The Answers to "The Ultimate Horror"

Disclosing the Correct Solutions in Vanity Fair's Questionnaire Contest in the May Issue

SAMUEL C. CHEW

1. Walt Whitman: Walt Whitman, line 1045.

2. Carved figure of Christ entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, riding on an ass.

3. Starbuck.

4Ezekiel.

5. James I of Scotland. Maurice Hewlett. A book.

6. Marino Faliero. , Byron; Delavigne; Swinburne. There are also several German dramas.

7. Stephan Lochner.

8. Simone Martini. Lippo Memmi.

9. Samuel Butler. His body was cremated and the ashes scattered.

10. Winchester. Beauvais.

11. It is in the Church of San Tome at Toledo, Spain.

12. (a) The Issenheim altarpiece by Mathias Grünewald; (b) Madonna and Two Saints by Giorgione; (c) The East Judgment by Roger van der Weyden; (d) The Resurrection by Piero della Francesca.

13. A large open space in London near the General Post Office. The name was originally "Smooth Fields."

14. The mandrake.

15. The monument commemorating the Battle of the Nations (J8I3) at Leipzig.

16. At Munich.

17. Ancient Jewish commentary on the Scriptures; an "exposition" (from the Hebrew verb "to search out" or "inquire").

18. "The Last Sigh of the Moor" is a spot in the Sierra Nevada near Granada where Boahdil turned to look for the last, time upon the city whence he had been expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella.—A spot on the hills near Shiraz in Persia from which the view of the city is of such exceeding beauty that Hafiz declared that all who gaze upon it are constrained to cry "Alláhu Akbar!" "God is Great!"

19. A. D. 960-1280.

20. The hard who chants "The Isles of Greece" in Byron's Don Juan (Canto iii). Sunium is on the promontory at Cape Colonna, the extreme South-East point of Attica.

21. Byron's Dun Juan, in manner and form much influenced by Berni and the other heroieomic poets of the Italian Renaissance.

22. A ritualistic dance, surviving from the Mozarabic rite, which takes place before the high altar of the cathedral of Seville during the Fiesta del Santisirno Corpus. Formerly there were twelve dancers (six boys and six girls; whence the name "the Six") ; now the dance is performed by ten boys.

23. William Blake:

A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all Heaven in a rage.

(Auguries of Innocence).

24. Rosmunda, Queen of the Lombards, who caused the death of her husband after he had forced her to drink from a cup fashioned out of her father's skull. There are many versions of the story in many literatures.

26.By the terms of the Treaty of Versailles Berlin was forced to return two missing panels to Ghent. These had been in Germany for about a century. At the same time Brussels restored to Ghent the two other missing panels of the Van Eyck altarpiece.

26. Rabelais (in immediate neighborhood) ; Ronsard (buried near by); Descartes; Balzac; Gregory of Tours; and less intimately Anatole France.

27. The Watsons; Sanditon.

28. Poems inspired by (sometimes addressed to) Mme. de Sabatier, scattered through Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal.

29. (a) Soames Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga, The White Monkey and The Silver Spoon and Enoch Soames in Seven Men.

(b) The red-headed ghost in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.

(c) The female angel in Vigny's Eloa.

(d) Satiric portrait of one John Wilson in Burns's Death and Doctor Hornbook.

(e) The gnomic pessimist in Webster's Duchess of Malfi.

30. Fanny Inday was the daughter of William Godwin's first wife by Captain Gilbert Imlay to whom she was not married. Mary Shelley was the daughter of Godwin and his first wife. Jane Clairmont was the daughter of Godwin's second wife by her first husband.

31. The letters of the Greek word for "fish" are the initials of the Greek words meaning "Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour." Tobias was instructed by the archangel Raphael to burn certain organs of a fish in his bridal-chamber in order to drive off from his wife Sarah the demon Asmodeus who was in love with her. The scheme was a complete success.

32. Feed the hungry; give drink to the thirsty; clothe the naked; visit the sick; visit prisoners; offer hospitality to strangers; bury the dead.

33. The pseudonym of Francois Rabelais. The authorship of his last book has been disputed.

34. The Moabite Stone, in the Louvre, is a monument dedicated to the god Kemosh by a king of Moab, to record his victory over the Israelites in the days of Ahab.

35. Antigone was not literally "put to death", for she hanged herself in the vault in which she had been buried alive by order of Creon. She had buried the body of her brother Polyneices in defiance of Creon's command.

36. Prick-song is written vocal music, sung from notes written or "pricked", as distinguished from that sung from memory or by ear. A rebeck is an early form of fiddle, with three strings. A sackbut is an obsolete form of bass trumpet, with a slide for altering the pitch like that of a trombone.

37. A rather rare motive in Christian art: the appearance of the archangel Gabriel to the Blessed Virgin Mary to announce that, her term of earthly life being accomplished, she is to be taken into Heaven. In a "Second Annunciation" the Virgin is always portrayed as of advanced years.

38.(a) Giles Fletcher's Christ's Victory and Triumph, Part II, stanza 42; better known from the fact that it is the motto of Poe's The Landscape Garden.

(b) Molière's Le Misanthrope, Act I, Scene ii.

(c) Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, first line of final chorus.

(d) Virgil's Aeneid, VI, 268.

(e) Victor Hugo's VExpiation, Part II, line 1 (in Les Chdtiments).

(f) Leopardi's All'Italia, opening lines.

(g) Goethe's Faust, Part I, line 44^4-

3g. Hodge; Boatswain; Wessex.

40. Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War; Boccaccio, Prologue to the Decameron; Dekker's The W underfill Year; Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year; John Wilson's City of the Plague; Shorthouse's John Inglesant; Pepys' Diary; Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi.

41. James Thomson, author of The City of Dreadful Night. "B"' stands for "Bysshe" as a sign of his admiration of Shelley; "V" for "Vanolis," an anagram of Novalis, a writer whom Thomson also admired.

42. Because the fourth Eclogue was generally misinterpreted as foretelling the Golden Age to follow the birth of Christ.

43. John Duns Scotus.

44(a) René; The old person of Graetna —Lear's Nonsense Look—(b) Empedocles.

45. Claus Sluter.

46. At Chantilly. The IIcures de Turin were destroyed by fire.

47. (a) Flaubert and Maupassant; (b) Cowper; (c) Diirer and Hans Sachs; (d) Rousseau; (e) Petrarch; (f) Wordsworth and De Quincey; (g) Monet; (h Moretto; (i) Gibbon; Mme. dcStael; (j) Landor; Fra Angelico.

48. Buskin.

49. Peter Breugel the Elder, also known as "Breugel le Drôle". Peter Breugel the Younger, known as "Breugel de l'Enfer." Jan Breugel, known as "Breugel de Velours."

50. Haydn.

51. The Great Passion; the Little Passion; the Life of Mary; the Apocalypse.

62. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.

53. Goya.

54A window showing the descent of Christ from Jesse. Jesse reclines at the base, and from his heart springs a tree whose branches are his chief descendants, with Christ at the top.

55. Charles Lamb.

56. "The Snake" was Shelley. "Cousin Hadji" was Swinburne. "Albé" was Byron. "Yorick" was Sterne. "Topsy" was William Morris.

67. Saint Christopher.

58. John Marston; James Thomson (the author of The Seasons) ; Nathaniel Lee.

5p. By boiling it in wine.

60. Maria Poe Clemm; Allegra; Annette Vallon; Clotilde de Vaux; Louise Colet.

61. Warburton's cook destroyed the manuscripts of a large number of unpublished Elizabethan and Jacobean plays.

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62. Voltaire's Henriade.

63. De la Motte Fouque. Sintram's companions were Death and the Devil.

64. The shrine at Bruges painted by Hans Memlink; the series of paintings by Carpaccio at Venice; the St. Ursula of Claude Lorraine.

65. In Bach's "Contest of Phoebus and Pan." Similar motifs occur in the Overture to Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream; Strauss' Don Quixote, and Saint-Saens Carnaval des Animaux.

66. In Paradise Regained.

67. The Pineta is the pine-forest near Ravenna. There is another of the same name near Pisa. No. 2, The Pines is the semi-detached villa at Putney where Swinburne lived with Watts-Dunton.

68. Many answers to the questions are possible; but the four most famous pictures are probably the Van Eyck Madonna; the Giorgione Sleeping Venus; the Dtirer Crucifixion; and the Vermeer Girl and Cavalier.

69. The giant Antaeus is compared by Dante (Inferno, xxxi, 136) to the "Torre Garisenda" at Bologna.

70. Ben Jonson.

71. Thomas Hardy; Rudyard Kipling; Sir James Frazer; Sir James Barrie; Sir George Otto Trevelyan; Viscount Haldane.

72. Alceste is the chief character in Moliere's Le Misanthrope. Alcestis was the wife of King Admetus, in whose place she consented to die. See the Alcestis of Euripides and Browning's Baluustions Adventure.

73. At Vallombrosa.

74. Chastity.

75. Jacopone da Todi. Peter Abelard.

76. Pauline Bonaparte for Canova.

77. Ulysses and Diomed (Inferno, Canto xxvi).

78. In the Museum of the Termae at Rome. At Dresden. In the Kaiser Frederick Museum at Berlin.

79. The legend declares that Saint Wilgeforte was a young woman vowed to chastity. Her father wished her to marry a rich prince. To preserve her vow she prayed to God to render her undesirable to a man. A few days later she grew a luxuriant beard. In his wrath and disappointment her father had her crucified. Images of the crucified woman are to be seen at various places in France, notably at Beauvais. The legend is a curious attempt to account for unfamiliar Crucifixes in which Christ is portrayed wearing a sort of gown.

80. The Gospel of Nicodemus (Part II).

81. At Montefalco, near Assisi.

82. TEgisthus.

83. A series of frescoes, the masterpieces of Giotto.

84. At Vicenza.

85. Dispute in and with the French Academy over the structure, style and tone of Corneille's Le Cid. The Coffre du Cid is a large chest fastened to the wall of a chapel of the cathedral at Burgos. Gautier called it "la doyenne des malles du monefe."

86. (a) "Are shadows, not substantial things."

(b) "Ere thy fair light had fled." (c) "By hands unseen are show'rs of vi'lets found."

(d) "But Shadwell never deviates into sense."

87. The only painter definitely known to have studied under Jan Van Eyck.—The author of the apocryphal book of Ecclesiastic us.

88. Two doors are by Ghiberti; but the South door, the oldest, is by Andrea Pisano.

89. Four reliefs immured near the entrance to the Doges' Palace on the Piazzetta at Venice. Of various legends about these oriental sculptures the most charming has it that these four Saracens conspired to rob the treasury of St. Mark. Each desired all the booty for himself, and each poisoned the other three, so that they all received a triple dose and died. The Venetians memorialized them in porphyry. The legend is apocryphal but the four Saracens are delightful.

90. Kayetsu designed it; Korin and Hokusai made it famous.

91. He wore a mask of pleasant appearance so long and acted so well in harmony with his assumed countenance, that his disagreeable disposition departed and he became as pleasant as his mask.

92. Swinburne. See Thalassius.

93. Henry Fielding. Tobias Smollett. John Addington Symonds and Edward John Trelawny.

94. Several hundred cuneiform letters and dispatches discovered in 1887 in the archive-chamber of Ikhnaton's "Foreign Office" at Tel-elAmarna, in which the "Heretic King's" intercourse and negotiations with Asiatic rulers are recorded.—Eight letters and a sonnet-sequence addressed by Mary Queen of Scots to the Earl of Bothwell, proving Mary's complicity in the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley. The authenticity of the "Gasket Letters" has been fiercely debated.—Letters addressed by Prosper Merimee to an "unknown" lady who was probably Mile. Jenny Daqin.—Imaginary correspondence of a Persian visitor to Europe and his friends, by Montesquieu.

95. These were Gargantua's first words.— These were Winnie-the-Pooh's, every morning.

96. Rabelais tells how he himself walked down Pantagruel's mouth (Pantagruel I, chapter xxxii) The Bander-log down Kaa's—The Jungle Book; Hop o' My Thumb down the Cow s—Lucian and his companion in the True History.—Domingo Gonzales, in Francis Godwin's The Man in the. Moone. Nils Holgerson in Selma Lerlöf's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.

97. On the Northern coast of the Gulf of Patras, in the province of Acarnania in Greece. Byron died there.

98. Mr. F's aunt in Little Dorrit —Samuel Butler.

99. Dryden. —Landor; Leigh Hunt. —Francis Thompson.—Nat Lee; Christopher Smart; William Cowper; John Clare.

100. Marmaduke Pickthall; William Godwin; Alfred de Vigny; Henry Osborn Taylor; Thomas Dekker; Charles Montagu Doughty; Amy Lowell ; Thomas Hope.