  The Reluctant Editor (1925-1930) _I tell you naught for your comfort Ballad of the White Horse_ COULD GILBERT HAVE divided his life between literary work, his home at Top Meadow, and those other elements called in the Autobiography "Friendship and Foolery," that life might well have been as he himself called it "indefensibly fortunate and happy." But he could not. Part of his philosophy of joy was that thanks must be given—for sunsets, for dandelions, for beech trees, for home and friends. And this thanks could only be the taking of his part in the fight. He would never, he once said, have turned of his own accord to politics: it is arguable that it would have been better if he never had. But his brother had plunged into the fray with that very political paper the New Witness and his brother's death had left it in Gilbert's hands. He felt the task to be a sacred legacy, and when the paper died for lack of funds his one thought was how to start it again. For many months he kept the office in being and paid salaries to a skeleton staff, consisting of Mr. Gander, the deaf old manager, Miss Dunham (now Mrs. Phillips) and an office boy. Mr. Titterton would stroll in and play cricket with the office boy with a paper ball and a walking-stick. Endless discussions were held as to how to re-start the paper and whether under the old name or a new one. Bernard Shaw had his own view. He wrote: 11 Feb.: 1923 MY DEAR CHESTERTONNot presume to dictate (I have all Jingle's delicacy); but if everybody else is advising you, why should not I? T.P.'s Weekly always had a weakly sound. But it established itself sufficiently to make that form of title the trade mark of a certain sort of paper. Hence Jack O'London's Weekly. It also set the trade sheep running that way. You have the precedents of Defoe and Cobbett for using your own Jee Kay see, kay see, kay see, Chesterton is a noble name; but Chesterton is Weakly spoils it. CHESTERTON'SThat is how it will be asked for at the bookstalls. You may be obliged to call later ventures Chesterton's Daily or Chesterton's Annual, but this one needs no impertinently superfluous definition: Chesterton's Perennial is amusing enough to be excusable; but a joke repeated every week is no joke. A picture cover like that of Punch might stand even that test if it were good enough; but where are you to find your Doyle? Week is a detestable snivelling word: nothing can redeem it, not even the sermon on the Mount. Seven Days is better, But reminds one of the police court as well as of the creation. Every Seven Days would sound well. But Chesterton's leaves no room for anything else. I am more than usually sure that I am right. Frances quite agrees with me. How would you like it if she were to publish a magazine and call it Fanny's First Paper? Ever G.B.S.If Gilbert answered this letter his answer has disappeared. He seems to have asked permission to publish it—probably with a view to collecting further opinions. 10 Adelphi Terrace, London, W.C.2. February 16th 1923. MY DEAR G.K.C.Of course you may publish any letter of mine that you care to, at your discretion. . . . But not only will the publication of a letter from me not add one to your circulation (nothing but a permanent feature will do that), but it may lead you to disregard the advice I give to all the people who start Labour papers (about two a week or so), which always is, "Don't open with an article to say that your paper supplies a want; don't blight your columns with 'messages'; don't bewilder your readers with the family jokes of your clique; else there will be no second number." Ponder this: it is sound. Your main difficulty is that the class whose champion you have made yourself reads either Lloyd's or nothing. To the rural proprietor, no longer a peasant, art, including belles lettres, is immorality, and people who idealize peasants, unpractical fools. Also the Roman Catholic Church, embarrassed by recruits of your type and born scoffers like Belloc, who cling to the Church because its desecration would take all the salt out of blasphemy, will quietly put you on the unofficial index. The Irish will not support an English journal because it occasionally waves a Green flag far better than they can wave it themselves. And the number of Jews who will buy you just to see what you say about them is not large enough to keep you going. Thus there is absolutely no public for your policy; and though there is a select one for yourself one and indivisible, it is largely composed of people to whom your oddly assorted antipathies and pseudo-racial feuds are uncongenial. Besides, on these fancies of yours you have by this time said all you have to say so many thousand times over, that your most faithful admirers finally (and always suddenly) discover they are fed up with the New Witness and cannot go on with it. This last danger becomes greater as you become older, because when we are young we can tell ourselves a new story every night between our prayers and our sleep; but later on we find ourselves repeating the same story with intensifications and improvements night after night until we are tired of it; and in the end (which you have not yet reached) a story revived from the old repertory has to last for months, and is more and more shaky as a protection against thinking of business, or lying there a prey to unwelcome reminiscences. And what happens to the story of the imaginative child happens also to the sermon or the feuilleton of the adult. It is inevitably happening to you. That is the case against the success of CHESTERTON'S. Your only chance finally is either to broaden your basis, or to have no basis at all, like Dickens in "Household Words" and "All The Year Round," and say, "Give me something with imagination in it, and I can do without politics or theoretic sociology of any kind." This is perhaps the only true catholicism in literature; but it will hardly serve your turn; because all the articles and stories that Dickens got are now mopped up by the popular press, which in his day stuck to politics and news and nothing else. So I am afraid you will have to stand for a policy, or at least a recognisable attitude, unless you are prepared to write a detective story every week and make Belloc write a satirical story as well. You could broaden your basis if you had money enough to try the experiment of giving ten poor but honest men in Beaconsfield and ten more in London capital enough to start for themselves as independent farmers and shopkeepers. The result would be to ruin 18 out of the twenty, and possibly to ruin the lot. You would then learn from your feelings what you would never learn from me, that what men need is not property but honorable service. Confronted either with 20 men ruined by your act, or 18 ruined and one Fascination Fledgby owning half a street in London, and the other half a parish in Bucks, you would—well, perhaps join the Fabian Society. The pseudo race feuds you should drop, simply because you cannot compete with the Morning Post, which gives the real thing in its succulent savagery whilst you can give only a "wouldn't hurt a fly" affectation of it. In religion too you are up against the fact that an editor, like an emperor, must not belong to a sect. Wells is on the right tack: my tack. See my prefaces to Androcles and Methuselah. We want the real Catholic Church above the manufactured one. The manufactured one is useful as the Salvation Army is useful, or the formulas of the Church of Christ Scientist; but they do not strike on the knowledge box of the modern intellectual; and it is on the modern intellectual that you are depending. I am an Irishman, and know how far the official Catholic Church can go. Your ideal Church does not exist and never can exist within the official organization, in which Father Dempsey will always be efficient and Father Keegan futile if not actually silenced; and I know that an officially Catholic Chesterton is an impossibility. However, you must find out all this for yourself as I found it out for myself. Mere controversy is waste of time; and faith is a curious thing. I believe that you would not have become a professed official Catholic if you did not believe that you believe in transubstantiation; but I find it quite impossible to believe that you believe in transubstantiation any more than, say, Dr. Saleeby does. You will have to go to Confession next Easter; and I find the spectacle—the box, your portly kneeling figure, the poor devil inside wishing you had become a Fireworshipper instead of coming there to shake his soul with a sense of his ridiculousness and yours—all incredible, monstrous, comic, though of course I can put a perfect literary complexion on it in a brace of shakes. Now, however, I am becoming personal (how else can I be sincere?). Ever, G. BERNARD SHAW.Meanwhile, Shaw as usual responded cordially to Gilbert's wish to make him an early attraction in the paper—but also as usual urged him towards the theatre: 10th Dec. 1924. By all means send me a screed about Joan [of Arc] for the cockpit. You should write plays instead of editing papers. Why not do George G.B.S.The specimen advance number was published before the end of 1924. In the leading article G.K. gave his reasons for agreeing finally to use his own name—although in the form attacked by Shaw. He had first viewed the proposal with a "horror which has since softened into loathing." He had looked for a title that should indicate the paper's policy. But while that policy was in fact a support of human normality: well-distributed property, freedom and the family—yet the surrounding atmosphere was so abnormal that "any title defining our doctrine makes it look doctrinaire." A name like The Distributive Review would suggest that a Distributist was like a Socialist, a crank or a pedant with a new theory of human nature. "It is so old that it has become new. At the same time I want a title that does suggest that the paper is controversial and that this is the general trend of its controversy. I want something that will be recognised as a flag, however fantastic and ridiculous, that will be in some sense a challenge, even if the challenge be received only with genial derision. I do not want a colourless name; and the nearest I can get to something like a symbol is merely to fly my own colours." Although the paper was never exclusively Catholic, that flag was for G.K. as it had been for Cecil of a very definite pattern and very clear colours: religiously the paper stood for Catholic Christianity, socially for the theory of small ownership, personal responsibility and property. It was in strong opposition especially to Socialism and even more to Communism. Bernard Shaw, Gilbert once said, wanted to distribute money among the poor—"we want to distribute power." During the last part of Cecil's editorship his wife had been Assistant Editor of the New Witness and she had so continued when Gilbert first became Editor. But she was neither a Catholic nor a Distributist. Religion seems not to have interested her, and her political outlook was entirely different from Gilbert's. In The Chestertons she dismissed Distributism as "quite without first principles" and "a pious hope and no more."* Obviously it was impossible for Gilbert to start his new paper with an Assistant Editor in entire disagreement with his views. I have sometimes wondered whether his intense dislike of having to tell Mrs. Cecil this was not almost as strong a factor in the delay as the money problem. [* I have learnt, as this book goes to press, that Mrs. Cecil became a Catholic in 1941.] There was no break in their relations: she went on writing for the paper, doing chiefly the dramatic criticism. But it is clear from her own account of the incident that she wholly misconstrued Gilbert's attitude and did not realise how far she herself had drifted from Cecil's views as well as from Gilbert's. Shaw wrote again: Reid's Palace Hotel MY DEAR G.K.C.The sample number has followed me out here. What a collector's treasure! Considering that I had Cecil's own assurance that my Quintessence of Ibsenism rescued him from Rationalism, and that it was written in 1889 (I abandoned Rationalism consciously and explicitly in 1881) I consider John Prothero's introduction of me to your readers as a recently converted Materialist Rationalist to be a most unnatural act; and it would serve her right if I never spoke to her again. Rationalism is the bane of the Church. A Roman priest always wants to argue with you. A Church of England parson flies in terror from an argument, a fundamentally sensible course. George Fox simply knocked arguers out with his "I have experimental knowledge of God." St. Thomas Aquinas was like me: he knew the worthlessness of ratiocination because he could do it so well, and yet despaired of the Inspirationists in practical life because they did it so badly. J.K.P. doesn't know her way about in this controversy; and I cannot take up her challenge. What makes me uneasy about the prospectus is that you drag in anti-prohibition. You might as well have declared for Brighter London at once, or said that the paper would be printed at the office of the Morning Advertiser. You run the risk of the money coming from The Trade. However, non olet. Only, remember the fate of all the editors—Gardiner, Donald, Massingham, etc., etc.—who have written without regard to their proprietors. The strength of your position is that they can hardly carry on with your name in the title without you. But they can kill the paper by stopping supplies if it does not pay; and the chances are that it will not. I have never had a farthing of interest on my shares in the New Statesman, and don't expect I ever shall. Therefore keep your list of shareholders as various and as uncommercial as you can: get Catholic money rather than beer money. As I am the real patentee of the Distributive State, and the D.S. is Socialism; and as, furthermore, the Church must remain at least neutral on Prohibition, as in the United States, where a Catholic priest has just set a praiseworthy example of neutrality by bringing about a record cop of bootleggers, and as the success of Prohibition is so overwhelming that it is bound to become a commonplace of civilization, you must regard it as at least possible that you will some day make the paper Socialist and Dry (with a capital). Therefore do not undertake to oppose anything: stand for what you propose to advocate, whether as to property or drink or anything else, but don't state your solutions as antitheses. By the way, don't propose equal distribution of land. It is like equal distribution of metal, rough on those who get the lead and rather too jolly for those who get the gold. Your equal distribution must come to equal distribution of the national income in terms of money. The £500 a year is absurd. Do you realize that it is £250 at pre-war rates, and subject to heavy taxation: net £375—pre-war 182-10-0? You have sold yourself into slavery for ten years for £3-10-2 a week. Are you quite mad? Make it at least £1500, plus payment for copy. Ever G.B.S.Of course it was not merely a question of inadequate payment for his work: as time went on, a large part of the financial burden of the paper had to be carried by him. Lord Howard de Walden helped generously and so did Mr. Chivers. Other donations came in but mostly very small ones. No proper accounts were kept: no watch on how the money went. And from time to time Gilbert would pay off a printing bill of £500 or so and go ahead hoping for better times. The money aspect did not worry him, I think, at first. There was always more to be made by a little extra effort: though a time was to come when every extra effort wearied him cruelly. But there was one thing he could not bear—quarrels on the Board or on the staff and above all the suggestion that he should adjudicate. "He was a bad judge of men," one of his staff told me. "He never shirked an intellectual issue, but in a practical crisis he was inclined to slide out." "He could never," said another, "stand up to accusations from one man against another." The first start was made with the existing staff of three. Miss Dunham was sub-editor and was usually left to see the paper through the press. G.K. would come up once or twice a week and dictate his own articles. "You never knew when he was coming," she says, "but you always knew when he was there by the smell of his cigar." He was practically a chain smoker and he always used the same brand. He left drawings on the blotter and everything else. He had no idea of time and when he said, "I think I'll go out now," he might stay out an hour or so, or he might not return at all. Lighting a cigar or cigarette he would make a sign in the air with the match. He never omitted this ritual, and Miss Dunham thinks it became like tapping the railings was to Dr. Johnson. "He used to come in and swing about on his little feet," she said. And it is true that his feet like his voice seemed too small to belong to the rest of him. Her great difficulty was that she could not get him to read and select among the contributions: too often this was left to her and she felt painfully inadequate to the task. For the first year all the Notes of the Week were written by G.K. Then he got Mr. Titterton as Assistant Editor: and after that, said the Assistant Editor with simplicity, "You couldn't always tell good Titterton from bad Chesterton." Everyone who worked at the office adored G.K.: especially the "little" people, typists, secretaries, office boys. "He was so kind," Miss Dunham said. "He never got angry. He never minded being interrupted. If his papers blew away he never got impatient. His patience hurt one." She had never seen him angry. That the paper was ever got out seems wonderful as the staff recall those days. Yet I think that all the stories about Gilbert's inefficiency as Editor have contributed towards an impression that I shared myself until quite lately—that G.K.'s Weekly was immeasurably inferior to the New Witness. Going more carefully through the files I have begun to question that impression. The paper was produced under certain obvious disadvantages. Even spending some days a week in London and telephoning freely it is not easy to edit a paper from the country. Gilbert thought of himself as a bad editor, and was not in fact a very good one. The contributions he accepted were uneven in quality: both Leaders and Notes of the Week when not written by him tended to be weak imitations of either himself or Belloc—tinged at times with an air of omniscience tolerable in Belloc but quite intolerable in his imitators. Just occasionally the equally unedited Notes and Leader were in contradiction of each other. Yet the paper remains an exceedingly interesting one. Analysing my earlier and late impressions I concluded that my earlier feeling of boredom sprang from the inevitable effect of the New Witness coming first and therefore having been read first. It is a disadvantage of consistency that, as Bernard Shaw remarked, you have said the same thing, you have told the same story, so often as the years go by. Taking a rest of a year and returning fresh to G.K.'s Weekly I was surprised at finding how much I enjoyed reading it and also at finding that it had been of more practical use than I remembered to the cause it served. The trend of the whole world is to make the State powerful and the family powerless. It was something that in these years G.K.'s Weekly should have helped to smash two bills of this nature-the Mental Deficiency and the Canal Children's Bills. Both these aimed at taking children from their parents, the first in the cause of health, the second of education. Against both Gilbert wrote brilliantly and successfully. G.K.'s Weekly has much more G.K. in it and quite as much Belloc as in the earlier years of the New Witness. Eric Gill, too, long a friend of the Chestertons, became the chief contributor on art. In 1925 he spent a night at Top Meadow to discuss the policy of the paper, especially with reference to industrialism and art. A little later the Gills moved from Wales much nearer to Beaconsfield and the two men met fairly often. Gill's letters are interesting. They are mostly before the visit to Beaconsfield and probably led to it. He begins by attacking Gilbert for "(1) supporting Orpenism as against Byzantinism and (2) thinking that the art of painting began with Giotto, whereas Giotto was really much more the end." In June 1925, G.K. was asking him to write about Epstein. Gill agreed to do so but insisted that Chesterton and Belloc must not disagree with him but "accept my doctrine as the doctrine of G.K.'s Weekly in matters of art—just as I accept yours in other matters." "I don't intend to write for you as an outsider (have I not put almost my last quid into your blooming Company?—7% or not). . . . God forbid that you should have an art critic who'll go round the picture shows for you and write bilge about this painter and that—this 'art movement' and that." In the first state of effervescence the labour he delighted in quite deadened the pain of the Editor's chair. Gilbert was prepared if necessary to write the whole paper and to treat it as a variant on the Toy Theatre or the Sword Stick: It was said that the Chicago pork machine used every part of a pig except the squeal. It might be said that the Fleet Street press machine uses only the squeal. . . . In short, nobody reading the newspapers could form the faintest notion of how intelligent we newspaper people are. The whole machine is made to chop up each mind into meaningless fragments and waste the vast mass even of those. Such a thing as one complete human being appearing in the press is almost unknown; and when an attempt is made at it, it necessarily has a certain air of eccentric egotism. That is a risk which I am obliged to run everywhere in this paper and especially on this page. As I have said, the whole business of actually putting a paper together is a new game for me to play, to amuse my second childhood; and it combines some of the characters of a jigsaw and a crossword puzzle. But at least I am called upon to do a great many different sorts of things; and am not tied down to that trivial specialism of the proletarian press.* [* March 28, 1925.] And again This paper exists to insist on the rights of man; on possessions that are of much more political importance than the principle of one man one vote. I am in favour of one man one house, one man one field; nay I have even advanced the paradox of one man one wife. But I am almost tempted to add the more ideal fancy of one man one magazine . . . to say that every citizen ought to have a weekly paper of this sort to splash about in . . . this kind of scrap book to keep him quiet.* [* April 4, 1925.] G.K. goes on to talk of an old idea of his: that a young journalist should write one article for the Church Times and another for the Pink 'Un and then put them into the wrong envelopes. It is that sort of contrast and that sort of combination that I am going to aim at in this paper . . . I cannot see why convictions should look dull or why jokes should be insincere. I should like a man to pick up this paper for amusement and find himself involved in an argument. I should like him to pursue it purely for the sake of argument and find himself pulled up short by a joke . . . I never can see why a thing should not be both popular and serious; that is, in the sense of being both popular and sincere. For the paper had a most serious purpose. He acknowledged its defects of bad printing (which the printers indignantly denied), bad proof-reading, bad editing, and claimed "to raise against the banner of advertisement the noble banner of apology." Because a creative revolution was what he wanted, words and forms were hard to find. It was easy to dress up stale ideas in a new dress but the terminology for something outside the old hack party programmes had to be fresh minted. He proposed various changes after a few months' running and introduced them thus: We should be only too glad if for this week only our readers would have the tact to retire and leave us alone. We are in a Hegelian condition, a condition not so much of Being as of Becoming. And no generous person should spy on an unfortunate fellow creature who is going through the horrible and degrading experience of being a Hegelian. It is even more embarrassing than being caught in the very act of evolution, which every clear headed person would desire to avoid.* [* December 12, 1925.] In this number he began The Return of Don Quixote and also a sort of scrapbook. He invited contributions dealing with every sort of approach to Distributism and promised "more than one series of constructive proposals and definite schemes of legislation. We do not promise that all these schemes will exactly agree with each other or that we shall agree with all of them. Some will be more conservative, some more drastic than our own view." This article ends on an ambitious note. Very varying schemes will be admitted, but the idea of the paper will thereby be strengthened not destroyed— For what we desire is not a paltry party programme but a It was not the first time he had demanded a revolution but, as the depression hit our country and Big Business seemed less and less capable of coping with it, the demand became more understandable and the fight against Monopoly more urgent. A thinking man should always attack the strongest thing in his own time. For the strongest thing of the time is always too strong. . . . The great outstanding fact and feature of our time is Monopoly.* [* April 25, 1925.] I have already referred to a debate on Monopoly between Chesterton and Mr. Gordon Selfridge, in which Selfridge, with the familiar unreality of the millionaire, maintained that there was no such thing. Anyone was free to open a store in rivalry of Selfridge's or to start a paper that should eclipse the Daily Mail! The only real monopoly, he added gracefully, was that of a genius like Chesterton whose work the ordinary man could not emulate. The graceful compliment Chesterton answered by offering to share his last epigram with Mr. Selfridge: but as to the main contention, what could he say? It was at once too easy and absolutely impossible to answer such a speech—or more truly such a speaker: only in a Country of the Blind could he have won a hearing. But Chesterton persevered. Even in 1924 the shadow of large scale unemployment had begun. And at this singularly inappropriate time came the Empire Exhibition at Wembley. In the failure of its appeal Chesterton saw hope: for he believed that from a frank facing of truth his country might yet conquer the coming perils. That was the real weakness of Wembley; that it so completely mistook the English temperament as to appeal to a stale mood. It appealed to a stale mood of success; when we need to appeal to a new and more noble mood of failure, or at least of peril. The English . . . no longer care to be told of an Empire on which the sun never sets. Tell them the sun is setting, and they will fight though the battle go against them to the going down of the sun: if they do not stay it, like Joshua. . . . We seriously propose that England should take her stand among the unhappy nations; it is too dismal a fate to go on being one of the happy ones. We must be as proud as Spain and Poland and Serbia; nations made more dear to their lovers by their disasters. Our disasters have begun; but they do not seem to have endeared us to anybody in particular. Our sorrow has come; but we gain no extra loyalty by it. The time has come to claim our crown of thorns; or at least not to cover it any longer with such exceedingly faded flowers.* [* March 21, 1925.] Always Chesterton was haunted by the present war. He had seen the Prussian peril conquered: he saw it rising again. Even before the advent of Hitler he knew that the tribe which had stolen from Austria and Denmark, had invaded France and crushed Poland was without repentance, and he feared that again the stupidity (or the greed) behind English and American policy was giving it another opportunity— "Those sturdy Teutons," he wrote ironically, "from whom we were descended up to the outbreak of the Great War, and from whom we are now showing signs of being descended again." The misfortune was that Englishmen had ceased to try to get free from "a secret government; conducted by we know not whom, and achieving we know not what. The real national life of our country is unconscious of its own national policy. The right hand of the Englishman, that holds the plough or the sword, knows not what his left hand doth with the pen and the cheque-book. Man is man; and Mond is master of his fate." For our government he apologised to France. He saw it as one and the same fight—against a heathenish money power and heathen Prussia. And the beating of the dark wings of enemy aeroplanes sounded in his dreams. As early as 1925 he wrote a Christmas play of St. George and the Dragon in which the Turkish Knight embodied his vision of Prussia and St. George spoke prophetically for England. SAINT GEORGE: I know that this is sure (They wound each other and the doctor comes to the help of the PRINCESS: Why should we patch this pirate up again? SAINT GEORGE: I will not fire upon my own red cross. PRINCESS: If you lay there, would he let you escape? SAINT GEORGE: I am his conqueror and not his ape. DOCTOR: Be not so sure of conquering. He shall rise When terror above your cities, dropping doom, |
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