AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

it the Street of Adventure. Philip Gibbs himself accentuated that intellectual
incongruity which was the comedy of the place; he carried a curious air of
being the right man in the wrong place. His fine falcon face, with its almost
unearthly refinement, seemed set in a sort of fastidious despair about ever
making it the right place. This was long before he gained his great distinctions
as a war correspondent; but he dealt in the same detached way with the other
great wars in the past. He had been studying the struggle between the great
men of the French Revolution; and had concentrated on what seemed to me an
unbalanced yet delicate detestation of Camille Desmoulins. He summoned him
before a tribunal of earnest talk, in my presence; and all the time he was
talking, I thought how like he looked to those high-minded, hatchet-faced,
hard humanitarian idealists among the great revolutionists whom he criticised.
David should have painted his profile. I begin with that impression of Gibbs
precisely because his figure did seem so detached and cleancut against the
background. But I myself was only the background; it was lightly alleged that
I could by myself have constituted a back scene. In other words, I belonged to
the old Bohemian life of Fleet Street; which has since been destroyed, not by
the idealism of detachment, but by the materialism of machinery. A newspaper
proprietor in later years assured me that it was a slander on journalism to tell
all these tales about taverns and ragged pressmen and work and recreation
coming at random at all hours of the night. “A newspaper office is now exactly
like any other place of business,” he said with a radiant smile; and I agreed
with a groan. The very name of Bohemia has faded from the map of London
as it has faded from the map of Europe. I have never understood why the new
diplomacy abandoned that old and noble national name, which was among the
things that were not lost on Mohacs Field; but it would seem that in both cases
the best things are lost in victory and not in defeat. At least I know that I
should have been annoyed if, in order to gain with doubtful judgment another
strip of territory, I had been suddenly asked to talk about England as West
Saxony; and that is what has happened to the long epic of Serbia, now
described as North Slavia. I remember when it was announced that Bohemia
was to cease to exist, at the very moment when it came into existence. It was
to be called Czechoslovakia; and I went about asking people in Fleet Street
whether this change was to be applied to the metaphorical Bohemia of our
own romantic youth. When the wild son disturbed the respectable household,
was it to be said, “I wish Tom would get out of his Czechoslovakian ways,” or,
when Fleet Street grew riotous, “I hate these rowdy Czechoslovakian parties.”
But the question is merely fanciful; for there is very little left in Fleet Street
that its worst enemies could call Czechoslovakian. The newspaper proprietor
was perfectly right in his facts; journalism is now conducted like any other
business. It is conducted as quietly, as soberly, as sensibly as the office of any
successful moneylender or moderately fraudulent financier. To such persons, it