Lore of Proserpine

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  LORE OF PROSERPINE

  BY

  MAURICE HEWLETT

  "Thus go the fairy kind, Whither Fate driveth; not as we Who fight with it, and deem us free Therefore, and after pine, or strain Against our prison bars in vain; For to them Fate is Lord of Life And Death, and idle is a strife With such a master ..."

  _Hypsipyle_.

  CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

  NEW YORK : : : : 1913

  COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY

  CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

  * * * * *

  TO

  DESPOINA

  FROM WHOM, TO WHOM

  ALL

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  PREFACE

  I hope nobody will ask me whether the things in this book are true,for it will then be my humiliating duty to reply that I don't know.They seem to be so to me writing them; they seemed to be so when theyoccurred, and one of them occurred only two or three years ago. Thatsort of answer satisfies me, and is the only one I can make. As I growolder it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish one kind ofappearance from another, and to say, that is real, and again, that isillusion. Honestly, I meet in my daily walks innumerable beings, toall sensible signs male and female. Some of them I can touch, somesmell, some speak with, some see, some discern otherwise than bysight. But if you cannot trust your eyes, why should you trust yournose or your fingers? There's my difficulty in talking about reality.

  There's another way of getting at the truth after all. If a thing isnot sensibly true it may be morally so. If it is not phenomenally trueit may be so substantially. And it is possible that one may seesubstance in the idiom, so to speak, of the senses. That, I take it,is how the Greeks saw thunder-storms and other huge convulsions; thatis how they saw meadow, grove and stream--in terms of their own fairhumanity. They saw such natural phenomena as shadows of spiritualconflict or of spiritual calm, and within the appearance apprehendedthe truth. So it may be that I have done. Some such may be theexplanation of all fairy experience. Let it be so. It is a fact, Ibelieve, that there is nothing revealed in this book which will notbear a spiritual, and a moral, interpretation; and I venture to say ofsome of it that the moral implications involved are exceedinglymomentous, and timely too. I need not refer to such matters anyfurther. If they don't speak for themselves they will get no help froma preface.

  The book assumes up to a certain point an autobiographical cast. Thisis not because I deem my actual life of any interest to any one butmyself, but because things do occur to one "in time," and thechronological sequence is as good as another, and much the most easyof any. I had intended, but my heart failed me, to pursue experienceto the end. There was to have been a section, to be called "Despoina,"dealing with my later life. But my heart failed me. The time is notyet, though it is coming. I don't deny that there are some things herewhich I learned from the being called Despoina and could have learnedfrom nobody else. There are some such things, but there is not verymuch, and won't be any more just yet. Some of it there will never befor the sorry reason that our race won't bear to be told fundamentalfacts about itself, still less about other orders of creation whichare sufficiently like our own to bring self-consciousness into play.To write of the sexes in English you must either be sentimental or asatirist. You must set the emotions to work; otherwise you must bequiet. Now the emotions have no business with knowledge; and there's areason why we have no fairy lore, because we can't keep our feelingsin hand. The Greeks had a mythology, the highest form of Art, and wehave none. Why is that? Because we can neither expound without wishingto convert the soul, nor understand without self-experiment. We don'twant to know things, we want to feel them--and are ashamed of ourneed. Mythology, therefore, we English must make for ourselves as wecan; and if we are wise we shall keep it to ourselves. It is a pity,because since we alone of created things are not self-sufficient,anything that seems to break down the walls of being behind which weagonise would be a comfort to us; but there's a worse thing than beingin prison, and that is quarrelling with our own nature.

  I shall have explained myself very badly if my reader leaves me withthe impression that I have been writing down marvels. The fact that athing occurs in nature takes it out of the portentous. There's nothingeither good or bad but thinking makes it so. With that I end.

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