After this descent into the abyss of distorted imagination, Nesbit quickly prepares us for the visionary ascent of the subsequent section (chapters 9 and 10): “There is a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs for ever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real. And when once people have found one of the little weak spots in that curtain which are marked by magic rings, and amulets, and the like, almost anything may happen” (p. 345). In contrast to the playful magic of Mabel’s wish to be twelve feet tall, the higher magic begins with a symbolic rebirth (inside the belly of a stone dinosaur) when the kind and sensitive Kathleen is transformed into one of the living statues we first encountered in the middle section of the first half (chapters 3 and 4). Surprisingly free of all fear, she is welcomed by the animate statue of the god Apollo and invited to witness “the beautiful enchantment” (p. 361) of the garden as it comes alive at night. Soon the other children are allowed to join in the “celestial picnic” (p. 370) with the marble Olympians, and Apollo’s lyre captivates them with “all the beautiful dreams of all the world ... and all the lovely thoughts that sometimes hover near, but not so near that you can catch them.... and it seemed that the whole world lay like a magic apple in the hand of each listener, and that the whole world was good and beautiful” (pp. 374-375). After the visionary moment fades with the dawn, the children must make their somewhat melancholy journey back to the everyday world. But prior to the end of this section they enter a magnificent hall (later identified as the Hall of Granted Wishes) that is surrounded by arches through which they can discern a multitude of images ranging from “a good hotel” for the Ugly-Wugly—“there are some souls that ask no higher thing of life”—to pictures that reveal “some moment when life had sprung to fire and flower—the best that the soul of man could ask or man’s destiny grant” (p. 380). Finally, at the end of the hall the children find the statue of the winged Psyche, symbolically the source of all wishes and imaginings, wearing the magical ring. With ceremonial deference to the goddess, they remove the ring from her hand, and the sensible Kathleen, who is not only aware of the deeper truth that “ ‘the ring’s what you say it is’ ” (p. 347) but also knows when enough is enough for mere mortals, makes the wish that “we were safe in our own beds, undressed, and in our nightgowns, and asleep” (p. 381).
After they return from the visionary world, the children participate in the enchantment of the real world that takes place in the final section of the novel (chapters 11 and 12). We learn that the “bailiff” who assisted with the confinement of the Ugly-Wuglies is actually Lord Yalding himself, and that Mademoiselle is the woman he loves despite the opposition of his relatives, who have deprived him of control over the estate. One by one the obstacles to their marriage are overcome, and at the Temple of Flora we witness a ceremony—reminiscent of the production of Beauty and the Beast that concluded the first half of the novel—in which Lord Yalding places the ring on the finger of his ever more radiant bride:The children have drawn back till they stand close to the lovers. The moonbeam slants more and more; now it touches the far end of the stone, now it draws nearer and nearer to the middle of it, now at last it touches the very heart and centre of that central stone. And then it is as though a spring were touched, a fountain of light released. Everything changes. Or, rather, everything is revealed. There are no more secrets. The plan of the world seems plain, like an easy sum that one writes in big figures on a child’s slate. One wonders how one can ever have wondered about anything. Space is not; every place that one has seen or dreamed of is here. Time is not; into this instant is crowded all that one has ever done or dreamed of doing. It is a moment and it is eternity. It is the centre of the universe and it is the universe itself. The eternal light rests on and illuminates the eternal heart of things (p. 409).
As the ceremony continues, all of the statues come alive—ancient creatures both real and imaginary, followed by a vast array of gods and goddesses—and the lovers proceed to the Hall of Granted Wishes (a.k.a. the Hall of Psyche), where the history of the ring is revealed and Mademoiselle makes a final wish “that all the magic this ring has wrought may be undone, and that the ring itself may be no more and no less than a charm to bind thee and me together for evermore” (p. 411). In the ensuing transformation, which echoes Prospero’s renunciation of magic at the end of The Tempest, the mystical light dies away, the windows of granted wishes disappear, and the statue of Psyche turns into a mere grave. At the same time, in the spirit of Keats and the Romantics, the very process of demythologizing the myth of Cupid and Psyche reveals its full significance, as the imaginary god and his lover are replaced by a real man and woman who are bound together in a climactic vision of the soul uplifted and transfigured by the power of love. Nesbit concludes the novel on a humorous note, but the return to the more impish manner of her “funny” magic dramatically underscores the turn to the more “serious” magic that gathers force over the second half of the novel. Many readers prefer the vitality of the former to the gravity of the latter, and many of those who admire her later works favor the social critique of The Story of the Amulet, The House of Arden, and Harding’s Luck over the Romantic Platonism of The Enchanted Castle. But never again would Nesbit undertake such an ambitious work of children’s fiction, and none of her other books possesses either the coherence or the complexity of her architectonic masterpiece.
VI
It is easy to underestimate Nesbit’s influence on modern children’s fiction, especially in North America, where she has never enjoyed the same level of popularity as she has in the British Isles. Historians continue to debate the degree of her originality, but they seem to agree that however much she was indebted to her Victorian predecessors, Nesbit brought a new and more modern voice to children’s fiction, and in certain respect, her distinctive fusion of magic and realism, which cast a spell on later generations of children’s authors, endures to this day. According to Colin Manlove, “After Nesbit, children’s fantasy was never quite the same again. She showed just how much fun could be made of bringing magic into the ordinary domestic lives of children: And she introduced to children’s fantasy the idea of the group of different children, rather than the frequently solitary child of earlier books. Her books demonstrated that fantasy could be wildly inventive and yet follow its own peculiar laws.”5 All of these Nesbit trademarks—the family ensemble, the mixture of the magic and the realism, the rites of passage between worlds—are prominent features of C. S. Lewis’s classic cycle The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956). With good reason Lewis’s admirers emphasize the influence of George MacDonald and members of his own literary circle, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. But as several Lewis scholars have pointed out, the Narnia series is in some ways far more closely related to Nesbit’s fiction, which informs the narrative voice, the basic elements of character and plot, and a surprising number of specific details, particularly in The Magician’s Nephew, which is set in Nesbit’s turn-of-the-century London and draws liberally on her works.6 On the other side of the Atlantic, Lewis’s American contemporary, Edward Eager, author of the popular “Half Magic” series (1954-1958), openly identifies Nesbit as the source of his inspiration. At the outset of the first volume, Half Magic, a family of four book-loving children forbids oral recitation after suffering through Evangeline, but “this summer the rule had changed. This summer the children had found some books by a writer named E. Nesbit, surely the most wonderful books in the world.... And now yesterday The Enchanted Castle had come in, and they took it out, and Jane, because she could read fastest and loudest, read it out loud all the way home, and when they got home she went on reading, and when their mother came home they hardly said a word to her, and when dinner was served they didn’t notice a thing they ate.”7 It is arguable that Nesbit’s influence has ebbed since the days of these mid-century testimonials, and that children’s fantasy itself has shifted terrain in the last few decades. But Nesbit’s imprint is still apparent in some of the genre’s most popular practitioners, including Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling, and even in cinematic productions such as Pixar’s Toy Story (1995), a direct descendant of The Magic City (1910). Admittedly, a century after their appearance her novels seem embedded in a bygone society and reflect some of its now outmoded values. Moreover, as a writer who seems to have one foot planted in Victorian society and the other in the twentieth century, Nesbit has sparked debate over the extent to which she departs from the heavy-handed didacticism of her literary predecessors, and it is often difficult to decide whether she is subverting or affirming the norms of her notably class-conscious and patriarchal society. But what seems to have endured beyond the cultural trappings of her transitional era is the freshness of her narrative voice, the vivacity and playful humor that in the right circumstances might modulate into high seriousness, and, perhaps above all, the perpetual fusion and confusion between the imaginary and the real, the books we read and the lives we live, the magical lure of our wishes, dreams, and desires, and the inevitably limited conditions of existence that they ceaselessly enchant.