The Red Angel

I find that there really are human beings who think fairy tales bad
for children. I do not speak of the man in the green tie, for him
I can never count truly human. But a lady has written me an earnest
letter saying that fairy tales ought not to be taught to children even
if they are true. She says that it is cruel to tell children fairy
tales, because it frightens them. You might just as well say that
it is cruel to give girls sentimental novels because it makes them cry.
All this kind of talk is based on that complete forgetting
of what a child is like which has been the firm foundation
of so many educational schemes. If you keep bogies and goblins
away from children they would make them up for themselves.
One small child in the dark can invent more hells than Swedenborg.
One small child can imagine monsters too big and black
to get into any picture, and give them names too unearthly
and cacophonous to have occurred in the cries of any lunatic.
The child, to begin with, commonly likes horrors, and he
continues to indulge in them even when he does not like them.
There is just as much difficulty in saying exactly where pure
pain begins in his case, as there is in ours when we walk of our
own free will into the torture-chamber of a great tragedy.
The fear does not come from fairy tales; the fear comes from
the universe of the soul.

. . . . .

The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable;
they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very
alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily
and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear
the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it--
because it is a fact. Fairy tales, then, are not responsible
for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear;
fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly;
that is in the child already, because it is in the world already.
Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey.
What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea
of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known
the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination.
What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to
kill the dragon.

Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him
for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless
terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies
in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe
more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.
When I was a child I have stared at the darkness until the whole
black bulk of it turned into one negro giant taller than heaven.
If there was one star in the sky it only made him a