cian
Oldershaw writes, "reading to him from the Canterbury Walt Whitman in
my bedroom at West Kensington. The seance lasted from two to three
hours, and we were intoxicated with the excitement of the discovery."

For some time now we shall find Gilbert dismissing belief in any
positive existence of evil and treating the universe on the Whitman
principle of jubilant and universal acceptance. He writes, too, in
the Whitman style. By far the most important of his notebooks is one
which, by amazing good fortune, can be dated, beginning in 1894 and
continuing for several years. In its attitude to man it is
Whitmanesque to a high degree, yet it is also most characteristically
Chestertonian. Whitman is content with a shouting, roaring optimism
about life and humanity. Chesterton had to find for it a
philosophical basis. Heartily as he disliked the literary pessimism
of the hour, he was not content simply to exchange one mood for
another. For whether he was conscious of it at the time or not, he
did later see Walt Whitman's outlook as a mood and not a philosophy.
It was a mood, however, that Chesterton himself never really lost,
solely because he did discover the philosophy needed to sustain it.
And thereby, even in this early Notebook, he goes far beyond Whitman.
Even so early he knew that a philosophy of man could not be a
philosophy of man only. He already _feels_ a presence in the universe:

It is evening
And into the room enters again a large indiscernable presence.
Is it a man or a woman?
Is it one long dead or yet to come?
That sits with me in the evening.

This again might have been only a mood--had he not found the
philosophy to sustain it too. It is remarkable how much of this
philosophy he had arrived at in The Notebook, before he had come to
know Catholics. Indeed the Notebook seems to me so important that it
needs a chapter to itself with abundant quotation.

Meanwhile, what was Gilbert doing about his work at University
College? Professor Fred Brown told Lawrence Solomon that when he was
at the Slade School he always seemed to be writing and while
listening to lectures he was always drawing. It is probably true
that, as Cecil Chesterton says, he shrank from the technical toils of
the artist as he never did later from those of authorship; and none
of the professors regarded him as a serious art student. They pointed
later to his illustrations of _Biography for Beginners_ as proof that
he never