THE PASSING OF THE LITTLE PEOPLE.
THERE was once a very childish child who laid her fairy-book on its face
across her knee, and sat all the morning watching the cups of the
honeysuckle, grieved that not one solitary elf was left to swing on its
sun-touched edges, and laugh back at her, with unforgetful eyes.
We are sorry for her, and sorry with her. The Little People, alas! have
gone away; would that they might return! No man knows why nor when they
left us; nor whither they turned their faces. The exodus was made softly
and slowly, till the whole bright tribe had stolen imperceptibly into
exile. Mills, steam-engines and prowling disbelievers joined to banish
them; their poetic and dreamy drama is over, their magic lamp out, and
their jocund music hushed and forbidden. Or perhaps they of themselves
went lingeringly and sorrowfully afar, because the world had grown too
rough for them.
Geoffrey Chaucer, in the fourteenth century, wrote in his sweet,
tranquil fashion:
In olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour . . .
Al was this lond fulfilled of faerie . . . . .
I speke of mony hundrid yeer ago;
But now can no man see non elves mo:
which you may understand as an announcement somewhat ahead of time. For
many, many "elves mo" were on record after the good poet's lyre was
hushed, and "thick as motes in the sunbeam" centuries after their
reported flight. There have been sound-headed folk in every age, of whom
Chaucer was one, who jested over the poor fairies and their arts, and
spoke of them only for gentle satire's sake. But though Chaucer was sure
the goblins had perished, his neighbors saw manifold lively specimens of
the race, without stirring out of the parish. Up to two hundred years
ago prayers were said in the churches against bad fairies!
[Illustration: "AL WAS THIS LOND FULFILLED OF FAERIE."]
Sir Walter Scott related that the last Brownie was the Brownie of
Bodsbeck, who lived there long, and vanished, as is the wont of his
clan, when the mistress of the house laid milk and a piece of money in
his haunts. He was loath to go, and moaned all night: "Farewell to
Bonnie Bodsbeck!" till his departure at break of day. A girl from
Norfolk, England, questioned by Mr. Thomas Keightley, admitted that she
had often seen the _Frairies_, dressed in white, coming up from their
little cities underground! Mr. John Brand saw a man who said he had seen
one that had seen fairies! And Mr. Robert Hunt, author of the _Drolls
and Traditions of Old Cornwall_, wrote that forty years ago every rock
and field in that country was peopled with them! and that "a gentleman
well-known in the literary world of London very recently saw in
Devonshire a troop of fairies! It was a breezy summer afternoon, and
these beautiful little creatures were floating on circling zephyrs up
the side of a sunlit hill, fantastically playing,
'Where oxlips and the nodding violet grow.'
So here are three trustworthy gentlemen, makers of books on this special
subject, and none of them very long dead, to offset Master Geoffrey
Chaucer, and to bring the "lond fulfilled of faerie" closer than he
dreamed. About the year 1865, a correspondent told Mr. Hunt the
following queer little story:
[Illustration: FAIRY STORIES.]
"I heard last week of three fairies having been seen in Zennor very
recently. A man who lived at the foot of Trendreen Hill in the valley of
Treridge, I think, was cutting furze on the hill. Near the middle of
the day he saw one of the small people, not more than a foot long,
stretched at full length and fast asleep, on a bank of heath, surrounded
by high brakes of furze. The man took off his furze-cuff and slipped the
little man into it without his waking up, went down to the house, and
took the little fellow out of the cuff on the hearthstone, when he
awoke, and seemed quite pleased and at home, beginning to play with the
children, who were well pleased also with the small body, and called him
Bobby Griglans. The old people were very careful not to let Bob out of
the house, nor be seen by the neighbors, as he had promised to show the
man where crocks of gold were buried on the hill. A few days after he
was brought, all the neighbors came with their horses, according to
custom, to bring home the winter's reek of furze, which had to be
brought down the hill in trusses on the backs of the horses. That Bob
might be safe and out of sight, he and the children were shut up in the
barn. Whilst the furze-carriers were in to dinner, the prisoners
contrived to get out to have a run round the furze-reek, when they saw a
little man and woman not much larger than Bob, searching into every hole
and corner among the trusses that were dropped round the unfinished
reek. The little woman was wringing her hands and crying 'O my dear and
tender Skillywidden! wherever canst thou be gone to? Shall I ever cast
eyes on thee again?' 'Go 'e back!' says Bob to the children; 'my father
and mother are come here too.' He then cried out: 'Here I am, mammy!' By
the time the words were out of his mouth, the little man and woman, with
their precious Skillywidden, were nowhere to be seen, and there has
been no sight nor sign of them since. The children got a sound thrashing
for letting Skillywidden escape."
[Illustration: THE CAPTURE OF SKILLYWIDDEN.]
Such is the latest evidence we can find of the whereabouts of our
goblins.
We may, however, consider ourselves their contemporaries, since among
the peasantry of many countries over-seas, the belief is not yet
extinct. But it is pretty clear to us, modern and American as we are
(safer in so thinking than anybody was anywhere before!) that the
"restless people," as the Scotch called them, are at rest, and clean
quit of this world; and perhaps satisfied, at last, of their chance of
salvation, along with fortunate Christians.
Such a great system as this of fairy-lore, propped on such show of
earnestness, grew up, not of a sudden like a mushroom after a July
rain, but gradually and securely, like a coral-reef. And the
dream-building was not nonsense at all, but a way of putting what was
evident and marvellous into a familiar guise. If certain strange things,
which are called phenomena, happened--things like the coming of pebbles
from clouds, music from sand, sparkling light from decay, or disease and
death from the mere handling of a velvety leaf--then our forefathers,
instead of gazing straight into the eyes of the fact, as we are taught
to do, looked askance, and made a fantastic rigmarole concerning the
pebbles, or the music, and passed it down as religion and law.
The simple-minded citizens of old referred any trifling occurrence,
pleasant or unpleasant, to the fairies. The demons and deities,
according to their notion of fitness, governed in vaster matters; and
the new, potent sprites took shape in the popular brain as the
controllers of petty affairs. If a shepherd found one of his flock sick,
it had been elf-shot; if a girl's wits went wool-gathering, it was a
sign she had been in fairyland; if a cooing baby turned peevish and
thin, it was a changeling! Wherever you now see a mist, a cobweb, a
moving shadow on the grass; wherever you hear a cricket-chirp, or the
plash of a waterfall, or the cry of the bird on the wing, there of yore
were the fairy-folk in their beauty. They stood in the mind to represent
the lesser secrets of Nature, to account for some wonder heard and seen.
It was many a century before nations stopped romancing about the brave
things on land and sea, and began to speculate, to observe more keenly,
to hunt out reasons, and to lift the haze of their own fancy from heroic
facts and deeds.
Think a moment of the Danish moon-man, who breathed pestilence, and the
moon-woman, whose harp was so charming. Well, the moon-man meant nothing
else than the marsh, slimy and dangerous, which yielded a malarial odor;
and the wee woman with her harp represented the musical night-wind,
which played over the marsh rushes and reeds. Was it not so, too, with
the larger myths of Greece? For the story of Proserpine, carried away by
the god of the under world, and after a weary while, given back for
half-a-year to her fond mother Ceres, tells really of the seed-corn
which is cast into her dark soil, and long hidden; but reappears in
glory, and stays overground for months, basking in the sun. And so on
with many a fable, which we read, unguessing of the thought and purpose
beneath. Though it was erring, we can hardly thank too much that joyous
and reverent old paganism which fancied it saw divinity in each move of
Nature, kept a natural piety towards everything that lived, and made a
thousand sweet memoranda, to remind us forever of the wonder and charm
of our earth. All mythology, and the part the fairies play in it, stands
for what is true.
----"Still
Doth the old instinct bring back the old names":
and again and again, when we cite some beautiful fiction of Merman and
Kobold, of White Dwarf or Pooka, we but repeat, whether aware of it or
not, how the dews come down at morning, or the storm-wind breaks the
strong trees, or how a comet, trailing light, bursts headlong across the
wide sky.
To comprehend fairy-stories, to get under the surface of them, we would
have to go over them all at great length, and with exhaustless patience.
And as in digging for the tendrils of a delicate, berry-laden vine, we
have to search, sometimes, deep and wide into the woodland loam, among
gnarly roots of shrubs and giant pines, so in tracing the sources of the
simplest tale which makes us glad or sad, we fall across a network of
ponderous ancient lore; of custom, prejudice, and lost day-dreams, from
which this vine, also, is hard to be severed.
The spirit of these neat little goblin-chronicles was right and sincere;
but the matter of them was often sadly astray. Of course, sometimes,
useless, misleading details gathered to obscure the first idea, and to
overrun it with a tangle of error; and not only were fine stories
spoiled, but many were started which were funny, or silly, or grim
merely, without serving any use beyond that.
But so powerful is Truth, when there was actually a grain of it at the
centre, that even those versions which were exaggerated and distorted,
played into the hands of what we call Folk-lore, and laid their golden
key at the feet of Science. You will discover that, besides pointing out
the workings of the natural world, the fairy-tales rested often on the
workings of our own minds and consciences. The Brownie was a little
schoolmaster set up to teach love of order, and the need of perfect
courtesy; the Nix betokened anything sweet and beguiling, which yet was
hurtful, and to which it was, and is, a gallant heart's duty not to
yield. And thus, from beginning to end, the elves at whom we laugh, help
us toward larger knowledge, and a more chivalrous code of behavior. How
shall we say, then, that there never was a fairy?
[Illustration: GOOD-BYE]
A miner, hearing the drip of subterranean water, took it to be a Duergar
or a Bucca, swinging his tiny hammer over the shining ore. His notion of
the Bucca, askew as it was, was one at bottom with our knowledge of the
dark brooklet. You, the young heirs of mighty Science, can often
outstrip the slow-gathered wisdom of dead philosophers. But do not
despise that fine old imagination, which felt its way almost to the
light. A sixteenth-century boy, who was all excitement once over the
pranks of Robin Goodfellow, knew many precious things which our very
great nineteenth-century acuteness has made us lose!
Good-bye, then, to the army of vanishing "gentry," and to their
steadfast friends, and to you, children dear! who are the guardians of
their wild unwritten records. Shall you not miss them when next the moon
is high on the blossomy hillocks, and the thistledown, ready-saddled,
plunges to be off and away? Merry fellows they were, and shrewd and
just; and we were very fond of them; and now they are gone. And their
going, like a mounting harmony, note by note, which ends in one noble
chord, with a hush after it, leads us to a serious parting word. Keep
the fairies in kindly memory; do not lose your interest in them. They
and their history have an enchanting value, which need never be outgrown
nor set aside; and to the gravest mind they bring much which is
beautiful, humane and suggestive.
We have found that believers in the Little People were not so wrong,
after all; and that the eye claiming to have seen a fairy saw, verily, a
sight quite as astonishing. Let us think as gently of other myths to
which men have given zeal, awe and admiration, of every faith hereafter
which seems to us odd and mistaken. For many things which are not true
in the exact sense, are yet dear to Truth; and follow her as a baby's
tripping tongue lisps the language of its mother, not very successfully,
but still with loyalty, and with a meaning which attentive ears can
always catch.
Surely, our ancestors loved the "span-long elves" who wrought them no
great harm, and who gave them help and cheer. We will praise them, too.
Who knows but some little goblin's thorny finger directed many an
innocent human heart to march, albeit waveringly, towards the ample
light of God?
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes:
Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
Page vii, "Puck" changed to "Pueck" (All that Pueck demanded)
Page vii, "wa" changed to "Wa" (Wag-at-the-Wa')
Page viii, "Kopenick" changed to "Koepenick" (Kobold of Koepenick)
Page viii, "changling" changed to "changeling" (was an Irish changeling)
Page viii, "Taknakaux" changed to "Taknakanx" (Taknakanx Kan)
Page 27, "airy" changed to "fairy" (to the fairy neighbors)
Page 30, illustration caption, "RUGEN" changed to "RUeGEN" (THE ISLE OF
RUeGEN)
Page 37, illustration caption, "RUGEN" changed to "RUeGEN" (DWARVES OF
RUeGEN)
Page 38, repeated word "and" removed from text. Original read (by twos
and and threes)
Page 93, illustration caption, "KOPENICK" changed to "KOePENICK" (KOBOLD
OF KOePENICK)
Page 169, "scources" changed to "sources" (the sources of the simplest)
End of Project Gutenberg's Brownies and Bogles, by Louise Imogen Guiney