by Ian Ker
We went on talking, of course, with no alteration in the arrangements, except that the lady of the house brought down her baby from an upper floor; and still the great plan unfolded itself for the poetic government of the world. Nobody in such circumstances is entirely without passing thoughts of the possible end; and much has been written about ideal or ironic circumstances in which that end might come. But I could imagine few more singular circumstances, in which to find myself at the point of death, than sitting in a big house in Mayfair and listening to a mad Russian, offering me the Crown of England.
After the Russian poet had left, Chesterton and Belloc walked across the Park with the last rumblings still echoing in the sky, and heard the All Clear signal’ as they came out by Buckingham Gate, like the noise of trumpets of triumph’. They talked a little of the prospects of the War, which was then in the transition stage between the last peril and the last deliverance’, and they ‘parted, not without a certain belated emotion of excitement’.5 The occasion must have been before February 1917, when the Russian Revolution broke out and the Czar abdicated, in view of the presence of the Czarist officer. Within, then, the time frame, ‘the last peril’ must have been the German assault on Verdun, which began on 21 February 1916 and which was intended to wipe out the French army, while the last deliverance’ must refer to the British Somme offensive, which began on 1 July, successfully eased the pressure on the French, and ended on 18 November, exactly a month before the final relief of Verdun.
The Zeppelin air raids, which were launched from occupied Belgium and always took place at night, inspired Ford Madox Hueffer (who would change his name to Ford Madox Ford in 1919), the son of a German father, Francis Hueffer, a music critic of The Times, and an English mother, the daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown, to publish, with Violet Hunt, Zeppelin Nights in 1915. The book was reviewed by J. K. Prothero, ‘Keith’ Jones’s pseudonym, in the New Witness of 6 January 1916. The review attacked the ‘dull offensiveness’ of the book, while acknowledging that Violet Hunt had provided some fugitive gleams of patriotism’. Hueffer’s lack of patriotism in suggesting that Londoners were cowering in terror in their cellars, ‘Keith’ suggested, only projected ‘his own fear into the minds of the nation with whom he resides’, and was written ‘for German consumption.’ The only panic was in the ‘foreign’ parts of London, particularly Whitechapel, which were ‘inhabited by non-Europeans’. It is generally supposed’, Keith’ wrote, ‘that Mr Hueffer is not exactly of pure European extraction, and this book is certain to confirm such impression.’ The truth was that, apart from these ‘aliens’, the people of London ‘not only refrain from cowering by day and palpitating by night, but with their own particular sense of humour, have turned the terror that walks in darkness, as devised by Berlin and ratified by Mr Hueffer into a joke…’.
The review provoked a letter in the next issue from a certain ‘J.M.’, which acknowledged that the book was a dreary pot-boiler, but complained: ‘That is no reason why you should go out of your way to insult Mr Hueffer by calling him a Jew and a coward.’ In fact, the letter went on, Hueffer was a Catholic and, although already in his forties, had secured a commission in the army. Furthermore, he had written the ‘two most brilliant’ analyses of Prussianism that had been published since the beginning of the war. ‘Keith’ retorted in the next issue of the paper that, because Hueffer had converted to Catholicism, that did not mean that ‘he ceases to be a Jew’. She was also aware that he had ‘written a novel centering round a particularly brutal type of sensualist’. This sneering reference to Hueffer’s The Good Soldier, which was also published in 1915, was too much even for one of the directors of the New Witness, E. S. P. Haynes, a literary solicitor and writer, to whom Belloc had dedicated The Servile State. Writing in the issue of 27 January, as ‘a personal friend’ of Hueffer, he took exception to J. K. Prothero’s ‘at best eccentric’ dismissal of ‘one of the ten greatest novels so far published in the twentieth century’. As for the author, he was ‘absent on military service’. ‘Keith’ replied to this rebuke in the next issue by citing in support the review the paper had published of The Good Soldier in the issue of 3 June 1915 by Thomas Seccombe, ‘a literary critic of considerable distinction’—who had indeed trashed a novel that has a claim to be one of the ten greatest English novels of the entire twentieth century. ‘Keith’ was supported by a letter in the issue of 10 February by a certain ‘M.F.’, who complained that Ford’s (adulterous) ‘Good Soldier’ was a slur on English soldiers fighting in the war, at which point the editor brought the correspondence to a close.
‘Keith’s’ offensive and vicious review was also too much for H. G. Wells, who wrote privately an undated letter to Chesterton to express his outrage.
Haven’t I on the whole behaved decently to you? Haven’t I always shown a reasonable civility to you and your brother and Belloc? Haven’t I betrayed at times a certain affection for you? Very well, then you will understand that I don’t start out to pick a needless quarrel with the New Witness crowd. But this business of the Hueffer book in the New Witness makes me sick. Some disgusting little greaser named Prothero has been allowed to insult old F.M.H. in a series of letters that make me ashamed of my species. Hueffer has many faults no doubt but firstly he’s poor, secondly he’s notoriously unhappy and in a most miserable position, thirdly he’s a better writer than any of your little crowd and fourthly, instead of pleading his age and his fat, and taking refuge from service in greasy obesity as your brother has done, he is serving his country. His book is a great book and Prothero just lies about it—I guess he’s a dirty minded priest or some such unclean thing.…The whole outburst is so envious, so base, so cat-in-the-gutter-spitting-at-the-passer-by, that I will never let the New Witness into the house again.6
To a reader today, Chesterton’s response (also undated) is remarkable for its forbearance on the one hand, and on the other for the lack of condemnation of ‘Keith’s’ disgusting personal attack on Hueffer. Clearly, the Marconi affair still deeply rankled with him. He told Wells that he knew enough of his ‘good qualities in other ways to put down everything’ in his letter to ‘an emotion of loyalty to another friend’:
Any quarrel between us will not come from me; and I confess I am puzzled as to why it should come from you, merely because somebody else who is not I dislikes a book by somebody else who is not you, and says so in an article for which neither of us is even remotely responsible. I very often disagree with the criticisms of Prothero; who is not a priest, but a poor journalist, and I believe a Free-Thinker. But whoever he may be (and I hardly think the problem worth a row between you and me) he has a right to justice; and you must surely see that even if it were my paper, I could not either tell a man to find a book good when he found it bad, or sack him for a point of taste which has nothing in the world to do with the principles of the paper. For the rest, Haynes represents the New Witness much more than a reviewer does, being both on the board and the staff; and he has put your view in the paper—I cannot help thinking with a more convincing logic. Don’t you sometimes find it convenient, even in my case, that your friends are less touchy than you are?
Extraordinarily conciliatory as Chesterton was in the face of Wells’s furious outburst, the truth is his response was somewhat disingenuous. What Chesterton calls ‘a point of taste’ had unfortunately a great deal to do with the ‘principles’ of a paper that under his brother’s editorship was violently and virulently anti-Semitic (as even Belloc acknowledged7). Moreover, Haynes had responded only to ‘Keith’s’ offensive and ignorant dismissal of The Good Soldier, not to her personal abuse of Hueffer. The remainder of Chesterton’s letter makes it clear that the political corruption, in which leading Jewish politicians had been deeply involved on one notorious occasion, that the New Witness was courageously attacking, justified any lapses of ‘good taste’.
By all means drop any paper you dislike, though if you do it for every book review you think unfair, I fear your admirable range
of modern knowledge will be narrow. Of the paper in question I will merely say this. My brother and in some degree the few who have worked with him have undertaken a task of public criticism for the sake of which they stand in permanent danger of imprisonment and personal ruin. We are incessantly reminded of this danger; and no one has ever dared to suggest that we have any motive but the best. If you should ever think it right to undertake such a venture, you will find that the number of those who will commit their journalistic fortunes to it is singularly small: and include some who have more courage and honesty than acquaintance with the hierarchy of art. It is even likely that you will come to think the latter less important.
Chesterton added in a postscript that, since Wells ‘specially’ mentioned Prothero’s letters, he must surely see that not to publish Prothero’s letters would mean not publishing ‘Haynes’ letter and others on your side’, which ‘could not be printed without permitting a rejoinder’.8
Wells could hardly refuse this olive branch and replied that he too could not quarrel with Chesterton.
But the Hueffer business aroused my long dormant moral indignation and I let fly at the most sensitive part of the New Witness constellation, the only part about whose soul I care. I hate these attacks on rather miserable exceptional people like Hueffer and Masterman. I know these arent [sic] perfect men but their defects make quite sufficient hells for them without these public peltings.
He admitted that he should have written to Cecil Chesterton instead, and one of these days he would ‘go and have a heart to heart talk with him’—except that he always got ‘so amiable’ when he met a man in the flesh. But Cecil ‘needs it—I mean the talking to’.9
2
In January 1916 Divorce versus Democracy was published by The Society of SS Peter and Paul, publishers to the Church of England. In the Preface, Chesterton says that he had been ‘asked to put forward in pamphlet form this rather hasty essay as it appeared in “Nash’s Magazine”’. And he begins with another attack on Prussia, the fount of all evil, for having ‘become the peculiar champions of that modern change which would make the State infinitely superior to the Family’. Christianity, on the contrary, ‘conceives of the home as self-governing in a manner analogous to an independent state; that is, that it may include internal reform and even internal rebellion; but because of the bond, not against it. In this way it is itself a sort of standing reformer of the State; for the State is judged by whether its arrangements bear helpfully or bear hardly on the human fulness and fertility of the free family.’ It was that section of the plutocracy that wanted ‘the division of sex for the division of labour’ that favoured ‘the extension of divorce : ‘The very same economic calculation which makes them encourage tyranny in the shop makes them encourage licence in the family.’10
Chesterton begins his argument that divorce is essentially undemocratic by conceding that the ‘difficulty of believing in democracy is that it is so hard to believe—like God and most other good things’. But there was also the difficulty of disbelieving in it, namely, that ‘there is nothing else to believe in’. It was mere ‘babytalk’ to talk about ‘Supermen’ or ‘Nature’s Aristocracy’, who ‘must be either those whom others think wise—who are often fools; or those who think themselves wise—who are always fools’. But if one is a democrat, then one must regard the extension of divorce as ‘the last and vilest of the insults offered by the modern rich to the modern poor’, who, unlike the rich, mainly believed in marital fidelity. Even if they did not, ‘the popularising of divorce’ would no doubt be used against the poor by the rich for ‘power goes with wealth’. It was easy to ‘forget that there is a great deal of difference between what laws define and what they do’: ‘Marriage will be called a failure wherever it is a struggle; just as parents in modern England are sent to prison for neglecting the children whom they cannot afford to feed.’ Upper-class ‘sentiment’ frowned on men hitting women as ungentlemanly: to a judge coming from the same social background, ‘a small pat or push’ could be exaggerated or invented ‘to assist those faked divorces so common among the fashionable’. But in a working-class culture, ‘to divorce people for a blow’ would be like divorcing a rich man for ‘slamming a door’. Easy divorce would mean that people could have ‘a series of lives’ rather than ‘a life’. It would be like but worse than the ‘cold creed’ of reincarnation in which ‘each incarnation must forget the other’: for ‘this short human life’ would be ‘broken up into yet shorter lives’, each of which would be ‘in its turn forgotten’.11
In October 1916 Cecil Chesterton was at last accepted for military service in the East Surrey regiment, having been rejected several times on medical grounds, before securing a transfer to the Highland Light Infantry by claiming Scots ancestry through his mother. Just before his brother had fallen ill, he had accompanied ‘Keith’ Jones to France when she was commissioned to write about the military hospitals in Boulogne. Once again he asked her to marry him, but this time there was a difference: would she marry him if he were sent to the front to fight? And this time it was impossible for her to refuse.12
The last issue of the New Witness to be edited by Cecil was that of 12 October 1916. In the next week’s issue he wrote ‘An Au Revoir to The New Witness’—it was in fact ‘An Adieu’, as he must have thought not unlikely at the time—in which he thanked his brother, ‘who, at no little personal sacrifice, has consented to undertake the editorship in my absence, and to allow his name to appear on the front page of the paper’. The name would not only bring prestige to the paper but guarantee a continuity of editorial policy.13 In his Autobiography Chesterton explains that, while it ‘would at any time have seemed to me about as probable or promising as that I should become a publisher or a banker or a leader-writer on The Times…the necessity arose’ out of the fact that ‘the New Witness… was passionately patriotic and Pro-Ally but as emphatically opposed to the Jingoism of the Daily Mail’, as well as the fact that there were ‘not too many people who could be trusted to maintain these two distinct indignations, without combining them by the disgusting expedient of being moderate’. The new editor promised readers that he would not take himself too seriously either as editor or as a contributor. There was an idea that the Christmas number should carry a picture of him, and he doubted if he would summon sufficient seriousness to resist: ‘There will be given away with the paper a lock of my hair, a fragment of one of my broken bootlaces, a small piece of blotting-paper, which I have really used (and used up) and some of the shavings of a blue pencil actually used in The New Witness office.’ ‘Keith’, who had looked after the paper while Cecil was in America speaking on behalf of the Allied cause and debating with supporters of Germany, was in charge of the office, since the new editor out in Beacons-field would to a large extent be an absentee editor.14
According to ‘Keith’, Chesterton was not only an absent but ‘an extremely bad editor’, who ‘could not realise the necessity for a cohesive policy for the paper, or a close association with its staff’. Had he spent at least one ‘strenuous day’ a week in the office, much might have been accomplished, she thought. But his visits were ‘occasional and fugitive, most of the time being occupied in the dictation of his articles’. His leading articles also, she considered, were less decisive than his brother’s, although ‘his amazing journalistic flair kept them succinct’. But he lacked Cecil’s crusading spirit and could not ‘inspire the same enthusiasm’. One aspect of his writing greatly entertained the staff, his ‘ingenuousness in corporeal matters’, that made him one occasion write that whenever ‘Mr George is in trouble he goes into a corner, by himself, and makes a nasty mess’. The New Witness, ‘Keith recalled, ‘always referred to the Welsh politician by his surname only, which was bitterly resented by his fellow Liberals’, in order to avoid using the ‘double-barrelled name that suggests to the simple a loftiness of character, an integrity of purpose that a plain surname does not contain’. When an amendment was suggested, Chesterton still did not
see the point: ‘Of course, if you think I’ve been too hard on him you might tone it down.’15 W. R. Titterton, who was on the staff and would succeed ‘Keith’ as assistant editor, observed: ‘Nothing bored him, but business bothered him.’ At first he did not at all care for ‘the rough-and-tumble hurry of the business of putting a paper to bed’, although Titterton thought he came to enjoy it. However, it was obvious that Chesterton had never wanted to be an editor, but had simply taken on the editing because he felt ‘it was a sacred trust’.16 Poor an editor as Chesterton may have been, as a prolific contributor he was the most valuable asset the paper had: he was the anonymous main leader writer and author of the weekly page of comment, which he started, called ‘At the Sign of the World’s End’, while he also contributed signed articles and verses.17
As an editor, he was much more open than his brother to contributions from outside the small circle of writers sympathetic to the views of the paper. Thus he was ready to publish a ‘Republican article’ by Shaw in February 1917,18 to which he intended to write an answer, ‘for my disagreement and agreement with you are equally vital’. He would not have been prepared to publish the article had he thought that the article could endanger the Allied cause, and he was sure that Shaw would have understood, even if he had ‘violently’ disagreed. He personally thought it was ‘bosh to treat political theories’ as though they were military secrets. He always thought that ‘if a thesis is wrong enough to be suppressed it is wrong enough to be rationally answered’. However, in spite of assurances he had previously received, at the last moment he had received ‘an intimation from my Press Bureau friends that they think after all it ought not to be published. I can only suppose their stupider superiors are stricken with some blithering blue funk’. But he could not risk his brother’s paper being closed down ‘except for its own principles’ and it would be ‘illogical to defy the authorities’ over a ‘thesis’ he would anyway have to dissociate himself from.19