Mystic Landscapes: George H. Ellwanger's In Gold & Silver

commentary by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

   

Like many who love the physical treasure a book can be, I am apt to grab something because it's lovely to behold, & just hope the content is worthy of lavish design. Sometimes it is not. Other reasons of interest include rarity &, for a collector of weird tales, the hope that at least one tale will have a ghost.

When I picked up In Gold & Silver (New York: Appleton, 1892) by George H. Ellwanger, I'd some slight hope for "A Shadow upon the Pool" being spooky. It turned out to be a trout-fishing adventure. Well then, the mystical forest journey evoked in "Warders of the Wood" must have a supernatural denoument since it begins with a quote from Thomas Hood's "The Haunted House" & the furtive whiskery gent surely turn out to be a Green Man. But no, the soundless voices that drew our hero deeper into the wood was largely his fisherman's instinct for the secret, idyllic fishing hole. So too "The Silver Fox of Hunt's Hollow" begins with a fantasy quote from Tennyson's "The Holy Grail" & ends with the lament of hamydryads, but once again the mystic quality is not at all Algernon Blackwood; rather, it is the longing, melancholic bond connecting humanity & nature.

It is comical that those of us questing for literary ghosts await them in everything we read.

But don't yet imagine that as a collector of things phantastique I did not receive due portion. This ornately bound book with illustrations by several artists may have been snatched up for physical beauty alone, but it did also make for an enjoyable couple evenings' reading -- & not alone for the Local Color pleasures in the Gennessee Valley. Of the four tales, three were woodland or fishing stories, quite good of kind; I liked them despite no interest in trout fishing & only moderate interest in foxes. But the title story -- ah, there! -- a modern-day Arabian Nights adventure.

The desert-evoking tone & style of "The Golden Rug of Kermanshah" is so different from the lake & forest tales it seems remarkable that this odd-man-out became the lead story, for it hardly represents the whole. It is redolent of the Yellow Nineties aestheticism as our travelling rug-collector adventures among sheiks & odeliscs in search of a fabled carpet the posession of which negates the necessity of all others.

Just as the nature stories have mystical intonations without crossing beyond realms of realism, so too the mystery & mysticism of this epitome of Arabian carpets never quite spills into the supernatural, as it does in stories by E. Hoffmann Price. Yet mysteriousness is held at a high pitch; that flying carpets exist seems always a possibility; & the highly colored prose makes of the landscapes something approaching the heroic fantasies of Sheherazade.

   

copyright © 2000 by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, all rights reserved

   

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