There is no need to describe the case in detail. On the charges concerned with the contract and ministerial corruption, the same witnesses (with the notable exception of Lloyd George) gave much the same evidence as before the Parliamentary Committee. Very little that was new emerged. The contract looked worse than ever after Cecil Chesterton's Counsel, Ernest Wild, had examined witnesses, but Mr. Justice Phillimore insisted that it had nothing to do with the case "whether the contract was badly drawn or improvident."

But indeed all this discussion of the contract was given an air of unreality by the extraordinary line the Chesterton Defence took. It distinguished between the two sets of charges, offering to justify the second (concerning Godfrey Isaacs' business record) but claiming that the first set brought accusation of corruption not against Godfrey but against Rufus and Herbert Samuel—who were not the prosecutors. It was an impossible position to say that Ministers were fraudulently giving a fraudulent contract to Godfrey Isaacs but that this did not mean that he was in the fraud. Cecil showed up unhappily under cross-examination on this matter, but from the point of view of his whole campaign worse was to follow: for Cecil withdrew the charges of corruption he had levelled at the Ministers!

Here are extracts from the relevant sections of the cross-examination by Sir Edward Carson:

Carson: And do you now accuse him [Godfrey Isaacs] of any abominable business—I mean in relation to obtaining the contract?

Cecil Chesterton: Yes, certainly; I now accuse Mr. Isaacs of very abominable conduct between March 7 and July 19.

Carson: Do you accuse the Postmaster General of dishonesty or corruption?

C. Chesterton: What I accused the Postmaster General of was of having given a contract which was a byword for laxity and thereby laying himself open reasonably to the suspicion that he was conferring a favour on Mr. Godfrey Isaacs because he was the Attorney-General's brother.

Carson: I must repeat my question, do you accuse the Postmaster-General of anything dishonest or dishonourable?

C. Chesterton: After the Postmaster-General's denials on oath I must leave the question; I will not accuse him of perjury.

Carson: And therefore you do not accuse him of anything dishonest or dishonourable?

AFTER SOME FURTHER QUESTIONING

Judge: That is evasion. Do you or do you not accuse him?

C. Chesterton: I have said "No."

LATER

C. Chesterton: My idea at that time was that Sir Rufus Isaacs had influenced Mr. Samuel to benefit Godfrey Isaacs.

Carson: You have not that opinion now?

C. Chesterton: Sir Rufus has denied it on oath and I accepted his denial.

Cecil still insisted that though the Ministers had not been corrupted, what had come to light about Godfrey's offer of American Marconi shares to his brother showed that Godfrey had tried to corrupt them. Godfrey could not have enjoyed the case very much. There was much emphasis on his concealment of Clause 10 (allowing the Government to terminate at any time): and Sir Alexander King, secretary to the Post Office, admitted that Godfrey Isaacs had asked that it be kept quiet: but this was not among the accusations Cecil had levelled at him. In his summing up, Mr. Justice Phillimore indicated the possibility that the shares Godfrey had so gaily sold belonged not to himself but to the English Marconi Company—merely adding that this question was not relevant to the present case. Further the record of his company failures was rather ghastly.

Here is a section of his cross-examination as to the companies he had been connected with before the Marconi Company—remember that there were twenty of them!

Wild: I am trying to discover a success.

Judge: It is not an imputation against a man that he has been a failure.

Wild: Here are cases after cases of failure.

Isaacs: That is my misfortune.

Judge: You might as well cross-examine any speculative widow.

Wild: A speculative widow would not be concerned in the management.

* * *

Wild: Can you point to one success except Marconi in the whole of your career?

Isaacs: In companies?

Wild: Yes.

Isaacs: A complete success, no; I should not call any one of them a complete success, but I may say that each of them was an endeavour to develop something new.

But Carson had made the point in his opening speech that though Godfrey Isaacs had been connected with so many failures, he had not been accused by the shareholders of anything dishonourable: in his closing speech he pointed out that "not one single City man had been brought forward to say that he had been deceived to the extent of one sixpence by the representations of Mr. Isaacs." And indeed the evidence called by the Defence in this present case, however suspicious it may have made some of his actions appear, did not establish beyond doubt any actual illegality.

The trial ended on June 9. The Judge summed up heavily against Cecil Chesterton. The jury was out only forty minutes. The verdict was "Guilty." Cecil Chesterton, says the Times, "smiled and waved his hand to friends and relations who sat beside the dock." The Judge preached him a solemn little homily and then imposed a fine of L100 and costs. The Chestertons and all who stood with them held that so mild a fine instead of a prison sentence for one who had been found guilty of criminal libel on so large a scale was in itself a moral victory. "It is a great relief to us," ran the first Editorial in the New Witness after the conclusion of the trial, "to have our hands free. We have long desired to re-state our whole case about the Marconi disgrace, in view of the facts that are now before us and the English people. . . . When we began our attack . . . we were striking at something very powerful and very dangerous . . . we were striking at it in the dark. The politicians saw to that. Our defence is that if we had not ventured to strike in the dark, we and the people of England should be in the dark still."

There can be no question of Cecil Chesterton's courage. But he may have exaggerated a little in saying that if the New Witness had not struck in the dark the nation would still be in the dark: Parliament had already refused to approve the contract without proper discussion and the Outlook was attacking vigorously, before the first New Witness attack. And there are grave drawbacks to the making of charges in the dark which later have to be withdrawn. Cecil's withdrawal of his charges against the Ministers and his failure to substantiate his charges against Godfrey's company record may have done more to hinder than help the cause of clean government. But his courage remains: and, if one has to choose, one prefers the immoderate man who said more than he knew to the careful men who said so much less. Gilbert giving evidence at the trial had said that he envied his brother the dignity of his present position. And with the Isaacs brothers in mind, one sees the point.

IV. AFTER THOUGHTS

Four days after the verdict against Cecil Chesterton, the Parliamentary Committee produced its report. There had been a draft report somewhat critical of the Marconi-buying Ministers by the Chairman, Sir Albert Spicer; and another considerably more critical by Lord Robert Cecil. Lord Robert's report said that Rufus Isaacs had committed "grave impropriety in making an advantageous purchase of shares . . . upon advice and information not yet fully available to the public. . . . By doing so he placed himself, however unwittingly, in a position in which his private interests or sense of obligation might easily have been in conflict with his public duty. . . ." Of his silence in the House, Lord Robert said: "We regard that reticence as a grave error of judgment and as wanting in frankness and in respect for the House of Commons."

Upon this Rufus Isaacs' son comments: "The vehemence of this language was not calculated to commend the draft to the majority of the Committee." Vehemence seems hardly the word; but at any rate the Committee did not adopt either Lord Robert's report or Sir Albert Spicer's.

By the usual party vote of 8 to 6, it adopted a report prepared by Mr. Falconer (one of the two whom Rufus Isaacs had approached privately) which simply took the line that the Ministers had acted in good faith and refrained from criticising them.

Parliament debated the matter a few days later on a Conservative motion: "That this House regrets the transactions of certain of its Ministers in the shares of the Marconi Company of America, and the want of frankness displayed by Ministers in their communications on the subject to the House." Rufus Isaacs' son speaks of the certain ruin of his father's career if "by some unpredictable misadventure" the motion had been carried. It would indeed have had to be an "unpredictable misadventure" for the voting was on the strictest party lines: which means that the House did not express its real opinion at all: the motion was defeated by 346 to 268. Lloyd George and Rufus Isaacs expressed regret for any indiscretion there might have been in their actions: Rufus explained that he would not have bought the shares—"if I had thought that men could be so suspicious of any action of mine." In the debate the Leader of the Opposition, Arthur Balfour, somewhat disdainfully refused to make political capital out of the business. Lloyd George and Isaacs were loudly cheered by their own Party—though whether they were cheered for having bought American Marconis or for having concealed the purchase from the House there is now no means of discovering. At any rate their careers were not damaged: the one went on to become Lord Chief Justice of England and later Viceroy of India: the other became Prime Minister during the war of 1914-1918.

One question arising from the episode is whether it meant what Cecil Chesterton and Belloc thought it meant in the world of party politics, or something entirely different. They seem throughout to have assumed that their thesis of collusion between the Party Leaders was proved by this scandal: it seems to me quite as easy to make the case that it was disproved.

A Conservative first raises the matter by inconvenient questions in the House. A group of young Conservatives pay the costs of Cecil Chesterton's defence. When a Parliamentary Committee is appointed to enquire into the alleged corruption, the story of every session becomes one of a Conservative minority trying hard to ferret out the truth and a ministerial majority determined to prevent their succeeding. Finally the leading Conservative Commissioner, Lord Robert Cecil, issues a restrained but most damning report which is, as a matter of course, rejected by the Liberal majority.

A Conservative M.P. told me he thought the great mistake made was that it had all been made "too much of a party question." Unless you already disbelieved quite violently in the existence of the two parties this would certainly be the effect upon you of reading the report of the Commission Sessions, and all that can be set against it is the fact that Mr. Balfour did, in the House of Commons, utter a conventional form of words which, as has been said, really amounted to a refusal to make political capital out of the affair.

I do not say, for I do not pretend to know, if this is the correct interpretation: it is certainly the obvious one.

Douglas Jerrold in a brilliant article on Belloc,* treats his theory of the Party System as a false one, and maintains that he mistook for collusion that degree of co-operation that alone could enable a country to be governed at all under a party system. A certain continuity must be preserved if, in the old phrase, "The King's Government is to be carried on"—but such continuity did not spell a corrupt collusion. If at this distance of time such a view can be held by a man of Mr. Jerrold's ability it could certainly be held at the time by the majority—and it may be that the continual assumption of an unproved fact got in the way in the fight against more obvious evil.

[* "Hilaire Belloc and the Counter Revolution" in For Hilaire Belloc.]

For bound up with this question is another: The Eye Witness seemed so near success and yet never quite succeeded. Might it have done so had it been founded with a single eye to creative opportunity—to the attack on the Servile State and the building of some small beginning of an alternative? G.K.'s Weekly was a slight improvement from that point of view—for it did create the Distributist League; but both papers, I think, had from their inception a divided purpose that made failure almost inevitable.

The fight against corruption which had been placed equal with the fight for property and liberty at the start of the Eye Witness is a noble aim. But, like the other, it is a life work. To do it a man must have time to spend verifying rumours or exploding them, following up clues, patiently waiting on events. I began to read the files with an assumption of the accuracy of the claims of the Eye and New Witness as to its own achievement in all this, but when the dates and facts in the Marconi case had been tabulated for me chronologically I began to wonder. Again and again the editor stated that The New Witness had been first to unearth the Marconi matter. But it hadn't. As we have seen, questions in the House and attacks in other papers had preceded their first mention of the subject.

So too the statement that the Marconi affair had proved how little Englishmen cared about corruption seemed almost absurd when one read not only the Conservative but also the Liberal comment of the time. "Political corruption is the Achilles heel of Liberalism," said an outstanding Liberal Editor; while Hugh O'Donnell in the New Witness paraphrased the wail of the "Cadbury" papers:

'Tis the voice of the Cocoa I hear it exclaim O Geordie, dear Geordie Don't do it again.

Just how scandalous was the Marconi scandal? At this distance of time it is difficult to arrive at any clear view. There are two main problems—the contract and the purchase of American Marconis.

The contract seems very definitely to have been unduly favourable to the Company; clauses were so badly drawn that they had to be supplemented by letters which had no legal effect; documents were lost, other tenders misinterpreted, other systems perhaps not fully examined, the report of a sub-committee shelved, Godfrey Isaacs allowed to issue a misleading report without correction from the Post Office. It all may spell corruption: but it need not. No one familiar with the workings of a Government department is likely to be surprised at any amount of muddle and incompetence. Matters are forgotten and then in the effort to make up for lost time important steps are simply omitted. Officials are pig-headed and unreasonable. And as to lost documents—

What of the ministers' dealings in shares? Godfrey may have been using Rufus to purchase ministerial favour. If so, he could hardly have done so on the comparatively small scale of the dealings known to us. The few thousand involved could not have meant an enormous amount to Rufus. He had, it is true, begun his career on the Stock Exchange, found himself insolvent and been "hammered." But he had gone on to make large sums at the Bar—up to thirty thousand pounds a year; and his salary as Attorney-General was twenty thousand a year.

There may, of course, have been far heavier purchases than we know about: the piece-by-piece emergence of what we do know gives us no confidence that all the pieces ever emerged. We have only the word of the two brothers for most of the story and one comes to feel that their word has no great meaning. But, allowing for all that, it is possible that Godfrey may have wanted Rufus to have the American shares out of family affection; of the shares Godfrey personally disposed of, a very large number went to relations and close friends—mother, sisters, his wife's relations—who certainly could not help to get his contract through Parliament. If this, the most charitable interpretation, is also the true one, Rufus and his political friends acted with considerable impropriety in snatching at this opportunity of quick and easy money. The rest of the story is of their efforts to prevent this impropriety being discovered. Had they mentioned it openly in Parliament on October 11, the matter might have ended there. But they lacked the nerve: the occasion passed: and nothing remained, especially for Rufus, but evasion, shiftiness, half-truth passing as whole truth, the farce of indignant virtue—a performance which left him not a shred of dignity and ought to have made it unthinkable that he should ever again be given public office. The perfect word on the whole episode was uttered, not by either Gilbert or Cecil Chesterton or by any of their friends, but by Rudyard Kipling. The case had meant a great deal to him. On June 15, a Conservative neighbour of Kipling wrote to Gilbert:

I cannot let the days pass without writing to congratulate you and your brother on the result of the Isaacs Trial. . . . I do feel, as many thousands of English people must feel, that the New Witness is fighting on the side of English Nationalism and that is our common battle. My neighbour, Rudyard Kipling, has followed every phase of the fight with interest of such a kind that it almost precluded his thinking of anything else at all and when he gets hold of the New Witness (my copy) I never can get it back again. You see, however much we have all disagreed—do disagree—we are all in the same boat about a lot of things of the first rank. . . . We can't afford to differ just now if we do agree—it's all too serious.

When Isaacs was appointed Viceroy of India, Kipling wrote the poem:

GEHAZI

Whence comest thou, Gehazi So reverend to behold In scarlet and in ermine And chain of England's gold? From following after Naaman To tell him all is well; Whereby my zeal has made me A judge in Israel.

Well done, well done, Gehazi, Stretch forth thy ready hand, Thou barely 'scaped from Judgment, Take oath to judge the land. Unswayed by gift of money Or privy bribe more base, Or knowledge which is profit In any market place.

Search out and probe, Gehazi, As thou of all canst try The truthful, well-weighed answer That tells the blacker lie: The loud, uneasy virtue, The anger feigned at will, To overbear a witness And make the court keep still.

Take order now, Gehazi, That no man talk aside In secret with the judges The while his case is tried, Lest he should show them reason, To keep the matter hid, And subtly lead the questions Away from what he did.

Thou mirror of uprightness, What ails thee at thy vows, What means the risen whiteness Of skin between thy brows? The boils that shine and burrow, The sores that slough and bleed— The leprosy of Naaman On thee and all thy seed?

Stand up, stand up, Gehazi, Draw close thy robe and go Gehazi, judge in Israel. A leper white as snow!

As the Times leading article of June 19, 1913, put it: "A man is not blamed for being splashed with mud. He is commiserated. But if he has stepped into a puddle which he might easily have avoided, we say that it is his own fault. If he protests that he did not know it was a puddle, we say that he ought to know better; but if he says that it was after all quite a clean puddle, then we judge him deficient in the sense of cleanliness. And the British public like their public men to have a very nice sense of cleanliness."

That, fundamentally, was what troubled Gilbert Chesterton then and for the rest of his life. He was not himself an investigator of political scandals—in that field he trusted his brother and Belloc, and on this particular matter Cecil had certainly said more than he knew and possibly more than was true. But it did not take an expert to know that some of the men involved in the Marconi Case had no very nice sense of cleanliness: and these men were going to be dominant in the councils of England, and to represent England in the face of the world, for a long time to come.



CHAPTER XX

The Eve of the War (1911-1915)

DURING THE EARLIER YEARS of the New Witness Gilbert had nothing to do with the editing, and his contributions to it were only part of the continuing volume of his weekly journalism. It would be almost impossible to trace all the articles in papers and magazines that were never republished: the volumes of essays appearing year by year probably contained the best among them. He was still in 1911 writing for the Daily News and every week until his death he continued to do "Our Notebook" for the Illustrated London News. I have found an unpublished ballade he wrote on the subject:

BALLADE OF A PERIODICAL

In icy circles by the Behring Strait, In moony jungles where the tigers roar, In tropic isles where civil servants wait, And wonder what the deuce they're waiting for, In lonely lighthouses beyond the Nore, In English country houses crammed with Jews, Men still will study, spell, perpend and pore And read the Illustrated London News.

Our fathers read it at the earlier date And twirled the funny whiskers that they wore Ere little Levy got his first estate Or Madame Patti got her first encore. While yet the cannon of the Christian tore The lords of Delhi in their golden shoes Men asked for all the news from Singapore And read the Illustrated London News.

But I, whose copy is extremely late And ought to have been sent an hour before I still sit here and trifle with my fate And idly write another ballad more. I know it is too late; and all is o'er, And all my writings they will now refuse I shall be sacked next Monday. So be sure And read the Illustrated London News.

ENVOY

Prince, if in church the sermon seems a bore Put up your feet upon the other pews, Light a Fabrica de Tabagos Flor And read the Illustrated London News.

Debating and lecturing went on, and an amusing letter from Bernard Shaw shows the preparations for a Three Star Show—Shaw against Chesterton with Belloc in the chair—in 1911. An exactly similar debate years later was published in a slender volume entitled Do We Agree? On both occasions the crowd was enormous and many had to be turned away. All three men were immensely popular figures and all three were at their best debating in a hall of moderate size where swift repartee could be followed by the whole audience.

Gilbert always shone on these occasions. The challenge of a debate brought forth all his powers of wit and humour. His opponent furnished material on which he could work. And how he enjoyed himself! Frank Swinnerton once heard him laugh so much that he gave himself hiccups for the rest of the evening. I heard him against Miss Cicely Hamilton and against Mr. Selfridge and felt the only drawback to be that the fight was so very unequal. The Selfridge debate in particular was sheer cruelty, so utterly unaware was the business man that he was being intellectually massacred by a man who regarded all that Selfridge's stores stood for as the ruin of England. Occasionally Mr. Selfridge looked bewildered when the audience rocked with laughter at some phrase that clearly conveyed no meaning to him at all. But so complete was his failure to understand what it was all about that when the meeting was over he asked if Chesterton would not write his name with a diamond on a window of his store already graced with many great names. For once Chesterton was at a loss for words. "Oh, how jolly!" he murmured feebly.

Very different was it when he debated with Bernard Shaw with Belloc as third performer.

Ayot St. Lawrence, Welwyn, Herts. 27th Oct. 1911.

Don't be dismayed: this doesn't need a reply.

MY DEAR G.K.C.

With reference to this silly debate of ours, what you have to bear in mind is this.

I am prepared to accept any conditions. If they seem unfair to me from the front of the house, all the better for me; therefore do not give me that advantage unless you wish to, or are—as you probably are—as indifferent to the rules as I am.

The old Hyndman-Bradlaugh & Shaw-Foote debates (S-F. was a two-nighter) were arranged thus. Each debater made 3 speeches: 1 of 30 minutes, 1 of 15 and 1 of 10. Strict time was kept (the audiences were intensely jealous of the least departure from the rules); and the chairman simply explained the conditions and called Time without touching the subject of debate.

The advantages of this were, (a) that the opponent or the opener could introduce fresh matter up to the end of his second speech, and was tied up in that respect for the last 10 minutes only, and (b) that the debate was one against one, and not one against two (and with less time allowed for him at that), as it must have been had the chairman dealt with the subject.

The disadvantages for us are that we both want Belloc to let himself go (I simply thirst for the blood of his Servile State—I'll Servile him); and nobody wants to tie you down to matter previously introduced when you make your final reply. We shall all three talk all over the shop—possibly never reaching the Socialism department—and Belloc will not trouble himself about the rules of public meeting and debate, even if there were any reason to suppose that he is acquainted with them. (Do you recollect how Parnell and Biggar floored the House in the palmy days of obstruction by meanly getting up the subject of public order, which no one else suspected the existence of?)

I therefore conclude that we had better make it to some extent a clowns' cricket match, and go ahead as in the debates with Sanders & Macdonald & Cicely Hamilton, which were all wrong technically. In a really hostile debate it is better to be as strict as possible; but as this is going to be a performance in which three Macs who are on the friendliest terms in private will belabor each other recklessly on wooden scalps and pillowed waistcoats and trouser seats, we need not be particular.

Still, you had better know exactly what you are doing: hence this wildly hurried scrawl.

Did you see my letter in Tuesday's Times? Magnificent!

My love to Mrs. Chesterton, and my most distinguished consideration to Winkle.* To hell with the Pope!

[* The Chestertons' dog who preceded Quoodle of the poem.]

Ever

G.B.S.

P.S. I told Sanders to explain to you that you would be entitled to half the gate (or a third if Belloc shares) and that you were likely to overlook this if you were not warned. I take it that you have settled this somehow.

At the second of these debates Belloc opened the proceedings by announcing to the audience "You are about to listen, I am about to sneer." His only contribution to the debate was to recite a poem:

Our civilisation Is built upon coal Let us chant in rotation Our civilisation That lump of damnation Without any soul Our civilisation Is built upon coal.

Bernard Shaw was on the friendliest terms with the others and admired their genius but thought it ill directed. Belloc, he had told Chesterton, was "wasting prodigious gifts" in the service of the Pope.

"I have not met G.K.C.: Shaw always calls him a man of colossal genius" writes Lawrence of Arabia to a friend.

As a lecturer Chesterton's success was less certain than as a debater. Many of his greatest admirers say they have heard him give very poor lectures. He was often nervous and worried beforehand. "As a lecture," wrote the Yorkshire Weekly Post after a performance in this year (1911), "it was a fiasco, but as an exhibition of Chesterton it was pleasing." Although his writing appeared almost effortless he did in fact take far more pains about it than he did in preparing for a lecture. He seemed quite incapable of remembering the time or place of appointment, or of getting there on time, if at all. Stories are told of his non-appearance on various platforms. My husband remembers a meeting in a London theatre at which Chesterton had been billed as one of the speakers. The meeting, arranged by the Knights of the Blessed Sacrament, was well under way before he arrived, panting but unperturbed. His apology ran something like this: "As knights you will understand my not being here at the beginning, for the whole point of knighthood was that the knight should arrive late but not too late. Had St. George not been late there would have been no story. Had he been too late, there would have been no princess."

Even more annoying was his habit of beginning his lecture by saying he had not prepared it. Such a remark is not likely to please any audience, least of all an audience that has paid for admission and knows that the lecturer is receiving a large fee. But money, whether he was receiving it or giving it away, meant nothing to him. He had not a strong voice, and I have seen him, when a microphone was provided, holding a paper of notes between himself and it. An ardent admirer of his writing told me he made far too many jokes about his size. Yet how pleasing they sometimes were: when his Chairman for instance, after a long wait, said he had feared a traffic accident: "Had I met a tram-car," Chesterton replied, "it would have been a great, and if I may say so, an equal encounter."

He thought badly of his own lecturing and began once by saying: "I might call myself a lecturer; but then again I fear some of you may have attended my lectures."

Actually, in spite of the jokes, his thoughts were centred entirely on his subject, not on himself. An anonymous Society Diarist quoted by Cosmo Hamilton writes of an occasion when: "he was given, rather foolishly, a little gold period chair and as he made his points it slowly collapsed under him. He rose just in time and sinking into another chair that someone put behind him began at the word he had last spoken. No acting could have secured such an effect of complete indifference. It was evident that he had barely noticed the incident."

Ellis Roberts completes the picture. He knew Gilbert already as a brilliant talker and came to hear him from a platform:

"I remember the manner of his lecture. It seemed to be written on a hundred pieces of variously shaped paper, written in ink and pencil (of all colours) and in chalk. All the pages were in a splendid and startling disorder and I remember being at first a little disappointed. Then the papers were abandoned and G.K.C. talked."*

[* Reading for Pleasure, p. 96.]

At this time Bernard Shaw scored a victory over his friend. For beside lecturing, journalism and the publication of three considerable and two minor books, Chesterton between 1911 and the War wrote the play that Shaw had been so insistently demanding. The books were: Manalive 1911, A Miscellany of Men (Essays) 1912, The Victorian Age in Literature February 1913, The Wisdom of Father Brown 1914, The Flying Inn 1914. The play was Magic produced at the Little Theatre in October 1913. One who admired it was George Moore. He wrote to Forster Bovill (November 24, 1913):

I followed the comedy of Magic from the first line to the last with interest and appreciation, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I think of all modern plays I like it the best. Mr. Chesterton wished to express an idea and his construction and his dialogue are the best that he could have chosen for the expression of that idea: therefore, I look upon the play as practically perfect. The Prologue seems unnecessary, likewise the magician's love for the young lady. That she should love the magician is well enough, but it materialises him a little too much if he returns that love. I would have preferred her to love him more and he to love her less. But this spot, if it be a spot, is a very small one on a spotless surface of excellence.

I hope I can rely upon you to tell Mr. Chesterton how much I appreciated his Play as I should like him to know my artistic sympathies.

"Artistic sympathies" is not ungenerous considering how Chesterton had written of George Moore in Heretics.

It is rather comic that all the reviews hailing from Germany where the play was very soon produced compare Chesterton with Shaw and many of them say that he is the better playwright. "He means more to it," a Munich paper was translated as saying, "than the good old Shaw." Chesterton's superiority can hardly be entertained in the matter of technique. Actually what the critic meant was that he preferred the ideas of Chesterton to the ideas of Shaw. Both men were chiefly concerned with ideas. But while Shaw excelled chiefly in presenting them through brilliant dialogue, G.K.'s deeper thoughts were conveyed in another fashion. The Duke might almost, it is true, have been a Shaw character, but the fun the audience got out of him was the least thing they received. Chesterton once said that he suspected Shaw of being the only man who had never written any poetry. Many of us suspect that Chesterton never wrote anything else. This play is a poem and the greatest character in it is atmosphere. Chesterton believed in the love of God and man, he believed in the devil: love conquers diabolical evil and the atmosphere of this struggle is felt even in the written page and was felt more vividly in the theatre. After a passage of many years those who saw it remember the moment when the red lamp turned blue as a felt experience.

But as to popularity, in England at least, it would be absurd to compare G.K. with G.B.S. The play's run was a brief one and it was years before he attempted another.

Chesterton was fighting corruption, fighting the Servile State. Above all things he was fighting sterility, fighting it in the name of life—life with its richness, its variety, its sins and its virtues, with its positively outrageous sanity. "Thank you for being alive," wrote an admirer to him.

Manalive is above all things a hymn to life. It is the acid test of a Chestertonian. Reviewers became wildly enthusiastic or bitterly scornful. Borrowing from his own phrase about Pickwick I am inclined to say that men not in love with life will not appreciate Manalive— nor, I should imagine, heaven. The ideas that make up the book had been long in his head. The story of White Wynd written while he was at the Slade School tells one half of the story, an unpublished fragment of the same period entitled "The Burden of Balham" the other half. The Great Wind that blows Innocent Smith to Beacon House is the wind of life and it blows through the whole story. Before an improvised Court of Law Smith is tried on three charges: housebreaking—but it was his own house that he broke into to renew the vividness of ownership; bigamy—but it was his own wife with whom he repeatedly eloped to renew the ecstasy of first love; murder with a large and terrifying revolver—but he dealt life not death from its barrel. For he used it only to threaten those who said they were tired of life or that life was not worth living, and he forced them through fear of death to hymn the praises of life.

The explanation given by Smith to Dr. Eames, the Master of Brakespeare College, of his ideas and his purpose gives the note of fooling and profundity filling the whole book.

"I want both my gifts to come virgin and violent, the death and the life after death. I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him—only to bring him to life. I begin to see a new meaning in being the skeleton at the feast."

"You can scarcely be called a skeleton," said Dr. Eames smiling.

"That comes of being so much at the feast," answered the massive youth. "No skeleton can keep his figure if he is always dining out. But that is not quite what I meant: what I mean is that I caught a kind of glimpse of the meaning of death and all that—the skull and the crossbones, the Memento Mori. It isn't only meant to remind us of a future life, but to remind us of a present life too. With our weak spirits we should grow old in Eternity if we were not kept young by death. Providence has to cut immortality into lengths for us, as nurses cut the bread and butter into fingers."

Manalive appeared in 1911. Next year came what is perhaps his best-known single piece of writing, the Battle of Lepanto. In the spring of 1912 he had taken part in a debate at Leeds, affirming that all wars were religious wars. Father O'Connor supported him with a magnificent description of the battle of Lepanto. Obviously it seized Gilbert's mind powerfully, for while he was still staying with Father O'Connor, he had begun to jot down lines and by October of that year the poem was published. One might fill a book with the tributes it has received from that day to this. Perhaps none pleased him more than a note from John Buchan (June 21, 1915): "The other day in the trenches we shouted your Lepanto."

The Victorian Age in Literature made many of his admirers again express the wish that he would stay in the field of pure literature. His characterisations of some of the Victorian writers were sheer delight.

Ruskin had a strong right hand that wrote of the great mediaeval Minsters in tall harmonies and traceries as splendid as their own; and also, so to speak, a weak and feverish left hand that was always fidgeting and trying to take the pen away—and write an evangelical tract about the immorality of foreigners . . . it is not quite unfair to say of him that he seemed to want all parts of the Cathedral except the altar.

Tennyson was a provincial Virgil . . . he tried to have the universal balance of all the ideas at which the great Roman had aimed: but he hadn't got hold of all the ideas to balance. Hence his work was not a balance of truths, like the universe. It was a balance of whims; like the British Constitution . . . he could not think up to the height of his own towering style.

. . . while Emily Bronte was as unsociable as a storm at midnight and while Charlotte Bronte was at best like that warmer and more domestic thing a house on fire—they do connect themselves with the calm of George Eliot, as the forerunners of many later developments of the feminine advance. Many forerunners (if it comes to that) would have felt rather ill if they had seen the things they foreran.

The best and most profound part of the book was however the working out of certain generalisations—the effect on the literature of the period of the Victorian compromise between religion and rationalism ("Macaulay, it is said, never talked about his religion: but Huxley was always talking about the religion he hadn't got"): the break-up of the compromise when Victorian Protestantism and Victorian rationalism simultaneously destroyed one another; the uniqueness of the nonsense-writing of the later Victorian period.

In one illuminating passage Chesterton defends what seems at first sight merely his own habit of getting dates and events in their wrong order.

The mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions and not by fixed dates, or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead . . . thus Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as it were, from a Shelleyan extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus Newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet delivered, that was coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason no one can understand tradition or even history who has not some tenderness for anachronism.

This was not merely special pleading: it contains a profound truth. Wilfrid Ward proved it of Newman in the biography that G.K. had probably just been reading. Chesterton noted it himself in his book on Cobbett who, as he said, saw what was not yet there. It is almost the definition of genius. Already at this date Chesterton and Belloc were fighting much that to the rest of us only became fully apparent long afterwards.

"I think you would make a very good God," wrote E. V. Lucas to Chesterton. There is indeed something divine in an almost ceaseless outpouring of creative energy. But only God can create tirelessly and Chesterton was at this time beginning to be tired. You can see it in The Flying Inn. The book is still full of vitality and the lyrics in it, later published separately under the title Wine, Water and Song, are as good in that kind as any that he ever wrote. But with all its vigour the book is a less joyful one than Manalive and it is a much more angry one. Manalive was a paean of joy to life. The Flying Inn is fighting for something necessary to its fulness—freedom.

It must have been just while he was writing it that there were threatenings of a case against him by Lever Brothers on account of a lecture given at the City Temple on "The Snob as Socialist." In answering a question he spoke of Port Sunlight as "corresponding to a Slave Compound." Others besides Lever Brothers were shocked and some clarification was certainly called for. Belloc and Chesterton meant by Slavery not that the poor were being bullied or ill treated but that they had lost their liberty. Gilbert went so far as to point out how much there was to be said in defence of a Slave state. Under Slavery the poor were usually fed, clothed and housed adequately. Slaves had often been much more comfortable in the past than were free men in the world of today. A model employer might by his regulations greatly increase the comfort of his workers and yet enslave them.

A letter from Bernard Shaw advising him to get up certain details asks the question of whether the workman at Port Sunlight would forfeit his benefits and savings should he leave. "If this is so," wrote Shaw, "then, though Lever may treat him as well as Pickwick would no doubt have treated old Weller, if he had consented to take charge of his savings, Lever is master of his employee's fate, and captain of his employee's soul, which is slavery." He went on to offer financial help in fighting the case. The "Christian Commonweal" had reported Chesterton's speech and was also threatened with the law. To the editor G. K. wrote:

Only a hasty line to elongate the telephone. I am sorry about this business for one reason only; and that is that you should be even indirectly mixed up in it. Lever can sue me till he bursts: I'm not afraid of him. But it does seem a shame when I've often attacked you (always in good faith and what was meant for good humour), and when you've heaped coals of fire by printing my most provocative words, that your chivalry should get you even bothered about it. I am truly sorry and ask pardon—of you, but not of old Sun and Soapsuds, I can tell you.

Another very hasty line about the way I shall, if necessary, answer; about which I feel pretty confident. I should say it is absurd to have libel actions about Controversies, instead of about quarrels. It would mean every Capitalist being prosecuted for saying that Socialism is robbery and every Socialist for saying property is theft. By great luck, the example lies at the threshold of the passage quoted. The worst I said of Port Sunlight was that it was a slave-compound. Why, that was the very phrase about which half the governing class argued with the other half a few years ago! Are all who called the Chinese slaves to be sued by all who didn't? Am I prosecuted for a terminology . . . enough, you know the rest. Go on with the passage and you will see the luck continues. Abrupt, brief, and perhaps abbreviated as my platform answer was, it really does contain all the safeguards against imputing cruelty or human crime to poor Lever. It defines slavery as the imposition of the master's private morality; as in the matter of the pubs. It expressly suggests it does not imply cruelty: for it goes out of its way to say that such slaves may be better off under such slavery. So they were, physically, both in Athens and Carolina. It then says that a merely mystical thing, which I think is Christianity, makes me think this slavery damnable, even if it is comfortable. I would defend all this, as a lawful sociological comment, in any Court in civilisation.

I tell you my line of defence, to use discreetly and at your discretion. If the other side are bent on fighting, I should reserve the defence. If they seem open to reason, I should point out that it is on our side.

His old schoolfellow Salter was also his solicitor and a letter to Wells shows in part the advice Salter gave.

DEAR WELLS,

I am asked to make a suggestion to you that looks like, and indeed is, infernal impudence: but which a further examination will rob of most of its terrors. Let not these terrors be redoubled when I say that the request comes from my solicitor. It is a great lark; I am writing for him when he ought to be writing for me.

In the forthcoming case of Lever v. Chesterton & Another, the Defendant Chesterton will conduct his own case; as his heart is not, like that of the lady in the song, Another's. He wants to fight it purely as a point of the liberty of letters and public speech; and to show that the phrase "slavery" (wherein I am brought in question) is current in the educated controversy about the tendency of Capitalism today. The solicitor, rather to my surprise, approves this general sociological line of defence; and says that I may be allowed one or two witnesses of weight and sociological standing—not (of course) to say my words are defensible, still less that my view is right—but simply to say that the Servile State, and Servile terms in connection with it, are known to them as parts of a current and quite unmalicious controversy. He has suggested your name: and when I have written this I have done my duty to him. You could not, by the laws of evidence, be asked to mix yourself up with my remarks on Lever: you could only be asked, if at all, whether there was or was not a disinterested school of sociology holding that Capitalism is close to Slavery—quite apart from anybody. Do you care to come and see the fun?

Yours always,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

The suggested line was so successful that Wells's testimony was not called for. The case was withdrawn. No apology was even asked from Gilbert, whose solicitor tells me that Messrs. Lever "behaved very reasonably when once it was made clear to them that Gilbert was not a scurrilous person making a vulgar and slanderous attack upon their business."

With H. G. Wells as with Shaw, Gilbert's relations were exceedingly cordial, but with a cordiality occasionally threatened by explosions from Wells. Gilbert's soft answer however invariably turned away wrath and all was well again. "No one," Wells said to me, "ever had enmity for him except some literary men who did not know him." They met first, Wells thinks, at the Hubert Blands, and then Gilbert stayed with Wells at Easton. There they played at the non-existent game of Gype and invented elaborate rules for it. Cecil came too and they played the War game Wells had invented. "Cecil," says Wells, comparing him with Gilbert, "seemed condensed: not quite big enough for a real Chesterton."

They built too a toy theatre at Easton and among other things dramatized the minority report of the Poor Law Commission. The play began by the Commissioners taking to pieces Bumble the Beadle, putting him into a huge cauldron and stewing him. Then out from the cauldron leaped a renewed rejuvenated Bumble several sizes larger than when he went in.

In the early days of their acquaintance Wells remembers meeting the whole Chesterton family in the street of a French town and inviting them to lunch. His own youngest son, a small boy, had left the room for a moment when Wells exclaimed: "Where's Frank? Good God, Gilbert, you're sitting on him."

The anxious way in which Gilbert got up and turned apologetically towards his own chair was unforgettable. An absent-minded man who in a gesture of politeness once gave his seat to three ladies in a bus might well be alarmed over the fate of a small boy found under him.

In his memoirs Wells relates another pleasing story of a Chestertonian encounter:

I once saw [Henry] James quarrelling with his brother William James, the psychologist. He had lost his calm; he was terribly unnerved. He appealed to me, to me of all people, to adjudicate on what was and what was not permissible in England. William was arguing about it in an indisputably American accent, with an indecently naked reasonableness. I had come to Rye with a car to fetch William James and his daughter to my home at Sandgate. William had none of Henry's passionate regard for the polish upon the surface of life and he was immensely excited by the fact that in the little Rye inn, which had its garden just over the high brick wall of the garden of Lamb House, G. K. Chesterton was staying. William James had corresponded with our vast contemporary and he sorely wanted to see him. So with a scandalous directness he had put the gardener's ladder against that ripe red wall and clambered up and peeped over!

Henry had caught him at it. It was the sort of thing that isn't done. It was most emphatically the sort of thing that isn't done. . . . Henry instructed the gardener to put away that ladder and William was looking thoroughly naughty about it.

To Henry's manifest relief, I carried William off and in the road just outside the town we ran against the Chestertons who had been for a drive in Romney Marsh; Chesterton was heated and I think rather swollen by the sunshine; he seemed to overhang his one-horse fly; he descended slowly but firmly; he was moist and steamy but cordial; we chatted in the road and William got his coveted impression.

The two must have suited each other a good deal better than Chesterton and the more conventional brother. Of Henry's reactions there was a comment from the other side of the Atlantic.

The Louisville Post reported that Henry James, being asked on a visit to his native country, "What do you think of Chesterton in England?" replied "In England we do not think of Chesterton." The Post commented rather neatly "This 'we' of our compatriot must be considered as either mythical or editorial—unless indeed it refers to that small and exquisite circle which immediately surrounds and envelopes him." In his Autobiography Gilbert is appreciative but amusing, describing Henry James's reactions to the arrival of Belloc from a walking tour unbrushed, unwashed and unshaven. After reading Dickens, William wrote from Cambridge, Mass.:

O, Chesterton, but you're a darling! I've just read your Dickens—it's as good as Rabelais. Thanks!

Wells, asked to debate with Gilbert, wrote to Frances:

Spade House, Sandgate. (undated)

DEAR MRS. CHESTERTON

God forbid that I should seem a pig [here a small pig is drawn] and indeed I am not and of all the joys in life nothing would delight me more than a controversy with G.K.C., whom indeed I adore. [Here is drawn a tiny Wells adoring a vast Chesterton.]

But—I have been recklessly promising all and everyone who asks me to lecture or debate; "If ever I do so again it will be for you," and if once I break the vow I took last year—

Also we are really quite in agreement. It's a mere difference in fundamental theory which doesn't really matter a rap—except for after dinner purposes.

Yours ever,

H. G. Wells.

Frances thought Wells was good for Gilbert, he tells me, because he took him out walking, but when the two men were alone Gilbert would say supplicatingly "We won't go for a walk today, will we?" "He thought it terrifying," said Wells, "the way my wife tidied up." Frances, too, tidied up, but cautiously. "She prevented G.K.," says Wells, "from becoming too physically gross. He ought not to have been allowed to use the word 'jolly' more than forty times a day."

He could not, Wells thought, have gone on living in a London which was that of ordinary social life, whether Mayfair or Bloomsbury. "Either the country or Dr. Johnson's London." And of the relation seen by Chesterton between liberty and conviviality he said, "Every time he lifted a glass of wine he lifted it against Cadbury."

In spite of growing restrictions as to sales and hours the Inn still remained for Chesterton a symbol of freedom in a world increasingly enslaved. It was pointed out to him how great a peril lay in drink, how homes were broken up and families destroyed through drunkenness. After the war began, a letter from one of his readers stressed a real danger:

Now I do beg you, Mr. Chesterton, much as you love writing in praise of drink, to give it a rest during the war. . . . You may have the degradation of any number of silly boys to your account without knowing it. . . .

I have written with a freedom—you will say perhaps rudeness—which a casual meeting with you, and a great admiration for your work by no means justifies, but which other things perhaps do. I beg you to forgive me.

It seems to me that this charge he never quite answered. To claim liberty is one thing, to hymn the glories of wine is quite another. And when he was attacked for the latter he always defended the former, saying that he did not deny the peril but that all freedom meant peril—peril must be preferred to slavery. There were things in which a man must be free to choose even if his choice be evil. This was a part of Chesterton's whole philosophy about drink—a subject on which he wrote constantly. It is interesting to note the stages of its development in his mind.

The Chesterton family had not a Puritan tradition in the sense of being teetotal. But Lucian Oldershaw tells me that in their boyhood he always felt G.K. himself to be a bit of a Puritan and I have come upon a boyish poem that seems to confirm this in the matter of wine.

THE TEA POT

Raised high on tripod, flashing bright, the Holy Silver Urn Within whose inmost cavern dark, the secret waters burn Before the temple's gateway the subject tea-cups bow And pass it steaming with thy gift, thy brown autumnal glow. Within thy silver fortress, the tea-leaf treasure piled O'er which the fiery fountain pours its waters undefiled Till the witch-water steals away the essence they enfold And dashes from the yawning spout a torrent-arch of gold. Then fill an honest cup my lads and quaff the draught amain And lay the earthen goblet down, and fill it yet again Nor heed the curses on the cup that rise from Folly's school The sneering of the drunkard and the warning of the fool.

* * *

Leave to the Stuart's cavalier the revel's blood-red wine To hiccup out a tyrant's health and swear his Right Divine Mine, Cromwell's* cup to stir within, the spirit cool and sure To face another Star Chamber, a second Marston Moor. Leave to the genius-scorner, the sot's soul-slaying urns That stained the fame of Addison, and wrecked the life of Burns For Etty's hand his private Pot, that for no waiter waits** For Cowper's lips his "Cup that cheers but not inebriates."

Goal of Infantine Hope, Unknown, mystic Felicity Sangrael of childish quest much sought, aethereal "Real Tea" Thy faintest tint of yellow on the milk and water pale Like Midas' stain on Pactolus, gives joy that cannot fail.

[* Cromwell's teapot was among the first used in England.]

[** Etty, the artist made his own tea in all hotels in a private pot.]

Childhood's "May I have real tea" had grown into the tea-table of the Junior Debating Club, and Lucian Oldershaw remembers Gilbert as a young man still lunching at tea shops. I found recently two versions of a fragment of a story called "The Human Club," written when he was at the Slade School. The second version opens:

A meal was spread on the table, for the members of the Human Club were, as their name implies, human, however glorified and transformed: the meal, however, consisted principally of tea and coffee, for the Humans were total abstainers, not with the virulent assertion of a negative formula, but as an enlightened ratification of a profound social effort (hear, hear), not as the meaningless idolatry (cheers) of an isolated nostrum (renewed cheers), but as a chivalrous sacrifice for the triumph of a civic morality (prolonged cheers and uproar).

The aims of the Human Club were many but among the more practical and immediate was the entire perfection of everything.

"Perfection is impossible," said the host, Eric Peterson, bowing his colossal proportions over the coffee-pot. He was in the habit of showing these abrupt rifts of his train of thought, like gigantic fragments of a frieze. But he said then quite simply, with no change in his bleak blue eyes, "perfection is impossible, thank God. The impossible is the eternal."

We are a long way from tea the "Oriental," cocoa the "vulgar beast," and wine the true festivity of man that we find in Wine, Water and Song. Chesterton had meanwhile discovered the wine-drinking peasants of France and Italy: he had discovered what were left of the old-fashioned inns of England where cider or beer are drunk by the sort of Englishmen he had come to love best—the poor. In his revolt against that dreary and pretentious element that he most hated in the middle classes he had come to feel that the life of the poor, as they themselves had shaped it when they were free men, was the ideal. And that ideal included moderate drinking, drinking to express joy in life and to increase it.

Already in Heretics (1904) he had in the essay called "Omar and the Sacred Vine" attacked the evil of pessimistic drinking. A man should never drink because he is miserable, he will be wise to avoid drink as a medicine for, health being a normal thing, he will tend in search of it to drink too much. But no man expects pleasure all the time, so if he drinks for pleasure the danger of excess is less.

The sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other rules—a paradox. Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasants of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.*

[* Heretics. John Lane, chapter VII, p. 103.]

But the human will must be brought into action and the gifts of God must be taken with the thanksgiving that is restraint. "We must thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them." The topic seemed to fascinate him; he returned to it again and again. In one essay he described himself opening all the windows in a private bar to get rid of the air of secrecy that he hated. Wine should be taken, not secretly but

Frankly and in fellowship As men in inns do dine.

Cocktails he abominated—and in fact strong spirits were almost as evil as wine and beer were good. In an essay "The Cowardice of Cocktails"* he is especially scathing in his comment on those who urge "that they give a man an appetite for his meals."

[* From Sidelights on New London & Newer York, p. 45.]

This is unworthy of a generation that is always claiming to be candid and courageous. In the second aspect, it is utterly unworthy of a generation that claims to keep itself fit by tennis and golf and all sorts of athletics. What are these athletes worth if, after all their athletics, they cannot scratch up such a thing as a natural appetite? Most of my own work is, I will not venture to say, literary, but at least sedentary. I never do anything except walk about and throw clubs and javelins in the garden. But I never require anything to give me an appetite for a meal. I never yet needed a tot of rum to help me to go over the top and face the mortal perils of luncheon.

Quite rationally considered, there has been a decline and degradation in these things. First came the old drinking days which are always described as much more healthy. In those days men worked or played, hunted or herded or ploughed or fished, or even, in their rude way, wrote or spoke, if only expressing the simple minds of Socrates or Shakespeare, and then got reasonably drunk in the evening when their work was done. We find the first step of the degradation, when men do not drink when their work is done, but drink in order to do their work. Workmen used to wait in queues outside the factories of forty years ago, to drink nips of neat whisky to enable them to face life in the progressive and scientific factory. But at least it may be admitted that life in the factory was something that it took some courage to face. These men felt they had to take an anaesthetic before they could face pain. What are we to say of those who have to take an anaesthetic before they can face pleasure? What of those, who when faced with the terrors of mayonnaise eggs or sardines, can only utter a faint cry for brandy? What of those who have to be drugged, maddened, inspired and intoxicated to the point of partaking of meals, like the Assassins to the point of committing murders? If, as they say, the use of the drug means the increase of the dose, where will it stop, and at what precise point of frenzy and delusion will a healthy grown-up man be ready to rush headlong upon a cutlet or make a dash for death or glory at a ham-sandwich? This is obviously the most abject stage of all; worse than that of the man who drinks for the sake of work, and much worse than that of the man who drinks for the 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 attended the conference of all the English men of letters, called together to compose a reply to the manifesto of the German professors. I at least among all those writers can say, 'What I have written I have written.'"

Then his illness came upon him. Dr. Pocock, coming for a first visit, found the bed partly broken under the weight of the patient who was lying in a grotesquely awkward position, his hips higher than his head.

"You must be horribly uncomfortable," he said.

"Why, now you mention it," said G.K., like a man receiving a new idea, "I suppose I am."

The doctor ordered a water-bed, and almost the last words he heard before the patient sank into coma were, "I wonder if this bally ship will ever get to shore."

The illness lasted several months. We can follow its progress (and his) in extracts from letters* written to Father O'Connor by Frances:

Nov. 25th, 1914. You must pray for him. He is seriously ill and I have two nurses. It is mostly heart-trouble, but there are complications. He is quite his normal self, as to head and brain, and he even dictates and reads a great deal.

Dec. 29th, 1914. Gilbert had a bad relapse on Christmas Eve, and now is being desperately ill. He is not often conscious, and is so weak—I feel he might ask for you—if so I shall wire. Dr. is still hopeful, but I feel in despair.

Jan. 3rd, 1915. If you came he would not know you, and this condition may last some time. The brain is dormant, and must be kept so. If he is sufficiently conscious at any moment to understand, I will ask him to let you come—or will send on my own responsibility. Pray for his soul and mine.

Jan. 7th, 1915. Gilbert seemed decidedly clearer yesterday, and though not quite so well today the doctor says he has reason to hope the mental trouble is working off. His heart is stronger, and he is able to take plenty of nourishment. Under the circumstances therefore I am hoping and praying he may soon be sufficiently himself to tell us what he wants done. I am dreadfully unhappy at not knowing how he would wish me to act. His parents would never forgive me if I acted only on my own authority. I do pray to God He will restore him to himself that we may know. I feel in His mercy He will, even if death is the end of it—or the beginning shall I say?

Jan. 12th, 1915. He is really better I believe and by the mercy of God I dare hope he is to be restored to us. Physically he is stronger, and the brain is beginning to work normally, and soon I trust we shall be able to ask him his wishes with regard to the Church. I am so thankful to think that we can get at his desire.

In January 1915 Frances wrote to my mother: "Gilbert remains much the same in a semi-conscious condition—sleeping a great deal. I feel absolutely hopeless; it seems impossible it can go on like this. The impossibility of reaching him is too terrible an experience and I don't know how to go through with it. I pray for strength and you must pray for me."

"Dearest Josephine," she wrote in a later undated letter, "Gilbert is today a little better, after being practically at a standstill for the past week. He asked for me today, which is a great advance, and hugged me. I feel like Elijah (wasn't it?) and shall go in the strength of that hug forty days. The recovery will be very slow, the doctors tell me, and we have to prevent his using his brain at all."

In this letter she begged to see my mother, and I remember when they met she told her that one day she had tried to test whether Gilbert was conscious by asking him, "Who is looking after you?" "He answered very gravely, 'God' and I felt so small," she said. Presently Frances told my mother that Gilbert had talked to her about coming into the Catholic Church. It was just at this time that she wrote to tell Father O'Connor that Gilbert said to her "Did you think I was going to die?" and followed this with the question, "Does Father O'Connor know?" After her conversation with my mother Frances wrote to her:

March 21

I think I would rather you did not tell anyone just yet of what I told you regarding my husband and the Catholic Church. Not that I doubt for a moment that he meant it and knew what he was saying and was relieved at saying it, but I don't want the world at large to be able to say that he came to this decision, when he was weak and unlike himself. He will ratify it no doubt when his complete manhood is restored. I know it was not weakness that made him say it, but you will understand my scruples. I know in God's good time he will make his confession of faith—and if death comes near him again I shall know how to act.

Thanks for all your sympathy. I did enjoy seeing you.

On Easter Eve Frances wrote two letters, one to Father O'Connor, one to my mother. To Father O'Connor she said:

All goes well here, though still very very slowly—G's mind is gradually clearing, but it is still difficult to him to distinguish between the real and the unreal. I am quite sure he will soon be able to think and act for himself, but I dare not hurry matters at all. I have told him I am writing to you often and he said, "That is right—I'll see him soon. I want to talk to him." He wanders at times, but the clear intervals are longer. He repeated the Creed last night, this time in English.

To my mother:

I feel the enormous significance of the resurrection of the body when I think of my dear husband, just consciously laying hold of life again. Indeed, I will pray that your dear ones may be kept in safety. God bless you for all your sympathy. I am so glad that Gilbert's decision (for I am sure it was a decision) has made you so happy. I dare not hurry anything, the least little excitement upsets him—last night he said the Creed and asked me to read parts of Myers' "St. Paul." He still wanders a good deal when tired but is certainly a little stronger. Love and Easter blessings to you all.

We ourselves were passing then through the shadow of death. Almost as Gilbert rose again to this life my father passed into life eternal. One of the very few letters I possess in Gilbert's own handwriting was also one of the first he wrote on recovery. It was to my mother:

I fear I have delayed writing to you, and partly with a vague feeling that I might so find some way of saying what I feel on your behalf and others'; and of course it has not come. Somewhat of what the world and a wider circle of friends have lost I shall try to say in the Dublin Review, by the kindness of Monsignor Barnes, who has invited me to contribute to it; but of all I feel, and Frances feels, and of the happy times we have had in your house, I despair of saying anything at all.

I can only hope you and yours will be able to read between the lines of what I write either here or there; and understand that the simultaneous losses of a good friend and a fine intellect have a way of stunning rather than helping the expression of either. I would say I am glad he lived to see what I feel to be a rebirth of England, if his mere presence in an older generation did not prove to me that England never died.

This sense of the rebirth of England gave to Gilbert's restored life a special quality of triumph that abode down to the end of the war.



CHAPTER XXI

The War Years

GILBERT WAS TAKING up life again and with it the old friendships and the old debates, in the new atmosphere created by the war.

To Bernard Shaw he wrote:

June 12th, 1915

MY DEAR BERNARD SHAW,

I ought to have written to you a long time ago, to thank you for your kind letter which I received when I had recovered and still more for many other kindnesses that seem to have come from you during the time before the recovery. I am not a vegetarian; and I am only in a very comparative sense a skeleton. Indeed I am afraid you must reconcile yourself to the dismal prospect of my being more or less like what I was before; and any resumption of my ordinary habits must necessarily include the habit of disagreeing with you. What and where and when is "Uncommon Sense about the War?" How can I get hold of it? I do not merely ask as one hungry for hostilities, but also as one unusually hungry for good literature. "Il me faut des geants," as Cyrano says; so I naturally wish to hear the last about you. You probably know that I do not agree with you about the War; I do not think it is going on of its own momentum; I think it is going on in accordance with that logical paradox whereby the thing that is most difficult to do is also the thing that must be done. If it were an easy war to end it would have been a wicked war to begin. If a cat has nine lives one must kill it nine times, saving your humanitarian feelings, and always supposing it is a witch's cat and really draws its powers from Hell. I have always thought that there was in Prussia an evil will; I would not have made it a ground for going to war, but I was quite sure of it long before there was any war at all. But I suppose we shall some day have an opportunity of arguing about all that. Meanwhile my thanks and good wishes are as sincere as my opinions; and I do not think those are insincere.

Yours always sincerely,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

Bernard Shaw replied:

22nd June 1915

MY DEAR CHESTERTON

I am delighted to learn under your own hand that you have recovered all your health and powers with an unimpaired figure. You have also the gratification of knowing that you have carried out a theory of mine that every man of genius has a critical illness at 40, Nature's object being to make him go to bed for several months. Sometimes Nature overdoes it: Schiller and Mozart died. Goethe survived, though he very nearly followed Schiller into the shades. I did the thing myself quite handsomely by spending eighteen months on crutches, having two surgical operations, and breaking my arm. I distinctly noticed that instead of my recuperation beginning when my breakdown ended, it began before that. The ascending curve cut through the tail of the descending one; and I was consummating my collapse and rising for my next flight simultaneously.

It is perfectly useless for you to try to differ with me about the war. NOBODY can differ with me about the war: you might as well differ from the Almighty about the orbit of the sun. I have got the war right; and to that complexion, you too must come at last, your nature not being a fundamentally erroneous one.

At the same time, it is a great pity you were not born in Ireland. You would have had the advantage of hearing the burning patriotism of your native land expressing itself by saying exactly the same things about England that English patriotism now says about Prussia, and of recognizing that though they were entirely true, they were also a very great nuisance, as they prevented people from building the future by conscientious thought. Also, Cecil would have seen what the Catholic Church is really like when the apostolic succession falls to the farmer's son who is cleverer with school books than with agricultural implements. In fact you would have learned a devil of a lot of things for lack of which you often drive me to exclaim "Gilbert, Gilbert, why persecutest thou me."

As to the evil will, of course there is an evil will in Prussia. Prussia isn't Paradise. I have been fighting that evil will, in myself and others, all my life. It is the will of the brave Barabbas, and of the militant Nationalists who admired him and crucified the pro-Gentile. But the Prussians must save their own souls. They also have their Shaws and Chestertons and a divine spark in them for these to work on. . . . What we have to do is to make ridiculous the cry of "Vengeance is mine, saith Podsnap," and, whenever anyone tells an Englishman a lie, to explain to the poor devil that it is a lie, and that he must stop cheering it as a splendid speech. For an Englishman never compares speeches either with facts or with previous speeches: to him a speech is art for art's sake, the disciples of our favoured politicians being really, if they only knew it, disciples of Whistler. Also, and equally important, we have to bear in mind that the English genius does not, like the German, lie in disciplined idealism. The Englishman is an Anarchist and a grumbler: he has no such word as Fatherland, and the idea which he supposes corresponds to it is nothing but the swing of a roaring chorus to a patriotic song. Also he is a muddler and a slacker, because tense and continuous work means thought; and he is lazy and fat in the head. But as long as he is himself, and grumbles, it does not matter. Given a furious Opposition screaming for the disgrace of tyrannical and corrupt ministers, and a press on the very verge of inviting Napoleon to enter London in triumph and deliver a groaning land from the intolerable burden of its native rulers' incapacity and rapacity and obsolescence, and the departments will work as well as the enemy's departments (perhaps better), and the government will have to keep its wits at full pressure. But once let England try what she is trying now: that is, to combine the devoted silence and obedience of the German system with the slack and muddle of Coodle and Doodle, and we are lost. Unless you keep up as hot a fire from your ink-bottle on the Government as the soldier keeps up from the trenches you are betraying that soldier. Of course they will call you a pro-German. What of that? They call ME a pro-German. We also must stand fire. As Peer Gynt said of hell, if the torture is only moral, it cannot be so very bad.

I grieve to say that some fool has stolen my title, and issued a two page pamphlet called Uncommon Sense about the War. So I shall have to call mine More Common Sense About the War. It is not yet in type: I haven't yet quite settled its destination. Any chance of seeing you both if we drive over from Ayot to Beaconsfield some Sunday or other afternoon.

Yours ever,

G.B.S.

Wells too was rejoicing over his recovery—

DEAR OLD G.K.C.,

I'm so delighted to get a letter from you again. As soon as I can I will come to Beaconsfield and see you. I'm absurdly busy in bringing together the Rulers of the country and the scientific people of whom they are totally ignorant. Lloyd George has never heard of Ramsey—and so on, and the hash and muddle and quackery on our technical side is appalling. It all means boys' lives in Flanders and horrible waste and suffering. Well, anyhow if we've got only obscure and cramped and underpaid scientific men we have a bench of fine fat bishops and no end of tremendous lawyers. One of the best ideas for the Ypres position came from Robert Mond but the execution was too difficult for our officers to attempt. So we've got a row of wounded and mangled men that would reach from Beaconsfield to Great Marlow—just to show we don't take stock in these damned scientific people.

Yours ever,

H.G.

No one however mad could have called Gilbert a pro-German: it was perhaps the only accusation the New Witness escaped. But while he largely agreed with Shaw's analysis of the Englishman as a natural Anarchist and grumbler, while he believed in the voluntary principle and disliked conscription, his general outlook was as different from Shaw's as were the pamphlets they both wrote.

In a book addressed to a German professor G.K. frankly confessed the real Crimes of England, for which she was now making reparation.

To any Englishman living in the native atmosphere the suggestion that England had been preparing an aggression against Germany seemed more than faintly ludicrous. We were not engaged in plotting in Europe—on the contrary we were far too careless of Europe. And the funds of the Liberal Party (which was in power) actually depended chiefly on Quaker Millionaires who were noted pacifists and at whose bidding national honour was jeopardised by our delay in declaring our support of France. We were not prepared for war and probably only the shock of the invasion of Belgium made certain our stand with France.

. . . It may seem an idle contradiction to say that our strength in this war came from not being prepared. But there is a truth that cannot be otherwise expressed. The strongest thing in sane anger is surprise. If we had time to think we might have thought better—that is worse. Everything that could be instinctive managed to be strong; the instant fury of contempt with which the better spirit in our rulers flung back the Prussian bribe; the instant solidarity of all parties; above all, the brilliant instinct by which the Irish leader cast into the scale of a free Europe the ancient sword of Ireland.*

[* The Uses of Diversity.]

Our crimes were in the past, not the present. The first had been when we gave aid to Prussia against Austria, Austria which was "not a nation" but "a kind of Empire, a Holy Roman Empire that never came," which "still retained something of the old Catholic comfort for the soul." We had helped to put Prussia instead of Austria at the head of the Germanies—Prussia which in the person of Frederick the Great "hated everything German and everything good." Francophile as Chesterton was, he yet had a certain tenderness for those old Germanies which "preserved the good things that go with small interests and strict boundaries, music, etiquette, a dreamy philosophy and so on."

Our next crimes had been in calling Prussia to our aid against Napoleon and in failing to assist Denmark against her. And by far our worst had been the using of Prussian mercenaries with their ghastly tradition of cruelty in Ireland in the '98.

There is in this little book one drawback from the historian's point of view: its view of the past is so oddly selective. Doubtless it is lawful to examine your own nation's conscience as you do your own—and not your neighbour's. Yet history should be rather an examination of facts than an examination of conscience. And historically Richelieu's policies had had quite something to say in the creation of Prussia; the conscript armies of the French Revolution had first made Europe into an armed camp. It was an undue simplification to insist exclusively on The Crimes of England.

But even while he did so Chesterton rejoiced that now at long last England was on the right side, on the side of Europe and of sanity. The New Witness group had always seen the issue as their countrymen were now suddenly beginning to see it. They had no sympathy with the "liberal" thinking, made in Germany, that had in the name of biblical and historical criticism been undermining the bases of Christianity. Their love of logic and of clarity had made German philosophy intolerable to them—it was wind, and it was fog. Finally their love of France had always made them conceive of Europe as centering in that country. For them there was one profound satisfaction even amid the horrors of war: that the issues were so clear.

But were they as clear to the whole world? If not they must be made so.

There were two main problems to be overcome in this matter, one of which was less pronounced at the time than it became later—the economic interpretation of history. Started by Karl Marx the idea that all history can be interpreted solely by economic causes has come since to have an extraordinary popularity even among those whose own philosophy and sociology are most widely removed from Marx. It is a view which Chesterton would always have dismissed with the contempt it deserves. Both he and Belloc saw as the determining factor in history, because it is the determining factor in human life, the free will of man. This does not mean that they would deny that the economic factor has often been powerful in conquering man's liberty, or a motive in its exercise. But Chesterton regarded the present age as a diseased one precisely because the money motive held so disproportionate a place in it. He looked back to the past and saw the world of today as almost unique in that respect. He looked forward to the future and hoped for a release from it.

And as he looked back into the past he saw something in the history of mankind far stronger than the economic motive—whether that mean the strife for wealth or the mere struggle for subsistence. He saw the all-pervading power of religion, which in bygone ages had presided over man's activities and turned the exercise of that most noble faculty free-will to the building of a civilization today undreamed of.

But in 1914 it was easier to get away from the economic interpretation of history than it was to overcome another difficulty in the minds of those who had not the Chesterton vision of Europe, and to whom it seemed that in a war between nations it was extremely likely that all parties were more or less equally to blame. "History," said Chesterton, "tends to be a facade of faded picturesqueness for most of those who have not specially studied it: a more or less monochrome background for the drama of their own day." But the nature of that background and the vision of today's drama will vary with the varying angle of historic vision.

There were two possible meanings for the statement that all nations were to blame for the world war. All nations had gone away from God. Motives of personal and national greed had ousted the old ideal of Christendom. It might roughly be said that no nation was seriously trying to seek the Kingdom of God and His Justice. International Finance had become a shadow resting on all the earth, and it could not have got this power if Governments had been governing solely for the good of their peoples. "Bow down your heads before God," is the invocation constantly used in the Missal during the penitential season of Lent and the government of every nation needed this call to repentance.

With this interpretation Chesterton would have agreed. All nations were to blame for the predisposing causes that made a world-war possible. But when we come to the question of actual responsibility for making this particular war, the statement means something very different and something with which Chesterton was prepared to join issue. Against him those who disliked France or England, and saw the history of those two countries as a history of Imperialism, were saying: if Germany had not attacked France, France would have attacked Germany; or: England would have been equally treacherous if it had paid her—look at the Treaty of Limerick.

Chesterton kept imploring people simply to look at the facts. Germany had in fact broken her word to France and attacked her. France had not attacked Germany. Germany had invaded Belgium. England had not invaded Holland "to seize a naval and commercial advantage; and whether they say that we wished to do it in our greed or feared to do it in our cowardice, the fact remains that we did not do it. Unless this common-sense principle be kept in view, I cannot conceive how any quarrel can possibly be judged. A contract may be made between two persons solely for material advantage on each side: but the moral advantage is still generally supposed to lie with the person who keeps the contract."*

[* The Barbarism of Berlin, 15-16.]

The promise and the vow were fundamental to Chesterton's view of human life. Discussing divorce he claims as essential to manhood the right to bind oneself and to be taken at one's word. The marriage vow was almost the only vow that remained out of the whole mediaeval conception of chivalry and he could not endure to see it set at nought. But even in the modern world there still remained some notion of the sacredness of a solemn promise.

"It is plain that the promise, or extension of responsibility through time, is what chiefly distinguishes us, I will not say from savages, but from brutes and reptiles. This was noted by the shrewdness of the Old Testament, when it summed up the dark, irresponsible enormity of Leviathan in the words, 'Will he make a pact with thee?' . . . The vow is to the man what the song is to the bird, or the bark to the dog; his voice whereby he is known."* There were two chief marks whereby it seemed to Chesterton that the Prussian invasion of Belgium was fundamentally an attack on civilization. Contempt for a promise was the first. He called it the war on the word.

[* Ibid., 32-33.]

The other mark of barbarism he called the refusal of reciprocity. "The Prussians," he wrote, "had been told by their literary men that everything depends upon Mood: and by their politicians that all arrangements dissolve before 'necessity.'"* This was not merely a contempt for the word but also an assumption that German necessity was like no other necessity because the German "cannot get outside the idea that he, because he is he and not you, is free to break the law; and also to appeal to the law." Thus the Kaiser at once violated the Hague Convention openly himself and wrote to the President of the United States to complain that the Allies were violating it. "For this principle of a quite unproved racial supremacy is the last and worst of the refusals of reciprocity."**

[* Ibid., 37.]

[* Ibid., p. 60.]

If these two ideas were allowed to prevail they must destroy civilization and so to Chesterton the war was a crusade and, to his profound joy, was understood as such by the people of England. The democratic spirit of our country "is rather unusually sluggish and far below the surface. And the most genuine and purely popular movement that we have had since the Chartists has been the enlistment for this war." Chesterton loved the heroic humour of the trenches: the cry of "Early Doors" from the boys rushing on death; the term Blighty for England and congratulations on a severe wound as a "good Blighty one"; the song under showers of bullets, "When It's Raining Keep Your Umbrella Up." The English, he once said, had no religion left except their sense of humour but I think he meant that they hung out humour somewhat defiantly as a smoke-screen for other things.

Anyhow he doubted neither that the war was worth winning nor that it could be won by our soldiers and sailors. And with the soldiers and sailors stood the munition workers and the Trades Unions which had sacrificed their cherished rights for the war period. If the only danger to England was on the Home Front it was not, in his eyes, to be found in the mass of the nation. Nor was he at first too apprehensive of the actions of the Government. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey might have been slow in declaring war but both were patriotic Englishmen and with them stood with equal patriotism the mass of the governing classes. If as has later been said the war had really been brought about by English political and financial interests, it is strange that Lord Desborough, head of the London house of J. P. Morgan and a leading financier of England, should have lost his two elder sons and the Prime Minister his eldest.

But the New Witness did see two dangers at home which might jeopardise the success of our armies in the field and bring about a premature and dishonourable peace. These were international finance, and the Press magnates.

Nothing so reminds me of how we were all feeling about the Daily papers just then as finding this letter to E. C. Bentley (dated July 20, 1915):

I was delighted to hear from you though very sorry to hear you have been bad. I mean physically bad; morally and intellectually you have evidently been very good. Seriously, I think you have done something to save this country; for the Telegraph continues to be almost the only paper that the crisis has sobered and not tipsified. I take it in myself and know many others who do so. Part of the fun about 'Armsworth is that quite a lot of old ladies of both sexes go about distinguishing elaborately between the Daily Mail and the Times.* It is a stagnant state of mind created in people who have never been forced by revolution or other public peril to distinguish between the things they are used to and the thoughts for which the things are supposed to stand. If you printed the whole of Ally Sloper's Half Holiday and called it the Athenaeum, they would read it with unmoved faces. So long as St. Paul's Cathedral stood in the usual place they would not mind if there was a Crescent on top of it instead of a Cross. By the way, I see the Germans have actually done what I described as a wild fancy in the Flying Inn; combined the Cross and the Crescent in one ornamental symbol. . . .

[* Both these papers were then owned by the same man—Alfred Harmsworth, who had become Lord Northcliffe.]

I am inclined to think that the attack upon Harmsworth which the New Witness developed attributed too much to purposed malice and did not allow enough for the journalistic craving for news and for "scoops." Probably some of the posters and articles to which they objected were not the work of Lord Northcliffe but of some young journalist anxious to sell his paper. Nevertheless the New Witness attack was not only largely justified but was also remarkably courageous. The staff of the New Witness were themselves journalists and men of letters. In both capacities as powerful a newspaper owner as Lord Northcliffe could damage them severely—and did. Never henceforward would any of them be able to write in one of his numerous papers, never would one of their books receive a favourable review. For Belloc did not hesitate to call Lord Northcliffe a traitor for the way in which he had attacked Kitchener, while Cecil amused himself by reviewing and pointing out the illiteracy of that strange peer's own writing. Later too when the Harmsworth papers were in full cry for the fall of Asquith and the substitution of Lloyd George, the New Witness took a strong stand. They pointed out too the way in which censorship was exercised against the smaller newspapers while the Northcliffe press seemed immune. Here was the fundamental danger. Whatever the motive, some of the attacks and articles printed were undoubtedly calculated, in military language, to cause alarm and despondency. It was appalling that in time of war this should be permitted; and, as they saw it, permitted because the Harmsworth millions had been used to secure a hold on certain politicians. To the New Witness "George" was simply Harmsworth's man.