Lore of Proserpine

Lore of Proserpine

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Title: Lore of Proserpine
Author: Maurice Hewlett
Release Date: July 1, 2006 [EBook #18730]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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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
* * * * *

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 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 distinguish one kind of
appearance from another, and to say, that is real, and again, that is
illusion. Honestly, 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? There's my difficulty in talking about reality.
There's 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 fair humanity. They
saw such natural phenomena as shadows of spiritual conflict or of
spiritual calm, 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
revealed 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 don't speak for
themselves they will get no help from a preface.
The book assumes up to a certain point an autobiographical 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 don't deny that there are some things here which I
learned from the being called Despoina and could have learned from
nobody else. There are some such things, but there is not very much,
and won't be any more just yet. Some of it there will never be for the
sorry reason that our race won't bear to be told fundamental facts about

itself, still less about other orders of creation which are sufficiently 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 there's a reason why we have no fairy
lore, because we can't 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