🥀 It is for fear of the grown-ups, or at least out of respect towards them, that a chapter must be given to fairies. If the children do not care very much for fairies, they must be made to care. “Who is to care if they do not? Who is to be properly childlike if they are not?” It was, accordingly, an illustrious grown-up who wrote (I am quoting Francis Thompson) “Know you what it is to be a child?” Well, we all should know, and we are generally anxious to teach one another. The poet answers for us most eloquently, “It is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses ... for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul....” And previously he had written, “It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism.” Were elves really of any importance to him? We must take his word for it, even though we may make a slight reservation because we know that even a great poet has some regard to what is expected. But another great poet, who never paid any attention to what is expected from him, has told us, out of his very own experience, not what childhood, but what one childhood, was. To Coventry Patmore it was a time rather of divination than of credulity. His “sweet childhood,” he names it; but it was a time of secrets, of thoughts wholly unsuggested by story-books, unprompted by authors, parents, uncles, godmothers, or imaginative adult persons of any kind of officiousness. It is certain that he did not think elves to be whispering in his ear. But he contemplated a pebble in the gravel of a garden path and conceived the thought that but for unrelaxing pressure it would explode into dust. Another real child—but not a wonderful child like Coventry Patmore—walking on grassy garden paths, was a little troubled to think how many living creatures she might be crushing; and how short their lives were, anyway. But, she thought, as the size and space differed between very large beings (herself, for example) and very small, so might time; and a minute of her life might be a full year of successions of feelings and happenings to the ant. Six years old could not put her speculation into appropriate words (a task which might tax sixty years old), but the thought was very definite to her. One of the privileges of a child is that he is very near the earth; he knows moss and the scudding creatures near it. When Oliver Wendell Holmes found the scent of a little box hedge to be suggestive of eternity, it was no doubt merely suggestive of time—the incalculable remote time of childhood, which stands very fairly for eternity—because he had smelt it when he was on the level of its fresh leaves. So Patmore, a little child on a garden path, found matter for close thought. Truth interested him, and fiction did not. In later years he gave himself to the truth of science, and finally to the truth of poetry. Truth was to him more splendid and more mysterious than any tale.

🥀 It may well be doubted whether children are generally credulous. It may even be doubted whether Francis Thompson believed in his own elves and their whispers—whether he cared for possible coaches and horses as much as for real pumpkins and mice. It may be that those elves of his were, in his wonderful boyhood, nothing other than symbols, believed in with interpretation.

🥀 For children do not believe in fairies a jot. I have just asked my youngest daughter whether she believed in them, and she said “Of course not—only I liked the stories.” Fiction to children is fiction and not fact. They are artists enough for that. And it is strange indeed that many elders have so forgotten childhood as to imagine that they believed in fairies, if they honestly do imagine it. What dull years have so blurred their past that they are willing to rehearse the sham memories of others? A belief in fairies is no child’s play. Children have nothing to do with it except as in some countries they tremble behind their trembling fathers. It pleased Ruskin—and for once I marvel at his pleasure—to think of fairies believed to be so disorderly in the woods at the back of Joan of Arc’s country that a church service was held in the forest depths once a year, and even then they were not quelled. I think this is the only false passage of Ruskin—I know no other. A belief in fairies is a terrible and an adult thing, a horrible heresy, and nothing for a tourist’s smiles. It was the cause that a woman, in remoter Ireland, believed to be not herself but a changeling left in her likeness and in her place by fairies, was burnt by the father, husband, and sons who loved the “lost” one—not many years ago. This is not child’s play; it is faith. We indeed are child’s-playing with serious things and with serious words when we ask our children to say they believe in fairies. Not that our request will ever make them believe; they are honest people. But in this appeal we tamper with the word “believe,” and palter with its sense. The pretty game of calling on the children of the audience of _Peter Pan_ to declare their faith in fairies seemed to me disastrous—a game of men and women at the expense of children, a cumbersome frolic at best and an artificial, a tyrannous use of the adult sense of sentimental humour against the helpless. I could with better conscience use my superior physical strength upon them than exploit them for love of my own condescension. (And yet Sir J. Barrie has written the most adorable “pretending” story ever written about a child.)

🥀 No, children love a fairy story not because they think it true, but because they think it untrue, and because it makes no fraudulent appeal to their excellent good sense. That sense they are delighted to put aside while they “pretend.” That is their own word. Every child uses it, and every child knows what he means by it. “Let’s pretend,” not “Let’s believe.” Their mother does not put “Let’s pretend” into the child’s mouth; she finds it there. Without it there is no play. But the pretending is always drama and never deception or self-deception. Nay, the more obvious the drama the better the child likes it, especially when he is quite young and simple. I have always found the favourite game of hide-and-seek to be that in which there is no mystery about the hiding-place. The child loves best to know the cupboard in which his mother is crouching; if he fairly sees her into it so much the better. Then does he pretend to seek her, pretend to find her; then does she pretend to amaze him with a rush; then does he pretend to be overcome with the surprise of it. This game never tires. Do not tell me that this splendid little actor is a “realist.” Even if you come to more elaborate drama—his pirates’ lair behind the sofa, his Indians in the shrubbery, if he deceived himself the whole play would immediately go out. You may indeed see a nervous child deceived, and frightened, by a mechanical toy. The mechanical toy is a silly blunder of the grown-up. The child sees in it some ambiguous life, where life ought not to be, and cries. There is no more fun in this than in the Irish peasant’s flames. In both cases there is no fair pretending but faith perverted.