AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

our recent Imperialism had been praise of Prussia, as an example and an
excuse. Nevertheless, to write of the Crimes of England, under that naked title,
was at that time liable to misunderstanding; and I believe that in some places
the book was banned like a pacifist pamphlet. It was not very pacifist. But all
this was to happen later. When I first recovered, I read up, as I have said, the
facts of the War. And then, like one resuming the normal routine of his life, I
started again to answer Mr. Bernard Shaw There is some foundation for the
anecdote told in Colonel Repington’s memoirs; that Mr. Belloc and I went on
talking through an air-raid and did not know it had begun. I am not sure at
what stage we did eventually realise it; but I am quite sure we went on talking.
I cannot quite see what else there was to do. But I remember the occasion very
well; partly because it was the first air-raid that I had experienced, though I
was going to and fro in London all through that period; and secondly because
there were other circumstances, which Colonel Repington does not mention,
which accentuated the ironic side of the abstractions of conversation and the
actuality of bombs. It was at the house of Lady Juliet Duff; and among the
guests was Major Maurice Baring, who had brought with him a Russian in
uniform; who talked in such a way as to defy even the interruptions of Belloc,
let alone of mere bombs. He talked French in a flowing monologue that
suavely swept us all before it; and the things he said had a certain quality
characteristic of his nation; a quality which many have tried to define, but
which may best be simplified by saying that his nation appears to possess
every human talent except common sense. He was an aristocrat, a landed
proprietor, an officer in one of the crack regiments of the Czar, a man
altogether of the old regime. But there was something about him that is the
making of every Bolshevist; something I have felt in every Russian I ever met.
I can only say that when he walked out of the door, one felt he might just as
well have walked out of the window. He was not a Communist; but he was a
Utopian; and his Utopia was far, far madder than any Communism. His
practical proposal was that poets alone should be allowed to rule the world. He
was himself, as he gravely explained, a poet. But he was so courteous and
complimentary as to select me, as being also a poet, to be the absolute and
autocratic governor of England. D’Annunzio was similarly enthroned to
govern Italy. Anatole France was enthroned to govern France. I pointed out, in
such French as could be interposed into such a mild torrent, that government
required an idée générale and that the ideas of France and D’Annunzio were
flatly opposed, rather to the disadvantage of any patriotic Frenchman. But he
waved all such doubts away; he was sure that so long as the politicians were
poets, or at any rate authors, they could never make any mistakes or fail to
understand each other. Kings and magnates and mobs might collide in blind
conflict; but literary men can never quarrel. It was somewhere about this stage
in the new social structure that I began to be conscious of noises without (as