In other words, the ideals, the ultimate convictions, are the trustworthy things; the actual experience of life is often matter not for distrust only but for scorn and contempt.  And this philosophy Mr. Chesterton learned in the nursery, from that “solemn and star-appointed priestess,” his nurse.  The fairy tale, and not the problem-novel, is the true presentment of human nature and of life.  For, in the first place it preserves in man the faculty most essential to human nature—­the faculty of wonder, without which no man can live.  To regain that faculty is to be born again, out of a false world into a true.  The constant repetition of the laws of Nature blunts our spirits to the amazing character of every detail which she reproduces.  To catch again the wonder of common things—­

                          “the hour
     Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower”

—­is to pass from darkness into light, from falsehood to truth.  “All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption:  a false assumption.  It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead:  a piece of clockwork.”  But that is mere blindness to the mystery and surprise of everything that goes to make up actual human experience.  “The repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again.  The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent on being understood.  The sun would make me see him if he rose a thousand times.”

That is one fact, which fairy tales emphasise—­the constant demand for wonder in the world, and the appropriateness and rightness of the wondering attitude of mind, as man passes through his lifelong gallery of celestial visions.  The second fact is that all such vision is conditional, and “hangs upon a veto.  All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld.  All the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing which is forbidden.”  This is the very note of fairyland.  “You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word ‘cow’; or you may live happily with the King’s daughter, if you do not show her an onion.”  The conditions may seem arbitrary, but that is not the point.  The point is that there always are conditions.  The parallel with human life is obvious.  Many people in the modern world are eagerly bent on having the reward without fulfilling the condition, but life is not made that way.  The whole problem of marriage is a case in point.  Its conditions are rigorous, and people on all sides are trying to relax them or to do away with them.  Similarly, all along the line, modern society is seeking to live in a freedom which is in the nature of things incompatible with the enjoyment or the prosperity of the human spirit.  There is an if in everything.  Life is like that, and we cannot alter it.  Quarrel with the seemingly arbitrary or unreasonable condition, and the whole fairy palace vanishes.  “Life itself is as bright as the diamond, but as brittle as the window-pane.”