eactions. He is not stupid enough to understand
fairyland. Fairies prefer people of the yokel type like myself; people
who gape and grin and do as they are told. Mr. Yeats reads into elfland
all the righteous insurrection of his own race. But the lawlessness of
Ireland is a Christian lawlessness, founded on reason and justice. The
Fenian is rebelling against something he understands only too well; but
the true citizen of fairyland is obeying something that he does not
understand at all. In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests
upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly
out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love
flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited. An apple
is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.

This is the tone of fairy tales, and it is certainly not lawlessness or
even liberty, though men under a mean modern tyranny may think it
liberty by comparison. People out of Portland Gaol might think Fleet
Street free; but closer study will prove that both fairies and
journalists are the slaves of duty. Fairy godmothers seem at least as
strict as other godmothers. Cinderella received a coach out of
Wonderland and a coachman out of nowhere, but she received a
command--which might have come out of Brixton--that she should be back
by twelve. Also, she had a glass slipper; and it cannot be a coincidence
that glass is so common a substance in folk-lore. This princess lives in
a glass castle, that princess on a glass hill; this one sees all things
in a mirror; they may all live in glass houses if they will not throw
stones. For this thin glitter of glass everywhere is the expression of
the fact that the happiness is bright but brittle, like the substance
most easily smashed by a housemaid or a cat. And this fairy-tale
sentiment also sank into me and became my sentiment towards the whole
world. I felt and feel that life itself is as bright as the diamond, but
as brittle as the window-pane; and when the heavens were compared to the
terrible crystal I can remember a shudder. I was afraid that God would
drop the cosmos with a crash.

Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to be
perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do
not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years. Such, it seemed, was
the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth; the happiness depended on
_not doing something_ which you