for a photograph either of Torquay or Limerick, I had gone out of my way to give the place a wild, fictitious name of my own, I think that in that case I should be justified in tearing my hair with rage if the people of Limerick or Torquay began to argue about bun-shops and green doors.  No reasonable man would expect Dickens to be so literal as all that even about Bath or Bury St. Edmunds, which do exist; far less need he be literal about Eatanswill, which didn’t exist.

I must confess, however, that I incline to the Sudbury side of the argument.  This does not only arise from the sympathy which all healthy people have for small places as against big ones; it arises from some really good qualities in this particular Sudbury publication.  First of all, the champions of Sudbury seem to be more open to the sensible and humorous view of the book than the champions of Ipswich—­at least, those that appear in this discussion.  Even the Sudbury champion, bent on finding realistic clothes, rebels (to his eternal honour) when Mr. Percy Fitzgerald tries to show that Bob Sawyer’s famous statement that he was neither Buff nor Blue, “but a sort of plaid,” must have been copied from some silly man at Ipswich who said that his politics were “half and half.”  Anybody might have made either of the two jokes.  But it was the whole glory and meaning of Dickens that he confined himself to making jokes that anybody might have made a little better than anybody would have made them.

FAIRY TALES

Some solemn and superficial people (for nearly all very superficial people are solemn) have declared that the fairy-tales are immoral; they base this upon some accidental circumstances or regrettable incidents in the war between giants and boys, some cases in which the latter indulged in unsympathetic deceptions or even in practical jokes.  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—­