Chesterton, Shaw and Belloc Wrangle Again
Don’t you wish you could have been on hand when G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw traded verbal fisticuffs? Well you can, sort of, if you’re in the D.C. area next Sunday, June 14. On that day, Washington Stage Guild, a theatre company that has often focused on Shaw, is reenacting a 1928 debate between the inimitable Fabian and the author of the Father Brown series. The event was one of a series of public hash-it-outs that the duo engaged in around this time.”It sort of became a media sensation,” Stage Guild artistic director Bill Largess told me, noting that Chesterton and Shaw were actually friends, and that their polemics were a little bit tongue-in-cheek. “They insulted each other back and forth, and it was all in very good humor,” he explained.
Largess found a transcript of the debate online while scouting around for a Shaw work the company hadn’t already staged. Apparently the only record of the Shaw-Chesterton debates to have survived, the text deals with rather subtle points related to socialist theories, but the colorful personalities of the polemicists–including Hilaire Belloc, who moderated–leap off the page. (Shaw teasingly notes that he’d like to wallop Chesterton with an umbrella, and Belloc wraps the session up by reciting a poem about fossil fuels.)
It’s interesting to note that another debate reenactment–the Irish Repertory Theatre’s production “The Rivalry,” about the Abraham Lincoln/Stephen Douglas debates–has recently extended its run in New York City. Aren’t there other seminal altercations from bygone years that might lend themselves to the modern limelight? Could this be a growth industry for theatres, perhaps collaborating with university history and philosophy departments?
(The Stage Guild’s Shaw-Chesterton performance–which is free–takes place at Flashpoint, 916 G Street, NW, Washington, D.C. at 2:30 and 7 pm on June 14. Call 240-582-0050 or email info@stageguild.org.)
Tags: Belloc, Chesterton, debates, Shaw, theatre
I’ve never been a big Chesterton fan. He’s too bombastic. for my tastes. But I know people still like him. Is that only because he seems to be a good culture warrior, just born a bit to early –a polemicist, an apologist-or is there something else there?
I own a copy of this debate from 1928, the first Canadian edition. Sadly the book is in disrepair…but Chesterton himself said that books tended to look thoroughly defeated after having being read by him. Cathleen, we will have to agree to disagree on Chesterton or at least admit we have different tastes.
I don’t always agree with him and no one can. Anton Pegis, Josef Pieper and Etienne Gilson all sang his praises over “The Dumb Ox” and righly so. I needed to read the book thrice before understanding it back in my undergraduate days. I still wonder if I understood it but it sent me on a path of study and greatly influenced my studies, future, thoughts and beliefs. Evolution is alive, socialism is dead, old England is dying and Aquinas has been resurrected, transformed and digested, and finally distributionism remains (and always will) a castle in the sky.
I personally love the speed and sharpness of his wit united with a very delicate soul. Chesterton seems to likely have disagreed with everything anyone else ever thought, but never has he disagreed with a person.
In this debate, along with other gems like Orthodoxy or his Autobiography, he seems to twist everything everyone has ever thought and make it compatible with his ideas. Reading Chesterton is like reading Aquinas, where the absolute most generous interpretations of Augustine or Aristotle or other philosophers and church fathers are stretched to the limit in order for Aquinas to avoid outwrite disagreeing with anyone.
The one advantage of Chesterton over Aquinas is wit. Every word is calculated to not only convince the reader (like Aquinas), but also to simultaneously elicit a strong emotional reaction, to stir the soul and spur action. Chesterton had the mind (and frame) of Aquinas, as Pegis noted he seemed to breath Aristotle; but he had the gentle soul of Francis.
Belloc was equally as bombastic, if not moreso, but Belloc was plagued by demons of his own creation. While Chesterton was at home in every home, or in no home, Belloc was one of those weathered souls unable to find a resting place, haunted by thoughts of his deceased wife and as Chesterton wrote in The Flying Inn, “red wine had brought red ruin.” Stories abound of Belloc wandering through London in a long trench coat, randomly appearing at some old acquaintance’s door and sitting down for dinner, only to produce a half-bottle of wine, a loaf of bread and a wheel of cheese from his pockets and to refuse to eat the warm food offered to him.
The archives of the New York Times, January 29, 1913, available online at no charge (but cannot be linked here), has a very full description of a Belloc-Shaw debate in Queen’s Hall London.
The debate was on Belloc’s thesis of the Servile State, published in 1911, that “if we do not re-establish the institution of property, we shall re-establish the institution of slavery. There is no third course.”
That debate — which we really never had — is now a hundred years old. Those who take the time to read it will have to conclude that Belloc was the prophet. Still, Shaw’s observations on the United States still hold up quite well.
An instance of Chesterton’s wit. When seeing NYC’s Broadway during a visit to the US, he said, “What a wonderful experience this is for someone who cannot read.”
Celia, thank you for this interesting post.
“I’ve never been a big Chesterton fan.”
No, me neither.
“He’s too bombastic. for my tastes. But I know people still like him. Is that only because he seems to be a good culture warrior, just born a bit to early –a polemicist, an apologist-or is there something else there?”
I think it’s 50% converted-to-the-light-side-of-the-force and 50% some-people-just-can’t-resist-aphorisms.
I’m pretty sure it’s not the Fr. Brown stories!
“I personally love the speed and sharpness of his wit united with a very delicate soul.”
I agree with Adam. Chesterton can be an acquired taste, and he certainly can be prolix at times. And, yes, he does come across on occasion as bombastic, but I think at heart he was a gentle soul who also happened to be brilliant master of the aphorism and the use of paradox. Some examples:
“Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
“A yawn is a silent shout.”
“Democracy is government by the uneducated, while aristocracy is government by the badly educated.”
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
“Some men never feel small, but these are the few who are.”
“A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.”
“Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”
Chesterton’s literary output was immense in his various turns as a critic, essayist, novelist, apologist, and poet. He made no pretense to writing great poetry, but the deep faith of this convert to Catholicism comes through, IMO, more clearly in his religious poems than it does in apologetics such as “Orthodoxy.” Here’s the last stanza to “The House of Christmas,” a poem I remember first reading in elementary school:
To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:TCu-uk6iueAJ:famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/g__k__chesterton/poems/6747+%22g.k.+chesterton%22+%2B+poems+%2B+christmas&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Adam Marischuk ==
I’d like to have the name of the Shaw-Chesterton debate book. Might the title page of your dilapidated copy still be extant? It’s not listed in the Wikipedia Chesterton bibliography. I’d like to search for the online copy.
Sometimes he strikes me as superficial, but sometimes as profound.
Celia,
Thanks for this most delicious initial entree into the blog. The delightful attraction about Shaw and Chesterton is that they could debate quite amiably. contrary to our current milieu where we take such umbrage at the slightest criticism instead of relating to the facts. They had no problem taking on the mighty with persistence. As with most famous writers, they are quoted usually to one’s convenience.
My favorite line from Shaw is: “I do better than most because I think at least once a week.”
Another pithy quote from Chesterton.
“The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.”
This may be true but everyone caters to them.
Bill Mazzella mentioned “milieu”: Yes, the milieu of Edwardian England was very different from ours. One major difference is that it was a time where the ideal “man of letters” was still celebrated. Both Shaw and Chesterton could be said to belong there.
Ann: Different topic… It was a delight chatting with you about Bernanos and the French Old Right in another thread. Besides anti-Semitism, it had not a little of anti-Americanism too. (That anti-Americanism went from the French Old Right to the French New Left is another topic for another time.) As for anti-Semitism, it plagued all right-wing movements at the time: something the Bill Buckley, Jr. made sure to rid of when he was helping to rebuild the right in 1950s USA.
Also, you and others may enjoy reading this review that came to me via Arts & Letters Daily. Three books under review and the catching headline read, “Occupied Minds: French culture under Nazi rule remained surprisingly vibrant.”
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_02/3858
What the hell, speaking of Europe I’m throwing in another link from Arts and Letters Daily. Religion is among the topics discussed.
A narrower Atlantic
Despite America’s move to the left under Obama, it’s still assumed that Europe and America are fundamentally different—in their economies, societies and values. But this is a myth
Peter Baldwin
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10746
A money quote: Here, we come to the grain of truth to the Atlantic divide. If there is anything that most separates American society from Europe, it is the continuing presence of an ethnically distinct underclass…. And if it is this distinct urban underclass that most distinguishes the US from Europe, Europeans should take notice. Europe’s birthrates have plummeted and immigration continues unabated. It is a demographic certainty that an ethnically and religiously distinct lower class in Europe will grow in the decades to come…
Chesterton has a quality of generosity, a big-heartedness (unlike Belloc) which makes him attractive, even lovable.
Cathleen, here is a good reason to be a Chesterton fan:
THE SONG OF THE STRANGE ASCETIC
If I had been a Heathen,
I’d have praised the purple vine,
My slaves should dig the vineyards,
And I would drink the wine.
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And his slaves grow lean and grey,
That he may drink some tepid milk
Exactly twice a day.
If I had been a Heathen,
I’d have crowned Neaera’s curls,
And filled my life with love affairs,
My house with dancing girls;
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And to lecture rooms is forced,
Where his aunts, who are not married,
Demand to be divorced.
If I had been a Heathen,
I’d have sent my armies forth,
And dragged behind my chariots
The Chieftains of the North.
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And he drives the dreary quill,
To lend the poor that funny cash
That makes them poorer still.
If I had been a Heathen,
I’d have piled my pyre on high,
And in a great red whirlwind
Gone roaring to the sky;
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And a richer man than I:
And they put him in an oven,
Just as if he were a pie.
Now who that runs can read it,
The riddle that I write,
Of why this poor old sinner,
Should sin without delight-
But I, I cannot read it
(Although I run and run),
Of them that do not have the faith,
And will not have the fun.
HIstoryman –
I’m a fan of Arts and Letters too. Great reading!
Here’s the address for the home page for anyone who doesn’t know it:
http://www.aldaily.com
The variety is amazing.