e'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 expound without wishing
to convert the soul, nor understand without self-experiment. We