The Last Fairy

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 317, 30 March 1928, Page 14

The Last Fairy

(Written for The Son-1 I HAVE just finished another of Stella Benson s novels, one called "Good-bye, Stranger.” It is an agitating and, in spots, bewildering book, Stella Benson being what one might term a faintly cubist writer. The book starts off with a verse expostulating against Democracy, plunges straight into China, and thence takes a fourth-dimensional stride over the borders of Fairyland. The leading character—at least, she was that to me. though her role is that of a somewhat grumpy Chorus —is an eldritch old woman called Mrs Cotton, who possesses a changeling son, not a changeling from his cradle days, but from the moment when he went out to a flower-bed to see if snap-dragons had any teeth. She thoroughly enjoys her changeling, because he is a flat and ruthless contradiction of all that she js wicked enough to hate: democracy, and gramophone music, and what she calls "synthetic American ki-hind-ness.” The changeling is married to a charming American (and it is with positive shock that you discover, all of a sudden, that her charm is really silliness). A dead leaf of a woman named Lena, with all a dead leaf's wisdom and apparent unattractiveness, is blown on to the scene, and promptly pursued by the changeling, to the complete distraction of that wholesome potato-flower, his American wife. At the crucial moment, the original son—“the fool I bore,” as Mrs Cotton calls him —is returned with thanks from Fairyland, and goes straight back.

guided by gramophone music, to his “happy, happy American home.” " ‘Perhaps,’ said Lena slowly, lifting a distraught face, ‘perhaps the world’s a little better for the loss of a stonyhearted fairy.’ “ ‘Perhaps it is a little better,’ said old Mrs Cotton, ‘a little ki-hinder. A little more American. But oh,” she cried, raising her knotted hands before her face, ‘there are so many men, and so few fairies.’ ” "So few fairies’* is Chorus’s—and Miss Benson’s—one real argument against Democracy: and after all, in those, or other words, practically every author in England has been holding the same argument aloft like a despairing flag. Mrs Cotton, irrational old lady, blames America for the passing of Gramarye. Says she: "We all fall away from high standards, but America’s teaching us how to lire up to low ones. There never was a second-rate thing where a first-rate thing ought to be until America put it there . . . It’s such a loud voice . . . It’s a mechanical voice speaking cheap an,j easy substitutes for Truth in a world where Truth has been so hard . . . Would you rather have all that American ki-hindness thah the glory of the unequal world, than wit, than learning, than loneliness, than strangeness. than the music of the fairies?” Well, the changeling passes, and the gramophone music tinkles out loud and cheerful over fairy music, bringing Kreisler and Caruso, tamed, into a few million homes. But in the night watches it is rather fun to stand and observe how various Englisji writers are taking, or mistaking, or endeavouring to avoid, the subject of democracy. It was all so easy, in Shelley’s day. All the gallantry, all the breaking day, lay on the side of the submerged. And the sun that rose in that century has passed more or less serenely to its zenith, and there remained fixed. The literati of the present day are finding, a little to their own dismay, that the sunset of an entirely different and now obscured creed is almost as romantic and fascinating as was that dawn of a hundred years ago. What is the nse of their attempting to write about Democracy? Democracy writes for itself, in cheap ears and cheap music and much - the - same - of - everything - foreveryone—and "so few fairies.” Writers of all nations, perhaps, prefer to champion obscurity rather than success: one can be so much more emphatic. But it is only the English writer who finds, at the end of all argument, that he prefers fairies to saints, that he cannot condemn the ppw way, but will lire and die in the old. Somebody, Mr George Bernard Shaw, I think it was, settled the question of Shakespeare once and for all by denouncing him as "a Tory and a snob.” In Shakespeare’s day, one might see "the people” in two roles—a* Caliban, or as Puck: not a gauzywinged Puck, but a shaggy, goodnatured, earth-brown creature, wise with the wisdom of the soil, endowed with broad shoulders on which children might ride. The Puck-Caliban conceptions lasted, practically unchanged, to the day of Dickens. A few Little Nells and Little Dorrits slipped in, very sweet and immaculate with their parasols and pantalettes. They were the mode. But who were the really important people? Caliban and Puck. In any Dickens novel you will find them both. changed in nothing but that London town is substituted for the enchanted island, and a few of Prospero’s controlling spells

And then, with a gasp,, the world woke up one morning to find that Caliban and Puck had gene, as Stella Benson's changeling went. In their place, having been away in Fairyland since the allegedly Golden Ages, stood the ordinary man—he whom old Mrs Cotton called "the fool I bore.” After Caliban and Puck most of the other strange and unaccounted-for things on earth took flight, until there was nothing but a little trail of wings, like a ragged rainbow on the horizon. On this ragged rainbow, the eyes of most English writers threaten to become permanently fixed, which would be a pity, seeing that they are clear and kindly eyes. But what saves Mr John Galsworthy’s steel-grey books from being ever so slightly “soggy”? Simply the little green, damp, fairyring patches when Soames stands alone, and the night-air of England is full of scents and secrets immemorial, and the crude colours of his everyday world are stolen away by darkness; or when Fleur and Jon are alone together in an orchard; or when Michael Mont, having sacrificed his dearest desires for his mad scheme of “Foggartism,” stands under the blue shadow of Westminster Abbey, and says to himself: “England, mjr England—as the poet puts it.” The last fairy, Beauty, has Mr Galsworthy securely spell-bound. The brave music of distant drums—and of none too distant gramophones—goes past him; and he probably listens, but does not join in. We arc enchanted By the lifeless music Of a stone-god piping in an ancient garden. I wonder if it’s because ancient lawns and gardens are so imperiously lovely, because the ghosts that walk across their moonlight are such serene autocrats. And because all the elmtrees rustle with each elegant horror at the bare idea of cheerful picknickers, ham sandwiches, and “Dixie” on a gramophone, that all the rash young authors who wander into these domains are almost certain to come under a spell? They may sit down under the shade of an oak tree with intent of starting their essays on "John So-and-So: Benefactor of Humanity.” But if ever they close their eyes, if the scratching of their pens isn’t determined enough to drown the calling of thrushes in the boughs above, they are lost. Beauty in distress —all beauty is in distress, nowadays—comes down to them and says: "I am the owner of flowers without any edible fruit, and of the horse that has never known furrow or plough. I prefer my trees as trees, not as firewood, which is the reason why, when perhaps you have been cold, theii branches have remained a nest for the stars, and a necklace for the pendant opals of the dawn. And I have no justice on my side, and very few champions, except those who are young or old enough to be open-eyed.” Like as not, the essays on public benefaction are torn up for ever, and instead one will find strange little sketches of the thoughts of castles and trees, and their old-fashioned owners. But after all, old Mrs Cotton has nothing very much to fear—until all gardens are turned into kitchen gardens, and until midsummer nights are no longer “dangerously starry.” The last fairy is the strongest fairv of all. ROBIN HYDE. Wellington.