ricatures, lists
of titles for short stories and chapters, unfinished short stories.
Several completed fairy stories and some of the best drawings were
published in _The Coloured Lands_. Others are hints later used in his
own novels: there is a fragment of _The Ball and the Cross_, a first
suggestion for _The Man Who Was Thursday_, a rather more developed
adumbration of _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_. This I think is later
than most of the notebooks; but, after the change in handwriting,
apparently deliberately and carefully made by Gilbert around the date
at which he left St. Paul's for the Slade School, it is almost
impossible to establish a date at all exactly for any one of these
notebooks. Notes made later when he had formed the habit of dictation
became difficult to read, not through bad handwriting, but because
words are abbreviated and letters omitted.

Some of the exercise books appear to have been begun, thrown aside
and used again later. There is among them one only of real
biographical importance, a book deliberately used for the development
of a philosophy of life, dated in two places, to which I devote a
chapter and which I refer to as _the_ Notebook. This book is as
important in studying Chesterton as the Pensees would be for a
student of Pascal. He is here already a master of phrase in a sense
which makes a comparison with Pascal especially apt. For he often
packs so much meaning into a brilliant sentence or two that I have
felt it worth while, in dealing especially with some of the less
remembered books, to pull out a few of these sentences for quotation
apart from their context.

Other important material was to be found in _G.K.'s Weekly_, in
articles in other periodicals, and in unpublished letters. With some
of the correspondences I have made considerable use of both sides,
and if anyone pedantically objects that that is unusual in a
biography I will adapt a phrase of Bernard Shaw's which you will find
in this book, and say, "Hang it all, be reasonable! If you had the
choice between reading me and reading Wells and Shaw, wouldn't you
choose Wells and Shaw."

GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON

CHAPTER I

Background for Gilbert Keith Chesterton

IT IS USUAL to open a biography with some account of the subject's
ancestry. Chesterton, in his _Browning_, after some excellent foolery
about pedigree-hunting, makes the suggestion that middle-class
ancestry is far more varied and interesting than