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 co