AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

printing press. It seems, to my simple mind, to depend a good deal on what
comes out of it.
But among these literary figures, there was one figure whom I shall put last
because I ought to put it first. It was the figure of a contemporary and
companion of all that world of culture; a close friend of Meredith; an artist
admired as artistic by the aesthetes and even by the decadents. But Alice
Meynell, though she preferred to be aesthetic rather than anaesthetic, was no
aesthete; and there was nothing about her that can decay. The thrust of life in
her was like that of a slender tree with flowers and fruit for all seasons; and
there was no drying up of the sap of her spirit, which was in ideas. She could
always find things to think about; even on a sick bed in a darkened room,
where the shadow of a bird on the blind was more than the bird itself, she said,
because it was a message from the sun. Since she was so emphatically a
craftsman, she was emphatically an artist and not an aesthete; above all, she
was like that famous artist who said that he always mixed his paints with
brains. But there was something else about her which I did not understand at
the time, which set her apart as something separate from the time. She was
strong with deep roots where all the Stoics were only stiff with despair; she
was alive to an immortal beauty where all the Pagans could only mix beauty
with mortality. And though she passed through my own life fitfully, and far
more rarely than I could wish, and though her presence had indeed something
of the ghostly gravity of a shadow and her passing something of the fugitive
accident of a bird, I know now that she was not fugitive and she was not
shadowy. She was a message from the Sun.
14.—PORTRAIT OF A FRIEND
Apart from vanity or mock modesty (which healthy people always use as
jokes) my real judgment of my own work is that I have spoilt a number of
jolly good ideas in my time. There is a reason for this; and it is really rather a
piece of autobiography than of literary criticism. I think The Napoleon of
Notting Hill was a book very well worth writing; but I am not sure that it was
ever written. I think that a harlequinade like The Flying Inn was an extremely
promising subject, but I very strongly doubt whether I kept the promise. I am
almost tempted to say that it is still a very promising subject--for somebody
else. I think the story called The Ball and the Cross had quite a good plot,
about two men perpetually prevented by the police from fighting a duel about
the collision of blasphemy and worship, or what all respectable people would
call, “a mere difference about religion.” I believe that the suggestion that the
modern world is organised in relation to the most obvious and urgent of all