Return to The Millinery home page
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at https://archiveofourown.org/works/43539366.
Fandom: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, with a visit from the Charles Cotton translation of Michel de Montaigne's Essays.
Rating: General Audiences
No warnings
Published 2022-12-10
Words: 1,046
I have observed in numerous of my neighbours and acquaintances a habit of settling arguments by the extraordinary and unnecessary measure, which however by the frequency of its use may be mistaken for a common necessity, of summoning a member of the faerie kind to adjudicate the argument. This is by no means a thing reserved for the most serious of arguments with the gravest consequences; indeed, matters that involve the honouring of contracts, the performance of needed work, the punishment of crimes, and the organisation of the government are by necessity determined by the laws of our own nation, which have the advantage of being intended for that purpose. The measure to which I refer is instead called into use when the argument is of very little or no consequence, and so there is no apparatus of the state that can be called upon to adjudicate it; a magistrate would not take time out of his schedule to decide, for example, whether the cattle in a particular province are more likely to be brown than black, and would remonstrate anyone who called him in to hear the terms of the debate. The faerie would seem even less likely to entertain topics of this kind, being uninterested in most of the affairs of Christians and finding it objectionable to be called away from their own pursuits to attend to the whims of another; indeed history can show us many a magician who summoned a faerie ill-advisedly, and suffered a loss of power both supernatural and mundane as a result. This practice has been blamed for the attenuation of power from this country in particular, as the magicians who sought to reinforce their sovereign's reach over the lands and oceans succeeded for many years and then failed catastrophically, apparently because the allies they thought they had bound were only waiting for an opportune moment to assert their own will; both the establishment of the papacy at Avignon and its failure to remain there have been attributed to the assertion and subsequent withdrawal of faerie co-operation.
However, it appears that this risk is lessened in proportion to the argument, so that deciding upon matters of large consequence is a burden that the faerie refuse any more to take up on our behalf and furthermore one with which they cannot be trusted, but inconsequential quarrels are a matter of some delight to them. So did I hear of a neighbour being better able to predict the weather than a man of whom he had heard in a neighbouring county. His superiority or inferiority to this man cannot have done him any good, since each one had knowledge of his own environs and its tendencies, and neither would have proven so capable if transferred to the lands of the other. Nevertheless he wished to know with certainty whether he was a more gifted prognosticator than his rival, and he asked the opinion of everyone who had had the opportunity to witness the work of both men; with the only result being, that he learned where the loyalties of those people lay. When circumstances colluded to bring these two into the same gathering, nothing would answer but that they settle between them forever who was more skilled at their shared talent, and yet no trial could be made between them in that time and place, since whatever predictions they made would need hours or days to prove correct and incorrect, and so neither would have the pleasure of winning the argument. Instead they took the step that has been so popular in recent years and conducted a ritual to ask a faerie to choose between them; which faerie, once being given to understand the terms of the question, and having been told that it must not choose on the basis of bribes or persuasion, told the newcomer, "I like the colour of your knees," and declared him the winner. What the comment about knees was intended to convey and whether it was related to the question at hand was not clear, and the faerie did not stay to answer questions about its methods of decision making. My acquaintance found this judgment disappointing, and yet sufficiently irrational that he could not argue with it, and he went home oddly satisfied that the question had been settled to the greatest degree it could be.
Such arbitrariness is often preferred for the purpose of allowing the smallest opportunity for future debate, because a faerie has the capability to prevent an argument from ever being visited again. People who try to reopen the subject find themselves speaking instead about rain, commerce, walruses, furniture, Mount Olympus, or the futility of war, and they can never again argue about what they once considered so important. I myself would find such binding a strong incentive against employing a faerie in this way, since the pleasures of discoursing freely greatly surpass those of being demonstrated to hold the right opinion; but this would seem not to be a popular belief, at least amongst those people who would consider summoning a faerie at all.
It is difficult to judge whether those who choose to foreclose future arguments truly believe they are happier having done so, since once the matter is concluded they can no longer speak their minds; which has led some to question whether they even know their own opinion any longer. That is, if someone cannot state their perspective, can they still believe it?—and indeed, how deeply does the prohibition penetrate? It might be said that to hold an opinion at all is to state something to oneself, and so the inability to speak goes with an inability to think—so that we must then not only fall short of the Delphic commandment to know ourselves, but must put away portions of ourselves in a place where they cannot be known. Thinking of this it is easy to understand why magic is not classed with rhetoric and astronomy as one of the great subjects of learning. The practice of magic offers to lessen the store of human knowledge while making the practitioner feel more certain of himself; whereas the practice of the true sciences increases our knowledge, while humbling us by revealing the scope of our ignorance.