Indices

Do you know what I've been doing for the last five (that's five) full days? Checking the proofs of, and compiling an index for, the above title, the forthcoming 2nd edition of my Palgrave History of Science Fiction. The first edition was 320pp. This second edition is 540pp. Quite a lot longer: every chapter has been revised and a whole new (and lengthy) chapter on '21st Century SF' added. The indexing was made more onerous than it might otherwise have been by virtue of (a) this overall lengthiness, and (b) the fact that a vol such as this is inevitably proper-name-heavy and dense with indexible stuff. Woh. Five days, though! It's true that Palgrave gave me the option to hire a professional indexer to do the job for me, but his or her fee would have been more than I'm likely to earn in royalties from the sale of the finished volume. Don't get me wrong: I admire professional indexers, and think them worthy of their hire. It's a tricky, laborious and skilled job. But I'm not rich enough blithely to pay the hundreds of pounds they deserve as their fee out of my own pocket; and even if I did, that would still leave the (lengthy, fiddly) proofs to do. No shortcut there.

I did suggest to Palgrave that the index should read, in its entirety,

Science Fiction, 1-540 passim.

But d'you know what, blood? I isn't allowed.

I think one reason I find compiling indices so frustrating (apart, that is, from the brute fact of, you know, actually compiling them: monotonous, repetitive, dull) is that a part of me believes they ought to have gone the way of, let's say, the old hand-assembled concordances. Useful once upon a time, such works have now been so thoroughly superseded by search engines and suchlike algorithms that they're left, in those libraries that have yet to get rid of them, like Easter Island Heads, proud among the wilderness. You think: 'years, perhaps decades of some poor human's life were consumed by this project!' Then you shake your head sadly and move on. Surely The Index is going this way? And the five days of my life I've just expended on this particular task? Phew.

Cityscape

Via.

Some Thoughts on Scott

So, I've embarked on a comprehensive re-read of Water Scott. Waverley and Guy Mannering are under my belt, and I'm halfway through The Antiquary, and it's proving quite the eye-opener. I'd read most (not, if I'm honest, absolutely all) of his novels before, some when I was an undergraduate, a chunk more soon after I started work as an academic, but my memory of even the more famous of them is patchy, and I ought to know them better. I ought because the novels themselves are, I'm discovering as I re-read, much more fascinating and complex and rich than I realised; and I ought to because no Romanticist or Victorianist can excuse an ignorance of Scott. Back then, everybody read him. He was the first global superstar of the novel. It's the Rule 34 of 19th-century literary studies: Everybody read Scott, no exceptions. Henry Crabb Robinson was always reading Scott; going through all the novels and, when he finished Castle Dangerous (1831) starting again on Waverley (1815) in an endless loop. Dickens's great dream, when he began writing fiction, was to do what Scott did. According to the old story, which may be apocryphal, though one hopes not, the Russian ambassador assumed Scotland had been named after Scott, to honour her most famous son.

Nowadays nobody reads him, and that's a puzzling thing. (Ann Rigney's recent The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (OUP 2012) is all about how and why Scott fell from popular favour). I used to think this has something to do with his prolixity, undeniably a feature of his writing. One does need to be able to take pleasure in sinking into the warm bath of Scott's prose fully to enjoy him. But the bath is a very pleasant one, and to step into any 21st-century bookshop is to be struck by just how many fat-spined long, long novels get sold today. People don't mind reading great long novels, or sinking into prose by Rowling, Meyers, Martin et al even though such prose is not a patch on Scott's. So maybe it's something else.

One of the things my re-read is reinforcing in me is a sense of the varieties of irony. Maybe that has something to do with it, since irony is rather out of fashion now. Not in my house, mind: I have a high regard for irony, aesthetically speaking; and, more, I consider it a crucial artistic feature of modernity. It acquires a significant momentum in Romantic and post-Romantic culture (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and all that). Indeed, I've half a mind to write a book about a particular two-horned manifestation of it in the Romantic novel. On the one hand: Jane Austen. On the other: Walter Scott. I suppose we don’t often think of Scott as a particularly ironic writer—he does foursquare, prosy historical adventure stories, in which a ‘wavering’ character (hence: 'the Waverley novels')  is positioned at some Big Historical Pivot Time: the Crusades; the English Civil War; the Jacobite Rebellion. There is peril, and questing, and journeying; there are battles and duels, and oodles of local colour and vividness. And Scott's success and influence parleyed this mix into later literary offshoots. There’s a reason that description—character caught up in big events, questing/fighting/adventure, lots of local colour—describes a hefty proportion of all the Space Opera and Adventure SF written.

Of course, only a fool would deny that Scott, despite his many excellences, lacks the sophistication and maturity of Austen at her best. To read Scott's books after reading Austen is to be struck by a kind of coarseness and flatness. Austen writes stories not about improbable adventures but about the probable dilemmas of everyday life, stories all readers can test against their own experience. But that’s not the crucial thing. It’s not that Austen writes about falling in love and marrying with sensitivity and charm—of course, that’s exactly what she does do; but there's more to it than that. It’s that she is one of the first creative artists in the world to understand characterisation in ironic terms. Emma Woodhouse simultaneously is handsome, clever and rich and a short-sighted, rather spoilt young woman. The glory of Emma as a novel is the way Austen expertly, beautifully traces her growth in self-knowledge and maturity, correlating it to her awareness of whom it is she really loves. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged …’ is a very clever sentence; because it both is and isn’t true—isn’t because not all men see marriage as central to life the way Austen’s women do, and is because love is much more important and resonant and human than questing/fighting/adventuring—and in the world of Austen’s novel this truth acquires a universality that derives by definition from the parameters of her art. It's what her novels are about.

 Scott has no characters like this. His heroes are heroic all the way through; his villains similarly villainous. They stalk about their stage-sets acting entirely in character from start of story to happy ending. The Waverley novels construe a WYSIWYG universe of reassuring moral absolutes. And yet, and yet: there is something in Scott that responded to the change in the times. He lacked the technical skill to portray the ironies of individual subjectivity the way Austen could, in part because his approach to character was wholly externalised. But in some of his novels he found a way of articulating something that approaches Austenian doubleness of character.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean. In The Talisman (1825) noble characters are constantly gadding about in disguise. Prince David of Scotland goes disguised as a slave. When King Richard falls sick he is attended, and healed, by an Arab physician called El Hakim. At the end of the novel we discover that this physician was actually Sultan Saladin himself, Richard’s enemy, all along. All this disguise gubbins is Scott’s way of intimating that a character like Saladin might be both the enemy of Christendom and an honourable, gallant individual at the same time. It’s a device that externalises what happens more naturally, and more persuasively, as interiorised characterisation in Austen’s novels. But it can be a very effective textual strategy for all that; and there are versions of this device, or variants upon it, throughout the Waverley novels. Edward Waverley's own bivalve political affiliation for example; or the complex games of prophesy and history, false-names and true identities, in Guy Mannering; the manifest and latent paired narratives of Heart of Midlothian.

Another, related matter: Lukács is right. Scott invents the Historical Novel not because nobody before him had ever written a novel set in the past, but because he creates a way formally of realising historical change as a lived-through dialectic: almost all his historical novels centre on a middling, unremarkable character who gets caught up in some big historical hinge point, who meets famous historical individuals (although those famous people are always secondary characters in the novel), who is offered a choice between 'the old ways' of feudal romanticism and the inevitable, coming social logic of bourgeois respectability and who chooses the latter.

Which brings me to: The Lord of the Rings. During my recent re-read of Waverley I found myself repeatedly put in mind of Tolkien's big book: the discursive style, the inset ballads and poems, the way a texture of lived-experience is created, but most of all the central shape—a middling character who leaves his comfortable English home, in part motivated by a imaginative curiosity about more romantic, older modes of life, and who gets caught up in the Great Events of the Day, which turn out to be the hinge upon which History itself turns. The narrative in both books is a there-and-back-again journey, through a landscape peopled with various different tribes (in Scott: English, Borderers, Lowland Scots, Highlanders) and different idioms and, in some cases, languages; the descriptions of mountains and battles, above all the elegaic sense of an old world passing away. But of course the LotR is Scott-like, since Tolkien grew up reading Scott as did all his class and generation. And because of Tolkien's influence on the development of Fantasy that means the default template for a great amount of Modern Fantasy is: the Waverley novels. Everybody interested in Fantasy should read them.

There's one more thing, which gives me the excuse to quote my favourite passage of Chesterton's critical prose, where he compares Scott and Dickens. It came back to me today, because The Antiquary, from where Chesterton takes the lines by Arthur Wardour and the beggar, is what I'm presently re-reading. But, really, the whole passage is on to something important about Scott; and one of the things I'm thinking about is how a 21st-century critic might reframe and develop the insights here:

Of all these nineteenth-century writers there is none, in the noblest sense, more democratic than Walter Scott. As this may be disputed, and as it is relevant, I will expand the remark. There are two rooted spiritual realities out of which grow all kinds of democratic conception or sentiment of human equality. There are two things in which all men are manifestly and unmistakably equal. They are not equally clever or equally muscular or equally fat, as the sages of the modern reaction (with piercing insight) perceive. But this is a spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic. And this, again, is an equally sublime spiritual certainty, that all men are comic. No special and private sorrow can be so dreadful as the fact of having to die. And no freak or deformity can be so funny as the mere fact of having two legs. Every man is important if he loses his life; and every man is funny if he loses his hat, and has to run after it. And the universal test everywhere of whether a thing is popular, of the people, is whether it employs vigorously these extremes of the tragic and the comic. Shelley, for instance, was an aristocrat, if ever there was one in this world. He was a Republican, but he was not a democrat: in his poetry there is every perfect quality except this pungent and popular stab. For the tragic and the comic you must go, say, to Burns, a poor man. And all over the world, the folk literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.

These, I say, are two roots of democratic reality. But they have in more civilised literature, a more civilised embodiment of form. In literature such as that of the nineteenth century the two elements appear somewhat thus. Tragedy becomes a profound sense of human dignity. The other and jollier element becomes a delighted sense of human variety. The first supports equality by saying that all men are equally sublime. The second supports equality by observing that all men are equally interesting.

In this democratic aspect of the interest and variety of all men, there is, of course, no democrat so great as Dickens. But in the other matter, in the idea of the dignity of all men, I repeat that there is no democrat so great as Scott. This fact, which is the moral and enduring magnificence of Scott, has been astonishingly overlooked. His rich and dramatic effects are gained in almost every case by some grotesque or beggarly figure rising into a human pride and rhetoric. The common man, in the sense of the paltry man, becomes the common man in the sense of the universal man. He declares his humanity. For the meanest of all the modernities has been the notion that the heroic is an oddity or variation, and that the things that unite us are merely flat or foul. The common things are terrible and startling, death, for instance, and first love: the things that are common are the things that are not commonplace. Into such high and central passions the comic Scott character will suddenly rise. Remember the firm and almost stately answer of the preposterous Nicol Jarvie when Helen Macgregor seeks to browbeat him into condoning lawlessness and breaking his bourgeois decency. That speech is a great monument of the middle class. Molière made M. Jourdain talk prose; but Scott made him talk poetry. Think of the rising and rousing voice of the dull and gluttonous Athelstane when he answers and overwhelms De Bracy. Think of the proud appeal of the old beggar in the Antiquary when he rebukes the duellists. Scott was fond of describing kings in disguise. But all his characters are kings in disguise. He was, with all his errors, profoundly possessed with the old religious conception, the only possible democratic basis, the idea that man himself is a king in disguise.

In all this Scott, though a Royalist and a Tory, had in the strangest way, the heart of the Revolution. For instance, he regarded rhetoric, the art of the orator, as the immediate weapon of the oppressed. All his poor men make grand speeches, as they did in the Jacobin Club, which Scott would have so much detested. And it is odd to reflect that he was, as an author, giving free speech to fictitious rebels while he was, as a stupid politician, denying it to real ones. But the point for us here is this that all this popular sympathy of his rests on the graver basis, on the dark dignity of man. "Can you find no way?" asks Sir Arthur Wardour of the beggar when they are cut off by the tide. "I'll give you a farm . . . I'll make you rich." . . . "Our riches will soon be equal," says the beggar, and looks out across the advancing sea.

Now, I have dwelt on this strong point of Scott because it is the best illustration of the one weak point of Dickens. Dickens had little or none of this sense of the concealed sublimity of every separate man. Dickens's sense of democracy was entirely of the other kind; it rested on the other of the two supports of which I have spoken. It rested on the sense that all men were wildly interesting and wildly varied. When a Dickens character becomes excited he becomes more and more himself. He does not, like the Scott beggar, turn more and more into man. As he rises he grows more and more into a gargoyle or grotesque. He does not, like the fine speaker in Scott, grow more classical as he grows more passionate, more universal as he grows more intense.

The response the beggar gives Sir Arthur Wardour is so brilliant and powerful, Chesterton is absolutely right to pick it out. Sends chills up my spine. But the properly salient passage here is this one: 'Scott was fond of describing kings in disguise. But all his characters are kings in disguise. He was, with all his errors, profoundly possessed with the old religious conception, the only possible democratic basis, the idea that man himself is a king in disguise.'

Remarks on the Legality and Expediency of ...

I know what you're thinking: finally somebody apologizes for the vices of the lower orders. At last!

(In case you're wondering, Duncan's conclusion is that prosecutions for religious opinion are neither legal nor expedient when used to attack the varieties of religious observance; but may be needful when the horrid atheism rears its ugly head).

The Cast of Outcast's Inn

So, there we have the title page to Modern Times, or, The Adventures of Gabriel Outcast (3 vols 1785), by John Trusler. Now: I was, for reasons that need not detain us, browsing through this fantastically obscure novel on Google Books earlier today, when I came across this little episode:





Ho ho. Anyway, this gave me pretty sharp déjà vu, and I found myself thinking: surely I'd read a similar scene in a nineteenth-century novel? Not one of Dickens's, I think, since I know them all pretty well; but maybe I'd read a scene like this in one of his occasional essays or stories, a Household Words or All The Year Round shorter piece? Or was it Thackeray? And if so, was one of these gentlemen slyly plagiarising poor old obscure Trusler? That might be worth knowing, if so. But I couldn't pin it down. Google was no use, so I posted a cry-for-help on Facebook.

Suggestions came in thick and fast, some of them blind-alleys (Tristram Shandy, Tom Jones, Henry Esmond). Karl Steel suggested The Phantom Tollbooth, which might indeed have been the source of my personal déjà vu, but, obviously, isn't a nineteenth-century novel (I couldn't shake my sense that there was a nineteenth-century version of this). Christine Ferguson, who certainly knows her 19th-century literature, said 'it's not what you're looking for, but this is essentially what happens to Jonathan Harker at Castle Dracula', which is certainly true but, as she notes, not what I was looking for. Ian Watson said this had actually happened to him in a hotel in Hungary. Jayaprakash Satyamurthy claimed he once read a Donald Duck story 'where Scrooge puts Donald in charge of a hotel. Scrooge comes to stay at the hotel incognito and Donald poses as the bellboy, concierge and so on.' I like to think that Jayaprakash reads more than just Donald Duck stories nowadays, but, you know: who knows? Jared Shurin noted that it happened in an I Love Lucy episode, and Nick Harkaway insisted it was a common gag, though he couldn't think of any particular examples.

By the end of this, process I found myself coming to the conclusion that actually this joke is one of those culturally ubiquitous comedy sequences, often recycled and repurposed. That in itself might explain my sense that I'd come across it before. But if so, then another question presents itself: is this version, in Trusler's 1785 Gabriel Outcast, the first version in print?

Star Camp (1865)

The Flagship of the 18th-Century French Aerial Navy. I found this in Christopher Hatton Turnor's Astra Castra: Experiments and Adventures in the Atmosphere (1865), a survey of manned flight from Greek myth into possible futurity. He found it who-knows-where, except that it is a post-Revolutionary French design.

Among my favourites: this rather-you-than-me-mate early-model parachute:

... and this nifty Persian airborn throne:

Here is Turnor's frankly over-propellered idea for a future dirigible:

He concludes with this slightly tinted glimpse of the future:

Twentieth-century Revelation indeed!

The Wellingtoniad (2824)

A piece of Thomas Babington Macaulay whimsy, this 1824 essay imagines a poet from a thousand years in the future writing a great epic poem about the, to him, deep-historical exploits of Lord Wellington. It represents, on its face, a comic-satiric dig at the invalidity of epic poetry in Macaulay's own day, a mode regarded as a kind of Malvolian cross-gartered-yellow-stocking. But the details are interesting, especially if we read them under the aegis of science fiction. 'I prophecy, then,' Macaulay says, 'that, in the year 2824, according to our present reckoning, a grand national Epic Poem, worthy to be compared with the Iliad, the Aeneid, or the Jerusalem, will be published in London.' He goes on, writing what amounts to a short-story in the future tense:

Richard Quongti will be born at Westminster on the 1st of July, 2786. He will be the younger son of the yonnger branch of one of the most respectable families in England. He will be lineally descended from Quongti, the famous Chinese liberal, who, after the failure of the heroic attempt of his party to obtain a constitution from the Emperor Fim Fam, will take refuge in England, in the twenty-third century. Here his descendants will obtain considerable note; and one branch of the family will be raised to the peerage ... He will display in his early youth such striking talents as will attract the notice of Viscount Qnongti, his third cousin, then secretary of state for the Steam Department. At the expense of this eminent nobleman, he will be sent to prosecute his studies at the university of Tombuctoo. To that illustrious seat of the muses all the ingenuous youth of every country will then be attracted by the high scientific character of Professor Quashaboo, and the eminent literary attainments of Professor Kissey Kickey. In spite of this formidable competition, however, Quongti will acquire the highest honours in every department of knowledge, and will obtain the esteem of his associates by his amiable and unaffected manners. The guardians of the young Duke of Carrington, premier peer of England, and the last remaining scion of the ancient and illustrious house of Smith, will be desirous to secure so able an instructor for their ward. With the Duke, Quongti will perform the grand tour, and visit the polished courts of Sydney and Capetown. After prevailing on his pupil, with great difficulty, to subdue a violent and imprudent passion which he had conceived for a Hottentot lady, of great beauty and accomplishments indeed, but of dubious character, he will travel with him to the United States of America. But that tremendous war which will be fatal to American liberty will, at that time, be raging through the whole federation. At New York the travellers will hear of the final defeat and death of the illustrious champion of freedom, Jonathan Higginbottom, and of the elevation of Ebenezer Hogsflesh to the perpetual Presidency. They will not choose to proceed in a journey which would expose them to the insults of that brutal soldiery, whose cruelty and rapacity will have devastated Mexico and Columbia, and now, at length, enslaved their own country.

Quongti returns (will return) to England and writes (will write) the Wellingtoniad, which is a huge hit. Macaulay quotes 'from Tombuctoo Review for April 2825'

In pathos, in splendour of language, in sweetness of versification, Mr. Quongti has long been considered as unrivalled. In his exquisite poem on the Omithorynchus Paradomus all these qualities are displayed in their greatest perfection. How exquisitely does that work arrest and embody the undefined and vague shadows which flit over an imaginative mind. The cold worldling may not comprehend it; but it will find a response in the bosom of every youthful poet ... It is difficult to conceive a plot more perfect than that of the Wellingtoniad. It is most faithful to the manners of the age to which it relates. It preserves exactly all the historical circumstances, and interweaves them most artfully with all the speciosa miracula of supernatural agency.

Then, before a summary of the poem, Macaulay inserts a slightly heavy-handed pointer to the point of all this mild satire: 'Some readers of the present day may think that Quongti is by no means entitled to the compliments which his Negro critic pays him on his adherence to the historical circumstances of the time in which he has chosen his subject; that, where he introduces any trait of our manners, it is in the wrong place, and that he confounds the customs of our age with those of much more remote periods. I can only say that the charge is infinitely more applicable to Homer, Virgil and Tasso. If, therefore, the reader should detect, in the following abstract of the plot, any little deviation from strict historical accuracy, let him reflect for a moment, whether Agamemnon would not have found as much to censure in the lliad,—Dido in the Eneid,—or Godfrey in the Jerusalem.' Now, on the one hand there needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this; it's one of the things Herbert Tucker explores so well (and in such detail) in his 2012 Epic book: the older models of epic, though still earnestly copied by minor writers, were being comprehensively redefined and remade by the major Romantic poets, the Blakes, Wordsworths and Byrons. This musty old version of what epic had been, the pedantic cleavage to classical epic conventions and the myopic collapsing together of myth and history, at a time when the first of these was becoming ideology in a purer sense and the latter complexifying and dialecticising beyond the scope of simplifying poetic narrative—all this was gone. As Austen's Northanger Abbey (her weakest book by far I think) has sniggering fun at the expense of Gothic, so Macaulay has fun at the expense of contemporary epic:

BOOK I. THE poem commences, in form, with a solemn proposition of the subject. Then the muse is invoked to give the poet accurate information as to the causes of so terrible a commotion. The answer to this question, being, it is to be supposed, the joint production of the poet and the muse, ascribes the event to circumstances which have hitherto eluded all the research of political writers, namely, the influence of the god Mars, who, we are told, had some forty years before usurped the conjugal rights of old Carlo Buonaparte, and given ' birth to Napoleon. By his incitement it was that the em— peror with his devoted companions was now on the sea, returning to his ancient dominions. The gods were at present, fortunately for the adventurer, feasting with the Ethiopians, whose entertainments, according to the ancient custom described by Homer, they annually attended, with the same sort of condescending gluttony which now carries the cabinet to Guildhall on the 9th of November. Neptune was, in consequence, absent and unable to prevent the enemy of his favourite island from crossing his element. Boreas, however, who had his abode on the banks of the Russian ocean, and who, like Thetis in the Iliad, was not of sufficient quality to have an invitation to Ethiopia, resolves to destroy the armament which brings war and danger to his beloved Alexander. He accordingly raises a storm which is most powerfully described. Napoleon bewails the inglorious fate for which he seems to be reserved. “Oh ! thrice happy,” says he, “those who were frozen to death at Krasnoi, or slaughtered at Leipzic. Oh, Kutusofi, bravest of the Russians, wherefore was I not permitted to fall by thy victorious sword?” He then offers a prayer to Eolus, and vows to him a sacrifice of a black ram. In consequence, the god recalls his turbulent subject; the sea is calmed; and the ship anchors in the port of Frejus. Napoleon and Bertrand, who is always called the faithful Bertrand, land to explore the country; Mars meets them disguised as a lancer of the guard, wearing the cross of the legion of honour. He advises them to apply for necessaries of all kinds to the governor, shows them the way, and disappears with a strong smell of gunpowder. Napoleon makes a pathetic speech, and enters the governor’s house. Here he sees hanging up a fine print of the battle of Austerlitz, himself in the foreground giving his orders. This puts him in high spirits; he advances and salutes the governor, who receives him most loyally, gives him an entertainment, and, according to the usage of all epic hosts, insists after dinner on a full narration of all that has happened to him since the battle of Leipzic.

BOOK II.

NAPOLEON carries his narrative from the battle of Leipzic to his abdication. But, as we shall have a great quantity of fighting on our hands, I think it best to omit the details.

BOOK III.

NAPOLEON describes his sojourn at Elba, and his return; how he was driven by stress of weather to Sardinia, and fought with the harpies there; how he was then carried southward to Sicily, where he generously took on board an English sailor, whom a man of war had unhappily left there, and who was in imminent danger of being devoured by the Cyclops; how he landed in the bay of Naples, saw the Sibyl, and descended to Tartarus; how he held a long and pathetic conversation with Poniatowski, whom he found wandering unburied on the banks of Styx; how he swore to give him a splendid funeral; how he had also an affectionate interview with Desaix; how Moreau and Sir Ralph Abercrombie tied at the sight of him. He relates that he then re-embarked, and met with nothing of importance till the commencement of the storm with which the poem opens.

BOOK IV.

THE scene changes to Paris. Fame, in the garb of an express, brings intelligence of the landing of Napoleon. The king performs a sacrifice: but the entrails are unfavourable ; and the victim is without a heart. He prepares te encounter the invader. A young captain Of the guard,» the son of Maria Antoinette by Apo11o,—in the shape of a fiddler, rushes in to tell him that Napoleon is approaching with a vast army. The royal forces are drawn out for battle. Full catalogues are given of the regiments on both sides; their colonels, lieutenant-colonels, and uniform.

BOOK V.

THE king comes forward and defies Napoleon to single combat. Napoleon accepts it. Sacrifices are offered. The ground is measured by Ney and Macdonald. The combatants advance. Louis snaps his pistol in vain. The bullet of Napoleon, on the contrary, carries off the tip of the king’s ear. Napoleon then rushes on him sword in hand. But Louis . snatches up a stone, such as ten men of those degenerate days will be unable to move, and hurls it at his antagonist. Mars averts it. Napoleon then seizes Louis, and is about to strike a fatal blow, when Bacchus intervenes, like Venus in the third book of the Iliad, bears off the king in a thick cloud, and seats him in an hotel at Lille, with a bottle of Maraschino and a basin of soup before him. Both armies instantly proclaim Napoleon emperor.

BOOK VI.

NEPTUNE, returned from his Ethiopian revels, sees with rage the events which have taken place in Europe. He flies to the cave of Alecto, and drags out the fiend, commanding her to excite universal hostility against Napoleon. The Fury repairs to Lord Castlereagh; and, as, when she visited Turnus, she assumed the form of an old woman, she here appears in the kindred shape of Mr. Vansittart, and in an impassioned address exhorts his lordship to war. His lordship, like Turnus, treats this unwonted monitor with great disrespect, tells him that he is an old doting fool, and advises him to look after the ways and means, and leave questions of peace and war to his betters. The Buy then displays all her terrors. The neat powdered hair bristles up into snakes; the black stockings appear clotted with blood; and, brandishing a torch, she announces her name and mission. Lord Castlereagh, seized with fury, flies instantly to the Parliament, and recommends war with a torrent of eloquent invective. All the members instantly clamour for vengeance, seize their arms which are hanging round the walls of the house, and rush forth to prepare for instant hostilities.

BOOK VII.

IN this book intelligence arrives at London of the flight of the Duchess d’Angouléme from France. It is stated that this heroine, armed from head to foot, defended Bordeaux against the adherents of Napoleon, and that she fought hand to hand with Clause], and beat him down with an enormous stone. Deserted by her followers, she at last, like Turnus, plunged, armed as she was, into the Garonne, and swam to an English ship which lay off the coast. This intelligence yet more inflames the English to war. A yet bolder flight than any which has been mentioned follows. The Duke of Wellington goes to take leave of the duchess; and a scene passes quite equal to the famous interview of Hector and Andromache. Lord Douro is frightened at his father’s feather, but begs for his epaulette.

BOOK VIII.

NEPTUNE, trembling for the event of the war, implores Venus, who, as the offspring of his element, naturally venerates him, to procure from Vulcan a deadly sword and a pair of unerring pistols for the Duke. They are accordingly made and superbly decorated. The sheath of the sword, like the shield of Achilles, is carved, in exquisiter fine miniature, with scenes from the common life of the period; a dance at Almack’s, a boxing match at the Fives-court, a lord mayor’s procession, and a man hanging. All these are fully and elegantly described. The Duke thus armed hastens to Brussels.

BOOK IX.

THE Duke is received at Brussels by the King of the Netherlands with great magnificence. He is informed of the approach of the armies of all the confederate kings. The poet, however, with a laudable zeal for the glory of his country, completely passes over the exploits of the Austrians in Italy, and the discussions of the congress. England and France, Wellington and Napoleon, almost exclusively occupy his attention. Several days are spent at Brussels in revelry. The English heroes astonish their allies by exhibiting splendid games, similar to those which draw the flower of the British aristocracy to Newmarket and Moulsey Hurst, and which will be considered by our descendants with as much veneration as the Olympian and Isthmian contests by classical students of the present time. In the combat of the cestus, Shaw, the life-guards-man, vanquishes the Prince of Orange, and obtains a bull as a prize. In the horse-race, the Duke of Wellington and Lord Uxbridge ride against each other; the Duke is victorious, and is rewarded with twelve opera-girls. On the last day of the festivities, a splendid dance takes place, at which all the heroes attend.

BOOK X.

Mans, seeing the English army thus inactive, hastens to rouse Napoleon, who, conducted by Night and Silence, unexpectedly attacks the Prussians. The slaughter is immense. Napoleon kills many whose histories and families are happily particularised. He slays Herman, the craniologist, who dwelt by the linden-shadowed Elbe, and measured with his eye the skulls of all who walked through the streets of Berlin. Alas! his own skull is now cleft by the Corsican sword. Four pupils of the University of Jena advance together to encounter the Emperor; at four blows he destroys them all. Blucher rushes to arrest the devastation; Napoleon strikes him to the ground and is on the point of killing him, but Gneisenau, Ziethen, Bulow, and all the other heroes of the Prussian army, gather. round him, and bear the venerable chief to a distance from the field. The slaughter is continued till night. In the meantime Neptune has despatched Fame to bear the intelligence to the Duke, who is dancing at Brussels. The whole army is put in motion. The Duke of Brunswick’s horse speaks to admonish him of his danger, but in vain.

BOOK XI.

PICTON, the Duke of Brunswick, and the Prince of Orange, engage Ney at Quatre Bras. Ney kills the Duke of Brunswick, and strips him, sending his belt to Napoleon. The English fall back on Waterloo. Jupiter calls a council of the gods, and commands that none shall interfere on either side. Mars and Neptune make very eloquent speeches. The battle of Waterloo commences. Napoleon kills Picton and Delaney. Ney engages Ponsonby and kills him. The Prince of Orange is wounded by Soult. Lord Uxbridge flies to check the carnage. He is severely wounded by Napoleon, and only saved by the assistance of Lord Hill. In the meantime the Duke makes a tremendous carnage among the French. He encounters General Duhesme and vanquishes him, but spares his life. He kills Toubert, who kept the gaming-house in the Palais Royal, and Maronet, who loved to spend whole nights in drinking champagne. Clerval, who had been hooted from the stage, and had then become a captain in the Imperial Guard, wished that he had still continued to face the more harmless enmity of the Parisian pit. But Larrey, the son of Esculapius, whom his father had instructed in all the secrets of his art, and who was surgeon-general of the French army, embraced the knees of the destroyer, and conjured him not to give death to one whose office it was to give life. The Duke raised him, and bade him live. But we must hasten to the close. Napoleon rushes to encounter Wellington. Both armies stand in mute amaze. The heroes fire their pistols; that of Napoleon misses, but that of Wellington, formed by the hand of Vulcan, and primed by the Cyclops, wounds the Emperor in the thigh. He flies, and takes refuge among his troops. The flight becomes promiscuous. The arrival of the Prussians, from a motive of patriotism, the poet completely passes over.

BOOK XII.

THINGS are now hastening to the catastrophe. Napoleon flies to London, and, seating himself on the hearth of the Regent, embraces the household gods, and conjures him, by the venerable age of George III., and by the opening perfections of the Princess Charlotte, to spare him. The Prince is inclined to do so; when, looking on his breast, he sees there the belt of the Duke of Brunswick. He instantly draws his sword, and is about to stab the destroyer of his kinsman. Piety and hospitality, however, restrain his hand. He takes a middle course, and condemns Napoleon to be exposed on a desert island. The King of France re-enters Paris; and the poem concludes.

It's all quite heavy-handed, this: by no means Macaulay's most enjoyable jeu d'esprit. I wonder if the problem is that he rather falls in love with the galumphing nonsensiad he conjures. I feel for him: as a science fiction writer, I rather fell for his thousand-year-hence future, where Timbuctoo is one of he world's leading universities and the key poet of the age is Chinese. This I take straightforwardly, as SFnal worldbuilding, and interestingly prescient, where Macaulay's original readership presumably read it as so absurd as to be richly amusing. But that's their loss. And part of me would like to read the actual Wellingtoniad proposed here.