Tremendous Trifles | Page 2

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.
Such is the story of Peter and Paul, which contains all the highest
qualities of a modern fairy tale, including that of being wholly unfit for
children; and indeed the motive with which I have introduced it is not
childish, but rather full of subtlety and reaction. It is in fact the almost
desperate motive of excusing or palliating the pages that follow. Peter
and Paul are the two primary influences upon European literature
to-day; and I may be permitted to put my own preference in its most

favourable shape, even if I can only do it by what little girls call telling
a story.
I need scarcely say that I am the pigmy. The only excuse for the scraps
that follow is that they show what can be achieved with a commonplace
existence and the sacred spectacles of exaggeration. The other great
literary theory, that which is roughly represented in England by Mr.
Rudyard Kipling, is that we moderns are to regain the primal zest by
sprawling all over the world growing used to travel and geographical
variety, being at home everywhere, that is being at home nowhere. Let
it be granted that a man in a frock coat is a heartrending sight; and the
two alternative methods still remain. Mr. Kipling's school advises us to
go to Central Africa in order to find a man without a frock coat. The
school to which I belong suggests that we should stare steadily at the
man until we see the man inside the frock coat. If we stare at him long
enough he may even be moved to take off his coat to us; and that is a
far greater compliment than his taking off his hat. In other words, we