a man
must first be an ascetic and Gilbert was not an ascetic in the
ordinary sense. But is there not for the thinker an asceticism of the
mind, very searching, very purifying? In his youth he had told
Bentley that creative writing was the hardest of hard labour. That
sense of the pressure of thought that made Newman call creative
writing "getting rid of pain by pain"; the profound depression that
often follows; the exhaustion that seems like a bottomless pit. St.
Theresa said the hardest penance was easier than mental prayer: was
not much of Gilbert's thought a contemplation?

Faith, thanksgiving, love, surely these far above bodily asceticism
can so clear a man's eyesight that he may fittingly be called a
mystic since he sees God everywhere. "The less a man thinks of
himself, the more he thinks of his good luck and of all the gifts of
God." Only a poet who was more than a poet could see so clearly of
what like St. Francis was.

When we say that a poet praises the whole creation, we commonly
mean only that he praises the whole cosmos. But this sort of poet
does really praise creation, in the sense of the act of creation. He
praises the passage or transition from nonentity to entity; there
falls here also the shadow of that archetypal image of the bridge,
which has given to the priest his archaic and mysterious name. The
mystic who passes through the moment when there is nothing but God
does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings in which there
was really nothing else. He not only appreciates everything but the
nothing of which everything was made. In a fashion he endures and
answers even the earthquake irony of the Book of Job; in some sense
he is there when the foundations of the world are laid, with the
mornings stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy.*

[* _St. Francis of Assisi_, pp. 112-13.]

But there was in all those years another element besides the giving
of thanks and the joy of creation: an abiding grief for the sorrows
of the sons of men and especially those of his own land. In this mood
the _Cobbett_ was written.

Nine years separate the publication of _William Cobbett_ from that of
the _History of England_. Written at the time when Englishmen were
fighting so magnificently, that book had radiated G.K.'s own mood of
hope, but to read _Rural Rides_, to meditate on Cobbett's England,
and then turn to the England of the hour was not