And yet again Chesterton expresses splendidly what I dimly have been thinking for a long time:
[George Bernard Shaw’s] misunderstanding of Shakespeare arose largely from the fact that he is a Puritan, while Shakespeare was spiritually a Catholic. The former is always screwing himself up to see truth; the latter is often content that truth is there. The Puritan is only strong enough to stiffen; the Catholic is strong enough to relax.
Shaw, I think, has entirely misunderstood the pessimistic passages of Shakespeare. They are flying moods which a man with a fixed faith can afford to entertain. That all is vanity, that life is dust and love is ashes, these are frivolities, these are jokes that a Catholic can afford to utter. He knows well enough that there is a life that is not dust and a love that is not ashes. But just as he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the matter of enjoyment, so he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the matter of melancholy. The sad exuberances of Hamlet are merely like the glad exuberances of Falstaff. This is not conjecture; it is the text of Shakespeare. In the very act of uttering his pessimism, Hamlet admits that it is a mood and not the truth. Heaven is a heavenly thing, only to him it seems a foul congregation of vapours. Man is the paragon of animals, only to him he seems a quintessence of dust. Hamlet is quite the reverse of a sceptic. He is a man whose strong intellect believes much more than his weak temperament can make vivid to him. But this power of knowing a thing without feeling it, this power of believing a thing without experiencing it, this is an old Catholic complexity, and the Puritan has never understood it.
Shakespeare confesses his moods (mostly by the mouths of villains and failures), but he never sets up his moods against his mind. His cry of vanitas vanitatum is itself only a harmless vanity. Readers may not agree with my calling him Catholic with a big C; but they will hardly complain of my calling him catholic with a small one. And that is here the principal point. Shakespeare was not in any sense a pessimist; he was, if anything, an optimist so universal as to be able to enjoy even pessimism.
And this is exactly where he differs from the Puritan. The true Puritan is not squeamish: the true Puritan is free to say “Damn it!” But the Catholic Elizabethan was free (on passing provocation) to say “Damn it all!”
G.K. Chesterton: George Bernard Shaw
November 9, 2010 at 10:20 am
The original. What a star. And Hello Notburga!
(I just wish the imitators would go and get a life!)
November 9, 2010 at 2:17 pm
Do you mean imitators of Shakespeare of of Chesterton?
November 10, 2010 at 2:11 pm
“Chesterton’s Ghost Appears, Suggests Fans Find ‘Other Interest'”. I think she’s thinking of all those young Americans dressed in tweed and smoking pipes in a self-conscious sort of way. But I was thinking, uncharitably, of Fr Dwight Longenecker, so I take it back, cos he clearly has a life.
November 11, 2010 at 5:01 pm
I wish my belly would stop imitating Chesterton, that’s for sure!
November 9, 2010 at 2:19 pm
*or of
November 9, 2010 at 5:16 pm
Dang, girl, right until the by-line I was thinking you had written it!
I agree with the sentiment, by the way. Catholics do love a good revel in the dramatic. Not sure if Shakespeare was Catholic, but the Anglicans of his day were fairly dramatic themselves, with their heads on pikes and what not.
November 10, 2010 at 12:07 pm
Awfully sorry to mislead you. I only feel long passages of italics are somewhat hard to read, so I didn’t use the quote option in wordpress.
(That anyone could suppose Chestertonian brilliancy had come from poor little me is somewhat unbelievable…)
November 10, 2010 at 4:00 pm
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