"Hope Mirrlees - Lud in the Mist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mirrlees Hope)

jurist, had drawn in one of his treatises a curious parallel between fairy things and the law. The men of the
revolution, he said, had substituted law for fairy fruit. But whereas only the reigning Duke and his priests
had been allowed to partake of the fruit, the law was given freely to rich and poor alike. Again, fairy was
delusion, so was the law. At any rate, it was a sort of magic, moulding reality into any shape it chose.
But, whereas fairy magic and delusion were for the cozening and robbing of man, the magic of the law
was to his intention and for his welfare.
In the eye of the law, neither Fairyland nor fairy things existed. But then, as Master Josiah had pointed
out, the law plays fast and loose with reality — and no one really believes it.
 Gradually, an almost physical horror came to be felt for anything connected with the Fairies and
Fairyland, and society followed the law in completely ignoring their existence. Indeed, the very word
"fairy" became taboo, and was never heard on polite lips, while the greatest insult one Dorimarite could
hurl at another was to call him "Son of a Fairy."
But, on the painted ceilings of ancient houses, in the peeling frescoes of old barns, in the fragments of
bas-reliefs built into modern structures, and, above all, in the tragic funereal statues of the Fields of
Grammary, a Winckelmann, had he visited Dorimare, would have found, as he did in the rococo Rome
of the eighteenth century, traces of an old and solemn art, the designs of which served as poncifs to the
modern artists. For instance, a well-known advertisement of a certain cheese, which depicted a comic,
fat little man menacing with knife and fork an enormous cheese hanging in the sky like the moon, was
really a sort of unconscious comic reprisal made against the action depicted in a very ancient Dorimarite
design, wherein the moon itself pursued a frieze of tragic fugitives.
Well, a few years before the opening of this story, a Winckelmann, though an anonymous one, actually
did appear in Lud-in-the-Mist; although the field of his enquiries was not limited to the plastic arts. He
published a book, entitled _Traces of Fairy in the Inhabitants, Customs, Art, Vegetation and Language of
Dorimare_.
His thesis was this: that there was an unmistakable fairy strain running through the race of Dorimarites,
which could only be explained by the hypothesis that, in the olden days, there had been frequent
intermarriage between them and the Fairies. For instance, the red hair, so frequent in Dorimare, pointed,
he maintained, to such a strain. It was also to be found, he asserted, in the cattle of Dorimare. For this
assertion he had some foundation, for it was undeniable that from time to time a dun or dapple cow
would bring forth a calf of a bluish tinge, whose dung was of a ruddy gold. And tradition taught that all
the cattle of Fairyland were blue, and that fairy gold turned into dung when it had crossed the border.
Tradition also taught that all the flowers of Fairyland were red, and it was indisputable that the
cornflowers of Dorimare sprang up from time to time as red as poppies, and the lilies as red as damask
roses. Moreover, he discovered traces of the Fairies' language in the oaths of the Dorimarites and in
some of their names. And, to a stranger, it certainly produced an odd impression to hear such high-flown
oaths as; by the Sun, Moon and Stars; by the Golden Apples of the West; by the Harvest of Souls; by
the White Ladies of the Fields; by the Milky Way, come tumbling out in the same breath with such
homely expletives as Busty Bridget; Toasted Cheese; Suffering Cats; by my Great-Aunt's Rump; or to
find names like Dreamsweet, Ambrose, Moonlove, wedded to such grotesque surnames as Baldbreech,
Fliperarde, or Pyepowders.
With regard to the designs of old tapestries and old bas-reliefs, he maintained that they were
illustrations of the flora, fauna, and history of Fairyland, and scouted the orthodox theory which explained
the strange birds and flowers as being due either to the artists' unbridled fancy or to their imperfect
control of their medium, and considered that the fantastic scenes were taken from the rituals of the old
religion. For, he insisted, all artistic types, all ritual acts, must be modelled on realities; and Fairyland is
the place where what we look upon as symbols and figures actually exist and occur.
If the antiquary, then, was correct, the Dorimarite, like a Dutchman of the seventeenth century, smoking
his churchwarden among his tulips, and eating his dinner off Delft plates, had trivialised to his own taste
the solemn spiritual art of a remote, forbidden land, which he believed to be inhabited by grotesque and
evil creatures given over to strange vices and to dark cults . . . nevertheless in the veins of the Dutchman