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 cathedrâ, 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.
[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 "Βασίλισσα τὣν βουνὣν," or "Μεγάλη Κυρά" 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 Cæsar, 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.
[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]
[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.