceeds with a growing tension, a series of little shocks. The
method is Socratic. The boy starts by thinking of something obvious,
like a Rolls-Royce. But where shall he put the beastly thing? Or a
beautiful lady. But what about her carte d'identité? Or money? Ah,
that's more like it--he is almost a beggar. Say a million dollars. He
prepares to turn the ring for this wish--except while one's about it two
millions seem safer--or ten--or--and money blares out into madness, and
the same thing happens when he thinks of long life: to die in forty
years--no, in fifty--in one hundred--horrible, horrible. Then a solution
occurs. He has always wanted to be a great painter. Well, he'll be it at
once. But what kind of greatness? Giotto's? Cézanne's? Certainly not;
his own kind, and he does not know what that is, so this wish likewise
is impossible.
And now a horrible old woman begins to haunt his days and dreams. She
reminds him vaguely of the girl who gave him the ring. She knows his
thoughts and she is always sidling up to him in the streets and saying,
"Dear boy--darling boy--wish for happiness." We learn in time that she
is the real witch--the girl was a human acquaintance whom she used to
get into touch with Flecker. The last of the witches--very lonely. The
rest have committed suicide during the eighteenth century--they could
not endure to survive into the world of Newton where two and two make
four, and even the world of Einstein is not sufficiently decentralised
to revive them. She has hung on in the hope of smashing this world, and
she wants the boy to ask for happiness because such a wish has never
been made in all the history of the ring.
Perhaps Flecker was the first modern man to find himself in this
predicament? The people of the old world had so little they knew surely
what they wanted. They knew about Almighty God, who wore a beard and sat
in an armchair about a mile above the fields, and life was very short
and very long too, for the days were so full of unthinking effort.
The people of the recorded olden times wished for a beautiful castle on
a high hill and lived therein until death. But the hill was not so high
one might see from the windows back along thirty centuries--as one may
from a bungalow. In the castle there were no great volumes filled with
words and pictures of things dug up by man's relentless curiosity from
sand and soil in all comers of the world; there was a sentimental
half-belief in dragons, but no knowledge that once upon a time only
dragons had lived on the earth--that man's grandfather and grandmother
were dragons; there were no movies flickering like thoughts against a
white wall, no phonograph, no machinery with which to achieve the
sensation of speed; no diagrams of the fourth dimension, no contrasts in
life like that of Waterville, Minn., and Paris, France. In the castle
the light was weak and flickering, hallways were dark, rooms deeply
shadowed. The little outside world was full of shadow, and on the very
top of the mind of him who lived in the castle played a dim
light--underneath were shadows, fear, ignorance, will-to-ignorance. Most
of all, there was not in the castle on the hill the breathless sense of
imminent revelation--that today or surely tomorrow Man would at a stroke
double his power and change the world again.
The ancient tales of magic were the mumbling thoughts of a distant
shabby little world--so, at least, thought Flecker, offended. The tales
gave him no guidance. There was too much difference between his world
and theirs.
He wondered if he hadn't dismissed the wish for happiness rather
heedlessly? He seemed to get nowhere thinking about it. He was not wise
enough. In the old tales a wish for happiness was never made! He
wondered why.
He might chance it--just to see what would happen. The thought made him
tremble. He leaped from his bed and paced the red-tiled floor, rubbing
his hands together.
"I want to be happy for ever," he whispered, to hear the words, careful
not to touch the ring. "_Happy ... for ever_"--the two syllables of the
first word, like hard little pebbles, struck musically against the bell
of his imagination, but the second was a sigh. _For ever_--his spirit
sank under the soft heavy impact of it. Held in his thought the word
made a dreary music, fading. "_Happy for ever_"--NO!!
Thus again and again--the mark of the true fantasist--does Norman Matson
merge the kingdoms of magic and common sense by using words that apply
to both, and the mixture he has created comes alive. I will not tell the
end of the story. You will have guessed its essentials, but there are
always surprises in the working of a fresh mind, and to the end of time
good literature will be made round this notion of a wish.
To turn from this simple example of the supernatural to a more
complicated one--to a highly accomplished and superbly written book
whose spirit is farcical: _Zuleika Dobson_ by Max Beerbohm. You all know
Miss Dobson--not personally, or you would not be here now. She is that
damsel for love of whom all the undergraduates of Oxford except one
drowned themselves during Eights week, and he threw himself out of a
window.
A superb theme for a fantasy, but all will depend on the handling. It is
treated with a mixture of realism, wittiness, charm and mythology, and
the mythology is most important. Max has borrowed or created a number of
supernatural machines--to have entrusted Zuleika to one of them would be
inept; the fantasy would become heavy or thin. But we pass from the
sweating emperors to the black and pink pearls, the hooting owls, the
interference of the Muse Clio, the ghosts of Chopin and George Sand, of
Nellie O'Mora; just as one fails another starts, to uphold this gayest
and most exquisite of funeral palls.
Through the square, across the High, down Grove Street they
passed. The Duke looked up at the tower of Merton, _ώs oὔπoτ' αὗθιs
ἀλλὰ νῦν πανύστατoν_. Strange that tonight it would still be
standing here, in all its sober and solid beauty--still be
gazing, over the roofs and chimneys, at the tower of Magdalen, its
rightful bride. Through untold centuries of the future it would stand
thus, gaze thus. He winced. Oxford walls have a way of belittling us;
and the Duke was loth to regard his doom as trivial.
Aye, by all minerals we are mocked. Vegetables, yearly deciduous, are
far more sympathetic. The lilac and laburnum, making lovely now the
railed pathway to Christ Church meadow, were all a-swaying and nodding
to the Duke as he passed by. "Adieu, adieu, your Grace," they were
whispering. "We are very sorry for you, very sorry indeed. We never
dared suppose you would predecease us. We think your death a very great
tragedy. Adieu! Perhaps we shall meet in another world--that is, if the
members of the animal kingdom have immortal souls, as we have."
The Duke was little versed in their language; yet, as he passed between
these gently garrulous blooms, he caught at the least the drift of their
salutation, and smiled a vague but courteous acknowledgment, to the
right and the left alternately, creating a very favourable impression.
Has not a passage like this--with its freedom of invocation--a beauty
unattainable by serious literature? It is so funny and charming, so
iridescent yet so profound. Criticisms of human nature fly through the
book, not like arrows but upon the wings of sylphs. Towards the
end--that dreadful end often so fatal to fiction--the book rather flags:
the suicide of all the undergraduates of Oxford is not as delightful as
it ought to be when viewed at close quarters, and the defenestration of
Noaks almost nasty. Still it is a great work--the most consistent
achievement of fantasy in our time, and the closing scene in Zuleika's
bedroom with its menace of further disasters is impeccable.
And now with pent breath and fast-beating heart, she stared at the lady
of the mirror, without seeing her; and now she wheeled round and swiftly
glided to that little table on which stood her two books. She snatched
Bradshaw.
We always intervene between Bradshaw and any one whom we see consulting
him. "Mademoiselle will permit me to find that which she seeks?" asked
Melisande.
"Be quiet," said Zuleika. We always repulse, at first, any one who
intervenes between us and Bradshaw.
We always end by accepting the intervention. "See if it is possible to
go direct from here to Cambridge," said Zuleika, handing the book on.
"If it isn't, then--well, see how one _does_ get there."