ow it is a nightmare.

That is the essential. That is the stern condition laid upon all
artists touching this luxury of fear. The terror must be fundamentally
frivolous. Sanity may play with insanity; but insanity must not be
allowed to play with sanity. Let such poets as the one I was reading in
the garden, by all means, be free to imagine what outrageous deities and
violent landscapes they like. By all means let them wander freely amid
their opium pinnacles and perspectives. But these huge gods, these
high cities, are toys; they must never for an instant be allowed to
be anything else. Man, a gigantic child, must play with Babylon and
Nineveh, with Isis and with Ashtaroth. By all means let him dream of the
Bondage of Egypt, so long as he is free from it. By all means let him
take up the Burden of Tyre, so long as he can take it lightly. But the
old gods must be his dolls, not his idols. His central sanctities, his
true possessions, should be Christian and simple. And just as a child
would cherish most a wooden horse or a sword that is a mere cross of
wood, so man, the great child, must cherish most the old plain things of
poetry and piety; that horse of wood that was the epic end of Ilium, or
that cross of wood that redeemed and conquered the world.

In one of Stevenson's letters there is a characteristically humorous
remark about the appalling impression produced on him in childhood
by the beasts with many eyes in the Book of Revelations: "If that was
heaven, what in the name of Davy Jones was hell like?" Now in sober
truth there is a magnificent idea in these monsters of the Apocalypse.
It is, I suppose, the idea that beings really more beautiful or more
universal than we are might appear to us frightful and even confused.
Especially they might seem to have senses at once more multiplex and
more staring; an idea very imaginatively seized in the multitude of
eyes. I like those monsters beneath the throne very much. But I like
them beneath the throne. It is when one of them goes wandering in
deserts and finds a throne for himself that evil faiths begin, and
there is (literally) the devil to pay--to pay in dancing girls or human
sacrifice. As long as those misshapen elemental powers are around the
throne, remember that the thing that they worship is the likeness of the
appearance of a man.

That is, I fancy, the true doctrine on the subject of Tales of Terror
and such things, which unless a man of letters do well and