The objection,
however, is not only false, but very much the reverse of the facts. The
fairy-tales are at root not only moral in the sense of being innocent,
but moral in the sense of being didactic, moral in the sense of being
moralising. It is all very well to talk of the freedom of fairyland, but
there was precious little freedom in fairyland by the best official
accounts. Mr. W.B. Yeats and other sensitive modern souls, feeling that
modern life is about as black a slavery as ever oppressed mankind (they
are right enough there), have especially described elfland as a place of
utter ease and abandonment--a place where the soul can turn every way at
will like the wind. Science denounces the idea of a capricious God; but
Mr. Yeats's school suggests that in that world every one is a capricious
god. Mr. Yeats himself has said a hundred times in that sad and splendid
literary style which makes him the first of all poets now writing in
English (I will not say of all English poets, for Irishmen are familiar
with the practice of physical assault), he has, I say, called up a
hundred times the picture of the terrible freedom of the fairies, who
typify the ultimate anarchy of art--
"Where nobody grows old or weary or wise,
Where nobody grows old or godly or grave.
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