unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally learnt it
from a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess
at once of democracy and tradition. The things I believed most then,
the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales.
They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are
not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic.
Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal,
though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong.
Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense.
It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth;
so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland,
but elfland that criticised the earth. I knew the magic beanstalk
before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I
was certain of the moon. This was at one with all popular tradition.
Modern minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush or the brook;
but the singers of the old epics and fables were supernaturalists,
and talked about the gods of brook and bush. That is what the moderns
mean when they say that the ancients did not "appreciate Nature,"
because they said that Nature was divine. Old nurses do not
tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that dance
on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for
the dryads.

But I deal here with what ethic and philosophy come from being
fed on fairy tales. If I were describing them in detail I could
note many noble and healthy principles that arise from them.
There is the chivalrous lesson of "Jack the Giant Killer"; that giants
should be killed because they are gigantic. It is a manly mutiny
against pride as such. For the rebel is older than all the kingdoms,
and the Jacobin has more tradition than the Jacobite. There is the