ENGLISH FAIRY POETRY.*
THIS little monograph is an excellent example of the good work which French scholars have been doing of late in the by-paths of English literature. English fairy poetry is plentiful, but though it springs out of the earliest human beliefs it was little practised till these beliefs had lost their living power. When a man is firmly convinced that the solitudes are peopled by strange spirits he will not name them, or if he does he will call them by the euphemism of the "Good Folk "; certainly he will not make poems about them. He is too much in awe of them to think about versifying. Hence the better part of M. Delattre's book is taken up with the Elizabethan age and the seventeenth cen- tury. The English belief was curiously compounded. The Teutonic fairies were both light and dark, but always oddly shs,pen and whimsical. "Through the whole elf belief there runs an undercurrent of morose gravity, a bitter sense of fate and doom." The Celtic) fairies were in general a nobler race, sharing more in human joys, comforters and lovers of mortals. The third strain came from the French "fays," those magic maidens, like Morgan le Fay and Vivien, whose inhuman beauty and witchery carry men out of the world to a twilight land of youth. All three elements combined to form the English belief, and as we might expect the products vary widely. The fairy world of the old balladists and of romances, like Huon of Bordeaux and Sir
* Jtj,1j Fairy Poetry from the Origins to the Seveltteenth Century'. By Florio Pplattren London : Hoary Prowls. Paris Didior. [4s. not.]
Launfal, combines "the earnestness of the folk-belief with the sweet vagaries of romance." Belief is there, but it has passed beyond unreasoning tenor. Man has begun "to embellish his faith." To Chaucer fairies seem one of the fancies of the common people, to be used in his picture of the plain man's mind, but without either the reverence of the believer or the glamour of the conscious artist. English poetry had to travel further from its source before the fairy mythology became a true subject for art.
The Elizabethan literature had the supreme merit of being at once bookish and popular—the work of scholars, and yet in close touch with common folk. Hence we should expect to find such fairy mythology as survived in the nation mirrored in the nation's poetry. Nor are we disappointed. The age of Elizabeth has given us our fairy classics. But it is a mythology with a difference. The Reformation did not oust superstition from the world, but it turned it into darker channels. The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries are the great witch-hunting epochs both in England and Scotland, and Reginald Soot's Discoverie of Witchcraft is the manual of the sport. The fairies survived among the peasantry, chiefly in roguish good-humoured forms like Robin Goodfellow and Torn Thumb, while the more delicate and fanciful legends fell out of belief and passed into a literary. tradition—what Warton calls a "civilized superstition." So we find a stereotyped fairy natural history accepted. The nymphs and fauns of the classics are transferred straightway into elves and fairies. Proserpine, as in Campion's lovely song, becomes the Fairy Queen. Oberon, the son of Julius Canal.. and Morgan is Fay, becomes the recognized name of the Fairy King, and in Spenser's great poem is identified with Henry VIII., of all unfairy-like figures. The Faerie Queens gave its sanction to this fantastic learning. We are given there the whole genealogy of the Elfin Emperors, from Prometheus down to Queen Elizabeth. The fairies had become a convention, and every tavern-poet paid homage to it in his rhymes. At such a moment, when old legends had become tainted with artifice, and yet survived sincerely in many popular beliefs, Shake- speare produced the greatest of all fairy poems. He wove into a wonderful whole a multitude of floating fancies. He took Oberon from Huon of Bordeaux and Titania, perhaps, from Ovid's Metamorphoses ; Mab from old Celtic fairydoni, and Puck or Robin Goodfellow from English folk-tales. As in popular tradition, his fairies are busy folk with a bustling world of their own ; but to this he adds a thousand touches of essential poetry. His spirits are true dreamland people.
Congenial to them are the most delicate things in nature— flowers, dewdrops, butterflies, and nightingales—and they answer to such sweet names as Pea.seblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed. They constitute a new supernaturalism, a sort of dainty, graceful world of the marvellous. They impersonate pastoral dreams and all that is connected with fragrant and moonlit groves." The world of pure fancy, the realm of the " little people," was never far from Shakespeare's heart. If in A Midsummer Night's Dream he gives them the better part of the stage, at the end of his career in The Tempest he speaks through them his farewell to art.
After Shakespeare the fairy faith declined. Scottish theology and Puritanism turned sour faces towards that innocent world, and the belief began to die even in the minds of the common people. More and more it became a literary artifice, with no roots in humanity. But there was still some delightful verse to be inspired by it. Drayton, towards the end of his long life, published his Nimphidia, fairy burlesque in a galloping mock-heroic metre, in which are recorded the quarrels of Pigwiggen and Oberon—a very different Oberon from Shakespeare's King. The thing was so much an artifice now that it could be parodied. Browne of Ta,vistock in his Britannia's Pastorals introduced fairy scenes, full of subtle and curious description ; but it is wit we get now rather than romance. Milton is more respectful, and used the homely English fairies as be used Greek nymphs and fauns to give to his high thoughts what Sir Henry Wotton called "a certain Doric delicacy." To Thomas Randolph they are only tricksy beings who kiss dairymaids on the sly. But with Herrick artifice reaches its consummation. The lover of Julia had, indeed, talked at times with the fairies, but they did not give him the staff for his Oberon's Feast. "Herrick's fairy world," tays M. Delattre truly, "is essentially different from Shakespeare's. The one might be justly compared to the early evening of a fine summer day, when the country is all aglow with the last rays of the departing sun. The other is but an artificial summer night, such as we see repre- sented on the stage, with painted scenery instead of a natural landscape." After Herrick the " Good Folk" fare poorly in Literature. Their heyday had gone with the old religion and the old ways. Puritanism denounced them, and they were eao better treated at the Restoration, the temper of which- " at the same time gross and dandified," says M. Delattre- had no love of delicate simplicities. Pepys thought A Mid- summer Night's ,Dream "the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life." About 1650 fairy poetry became extinct in England, and to the eighteenth-century poets a "fay" was a cumbrous poetic property who bad something to do with a' " bower " or a "grotto." But the little people had their revenge. In time the Romantic Revival set the horns of
Elfland blowing again, and we have all the witcheries of Scott and Hogg, of Keats and Coleridge. It was no more than an archaism, perhaps, for all its beauty, for the England of 1820 believed as little as the England of Pope. But in our own day it would seem as if we had got back almost to the con- dition of the early Elizabethan age, for we have Mr. Yeats and his school making a passionate creed out of fairy-tales and claiming for it a popular as well as a literary following.
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