That is the case against the success of CHESTERTON'S.
Your only chance finally is either to broaden your basis, or to have no basis at all, like Dickens in "Household Words" and "All The Year Round," and say, "Give me something with imagination in it, and I can do without politics or theoretic sociology of any kind." This is perhaps the only true catholicism in literature; but it will hardly serve your turn; because all the articles and stories that Dickens got are now mopped up by the popular press, which in his day stuck to politics and news and nothing else. So I am afraid you will have to stand for a policy, or at least a recognisable attitude, unless you are prepared to write a detective story every week and make Belloc write a satirical story as well.
You could broaden your basis if you had money enough to try the experiment of giving ten poor but honest men in Beaconsfield and ten more in London capital enough to start for themselves as independent farmers and shopkeepers. The result would be to ruin 18 out of the twenty, and possibly to ruin the lot. You would then learn from your feelings what you would never learn from me, that what men need is not property but honorable service. Confronted either with 20 men ruined by your act, or 18 ruined and one Fascination Fledgby owning half a street in London, and the other half a parish in Bucks, you would—well, perhaps join the Fabian Society.
The pseudo race feuds you should drop, simply because you cannot compete with the Morning Post, which gives the real thing in its succulent savagery whilst you can give only a "wouldn't hurt a fly" affectation of it. In religion too you are up against the fact that an editor, like an emperor, must not belong to a sect. Wells is on the right tack: my tack. See my prefaces to Androcles and Methuselah. We want the real Catholic Church above the manufactured one. The manufactured one is useful as the Salvation Army is useful, or the formulas of the Church of Christ Scientist; but they do not strike on the knowledge box of the modern intellectual; and it is on the modern intellectual that you are depending. I am an Irishman, and know how far the official Catholic Church can go. Your ideal Church does not exist and never can exist within the official organization, in which Father Dempsey will always be efficient and Father Keegan futile if not actually silenced; and I know that an officially Catholic Chesterton is an impossibility.
However, you must find out all this for yourself as I found it out for myself. Mere controversy is waste of time; and faith is a curious thing. I believe that you would not have become a professed official Catholic if you did not believe that you believe in transubstantiation; but I find it quite impossible to believe that you believe in transubstantiation any more than, say, Dr. Saleeby does. You will have to go to Confession next Easter; and I find the spectacle—the box, your portly kneeling figure, the poor devil inside wishing you had become a Fireworshipper instead of coming there to shake his soul with a sense of his ridiculousness and yours—all incredible, monstrous, comic, though of course I can put a perfect literary complexion on it in a brace of shakes.
Now, however, I am becoming personal (how else can I be sincere?). Besides I am going on too long and the lunch bell is ringing. So forgive me, and don't bother to answer unless you cannot help it.
Ever,
G. BERNARD SHAW.
Meanwhile, Shaw as usual responded cordially to Gilbert's wish to make him an early attraction in the paper—but also as usual urged him towards the theatre:
10th Dec. 1924.