Lore Of Proserpine

LORE OF, PJ. SERFIN 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 SCRIBNERS SONS NEW YORK 1913 TO DESPOINA FROM WHOM, TO WHOM ALL 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 dont know. They seem to be so to me writing them they seemed to be so when they occurred, and one of them occurred only two or three years ago. That sort of answer satisfies me, and is the only one I can make. As I grow older it becomes more and more difficult to distin guish one kind of appearance from another, and to say, that is real, and again, that is illusion. Hon estly, I meet in my daily walks innumerable beings, to all sensible signs male and female. Some of them I can touch, some smell, some speak with, some see, some discern otherwise than by sight. But if you cannot trust your eyes, why should you trust your nose or your fingers Theres my diffi culty in talking about reality. Theres another way of getting at the truth after all. If a thing is not sensibly true it may be morally so. If it is not phenomenally true it may be so substantially. And it is possible that one may see substance in the idiom, so to speak, of the senses. That, I take it, is how the Greeks saw thunder-storms and other huge convulsions that is how they saw meadow, grove and stream in terms of their own viii PREFACE fair humanity. They saw such natural phenomena as shadows of spiritual conflict or of spiritualcalm, and within the appearance apprehended the truth. So it may be that I have done. Some such may be the explanation of all fairy experience. Let it be so. It is a fact, I believe, that there is nothing re vealed in this book which will not bear a spiritual, and a moral, interpretation and I venture to say of some of it that the moral implications involved are exceedingly momentous, and timely too. I need not refer to such matters any further. If they dont speak for themselves they will get no help from a preface. The book assumes up to a certain point an auto biographical cast. This is not because I deem my actual life of any interest to any one but myself, but because things do occur to one in time, and the chronological sequence is as good as another, and much the most easy of any. I had intended, but my heart failed me, to pursue experience to 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 not yet, though it is coming, I dont deny that there are some tilings here which I learned from the being called Dcspoina and could have learned from nobody else There are some such things, but there Is not very much, and wont be any more just yet. Some of it there will never be for the sorry reason that our race wont bear to be told fundamental facts about itself, still less about other orders of creation which are suffi PREFACE ix ciently like our own to bring self-consciousness into play. To write of the sexes in English you must either be sentimental or a satirist. You must set the emotions to work otherwise you must be quiet. Now the emotions have no business with knowledge and theres a reason why we have nofairy lore, because we cant keep our feelings in hand. The Greeks had a mythology, the highest form of Art, and we have none. Why is that Because we can neither expound without wishing to convert the soul, nor understand without self - experiment. We dont want to know things, we want to feel them and are ashamed of our need. Mythology, therefore, we English must make for ourselves as we can and if we are wise we shall keep it to ourselves...