ild 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 negro 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 negro 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