Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 754, June 8, 1878

No. 754.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 1878.
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?