Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Page 8

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 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