The best test of an influence in a writer's life is to compare what he wrote before with what he wrote after he was first subjected to it. It is easy to apply this test to Belloc's influence on G.K.C. because of the mass we still have of his boyhood writings. In pure literature, in philosophy and theology he remains untouched by the faintest change. Pages from the Notebook could be woven into Orthodoxy, essays from The Debater introduced into The Victorian Age in Literature, and it would look simply like buds and flowers on the same bush. Belloc has characterized himself as ignorant of English literature and says he learnt from Chesterton most of what he knows of it, while there is no doubt Chesterton was by far the greater philosopher.

With politics, sociology, and history (and the relation of religion to all three) it is different. Belloc himself told me he thought the chief thing he had done for Chesterton when they first met was to open his eyes to reality—Chesterton had been unusually young for his twenty-six years and unusually simple in regard to the political scene. He was in fact the young man he himself was later to describe as knowing all about politics and nothing about politicians. The four years between the two men seemed greater than it was, partly because of Belloc's more varied experience of life—French military training, life at Oxford, wide travel and an early marriage.

Belloc, then, could teach Chesterton a certain realism about politics—which meant a certain cynicism about politicians. Far more valuable, however, was what Belloc had to give him in sociology. We have seen that G.K. was already dissatisfied with Socialism before he met Belloc; it may be that by his consideration of the nature of man he would later have reached the positions so individually set out in What's Wrong with the World—but this can only remain a theoretical question. For Belloc did actually at this date answer the sociological question that Chesterton at this date was putting: answered it brilliantly and answered it truly. Every test that G.K. could later apply—of profound human reality, of truth divinely revealed—convinced him that the answer was true.

He had, he has told us, been a Socialist because it was so horrible not to be one, but he now learned of the historical Christian alternative—equally opposed to Socialism and to Capitalism— well-distributed property. This had worked in the past, was still working in many European countries, could be made to work again in England. The present trend appeared to Belloc to be towards the Servile State, and in the book with this title and a second book The Restoration of Property he later developed his sociology. After this first meeting, two powerful and very different minds would reciprocally influence one another. An admirer of both told me that he thought Chesterton got the idea of small property from Belloc but gave Belloc a fuller realization of the position of the family. One difference between them is that Belloc writes sociology as a textbook while Chesterton writes it as a human document. All the wealth of imagination that Belloc pours into The Path to Rome or The Four Men he sternly excludes from the Servile State. The poet, traveller, essayist is one man, the sociologist another.

The third field of influence was history. Here Belloc did Chesterton two great services—he restored the proportion of English history, and he put England back into its context. Since the Reformation, English history had been written with all the stress on the Protestant period. Lingard had written earlier but had not been popularized and certainly would not be used at St. Paul's School. And even Lingard had laid little stress on the social effects of the Reformation. Mr. Hammond's contemporary work on English social history fitted into Belloc's more vivid if less documented vision—none of this could be disregarded by later writers.

Belloc, too, restored that earlier England to the Christendom to which it belonged. The England of Macaulay or of Green had, like Mr. Mantalini's dowager, either no outline or a "demned outline" for it was cut out of a larger map. And Chesterton was always seeking an outline of history.

To get England back into the context of Christendom is a great thing: just how great must depend upon how rightly Christendom is conceived. One cannot always escape the feeling that Belloc conceives it too narrowly. His famous phrase "The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith" omits too much—the East out of which Christianity came; the new worlds into which Europe has flowed. Belloc of course knows these things and has often said them. It is rather a question of emphasis, of how things loom in the mind when judgments have to be made. In that sense he does tend to narrow the Faith to Europe: in exactly the same sense he does tend to narrow Europe to France. Born in France of a French father, educated in England, Belloc chose his mother's nationality, chose to be English; but his Creator had chosen differently, and there is not much a man can do in competition with his Creator. I do not for a moment suggest that Belloc, having chosen to be English, is conscious of anything but loyalty to the country of his adoption. The thing lies far below the mind's conscious movements. Belloc thinks of himself as an Englishman with a patriotic duty to criticise his country, but his feelings are not really those of an Englishman. Once at least he recognised this when he wrote the verse:

England to me that never have malingered, Nor spoken falsely, nor your flattery used, Nor even in my rightful garden lingered—: * What have you not refused?

[* Italics mine.]

And just as France was Belloc's rightful garden so England was Chesterton's. When first they talked of the Church he told Belloc that he wanted the example of "someone entirely English who should none the less have come in." When criticising his country his voice has the note of pain that only love can give. Belloc saw him as intensely national "English of the English . . . a mirror of England . . . he writes with an English accent."

It is of some interest that after meeting Belloc Gilbert added notes to two early poems, each note reflecting a judgment of Belloc's—on the Dreyfus case which Belloc saw as all French Catholics saw it: on Anglo-American relations which Belloc saw as most Latin Europeans would see it.

(1) The first was the poem entitled "To a Certain Nation"—addressed to France in commentary on the Dreyfus case of 1899 which must be briefly explained for those who are too young to remember the excitement it caused. Captain Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, had been found guilty of treachery and sent to Devil's Island. All France was divided into two camps on the question of his guilt or innocence. In general, Catholics and what we should call the Right were all for his guilt; atheists, anti-clericals and believers in the Republic were for his innocence. Passions were roused to fury on both sides. English opinion was almost entirely for his innocence. I was a small girl at the time and I remember that my brother and I amused ourselves by crying Vive Dreyfus, on all possible and impossible occasions, for the annoyance of our pious French governess. I remember also that our parents were startled by the vehemence of the French Catholic paper La Croix from which our governess imbibed her views. Ultimately the case was reopened, and Dreyfus, after years of horror on Devil's Island, found not guilty and restored to his rank in the army. But there are, I know, Catholic Frenchmen alive today who refuse to believe in his innocence and hold that the whole thing was a Jewish-Masonic plot that hampered the French espionage service and nearly lost us the war of 1914.

In the first edition of The Wild Knight, written before the meeting with Belloc, Gilbert, like any other English Liberal, had assumed Dreyfus' innocence and in the poem "To a Certain Nation" had reproached the France of the Revolution, the France he had loved, as unworthy of herself.

. . . and we Who knew thee once, we have a right to weep.

The Note in the second edition shows him as now undecided about Dreyfus' guilt and concludes: "There may have been a fog of injustice in the French courts; I know that there was a fog of injustice in the English newspapers."

(2) In "An Alliance" Chesterton had gloried in "the blood of Hengist" and hymned an Anglo-American alliance with the enthusiasm of a young Republican who took for granted the links of language and of origin that might draw together two great countries into something significant:

In change, eclipse, and peril Under the whole world's scorn, By blood and death and darkness The Saxon peace is sworn; That all our fruit be gathered And all our race take hands, And the sea be a Saxon river That runs through Saxon lands.

But in the Note to the second edition, he says:

In the matter of the "Anglo-American Alliance" I have come to see that our hopes of brotherhood with America are the same in kind as our hopes of brotherhood with any other of the great independent nations of Christendom. And a very small study of history was sufficient to show me that the American Nation, which is a hundred years old, is at least fifty years older than the Anglo-Saxon race.*

[* Collected Poems, p. 318.]

The poem was of course only a boyish expression of a boyish dream; like all dreams, like all boyhood dreams especially, it omitted too much; yet it contained a thought that might well have borne rich fruit in Gilbert's Catholic life.

My mother told me once that when after three years' study of Queen Elizabeth's character she came to a different conclusion from Belloc, she found it almost impossible to resist his power and hold on to her own view. It must be realised that Chesterton actually preferred the attitude of a disciple. A mutual friend has told me that Chesterton listened to Belloc all the time and said very little himself. In matters historical where he felt his own ignorance, Gilbert's tendency was simply to make an act of faith in Belloc.

On nothing were the two men more healthily in accord than on the Boer War. In an interesting study of Belloc, prefixed to a French translation of Contemporary England, F. Y. Eccles explains how he and most of the Speaker group differed from the pacifist pro-Boers, who hated the South African war because they hated all wars. The young Liberals on the Speaker were not pacifists. They hated the war because they thought it would harm England—harm her morally—to be fighting for an unjust cause, and even materially to be shedding the blood of her sons and pouring out her wealth at the bidding of a handful of alien financiers. Thus far Gilbert was among one group with whom he was in fullest sympathy. But I think he went further. Mr. Eccles told me that most of the Speaker group had no sympathy with the Boers. Gilbert had. He thought of them as human beings who might well have been farmers of Sussex or of Kent, something of an older civilization, resisting money power and imperialism and perishing thereby.

Few, indeed, of the Liberal Party held Chesterton's ideal—an England territorially small, spiritually great. The Speaker was struggling against odds: it was the voice of a tiny group. To Gilbert it seemed that this mattered nothing so long as that little group held to their great ideas, so long as the paper represented not merely a group or a party but the Liberal Idea. In an unfinished letter to Hammond is to be found this idea as he saw it and his dawning disappointment even with the paper that most nearly stood for it:

I am just about to commit a serious impertinence. I believe however that you will excuse it because it is about the paper and I know there is not another paper dead or alive for which I would take the trouble or run the risk of offence.

I am hearing on all sides the Speaker complained of by the very people who should be and would be (if they could) its enthusiastic supporters and I cannot altogether deny the truth of their objections, though I am glad to notice both in them and in myself the fact that those objections are tacitly based on the assumption of the Speaker having an aim and standard higher than other papers. If the Speaker were a mere party rag like "Judy" or "The Times," it would be only remarkable for moderation, but to us who have built hopes on it as the pioneer of a younger and larger political spirit it is difficult to be silent when we find it, as it seems to us, poisoned with that spirit of ferocious triviality which is the spirit of Birmingham eloquence, and with that evil instinct which has disintegrated the Irish party, the instinct for hating the man who differs from you slightly, more than the man who differs from you altogether.

Of two successive numbers during the stress of the fight (a fight in which we had first to unite our army and then to use it) a considerable portion was devoted, first to sneering at "The Daily News" and then to sneering at "The Westminster Gazette." . . .

There is a sentence in the Book of Proverbs which expresses the whole of my politics. "For the liberal man deviseth liberal things and by his liberality he shall stand." Now what I object to is sneering at "The Westminster" as a supporter of Chamberlain when everyone knows that it hardly lets a day pass without an ugly caricature of him. What I object to in this is that it is talking Brummagem—it is not "devising liberal things" but spiteful, superficial, illiberal things. It is claptrap and temporary deception of the "Patriotism before Politics" order. . . .

To all this you will say there is an obvious answer. The Speaker is a party paper and does not profess to be otherwise. But here I am sure we are mistaking our mission. What the Speaker is (I hope and believe) destined to do, is to renovate Liberalism, and though Liberalism (like every other party) is often conducted by claptrap, it has never been renovated by claptrap, but by great command of temper and the persistent exposition of persuasive and unanswerable truths. It is while we are in the desert that we have the vision: we being a minority, must be all philosophers: we must think for both parties in the State. It is no good our devoting ourselves to the flowers of mob oratory with no mob to address them to. We must, like the Free Traders, for instance, have discoveries, definite truths and endless patience in explaining them. We must be more than a political party or we shall cease to be one. Time and again in history victory has come to a little party with big ideas: but can anyone conceive anything with the mark of death more on its brow than a little party with little ideas?*

[* Undated, handwritten letter in a notebook.]

Such Liberalism was not perhaps of this world. It certainly was not of the Liberal Party!

Gilbert argued much with himself during these years. He had come out of his time of trial with firm faith in God and in man. But his philosophy was still in the making, and he made it largely out of the material supplied by ordinary London suburban society and by the rather less usual society of cranks and enthusiasts so plentiful at the end of the nineteenth century. He has written in the Autobiography of the artistic and dilettante groups where everyone discussed religion and no one practised it, of the Christian Socialists and other societies into which he and Cecil found their way, and of some of the friendships they formed. Among these one of the closest was with Conrad Noel who wrote in answer to my request for his recollections:

We met G.K.C. for the first time at the Stapleys' in Bloomsbury Square, at a series of meetings of the Christo-Theosophic Society. He was like a very big fish out of water; he was comparatively thin, however, in those days, nearly forty years ago. We had been much intrigued by the weekly contribution of an unknown writer to "The Speaker" and "The Nation"—brilliant work, and my wife and I, independently, came to the conclusion when we heard this young man speak that it must be he. The style was unmistakable.

I thought of writing to him to congratulate him on his speech, but before I could do so, I got a letter from him, saying that he was coming to hear me in the same series in a week or so; it was thus we first became acquainted, and the acquaintance ripened into a warm friendship with us both. He and his brother Cecil were in and out of our flat in Paddington Green, where I was assistant curate. He was genial, bubbling over with jokes, at which he roared with laughter.

The question was becoming insistent: when would there be enough money for Frances and Gilbert to get married?

In one letter Frances asks him what he thinks of Omar Khayyam. He replies at great length, and concludes:

You see the result of asking me for an opinion. I have written it very hurriedly: if I had paused I might make an essay of it. (Commercial Pig!) Never mind, sweetheart, that Essay might be a sauce-pan some day—or at any rate a cheap toast-rack.

Of his belief in God, in man, in goodness, as against the pessimist outlook of the day, Gilbert, as we have seen, felt profound certitude. That his outlook was one that held him back from many fields of opportunity he was already partly conscious. A fragment of a letter to Frances expresses this feeling.

. . . I find I cannot possibly come tonight as my Canadian uncle keeps his last night in England in a sort of family party. And I abide by my father's house—said our Lady of the Snows.

I have just had a note from Rex, asking me, with characteristic precision, if I can produce a play in the style of Maeterlinck by 6.50 this afternoon, or words to that effect. The idea is full of humour. He remarks, as a matter of fact that there is just a remote chance of his getting the Stage Society to act my play of The Wild Knight. This opens to me a vista of quite new ambition. Why only at the Stage Society?—I see a visionary programme.

The Wild Knight . . . . . . . . . . . . Mr. Charles Hawtree Captain Redfeather . . . . . . . . . . Mr. Penley Olive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miss Katie Seymour Priest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sir Henry Irving Lord Orm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mr. Arthur Roberts

I am working and must get on with my work. I do not feel any despondency about it because I know it is good and worth doing. It is extraordinary how much more moral one is than one imagines. At school I never minded getting into a row if it were really not my fault. Similarly, I have never cared a rap for rejections or criticisms, since I had got a point of view to express which I was certain held water. Some people think it holds water—on the brain. But I don't mind. Bless them.

I am afraid, darling, that this doctrine of patience is hard on you. But really it's a grand thing to think oneself right. It's what this whole age is starving for. Something to suffer for and go mad and miserable over—that is the only luxury of the mind. I wish I were a convinced Pro-Boer and could stare down a howling mob. But I am right about the Cosmos, and Schopenhauer and Co. are wrong. . . .

Two interesting points in this letter are the remark about wishing to be a convinced Pro-Boer—which he certainly became—and the suggestion of a possible performance of The Wild Knight. Perhaps the letter was written before he had finally taken his stand (it has no dating postmark), or perhaps it merely means that his convictions on the cosmos are more absolute than on the war. As to The Wild Knight: it was never acted and its publication was made possible only by the generosity of Gilbert's father. For a volume of comic verse, Greybeards at Play, which appeared earlier in the same year (1900), he could find a publisher, but serious poetry has never been easy to launch.

The letter that follows has a more immediate bearing on their own future:

11, Warwick Gardens, Good Friday. 1900.

. . . As you have tabulated your questions with such alarming precision I must really endeavour to answer them categorically.

(1) How am I? I am in excellent health. I have an opaque cold in my head, cough tempestuously and am very deaf. But these things I count as mere specks showing up the general blaze of salubrity. I am getting steadily better and I don't mind how slowly. As for my spirits a cold never affects them: for I have plenty to do and think about indoors. One or two little literary schemes—trifles doubtless—claim my attention.

(2) Am I going away at Easter? The sarcastic might think it a characteristic answer, but I can only reply that I had banished the matter from my mind, a vague problem of the remote future until you asked it: but since this is Easter and we are not gone away I suppose we are not going away.

(3) I will meet you at Euston on Tuesday evening though hell itself should gape and bid me stop at home.

(4) I am not sure whether a review on Crivelli's art is out this week: I am going to look.

(5) Alas! I have not been to Nutt. There are good excuses, but they are not the real ones. I will write to him now. Yes: Now.

(6) Does my hair want cutting? My hair seems pretty happy. You are the only person who seems to have any fixed theory on this. For all I know it may be at that fugitive perfection which has moved you to enthusiasm. Three minutes after this perfection, I understand, a horrible degeneration sets in: the hair becomes too long, the figure disreputable and profligate: and the individual is unrecognised by all his friends. It is he that wants cutting then, not his hair.

(7) As to shirt-links, studs and laces, I glitter from head to foot with them.

(8) I have had a few skirmishes with Knollys but not the general engagement. When this comes off, you shall have news from our correspondent. (Knollys was Frances's brother.)

(9) I have got a really important job in reviewing—the Life of Ruskin for the Speaker. As I have precisely 73 theories about Ruskin it will be brilliant and condensed. I am also reviewing the Life of the Kendals, a book on the Renascence and one on Correggio for "The Bookman."

(10) How far is it to Babylon? Babylon I am firmly convinced is just round the corner: if one could be only certain which corner. This conviction is the salt of my life.

(11) Really and truly I see no reason why we should not be married in April if not before. I have been making some money calculations with the kind assistance of Rex, and as far as I can see we could live in the country on quite a small amount of regular literary work. . .

P.S. Forgot the last question.

(12) Oddly enough, I was writing a poem. Will send it to you.

Gilbert's engagement had given him the impetus to earn more but he was always entirely unpractical. His salary at Fisher Unwin's had been negligible and he was not making much yet by the journalism which was now his only source of income. The repeated promise to "write to Nutt" is very characteristic. For Nutt was the manager of the solitary publisher who was at the moment prepared to put a book of Gilbert's on the market at his own risk!

Although they did not manage to get married this year, by the end of it he was becoming well known. The articles, in the Speaker especially, were attracting attention and Greybeards at Play had a considerable success. This, the first of Gilbert's books to be published, is a curiosity. It is made up of three incredibly witty satirical poems—"The Oneness of the Philosopher with Nature," "The Dangers Attending Altruism on the High Seas" and "The Disastrous Spread of Aestheticism in All Classes." The illustrations drawn by himself are as witty as the verses. By the beginning of 1901 his work was being sought for by other Liberal periodicals and he was writing regularly for the Daily News. The following letter to Frances bears the postmark Feb. 8, 1901.

Somewhere in the Arabian Nights or some such place there is a story of a man who was Emperor of the Indies for one day. I am rather in the position of that person: for I am Editor of the Speaker for one day. Hammond is unwell and Hirst has gone to dine with John Morley, so the latter asked me to see the paper through for this number. Hence this notepaper and the great hurry and brevity which I fear must characterise this letter.

There are a few minor amusing things, however, that I have a moment to mention.

(1) The "Daily News" have sent me a huge mass of books to review, which block up the front hall. A study of Swinburne—a book on Kipling—the last Richard le Gallienne—all very interesting. See if I don't do some whacking articles, all about the stars and the moon and the creation of Adam and that sort of thing. I really think I could work a revolution in Daily paper—writing by the introduction of poetical prose.

(2) Among other books that I have to review came, all unsolicited, a book by your old friend Schofield. Ha! Ha! Ha! It's about the Formation of Character, or some of those low and beastly amusements. I think of introducing parts of my Comic Opera of the P.N.E.U. into the articles.

(3) Another rather funny thing is the way in which my name is being spread about. Belloc declares that everyone says to him "Who discovered Chesterton?" and that he always replies "The genius Oldershaw." This may be a trifle Gallic, but Hammond has shown me more than one letter from Cambridge dons and such people demanding the identity of G.K.C. in a quite violent tone. They excuse themselves by offensive phrases in which the word "brilliant" occurs, but I shouldn't wonder if there was a thick stick somewhere at the back of it.

Belloc, by the way, has revealed another side of his extraordinary mind. He seems to have taken our marriage much to heart, for he talks to me, no longer about French Jacobins and Mediaeval Saints, but entirely about the cheapest flats and furniture, on which, as on the others, he is a mine of information, assuring me paternally that "it's the carpet that does you." I should think this fatherly tone would amuse you.

Now I must leave off: for the pages have come up to be seen through the press. . . .

Greybeards at Play its author never took very seriously. It was not included in his Collected Poems and he does not even mention it in his Autobiography. He attached a great deal more importance to The Wild Knight and Other Poems. It was a volume of some fifty poems, many of which had already appeared in The Outlook and The Speaker. It was published late in 1900 and produced a crop of enthusiastic reviews and more and more people began to ask one another, "Who is G. K. Chesterton?"

One reviewer wrote: "If it were not for the haunting fear of losing a humourist we should welcome the author of The Wild Knight to a high place among the poets." Another spoke of the "curious intensity" of the volume. Among those who were less pleased was John Davidson, on whom the book had been fathered by one reviewer, and who denied responsibility for such "frantic rubbish," and also a "reverent" reviewer who complained, "It is scattered all over with the name of God."

To Frances, Gilbert wrote:

I have been taken to see Mrs. Meynell, poet and essayist, who is enthusiastic about the Wild Knight and is lending it to all her friends.

Last night I went to Mrs. Cox's Book Party. My costume was a great success, everyone wrestled with it, only one person guessed it, and the rest admitted that it was quite fair and simple. It consisted of wearing on the lapel of my dress coat the following letters. U.U.N.S.I.J. Perhaps you would like to work this out all by yourself—But no, I will have mercy and not sacrifice. The book I represented was "The Letters of Junius."

Mrs. Meynell never came to know Gilbert well and her daughter says in the biography that her mother realised his "critical approval" (admiration would be a better word) of her own work only by reading his essays. But he once wrote an introduction for a book of hers and her admiration of him would break out frequently in amusing exclamations: "I hope the papers are nice to my Chesterton. He is mine much more, really, than Belloc's."* "If I had been a man, and large, I should have been Chesterton."**

[* Alice Meynell, p. 259.]

[** Ibid., p. 260.]

Brimley Johnson, who was to have been Gilbert's brother-in-law, sent The Wild Knight to Rudyard Kipling. His reply is amusing and also touching, for Mr. Johnson was clearly pouring out, in interest in Gilbert's career and in forwarding his marriage with Frances, the affections that might merely have been frozen by Gertrude's death.

The Elms, Rottingdean, Nov. 28th.

DEAR MR. JOHNSON,

Many thanks for The Wild Knight. Of course I knew some of the poems before, notably The Donkey which stuck in my mind at the time I read it.

I agree with you that there is any amount of promise in the work—and I think marriage will teach him a good deal too. It will be curious to see how he'll develop in a few years. We all begin with arrainging [sic] and elaborating all the Heavens and Hells and stars and tragedies we can lay our poetic hands on—Later we see folk—just common people under the heavens—

Meantime I wish him all the happiness that there can be and for yourself such comfort as men say time brings after loss. It's apt to be a weary while coming but one goes the right way to get it if one interests oneself in the happiness of other folk. Even though the sight of this happiness is like a knife turning in a wound.

Yours sincerely,

RUDYARD KIPLING.

P.S. Merely as a matter of loathsome detail, Chesterton has a bad attack of "aureoles." They are spotted all over the book. I think every one is bound in each book to employ unconsciously some pet word but that was Rossetti's.

Likewise I notice "wan waste" and many "wans" and things that "catch and cling." He is too good not to be jolted out of that. What do you say to a severe course of Walt Whitman—or will marriage make him see people?

Gilbert had already taken both prescriptions—Walt Whitman and "folk, just common people under the heavens." (Many years later James Agate wrote in Thursdays and Fridays: "Unlike some other serious thinkers, Chesterton understood his fellow men; the woes of a jockey were as familiar to him as the worries of a judge.") Perhaps some slight echoes of Swinburne did remain in this collection. Many earlier poems exist in the Swinburne manner, not of thought but of expression: Gilbert left an absolute command that these should never be published.

All Englishmen were stricken by the death of Queen Victoria. Mr. Somers Cocks, who had come to know Gilbert through his intimacy with Belloc, remembers that he wept when he heard of it. The tears may almost be heard in a letter to Frances.

Today the Queen was buried. I did not see the procession, first because I had an appointment with Hammond (of which more anon) and secondly because I think I felt the matter too genuinely. I like a crowd when I am triumphant or excited: for a crowd is the only thing that can cheer, as much as a cock is the only thing that can crow. Can anything be more absurd than the idea of a man cheering alone in his back bedroom? But I think that reverence is better expressed by one man than a million. There is something unnatural and impossible, even grotesque, in the idea of a vast crowd of human beings all assuming an air of delicacy. All the same, my dear, this is a great and serious hour and it is felt so completely by all England that I cannot deny the enduring wish I have, quite apart from certain more private sentiments, that the noblest Englishwoman I have ever known was here with me to renew, as I do, private vows of a very real character to do my best for this country of mine which I love with a love passing the love of Jingoes. It is sometimes easy to give one's country blood and easier to give her money. Sometimes the hardest thing of all is to give her truth.

I am writing an article on the good friend who is dead: I hope particularly that you will like it. The one I really like so far is Belloc's in the "Speaker." I had, as I said, many things to say, but owing to the hour and a certain fatigue and idiocy in myself, I have only space for the most important.

Hammond sent for me today and asked me seriously if I would help him in writing a book on Fox, sharing work, fame and profits. I told him that I had no special talent for research: he replied that he had no talent for literary form. I then said that I would be delighted to give him such assistance as I honestly thought valuable enough for him to split his profits for, that I thought I could give him such assistance in the matter of picturesqueness and plan of idea, more especially as Fox was a great hero of mine and the philosophy of his life involves the whole philosophy of the Revolution and of the love of mankind. We arranged that we would make a preliminary examination of the Fox record and then decide. . . .*

[* This book was never written nor even, I think, begun.]

Three more letters, two to Frances, one to his mother, complete the outline of this eventful period. He was now determined to get married quickly. For the first time and entirely without rancour, he realised the inevitable competition in the world of journalism. The struggle for success meant men fighting one another. Other journalists were fighting him; but truly enough, though with a rare dispassionateness, he realised that this meant a need for Daily bread in others similar to his own.

11, Warwick Gardens, W. (postmark: Feb. 19, 1901)

. . . I hope that in your own beautiful kindness you will be indulgent just at this time if I only write rough letters or postcards. I am for the first time in my life, thoroughly worried, and I find it a rather exciting and not entirely unpleasant sensation. But everything depends just now, not only on my sticking hard to work and doing a lot of my very best, but on my thinking about it, keeping wide awake to the turn of the market, being ready to do things not in half a week, but in half an hour; getting the feelings and tendencies of other men and generally living in work. I am going to see Lehmann tomorrow and many things may come of it. I cannot express to you what it is to feel the grip of the great wheel of real life on you for the first time. For the first time I know what is meant by the word "enemies"—men who deliberately dislike you and oppose your career—and the funny thing is that I don't dislike them at all myself. Poor devils—very likely they want to be married in June too.

I am a Socialist, but I love this fierce old world and am beginning to find a beauty in making money (in moderation) as in making statues. Always through my head one tune and words of Kipling set to it.

"They passed one resolution, your sub-committee believe You can lighten the curse of Adam when you've lightened the curse of Eve. And till we are built like angels, with hammer and chisel and pen We'll work for ourselves and a woman, for ever and ever—Amen."

11, Warwick Gardens, W. (postmark: March 4, 1901)

. . . I have delayed this letter in a scandalous manner because I hoped I might have the arrangements with the Daily News to tell you; as that is again put off, I must tell you later. The following, however, are grounds on which I believe everything will turn out right this year. It is arithmetic. "The Speaker" has hitherto paid me L70 a year, that is L6 a month. It has now raised it to L10 a month, which makes L120 a year. Moreover they encourage me to write as much as I like in the paper, so that assuming that I do something extra (poem, note, leader) twice a month or every other number, which I can easily do, that brings us to nearly L150 a year. So much for "The Speaker." Now for the "Daily News," both certainties and probabilities. Hammond (to whom you will favour me by being eternally grateful) pushed me so strongly with Lehmann for the post of manager of the literary page that it is most probable that I shall get it. . . . If I do, Hammond thinks they couldn't give me less than L200 a year. So that if this turns out right, we have L350, say, without any aid from "Bookman," books, magazine articles or stories.

Let us however, put this chance entirely on one side and suppose that they can give me nothing but regular work on the "Daily News." I have just started a set of popular fighting articles on literature in the "Daily News" called "The Wars of Literature." They will appear at least twice a week, often three times. For each of these I am paid about a guinea and a half. This makes about L3 a week which is L144 a year. Thus with only the present certainties of "Speaker" and "Daily News" we have L264 a year, or very likely (with extra "Speaker" items) L288, close on L300. This again may be reinforced by all sorts of miscellaneous work which I shall get now my name is getting known, magazine articles, helping editors or publishers, reading Mss. and so on. In all these calculations I have kept deliberately under the figures, not over them: so that I don't think I have failed altogether to bring my promise within reasonable distance of fact already. Belloc suggested that I should write for the "Pilot" and as he is on it, he will probably get me some work. Hammond has become leader-writer on the "Echo" and will probably get me some reviewing on that. And between ourselves, to turn with intense relief, from all this egotism, Hammond and I have a little scheme on hand for getting Oldershaw a kind of editorial place on the "Echo" where they want a brisk but cultivated man of the world. I think we can bring it off: it is a good place for an ambitious young man. It would give me more happiness than I can say, while I am building my own house of peace, to do something for the man who did so much in giving me my reason for it.

For well Thou knowest, O God most wise How good on earth was his gift to me Shall this be a little thing in thine eyes That is greater in mine than the whole great sea?

I am afraid . . . that this is a very dull letter. But you know what I am. I can be practical, but only deliberately, by fixing my mind on a thing. In this letter, I sum up my last month's thinking about money resources. I haven't given a thought yet to the application and distribution of them in rent, furniture, etc. When I have done thinking about that you will get another dull letter. I can keep ten poems and twenty theories in my head at once. But I can only think of one practical thing at a time. The only conclusion of this letter is that on any calculation whatever, we ought to have L300 a year, and be on the road to four in a little while. With this before you I daresay you (who are more practical than I) could speculate and suggest a little as to the form of living and expenditure. . . .

Gilbert's mother perhaps needed more convincing. The letter to her has no postmark but the L300 a year has grown to almost L500 and a careful economy is promised.

Mrs. Barnes The Orchards Burley. Hants.

MY DEAREST MOTHER,

Thank you very much for your two letters. If you get back to Kensington before me (I shall return on Thursday night: I find I work here very well) would you mind sending on any letters. You might send on the cheque: though that is not necessary.

There is a subject we have touched on once or twice that I want to talk to you about, for I am very much worried in my mind as to whether you will disapprove of a decision I have been coming to with a very earnest belief that I am seeking to do the right thing. I have just had information that my screw from "The Speaker" will be yet further increased from L120 a year to L150, or, if I do the full amount I can, L190 a year. I have also had a request from the "Daily News" to do two columns a week regularly, which [is] rather over L100 a year, besides other book reviews. My other sources of income which should bring the amount up to nearly L150 more, at any rate, I will speak of in a moment.

There is something, as I say, that is distressing me a great deal. I believe I said about a year ago that I hoped to get married in a year, if I had money enough. I fancy you took it rather as a joke: I was not so certain about it myself then. I have however been coming very seriously to the conclusion that if I pull off one more affair—a favourable arrangement with Reynolds' Newspaper, whose editor wants to see me at the end of this week, I shall, unless you disapprove, make a dash for it this year. When I mentioned the matter a short time ago, you said (if I remember right) that you did not think I ought to marry under L400 or L500 a year. I was moved to go into the matter thoroughly then and there, but as it happened I knew I had one or two bargains just coming of which would bring me nearer to the standard you named, so I thought I would let it stand over till I could actually quote them. Believe me, my dearest mother, I am not considering this affair wildly or ignorantly: I have been doing nothing but sums in my head for the last months. This is how matters stand. The Speaker editor says they will take as much as I like to write. If I write my maximum I get L192 a year from them. From the Daily News, even if I do not get the post on the staff which was half promised me, I shall get at least L100 a year with a good deal over for reviews outside "The Wars of Literature." That makes nearly L300. With the Manchester Sunday Chronicle I have just made a bargain by which I shall get L72 a year. This makes L370 a year altogether. The matter now, I think, largely depends on Reynolds' Newspaper. If I do, as is contemplated, weekly articles and thumbnail sketches, they cannot give me less than L 100 a year. This would bring the whole to L470 a year, or within L30 of your standard. Of course I know quite well that this is not like talking of an income from a business or a certain investment. But we should live a long way within this income, if we took a very cheap flat, even a workman's flat if necessary, had a woman in to do the laborious Daily work and for the rest waited on ourselves, as many people I know do in cheap flats. Moreover, journalism has its ups as well as downs, and I, I can fairly say, am on the upward wave. Without vanity and in a purely businesslike spirit I may say that my work is talked about a great deal. It is at least a remarkable fact that every one of the papers I write for (as detailed above) came to me and asked me to do work for them: from the Daily News down to the Manchester Sunday Chronicle. I have, as I say, what seems to me a sufficient income for a start. That I shall have as good and better I am as certain as that I sit here. I know the clockwork of these papers and among one set of them I might almost say that I am becoming the fashion.

Do not, please, think that I am entertaining this idea without realising that I shall have to start in a very serious and economical spirit. I have worked it out and I am sure we could live well within the above calculations and leave a good margin.

I make all these prosaic statements because I want you to understand that I know the risks I think of running. But it is not any practical question that is distressing me: on that I think I see my way. But I am terribly worried for fear you should be angry or sorry about all this. I am only kept in hope by the remembrance that I had the same fear when I told you of my engagement and that you dispelled it with a directness and generosity that I shall not forget. I think, my dear Mother, that we have always understood each other really. We are neither of us very demonstrative: we come of some queer stock that can always say least when it means most. But I do think you can trust me when I say that I think a thing really right, and equally honestly admit that I can hardly explain why. To explain why I know it is right would be to communicate the incommunicable, and speak of delicate and sacred things in bald words. The most I can say is that I know Frances like the back of my hand and can tell without a word from her that she has never recovered from a wound* and that there is only one kind of peace that will heal it.

[* Gertrude's death.]

I have tried to explain myself in this letter: I can do it better in a letter, somehow, but I do not think I have done it very successfully. However, with you it does not matter and it never will matter, how my thoughts come tumbling out. You at least have always understood what I meant.

Always your loving son,

GILBERT.



CHAPTER XI

Married Life in London

The suburbs are commonly referred to as prosaic. That is a matter of taste. Personally I find them intoxicating.

Introduction to Literary London.

THE WEDDING DAY drew near and the presents were pouring in.

"I feel like the young man in the Gospel," said Gilbert to Annie Firmin, "sorrowful, because I have great possessions."

Conrad Noel married Gilbert and Frances at Kensington Parish Church on June 28, 1901. As Gilbert knelt down the price ticket on the sole of one of his new shoes became plainly visible. Annie caught Mrs. Chesterton's eye and they began to laugh helplessly. Annie thinks, too, that for once in their lives Gilbert and Cecil did not argue at the Reception.

Lucian Oldershaw drove ahead to the station with the heavy luggage, put it on the train and waited feverishly. That train went off (with the luggage), then another, and at last the happy couple appeared. Gilbert had felt it necessary to stop on the way "in order to drink a glass of milk in one shop and to buy a revolver with cartridges in another." The milk he drank because in childhood his mother used to give him a glass in that shop. The revolver was for the defense of his bride against possible dangers. They followed the luggage by a slow train.

This love of weapons, his revolver, his favourite sword-stick, remained with him all his life. It suggested the adventures that he always bestowed on the heroes of his stories and would himself have loved to experience. He noted in Twelve Types Scott's love of armour and of weapons for their own sakes—the texture, the power, the beauty of a sword-hilt or a jewelled dagger. As a child would play with these things Gilbert played with them, but they stood also in his mind for freedom, adventure, personal responsibility, and much else that the modern world had lost.

The honeymoon was spent on the Norfolk Broads. On the way they stopped at Ipswich "and it was like meeting a friend in a fairy-tale to find myself under the sign of the White Horse on the first day of my honeymoon." Annie Firmin was staying in Warwick Gardens for the wedding and afterwards. Gilbert's first letter, from the Norfolk Broads, began "I have a wife, a piece of string, a pencil and a knife: what more can any man want on a honeymoon."

Asked on his return what wallpapers he would prefer in the house they had chosen, he asked for brown paper so that he could draw pictures everywhere. He had by no means abandoned this old habit, and Annie remembers an illness during which he asked for a long enough pencil to draw on the ceiling. Their quaint little house in Edwardes Square, Kensington, lent to them by Mr. Boore, an old friend of Frances, was close to Warwick Gardens. "I remember the house well," wrote E. C. Bentley later, "with its garden of old trees and its general air of Georgian peace. I remember too the splendid flaming frescoes, done in vivid crayons, of knights and heroes and divinities with which G.K.C. embellished the outside wall at the back, beneath a sheltering portico. I have often wondered whether the landlord charged for them as dilapidations at the end of the tenancy."

They were only in Edwardes Square for a few months and then moved to Overstrand Mansions, Battersea, where the rest of their London life was spent. It was here I came to know them a few years later. As soon as they could afford it they threw drawing-room and dining-room together to make one big room. At one end hung an Engagement board with what Father O'Connor has described as a "loud inscription"— LEST WE FORGET. Beside the engagements was pinned a poem by Hilaire Belloc:

Frances and Gilbert have a little flat At eighty pounds a year and cheap at that Where Frances who is Gilbert's only wife Leads an unhappy and complaining life: while Gilbert who is Frances' only man Puts up with it as gamely as he can.

The Bellocs chose life in the country much earlier than the Chestertons, and an undated letter to Battersea threatens due reprisals in an exclusion from their country home, if the Chestertons are not prepared to receive him in town at a late hour.

Kings Land, Shipley, Horsham

It will annoy you a good deal to hear that I am in town tomorrow Wednesday evening and that I shall appear at your Apartment at 10.45 or 10.30 at earliest. P.M.! You are only just returned. You are hardly settled down. It is an intolerable nuisance. You heartily wish I had not mentioned it.

Well, you see that [arrow pointing to "Telegrams, Coolham, Sussex"], if you wire there before One you can put me off, but if you do I shall melt your keys, both the exterior one which forms the body or form of the matter and the interior one which is the mystical content thereof.

Also if you put me off I shall not have you down here ever to see the Oak Room, the Tapestry Room, the Green Room etc.

Yrs, H.B.

Early in his Battersea life Gilbert received a note from Max Beerbohm, the great humourist, introducing himself and suggesting a luncheon together.

I am quite different from my writings (and so, I daresay, are you from yours)—so that we should not necessarily fail to hit it off.

I, in the flesh, am modest, full of commonsense, very genial, and rather dull.

What you are remains to be seen—or not to be seen—by me, according to your decision.

Gilbert's decision was for the meeting and an instant liking grew into a warm friendship. As in J.D.C. days Gilbert had written verse about his friends, so now did he try to sum up an impression, perhaps after some special talk:

And Max's queer crystalline sense Lit, like a sea beneath a sea, Shines through a shameless impudence As shameless a humility. Or Belloc somewhat rudely roared But all above him when he spoke The immortal battle trumpets broke And Europe was a single sword.*

[* Unpublished fragment.]

Somewhere about this time must have occurred the incident mentioned by George Bernard Shaw in a note which appeared in the Mark Twain Quarterly (Spring, 1937):

I cannot remember when I first met Chesterton. I was so much struck by a review of Scott's Ivanhoe which he wrote for the Daily News in the course of his earliest notable job as feuilletonist to that paper that I wrote to him asking who he was and where he came from, as he was evidently a new star in literature. He was either too shy or too lazy to answer. The next thing I remember is his lunching with us on quite intimate terms, accompanied by Belloc.

The actual first meeting, forgotten by Shaw, is remembered by Gilbert's brother-in-law, Lucian Oldershaw. He and Gilbert had gone together to Paris where they visited Rodin, then making a bust of Bernard Shaw. Mr. Oldershaw introduced Gilbert to G.B.S., who, Rodin's secretary told them, had been endeavouring to explain at some length the nature of the Salvation Army, leading up (one imagines) to an account of Major Barbara. At the end of the explanation, Rodin's secretary remarked—to a rather apologetic Shaw—"The Master says you have not much French but you impose yourself."

"Shaw talked Gilbert down," Mr. Oldershaw complained. That the famous man should talk more than the beginner is hardly surprising, but all through Gilbert's life the complaint recurs on the lips of his admirers, just as a similar complaint is made by Lockhart about Sir Walter Scott. Chesterton, like Scott, abounded in cordial admiration of other men and women and had a simple enjoyment in meeting them. And Chesterton was one of the few great conversationalists—perhaps the only one—who would really rather listen than talk.

In 1901 appeared his first book of collected essays, The Defendant. The essays in it had already appeared in The Speaker. Like all his later work it had the mixed reception of enthusiasts who saw what he meant, and puzzled reviewers who took refuge in that blessed word "paradox." "Paradox ought to be used," said one of these, "like onions to season the salad. Mr. Chesterton's salad is all onions. Paradox has been defined as 'truth standing on her head to attract attention.' Mr. Chesterton makes truth cut her throat to attract attention."

Without denying that his love of a joke led him into indefensible puns and suchlike fooleries (though Mgr. Ronald Knox tells me he is prepared to defend all of G.K.'s puns), I think nearly all his paradoxes were either the startling expression of an entirely neglected truth, or the startling re-emphasis of the neglected side of a truth. Once, he said: "It is a paradox, but it is God, and not I, who should have the credit of it." He proved his case a few years later in the chapter of Orthodoxy called "The Paradoxes of Christianity." What it amounted to was roughly this: paradox must be of the nature of things because of God's infinity and the limitations of the world and of man's mind. To us limited beings God can express His idea only in fragments. We can bring together apparent contradictions in those fragments whereby a greater truth is suggested. If we do this in a sudden or incongruous manner we startle the unprepared and arouse the cry of paradox. But if we will not do it we shall miss a great deal of truth.

Chesterton also saw many proverbs and old sayings as containing a truth which the people who constantly repeated them had forgotten. The world was asleep and must be awakened. The world had gone placidly mad and must be violently restored to sanity. That the methods he used annoyed some is undeniable, but he did force people to think, even if they raged at him as the unaccustomed muscles came into play.

"I believe," he said in a speech at this date, "in getting into hot water. I think it keeps you clean." And he believed intensely in keeping out of a narrow stream of merely literary life. To those who exalted the poet above the journalist he gave this answer:

The poet writing his name upon a score of little pages in the silence of his study, may or may not have an intellectual right to despise the journalist: but I greatly doubt whether he would not morally be the better if he saw the great lights burning on through darkness into dawn, and heard the roar of the printing wheels weaving the destinies of another day. Here at least is a school of labour and of some rough humility, the largest work ever published anonymously since the great Christian cathedrals.*

[* "A Word for the Mere Journalist." Darlington North Star: February 3, 1902.]

He plunged then into the life of Fleet Street and held it his proudest boast to be a journalist. But he had his own way of being a journalist:

On the whole, I think I owe my success (as the millionaires say) to having listened respectfully and rather bashfully to the very best advice, given by all the best journalists who had achieved the best sort of success in journalism; and then going away and doing the exact opposite. For what they all told me was that the secret of success in journalism was to study the particular journal and write what was suitable to it. And, partly by accident and ignorance and partly through the real rabid certainties of youth, I cannot remember that I ever wrote any article that was at all suitable to any paper. . . . I wrote on a Nonconformist organ like the old Daily News and told them all about French cafes and Catholic cathedrals; and they loved it, because they had never heard of them before. I wrote on a robust Labour organ like the old Clarion and defended mediaeval theology and all the things their readers had never heard of; and their readers did not mind me a bit.*

[* Autobiography, pp. 185-6.]

Mr. Titterton, who worked also on the Daily News and came at this time to know G.K. in the Pharos Club, says that at first he was rather shy of the other men on the staff but after a dinner at which he was asked to speak he came to know and like them and to be at home in Fleet Street. He liked to work amid human contact and would write his articles in a public-house or in the club or even in the street, resting the paper against a wall.

Frank Swinnerton records* a description given him by Charles Masterman of

how Chesterton used to sit writing his articles in a Fleet St. cafe, sampling and mixing a terrible conjunction of drinks, while many waiters hovered about him, partly in awe, and partly in case he should leave the restaurant without paying for what he had had. One day . . . the headwaiter approached Masterman. "Your friend," he whispered, admiringly, "he very clever man. He sit and laugh. And then he write. And then he laugh at what he write."

[* Georgian Scene, p. 94.]

He loved Fleet Street and did a good deal of drinking there. But not only there. When (in the Autobiography) he writes of wine and song it is not Fleet Street and its taverns that come back to his mind but "the moonstruck banquets given by Mr. Maurice Baring," the garden in Westminster where he fenced with real swords against one more intoxicated than himself, songs shouted in Auberon Herbert's rooms near Buckingham Palace.

After marriage Frances seems to have given up the struggle, so ardently pursued during their engagement, to make him tidy. By a stroke of genius she decided instead to make him picturesque. The conventional frock-coat worn so unconventionally, the silk hat crowning a mat of hair, disappeared, and a wide-brimmed slouch hat and flowing cloak more appropriately garbed him. This was especially good as he got fatter. He was a tall man, six foot two. As a boy he had been thin, but now he was rapidly putting on weight. Neither he nor Cecil played games (the tennis did not last!) but they used to go for long walks, sometimes going off together for a couple of days at a time. Gilbert still liked to do this with Frances, but the sedentary Daily life and the consumption of a good deal of beer did not help towards a graceful figure. By 1903 G.K. was called a fat humourist and he was fast getting ready to be Dr. Johnson in various pageants. By 1906—he was then thirty-two—he had become famous enough to be one of the celebrities painted or photographed for exhibitions; and Bernard Shaw described a photo of him by Coburn:

Chesterton is "our Quinbus Flestrin," the young Man Mountain, a large abounding gigantically cherubic person who is not only large in body and mind beyond all decency, but seems to be growing larger as you look at him—"swellin' wisibly," as Tony Weller puts it. Mr. Coburn has represented him as flowing off the plate in the very act of being photographed and blurring his own outlines in the process. Also he has caught the Chestertonian resemblance to Balzac and unconsciously handled his subject as Rodin handled Balzac. You may call the placing of the head on the plate wrong, the focussing wrong, the exposure wrong if you like, but Chesterton is right and a right impression of Chesterton is what Mr. Coburn was driving at.

The change in his appearance G.K. celebrated in a stanza of his "Ballade of the Grotesque":

I was light as a penny to spend, I was thin as an arrow to cleave, I could stand on a fishing-rod's end With composure, though on the qui vive; But from Time, all a-flying to thieve, The suns and the moons of the year, A different shape I receive; The shape is decidedly queer.

"London," said a recently arrived American, "is the most marvellously fulfilling experience. I went to see Fleet Street this morning, and met G. K. Chesterton face to face. Wrapped in a cloak and standing in the doorway of a pie-shop, he was composing a poem reciting it aloud as he wrote. The most striking thing about the incident was that no one took the slightest notice."

I doubt if any writer, except Dickens, has so quickly become an institution as Chesterton. Nor, of course, would his picturesqueness in Fleet Street or his swift success as a journalist have accomplished this but for the vast output of books on every conceivable subject.

But before I come to the books written during those years at Battersea, a word must be said of another element besides his journalistic contacts that was linking G.K. with a wider world than the solely literary. We have seen that even when his religion was at its lowest point, in the difficult Art School days, he never lost it entirely—"I hung on to religion by one thin thread of thanks." In the years of the Notebook, he advanced very far in his pondering on and acceptance of the great religious truths. But this did not as yet mean attachment to a Church. Then he met Frances. "She actually practised a religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived." Now that they were married, Frances, as a convinced Anglo-Catholic, was bringing more clergy and other Anglican friends into Gilbert's circle. Moreover, he was lecturing all over England, and this brought him into contact with all sorts of strange religious beliefs. "Amid all this scattered thinking . . . I began to piece together fragments of the old religious scheme; mainly by the various gaps that denoted its disappearance. And the more I saw of real human nature, the more I came to suspect that it was really rather bad for all these people that it had disappeared."*

[* Autobiography, p. 177.]

In 1903-04 he had a tremendous battle (the detail of which will be treated in the next chapter) in the Clarion with Robert Blatchford. In it he adumbrated many of the ideas that were later developed in Orthodoxy. Of the arguments used by Blatchford and his atheist friends, G.K. wrote that the effect on his own mind was: "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian." In a diary kept by Frances spasmodically during the years 1904-05, she notes that Gilbert has been asked to preach as the first of a series of lay preachers in a city church. She writes:

March 16th. One of the proudest days of my life. Gilbert preached at St. Paul's, Covent Garden for the C.S.U. [Christian Social Union] Vox populi vox Dei. A crammed church—he was very eloquent and restrained. Sermons will be published afterwards.

Published they were: under the title, Preachers from the Pew.

March 30th. The second sermon: "The Citizen, the Gentleman and the Savage." Even better than last week. "Where there is no vision the people perisheth."

When it is remembered that the Browning, the Watts, Twelve Types and the Napoleon of Notting Hill had all been published and received with acclaim, it is touching that Frances should speak thus of the "proudest day" of her life. That Gilbert should himself have vision and show it to others remained her strongest aspiration. Not thus felt all his admirers. The Blatchford controversy on matters religious became more than many of them could bear.

A plaintive correspondent (says the Daily News), who seems to have had enough of the eternal verities and the eternal other things, sends us the following "lines written on reading Mr. G. K. Chesterton's forty-seventh reply to a secularist opponent":

What ails our wondrous "G.K.C." Who late, on youth's glad wings, Flew fairylike, and gossip'd free Of translunary things,

That thus, in dull didactic mood, He quits the realms of dream, And like some pulpit-preacher rude, Drones on one dreary theme?

Stern Blatchford, thou hast dashed the glee Of our Omniscient Babe; Thy name alone now murmurs he, Or that of dark McCabe.

All vain his cloudy fancies swell, His paradox all vain, Obsessed by that malignant spell Of Blatchford on the brain.

H.S.S.*

[* Daily News, 12 January, 1904.]

Mr. Noel has a livelier memory of Gilbert's religious and social activities. On one occasion he went to the Battersea flat for a meeting at which he was to speak and Gilbert take the chair, to establish a local branch of the Christian Social Union. The two men got into talk over their wine in the dining-room (then still a separate room) and Frances came in much agitated. "Gilbert you must dress. The people will be arriving any moment.

"Yes, yes, I'll go."

The argument was resumed and went on with animation. Frances came back. "Gilbert, the drawing-room is half full and people are still arriving." At last in despair she brought Gilbert's dress-clothes into the dining-room and made him change there, still arguing. Next he had to be urged into the drawing-room. Established at a small table he began to draw comic bishops, quite oblivious of the fact that he was to take the chair at the now assembled meeting. Finally Frances managed to attract his attention, he leaped up overthrowing the small table and scattering the comic bishops.

"Surely this story," said a friend to whom I told it, "proves what some people said about Chesterton's affectation. He must have been posing."

I do not think so, and those who knew Gilbert best believed him incapable of posing. But he was perfectly capable of wilfulness and of sulking like a schoolboy. It amused him to argue with Mr. Noel, it did not amuse him at all to take the chair at a meeting. So, as he was not allowed to go on arguing, he drew comic bishops.

There was, too, more than a touch of this wilfulness in the second shock he administered to respectable Battersea later in the evening. An earnest young lady asked the company for counsel as to the best way of arranging her solitary maid's evening out. "I'm so afraid," ended the appeal, "of her going to the Red Lion."

"Best place she could go," said Gilbert. And occasionally he would add example to precept, for society and Fleet Street were not the only places for human intercourse. "At present," commented a journalist, "he is cultivating the local politics of Battersea; in secluded ale houses he drinks with the frequenters and learns their opinions on municipal milk and on Mr. John Burns."

"Good friends and very gay companions," Gilbert calls the Christian Social Union group of whom, beside Conrad Noel, were Charles Masterman, Bishop Gore, Percy Dearmer, and above all Canon Scott Holland. Known as "Scotty" and adored by many generations of young men, he was "a man with a natural surge of laughter within him, so that his broad mouth seemed always to be shut down on it in a grimace of restraint."* Like Gilbert, he suffered from the effect of urging his most serious views with apparent flippancy and fantastic illustrations. In the course of a speech to a respectable Nottingham audience he remarked, "I dare say several of you here have never been in prison."

[* Autobiography, p. 169.]

"A ghastly stare," says Gilbert, describing this speech, "was fixed on all the faces of the audience; and I have ever since seen it in my own dreams; for it has constituted a considerable part of my own problem."

Gilbert's verses, summarizing the meeting as it must have sounded to a worthy Nottingham tradesman, are quoted in the Autobiography and completed in Father Brown on Chesterton. I have put them together here for they show how merrily these men were working to change the world.

The Christian Social Union here Was very much annoyed; It seems there is some duty Which we never should avoid, And so they sang a lot of hymns To help the Unemployed.

Upon a platform at the end The speakers were displayed And Bishop Hoskins stood in front And hit a bell and said That Mr. Carter was to pray, And Mr. Carter prayed.

Then Bishop Gore of Birmingham He stood upon one leg And said he would be happier If beggars didn't beg, And that if they pinched his palace It would take him down a peg.

He said that Unemployment Was a horror and a blight, He said that charities produced Servility and spite, And stood upon the other leg And said it wasn't right.

And then a man named Chesterton Got up and played with water, He seemed to say that principles Were nice and led to slaughter And how we always compromised And how we didn't orter.

Then Canon Holland fired ahead Like fifty cannons firing, We tried to find out what he meant With infinite enquiring, But the way he made the windows jump We couldn't help admiring.

I understood him to remark (It seemed a little odd.) That half a dozen of his friends had never been in quod. He said he was a Socialist himself, And so was God.

He said the human soul should be Ashamed of every sham, He said a man should constantly Ejaculate "I am" When he had done, I went outside And got into a tram.

Partly perhaps to console himself for the loss of his son's Daily company, chiefly, I imagine, out of sheer pride and joy in his success, Edward Chesterton started after the publication of The Wild Knight pasting all Gilbert's press-cuttings into volumes. Later I learnt that it had long been Gilbert's weekly penance to read these cuttings on Sunday afternoon at his father's house. Traces of his passage are visible wherever a space admits of a caricature, and occasionally, where it does not, the caricature is superimposed on the text.

His growing fame may be seen by the growing size of these volumes and the increased space given to each of his books. Twelve Types in 1902 had a good press for a young man's work and was taken seriously in some important papers, but its success was as nothing compared with that of the Browning a year later. The bulk of Twelve Types, as of The Defendant, had appeared in periodicals, but never in his life did Gilbert prepare a volume of his essays for the press without improving, changing and unifying. It was never merely a collection, always a book.

Still, the Browning was another matter. It was a compliment for a comparatively new author to be given the commission for the English Men of Letters Series. Stephen Gwynn describes the experience of the publishers:

On my advice the Macmillans had asked him to do Browning in the "English Men of Letters," when he was still not quite arrived. Old Mr. Craik, the Senior Partner, sent for me and I found him in white fury, with Chesterton's proofs corrected in pencil; or rather not corrected; there were still thirteen errors uncorrected on one page; mostly in quotations from Browning. A selection from a Scotch ballad had been quoted from memory and three of the four lines were wrong, I wrote to Chesterton saying that the firm thought the book was going to "disgrace" them. His reply was like the trumpeting of a crushed elephant. But the book was a huge success.*

[* Quoted in Chesterton, by Cyril Clemens, p. 14.]

In fact, it created a sensation and established G.K. in the front rank. Not all the reviewers liked it, and one angry writer in the Athenaeum pointed out that, not content with innumerable inaccuracies about Browning's descent and the events of his life, G.K. had even invented a line in "Mr. Sludge the Medium." But every important paper had not only a review but a long review, and the vast majority were enthusiastic. Chesterton claimed Browning as a poet not for experts but for every man. His treatment of the Browning love affair, of the poet's obscurity, of "The Ring and the Book," all receive this same praise of an originality which casts a true and revealing light for his readers. As with all his literary criticism, the most famous critics admitted that he had opened fresh windows on the subject for themselves.

This attack on his inaccuracy and admiration for his insight constantly recurs with Chesterton's literary work. Readers noted that in the Ballad of the White Horse he made Alfred's left wing face Guthrum's left wing. He was amused when it was pointed out, but never bothered to alter it. His memory was prodigious. All his friends testify to his knowing by heart pages of his favourite authors (and these were not few). Ten years after his time with Fisher Unwin, Frances told Father O'Connor that he remembered all the plots and most of the characters of the "thousands" of novels he had read for the firm. But he trusted his memory too much and never verified. Indeed, when it was a question merely of verbal quotation he said it was pedantic to bother, and when latterly Dorothy Collins looked up his references he barely tolerated it.

Again while he constantly declared that he was no scholar, he said things illuminating even to scholars. Thus, much later, when Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas appeared, the Master-General of the Dominican Order, Pere Gillet, O.P., lectured on and from it to large meetings of Dominicans. Mr. Eccles told me that talking of Virgil, G.K. said things immensely illuminating for experts on Latin poetry. In a very different field, Mr. Oldershaw noted after their trip to Paris that though he could set Gilbert right on many a detail yet his generalisations were marvellous. He had, said Mr. Eccles, an intuitive mind. He had, too, read more than was realised, partly because his carelessness and contempt for scholarship misled. Where the pedant would have referred and quoted and cross-referred, he went dashing on, throwing out ideas from his abundance and caring little if among his wealth were a few faults of fact or interpretation. "Abundance" was a word much used of his work just now, and in the field of literary criticism he was placed high, and had an enthusiastic following. We may assume that the Browning had something to do with Sir Oliver Lodge's asking him in the next year (1904) to become a candidate for the Chair of Literature at Birmingham University. But he had no desire to be a professor.

Frances, in her diary, notes some of their widening contacts and engagements. The mixture of shrewdness and simplicity in her comments will be familiar to those who knew her intimately. Meeting her for the first time I think the main impression was that of the "single eye." She abounded in Gilbert's sense, as my mother commented after an early meeting, and ministered to his genius. Yet she never lost an individual, markedly feminine point of view, which helped him greatly, as anyone can see who will read all he wrote on marriage. He shows an insight almost uncanny in the section called, "The Mistake About Women" in What's Wrong with the World. "Some people," he said in a speech of 1905, "when married gain each other. Some only lose themselves." The Chestertons gained each other. And by the sort of paradox he loved, Frances did so by throwing the stream of her own life unreservedly into the greater river of her husband's. She writes in her Diary, for 1904:

Gilbert and I meet all sorts of queer, well-known, attractive, unattractive people and I expect this book will be mostly about them. . . .

Feb. 17th. We went together to Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Colvin's "At home." It was rather jolly but too many clever people there to be really nice. The clever people were Mr. Joseph Conrad, Mr. Henry James, Mr. Laurence Binyon, Mr. Maurice Hewlett, and a great many more. Mr. and Mrs. Colvin looked so happy.

Feb. 23rd. Gilbert went as Mr. Lane's guest to a dinner of the "Odd Volumes" at the Imperial Restaurant. The other guest was Baden Powell. He and Gilbert made speeches. . . .

March 8th. Gilbert was to speak on "Education" at a C.S.U. meeting at Sion College, but a debate on the Chinese Labour in South Africa was introduced instead and went excitingly. There is to be a big meeting of the C.S.U. to protest. Though I suppose it's all no good now. When the meeting was over we adjourned to a tea-shop and had immense fun. Gilbert, Percy Dearmer and Conrad Noel walked together down Fleet Street, and never was there a funnier sight. Gilbert's costume consisted of a frock coat, huge felt hat and walking stick brandished in the face of the passers-by, to their exceeding great danger. Conrad was dressed in an old lounge suit of sober grey with a clerical hat jauntily stuck on the back of his head (which led someone to remark, "Are you here in the capacity of a private gentleman, poor curate, or low-class actor?"). Mr. Dearmer was clad in wonderful clerical garments of which he alone possesses the pattern, which made him look like a Chaucer Canterbury Pilgrim or a figure out of a Noah's ark. They swaggered down the roadway talking energetically. At tea we talked of many things, the future of the "Commonwealth" chiefly . . .

March 22nd. Meeting of Christian Theosophical Society at which Gilbert lectured on "How Theosophy appears to a Christian." He was very good. Herbert Burrows vigorously attacked him in debate afterwards . . . Napoleon of Notting Hill was published.

April 27th. The Bellocs and the Noels came here to dinner. Hilaire in great form recited his own poetry with great enthusiasm the whole evening . . .

May 9th. the Literary Fund Dinner. About the greatest treat I ever had in my life. J. M. Barrie presided. He was so splendid and so complimentary. Mrs. J. M. Barrie is very pretty, but the most beautiful woman there was Mrs. Anthony Hope—copper coloured hair, masses, with a wreath of gardenias—green eyes—and a long neck, very beautiful figure. The speakers were Barrie, Lord Tennyson, Comyns Carr, A. E. W. Mason, Mrs. Craigie (who acquitted herself wonderfully) and Mrs. Flora Annie Steel. After the formal dinner was a reception at which everyone was very friendly. It is wonderful the way in which they all accept Gilbert, and one well-known man told me he was the biggest man present. Anyhow there was the feeling of brotherhood and fellowship in the wielding of "the lovely and loathely pen" (J. M. Barrie's speech).

May 12th. Went to see Max Beerbohm's caricature of Gilbert at the Carfax Gallery. "G.K.C.—humanist—kissing the World." It's more like Thackeray, very funny though.

June 9th. A political "at home" at Mrs. Sidney Webb's—saw Winston Churchill and Lloyd George. Politics and nothing but politics is dull work though, and an intriguer's life must be a pretty poor affair. Mrs. Sidney Webb looked very handsome and moved among her guests as one to the manner born. I like Mrs. Leonard Courtenay who is always kind to me. Charlie Masterman and I had a long talk on the iniquities of the "Daily News" and goodness knows they are serious enough.

June 22nd. An "at home" at Mrs. ——'s proved rather a dull affair save for a nice little conversation with Watts Dunton. His walrusy appearance which makes the bottom of his face look fierce, is counteracted by the kindness of his little eyes. He told us the inner story of Whistler's "Peacock Room" which scarcely redounds to Whistler's credit. The Duchess of Sutherland was there and many notabilities. Between ourselves Mr. —— is a good-hearted snob. His wife nice, intelligent, but affected (I suppose unconsciously). I don't really like the "precious people." They worry me.

June 30th. Graham Robertson's "at home" was exceedingly select. I felt rather too uncultivated to talk much. Mr. Lane tucked his arm into mine and requested to know the news which means, "tell me all your husband is doing, or going to do, how much is he getting, who will publish for him, has he sold his American rights, etc." Cobden's three daughters looked out of place, so solid and sincere are they. It was all too grand. No man ought to have so much wealth.

July 5th. Gilbert went today to see Swinburne—I think he found it rather hard to reconcile the idea with the man, but he was interested, though I could not gather much about the visit. He was amused at the compliments which Watts Dunton and Swinburne pay to each other unceasingly.

December 8th. George Alexander has an idea that he wants Gilbert to write a play for him, and sent for him to come and see him. He was apparently taken with the notion of a play on the Crusades, and although there is at present no love incident in Gilbert's mind, Alexander introduced and acted the supposed love scene with great spirit. It may come off some day perhaps.

December 31st. H. Belloc's been very ill but is better, thank God.

1905

Feb. 1st. Gilbert, a guest at the "Eighty Club" dinner. Rhoda and I went to after dinner speeches. G. W. E. Russell (Chair). Augustine Birrell guest and Sir Henry Fowler. It amused me hugely. Russell so imprudent and reckless, Birrell so prudent and incapable of giving himself away, Sir Henry Fowler so commonplace and trite. He looked so wicked. I thought of Mr. Haldane's story of Fowler's fur coat and his single remark on examining it: "skunk."

Feb. 11th. Rather an interesting lunch at Mrs. J. R. Green's. Jack Yeats and Mrs. Thursby were there. The atmosphere is too political and I imagine Mrs. Green to be a bit of a wire-puller, though I believe a nice woman.

Feb. 24th. Mr. Halliwell Sutcliffe came over. He is amusing and nice. Very puzzled at Gilbert's conduct, which on this particular occasion was peculiarly eccentric.

March 9th. I had an amusing lunch at the Hotel Cecil with Miss Bisland (representative of McClure). Evidently thinks a lot of Gilbert and wants his work for McClure. O ye gods and little fishes! The diplomatic service ought to be all conducted by women. I offered her Margaret's poems in exchange for a short interview with Meredith which she wishes Gilbert to undertake.

March 14th. Gilbert dined at the Buxtons, met Asquith.

March 19th. Lienie is in town and we have been with her to call on the Duchess of Sutherland. When I had got used to the splendour it was jolly enough. Her Grace is a pretty, sweet woman who was very nervous, but got better under the fire of Gilbert's chaff. She made him write in her album which he did, a most ridiculous poem of which he should be ashamed. It must be truly awful to live in the sort of way the Duchess does and endeavour to keep sane.

May 20th. Words fail me when I try to recall the sensation aroused by a J.D.C. dinner. It seems so odd to think of these men as boys, to realize what their school life was and what a powerful element the J.D.C. was in the lives of all. And there were husbands and wives, and the tie so strong, and the long, long thoughts of schoolboys and schoolgirls fell on us, as if the battle were still to come instead of raging round us.

May 24th. We went together to see George Meredith. I suppose many people have seen him in his little Surrey Cottage; Flint Cottage, Boxhill. He has a wonderful face and a frail old body. He talks without stopping except to drink ginger-beer. He told us many stories, mostly about society scandals of some time back. I remember he asked Gilbert, "Do you like babies?" and when Gilbert said, "Yes," he said "So do I, especially in the comet stage."

June 5th. Granville Barker came to see Gilbert, touching the possibility of a play.

June 29th. A garden party at the Bishop's House, Kennington. The Bishop told me that A. J. Balfour was very impressed with "Heretics." Guild of St. Matthew Service and rowdy supper. Gilbert made an excellent speech.

July 5th. Gilbert dined at the Asquiths; met Rosebery. I think he hated it.

July 16th. Gilbert went to see Mrs. Grenfell at Taplow. He met Balfour, Austen Chamberlain and George Wyndham. Had an amusing time, no doubt. Says Balfour is most interesting to talk to but appears bored. George Wyndham is delightful.

One felt always with both Frances and Gilbert that this society life stayed on the surface—amusing, distracting, sometimes welcome, sometimes boring—but never infringing the deeper reality of their relationships with old friends, with their own families, with each other. Frances wrote endless business and other letters for them both: in just a handful, mainly to Father O'Connor, does she show her deeper life of thought and feeling. Gilbert had little time now for writing anything but books and articles. Never a very good correspondent he had become an exceedingly bad one. Annie Firmin's engagement to Robert Kidd produced one of the few letters that exist. It is handwritten and undated.

A Restaurant somewhere.

MY DEAR ANNIE,

I have thought of you, I am quite certain, more often than I have of any human being for a long time past—except my wife who recalls herself continually to me by virtues, splendours, agreeable memories, screams, pokers, brickbats and other things. And yet, though whenever my mind was for an instant emptied of theology and journalism and patriotism and such rot, it has been immediately filled with you, I have never written you a line.

I am not going to explain this and for a good reason. It is a part of the Mystery of the Male, and you will soon, even if you do not already, get the hang of it, by the society of an individual who while being unmistakably a much better man than I am, is nevertheless male. I can only say that when men want a thing they act quite differently to women. We put off everything we want to do, in the ordinary way. If the Archangel Michael wrote me a complimentary letter tomorrow (as perhaps he may) I should put it in my pocket, saying, "How admirable a reply shall I write to that in a week or a month or so." I put off writing to you because I wanted to write something that had in it all that you have been, to me, to all of us. And now instead I am scrawling this nonsense in a tavern after lunch.

My very dear old friend, I am of a sex that very seldom takes real trouble, that forgets the little necessities of time, that is by nature lazy. I never wanted really but one thing in my life and that I got. Any person inspecting 60 Overstrand Mansions may see that somewhat excitable thing—free of charge. In another person, whom with maddening jealousy I suspect of being some inches taller than I am, I believe I notice the same tendency towards monomania. He also, being as I have so keenly pointed out, male, he also—I think has only wanted one thing seriously in his life. He also has got it: another male weakness which I recognize with sympathy.

All my reviewers call me frivolous. Do you think all this kind of thing frivolous? Damn it all (excuse me) what can one be but frivolous about serious things? Without frivolity they are simply too tremendous. That you, who, with your hair down your back, played at bricks with me in a house of which I have no memory except you and the bricks, that you should be taken by someone of my miserable sex—as you ought to be—what is one to say? I am not going to wish you happiness, because I am quite placidly certain that your happiness is inevitable. I know it because my wife is happy with me and the wild, weird, extravagant, singular origin of this is a certain enduring fact in my psychology which you will find paralleled elsewhere.

God bless you, my dear girl.

Yours ever, GILBERT CHESTERTON.

Married in 1903, Annie and her husband took another flat in Overstrand Mansions.

"Gilbert never cared what he wore," she writes. "I remember one night when my husband and I were living in the same block of flats he came in to ask me to go and sit with Frances who wasn't very well, while he went down to the House to dine with Hugh Law—Gilbert was very correctly dressed except for the fact that he had on one boot and one slipper! I pointed it out to him, and he said: 'Do you think it matters?' I told him I was sure Frances would not like him to go out like that—the only argument to affect him! When he was staying with me here in Vancouver, Dorothy Collins had to give him the once-over before he went lecturing—they had left Frances in Palos Verdes as she wasn't well."

In 1904, were published a monograph on Watts, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and an important chapter in a composite book, England a Nation.

The Watts is among the results of Gilbert's art studies. Its reviewers admired it somewhat in the degree of their admiration for the painter. But for a young man at that date to have seen the principles of art he lays down meant rare vision. The portrait-painter, he says, is trying to express the reality of the man himself but "he is not above taking hints from the book of life with its quaint old woodcuts." G.K. makes us see all the painter could have thought or imagined as he sets us before "Mammon" or "Jonah" or "Hope" and bids us read their legend and note the texture and lines of the painting. His distinction between the Irish mysticism of Yeats and the English mysticism of Watts is especially valuable, and the book, perhaps even more than the Browning or the Dickens, manifests Gilbert's insight into the mind of the last generation. The depths and limitations of the Victorian outlook may be read in G. F. Watts.

The story of the writing of The Napoleon was told me in part by Frances, while part appeared in an interview* given by Gilbert, in which he called it his first important book:

[* Quoted in Chesterton, by Cyril Clemens, pp. 16-17.]

I was "broke"—only ten shillings in my pocket. Leaving my worried wife, I went down Fleet Street, got a shave, and then ordered for myself, at the Cheshire Cheese, an enormous luncheon of my favourite dishes and a bottle of wine. It took my all, but I could then go to my publishers fortified. I told them I wanted to write a book and outlined the story of "Napoleon of Notting Hill." But I must have twenty pounds, I said, before I begin.

"We will send it to you on Monday."

"If you want the book," I replied, "you will have to give it to me today as I am disappearing to write it." They gave it.

Frances meanwhile sat at home thinking, as she told me, hard thoughts of his disappearance with their only remaining coin. And then dramatically he appeared with twenty golden sovereigns and poured them into her lap. Referring to this incident later, Gilbert said, "What a fool a man is, when he comes to the last ditch, not to spend the last farthing to satisfy the inner man before he goes out to fight a battle with wits." But it was his way to let the money shortage become acute and then deal with it abruptly. Frank Swinnerton relates that when, as a small boy, he was working for J. M. Dent, Gilbert appeared after office hours with a Dickens preface but refused to leave it because Swinnerton, the only soul left in the place, could not give him the agreed remuneration.

The Napoleon is the story of a war between the London suburbs, and grew largely from his meditations on the Boer War. Besides being the best of his fantastic stories, it contains the most picturesque account of Chesterton's social philosophy that he ever gave. But it certainly puzzled some of the critics. One American reviewer feels that he might have understood the book if he "had an intimate knowledge of the history of the various boroughs of London and of their present-day characteristics." Others treat the story as a mere joke, and many feel that it is a bad descent after the Browning. "Too infernally clever for anything," says one.