together. There had been a moment when they were not there; there was
a moment when I saw them. I saw three of them together, two females
and a male. They formed a circle, facing inwards, their arms
intertwined. The pale colour of their garments, the grey tones in
their flesh were so perfectly in tune with the hazy light, that it
would have been impossible, I am certain, to have seen them at all at
a hundred yards' distance. I could not determine whether they were
conversing or not: if they were, it was without speech. I have never
heard an articulate sound from any one of them, and have no provable
reason for connecting the unvoiced music I have sometimes discerned
with any act of theirs. It has accompanied them, and may have
proceeded from them--but I don't know that. Of these three linked
together I remember that one of them threw back her head till she
faced the sky. She did not laugh, or seem to be laughing: there was no
sound. It was rather as if she was bathing her face in the light. She
threw her head back so far that I could see the gleam in her wild
eyes; her hair streamed downward, straight as a fall of water. The
other two regarded her, and the male presently withdrew one of his
arms from the circle and laid his hand upon her. She let it be so;
seemed not to notice.
Imperceptibly others had come about these three. If I took my eyes off
a group for a moment they were attracted to other groups or single
shapes. Some lay at ease on the sward, resting on elbow; some prone,
on both elbows; some seemed asleep, their heads on molehill pillows;
some sat huddling together, with their chins upon their knees; some
knelt face to face and held each other fondly; some were teasing, some
chasing others, winding in and out of the scattered groups. But
everything was doing in complete silence.
Now and again one, flying from another, would rise in the air, the
pursuer following. They skimmed, soared, glided like swallows, in long
sweeping curves--there was no noise in their flight. They were quite
without reticence in their intercourse; desired or avoided, loved or
hated as the moment urged them; strove to win, struggled to escape,
achieved or surrendered without remark from their companions. They
were like children or animals. Desire was reason good; and if love was
soon over, hate lasted no longer. One passion or the other set them
scuffling: when it was spent they had no after-thought.
One pretty sight I saw. A hare came lolloping over the valley bottom,
quite at his ease. In the midst of the assembly he stopped to nibble,
then reared himself up and cleaned his face. He saw them and they him
without concern on either side.
The valley filled up; I could not count the shifting, crossing,
restless shapes I saw down there. Presently, without call or signal,
as if by one consent, the Oreads joined hands and enclosed the whole
circuit in their ring. The effect in the dusk was of a pale glow, as
of the softest fire, defining the contour of the valley; and soon they
were moving, circling round and round. Shriller and louder swelled the
hidden music, and faster span the ring. It whirled and wavered, lifted
and fell, but so smoothly, with such inherent power of motion, that it
was less like motion visible than motion heard. Nothing was
distinguishable but the belt of pale fire. That which I had seen
before they had now become--a ring of flame intensely swift. As if
sucked upward by a centripetal force it rose in the air. Wheeling
still with a sound incredibly shrill it rose to my level, swept by me
heralded by a keen wind, and was followed by a draught which caught
leaves and straws of grass and took them swirling along. Round and up,
and ever up it went, narrowing and spiring to the zenith. There,
looking long after it, I saw it diminish in size and brightness till
it became filmy as a cloud, then melted into the company of the
stars.
A SUMMARY CHAPTER
Now, it is the recent publication by Mr. Evans Wentz of a careful and
enthusiastic work upon _The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries_ which has
inspired me to put these pages before the public. Some of them have
appeared in the magazines as curious recitals and may have afforded
pastime to the idle-minded, but without the courageous initiative of
Mr. Wentz I don't know that I should have attempted to give them such
coherence as they may claim to possess. And that, I fear, will be very
little without this chapter in which I shall, if I can, clear the
ground for a systematic study of the whole subject. No candid reader
can, I hope, rise from the perusal of the book without the conviction
that behind the world of appearance lies another and a vaster with a
thronging population of its own--with many populations, indeed, each
absorbed in uttering its being according to its own laws. If I have
afforded nothing else I have afforded glimpses into that world; and
the question now is, What do we precisely gather, what can we be said
to know of the laws of that world in which these swift, beautiful and
apparently ruthless creatures live and move and utter themselves? I
shall have to draw upon more than I have recorded here: cases which I
have heard of, which I have read of in other men's books, as well as
those which are related here as personal revelation. If I speak
pragmatically, _ex cathedra_, it is not intentional. If I fail
sometimes to give chapter and verse it will be because I have never
taken any notes of what has gone into my memory, and have no documents
to hand. But I don't invent; I remember.
* * * * *
There is a chain of Being of whose top alike and bottom we know
nothing at all. What we do know is that our own is a link in it, and
cannot generally, can only fitfully and rarely, have intercourse with
any other. I am not prepared with any modern instances of intercourse
with the animal and vegetable world, even to such a limited extent,
for instance, as that of Balaam with his ass, or that of Achilles with
his horses; but I suspect that there are an enormous number
unrecorded. Speech, of course, is not necessary to such an
intercourse. Speech is a vehicle of human intercourse, but not of that
of any other created order so far as we know.[8] Birds and beasts do
not converse in speech, smell or touch seems to be the sense
employed; and though the vehicles of smell and touch are unknown to
us, in moments of high emotion we ourselves converse otherwise than by
speech. Indeed, seeing that all created things possess a spirit
whereby they are what they are, it does not seem necessary to suppose
intercourse impossible without speech, and I myself have never had any
difficulty in accepting the stories of much more vital mixed
intercourse which we read of in the Greek and other mythologies. If we
read, for instance, that such and such a man or woman was the
offspring of a woman and the spirit of a river, or of a man and the
spirit of a hill or oak-tree, it does not seem to me at all
extraordinary. The story of the wife who suffered a fairy union and
bore a fairy child which disappeared with her is a case in point. The
fairy father was, so far as I can make out, the indwelling spirit of a
rose, and the story is too painful and the detail in my possession too
exact for me to put it down here. I was myself actually present, and
in the house, when the child was born. I witnessed the anguish of the
unfortunate husband, who is now dead. Mr. Wentz has many instances of
the kind from Ireland and other Celtic countries; but fairies are by
no means confined to Celtic countries, though they are more easily
discerned by Celtic races.
[Footnote 8: The speech of Balaam's ass or of Balaam, of Achilles and
his horses are, of course, necessary conventions of the poet's and do
not imply that words passed between the parties.]
Of this chain of Being, then, of which our order is a member, the
fairy world is another and more subtle member, subtler in the right
sense 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 any
of the lower orders, of which man is one, it has no sensible wrapping
unless deliberately it consents to inhabit one. This, as we know, it
frequently does. I have mentioned several cases of the kind; Mrs.
Ventris was one, Mabilla By-the-Wood was another. I have not
personally come across any other cases where a male fairy took upon
him the burden of a man than that of Quidnunc. Even there I have never
been satisfied that Quidnunc became man to the extent that Mrs.
Ventris did. Quidnunc, no doubt, was the father of Lady Emily's
children; but were those children human? There are some grounds for
thinking so, and in that case, if "the nature follows the male,"
Quidnunc must have doffed his immateriality and suffered real
incarnation. If they were fairy children the case is altered. Quidnunc
need not have had a body at all. Now since it is clear that the fairy
world is a real order of creation, with laws of its own every whit as
fixed and immutable as those of any other order known to naturalists,
it is very reasonable to inquire into the nature and scope of those
laws. I am not at all prepared at present to attempt anything like a
digest of them. That would require a lifetime; and no small part of
the task, after marshalling the evidence, would be to agree upon terms
which would be intelligible to ourselves and yet not misleading. To
take polity alone, are we to understand that any kind of Government
resembling that of human societies obtains among them? When we talk of
Queens or Kings of the Fairies, of Oberon and Titania, for example,
are we using a rough translation of a real something, or are we
telling 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 Greek
Folk-lore?_ Who is Despoina, with whom I myself have conversed, "a
dread 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 some
greater Spirit among themselves, bow to it instantly and submit to its
decrees; but they do not, so far as I can understand, acknowledge a
monarchy in any sense of ours. If there is a Supreme Power over the
fairy creation it is Proserpine; but hers is too remote an empire to
be 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 the
invisible creation no doubt, but she would never have commerce with
it. No fairy hath seen her at any time; no sovereignty such as we are
now discussing would be applicable to her dominion. That of Artemis,
or that of Pan, is more comparable. Artemis is certainly ruler of the
spirits of the air and water, of the hills and shores of the sea, and
to some extent her power overlaps that of Pan who is potent in nearly
all land solitudes. But really the two lord-ships can be exactly
discriminated. They never conflict. The legions of Artemis are all
female, though on earth men as well as women worship her; the legions
of Pan are all male, though on earth he can chasten women as well as
men.[9] But Pan can do nothing against Artemis, nor she anything
against him or any of his. The decree or swift deed of either is
respected by the other. They are not, then, as earthly kings, leaders
of their hosts to battle against their neighbours. Fairies fight and
marshal themselves for war; Mr. Wentz has several cases of the kind.
But Pan and Artemis have no share in these warfares. Queen Mab is one
of the many names, and points to one of the many manifestations of
Artemis; 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 from
a 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 husband
in 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? The
statement is too sweeping.]
But she is, of course, a goddess, and not a queen in our sense of the
word. The fairies, who partake of her nature just so far as we partake
of theirs, pray to her, invoke her, and make her offerings every day.
But a vital difference between their kind and ours is that they can
see her and live; and we never see the Gods until we die.
They have no other leaders, I believe, and certainly no royal houses.
Faculty is free in the fairy world to its utmost limit. A fairy's
power within his own order is limited only by the extent of his
personal faculty, and subject only to the Gods. There is no civil law
to restrain him, and no moral law; no law at all except the law of
being.[10]
[Footnote 10: Apparent eccentricities of this law, such as the
obedience to iron, or zinc (if we may believe Beckwith), should be
noted. I can't explain them. They seem arbitrary at first sight, but
nothing in Nature is arbitrary.]
We are contemplating, then, a realm, nay, a world, where anarchy is
the rule, and anarchy in the widest sense. The fairies are of a world
where Right and Wrong don't obtain, where Possible and Impossible are
the only finger-posts at cross-roads; for the Gods themselves give no
moral sanction to desire and hold up no moral check. The fairies love
and hate intensely; they crave and enjoy; they satisfy by kindness or
cruelty; they serve or enslave each other; they give life or take it
as their instinct, appetite or whim may be. But there is this
remarkable thing to be noted, that when a thing is dead they cannot be
aware of its existence. For them it is not, it is as if it had never
been. Ruth, therefore, is unknown, their emotions are maimed to that
serious extent that they cannot regret, cannot pity, cannot weep for
sorrow. They weep through rage, but sorrow they know not. Similarly,
they cannot laugh for joy. Laughing with them is an expression of
pleasure, but not of joy. Here then, at least, we have the better of
them. I for one would not exchange my privilege of pity or my
consolation of pure sorrow for all their transcendent faculty.
It is often said that fairies of both sexes seek our kind because we
know more of the pleasure of love than they do. Since we know more of
the griefs of it that is likely to be true; but it is a great mistake
to suppose that they are unsusceptible to the great heights and deeps
of the holy passion. It is to make the vulgar confusion between the
passion and the expression of it. They are capable of the greatest
devotion to the beloved, of the greatest sacrifice of all--the
sacrifice of their own nature. These fairy-wives of whom I have been
speaking--Miranda King, Mabilla By-the-Wood--when they took upon them
our nature, and with it our power of backward-looking and
forward-peering, was what they could remember, was what they must
dread, no sacrifice? They could have escaped at any moment, mind you,
and been free.[11] Resuming their first nature they would have lost
regret. But they did not. Love was their master. There are many cases
of the kind. With men it is otherwise. I have mentioned Mary Wellwood,
the carpenter's wife, twice taken by a fairy and twice recaptured. The
last 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 gets
some, but not all, of the fairy attributes, while her children have
them in full at birth. She bears them with all the signs of human
motherhood, and directly they are born her earthly rights and duties
cease. She does not nurse them and she can only rise in the air when
they are with her. That means that she cannot go after them if they
are long away from her, unless she can get another fairy to keep her
company. By the same mysterious law she can only conceal herself, or
doff her appearance, with the aid of a fairy. For some time after her
abduction or surrender her husband has to nourish her by breathing
into her mouth; but with the birth of her first child she can support
herself in the fairy manner. It was owing to this imperfect state of
being 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 her
fairy-power and her children have none of it or only vestiges--so much
as the children of a genius may perhaps exhibit. I am not able to say
how long the fairy-wife's ability to resume her own nature lasts. _The
Forsaken Merman_ occurs to one; but I doubt if Miranda King, at the
time, say, of her son's marriage with Mabilla, could have gone back to
the sea. Sometimes, as in Mrs. Ventris's case, fairy-wives play truant
for a night or for a season. I have reason to believe that not
uncommon. The number of fairy-wives in England alone is very
considerable--over a quarter of a million, I am told.]
But with regard to their love-business among themselves it is a very
different matter, so far as I can understand it. The fairy child is
initiated at the age of puberty and is then competent to pair. He is
not long in selecting his companion; nor does she often seem to refuse
him, though mating is done by liking in all cases and has nothing
whatever to do with the parents. It must be remembered, of course,
that they are subject to the primitive law from which man only has
freed himself. They frequently fight for the possession of the female,
or measure their powers against each other; and she goes with the
victor or the better man.[12] I don't know any case where the advance
has been made by the female. Pairing may be for a season or for a
period or for life. I don't think there is any rule; but in all cases
of separation the children are invariably divided--the males to the
father, the females to the mother. After initiation the children owe
no allegiance to their parents. Love with them is a wild and wonderful
rapture in all its manifestations, and without regard necessarily to
sex. I never, in my life, saw a more beautiful expression of it than
in the two females whom I saw greet and embrace on Parliament Hill.
Their motions to each other, their looks and their clinging were
beyond expression tender and swift. Nor shall I ever forget the pair
of Oreads in the snow, of whose meeting I have said as much as is
possible in a previous chapter. It must be remembered that I am
dealing with an order of Nature which knows nothing of our shames and
qualms, which is not only unconscious of itself but unconscious of
anything but its immediate desire; but I am dealing with it to the
understanding of a very different order, to whom it is not enough to
do a thing which seems good in its own eyes, but requisite also to be
sure of the approbation of its fellow-men. I should create a wrong
impression were I to enlarge upon this branch of my subject; I should
make my readers call fairies shameful when as a fact they know not the
meaning of shame, or reprove them for shamelessness when, indeed, they
are luckily without it. I shall make bold to say once for all that as
it is absurd to call the lightning cruel, so it is absurd to call
shameful those who know nothing about the deformity. No one can know
what love means who has not seen the fairies at their loving--and so
much for that.
[Footnote 12: I saw an extraordinary case of that, where a male came
suddenly before a mated pair, asserted himself and took her to himself
incontinent. There was no fighting. He stood and looked. The period of
suspense was breathless but not long.]
The laws which govern the appearance of fairies to mankind or their
commerce with men and women seem to be conditioned by the ability of
men to perceive them. The senses of men are figuratively speaking
lenses coloured or shaped by personality. How are we to know the form
and pressure of the great river Enipeus, whose shape, for the love of
Tyro, Poseidon took? And so the accounts of fairy appearance, of fairy
shape, size, vesture, will vary in the measure of the faculty of the
percipient. To me, personally, the fairies seem to go in gowns of
yellow, grey, russet or green, but mostly in yellow or grey. The
Oreads or Spirits of the hills vary. In winter their vesture is
yellow, 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. The
fairies in a Norman forest had long brown garments, very close and
clinging, to the ankles. They were belted, and their hair was loose.
But that is invariable. I never saw a fairy with snooded or tied up
hair. They are always bare-footed. Despoina is the only fairy I ever
saw in any other colour than those I have named. She always wears
blue, of the colour of the shadows on a moonlight night, very
beautiful. She, too, wears sandals, which they say the Satyrs weave
for her as a tribute. They lay them down where she has been or is
likely to be; for they never see her.
But this matter of vesture is really a digression: I have more
important matter in hand, and that is to consider the intercourse
between fairy and mortal, as it is governed by appearance. How does a
man, for instance, gain a fairy-wife? How does a woman give herself to
a fairy-lover? I have given a careful account of a case of each sort
in answer. Young King gained his wife by capture; Lady Emily Rich
followed her lover at a look.
But this does not really touch the point, which is, rather, how was
Lady Emily Rich brought or put into such a relation with Quidnunc
that she could receive a look from him? How was King put into such a
relation with Mabilla that he could take her away from her own people?
There must have been an incarnation, you would say; and I should agree
with you. Now in Andrew King's case there was belief to go upon, the
belief common to all the Cheviot side, handed down to it from untold
generations and never lost; coupled with that, there was an intense
and probably long-standing desire in the young man himself to realise
and substantiate his belief. He had brooded over it, his fancy had
gone to work upon it; he loved his Mabilla before ever he saw her; his
love, it was, which evoked her. And I take it as proved--at any rate
it is proved to my own satisfaction--that faith coupled with desire
has power--the power of suggestion it is called--over Spirit as it
certainly has over Matter. If I say, then, that Andrew King evoked
Mabilla By-the-Wood, called her out of her own world into his, I
assert two things: the first, that she was really at one time in her
own world, the second, that she was afterward really in his. The
second my own senses can vouch for. That she was fetched back by the
King of the Wood and recaptured by Andrew are minor points. Grant the
first taking and there is no difficulty about them.
Mr. Lawson gives cases from Greece which point to certain ritual
performances on the part of the lover; the snatching, for instance, of
a handkerchief from the beloved, of which the preservation is
tantamount to the permanence of the subsequent union. He has a curious
case, too, of a peasant who married a nymph and gave her a child but
could not make her speak to him. He consulted a wise woman who advised
him 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, "You
dog, leave my child alone," she said, and seized it from him, and with
it disappeared. That is parallel to my case where love made Mabilla
speak. It was love for her husband, to be sure; but she had then no
children.
Mr. Wentz gets no evidence of fairy-wives from Ireland, but a great
number out of Wales. One of them is the beautiful tale of Einion and
Olwen (p. 161) which has many points of resemblance with mine from the
Border. Einion also seems to have met the King of the Wood. Like
Andrew King he was kissed by the nymphs, but only by one of them; but
unlike him he stayed in their country for a year and a day, then went
back 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 cases
to add to that of Quidnunc, but before giving them, let me say of his
affair that since the suggestion there seems to have come from him to
the woman, the incarnation, if such there were, must have been
voluntary. Evocation was not instrumental in it. He appeared before
her, as she had appeared before others, many others, including myself,
and his subsequent commerce with her was achieved by his own personal
force. You may say that she had been prepared to see him by belief and
desire, by belief and desire acting upon a mind greatly distressed and
probably overwrought. You may say that she saw what she ardently
desired to see. It is quite true, I cannot deny it; but I point to his
previous manifestations, and leave it there.