Chapter 31

The Living Voice

CHESTERTON SPOKE ONCE of the keen joy for the intellect of discovering the causes of things, but he was not greatly interested in science. He would have said that although the physical sciences did represent an advance in the grasp of truth it was, in the words of Browning, only the "very superficial truth." He desired a knowledge of causes that did not dwell simply on what was secondary but led back to the First and Final Cause. To the mediaeval thinker, science was fascinating as Philosophy's little sister: it was to Philosophy what Nature was to man. Nature had been to St. Francis a little lovely, dancing sister. Science had been to St. Thomas the handmaid of philosophy. The modern world thought these proportions fantastic. Huxley used Nature as a word for God. Physical Science had ousted Philosophy.

An American friend lately told me of a girl who, asked if she believed in God replied, "Sure, I believe in God, but I'm not nuts about Him." Gilbert was not "nuts" about Science: therefore in a world that saw nothing else to be "nuts" about he was called its enemy. And as with other things taken more solemnly by most moderns he preferred to get fun out of the inventions of the age.

He wrote in a fairly early number of _G.K.'s Weekly:_

ESKIMO SONG

. . . So that the audience in Chicago will have the advantage of hearing Eskimos singing. (Or words to that effect.)

--_Wireless Programme_.

Oh who would not want such a wonderful thing As the pleasure of hearing the Eskimos sing? I wish I had Eskimos out on the lawn, Or perched on the window to wake me at dawn: With Eskimos singing in every tree Oh that would be glory, be glory for me!

Oh list to the song that the Eskimos sing, When the penguin would be if he could on the wing, Would soar to the sun if he could, like the lark, But for most of the time it is totally dark.

Or hark to the bacchanal songs that resound When they're making a night of it half the year round, And carousing for months till the morning is pale, Go home with the milk of the walrus and whale.

Oh list to the sweet serenades that are hers, Who expensively gowned in most elegant furs, Leans forth from the lattice delighted to know That her heart is like ice and her hand is like snow.

* * * * *

God bless all the dear little people who roam And hail in the icebergs the hills of their home; For I might not object to be listening in If I hadn't to hear the whole programme begin. And the President preach international peace, And Parricide show an alarming increase, And a Justice at Bootle excuse the police, And how to clean trousers when spotted with grease, And a pianist biting his wife from caprice, And an eminent Baptist's arrival at Nice, And a banker's regrettably painless decease, And the new quarantine for the plucking of geese, And a mad millionaire's unobtrusive release, And a marquis divorced by a usurer's niece-- If all of these items could suddenly cease And leave me with one satisfactory thing I really _should_ like to hear Eskimos sing.

This was hardly the expression of an attitude to science, but he did have such an attitude. Life was to him a story told by God: the people in it the characters in that story. But since the story was told by God it was, quite literally, a magic story, a fairy story, a story full of wonders created by a divine will. As a child a toy telephone rigged up by his father from the house to the end of the garden had breathed that magic quality more than the Transatlantic Cable could reveal it in later life. It did not need mechanical inventions to make him see life as marvellous. His over-ruling interest was not in mechanics but in Will: the will of God had created the laws of nature and could supersede them: the will of Man could discover these laws and harness them to its purposes. Gold is where you find it and the value of science depends on the will of man: a position which may not sound so absurd in the light of the harnessing of science to the purposes of destruction. When discussing machines "we sometimes tend," said Chesterton in _Sidelights_, "to overlook the quiet and even bashful presence of the machine gun."

There was an impishness in Gilbert, especially in his youth, that encouraged the idea of his enmity to science. Where he saw a long white beard he felt like tweaking it: an enquiring nose simply asked to be pulled. It was only in (comparatively) sober age that he bothered in _The Everlasting Man_ to explain "I am not at issue in this book with sincere and genuine scholars, but with a vast and vague public opinion which has been prematurely spread from certain imperfect investigations."* That "vast and vague public opinion" certainly suspected him of irreverence even towards sincere and genuine scholars. Yet it was by his use of the most marvelous of modern inventions that he won in the end the widest hearing among that public that he had ever known.

[* _The Everlasting Man_, p. 67.]

It is not so many years ago that we donned earphones in a doubtful hope of being able to hear something over the radio. It is the less surprising that it was only in the last few years of his life that Gilbert became first interested in the invention and presently one of the broadcasters most in request by the B.B.C. He felt about the radio as he did about most modern inventions: that they were splendid opportunities that were not being taken--or else were being taken to the harm of humanity by the wrong people. What was the use of "calling all countries" if you had nothing to say to them.

"What much modern science fails to realise," he wrote, "is that there is little use in knowing without thinking."

And again, writing about the amazing discoveries of the day: "Nobody is taking the smallest trouble to consider who in the future will be in command of the electricity and capable of giving us the shocks. With all the shouting about the new marvels, hardly anybody utters a word or even a whisper about how they are to be prevented from turning into the old abuses. . . . People sometimes wonder why we not infrequently refer to the old scandal covered by the word Marconi. It is precisely because all these things are really covered by that word. There could not be a shorter statement of the contradiction than in men howling that word as a discovery and hushing it up as a story."*

[* _G.K.'s Weekly_, Aug. 15, 1925.]

For the thing that really frightened him about the radio was its possibilities as a new instrument of tyranny. The British Broadcasting Company holds in England a monopoly and is to a considerable extent under Government control. It is possible to forbid advertising programmes because the costs are met by a tax of 10 sh. a year levied on the possession of a radio set.

In an article called "The Unseen Catastrophe" (January 28, 1928) Gilbert wrote:

Suppose you had told some of the old Whigs, let alone Liberals, that there was an entirely new type of printing press, eclipsing all others; and that as this was to be given to the King, all printing would henceforth be government printing. They would be roaring like rebels, or even regicides, yet that is exactly what we have done with the whole new invention of wireless. Suppose it were proposed that the king's officers should search all private houses to make sure there were no printing presses, they would be ready for a new revolution. Yet that is exactly what is proposed for the protection of the government monopoly of broadcasting. . . . There is really no protection against propaganda . . . being entirely in the hands of the government; except indeed, the incredible empty-headedness of those who govern. . . . On that sort of thing at least, we are all Socialists now. It is wicked to nationalize mines or railroads; but we lose no time in nationalizing tongues and talk . . . we might once have used, and we shall now never use, the twentieth century science against the nineteenth century hypocrisy. It was prevented by a swift, sweeping and intolerant State monopoly; a monster suddenly swallowing all rivals, alternatives, discussions, or delays, with one snap of its gigantic jaws. That is what I mean by saying, "We cannot see the monsters that overcome us." But I suppose that even Jonah, when once he was swallowed, could not see the whale.

In the autumn of 1932 Gilbert was first asked to undertake a series of radio talks for the B.B.C. Every one seems agreed that he was an extraordinary success. Letters from Broadcasting House are full of such remarks as: "You do it admirably," "quite superb at the microphone." In one his work is called "unique." Radio was now added to all his other activities during the four years he still had to live. Dorothy kept a diary in which she noted in one year the giving of as many as forty lectures, and entered reminders of engagements of the most varying kinds all over England: from the King's Garden Party to the Aylesbury Education Committee and the Oxford Union: to Scotland for Rectorial Campaigns: dinners at the Inner Temple and the Philosophical Society: Detection Club dinners and Mock Trials, at one of which he was Defendant on the charge of "perversely preferring the past to the present."

Besides the books discussed in the last chapter, the Dickens' _Introductions_ and the _Collected Poems_ were republished in 1933. Other books were planned, including one on Shakespeare.

That same year Gilbert's mother died. During her last illness Frances was torn between London and Beaconsfield, for her own mother was dying in a Nursing Home at Beaconsfield, her mother-in-law at Warwick Gardens. Once I drove with her between the two and she told me how she suffered at the difficulty of giving help to two dying Agnostics. She told me on that drive how she knew her mother-in-law had not liked her but had lately made her very happy by saying she realised now that she had been the right wife for Gilbert. To a cousin, Nora Grosjean, Frances spoke too of how she and Mrs. Edward had drawn together in those last days and she added, "No mother ever thinks any woman good enough for her son." Nora Grosjean also reports, "Aunt Marie said to me more than once, 'I always respect Frances--she kept Gilbert out of debt.'"

Warwick Gardens had been their home so long that vast accumulations of papers had piled up there. "Mister Ed." too had been in a sort keeper of the family archives. Gilbert glanced at the mass and, as I mentioned at the beginning of this book, told the dustman to carry it off. Half had already gone when Dorothy Collins arrived and saved the remainder. She piled it into her car and drove back to Beaconsfield, Gilbert keeping up a running commentary all the way on "the hoarding habits of women."

The money that came to Gilbert and Frances after Mrs. Edward's death made it possible for them to plan legacies not only for friends and relatives but also for the Catholic Church in Beaconsfield with which they had increasingly identified their lives and their interests. Their special dream was that Top Meadow itself should be a convent--best of all a school--and in this hope they bequeathed it to the Church.

A year later another family event, this time a joyful one, took Gilbert back to his youth; Mollie Kidd, daughter of Annie Firmin, became engaged to be married. She was a rather special young cousin to Gilbert both because of the old affection for her mother and because she had played hostess to him in Canada when her mother was