He was asked to submit a manuscript but promised he should not be kept to the letter of it. "We should like you to make variations as these occur to you as you speak at the microphone. Only so can the talk have a real show of spontaneity about it." "You will forgive me," one official writes, "if I insist on speaking to you personally. That is how I think of our relations." G.K. was unique and they told him so.
A lot of reading was necessary for these talks—each one dealing with from four to ten books—and also a principle of selection. The principle Gilbert chose for one series was historical: "Literature lives by history. Otherwise it exists: like trigonometry." In the fifth talk of the Autumn series of 1934, he gives a general idea of what he has been attempting.
This is the hardest job I have had in all these wireless talks; and I confront you in a spirit of hatred because of the toils I have endured on your behalf; but, after all, what are my sufferings compared to yours? Incredible as it may seem to anybody who has heard these talks, they had originally a certain consistent plan. I dealt first with heroic and half-legendary stories, touched upon medieval chivalry, then on the party-heroes of Elizabethan or Puritan times; then on the eighteenth century and then the nineteenth. In this address I had meant to face the twentieth century; but I find it almost faceless, largely featureless; and, anyhow, very bewildering. I had meant to take books typical of the twentieth century as a book on Steele is typical of the eighteenth or a book on Rossetti of the nineteenth. And I have collected a number of most interesting twentieth century books, claiming to declare a twentieth-century philosophy; they really have a common quality; but I rather hesitate to define it. Suppose I said that the main mark of the twentieth century in ethics as in economics, is bankruptcy. I fear you might think I was a little hostile in my criticism. Suppose I said that all these books are marked by a brilliant futility. You might almost fancy that I was not entirely friendly to them. You would be mistaken. All of them are good; some of them are very good indeed. But the question does recur; what is the good of being good in that way? . . .
Mr. Geoffrey West's curious "Post War Credo" has one Commandment. He does say, he does shout, we might say, he does yell, that there must be No War . . . but he cannot impose his view because authority has gone; and he cannot prove his view; because reason has gone. So again it all comes back to taste. And I have enjoyed the banquet of these excellent books; but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
The peculiar half-official half-private direction of Broadcasting House is based on a theory of strict impartiality towards all opinions and an attempt simply to give the public the programmes that the public wants. Whether it is possible to maintain such a position is another question: that this is the theory there is no doubt—and one result is an abiding uncertainty of mind in most of the officials.
Broadcasting House hangs suspended in the air of public opinion and that fickle breath leaves them in no security as to any of their artists. The resulting sensitiveness became soothed as the months passed on and they got as near to trusting Chesterton as they ever come with any one. True, letters came attacking him, but far more enthusiastically approving of him. And the attacks he answered often by private letters that turned the critic into a friend.
Some of his suggestions were not acceptable. He was warned off a proposed humorous talk about Dean Inge and Bishop Barnes in a series called "Speeches that never happened"—("Subject too serious," "avoid religion"). But he was later asked to talk in a series on Freedom as a Catholic and also to debate with Bertrand Russell on "Who should bring up our children." In this debate he was especially brilliant, says Maurice Baring; and another friend wrote "I have just been listening not without joy to your putting it across Mr. Bertrand Russell. . . .
"Afterthought: What a Mincer! It struck me very much, having read much of his writing with interest. It just shows that the spoken word still has something that the written one can't convey. Is there a Mincing Mind, of which a mincing voice is the outward and visible warning?"
It was interesting that the last few years of Gilbert's life should have furnished this unique opportunity of contact through the spoken word between him and the English people. His voice on the radio had none of the defects that marred it in a hall: his material was far better arranged, his delivery perfect. He seemed to be there beside the listener, talking in amity and exchanging confidences. The morning after his death Edward Macdonald passed a barber's shop off Chancery Lane. The man was lathering a customer's face but recognising Mr. Macdonald, left the customer and ran out brush in hand.
"I just want to say I was sorry to hear the news," he said. "He was a grand man."