He was simply a man who had discovered a crime: ancient like many crimes; concealed like all crimes. He was as one who had found in a dark wood the bones of his mother, and suddenly knew she had been murdered. He knew now that England had been secretly slain. Some, he would say, might think it a matter of mild regret to be expressed in murmurs. But when he found a corpse he gave a shout; and if fools laughed at anyone shouting, he would shout the more, till the world should be shaken with that terrible cry in the night.
It is that ringing and arresting cry of "Murder!" wrung from him as he stumbled over those bones of the dead England, that distinguishes him from all his contemporaries.*
[* Ibid., pp. 176-77.]
Yet, for the Christian, hope remains: no murder can be the end. "Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave." This quotation is from the chapter called "Five Deaths of the Faith" in The Everlasting Man. Several times in the book Chesterton puts aside tempting lines of thought with the remark that he intends to develop them later—in one of the unwritten books that he always felt were so much better than those he actually wrote. Would any human life have been long enough to develop them all? Anyhow, even the whole of this life was not available.
As I turn to the story of the weekly paper rising again from its ashes I ask myself the question I have often asked: was it worth while? I cannot answer the question. Something of his manhood seemed to Gilbert bound up with this struggle, and it may be he would have been a lesser man had he abandoned it. And yet at moments imagining the poetry, the philosophy that might have been ours—another White Horse, another Everlasting Man—I am tempted to wish that these years had not thus been sacrificed to the paper which enshrined his brother's memory.
CHAPTER XXV
The Reluctant Editor (1925-1930)
_I tell you naught for your comfort
Yea naught for your desire
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
Ballad of the White Horse_
COULD GILBERT HAVE divided his life between literary work, his home at Top Meadow, and those other elements called in the Autobiography "Friendship and Foolery," that life might well have been as he himself called it "indefensibly fortunate and happy." But he could not. Part of his philosophy of joy was that thanks must be given—for sunsets, for dandelions, for beech trees, for home and friends. And this thanks could only be the taking of his part in the fight. He would never, he once said, have turned of his own accord to politics: it is arguable that it would have been better if he never had. But his brother had plunged into the fray with that very political paper the New Witness and his brother's death had left it in Gilbert's hands. He felt the task to be a sacred legacy, and when the paper died for lack of funds his one thought was how to start it again.