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The Island of the Fay
Nullus enim locus sine genio est.--SERVIUS
'La musique,' says Marmontel, in those 'Contes Moraux'<1>
which, in all our translations, we have insisted upon calling
'Moral Tales' as if in mockery of their spirit--'la musique est
le seul des talents qui jouissent de lui-meme; tous les autres
veulent des temoins.' He here confounds the pleasure derivable
from sweet sounds with the capacity for creating them. No more
than any other talent, is that for music susceptible of complete
enjoyment, where there is no second party to appreciate its
exercise. And it is only in common
<1>Moraux is here derived from moeurs and its
meaning is fashionable, or, more strictly, 'of manners'.
with other talents that it produces effects which may be fully
enjoyed in solitude. The idea which the raconteur has either
failed to entertain clearly, or has sacrificed in its expression
to his national love of point, is, doubtless, the very tenable
one that the higher order of music is the most thoroughly
estimated when we are exclusively alone. The proposition, in
this form, will be admitted at once by those who love the lyre
for its sake, and for its spiritual uses. But there is one
pleasure still within the reach of fallen mortality--and perhaps
only one--which owes even more than does music to the accessory
sentiment of seclusion. I mean the happiness experienced in the
contemplation of natural scenery. In truth, the man who would
behold aright the glory of God upon earth must in solitude behold
that glory. To me, at least, the presence--not of human life
only, but of life in any other form than that of the green things
which grow upon the soil and are voiceless--is a stain upon the
landscape--is at war with the genius of the scene. I love,
indeed, to regard the dark valleys, and the grey rocks, and the
waters that silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy
slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains that look down upon
all--I love to regard these as themselves but the colossal
members of one vast animate and sentient whole--a whole whose
form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and most inclusive
of all; whose path is among associate planets; whose meek
handmaiden is the moon; whose mediate sovereign is the sun; whose
life is eternity; whose thought is that of a God; whose enjoyment
is knowledge; whose destinies are lost in immensity; whose
cognizance of ourselves is akin with our own cognizance of the
animalculae which infest the brain--a being which we, in
consequence, regard as purely inanimate and material, much in the
same manner as these animalculae must thus regard us.
Our telescopes and our mathematical investigations assure us
on every hand--notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of
the priesthood--that space, and therefore that bulk, is an
important consideration in the eyes of the Almighty. The cycles
in which the stars move are those best adapted for the evolution,
without collision, of the greatest possible number of bodies.
The forms of those bodies are accurately such as, within a given
surface, to include the greatest possible amount of matter;--
while the surfaces themselves are so disposed as to accommodate a
denser population than could be accommodated on the same surfaces
otherwise arranged. Nor is it any argument against bulk being an
object with God, that space itself is infinite; for there may be
an infinity of matter to fill it. And since we see clearly that
the endowment of matter with vitality is a principle--indeed as
far as our judgments extend, the leading principle in the
operations of Deity--it is scarcely logical to imagine it
confined to the regions of the minute, where we daily trace it,
and not extending to those of the august. As we find cycle
within cycle without end--yet all revolving around one far-
distant centre which is the Godhead, may we not analogically
suppose, in the same manner, life within life, the less within
the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine? In short, we are
madly erring, through self-esteem, in believing man, in either
his temporal or future destinies, to be of more moment in the
universe than that vast 'clod of the valley' which he tills and
contemns, and to which he denies a soul for no more profound
reason than that he does not behold it in operation.<1>
These fancies, and such as these, have always given to my
meditations among the mountains, and the forests, by the rivers
and the ocean, a tinge of what the everyday world would not fail
to term the fantastic. My wanderings amid such scenes have been
many, and far-searching, and often solitary; and the interest
with which I have strayed through many a dim deep valley, or
gazed into the reflected Heaven of many a bright lake, has been
an interest greatly deepened by the thought that I have strayed
and gazed alone. What flippant Frenchman<2> was it who said, in
allusion to the well-known work of Zimmerman, that 'la solitude
est une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu'un pour vous dire que la
solitude est une belle chose'. The epigram cannot be gainsaid;
but the necessity is a thing that does not exist.
It was during one of my lonely journeyings, amid a far-
distant region of mountain locked within mountain, and sad rivers
and melancholy tarns writhing or sleeping within all--that I
chanced
<1>Speaking of the tides, Pomponius Mela, in his treatise De
Situ Orbis, says: 'Either the world is a great animal, or,' etc.
<2>Balzac--in substance--I do not remember the words.
upon a certain rivulet and island. I came upon them suddenly in
the leafy June, and threw myself upon the turf, beneath the
branches of an unknown odorous shrub, that I might doze as I
contemplated the scene. I felt that thus only should I look upon
it--such was the character of phantasm it wore.
On all sides--save to the west, where the sun was about
sinking--arose the verdant walls of the forest. The little river
which turned sharply in its course, and was thus immediately lost
to sight, seemed to have no exit from its prison, but to be
absorbed by the deep green foliage of the trees to the east--
while in the opposite quarter (so it appeared to me as I lay at
length and glanced upward) there poured down noiselessly and
continuously into the valley, a rich golden and crimson waterfall
from the sunset fountains of the sky.
About midway in the short vista which my dreamy vision took
in, one small circular island, profusely verdured, reposed upon
the bosom of the stream.
So blended bank and shadow there,
That each seemed pendulous in air--
so mirror-like was the glassy water, that it was scarcely
possible to say at what point upon the slope of the emerald turf
its crystal dominion began.
My position enabled me to include in a single view both the
eastern and western extremities of the islet; and I observed a
singularly-marked difference in their aspects. The latter was
all one radiant harem of garden beauties. It glowed and blushed
beneath the eye of the slant sunlight, and fairly laughed with
flowers. The grass was short, springy, sweet-scented, and
Asphodel-interspersed. The trees were lithe, mirthful, erect--
bright, slender, and graceful--of eastern figure and foliage,
with bark smooth, glossy, and parti-coloured. There seemed a
deep sense of life and joy about all; and although no airs blew
from out the Heavens, yet everything had motion through the
gentle sweepings to and fro of innumerable butterflies, that
might have been mistaken for tulips with wings.<1>
<1>Florem putares mare per liquidum aethera.--P. COMMIRE.
The other or eastern end of the isle was whelmed in the
blackest shade. A sombre, yet beautiful and peaceful gloom here
pervaded all things. The trees were dark in colour and mournful
in form and attitude--wreathing themselves into sad, solemn, and
spectral shapes, that conveyed ideas of mortal sorrow and
untimely death. The grass wore the deep tint of the cypress, and
the heads of its blades hung droopingly, and, hither and thither
among it, were many small unsightly hillocks, low and narrow, and
not very long, that had the aspect of graves, but were not;
although over and all about them the rue and rosemary clambered.
The shade of the trees fell heavily upon the water, and seemed to
bury itself therein, impregnating the depths of the element with
darkness. I fancied that each shadow, as the sun descended lower
and lower, separated itself sullenly from the trunk that gave it
birth, and thus became absorbed by the stream; while other
shadows issued momently from the trees, taking the place of their
predecessors thus entombed.
This idea, having once seized upon my fancy, greatly excited
it, and I lost myself forthwith in reverie. 'If ever island were
enchanted'--said I to myself--'this is it. This is the haunt of
the few gentle Fays who remain from the wreck of the race. Are
these green tombs theirs?--or do they yield up their sweet lives
as mankind yield up their own? In dying, do they not rather
waste away mournfully; rendering unto God little by little their
existence, as these trees render up shadow after shadow,
exhausting their substance unto dissolution? What the wasting
tree is to the water that imbibes its shade, growing thus blacker
by what it preys upon, may not the life of the Fay be to the
death which engulfs it?'
As I thus mused, with half-shut eyes, while the sun sank
rapidly to rest, and eddying currents careered round and round
the island, bearing upon their bosom large, dazzling, white
flakes of the bark of the sycamore--flakes which, in their
multiform positions upon the water, a quick imagination might
have converted into anything it pleased--while I thus mused, it
appeared to me that the form of one of those very Fays about whom
I had been pondering, made its way slowly into the darkness from
out the light at the western end of the island. She stood erect,
in a singularly fragile canoe, and urged it with the mere phantom
of an oar. While within the influence of the lingering sunbeams,
her attitude seemed indicative of joy--but sorrow deformed it as
she passed within the shade. Slowly she glided along, and at
length rounded the islet and re-entered the region of light.
'The revolution which has just been made by the Fay,' continued I
musingly--'is the cycle of the brief year of her life. She has
floated through her winter and through her summer. She is a year
nearer unto Death: for I did not fail to see that as she came
into the shade, her shadow fell from her, and was swallowed up in
the dark water, making its blackness more black.'
And again the boat appeared, and the Fay; but about the
attitude of the latter there was more of care and uncertainty,
and less of ecstatic joy. She floated again from out of the
light and into the gloom (which deepened momently), and again her
shadow fell from her into the ebony water and became absorbed
into its blackness. And again and again she made the circuit of
the island (while the sun rushed down to his slumbers), and at
each issuing into the light, there was more sorrow about her
person, while it grew feebler, and far fainter, and more
indistinct; and at each passage into the gloom, there fell from
her a darker shade, which became whelmed in a shadow more black.
But at length, when the sun had utterly departed, the Fay, now
the mere ghost of her former self, went disconsolately with her
boat into the region of the ebony flood,--and that she issued
thence I cannot say,--for darkness fell over all things, and I
beheld her magical figure no more.