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, MN, 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 forever,” he whispered, to hear the words, careful not to touch the ring. “Happy … forever”—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. Forever—his spirit sank under the soft heavy impact of it. Held in his thought the word made a dreary music, fading. “Happy forever”—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, ώς οὔποτ’ αὗθις ἀλλὰ νῦν πανύστατον. 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
