Fantastic Metropolis

‘So quick bright things come to confusion.’ That line in A Midsummer Night’s Dream might have been written by Shakespeare as an elegy for the life of Richard Dadd. The story of how this shy and gifted young painter turned into the notorious Victorian parricide, who spent half a century confined in institutions for the criminally insane, remains an exemplary tale of the confusion and defeat of human aspiration.

He lived from 1817 to 1888. His father was an apothecary and chemist from Chatham in Kent. In 1837, Richard entered the Royal Academy Schools, where he was a diligent student. The remarkable gentleness of his character was remarked upon by his contemporaries. In 1841, he had his first public success with two paintings, Titania Sleeping and Puck, both visual excursions into themes provided by A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dadd seems to have been fascinated to the point of obsession with the Middle Spirits, that region of supernatural beings who are neither angels nor devils, but a mixture like ourselves of good and evil. In Shakespeare’s play they can be experienced by human beings only in dreams, thus acquiring a dream’s intensity but always within a dream’s parenthesis. We wake to another reality.

In portraying this world of enchantment, Dadd was in no way unusual. The Dream was by far the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays in the nineteenth century. The recent exhibition of fairy paintings at the Royal Academy displayed the tremendous popularity of that genre, and displayed too how easily it can slide into kitsch. Lachrymose confections, set up to permit the loving delineations of pre-pubescent nudity, with the excuse of a pair of glued-on gossamer wings to introduce the designation ‘fairy,’ can cloy remarkably swiftly. But nothing in Dadd is like that, at least partly because his world of enchantment is always a world of menace at the same time.

In 1842, Dadd left England with Sir Thomas Phillips for a trip which would encompass the Near East. During this expedition Dadd painted many evocative watercolours of places such as Bethlehem—studies which could be mistaken for those of any number of orientalists, in search of distant exoticism, the glamour to be had on the far side of industrialism. Yet even here a caveat should be entered. One of the most famous species of that nineteenth-century orientalism which we have inherited is the seraglio painting, such as those of Ingres. It seems here as though the Levant is a vast harem of langorous bodies, draped in diaphanous veils. Here the pre-industrialism of the Ottoman empire dissolves into lethargic eroticism. This is life as provocative display, in which any activity other than dalliance and delectation appears unthinkable. This is merely the visual equivalent of Napoleon’s Egyptian conquest of 1798.

This was not what Dadd saw, or even pretended to see. Instead his Middle East is filled with people going about their mysterious business. They talk unintelligibly at street corners. This has more to do with the genuinely enquiring orientalism of Edward Lear or David Roberts, and one of the things it surely does is to mark a line of exclusion. If Ingres’ levantine images are appropriative, reducing the human being to luscious decoration, Dadd’s reveal and record a potential danger.

And it was in fact during this trip that Dadd showed the first signs of insanity. He became convinced that he was tormented by devils, and that he was under the sway of the god Osiris. He entertained fantasies of killing Phillips. By the time he returned to England he was obviously in a state of mental incompetence, and on the 28th August he stabbed his father to death in Cobham Park, near Chatham, believing him to be the devil in disguise. Then he fled to France, where he very nearly committed another murder, before being captured, returned to England, certified insane and incarcerated in the male criminal block of the Bethlem Hospital, the institution popularly known as Bedlam.

Dadd seems to have been sympathetically treated during his confinement. He was certainly encouraged to paint, and it was at this time that he produced his two greatest works: The Fairy Feller’s Master-stroke and Contradiction: Oberon and Titania. It is the former that is most often reproduced, in whole or in part, and it was this picture that started me off on my enquiry. It hangs in the Tate, and the first thing that strikes one is its diminutive size. Having seen so many reproductions, which turn out to have been enlargements, the small-scale actuality comes as a shock. Dadd was a miniaturist. It is an art-form that recommends itself to the vulnerable, since its effects are easily hidden. But if the dimensions are small, the achievement is huge. There is a whole world in this painting, portrayed with the one-hair-brush finesse of a Van Eyck.

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.

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