In the deep green lanes of leafy Devonshire, and over its broad heaths
and moors, there are (as we had occasion to shew in a recent sketch)
still pixies to be found by those who believe in them; as there are yet
‘the little folk’—‘the good people’—in the remotest parts of Scotland,
leprechauns in Ireland, and _les dames blanches_ in France. And still,
as in olden time, poor dazed mortals are pixy-led;—fascinated, like the
victims of the Sirens of old, by the songs which to others are but as
the sighing of the wind among the reeds, but which to them are divinest
music, full of lovely promises and of fairest visions. To them that
handful of withered leaves is a mass of shining gold; and Rübezahl,
now a gnome of the mines and now a charcoal-burner of the mountains,
is followed without question or suspicion when he poses for Apollo or
offers himself as Alexander. The old old times, when fairy Melusines
were women by day and snakes by night—when demon lovers abounded, and
men and maidens lost their souls for eyes too bright to be true—are
still repeated in the circumstances of to-day; and to one under the
spell of the pixies, old age is youth, ugliness is beauty, and sordid
meanness is magnanimity and goodness. The subtle enchantment of glamour
is thrown over every part of life; and, like gardens seen in dreams,
where the flowers of spring and the fruits of autumn grow side by side
on the same branch, those touched with elfin fingers see things which
never existed and as they never existed; enriching with the wealth of
their own fancy natures left dowerless by genius, by beauty, by grace;
exalting mediocrity into the high place of excellence—like the godhead
once worshipped in a bull and reverenced in a hawk.
A man lies at the feet of a vitalised machine, a living doll—a talking
marionette—whom he idealises as the crowned grace of womanhood, just
as Titania before him idealised the ass’s head of her Gentle Joy. He
sees nothing in its true light, but, pixy-led, hears only the sweet
poem of his own love, knows only the magic beauty of his own creation.
Where others gauge the vulgar selfishness of a commonplace schemer who
has weighed her chances and her advantages in the scales together, and
has decided on accepting him and his title and his banker’s book as
the best that she can do for herself, he declares to be unfathomable
the sweet reticence of her modesty, the saintly devotion of her gentle
heart, given to him so generously for love’s sake only. Stolidity is
dignity and stupidity repose; a fatuous smile is the expression of her
inherent sweetness; levity is light-heartedness; frivolity good-humour;
the flirtations, which are patent to the world at large and food for
all the circle to discuss, are the natural liking of a pretty woman
for an innocent admiration which is as naturally her due; the delicacy
of health, which others know as a mere blind—used now as an excuse for
self-indulgent indolence, now as the assigned reason for a retirement
not always wisely employed—is to him, pixy-led, an incessant spur to
his pity, to his fear, to his devotion. Blinded as he is, even when
she neglects her children for her pleasure—for the idle play that she
calls her work—and for the coarser personal ambition which she calls
a cause—he reverences her as a leader, of society or otherwise, doing
her duty to herself and to others; a creature too full of intellectual
power and genius to be confined to the four narrow walls of home;
and he thinks that a hired nurse and paid governess can do all for
the little ones which is necessary, and at less expenditure of fine
material. This is the lover and husband pixy-led; and who can open his
eyes?
The mother who adores her handsome, plausible, scampish son; who
accepts his boastings as if they were so many announcements in the
Gazette; and to whom the significant fact that the splendour of his
self-reported career never consolidates into public recognition or
tangible fortune, conveys nothing but a sense of the injustice of Fate
and the crossness of circumstance—what is she but pixy-led, the magic
herb that has blinded her being, her maternal love? She believes in
her scamp as other folks believe in the Gospel; credits all his wild
romances about his past and his present, of which she had no more proof
than the courtiers had of their king’s magic wind-woven garments; and
makes no doubt, raises no question as to the certain fortune that
awaits him—put on paper as a sum; and figures you know cannot lie!—if
only she will trust him with his sisters’ portion and her own jointure.
She places herself and her daughters unreservedly in his hands; and
though others know that her fairy palace is only a hill-side mound of
earth and rubbish—her golden tables and delicious fruits nothing but
‘agaricus and fungi with mildew and mould’—and the noble music by which
she is bewitched, the shrill screechings of a ‘scrannel pipe’—yet to
her the cheat is true; and, pixy-blinded, pixy-led as she is, probably
remains true to the end. For even when the inevitable crash comes, and
all these rainbow hopes of glittering success pass away into the dark
clouds of ruin and despair, even then she clings to her faith in her
boy as a devotee clings to the image of her god; and is so certain
that, either all will come right in the end or, if that is impossible,
then that it was not his fault. If this had happened, or that had not
happened—things impossible to foresee and as impossible to control—the
rainbow would never have faded away and they would have built their
palace under its arch. How was he to blame if facts were too strong
for him, and fortune was not to be wooed or won? So she argues,
influenced by the ‘good people’ who delude her with their false shows
and fair-spoken words; making use of one of the holiest feelings of
human nature to bring about her sorrow, and using one of the sweetest
attributes of womanhood to compass ruin.
If we are pixy-led by our affections, how much more by our passions
and our fancies! What after all is that thirst for fame, which goes
under the name of ambition, but a delusion created by the Pucks and
the Rübezahls of the unseen fairy-world that is about us? What is that
craze for ‘success’ but the same thing? A man gives all that makes life
worth having for the name of having succeeded in his career. He toils
through youth, maturity, and into old age, and then he plants his foot
on that final rung of the ladder where he has coveted to stand:—he buys
that special property; holds that special office; is invested with
that one long-desired dignity:—And all for what? To totter through
the few frail years still left to him, and from which hard work and
harder living have taken all savour. Broken in health, how can he,
barring certain notable exceptions, enjoy those good things which he
gave that health and his manhood to attain? Hardened in heart by the
friction and the fight, how can he know the happiness which springs
from participation, from sympathy, wherein lies the only true happiness
of man? His mind narrowed by long compression in one groove, can he, at
his age, learn the delights of art, the glory of science, the solace of
literature? He has been following the pixy who promised him Success;
and the imp has kept her word. But the curse which lies in fairy gold
is repeated even in the fulfilment; and when the endowment is made, the
power of profiting by it is gone. For all the purposes of wealth, that
pyramid of gold might as well be only a mass of withered forest-leaves.
The woman who sacrifices the gallant fellow whom she loves for the man
whom she does not love, because the one has as many thousands as that
other has hundreds, is she not pixy-led?—to be landed before long in
the worst Slough of Despond to be found in the whole tract of human
life! And the man who gives up his sweet young love, with beauty a
true heart and a noble nature for her only dower, to marry instead
that hard-faced woman with her dazzling jointure and her evil heart—is
he not also pixy-led to his own substantial ruin if seeming success?
Where love is the unswerving star set for guidance in the heavens,
money and ambition are the torches waved by the flitting pixies over
the morass—we know with what result to those who follow! So with honour
in a ragged mantle instead of chicanery in cloth of gold; so with
truth pelted in the pillory instead of falsehood set in high places;
so with all the true and noble things of life, whatever their outside
reception, instead of the apparent glitter of what men call success,
and the soul knows to be death.
Pixy-led by superstitious fancies, now of things and now of persons,
we are as often the slaves of seeming as the believers in truths. All
the crazy beliefs which have turned the steady-going world of intellect
upside down, and substituted for realities the merest nightmares—when
they are not day-dreams—are of the nature of things pixy-led. There
are people who believe in the secret police as a power defying the
house-door key and penetrating into private dwellings from basement
to garret. And there are people who believe in secret poisonings
and the presence in our midst of murderers in dress coats and white
kid gloves—men who have done to death their wives and sisters and
friends—it maybe even their mothers—when they will gain so much by the
quiet removal of these poor creatures, apparently loved and tended
while in reality murdered—but men whom neither society suspects nor the
law can touch. What is all this but pixy-led belief?—a mere phantasy
founded on nothing, without proof, foundation, or argument. None the
less there are hundreds who believe implicitly in these two things—the
universal overlooking of the secret police, and the prevalence of
undetected poisoning among respectable families over whom the shadow of
crime has apparently never passed.
It is the same kind of thing, inverted, when people give credence
to certain statements, which if true will be their salvation, but
which have neither proof nor warranty. They believe because they are
told—never mind who the teller or how unlikely the tale; just as to
say, ‘I read it in a book’—‘I saw it in the newspaper,’ is the clincher
to them of all trustworthiness. You will make your fortune by such
and such a scheme; a fortune to be had only for the lifting and at
very little risk. So whisper the pixies, singing low and sweet to the
ear of credulity, under the guise of a sharp-faced man who has been
‘something in the City’ for all his life, though he never seems to
have brought much out of it. What says the common-sense of experience
on the other side? Would that fortune have been left for you to pick
up if those who shew it you could have gained it for themselves? Would
the finder, the pioneer, the displayer thereof—he the ragged robin
notoriously impecunious and out at elbows—be such a philanthropist
as to give away what he needs so greatly, for the mere pleasure of
doing a kind thing to a comparative stranger? Pixy sings with its
sweet seductive tenor for the one part, and common-sense puts in its
controlling bass for the other; but the flattering imp too often wins
the day, and reason retires shivering and sad, rebuked and rebuffed!
Pixy-led by our hopes and our fears, our passions and our affections,
so are we by our tastes. The men who ruin themselves for horses
and hounds, for pictures and _bric-à-brac_, for gardens and fancy
fowls;—they have poor relations—nieces who are making their own living,
young, tender, delicate; sisters who are sitting desolate among the
cold ashes of the ruined hearth: but the uncle and the brother wastes
his clear thousands over toys, and thinks himself blessed when he has
got hold of an unintelligible daub, god-fathered to a famous painter,
or a bit of cracked porcelain sworn to by the dealer as unique.
Pixy-led by our senses we spend our strength like our substance in
pleasure and flood our brains with drink that we may live in a fool’s
paradise half our time and a real hades for the next half. Pixy-led by
our ignorance we accept the appearance of things for their substance
and knock our heads against the walls by which we are surrounded,
determined not to learn their real properties. Thus we seek to exorcise
the murderous diseases of men, moral as well as physical, by muttered
charms and potent talismans, rather than by tracing the cause in
its course—baring the roots—and thus learning how best to extirpate
them. But we content ourselves with sighing at the hard necessities
of Fate; and, wrapping ourselves up in a false cloak of religion, we
say that the Father of Men and the God of Love has laid on us these
terrible scourges that we may learn patience under suffering; while
shutting our eyes to the fact that with every poison is an antidote and
that every evil has its remedy. Pixy-led by our fears we create the
sorrows that we dread, and live in a world of misery fashioned by our
self-tormenting hands. How many time-honoured beliefs and cherished
ideas are only fancies and superstitions without base or substance!—how
many beloved things are utterly without value, and beautiful creatures
mere pixy cheats if only we could open our eyes and see! Oh! if ever
the reign of truth, clear, bright, unmistakable truth, comes on this
sad earth of ours, what a heap of dead bones which now seem to have
life would fall together—what enchantment of the pixies would be at an
end! The gold that now we cherish would be turned to rubbish to which
we would not give harbourage; and the things which we now believe to
be rubbish would prove themselves of purest gold throughout. Among
our most earnest prayers may be inserted that of deliverance from the
charms and magic spells of the pixies—in other words, deliverance from
vain imaginings and false beliefs; from baseless hope and causeless
fear; the restless doubt of an unproved suspicion, and the blind faith
which accepts because it wishes, and believes because it desires.