"Fighting Friends": The Chesterton-Shaw Debates

Abstract

robust man, large in girth, an avowed journalist, a former Socialist turned passionate defender of Christianity, and, with an almost Falstaffian charm, a loyal patron of the English tavern, the place, he thought, where true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink. Shaw, Chesterton's antithesis, was remarkably fit and agile, a dedicated playwright, a disarmingly orthodox and shockingly radical religious thinker, as William Sylvester Smith says,1 a committed but nondoctrinaire Socialist, a teetotaler, and a vegetarian. Given these differences, it is not hard to imagine why Chesterton and Shaw were such fierce intellectual foes. is much harder indeed to imagine how their differences helped them to be such good friends. Chesterton speaks to this paradox in his Autobiography, published posthumously in 1936. He writes, It is necessary to disagree with him [Shaw] as much as I do in order to admire him as much as I do.2 Twenty-eight years earlier, in his article The Chesterbelloc, printed in the New Age in February 1908, Shaw, with his characteristically good humor, describes Chesterton with the eye of a portrait painter but the sentiment of a friend: Now Chesterton, he says, be trusted anywhere without a policeman. He might knock at a door and run away perhaps even lie down across the threshold to trip up the emergent householder; but his crimes would be hyperbolic crimes of the imagination and humor, not of malice. He is friendly, easy-going, unaffected, gentle, magnanimous, and genuinely democratic.3 is worth returning to these remarks if for no other reason than to remember the warm generosity and sharp wit of both writers, and perhaps there is no better time than now, after the fall into theory,4 to borrow David Richter's phrase, to think about how humanely Chesterton and Shaw treated each other. But one should not allow their mutual good will to obscure the fact that they had to learn how to be foes before they could be