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.