accident has cut me off this week from many current publications; and left me much to my own devices. it is therefore my immutable purpose to write an article about myself, under the thin pretence of noticing a book about mr. bernard shaw.
this is all the more fun because it is exactly what mr. bernard shaw would do himself; nor should i blame him. i like mr. shaw’s type of egoism; because, if he talks big, it is at least about big things; things bound to be bigger than himself.
i revolt, not against the loud egoist, but the gentle egoist; who talks tenderly of trifles; who says, “a sunbeam gilds the amber of my cigarette-holder; i find i cannot live without a cigarette-holder.” i resist this arrogance simply because it is more arrogant. for even so complete a fool cannot really suppose we are interested in his cigarette-holder; and therefore must suppose that we are interested in him. but i defend a dogmatic egoist precisely because he deals in dogmas.
the apostles’ creed is not regarded as a pose of foppish vanity; yet the word “i” comes before even the word “god.” the believer comes first; but he is soon dwarfed by his beliefs, swallowed in the creative whirlwind and the trumpets of the resurrection. and if a man says he believes in the superman or the socialist state, i think him equally modest; only not so sensible.
mr. herbert skimpole’s book, bernard shaw: the man and his work, contains many suggestive and valuable things to which i cannot do justice, including allusions to myself mostly only too flattering, and in one case both amusing and mystifying. the passage suggests that all the active figures in my idle fictions are made as fat as i am; though i cannot recall that any of them are fat at all; except a semi-supernatural monster in a nightmare called the man who was thursday.
let there be no alarm, however, that i shall talk about such nightmares, or any of my own tales; like shaw, i am egoistic about things that matter. mr. skimpole says that while shaw and i agree that the world should be adapted to the man, “chesterton includes our present institutions among the parts of a man’s soul which cannot be altered.” now there is here a potential mistake, which i will not apologize for taking more seriously than any fancy about the figures in my very amateurish romances.
i need not say i do not mind being called fat; for deprived of that jest, i should be almost a serious writer. i do not even mind being supposed to mind being called fat. but being supposed to be contented, and contented with the present institutions of modern society, is a mortal slander i will not take from any man.
whatever are the institutions i defend, they are not primarily those of the present. they have been attempted in the past; and i hope they may be achieved in the future; but they are not present, but conspicuous by their absence. mr. skimpole truly says that i defend domesticity and piety and patriotism, but these are not the typical institutions of to-day.
the typical institutions of to-day are a divorce court cutting up families with the speed of a sausage machine; a science which preaches the destiny without the divinity of calvinism; and a finance that crosses all frontiers with the same enlightened indifference that is shown by cholera.
these are the institutions of the instant, and even mr. skimpole has realized them as those of the immediate future. in a somewhat innocent passage he says that “it is of no use for shaw to point out” to me the hope of a cosmopolitan future; “that internationalism, social class-feeling, and imperialism all point the same way he refuses to see.”
it is indeed useless for shaw to point out to me that i should follow the lead of these things; since i happen to detest imperialism, disbelieve in internationalism and distrust “social class-feeling,” so far as i know what it means. i am well aware that an imperial chancellor in berlin, an international money-lender in johannesburg, and an anarchist spy in petrograd, are “all pointing the same way”; and that is why i feel pretty safe in going the other.
i warmly apologize to mr. skimpole for writing a personal explanation instead of a review of his book, which contains many things well worth writing and reviewing; notably the shrewd remark about shaw’s style; in which what is a paradox in spirit is seldom an epigram in form. it takes our breath away rather by taking itself for granted than by defining itself like a defiance. but i fancy mr. skimpole will sympathize with me if i am primarily concerned with his convictions, as he is with mine, and as we both are with shaw’s.
and he has gone to the vital point in emphasizing this matter of the things permanent in man. when i say that religion and marriage and local loyalty are permanent in humanity, i mean that they recur when humanity is most human; and only comparatively decline when society is comparatively inhuman.
they have declined in the modern world. they may return through the war; but anyhow, where we have the small farm and the free man and the fighting spirit, there we shall have the salute to the soil and the roof and to the altar.
to take a more casual case: i believe that when men are happy, they sing; not only at the piano but at the plough, or at least in the intervals of ploughing; at their work and in their walks abroad. i am well aware that modern men do not sing in the street very much. i am well aware that cosmopolitan money-lenders never sing, but die with all their music in them. i know that the song of the happy meat-contractor is not one of “our present institutions.”
i know that one can seldom come at dawn upon some solitary london banker carolling more sweetly than the lark; and even his clerks do not often sing in chorus over their ledgers. but i still think it is more human to sing than not to sing; and that, being more human, it is more permanent in humanity.
some righteous revolution will teach the bankers and contractors that little birds who can sing and won’t sing must be made to sing—or at any rate made to squeal. in the interlude, the instinct of song takes refuge in the lesser thing called poetry, or even prose; and to-morrow the fever of personal sincerity may have passed; and i shall return, with a lowly air, to literature.
