Diogenes of London (collection)/The Dead Immortals

HE creatures of our fathers' fancy have long since taken flight from the woods and meadows of our land, leaving no vestige upon their once familiar habitations. The whole length of this island, heretofore populous with dainty presences, lies now forlorn and empty in the possession of inferior hands. The soil is turned to ignoble uses, broken with the plough and the harrow, and the hills that once tinkled to the laughter of the fairy now smoke from a hundred brazen mouths; or at best stand silent in a melancholy reticence. Each hour brings its own disillusionment, but it seems a pity we have lost our hold upon this pretty faith, which ran against no whim of modern progress. The red sun takes the humours from the grass, and the wind set the trees a-quiver, but they warm not, neither fan, the elfin folk in the quiet glades. All these are fled, rapt into a limbo of forgotten myths, where gnomes and djinns and trolls keep them spectral company. The lively imagination of the human kind has fashioned a creditable variety of these creatures, and now that the art is gone with the capacity of belief, we cold inheritors of the ages may take our choice from a motley society of perished immortals. For myself, I have little liking for the Oriental invention; one could not have used these lank black monsters with special tenderness or confidence. They were too oppressive in their distance from humanity, and it had been impossible to invest them with the common graces of intercourse. They were not constructed for company, and at most might be tamed into some sort of grudging slavery by mystic rings and signals. For the more part their work was evil like their persons, and you could not but feel that they were happiest torturing some individual enemy out of his wits. they were potent enough, it is true, and had an admirable gift of in corporeality which must have served their masters at odd times; but their grotesque and ingenious personalities put them out of human sympathy. One could never have been quite secure with them; while they lasted, society must have ever been within a pinch of chaos. The djinns would have made a black and a bitter business of the world.

The Greeks, on the other hand, showed a far more fastidious taste in conjecture. Knowing of nothing more delightful than themselves, they proceeded to build up a heaven upon this basis, withdrawing therefrom the least idyllic elements of their own nature. My sentiment has always lain at the mercy of their mythology, but yet I cannot in my mind wholly acquit the plan of imperfection. The gods and the goddesses, with the various nymphs and resident deities of earth, though a charming society, cunningly and elegantly devised, come too near our human selves to keep their necessary dignity. The notion that the divine and beautiful beings should make a playground of our favoured planet is of itself ravishing beyond question; but still I have that critical objection in my eye. They were too little remote, too omnipresent, too casual and inevitable in their dealings; they could have been no surprise to one of any decent experience in the world, and must have worn themselves indeed into a commonplace. This would have been of little con- sequence had they been intrinsically superior to or more profound than their subjects; but they were insufficiently commanding to enforce respect, and thus, no doubt, they came to pass current lightly, at times even for a joke. And yet life was after all the fuller for the fine superstition. It was not indigenous here nor even naturalised, but it is pleasant to reflect that, had Pan not died, he and his train might have visited England. Nowhere would he have found a more free and fitting paradise. I can with difficulty refer the system to our own woods and streams, so long the haunts of other creatures, yet the white flash of naiad limbs in the running water would add some glory to a landscape. These nymphs were but feminine, if of a little finer clay; they had the form and faculty of woman, no more; but their tastes were entirely original, and though they shared with their mortal sisters the sexual frailty, and were nothing moved thereby, yet they employed a delicate art in the occasions of their appearance, and the vision of them leaned unto the romantical. You might indeed have surprised them skimming and gliding through the translucent shallows, and taken them at first sight for a bevy of girls at play, but your visit would have a mightier consequence than merely to start the pack blushing and squealing. You have no opportunity of this experience now; not even in Greece. The river goes purling and loitering on his way, for all the world as though never a naiad had dipped from his banks. There is a certain desolation in the thought. Poppies and willows and marigolds and marguerites you shall find, but never a shining body with tossing hair afloat from shallow to shallow, through deep upon deep. The pools are ruffled only by the trout and the grayling or the flitting gnats; the spirits are clean gone from their accustomed places.

It was a pretty humour to people the woods also with these rare inhabitants, but there was little proportion in the thought. For the fair and sprightly hamadryads were really better suited to the smiling meadows than to the grim forests. By the side of knotted boles and gnarled branches the lithe and lovely limbs would make an uncouth contrast, incongruous to the reason, however enlivening to wayfarers conscious of the peeping eyes. In this respect our Northern fancy has observed a severe propriety, as indeed through- out its inventions it has been most sensitive and exact. For the forests there were gnomes, goblins for the dark places of the hills, elves and fairies for the meadowlands and dales: mermaids also to wash about the seas. The rivers managed somehow to slip out of this scheme, though doubtless a fluent occasion of elfin happiness. How peculiarly appropriate was this division of power! It was the pretty issue of a dream more spiritual than the Greek's, more familiar than the Oriental's. The countryside was crowded with these presences dancing somewhere betwixt invisibility and materiality, hovering like things unshapen in the eyesight. Should you close your lids at moonlight, they would flicker before you between sleeping and waking, with the transient reality of darting flames; in and out, in and out of the vision they would fly, till, grown audacious from the indolence of your recognition, they would descend into the warm life, and come skipping breast-high amid the daisies. The grin with which those elves would approach you was of the merriest and most affable, and their antics were vastly entertaining. Not Puck nor Cobweb nor any of them, you could swear, would do you harm. They must have their own small chuckle, being of a humorous turn; but the jest against you was ever to be amiable. And their fairy companions were models of elegance in minature [sic]; the daintiest fry that ever presumed on immortality, large-eyed and wonder-mouthed, fragile and delicate beyond apprehension. Could you steal through the woods to the verge of the open glade you might behold them upon any clear night, a merry band, fluttering in a ring about the ancient groaning oaks, kicking their elfin heels, tumbling and rioting through the long grass-stalks, a pretty company of dishevelled spirits gone mad at the fulness of the moon. They were unlike the gloomy djinns or the very human naiads: theirs was the very spirit of fantastic delight, the pure ecstasy of disembodiment. No less than the sad-eyed mermaid became her melancholy sea did those gay mannikins and fays fulfil the humour of the cheerful countryside. It is in all ways a pitiful reflection that they are gone. But just as a noise from your hiding-place within the copse must have sent them all into an instant dissolution, so too at some big roar in the world's progress have they vanished o' nights for ever, and only silence now holds the long valleys.