Platform tricks saved Mr. Shaw from falling to the Synge level. Contact
with rude men and ruder women in public places kept him in familiar
alliance with normal things, and so it came about that his genius,
though it soared, never soared out of sight. He marched ahead of the
crowd, but he never went so far ahead of it that it could not catch
up with him. He urged reluctant men and women to follow him along the
paths that were obscure and difficult, but he never urged them to try
a path which he had not himself explored, or was unwilling to explore.
Not all of his advice was accepted ... not all of it was worthy of
acceptance ... but all of it, accepted or rejected, was listened to.
He would have found a readier agreement to take his advice if he had
been less logical in his arguments, but his mind governs his life so
completely that he cannot make any allowances for the wayward character
of the average man. He has given himself so completely to his mind that
his feelings seem to have atrophied. He is incapable, apparently, of
understanding the beauty and fascination of mere irrelevancy. A study
of his work reveals no consciousness on his part of natural beauty. He
seems not to know that a tree is a lovely thing, that its loveliness is
entirely without moral or sociological significance. He would probably
agree with Dr. Johnson that one field is very like another field, that
water in one part of the world is identical with water in another part
of the world ... and would be just as remote from the truth as Dr.
Johnson was: for one field is not like another field, and water in one
place can be very dissimilar in look from water in some other place.
Mr. Shaw would not suffer one pang at the destruction of St. Paul's
Cathedral if he felt that its destruction made the processes of life
more convenient to the ordinary citizen. If he had to choose between
Rheims Cathedral and an improved drainage system for France ... a thing
which France very badly needs, as any one with a nose can tell ... he
would choose the drainage system. The College of Cardinals is less
lovely in the eyes of Mr. Shaw than the members of a Borough Council.
He would rather possess a good fountain-pen than the first folio of
Shakespeare's plays. There was a man in Dublin who singularly resembled
him in everything except wit. Francis Sheehy Skeffington, who was
wrongly executed in the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, had Mr. Shaw's
logical faculty without Mr. Shaw's redeeming wit. He was a very honest,
courageous, and personally attractive man, just as Mr. Shaw is, but he
was also a very wrong-headed man and totally incapable of any sort of
concerted action with other people. Mr. Shaw's wit brings him into more
cordial relationship with other human beings than Sheehy Skeffington
would ever have achieved. I remember, just before the war began,
meeting Skeffington in North Wales. He, too, was insensible to natural
beauty and was without respect for tradition or ancient institutions.
I took him one evening to a lake in Anglesey where many reeds grew. I
asked him to watch while I clapped my hands, and when I had done so,
thousands of starlings flew out of the reeds with a great fluttering
of wings, making a tremendous disturbance because they had been roused
from their sleep. Skeffington gazed at these birds as if he had never
seen a starling before. I judged by the look of astonishment in his
face that if he could have persuaded himself to believe in magic, he
would have regarded me as a magician. By merely smiting my hands, I had
filled the air with fluttering birds! This experience so interested
me that I decided to make other experiments with Skeffington, and
so, on the following day, I took him to a field outside the village
where some very fine druidical remains were to be seen. I led him
up to the stones and waited to see what effect they would have upon
him. He looked at them for a few moments, and then, quite unmoved by
the fact that they had been standing there for more than a thousand
years and were all that was left of an ancient religion, he took a
piece of paper from his pocket and, murmuring in his high-pitched
Ulster voice, "I think I'll do a little propaganda!" thrust it into a
crevice of the old altar. The paper had VOTES FOR WOMEN on it! He was
totally incapable of understanding why this act of his disgusted me.
His mind was indifferent to such things as tradition; he simply could
not visualize those stones as anything other than a remarkably useful
hoarding on which to advertise his latest enthusiasm. I suppose that if
he thought of the druids at all, he thought contemptuously of them as
barbarians to whom had been denied the enlightenment that he enjoyed;
and his desperately logical mind, working on the fact that many persons
would visit these remains, suggested to him that here was an excellent
opportunity of thrusting his propaganda upon the attention of people
reluctant to give any heed to it!...
I cannot conceive of Mr. Shaw doing just that thing because his wit
would save him from it; but I feel that if his wit were taken from him
or had been denied to him, he would have behaved exactly as Sheehy
Skeffington behaved then. It is his superb, spontaneous wit that keeps
him in continuous contact with normal men. Synge had no wit, and
because he had not, was thrust into solitude. Skeffington had no wit
... there never was on earth a man so destitute of a sense of humour
as Francis Skeffington ... and because he had not, he lived a life of
intellectual isolation from his fellows in spite of the fact that most
people liked him. Skeffington's courage and honesty ... and I have
known few men so courageous and honest as he was ... served him partly,
but not wholly, as Mr. Shaw's wit serves him. Mr. Shaw has great
intellectual courage and is a very honest man, but these qualities,
though they win respect in the long run, have an isolating effect on a
man in such a world as this, and were it not for his wit, he would be
an Ishmael, too. Take the wit from Mr. Shaw and the courage from Sheehy
Skeffington, substitute for them a fractious sense of beauty, and the
result is ... John Millington Synge.
V
Mr. Chesterton has illustrated the peculiar quality of the English
mind by comparing the roads of France with the roads of England; and
the comparison might be used to illustrate the difference between
the mind of Mr. Shaw and the mind of the average man. Mr. Chesterton,
with that startling profundity that is to be discovered in much of
his writing that seems at first merely to be conjuring stuff, asserts
that the design of English and French roads, the first all winding and
irregular, the second straight as if drawn with the aid of a ruler,
shows a fundamental difference between the two races: the English as
wayward and casual as their roads, going lazily and easily to their
journey's end; the French as logical and well-defined as their roads,
going without any circumlocution to their journey's end. Mr. Shaw's
mind goes directly to its goal, and he tries to persuade the rest of
mankind to follow his example. But the rest of mankind does not wish
to go by the most direct route to any goal: it wants to dally on the
ways; it wants to explore all the little bye-paths and hidden corners;
it even wants to turn back on its course to examine again some place
that it has already seen; and above all, it wants to waste time. When
Mr. Shaw contemplates the world engaged in this careless way of living,
he bursts into a passion of wit where less gifted men, such as Sheehy
Skeffington, would burst into anger; and he lashes the world with
his tongue. Mankind, because Mr. Shaw is a genius, listens to him, as
mankind always has listened to men of genius, in a puzzled fashion, and
even speculates on whether it ought not to follow his advice; but it is
in the nature of man to be illogical, and so, after a little thought,
man goes on being wayward and casual. Even in France, where logic has
become an obsession, men are more illogical than Mr. Shaw would have
them be; and it is a very curious commentary on his work that in so
logical a country as France, his plays make far less stir than in any
other country in Europe. I imagine that the French are so cursed with
logic that their minds revolt from the extreme reasoning of Mr. Shaw as
an overloaded stomach revolts from rich food. Once, in France, when my
battalion was marching along a road towards a part of the country in
which we had been some weeks before, I heard a soldier in my platoon
saying to his comrade as we came to familiar places, "Thank God,
they've cut down those bloody trees!" and immediately I understood why
the French roads bored the British soldier. That inexorable logic, all
that neatness, those terribly straight roads with the trees growing
at regular intervals ... "dressing by the right" as the soldiers said,
and looking as if the men who planted them had performed the operation
according to some mathematical formula ... all these things, inhumanly
tidy and well-ordered, nauseated the mind. I have done much walking
on English and French roads, and I will wager that boredom will seize
the traveller on a French road long before his interest on an English
road has been exhausted. And in their unintellectual, instinctive,
wayward fashion, the English are more right about life than the French
are. Mr. Shaw, I imagine, is incapable of understanding the state of
mind of my soldier who thanked God that the neatly-arranged trees on
the neatly-designed French road had been cut down. To him it would
seem right that if trees are to be grown at all, they should be grown
according to formula. He sees something stupid and wrong in the English
method of planting an acorn in any hole that is visible and letting the
tree grow as it pleases.