Playing with children [he wrote at this time] is a glorious thing: but the journalist in question has never understood why it was considered a soothing or idyllic one. It reminds him, not of watering little budding flowers, but of wrestling for hours with gigantic angels and devils. Moral problems of the most monstrous complexity besiege him incessantly. He has to decide before the awful eyes of innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother's bricks, in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of his turn, it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling on the sister's picture-book, and whether such conduct does not justify the sister in blowing out the brother's unlawfully lit match.
Just as he is solving this problem upon principles of the highest morality, it occurs to him suddenly that he has not written his Saturday article; and that there is only about an hour to do it in. He wildly calls to somebody (probably the gardener) to telephone to somewhere for a messenger; he barricades himself in another room and tears his hair, wondering what on earth he shall write about. A drumming of fists on the door outside and a cheerful bellowing encourage and clarify his thoughts. . . . He sits down desperately; the messenger rings at the bell; the children drum on the door; the servants run up from time to time to say the messenger is getting bored; and the pencil staggers along, making the world a present of fifteen hundred unimportant words, and making Shakespeare a present of a portion of Gray's _Elegy_; putting "fantastic roots wreathed high" instead of "antique roots peep out."* Then the journalist sends off his copy and turns his attention to the enigma of whether a brother should commandeer a sister's necklace because the sister pinched him at Littlehampton.
[* Chesterton had actually made this slip, and the present quotation is from the article he wrote in apology.]
On the sands I romped with children Do you blame me that I did not improve myself By bottling anemones? But I say that these children will be men and women And I say that the anemones will not be men and women (Not just yet, at least, let us say). And I say that the greatest men of the world might romp with children And that I should like to see Shakespeare romping with children And Browning and Darwin romping with children And Mr. Gladstone romping with children And Professor Huxley romping with children And all the Bishops romping with children; And I say that if a man had climbed to the stars And found the secrets of the angels, The best thing and the most useful thing he could do Would be to come back and romp with children.