June 12th, 1915
MY DEAR BERNARD SHAW,
I ought to have written to you a long time ago, to thank you for your kind letter which I received when I had recovered and still more for many other kindnesses that seem to have come from you during the time before the recovery. I am not a vegetarian; and I am only in a very comparative sense a skeleton. Indeed I am afraid you must reconcile yourself to the dismal prospect of my being more or less like what I was before; and any resumption of my ordinary habits must necessarily include the habit of disagreeing with you. What and where and when is "Uncommon Sense about the War?" How can I get hold of it? I do not merely ask as one hungry for hostilities, but also as one unusually hungry for good literature. "Il me faut des géants," as Cyrano says; so I naturally wish to hear the last about you. You probably know that I do not agree with you about the War; I do not think it is going on of its own momentum; I think it is going on in accordance with that logical paradox whereby the thing that is most difficult to do is also the thing that must be done. If it were an easy war to end it would have been a wicked war to begin. If a cat has nine lives one must kill it nine times, saving your humanitarian feelings, and always supposing it is a witch's cat and really draws its powers from Hell. I have always thought that there was in Prussia an evil will; I would not have made it a ground for going to war, but I was quite sure of it long before there was any war at all. But I suppose we shall some day have an opportunity of arguing about all that. Meanwhile my thanks and good wishes are as sincere as my opinions; and I do not think those are insincere.
Yours always sincerely,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
Bernard Shaw replied:
22nd June 1915
MY DEAR CHESTERTON
I am delighted to learn under your own hand that you have recovered all your health and powers with an unimpaired figure. You have also the gratification of knowing that you have carried out a theory of mine that every man of genius has a critical illness at 40, Nature's object being to make him go to bed for several months. Sometimes Nature overdoes it: Schiller and Mozart died. Goethe survived, though he very nearly followed Schiller into the shades. I did the thing myself quite handsomely by spending eighteen months on crutches, having two surgical operations, and breaking my arm. I distinctly noticed that instead of my recuperation beginning when my breakdown ended, it began before that. The ascending curve cut through the tail of the descending one; and I was consummating my collapse and rising for my next flight simultaneously.
It is perfectly useless for you to try to differ with me about the war. NOBODY can differ with me about the war: you might as well differ from the Almighty about the orbit of the sun. I have got the war right; and to that complexion, you too must come at last, your nature not being a fundamentally erroneous one.