I
There is a legend, much beholden to Shakespeare, that learning and
leanness are akin to each other, while dull wits flourish in company
with obesity. The curious submission sometimes made by Shakespeare
to common prejudices and ignorance, glorified by the name of legend,
caused him too often to forget the obligation of the aristocrat to
think for himself, and remember only to think with the mob; and the
singular fact about this forgetfulness of his is that when he chose
to think with the mob, he nearly always did so when the mob was in
the wrong. He preferred the judgment of the street to the judgment of
informed minds when he wrote "Richard the Third," and allowed himself
to malign that excellent and most capable prince and monarch. Richard
was one of the ablest of the kings of England, but Shakespeare,
forgetting his obligations to his own genius, portrays him as a
pervert with a mania for blood. He yields to the common view in his
references to fat men. Falstaff is fat and flighty and a coward, a
drunkard, a braggart and a misleader of young princes, although the
prototype of Sir John was himself a man of known courage. Cassius was
deemed to think too much because he had a lean and hungry look. Julius
Cæsar desired the society of fat men who, presumably, indulged but
seldom in thought and never in any that could be called dangerous. Fat
men are endowed with but one tolerable virtue: that of good nature; and
if any fat men ever enters heaven, it will be because of his equable
temper and in spite of his corpulence.
Mr. Chesterton is a fat man. There is a rumour in England that many
Americans felt they had been defrauded of their money when they went to
hear him lecture lately because he was hardly so fat as they had been
led to believe! He certainly is not so bulky now, because of a serious
illness, as he was when I first knew him, but in those days he was
undeniably an enormous man. And in himself he is a complete refutation
of the legend that fat men are dull men. Dr. Johnson was another fat
man whose large flesh covered a large intellect. Dr. Johnson, indeed,
was so able a man that, in spite of an incorrigibly lazy character,
which kept him abed of mornings when he ought to have been improving
the shining hour, he compiled a dictionary with little assistance
which, so Frenchmen said, would have engaged the labours of forty
French scholars for a long time.
These legends about men of wit and dull men need to be revised. There
have been as many fat men of genius as there have been lean men of
genius. There have been as many epicurean geniuses as there have been
ascetic geniuses. My experience is that men of great mental energy are
fonder of their food than many men with torpid minds; and some of the
ablest men I know are excessively addicted to the pleasures of the
table. Mr. Shaw is a fastidious feeder, with odd likes and dislikes,
but no one could say that he is indifferent to what he eats. It is, I
think, an ironic commentary on the legend that fat men are lacking in
cleverness, that much the cleverest of those who oppose the opinions of
the lean Mr. Shaw is the fat Mr. Chesterton.
Mr. Chesterton, was sent into the world by an All-Just God for the
exclusive purpose of saying the opposite to Mr. Shaw. With the most
complimentary intention I say that Mr. Chesterton's job in the world
is, when Mr. Shaw speaks, to reply, "On the contrary!..." He has to
restore the balance which Mr. Shaw very vigorously disturbs. Mr.
Chesterton is considerably younger than Mr. Shaw, much younger than
most people, on seeing him, imagine him to be. He was born in London
in 1874. His book on Browning was published when he was twenty-nine,
and "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" when he was thirty. The bulk of his
work, and certainly the best of it, with the exception of the "Short
History of England," was published before he was forty. The bulk, and
certainly the best, of Mr. Shaw's work was published after he had
passed his fortieth year. A critic comparing the two writers ought to
remember that Mr. Shaw's work is mainly that of a mature man, whereas
that of Mr. Chesterton is mainly the work of a young man.