Tremendous Trifles

The Red Angel

I find that there really are human beings who think fairy tales bad

for children. I do not speak of the man in the green tie, for him

I can never count truly human. But a lady has written me an earnest

letter saying that fairy tales ought not to be taught to children even

if they are true. She says that it is cruel to tell children fairy

tales, because it frightens them. You might just as well say that

it is cruel to give girls sentimental novels because it makes them cry.

All this kind of talk is based on that complete forgetting

of what a child is like which has been the firm foundation

of so many educational schemes. If you keep bogies and goblins

away from children they would make them up for themselves.

One small child in the dark can invent more hells than Swedenborg.

One small child can imagine monsters too big and black

to get into any picture, and give them names too unearthly

and cacophonous to have occurred in the cries of any lunatic.

The child, to begin with, commonly likes horrors, and he

continues to indulge in them even when he does not like them.

There is just as much difficulty in saying exactly where pure

pain begins in his case, as there is in ours when we walk of our

own free will into the torture-chamber of a great tragedy.

The fear does not come from fairy tales; the fear comes from

the universe of the soul.

. . . . .

The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable;

they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very

alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily

and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear

the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it--

because it is a fact. Fairy tales, then, are not responsible

for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear;

fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly;

that is in the child already, because it is in the world already.

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey.

What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea

of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known

the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination.

What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to

kill the dragon.

Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him

for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless

terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies

in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe

more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.

When I was a child I have stared at the darkness until the whole

black bulk of it turned into one n***o giant taller than heaven.

If there was one star in the sky it only made him a Cyclops.

But fairy tales restored my mental health, for next day I read

an authentic account of how a n***o giant with one eye, of quite

equal dimensions, had been baffled by a little boy like myself

(of similar inexperience and even lower social status)

by means of a sword, some bad riddles, and a brave heart.

Sometimes the sea at night seemed as dreadful as any dragon.

But then I was acquainted with many youngest sons and little

sailors to whom a dragon or two was as simple as the sea.

Take the most horrible of Grimm's tales in incident and imagery,

the excellent tale of the "Boy who Could not Shudder," and you

will see what I mean. There are some living shocks in that tale.

I remember specially a man's legs which fell down the chimney

by themselves and walked about the room, until they were rejoined

by the severed head and body which fell down the chimney after them.

That is very good. But the point of the story and the point

of the reader's feelings is not that these things are frightening,

but the far more striking fact that the hero was not frightened at them.

The most fearful of all these fearful wonders was his own absence

of fear. He slapped the bogies on the back and asked the devils

to drink wine with him; many a time in my youth, when stifled with some

modern morbidity, I have prayed for a double portion of his spirit.

If you have not read the end of his story, go and read it;

it is the wisest thing in the world. The hero was at last taught

to shudder by taking a wife, who threw a pail of cold water over him.

In that one sentence there is more of the real meaning of marriage

than in all the books about s*x that cover Europe and America.

. . . . .

At the four corners of a child's bed stand Perseus and Roland, Sigurd and

St. George. If you withdraw the guard of heroes you are not making

him rational; you are only leaving him to fight the devils alone.

For the devils, alas, we have always believed in. The hopeful element in

the universe has in modern times continually been denied and reasserted;

but the hopeless element has never for a moment been denied.

As I told "H. N. B." (whom I pause to wish a Happy Christmas in its

most superstitious sense), the one thing modern people really do

believe in is damnation. The greatest of purely modern poets summed

up the really modern attitude in that fine Agnostic line--

"There may be Heaven; there must be Hell."

The gloomy view of the universe has been a continuous tradition;

and the new types of spiritual investigation or conjecture all begin

by being gloomy. A little while ago men believed in no spirits.

Now they are beginning rather slowly to believe in rather slow spirits.

. . . . .

Some people objected to spiritualism, table rappings, and such things,

because they were undignified, because the ghosts cracked jokes or

waltzed with dinner-tables. I do not share this objection in the least.

I wish the spirits were more farcical than they are. That they

should make more jokes and better ones, would be my suggestion.

For almost all the spiritualism of our time, in so far as it is new,

is solemn and sad. Some Pagan gods were lawless, and some Christian

saints were a little too serious; but the spirits of modern spiritualism

are both lawless and serious--a disgusting combination. The specially

contemporary spirits are not only devils, they are blue devils.

This is, first and last, the real value of Christmas; in so far

as the mythology remains at all it is a kind of happy mythology.

Personally, of course, I believe in Santa Claus; but it is the season

of forgiveness, and I will forgive others for not doing so.

But if there is anyone who does not comprehend the defect in our

world which I am civilising, I should recommend him, for instance,

to read a story by Mr. Henry James, called "The Turn of the Screw."

It is one of the most powerful things ever written, and it is one

of the things about which I doubt most whether it ought ever to have

been written at all. It describes two innocent children gradually

growing at once omniscient and half-witted under the influence of

the foul ghosts of a groom and a governess. As I say, I doubt whether

Mr. Henry James ought to have published it (no, it is not indecent,

do not buy it; it is a spiritual matter), but I think the question

so doubtful that I will give that truly great man a chance.

I will approve the thing as well as admire it if he will write

another tale just as powerful about two children and Santa Claus.

If he will not, or cannot, then the conclusion is clear; we can

deal strongly with gloomy mystery, but not with happy mystery;

we are not rationalists, but diabolists.

. . . . .

I have thought vaguely of all this staring at a great red fire that

stands up in the room like a great red angel. But, perhaps, you have

never heard of a red angel. But you have heard of a blue devil.

That is exactly what I mean.