The Dragon's Grandmother

I met a man the other day who did not believe in fairy tales.
I do not mean that he did not believe in the incidents narrated
in them--that he did not believe that a pumpkin could turn into
a coach. He did, indeed, entertain this curious disbelief.
And, like all the other people I have ever met who entertained it,
he was wholly unable to give me an intelligent reason for it.
He tried the laws of nature, but he soon dropped that.
Then he said that pumpkins were unalterable in ordinary experience,
and that we all reckoned on their infinitely protracted pumpkinity.
But I pointed out to him that this was not an attitude we
adopt specially towards impossible marvels, but simply
the attitude we adopt towards all unusual occurrences.
If we were certain of miracles we should not count on them.
Things that happen very seldom we all leave out of
our calculations, whether they are miraculous or not.
I do not expect a glass of water to be turned into wine;
but neither do I expect a glass of water to be poisoned with
prussic acid. I do not in ordinary business relations act
on the assumption that the editor is a fairy; but neither do I
act on the assumption that he is a Russian spy, or the lost
heir of the Holy Roman Empire. What we assume in action is
not that the natural order is unalterable, but simply that it
is much safer to bet on uncommon incidents than on common ones.
This does not touch the credibility of any attested tale
about a Russian spy or a pumpkin turned into a coach.
If I had seen a pumpkin turned into a Panhard motor-car
with my own eyes that would not make me any more inclined
to assume that the same thing would happen again. I should not
invest largely in pumpkins with an eye to the motor trade.
Cinderella got a ball dress from the fairy; but I do not suppose
that she looked after her own clothes any the less after it.

But the view that fairy tales cannot really have happened,
though crazy, is common. The man I speak of disbelieved
in fairy tales in an even more amazing and perverted sense.
He actually thought that fairy tales ought not to be told
to children. That is (like a belief in slavery or annexation)
one of those intellectual errors which lie very near
to ordinary mortal sins. There are some refusals which,
though they may be done what is called conscientiously,
yet carry so much of their whole horror in the very act of them,
that a man must in doing them not only harden but slightly
corrupt his heart. One of them was the refusal of milk to young
mothers when their husbands were in the field against us.
Another is the refusal of fairy tales to children.

. . . . .

The man had come to see me in connection with some silly society
of which I am an