on
before I was certain of the moon. This was at one with all popular
tradition. Modern minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush
or the brook; but the singers of the old epics and fables were
supernaturalists, and talked about the gods of brook and bush. That is
what the moderns mean when they say that the ancients did not
"appreciate Nature," because they said that Nature was divine. Old
nurses do not tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that
dance on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for the
dryads.

But I deal here with what ethic and philosophy come from being fed on
fairy tales. If I were describing them in detail I could note many noble
and healthy principles that arise from them. There is the chivalrous
lesson of "Jack the Giant Killer"; that giants should be killed because
they are gigantic. It is a manly mutiny against pride as such. For the
rebel is older than all the kingdoms, and the Jacobin has more tradition
than the Jacobite. There is the lesson of "Cinderella," which is the
same as that of the Magnificat--_exaltavit humiles._ There is the great
lesson of "Beauty and the Beast"; that a thing must be loved _before_
it is loveable. There is the terrible allegory of the "Sleeping Beauty,"
which tells how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts,
yet cursed with death; and how death also may perhaps be softened to a
sleep. But I am not concerned with any of the separate statutes of
elfland, but with the whole spirit of its law, which I learnt before I
could speak, and shall retain when I cannot write. I am concerned with a
certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy
tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

It might be stated this way. There are certain sequences or developments
(cases of one thing following another), which are, in the true sense of
the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the word,
necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences. We in
fairyland (who are the most reasonable of all creatures) admit that
reason and that necessity. For instance, if the Ugly Sisters are older
than Cinderella, it is (in an iron and awful sense) _necessary_ that
Cinderella is younger than the Ugly Sisters. There is no getting out of
it. Haeckel may talk as much fatalism about that fact as he pleases: it
really must be. If Jack is the son of a miller, a miller is the father
of Jack.