Gilbert: The Man Who was G. K. Chesterton

by Michael Coren

  On 3rd May the National Festival of Poland, commemorating the Polish Constitution of 1791, was held. The entertainments were lavish, with the Chestertons being guests of one of Poland’s elite and famous cavalry regiments. The party also travelled to Krakow, “even more the national city because it is not the capital,” and there saw a performance of “Acropolis.” Adam Harasowki, who now lives in Newark, England, met Gilbert during the visit.

  The main Polish cities which G.K.C. visited were Warsaw, Poznan, Krakow, Lwow and Wilno, in that order. From Krakow he made an excursion to the salt mines of Wieliczka; he also visited the beautiful mountain resort of Zakopane in the Tatra mountains … I remember being very nervous before meeting such a famous man as Chesterton and making my maiden speech of welcome. I need not have been, as from the word “go” he was very cordial, charming and extremely witty, with a strong sense of humour. I remember that he asked me (after my speech) what Polish word would be most useful for him to remember. I told him he must learn to say: “psia krew,” which means “dog’s blood” and is really a mild swear word, but it is used often to express anger, as well as surprise or admiration. All the students roared with laughter and Chesterton laughed with us. Mrs Chesterton did not laugh and was far less at ease during the rest of her stay in Lwow. Miss Collins was the ideal, super-efficient secretary … I accompanied them everywhere during their two-and-a-half days’ stay in Lwow. The highlight of it was a reception (on 19th May, 1927) at a club of local writers and artists, at which Chesterton was the guest of honour …

  Gilbert’s inscription in the Polish P.E.N. Club album was the ringing “If Poland had not been born again, all the Christian nations would have died.” It was hyperbole, but also an honest indication of his love for the country. When he arrived in Britain he wrote an article for the Illustrated London News entitled “On Poland” in which he expressed his regard for the Polish people, his admiration of their bravery — he reminded his readers of the war of 1920 when the Poles defeated the stronger and larger Russian army — and the Christian nature of the Polish will to exist and survive. He wrote and lectured, debated and pleaded the case for Poland. He did not live to see the German rape of the country, and the Soviet smashing of it; that is probably for the best. Although even then, Gilbert may have been the only man to confidently predict the rise of Solidarity some time in the future.

  X - Best of Enemies, Best of Friends

  Gilbert clung to friendships, aspired to them, all his life. It was as though they were spiritual and intellectual lifelines to him, providing an opportunity for stimulation and succour. This had shown itself as early as the appearance of Cecil Chesterton, and later in Gilbert’s alacrity in accepting so much — and so much nonsense — in what Belloc said. It was Gilbert’s incredulity, not his credulity, which was the crux of his genius. How astounding it was then that he should accept so readily the polemics of those he perceived as friends! Part of this was due to his modesty; a harsher description would be insecurity. He could never quite believe in his own brilliance, but would frequently believe in the brilliance of others. It was what made him so likeable, and so easily exploited.

  The most curious bond which developed in Gilbert’s life was with George Bernard Shaw. It was curious because it was unlikely, as unlikely as two opposing champions clawing through their animosity to embrace and respect each other. It was unlikely, and it was good. They met for the first time in Paris in 1901. Lucien Oldershaw had taken Gilbert to visit Auguste Rodin, that doyen of late-nineteenth-century sculptors whose famous work, “The Kiss,” had at this point been captivating the artistic communities of Europe for fifteen years. He was now sixty-one, but still an imposing figure and an approachable man. It was not, however, the venerable Frenchman who attracted Gilbert’s interest, but his model on that occasion. Shaw was posed in perfect subject form, and remained so while he lectured Gilbert on the theme of the Salvation Army. Shaw was forty-five years old, Gilbert twenty-seven. Their relationship had just been born.

  Shaw would come to forget the initial meeting, recalling only a letter he wrote to Gilbert after reading one of his reviews in the Daily News. He wanted to know “who he was and where he came from,” but received no reply from the overworked and overmodest young journalist. When the friendship did blossom it occupied both men’s time and thoughts to a considerable degree. “My principal experience, from first to last,” wrote Gilbert, “has been in argument with him. And it is worth remarking that I have learned to have a warmer admiration and affection out of all that argument than most people get out of agreement. Bernard Shaw, unlike some whom I have had to consider here, is seen at his best when he is wrong. Or rather, everything is wrong about him except himself.” As for Shaw, he never doubted his own righteousness, and never doubted Gilbert’s good-hearted, brilliant, witty, invincible ignorance.

  After only two years of the friendship Gilbert agreed to write a biography of his kindest enemy for his publisher, and enemy he most certainly was: Shaw the Fabian socialist, Shaw the atheist, Shaw the vegetarian and eschewer of alcohol, Shaw the thin. They wrote and met, seldom agreeing and never hating. In February 1908 Shaw wrote a piece in the New Age entitled “The Chesterbelloc.” It analysed H.G. Wells as well as Gilbert and Belloc, alleging that Gilbert was plain French on his mother’s side, and Belloc was determined not to be an Englishman. Together, and they could not be considered as separate entities, they were a conspiracy, a pantomime spectacle, the Chester-Belloc. “To set yourself against the Chesterbelloc” he wrote, “is not merely to be unpatriotic, like setting yourself against the Daily Mail or Express: it is to set yourself against all the forces … of humanity.” The Chesterbelloc pained him, because he saw in it those very qualities — goodness, democracy, authentic Christianity — which he coveted, and never genuinely understood.

  Part of this attack was a plan, a scheme to dissuade Gilbert from writing Shaw’s biography, and provoking him into composing a play which Shaw had discussed with him some time earlier. There was, of course, more to it than that, including a growing antipathy towards Belloc. In March 1908 Shaw wrote to Gilbert

  My dear G.K.C.,

  What about that play? It’s no use trying to answer me in the New Age: The real answer to my article is the play. I have tried fair means: The New Age article was the inauguration of an assault below the belt. I shall deliberately destroy your credit as an essayist, as a journalist, as a critic, as a liberal, as everything that offers your laziness a refuge, until starvation and shame drive you to serious dramatic parturition. I shall repeat my public challenge to you: vaunt my superiority: insult your corpulence, lecture Bellow, if necessary, call on you and steal your wife’s affections by intellectual and athletic displays, until you contribute something to the British drama. You are played out as an essayist: your ardour is soddened, your intellectual substance crumbled … Another five years of this and you will be the apologist of every infamy that wears a Liberal or Catholic mask.

  Gilbert wrote the biography. It was published in August 1909 by John Lane. In the Introduction Gilbert wrote: “Most people either say that they agree with Bernard Shaw or that they do not understand him. I am the only person who understands him, and I do not agree with him.” The book was more an analysis of Shavian ideas and ideals than a life of a man. That was typical of Gilbert’s biographical aspirations. He saw Shaw as the “greatest of modern Puritans and perhaps the last,” and thought that it was “because he is quick-witted that he is long-winded.” It was full of the brief, excoriating and wonderfully perceptive remarks which Gilbert’s readers now expected. He didn’t so much blacken white sepulchres, as tone down one or two red ones. Shaw, he wrote, would “lure his enemy on with fantasies and then overwhelm him with facts;” and that “the truth is that the very rapidity of such a man’s mind makes him seem slow in getting to the point;” and that Shaw disapproved of murder “not so much because it wastes the life of the corpse, as because it wastes the time of the murderer.”

  Shaw
reviewed the book in The Nation. Gilbert knew that he would; and so did he. “This book is what everybody expected it to be” he wrote, “the best work of literary art I have yet provoked … Everything about me which Mr. Chesterton had to divine, he divined miraculously. But everything that he could have ascertained easily by reading my own plain directions on the bottle, as it were, remains for him a muddled and painful problem solved by a comically wrong guess.” He was hurt. Not by the intensity of the attack — there had been worse in the past — but because an arrow from Gilbert was an arrow which could pierce that contrived shell of Bernard Shaw. Gilbert was aware of the fact, and wrote with some haste to Shaw, hoping to confirm that their “recent tournaments” had not damaged their friendship. It probably had. There would now be a certain guarded flavour in Shaw’s attitude towards Gilbert; the door was still open, but the handle was never very far from reach.

  Shaw attempted to drown his reluctance in a tidal wave of enthusiasm. He composed a scenario for the still-unwritten play of Gilbert’s, dealing with the return of St. Augustine to England. Again, Gilbert refused to put pen to paper. Shaw’s enthusiasm for the enterprise was double-edged. He wanted a companion dramatist, and genuinely considered Gilbert to be a literary talent of the highest calibre, although, of course he thought he was better, and this could only be proven by the comparison of two like forms: play to play. If Shaw knew this, Gilbert did as well. Shaw offered to drive to Beaconsfield to help with the opening scenes. Gilbert replied that when the scenes would open, they would open on their own.

  The essence of their argument revolved around their personalities: where Gilbert parried and teased, Shaw lunged and cut deep; where Gilbert talked and laughed for conversation’s sake, Shaw only ever did things for a pre-arranged purpose. It was the difference between the academic and the practical, between the rolling downs and the industrial cities. Shaw could only see pain and poverty and peasants in the history of Europe, and looked forward to an age of social engineering and constant human improvement. Gilbert, of course, saw no uninterrupted line of advancement of species through the ages, and relied on things past for spiritual guidance. Gregory Macdonald described how the two men seemed to coruscate when they met, how a packed room would appear to become empty but for them when they entered it. Their conflict and their friendship was seen as a tryst, both by Shaw and Gilbert, and by their supporters. London followed them. England followed them. The uninitiated recoiled at some of the dialogue and correspondence between the men, certain that one or other had gone too far. Their fears were not grounded. Wrote Gilbert in his Shaw biography

  I hear many people complain that Bernard Shaw mystifies them. I cannot imagine what they mean; it seems to me that he deliberately insults them. His language, especially on moral questions, is generally as straight and solid as that of a bargee and far less ornate and symbolic than that of a hansom-cabman. The prosperous English Philistine complains that Mr Shaw is making a fool of him. Whereas Mr Shaw is not in the least making a fool of him, Mr Shaw is, with laborious lucidity, calling him a fool. G.B.S. calls a landlord a thief; and the landlord, instead of denying or resenting it, says “Ah, that fellow hides his meaning so cleverly that one can never make out what he means, it is all so fine spun and fantastical.” G.B.S. calls a statesman a liar to his face, and the statesman cries in a kind of ecstasy, “Ah, what quaint, intricate and half tangled trains of thought! Ah, what elusive and many coloured mysteries of half meaning!” I think it always quite plain what Mr Shaw means, even when he is joking, and it generally means that the people he is talking to ought to howl aloud for their sins. But the average representative of them undoubtedly treats the Shavian meaning as tricky and complex when it is really direct and offensive. He always accuses Shaw of pulling his leg, at the exact moment when Shaw is pulling his nose.

  For “nose” it might perhaps be more accurate to read “noose.” When Shaw wanted to be deadly, he was. His debating skills were fine-tuned, rehearsed and practised at Fabian Society meetings and in front of mirrors. He thought on his feet at least as well as he thought at his writing desk. He took pride in what he saw as the traditional, almost atavistic, gift of the gab. Oratory was not a mere annex of the written skills, it was a separate discipline in itself. He revelled in the atmosphere of the debate, the appreciation of the victory, and the vanquishing of the defeated. Gilbert was the amateur incarnate. Frequently late, invariably badly organised and with poorly documented notes, he enjoyed debate as the diarist relishes his nightly sojourns into writing. On one occasion he turned to face an audience with his trouser buttons undone, on another a period chair collapsed under his weight. Vincent Brome described him as

  … puffing and blowing like a distressed whale, hopelessly late and not altogether repentant. Not infrequently he started by saying he had not prepared the lecture and sometimes ran off into tiresome generalities … He made far too many jokes about his size, but certainly it deserved some mention since he towered over other men and achieved a Falstaffian girth no one had ever dared to measure. His voice was high and not very penetrating. Given a microphone he sometimes thrust his notes between himself and the microphone, successfully muffling it …

  The two men debated for the first time in 1911, at The Heretics Club in Cambridge. It was to set the pattern for the Shaw-Chesterton meetings: brilliant, confused and confusing, bitingly amusing, and with no palpable results. A great deal of mythology developed around and about these verbal exchanges. Gilbert did not, as had been thought by some chroniclers of the debates with drunken imaginations if not drunken minds, accuse Shaw of “being sober,” and neither was ink thrown behind the curtains of the stage. For both men the sense of anticipation and verbal battle was all the excitement necessary. Religion always figured, usually largely, sometimes only in passing. Shaw knew that Gilbert did not like his own faith being attacked, and Gilbert knew that Shaw did not like being accused of having any religious faith at all. Hence it was of no surprise that Shaw began his cannonade with the statement that religion was of little interest to any serious Heretic. The Heretic, he said, was a man with “a home-made religion,” and was safe and reliable. The danger in society were the masses, who believed any religious instruction they were given, and had to be carefully watched.

  Gilbert’s reply reflected what he had written in 1905, in his book Heretics. It was his belief that heresy was facile, whimsical, even cowardly. Orthodoxy demanded courage, the courage to appear to be unfashionable. In times past it was perceived as egregious to be a heretic, whereas in the contemporary world men proudly wore the description, relishing its “dangerous and progressive” connotations. He had devoted an entire chapter in Heretics to Bernard Shaw, arguing that

  Mr Shaw’s old and recognised philosophy was that powerfully presented in “The Quintessence of Ibsenism.” It was, in brief, that conservative ideals were bad, not because they were conservative, but because they were ideals. Every ideal prevented men from judging justly the particular case; every moral generalisation oppressed the individual; the golden rule was there was no golden rule. And the objection to this is simply that it pretends to free men, but really restrains them from doing the only thing that men want to do.

  At Cambridge he decided to interpret Shaw literally so as to demonstrate the ridiculous aspects of his argument. It was an insipid method of argument, one to which Gilbert turned only when profoundly upset by an opponent, or somewhat frightened of him. So Shaw thought that heretics were those people who “found a machine such as a motor car” and transformed it into something completely different, Gilbert explained. He declared his confusion. He had no objection, he said, to people changing machines, but “strongly objected to their finding a bicycle, turning it into a sewing machine and then trying to ride the sewing machine.” Shaw responded that Gilbert was deliberately missing the point, and that the only plausible system of religion — if indeed one was required at all, which he doubted — would be one in which God, or god, could be completely understood by h
is followers. He went on to proclaim that an agnostic was simply an atheist without the courage of his convictions, and that the only practical consequence of a divinity was the evolution of a moral system or network, which could, and he emphasised “could,” be of benefit to the people. He continued that the discussion was quite academic, even irrelevant, because God was a direct product of the ignorance of medieval superstition and ignorance, and no such hypothesis was needed in the modern age, when science provided solutions to the long unanswered problems of where, why and when. Gilbert’s simple riposte was to state that “He would emulate Shaw’s blasphemy, because he thought it was an easy game … if ever God died it was in the middle of the eighteenth century. It now remained for Mr Shaw to explain why God had risen from the dead.” Shaw, of course, did nothing of the sort. Gilbert, of course, had not expected nothing of the sort. The meeting terminated in a good deal of hand-shaking, back-slapping and mutual congratulations. Gilbert gripped Shaw’s arm and told him he argued well for a Puritan; Shaw grasped Gilbert’s hand and told him that it was enough that he, Gilbert, argued at all, considering he was an orthodox Christian.

  The popularity of the encounter surprised the protagonists, and provided a focal point for the increasingly polarised literary community. Another challenge was proposed. Shaw wrote to Gilbert

  With reference to this silly debate of ours, what you have to bear in mind is this. I am prepared to accept any conditions. If they seem unfair to me from the front of he house, all the better for me; therefore do not give me that advantage unless you wish to, or are — as you probably are — as indifferent to rules as I am … Did you see my letter in Tuesday’s Times? Magnificent! My love to Winkle [the Chesterton’s dog]. To hell with the Pope!