So the Faery Castle comes in by an illusion in the Ballad of the
Battle of Val-es-Dunes.
* * * * *
What is this vision which our race has so symbolised or so seen and to which are thus attached its oldest memories? It is the miraculous moment of intense emotion in which whether we are duped or transfigured we are in touch with a reality firmer than the reality of this world. The Faery Castle is the counterpart and the example of those glimpses which every man has enjoyed, especially in youth, and which no man even in the dust of middle age can quite forget. In these were found a complete harmony and satisfaction which were not negative nor dependent upon the absence of discord—such completion as criticism may conceive—but as positive as colour or as music, and clothed as it were in a living body of joy.
The vision may be unreal or real, in either case it is valid: if it is unreal it is a symbol of the world behind the world. But it is no less a symbol; even if it is unreal it is a sudden seeing of the place to which our faces are set during this unbroken marching of years.
Once on the Sacramento River a little before sunrise I looked eastward from a boat and saw along the dawn the black edge of the Sierras. The peaks were as sharp as are the Malvern from the Cotswold, though they were days and days away. They made a broad jagged band intensely black against the glow of the sky. I drew them so. A tiny corner of the sun appeared between two central peaks:—at once the whole range was suffused with glory. The sun was wholly risen and the mountains had completely disappeared,—in the place where they had been was the sky of the horizon.
At another time, also in a boat, I saw beyond a spit of the Tunisian coast, as it seemed a flat island. Through the heat, with which the air trembled, was a low gleam of sand, a palm or two, and, less certainly, the flats and domes of a white native village. Our course, which was to round the point, went straight for this island, and, as we approached, it became first doubtful, then flickering, then a play of light upon the waves. It was a mirage, and it had melted into the air.
* * * * *
There is a part of us, as all the world knows, which is immixed with change and by change only can live. There is another part which lies behind motion and time, and that part is ourselves. This diviner part has surely a stronghold which is also an inheritance. It has a home which perhaps it remembers and which certainly it conceives at rare moments during our path over the moor.
This is that Faëry Castle. It is revealed at the sound of a trumpet; we turn our eyes, we glance and we perceive it; we strain to reach it—in the very effort of our going the doom of human labour falls upon us and it vanishes away.
It is real or unreal. It is unreal like that island which I thought to see some miles from Africa, but which was not truly there: for the ship when it came to the place that island had occupied sailed easily over an empty sea. It is real, like those high Sierras which I drew from the Sacramento River at the turn of the night and which were suddenly obliterated by the rising sun.