rt did mature very late. He was now passing
through the stage described by Keats: "The imagination of a boy is
healthy and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is
a space of life between"--a period unhealthy or at least ill-focussed.

Intellectually Gilbert suffered at this time from an extreme
scepticism. As he expressed it he "felt as if everything might be a
dream" as if he had "projected the universe from within." The
agnostic doubts the existence of God. Gilbert at moments doubted the
existence of the agnostic.

Morally his temptations seem to have been in some strange psychic
region rather than merely physical. The whole period is best
summarised in a passage from the _Autobiography_, for looking back
after forty years Gilbert still saw it as deeply and darkly
significant: as both a mental and moral extreme of danger.

There is something truly menacing in the thought of how quickly I
could imagine the maddest, when I had never committed the mildest
crime . . . there was a time when I had reached that condition of
moral anarchy within, in which a man says, in the words of Wilde,
that "Atys with the blood-stained knife were better than the thing I
am." I have never indeed felt the faintest temptation to the
particular madness of Wilde, but I could at this time imagine the
worst and wildest disproportions and distortions of more normal
passion; the point is that the whole mood was overpowered and
oppressed with a sort of congestion of imagination. As Bunyan, in his
morbid period, described himself as prompted to utter blasphemies, I
had an overpowering impulse to record or draw horrible ideas and
images; lunging deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide.*

[* Pp. 88-9.]

Two of his intimate friends, finding at this time a notebook full of
these horrible drawings, asked one another, "Is Chesterton going mad?"

He dabbled too in spiritualism until he realised that he had reached
the verge of forbidden and dangerous ground:

I would not altogether rule out the suggestion of some that we were
playing with fire; or even with hell-fire. In the words that were
written for us there was nothing ostensibly degrading, but any amount
that was deceiving. I saw quite enough of the thing to be able to
testify with complete certainty, that something happens which is not
in the ordinary sense natural, or produced by the normal and
conscious h