PIXY-LED.
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.