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.]