AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

whatever gods might be, not like Swinburne, because no life lived for ever, but
because any life lived at all; not, like Henley for my unconquerable soul (for I
have never been so optimistic about my own soul as all that) but for my own
soul and my own body, even if they could be conquered. This way of looking
at things, with a sort of mystical minimum of gratitude, was of course, to some
extent assisted by those few of the fashionable writers who were not
pessimists; especially by Walt Whitman, by Browning and by Stevenson;
Browning’s “God must be glad one loves his world so much”, or Stevenson’s
“belief in the ultimate decency of things”. But I do not think it is too much to
say that I took it in a way of my own; even if it was a way I could not see
clearly or make very clear. What I meant, whether or no I managed to say it,
was this; that no man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls
himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt
to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back
of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment
at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for
this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might
suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy. There were
other aspects of this feeling, and other arguments about it, to which I shall
have to return. Here it is only a necessary part of the narrative; as it involves
the fact that, when I did begin to write, I was full of a new and fiery resolution
to write against the Decadents and the Pessimists who ruled the culture of the
age.
Thus, among the juvenile verses I began to write about this time was one
called “The Babe Unborn”, which imagined the uncreated creature crying out
for existence and promising every virtue if he might only have the experience
of life. Another conceived the scoffer as begging God to give him eyes and
lips and a tongue that he might mock the giver of them; a more angry version
of the same fancy. And I think it was about this time that I thought of the
notion afterwards introduced into a tale called Manalive; of a benevolent being
who went about with a pistol, which he would suddenly point at a pessimist,
when that philosopher said that life was not worth living. This was not printed
until long afterwards; but the verses were collected into a little volume; and
my father was so imprudent as to help me to get them published under the title
of The Wild Knight. And this is an important part of the story, in so far as any
part of the story is important, because it did involve my introduction to
literature and even to literary men.
My little volume of verse was reviewed with warm and almost
overwhelming generosity by Mr. James Douglas, then almost entirely known
as a leading literary critic. Impetuosity as well as generosity was always one of
Mr. Douglas’s most attractive qualities. And he insisted, for some reason, on
affirming positively that there was no such person as G. K. Chesterton; that