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Fantasy Commentator, v. 1, issue 5, Winter 1944-1945
Page 93
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FANTASY COMMENTATOR 93 That this is uncertain ground, no one knows better than I, for I base my argument on nothing more than that vague feeling which makes a student of early English poetry say, when he comes to certain lines in Beowulf or The Phoenix, "By the pricking of my thumbs, something Celtic this way comes." But if a poignantly lyric treatment of nature, if the use of the occult and of an otherworld which is hidden behind a very thin veil are characteristic of what we call Celtic romanticism, then these novels are Celtic in mood. My imaginary scholar of the future may well be misled as he reads the many almost painfully loving descriptions of the English countryside which make these 1940 novels poetic. He will be apt to say that they lament a day which is past. But he must remember that, although by the end of 1941 many of these tenderly lyric passages had become a remembrance of things past, at the time when the writers set pen to paper they were a remembrance of things present, the expression of a nostalgia for beloved scenes and objects which had not yet been discovered. But a few illustrations will make the point more clear. One of the best examples of pure fantasy is Clemence Dane's The Moon is Feminine. The story is laid in Brighton in 1801: Henry Cope befriends a seal caught in a net and frees it. But Henry is descended from a certain greenish maiden who walked out of a hill and married one of his mortal ancestors, which makes him kin to the people of St. Martin's Land. The seal's master, a strange gypsy boy from the sea, strikes up a friendship with Henry and comes between him and his love for Molly. At last Molly is ravished and destroyed by the sea-gypsy, leaving Henry a forlorn, mad, green-clad man seeking his lost love on the Brighton beach. One recalls that green is the magic color in Celtic folklore, and that in the ancient stories the sea and the hills are peopled with many creatures not wholly of this world. Mildred Cram's Kingdom of Innocents is another beautifully embroidered fairy tale. The story is told by an American who is entitled to insight because his name is Morgan. In the "oldest house in England," a great estate in the middle of an ancient forest, lives Stephen Gayle who is described as "Arthurian." He loves every inch and tradition of his ancestral soil. The gardens are kept up by a strange dwarf, who seems to be one of the "Little People" bold enough to stay on in a war-threatened England. There is a horse named "The Shagraun," which seems to have unicorn blood, and a friendly goblin who flees to Lapland when motorcars begin to spread destruction and the smell of war is in the air. Stephen plays Mark to his wife's Inseult. But the real story is of Joan and Richard who are orphaned by the first World War and become so terrified of adult life that they make their wish, in the middle of a Druid ring, that they may never grow up. Their bodies become adult, but like Martin in Thunder on the Left, they preserve the innocence of childhood. This innocence looks like insanity to materialistic adults, and at last the innocents return to the Druid ring to undo the spell and grow up---to live happily ever after in spite of another war, until at the end they step out of their bodies and walk away into eternal springtime. But there is evidence of a more concrete sort. One notices that in these novels the names of places and characters are Norman or Welsh. There is constant return to Roman and early British traditions; the Angles and Saxons are pointedly ignored. To realize how very repeatedly they are ignored, one has only to read the opening chapters of Green's History of the English People. In this connection Warwick Deeping's Man Who Went Back is of special interest because it underlines what is only suggested in the other tales. This novel is fourth-dimensional in its mechanism, although the subject matter belongs here, inasmuch as the twentieth century hero meets with an accident in 1939, and is shifted back into the body of a Briton who has been fighting off the Saxon in-
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FANTASY COMMENTATOR 93 That this is uncertain ground, no one knows better than I, for I base my argument on nothing more than that vague feeling which makes a student of early English poetry say, when he comes to certain lines in Beowulf or The Phoenix, "By the pricking of my thumbs, something Celtic this way comes." But if a poignantly lyric treatment of nature, if the use of the occult and of an otherworld which is hidden behind a very thin veil are characteristic of what we call Celtic romanticism, then these novels are Celtic in mood. My imaginary scholar of the future may well be misled as he reads the many almost painfully loving descriptions of the English countryside which make these 1940 novels poetic. He will be apt to say that they lament a day which is past. But he must remember that, although by the end of 1941 many of these tenderly lyric passages had become a remembrance of things past, at the time when the writers set pen to paper they were a remembrance of things present, the expression of a nostalgia for beloved scenes and objects which had not yet been discovered. But a few illustrations will make the point more clear. One of the best examples of pure fantasy is Clemence Dane's The Moon is Feminine. The story is laid in Brighton in 1801: Henry Cope befriends a seal caught in a net and frees it. But Henry is descended from a certain greenish maiden who walked out of a hill and married one of his mortal ancestors, which makes him kin to the people of St. Martin's Land. The seal's master, a strange gypsy boy from the sea, strikes up a friendship with Henry and comes between him and his love for Molly. At last Molly is ravished and destroyed by the sea-gypsy, leaving Henry a forlorn, mad, green-clad man seeking his lost love on the Brighton beach. One recalls that green is the magic color in Celtic folklore, and that in the ancient stories the sea and the hills are peopled with many creatures not wholly of this world. Mildred Cram's Kingdom of Innocents is another beautifully embroidered fairy tale. The story is told by an American who is entitled to insight because his name is Morgan. In the "oldest house in England," a great estate in the middle of an ancient forest, lives Stephen Gayle who is described as "Arthurian." He loves every inch and tradition of his ancestral soil. The gardens are kept up by a strange dwarf, who seems to be one of the "Little People" bold enough to stay on in a war-threatened England. There is a horse named "The Shagraun," which seems to have unicorn blood, and a friendly goblin who flees to Lapland when motorcars begin to spread destruction and the smell of war is in the air. Stephen plays Mark to his wife's Inseult. But the real story is of Joan and Richard who are orphaned by the first World War and become so terrified of adult life that they make their wish, in the middle of a Druid ring, that they may never grow up. Their bodies become adult, but like Martin in Thunder on the Left, they preserve the innocence of childhood. This innocence looks like insanity to materialistic adults, and at last the innocents return to the Druid ring to undo the spell and grow up---to live happily ever after in spite of another war, until at the end they step out of their bodies and walk away into eternal springtime. But there is evidence of a more concrete sort. One notices that in these novels the names of places and characters are Norman or Welsh. There is constant return to Roman and early British traditions; the Angles and Saxons are pointedly ignored. To realize how very repeatedly they are ignored, one has only to read the opening chapters of Green's History of the English People. In this connection Warwick Deeping's Man Who Went Back is of special interest because it underlines what is only suggested in the other tales. This novel is fourth-dimensional in its mechanism, although the subject matter belongs here, inasmuch as the twentieth century hero meets with an accident in 1939, and is shifted back into the body of a Briton who has been fighting off the Saxon in-
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