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.