On
that strange land he ran up his flag, only to make the further and more
astonishing discovery that it was the Christian faith at which he had
arrived. Nietzsche had preached to him, as to Mr. Bernard Shaw, his
great precept, "Follow your own will." But when Mr. Chesterton obeyed he
arrived, not at Superman, but at the ordinary old-fashioned morality.
That, he found, is what we like best in our deepest hearts, and desire
most. So he too "discovered England."
He begins, like Margaret Fuller, with the fundamental principle of
accepting the universe. The thing we know best and most directly is
human nature in all its breadth. It is indeed the one thing immediately
known and knowable. Like R.L. Stevenson, he perceives how tragically and
comically astonishing a phenomenon is man. "What a monstrous spectre is
this man," says Stevenson, "the disease of the agglutinated dust,
lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding,
growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair
like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing
to set children screaming;--and yet looked at nearlier, known as his
fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes!" In like manner Mr.
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