Some people felt it an affectation that the Irish should put up their street signs in Gaelic but G.K. defended it. "It is well to remember that these things, which we also walk past every day, are exactly the sort of things that always have, in the nameless fashion, the national note."
It is this sensation of stemming a stream, of ten thousand things all pouring one way, labels, titles, monuments, metaphors, modes of address, assumptions in controversy, that make an Englishman in Ireland know that he is in a strange land. Nor is he merely bewildered, as among a medley of strange things. On the contrary, if he has any sense, he soon finds them united and simplified to a single impression, as if he were talking to a strange person. He cannot define it, because nobody can define a person, and nobody can define a nation. He can only see it, smell it, hear it, handle it, bump into it, fall over it, kill it, be killed for it, or be damned for doing it wrong. He must be content with these mere hints of its existence; but he cannot define it, because it is like a person, and no book of logic will undertake to define Aunt Jane or Uncle William. We can only say, with more or less mournful conviction, that if Aunt Jane is not a person, there is no such thing as a person. And I say with equal conviction that if Ireland is not a nation, there is no such thing as a nation. . . .
* * * *
In September 1916 Cecil Chesterton bade farewell to the New
Witness. He was in the army as a private in the East in the East
Surreys, and G.K. took over the editorship.
I like Chesterton's paper, the New Witness [wrote an American journalist in the New York Tribune (no, not yet Herald-Tribune)], since G.K.C. has taken it over. . . . Gilbert Chesterton seems to me the best thing England has produced since Dickens. . . . I like the things he believes in, and I hate sociological experts and prohibitionists and Uhlan officers, which are the things he hates. I feel in him that a very honest man is speaking. . . . I like his impudence to Northcliffe. . . . As a journalist Chesterton gets only about a quarter of himself into action. But even a quarter of Chesterton is good measure. . . . He works very hard at his journalism. That is why he doesn't do it as well as his careless things, which give him fun. But for all that there is no other editorial page in England or the United States written with the snap, wit and honest humanity of his paragraphs. I hope he won't blunt himself by overwork. It would be an international loss if that sane, jolly mind is bent to routine. England has need of him.
The overwork and the high quality of it were alike undeniable, but after the long repose of his illness G.K. seemed like a giant refreshed and ready to run his course. Each week's New Witness had an Editorial, besides the paragraphs of which the New York Tribune speaks (not all of these however written by himself), and a signed article under the suggestive general heading "At the Sign of the World's End." The difference between articles and a real book, and the degree of work needed to turn the one into the other, may be seen if the essays on Marriage in the paper be compared with The Superstition of Divorce for which they furnished material, and those on Ireland with Irish Impressions. There were besides very many articles in other papers English and American and he was also writing his History of England.
If all Englishmen had kept the same unwavering gaze at reality as Chesterton much of what he called "the rather feeble-minded reaction" that followed the war might have been avoided and with it the advent of Hitler. Particularly he opposed the tendency to call "Kaiserism" what is now called "Hitlerism" and should always be called Prussianism. While agreeing that care should be taken not to write of German atrocities that could not be substantiated he insisted that there was no ground for forgetting or ignoring the findings of the American enquiry in Belgium which had established more than enough. These horrors, the bombing of civilians, shelling of open towns and sinking of passenger ships culminating with the Lusitania, were in the main what brought America into the war. Here, as with England, Chesterton did not admit as primary what has since been so exclusively stressed—the economic motive. Here as with England he took the volunteer army as one great proof of the will of a Nation. And those of us who remember can testify that in America as in England the will of the people was ahead of the decision of the politicians.
On one point Chesterton's articles have a special interest: the question of reprisals. When the Germans broke yet another of the promises of the Hague Convention and initiated the use of poison gas there was much discussion as to the ethics of reprisals and G.K. used against reprisals two arguments one of which was a rare example of a fallacy in his arguments. If a wasp stings you, he said, you do not sting back. No, we might reply, but you squash it—you have as a man an advantage over a wasp and so do not need to use its own weapons to defeat it.
His other argument is far more powerful—is indeed overwhelming. If you use, even as reprisals, unlawful weapons, it is harder to prove you did not initiate them. And I remember well another feeling at the time expressed by G.K. which was I believe that of the majority of English people—if we use these things, if we accept the Prussian gospel of "frightfulness" then spiritually we have lost the war. Spiritually Prussia has conquered: as she has engulfed the old Germanies and, first imposing her rule, then gained acceptance of her ideas, so it may be with us. Ideas are everything and the barbarians destroy more with ideas even than by material weapons, horrible as these may be.
Inclined at first to hope for the fruits of democracy from the Russian revolution Chesterton was soon being reproached by H. G. Wells for "dirty" suspiciousness about the Bolshevik leaders and their motives. But the collapse of Russia and the defeat of Rumania alike only strengthened the necessity of the fight to a finish with Prussia that became as the months passed the absorbing aim of the New Witness. In the treaties respectively of Brest-Litovsk and Bukarest Germany imposed upon these two countries incredibly harsh terms.