“The scene was not just the first thing he could remember seeing; it was more significant than that, for it had ‘a sort of aboriginal authenticity impossible to describe; something at the background of all my thoughts; like the very back-scene of the theatre of things’. He had no recollection of what the scene was meant to represent, but nevertheless ‘that one scene glows in my memory like a glimpse of some incredible paradise’. And the significance of it for Chesterton brings us to the most important theme that pervades his thought and writings: the idea of limitation, which was central to his thought on art, literature, politics, and religion. ‘Why should looking through a square hole, at yellow pasteboard, lift anybody into the seventh heaven of happiness...’ The scene was, Chesterton explained, ‘a sort of symbol of all that I happen to like in imagery and ideas. All my life I have loved edges; and the boundary line that brings one thing sharply against another. All my life I have loved frames and limits; and I will maintain that the largest wilderness looks larger seen through a window.’ And so in his view ‘the perfect drama must strive to arise to the higher ecstasy of the peep-show’. This was why he particularly liked ‘abysses and bottomless chasms and everything else that emphasises a fine shade of distinction between one thing and another; and the warm affection I have always felt for bridges is connected with the fact that the dark and dizzy arch accentuates the chasm even more than the chasm itself.’ In these earliest sensations, Chesterton believed he was ‘feeling the fragmentary suggestions of a philosophy I have since found to be true’.”
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