introduction:

Most people either say that they agree with
Bernard Shaw or that they do not understand him. I
am the only person who understands him, and I do
not agree with him.

Chesterton, of course, could not possibly agree with such an avowed and
utter Puritan as Mr. Shaw. The Puritan has to be a revolutionary, which
means a man who pushes forward the hand of the clock. Chesterton, as
near as may be, is a Catholic Tory, who is a man who pushes back the
hand of the clock. Superficially, the two make the clock show the same
hour, but actually, one puts it on to a.m., the other back to p.m.
Between the two is all the difference that is between darkness and day.

Chesterton's point of view is distinctly like Samuel Johnson's in more
respects than one. Both critics made great play with dogmatic assertions
based on the literature that was before their time, at the expense of
the literature that was to come after. In the book on Shaw, Chesterton
strikes a blow at all innovators, although he aims only at the obvious
failures.

The truth is that all feeble spirits naturally
live in the future, because it is featureless; it
is a soft job; you can make it what you like. The
next age is blank, and I can paint it freely with
my favourite colour. It requires real courage to
face the past, because the past is full of facts
which cannot be got over; of men certainly wiser
than we and of things done which we cannot do. I
know I cannot write a poem as good as _Lycidas_.
But it is always easy to say that the particular
sort of poetry I can write will be the poetry of
the future.

Sentiments such as these have made many young experimentalists feel that
Chesterton is a traitor to his youth and generation. Nobody will ever
have the detachment necessary to appreciate "futurist" poetry until it
is very much a thing of the past, because the near past is so much with
us, and it is part of us, which the future is not. But fidelity to the
good things of the past does not exonerate us from the task of looking
for the germs of the good things of the future. The young poet of to-day
sits at the feet of Sir Henry Newbolt, whose critical appreciation is
undaunted by mere dread of new things, while to the same youth and to
his friends it has simply never occurred, often enough, to th