It is a dreadful thing to say that Mr. W.B. Yeats does not understand
fairyland. But I do say it. He is an ironical Irishman, full of
intellectual reactions. He is not stupid enough to understand
fairyland. Fairies prefer people of the yokel type like myself; people
who gape and grin and do as they are told. Mr. Yeats reads into elfland
all the righteous insurrection of his own race. But the lawlessness of
Ireland is a Christian lawlessness, founded on reason and justice. The
Fenian is rebelling against something he understands only too well; but
the true citizen of fairyland is obeying something that he does not
understand at all. In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests
upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly
out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love
flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited. An apple
is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.

This is the tone of fairy tales, and it is certainly not lawlessness or
even liberty, though men under a mean modern tyranny may think it
liberty by comparison. People out of Portland Gaol might think Fleet
Street free; but closer study will prove that both fairies and
journalists are the slaves of duty. Fairy godmothers seem at least as
strict as other godmothers. Cinderella received a coach out of
Wonderland and a coachman out of nowhere, but she received a
command--which might have come out of Brixton--that she should be back
by twelve. Also, she had a glass slipper; and it cannot be a coincidence
that glass is so common a substance in folk-lore. This princess lives in
a glass castle, that princess on a glass hill; this one sees all things
in a mirror; they may all live in glass houses if they will not throw
stones. For this thin glitter of glass everywhere is the expression of
the fact that the happiness is bright but brittle, like the substance