by Ian Ker
Meanwhile that spring Cecil Chesterton was discharged from active service because of a septic hand and sent to the regimental office in Scotland to recuperate, where he carried out light desk duties. ‘Keith’ visited him there and secured a promise that he would not volunteer again for active service. However, the news from the front grew worse and reinforcements were desperately needed, so Cecil broke his promise and once again volunteered for the front. ‘Keith’s’ ‘telegram of joy’ to him on 11 November, Armistice Day, was left unanswered, although he had always written regularly to her. A few days later a delayed letter did reach her, explaining that ‘he had not been feeling at all well, but had not gone sick until after the Armistice, when he felt he could be spared from the line. He wrote from a hospital at Wimereux, and there was an underlying note of pain and disappointment that gave me a queer foreboding…’. In fact, she later learned that after
reporting sick he had had to march from Ypres for twelve miles in the heavy rain, until at last the Officer Commanding, seeing how ill he was, told him to fall out. He was by then soaked through and through and when, after a long train journey and a bumpy passage in a lorry, he finally reached the base, he was seriously ill with nephritis.
A couple of days later, ‘Keith’ received a telegram, which had also been delayed, from the War Office to say that ‘Private Chesterton was on the danger list, but regretted that owing to transport difficulties [she] could not be allowed to visit him’. Had Cecil been an officer, transport would have been arranged for her. To get a journalist’s pass would take three days. Fortunately, her brother-in-law had contacted Maurice Baring, who was able to pull strings, and ‘Keith’ left for France. There she was confronted at the hospital by the matron, who coldly demanded to know why she had not come weeks before in response to a telegram they had sent; it had apparently gone astray. Cecil spoke ‘a little wistfully’ about things at home but declared he was feeling much better. During the night his condition worsened, and when dawn came he clutched ‘Keith’s’ hand and smiling said, ‘It’s good-bye…’. She telegraphed her brother-in-law, who got Frances to break the news to his mother (‘which added to her hurt’, according to ‘Keith’)—he ‘could not face his brother’s death’. Of the family only ‘Keith’ was present at Cecil’s burial in a military cemetery.39
On 13 December, exactly a week after his brother’s death on 6 December, Chesterton wrote somewhat ambiguously in his editorial in the New Witness, that his brother had ‘died in France of the effects of the last days of the fighting’, as though he might have died while actually in action. ‘The work which he put first he did before he died. The work which he put second, but very near to the other, he left for us to do. There are many of us who will abandon many other things, and recognise no greater duty than to do it.’ In his Autobiography Chesterton eulogized his brother as one who ‘alone of all the men of our time possessed the two kinds of courage that have nourished the nation; the courage of the forum and of the field’, implying even more strongly that he had actually died in action: ‘In the second case he suffered with thousands of men equally brave; in the first he suffered alone. For it is another example of the human irony that it seems easier to die in battle than to tell the truth in politics.’ However, Cecil had as good as died in battle, and his brother cannot be blamed for a very excusable slight exaggeration. In the same issue of the New Witness, Belloc also praised Cecil’s courage: ‘He never in his life checked an action or a word from consideration of personal caution, and that is more than can be said of any other man of his time.’40 As for Chesterton, in his grief, he wrote in his ‘At the Sign of the World’s End’ column ‘An Open Letter to Lord Reading’, the former Sir Rufus Isaacs. Since January 1918 Reading had been acting as the ambassador-extraordinary and high commissioner in Washington, as well as being lord chief justice. He was now attending the Peace Conference in Paris with Lloyd George, who was now prime minister. At this crucial juncture when the future of Europe was to be decided, it was humiliating, Chesterton considered, that Britain should be represented by the two ministers involved in the Marconi scandal. In his well-known satirical poem ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’, Chesterton complained bitterly:
The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home:
And bees and birds of England
About the cross can roam.
But they that fought for England,
Following a falling star,
Alas, alas for England
They have their graves afar.
And they that rule in England,
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas for England
They have no graves as yet.41
Ironically, before Cecil had died, Godfrey Isaacs had in effect been found guilty in court of perjury in an action he had taken against a Liberal politician. His brother, Chesterton wrote in his open letter to Lord Reading with not a little inaccuracy, had ‘found death in the trenches to which he had freely gone’; while Godfrey Isaacs had ‘found dismissal in those very Courts to which he had once successfully appealed’: ‘You are far more unhappy; for your brother is still alive.’ Isaacs was, of course, he continued, ‘a blot on the English landscape’ and ‘the political men who made you are the creeping things of the earth’. But Chesterton was willing to believe that in the Marconi scandal ‘it was the mutual dependence of the members of your family’ that had ‘necessitated the sacrifice of the dignity and independence of my country’, and that, if it was ‘decreed that the English nation is to lose its public honour, it will be partly because certain men of the tribe of Isaacs kept their own strange private loyalty’. And he was willing to count this as a virtue ‘as your own code may interpret virtue; but the fact would alone be enough to make me protest against any man professing your code and administering our law’. It was not, he claimed, a ‘question of disliking any race’ nor ‘even a question of disliking any individual’. But it was a question of Jewish international financiers wanting in their own interests to protect the German states, headed by Prussia. In particular, there was the question of Poland:
Are we to lose the War which we have already won? That and nothing else is involved in losing the full satisfaction of the national claim of Poland. Is there any man who doubts that the Jewish International is unsympathetic with that full national demand? And is there any man who doubts that you will be sympathetic with the Jewish International?
To send the ‘the chief Marconi Minister as our chief Foreign Minister’ was to send ‘a man who is a standing joke against England’. His very name in the countries he was going to have to deal with was ‘a sort of pantomime proverb like Panama or the South Sea Bubble’. Did Lord Reading, Chesterton demanded, have ‘the serious impudence’ to call Chesterton and his friends ‘Anti-Semites because we are not so extravagantly fond of one particular Jew as to endure this for him alone’? Sometimes Chesterton wondered whether Jews like Isaacs felt their position to be
unreal, a mere masquerade; as I myself might feel it if, by some fantastic luck in the old fantastic civilisation of China, I were raised from the Yellow Button to the Coral Button, or from the Coral Button to the Peacock’s Feather. Precisely because these things would be grotesque, I might hardly feel them as incongruous. Precisely because they meant nothing to me I might be satisfied with them, I might enjoy them without any shame at my own impudence as an alien adventurer. Precisely because I could not feel them as dignified, I should not know what I had degraded.
He had often tried ‘to imagine and allow for an alien psychology in this matter’, and he recommended Lord Reading ‘and Jews far worthier than you’ not to ‘dismiss as Anti-Semitism what may well prove the last serious attempt to sympathise with Semitism’. He, Chesterton, he insisted, allowed for Lord Reading’s ‘position more than most men allow for it; more, most assuredly, than most men will allow for it in the darker days that yet may come’. It was ‘utterly false to suggest’ that either he or his brothe
r, ‘a better man than I, whose work I now inherit, desired this disaster for you and yours, I wish you no such ghastly retribution. Daniel son of Isaac, Go in peace; but go.’42 In his Autobiography, Chesterton claimed that he had tried to write ‘with all restraint’, believing that Rufus Isaacs ‘had really acted against my nation, but in favour of his own blood; and that he who had talked, and doubtless despised even in talking, the tedious Parliamentary foolery about having once met his brother at a family function, had in truth acted throughout from those deep domestic loyalties that were my own tragedy in that hour’.43 To later readers, the letter seems utterly anti-Semitic—and the question of Chesterton’s alleged anti-Semitism will be discussed in due course44—but the fact remains that a ‘ghastly retribution’ would not fall upon Lord Reading but within a couple of decades upon the whole hapless Jewish people at the hands of the very nation that Rufus Isaacs had allegedly gone to Paris to protect. For Chesterton and the New Witness, the overwhelming priority was to ensure that a strong Prussia at the head of Germany would never again be a threat to the peace of Europe. But of hardly less importance was the strengthening of Poland and a return to its historic boundaries, which included in particular the port of Danzig, which could give Poland access to Western Europe, and East Prussia, where the majority of the population was Polish. In the event, the Treaty of Versailles (the result of the Peace Conference that had begun in January 1919), which was signed on 28 June 1919 and which humiliated but only weakened Germany in the short term, was for Chesterton and the New Witness a complete disaster—as, indeed, it proved to be, since it aroused great German resentment but failed to render it sufficiently weak. French public opinion had called for the crippling of Germany through massive reparations, but Britain and the United States were unwilling to lose an important trading partner and feared the threat from revolutionary Communist Russia. As for the ineffectual League of Nations that was supposed to guarantee peace, it appealed to the idealistic American President Wilson, who was at least as ignorant as Lloyd George of the realities of continental European politics, to international finance, and to pacifist opinion strengthened by the horrors of the recent war.45
According to Titterton, Cecil Chesterton’s widow was ‘unable to carry on’ as assistant editor for a year after her husband’s death; but he saw no reason to go into ‘details’ as to why not.46 At her suggestion, Titterton succeeded her. ‘Keith’ herself said that she ‘could not have borne just then to live and breathe and have my being in the Street where Cecil and I had worked together and planned and loved together’. But she had contemplated the alternative, enduring ‘familiar surroundings until time softened the sting of reiterated memory’.47 It seems, however, as will shortly become clear, that her brother-in-law also put some pressure on her to go—Titterton’s reference to ‘details’ suggests that ‘Keith’s’ reason for going was not the only one. As for Chesterton himself, editing was hardly his natural avocation. Nor would politics, he wrote in the paper, ever ‘have been my province, either in the highest or the lowest sense’. He had hitherto thought of himself as ‘merely a stop-gap’, but this had ‘terribly’ changed:
I must now either accept this duty entirely or abandon it entirely. I will not abandon it; for every instinct and nerve of intelligence I have tells me that this is a time when it must not be abandoned. I must accept a comparison that must be a contrast, and a crushing contrast; but though I can never be as good as my brother, I will see if I can be better than myself.
There was, however, one way in which he would be a better editor than his brother: he was much less reckless and indifferent about checking his facts. He told a contributor whose article had been held up while its accuracy was checked that, while he did not fear a lawsuit or even a fine or imprisonment, what he did dread was printing something that was un-true.48 Nevertheless, while Chesterton was proud of being a journalist, being an editor was a very different matter: it involved responsibilities and the need to make decisions, duties that did not pertain to a newspaper columnist. Nor was his wife at all happy about it: ‘It seemed to her too great a drain on his time and energy: it made the writing of his important books more difficult.’ Although she would not attempt to dissuade him, she would have been delighted if he had decided not to attempt to carry on his brother’s work.49 Apart from anything else, the New Witness needed constant injections of cash, most of which had to come from Chesterton himself, although Sir Thomas Beecham, who joined the editorial board, invested some capital.50
During the spring and summer of 1919 Chesterton and Belloc discussed the possibility of Belloc returning as editor. But there was a problem. While Belloc had liked Cecil Chesterton and sympathized with many of his ideas, he had thought him a bad editor, drawing his contributors from too small a clique. The paper was not sufficiently ‘broad’ and ‘diversified’ and ‘witty’, he told Maurice Baring in 1913, and, while he entirely agreed with the paper’s hostility to ‘Jewish financial power’, it was ‘essential to avoid anything like the suspicion of fanaticism’: ‘I think it is particularly silly to turn the one independent paper we still have into a monotonous mass of repetition upon the one single question of the hundred it should deal with.’ But his advice had always been ignored and the points which he had emphasied when he was editor had been ‘quite abandoned’.51 There was, therefore, no chance that Belloc would resume editorship if ‘Keith’ Chesterton returned as assistant editor.
On 22 April 1919 Chesterton wrote to Belloc: ‘You know the somewhat delicate personal situation with which I should have to deal first; but I brought it off once before; and I have little doubt that if necessary I could do it again.’52 Chesterton must here be referring to his persuading ‘Keith’ to relinquish, at least temporarily, the assistant editorship the previous year when he took over as permanent editor. On 3 May he wrote again to say that, while he agreed with Belloc about the ‘policy’ the paper should pursue, ‘there are certain limits to my action which I will not pass even for a good public object.’
My sister-in-law is my sister-in-law; and, apart from my sympathy for her, she is not and never has been a person I could treat like an ordinary subordinate on what was, after all, my brother’s paper when he died. If it were a property, she would be the heiress.…This being so, I have to get her consent in a free and friendly fashion. As you know, I once got it; but the very way in which I got it happens to make it a rather different matter to get it again; though I still have every hope of doing so. I got it by saying that you alone could get the paper financed (as you then had good hopes of doing) and that if you financed it, you would naturally want to manage it. Now of course my own real reasons for wanting you go far beyond this; but you will see the logical difficulty of insisting on you without the funds, when I had only insisted on you because of the funds. I put it thus baldly, knowing that you prefer lucidity to good taste. I must have some special reason for re-opening the matter at this time…I think I can manage it; but it may not be done at one stroke. Meanwhile I suggest two things, which you might possibly be able to do, and which would make it easier.
First, if you could weigh in now with some important articles on some point of policy, preferably involving particular knowledge, such as foreign policy; I could take up the point more generally in the leaders…I think I should be more in a position to say ‘I want this vein worked thoroughly; and nobody but Belloc can work it’. I think this would be much better than your entering abruptly to edit a paper to which you did not contribute. I have known new people on the New Witness, who had the absurd idea that you would entirely alter the policy which, as a fact, you originally invented....
Second, I wonder whether it would be possible for you to collect some money for the paper; not large sums to finance it, but small sums to help it..... anybody who brought any sort of marriage portion to the union, so to speak, would make it possible to use something of the same argument as before. I will let you have more details about this side of the business when I have heard from the New
Witness people; but if they are in a hole, I should like to have a general reason for renewing negotiations with you.
Chesterton ended the letter by saying that he had ‘never believed so strongly…that England needs an organ like the New Witness, as I think you and I could make it’.53
On 25 August he wrote again to say that there were ‘really three separate things’ he had to consider. There was the ‘cause’, regarding which he was ‘sure’ that it would be better if Belloc were editor, especially if he could succeed in finding money as he, Chesterton, had not been able to: ‘You are the only man in the world to do it; and Cecil would have thought so as much as I.’ He did not necessarily agree’ with all Belloc’s ‘criticisms’, but he did ‘broadly agree that the paper would be ‘better without any intervention by other influences Cecil left on it’. He obviously could not have sacked Cecil’s wife while he was only ‘in temporary control of Cecil’s paper at Cecil’s request’: ‘If it can be done now by agreement with her, I certainly think the ideals involved will be all right.’ Personally, he would be ‘relieved to be clear’ of the paper, except as a contributor: ‘Editing is about as much my job as tight-rope dancing…’. And it was ‘physically impossible’ for him ‘really to edit the paper and also earn enough money to finance it’. ‘Besides, I want to write things of my own, a lot of which I have promised.’ Finally, there was the ‘personal matter’, which he put last but which really came first.
I can’t help feeling private relations as more important than public; and I will not at any price go out in a sort of stink of having treated my present colleagues badly. The case of my sister-in-law cannot be for me even an ordinary case of treating an assistant well. Those nearest to our nearest may not happen to be the people who would have been our chief chosen friends, but they must be our friends; or memories are wounded and life made very ugly. I have not only a great respect for her real loyalty to the cause, but a great regard for her many good qualities; and I must protect not only her interests but her feelings.