[In the excerpt below, Landow, examining the major works of John Ruskin. George MacDonald. George Meredith, William Morris, and William Hope Hodgson, maintains that these authors did not write simple escapist fiction, but instead used fantasy to comment on serious issues.]

In order to examine the characteristics of literary fantasy since 1850 in the most economical manner, I propose in the following pages to survey this Victorian and modern literary mode in terms of one work by each of five major authors—John Ruskin (1819-1900), George MacDonald (1824-1905), George Meredith (1828-1909), William Morris (1834-1896), and William Hope Hodgson (1875-1918). These five works, each of which represents a particular form of fantastic fiction, will enable us to perceive the defining characteristics of this literary form while also permitting us to observe what the verbal and visual arts in this mode have in common.

John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River exemplifies the literary fairy tale, a form which, like the literary ballad, imitates the anonymous products of popular or folk tradition. Ruskin's tale, which he wrote in 1841, two years before he began Modern Painters, tells of Hans and Schwartz, two selfish, evil brothers whose greed costs them their Edenic Treasure Valley and then their lives, and of the third brother, Gluck, whose generosity and self-sacrifice restore the valley's fertility. One cold winter evening when Gluck is minding the house, a fairy visitor arrives and demands entrance:

It was the most extraordinary looking little gentleman he had ever seen in his life. He had a very large nose, slightly brass-coloured, and expanding towards its termination into a development not unlike the lower extremity of a key bugle; his cheeks were very round, and very red, and might have warranted a supposition that he had been blowing a refractory fire for the last eight-and-forty hours; his eyes twinkled merrily through long silky eyelashes, his moustaches curled twice round like a corkscrew on each side of his mouth, and his hair, of a curious mixed pepper-and-salt colour, descended far over his shoulders. He was about four-feet-six in height, and wore a conical pointed cap of nearly the same altitude, decorated with a black feather some three feet long. His doublet was prolonged behind into something resembling a violent exaggeration of what is now termed a "swallow tail," but was much obscured by the swelling folds of an enormous black, glossy-looking cloak, which must have been very much too long in calm weather, as the wind, whistling around the old house, carried it clear out from the wearer's shoulders to about four times his own length.³

When the cruel, avaricious brothers return home, they expectedly order their strange visitor, who turns out to be South West Wind Esquire, to leave. At the stroke of midnight, the brothers are awakened by a tremendous crash to discover that their room is flooded. "They could see in the midst of it an enormous foam globe, spinning round, and bobbing up and down like a cork, on which, as on a most luxurious cushion, reclined the little old gentleman, cap and all. There was plenty of room for it now, for the roof was off (1.323). The morning light reveals that their precious valley, whose riches they never shared, has been transformed into a desert of red sand, and so, not having learned their lesson, they decamp for the nearest city where they set themselves up as cheating goldsmiths. Failing to prosper, they soon melt down all their hoarded gold until they have only Gluck's mug which an uncle had given the little boy. "The mug was a very odd mug to look at. The handle was formed of two wreaths of flowing golden hair, so finely spun that it looked more like silk than metal, and these wreaths descended into, and mixed with, a beard and whiskers of the same exquisite workmanship, which surrounded and decorated a very fierce little face, of the reddest gold imaginable, right in the front of the mug, with a pair of eyes in it which seemed to command its whole circumference" (1.326-27). Placing the mug in the melting pot, the brothers leave for the alehouse and instruct their younger brother to watch over the pot. While gazing out of a window at the desiccated remains of his beloved Treasure Valley, Gluck is astonished to hear the melted gold singing, and when on its orders he decants it, out jumps a golden dwarf a foot and a half high—the King of the Golden River, who had been enchanted by an evil spell. The grateful king thereupon rewards Gluck by telling him how to make his fortune: "'Whoever shall climb to the top of that mountain from which you see the Golden River issue, and shall cast into the stream at its source three drops of holy water, for him, and for him only, the river shall turn to gold. But no one failing in his first, can succeed in a second attempt; and if any one shall cast unholy water into the river, it will overwhelm him, and he will become a black stone'" (1.331). Predictably, the two brothers, who try to cheat each other, turn themselves into black stones, whereas Gluck, who gives his last holy water to an old man, a child, and a dog (all of whom turn out to be the dwarf king in magic guise), is rewarded again by the King of the Golden River with three drops of dew. When sprinkled on the source of the river, they transform the desert valley once again into an earthly paradise.

Although Ruskin uses the fairy tale to enforce the moral that selfishness is evil and destructive, its chief point is one central to his entire career as a critic of art and society—namely, as he put it in Unto This Last (1860), that "THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration" (17.105). Nonetheless, his later statements about fantasy and imagination suggest that the understanding of these ideas is at most a secondary experience and not the primary one he intended. According to his lecture "Fairy Land" in The Art of England (1884), fantastic or fairy art is "the art which intends to address only childish imagination, and whose object is primarily to entertain with grace" (33.332). For him, such an aim is an extremely important one.

Ruskin has all too often been mistakenly thought to espouse a crude didacticism, in part because he advances so emphatically the notion that beginning artists should present visual truth. But, in fact, as he several times urges in Modern Painters and his other writings, the most valuable, most educational, most moral function of art is simply to be beautiful. He can take such an undidactic approach to the arts because his theories of beauty assume that beauty is a divinely intended pleasure the enjoyment of which is itself a moral and spiritual act. Similarly, when he writes of fairy literature and art for children, he opposes its vulgarization by didactic intent because he believes that exercising the young imagination is itself a most valuable purpose. Appropriately, Ruskin begins his lecture on fairy art by announcing that he will take on Dickens' Gradgrind, the archetypal utilitarian educator who wanted children to learn facts and suppress their imaginations. Like Dickens, Ruskin works within a moral and philosophical tradition which held that feeling and imagination play—and should play—crucial roles in moral decision; so that to develop the imagination is to develop a mature human mind. Ruskin therefore tells his audience that "it is quite an inexorable law of this poor human nature of ours, that in the development of its healthy infancy, it is put by Heaven under the absolute necessity of using its imagination as well as its lungs and its legs;—that it is forced to develop its power of invention, as a bird its feathers of flight" (33.329).

Although "Fairy Land" concerns itself largely with art and literature for children, his remarks decades before in Modern Painters make it abundantly clear that he conceives the fantastic imagination as one of the defining characteristics of humanity and its highest art. According to him, whereas the student artist and those of lesser imagination must concentrate upon topographical, realistic studies which store the mind with visual fact, the great artist, such as Turner, creates imaginative transformations of reality which most of his audience will receive as fantastic distortions—thus the need for criticism and for Ruskin to have begun Modern Painters in order to demonstrate to hostile critics that Turner's later visions of mist and fire were firmly based on reality. By creating such unusual and unexpected images of the world of matter and spirit, the great artist produces a work which enables us to perceive with his eyes and imagination. Each artist necessarily transforms the world according to the strengths and limitations of his own character, imagination, and age, and in the third volume of Modern Painters (1856), Ruskin endeavors to explain the various imaginative modes in which artists work. Purist art, for example, arises in the "unwillingness . . . to contemplate the various forms of definite evil which necessarily occur in . . . the world" (5.103-04). Artists, like Fra Angelico, "create for themselves an imaginary state, in which pain and imperfection either do not exist, or exist in some edgeless and enfeebled condition" (5.104). Turning to a lesser English example, he describes Thomas Stothard in terms strikingly like those with which he was later to describe Kate Greenaway (Plate 7):

It seems as if Stothard could not conceive wickedness, coarseness, or baseness; every one of his figures looks as if it had been copied from some creature who had never harboured an unkind thought, or permitted itself an ignoble action. With this intense love of mental purity is joined, in Stothard, a love of mere physical smoothness and softness, so that he lived in a universe of soft grass and stainless fountains, tender trees, and stones at which no foot could stumble. (5.105)

Although such art can provide us some brief respite from the pains of this life, it is, finds Ruskin, essentially childish and incomplete.

A potentially higher art appears in the grotesque, which takes three forms. The central mode of the grotesque arises from the fact that the human imagination "in its mocking or playful moods . . . is apt to jest, sometimes bitterly, with under-current of sternest pathos, sometimes waywardly, sometimes slightly and wickedly, with death and sin; hence an enormous mass of grotesque art, some most noble and useful, as Holbein's Dance of Death, and Albrecht Dürer's Knight, Death and the Devil, going down gradually through various conditions of less and less seriousness into an art whose only end is that of mere excitement, or to amuse by terror" (5.131). In addition to this darker form of the grotesque, which includes work ranging from traditional religious images of death and the devil to satire and horrific art, there is a comparatively rare form which arises "from an entirely healthful and open play of the imagination, as in Shakespeare's Ariel and Titania, and in Scott's White Lady" (5.131). This delicate fairy art is so seldom achieved because "the moment we begin to contemplate sinless beauty we are apt to get serious; and moral fairy tales, and such other innocent work, are hardly ever truly, that is to say, naturally, imaginative; but for the most part laborious inductions and compositions. The moment any real vitality enters them, they are nearly sure to become satirical, or slightly gloomy, and so connect themselves with the evil-enjoying branch" (5.131-32).

The third form of the grotesque, which served as the basis for Ruskin's conception of a high art suited to the Victorian age, is the "thoroughly noble one . . . which arises out of the use or fancy of tangible signs to set forth an otherwise less expressible truth; including nearly the whole range of symbolical and allegorical art and poetry" (5.132). Ruskin's valuable perception that fantastic art and literature form part of a continuum which includes sublime, symbolic, grotesque, and satirical works is particularly useful to anyone interested in this mode, because fantastic art does, in fact, share much with satire and symbol, caricature and sublime. After all, much of the delight of Caldecott's courting frog (Plate 4), Griset's fisherman (Plate 5), and Rackham's witches arises in the way they caricature normal humanity, and similarly, when we receive pleasure from this last artist's wonderfully humanized trees (Plate 9), it is precisely because they are so human; because, in other words, they share so much of the human that they enable us to see ourselves better because we see ourselves in such guise.

Such delightful, and often unsettling presentation of aspects of our everyday reality in strange form is also a common feature of literary fantasy and appears in works as different as Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. But the literary fantasy's primary method is to transform not single elements in our world but that entire world itself, thus immersing us in another reality whose laws are different, often disconcerting, and occasionally terrifying. George MacDonald's Phantastes (1858), which will serve as our second major example, takes as its province the world of fairyland. Although MacDonald's fairyland, like that of Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, borrows many features from the fairy tale, this far more complex fictional world is essentially a new creation through which its inventor can explore adult themes.

MacDonald opens his tale in our world, but by the second chapter he has transformed it into a very strange place indeed. The morning after his twenty-first birthday, when the orphan Anodos has come into his estates, he is greeted by a tiny fairy-figure able to vary her size at will, who announces that she is his grandmother and that she has come to inform him that he is about to make a voyage to Fairy Land. Anodos, who does not even believe in Fairy Land, is astonished to awaken the next morning to

the sound of running water near me; and, looking out of bed, I saw that a large green marble basin, in which I was wont to wash, and which stood on a low pedestal of the same material in a corner of my room, was overflowing like a spring; and that a stream of clear water was running over the carpet, all the length of the room, finding its outlet I knew not where. And, stranger still, where this carpet, which I had myself designed to imitate a field of grass and daisies, bordered the course of the little stream, the grass-blades and daisies seemed to wave in a tiny breeze that followed the water's flow; while under the rivulet they bent and swayed with every motion of the changeful current, as if they were about to dissolve with it, and, forsaking their fixed form, become fluent as the waters.

My dressing-table was an old-fashioned piece of furniture of black oak, with drawers all down the front. These were elaborately carved in foliage, of which ivy formed the chief part. The nearer end of this table remained just as it had been, but on the further end a singular change had commenced. I happened to fix my eye on a little cluster of ivy-leaves. The first of these was evidently the work of the carver; the next looked curious; the third was unmistakably ivy; and just beyond it a tendril of clematis had twined itself about the gilt handle of one of the drawers. Hearing next a slight motion above me, I looked up, and saw that the branches and leaves designed upon the curtains of my bed were slightly in motion. Not knowing what change might follow next, I thought it high time to get up; and, springing from the bed, my bare feet alighted upon a cool green sward; and although I dressed in all haste, I found myself completing my toilet under the boughs of a great tree.⁴

This transformation of the main character's everyday reality into a far different one well exemplifies a central device of the literary fantasy.

Whereas the artist working with visual fantasy usually must place us immediately inside a fantastic kingdom, the creator of literary fantasy, who works with a narrative, sequential mode, has two choices. Like the artist he can open his work by immediately immersing us in his new world and such is the manner of proceeding adopted by William Morris in The Water of the Wondrous Isles and George Meredith in The Shaving of Shagpat, two works at which we shall soon look. The far more usual strategy is for the writer to employ some narrative device which displaces us from our everyday world into his created one. The most prosaic such device occurs in C. J. Cutliffe Hyne's The Lost Continent (1899), in which an adventurer discovers an ancient manuscript in a South American cave; when deciphered this manuscript turns out to contain the tale of Deucalion, the last survivor of Atlantis. A similar favorite device of this lost-world fiction so popular around 1900 is the discovery of a map which then leads the adventurous protagonists on a voyage of discovery which culminates in the fantastic world. In contrast, William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land (1912), William Morris' The Dream of John Ball (1888), and Lewis Carroll's Alice books (1865, 1871), use the device of the dream to move us into the fantastic realm, while the magic doorway or mirror, which appears in George MacDonald's Lilith (1895) and C. S. Lewis' Narnia books, is another effective means of transporting us to a fantastic world. Occasionally, as in Through the Looking Glass, an author may first employ a magical transformation and only later, at the story's end, reveal that the metamorphosis of reality actually occurred within a dream.

Since much of the fascination and delight which characterize the finest literary fantasies derive from their continual sharp contrast of fantastic and everyday existence, such devices of transformation are central to the form. Even Morris, who begins his narrative already within his imagined world, must find a means of displacing us from our usual conceptions of things, and so he employs a peculiar invented language and geography—a technique adopted by many subsequent authors—to insulate us from our world and its prosaic expectations. In the comparatively rare cases where the visual artist effects a transformation from our normal, prosaic world to his fantastic one within the picture itself he must similarly make use of formal devices. For example, in Rackham's There's a whispering from tree to tree (Plate 9) we perceive that the figures in the distance exist in a nonfantastic world, while the trees closest to the viewer become progressively more animated as they near the picture-plane. Rackham, in other words, has found a convincing means of showing how, as human beings withdraw from the forest, its hidden, fantastic life comes into being. To do so he has made use of devices of rational perspective to turn a potentially static image into a sequential, narrative one. Furthermore, by making the eye of the spectator effect this narrative or sequential progression, he has not only made him animate the picture himself but has also permitted him briefly to borrow the artist's vision and see, for a few moments, with his eyes.

Once we have entered the world of MacDonald's Phantastes, we soon discover that its laws, its principles of order, are completely different from those we know. As Anodos remarks, "it is no use trying to account for things in Fairy Land; and one who travels there soon learns to forget the very idea of doing so, and takes everything as it comes; like a child, who, being in a chronic condition of wonder, is surprised at nothing" (p. 33). In Phantastes, unlike more prosaic forms of fantastic fiction, such as that devoted to lost worlds, the principle of transformation continues to operate throughout the narrative, creating surprising incident and novel delight. Anodos finds a statue of a woman which springs to life; then he receives advice from an animated tree, finds a magic boat which takes him to a fairy palace, leaves it and finds himself in a wasteland, enters a cottage whose magic doors return him to his past, and so on. Such episodic narrative is entirely in keeping with the main drive of fantasy, which is to deny the primacy of our everyday laws of cause-and-effect.

Although Phantastes and similar works, such as David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), deny the applicability of some of our basic facts of existence, these episodic plots are hardly random or chaotic, for as C. S. Lewis explains, "To construct plausible and moving 'other worlds,' you must draw on the only 'other world' we know, that of the spirit."⁵ This fantastic world can take as many forms as the human spirit itself. For Lewis himself "the world of the spirit" is the world of Christian theology, and both his Perelandra and Narnia series, like MacDonald's Lilith, are allegorical embodiments of the Christian truths of redemption and spiritual growth. David Lindsay, who finds such belief irrelevent to human needs, presents an entirely different set of embodied human (and alien) possibilities. For Morris, also a secular thinker, the world of the spirit takes the form of an ideal of sexual and social development. In Phantastes, which relates Anodos' discovery of the moral truth that one cannot find oneself until one loses sight of oneself and one's desires, the spirit is largely moral, though imbued with theological overtones.

Following the German art fairy tale or Märchen, MacDonald employs a dream or dreamlike structure, revealing that to him the world of the spirit must be seen in terms of human psychology, the human inner world. In fact, a great many Victorian and later fantasies employ such dream structure, for the movement into the subjective world of the mind is the first step into fantasy. Essentially, there are two ways to claim that the world of everyday reality, the world of the realistic novel, is inadequate to human needs: the first is to claim that a higher world of religious or political ideas and ideals is more important, more relevant; while the second is to claim that the inner worlds of the human mind, its subjective experiences, have primary value. Lewis and MacDonald embody the first view; Kafka and Lovecraft the second.

Novel and fantasy touch upon each other in this matter of the inner world, and if one envisages a spectrum of fictions with the realistic novels of Eliot and Trollope at one end and the fantasies of MacDonald and Lindsay at the other, the novel of psychological realism occupies a middle position—and shares qualities of both. Thus, Jane Eyre, which purports to convey both the objective experiences and inner world of its orphan protagonist, has as much in common with the creations of MacDonald as it does with those of Thackeray, Trollope, and Gaskell. Modernist and later fiction which employs stream-of-consciousness and episodic, discontinuous structure often seems far closer to Phantastes than to Middlemarch or The Way We Live Now.

Although it is one of the most imaginative of fantastic tales in its rich incident, unexpected transformations, and completely imagined landscapes, Phantastes ends by returning us to this world. MacDonald chooses to have Anodos leave Fairy Land in part because the now wiser hero must learn to apply the lessons learned there in this world. An even more important reason is that excessive dwelling in the inner world is dangerous and destructive: Phantastes, which opens with an epigraph from Shelly's "Alastor," demonstrates that an excessive yearning for the ideals created by our imaginations can destroy the self and others, particularly when the self has a Pygmalionlike vision and attempts to possess another human being as a means of fulfillment. In contrast, some of the greatest authors of later fantasy, including H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Lord Dunsany, have chosen the road MacDonald rejected and written of dreamworlds more "real" than the waking world. Whereas Hodgson and Morris use the dream as a way of entering a supposedly existent future world, whether it be hundreds or millions of years distant in time, these others have employed the dream as a way into an entirely subjective realm to which the power of desire gives a higher reality—though one which is almost always destructive and cruel.

MacDonald's Phantastes, which combines the worlds of the fairy tale and the Märchen, exemplifies one chief form of literary fantasy. Another major form is the exotic tale set in the magical universe of the Arabian Nights, and this form has always held great appeal for illustrators. Like Shakespeare's The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Arabian Nights, or the Book of a Thousand and One Nights has provided a great source of inspiration for artists including John Dickson Batten; Edward Julius Detmold (Plate 6); Edmund Dulac; Arthur Boyd Houghton; Henry Justice Ford; Charles, Tom, and William Heath Robinson; and Sir John Tenniel. Artists and writers conceive of this exotic realm as sensual, lush with heavy perfumes, strange vegetation, and bright intense colors—a world of fierce justice and bizarre adventure in which lamps contain djinns or genies and great risks can bring great success. The visual side of this fascination with the exotic, which is one of the important currents of European and British romanticism, appears not only in fantastic illustration but also in scenes of life in the Middle East painted by so many nineteenth-century artists, including W. J. Muller, David Roberts, J. F. Lewis, William Holman Hunt, Joseph Farquharson, and Andrew Geddes.

George Meredith's first work of extended fiction, The Shaving of Shagpat (1855), offers us a glimpse at the literary use of the exotic fantasy at its most delightful. Like Dulac, who later imitated the conventions of Persian, Chinese, and Japanese art for his illustrations, Meredith uses the exotic style known to readers of The Arabian Nights to displace us into his fantastic imagined world: "Now, the story of Shibli Bagarag, and of the ball he followed, and of the subterranean kingdom he came to, and of the enchanted palace he entered, and of the sleeping king he shaved, and of the two princesses he released, and of the Afrite held in subjection by the arts of one and bottled by her, is it not known as 'twere written on the finger-nails of men and traced in their corner-robes?"⁶ This tale of a brave and adventurous, if vain, barber begins as a spoof of the genre, because it has such an unusual hero and even more unusual villain, who at first seems little more than an obese pile of black hair—"indeed a miracle of hairiness, black with hairs as he had been muzzled with it, and his head as it were a berry in a bush by reason of it. . . . Now would he close an eye, or move two fingers, but of other motion made he none, yet the people gazed at him with eagerness" (pp. 8-9). Meredith turns this apparent parody of the adventure tale into a straightforward exotic fantasy when he reveals that Shibli's future wife, the good sorceress Noorna, had unwittingly created this apparently comical monster, who possesses strong supernatural powers, when she placed in Shagpat's scalp the magical hair of the Genie Karaz, from whom she was fleeing. To save the world, which is increasingly coming under Shagpat's power of illusion, Shibli must pass repeated tests, obtain a magic sword, and destroy the source of evil magic.

Like the art and poetry of Beardsley (and like Wallace Stevens in "The Comedian as the Letter C"), Meredith employs the barber as a grotesque figure of the artist in a fallen world—a man who attempts to establish order and beauty which time and nature continually destroy. In Meredith this conception of the artist—for Shibli, like his creator, is a teller of tales—is treated only half-seriously. Meredith similarly handles and much qualifies traditional notions of adventure, heroism, and masculine strength. As the clear-sighted Noorna tells her father, the good Vizier Feshnavat, "there is all in this youth . . . that's desirable for the undertaking. . . . 'Tis clear that vanity will trip him, but honesty is a strong upholder; and he is one that hath the spirit of enterprise and the mask of dissimulation" (p. 95). In this most unpuritanic, un-English, un-Victorian world, dissimulation is a virtue, for Meredith has caught the tone of all great adventurers who descend from Odysseus to entertain us with cunning and resourcefulness. But despite the fact that Shibli is well aware of the dangers of vanity, he continually succumbs to it and is victorious only because Noorna scolds and rescues him until he is finally able to rescue her in turn. Like MacDonald's almost exactly contemporaneous Phantastes, The Shaving of Shagpat uses its fantastic events to present serious themes of human illusion, the dangers of pride, and the nature of true heroic action. In fact, its guiding ideas much resemble those of the usual nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, but unlike the realistic novel of growth and self-discovery, Shagpat does not dramatize major changes in the main character. We are warned against his immature vanity, we see its dangerous effects, and we see him conquer it, but as we close the covers of the book, we do not find Shibli, the barber turned monarch, essentially changed. We wonder what would happen to him without Noorna and hope she will never be far from his side.

As delightfully as Meredith enacts these serious themes, which incidentally also inspired his far different novels of high comedy, he most impresses us with his depiction of magical weapons and an underground world. Escaping the wiles of the evil sorceress Rabesqurat by means of a lily rooted in a living heart, Shibli enters the underground lands and begins a series of tests which gain him the magic sword he needs to destroy Shagpat. He strikes a magic door

and discovered an opening into a strange dusky land, as it seemed a valley, on one side of which was a ragged copper sun setting low, large as a warrior's battered shield, giving deep red lights to a brook that fell, and over a flat stream a red reflection, and to the sides of the hills a dark red glow. The sky was a brown colour; the earth a deeper brown, like the skins of tawny lions. Trees with reddened stems stood about the valley, scattered and in groups, showing between their leaves the cheeks of melancholy fruits swarthily tinged, and toward the centre of the valley a shining palace was visible, supported by massive columns of marble reddened by that copper sun. (p. 177)

Entering the palace, Shibli survives a series of tests characteristic of the romance to gain the magic sword at last. The book closes after his triumphant battle against Shagpat, the Genie Karaz, and the evil sorceress Rabesqurat, who rely upon magical weapons and strange transformations. The Shaving of Shagpat is thus an important nineteenth-century precursor of the so-called "Sword-and-Sorcery" school of fantasy literature. This form, which was inspired largely by Lord Dunsany in his "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth" and similar writings, combined the ancient materials of The Arabian Nights with chivalric legend and dragonlore of the North. In the twentieth century this kind of fantasy became a mainstay of pulp magazines and, like space operas with science fiction, did much to lower the reputation of fantasy as a serious form. These elements have been developed far more successfully in recent decades by J. R. R. Tolkien and the Americans Ursula K. Le Guin and Anne McCaffrey.

Ruskin and MacDonald have guided us into the fantasy world of Fairy Land, and Meredith has shown us the universe of the exotic fantasy. An historically more important imaginative cosmos appears in the prose romances of William Morris. According to Lin Carter, the author of fantasy literature whose paperback editions of the masters of this mode have done so much to popularize it in America, Morris is the true creator of heroic fantasy:

Oriental tales like Vathek and The Shaving of Shagpat are set—not in completely imaginary worlds of their authors' invention, as are the romances of William Morris—but in "literary" versions of the actual Middle East. . . . No one ever tried to write another Vathek or Shagpat, and only a few books (such as the Perelandra trilogy of C. S. Lewis and David Lindsay's brilliant and astounding novel A Voyage to Arcturus) show to any extent the influence of Lilith and Phantastes. But the genre of heroic fantasy laid in an imaginary world descends from William Morris to Lord Dunsany and E. R. Eddison, and from thence to whole generations of writers such as James Branch Cabell, Fletcher Pratt (The Blue Star), Robert E. Howard, J. R. R. Tolkien, L. Sprague de Camp (The Tritonian Ring and The Goblin Tower), Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, Jane Gaskell, [and] Lloyd Alexander. . . . From the world of the Wood and the world of the Well descend all the later worlds of fantastic fiction, Poictesme and Oz and Tormance, Barsoom and Narnia and Zothique, Gormenghast and Zimiamvia and Middle-Earth.⁷

Writers in the twentieth century have advanced farther down the road towards imagining alternate universes, for increasingly they have attempted, like de Camp, to people their worlds with new sentient creatures, societies, and entire congeries of legend, religion, and culture. Such movements of fantasy literature into the realm of speculative anthropology and theology make it clear that fantasy and romance create their imagined worlds as a means of exploring this one. It is important to emphasize once more the essential seriousness and potential humanistic contributions of such genres, since until recently their claims have been consistently scanted by academic critics and other advocates of "high" culture.

Similarly, students of Morris and Victorian culture have in general failed to see in his great prose romances anything more than escapist fiction. Although the obvious connections between his political beliefs and the propagandistic A Dream of John Ball (1888) and News from Nowhere (1891) have long been perceived, the equally important relation between these beliefs and the prose romances have not. One importance of the imagined world in The Water of the Wondrous Isles and similar writings is that it permits Morris to solve a basic problem confronting an author of political fiction—the problem of how to represent life in an ideal society which, by definition, does not exist under present conditions. The difficulty of dramatizing a positive political program is very great, and most successful political novels in fact take the form of satire or of a quasi-journalistic exposé of existing abuses. In contrast, Morris' romances take the more daring approach of creating the image of a better world for which man can strive. A Dream of John Ball is set in the fourteenth century and News from Nowhere takes place in the near future. In contrast, The House of the Wolfings (1888) and The Roots of the Mountains (1889) take place at that historical moment when Roman armies came into conflict with German tribal society, and although these works have major fantastic elements, their worlds are still largely historical reconstructions. Only with the great allegorical romances, The Well at the World's End (1896) and The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897), does he bring to fruition his search for an ideal world in which to dramatize the problems of self and society which he had begun with his first prose fiction, The Wood Beyond the World (1894).

The Water of the Wondrous Isles, one of the finest as well as the most unusual of fantasies, well represents Morris' contribution to the genre. It is the tale of a young girl, Birdalone, who was kidnapped by a witch and raised in isolation. She escapes from her captor in the witch's magic Sending Boat and voyages to the Castle of the Quest by way of a series of fantastic islands. At the castle she falls in love with one of the knights, flees from him after she causes the death of another knight, and goes to live and work in a city. At last, she recognizes her duties to self, lover, and society, and she rescues her Arthur. As Barbara J. Bono, author of the most important study of Morris' fiction, points out:

Birdalone's sojourn in and around the Water of the Wondrous Isles forms an extended allegory of sexual maturation. Her journey away from the Castle of the Quest to the City of the Five Crafts reverses this pattern as she gains experience of the world of societal relations. In her first journey across the lake she encounters many emblems of the destructive extremes of pure femaleness and pure maleness, beginning with the two offshore islets, Green Eyot and Rocky Eyot, and continued and developed in much more grotesque form in the isles of her later journey. If the witch's Isle of Increase Unsought is a Bower of Bliss of extreme female sensuality, the Isle of Nothing is the reductive expression of male sterility, while neither the lush beauty of the Isle of Queens nor the fierce stoniness of the Isle of Kings prevents these places from being essentially dead After Birdalone's journey across the water she has both the nature-derived power and the experience of sexual awakening which will enable her to love.⁸

She must now learn the proper social context for her love, Bono adds, and the second half of the book is occupied with this social education, which "culminates in Birdalone and Arthur's decisions to leave their idyll of love to be reunited with their friends." Although Morris always presents nature as the source of his characters' strength, he emphasizes that such strength can only be developed and fulfilled within a community of other human beings.

Like Rossetti and Burne-Jones, Morris creates an ideal quasi-medieval fantasy world whose keynote is a spiritualized eroticism. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who early came under the spell of chivalric romance and Dante's Vita Nuova, set the tone for many of his associates when he placed his pensive, yearning lovers within medieval settings. In his early works Burne-Jones eagerly followed him into this fantasy world of passionate love and heroic rescues with Clerk Saunders (1861), Iseult on the Ship (1857), The Knight's Farewell (1858), and Sir Galahad (1858). Such Pre-Raphaelite visions of idealized romantic love in a medieval setting had an enormous influence on English Victorian fine and decorative arts. Painters as different as John William Waterhouse, J. R. Spencer Stanhope, John Melhuish Strudwick, and Walter Crane continued to paint in this mode for more than a half century after Rossetti began it, and its influence upon the decorative arts was as equally long-lived and interesting. The close association of this idealized medieval fantasy world and Pre-Raphaelite conceptions of ideal love had a particularly important effect on the decorative arts, for they gave a major impetus to the attempt by Morris and his associates to create a complete, aesthetically satisfying environment. They not only wanted to create well-designed implements and total settings for a full, humane existence, but they also wished to use them to transform their own living space into miniature fantasy worlds. The Victoria and Albert's Saint George Cabinet (1861), designed by Webb with scenes painted by Morris himself, and The King René of Anjou's Honeymoon Cabinet, designed by Seddon and decorated by Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Brown, and Prinsep for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., exemplify such use of Pre-Raphaelite themes to fantasize the implements of daily life.

Nonetheless, although Morris resembles other members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement when he makes romantic love in a quasi-medieval setting central to his prose romances, his characterization of Birdalone as a heroic, active, sensual young woman sounds an entirely new note. Both the early Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the later aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism, which evolved under Rossetti's direction and influence, depicted love from the male point of view. As a result, both earlier and later forms of Pre-Raphaelitism tend to present a particularly masculine conception of woman. Their peculiarly Victorian notion of female nature conceives of it dividing quite sharply into two diametrically opposed categories—the active Lilith figure who devours men, and the passive, pensive maiden who waits for a man to awaken or complete her partially formed nature. The active woman, of whom Victorian men seemed so fearful, appears as Rossetti's Lady Lilith and Astarte Syriaca and as Swinburne's Delores and his Venus in "Laus Veneris." This conception of the fatal, devouring woman, which so inspired illustrators such as Aubrey Beardsley and Alastair, plays a comparatively minor role in Pre-Raphaelite work. Far more important is the other more central conception of woman as a passive, contemplative creature awaiting the lover for awakening, salvation, or even creation. Many of the most important paintings of the early Brotherhood form a series on the theme of romantic love and its frequently tragic aftermath: Millais' The Woodsman's Daughter (1851), which is an illustration of Patmore's poem on the unrequited love of a young country girl for a squire's son, presents the first act of a drama which ends with the seduced girl's death, while his Mariana (1851) presents a young woman from Tennyson's poem awaiting her lover who does not arrive. The paintings by Hunt and Millais of The Eve of St. Agnes (1848, 1863) follow Keats's poem in depicting a successful close to a tale of romantic love, while Millais' Lorenzo and Isabella (1849) and Hunt's Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1867) illustrate another poem by this poet which ends tragically. Hunt's The Pilgrim's Return (1847) and his illustration to Tennyson's "The Ballad of Oriana" (1857) represent the lover mourning over his dead beloved, but the most famous example of the "dead woman" theme is, of course, Millais' Ophelia (1851), though Arthur Hughes and many other artists and sculptors attempted the same subject.

Whereas these early works in the Pre-Raphaelite hardedge style present a precise historically locatable world in sharp outline and bright colors, Burne-Jones' paintings, which represent the high point of the aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism that descends from Rossetti, set their figures in a sensual, penumbral world. A large proportion of Burne-Jones' major works concern themselves with embodying his fascination, almost obsession, with the relations of men and women. Taken together, these works comprise a sexual myth that had great appeal for the artist and his contemporaries. St. George and the Dragon (1868), Cupid Delivering Psyche (c.1871), and the Perseus series (1875-1888), like Rossetti's "The Wedding of St. George and the Princess Sabra" (1857), present various stages in the dominant male's rescue of the helpless maiden. Similarly, in The Briar Rose series (1870-1890) the heroic prince pierces the forbidding enchanted thicket in order to awaken this sleeping beauty, thus restoring her and her entire world to life. King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1880), which appropriately repeats the disposition of figures employed in his Annunciation (1876-1879), depicts a powerful male character essentially creating his beloved—a subject Burne-Jones rendered most elaborately in the Pygmalion series (1868-1870), a work which can stand as the type of his sexual myth. Here the young man literally creates his own ideal beloved and is blessed when Venus vivifies her—a Victorian dream come true! MacDonald's Anodos learns all too painfully that such attempts to discover, capture, and possess one's ideal in another person are a self-destructive form of aggression. The Pre-Raphaelites, on the other hand, tended to see this as the ideal form of romantic love—and as one attainable both in art and life. As is well known, members and associates of the Pre-Raphaelite circle married relatively uncultured and even illiterate young women whom they then sought to remake according to a desired image. Although Holman Hunt ultimately failed to be either Cophetua or Pygmalion to Annie Miller, Brown, Rossetti, and Morris married their young women.

Many of Burne-Jones' major depictions of this sexual fantasy derive from Morris' own Earthly Paradise, for which they began as illustrations, and it is certainly tempting to see Morris' radically different women of the late prose romances as his mature reaction against the results of attempting to embody such attitudes in real life. At any rate, Birdalone is a development of Pre-Raphaelite conceptions of idealized womanhood which move far beyond the ail-too-Victorian world of erotic reverie created by his friends and associates. Although Birdalone shares the innocent beauty and grace, as well as the rich inner life of the Pre-Raphaelite heroine, she is a strong, active figure who not only shapes her own destiny but who also rescues her beloved and restores him to self, sanity, and civilization.

In contrast to Morris' progressive use of the fantasy, William Hope Hodgson, whose The Night Land (1912) exemplifies the darker or horrific form of this mode, uses it to embody reactionary social and sexual belief. His vision of a sunless earth millions of years in the future inhabited by Boschian monsters and fearsome spiritual and physical horror clearly is the product of that major cultural anxiety which John A. Lester, Jr. has analyzed in Journey Through Despair, 1880-1914.⁹ Hodgson's vision of "the Last Redoubt—that great Pyramid of grey metal which held the last millions of this world from the power of the Slayers"¹⁰ well expresses the attitudes of those many thinkers who feared that Western civilization was drawing to a close.

Hodgson relates his bizarre tale of the dark future in an archaic, almost Morrisian diction, which serves, like that of his predecessor, to displace the reader into his imaginative world. The unnamed teller of the tale is an English landowner of some unspecified but premodern age who grieves for his dead wife, Mirdath the Beautiful. He discovers that "at night in my sleep [I] waked into the future of this world, and [have] seen strange things and utter marvels. .. . In this last time of my visions, of which I would tell, it was not as if I dreamed; but, as it were, that I waked into the dark, in the future of this world. And the sun had died" (p. 34). The narrator, who preserves a memory of his earlier identity, discovers that he is a telepathically gifted youth trained to help preserve the great Redoubt. The burden of the tale, which follows the pattern of medieval romance, takes the form of the young man's perilous adventures in the Night Land to save a telepathic girl from the Lesser Refuge, a smaller redoubt of which all knowledge had been lost for thousands of years until the hero makes mental contact with it. The young woman, Naani, discovers herself to be the reincarnation of Mirdath, and so the two lovers are reunited after millions of years—but first they must make the journey to safety, crawling for days through total darkness, avoiding giants, abhumans, enormous spiders, and a spiritual evil which is far more terrifying than these physical dangers. Hodgson's archaic and often repulsive ideas of the ideal relations between man and woman are appropriate to a work derived from chivalric romance, but his disturbing mixture of chivalric devotion and brutality—he obviously takes great pleasure in having the hero physically punish his beloved—adds a bizarre dimension to an already strange work. The weird love interludes which punctuate the return journey nonetheless do serve as effective counterpoints to the characters' horrific adventures, the imagination of which provides the main appeal of The Night Land.

Introducing us to this nightmarish future, the protagonist explains that the monstrously evil beings surrounding the Great Redoubt had their origin in the

Days of the Darkening (which I might liken to a story which was believed doubtfully, much as we of this day believe the story of the Creation). A dim record there was of olden sciences (that are as yet far off in our future) which, disturbing the unmeasurable Outward Powers, had allow [sic] to pass the Barrier of Life some of these Monsters and Ab-human creatures. . . . And thus there had materialised, and in other cases developed, grotesque and horrible Creatures, which now beset the humans of this world. And where there was no power to take on material form, there had been allowed to certain dreadful Forces to have power to affect the life of the human spirit. . . . As that Eternal Night lengthened itself upon the world, the power of terror grew and strengthened, (pp. 44, 46)

Like the American H. P. Lovecraft, whose work also was often marred by repetition, stilted writing, and reactionary ideas, Hodgson's great gift was the ability to communicate this "power of terror." Both in The Night Land and The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" (1907), a tale of men shipwrecked on a monstrous island, he embodies all the fears that haunt men sleeping and waking—fears of dissolution, loss of identity, and helplessness in the presence of hideous evil.

Horror fiction takes two basic forms, the most popular of which is the horror or ghost story which reveals the presence of often unexpected terrors within a realistically conceived world. Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood, Charles Dickens, Arthur Machen, and many authors of recent years have excelled in writing this sensational cousin to the realistic novel. Frequently, the narrator or main character is a skeptical, even unimaginative person who, by the tale's end, is either convinced of the existence of fantastic horror breaking into his everyday world or punished for his skepticism by it. In contrast, the horrific fantasy—like the allegorical romances of Morris—takes place in either a fully created world or so emphasizes the hidden presence of such a world bordering on our own (or lying beneath it) that it subsumes the everyday world with which it began. Hodgson's books, Mervyn Peake's "Boy in Darkness," and Lovecraft's many tales exemplify such worlds of terrifying fantasy.

The evil which provides the horror in both forms of fiction—horror story and horrific fantasy—appears in a limited number of forms. First, there is the common use of Satanism and witchcraft, which obviously relies heavily on a Judaeo-Christian conception of evil that often receives a distinctly Manichean twist: the presence of Satanic evil in such overwhelming form makes the devil appear another deity of potency equal to God. Medieval grotesques, medieval and later representations of temptations and the Last Judgment, and the work of Bosch, Brueghel, and their imitators have provided powerful inspiration for artists and writers who work in this fantastic mode. In the period since 1850 it appears in illustration both in seriously horrific forms and in the more whimsical creations of Rackham's witches and Sime's "Devil with a Coal Scuttle." A second, closely-related source of evil, which present the continued existence of older, all-but-forgotten divinities and forces, derives from classical and Northern mythology and the darker side of fairy lore. Arthur Machen's "The Lost Brother" (from The Three Imposters, 1890) and Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" exemplify the use in horrific fantasy of these dangerous, destructive, and often hideously cruel forces which remain outside the Judaeo-Christian scheme of things, while Sime's drawings for The Fantasy of Life (1901) represent their appearance in fantastic art.

The third source of horror, which occasionally combines with the previous two, derives from man's fear of formlessness, chaos, and devolution. Machen's "Novel of the White Powder" (1901), Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror," and the giant slugs and other creatures of The Night Land draw upon both our normal antipathy to slimy, decaying substances and our instinctive revulsion at the way death and dissolution reduce living form to shapelessness. As Barton L. St. Armand has pointed out in his study of Lovecraft, the American writer's use of such horrifying dissolution, which use embodies his existential nausea and fear of universal corruption, derives largely from the classical example of such an image—Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar."¹¹ At the conclusion of Poe's tale, Valdemar, who had been hypnotized at the point of death, is awakened from his trance and "his whole frame—within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk—crumbled—absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before the whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putrescence."¹² In Harry Clark's wonderfully grisly illustration of this passage, the onlookers recoil in horror at the disintegrating body, from which part of an arm has detached itself and from whose eyes and mouth blood and gore run.

Although Hodgson's The Night Land relies frequently on such horrific sensationalism, it is equally concerned with emphasizing the ability to endure this horror possessed "by that lonely and mighty hill of humanity, facing its end—so near the Eternal, and yet so far deferred in the minds and to the senses of those humans. And thus it hath been ever" (p. 46). Hodgson frequently attempts to show that his nightmarish cosmos has a serious general significance, that it is relevant to human experience throughout the ages. His remarks about evolution, science, and spirituality suggest that he took these points quite seriously and they are not, as is often the case in such stories, merely attempts to establish the credibility of a fictional world. The miraculous intervention of a good divinity in this Manichean world at points when the hero has otherwise no chance of survival further suggests that Hodgson believed that if man strove heroically to preserve love and humanity against the forces of evil, he might expect to be rewarded by supernatural aid which, while it might not bring him final victory, would allow him to battle on equal terms.

In fact, all the examples of fantasy at which we have looked turn out to be vehicles by which their authors dramatize ideas of high seriousness rather than mere escapist fictions. The essential seriousness of much fine fantastic literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries appears nowhere more clearly than in works such as Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies (1863) and George MacDonald's "The Golden Key" and At the Back of the North Wind (1871), which employ the great potential of fantasy as a literary mode to convey Christian ideas of the afterlife. At the Back of the North Wind, for instance, relates how a young boy has magical adventures in the company of the mysterious North Wind who we gradually come to realize is Death itself. In the nineteenth century, when diseases carried away many children before they reached their teens, sermons, tracts, and fiction often sought to console parents and prepare children for an early death by removing its terrors. Fantasy is far better suited than the tract or sermon to convey the essentially paradoxical notion that earthly life (which is but a preparation for a higher, fuller eternal life) is a form of death, while death (which at first seems so fearful) is the only means to true life. In the Gospels Christ tells His disciples that a seed can only bear fruit if it dies—if it loses its initial state and develops into another. The Christian lives with this paradox and must learn to redefine death, ultimately finding in it a new, higher, and essentially fantastic meaning. Since the central principle of literary and visual fantasy is precisely such shifting of basic laws or meanings by which we experience the world, this artistic mode is well suited to embodying views which deny that everyday reality, the here and now, is either all-important or the only form of reality.

As the various works at which we have looked suggest, fantasy in fact comprises a second great tradition of English fiction. Even the Marxist critic Arnold Kettle, who despises the romance as the escapist fictions of a ruling class, recognizes that "all art is, in an important sense, an escape. . . . There is a sense in which the capacity to escape from his present experience . . . is man's greatest and distinguishing ability. . . . This fantastic quality of art, that it takes us out of the real world so that, as Shelley put it, it 'awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought,' this quality is not a trivial or accidental by-product but the very essence of the value of art. If art did in fact—as the ultra-naturalistic school tends to assume—merely paint a picture of what is, it would be a much less valuable form of human activity, for it would not alter men's consciousness but merely confirm it."¹³ Kettle's important recognition of the essential value of escape or withdrawal from everyday life and its assumptions is developed independently by Morse Peckham into a compelling theory of the arts. According to his Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior, and the Arts, the arts are "an adaptational mechanism" which acts as a "rehearsal for those real situations in which it is vital for our survival to endure cognitive tension, to refuse the comforts of validation . . . when such validation is inappropriate because too vital interests are at stake; art is the reinforcement of the capacity to endure disorientation so that a real and significant problem may emerge. Art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of a false world so that man may endure exposing himself to the tensions and problems of the real world."¹⁴ Although neither Kettle nor Peckham concerns himself with fantastic literature and art, it seems probable that the strange worlds of such paintings and fictions have an equal if not greater capacity to return us to everyday life with our imaginations exercised and strengthened as do works of the realistic schools. Fantasy's essential abilities to entertain, instruct, and exercise the mind and spirit make it, in short, a major mode and one well worth serious, if delighted, attention.

¹ Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1957), pp. 12-13.

² Eric S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 37.

³ John Ruskin, Works (The Library Edition), eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903-1912), I, 316. Hereafter cited in the text by volume and page.

⁴ George MacDonald, Phantastes (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1964), pp. 19-20. Hereafter cited in the text.

⁵ C. S. Lewis, "On Stories," in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harvest, 1975), p. 12.

⁶ George Meredith, The Shaving of Shagpat (New York: Ballantine, 1970), p. 1. Hereafter cited in the text.

⁷ Lin Carter, "About The Well at the World's End and William Morris," in The Well at the World's End, 2 vols. (New York: Ballantine, 1970), I, x-xi; II, [iii].

⁸ Barbara J. Bono, "The Prose Fictions of William Morris: A Study in the Literary Aesthetic of a Victorian Social Reformer," Victorian Poetry, 13, no. 3-4 (1975), 52.

⁹ John A. Lester, Jr., Journey Through Despair, 1880-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). See also Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

¹⁰ William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1976), p. 34. Hereafter cited in the text.

¹¹ Barton L. St. Armand, The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H P. Lovecraft (Elizabethtown, N.Y.: Dragon Press, 1977), pp. 59-77.

¹² Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems (New York: Modern Library, 1938), p. 103.

¹³ Arnold Kettle, An Introduction to the English Novel, 2nd ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1967), I, 31.

¹⁴ Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior, and the Arts (New York: Schocken, 1967), p. 314.