Woe unto him that is smart, for men will hold him smart always,
even when he is serious.*
[* Ibid.]
A pessimist is a man who has never lived, never suffered: "Show me a person who has plenty of worries and troubles and I will show you a person who, whatever he is, is not a pessimist."
This idea G.K. developed later in the Dickens, dealing with the alleged over-optimism of Dickens—Dickens who if he had learnt to whitewash the universe had learnt it in a blacking factory, Dickens who had learnt through hardship and suffering to accept and love the universe. But that he wrote later. The quotations given here come from the Notebook begun in 1894 and used at intervals for the next four or five years, in which Gilbert wrote down his philosophy step by step as he came to discover it. The handwriting is the work of art that he must have learnt and practised, so different is it from his boyhood's scrawl. Each idea is set down as it comes into his mind. There is no sequence. In this book and in The Coloured Lands may be seen the creation of the Chesterton view of life—and it all took place in his early twenties. From the seed-thoughts here, Orthodoxy and the rest were to grow—here they are only seeds but seeds containing unmistakably the flower of the future:
They should not hear from me a word
Of selfishness or scorn
If only I could find the door
If only I were born.
He makes the Unborn Babe say this in his first volume of poems. And in the Notebook we see how the babe coming into the world must keep this promise by accepting life with its puzzles, its beauty, its fleetingness: "Are we all dust? What a beautiful thing dust is though." "This round earth may be a soap-bubble, but it must be admitted that there are some pretty colours on it." "What is the good of life, it is fleeting; what is the good of a cup of coffee, it is fleeting. Ha Ha Ha."
The birthday present of birth, as he was later to call it in Orthodoxy, involved not bare existence only but a wealth of other gifts. "A grievance," he heads this thought:
Give me a little time,
I shall not be able to appreciate them all;
If you open so many doors
And give me so many presents, O Lord God.
He is almost overwhelmed with all that he has and with all that is, but accepts it ardently in its completeness.
If the arms of a man could be a fiery circle embracing the round
world, I think I should be that man.