“This is a noble record of a noble life.”
CHAPTER TWO
LITERARY APPRENTICESHIP
Chesterton had a shorter apprenticeship for a writing career than most men of letters. After leaving St. Paul’s he went to the Slade Art School where he graduated in 1891 at the age of seventeen. He forthwith began reviewing books on art for the “Bookman,” the “Speaker,” and other periodicals. In 1901 he married Frances Blogg whom he had known for some time. Among those present at the wedding was Miss Elizabeth Yeats, the sister of the poet William Butler Yeats, who recalls,
“My sister and I were at the Chesterton’s wedding at St. Mary’s Abbots in Kensington. Gilbert wanted the ceremony as ceremonial as possible—but Frances, who then belonged to some new thought people in religious matters, wanted everything possible cut from the Church of England Service—except just the legal parts. Gilbert had been, of course, brought up a nonconformist.”
Chesterton’s marriage was the beginning of thirty-five years of happiness with a wife who was ideally congenial.[A]
His first book “Greybeards at Play,” consisting of jingles and sketches, had appeared in 1894. As time went on he gradually found the expression of ideas more satisfying than any kind of art work.
[A] Frances Chesterton died December 12, 1938.
From 1898 to 1901 he and his brother Cecil helped Hilaire Belloc on “The New Witness,” a weekly paper pledged to wage eternal against political corruption. Some years earlier he had severed his connections with socialism and adopted Belloc’s ideas now known as “Distributism,” the progress of which was to be ultimately chronicled by the famous “G. K.’s Weekly” founded in 1926.
Stephen Gwynn recalls the first book written for Macmillan.
“It is so long ago that I only dimly remember my first encounter with G. K. C. He was married and they let a flat—Battersea Park—a tiny flat—in 1901. I never knew two people who changed less in nearly forty years.