giant. This has not, I think, been done
before in literature; but I have little doubt that the psychological
substance of it existed in fact. I have little doubt that the giant
whom Jack killed did regard himself as the Superman. It is likely
enough that he considered Jack a narrow and parochial person who wished
to frustrate a great forward movement of the life-force. If (as not
unfrequently was the case) he happened to have two heads, he would
point out the elementary maxim which declares them to be better than
one. He would enlarge on the subtle modernity of such an equipment,
enabling a giant to look at a subject from two points of view, or to
correct himself with promptitude. But Jack was the champion of the
enduring human standards, of the principle of one man one head and one
man one conscience, of the single head and the single heart and the
single eye. Jack was quite unimpressed by the question of whether the
giant was a particularly gigantic giant. All he wished to know was
whether he was a good giant--that is, a giant who was any good to us.
What were the giant's religious views; what his views on politics and
the duties of the citizen? Was he fond of children--or fond of them
only in a dark and sinister sense? To use a fine phrase for emotional
sanity, was his heart in the right place? Jack had sometimes to cut him
up with a sword in order to find out. The old and correct story of Jack
the Giant-Killer is simply the whole story of man; if it were
understood we should need no Bibles or histories. But the modern world
in particular does not seem to understand it at all. The modern world,
like Mr. Wells is on the side of the giants; the safest place, and
therefore the meanest and the most prosaic. The modern world, when it
praises its little Caesars, talks of being strong and brave: but it
does not seem to see the eternal paradox involved in the conjunction of
these ideas. The strong cannot be brave. Only the weak can be brave;
and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted,
in time of doubt, to be strong. The only way in which a giant could
really keep himself in training against the inevitable Jack would be by
continually fighting other giants ten times as big as himself. That is
by ceasing to be a giant and becoming a Jack. Thus that sympathy with
the small or the defeated as such, with which we Liberals and
Nationalists have been often reproached, is not a useless
sentimenta