_NOTE TO THE CROWN_
_The Crown was written in 1915, when the war was already twelve months
old, and had gone pretty deep. John Middleton Murry said to me: “Let us
do something.”_
_The doing consisted in starting a tiny monthly paper, which Murry
called The Signature, and in having weekly meetings somewhere in
London--I have now no idea where it was--up a narrow stair-case over a
green-grocer’s shop: or a cobbler’s shop. The only thing that made any
impression on me was the room over the shop, in some old Dickensey part
of London, and the old man downstairs._
_We scrubbed the room and colour-washed the walls and got a long table
and some windsor chairs from the Caledonian market. And we used to make
a good warm fire: it was dark autumn, in that unknown bit of London.
Then on Thursday nights we had meetings of about a dozen people. We
talked, but there was absolutely nothing in it. And the meetings didn’t
last two months._
_The Signature was printed by some little Jewish printer away in the
east end. We sold it by subscription, half-a-crown for six copies. I
don’t know how many subscriptions there were: perhaps fifty. The
helpless little brown magazine appeared three times, then we dropped it.
The last three of the Crown essays were never printed._
_To me the venture meant nothing real: a little escapade. I can t
believe in “doing things” like that. In a great issue like the war,
there was nothing to be “done”, in Murry’s sense. There is still nothing
to be “done”. Probably not for many, many years will men start to “do”
something. And even then, only after they have changed gradually, and
deeply._
_I knew then, and I know now, it is no use trying to do anything--I
speak only for myself--publicly. It is no use trying merely to modify
present forms. The whole great form of our era will have to go. And
nothing will really send it down but the new shoots of life springing up
and slowly bursting the foundations. And one can do nothing, but fight
tooth and nail to defend the new shoots of life from being crushed out,
and let them grow. We can’t make life. We can but fight for the life
that grows in us._
_So that, personally, little magazines mean nothing to me: nor groups,
nor parties of people. I have no hankering after quick response, nor the
effusive, semi-intimate back-chat of literary communion. So it was
ridiculous to offer The Crown in a little six-penny pamphlet. I always
felt ashamed, at the thought of the few who sent their half-crowns.
Happily they were few; and they could read Murry. If one publishes in
the ordinary way, people are not asked for their sixpences._
_I alter The Crown only a very little. It says what I still believe. But
it’s no use for a five minutes’ lunch._