The Giant - Page 2

one wild impulse to climb up the front of the hotel
and fall in at one of the windows), and I tried to think,
as all decent people are thinking, what one can really do.
And all the time that oppressive wall went up in front of me,
and took hold upon the heavens like a house of the gods.

. . . . .

It is remarkable that in so many great wars it has been
the defeated who have won. The people who were left
worst at the end of the war were generally the people
who were left best at the end of the whole business.
For instance, the Crusades ended in the defeat of the Christians.
But they did not end in the decline of the Christians;
they ended in the decline of the Saracens. That huge prophetic wave
of Moslem power which had hung in the very heavens above the towns
of Christendom, that wave was broken, and never came on again.
The Crusaders had saved Paris in the act of losing Jerusalem.
The same applies to that epic of Republican war in the eighteenth
century to which we Liberals owe our political creed.
The French Revolution ended in defeat: the kings came back
across a carpet of dead at Waterloo. The Revolution had
lost its last battle; but it had gained its first object.
It had cut a chasm. The world has never been the same since.
No one after that has ever been able to treat the poor merely
as a pavement.

These jewels of God, the poor, are still treated as mere
stones of the street; but as stones that may sometimes fly.
If it please God, you and I may see some of the stones
flying again before we see death. But here I only remark
the interesting fact that the conquered almost always conquer.
Sparta killed Athens with a final blow, and she was born again.
Sparta went away victorious, and died slowly of her own wounds.
The Boers lost the South African War and gained South Africa.

And this is really all that we can do when we fight something really
stronger than ourselves; we can deal it its death-wound one moment;
it deals us death in the end. It is something if we can shock
and jar the unthinking impetus and enormous innocence of evil;
just as a pebble on a railway can stagger the Scotch express.
It is enough for the great martyrs and criminals of the French revolution,
that they have surprised for all time the secret weakness of the strong.
They have awakened and set leaping and quivering in his crypt for ever
the coward in the hearts of kings.

. . . . .

When Jack the Giant-Killer really first saw the giant his
experience was not such as has been generally supposed.
If you care to hear it I will tell you the real story of Jack
the Giant-Killer. To begin with, the most awful thing which Jack
first felt about the giant was that he was not a giant.