Shaw's generosity and the direction of his sympathy
he has a heroically large and generous heart; but not a heart in the right place
The praise is substantive: Chesterton distinguishes the strength of Shaw's benevolence from its orientation. His earlier Heretics (1905) makes almost the same distinction. Chapter IV praises Shaw's intellectual consistency and fairness but argues that he measures actual humanity against an imagined superior creature. This standard makes ordinary people look defective before their merits have been appreciated. The chapter calls him practically humane yet, in this particular sense, inhumane. Read alongside that argument, the misplaced heart means sympathy governed by an inadequate conception of its human object. This is a cross-work interpretation, not a claim of self-quotation. Heretics, IV, paragraphs beginning “There is another man” and “For the truth is that Mr. Shaw has never seen things”.
Chesterton's later George Bernard Shaw (1909) supplies a qualification. He explicitly defends Shaw's compassion for animals and his severity toward those who excuse cruelty. His criticism comes when he turns to Shaw's lack of fellow feeling with ordinary people: benevolence can become a superior reformer's wish to replace them with a more satisfactory population. The paragraph beginning “Thus the Irish detachment” distinguishes this disdain from the admirable side of Shaw's commitments. This later elaboration helps prevent the passage from being mistaken for a general attack on humanitarian reform. George Bernard Shaw, humanitarianism discussion, paragraphs beginning “Shaw adopted this crusade,” “In this quarrel,” and “Thus the Irish detachment”.
The opening bodily metaphor thus introduces goodness as a relation between capacities and their proper objects. The chapter develops this through separated virtues, misplaced humility, and finally united gentleness and courage. That is a reading of the chapter's structure; the comparisons establish the continuity of Chesterton's diagnosis, not its accuracy as a judgment of Shaw. Editions inspected: Gutenberg plain-text witnesses #470 and #19535; the assigned Orthodoxy (1908) chapter and Gutenberg #16769.
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