G.K. Chesterton "Fairy Tales" (from All Things Considered)

In G.K. Chesterton's "Fairy Tales" essay, he writes:

I think the poets have made a mistake: because the world of the fairy-tales is a brighter and more varied world than ours, they have fancied it less moral; really it is brighter and more varied because it is more moral.  [...] But suppose a man were born in a modern prison, and grew accustomed to the deadly silence and the disgusting indifference; and suppose he were then suddenly turned loose upon the life and laughter of Fleet Street.  He would, of course, think that the literary men in Fleet Street were a free and happy race; yet how sadly, how ironically, is this the reverse of the case!  And so again these toiling serfs in Fleet Street, when they catch a glimpse of the fairies, think the fairies are utterly free.

(He attributes their "apparent gaiety and [...] delusive beauty," their seeming "lovely and lawless" nature, "too exquisite to descend to the ugliness of everyday duty," to a mere "illusion created by the sudden sweetness of their presence."  In his usual exuberant way, Chesterton goes on to suggest that fairy-tales, "so far from being lawless, go to the root of all law.")


But it's primarily the illustration he has used -- a man born in prison who is suddenly loosed upon Fleet Street -- that strikes me here.  Because it reminds me (just a little) of Tolkien's description of the function of Escape in "On Fairy-stories":

Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. Just so a Party-spokesman might have labelled departure from the misery of the Führer's or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery. In the same way these critics, to make confusion worse, and so to bring into contempt their opponents, stick their label of scorn not only on to Desertion, but on to real Escape, and what are often its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt. Not only do they confound the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter; but they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the “quisling” to the resistance of the patriot. To such thinking you have only to say “the land you loved is doomed” to excuse any treachery, indeed to glorify it.