ed on
Original Sin, and consequently and quite logically tended not to
educate, but to repress. There are no new fairy-tales of the days
when your grandmothers wore crinolines--I know, for I have
searched. Mothers and nurses taught the old ones; the Three Bears
still found, one after another, that 'somebody has been sleeping
in my bed'; Fatima continued to call 'Sister Anne, do you see
anyone coming?' the Wolf to show her teeth under her nightcap and
snarl out (O, great moment!) 'All the better to eat you with, my
dear.' But the Evangelicals held field. Those of our grandfathers
and grandmothers who understood joy and must have had fairies for
ministers--those of our grandmothers who played croquet through
hoop with a bell and practised Cupid's own sport archery--those
of our grandfathers who wore jolly peg-top trousers and Dundreary
whiskers, and built the Crystal Palace and drove to the Derby in
green-veiled top-hats with Dutch dolls stuck about the brim--_tot
circa unum caput tumultuantes deos_--and those splendid uncles
who used to descend on the old school in a shower of gold--
half-a-sovereign at the very least--all these should have trailed
fairies with them in a cloud. But in practice the evangelical
parent held the majority, put away all toys but Noah's Ark on
Sundays, and voted the fairies down.

I know not who converted the parents. It may have been that
benefactor of Europe, Hans Christian Andersen, born at Odensee in
Denmark in April 1805. He died, near Copenhagen, in 1875, having
by a few months outlived his 70th birthday. I like to think that
his genius, a continuing influence over a long generation, did
more than anything else to convert the parents. The schools,
always more royalist than the King, professionally bleak,
professionally dull, professionally repressive rather than
educative, held on to a tradition which, though it had to be on
the sly, every intelligent mother and nurse had done her best to
evade. The schools made a boy's life penitential on a system.
They discovered athletics, as a safety-valve for high spirits
they could not cope with, and promptly made that safety-valve
compulsory! They went on to make athletics a religion. Now
athletics are not properly a religious exercise, and their
meaning evaporates as soon as you enlist them in the service of
repression. They are being used to do the exact opposite of that
for which God meant them. Things are better now: but in those
times how