THE TWO FAIRYLANDS—A Study in the Literature of Wonder: by Kenneth Morris

I

ONE has been reading a fairy-tale of our own day, which has made a great stir in literary and dramatic circles, and it has given rise to certain ideas as to canons of criticism. Its name, and its author's, do not matter; there will be more freedom if they remain unmentioned.

What a charm is here! Millions of colors that never were in the rainbow nor the sea-shell; a subtle, exquisite loveliness—which yet, in the after-taste—somehow repels. Always mystery; what we call inanimate things waking to life (as they should do, indeed, in any right-minded fairy-tale); a sense of mutable, inconsequent horizons, over which no sun has ever risen or set. And, as there should be in fairy-tales, a kind of esotericism glimmering through; a meaning concealed yet obvious. Yet there is fairy gold and fairy gold. The best kind has the aspect of a petal or a pebble; but with the dawn, lo, some diamond or magical tiara. We are a little doubtful that this moon-wan opalescence will not turn out to be only a good worthy piece of Birmingham-ware. Withal, there are fine notes at the end, that touch deep centers in us; for these one can but be duly and truly thankful.

There are certainly two methods of imagination; and we find them shown forth excellently in fairy literature. By that we mean all mythology; every tale wherein non-human or magical agents play their part. It will include a good part of our poetry; Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Poe, and Tennyson all dipped into it at times, or moved habitually among its haunted valleys.

There are two roads running out from our actual world, and they run through two separate Fairy-Lands. You shall go out by your front door when the sun is shining, and come upon the one of them. It leads through a wood of daffodils—Wordsworth's and Shakespeare's daffodils—in whose company you will find yourself strangely exultant: these are they that "take the winds with beauty"; hence their jocundity and infectious mirth. Alive? Why, certainly; and wise also—only perhaps you shall not yet be allowed to pry too curiously into their counsels. All the flowers are alive in this fairyland; and they all have their own secrets, which are sunbright and beneficent. Sunbright, or sundark like the hyacinth—but still beneficent: poppy and mandragora are not allowed to grow here.

As you ride on, you shall still feel the shining of the sun and the vigor of the wind; or perhaps there will be sweet intimate grayness of clouds, or perhaps the sweetness of rain. Rain or wind, you will feel the touch of either on your face, and smell the earth-scent. There is one valley there, where the sky is always clouded and windy; the sedge is withered on the lake there, and no birds sing. But for that, you might mistake it at first for a place in the other fairyland, because of the haggard and woe-begone knight-at-arms you are to meet with, "alone and palely loitering." Keats came to this valley, and heard his whole story from him: it was this knight-at-arms who met La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

Like everything else in this fairy-land, it is true; in this case the beauty of its truth is awful. For you are not to suppose there are no tragedies enacted here: there are as many as there are in the world. There are a thousand wanderers in the valleys and on the mountains, who would lure you away from the sunlight and the rain. Here, often and often, it is written: "Look not behind, or thou art lost." Yet no ruin can come upon you that is not definitely evitable: one holds one's fate in one's own hands, and need fear nothing but himself.

In another hundred of fairyland, your road runs by over windy wolds of rye and barley, and down past the island in the river where dwells the Lady of Shalott. While she weaves her web, finding her whole delight in the pictures, note that the sun or the moon is still shining; afterwards, when she has turned and the curse has come upon her, the low skies are raining ever so heavily. By the presence of the sun and moon and wind and rain, by the earth-smell and the water-song, you shall know that you are in the fairyland of the Right Hand, and that everything about you is true. The story of the Lady of Shalott true? Why, yes; a million and a million times. A tragedy again; fairyland is full of tragedies. Yet she need not have left the web, need not have seen the bloom on the water-lilies, need not ever have looked down to Camelot.

And how nearly a tragedy is this scene too—of Titania, poor lady, falling in love with the Ass! For, if you go far enough, you shall come upon Oberon and his court; you shall find sweet Bully Bottom also, strangely wandered from his own world, and with that queer, inevitable headpiece clapped upon him. What else should he wear, in fairyland? As was said, everything is so desperately true here; and sage and simple are alike to come by their own. Should you stray here, no silk hat has potent enough magic of the modern to protect your respectability: a wandering wind will whisk it away, and you will appear in crown or ass-head, according to your merits; or perchance in a dinted, war-worn helmet, or wearing a garland of oak or laurel or bay. No one may wear any colors but his own in fairyland.

There are innumerable provinces here, reigned over by innumerable potentates; but you are to look for sun and moon and wind and rain in all of them. Perseus and Theseus and Herakles; Roland and the good knight Charlemain; Cuchullain and the Red Branch; the men of the Emperor Arthur, and Oisin and Oscar and Finn—they are all here; here are fought Moytura, Fontarabbia, Camlan. Ulysses flies the Island of Calypso anew; and Odin comes anew into the Hall of the Dwarfs. There is always a feast at Gwalas in Penfro; and the door that looks out towards Aberhenfelen and Cornwall is flung wide by Heilyn again and again—tragedy of tragedies; no one had opened that door until then, from the time the sea and the sky and that old palace were made. But hark! it is the scream of a real seagull that is blown down the hall. Innumerable are the beauties and wonders and sorrows of this region; and they are all true, true, true: you can hear the natural winds and waves always, and taste the salt of natural wind-driven spray.

Yet in a sorrowless Italy here, Saturn still is reigning: and here

listening to the sweet pipings of Pan: for the Golden Age has not faded and you may come on Brugh-na-Boinne and the Hills of Arcady and the Island of the Appletrees; you may come on all the haunts of Plenydd, Alawn, Angus, Baldur, and Apollo.

II

So much, then, for the Fairyland of the Right-hand, as we may call it; there is also a Left-hand fairyland, however; and its character and denizens are altogether different.

You come to it by a road that never goes out of doors. I suspect that you lock and bar your study door, and draw the curtains, and make fearfully sure of your solitude. Then you sally forth by uncanny gateways, and come where never hay was mown. There is light there, especially at first; but the end is a dreadful darkness. The light is of a kind, indeed, that never was on land or sea; but we may be thankful for that. Our lands and seas are the wholesomer for the lack of it.

At first it is not all so different, as to let us see at once we are in no hallowed region. There is beauty, and color; but the beauty is neither from the sun nor from the moon, and the color from no dawn nor sunset, from no sky nor sea. Shifting mists may give place to a dazzling Moorish palace, or to a peasant's cottage inhabited by the dead. Mirth or sadness may lurk in such dwellings; but beware of any intimacy with them: you cannot tell what fair seeming masks the ghoul. There is no order nor established nature of things, nothing you can depend on. The fig grows on the thistle; but any hunger is better than to eat it; vines and figtrees are prolific of innumerable thorns. Gorgeous blooms prophesy only of doom and impending horror. That is, when you have journeyed some little while. At first, perhaps, they will tell no tale but of sweetness and fragrance for the senses. Luxurious poppies are on every roadside, haunted with night and dreams: but beware of the whitest lily, the deepest rose; besides these the poppies are but flower children innocent of guile.

Very early on the way to this fairyland, you shall come to Xanadu, where Kublai Khan decreed his stately pleasure-dome. A beautiful place? Yes, but mark; here Alph, the sacred river runs "through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea." There is much wonder in that; but also darkness, and—incipient terror. Your true and right-hand fairyland, "bards in fealty to Apollo hold." It is all "in the Face of the Sun and the Eye of Light."

For a lone reminder of better things, the forests of Xanadu do inclose sunny spots of greenery; but the heart of the place! It is "as holy and enchanted as e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover." Heavens! is that your mark of holiness? They do not so reckon it in the right fairyland, where the tragedies are effects flowing from causes. And the beauty of the place? "The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves":—a scintillant mirage, a sensuous unreal efflorescence of phantasmagoria; and midst it all, "ancestral voices prophesying war."

Christabel, Genevieve, and The Ancient Mariner all belong to this fairyland; the first two near the hither frontier, and the last much farther in. For one has to note how beauty wanes as the sun-known horizons recede, and how its place is taken by a new kind of harmony, a chiaroscuro of keen terror and gloom. This also holds one, as beauty does; indeed, plays on the emotion with a more compelling, because wilder and louder, touch. So we call the pictures and poems of the left-hand fairyland also beautiful, also works of Art. Some day I think we shall be wiser; our critics will use a deeper discrimination. Beauty is not that which most stirs the emotion, but that which most stirs it in a certain way. There is the evolutionary urge upward to be considered; what works against that has no real right to the name of beauty. You are to note here, that the further one travels in this dark fairyland, the more Wonder transforms itself into horror. Wonder went with us all through the bright realm, and grew from the mere wizardry of flowers and mountains, into the atmosphere of majesty that surrounds the soul and the judgments of Spiritual Law. The wizard-glow in the woodlands waxes, and resolves itself into one of the elder gods. But in the other case, the Daughter of Glamor that leads us is like the Gwrach y Rhibyn in the Celtic tales; subtly luring and exquisite at first, she turns into a fearful terrifying hag, and he who accompanies her does well if he escapes with his reason.

Glamor fills both regions; the one, a clean natural magic; the other, not so decadent in the beginning, as to be wanting in some few waning rays of the sun. In either case, it is partly the sense of a certain depth in the things seen or heard; you know that the words of the poem or story stand for something more than is actually spoken. Fairy dwellings again; the grass-grown hillock that melts and reveals itself a palace of the Immortals. In the poetry of the Right-hand Fairyland, this is precisely what we find; beautiful is the seen, but infinitely more beautiful and grander that which it symbolizes or indicates. In that magical country, there is nothing not quickening with ancient truth, and all the dramas enacted are leaves out of the diary of the human soul. Hence the many tragedies, the many fallings of fate, dooms that flow out of deeds done or undone. But in the other, we find none of this. There, the esotericism is poorer than the outward form. Fate is fate there, no longer Karma. At the best there may be some moral taught; yet even then, it is doubtful if the lesson will be of supreme value. It will not equal in weight the great superstructure of art raised over it; as if one should sack the caves of the whole sea, to find some not too-precious stone. It will be an after-thought, a gem added, an excuse; not the seed and reason of the whole work. More often, it will be some mere allegory of the passions, void of truth in the deeper sense; or the deliberate esotericizing of a Sandford-and-Mertonism. Yet these will be the very best the left-hand fairyland has to offer; go a little further in, and you have simply riot on the planes of delirium. Coleridge's Genevieve and Keat's Belle Dame will point the difference. There is something of the same color and mystery, even a parallelism in the subject-matter of the two poems: but the first is mere sound and beauty, signifying nothing, and the second a picture of the fate of one who has been lured away by passion from the true paths of the Soul. They are surely wrong, who ascribe to Coleridge the originality, and say that Keats followed him. The truth is that the two are not comparable; Keat's voyagings were to the right hand, Coleridge's, here, to the left.

And the last places in the witch-land? The House of Usher rears itself gauntly beside its tarn there, and incontinently and dreadfully falls. It is an "ultimate dim Thule," reached by a road haunted only of evil angels. It is the home of decay, horror, and death; there is a godless phosphorescence about it.

But, you say, did not Dante wander there, and Milton? No. Whither they went, they went armed in the uprightness of spiritual strength. They made their hells somber, terrible, august; not glamorous or attractive. In Malebolge and Pandemonium alike, there is a certain stability also, a procession of cause and effect; there are horrors, but they are not inconsequential; they take their place in a definite scheme of things. And here is a literary touchstone; both Milton and Dante wielded that supreme quality of style which is called the Grand Manner, so that the mere boom and march of their verses arouses the feeling of heroism, of titan strength: a thing it was never given the decadents and drug-fed to do. Dante had his safe guide and teacher with him; as he walked through the wonders and terrors of hell, he himself was the thing most aloof and wonderful. Unscathed he might pass to his meeting with Beatrice, and walk with her in heaven as majestically, as he had walked with Virgil through hell. Milton, too, with all his limitations, remains a thing majestic for our vision; poet or politician, he is still the armed and terrible warrior of God. In his characteristic and later mood, he seeks never beauty, but always righteousness; indeed, his chief fault is that he lost sight of any unity in the two. Comus and Lycidas will show us from what fairyland he had graduated, to take part in the stern earthly labors of his prime.

But here is the mark of the later Coleridge, and of all true wanderers in the fairyland of the left. When they see him, "All should cry Beware, beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair." Yes—in one of his moods. But what when the inspiration had passed; when the turbulent dark glory that held them had waned from before his eyes; when the Dead Sea Fruit of his fairyland had withered, and left him to be nourished with filth and cinders? Then, too, wholesome men cry Beware!—but of a victim of opium, a morphiomaniac, or one sodden with cocaine; a poor wreck of a man, at sight of whom if you close your eyes, it will not be in "holy dread," but in mere sorrow and pity.

Poor Coleridge! it was laudanum, and not honey-dew or the milk of Paradise that inspired him. And perhaps we might trace all that part of the literature of wonder which comes from the dark, left-hand fairyland, to drugs; which would remove from the category of genius many a name that figures there now.