The Reluctant Editor (1925-1930)
_I tell you naught for your comfort
Yea naught for your desire
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
Ballad of the White Horse_
COULD GILBERT HAVE divided his life between literary work, his home
at Top Meadow, and those other elements called in the _Autobiography_
"Friendship and Foolery," that life might well have been as he
himself called it "indefensibly fortunate and happy." But he could
not. Part of his philosophy of joy was that thanks must be given--for
sunsets, for dandelions, for beech trees, for home and friends. And
this thanks could only be the taking of his part in the fight. He
would never, he once said, have turned of his own accord to politics:
it is arguable that it would have been better if he never had. But
his brother had plunged into the fray with that very political paper
the _New Witness_ and his brother's death had left it in Gilbert's
hands. He felt the task to be a sacred legacy, and when the paper
died for lack of funds his one thought was how to start it again.
For many months he kept the office in being and paid salaries to a
skeleton staff, consisting of Mr. Gander, the deaf old manager, Miss
Dunham (now Mrs. Phillips) and an office boy. Mr. Titterton would
stroll in and play cricket with the office boy with a paper ball and
a walking-stick. Endless discussions were held as to how to re-start
the paper and whether under the old name or a new one. Bernard Shaw
had his own view. He wrote:
11 Feb.: 1923
MY DEAR CHESTERTON
Not presume to dictate (I have all Jingle's delicacy); but if
everybody else is advising you, why should not I?
_T.P.'s Weekly_ always had a weakly sound. But it established
itself sufficiently to make that form of title the trade mark of a
certain sort of paper. Hence _Jack O'London's Weekly_. It also set
the trade sheep running that way.
You have the precedents of Defoe and Cobbett for using your own
name; but _D.D.'s Weekly_ is unthinkable, and W.C.'s Weekly indecent.
Your initials are not euphonious: they recall that brainy song of my
boyhood, U-pi-dee.
Jee Kay see, kay see, kay see,
Jee Kay see, Jee Kay see.
Jee Kay see, Kay see, Kay see,
Jee Kay see Kay see.
Chesterton is a noble name; but Chesterton is Weakly spoils it.
Call it simply
CHESTERTON'S
That is how it will be asked for at the bookstalls. You may be
obliged to call later ventures _Chesterton's Daily_ or _Chesterton's
Annual_, but this one needs no impertinently superfluous definition:
_Chesterton's Perennial_ is amusing enough to be excusable; but a
joke repeated every week is no joke. A picture cover like that of
Punch might stand even that test if it were good enough; but where
are you to find your Doyle?
Week is a detestable snivelling word: nothing can redeem it, not
even the sermon on the Mount. Seven Days is better, But reminds one
of the police court as well as of the creation. Every Seven Days
would sound well. But _Chesterton's_ leaves no room for anything
else. I am more than usually sure that I am right.
Frances quite agrees with me. How would you like it if she were to
publish a magazine and call it Fanny's First Paper?
Ever
G.B.S.
If Gilbert answered this letter his answer has disappeared. He seems
to have asked permission to publish it--probably with a view to
collecting further opinions.
10 Adelphi Terrace, London, W.C.2.
February 16th 1923.
MY DEAR G.K.C.
Of course you may publish any letter of mine that you care to, at
your discretion.
. . . But not only will the publication of a letter from me not add
one to your circulation (nothing but a permanent feature will do
that), but it may lead you to disregard the advice I give to all the
people who start Labour papers (about two a week or so), which always
is, "Don't open with an article to say that your paper supplies a
want; don't blight your columns with 'messages'; don't bewilder your
readers with the family jokes of your clique; else there will be no
second number." Ponder this: it is sound.
Your main difficulty is that the class whose champion you have made
yourself reads either Lloyd's or nothing. To the rural proprietor,
no longer a peasant, art, including _belles lettres_, is immorality,
and people who idealize peasants, unpractical fools. Also the Roman
Catholic Church, embarrassed by recruits of your type and born
scoffers like Belloc, who cling to the Church because its desecration
would take all the salt out of blasphemy, will quietly put you on the
unofficial index. The Irish will not support an English journal
because it occasionally waves a Green flag far better than they can
wave it themselves. And the number of Jews who will buy you just to
see what you say about them is not large enough to keep you going.
Thus there is absolutely no public for your policy; and though there
is a select one for yourself one and indivisible, it is largely
composed of people to whom your oddly assorted antipathies and
pseudo-racial feuds are uncongenial. Besides, on these fancies of
yours you have by this time said all you have to say so many thousand
times over, that your most faithful admirers finally (and always
suddenly) discover they are fed up with the _New Witness_ and cannot
go on with it. This last danger becomes greater as you become older,
because when we are young we can tell ourselves a new story every
night between our prayers and our sleep; but later on we find
ourselves repeating the same story with intensifications and
improvements night after night until we are tired of it; and in the
end (which you have not yet reached) a story revived from the old
repertory has to last for months, and is more and more shaky as a
protection against thinking of business, or lying there a prey to
unwelcome reminiscences. And what happens to the story of the
imaginative child happens also to the sermon or the feuilleton of the
adult. It is inevitably happening to you.
That is the case against the success of CHESTERTON'S.
Your only chance finally is either to broaden your basis, or to
have no basis at all, like Dickens in "Household Words" and "All The
Year Round," and say, "Give me something with imagination in it, and
I can do without politics or theoretic sociology of any kind." This
is perhaps the only true catholicism in literature; but it will
hardly serve your turn; because all the articles and stories that
Dickens got are now mopped up by the popular press, which in his day
stuck to politics and news and nothing else. So I am afraid you will
have to stand for a policy, or at least a recognisable attitude,
unless you are prepared to write a detective story every week and
make Belloc write a satirical story as well.
You could broaden your basis if you had money enough to try the
experiment of giving ten poor but honest men in Beaconsfield and ten
more in London capital enough to start for themselves as independent
farmers and shopkeepers. The result would be to ruin 18 out of the
twenty, and possibly to ruin the lot. You would then learn from your
feelings what you would never learn from me, that what men need is
not property but honorable service. Confronted either with 20 men
ruined by your act, or 18 ruined and one Fascination Fledgby owning
half a street in London, and the other half a parish in Bucks, you
would--well, perhaps join the Fabian Society.
The pseudo race feuds you should drop, simply because you cannot
compete with the _Morning Post_, which gives the real thing in its
succulent savagery whilst you can give only a "wouldn't hurt a fly"
affectation of it. In religion too you are up against the fact that
an editor, like an emperor, must not belong to a sect. Wells is on
the right tack: my tack. See my prefaces to Androcles and Methuselah.
We want the real Catholic Church above the manufactured one. The
manufactured one is useful as the Salvation Army is useful, or the
formulas of the Church of Christ Scientist; but they do not strike on
the knowledge box of the modern intellectual; and it is on the modern
intellectual that you are depending. I am an Irishman, and know how
far the official Catholic Church can go. Your ideal Church does not
exist and never can exist within the official organization, in which
Father Dempsey will always be efficient and Father Keegan futile if
not actually silenced; and I know that an officially Catholic
Chesterton is an impossibility.
However, you must find out all this for yourself as I found it out
for myself. Mere controversy is waste of time; and faith is a curious
thing. I believe that you would not have become a professed official
Catholic if you did not believe that you believe in
transubstantiation; but I find it quite impossible to believe that
you believe in transubstantiation any more than, say, Dr. Saleeby
does. You will have to go to Confession next Easter; and I find the
spectacle--the box, your portly kneeling figure, the poor devil
inside wishing you had become a Fireworshipper instead of coming
there to shake his soul with a sense of his ridiculousness and
yours--all incredible, monstrous, comic, though of course I can put a
perfect literary complexion on it in a brace of shakes.
Now, however, I am becoming personal (how else can I be sincere?).
Besides I am going on too long and the lunch bell is ringing. So
forgive me, and don't bother to answer unless you cannot help it.
Ever,
G. BERNARD SHAW.
Meanwhile, Shaw as usual responded cordially to Gilbert's wish to
make him an early attraction in the paper--but also as usual urged
him towards the theatre:
10th Dec. 1924.
By all means send me a screed about Joan [of Arc] for the cockpit.
But I protest I have no views about her. I am only the first man
modest enough to know his place _auprès d'elle_ as a simple reporter
and old stage hand.
You should write plays instead of editing papers. Why not do George
Fox, who was released from the prisons in which Protestant England
was doing its best to murder him, by the Catholic Charles II? George
and Joan were as like as two peas in pluck and obstinacy.
G.B.S.
The specimen advance number was published before the end of 1924. In
the leading article G.K. gave his reasons for agreeing finally to use
his own name--although in the form attacked by Shaw. He had first
viewed the proposal with a "horror which has since softened into
loathing." He had looked for a title that should indicate the paper's
policy. But while that policy was in fact a support of human
normality: well-distributed property, freedom and the family--yet the
surrounding atmosphere was so abnormal that "any title defining our
doctrine makes it look doctrinaire." A name like _The Distributive
Review_ would suggest that a Distributist was like a Socialist, a
crank or a pedant with a new theory of human nature. "It is so old
that it has become new. At the same time I want a title that does
suggest that the paper is controversial and that this is the general
trend of its controversy. I want something that will be recognised as
a flag, however fantastic and ridiculous, that will be in some sense
a challenge, even if the challenge be received only with genial
derision. I do not want a colourless name; and the nearest I can get
to something like a symbol is merely to fly my own colours."
Although the paper was never exclusively Catholic, that flag was for
G.K. as it had been for Cecil of a very definite pattern and very
clear colours: religiously the paper stood for Catholic Christianity,
socially for the theory of small ownership, personal responsibility
and property. It was in strong opposition especially to Socialism and
even more to Communism. Bernard Shaw, Gilbert once said, wanted to
distribute money among the poor--"we want to distribute power."
During the last part of Cecil's editorship his wife had been
Assistant Editor of the _New Witness_ and she had so continued when
Gilbert first became Editor. But she was neither a Catholic nor a
Distributist. Religion seems not to have interested her, and her
political outlook was entirely different from Gilbert's. In _The
Chestertons_ she dismissed Distributism as "quite without first
principles" and "a pious hope and no more."* Obviously it was
impossible for Gilbert to start his new paper with an Assistant
Editor in entire disagreement with his views. I have sometimes
wondered whether his intense dislike of having to tell Mrs. Cecil
this was not almost as strong a factor in the delay as the money
problem.
[* I have learnt, as this book goes to press, that Mrs. Cecil became
a Catholic in 1941.]
There was no break in their relations: she went on writing for the
paper, doing chiefly the dramatic criticism. But it is clear from her
own account of the incident that she wholly misconstrued Gilbert's
attitude and did not realise how far she herself had drifted from
Cecil's views as well as from Gilbert's.
Shaw wrote again:
Reid's Palace Hotel
Funchal, Madeira.
16th January, 1925.
MY DEAR G.K.C.
The sample number has followed me out here. What a collector's
treasure!
Considering that I had Cecil's own assurance that my Quintessence
of Ibsenism rescued him from Rationalism, and that it was written in
1889 (I abandoned Rationalism consciously and explicitly in 1881) I
consider John Prothero's introduction of me to your readers as a
recently converted Materialist Rationalist to be a most unnatural
act; and it would serve her right if I never spoke to her again.
Rationalism is the bane of the Church. A Roman priest always wants
to argue with you. A Church of England parson flies in terror from an
argument, a fundamentally sensible course. George Fox simply knocked
arguers out with his "I have experimental knowledge of God." St.
Thomas Aquinas was like me: he knew the worthlessness of
ratiocination because he could do it so well, and yet despaired of
the Inspirationists in practical life because they did it so badly.
J.K.P. doesn't know her way about in this controversy; and I cannot
take up her challenge.
What makes me uneasy about the prospectus is that you drag in
anti-prohibition. You might as well have declared for Brighter London
at once, or said that the paper would be printed at the office of the
_Morning Advertiser_. You run the risk of the money coming from The
Trade. However, _non olet_. Only, remember the fate of all the
editors--Gardiner, Donald, Massingham, etc., etc.--who have written
without regard to their proprietors. The strength of your position is
that they can hardly carry on with your name in the title without
you. But they can kill the paper by stopping supplies if it does not
pay; and the chances are that it will not. I have never had a
farthing of interest on my shares in the New Statesman, and don't
expect I ever shall. Therefore keep your list of shareholders as
various and as uncommercial as you can: get Catholic money rather
than beer money.
As I am the real patentee of the Distributive State, and the D.S.
is Socialism; and as, furthermore, the Church must remain at least
neutral on Prohibition, as in the United States, where a Catholic
priest has just set a praiseworthy example of neutrality by bringing
about a record cop of bootleggers, and as the success of Prohibition
is so overwhelming that it is bound to become a commonplace of
civilization, you must regard it as at least possible that you will
some day make the paper Socialist and Dry (with a capital). Therefore
do not undertake to oppose anything: stand for what you propose to
advocate, whether as to property or drink or anything else, but don't
state your solutions as antitheses.
By the way, don't propose equal distribution of land. It is like
equal distribution of metal, rough on those who get the lead and
rather too jolly for those who get the gold. Your equal distribution
must come to equal distribution of the national income in terms of
money.
The £500 a year is absurd. Do you realize that it is £250 at
pre-war rates, and subject to heavy taxation: net £375--pre-war
182-10-0? You have sold yourself into slavery for ten years for
£3-10-2 a week. Are you quite mad? Make it at least £1500, plus
payment for copy.
Ever
G.B.S.
Of course it was not merely a question of inadequate payment for his
work: as time went on, a large part of the financial burden of the
paper had to be carried by him. Lord Howard de Walden helped
generously and so did Mr. Chivers. Other donations came in but mostly
very small ones. No proper accounts were kept: no watch on how the
money went. And from time to time Gilbert would pay off a printing
bill of £500 or so and go ahead hoping for better times. The money
aspect did not worry him, I think, at first. There was always more to
be made by a little extra effort: though a time was to come when
every extra effort wearied him cruelly. But there was one thing he
could not bear--quarrels on the Board or on the staff and above all
the suggestion that he should adjudicate.
"He was a bad judge of men," one of his staff told me. "He never
shirked an intellectual issue, but in a practical crisis he was
inclined to slide out."
"He could never," said another, "stand up to accusations from one man
against another."
The first start was made with the existing staff of three. Miss
Dunham was sub-editor and was usually left to see the paper through
the press. G.K. would come up once or twice a week and dictate his
own articles.
"You never knew when he was coming," she says, "but you always knew
when he was there by the smell of his cigar." He was practically a
chain smoker and he always used the same brand. He left drawings on
the blotter and everything else. He had no idea of time and when he
said, "I think I'll go out now," he might stay out an hour or so, or
he might not return at all. Lighting a cigar or cigarette he would
make a sign in the air with the match. He never omitted this ritual,
and Miss Dunham thinks it became like tapping the railings was to Dr.
Johnson.
"He used to come in and swing about on his little feet," she said.
And it is true that his feet like his voice seemed too small to
belong to the rest of him. Her great difficulty was that she could
not get him to read and select among the contributions: too often
this was left to her and she felt painfully inadequate to the task.
For the first year all the Notes of the Week were written by G.K.
Then he got Mr. Titterton as Assistant Editor: and after that, said
the Assistant Editor with simplicity, "You couldn't always tell good
Titterton from bad Chesterton." Everyone who worked at the office
adored G.K.: especially the "little" people, typists, secretaries,
office boys.
"He was so kind," Miss Dunham said. "He never got angry. He never
minded being interrupted. If his papers blew away he never got
impatient. His patience hurt one." She had never seen him angry.
That the paper was ever got out seems wonderful as the staff recall
those days. Yet I think that all the stories about Gilbert's
inefficiency as Editor have contributed towards an impression that I
shared myself until quite lately--that _G.K.'s Weekly_ was
immeasurably inferior to the _New Witness_. Going more carefully
through the files I have begun to question that impression.
The paper was produced under certain obvious disadvantages. Even
spending some days a week in London and telephoning freely it is not
easy to edit a paper from the country. Gilbert thought of himself as
a bad editor, and was not in fact a very good one. The contributions
he accepted were uneven in quality: both Leaders and Notes of the
Week when not written by him tended to be weak imitations of either
himself or Belloc--tinged at times with an air of omniscience
tolerable in Belloc but quite intolerable in his imitators. Just
occasionally the equally unedited Notes and Leader were in
contradiction of each other. Yet the paper remains an exceedingly
interesting one. Analysing my earlier and late impressions I
concluded that my earlier feeling of boredom sprang from the
inevitable effect of the _New Witness_ coming first and therefore
having been read first. It is a disadvantage of consistency that, as
Bernard Shaw remarked, you have said the same thing, you have told
the same story, so often as the years go by.
Taking a rest of a year and returning fresh to _G.K.'s Weekly_ I was
surprised at finding how much I enjoyed reading it and also at
finding that it had been of more practical use than I remembered to
the cause it served. The trend of the whole world is to make the
State powerful and the family powerless. It was something that in
these years _G.K.'s Weekly_ should have helped to smash two bills of
this nature-the Mental Deficiency and the Canal Children's Bills.
Both these aimed at taking children from their parents, the first in
the cause of health, the second of education. Against both Gilbert
wrote brilliantly and successfully.
_G.K.'s Weekly_ has much more G.K. in it and quite as much Belloc as
in the earlier years of the _New Witness_. Eric Gill, too, long a
friend of the Chestertons, became the chief contributor on art. In
1925 he spent a night at Top Meadow to discuss the policy of the
paper, especially with reference to industrialism and art. A little
later the Gills moved from Wales much nearer to Beaconsfield and the
two men met fairly often. Gill's letters are interesting. They are
mostly before the visit to Beaconsfield and probably led to it. He
begins by attacking Gilbert for "(1) supporting Orpenism as against
Byzantinism and (2) thinking that the art of painting _began_ with
Giotto, whereas Giotto was really much more the end."
In June 1925, G.K. was asking him to write about Epstein. Gill agreed
to do so but insisted that Chesterton and Belloc must not disagree
with him but "accept my doctrine as the doctrine of _G.K.'s Weekly_
in matters of art--just as I accept yours in other matters." "I don't
intend to write for you as an outsider (have I not put almost my last
quid into your blooming Company?--7% or not). . . . God forbid that
you should have an art critic who'll go round the picture shows for
you and write bilge about this painter and that--this 'art movement'
and that."
In the first state of effervescence the labour he delighted in quite
deadened the pain of the Editor's chair. Gilbert was prepared if
necessary to write the whole paper and to treat it as a variant on
the Toy Theatre or the Sword Stick:
It was said that the Chicago pork machine used every part of a pig
except the squeal. It might be said that the Fleet Street press
machine uses only the squeal. . . .
In short, nobody reading the newspapers could form the faintest
notion of how intelligent we newspaper people are. The whole machine
is made to chop up each mind into meaningless fragments and waste the
vast mass even of those. Such a thing as one complete human being
appearing in the press is almost unknown; and when an attempt is made
at it, it necessarily has a certain air of eccentric egotism. That is
a risk which I am obliged to run everywhere in this paper and
especially on this page. As I have said, the whole business of
actually putting a paper together is a new game for me to play, to
amuse my second childhood; and it combines some of the characters of
a jigsaw and a crossword puzzle. But at least I am called upon to do
a great many different sorts of things; and am not tied down to that
trivial specialism of the proletarian press.*
[* March 28, 1925.]
And again
This paper exists to insist on the rights of man; on possessions
that are of much more political importance than the principle of one
man one vote. I am in favour of one man one house, one man one field;
nay I have even advanced the paradox of one man one wife. But I am
almost tempted to add the more ideal fancy of one man one
magazine . . . to say that every citizen ought to have a weekly paper
of this sort to splash about in . . . this kind of scrap book to keep
him quiet.*
[* April 4, 1925.]
G.K. goes on to talk of an old idea of his: that a young journalist
should write one article for the _Church Times_ and another for the
_Pink 'Un_ and then put them into the wrong envelopes.
It is that sort of contrast and that sort of combination that I am
going to aim at in this paper . . . I cannot see why convictions
should look dull or why jokes should be insincere. I should like a
man to pick up this paper for amusement and find himself involved in
an argument. I should like him to pursue it purely for the sake of
argument and find himself pulled up short by a joke . . . I never can
see why a thing should not be both popular and serious; that is, in
the sense of being both popular and sincere.
For the paper had a most serious purpose. He acknowledged its defects
of bad printing (which the printers indignantly denied), bad
proof-reading, bad editing, and claimed "to raise against the banner
of advertisement the noble banner of apology." Because a creative
revolution was what he wanted, words and forms were hard to find. It
was easy to dress up stale ideas in a new dress but the terminology
for something outside the old hack party programmes had to be fresh
minted.
He proposed various changes after a few months' running and
introduced them thus:
We should be only too glad if for this week only our readers would
have the tact to retire and leave us alone. We are in a Hegelian
condition, a condition not so much of Being as of Becoming. And no
generous person should spy on an unfortunate fellow creature who is
going through the horrible and degrading experience of being a
Hegelian. It is even more embarrassing than being caught in the very
act of evolution, which every clear headed person would desire to
avoid.*
[* December 12, 1925.]
In this number he began _The Return of Don Quixote_ and also a sort
of scrapbook. He invited contributions dealing with every sort of
approach to Distributism and promised "more than one series of
constructive proposals and definite schemes of legislation. We do not
promise that all these schemes will exactly agree with each other or
that we shall agree with all of them. Some will be more conservative,
some more drastic than our own view." This article ends on an
ambitious note. Very varying schemes will be admitted, but the idea
of the paper will thereby be strengthened not destroyed--
For what we desire is not a paltry party programme but a
Renaissance.
It was not the first time he had demanded a revolution but, as the
depression hit our country and Big Business seemed less and less
capable of coping with it, the demand became more understandable and
the fight against Monopoly more urgent.
A thinking man should always attack the strongest thing in
his own time. For the strongest thing of the time is always
too strong. . . . The great outstanding fact and feature of
our time is Monopoly.*
[* April 25, 1925.]
I have already referred to a debate on Monopoly between Chesterton
and Mr. Gordon Selfridge, in which Selfridge, with the familiar
unreality of the millionaire, maintained that there was no such
thing. Anyone was free to open a store in rivalry of Selfridge's or
to start a paper that should eclipse the _Daily Mail!_ The only real
monopoly, he added gracefully, was that of a genius like Chesterton
whose work the ordinary man could not emulate. The graceful
compliment Chesterton answered by offering to share his last epigram
with Mr. Selfridge: but as to the main contention, what could he say?
It was at once too easy and absolutely impossible to answer such a
speech--or more truly such a speaker: only in a Country of the Blind
could he have won a hearing. But Chesterton persevered. Even in 1924
the shadow of large scale unemployment had begun. And at this
singularly inappropriate time came the Empire Exhibition at Wembley.
In the failure of its appeal Chesterton saw hope: for he believed
that from a frank facing of truth his country might yet conquer the
coming perils.
That was the real weakness of Wembley; that it so completely
mistook the English temperament as to appeal to a stale mood. It
appealed to a stale mood of success; when we need to appeal to a
new and more noble mood of failure, or at least of peril. The
English . . . no longer care to be told of an Empire on which the sun
never sets. Tell them the sun is setting, and they will fight though
the battle go against them to the going down of the sun: if they do
not stay it, like Joshua. . . .
We seriously propose that England should take her stand among the
unhappy nations; it is too dismal a fate to go on being one of the
happy ones. We must be as proud as Spain and Poland and Serbia;
nations made more dear to their lovers by their disasters. Our
disasters have begun; but they do not seem to have endeared us to
anybody in particular. Our sorrow has come; but we gain no extra
loyalty by it. The time has come to claim our crown of thorns; or at
least not to cover it any longer with such exceedingly faded flowers.*
[* March 21, 1925.]
Always Chesterton was haunted by the present war. He had seen the
Prussian peril conquered: he saw it rising again. Even before the
advent of Hitler he knew that the tribe which had stolen from Austria
and Denmark, had invaded France and crushed Poland was without
repentance, and he feared that again the stupidity (or the greed)
behind English and American policy was giving it another opportunity--
"Those sturdy Teutons," he wrote ironically, "from whom we were
descended up to the outbreak of the Great War, and from whom we are
now showing signs of being descended again."
The misfortune was that Englishmen had ceased to try to get free from
"a secret government; conducted by we know not whom, and achieving we
know not what. The real national life of our country is unconscious
of its own national policy. The right hand of the Englishman, that
holds the plough or the sword, knows not what his left hand doth with
the pen and the cheque-book. Man is man; and Mond is master of his
fate." For our government he apologised to France. He saw it as one
and the same fight--against a heathenish money power and heathen
Prussia. And the beating of the dark wings of enemy aeroplanes
sounded in his dreams. As early as 1925 he wrote a Christmas play of
St. George and the Dragon in which the Turkish Knight embodied his
vision of Prussia and St. George spoke prophetically for England.
SAINT GEORGE: I know that this is sure
Whatever man can do, man can endure,
Though you shall loose all laws of fight, and fashion
A torture chamber from a tilting yard,
Though iron hard as doom grow hot as passion,
Man shall be hotter, man shall be more hard,
And when an army in your hell fire faints,
You shall find martyrs who were never saints.
_(They wound each other and the doctor comes to the help of the
Turkish knight.)_
PRINCESS: Why should we patch this pirate up again?
Why should you always win and win in vain?
Bid him not cut the leg but cut the loss.
SAINT GEORGE: I will not fire upon my own red cross.
PRINCESS: If you lay there, would he let you escape?
SAINT GEORGE: I am his conqueror and not his ape.
DOCTOR: Be not so sure of conquering. He shall rise
On lighter feet, on feet that vault the skies.
Science shall make a mighty foot and new,
Light as the feather feet of Perseus flew,
Long as the seven leagued boots in tales gone by,
This shall bestride the sea and ride the sky.
Thus shall he fly, and beat above your nation
The clashing pinions of Apocalypse,
Ye shall be deep sea fish in pale prostration
Under the sky foam of his flying ships.
When terror above your cities, dropping doom,
Shall shut all England in a lampless tomb,
Your widows and your orphans now forlorn
Shall be no safer than the dead they mourn.
When all their lights grow dark, their lives grow gray,
What will those widows and those orphans say?
SAINT GEORGE: Saint George for Merrie England.
He saw the aeroplanes in vision and he saw courage and patriotism. I
think he must rejoice today that betrayal of the allied cause has not
been at the hands of an Englishman. He had said many hard things
about the English aristocracy and gentry: but these two virtues he
had always granted were theirs. And in his vision he saw hope:
England may soon be poor enough to be praised with an undivided
heart. We are not sure that the ruins of Wembley may not be the
restoration of Westminster. It is when a nation has recovered from
the illusion of owning everything that it discovers that it does
stand for something; and for that something it will fight with a
lucid and just tenacity which no mere megalomania can comprehend. We
are not so perverse as to wish to see England ruined that she may be
respected. But we do think she will be happy in having the sort of
respect that could remain even if she were ruined. Patriotic as the
English have always been, the patriotism of their educated class has
seldom had this peculiar sort of extra energy that is given by a
conscience completely at rest. If that were added, they might well
make such a stand as would astound the world. All their other
virtues, their humour and sporting spirit and freedom from the
morbidities and cruelties of fatigue, might enter into their full
heritage when joined to the integrity and intellectual dignity that
belong to self defence and self respect. We are far from sure that
the world has not yet to see our nation in its finest phase.
What may be in the womb of night we know not, nor what are those dim
outlines that show on the horizon.
"In truth" he wrote, "no man knows how near we are to death or to
dawn. I am not sure whether I am making this speech from a
scaffolding or a scaffold."
It is easy for the young to undertake hard things: they never know
how hard they are. And they are certain of success. The "lessons of
experience" signify to the young that other men have failed: their
own experience shall teach others the meaning of success. But to
begin again at fifty, with the special spring of youth gone and with
the sad lessons of one's own experience in the mind: this calls
indeed for a rare courage. Gilbert knew all the cost in time, energy,
money and reputation that he would have to pay--that he did pay. And
he stood increasingly alone. Cecil's had been the irreparable loss,
but others of the old circle were dropping out and their places were
not filled.
Jack Phillimore's death in 1926 was a heavy blow. To his memory
Gilbert dedicated _The Queen of Seven Swords_, published the year of
his death.
You go before me on all roads
On bridges broad enough to spread
Between the learned and the dunce
Between the living and the dead.
The gulf between the Socialist group and the Distributist had become
far more obvious than of yore: Shaw and Wells would still write for
G.K. but only because he was their friend. If F. Y. Eccles, if
Desmond McCarthy today contributed, it would too be chiefly from
affection for Gilbert. One article by Mr. McCarthy described the old
days when the original _Eye Witness_ was in being and he, Cecil and
Belloc sat around the table editing it and sticking triolets thrown
off in hot haste into those nasty little spaces left by articles that
did not quite fit, or supplying three or four articles and a Ballade
Urbane while the printers waited.
We have to print a triolet
When space is clamouring for matter
We try to put it off and yet
We have to print a triolet
It is with infinite regret
That we admit the silly patter
We have to print a triolet
When space is clamouring for matter.
Such joyous scrambles are proper to youth, and now none of them were
young.
All authors worthy of the name have found their platform and made
permanent engagements by middle life: professional men are absorbed
by work and life: they simply had not time to give as of yore to
build up this new-old venture. The names of Shaw and Wells continue
to appear among the contributors, often enough in religious debate.
Reading the files and visiting the two men to talk of Gilbert, I made
one discovery that is curious from whichever side you look at it. Two
able and indeed brilliant men betrayed not only an amazing degree of
ignorance concerning the tenets of Catholicism but also a bland
conviction that they knew them well. Wells in conversation based his
claim on the fact that he had long been intimately acquainted with an
ex-nun. Shaw I fancy felt he must know all about something that had
surrounded him in infancy--for, as the reader must have noticed, he
is much preoccupied by the thought of his Irish descent and education.
But what seems to me even stranger about the situation is the absence
on the Catholic side of any effort to explain to these men the
doctrines they misconstrued. When Wells, for instance, gave a crude
and inaccurate statement of the doctrine of the Fall, Belloc laughed
at him, Chesterton and Father McNabb both wrote long and picturesque
articles, illuminating to a believer but, as instruction to an
unbeliever, quite useless. A correspondence that seemed likely to
drag on forever ended abruptly with Wells asking about the Fall,
"Tell me, did it really happen?" to which Chesterton briefly replied,
"Yes."
I imagine he thought he and the other writers had said this several
times already, but in fact they had not. Perhaps they did not realise
where the beginning must be made in instructing otherwise instructed
men on the subject of Catholicism. It is all very interesting and
curious. But it largely explains why Bernard Shaw found it hard to
believe that Gilbert believed in Transubstantiation. Has any Catholic
ever explained the philosophic meaning of Transubstantiation to the
Great old Irish Man of English Letters? Even Gilbert was perhaps too
much inclined simply to play the fool in high-spirited fashion with
those who attacked the Faith in his paper or other papers. But then
how well he played it!
Here are some imaginary interviews on
. . . the recently discovered traces of an actual historical Flood:
a discovery which has shaken the Christian world to its foundations
by its apparent agreement with the Book of Genesis. . . .
The Dean of St. Paul's remarked: "I do not see that there is any
cause for alarm. Protestantism is still founded on an impregnable
rock: on that deep and strong foundation of disbelief in the Bible
which supports the spiritual and intellectual life of all true
Christians today. Even if dark doubts should arise, and it should
seem for the moment as if certain passages in the Scripture story
were true, we must not lose heart; the cloud will pass: and we have
still the priceless possession of the Open Bible, with all its
inexhaustible supply of errors and inconsistencies: a continual
source of interest to scholars and a permanent bulwark against
Rome. . . ."
Mr. H. G. Wells exclaimed: "I am interested in the Flood of the
future: not in any of these little local floods that may have taken
place in the past. I want a broader, larger, more complete and
coordinated sort of Flood: a Flood that will really cover the whole
ground. I want to get people to understand that in the future we
shall not divide water, in this petty way, into potty little ponds
and lakes and rivers: it will be one big satisfying thing, the same
everywhere. _Après moi le Déluge_. Belloc in his boorish boozy way
may question my knowledge of French; but I fancy that quotation will
settle him."*
[* March 30, 1929.]
On the favourite topic of modern advertisement, having read an essay
which said that good salesmanship made "everything in the garden
beautiful," Gilbert again thought of Genesis:
There was only one actor in that ancient drama who seems to have
had any real talent for salesmanship. He seems to have undertaken to
deliver the goods with exactly the right preliminaries of promises
and praise. He knew all about advertisement: we may say he knew all
about publicity, though not at the moment addressing a very large
public. He not only took up the slogan of Eat More Fruit, but he
distinctly declared that any customers purchasing his particular
brand of fruit would instantly become as gods. And as this is exactly
what is promised to the purchasers of every patent medicine, popular
tonic, saline draught or medicinal wine at the present day, there can
be no question that he was in advance of his age. It is extraordinary
that humanity, which began with the apple and ended with the patent
medicine, has not even yet become exactly like gods. It is still more
extraordinary (and probably the result of a malicious interpolation
by priests at a later date) that the record ends with some
extraordinary remarks to the effect that one thus pursuing the bright
career of Salesmanship is condemned to crawl on his stomach and eat a
great deal of dirt.*
[* March 23, 1929.]
The relation between Belloc and the paper, as between Belloc and
Gilbert himself, was a unique one. Not indeed its "onlie begetter,"
he was equally with Cecil begetter of the original paper and its
first editor. He was Gilbert's chief guide to the historical and
political scene of Europe. Both men shared, had fought all their
lives for, their ideas of Freedom, the Family, Restoration of
Property and all that is involved in Catholic Christianity. And
Belloc said repeatedly that he had no platform for the continuous
expression of these ideas. Such books as his _Cruise of the Nona_
found still as wide a public as had _The Path to Rome_ a quarter
century earlier, and in those books his philosophy may be read. But
he had, too, urgent commentaries on Foreign Affairs and Current
Politics--and for these _G.K.'s Weekly_ became his platform as
completely as the _New Witness_ had been in the past. To Gilbert this
appeared one chief value of his paper: in an article from which I
quote in the next chapter he gives it as one of the two reasons for
which he toiled to keep _G.K.'s Weekly_ in existence.
Week by week Belloc on Current or Foreign Affairs wrote of what was
happening and what would presently come of it. And who can say
reading those articles today that it would not have changed the
defeats of this war into victory at a far earlier date had our
statesmen read and heeded--the analysis for instance of the peril of
the aeroplane, of the threat to the Empire from Japan, the importance
of keeping Italy's friendship in the Mediterranean, the growing
strength of Germany and the awful risk we took in allowing her to
rearm, in failing to arm against her?
Whether he was right or, as many held, wildly wrong about what
underlay our failures of judgment, his views must be briefly traced
because of their effect on Gilbert and others. In the financial world
he saw England in the first years after the war dominated by the
International Banking Power, which made us as it were a local branch
of Wall Street. In his view it was the bankers both of America and
England who first insisted that Germany could not pay her reparations
and later made England repudiate her own war debts to America (though
she had, he showed, already paid in interest and principal more than
half of what had been lent). The banks did this because they had lent
commercially both to Germany and England sums whose safety meant more
to them than moneys merely owing to the nations--which would not
benefit the banks! England thus became subservient to the United
States and had to follow American financial policies. It was these
policies that led to the abandonment of the unwritten alliance with
France and especially to allowing Germany to rearm (helped by loans
from these same banks), to reoccupy the Rhineland and remilitarise
the Ruhr.
Next, in Belloc's view, came a worse stage yet in which the banks had
given place to Big Business which was increasingly controlling
Parliament. The plutocracy that had bit by bit eaten into our
aristocracy and gained ascendancy in the Govemment was not, like our
ancient aristocracy, trained for the business and was utterly
uninformed especially in foreign affairs. The one remaining hope, the
permanent officials, especially of the Foreign Office, were less and
less listened to; latterly he held too that even the Foreign Office
had lost its old sure touch. Hence a constant vacillation in our
policies which weakened England's position and made certain some
terrible disaster.
This fear is ever present in Belloc's articles and ever brooded on by
the Editor. He rallied his forces to urge, week after week, the
possible alternative to disaster--the recovery by the people of
England of power and freedom, the restoration of England to its place
in a restored Europe, freed from the German menace. Despite the
natural high spirits a certain gloom and more than a touch of
fierceness mark the work of these years. Summing up "the twenties"
of the century, Chesterton saw them as singularly bankrupt spiritually
and intellectually, and he foresaw from their sowing a miserable
harvest.