by Ian Ker
I hear it exclaim
O Geordie, dear Geordie
Don’t do it again.117
The Liberal Nation observed acidly: ‘Political corruption is the Achilles heel of Liberalism.’118 The ministers had been guilty of more than gambling on the stock market, but, even if that was all they had been doing, it was particularly hypocritical of Lloyd George, who, as Chesterton was to point out in his Autobiography, had ‘made himself the mouthpiece of the Nonconformist Conscience’, and of whom ‘we did make fun… when he appeared in a transaction uncommonly like a gamble’.119
As for Sir Rufus Isaacs, he became Lord Chief Justice only a few months later in October 1913. It was then the custom for the attorney general to succeed the outgoing lord chief justice, and Asquith, faced with the choice of appearing to accept that Isaacs’s reputation had been tarnished by the Marconi scandal or of outraging public opinion, chose the latter course. The unfortunate appointment had one good result: it inspired the scandalized Rudyard Kipling, who had followed the Marconi scandal with close interest, to write his witheringly sarcastic poem ‘Gehazi’, which contained this particularly damaging stanza:
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.120
Looking back, Chesterton saw the scandal as a turning point in English history: the division between the pre-Marconi and the post-Marconi days was almost as significant, he thought, as that between the pre-war and post-war periods. The Victorian public ‘belief that English politics were not only free from political corruption, but almost entirely free from personal motives about money’ had been destroyed for ever. What for Chesterton made the politicians’ behaviour particularly disgraceful was that they had brazenly claimed to be telling the truth, even though they had conveniently and deliberately suppressed all reference to the American Marconi Company. This deception by ‘a verbal equivocation of the double sense of “this Company”’ was much worse than if they had lied out of some misguided loyalty ‘and under certain conventions of parliamentary self-defence’, behaviour that could possibly be excused as a ‘perverted form of honour’. However, Chesterton unfortunately persisted in believing what Belloc and his brother had continued to insist during the parliamentary inquiry—namely, that the scandal proved what they had claimed about party collusion in The Party System. No doubt loyalty to his beloved dead brother’s memory made him grossly understate the strength of the condemnation in Lord Robert Cecil’s minority report, which, he most unfairly sneered, ‘reported that some things were not quite so nice’. However, when he complained that Balfour had ‘said that they must judge men like Lloyd George (whom they knew so well and loved so much) more leniently than they would judge a common outsider’, he was rather closer to the truth. For Balfour had gone out of his way to exonerate the ministers of any possible corruption on the ground that they were honourable fellow members of Parliament whom he would not dream of suspecting of any such thing. Chesterton recognized that Cecil had ‘undoubtedly used all the violent vocabulary of Cobbett’ in his attacks in the New Witness, but, he claimed, his brother ‘had not in fact the faintest grain of malice, or even irritation’, but always spoke of his opponents ‘with perfect good humour and charity’. He allowed for the Isaacs brothers’ ‘Jewish virtues of family loyalty and the rest’, and even found ‘excuses for the other politicians; though it is extremely typical of the real attitude of our group, which was accused of fanatical Anti-semitism, that he was always more ready to excuse the Jews than the Gentiles’. As for the myth that the Marconi scandal was used as an excuse for an attack on the Jews, Belloc had neatly refuted that when, in giving evidence in court, he had observed that ‘anybody less like a Jew than… Lloyd George it would be difficult to imagine’. (When he appeared before the parliamentary committee of inquiry, Belloc maintained that he had never written against poor Jews but only the rich Jews who were so prominent in the international finance world, a world that might become largely Gentile with the growing power of America, in which case he would attack it just the same.) The story had an ironically happy ending: many years after his brother had died, fortified by the last rites of the Catholic Church, ‘his old enemy, Godfrey Isaacs, died very shortly after having been converted to the same Universal Catholic Church. No one would have rejoiced more than my brother… It is the only reconciliation; and it can reconcile anybody. Requiescant in pace.’121
9
The Victorian Compromise and Illness
1
WRITING to Father O’Connor on 15 May 1913 about Cecil Chesterton’s forthcoming trial and asking for his prayers, Frances added: ‘Sir William Lever has taken out a writ for libel against Gilbert. But our solicitors don’t think he has a case. But it is worrying and the law is tricky.’1 In answering questions after a lecture, Chesterton had referred to Port Sunlight, home to the Lever Brothers’ soap-manufacturing business, as ‘a slave-compound’. With the matter still unresolved a year later, Shaw wrote on 11 June 1914, offering financial help to fight the case: ‘How about money? Can I do anything? Dont [sic] spare my banker. You wont [sic] hurt me, as I have just now an unnecessarily large current balance.’2 On the 20th he wrote again, to say that, if an employee lost his benefits and savings if he left Lever Brothers’ employment, 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’.3 Chesterton wrote to apologize to the editor of the Christian Commonwealth, which had reported the lecture and was also threatened with legal proceedings. He was confident that, if a case were brought, he could offer a successful defence. After all, he had gone out of his way to say that the slaves of such a slave compound ‘may be better off under slavery… physically’, as had been the case in ancient Athens and the American South. On the advice of his solicitor, he wrote to H. G. Wells to ask if Wells would be prepared to testify that ‘the Servile State and servile terms in connection with it’ were known to him ‘as parts of a current and quite unmalicious controversy’. With the approval of his solicitor (‘rather to my surprise’), he wanted to fight the case ‘purely as a point of the liberty of letters and public speech; and to show that the phrase “slavery”… is current in the educated controversy about the tendency of Capitalism today’.4
He told Belloc that he had decided to fight the case ‘on the broadest and simplest lines of the freedom of political utterance… and with scarcely any details at all’. He would ‘prove the semi-servile conditions, but scarcely any that are not admitted in their own pamphlets and regulations’. He would not ‘spy on poor old Port Sunlight’. His solicitor approved his course of action because it would ‘prove the absence of personal malice’. He proposed to conduct his own case ‘and make it something of a political trial… an advertisement for the new sociology that you started’. His solicitor thought he would even be allowed to ‘call witnesses to the existence of the Servile State controversy; and the recognised and impersonal use of the servile terminology’. And he had suggested Belloc, who had ‘dealt with it as impartial economic theory’. Belloc could testify to ‘the existence’ of his book The Servile State and to the fact that the book and its ‘theory’ were being ‘discussed apart from any individual abuse—or abuses’. Even before this action against him, he had been ‘thinking a great deal’ about Belloc’s view that his brother Cecil had been ‘unwise to fix on the technical finance of Godfrey Isaacs rather than the public position of ministers’, and he had come to the conclusion that Belloc was right. This ‘line of attack would have been plainer and more popular; and therefore more damaging’. What Belloc had said now confirmed him in the decision he had ‘almost’ already made.5 He subsequent
ly wrote to tell Belloc that his solicitor had telephoned to say that the other side’s solicitors would not proceed against him if he was ready to sign a statement that merely stated what he had ‘empowered’ his solicitor ‘to say a year before, and what was already in my prepared defence. That is, that my remarks were political criticism of the tendency to slavery… and did not imply that Lever was personally cruel.’ Chesterton insisted that his solicitor should consult his brother Cecil, who had also been served with a writ by Lever. They both agreed that the statements they had been asked to sign constituted ‘an apologia, the opposite of an apology’, and that therefore there was no logical reason why they should refuse to sign.6 To Wells he attributed the climbdown to the fact that the other side knew he had people like Wells on his side.7
2
On 1 February 1913, when his last column appeared, Chesterton’s career as a Saturday columnist on the Daily News had come to an end. A week before, his poem ‘A Song of Strange Drinks’ had appeared in the New Witness in the issue of 23 January. It began:
Feast on wine and fast on water
And your honour shall stand sure…
But if an angel from heaven offers you any other drinks, the poem advises:
Thank him for his kind intentions,
Go and pour them down the sink.
The second stanza is fairly disparaging about tea, but the third stanza makes it clear that tea is greatly preferable to another hot beverage:
Tea, although an Oriental,
Is a gentleman at least;
Cocoa is a cad and coward,
Cocoa is a vulgar beast,
Cocoa is a dull, disloyal,
Lying, crawling cad and clown,
And may very well be grateful
To the fool that takes him down.
The poem ends by deploring another non-alcoholic drink that has appeared on the contemporary scene:
Heaven sent us Soda Water
As a torment for our crimes.8
In one of his columns in the Daily News in 1909, republished in Alarms and Discussions, Chesterton had associated soda water with imperialism: ‘You can get a whisky and soda at every outpost of the Empire: that is why so many Empire-builders go mad.’9 But all his readers knew what cocoa was associated with and why Chesterton held it up for special opprobrium. These readers included A. G. Gardiner, the editor of the Daily News, the owner of which was George Cadbury, the chocolate and cocoa manufacturer. The Marconi scandal had completed Chesterton’s total disillusion with the Liberal Party, of which Cadbury was a leading supporter. Cadbury and his ‘Cocoa Press’ were under constant attack in the New Witness, and Chesterton was probably relieved when, as Chesterton recalled in his Autobiography, Gardiner wrote him ‘a very sympathetic but rather sad letter, hoping that no personal attack was meant on some of the pillars of the Party’. Chesterton was able truthfully to assure him that his ‘unaffected physical recoil from cocoa was not an attack on Cadbury, any more than his praise of wine, which ‘was a traditional thing’, was ‘intended for an advertisement’ for a well-known wine merchant.10 For, in his book on Blake, Chesterton had already made clear his dislike of cocoa on other grounds than political: ‘Modern hygienic materialism is very like cocoa; it would be impossible to express one’s contempt for it in stronger terms than that. There he had also said, ‘Most modern ethical and idealistic movements might well be represented by soda-water—which is a fuss about nothing.’11 But, of course, he knew quite well the political significance of attacking cocoa, quite apart from his own dislike of the beverage. Recalling his exchange with Gardiner in his Autobiography, Chesterton was confused about dates, as it was the appearance of the verses in the New Witness in January 1913 and not their republication in the Flying Inn a year later, that brought about his resignation as the Daily News’s immensely popular Saturday columnist. Gardiner had written to say that he had ‘too much respect for your sense of decency to suppose you would stoop to so gross an outrage on those with whom you have been associated in journalism for years’, and asked Chesterton to correct the unfortunate and doubtless unintended ‘impression’ the verse had given. Chesterton had replied that he had nothing but warm feelings personally for Cadbury, in spite of their fundamental political differences.12 Nevertheless, he wrote, ‘it is quite impossible for me to continue taking the money of a man who may think I have insulted him. It is equally impossible for me to permit him or anyone else to control what I choose to write in other places. Therefore I see no other course but to surrender my position on the paper quite finally.’13 ‘I hate all separations,’ Gardiner replied. ‘This I hate for many reasons, but I will not trouble you with them.’ But Gardiner was sanguine that the separation would not be permanent: ‘I think you will find the columns of the D.N. open to you in the future, as they have always been.’14
Meanwhile Chesterton wrote to the editor of the Socialist Daily Herald that the Daily News ‘had come to stand for almost everything I disagree with; and I thought I had better resign before the next great measure of social reform made it illegal to go on strike’. Thankfully, he could no longer be sarcastically referred to as ‘a flourishing property of Mr Cadbury’, as Shaw had recently done in a debate with Belloc.15 But his association with the Daily Herald, for which he now began to write, his first article appearing on 12 April, was to be short lived: ‘I left the Liberal paper and wrote for a Labour paper, which turned ferociously Pacifist when the War came: and since then I have been the gloomy and hated outcast you behold, cut off from the joys of all the political parties,’ he lamented to the readers of his Autobiography. But, he says, with the passing of Lloyd George’s National Insurance Act of 1911, whereby insurance contributions became compulsory, he had already effectively left the Liberal Party as ‘too illiberal to be endured’, for he thought that the act was ‘a step to the Servile State; as legally recognising two classes of citizens; fixed as masters and servants’. His ‘verse of violent abuse of Cocoa’ was ‘a comic coincidence’ that helped him on his way.16
Belloc’s trenchant analysis of the Capitalist and Socialist systems, The Servile State, to which Chesterton was referring, was published in 1912 a year after Lloyd George’s act, which the latter openly advocated as his answer to the German insurance system established by Bismarck—another reason for Chesterton to oppose the act.17 According to Chesterton, Belloc’s analysis of the so-called Servile State was ‘as strictly scientific as a military map is military’. And, while no one could say the book was a popular success, ‘the title of the book was immediately and vastly popular. There was a time when errand-boys and railway-porters said “Servile State”; they did not know what it meant; but they knew about as much as the book-reviewers and even the dons.’ The thesis of the book was that Socialism does not lead to a Socialist society:
This is partly because of compromise and cowardice; but partly also because men have a dim indestructible respect for property, even in its disgusting disguise of modern monopoly. Therefore, instead of the intentional result, Socialism, we shall have the unintentional resultant: Slavery. The compromise will take the form of saying, ‘We must feed the poor; we won’t rob the rich; so we will tell the rich to feed the poor, handing them over to be the permanent servants of a master-class, to be maintained whether they are working or no, and in return for that complete maintenance giving a complete obedience.’ All this, or the beginnings of it, can be seen in a hundred modern changes, from such things as Insurance Acts, which divide citizens by law into two classes of masters and servants, to all sorts of proposals for preventing strikes and lock-outs by compulsory arbitration. Any law that sends a man back to work, when he wants to leave it, is in plain fact a Fugitive Slave Law.18
3
February 1913 saw the publication of Chesterton’s The Victorian Age in Literature in the Home University Library series. The editors of the series prefaced the book with a cautionary advice: ‘this book is not put forward as an authoritative history of Victorian literature. It is a free a
nd personal statement of views and impressions about the significance of Victorian literature…’19
The first and best chapter of the book is entitled ‘The Victorian Compromise and its Enemies’. For Chesterton, ‘the most important event in English history was the event that never happened at all—the English Revolution on the lines of the French Revolution’. The democratic ‘spirit of Cobbett’ had ‘burned like a beacon’, but the revolution ‘failed because it was foiled by another revolution; an aristocratic revolution, a victory of the rich over the poor’. This revolution of enclosures and game laws, whereby England ‘became finally a land of landlords instead of common landowners’, resulted in ‘the spirit of revolt’ taking ‘a wholly literary form’. It was a paradox that the ‘practical’ English became ‘rebels in arts’, whereas the French were ‘rebels in arms’. Following on from the visionary Blake, the English Romantic poets were unequalled in giving to ‘the imagination… the sense of having broken out into the very borderlands of being’. Subsequently, the Victorian Carlyle’s French Revolution, verbally speaking, ‘was more revolutionary than the real French revolution’. Thus it was English literature that retained ‘the romantic liberalism of Rousseau’ that had inspired revolutions on the Continent. Instead of revolution, then, the newly enriched early Victorian middle class, unlike its French counterpart, decided to support ‘a sort of aristocratical compromise’ rather than ‘a clean sweep and a clear democratic programme’. Its representative was Macaulay, who supported the great Reform Bill but condemned the Chartists: ‘Cobbett was dead.’ Macaulay was also quintessentially Victorian in his ‘praise of Puritan politics and abandonment of Puritan theology’, his ‘belief in a cautious but perpetual patching up of the Constitution’, his ‘admiration for industrial wealth’. But above all else, ‘he typifies the two things that really make the Victorian Age itself, the cheapness and narrowness of its conscious formulae; the richness and humanity of its unconscious tradition’. For there were two Macaulays, ‘a rational Macaulay who was generally wrong, and a romantic Macaulay who was almost invariably right’: ‘His reason was entirely one-sided and fanatical. It was his imagination that was well-balanced and broad.’ As a typical Victorian, he believed in the inevitability of progress: he thought politics, like technology, ‘as an experimental science, must go on improving’; but unfortunately he forgot that ‘unless the soul improves with time there is no guarantee that the accumulations of experience will be adequately used’. Chesterton regarded the defeat of the ‘larger’ by the ‘smaller’ Macaulay as the Victorian tragedy: ‘Later men had less and less of that hot love of history he had inherited from Scott. They had more and more of that cold science of self-interests which he had learnt from Bentham.’ But even the arch-Utilitarian Mill, who ‘had to preach a hard rationalism in religion, a hard competition in economics, a hard egoism in ethics’, still had ‘a sort of embarrassment’ as ‘he exhibited all the wheels of his iron universe rather reluctantly, like a gentleman in trade showing ladies over his factory’.20