Late Victorian Gothic Tales - Published by Oxford University Press, this volume contains an excellent introductory essay by Roger Luckhurst and a dozen selections from some of the finest authors of the period - Oscar Wilde, Arthur Machen, Henry James, Vernon Lee, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Bithia Mary Croker, Grant Allen, M.P. Shiel, and Jean Lorrain. For the purposes of my review, I will focus on the two Jean Lorrain tales since the French writer is perhaps the least well known of the authors included. Besides which, Jean Lorrain is one of my all time favorites and I jump on any opportunity to share my enthusiasm for his Decadent fiction. Here goes:
MAGIC LANTERN
Two Parisians at a concert of the music of Hector Berlioz. Following a performance of The Damnation of Faust, the narrator complains to his physician friend that modern science has killed poetry and everything else associated with a sense of the fantastic and fantasy. He goes on, “We have an abstruse mathematical treatise inn place of the heart, the appetites of a piglet in the belly, bridles and racing tips in the imagination, and a clockwork movement in the brain.”
This, an expression of a major theme among the fin de siècle Decadents: the prevailing influence of positivism, scientism and skepticism along with the engineers and hack journalists have all but destroyed the French population’s capacity for intuition and refinement so necessary for music, the arts and aesthetic experience.
Deep into the conversation the physician objects to the notion that all is flat and devoid of traces of the supernatural. No, no, he insists, right here in the theater we are surrounded by such horrors as the specters of human heads, vampires, ghouls and witches. When the narrator doubts the truth of such a rash statement, the physician directs his companion to take up his opera-glasses and train them on three unmarried women with chalky complexions and painted faces. He alludes to the list of men who came to a quick end at the hands of these women once these lovelies go their claws into the gentlemen.
Then there is another beautiful madam whose looks and embrace are as deadly as a mechanical mannequin on parade. “To hold between one’s arms that rotating Sidonie, to run into those lips, as cold as lips of waz: does the idea not make you shudder?” And up in the balcony, wives of the merchantile Barrons, “all of them morphinated, caterised, dosed, drugged by psychotherapeutic novels and ether: medicated, anaemiated, androgynes, hysterics and consumptives.” To the increased horror and stupefaction of the narrator, the physician's examples continue, one after the other after the other.
The Magic Lantern is vintage Jean Lorrain, the author at the top of the list of French Decadents in exploring the prevailing urban landscapes of perversity, debauchery, deviance, kinkiness, and out-and-out weirdness.
THE SPECTRAL HAND
“When the world was rocked by the scandal of the murder of the Comtesse d’Orthyse, my friend Jacques and I were by no means astonished as everyone else.” So begins the unnamed narrator’s haunting tale recounting the revelation of how exactly he and his friend Jacques knew who would put the revolver to the Comesse’s heart and pull the trigger.
It all began two years prior when the now dead lady was the widow of the Marquis de Strada and in the full flower of her beauty, a lady famous for her flamboyance, elegance and exquisite aesthetic taste. Her gowns made from rare fabrics brought about a revolution among Parisian couturiers. “In all the clubs and boudoirs of the city people discussed reports of her dressing-room, whose lacquered green chairs were each encrusted with a trefoil of diamonds, and whose Dresden china bath-tub, supported by three bronze Japanese frogs, were the epitome of symbolic extravagance.” (I include this quote to highlight Jean Lorrain’s opulent writing style on display from beginning to end. My retelling is merely a reviewer’s thin gruel.) Anyway, in a word, the Comtesse d’Orthyse’s drawing room was the most cherished destination for artists, writers, musicians and literati throughout all of Europe.
The narrator’s story takes place during an evening at the home of the Marquise with four guests present: himself, Jacques, Henri Tramsel and poet Pierre de Lisse. The conversation revolved around literature and the arts with a particular focus on the nightmarish paintings of Breughel and Hokusai.
After dinner, all retired to the drawing-room where the Marquise recalled an event from her youth touching on occult themes. A discussion ensued revolving around magic, spiritualism and the fantastic. When someone mentioned table-turning, the Marquise sprang to her feet and rang for her servant to bring a small round table to the room.
But, alas, when their attempts to persuade the spirits to tilt the table proved fruitless, the short-tempered Marquise became extremely irritated which prompted Henri Tramsel to propose they should try another method he called “the spectral hand.” When asked what he meant by that, Henri Tramel assured all present this was the most certain means by which the living might enter into conversation with the dead. He went on to warn everyone such an experiment was dangerous and required courage and strength of character.
The harrowing yarn continues. Unbeknownst to the others in the room, one of the participants sees ghosts and unfolding future tragedy. Up for a beautiful Gothic tale, fin de siècle-style? If so, this Jean Lorrain is for you.
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