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I have been an onlooker of life. Since I was a very young man I have been watching, listening, recording, among many people in many scenes, but never as one of the actors in its drama. I was always “a chield amang ye takin’ notes.”

That is the role of most writers in this modern age; though far back in history, as in ancient Greece, the poets and philosophers were often men of action—soldiers and statesmen. Our own Winston Churchill in our own day ranks high among historians who helped to make history.

Now most of our professional writers stand in the wings of life’s drama, watching its performance with critical and sometimes despairing eyes. What is the meaning of this eternal merry-go-round called Life? What sense is there in it, or what purpose? Will there never be an end to man’s madness or wickedness? Will humanity always fling itself into the fiery furnace of war or be doomed to misery, starvation, and torment?

These lookers-on, these writing men and women, seem aloof to life in the eyes of those who are in the hurly-burly. There they are tapping out words on their typewriters, living in solitary places, consorting with a few chosen spirits of their own profession, turning out novels or plays, or crossword puzzles which they call poetry. What importance have they in the world of action? That question may be asked—and I have heard it asked—by foolish people who have an ill-concealed contempt for the man or woman who is busy with words.

In the beginning was the Word. Behind any action there is an idea. The word-makers are those who have changed the course of history and directed the drama of life. For sometimes their words are explosive and dynamic—even terrible and destructive.

There was a middle-aged man with a white woolly beard and white woolly whiskers who sat day after day in the British Museum; a quiet, harmless old gentleman he looked. His name was Karl Marx. He wrote a book called Das Kapital, and many others. It is not too much to say that they have caused the death of millions of men and women, following the Communist revolution in Russia, and that the menace of a third World War now casting its shadow over the minds of men is due in its origin to the words he wrote in a London lodging-house. So the French revolution was inspired and set in motion by a group of intellectuals called the Encyclopædists. On the other hand, the noblest ideals, the awareness of life’s beauty, the love of humanity have been inspired by the written word—written in prison by John Bunyan, written in blindness by John Milton, written back stage or on a tavern table by William Shakespeare, written by Dickens in rooms crowded by the immortal characters of his imagination.

I do not want to be too portentous about all this, but only to claim that the writers of words—our novelists and playwrights and poets—those who stand in the wings of life’s drama, as it seems, may be those who pull the strings of this puppet play called Life.

*****

I have known a few writers who have changed and moulded to some extent the minds of men and women during my own lifetime. One of them was H. G. Wells. I knew him when he had a dynamic energy of mind, with an inexhaustible sense of humour, and a wealth of whimsical ideas which leapt into his mind without effort. At my own dinner table more than once he enchanted the company by chasing some idea and building it up into some fantastic tale. In my club, with Arnold Bennett and others, his comments were mirth-raising. In his own home in Essex he was a delightful and amusing host, playing a game of his own invention with a ball which bounced in a most unexpected way, rushing to a pianola to pedal out the magnificence of Beethoven, entertaining his guests by his prankish mind. But behind all this playfulness, which poured into his early books like Mr. Kipps and Mr. Polly, he had a serious and almost desperate purpose. It was to awaken the intelligence of that new class of young men and women who had reaped the reward of elementary education and were reading, going to night classes, and beginning to think of the big problems of life. He wanted them to use this intelligence to make a better kind of world for themselves and others. He had a splendid vision of this better world: without war—that monstrous anachronism—with an ordered prosperity, a finer and more beautiful civilisation, illimitable in its possibilities. He saw it coming. He believed he saw it coming. He was its prophet and hoped to be in some measure its architect. It was his time of hope and optimism and faith.

There was another road down which his imagination went exploring. It led to the future of scientific discovery, not altogether favourable to humanity as forecast in his War of the Worlds, the First Men in the Moon, the War in the Air, the Food of the Gods, and so on. A prodigious worker, he plunged gallantly into his Outline of History, taking the whole of the world’s story from the beginning—a good enough achievement for one man’s lifetime. One has to criticise many of his ideas, and one has to smile at his fierce prejudices, but it did not deserve the ridicule and contempt poured upon it by men like Hilaire Belloc. On the contrary, it is a brilliant sweeping survey of world history, and for the first time put the great historical events and personages into their true perspective and their place in time. His anticipations of things to come in many of his books were uncannily prophetic and well in advance of scientific discovery. But his importance as a writer who influences the mind and morals of his own time is that he awakened and inspired city clerks, night-club students, the white-collar young man, the shop assistant, the students of the London School of Economics—the new intelligentsia. He was as a humorist, satirist, and social historian in the true line of succession to Charles Dickens. He knew and understood these young people groping for truth, eager for guidance, seeing themselves through his eyes, and his humour, sharing his faith in the glorious future ahead. They were pacifists as he was. They believed in Progress with a big P, and—poor dears!—through no fault of their own they were all wrong, as he was. Two wars came to spoil the picture. Humanity was not pursuing an inevitable line of progress, but was harking back to the Dark Ages. The youth of the world was mown down by machine-gun fire; cities were burning; ruin was widespread. The sum of human agony was immeasurable. Cruelty came out of its old lairs. There were torture chambers and concentration camps.

Wells himself died in despair. All his dreams had gone crashing into the mud. Reason had not prevailed. Human intelligence had failed. Civilisation itself was shrinking and crumbling. In his last phase he could see no light anywhere, and this man of hopefulness, this laughing jester of life, this prophet of Progress, fell into a dark pessimism. One of his last pamphlets was called Man’s Mind at the End of its Tether.

It was a tragic ending, and it is best to remember H. G. Wells as he will be remembered, not for his excursions into social philosophy, but for the comedy of his Mr. Polly and Mr. Kipps, or Tono Bungay, Love and Mr. Lewisham, and his genius as a story teller.

*****

There was another writer of great influence on the thought and character of his time with whom I came in touch. I can claim at least that I spent a fortnight—an astonishing fortnight—in the company of Bernard Shaw. That was when he came out to France in the First World War. I may have had something to do with his coming. I was asked by the Chief of Intelligence, General Macdonagh, what writer I would recommend as a visitor to the Front who might produce something good about the life and heroism of our men. Almost in jest, with my imagination running wild, I said, “What about Bernard Shaw?”

The Chief of Intelligence laughed.

“Good heavens, what an idea!”

But not long afterwards out came Bernard Shaw, with his beard blowing in the wind of France and Flanders.

I went about with him to places like Ypres and Vimy and Arras. I sat with him at luncheon and dinner in generals’ messes. In whatever company he was he looked the most distinguished man, and wherever he was his wit flashed out. Adjusting his steel hat when going into Arras, which was under heavy gunfire, he turned to me and said, “Gibbs, if the Germans kill me today they’ll be a very ungrateful people!”

A general who felt uneasy as his host broke the silence by saying,

“When do you think this war will be over?”

Shaw may have been waiting for that question.

“Well, General,” he answered, “we’re all anxious for an early and dishonourable peace.”

The general was not amused but there was a yelp of laughter from his junior staff officers.

He was very mischievous, as usual. He went back to write a screed called Joy-riding at the Front, which deeply offended the people at home. It seemed heartless and lacking any sense of compassion. It seemed to make a mockery of the war. I have not read it since it was first published, but I wonder whether I should be shocked with it, or whether it would read now as the clear, cold light of a keen intelligence not sparing the truth. I ought to read it again.

He was not unpatriotic and not a passionate pacifist, and one day he made a confession of faith to me.

“This war,” he said, “runs on parallel lines of thought. One of them is that it is a complete degradation of all that we mean by civilisation. The other is, my dear Gibbs, that we’ve got to beat the Boche.”

I was never converted by Shaw to any of his political and social ideas. Sometimes I wish I had been as a young man. Perhaps I ought to have been one of his Fabians at a time when there was great and desperate need of raising the standard of life for the labouring classes. The slums were still there. Wages were low and hours long. There was child labour in the factories, defended, I remember, by Franklin Thomasson, proprietor of that ill-fated paper The Tribune, dedicated to the gospel of Liberalism, of which I was a literary editor—Thomasson owing his wealth to the cotton spinning of Lancashire.

Bernard Shaw and his friends declared war on that kind of thing and Shaw, above all, had a pen like a sword as champion of justice and fair play against the monsters of greed and side-whiskered humbug. But I didn’t like his full-fledged Socialism (and don’t like it now), and in later years I didn’t like some of his friends—those egregious Webbs—Sidney and Beatrice—who swallowed all the propaganda of Lenin and company, and defended the Communist régime in Russia and its iron tyranny of dictatorship, regardless of its cruelties and mass executions and the slave state of the Russian people.

Shaw’s plays were a catalytic influence on the thought of our time. They broke down many absurdities in our old-fashioned Victorian view of life. They cut clean through many falsities. They had an audacity and brilliance of wit which for a time was shocking to the conventional mind. Looking back on their first productions it is astonishing to think how many people were shocked. I remember well going to see Arms and the Man when it was first performed. Nowadays there does not seem anything to quarrel about, any spark of explosive material. But that night when I went several people rose to leave their seats indignantly. They could not stand Shaw’s satire on war and the quality of courage, as soldiers are supposed to have it in heroic style. It seemed to them in the worst possible taste and very near to blasphemy.

Shaw’s discussions on marriage, on women, on kings and capitalists and dustmen and window cleaners did at least let in a lot of fresh air through the closed windows of Victorian and Edwardian homes. They made people think, and to laugh at these satires on life. Never to weep—except perhaps at St. Joan.

There is no sweetness or warmth in Shaw’s plays. His characters are not fully human, but, like those in the plays of Molière, to whom Shaw has some affinity, appear on the stage as types and exponents of one side or another in his argument on life. One does not find them lovable. But as a satirist of social life, penetrating in his analysis, he stands unrivalled in our time.

*****

Another writer of genius was good enough to give me his friendship. His was a jolly kind of genius and no one enjoyed it more than himself, astonished by the fantasy and wildness of his own imagination, delighted by the quips and quiddities of his play with words. He was the first to laugh and chuckle at them as he wrote an article in a Fleet Street restaurant or on a table in an A.B.C., though without the slightest self-conceit. It was of course G. K. Chesterton. He was a laughing philosopher, but underneath his glorious sense of humour he was intensely serious as a witness and preacher of what he believed to be the truth. He loved justice and hated injustice. He fought for the liberty of the soul. He believed in God and the Christian virtues of faith, courage, and the splendour of chivalry, with the Cross and the sword. He loved life, including beer and wine, and beauty and laughter, and hated anything which denied or frustrated or cramped its enjoyment. There was an undying romance in his heart, the romance of history, the boyish enthusiasm for noble deeds and heroes and saints. Even in his most jesting moods and in his most playful tricks with words and ideas, this message came through.

It is a pity there was no Boswell to record his conversation, for his wit and wisdom flowed through it unceasingly, as I had the joy of hearing him from time to time. He was a generous friend with a warmth of loyalty for those he liked.

Once at a dinner given to celebrate the first production of that Liberal newspaper The Tribune he uttered a panegyric of its young literary editor, who was myself. It was embarrassing to me and annoying to Franklin Thomasson its proprietor, but Chesterton enjoyed himself and it did me no harm.

*****

Nobility is rare among those who write books, and nobility is a rare quality anyhow in this modern age, but there was one author I knew who had a certain touch of it in mind and manner, not as a pose, for he was without pose, but in a born natural way like an aristocrat of a previous age. That was John Galsworthy. Some people were put off by his style and manner. They thought him a snob, whereas he loved the common man—farmers and sheep-shearers and all rustic folk. But he had never known poverty. His clothes were cut by the best tailor; he bought his boots at Lobb’s; he was in every sense of the word that somewhat old-fashioned type in this careless age, “an English gentleman.” That was at first sight, perhaps, a little intimidating. There was no hail-fellow-well-met touch about him. Yet when I was an impecunious journalist, shabbily dressed, he was charming to me and was not above drinking a cup of weak coffee with me in an A.B.C. round the corner in Fleet Street. I found in him a very human sweetness and sensitivity to all human suffering. At that time we were both troubled by the wave of unemployment, and together we tried to do something about it by an appeal to high powers through the Press. That was how I came to know him.

Like Chesterton, whom in no way did he resemble in the faintest degree, he hated injustice. He also hated cruelty, the vulgarity of wealth, meanness and intolerance and lack of fair play. The plays he wrote are based on these themes. That is their weakness from the point of view of art. They are plays with a purpose, to put over some denunciation of the things he most disliked or to preach pity for human suffering. So it was with Justice, in showing the agony and terror of solitary confinement. Winston Churchill saw it as Home Secretary and was deeply moved, and promised to do something about it. Galsworthy’s characters and plots are not always true to life, the plots being somewhat obviously constructed, but they are still impressive and poignant. In broadcast productions by the B.B.C. they still hold one’s interest and stir one’s emotion.

His best work was The Forsyte Saga. His portraits of those old Forsytes, and of Soames himself, are perfect, written with a complete sympathy and understanding. They belong to a period of social history now gone. Their types no longer exist, their way of life in a prosperous, secure middle-class England has departed after two World Wars and a social revolution levelling us all. He was not successful with his younger crowd. They are not quite authentic in their manners and speech. He invents his own slang for them. But the book as a whole is a work of genius and there are many passages of great beauty in it; his descriptions of Soames’s garden in sunlight and moonlight, and all through its pages there is the revelation of a mind sensitive to all human agony and to the troubled ardour of youth. I believe The Forsyte Saga will live in English literature, though it is a fashion now to doubt it.

*****

Living in the country now I don’t see many authors with whom I can discuss books and ideas. But one of them was my great friend until quite recently he died. I find it hard to believe that he has gone, and sometimes glance at the big armchair in which he used to sit—and take a nap—half expecting to see him there, with his thin-lipped smile, amused perhaps at having dropped off to sleep.

“What about another game?” he would ask, rousing himself.

James Lonsdale Hodson was not one of the most famous writers, but he had made a distinguished place for himself as war correspondent, diarist, novelist, playwright, and speaker on the B.B.C. A Lancashire man, he had a great following in the North of England—many of his novels and plays dealt with its life and character which he knew to the very marrow of its bones.

He was the most industrious of all writers I have known, never far from his typewriter, which he would bring with him on week-end visits. Having been a newspaper man for many years in the old days, he could write anywhere and at any time between interludes for work and play. But he didn’t like work for its own sake. He much preferred a game of golf, or billiards, or a wild form of croquet into which I initiated him. That was called Madders because it makes you madder and madder, and he became so keen on this that often we would start our duels on the lawn soon after breakfast and go on until dusk, with interludes for refreshment and a bit of talk. With a fine eye and a delicate touch, with his long thin hands, he was good at any game, and towards the end I had to acknowledge his superiority on my lawn.

He had a boyish enthusiasm for this kind of thing, putting all he knew into any game he played. He was out to win because otherwise he thought it childish, but he was a generous loser and delighted if I made a good shot or a winning stroke. To the end of his life, within a week or two, he played a fine game of golf and was seldom beaten by his friends. Perhaps that was the cause of his untimely death, because he may have strained himself too much on a golfing holiday.

A soldier in the First World War, he went through the battles of the Somme and all the mud and blood of those terrible days in High Wood and the places of death. That experience was always in the background of his mind and his emotion was deeply stirred when he wrote about it or spoke about it. The last novel he wrote was Return to the Wood, that wood being High Wood in which so many of his friends had been killed. It followed a talk he had given on the B.B.C., which greatly moved his listeners because of the emotion in his voice, so intense that he could hardly get through his script.

He became half a pacifist, hating war, yet he believed that there were times when war is necessary for a nation’s honour or the defence of liberty. In the Second World War he became a correspondent and took all risks, going out to meet them in France, North Africa, Burma, and in convoy at sea. During this time he wrote his diaries, published in a series of books by Gollancz. He puts in every detail of his day’s experience, which he noted down with penetrating observation, recording conversations on these ways of adventure. They contain the raw material of history, and later on will be used as such by future historians. For here are the facts, the colour, the character, the thoughts, the blurting out of truth by officers and men and young pilots of fighting planes, and the Mercantile Marine taking their ships through minefields and enemy submarines. One of Hodson’s finest books—in my opinion the best, though not in his own judgment—is a novel called English Family. It is all there, that Second World War as seen and suffered by a typical family in different ways of service.

Hodson, in spite of the sweetness in him, was a severe critic of men and affairs. He had no patience with dishonesty, slackness, or any touch of crookedness and charlatanism. He had a complete honesty of mind and his intellectual integrity was absolute. In newspaper articles and in “Letters to the Editor” he exposed what he believed to be anything fraudulent or unfair; and doubtless he made enemies by so doing, but he made many friends who admired his courage.

He was a generous-hearted man and my own best friend. When I was a patient in Charing Cross Hospital for two operations he came to see me every day, getting on the right side of the nurses, and finding a private staircase leading to my room, he would appear, regardless of visiting hours—even sometimes when the hospital was settling down for the night. When he was taken ill himself I went to see him in hospital, and as I sat by his bedside he smiled at me and said: “The boot is on the other leg now!” These were the last words I heard him say. A few days later he was dead.

*****

I rejoice in still having a good friend among my brothers of the pen. He comes into my room from time to time and fills it with laughter and lively anecdotes about authors past and present, and private information behind the scenes of the publishing world, and fantastic characters whom he has known on his way through life. So I have a good time with Frank Swinnerton, novelist, historian of books and bookmen, critic, essayist and, privately, a born mimic.

It is one of the best of my pleasures to go to tea with him in a very old house called Old Tokefield, where Mrs. Swinnerton and her charming young daughter Olivia give one a kind welcome to a table with hot scones, currant buns, buttered toast, and a rich variety of attractive cakes. Here in the bosom of his family and in an atmosphere of peace and happiness, Frank Swinnerton has always another story to tell, another rich episode in life’s comedy; and his wife and daughter laugh in the right place as though they had heard it for the first time. Two cats, or three, come into the room haughtily or stealthily, and their master talks to them in their own language which he understands perfectly, having long been a student of cat psychology. Lately we have been pleased to pretend that he is one of the strong, silent men, because no less than two of his friends apologised for having talked too much. When I write to him I venture to hope that he will break his silence when next he comes. In the next letter he writes in the tiniest handwriting—each letter perfect, though microscopic—he hopes that I will pardon his miserable speechlessness. This seems to us both a very good joke.

Dear Frank Swinnerton has a genius for friendship. He knows, or has known, a great number of contemporary writers. There was a long comradeship between him and Arnold Bennett, whom he understood so well that once when somebody asked Bennett what he thought on a certain subject, Bennett, inhibited by a stammer, said, “You tell him, Swinnerton.” He can imitate Bennett’s way of speech and manners so perfectly that it is quite uncanny. It is Arnold Bennett himself, as I used to know him in the Reform Club, to which we both belonged, or as I used to meet him for a morning greeting in Cadogan Gardens, when both of us were living in that neighbourhood. But I didn’t know him well. He was an extraordinarily shy man. I actually saw him blush when I thanked him for an act of kindness to a young friend of mine. But Swinnerton established with him one of those ideal friendships which exist sometimes, but not often, between two men utterly unlike each other in character and temperament.

Frank Swinnerton has a tremendous correspondence with writers (both men and women), publishers, and critics. They write long letters to him telling him of their troubles and asking for his advice. For they know that this friend of theirs is kind, knowledgeable, and wise as well as witty.

He makes one laugh, but if one needs sympathy, a cheering word in sickness or in sorrow, one gets it generously and quickly from this hard-worked author—always working, always writing—whom I am lucky to have as my friend.