There are few works in the English language the brilliancy of which is so sustained. _Orthodoxy_ is a rapid torrent of epigrammatically expressed arguments. Chesterton's method in writing it is that of the digger wasp. This intelligent creature carries on the survival of the fittest controversy by paralyzing its opponent first, and then proceeding to lay the eggs from which future fitness will proceed in the unresisting but still living body. Chesterton begins by paralyzing his reader, by savagely attacking all the beliefs which the latter, if he be a modern and a sceptic, probably regards as first principles. Tolerance is dismissed, as we have just seen, as a mere excuse for not caring. Reason, that awful French goddess, is shown to be another apology. Nietzsche and various other authors to whom some of us have bent the knee are slaughtered without misery. Then Chesterton proceeds to the argument, the reader being by this time receptive enough to swallow a camel, on the sole condition that G.K.C. has previously slightly treacled the animal.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to assert that at this point Chesterton pretends to begin his argument. As a matter of strict fact he only describes his adventures in Fairyland, which is all the earth. He tells us of his profound astonishment at the consistent recurrence of apples on apple trees, and at the general jolliness of the earth. He describes, very beautifully, some of the sensations of childhood making the all-embracing discovery that things are what they seem, and the even more joyful feeling of pretending that they are not, or that they will cease to be at any moment. A young kitten will watch a large cushion, which to it is a very considerable portion of the universe, flying at it without indicating any very appreciable surprise. A child, in the same way, would not be surprised if his house suddenly developed wings and flew away. Chesterton cultivated this attitude of always expecting to be surprised by the most natural things in the world, until it became an obsession, and a part of his journalistic equipment. In a sense Chesterton is the everlasting boy, the Undergraduate Who Would Not Grow Up. There must be few normally imaginative town-bred children to whom the pointed upright area-railings do not appear an unsearchable armoury of spears or as walls of protective flames, temporarily frozen black so that people should be able to enter and leave their house. Every child knows that the old Norse story of a sleeping Brunnhilde encircled by flames is true; to him or her, there is a Brunnhilde in every street, and the child knows that there it always has a chance of being the chosen Siegfried. But because this view of life is so much cosier than that of the grown-ups, Chesterton clings to his childhood's neat little universe and weeps pathetically when anybody mentions Herbert Spencer, and makes faces when he hears the word Newton. He insists on a fair dole of surprises. "Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys and sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs?"