G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  The greatest paradox about Shaw for Chesterton, which was consistent with his excessive seriousness, was that the ‘one or two plain truths which quite stupid people learn at the beginning are exactly the one or two truths which Bernard Shaw may not even learn at the end’. He had never experienced ‘the things that most of us absorb in childhood; especially the sense of the supernatural and the sense of the natural; the love of the sky with its infinity of vision, and the love of the soil with its strict hedges and solid shapes of ownership’. He was like ‘a daring pilgrim’ who had ‘set out from the grave to find the cradle. He started from points of view which no one else was clever enough to discover, and he is at last discovering points of view which no one else was ever stupid enough to ignore.’ Chesterton attributed this ‘absence of the red-hot truisms of boyhood; this sense that he is not rooted’ to Shaw’s ‘position as a member of an alien minority in Ireland’. He ‘was never national enough to be domestic’. The fact that he did not celebrate his birthday was typical:

  A man should always be tied to his mother’s apron-strings; he should always have a hold on his childhood, and be ready at intervals to start anew from a childish standpoint. Theologically the thing is best expressed by saying, ‘You must be born again.’ Secularly it is best expressed by saying, ‘You must keep your birthday.’ Even if you will not be born again, at least remind yourself occasionally that you were born once.12

  For birthdays for Chesterton involved the humility of laughing at oneself:

  Birthdays are a glorification of the idea of life, and it exactly hits the weak point in the Shaw type of optimism… that it does not instinctively side with such religious celebrations of life. Mr Shaw is ready to praise the Life-force, but he is not willing to keep his birthday, which would be the best of all ways to praise it. And the reason is that the modern people will do anything whatever for their religion except play the fool for it.… Mr Shaw is quite clearly aware that it is a very good thing for him and for everyone else that he is alive. But to be told so in the symbolic form of brown-paper parcels containing slippers or cigarettes makes him feel a fool; which is exactly what he ought to feel.… A birthday does not come merely to remind a man that he has been born. It comes that he may be born again. And if a man is born again he must be as clumsy and as comic as a baby.13

  A few years later, Chesterton wrote that he considered neglecting birthdays

  a subtle form of the infernal pessimism which poisoned literature in my boyhood; and which I wish I could think I had done something to defeat. Bernard Shaw cannot be induced to keep his birthday, I think I shall keep it for him and so have two birthdays; which might be regarded as a less mystical method of being born again.14

  This ‘lack of roots, this remoteness from ancient instincts and traditions’, was responsible for Shaw saying things that were ‘not so much false as startlingly and arrestingly foolish’, such as that ‘Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by poulterers and wine merchants from strictly business motives’. Again, Shaw could not ‘grasp and enjoy the things commonly called convention and tradition; which are foods upon which all human creatures must feed frequently if they are to live’. Convention meant literally ‘the coming together of men; every mob is a convention’. But then Shaw despised the masses—whereas Chesterton ‘in matters of theory… would always trust the mob’: ‘He has no respect for collective humanity in its two great forms; either in that momentary form which we call a mob, or in that enduring form which we call a convention.’ Far from being dead, conventions are ‘full of accumulated emotions, the piled-up and passionate experiences of many generations asserting what they could not explain’. But Shaw had ‘always made this one immense mistake (arising out of that bad progressive education of his), the mistake of treating convention as a dead thing; treating it as if it were a mere physical environment like the pavement or the rain. Whereas it is a result of will; a rain of blessings and a pavement of good intentions.’ He would be worried if the evening paper disagreed with him: ‘That the tradition of two thousand years contradicted him did not trouble him for an instant.’ Perhaps one could say that his ‘only pure paradox’ was ‘this almost unconscious one; that he tended to think that because something has satisfied generations of men it must be untrue’. The root trouble with Shaw was that ‘he was exiled from Ireland in the very act of being born in Ireland’. In order to be a revolutionary without being a nationalist as well he had to move to England: ‘But the result was that he was not really born in either of the two countries.’ Having started from ‘homelessness’, he ‘had no traditions’. But the truth was that he was not so much homeless as unborn: ‘he still suffers, even down to his splendid old age, from the annoying omission of having never been born.’15

  Shaw’s lack of interest in and enjoyment of the ordinary things of the common man was evident in his humanitarianism, which did not mean the cause of humanity, but rather, if anything, the cause of everything else’: ‘At its noblest it meant a sort of mystical identification of our life with the whole life of nature.’ Chesterton considered Shaw’s greatest defect was his ‘lack of democratic sentiment’. For there was nothing democratic either in his humanitarianism or his Socialism’. He was ‘a demagogue without being a democrat’.

  These new and refined faiths tended rather to make the Irishman yet more aristocratic, the Puritan yet more exclusive. To be a Socialist was to look down on all the peasant owners of the earth, especially on the peasant owners of his own island. To be a Vegetarian was to be a man with a strange and mysterious morality, a man who thought the good lord who roasted oxen for his vassals only less bad than the bad lord who roasted the vassals. None of these advanced views could the common people hear gladly; nor indeed was Shaw especially anxious to please the common people. It was his glory that he pitied animals like men; it was his defect that he pitied men only too much like animals.

  Still, Shaw was at least a republican who had no time for the artistic individualism’ of the fin de siècle, when the ‘decay of society was praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms’. Shaw could have been the ‘wittiest’ of the Decadents, ‘who could have made epigrams like diamonds’. Instead, he had as a Fabian laboured in a mill of statistics and crammed his mind with all the most dreary and the most filthy details’. This was indeed a passion so implacable and so pure’ that one could not but admire it. And the noblest’, the greatest thing’ in Shaw was a serious optimism—even a tragic optimism. Life is a thing too glorious to be enjoyed.’ For Shaw’s ‘worship of life’—‘Man… must follow the flag of life as fiercely from conviction as all other creatures follow it from instinct’—was ‘by no means lively’. Shaw had, as it were, turned his master Schopenhauer, the great prophet of pessimism, on his head. Schopenhauer had taught that life is unreasonable. The intellect, if it could be impartial, would tell us to cease; but a blind partiality, an instinct quite distinct from thought, drives us on to take desperate chances in an essentially bankrupt lottery.’ Shaw agreed that life was unreasonable, but ‘so much the worse for reason’. For ‘life is the primary thing’, while ‘reason is lifeless’ and must therefore ‘be trodden down’. The ordinary or common man, however, unlike the master of pessimism and his pupil, did not share this philosophy of misery, which was reflected in ‘the ingrained grimness and even inhumanity of Shaw’s art’.16

  For all Shaw’s contempt for the masses, his Socialism was the noblest thing in him’. He really did have a proper brotherly bitterness about the oppression of the poor’. However, as a disciple of Nietzsche, Shaw believed not in democracy but in the Superman, which meant the incredibly caddish doctrine that the strength of the strong is admirable, but not the valour of the weak’:

  Nietzsche might really have done some good if he had taught Bernard Shaw to draw the sword, to drink wine, or even to dance. But he only succeeded in putting into his head a new superstition, which bids fair to be the chief superstition of the dark ages which are possibly in f
ront of us—I mean the superstition of what is called the Superman.17

  Chesterton’s foreboding, long before the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of the Second World War, was chillingly fulfilled in Shaw’s later enthusiasm for Stalin, who, he thought, should be awarded the Nobel prize for peace! A few years before, Chesterton had warned Robert Blatchford in a private letter about the danger of believing that perfect heredity and environment make the perfect man’—namely, that it would lead to a ‘political aristocracy’. Indeed, while he, Blatchford, was ‘turning over the musty folios of early Victorian materialism, newer things are happening: a fresh and fierce philosophy of oligarchy and the wise few is spreading from Germany all over the world.’ But the wisest oligarchy or Superman with unlimited power could not escape the consequences of the Fall: ‘Selfishness is a permanent and natural danger which arises from the existence of a self.’18

  Chesterton thought that Shaw would in the end have seen through the nonsense of the Superman—who was to come by natural selection’ by means of the life-force’ which desires above all things to make suitable marriages… eventually to produce a Superman’—had it not been that he ‘ceased to believe in progress altogether’. The disillusion was general, and helped Nietzsche establish the Superman on his pedestal’. Chesteston himself had never been a believer in progress for the sake of progress. Those ‘two incredible figures’ who had appeared towards the end of the nineteenth century, the progressive and the conservative, would have been ‘overwhelmed with laughter by any other intellectual commonwealth of history. There was hardly a human generation which could not have seen the folly of merely going forward or mere standing still…’. The modern progressive now meant, not a man who wanted democracy, but a man who wanted something newer than democracy’, a reformer ‘a man who wanted anything that he hadn’t got’. This progressive ‘was so eager to be in advance of his age that he pretended to be in advance of himself’. Institutions had to be sneered at ‘as old-fashioned’, out of ‘a servile and snobbish fear of the future’. Now, while Shaw had ‘pleasantly surprised innumerable cranks and revolutionaries by finding quite rational arguments for them, he surprised them unpleasantly also by… revolutionising the revolutionists’. And this ‘great game of dishing the anarchists continued for some time to be his most effective business’, this great game of catching revolutionists napping, of catching the unconventional people in conventional poses, of outmarching and outmanoeuvring progressives till they felt like conservatives, of undermining the mines of Nihilists till they felt like the House of Lords’. But Shaw’s ‘modernity—which means, the seeking for truth in terms of time’ was ‘that silliest and most snobbish of all superiorities, the mere aristocracy of time’: ‘All works must thus become old and insipid which have ever tried to be modern,” which have consented to smell of time rather than eternity. Only those who have stooped to be in advance of their time will ever find themselves behind it.’ Shaw had been ‘the unhappy Progressive trying to be in front of his own religion, trying to destroy his own idol and even to desecrate his own tomb’. And Chesterton’s cruellest hit was that progressivism, far from showing the strength of the Superman that Shaw now admired, was actually characteristic of all feeble spirits’ who naturally live in the future, because it is featureless; it is a soft job; you can make it what you like. The next page is blank, and I can paint it freely with my favourite colour. It requires real courage to face the past, because the past is full of facts which cannot be got over…’.19

  Apart from lack of humour, Shaw also lacked another essential Chestertonian attribute: he suffered from a blindness to paradox’. Thus he could not understand marriage because he could not understand the paradox of marriage; that the woman is all the more the house for not being the head of it’. Nor could he understand patriotism, because he could not understand the paradox of patriotism; that one is all the more human for not merely loving humanity’. Indeed, Shaw could not quite understand life, because he will not accept its contradictions’. One might say he could understand everything in life except its paradoxes, especially that ultimate paradox that the very things that we cannot comprehend are the things that we have to take for granted’.20

  Shaw had predicted that the book would not contain any facts; but it will be exceedingly interesting’.21 Years later, he was to write that, although Chesterton had ‘apparently never read a word of mine, or saw more than one play (which he does not remember), he makes me a peg on which to hang a very readable essay on things in general’.22 At the time in a review article in the Nation, Shaw called the book ‘the best work of literary art I have yet provoked. It is a fascinating portrait study; and I am proud to have been the painter’s model.’ It was, he thought, ‘in the great tradition of literary portraiture: it gives not only the figure, but the epoch’. But for Shaw there was a paradox: ‘Everything about me which Mr Chesterton had to divine he has 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.’ It was undoubtedly ‘a very fine’ picture. The problem was that it did not bear any resemblance to Shaw’s actual ‘doctrine’. As to his objectionable teetotalism: ‘Have I survived the cry of Art for Art’s Sake, and War for War’s Sake, for which Mr Chesterton rebukes Whistler and Mr. Rudyard Kipling, to fall a victim to this maddest of all cries: the cry of Beer for Beer’s Sake?’23

  The reviews were mostly favourable, although the spectacle of Shaw reviewing Chesterton on Shaw aroused some sarcastic comment on the financial aspects of this mutual self-publicity. One reviewer wondered whether Shaw had actually invented Chesterton:

  Shaw, it is said, tired of Socialism, weary of wearing Jaegers, and broken down by teetotalism and vegetarianism, sought, some years ago, an escape from them. His adoption, however, of these attitudes had a decided commercial value, which he did not think it advisable to prejudice by wholesale surrender. Therefore he, in order to taste the forbidden joys of individualistic philosophy, meat, food and strong drink, created Chesterton’. This mammoth myth, he decided, should enjoy all the forms of fame which Shaw had to deny himself. Outwardly, he should be Shaw’s antithesis. He should be beardless, large in girth, smiling of countenance, and he should be licensed to sell paradoxes only in essay and novel form, all stage and platform rights being reserved by Shaw.

  In order to carry out the impersonation, Shaw had had the idea of living near the tunnel that connects Adelphi with the Strand. Having changed in a cellar, he would emerge on the Strand side of the tunnel, free to enjoy the life of Chesterton before returning in the evening to be Shaw in Adelphi.24

  2

  In his Illustrated London News column of 2 October 1909, Chesterton addressed the question of Indian nationalism. ‘The test of a democracy is not whether the people vote,’ he argued, but whether the people rule. The essence of a democracy is that the national tone and spirit of the typical citizen is apparent and striking in the actions of the state.’ And he thought that the principal weakness’ of Indian nationalists seeking independence was that their nationalism was not very Indian and not very national’: There is a difference between a conquered people demanding its own institutions and the same people demanding the institutions of the conqueror.’25 The article was read by Ghandi, who was in London at the time to press for freer rights of residence, travel and trade to members of the Indian diaspora in South Africa’, where he was then living. He referred to the article in a dispatch he sent to the paper he had founded in Durban, Indian Opinion. This article for some reason did not appear until January of the following year. In the meantime, Ghandi had responded to Chesterton’s criticism by completing in ten days, on board the ship that carried him back to South Africa, an extended defence of the virtues of ancient Indian civilization’. Written in Ghandi’s mother tongue, it was published under the title Hind Swaraj, and also in English under the title Indian Home Rule, in Durban in 1910. Apa
rt from Ghandi’s two-volume autobiography and collections of articles and speeches, it was the only book qua book that Ghandi ever published.26