t.

I must confess, however, that I incline to the Sudbury side of the
argument. This does not only arise from the sympathy which all healthy
people have for small places as against big ones; it arises from some
really good qualities in this particular Sudbury publication. First of
all, the champions of Sudbury seem to be more open to the sensible and
humorous view of the book than the champions of Ipswich--at least, those
that appear in this discussion. Even the Sudbury champion, bent on
finding realistic clothes, rebels (to his eternal honour) when Mr. Percy
Fitzgerald tries to show that Bob Sawyer's famous statement that he was
neither Buff nor Blue, "but a sort of plaid," must have been copied from
some silly man at Ipswich who said that his politics were "half and
half." Anybody might have made either of the two jokes. But it was the
whole glory and meaning of Dickens that he confined himself to making
jokes that anybody might have made a little better than anybody would
have made them.

FAIRY TALES

Some solemn and superficial people (for nearly all very superficial
people are solemn) have declared that the fairy-tales are immoral; they
base this upon some accidental circumstances or regrettable incidents in
the war between giants and boys, some cases in which the latter indulged
in unsympathetic deceptions or even in practical jokes. The objection,
however, is not only false, but very much the reverse of the facts. The
fairy-tales are at root not only moral in the sense of being innocent,
but moral in the sense of being didactic, moral in the sense of being
moralising. It is all very well to talk of the freedom of fairyland, but
there was precious little freedom in fairyland by the best official
accounts. Mr. W.B. Yeats and other sensitive modern souls, feeling that
modern life is about as black a slavery as ever oppressed mankind (they
are right enough there), have especially described elfland as a place of
utter ease and abandonment--a place where the soul can turn every way at
will like the wind. Science denounces the idea of a capricious God; but
Mr. Yeats's school suggests that in that world every one is a capricious
god. Mr. Yeats himself has said a hundred times in that sad and splendid
literary style which makes him the first of all poets now writing in
English (I will not say of all English poets, for Irishmen are familiar
with the practice of physical assault), he has, I say, called up a
hund