IN THE PUBLIC EYE.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXVII, Issue 17263, 2 September 1916, Page 12

IN THE PUBLIC EYE.

PROMINENT PEOPLE OF THE PERIOD. “ Perhaps the first and finest wav correspondent this war has produced,” is Mr G. K. Chesterton’s opinion of Mr Philip Gibbs. Mr Chesterton abandoning paradox for tho timo being, has contributed to tho “Daily Chronicle” a very warm api>recintion of tho correspondent who has done, aud continues to do, such telling work in the western theatre. “ When I last met Mr Philip Gibbs,” lie says, “there was little apparently about him and his surroundings to suggest his distinction in this department, though ho had already gained distinction in many. It. was, if I remember rightly, at a small debating club in the days of p?noe, at which 1 had to speak about something, and wa3 speaking as. best I could about something else. He sat in the front row, with a grave expression which is somewhat habitual with him; and he made me nervous. I do not think that 1 was afraid that ho would ray anything, but only afraid that ho would not. I bad, and have, a particularly high opinion of Ids judgment, especially as a critic; and lie lookwl like a critic, more distinctly and perfectly than he looked like anything else. liis features aro very fine, after til© fashion of what I can only call a delicate falcon—a. falcon not in tho best of health. His expression is_at once sensitive and incisive; and ho dressed in dark clothes too obtrusive to bo called dapper, bub more deliberately respectable than is the rule of Fleet Street. He looked liko a grave and gifted man of letters; but he looked, superficially at least, as if he were rather for the study than the stage, as the bad bad critics say about Shakespeare.

“ They would also, it would now be generally admitted, havo been bad critics about Mr Philip Gibbs. But nobody could' possibly have looked leas liko the war correspondent of Victorian tradition, who was something between a bushranger and a commercial traveller. 110 had written some admirable novels, about, places on which liis soul had perched.’ liko*a bird; a.story about the flats beside Battersea Park; a story about Fleet Street, called ' The Street of Adventure.’ The bird was to perch in stranger places. Sonic will see an element ot irony in the, fact that the finished man of letters, who described the modern Grub Street as ‘ The Street of Adventure,’ should since then have been dragged by destiny, or rather duty, through streets of appalling adventure after tho manner of those of Landreeies or Guise; streets that wero sometimes blocked by standing crowds of corpses, like a dead mob risen against a dishonoured leader. But it may well be maintained that a man who saw no romance in Fleet Street would .see nenc in France.”

It is tho special distinction of Mr Gibbs’s work that ho treats armies as being essentially human. “A bad custom has crept in recent, times into political as well ns military criticism,” Mr Chesterton writes; “a custom ot treating collective humanity as if it were dead merely because it is corporate—and ought to bs most aliveMaterial and even mechanical metaphors have been used, both in peace and war, for things of which the spirit and the will aro or ought to be the very essence. In politics men talked of ‘ the swing of the pendulum.’ In military criticism they talked oi tho 1 turn of the tide.' Yet surely the citizen ought not to be imagined as hanging in mid-air on a string (unless he be a. very provocative specimen) and swinging heavily and helplessly to and fro. And those human seas which wo call armies do not ebb and flow by blind necessities inferior to the soul of man. Thev are alive ; their ' waters can flow up hill; their high-water marks aro tho ends of the earth; and they ‘owe no homage’ unto the moon. It is in this light especially, I think, that wo who know him in Fleet Street in tho. quiet times havo pleasure in regarding the distinguished writer who is, for us at least who knew him, the ambassador of Fleet. Street at- the front. 'While working under extraordinary circumstances with an_ almost fiendish efficiency, especially in th© matter of speed (only the other day he sent 5000 words of vivid and quite dc-tailed description of the British attack, in a time which would havo, been normally adequate for <a mero general announcement of it) his work in every word of it is that of a writer and not n. reporter; and is penetrated everywhere with that nameless spirit which makes and will always make the pen something moro than a machine or even a mere tool.

“ The original Street of Adventure, which now looks &o sin all upon the map, does after all give something without which all adventures are nothing more than events. And. this truth that war is after all & thing of , wilt at its root, and only on its surface of routine, is only another way of saying that war description can be artistic because it is spiritual; for the word artistic is hero much less misleading than the rather battered word 1 picturesque.’ The tedious lie which tells us that modern war is dull and dehumanised, -a thing merely of unmeaning movements and unthmsab»e distances, is a catchword lingering out of tho talk in the timo of peace; it is not an experience of the war itself. It has gone tlio way of many other legends of pacifist manufacture, like the legend of an unconquerable Germany. But. if there had been nothing else "to damage it, the pen of Philip Gibbs would have destroyed it altogether. From the vivid glimpses he has given we> should already have understood that a great war means many small battles or even duels. We should have known that a war ot trenches does not merely mean a war of telescopes, but often means a. war of bayonets. And a war of the bayonet can occasionally mean something very like what our fathers have talked about as a war to the knife.

“But it is a fact almost equally important, and a fact which will become, more and v'”© important as the whole history of those' times tails into perspective, that while he was not afraid of being picturesque, he never in evil times and under evil examples attempted to achieve that result by being panicky—or what it. is considered more polite to call ‘pessimist.’ Ho was one of the very first in the field, appearing behind' the French linos immediately on the declaration of war as representative of,the ‘Daily Chronicle. a newspaper with which he has long been associated. He therefore saw with his own eyes that disastrous beginning of the war which looked very like tho disastrous end of it. Fie stood close to the catastrophe when tho line of the great Alliance went, down at Mons: nnd an armed empire seemed bearing down on Paris' like a doom. His dispatches from the front wore full of facts and images calculated to make us imagine the meaning of a retreat; but, he added no needless word to make us despair of it. Above all, anyone reading his account, down to its most pathetic intimacies of pain and labour, kept firmly in mind the impression that the process tinder consideration was a retreat, and not a rout.”

“ In tho war work of Mr Philip Gibbs nothing has been moro admirable or moro characteristic than the. tone—-

a tone which has from the first been a corrective to such, pessimist hysterics; a tone which can only bo described as a sober exaltation. Ho really writes of tragedy in tho right way," Mr Chesterton concludes, "as if ho were too close to frightful things to bo # frightened of 'them. With something of that moral and spiritual faith which is his in other matters, he understands that an infinite degree of pain remains always on another plane than that of pessimism. As Alice pointed out to that very modern sophist, the Rod Queen, no comparison can turn any kind of hill into a valley; and no accumulation of difficulty lias in itself anything to do with despair. _ The experiment of trusting the decisively literary temper in fudging of tho terrors of a campaign has found in Mr Gibbs’s work a very high justification. He bas been able to keep that humane detachment, so much misunderstood in tho ‘better sort of artist, in dealing with the most frightful facts as in dealing with bin own fancies. Hasty as his work has necessarily been, and huge ns is tho ground it has to cover, any man whoso trade is writing cat! see that bo has never lost his grip on an adjective or got entangled in a- train. of thought; ho lias kept his style, which is a true test of keeping liis head. He represents in this the best stiirifc of England in tho war; a spirit which allpears in tho uneducated as humour; and is (-ailed by the badly educated ofitimisni. If it .must hjivo a name, it is merely manhood. For oven tho horrors of war ought not to bo too horrible for any mail—except the man who is in the wrong."