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.
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.
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.