"In truth" he wrote, "no man knows how near we are to death or to dawn. I am not sure whether I am making this speech from a scaffolding or a scaffold."
It is easy for the young to undertake hard things: they never know how hard they are. And they are certain of success. The "lessons of experience" signify to the young that other men have failed: their own experience shall teach others the meaning of success. But to begin again at fifty, with the special spring of youth gone and with the sad lessons of one's own experience in the mind: this calls indeed for a rare courage. Gilbert knew all the cost in time, energy, money and reputation that he would have to pay—that he did pay. And he stood increasingly alone. Cecil's had been the irreparable loss, but others of the old circle were dropping out and their places were not filled.
Jack Phillimore's death in 1926 was a heavy blow. To his memory Gilbert dedicated The Queen of Seven Swords, published the year of his death.
You go before me on all roads
On bridges broad enough to spread
Between the learned and the dunce
Between the living and the dead.
The gulf between the Socialist group and the Distributist had become far more obvious than of yore: Shaw and Wells would still write for G.K. but only because he was their friend. If F. Y. Eccles, if Desmond McCarthy today contributed, it would too be chiefly from affection for Gilbert. One article by Mr. McCarthy described the old days when the original Eye Witness was in being and he, Cecil and Belloc sat around the table editing it and sticking triolets thrown off in hot haste into those nasty little spaces left by articles that did not quite fit, or supplying three or four articles and a Ballade Urbane while the printers waited.
We have to print a triolet
When space is clamouring for matter
We try to put it off and yet
We have to print a triolet
It is with infinite regret
That we admit the silly patter
We have to print a triolet
When space is clamouring for matter.
Such joyous scrambles are proper to youth, and now none of them were young.
All authors worthy of the name have found their platform and made permanent engagements by middle life: professional men are absorbed by work and life: they simply had not time to give as of yore to build up this new-old venture. The names of Shaw and Wells continue to appear among the contributors, often enough in religious debate. Reading the files and visiting the two men to talk of Gilbert, I made one discovery that is curious from whichever side you look at it. Two able and indeed brilliant men betrayed not only an amazing degree of ignorance concerning the tenets of Catholicism but also a bland conviction that they knew them well. Wells in conversation based his claim on the fact that he had long been intimately acquainted with an ex-nun. Shaw I fancy felt he must know all about something that had surrounded him in infancy—for, as the reader must have noticed, he is much preoccupied by the thought of his Irish descent and education.
But what seems to me even stranger about the situation is the absence on the Catholic side of any effort to explain to these men the doctrines they misconstrued. When Wells, for instance, gave a crude and inaccurate statement of the doctrine of the Fall, Belloc laughed at him, Chesterton and Father McNabb both wrote long and picturesque articles, illuminating to a believer but, as instruction to an unbeliever, quite useless. A correspondence that seemed likely to drag on forever ended abruptly with Wells asking about the Fall, "Tell me, did it really happen?" to which Chesterton briefly replied, "Yes."
I imagine he thought he and the other writers had said this several times already, but in fact they had not. Perhaps they did not realise where the beginning must be made in instructing otherwise instructed men on the subject of Catholicism. It is all very interesting and curious. But it largely explains why Bernard Shaw found it hard to believe that Gilbert believed in Transubstantiation. Has any Catholic ever explained the philosophic meaning of Transubstantiation to the Great old Irish Man of English Letters? Even Gilbert was perhaps too much inclined simply to play the fool in high-spirited fashion with those who attacked the Faith in his paper or other papers. But then how well he played it!