Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Page 8

May 29, 1874 at a
house in Sheffield Terrace, Campden Hill, just below the great tower of
the Waterworks which so much impressed his childish imagination.
Lower down the hill was the Anglican Church of St. George, and here
he was baptised. When he was about five, the family moved to
Warwick Gardens. As old-fashioned London houses go, 11 Warwick
Gardens is small. On the ground floor, a back and front room were for
the Chestertons drawing-room and dining-room with a folding door
between, the only other sitting-room being a small study built out over
the garden. A long, narrow, green strip, which must have been a good
deal longer before a row of garages was built at the back, was Gilbert's
playground. His bedroom was a long room at the top of a not very high
house. For what is in most London houses the drawing-room floor is in
this house filled by two bedrooms and there is only one Poor above it.
Cecil was five years younger than Gilbert, who welcomed his birth
with the remark, "Now I shall always have an audience," a prophecy
remembered by all parties because it proved so singularly false. As
soon as Cecil could speak, he began to argue and the brothers'
intercourse thenceforward consisted of unending discussion. They
always argued, they never quarrelled.
There was also a little sister Beatrice who died when Gilbert was very
young, so young that he remembered a fall she had from a
rocking-horse more clearly than he remembered her death, and in his
memory linked with the fall the sense of loss and sorrow that came
with the death.

It would be impossible to tell the story of his childhood one half so well
as he has told it himself. It is the best part of his Autobiography. Indeed,
it is one of the best childhoods in literature. For Gilbert Chesterton
most perfectly remembered the exact truth, not only about what
happened to a child, but about how a child thought and felt. What is
more, he sees childhood not as an isolated fragment or an excursion
into fairyland, but as his "real life; the real beginnings of what should
have been a more real life; a lost experience in the land of the living."
I was subconsciously certain then, as I am consciously certain now, that
there was the white and solid road and the worthy beginning of the life
of man; and that it is man who afterwards darkens it with dreams or
goes astray from it in self-deception. It is only the grown man who
lives a life of make-believe and pretending; and it is he who has his
head in a cloud.*
[* Autobiography, p. 49.]
Here are the beginnings of the man's philosophy in the life and
experience of the child. He was living in a world of reality, and that
reality was beautiful, in the clear light of "an eternal morning," which
"had a sort of wonder in it, as if the world were as new as myself." A
child in this world, like God in the moment of creation, looks upon it
and sees that it is very good. It was not that he was never unhappy as a
child, and he had his share of bodily pain. "I had a fair amount of
toothache and especially earache." But the child has his own
philosophy and makes his own proportion, and unhappiness and pain
"are of a different texture or held on a different tenure."
What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a
wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous
world. What gives me this shock is almost anything I really recall; not
the things I should think most worth recalling. This is where it differs
from the other great thrill of the past, all that is connected with first
love and the romantic passion; for that, though equally poignant, comes
always to a point; and is narrow like a rapier piercing the heart,
whereas the other was more like a hundred windows opened on all
sides of the head.*

[* Autobiography, pp. 31-32.]
These windows opening on all sides so much more swiftly for the
genius than for the rest of us, led to a result often to be noted in the
childhood of exceptional men: a combination of backwardness and
precocity. Gilbert Chesterton was in some ways a very backward child.
He did not talk much before three. He learnt to read only at eight.
He loved fairy tales; as a child he read them or had them read aloud to
him: as a big boy he wrote and illustrated a good many, some of which
are printed in The Coloured Lands. I have found several fragments