The Red Angel - Page 2

Cyclops.
But fairy tales restored my mental health, for next day I read
an authentic account of how a negro giant with one eye, of quite
equal dimensions, had been baffled by a little boy like myself
(of similar inexperience and even lower social status)
by means of a sword, some bad riddles, and a brave heart.
Sometimes the sea at night seemed as dreadful as any dragon.
But then I was acquainted with many youngest sons and little
sailors to whom a dragon or two was as simple as the sea.

Take the most horrible of Grimm's tales in incident and imagery,
the excellent tale of the "Boy who Could not Shudder," and you
will see what I mean. There are some living shocks in that tale.
I remember specially a man's legs which fell down the chimney
by themselves and walked about the room, until they were rejoined
by the severed head and body which fell down the chimney after them.
That is very good. But the point of the story and the point
of the reader's feelings is not that these things are frightening,
but the far more striking fact that the hero was not frightened at them.
The most fearful of all these fearful wonders was his own absence
of fear. He slapped the bogies on the back and asked the devils
to drink wine with him; many a time in my youth, when stifled with some
modern morbidity, I have prayed for a double portion of his spirit.
If you have not read the end of his story, go and read it;
it is the wisest thing in the world. The hero was at last taught
to shudder by taking a wife, who threw a pail of cold water over him.
In that one sentence there is more of the real meaning of marriage
than in all the books about sex that cover Europe and America.

. . . . .

At the four corners of a child's bed stand Perseus and Roland, Sigurd and
St. George. If you withdraw the guard of heroes you are not making
him rational; you are only leaving him to fight the devils alone.
For the devils, alas, we have always believed in. The hopeful element in
the universe has in modern times continually been denied and reasserted;
but the hopeless element has never for a moment been denied.
As I told "H. N. B." (whom I pause to wish a Happy Christmas in its
most superstitious sense), the one thing modern people really do
believe in is damnation. The greatest of purely modern poets summed
up the really modern attitude in that fine Agnostic line--

"There may be Heaven; there must be Hell."

The gloomy view of the universe has been a continuous tradition;
and the new types of spiritual investigation or conjecture all begin
by being gloomy. A little while ago men believed in no spirits.
Now they are beginning rather slowly to believe in rather slow spirits.

. . . . .