AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

the defensive. I shall have more to say of this aspect of the matter later on; the
point is for the moment that an art school can be a very idle place and that I
was then a very idle person.
Art may be long but schools of art are short and very fleeting, and there
have been five or six since I attended an art school. Mine was the time of
Impressionism; and nobody dared to dream there could be such a thing as
Post-Impressionism or Post-Post-Impressionism. The very latest thing was to
keep abreast of Whistler and take him by the white forelock, as if he were
Time himself. Since then that conspicuous white forelock has rather faded into
a harmony of white and grey and what was once so young has in its turn
grown hoary. But I think there was a spiritual significance in Impressionism,
in connection with this age as the age of scepticism. I mean that it illustrated
scepticism in the sense of subjectivism. Its principal was that if all that could
be seen of a cow was a white line and a purple shadow, we should only render
the line and the shadow; in a sense we should only believe in the line and the
shadow, rather than in the cow. In one sense the Impressionist sceptic
contradicted the poet who said he had never seen a purple cow. He tended
rather to say that he had only seen a purple cow; or rather that he had not seen
the cow but only the purple. Whatever may be the merits of this method of art,
there is obviously something highly subjective and sceptical about it as a
method of thought. It naturally lends itself to the metaphysical suggestion that
things only exist as we perceive them, or that things do not exist at all. The
philosophy of Impressionism is necessarily close to the philosophy of Illusion.
And this atmosphere also tended to contribute, however indirectly, to a certain
mood of unreality and sterile isolation that settled at this time upon me; and I
think upon many others.
What surprises me in looking back on youth, and even on boyhood, is the
extreme rapidity with which it can think its way back to fundamental things;
and even to the denial of fundamental things. At a very early age I had thought
my way back to thought itself. It is a very dreadful thing to do; for it may lead
to thinking that there is nothing but thought. At this time I did not very clearly
distinguish between dreaming and waking; not only as a mood but as a
metaphysical doubt, I felt as if everything might be a dream. It was as if I had
myself projected the universe from within, with its trees and stars; and that is
so near to the notion of being God that it is manifestly even nearer to going
mad. Yet I was not mad, in any medical or physical sense; I was simply
carrying the scepticism of my time as far as it would go. And I soon found it
would go a great deal further than most of the sceptics went. While dull
atheists came and explained to me that there was nothing but matter, I listened
with a sort of calm horror of detachment, suspecting that there was nothing but
mind. I have always felt that there was something thin and third-rate about
materialists and materialism ever since. The atheist told me so pompously that