he sake of play.

Wine, Chesterton maintained, should not be drunk as an aid to
creative production, yet one may find that increased power of
creation sometimes follows in its wake. And here of course was a
danger to a man who worked as hard as Chesterton. He sometimes spoke
of himself as "idle," but I think it would be hard to match either
his output or his hours of creative work. I remember one visit that I
paid to Beaconsfield when he was writing one of his major books. He
was in his study by 10 in the morning, emerged for lunch at 1 and went
back from about 2:30 to 4:30. After tea he worked again until a 7:30
dinner. His wife and I went to bed about 10:30 leaving him preparing
his material for the next day. Towards 1 A.M. a ponderous tread as he
passed my door on his way to bed woke me to a general impression of
an earthquake.

In a passage in _Magic_ G.K. makes his hero say, "I happen to have
what is called a strong head and I have never been really drunk." It
was true of himself, but in these years just before the Great War,
before his own severe illness, intimate friends have told me that
they had seen him unlike himself, that they felt he had come to
depend, "almost absent-mindedly" one said, on the stimulus of wine
for the sheer physical power to pour forth so much.

Besides overwork G.K. was in these years mentally oppressed by the
strain of the Marconi Case, and then almost overwhelmed by the horror
of the World War. A man very tender of heart, sensitive and intensely
imaginative, he could not react as calmly as Cecil himself did to
what both believed the probability of the latter's imprisonment. And
when that strain was removed there remained the stain on national
honour, the opening gulf into which he saw his country falling. To
him the Marconi Case was a heavier burden than the war. For, as he
saw it, in the Marconi Case the nation was wrong in enduring
corruption and in the war the nation was magnificently right in
resisting tyranny.

So Chesterton felt, yet the outbreak of the war with all its human
suffering to mind and body weighed heavily upon him too. He wrote
_The Barbarism of Berlin_ of which I will say something in the next
chapter--for it belongs to those writings of the war period the
series of which is so consistent that in his _Autobiography_ he was
able to claim that he had no sympathy "with the rather weak-minded
reaction that is going on round us. At the first outbreak of the War
I at