Lore of Proserpine | Page 5

held him to his co-tenant would have been a thing to
avoid. He desires liberty, and nothing less will content him. This he
will only have by inaction, by mewing his sempiternal youth in his
cage and on his perch.
But the tie uniting the pair of us is of such a nature that neither can be
uninfluenced by the other. It is just that you should hear both sides of
the case. My forensic, eating and arguing self has bullied my other into
hypocrisy over and over again. He has starved him, deprived him of his
holidays, ignored him, ridiculed him, snubbed him mercilessly. This is
severe treatment, you'll allow, and it's worse even than it seems. For the
unconscionable fellow, owing to this coheirship which he pretends to
disesteem, has been made privy to experiences which must not only
have been extraordinary to so plain and humdrum a person, but which
have been, as I happen to know, of great importance to him, and
which--to put the thing at its highest--have lifted him, dull dog as he is,
into regions where the very dogs have wings. Out upon it! But he has
been in and out with his victim over leagues of space where not one
man in ten thousand has been privileged to fare. He has been familiar
all his life with scenes, with folk, with deeds undreamed of by
thirty-nine and three-quarters out of forty millions of people, and by
that quarter-million only known as nursery tales. Not only so, but he
has been awakened to the significance of common things, having at
hand an interpreter, and been enabled to be precise where Wordsworth
was vague. He has known Zeus in the thunder, in the lightning beheld
the shaking of the dread Ægis. In the river source he has seen the
breasted nymph; he has seen the Oreads stream over the bare hillside.
There are men who see these things and don't believe them, others who
believe but don't see. He has both seen and believed. The painted,
figured universe has for him a new shape; whispering winds and falling

rain speak plainly to his understanding. He has seen trees as men
walking. His helot has unlocked the world behind appearance and made
him free of the Spirits of Natural Fact who abide there. If he is not the
debtor of his comrade--and he protests the debt--he should be. But the
rascal laps it all up, as a cat porridge, without so much as a wag of the
tail for Thank-you. Such are the exorbitant overlords in mortal men,
who pass for reputable persons, with a chief seat at feasts.
Such things, you may say, read incredibly, but, mutatis mutandis, I
believe them to be common, though unrecorded, experience. I
deprecate in advance questions designed to test the accuracy of my
eyesight or the ingenuous habit of my pen. I have already declared that
the windows of my first-floor lodger are of such properties that they
show you, in Xenophon's phrase, [Greek: ta onta te ôs onta, kai ta mê
onta ôs ouk onta]. Now consider it from his side. If I were to tell the
owner of those windows that I saw the policeman at the corner, a
helmeted, blue-tunicked, chin-scratching, ponderous man, some six
foot in his boots, how would he take it? Would he not mock me? What,
that rat? Ridiculous! And what on earth could I reply? I tell you, the
whole affair is one of windows, or, sometimes, of personally-conducted
travel; and who is Guide and who Guided, is one of those nice
questions in psychology which perhaps we are not yet ready to handle.
Of the many speculations as to the nature of the subliminal Self I have
never found one to be that he may be a fairy prisoner, occasionally on
parole. But I think that not at all unlikely. May not metempsychosis be
a scourge of two worlds? If the soul of my grandam might fitly inhabit
a bird, might not a Fairy ruefully inhabit the person of my grandam? If
Fairy Godmothers, perchance, were Fairy Grandmothers! I have some
evidence to place before the reader which may induce him to consider
this hypothesis. Who can doubt, at least, that Shelley's was not a case
where the not-human was a prisoner in the human? Who can doubt that
of Blake's? And what was the result, forensically? Shelley was treated
as a scoundrel and Blake as a madman. Shelley, it was said, broke the
moral law, and Blake transcended common sense; but the first, I reply,
was in the guidance of a being to whom the laws of this world and the
accidents of it meant nothing at all; and to the second a wisdom stood
revealed which to human