A SUMMARY CHAPTER
Now, it is the recent publication by Mr. Evans Wentz of a careful andenthusiastic work upon _The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries_ which hasinspired me to put these pages before the public. Some of them haveappeared in the magazines as curious recitals and may have affordedpastime to the idle-minded, but without the courageous initiative ofMr. Wentz I don't know that I should have attempted to give them suchcoherence as they may claim to possess. And that, I fear, will be verylittle without this chapter in which I shall, if I can, clear theground for a systematic study of the whole subject. No candid readercan, I hope, rise from the perusal of the book without the convictionthat behind the world of appearance lies another and a vaster with athronging population of its own--with many populations, indeed, eachabsorbed in uttering its being according to its own laws. If I haveafforded nothing else I have afforded glimpses into that world; andthe question now is, What do we precisely gather, what can we be saidto know of the laws of that world in which these swift, beautiful andapparently ruthless creatures live and move and utter themselves? Ishall have to draw upon more than I have recorded here: cases which Ihave heard of, which I have read of in other men's books, as well asthose which are related here as personal revelation. If I speakpragmatically, _ex cathedra_, it is not intentional. If I failsometimes to give chapter and verse it will be because I have nevertaken any notes of what has gone into my memory, and have no documentsto hand. But I don't invent; I remember.
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There is a chain of Being of whose top alike and bottom we knownothing at all. What we do know is that our own is a link in it, andcannot generally, can only fitfully and rarely, have intercourse withany other. I am not prepared with any modern instances of intercoursewith the animal and vegetable world, even to such a limited extent,for instance, as that of Balaam with his ass, or that of Achilles withhis horses; but I suspect that there are an enormous numberunrecorded. Speech, of course, is not necessary to such anintercourse. Speech is a vehicle of human intercourse, but not of thatof any other created order so far as we know.[8] Birds and beasts donot converse in speech, smell or touch seems to be the senseemployed; and though the vehicles of smell and touch are unknown tous, in moments of high emotion we ourselves converse otherwise than byspeech. Indeed, seeing that all created things possess a spiritwhereby they are what they are, it does not seem necessary to supposeintercourse impossible without speech, and I myself have never had anydifficulty in accepting the stories of much more vital mixedintercourse which we read of in the Greek and other mythologies. If weread, for instance, that such and such a man or woman was theoffspring of a woman and the spirit of a river, or of a man and thespirit of a hill or oak-tree, it does not seem to me at allextraordinary. The story of the wife who suffered a fairy union andbore a fairy child which disappeared with her is a case in point. Thefairy father was, so far as I can make out, the indwelling spirit of arose, and the story is too painful and the detail in my possession tooexact for me to put it down here. I was myself actually present, andin the house, when the child was born. I witnessed the anguish of theunfortunate husband, who is now dead. Mr. Wentz has many instances ofthe kind from Ireland and other Celtic countries; but fairies are byno means confined to Celtic countries, though they are more easilydiscerned by Celtic races.
[Footnote 8: The speech of Balaam's ass or of Balaam, of Achilles andhis horses are, of course, necessary conventions of the poet's and donot imply that words passed between the parties.]
Of this chain of Being, then, of which our order is a member, thefairy world is another and more subtle member, subtler in the rightsense of the word because it is not burdened with a material envelope.Like man, like the wind, like the rose, it has spirit; but unlike anyof the lower orders, of which man is one, it has no sensible wrappingunless deliberately it consents to inhabit one. This, as we know, itfrequently does. I have mentioned several cases of the kind; Mrs.Ventris was one, Mabilla By-the-Wood was another. I have notpersonally come across any other cases where a male fairy took uponhim the burden of a man than that of Quidnunc. Even there I have neverbeen satisfied that Quidnunc became man to the extent that Mrs.Ventris did. Quidnunc, no doubt, was the father of Lady Emily'schildren; but were those children human? There are some grounds forthinking so, and in that case, if "the nature follows the male,"Quidnunc must have doffed his immateriality and suffered realincarnation. If they were fairy children the case is altered. Quidnuncneed not have had a body at all. Now since it is clear that the fairyworld is a real order of creation, with laws of its own every whit asfixed and immutable as those of any other order known to naturalists,it is very reasonable to inquire into the nature and scope of thoselaws. I am not at all prepared at present to attempt anything like adigest of them. That would require a lifetime; and no small part ofthe task, after marshalling the evidence, would be to agree upon termswhich would be intelligible to ourselves and yet not misleading. Totake polity alone, are we to understand that any kind of Governmentresembling that of human societies obtains among them? When we talk ofQueens or Kings of the Fairies, of Oberon and Titania, for example,are we using a rough translation of a real something, or are wetelling the mere truth? Is there a fairy king? The King of the Wood,for instance, who was he? Is there a fairy queen? Who is Queen Mab?Who is Despoina? Who is the Lady of the Lake? Who is the "_[Greek:Basilissa ton bounon]_," or "_[Greek: Megale Kura]_" of whom Mr.Lawson tells us such suggestive things in his _Modern GreekFolk-lore?_ Who is Despoina, with whom I myself have conversed, "adread goddess, not of human speech?" The truth, I suspect, is this.There are, as we know, countless tribes, clans, or orders of fairies,just as there are nations of men. They confess the power of somegreater Spirit among themselves, bow to it instantly and submit to itsdecrees; but they do not, so far as I can understand, acknowledge amonarchy in any sense of ours. If there is a Supreme Power over thefairy creation it is Proserpine; but hers is too remote an empire tobe comparable to any of ours. Not even Caesar, not even the Great King,could hope to rule such myriads as she. She may stand for theinvisible creation no doubt, but she would never have commerce withit. No fairy hath seen her at any time; no sovereignty such as we arenow discussing would be applicable to her dominion. That of Artemis,or that of Pan, is more comparable. Artemis is certainly ruler of thespirits of the air and water, of the hills and shores of the sea, andto some extent her power overlaps that of Pan who is potent in nearlyall land solitudes. But really the two lord-ships can be exactlydiscriminated. They never conflict. The legions of Artemis are allfemale, though on earth men as well as women worship her; the legionsof Pan are all male, though on earth he can chasten women as well asmen.[9] But Pan can do nothing against Artemis, nor she anythingagainst him or any of his. The decree or swift deed of either isrespected by the other. They are not, then, as earthly kings, leadersof their hosts to battle against their neighbours. Fairies fight andmarshal themselves for war; Mr. Wentz has several cases of the kind.But Pan and Artemis have no share in these warfares. Queen Mab is oneof the many names, and points to one of the many manifestations ofArtemis; the Lady of the Lake is another. Both of these have died out,and in the country she is generally hinted at under the veil of"Mistress of the Wood" or "Lady of the Hill." I heard the latter froma Wiltshire shepherd; the former is used in Sussex, in the Cheviots,and in Lincolnshire, and was introduced, I believe, by the Gipsies.Titania was a name of romance, and so was Oberon, that of her husbandin romance. Queen Mab has no husband, nor will she ever have.
[Footnote 9: But if this is true, who is the King of the Wood? Thestatement is too sweeping.]
But she is, of course, a goddess, and not a queen in our sense of theword. The fairies, who partake of her nature just so far as we partakeof theirs, pray to her, invoke her, and make her offerings every day.But a vital difference between their kind and ours is that they cansee her and live; and we never see the Gods until we die.
They have no other leaders, I believe, and certainly no ro
yal houses.Faculty is free in the fairy world to its utmost limit. A fairy'spower within his own order is limited only by the extent of hispersonal faculty, and subject only to the Gods. There is no civil lawto restrain him, and no moral law; no law at all except the law ofbeing.[10]
[Footnote 10: Apparent eccentricities of this law, such as theobedience to iron, or zinc (if we may believe Beckwith), should benoted. I can't explain them. They seem arbitrary at first sight, butnothing in Nature is arbitrary.]
We are contemplating, then, a realm, nay, a world, where anarchy isthe rule, and anarchy in the widest sense. The fairies are of a worldwhere Right and Wrong don't obtain, where Possible and Impossible arethe only finger-posts at cross-roads; for the Gods themselves give nomoral sanction to desire and hold up no moral check. The fairies loveand hate intensely; they crave and enjoy; they satisfy by kindness orcruelty; they serve or enslave each other; they give life or take itas their instinct, appetite or whim may be. But there is thisremarkable thing to be noted, that when a thing is dead they cannot beaware of its existence. For them it is not, it is as if it had neverbeen. Ruth, therefore, is unknown, their emotions are maimed to thatserious extent that they cannot regret, cannot pity, cannot weep forsorrow. They weep through rage, but sorrow they know not. Similarly,they cannot laugh for joy. Laughing with them is an expression ofpleasure, but not of joy. Here then, at least, we have the better ofthem. I for one would not exchange my privilege of pity or myconsolation of pure sorrow for all their transcendent faculty.
It is often said that fairies of both sexes seek our kind because weknow more of the pleasure of love than they do. Since we know more ofthe griefs of it that is likely to be true; but it is a great mistaketo suppose that they are unsusceptible to the great heights and deepsof the holy passion. It is to make the vulgar confusion between thepassion and the expression of it. They are capable of the greatestdevotion to the beloved, of the greatest sacrifice of all--thesacrifice of their own nature. These fairy-wives of whom I have beenspeaking--Miranda King, Mabilla By-the-Wood--when they took upon themour nature, and with it our power of backward-looking andforward-peering, was what they could remember, was what they mustdread, no sacrifice? They could have escaped at any moment, mind you,and been free.[11] Resuming their first nature they would have lostregret. But they did not. Love was their master. There are many casesof the kind. With men it is otherwise. I have mentioned Mary Wellwood,the carpenter's wife, twice taken by a fairy and twice recaptured. Thelast time she was brought back to Ashby-de-la-Zouche she died there.But there is reason for this. A woman marrying a male fairy getssome, but not all, of the fairy attributes, while her children havethem in full at birth. She bears them with all the signs of humanmotherhood, and directly they are born her earthly rights and dutiescease. She does not nurse them and she can only rise in the air whenthey are with her. That means that she cannot go after them if theyare long away from her, unless she can get another fairy to keep hercompany. By the same mysterious law she can only conceal herself, ordoff her appearance, with the aid of a fairy. For some time after herabduction or surrender her husband has to nourish her by breathinginto her mouth; but with the birth of her first child she can supportherself in the fairy manner. It was owing to this imperfect state ofbeing that Mary Wellwood was resumed by her friends the first time.The second time she went back of her own accord.
[Footnote 11: When a fairy marries a man she gradually loses herfairy-power and her children have none of it or only vestiges--so muchas the children of a genius may perhaps exhibit. I am not able to sayhow long the fairy-wife's ability to resume her own nature lasts. _TheForsaken Merman_ occurs to one; but I doubt if Miranda King, at thetime, say, of her son's marriage with Mabilla, could have gone back tothe sea. Sometimes, as in Mrs. Ventris's case, fairy-wives play truantfor a night or for a season. I have reason to believe that notuncommon. The number of fairy-wives in England alone is veryconsiderable--over a quarter of a million, I am told.]
But with regard to their love-business among themselves it is a verydifferent matter, so far as I can understand it. The fairy child isinitiated at the age of puberty and is then competent to pair. He isnot long in selecting his companion; nor does she often seem to refusehim, though mating is done by liking in all cases and has nothingwhatever to do with the parents. It must be remembered, of course,that they are subject to the primitive law from which man only hasfreed himself. They frequently fight for the possession of the female,or measure their powers against each other; and she goes with thevictor or the better man.[12] I don't know any case where the advancehas been made by the female. Pairing may be for a season or for aperiod or for life. I don't think there is any rule; but in all casesof separation the children are invariably divided--the males to thefather, the females to the mother. After initiation the children oweno allegiance to their parents. Love with them is a wild and wonderfulrapture in all its manifestations, and without regard necessarily tosex. I never, in my life, saw a more beautiful expression of it thanin the two females whom I saw greet and embrace on Parliament Hill.Their motions to each other, their looks and their clinging werebeyond expression tender and swift. Nor shall I ever forget the pairof Oreads in the snow, of whose meeting I have said as much as ispossible in a previous chapter. It must be remembered that I amdealing with an order of Nature which knows nothing of our shames andqualms, which is not only unconscious of itself but unconscious ofanything but its immediate desire; but I am dealing with it to theunderstanding of a very different order, to whom it is not enough todo a thing which seems good in its own eyes, but requisite also to besure of the approbation of its fellow-men. I should create a wrongimpression were I to enlarge upon this branch of my subject; I shouldmake my readers call fairies shameful when as a fact they know not themeaning of shame, or reprove them for shamelessness when, indeed, theyare luckily without it. I shall make bold to say once for all that asit is absurd to call the lightning cruel, so it is absurd to callshameful those who know nothing about the deformity. No one can knowwhat love means who has not seen the fairies at their loving--and somuch for that.
[Footnote 12: I saw an extraordinary case of that, where a male camesuddenly before a mated pair, asserted himself and took her to himselfincontinent. There was no fighting. He stood and looked. The period ofsuspense was breathless but not long.]
The laws which govern the appearance of fairies to mankind or theircommerce with men and women seem to be conditioned by the ability ofmen to perceive them. The senses of men are figuratively speakinglenses coloured or shaped by personality. How are we to know the formand pressure of the great river Enipeus, whose shape, for the love ofTyro, Poseidon took? And so the accounts of fairy appearance, of fairyshape, size, vesture, will vary in the measure of the faculty of thepercipient. To me, personally, the fairies seem to go in gowns ofyellow, grey, russet or green, but mostly in yellow or grey. TheOreads or Spirits of the hills vary. In winter their vesture isyellow, in summer it is ash-green. The Dryad whom I saw was in grey,the colour of the lichened oak-tree out of which she gleamed. Thefairies in a Norman forest had long brown garments, very close andclinging, to the ankles. They were belted, and their hair was loose.But that is invariable. I never saw a fairy with snooded or tied uphair. They are always bare-footed. Despoina is the only fairy I eversaw in any other colour than those I have named. She always wearsblue, of the colour of the shadows on a moonlight night, verybeautiful. She, too, wears sandals, which they say the Satyrs weavefor her as a tribute. They lay them down where she has been or islikely to be; for they never see her.
But this matter of vesture is really a digression: I have moreimportant matter in hand, and that is to consider the intercoursebetween fairy and mortal, as it is governed by appearance. How does aman, for instance, gain a fairy-wife? How does a woman give herself toa fairy-lover? I have given a careful account of a case of each sortin answer. Young King gained his wife by capture; Lady Emily Richfollowed her lover at a look.
But this does not really touch the po
int, which is, rather, how wasLady Emily Rich brought or put into such a relation with Quidnuncthat she could receive a look from him? How was King put into such arelation with Mabilla that he could take her away from her own people?There must have been an incarnation, you would say; and I should agreewith you. Now in Andrew King's case there was belief to go upon, thebelief common to all the Cheviot side, handed down to it from untoldgenerations and never lost; coupled with that, there was an intenseand probably long-standing desire in the young man himself to realiseand substantiate his belief. He had brooded over it, his fancy hadgone to work upon it; he loved his Mabilla before ever he saw her; hislove, it was, which evoked her. And I take it as proved--at any rateit is proved to my own satisfaction--that faith coupled with desirehas power--the power of suggestion it is called--over Spirit as itcertainly has over Matter. If I say, then, that Andrew King evokedMabilla By-the-Wood, called her out of her own world into his, Iassert two things: the first, that she was really at one time in herown world, the second, that she was afterward really in his. Thesecond my own senses can vouch for. That she was fetched back by theKing of the Wood and recaptured by Andrew are minor points. Grant thefirst taking and there is no difficulty about them.
Mr. Lawson gives cases from Greece which point to certain ritualperformances on the part of the lover; the snatching, for instance, ofa handkerchief from the beloved, of which the preservation istantamount to the permanence of the subsequent union. He has a curiouscase, too, of a peasant who married a nymph and gave her a child butcould not make her speak to him. He consulted a wise woman who advisedhim to threaten her with the fire for the baby if she would not talk.He did it and the charm worked. The Nymph spoke fiercely to him, "Youdog, leave my child alone," she said, and seized it from him, and withit disappeared. That is parallel to my case where love made Mabillaspeak. It was love for her husband, to be sure; but she had then nochildren.
Mr. Wentz gets no evidence of fairy-wives from Ireland, but a greatnumber out of Wales. One of them is the beautiful tale of Einion andOlwen (p. 161) which has many points of resemblance with mine from theBorder. Einion also seems to have met the King of the Wood. LikeAndrew King he was kissed by the nymphs, but only by one of them; butunlike him he stayed in their country for a year and a day, then wentback to his own people, and finally returned for his fairy-wife.Taliesin was their son. No conditions seem to have been made.
So much for fairy brides, but now for fairy grooms. I have two casesto add to that of Quidnunc, but before giving them, let me say of hisaffair that since the suggestion there seems to have come from him tothe woman, the incarnation, if such there were, must have beenvoluntary. Evocation was not instrumental in it. He appeared beforeher, as she had appeared before others, many others, including myself,and his subsequent commerce with her was achieved by his own personalforce. You may say that she had been prepared to see him by belief anddesire, by belief and desire acting upon a mind greatly distressed andprobably overwrought. You may say that she saw what she ardentlydesired to see. It is quite true, I cannot deny it; but I point to hisprevious manifestations, and leave it there.
Here is a tale to the purpose which I got out of Worcestershire. Twogirls, daughter and niece of a farmer, bosom friends and bed-fellows,became involved in a love-affair and, desperate of a happy issue,attempted a charm to win their lovers back. On All Hallow Eve, twohours before the sun, they went into the garden, barefoot, in theirnightgowns and circled about a stone which was believed to bebewitched.[13] They used certain words, the Lord's prayer backward orwhat not, and had an apparition. A brown man came out of the bushesand looked at them for some time. Then he came to them, paralysed asthey may have been, and peering closely into the face of one of themgave her a flower and disappeared. That same evening they kept theHallow E'en with the usual play, half-earnest, half-game, and, amongother things which they did, "peascodded" the girls. The game is avery old one, and consists in setting the victim in a chair with herback to the door while her companions rub her down with handfuls ofpea-shucks. During this ceremony if any man enter the room he is herlover, and she is handed over to him. This was done, then, to one ofthe girls who had dared the dawn magic; and in the midst of it a brownman, dressed in a smock-frock tied up with green ribbons, appeared,standing in the door. He took the girl by the hand and led her out ofthe house. She was seen no more that night, nor for many daysafterward, though her parents and neighbours hunted her far and wide.By-and-by she was reported at a village some ten or twelve miles offon the Shropshire border, where some shepherds had found her wanderingthe hill. She was brought home but could give no good account ofherself, or would not. She said that she had followed her lover,married him, and lost him. Nothing would comfort her, nothing couldkeep her in the house. She was locked in, but made her way out; shewas presently sent to the lunatic asylum, but escaped from that. Thenshe got away for good and all and never came back again. No trace ofher body could be found. What are you to make of a thing of the sort?I give it for what it is worth, with this note only, that theapparition was manifest to several persons, though not, I fancy, toany but the girls concerned in the peascodding.
[Footnote 13: It is said to have been the base of a Roman terminalstatue, but I have not seen it.]
The Willow-lad's is another tale of the same kind. It was described in1787 by the Reverend Samuel Jordan in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, if Iam not mistaken.
The Willow-lad was an apparition which was believed to appear in awithy-bed on the banks of the Ouse near Huntingdon. He could only beseen at dusk, and only by women. He had a sinister reputation, and tosay of a girl that she had been to the withy-bed was a broad hint thatshe was no better than she should be. Yet, according to Mr. Jordan,the girls did go there in numbers, and to such effect that by an orderof the Town Council the place was stubbed up. You had to go alone tothe withy-bed between sunset and sunrise of a moonless night, to layyour hand upon a certain stump and say, and in a loud voice:--
Willow-boy, Willow-boy, come to me soon, After the sun and before the moon. Hide the stars and cover my head; Let no man see me when I be wed.
One would like to know whether the Willow-lad's powers perished withthe withy-bed. They should not, but should have been turned tomalicious uses. There are many cases in Mr. Lawson's book of themalefical effect upon the Dryads of cutting down the trees whosespirit they are. And most people know Landor's idyll, or if theydon't, they should.
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There are queer doings under the sun as well as under the moon. A manmay travel far without leaving his arm-chair by the fire, in countrieswhere no tourist-tickets obtain, and see stranger things than arerecorded by Herr Baedeker.
The waies through which my weary steps I guide In this delightful land of Faery Are so exceeding spacious and wyde, And sprinckled with such sweet variety Of all that pleasant is to eare or eye, That I, nigh ravisht with rare thoughts' delight, My tedious travele doe forget thereby; And when I gin to feele decay of might, It strength to me supplies, and chears my dulled spright.
THE END
Lore of Proserpine Page 13
