What we all say happens every day is this: I wake up: dress myself, eat bacon and bread and coffee for breakfast: walk up to High St. Station, take a fourpenny ticket for Blackfriars, read the Chronicle in the train, arrive at 11, Paternoster Buildings: read a MS called "The Lepers" (light comedy reading) and another called "The Preparation of Ryerson Embury"—you know the style—till 2 o'clock. Go out to lunch, have—(but here perhaps it would be safer to become vague), come back, work till six, take my hat and walking-stick and come home: have dinner at home, write the Novel till 11, then write to you and go to bed. That is what, we in our dreamy, deluded way, really imagine is the thing that happens. What really happens (but hist! are we observed?) is as follows.
Out of the starless night of the Uncreated, that was before the stars, a soul begins to grope back to light. It gropes its way through strange, half-lighted chambers of Dreams, where in a brown and gold twilight, it sees many things that are dimly significant, true stories twisted into new and amazing shapes, human beings whom it knew long ago, sitting at the windows by dark sunsets, or talking in dim meadows. But the awful invading Light grows stronger in the dreams, till the soul in one last struggle, plunges into a body, as into a house and wakes up within it. Then he rises and finds himself in a wonderful vast world of white light and clear, frankly coloured shapes, an inheritor of a million stars. On enquiry he is informed that his name is Gilbert Keith Chesterton. This amuses him.
He goes through a number of extraordinary and fantastic rituals; which the pompous elfland he has entered demands. The first is that he shall get inside a house of clothing, a tower of wool and flax; that he shall put on this foolish armour solemnly, one piece after another and each in its right place. The things called sleevelinks he attends to minutely. His hair he beats angrily with a bristly tool. For this is the Law. Downstairs a more monstrous ceremony attends him.
He has to put things inside himself. He does so, being naturally polite. Nor can it be denied that a weird satisfaction follows. He takes a sword in his hand (for what may not befall him in so strange a country!) and goes forth: he finds a hole in the wall, a little cave wherein sits One who can give him the charm that rules the horse of water and fire. He finds an opening and descends into the bowels of the earth. Down, among the roots of the Eternal hills, he finds a sunless temple wherein he prays. And in the centre of it he finds a lighted temple in which he enters. Then there are noises as of an earthquake and smoke and fire in the darkness: and when he opens the door again he is in another temple, out of which he climbs into another world, leagues and leagues away. And when he asks the meaning of the vision, they talk gibberish and say, "It is a train."
So the day goes, full of eerie publishers and elfin clerks, till he returns and again puts things inside him, and then sits down and makes men in his own head and writes down all that they said and did. And last of all comes the real life itself. For half-an-hour he writes words upon a scrap of paper, words that are not picked and chosen like those that he has used to parry the strange talk of the folk all day, but words in which the soul's blood pours out, like the body's blood from a wound. He writes secretly this mad diary, all his passion and longing, all his queer religion, his dark and dreadful gratitude to God, his idle allegories, the tales that tell themselves in his head; the joy that comes on him sometimes (he cannot help it!) at the sacred intoxication of existence: the million faults of idleness and recklessness and the one virtue of the unconquered adoration of goodness, that dark virtue that every man has, and hides deeper than all his vices—he writes all this down as he is writing it now. And he knows that if he sticks it down and puts a stamp on it and drops it into the mouth of a little red goblin at the corner of the street—he knows that all this wild soliloquy will be poured into the soul of one wise and beautiful lady sitting far away beyond seas and rivers and cities, under the shadow of an alien Cathedral. . . . This is not all so irrelevant as you may think. It was this line of feeling that taught me, an utter Rationalist as far as dogma goes, the lesson of the entire Spirituality of things—an opinion that nothing has ever shattered since. I can't express myself on the point, nobody can. But it is only the spirituality of things that we are sure of. That the eyes in your face are eyes I do not know: they may have other names and uses. I know that they are good or beautiful, or rather spiritual. I do not know on what principle the Universe is run, I know or feel that it is good or spiritual. I do not know what Gertrude's death was—I know that it was beautiful, for I saw it. We do not feel that it is so beautiful now—why? Because we do not see it now. What we see now is her absence: but her Death is not her absence, but her Presence somewhere else. That is what we knew was beautiful, as long as we could see it. Do not be frightened, dearest, by the slow inevitable laws of human nature, we shall climb back into the mountain of vision: we shall be able to use the word, with the accent of Whitman. "Disembodied, triumphant, dead."
In the Notebook he was writing:
There is a heart within a distant town
Who loves me more than treasure or renown
Think you it strange and wear it as a crown.
Is not the marvel here; that since the kiss
And dizzy glories of that blinding bliss
One grief has ever touched me after this.
We see Gilbert in the next two letters more concerned about a grand dinner of the J.D.C. than about his future fame and fortune. In the second he mentions almost casually that he is leaving Fisher Unwin. From now on he was to live by his pen.
11 Warwick Gardens, W. Tuesday Night. 3rd Oct. 1899.