Lore of Proserpine

by Maurice Hewlett

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.

[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.

[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.