umourist 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 th