AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

that it would require a very large bribe indeed to induce him to be good. It
therefore seems to the modern philosopher what it would seem to the modern
politician to say, “I will give you fifty thousand pounds when you have, on
some one definite and demonstrated occasion, kept your word.” The solid
price seems something quite distinct from the rare and reluctant labour. But it
does not seem like that to the child. It would not seem like that to the child, if
the Fairy Queen said to the Prince, “You will receive the golden apple from
the magic tree when you have fought the dragon.” For the child is not a
Manichee. He does not think that good things are in their nature separate from
being good. In other words, he does not, like the reluctant realist, regard
goodness as a bad thing. To him the goodness and the gift and the golden
apple, that is called an orange, are all parts of one substantial paradise and
naturally go together. In other words, he regards himself as normally on
amiable terms with the natural authorities; not normally as quarrelling or
bargaining with them. He has the ordinary selfish obstacles and
misunderstandings; but he does not, in his heart, regard it as odd that his
parents should be good to him, to the extent of an orange, or that he should be
good to them, to the extent of some elementary experiments in good
behaviour. He has no sense of being corrupted. It is only we, who have eaten
the forbidden apple (or orange) who think of pleasure as a bribe.
My main purpose here, however, is to say this. To me my whole childhood
has a certain quality, which may be indescribable but is not in the least vague.
It is rather more definite than the difference between pitch dark and daylight,
or between having a toothache and not having a toothache. For the sequel of
the story, it is necessary to attempt this first and hardest chapter of the story:
and I must try to state somehow what I mean by saying that my own childhood
was of quite a different kind, or quality, from the rest of my very undeservedly
pleasant and cheerful existence.
Of this positive quality the most general attribute was clearness. Here it is
that I differ, for instance, from Stevenson, whom I so warmly admire; and who
speaks of the child as moving with his head in a cloud. He talks of the child as
normally in a dazed daydream, in which he cannot distinguish fancy from fact.
Now children and adults are both fanciful at times; but that is not what, in my
mind and memory, distinguishes adults from children. Mine is a memory of a
sort of white light on everything, cutting things out very clearly, and rather
emphasising their solidity. The point is that the white light had a sort of
wonder in it, as if the world were as new as myself; but not that the world was
anything but a real world. I am much more disposed now to fancy that an
apple-tree in the moonlight is some sort of ghost or grey nymph; or to see the
furniture fantastically changing and crawling at twilight, as in some story of
Poe or Hawthorne. But when I was a child I had a sort of confident
astonishment in contemplating the apple-tree as an apple-tree. I was sure of it,