by Ian Ker
H. G. Wells replied to Belloc and Chesterton on 11 January. Chesterton responded on 25 January. Like Shaw, Wells had ‘a contempt for mankind’—although he expressed it ‘gently’ rather than ‘fiercely’—assuming that those who frequented ‘the bar must be as dull and greasy as the bar; that mean streets must have mean emotions’. Chesterton agreed, however, that there was ‘one evil’ that Socialism would ‘cure—starvation’: ‘There is one argument for Socialism—hunger.’ On 15 February Shaw joined battle with the best-known article of the controversy, in which he introduced to the public the ‘Chesterbelloc’—‘a very amusing pantomime elephant, the front legs being that very exceptional and unEnglish individual Hilaire Belloc, and the hind legs… G. K. Chesterton’. It was not a well-coordinated animal: ‘Chesterton and Belloc are so unlike that they get frightfully in one another’s way,’ and, ‘in order to co-ordinate the movements of the Chesterbelloc, Chesterton has to make all the intellectual sacrifices that are demanded by Belloc’. Shaw issued this challenge to this ill-matched beast:
And now, what has the Chesterbelloc (or either of its two pairs of legs) to say in its defence? But it is from the hind legs that I particularly want to hear: because South Salford will very soon cure Hilaire Forelegs of his fancy for the ideals of the Catholic peasant proprietor. He is up against his problems in Parliament: it is in Battersea Park that a great force is in danger of being wasted.3
Chesterton replied on 29 February in an article called ‘The Last of the Rationalists’, complaining again that Shaw and his fellow Socialists had ‘no sympathy with the poor’: they had ‘Niagaras of pity. But they have no sympathy; they do not feel with ordinary men about ordinary things.’ It was not surprising that this monstrous animal, the Chester-Belloc, with its horrible fore legs and its hideous hind legs’, terrified them: ‘it is Humanity on the move.’ As for Shaw’s rejection of Christianity, this was simply because of the positivist philosophy in which we were all brought up; but some of us have thought our way out of it’. Shaw was telling everybody ten times a week that what we want is not reason but life’, and that the lust to live, to live even for oneself, to live infinitely’ was ‘glorious’: ‘Exactly: but the moment you mention life beyond the grave, Shaw’s mind drops forty feet to the level of the Hall of Science, and he begins to say that it is mean and cowardly to wish to live for ever. This is manifest nonsense. It cannot be noble to desire life and mean to desire everlasting life.’ Again, for the last five years Shaw had been ‘preaching’ the ‘doctrine of the transforming power of will. But it will give him a great shock when he discovers that it is only the Christian doctrine of Miracles: then, very likely, he will drop it like a hot potato.’
The next day Shaw wrote to Chesterton, demanding to know why he had still not written a play, Shaw’s own favoured medium for communicating his ideas. That should be Chesterton’s medium, too, for responding to Shaw’s Chesterbelloc’ attack.
What about that play? It is 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; torture Belloc; 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, by the attempt to keep up the work of your twenties in your thirties. Another five years of this and you will be the apologist of every infamy that wears a Liberal or Catholic mask.
In conclusion, Shaw insists: ‘Nothing can save you now except a rebirth as a dramatist.’4
Meanwhile the debate continued in the New Age into the next year and spread to public meetings, at one of which in November 1908 Shaw and Cecil Chesterton supported Socialism against Belloc and Chesterton.
In December Chesterton returned to the attack on Shaw in his weekly platform, the Daily News, demonstrating to Shaw how to be serious by being farcical. The article, a little satirical gem, typically much funnier than anything in Chesterton’s fiction, was headed ‘How I Found the Superman’. He had found him, he teased, in just the kind of place the intellectuals like Shaw and Wells most despised—the London dormitory suburb of South Croydon. His mother was ‘Lady Hypatia Smyth-Browne (now Lady Hypatia Hagg)’, whose name ‘will never be forgotten in the East End, where she did such splendid social work’. Chesterton evokes the aristocratic, Socialist philanthropist (he once defined the philanthropist as ‘not a brother’ but ‘a supercilious aunt’5): ‘Her constant cry of “Save the children!” referred to the cruel neglect of children’s eyesight involved in allowing them to play with crudely painted toys.’ As a good Fabian, she could quote unanswerable statistics to prove that children allowed to look at violet and vermilion often suffered from failing eyesight in their extreme old age; and it was owing to her ceaseless crusade that the pestilence of the Monkey-on-the-Stick was almost swept from Hoxton.’ This ‘devoted worker would tramp the streets untiringly, taking away the toys from all the poor children, who were often moved to tears by her kindness’. But then, unfortunately, her good work was interrupted, partly by a new interest in the creed of Zoroaster, and partly by a savage blow from an umbrella’.
It was inflicted by a dissolute Irish apple-woman, who, on returning from some orgy to her ill-kept apartment, found Lady Hypatia in the bedroom taking down some oleograph, which, to say the least of it, could not really elevate the mind. At this the ignorant and partly intoxicated Celt dealt the social reformer a severe blow, adding to it an absurd accusation of theft. The lady’s exquisitely balanced mind received a shock; and it was during a short mental illness that she married Dr Hagg.
At first, there seemed to be ‘something like a rift, a faint, but perceptible, fissure’ between the views of Dr Hagg, a practitioner of eugenics, with a ‘ruthless insight into the history of religions’, and ‘those of his aristocratic wife’:
For she was in favour (to use her own powerful epigram) of protecting the poor against themselves; while he declared pitilessly, in a new and striking metaphor, that the weakest must go to the wall. Eventually, however, the married pair perceived an essential union in the unmistakably modern character of both their views; and in this enlightened and comprehensible expression their souls found peace. The result is that this union of the two highest types of our civilization, the fashionable lady and the all but vulgar medical man, has been blessed by the birth of the Superman, that being whom all the labourers in Battersea are so eagerly expecting night and day.
The discoverer of the Superman finds the residence of Dr and Lady Hagg without difficulty, and boldly asks ‘if the Superman was nice looking’.
‘He creates his own standard, you see,’ [Lady Hypatia] replied, with a slight sigh. Upon that plane he is more than Apollo. Seen from our lower plane, of course…’ And she sighed again.
I had a horrible impulse, and said suddenly, Has he got any hair?’
There was a long and painful silence, and then Dr Hagg said smoothly, Everything upon that plane is different; what he has got is not… well, not, of course, what we call hair… but…’
As a journalist, the discoverer says that he would like to be able to say that he has shaken hands with the Superman. That presents problems: You know he can’t exactly shake hands… not hands, you know… The structure, of course… ‘Rushing into the room where he supposes the Superman to be, the discoverer finds it to be pitch black. He hears ‘a small sad yelp’ from within, and behind him a double shriek’. You have let in a draught on him; and he is dead.’ As he walks away from Croydon that night, he sees a coffin being carried out ‘that was not of any human shape’. Above the wind whirled the popla
rs, ‘so that they drooped and nodded like the plumes of some cosmic funeral’. It is, indeed,” said Dr Hagg, the whole universe weeping over the frustration of its most magnificent birth.” But I thought that there was a hoot of laughter in the high wail of the wind.’6
Next year, Chesterton became engaged in controversy of a very different kind. In January 1909 he published an article in the modernist Church Socialist Quarterly, contrasting traditional Christianity, which ‘like a tree goes on growing, and therefore goes on changing; but always in the fringes surrounding something unchangeable’, with modernist Christianity, which means not something that produces external changes from a permanent and organic centre’ but ‘something that changes completely and entirely in every part, at every minute, like a cloud’. In reply to a scathing attack in the April issue by Robert Dell, a Roman Catholic Modernist, Chesterton responded in the July issue by wondering why Dell could not become a new-fashioned Catholic without immediately becoming an old-fashioned Protestant’. Dell must know that a convert like Newman did not stop thinking when he became a Roman Catholic. And he added for good measure words that remind one of Newman’s defence of the infallibility of the Roman Catholic Church in the last chapter of his Apologia pro Vita sua:
he must know that the whole phrase about being saved the trouble of thinking is a boyish fallacy. Euclid does not save geometricians the trouble of thinking when he insists on absolute definitions and unalterable axioms. On the contrary, he gives them the great trouble of thinking logically. The dogma of the Church limits thought about as much as the dogma of the solar system limits physical science. It is not an arrest of thought, but a fertile basis and constant provocation of thought.
Significantly, Chesterton admitted that he was ‘still in some doubt’ as to the seat of the Catholic authority’, but he was in no doubt that he was closer to high Anglicans than the Roman Modernists’. And he had never felt closer to the Church of Rome than when he read Dell’s attack on it. Unsurprisingly, Dell left the Roman Catholic Church and abandoned Christianity.7
In the same month in the Hibbert Journal Chesterton replied to an article denying the divinity of Christ. As in Orthodoxy, he challenged stereotyped conceptions of Jesus. Reading the Gospels does not, he protested, give us the picture of ‘a recognisable Jew of the first century, with the traceable limitations of such a man’. This was ‘exactly what we do not see’; rather what we see is an extraordinary being who would certainly have seemed as mad in one century as another, who makes a vague and vast claim to divinity’. Sometimes he seemed like a maniac’, at other times like a ‘prophet’. What he definitely was not was ‘a Galilean of the time of Tiberius’; nor did he appear so to his fellow Jews, who lynched him, still shuddering at his earth-shaking blasphemies’. Nor was he any ordinary teacher: he was splendid and suggestive indeed, but full of riddles and outrageous demands’. On the other hand, if God had really become man, then I think we should see in such a being exactly the perplexities that we see in the central figure of the Gospels’:
I think he would seem to us to contradict himself; because, looking down on life like a map, he would see a connection between things which to us are disconnected. I think, however, that he would always ring true to our own sense of right, but ring (so to speak) too loud and too clear. He would be too good… for us… I think there would be, in the nature of things, some tragic collision between him and the humanity he had created, culminating in something that would be at once a crime and an expiation… I think, in short, that he would give us a sensation that he was turning all our standards upside down, and yet also a sensation that he had undeniably put them the right way up.8
At the beginning of July Chesterton wrote confidentially to Father O’Connor about the state of Frances’s health. They were again up north staying in Ilkley but not with the Steinthals (he wrote from 10 Crossbeck Road, where they had presumably taken lodgings). Clearly, Chesterton was or had been very worried not about Frances’s physical but about her mental health, no doubt wondering if depression did not run in his wife’s family. He had ‘brought Frances away here she was hit so heavily with a sort of wasting fatigue’. He was anxious to discover whether ‘the doctors were right in thinking it only fatigue or whether (by the hellish chance out of a hundred) it might be the beginning of some real illness’. But he was now ‘pretty well convinced’ that ‘the doctors are right and it is only nervous exhaustion’.9 He would not, he continued,
write this to anyone else, but you combine so unusually in your own single personality the characters of (1) Priest (2) human being (3) man of science (4) man of the world (5) man of the other world (6) old friend (7) new friend, not to mention Irishman and picture dealer, that I dont [sic] mind suggesting the truth to you.
‘Frances’, he explained, ‘has just come out of what looked bad enough to be an illness, and is just going to plunge into one of her recurrent problems of pain and depression. The two may be just a bit too much for her and I want to be with her every night for a few days—there’s an Irish Bull for you!’ He ended by enlightening the priest on an aspect of the sacrament of marriage that he may not have learned in his theological studies:
One of the mysteries of Marriage (which must be a Sacrament and an extraordinary one too) is that a man evidently useless like me can yet become at certain instances indispensable. And the further oddity (which I invite you to explain on mystical grounds) is that he never feels so small as when he really knows that he is necessary.10
Chesterton’s critical study George Bernard Shaw was published in August. The central focus of the book is the seriousness that comes from Puritanism. Shaw sees ‘existence as an illusion and yet as an obligation’; his is ‘the heroism of a morbid and almost asphyxiated age’ that sees this world ‘as a man-trap into which we may just have the manhood to jump’, where one speaks of ‘the courage to live’. His slogan is ‘Let us eat, drink, and be serious’. And the reason is that he is ‘the greatest of the modern Puritans and perhaps the last’. Chesterton defines the essence of Puritanism as ‘a refusal to contemplate God or goodness with anything lighter or milder than the most fierce concentration of the intellect’, the idea that ‘God can only be praised by direct contemplation of Him’ and only with the ‘brain’, it being ‘wicked to praise Him with your passions or your physical habits or your gesture or instinct of beauty’. The English had decided ‘to be hearty and humane in spite of the Puritans’ and the Scots ‘to be romantic in spite of the Puritans’, as was reflected in a writer like Dickens who had ‘picked up the tradition of Chaucer’, and writers like Scott and Stevenson who had also returned to the medieval tradition. Only in Ireland did there survive ‘the fierce detachment of the true Puritan’ like Shaw, who ‘is never frivolous… never gives his opinions a holiday… is never irresponsible even for an instant’. He therefore falls under Chesterton’s greatest condemnation: ‘his wit is never a weakness; therefore it is never a sense of humour.’ Shaw was ‘not a humorist, but a great wit’. The difference between wit and humour is that ‘wit is always connected with the idea that truth is close and clear’, humour ‘with the idea that truth is tricky and mystical and easily mistaken’. The trouble with Shaw was that he had ‘no nonsensical second self which he can get into as one gets into a dressinggown; that ridiculous disguise which is yet more real than the real person’. He ‘never said an indefensible thing; that is, he never said a thing that he was not prepared brilliantly to defend’. It is the Calvinist who ‘sees the consistency in things’ and is therefore a wit; but it is the Catholic who ‘sees the inconsistency in things’ who is the humorist. That was why there was ‘nothing Gothic’ about Shaw’s genius: ‘he could not build a mediaeval cathedral in which laughter and terror are twisted together in stone, molten by a mystical passion. He can build, by way of amusement, a Chinese pagoda; but when he is in earnest, only a Roman temple.’ Even in Shaw’s comedies, where the heroes ‘always seem to flinch’ from making fools of themselves, there was ‘a certain
kicking’ against the ‘great doom of laughter’ at man who is ‘absurd from the grave baby to the grinning skull’, who ‘is born ridiculous, as can easily be seen if you look at him soon after he is born’. Insofar as Shaw was a humorist, he was the kind of humorist who hates rather than loves to see man as ‘absurd’. Shaw, however, did exhibit ‘all that is purest in the Puritan; the desire to see truth face to face even if it slay us, the high impatience with irrelevant sentiment or obstructive symbol; the constant effort to keep the soul at its highest pressure and speed’. Unfortunately, Shaw also suffered from Puritan prejudices, for Puritanism had naturally ‘not been able to sustain through three centuries that naked ecstasy of the direct contemplation of truth’—‘One cannot be serious for three hundred years.… In eternal temples you must have frivolity. You must be “at ease in Zion” unless you are only paying it a flying visit.’ Puritanism had consequently degenerated, on the one hand, into a ‘fatal fluency’ of uplifting ‘righteousness’; on this ‘weak and lukewarm torrent’, into which had ‘melted down much of that mountainous ice which sparkled in the seventeenth century, bleak indeed but blazing’, Shaw had ‘made fierce and on the whole fruitful war’. On the other hand, Shaw, while abandoning ‘that great and systematic philosophy of Calvinism which has much in common with modern science and strongly resembles ordinary… determinism’, was like modern Puritans in retaining ‘the savage part’ of Puritanism—the ‘savage negations’ of its ‘philosophy of taboos’, to which had been added in the nineteenth century ‘a mystical horror of those fermented drinks which are part of the food of civilised mankind’. It was clear that the prohibition was ‘very largely a mystical one’ from the fact that money, for instance, could be as socially harmful as drink but nobody shuddered at the sight of a man going to the bank as opposed to the pub. This showed that the real objection was not to the ‘excess… but the beer’ itself. It was regarded as a ‘drug’ rather than a ‘drink’, as a ‘mystical substance’ that could ‘give monstrous pleasures or call down monstrous punishments’. Again, such was the grip of Irish Puritanism that it would never even have occurred to Shaw to ‘stroll into one of the churches of his own country, and learn something of the philosophy that had satisfied Dante and Bossuet, Pascal and Descartes’. The truth was that he had ‘never seen’ the Catholic Church—which he ‘is sure he does not like’. Puritanism was also the reason why he disliked Shakespeare, who was ‘spiritually a Catholic’.11