nsistent and overwhelming;
this necessarily happens at a certain stage of a successful writer's
career. He was just successful enough to invite others and not
successful enough to reject them . . . there was almost too much work
for his imagination, and yet not quite enough work for his
housekeeping. . . . And it is a curious tribute to the quite curious
greatness of Dickens that in this period of youthful strain we do not
feel the strain but feel only the youth. His own amazing wish to
write equalled or outstripped even his readers' amazing wish to read.
Working too hard did not cure him of his abstract love of work.
Unreasonable publishers asked him to write ten novels at once; but he
wanted to write twenty novels at once.

Thus too with Gilbert. The first eight years of his married life saw
in swift succession the publication of ten books comprising literary
and art criticism and biography, poetry, fiction (or rather fantasy),
light essays and religious philosophy. All these were so full at once
of the profound seriousness of youth, and of the bubbling wine of its
high spirits, as to recall another thing Gilbert said: that Dickens
was "accused of superficiality by those who cannot grasp that there
is foam upon deep seas." That was the matter in dispute about
himself, and very furiously disputed it was during these years. Was
G.K. serious or merely posing, was he a great man or a mountebank,
was he clear or obscure, was he a genius or a charlatan? "Audacious
reconciliation," he pleaded--or rather asserted, for his tone could
seldom be called a plea, "is a mark not of frivolity but of extreme
seriousness."

A man who deals in harmonies, who only matches stars with angels,
or lambs with spring flowers, he indeed may be frivolous; for he is
taking one mood at a time, and perhaps forgetting each mood as it
passes. But a man who ventures to combine an angel and an octopus
must have some serious view of the universe. The man who should write
a dialogue between two early Christians might be a mere writer of
dialogues. But a man who should write a dialogue between an early
Christian and the Missing Link would have to be a philosopher. The
more widely different the types talked of, the more serious and
universal must be the philosophy which talks of them. The mark of the
light and thoughtless writer is the harmony of his subject matter;
the mark of the thou