The order and organization of these celestial beings, among whom the infinite multiplicity of providential offices is thus distributed, falling within the domain of marvelousness and ideality, of course, took the thousand hues and shapes which these prismatic faculties would bestow; and in the various accommodations and special applications of the doctrine, it naturally grew complicated, obscure, and sometimes even incoherent; but in all the confusion of a hundred tongues, kindreds and climates, a substantial conformity to a common standard is apparent enough to prove the identity of origin and the fundamental truth common to them all.
It is to introduce one of these remarkable correspondences that these reflections are employed.
Fairy tales, it is said by encyclopedists, were brought from Arabia into France in the twelfth century, but this can only mean that that was the epoch of the exotic legends. In England, if they were not indigenous, they certainly were naturalized centuries before Chaucer flourished; and they were as familiar as the catechism, and almost as orthodox, when Spencer, wrote his Fairy Queen, and Shakspeare employed their agency in his most exquisite dramas. But their date is, in fact, coeval with tradition, and earlier than all written records, and their origin is without any necessary locality, for they spring spontaneously from faith in the supernatural. They are inseparable from poetry. The priesthood of nature, which enters for us the presence of the invisible and converses familiarly with the omnipresent life of the creation, recognizes the administration of an ethereal hierarchy in all the phenomena of existence; they serve to impersonate the spiritual forces, which are felt in all heroic action, and they graduate the responsive sympathies of Heaven to all the supernatural necessities of humanity. The live soul can make nothing dead; it can take no relation to insensate matter; it invests the universe with a conscious life, answering to its own; and an infinite multitude of intermediate spirits stand to its conceptions for the springs of the universal movement. Rank upon rank, in spiral ascent, the varied ministry towers from earth to heaven, answering to every need, supporting every hope, and environing the whole life of the individual and the race with an adjusted providence, complete and adequate. In the great scale, place and office are assigned for spirits celestial, ethereal and terrestrial, in almost infinite gradation. The highest religious sentiments, the noblest styles of intellect and imagination, and the lower and coarser apprehensions of the invisible orders of being, are all met and indulged by the accommodating facility of the system.
The race of Peris of Persia, and Fairies of western Europe, hold a very near and familiar relation to the every day life of humanity, by their large intermixture of human characteristics and the close resemblance and alliance of their probationary existence and ultimate destiny to the life and fortunes of men. A commonplace connection with ordinary affairs and household interests constitutes the largest part of the popular notion of them; and their interferences among the vulgar are almost absurd and ludicrous enough to impeach the earnestness of the superstition; but our best poets have shown them capable of very noble and beneficent functions in heroic story. Like our own various nature, they are a marvellous mixture of the mighty and the mean, the magnanimous, the malignant and the mirthful; they stand, in a word, as our own correspondents in a subtler sphere, and serve to illustrate, by exaggerating, all that is true and possible in us, but more probable of them—our own shadows lengthened, and our own light brightened into a higher life. In some countries the legends are obscure, in others clear; but they all agree well enough in ascribing their origin to the intermarriage of angels with “the daughters of men,” and that they are put under penance and probation for the recovery of their paradise. So, like our own race, they have fallen from a higher estate; their natures are half human, and their general fortunes are freighted on the same tide.
The nursery tale of the Sleeping Beauty will serve capitally to illustrate our theme. Handed down from age to age, and passed from nation to nation, through the agency of oral tradition chiefly, it has of course taken as many shapes as the popular fancy could impart to it; but the essential points, seen through all the existing forms, are substantially these:
A grand coronation festival of a young queen abruptly opens the story. The state room of the palace is furnished with Oriental magnificence. The representatives of every order, interest and class in the kingdom—constructively the whole community—are present to witness and grace the scene. The fairies who preside over the various departments of nature, and the functions and interests of society, are assembled by special invitation to invoke the blessings and pledge the favors of their several jurisdictions to the opening reign. The ceremony proceeds; the young queen is crowned; the priest pronounces the benediction, and the generous sprites bestow beauty and goodness, and every means of life and luxury, until nothing is left for imagination to conceive or heart to wish. But an unexpected and unwelcome guest arrives—an old Elf, of jealous and malignant character, whose intrusion cannot be prevented, and whose power, unhappily, is so great, that the whole tribe of amicable spirits cannot unbind her spells. Neither can she directly revoke their beneficences; for such is the constitution of fairy-land that the good and evil can neither annihilate each other’s powers nor check each other’s actions, and their active antagonism can have place and play only in issues and effects. The good commanded and dispensed cannot be utterly annulled, the profusion of blessings prepared and pledged cannot be hindered in their source or interrupted in their flow, but the recipients are the debatable ground; they are, within certain limits, subject to the control of the demon, and the end is as well attained by striking them incapable of the intended good. The queen and her household are cast into a magic slumber until (for the Evil will be ultimately destroyed by the Good) an age shall elapse and bring a Deliverer, who, through virtue and courage, shall dissolve the infernal charm. The blight fell upon the paradise in its full bloom, and it remained only for the youngest fairy present, who had withheld her benefactions to the last, to mitigate the doom she could not avert, by bestowing pleasant dreams upon the long and heavy sleepers. A century rolls round. The Knight of the Lion undertakes the enterprise; encounters the horrible troops of monsters and foul fiends which guard the palace; overcomes them; enters the enchanted hall, and wakens the whole company to life, liberty and joy again. The knight is, of course, rewarded with the love he so well deserves and the hand he has so richly earned.
This is obviously the story of the apostacy and redemption of the human family, in the form of a fairy legend. It conforms closely to the necessary incidents of such a catastrophe, and answers well and truly to the intuitive prophecy of man’s final recovery. In substance and method the correspondence is obvious. Every notion of “the fall,” whether revealed or fictitious, assumes the agency of “the wicked one;” and the final recovery, universally expected, involves the sympathies and employs the services of the “ministering spirits,” as important instruments in the happy consummation.
This tale was presented as a dramatic spectacle last winter at the Boston Museum. The play is a minutely faithful expositor of the legend; and it is by the aid of this fine scenic exhibition that I am able to adjust the details, of which the primitive story is so legitimately capable, to the answering points in the great epic of human history “as it is most surely believed among us.” The parallel presented does not seem to me fanciful, but the circumstantial exactness of resemblance may, I think, be accounted for without supposing a designed imitation.
Before tracing the specialties and their allusions, let us notice the general parallelism found between the pivotal points of the fabulous and authentic representations.
The Bible Eden is introduced at the same stage of the story’s action and in the same attitude to the principal characters of the narrative; it stands on the coronation day of its monarch, perfect in all its appointments; the realms of air, earth and ocean in auspicious relation, every element harmoniously obedient, and the garden still glows with the smile which accompanied the approving declaration, “it is very good.” Dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the face of the earth, is conferred, and the heavens add their felicities to the inaugural rejoicings—“the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” The gifts are without measure or stint, and the Divine beneficence cannot be tainted in its source nor impeded in its efflux, but the intended recipients, by “the wiles of the enemy,” are rendered incapable of the enjoyment. The sin-blunted sense and passion blinded soul of the fallen race, are plunged into a spiritual stupor, which sleep—the sister and semblance of death—strikingly illustrates; and through the long age of moral incapacity which follows, the highest mode of life is but dimly recognized and feebly felt in the dreams of a paradise lost and the visions of a millenium to come; till, “in the fullness of time,” when a complete psychical age shall be past. The Deliverer, having first overcome the wicked one, shall lead captivity captive, and by the “marriage of the Lamb” with “the bride which is the Church,” perfect the redemption and bring in the new heavens and new earth.