ontroversy by paralyzing its opponent first, and then
proceeding to lay the eggs from which future fitness will proceed in the
unresisting but still living body. Chesterton begins by paralyzing his
reader, by savagely attacking all the beliefs which the latter, if he be
a modern and a sceptic, probably regards as first principles. Tolerance
is dismissed, as we have just seen, as a mere excuse for not caring.
Reason, that awful French goddess, is shown to be another apology.
Nietzsche and various other authors to whom some of us have bent the
knee are slaughtered without misery. Then Chesterton proceeds to the
argument, the reader being by this time receptive enough to swallow a
camel, on the sole condition that G.K.C. has previously slightly
treacled the animal.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to assert that at this point
Chesterton pretends to begin his argument. As a matter of strict fact he
only describes his adventures in Fairyland, which is all the earth. He
tells us of his profound astonishment at the consistent recurrence of
apples on apple trees, and at the general jolliness of the earth. He
describes, very beautifully, some of the sensations of childhood making
the all-embracing discovery that things are what they seem, and the even
more joyful feeling of pretending that they are not, or that they will
cease to be at any moment. A young kitten will watch a large cushion,
which to it is a very considerable portion of the universe, flying at it
without indicating any very appreciable surprise. A child, in the same
way, would not be surprised if his house suddenly developed wings and
flew away. Chesterton cultivated this attitude of always expecting to be
surprised by the most natural things in the world, until it became an
obsession, and a part of his journalistic equipment. In a sense
Chesterton is the everlasting boy, the Undergraduate Who Would Not Grow
Up. There must be few normally imaginative town-bred children to whom
the pointed upright area-railings do not appear an unsearchable armoury
of spears or as walls of protective flames, temporarily frozen black so
that people should be able to enter and leave their house. Every child
knows that the old Norse story of a sleeping Brunnhilde encircled by
flames is true; to him or her, there is a Brunnhilde in every street,
and the child knows that there it always has a chance of being the
chosen Siegfried. But because this view of life is so much cosier than
th