bered letters, and to a
much greater extent the designer and imaginer of unwritten letters:
and I cannot remember whether I ever acknowledged properly your
communications about Claudel, especially your interesting remarks
about the comparative coolness of Henri de Regnier about him. It
struck me because I think it is part of something I have noticed
myself; a curious and almost premature conservatism in the older
generation of revolutionaries, particularly when they were pagan
revolutionaries. Not that I suppose de Regnier is particularly old or
in the stock sense a revolutionist; but I think you will know the
break between the generations to which I refer. I remember having
exactly the same experience the only time I ever talked to Swinburne.
I had regarded (and resisted) him in my boyhood as a sort of
Antichrist in purple, like Nero holding his lyre, and I found him
more like a very well-read Victorian old maid, almost entirely a
_laudator temporis acti_ disposed to say that none of the young men
would ever come up to Tennyson--which may be quite true for all I
know. I fancy it has something to do with the very fact that their
revolt was pagan, and being temporal was also temporary. When that
particular fashion in caps of liberty has gone out, they have nothing
to fall back on but the feeling which Swinburne himself puts into the
mouth of the pagan on the day when Constantine issued the
proclamation.

"But to me their new device is barren, the days are bare
Things long gone over suffice, and men forgotten that were."

I only tell you all this because you might find it amusing to keep
an eye on the _New Statesman_ as well as the _New Witness_, where
there is a small repetition of the same thing. Bernard Shaw has
written an article which is supposed to be about his view of me and
Socialism; but which may be said more truly to be about his blindness
to Hilary and his Servile State. It is quite startling to me to find
how wholly he misses Hilary's point; and how wildly he falls back on
a sort of elderly impatience with our juvenile paradox and
fantasticality. I shall answer him as abusively as my great personal
liking for him will allow and I think Hilary is going to do the same;
so if you ever see such papers, you might enjoy the fun.

Yours always,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

DEAR MAURICE,

Thank you ever