All posts tagged dwarf

A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde (1891)

In the second half of the 1880s, among all his other essays and articles, Oscar Wilde developed a skill for writing exquisite fairy tales. Five were collected in The Happy Prince and Other Tales published in 1888. Four longer ones were collected in this volume, published in September 1891, Wilde’s annus mirabilis.

The Young King (5,338 words)
The Birthday of the Infanta (7,360 words)
The Fisherman and his Soul (13,975)
The Star-Child (6,372)

1. The Young King

In a fairy land far away the old king has died and the young king is preparing for his coronation. He is just a ‘lad’ of 16. He is notable for two reasons: his backstory and his character.

Backstory He is illegitimate. His mother, the princess, had an affair with someone far beneath her in social position and so, as soon as the baby was born it was taken from her and given away to a poor couple, a goatherd and his wife – as in umpteen legends going back to antiquity. The mother quickly sickened and died (or, some rumours have it, was poisoned) while the unwanted father was murdered and done away with. However, as the old king lay dying, he was attacked by conscience (or wanted to perpetuate his line) and so called for the boy to be tracked down and brought back to court as the only heir.

Character Despite his rough upbringing, the boy turns out to have exquisite taste and is, like the protagonist of every other Wilde narrative, possessed of ‘strange passion for beauty’. Once he’s been welcomed back to the palace and acknowledged in front of the entire as his heir by the dying king, the boy immediately takes to exploring the palace, often ‘accompanied by the slim, fair-haired Court pages, with their floating mantles, and gay fluttering ribands’.

The core of the story is highly structured and moralising: over the course of the night before the coronation the young king-to-be has three harrowing dreams:

he dreams he is in the squalid attic room where gaunt weavers bend over their looms, crushed by poverty, exploited by their employer, and talks with a weaver who explains their wretched plight, slaves in all but name – then the king realises with a start that they are weaving his coronation robe and wakes with a cry
he dreams he is on a galley rowed by shackled slaves being whipped, run and managed by Blacks who anchor near an Arab land and force the youngest nimblest galley slave to dive for pearls, until he fetches up a magnificent one which the cruel owner of the galley announces will go in the sceptre of the young king – who again awakes with a cry of horror
he dreams of a tropical country where thousands are digging endlessly in a dry riverbed for jewels and as he watches Death and Avarice have an argument, Death saying he wants one of the three grains of corn Avarice is holding and when the latter refuses to hand one over, Death sends three waves of death in the form of Ague, Fever and Plague through the toiling masses killing them all wretchedly, then a figure behind him tells the king that all these people are suffering and dying to find rubies for the king’s crown, and he wakens a third time in horror

What happens is both predictable and unexpected. The next morning the lad wakes from his sleep as his chamberlain and servants come in to offer him the grand cloak and crown and sceptre he is to wear at his coronation but, in line with what he’s seen, the king refuses them all. His officials argue that ‘the people’ will only know he is king if he dresses like a king which angers the king who insists on digging up the simple goatherd costume he was wearing when the old king’s messengers found him.

Dressed thus he insists on riding through the assembled crowds to the cathedral but is surprised when the people boo and jeer him. He engages in a stylised dialogue with one of the poor who says he doesn’t realise that the poor depend on the king being dressed in fine array, that:

‘Sir, knowest thou not that out of the luxury of the rich cometh the life of the poor? By your pomp we are nurtured, and your vices give us bread. To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still.’

The king stands at the apex of the economy which keeps the poor employed and fed. If he and the rich stop buying and wearing fine outfits, the poor will be thrown out of work and starve. And when he arrives at the cathedral the archbishop adds his piece to the argument for fine clothes and glory, namely that the world is full of all kinds of suffering and one man, by himself, cannot change it.

‘As for thy dreams, think no more of them. The burden of this world is too great for one man to bear, and the world’s sorrow too heavy for one heart to suffer.’

Saddened that nobody understands him, the young king bows before the image of Christ and prays. At that moment a bunch of knights charge into the cathedral all ready to kill this supposed king who shames their rank and their knighthood (reminiscent of Henry II and Thomas Becket) except something magical happens.

The sun streaming in through the cathedral window transforms his rags into robes, his staff blossoms with lilies, the chaplet of thorns he rose blooms with roses as he stands in a mystical light and the choir sings and the Glory of God fills the cathedral. The knights quail and the Archbishop recognises the hand of God and the new king rides back through his people with the face of an angel.

The moral

It’s striking how Wilde ties the story so closely to Christian doctrine. It is, in its sexy, sensual, gay way, a traditional Christian parable about God’s love for the poor and pure in heart.

Style

But also the point of the story is its exquisite prose poetry. Has any other English writer ever written such sustained passages of beautiful shimmering prose?

The walls were hung with rich tapestries representing the Triumph of Beauty. A large press, inlaid with agate and lapis-lazuli, filled one corner, and facing the window stood a curiously wrought cabinet with lacquer panels of powdered and mosaiced gold, on which were placed some delicate goblets of Venetian glass, and a cup of dark-veined onyx. Pale poppies were broidered on the silk coverlet of the bed, as though they had fallen from the tired hands of sleep, and tall reeds of fluted ivory bare up the velvet canopy, from which great tufts of ostrich plumes sprang, like white foam, to the pallid silver of the fretted ceiling. A laughing Narcissus in green bronze held a polished mirror above its head. On the table stood a flat bowl of amethyst.

2. The Birthday of the Infanta

Infanta was the title given to the eldest daughter of the King of Spain. The Infanta in this story is just 12 years old. Since her father, the King, is described as being so attached to the memory of the infanta’s mother who died young that he offended the Holy Roman Emperor by rejecting the hand of the Emperor’s niece as a second marriage and that the Emperor instigated the revolt of the Netherlands against Spanish rule as revenge, and since that revolt began in the later 1560s, we can deduce that the tale is set at the court of King Philip of Spain, maybe in the 1570s.

The first part of the ‘story’, such as it is, consists of an amazingly detailed a vivid description of the celebrations and entertainments laid on for the 12th birthday of this infanta, featuring a procession of aristocratic children, a pretend bullfight, a tightrope walker, a puppet play, an African juggler and snake charmer, gypsies playing zithers, a performing bear, barbary apes and so on.

But the star performer is a dwarf, sold to the court by his peasant father just a few days earlier, an innocent soul full of mirth and happiness. He dances for the infanta and her friends who laugh at him for his ugliness and clumsiness and because he is so blithely unaware of his own ugliness. Copying the kind of thing she’s seen grown-up women do the infanta plucks a rose from a bush and throw it to the dwarf who, in his naivety, clasps it to his bosom and goes down on one knee in reverence to her little highness, who shrieks with laughter.

Then the children are taken away to the birthday feast, but the dwarf is informed that the infanta wants him to perform the same dance after the siesta.

The second part of the story takes a sharp turn from the fairly realistic into the fantastical, because as the dwarf dances with delight in the palace gardens when he learns that the infanta wants him to perform again, Wilde gives us the reactions of a load of non-human objects. In turn we are told the haughty disdain of the tulips and lilies and cacti, the rose tree, the geraniums and the violets who all deprecate his clumsy frolicking. The old sundial, the goldfish and the peacock are largely indifferent. But the birds like his energy and the lizards, very philosophical creatures, ponder his behaviour. This interlude of flowers and animals is delightfully high-spirited and humorous. I particularly liked the characterisation of the lizards as deep thinkers who often spend hours and hours immobile and pondering Deep Thoughts.

The third part consists of two pages which focus in on the dwarf’s happy-go-lucky existence in the forest, frolicking with the wild animals, completely at home with nature, innocent and free.

The fourth and final part describes the dwarf’s cruel death. For he makes his way back to the palace early, so keen is he to dance for the infanta, discovers various doors open and, while everyone is still at siesta wanders through some of the most important state rooms which are all eerily empty. I was imagining maybe he’d be caught and arrested for spying but his fate is crueller.

In the fourth or fifth room he comes to he spies a distorted little man with an enormous head and an ugly face just walking into the room. As he enters, skirts round the room, bows at the figure and so on, the figure does the same back. Being a child of nature he has never seen a mirror before. But eventually it hits him that this squat ugly deformed little creature is him and he is stricken with horror then despair. He clutches his side and falls to the stone floor and it’s at this point that the infanta and her child friends come into the room and encounter him. They all start laughing, believing its part of his act, until the Chamberlain examines him and sombrely pronounces that the dwarf is dead, and that he died of a broken heart.

And the Infanta frowned, and her dainty rose-leaf lips curled in pretty disdain. ‘For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts,’ she cried, and she ran out into the garden.

Commentary

So maybe it shouldn’t be called the ‘Infanta’s Birthday’ at all, but ‘The Dwarf Who Died of a Broken Heart’. Certainly the ‘moral’ is something to do with the age-old dichotomy between the innocence of nature and the corrupt heartlessness of the city, between happy-go-lucky countrymen and heartless urban aristocrats. What really bites is that final throwaway line of the infanta’s – ‘Let those who play with me have no hearts’ as she runs into the garden to play. It’s terrifying in its implications, reminding me of the last line of Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair.

The Fisherman and his Soul

By far the longest story in the collection, at its heart ‘The Fisherman and his Soul’ has a clear tripartite structure but with more digressions and complications.

In the timeless world of fairy stories an archetypal Fisherman goes fishing every day, throwing his nets into the sea. One day he catches a beautiful Mermaid and falls in love at first sight. He refuses to let her go until she makes a promise to return every day to sing for him. And so he fishes all day and then calls her to serenade him every evening.

Eventually he tells her he loves her and wants to live with her under the sea but she says no mortal with a human soul can live there. He will have to send away his soul. Next morning the fisherman goes to see the local Priest and asks how he can send away his soul. The Priest is, naturally, appalled. He tells the fisherman the human soul is more precious than anything on earth, and the as for the Sea-folk, they have no souls and are lost. The Fisherman wants to be as simple and easy as the Fauns in the wood or the Mermen but the Priest assures him these Pagan creatures are evil. When the Fisherman tells the Priest he has fallen in love with a Mermaid, the latter drives him from his house.

The Fisherman goes wandering miserably in the marketplace and offers his soul to the merchants, repeating the phrase ‘I cannot see it. I may not touch it. I do not know it.’. But the merchants laugh at him, saying the soul is worth nothing to them, but they’ll happily buy his body as a slave.

Then he remembers someone telling him about a Witch who lives in a cave at the head of the bay. She receives him, calls him a pretty boy, shows off her knowledge, but when he explains he wants to give away his soul is appalled. But then makes him promise to meet her that night on the top of the mountain. He is delighted and goes away, but the Witch bitterly reflects that this pretty boy ought to be hers rather than the Mermaid’s.

That night he climbs to the top of the mountain and attends a Witches’ Sabbath. The Witch makes him dance a wild dervish with him until he realises someone is watching them, a smiling man. The Witches kiss his hand. It is nowhere mentioned but clearly this is the Devil.

The Witch takes the Fisherman’s hands to introduce him to the seated man but, on a sudden instinct, the Fisherman crosses himself which causes a great kerfuffle: the Witches fly away shrieking, the man spasms in pain, leaps onto a horse to ride away.

His Witch tries to flee as well but the Fisherman holds her tight by the wrist. She bitterly repeats the claim that he ought to be hers, she is as fair as the mermaid, but the Fisherman refuses to let go her wrist till she tells him the secret.

Eventually she takes from her girdle a little knife with a handle of green viper’s skin. She tells him to stand on the seashore with his back to the moon, bend down and cut away his shadow for the shadow is the visible part of the soul.

Now his soul begs not to be parted from him and when the Fisherman insists, begs to be allowed to take his heart with him for the world is very cruel, but the Fisherman refuses, cuts him loose and casts him off. This will turn out to be an important detail. Then his soul rises up like a shadow copy of him and says they will meet at this place, once a year.

Now, as in so many fairy stories, w enter a set of three. On three consecutive years to the day when he was cast loose, his soul stands on the seashore and calls him and the Fisherman comes up, lounges in a pool and listens. And three times his soul gives him a long account of the adventures he’s had in the previous twelve months.

At the end of Year One the soul describes how he headed East for ‘From the East cometh everything that is wise.’ He travelled to the land of the Tartars, travels with merchants, saw many wonderful things (gryphons, pygmies). He came to a temple where he was shown the Mirror of Wisdom which he promptly stole and hid and now offers to the Fisherman – ‘They who possess this mirror know everything, nor is there anything hidden from them.’ But the Fisherman laughingly says ‘Love is better than Wisdom’ and dives back into the waves, and, in a formulaic phrase which is repeated after each of the three years, ‘the Soul went weeping away over the marshes.’

At the end of Year Two the soul describes how he next headed South for ‘From the South cometh everything that is precious’, to the city of Ashter, all described with sumptuous Orientalist details. When the Emperor of the place was carried in grand ceremony through the city, the soul refused to make him obeisance which terrified onlookers. He was subsequently summoned to the Emperor’s palace, richly described, and into the inner sanctum, to find the young man lounging on a couch of dyed lion skins with a falcon perched upon his wrist. After a brief interview the Emperor signals his huge Nubian (i.e. Black) servant to dispatch the soul with a huge scimitar but this passes clean through the soul doing no harm, the emperor then throws a spear at him, ditto, at which he leaps up and stabs the Nubian in the neck who swiftly bleeds to death ‘lest the slave should tell of his dishonour.’

The man writhed like a trampled snake, and a red foam bubbled from his lips.

The story about the dwarf was quite genuinely upsetting. This long tale is quite frequently bloodthirsty and even sadistic. Not really a ‘fairy story’ that you’d want to read to a child, I think. This collection is more ‘fairy tales for adults’.

Terrified, the emperor begs the soul to leave his city which the soul says he will do if given half of his treasure so the Emperor takes him to his treasure room, gorgeously described. But after a grand survey of it, the soul maliciously says all he wants is the little lead ring the Emperor wears on his finger. Clearly this has a deep significance because the Emperor turns pale and refuses.

Here the text does another repetition, the soul uses a phrase he used at the end of the first year –’ I did a strange thing, but what I did matters not’. Its recurrence made me think he means that he murdered the Emperor and took the ring, for next thing we hear he is telling the Fisherman that the ring is concealed in a secret place a day’s journey from the seashore where they both are. Same happened with the Mirror of Wisdom. One minute the priest is explaining its power to him, next ‘ I did a strange thing, but what I did matters not’ i.e. presumably killed him, too. The soul, we are being informed, is a murderer.

Now the soul tempts the Fisherman for a second time, telling him that ‘He who has this Ring is richer than all the kings of the world.’ But for a second time the Fisherman scorns him, repeating the phrase he used after the year one account, ‘Love is better than Riches,’ he cried, ‘and the little Mermaid loves me.’

And, for the second time the text deploys the same formulaic phrase – ‘ and the Soul went weeping away over the marshes.’

At the end of Year Three the soul calls the Fisherman up from the depths to hear his account of the year. This time he doesn’t head in a compass direction which is a shame, I’d like to have read Wilde’s description of the frozen North or maybe strange islands in the Atlantic (Madeira, the Azores).

Instead he describes going to the nine-gated city of Ashtar where he sees an old man play a lute and a young woman with white feet dance. Now where the offers of Wisdom and Wealth had both failed, the promise of white feet succeeds. The mermaid has no feet and suddenly the Fisherman is overcome by a desire to see this dancing woman. He comes up out of the sea and his soul rushes back into his body, and the Fisherman thereupon regains his shadow.

Now there follows a new series of events cast in a formulaic or standardised format, as they come to a succession of cities.

In the first city the Fisherman asks his soul if this is where the dancer is but the soul says no, not yet. They go through the market and the soul tells the Fisherman to steal a silver cup from a market stall, which he does, but a mile outside the city he is overcome by guilt and throws it away. When he asks why his soul made him do this, his soul replies ‘Be at peace, be at peace.

They come to the second city and he Fisherman asks his soul if this is where the dancer is but the soul says no, not yet. As they pass through the Street of the Sellers of Sandals his soul tells him to hit a harmless child standing by a jar so the Fisherman beats him till he cries. A mile outside the city he is overcome by guilt and asks why his soul made him do this, but his soul replies ‘Be at peace, be at peace.’

They come to a third city but have nowhere to stay. A merchant offers him a bed for the night and feeds him. In the middle of the night his soul wakes him up and makes him go to the merchant’s bedroom to steal his gold and, when the merchant wakes and asks him what he’s doing, to kill him and take the gold. A mile outside the city he is overcome by guilt and asks why his soul made him do this, but his soul replies ‘Be at peace, be at peace.’

But now the Fisherman won’t accept this and demands to know why his soul is making him behave so badly. And the soul gives an explanation which is highly meaningful and resonant. When the Fisherman cast him off he wouldn’t give him his heart (which he said he needed to love the Mermaid) and so the soul went about the world without a heart, learning the ways of the heartless, and now this heartless soul is back inside of him, guiding him.

Horrified the Fisherman takes the green-handled knife and bends and tries to cut away his shadow but the soul mocks him, saying that trick only works once. Now he has accepted him back and can never be rid of him, going on to point out that this was understood by the Witch who gave him the knife and by her master (the Devil).

After having a good cry the Fisherman determines to return to the sea and his beloved, despite his soul’s best efforts to tempt him away with promises of dancers and houris and the Valley of Pleasure en route.

But when they arrive at the sea and the Fisherman calls for the little Mermaid there is no reply. He builds a hut by the sea and never stops calling but for a whole year there is no reply and his soul mocks him. Having tempted him with the world’s pleasures and failed, the soul now sets to tempting him with visions of the world’s pain and suffering (echoing the kinds of visions of suffering we read in The Young King), the implication being that the Fisherman could devote his life to ameliorating suffering. But this doesn’t distract the Fisherman from calling for the little Mermaid morning, noon and night.

At the end of the second year his soul asks him to be admitted into his heart. The Fisherman (slightly perplexingly) agrees but the soul finds that his heart belongs so entirely to the little Mermaid that there is no way in.

But just at that moment there comes a great wailing from the sea and the body of the little Mermaid is washed up on the shore, dead. The Fisherman embraces it and covers it with kisses and dies of a broken heart, which allows his soul to enter in as he expires, and the sea comes up and covers both their bodies.

What, you might very well ask, was that all about? But it hasn’t finished yet. There’s an epilogue or coda.

Remember the Priest who the Fisherman went to ask advice from? Well, the morning after the storm he goes down to the shore to bless the sea and with him went the monks and the musicians, and the candle-bearers, and the swingers of censers, and a great company.

When he sees the bodies of the Fisherman and the Mermaid entwined, he changes his mind and curses the sea and the Sea folk. He tells his staff to bury the bodies in a corner of ‘the Field of the Fullers’, which the notes tell me is a place mentioned in the Old Testament as being outside the walls of the city of Jerusalem, since the process of fulling (processing cloth) requires alkali and noxious chemicals. So it’s associated with bad smells and sterility.

Then ‘on the third year’ the Priest goes to officiate and discovers his altar is covered with strange flowers, and their scent intoxicates him so that when he goes to deliver a sermon about the wrath of God he ends up speaking about Love, despite himself. And when he asks his staff where the flowers come from they say they bloomed in the corner of the Fullers’ Field where the Fisherman and the Mermaid are buried. And the Priest is troubled and trembles and prays. Why? Is the love of the Fisherman and the Mermaid a kind of pagan transgressive love which is (in a deliberate paradox) more precious to God than the Priest’s narrow-minded dogmatism? But, as we’ve seen, it is a very odd love indeed, not at all a straightforward thing of beauty, but troubled right from the start when the Fisherman had to more or less trick her into it, and then which required him to give over his soul to sinfulness and wickedness.

But the upshot is that in the morning the Priest goes down to the seashore with his entourage and, contrary to his opposition to them, blesses the sea and the Sea-folk and, while he’s at it, the Fauns:

and the little things that dance in the woodland, and the bright-eyed things that peer through the leaves. All the things in God’s world he blessed, and the people were filled with joy and wonder.

So…has the Priest’s mind been opened by the example of the Fisherman and the Mermaid? But, as I’ve said, it was hardly a model love, was it, being compromised at every step of the way? And what are we to make of the Fisherman’s treatment of his soul who he sent into the world without a heart? Should he have sent him into the world with his heart? But then he wouldn’t have been able to go into the sea to live with the Mermaid which, this final section seems to imply, was a holy and noble thing to do. I’m very confused. It seems to be two stories (the Fisherman and the Mermaid, and the Fisherman and his soul) mashed together into one, neither quite working in this uneasy combination. It ends with a sad coda:

Yet never again in the corner of the Fullers’ Field grew flowers of any kind, but the field remained barren even as before. Nor came the Sea-folk into the bay as they had been wont to do, for they went to another part of the sea.

In his introduction to the Penguin edition, Ian Small points out Wilde’s deliberate (and provocative) reversal of Christian convention whereby the soul is said to be the seat of virtue and the body is always tempting it with sensual pleasure; here the body is the seat of a simple faithful love (for the Mermaid) and it’s the soul which has the wicked adventures and turns into the instrument of sin and temptation. While that is, in theory, a neat inversion, the complex text it’s embedded in is, as we’ve seen, nowhere near as straightforward.

If, as Small suggests, Wilde’s tale is telling us that the body is the seat of love and fidelity while the soul is the source of evil and temptation, he goes about conveying this slick paradox in a tortuous and convoluted way.

4. The Star-Child

It’s a very cold winter and the animals in this fairy tale northern forest are grumbling about it:

‘The Earth is going to be married, and this is her bridal dress,’ whispered the Turtle-doves to each other. Their little pink feet were quite frost-bitten, but they felt that it was their duty to take a romantic view of the situation.
‘Nonsense!’ growled the Wolf. ‘I tell you that it is all the fault of the Government, and if you don’t believe me I shall eat you.’ The Wolf had a thoroughly practical mind, and was never at a loss for a good argument.

It is a parable about kindness, humility and forgiveness. Two woodsmen are coming home in the deep winter snow when they see a shooting star fall to earth. They are poor men and hope it will contain a crock of gold. Instead they discover a cloak of golden tissue, curiously wrought with stars which turns out to wrap a child. One woodsman suggests leaving it there to die of exposure, the first uncharitable thought, but they other wraps it back up and takes it home.

But here his wife is angry and then tearful because they can’t afford to feed their own children, the second uncharitable thought. But then she relents and takes him in. They store the golden cloak he came in and the amber necklace round his neck in their chest.

The Star-Child grows up to be beautiful and charismatic. But his beauty spoils him. by the age of ten he is a spoilt, petulant child, given to cruelty to animals such as blinding helpless moles, throwing stones at beggars who visit their village. Neither his foster parents nor the village priest with a lecture about God, love and charity can change him.

Then one day arrives at the village a poor beggar women dressed in rags whose feet are bleeding from her long journeying. The Star-Child throws stones at her until his father intervenes, telling him off and reminding how he and his wife took him in after they found him in the woods. At this the beggar woman’s ears prick up and she asks if they found him wrapped in a cloak of stars and wearing an amber necklace. When the woodsman confirms this she bursts into tears and declares this is her long-lost son who was stolen from her by robbers, then left to die.

But when the woman asks to be recognised the Star-Child mocks her and says he would rather kiss an adder or toad than her and strolls out to go and rejoin his gang. However, when he approaches them they yell out mockery and ridicule, claiming he is a monster with the head of a toad and the scaled body of an adder, and when he goes to a pond to check his reflection, he discovers it is true. He has lost his gorgeous good looks and is now a monster.

He realises he has been punished for his evil behaviour and condemned to wander the earth until he finds his mother and can make things right. He asks the animals of the wood for help but the mole replies that the Star-Child blinded him and now he cannot see and the linnet says he clipped his wings so now he cannot fly. Thus his past cruelties come back not just to haunt him but to hinder his quest.

Anyway he wanders far and wide, being mocked at, having stones thrown at him and refused food at all the villages – exactly the treatment he meted out to poor beggars. Thus is the hard-hearted paid back in kind.

Finally he comes to a city where he is captured and sold as a slave to ‘an old and evil-visaged man’ who locks him in a dungeon, feeding him on gruel and dirty water. This man turns out to be ‘the subtlest of the magicians of Libya and had learned his art from one who dwelt in the tombs of the Nile’. Now he sets him three tasks (all good fairy stories have the triad structure). On three consecutive days the wicked old man sends him into the nearby forest to find three types of gold, a lump of white, yellow and red gold.

The first time he spends all day looking for it and is about to quit when he hears an animal crying in pain and discovers a hare caught in a trap. Now utterly chastened and kind, the Star-Child frees the animal from its trap and in return, the hare leads him to the lump of white gold.

However, on his return to the city he encounters a miserable leper rattling his bowl and begging. When the Star-Child explains that he only has the lump of gold the beggar still rattles his bowl and so, on reflection, the Star-Child gives him the gold he was sent to fetch. So, as you can imagine, when he arrives back at the Magician’s house, the latter beats him and doesn’t feed him.

On the next two days the same thing happens: the magician sends him out for the yellow and red gold, he meets the hare who shows him where they are and, on both days, on h is return to the city, he hands them over to the begging leper.

And now we enter the endgame for, after his third donation to the leper, as he walks through the city he is astonished to discover all the people, even the armed guards, the priests and high officers, bowing low and reverencing him. For he has been transformed, the vile appearance of the scaled toad has disappeared and he has been restored to his former dazzling good looks. Not only this, but the priests etc swear that he is ‘the lord for whom we have been waiting.’

And now, finally, he sees the mother he’s been searching for for so long, the beggar woman in rags, standing next to the leper and runs over to her and gets down on hands and knees and kisses the wounds on her feet and begs forgiveness. And they bid him rise and, when he stands, he sees the pair have been transformed: his ragged mother is now a queen and the leper is a king. They are his true parents. And they take him to the palace and array him as a prince and crown him and give him a sceptre and he rules over the city wisely and fairly, humanely and charitably.

To the Woodcutter and his wife he sent many rich gifts, and to their children he gave high honour. Nor would he suffer any to be cruel to bird or beast, but taught love and loving-kindness and charity, and to the poor he gave bread, and to the naked he gave raiment, and there was peace and plenty in the land.

Commentary

This is easier to understand than the complexities of ‘The Fisherman’ and is a fable about love softening a hard heart, about the healing power of humility and redemption etc. The opening premise is a bit shaky, though. If the mother is correct that her baby was stolen from her in the woods a) why did the robbers who stole it, simply abandon it wrapped in a precious cloak and wearing a precious necklace instead of stealing those things and leaving it utterly exposed? and b) what is the whole ‘star falling from the sky’ thing about? It cannot be reconciled with the mother’s account. This is a small instance of Wilde wanting to include two irreconcilable things in one story mostly, one concludes, because the Star-Child idea was too dazzling to drop.

Homoeroticism

Has anyone else ever written such beautiful English prose?

Bronze-limbed and well-knit, like a statue wrought by a Grecian, he stood on the sand with his back to the moon, and out of the foam came white arms that beckoned to him, and out of the waves rose dim forms that did him homage. (The Fisherman)

And every year he became more beautiful to look at, so that all those who dwelt in the village were filled with wonder, for, while they were swarthy and black-haired, he was white and delicate as sawn ivory, and his curls were like the rings of the daffodil. His lips, also, were like the petals of a red flower, and his eyes were like violets by a river of pure water, and his body like the narcissus of a field where the mower comes not. (The Star Child)

Orientalism

It barely needs to be stated that the last two of the stories overflow with Orientalist tropes and images. They were among the literary stereotypes of the age (as are all the clichés about the cruelty of 16th century Spain which colour and shape ‘The Infanta’s Birthday’). You can read my detailed summary and critique of Edward Said’s ground-breaking study of Orientalism.

Thoughts

All four fairy stories clearly have a moral since they are drenched in the language of moral meaning. And yet, what with their unsuitability for reading to any normal young child, I wondered whether these fairy tales, with their conventions of moral and meaning, are, in the end, no more than vehicles or scaffolds or pretexts which enable Wilde’s dazzling prose to work its magic. The point is not the ‘morals’ (although they’re there if you want them), the point is the style, the art, the beauty.

Oscar Wilde reviews

Oscar Wilde reviews

The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson (1888)

This is unashamedly a children’s book. It was published as a monthly serial in Young Folks: A Boys’ and Girls’ Paper of Instructive and Entertaining Literature from June to October 1883 under the pseudonym ‘Captain George North’ (the same pen name Stevenson used for Treasure Island). Still, I am reading and experiencing it as an adult.

Cover of The Black Arrow illustrated by N.C. Wyeth

The Wars of the Roses

The story is set against the backdrop of the Wars of the Roses, a confusing conflict when the weakness and mental illness of King Henry VI allowed a major civil war to develop between followers of two large noble families – York and Lancaster, each fighting for the crown – which dragged on for a generation, from 1455 to 1485. (Hence the novel’s sub-title, A Tale of the Two Roses.)

There is no high-level explanation of any of this in the novel, and no date given to help the reader orientate themself. We see the conflict not from the vantage of courts and kings, but reflected in the microcosm of what seems to be a small area of the Fenland i.e East Anglia, around the fictional village of Tunstall, with its Moat House and nearby Holyrood Abbey.

The novel opens with a confused throng of villagers, the publican, the local parson Sir Oliver Oates, the lord of the manor Sir Daniel Brackley, and his ward the young teenager Dick Shelton, as they get confused reports of a battle, or at least of another nobleman in some kind of warlike trouble, nearby.

Things are further confused when Brackley’s man, Bennet Hatch, takes Dick to go and talk to old Nick Appleyard, the oldest man in the village who saw service under Henry the Fifth. Hatch wants to ask him to form a small troop to defend the village while the other men ride off to the battle. But they’ve barely started talking before out of nowhere a big arrow whizzes past them, embeds itself between Appleyard’s shoulders and, after a few, shudders, he dies. There are enemies in the woods across the valley. But who? Why?

Brackley is rallying his men outside the village pub when some of them spot a figure fleeing from the churchyard across fields and into the nearby woods. Dick runs over to the church and finds a parchment nailed to the door which promises revenge against oppressors and is signed ‘Jon Amend-All of the Green Wood, And his jolly fellaweship’. It is in the form of doggerel verse:

I had four blak arrows under my belt,
Four for the greefs that I have felt,
Four for the nomber of ill menne
That have opressid me now and then.

it goes on to name four specific individuals who it threatens with death for their ‘crimes’.

One is gone; one is wele sped;
Old Apulyaird is ded.

One is for Maister Bennet Hatch,
That burned Grimstone, walls and thatch.

One for Sir Oliver Oates,
That cut Sir Harry Shelton’s throat.

Sir Daniel, ye shull have the fourt;
We shall think it fair sport.

It seems to be blaming all four for taking part in the murder of Harry Shelton (Dick’s father) and the burning down of his house. When, in the next scene, we see the slippery and corrupt Sir Daniel Brackley extracting money with menaces i.e. doubling his tenants’ rents to him or else promising to hang them, we quickly come to suspect the poetic accusation is correct. Brackley has brought Dick up, harsh but fair, but the poem seems to implicate him in the murder of Dick’s father when Dick was a small child, and the burning down of his family’s house, Grimstone. You don’t have to be a genius to suspect that young Dick will find himself falling out with his guardian and in with Jon and the romantic woodland ‘fellaweship’.

Adventure and excitement

Stevenson possesses in abundance the boys adventure skill of creating tense moments which set the pulses racing and inflame the teenage mind in all of us. When Brackley (not suspecting the boy’s growing suspicions) sends Dick on an errand to nearby Tunstall Moat House, he finds himself falling in with another young lad who was at the inn and is (for some reason) also going the same way. Once they’ve identified themselves to each other, they carry on through the snowy woods (the novel is set in the depths of winter).

In this scene, the boys have arrived at the ruins of the burnt-out mansion, only to realise there are other people around in the neighbourhood, then realising it is the ‘woodland fellaweship’. They climb warily through the debris and look out through a ruined windowframe:

Peering through this, they were struck stiff with terror at their predicament. To retreat was impossible; they scarce dared to breathe. Upon the very margin of the ditch, not thirty feet from where they crouched, an iron caldron bubbled and steamed above a glowing fire; and close by, in an attitude of listening, as though he had caught some sound of their clambering among the ruins, a tall, red-faced, battered-looking man stood poised, an iron spoon in his right hand, a horn and a formidable dagger at his belt.
(Chapter 4. A Greenwood Company)

The story is chock full of such moments of suspense, confrontation, escape, fights, battles, storms at sea – Stevenson threw everything he could think of and the kitchen sink into the plot.

Fast-moving plot

This other lad Dick has teamed up with is called John Matcham. They watch the outlaws interrupt their meal in the clearing to go off and attack a line of Brackley’s men who are wending through a different part of the woods. Continuing on their way, they encounter a strange leper slowly ringing a mournful hand bell, who reveals himself to be Brackley in a disguise he’s adopted to navigate the dangerous woods. All three finally make it to the safety of Tunstall Moat, Brackley’s base.

Book 2. The Moat House

Here, Dick confronts Brackley with his suspicions and makes him swear he had nothing to do with murdering his (Dick’s) father – which he does with easy fluency. But the parson also named in the doggerel accusation, Sir Oliver Oates, can’t bring himself to take an oath, stuttering and hesitating and turning red, pretty much incriminating himself.

Moreover, one of Brackley’s men brought wounded to the Moat House after the attack on them by the outlaws which Dick and John witnessed, and who is now dying – one John Carter – more or less confesses to the murder and implicates Brackley.

Right. So we have established that Sir Daniel Brackley is the man who helped or was responsible for murdering Dick Shelton’s father and burning down his ancestral home, years ago, but who then adopted and raised Dick. The scales fallen from his eyes, Dick and John decide to escape from the Moat House. But this proves easier said than done since it is a medieval fortress and full of Brackley’s men on high alert for an attack. There is a lot of creeping along spooky, dark castle corridors holding only a rushlight.

Illustration for The Black Arrow by the wonderful N.C. Wyeth

Illustration for The Black Arrow by N.C. Wyeth (1916)

Eventually they are discovered and flee into a vacant room, barricading themselves in against attackers. After repelling an attack through an unsuspected trap door – John Matcham finally reveals that ‘he’ is a maid in disguise. ‘He’ is Joanna Sedley, heir to a fine estate etc etc. whose family are all dead and so has spent her life being held hostage by a number of great lords, all planning marriage deals for her.

Now Brackley has possession of her and wants to marry her off to another lord who will pay a fine price. There is just time for Dick and Joanna to realise they are in love with each other! before the door is forced open by Brackley’s men who seize Joanna and almost grab Dick, who wriggles free, plunges out the window into the moat below, swims across it and scrambles to safety under cover of darkness. Phew!

Book 3. My Lord Foxham

Several months have gone by and the House of Lancaster is in the ascendant with the Yorkists defeated – the small port of Shoreby-on-the-Till is full of Lancastrian nobles including Brackley, sucking up to the new masters of the land. Now we learn that Dick has been hiding out all this time with the outlaws in the forest and that their leader is called Ellis Duckworth. He has loaned Dick some of his cut-throats, criminals and deserters to tail Brackley to Shoreby and now the chapter opens with them hiding out, drinking and grumbling, in a low pub.

One of their spies comes in to report that Brackley is going to a midnight assignation at a house by the sea – Dick and his men follow, Dick climbs over the wall and peers through the window and sees the house contains Joanna Sedley, now magically transformed from the ‘boy’ he shared adventures with in book one into a tall, stately, womanly figure – he is even more in love with her, though a little daunted by her fine womanhood.

Other figures are seen moving suspiciously around the walls and so Dick’s men attack them, leading to a scrappy fight. Dick kills one then tackles a good-sized man in a fight which spills into the sea – Dick manages to trip him, get him under the waves and forces him to yield. It turns out to be Lord Foxham, himself no friend of Brackley, himself come to spy on Joanna. Realising they’re on sort of the same side, Dick and Foxham arrange to meet next day at St Bride’s Cross, just outside Shoreby, ‘on the skirts of Tunstall Forest’. Here Lord Foxham confirms his identity and that he is the rightful protector of the fair Joanna Sedley. Dick’s passionate protestations about her safety persuade Foxham that Dick truly loves her, and he declares that Dick shall marry her. Only the slight problem that she is held captive by Brackly and betrothed to Lord Shoreby stands in the way.

So Dick resolves to rescue fair Joanna from the house by the sea. Since his fight with Foxham’s men the night before was pretty conspicuous, Brackley has doubled his guard, placing armed men round the house and knights on the approach roads, so Dick has the bright idea of approaching by sea. In a series of rather contorted events which are typical of the novel’s contrived storyline, Dick commissions his pack of criminals to steal a ship, which they do by hailing the master of a boat newly arrived in the port of Shoreby, as he comes ashore, then plying him with so much drink that he is easy to lure outside, mug and tie up. Then the gang row back out to the ship – the ironically named Good Hope – take command of it and sail it to a rough pier not far from the isolated house where Joanna is being held.

But when our men leave the ship and walk along the rough pier they find themselves instantly attacked, coming under bow and arrow fire, killing and injuring many, the whole crew panicking and rushing back to the ship, some falling into the water and drowning, others expiring on the deck. Quite a bloody scene.

Even Lord Foxham, who we only met ten pages earlier, is wounded, and carried to a cabin below decks. Here, once the ship has weighed anchor, he tells Dick that he was scheduled to meet the young Duke of Gloucester (the future King Richard III) of the house of York, with notes about the deployment of the Lancastrian forces around Shoreby. Dick must now undertake this mission. And Foxham names Dick the rightful husband of Lady Joanna in the letters he asks Dick to bear – but it is up to him to actually secure her.

In further melodrama the ship is now driven by heavy seas to shipwreck on the sand not far from Shoreby. Once the tide has gone out all the survivors of the vain attack on Brackley’s house struggle ashore and traipse inland, but not without – in yet more action – briefly coming under attack from a platoon of men apparently place there to defend the coast. But they escape without any more casualties.

All of this, by the way, takes place in the depth of winter, with darkening stormy skies, high seas, and snow storms. It is all very atmospheric and well described but the underlying scenario is too far-fetched for the reader to buy into.

Book 4. The Disguise

Dick pays off the motley crew, all too happy to leave their unlucky (and very young) leader, and elects to stick with Lawless. This outlaw has emerged with higher stature then the other cut-throats: it was he who Dick saw in the clearing cooking the outlaws’ meal; it was he who took control of the Good Hope‘s helm, steered it through the storm and ensured it survived the wreck. Now Lawless takes Dick through the snow-struck forest to his secret lair in the woods, a warren created when a tall beech tree was blown over, with the sides shored up with earth and turf and the entrance covered with brushwood.

Lawless leading young Dick to his den in the woods, illustration by N.C. Wyeth

It is, in other words, a fantasy version of a boy’s den in the woods. Inside it is surprisingly warm and snug, especially after Lawless lights a fire, they cook and eat some food and share some sweet wine, and Dick tells his story. ‘You want Lady Joan?’ Lawless asks Dick. ‘Let’s go and get her.’ So Lawless opens one of the several trunks stashed round his den and gets out several friar’s cassocks, complete with rope belts. And a tray of make-up pencils (a sort of indication of the theatrical origins or references of much of the language and plot of the novel). He gets Dick to put on the friar’s costume and then applies make-up to make him seem older, a wise old wandering friar. They head off through the snowy woods, back towards Sir Daniel Brackley’s residence in Shoreby.

Here, in the chaos of an over-packed lord’s house, Dick sees two fine ladies heading upstairs and follows them, till he encounters Lady Joan again, in the company of her serving lady. But oh alas and alack! Joanna reveals that she is to be married next day to Lord Shoreby. She and the lady must go back downstairs to the marriage feast while Dick stays hidden. Off they go but only a few minutes later a malevolent dwarf-jester comes snooping around and, as he discovers evidence of Dick hiding, Dick leaps out, they tussle, and Dick stabs him to death with his poniard. (For the hero of a children’s story Dick kills quite a few people – he killed one of Foxham’s men in the fight by the sea, he kills the dwarf – and all this pales next to the slaughter in book 5. It’s a surprisingly violent book.)

When the dwarf’s body is discovered by servants there is much alarm and shouting but Dick stays hidden in Lady J’s room, when she returns for a further clasping of hands and bosoms and protestations of love – all watched by the ironic lady-in-waiting, before Dick tries to make his escape.

Since he is still in his disguise as a friar, he tells the house guards that he is going to the nearby church to pray for the dwarf’s soul (his body having been laid in state there), but the guards take him at his word and frog-march him to the church. Here he is no sooner introduced to the parson, Sir Oliver Oates, who begins to recognise him through is disguise than Dick throws himself on his mercy. In an unguarded moment the parson, for his part, admits that he was used as a decoy to lure Dick’s father to his death all those years ago, but swears he didn’t know that was what was going to happen. The soldiers are sitting in the pews watching him suspiciously so there’s no way Dick can escape the church, and so he spends the night next to Sir Oliver, pretending to mutter prayers for the dead dwarf.

Next morning they are woken early by the grand procession for the wedding of Lord Shoreham to Lady Joanna. But barely has the fine lord entered the church, richly caparisoned and accompanied by his fragrant retinue than a brace of arrows ring out, shooting him dead on the spot, injuring Brackley, creating hysteria and panic among the attendants and ladies.

This is stilled by the imperious voice of Lord Risingham, the noblest man present. To Dick’s dismay the parson immediately betrays him and Lawless (his fellow fake friar) and they are dragged before Risingham and all kinds of accusations thrown at them of being in league with the fellowship of the Black Arrow and therefore involved in this sacrilegious outrage.

Brackley is incensed and wants to drag Dick off and torture him to death, but Lady Joanna intercedes to say she never wanted to marry Lord Shoreby and loves Dick, and her (cheeky) lady in waiting backs up the story and so Risingham, who has seniority, has Dick taken by soldiers to his own chambers to judge.

Here Dick saves the day by admitting that he guilty to some extent of falling in with the fellowship of forest crooks, but he only did so after learning that Brackley murdered his father. He clinches his case by handing over to Risingham a letter he had conveniently found on the murdered dwarf in which the villain Brackley plots to overthrow the Yorkist interest – which includes Risingham – and then hand over Risingham’s lands to Lord Shoreby. Risingham is incensed and instantly releases Dick, making him swear to mend his ways.

So Dick finally gets to escape the house and trouble and is walking free across Shoreby when, of all the bad luck, as he is passing one of the inns on the dockside, out of it stumble some very drunk sailors which include Arblaster, the unfortunate captain who Dick’s men got drunk, mugged and then whose ship they stole and wrecked. He doesn’t recognise him but his wretched dog does, coming barking up to him and lawless, still in their silly friar disguises. The drunks grow in suspicion and when he tries to bolt, grab him, tie him up and drag him back into the pub. Here Dick spins a long cock and bull story, admitting he is one of the outlaws but has grudges against them, and that the outlaws have a vast pile of treasure in the woods, and persuading Arblaster and his mates that he’ll lead them to it. In its way this is a curious and flavoursome scene. They are by this stage very drunk and Dick makes them show him the only possession of his which they found and therefore took off him – Lord Foxham’s signet ring with which he was to identify himself to Richard of Gloucester – when Dick snatches it, up ends the tables in their faces, and scarpers out the door and along the quayside into the night. Phew.

Book 5. Crookback

Though as convoluted in detail as the others, this is in some ways the simplest book. If you remember, Dick had promised Lord Foxham he would rendezvous with Richard Duke of Gloucester and give him Foxham’s writings on the disposition of enemy (Lancastrian) forces in Shoreby. Now, Dick hid those papers when he was at Lawless’s den in the woods, which is why Arblaster and his drunk shipmates didn’t find them when they searched Dick the night before.

Now, the next morning, Dick is on his way through the woods back to Lawless’s den to get them, when he comes across a man defending himself against several attackers. Dick throws himself into the fray, coming to his defence, and together they beat the men off. At which point the other blows his horn and a brace of horsemen arrive and quickly identify the man he’s saved as Richard Duke of Gloucester, known as Crookback and as every schoolboy in 1888 knew, the man who would become King Richard III, according to legend the most wicked monarch in England’s history.

At this point, if it hadn’t been obvious before, the reader realises that this is a novel not only about two roses but about two Richards. For immediately the duke of Gloucester reveals the manic glint in his eye and the intensity of his ambition.

Gloucester explains to Dick that he is about to attack Shoreby and Dick gives him an eye-witness description of the Lancastrian forces every bit as good as Foxham’s. Gloucester knights Dick on the spot, from this point onwards Sir Richard Shelton. But says now he must command a troop during the forthcoming battle of Shoreby.

The (fictional) Battle of Shoreby is described across two chapters in impressive detail. The reader feels this is what it must be like to attack a medieval town through narrows streets and, as Dick does, command his men to raise a barricade with furniture looted from the rickety houses and then withstand attacks from massed archers and from armoured knights on horseback. It is rip-roaring exciting stuff.

Eventually the battle is won and Richard asks permission to ride and rescue his lady love, and Gloucester gives him a troop of men. Off they go trailing Brackly and his forces through the forest. After various delays and losing of the tracks, Dick and his men creep up on Brackley’s party gathered round a fire which includes Lady Joanna. They gather and attack, but Brackley’s men were waiting for them and mount a a surprise counter-attack. Joanna runs to Dick in the confusion and they escape the confusion of battle into the dense forest.

(It’s worth noting that although the novel is made of clichés, there keep coming unexpected complications and rebuffs, which give it a sort of realistic but also quite a frustrating feel. When Dick and his gang stole the ship and sailed it round to attack Brackley’s house by the sea I thought it would be a storming triumph, so was very surprised when they are beaten back and many killed or injured by bowfire before they’ve barely got off the jetty.)

Briefly, Dick and Joanna make it back to the safety of Lord Foxham’s house. There is a further encounter with Gloucester where Dick displeases the great man with a notable request. Gloucester says he will give Dick anything he desires, and at that moment – as it happens – amid the chaos of post-battle Shoreby, some troops come past hustling some captives who Gloucester, barely bothering to look, orders to be hanged. And Dick recognises among them Arblaster, the wretched sea captain who Richard has twice wronged, stealing his ship and ruining his livelihood, then throwing a table at him in the quayside pub. Now Dick sees a way to atone for his past sins and asks Gloucester to spare this man’s life. Irritated at the triviality of the request, Gloucester agrees to do so – since he has given his word – but fiercely tells Dick that he can’t expect to rise in his army, in his cause, if he throws away favours on trifle. And so Gloucester gallops off.

Next morning Dick is up betimes, accoutred and arrayed in the finest regalia Foxham can provide, ready for his wedding to Lady Joanna. He strolls around the town, surveying the triumphant Yorkist troops, before straying further afield and ends up walking through the (by now very familiar) snowy woods.

And it is here that the psychological climax of the book comes, when Dick disturbs a figure lurking in the woods in disguise and it turns out to be none other than Sir Daniel Brackley. They argue. They nearly fight but Dick refuses to shed blood on his wedding day. In fact he admits – to Brackley, to the reader, to himself – that he has done too many bloody deeds recently, spilled too much blood. Although he has all the justification for it, he will not harm Brackley. He tells him to go before he calls the guards. And so Brackley shuffles off, suspiciously.

At which point there is the twang of a bow and from a nearby thicket an arrow is despatched which embeds itself in Brackley, who falls to the ground. Dick rushes to him and just has time to tell him that, yes, it is a Black Arrow, when Brackley expires. And Ellis Duckworth comes from the thicket holding his bow. He heard Dick forgive Brackley, but he can’t forgive. He asks Dick to pray for his soul. And Dick notes that vengeance hasn’t made Duckworth feel good, in fact he feels sick and guilty. Give it up, says Dick. Hatch died in the Battle of Shoreham. So three of the four mentioned in the original verse threat are now despatched. Dick asks forgiveness for the parson and Duckworth, reluctantly agrees.

‘Be at rest; the Black Arrow flieth nevermore—the fellowship is broken.’

‘But be at rest; the Black Arrow flieth nevermore’. Illustration by N. C. Wyeth

In the short conclusion to the book, Dick marries his Joan. Richard Crookback makes a last appearance riding by with the long train of his armed men, going towards the next battle, and parries banter with Foxham, Joan and Dick, offering Joan the husband of her choice. Of course she cleaves to honest Dick, and Gloucester pshaws, turns his horse and gallops off towards his destiny.

And in the last few sentences we learn that Dick and Joan lived out their lives in peace and happiness far from the wars and that two old men – Arblaster the shipman and Lawless the rogue – also live out their lives in peace. Dick has, in some measure, atoned for his youthful bloodthirstiness, by at key moments, interceding and saving both their lives. And with that thought, or moral, the book ends.

Reasons for The Black Arrow’s relative failure

The relative failure and comparative neglect of this novel makes you appreciate the elements which made the classics Treasure Island and Kidnapped such successes. I identify four reasons:

1. One hero

In those novels there is one boy hero (Jim Hawkins, David Balfour) – clearly identified in the first sentence – and you are thrown immediately into his plight – which is also described clearly and obviously. In The Black Arrow the picture is much more confused: it takes fifty pages or more to become really clear that the story is about a young lad, Master Richard (‘Dick’) Shelton, the ward of the wicked Sir Daniel Brackley, and this is because quite a few characters are introduced in the confused and busy opening scenes.

2. Third person narrator

The successful tales are first-person narratives, throwing you directly and immediately into the adventure at first hand. The Black Arrow has a third-person narrator who is not, for some reason, very believable, partly because of the confusion of plot which dogs a lot of the story.

3. Good guys and bad guys

In his classic works you know who the good guys and bad guys are – the pirates in Treasure Island, the ship’s crew and then the loyalist British army in Kidnapped. In this book it is much harder to tell for several reasons:

a) it’s a civil war so there’s no immediate way of knowing who’s on whose side, except by asking
b) characters change sides, including the hero who is not wholeheartedly for either side

4. A charismatic anti-hero

When Richard Crookback appears in the fifth act, the reader realises that this is the fourth reason why this novel isn’t as successful as Kidnapped or Treasure Island – the presence of a charismatic baddy.

Both those stories introduce fairly early on a hugely charismatic, charming, threatening, adult hero who enthrals the boy narrator and comes to dominate the story – namely Long John Silver and Alan Breck Stewart. Their presence, their charming rogueish amorality, lifts both books onto a completely different level.

In this book, the dangerous charismatic adult is Richard Crookback – he immediately captures our attention by his spirited self-defence against four or five attackers, and then with his arrogant nonchalance as soon as he starts talking to Dick. From now to the end of the novel the story lifts and sails whenever he is present – he is a pantomime villain like Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham in the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. But his arrival makes you realise that he is what the preceding four-fifths of the book have been missing.

Medieval vocabulary

Apparently Stevenson used the Paston Letters, a collection of authentic correspondence from the period, as his model, and – as someone who studied medieval literature at university – I did feel the text had some of the tang and hempen antiquity of the older language, albeit interlarded with what I thought were Shakespearian usages from 200 years later, and some speeches which had a Scots ring to me. You have to be prepared to enjoy exchanges like this:

She was groping for the bolt, when Dick at last comprehended.
‘By the mass!’ he cried, ‘y’ are no Jack; y’ are Joanna Sedley; y’ are the maid that would not marry me!’
The girl paused, and stood silent and motionless. Dick, too, was silent for a little; then he spoke again.
‘Joanna,’ he said, ‘y’ ’ave saved my life, and I have saved yours; and we have seen blood flow, and been friends and enemies—ay, and I took my belt to thrash you; and all that time I thought ye were a boy. But now death has me, and my time’s out, and before I die I must say this: Y’ are the best maid and the bravest under heaven, and, if only I could live, I would marry you blithely; and, live or die, I love you.’
She answered nothing.
‘Come,’ he said, ‘speak up, Jack. Come, be a good maid, and say ye love me!’
‘Why, Dick,’ she cried, ‘would I be here?’
‘Well, see ye here,’ continued Dick, ‘an we but escape whole we’ll marry; and an we’re to die, we die, and there’s an end on’t.’
(Chapter 3. The Room Over The Chapel)

On the other hand, one of the pleasures of reading old literature, especially something as conventional in its way as this ripping yarn, is the logical habits of mind of writers brought up in previous ages. There is a lovely logic to the deployment of the material in the opening of the chapter ‘In Mine Enemies’ House’ – the way the place is identified, then described, then the attitude behind its busy state, then a specific setting in time given, and then the weather: the whole impression being rounded up and summarised in the witty sentence about the eye of the modern.

Sir Daniel’s residence in Shoreby was a tall, commodious, plastered mansion, framed in carven oak, and covered by a low-pitched roof of thatch. To the back there stretched a garden, full of fruit-trees, alleys, and thick arbours, and overlooked from the far end by the tower of the abbey church.
The house might contain, upon a pinch, the retinue of a greater person than Sir Daniel; but even now it was filled with hubbub. The court rang with arms and horseshoe-iron; the kitchens roared with cookery like a bees’-hive; minstrels, and the players of instruments, and the cries of tumblers, sounded from the hall. Sir Daniel, in his profusion, in the gaiety and gallantry of his establishment, rivalled with Lord Shoreby, and eclipsed Lord Risingham.

All guests were made welcome. Minstrels, tumblers, players of chess, the sellers of relics, medicines, perfumes, and enchantments, and along with these every sort of priest, friar, or pilgrim, were made welcome to the lower table, and slept together in the ample lofts, or on the bare boards of the long dining-hall.

On the afternoon following the wreck of the Good Hope, the buttery, the kitchens, the stables, the covered cartshed that surrounded two sides of the court, were all crowded by idle people, partly belonging to Sir Daniel’s establishment, and attired in his livery of murrey and blue, partly nondescript strangers attracted to the town by greed, and received by the knight through policy, and because it was the fashion of the time.

The snow, which still fell without interruption, the extreme chill of the air, and the approach of night, combined to keep them under shelter. Wine, ale, and money were all plentiful; many sprawled gambling in the straw of the barn, many were still drunken from the noontide meal. To the eye of a modern it would have looked like the sack of a city; to the eye of a contemporary it was like any other rich and noble household at a festive season.

There is a pleasure and a seduction in the logical disposition of the material, a pleasing old-fashioned storytellingness. I made a note of sundry medieval words which, although I’ve often read before, I don’t actually fully understand.

arbalest – a crossbow with a special mechanism for drawing back and releasing the string
baldric – a belt worn over one shoulder to carry a weapon (usually a sword) or other implement such as a bugle or drum
brigandine – a cloth garment, generally canvas or leather, lined with small oblong steel plates riveted to the fabric
buckler – a small shield, up to 18 inches in diameter, held in the fist with a central handle behind the boss
cresset – a metal cup or basket, mounted to a pole, containing flammable substance like oil, pitch or a rope steeped in rosin, burned as a light or beacon
gyves – a shackle, especially for the leg
losels – a worthless person or scoundrel
lout – verb: to bow or stoop
murrain – a plague, epidemic, or crop blight
poniard – a small, slim dagger
pottage – a thick soup or stew made by boiling vegetables, grains, and, if available, meat or fish
sallet – a light medieval helmet, usually with a vision slit or a movable visor
shaw – a coppice or thicket of trees
tippet – a scarf-like narrow piece of clothing, worn over the shoulders
tucket – a flourish on a trumpet
windac – a piece of equipment to pull back the tight string of a crossbow

Books & Boots

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A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde (1891)