As to size, I am afraid the present book is a large one--although not as large as Boswell's _Johnson_ or _Gone with the Wind_. But in this matter I am unrepentant, for I have faith in Chesterton's own public. The book is large because there is no other way of getting Chesterton on to the canvas. It is a joke he would himself have enjoyed, but it is also a serious statement. For a complete portrait of Chesterton, even the most rigorous selection of material cannot be compressed into a smaller space. I have first written at length and then cut and cut.
At first I had intended to omit all matter already given in the _Autobiography_. Then I realised that would never do. For some things which are vital to a complete Biography of Chesterton are not only told in the _Autobiography_ better than I could tell them, but are recorded there and nowhere else. And this book is not merely a supplement to the _Autobiography_. It is the Life of Chesterton.
The same problem arises with regard to the published books and I have tried to solve it on the same line. There has rung in my mind Mr. Belloc's saying: "A man is his mind." To tell the story of a man of letters while avoiding quotation from or reference to his published works is simply not to tell it. At Christopher Dawson's suggestion I have re-read all the books _in the order in which they were written_, thus trying to get the development of Gilbert's mind perfectly clear to myself and to trace the influences that affected him at various dates. For this reason I have analysed certain of the books and not others--those which showed this mental development most clearly at various stages, or those (too many alas) which are out of print and hard to obtain. But whenever possible in illustrating his mental history I have used unpublished material, so that even the most ardent Chestertonian will find much that is new to him.
For the period of Gilbert's youth there are many exercise books, mostly only half filled, containing sketches and caricatures, lists of titles for short stories and chapters, unfinished short stories. Several completed fairy stories and some of the best drawings were published in _The Coloured Lands_. Others are hints later used in his own novels: there is a fragment of _The Ball and the Cross_, a first suggestion for _The Man Who Was Thursday_, a rather more developed adumbration of _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_. This I think is later than most of the notebooks; but, after the change in handwriting, apparently deliberately and carefully made by Gilbert around the date at which he left St. Paul's for the Slade School, it is almost impossible to establish a date at all exactly for any one of these notebooks. Notes made later when he had formed the habit of dictation became difficult to read, not through bad handwriting, but because words are abbreviated and letters omitted.