McCabe’s objection to the method, and the defense of Shaw
Dullness will, however, free me from the charge which I most lament; the charge of being flippant.
A concrete earlier version of this dispute appears in Heretics (1905), chapter XVI, ‘On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity’. Chesterton there reproduces Joseph McCabe’s criticism from Christianity and Rationalism on Trial. As quoted, McCabe explicitly acknowledges Chesterton’s serious purpose; his objection concerns whether strained paradoxes, unreliable facts and imaginative verbal effects can give readers a sound understanding of social questions. He is questioning the adequacy of a method, not simply denying its author’s sincerity.
Chesterton’s answer separates a writer’s comic manner from the seriousness of his beliefs. In the same chapter he also defends Shaw against the suggestion that Shaw adopts opinions just to surprise an audience, challenging McCabe to identify a position adopted for novelty rather than derived from Shaw’s established convictions. Chapter IV, ‘Mr. Bernard Shaw’, makes the complementary claim: Shaw’s startling statements proceed from an unusually consistent standard, although Chesterton rejects that standard. The alliance here is therefore about intellectual honesty, not agreement in doctrine.
This earlier exchange explains why Shaw belongs in Chesterton’s defense of himself. It also reveals a limit of the defense: showing that a joke expresses a sincere conviction does not yet establish that the conviction is true or that the joke supplies adequate evidence. Orthodoxy must still make its substantive case. McCabe is a documented predecessor to the controversy, but the unnamed accusers in this paragraph cannot all be identified with him.
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