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 sex 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 m