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.