Tremendous Trifles
Once upon a time there were two little boys who lived
chiefly in the front garden, because their villa was
a model one. The front garden was about the same
size as the dinner table; it consisted of four strips
of gravel, a square of turf with some mysterious pieces
of cork standing up in the middle and one flower bed
with a row of red daisies. One morning while
they were at play in these romantic grounds, a passing
individual, probably the milkman, leaned over the
railing and engaged them in philosophical conversation.
The boys, whom we will call Paul and Peter, were at
least sharply interested in his remarks. For
the milkman (who was, I need say, a fairy) did his
duty in that state of life by offering them in the
regulation manner anything that they chose to ask for.
And Paul closed with the offer with a business-like
abruptness, explaining that he had long wished to
be a giant that he might stride across continents
and oceans and visit Niagara or the Himalayas in an
afternoon dinner stroll. The milkman producing
a wand from his breast pocket, waved it in a hurried
and perfunctory manner; and in an instant the model
villa with its front garden was like a tiny doll’s
house at Paul’s colossal feet. He went
striding away with his head above the clouds to visit
Niagara and the Himalayas. But when he came to
the Himalayas, he found they were quite small and
silly-looking, like the little cork rockery in the
garden; and when he found Niagara it was no bigger
than the tap turned on in the bathroom. He wandered
round the world for several minutes trying to find
something really large and finding everything small,
till in sheer boredom he lay down on four or five
prairies and fell asleep. Unfortunately his head
was just outside the hut of an intellectual backwoodsman
who came out of it at that moment with an axe in one
hand and a book of Neo-Catholic Philosophy in the
other. The man looked at the book and then at
the giant, and then at the book again. And in
the book it said, “It can be maintained that
the evil of pride consists in being out of proportion
to the universe.” So the backwoodsman put
down his book, took his axe and, working eight hours
a day for about a week, cut the giant’s head
off; and there was an end of him.
Such is the severe yet salutary history of Paul.
But Peter, oddly enough, made exactly the opposite
request; he said he had long wished to be a pigmy
about half an inch high; and of course he immediately
became one. When the transformation was over
he found himself in the midst of an immense plain,
covered with a tall green jungle and above which,
at intervals, rose strange trees each with a head
like the sun in symbolic pictures, with gigantic rays
of silver and a huge heart of gold. Toward the
middle of this prairie stood up a mountain of such
romantic and impossible shape, yet of such stony height
and dominance, that it looked like some incident of
the end of the world. And far away on the faint
horizon he could see the line of another forest, taller
and yet more mystical, of a terrible crimson colour,
like a forest on fire for ever. He set out on
his adventures across that coloured plain; and he has
not come to the end of it yet.
