absence of mind.  The aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things.  The thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees.  Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice.  Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing.  Men might go through fire to find a cowslip.  Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the blackbird.  They would not go through common Christian marriage by way of recompense to the cowslip.  Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals.  Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets.  But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets.  We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

Well, I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.  I left the nurse guardian of tradition and democracy, and I have not found any modern type so sanely radical or so sanely conservative.  But the matter for important comment was here, that when I first went out into the mental atmosphere of the modern world, I found that the modern world was positively opposed on two points to my nurse and to the nursery tales.  It has taken me a long time to find out that the modern world is wrong and my nurse was right.  The really curious thing was this:  that modern thought contradicted this basic creed of my boyhood on its two most essential doctrines.  I have explained that the fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness.  But I found the whole modern world running like a high tide against both my tendernesses; and the shock of that collision created two sudden and spontaneous sentiments, which I have had ever since and which, crude as they were, have since hardened into convictions.

First, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning.  The leaf on the tree is green because it could never have been anything else.  Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet.  He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it.  He is pleased that snow is white on the strictly reasonable ground that it might have been black.  Every colour has in it a bold quality as of choice; the red of garden roses is not only decisive but dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood.  He feels that something has been done.  But the great determinists of the nineteenth century were strongly against this native feeling that something had happened an instant before.  In fact, according to them, nothing ever really had happened since the beginning of the world.  Nothing ever had happened since existence had happened; and even about the date of that they were not very sure.