George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw:

I was looking through Arts & Letters Daily in the hope that they'd have a nice collection of Zinn obituaries for our reading pleasure. However, what I found instead was an old movie of "The World's Outstanding Literary Genius," George Bernard Shaw.



Complete with praise for Mussolini's 'kindly nature'!

But confer with this, starting at the four minute mark (h/t Dad29):



Now, how great a 'genius' do you have to be to appreciate that? But at least you know why he was giving the fascist salute. That part was merely playful. The rest appears to have been in deadly earnest.

G. K. Chesterton and Shaw managed to be great friends, plying their considerable wits against one another.

Chesterton: I see there has been a famine in the land.
Shaw: And I see the cause of it.

Shaw: If I were as fat as you, I would hang myself.
Chesterton: If I were to hang myself, I would use you for the rope.

They also had remarkable debates that infuriated much of the population and interested other parts of it. Perhaps it was easier to take Mr. Shaw's remarks on having 'gentlemanly gas chambers' as merely a transgressive idea before certain regimes began actually to employ that idea. Yet Chesterton did not do so: he said that he thought Shaw was the most serious of men, that 'even his jokes are serious.' Fortunately, perhaps, Chesterton died before the reality of his friend's ideas was laid bare before the world.

Chesterton said many things about Shaw, but he felt his best was this:

And there is no more subtle truth than that of the everyday phrase about a man having "his heart in the right place." It involves the idea of normal proportion; not only does a certain function exist, but it is rightly related to other functions. Indeed, the negation of this phrase would describe with peculiar accuracy the somewhat morbid mercy and perverse tenderness of the most representative moderns. If, for instance, I had to describe with fairness the character of Mr. Bernard Shaw, I could not express myself more exactly than by saying that he has a heroically large and generous heart; but not a heart in the right place.

It ought to be terrifying to see just how far a "heroically large and generous heart" can carry you.