Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Page 9

in
praise of Hans Andersen written apparently in his schooldays. In the
chapter of Orthodoxy called "The Ethics of Elfland" he shows how the
truth about goodness and happiness came to him out of the old fairy
tales and made the first basis for his philosophy. And George
Macdonald's story The Princess and the Goblin made, he says, "a
difference to my whole existence, which helped me to see things in a
certain way from the start." It is the story of a house where goblins
were in the cellar and a kind of fairy godmother in a hidden room
upstairs. This story had made "all the ordinary staircases and doors and
windows into magical things." It was the awakening of the sense of
wonder and joy in the ordinary things always to be his. Still more
important was the realization represented by the goblins below stairs,
that "When the evil things besieging us do appear, they do not appear
outside but inside." In life as in this story there is
. . . a house that is our home, that is rightly loved as our home, but of
which we hardly know the best or the worst, and must always wait for
the one and watch against the other. . . . Since I first read that story
some five alternative philosophies of the universe have come to our
colleges out of Germany, blowing through the world like the east wind.
But for me that castle is still standing in the mountains, its light is not
put out.*
[* Introduction to George Macdonald and His Wife.]
All this to Gilbert made the story the "most real, the most realistic, in
the exact sense of the phrase the most like life" of any story he ever

read--then or later! Another recurrent image in books by the same
author is that of a great white horse. And Gilbert says, "To this day I
can never see a big white horse in the street without a sudden sense of
indescribable things."*
[* Ibid.]
Of his playmates, "one of my first memories," he writes in the
Autobiography, "is playing in the garden under the care of a girl with
ropes of golden hair; to whom my mother afterwards called out from
the house, 'You are an angel'; which I was disposed to accept without
metaphor. She is now living in Vancouver as Mrs. Robert Kidd."
Mrs. Kidd, then Annie Firmin, was the daughter of a girlhood friend of
Mrs. Chesterton's. She called her "Aunt Marie." She and her sister,
Gilbert says in the Autobiography, "had more to do with enlivening my
early years than most." She has a vivid memory of Sheffield Terrace
where all three Chesterton children were born and where the little sister,
Beatrice, whom they called Birdie, died. Gilbert, in those days, was
called Diddie, his father then and later was "Mr. Ed" to the family and
intimate friends. Soon after Birdie's death they moved to Warwick
Gardens. Mrs. Kidd writes:
. . . the little boys were never allowed to see a funeral. If one passed
down Warwick Gardens, they were hustled from the nursery window at
once. Possibly this was because Gilbert had such a fear of sickness or
accident. If Cecil gave the slightest sign of choking at dinner, Gilbert
would throw down his spoon or fork and rush from the room. I have
seen him do it so many times. Cecil was fond of animals. Gilbert wasn't.
Cecil had a cat that he named Faustine, because he wanted her to be
abandoned and wicked--but Faustine turned out to be a gentleman!
Gilbert's story-telling and verse-making began very early, but not, I
think, in great abundance; his drawing even earlier, and of this there is
a great deal. There is nothing very striking in the written fragments that
remain, but his drawings even at the age of five are full of vigour. The
faces and figures are always rudimentary human beings, sometimes a
good deal more, and they are taken through lengthy adventures drawn

on the backs of bits of wall paper, of insurance forms, in little books
sewn together, or sometimes on long strips glued end to end by his
father. These drawings can often be dated exactly, for Edward
Chesterton, who later kept collections of press-cuttings and
photographs of his son, had already begun to collect his drawings,
writing the date on the back of each. With the earlier ones he may, one
sometimes suspects, have helped a little, but it soon becomes easy to
distinguish between the two styles.
Edward Chesterton was the most perfect father that could have been
imagined to help in the opening of windows on every side. "My father
might have reminded people of Mr. Pickwick, except that he was
always bearded