Gilbert: The Man Who was G. K. Chesterton

by Michael Coren

  People, if you have any prayers,

  Say prayers for me:

  And lay me under a Christian stone

  In that lost land I thought my own,

  To wait till the holy horn is blown,

  And all poor men are free.

  The theme and symbol of the white horse had interested Gilbert from the time when his father had carved him a white hobbyhorse when he was a child. The inn where he spent his honeymoon was named after such a beast, and he had been deeply moved by his first sight of the white horse cut into the chalk of the Wiltshire downs. He began the epic in 1906, and was showing early versions of it to people the following year. The facts of the battle are, true to Gilbert’s previous record, inaccurate. He had the left-hand end of the Danish army fighting the left-hand end of King Alfred’s forces; this was mentioned by both his family and his critics, but his only response was to laughingly agree. He knew, as did all lovers of the poem, that it was the spirit rather than the strategy of the battle which was being recounted. His initial intention however had been to maintain a standard of authenticity in the poem, and to this purpose he travelled with Frances to Glastonbury and the Somerset areas where King Alfred had hidden and later taken up arms. His dedication revealed the purpose and background to the poem

  Therefore I bring these rhymes to you

  Who brought the cross to me …

  Do you remember when we went

  Under a dragon moon,

  And ’mid volcanic tints of night

  Walked where they fought the unknown fight

  And saw black trees on the battle-height,

  Black thorn on Ethandune? …

  Take these; in memory of the hour

  We strayed a space from home

  And saw the smoke-hued hamlets, quaint

  With Westland king and Westland saint,

  And watched the western glory faint

  Along the road to Frome.

  The Danes are depicted with a true horror and terror as they invaded and conquered England. Nobody was willing to take on these hellish, granite armies, until Alfred, inspired by a vision of the Virgin Mary, raised the banner of England and Christ. The battle is bloody, the losses are great. It seems that the day is lost, but no. Smashed and tired, the English are called by their King once again to charge their enemies, and they do so. The Danes are pushed back, and Wessex is saved. Gilbert was faithful enough to history to describe the event as only a partial victory — the north of England was still held by the enemy — but it was a victory indeed. It moved readers to patriotic tears, touched a nerve in the pre-First World War days when Germany seemed to be ever on the rise.

  During another war with a far more barbaric Germany The Times quoted the poem, feeling that nothing else was necessary in its leader article than the lines

  I tell you naught for your comfort,

  Yea, naught for your desire,

  Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.

  Night shall be thrice night over you,

  And heaven an iron cope.

  Do you have joy without a cause,

  Yea, faith without a hope?

  His next prose work was Manalive, an optimistic tale of one Innocent Smith and his endeavours to make the world a better, happier place. He has adventures with other women, lives in other houses; but all the women turn out to be his wife, all the various houses his own home. It is a charming tale, if drawn out and in dire need of a strong editor. The Victorian Age in Literature was a study not so much of nineteenth-century writers and writing, but of Gilbert’s attitude towards nineteenth-century writers and writing. “Macaulay took it for granted” he wrote, “that common sense required some kind of theology, while Huxley took it for granted that common sense meant having none. Macaulay never talked about his religion: but Huxley was always talking about the religion he hadn’t got.” There are some painfully vapid and uninteresting passages in the book, usually when he is discussing the writers he liked as opposed to those he disliked; he always found sharp criticism easier than flattering praise. The one-liners and succinct descriptions are memorable: “Matthew Arnold kept a smile of heartbroken forbearance, as of the teacher in an idiot school, that was enormously insulting.” On the Oxford Movement he wrote, “it was a bow that broke when it had let loose the flashing arrow that was Newman;” of Thomas Hardy, “he became a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot;” and of John Stuart Mill that there was about him “even a sort of embarrassment; he exhibited all the wheels of his iron universe rather reluctantly, like a gentleman in trade showing ladies over his factory.” It was a successful book, and has been ever since publication.

  While Gilbert was working on The Victorian Age in Literature his friend Hilaire Belloc and brother Cecil were launching the first issue of their magazine The Eye-Witness. The motivation for the weekly journal was in part a genuine interest in exposing corruption in high places, in part a weighty dose of paranoia and a conspiracy theory mania. The two men had written a book entitled The Party System earlier, a fascinating but heavily faulted work which aimed to “support the tendency now everywhere apparent and finding expression, a tendency to expose and ridicule as it deserves, to destroy and to supplant the system under which Parliament, the governing institution of this country, has been rendered null.” Belloc edited the magazine for the first year, but his attention and loyalties were seldom lasting. He was succeeded by Cecil Chesterton, a fearless and forward child, an aggressive young man and a cuttingly hard editor.

  Maurice Baring, a friend of both the Chestertons and Belloc, was also involved with the project, having been closely connected with the magazine which preceded The Eye-Witness. Baring was now a Roman Catholic, an adult convert, and a man of deeply conservative and anti-Semitic views. He had established a close friendship with Belloc, the odd couple drinking, debating and abusing long into the night. When he detached himself from the new magazine a higher quality of writers offered their services: H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw, both Fabian socialists, wrote articles, and Gilbert contributed some ballads. His “A Ballade of Suicide” appeared on 21st September 1911

  The gallows in my garden, people say,

  Is new and neat and adequately tall.

  I tie the noose on in a knowing way

  As one that knots his necktie for a ball;

  But just as all the neighbours — on the wall —

  Are drawing a long breath to shout “Hurray!”

  The strangest whim has seized me … After all

  I think I will not hang myself today.

  Nor was this the only lasting poem to appear. “Lepanto,” that lyrical expression of Gilbert’s sense of history, also graced the pages of the magazine

  The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,

  (Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)

  The hidden room in a man’s house where God sits all the year,

  The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.

  He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea

  The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;

  They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,

  They veil the plumed lions on the galleys of St Mark …

  Cecil Chesterton re-named the troubled journal the New Witness, and subsidised it with a generous loan from his father. Ada Jones, who he was still determined to marry, was asked to become assistant editor; she accepted the journalistic post, declined for the time being the offer of marital status. There were always personality clashes within the ranks of the staff at the magazine, which attracted eccentrics as well as skilled journalists. Ada Jones did not get along with the company secretary, pushed for his dismissal, and provoked a threat of litigation and very bad publicity. In spite of this humour played a part in the life of the New Witness, frequently too great a part. It was an inefficient organisation, a collection of individuals and opinions masquerading under
the disguise of a serious, campaigning newspaper. There were some dynamic young writers on call, amongst them Arthur Ransome and Charles Scott Moncrieff; they rapidly realised that this was not the thrusting, lean journal they had been expecting. Cecil Chesterton needed a scandal, a cause to pursue. He did not need to look very far.

  VIII - Marconi and the Jews

  The public issue which fell so neatly into Cecil Chesterton’s hands was not as important or dramatic as he believed; viewing it through the distorting telescope of history its impact on British society appears to be minimal. Yet the Marconi scandal occupied the time, thoughts and work of the Chesterton brothers to such an extent that even politically active friends believed them to be obsessed. The incident captured the imagination of Cecil first, it seemed to prove all of his ideas about a huge international conspiracy, and then took hold of Gilbert. In his Autobiography he had this to say

  It is the fashion to divide recent history into Pre-War and Post-War conditions. I believe it is almost as essential to divide them into the Pre-Marconi and Post-Marconi days. It was during the agitations upon that affair that the ordinary English citizen lost his invincible ignorance; or, in ordinary language, his innocence. And as I happened to play a part, secondary indeed, but definite, in the quarrel about this affair, and as in any case anything that my brother did was of considerable importance to me and my affairs, it will be well to pause for a moment upon this peculiar business; which was at the time, of course, systematically misrepresented and which is still very widely misunderstood. I think it probable that centuries will pass before it is seen clearly and in its right perspective; and that then it will be seen as one of the turning-points in the whole history of England and the world.

  The facts, rather than the dramatic fiction, of Marconi are as follows. In the March of 1912 Sir Herbert Samuel was offered and accepted a tender from the English Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company for the construction of a chain of wireless stations throughout the British Empire, an enormous contract. Samuel was a Jewish politician in the Liberal Party, held the position of Postmaster-General and was well known for his Zionist views. This singled him out, for amongst Jewish politicians and leaders at the time there was a tendency to hide under Anglo-Saxon attitudes and to reject Zionism as “an instrument to force us back into the ghetto.” Edwin Montagu, the Conservative minister, for example, took control of a Jewish anti-Zionist newspaper; inconceivable only a few years later. There was no such assimilation from Sir Herbert Samuel; he believed that he was an Englishman, a Jew, a Liberal, in that order; if anyone felt ill at ease with those attributes that was a problem for them, not for Samuel. When he accepted the Marconi contract there was a sudden and dramatic rise in the price of Marconi shares, especially since the sinking of the Titanic on the night of the 14th April and the subsequent public realisation of how vitally important wireless communications were, and would become. The managing director of the English Marconi Company was Godfrey Isaacs, who was also managing director of the American Marconi Company; technically an independent organisation but in reality simply another branch of the same Marconi empire. The Isaacs brothers were, of course, Jewish, and very successful. For Cecil Chesterton the idea of Jews as Jews was acceptable, the idea of Jews as successful and important men of affairs was a little harder to stomach.

  Godfrey Isaacs decided to expand the American company, in which the English company had a majority shareholding, by floating a new issue of shares on the British market on 18th April. This would have been a tolerable practice, but only nine days earlier he had indicated to his brothers Harry and Rufus that it might be a wise idea to buy some of the shares, then at a price far below what even the least astute of economists would have predicted once the market opened up. Harry Isaacs bought 56,000, Rufus bought 10,000 and both Lloyd George and the Liberal Chief Whip took 1,000 shares.

  When the new issue was floated on the 19th April the shares immediately jumped to £4.00, twice the price the politicians and their friends had paid for them. The three government ministers sold their shares without delay, making an easy and substantial profit. It took no time at all for rumour to circulate within the City of London, then in Westminster and Whitehall, and finally in Fleet Street. The guilty group knew people in extremely high places, and had influence far beyond the confines of government and business. The press was reluctant to print too much at first, but as more information leaked out to the public they had to make a statement. It escaped the notice of nobody that most of those involved in the scandal were Jewish.

  To Cecil Chesterton it seemed that all his painful anger, all his efforts to convince others that there were secret cabals of dark men plotting dark deeds had been proved worthwhile. After severe pressure a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry was formed, and concluded that the men involved had acted in good faith. A motion was proposed in the House of Commons which criticised their actions, but after a show of contrition from Sir Rufus Isaacs and Lloyd George it was defeated. It seemed that the matter was at an end, and that this was a generous verdict for those at the centre of the affair. There was no conspiracy, there may not have been any positive wrong-doing on the part of Rufus Isaacs, but at the very least there was a case to answer for acting without sufficient thought, and with far too little consideration for their public positions. Men in the leading firms of the City were undoubtedly carrying out similar deals on a weekly basis, but they were not ministers of the Crown.

  Cecil Chesterton, of course, was not satisfied. The Eye-Witness had made its position clear in the joint issues of business conspiracy and the Jews — it felt that the two obstacles were by their nature linked — from an early stage. A 1911 article stated that

  There exists in the midst of European civilisation a race alien to and different from the Western blood among which it must live. This race is segregated in no artificial manner yet permanently and uniquely survives intact. So far from this segregation being due to stratification or difference of abilities between higher and lower, the Jewish nation is, and has always been, eminent in the highest intellectual employment which European civilisation could find. It has on this account been accepted sometimes as a necessity, sometimes as an advantage, but always in practice as a part of the European scheme. None the less the presence of this alien element has proved sometimes an irritant, always an element of friction, and a social arrangement in which that friction should be reduced to a minimum, and the necessary or, at any rate, normal presence of the small non-European minority in our midst shall be made as innocuous as possible, is a goal practically obtainable and eminently to be desired.

  The style of Hilaire Belloc is obvious. In a further piece he wrote

  Now unless the Jewish race is to be absorbed and disappear in the mass of European blood and tradition surrounding it, that contrast and its consequent friction will increase in the near future until their worst fruit shall have ripened: a fruit of oppression, injustice, and enduring hatred.

  To avoid that lamentable conclusion three policies are present. The first — and that still most generally held in Western Europe — is to regard the matter as solved; vaguely to suppose the absorption of the alien race as feasible, and its presence for the moment as something at once absurdly separate and yet not separate from the life of the community as innocuous. The second policy is that of exclusion. The third policy is to grant the Jew recognition and privilege.

  Which of these three shows comprehension of our need and of the Jewish need, and which is the most likely to afford a standing answer to this gravest of modern questions?

  Such an early obsession with the Jewish question made it an easy step for the staff and supporters of the New Witness to take a firm stand on Marconi. Cecil Chesterton did not have the passion of Belloc on the subject, and was more the victim of ignorance. Later, during the First World War he, as a Catholic, was given the most menial tasks to serve by a bigoted superior. The other soldier to suffer because of his faith was a Jewish man, who was given even more unsavoury tas
ks to perform. Cecil could not understand why the Protestant saved his most angry prejudice for the Jew rather than the Catholic. He had no idea, no real conception, of how hateful gentiles could be towards Jews, and insisted on believing anti-Semitic talk to be at best constructive criticism, at worst lighthearted teasing. Hence he had no qualms about attacking Jewish men of affairs not only for their apparent dishonesty, but also for their Jewishness. It was his duty, his job, at times his virtual recreation.

  He accused Godfrey Isaacs of theft, and of gross dishonesty in other business affairs as well as Marconi. In January 1913 his magazine listed twenty bankrupt companies which Isaacs had had some connection with, and paid sandwichmen to march up and down in front of Isaacs’s office with accusations against the unfortunate man written on their signs. Godfrey Isaacs could take no more. He decided to prosecute Cecil on a charge of criminal libel. As arrogant as ever, Cecil laughed at the summons and put it in a frame in the New Witness offices. He was warned by friends to take care; his friends were ignored. Gilbert pleaded with Cecil to back down before it was too late, to no result. The case went to the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey on the 27th May 1913. Gilbert was there, along with his uncle Arthur, and the writer J.M. Barrie. What they saw was the humiliation of a proud man.