Fantastic Metropolis

The nature of that world is problematical, not least because we have degraded the potent and preternatural context of faerie into the manageable cargo of the fairy tale. In the process we have manufactured sugared images to convey a world which was once a matter of fear as much as delight. Whether Shakespeare did or did not believe in the Middle Spirits, we shall never know, but his imagination grasped their reality, just as Dadd’s did, and this is a world where our rules do not apply. The philosopher Wittgenstein once said that if a lion could speak we would not understand him, and what he meant was that a language is intricately veined in a world of meaning and activity from which it cannot be separated. If creatures rooted in an entirely different world of expectation and requirement were to chance upon the gift of language, they would speak in a manner so entirely different from ourselves that there would be no understanding. Peering at Dadd’s extraordinary painting, attempting to fathom the startling detail of its iconography, one senses first the reality of the figures. However weird some of them might appear, they have a gravity and potency that is undeniable. This is a world of hallucinatory vividness, whose recurrent motif is dread. Laws are in inexorable motion here, but we are not allowed to know what they are. This is perhaps Dadd’s authentic orientalism of the spirit. (Literary equivalents of such alienation might be Kafka’s The Castle or Borges’ Doctor Brodie’s Report, but in both those cases one feels that the writer can return from the minatory world of displacement he has created; with Dadd, one knows that he cannot. The terror of this imprisonment is not dictated merely by the institution’s walls.)

This started to raise a question in my mind, one which the writing of the story by no means answered. If this is an art of insanity, and it is usually portrayed as such, then what distinguishes it from an art of sanity? In this respect, definitions might have been easier for the Victorians than they are for us. Certain types of juxtaposition and inconsequentiality in themselves suggested insanity to them, but in our century of Dada and surrealism, such manoeuvres of the mind have been actively cultivated, a cultivation already prefigured in Rimbaud’s deliberate derangement of all the senses. In reviewing Dadd’s Puck for the journal Art Union in 1841, the critic wrote admiringly of the work, but said that the artist should ‘stop short of the boundaries which divide the imagination from the absurd’. It was an admonition Dadd declined, as has our century.

The preternatural world of coded menace that Dadd portrays survives to some extent into our day in the world of horror movies, which have at their command a technology of effects that far outstrips anything available to Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre, or for that matter to Dadd, however fine his brush. But imaginative creations need to find a retaining space in the human mind or they remain homeless, and no amount of special effects can alter that. The world of faerie might have been degraded to milky images on Christmas cards and red-faced garden gnomes, but it remains embedded in the memory of language, all the same. Among the names still used for the foxglove are fairy-bell, fairy-cap, fairy-finger, fairy-glove, fairy-thimble and fairy-weed. If the tradition seems to have found a terminus in the dithering eccentricity of Disney’s fairy godmother in Cinderella, one suddenly finds that it has found new and surprising life elsewhere. Just as in the nineteenth century, Keats and later Christina Rossetti breathed unexpected life into these categories of the preternatural in Lamia and Goblin Market, so the same thing keeps happening in our time. There was Tolkien, for example. More recently, Nick Willing’s film Photographing Fairies treated these themes with immense seriousness, even though starting from the much-derided Cottingley fairies, and even if a number of Ron Mueck’s manikins conceded more to the spirit of Victorian sentimentality than was necessary. What this proves, it seems to me, is that any structure of the imagination is true if enough true feeling is invested in it. Or as Blake once said, Dante’s inferno is real not despite but because it is imagined. Mainstream Victorian art tried to divest the fairies of their uncanny powers, and stitch them as a decorative margin onto the great canvas called The Progress of Man. It’s hardly surprising they quit the scene of the crime.

In my pursuit of Dadd, I visited the building in Southwark that was called Bedlam when he was an inmate. These days it is called the Imperial War Museum. The wings that held the criminally insane are gone now, having been demolished. One has to try to imagine them. The precise shape of the threatening creatures that troubled Dadd’s mind were never, in any case, visible to anyone else except when he painted them. But there are plenty of threatening shapes there all the same, in the form of twentieth-century weaponry. In their sleekness, their ability to travel silently through the air at great speeds, and the immense amount of intelligence and imagination that has gone into their creation, they are uncannily similar to the Middle Spirits. That kingdom, it would seem, is never empty for long.

“Richard Dadd in Bedlam” by Alan Wall appears in his fiction collection Richard Dadd in Bedlam and Other Stories (Vintage, 2000).