he stage was
lighted. They saw five or six people walking about and they said,
"That man looks very heroic striding about with a sword." Plenty of
people outside in the street looked more heroic striding about with
an umbrella; but they did not see these things, all the lights being
turned out. That was the really philosophic objection to an
aristocratic society. It was not that the lord was a fool. He was
about as clever as one's own brother or cousin. It was because one's
attention was confined to a few people that one judged them as one
judged actors on the stage, forgetting everybody else.

Chesterton thought everybody should be remembered whether suburban,
proletarian, aristocrat or pauper. Shortly after the removal to
Beaconsfield he was summoned to give evidence before a Parliamentary
Commission on the question of censorship of the theatre. Keep it, he
said, to the surprise of many of his friends, but change the manner
of its exercise. Let it be no longer censorship by an expert but by a
jury--by twelve ordinary men. These will be the best judges of what
really makes for morality and sound sense. He had come to give
evidence, he said, not as a writer but as the representative of the
gallery, and he was concerned only with "the good and happiness of
the English people."

One bewildered Commissioner was understood to murmur that their terms
of reference were not quite so wide as that.

The chapter in the _Autobiography_ called "Friendships and Foolery"
ends suddenly with a reference to the war but, like the whole book,
it leaps wildly about. One point in it is interesting and links up
with the introduction to Titterton's _Drinking Songs_ that Gilbert
later wrote. To shout a chorus is natural to mankind and G.K. claims
that he had done it long before he heard of Community Singing. He
sang when out driving, or walking over the moors with Father
O'Connor; he sang in Fleet Street with Titterton and his journalist
friends; he sang the _Red Flag_ on Trade Union platforms and _England
Awake_ in Revolutionary groups. There was, he claims, a legend that
in Auberon Herbert's rooms not far from Buckingham Palace "we sang
Drake's Drum with such passionate patriotism that King Edward the
Seventh sent in a request for the noise to stop."

Yet it was all but impossible to teach Gilbert a tune, and Bernard
Shaw felt this (as we have seen) a real drawback to his friend's
understanding of his own life