mbination 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 cellar and a kind of fairy
godmother in a hidden room upstairs. This story had made "all the
ordinary staircases and doors and windows into magical things." It
was the awakening of the sense of wonder and joy in the ordinary
things always to be his. Still more important was the realization
represented by the goblins below stairs, that "When the evil things
besieging us do appear, they do not appear outside but inside." In
life as in this story there is

. . . a house that is our home, that is rightly loved as our home,
but of which we hardly know the best or the worst, and must always
wait for the one and watch against the other. . . . Since I first
read that story some five alternative philosophies of the universe
have come to our colleges out of Germany, blowing through the world
like the east wind. But for me that castle is still standing in the
mountains, its light is not put out.*

[* Introduction to _George Macdonald and His Wife_.]

All this to Gilbert made the story the "most real, the most
realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life" of
any story he ever read--then or later! Another recurrent image in
books by the same author is that of a great white horse. And Gilbert
says, "To this day I can never see a big white horse in the street
without a sudden sense of indescribable things."*

[* Ibid.]

Of his playmates, "one of my first memories," he writes in the
_Autobiography_, "is playing in the garden under the care of a girl
with ropes of golden hair; to whom my mother afterwards called out
from the house, 'You a