hen you take your turn on
the committee you will find him out) and that though the German
lawyer has had L7 and is going ahead (L7 worth of law in Germany
takes you to the House of Lords) everything is hung up because you
will not answer Thring's* letters. Thring, in desperation, appeals to
me, concluding with characteristic simplicity that we must be friends
because you have written a book about me. As the conclusion is
accidentally and improbably true, I now urge you to give him whatever
satisfaction he requires. I have no notion what it is, or what the
case is about; but at least answer his letters, however infuriating
they may be. Remember: you pay Thring only L500, for which you get
integrity, incorruptibility, implacability, and a disposition greatly
to find quarrel in a straw on your behalf (even with yourself) and
don't complain if you don't get L20,000 worth of tact into the
bargain. And your obligations to us wretched committee men are simply
incalculable. We get nothing but abuse and denigration: authors weep
with indignation when we put our foot on some blood-sucking,
widow-cheating, orphan starving scoundrel and ruthlessly force him to
keep to his mite of obligation under an agreement which would have
revolted Shylock: unless the best men, the Good Professionals, help
us, we are lost. We get nothing and spend our time like water for you.

[* Herbert Thring was the barrister employed by the Society of
Authors.]

All we ask you to do is to answer Thring and let us get along with
your work.

Look here: will you write to Thring.

_Please_ write to Thring.

I say: have you written to Thring yet?

G.B.S.

I doubt whether he had. Those chance sums he poured from time to time
into Frances' lap were usually not what they should have been, an
advance on a royalty. _Orthodoxy_ he sold outright for L100. No man
ever worked so hard to earn so little.

When later Gilbert employed Messrs. A. P. Watt as his literary agents
a letter to them (undated, of course, and written on the old
notepaper of his first Battersea flat) shows a mingling of gratitude
to his agents with entire absence of resentment towards his
publishers, which might be called essence of Chesterton:

The prices you have got me for books, compared with what I used
weakly to demand, seem to me to come out of fairyland. It seems to me
that there is a genuine busi