Christmas pantomime this
would be all very well; but one expects the jokes of Bernard Shaw to
have some intellectual root, however fantastic the flower. And obviously
all historic common sense is against the idea that that dim Druid
people, whoever they were, who dwelt in our land before it was lit up by
Rome or loaded with varied invasions, were a precise facsimile of the
commercial society of Birmingham or Brighton. But it is a part of the
Puritan in Bernard Shaw, a part of the taut and high-strung quality of
his mind, that he will never admit of any of his jokes that it was only
a joke. When he has been most witty he will passionately deny his own
wit; he will say something which Voltaire might envy and then declare
that he has got it all out of a Blue book. And in connection with this
eccentric type of self-denial, we may notice this mere detail about the
Ancient Briton. Someone faintly hinted that a blue Briton when first
found by Caesar might not be quite like Mr. Broadbent; at the touch Shaw
poured forth a torrent of theory, explaining that climate was the only
thing that affected nationality; and that whatever races came into the
English or Irish climate would become like the English or Irish. Now the
modern theory of race is certainly a piece of stupid materialism; it is
an attempt to explain the things we are sure of, France, Scotland, Rome,
Japan, by means of the things we are not sure of at all, prehistoric
conjectures, Celts, Mongols, and Iberians. Of course there is a reality
in race; but there is no reality in the theories of race offered by some
ethnological professors. Blood, perhaps, is thicker than water; but
brains are sometimes thicker than anything. But if there is one thing
yet more thick and obscure and senseless than this theory of the
omnipotence of race it is, I think, that to which Shaw has fled for
refuge from it; this doctrine of the omnipotence of climate. Climate
again is something; but if climate were everything, Anglo-Indians would
grow more and more to look like Hindoos, which is far from being the
case. Something in the evil spirit of our time forces people always to
pretend to have found some material and mechanical explanation. Bernard
Shaw has filled all his last days with affirmations about the divinity
of the non-mechanical part of man, the sacred quality in creation and
choice. Yet it never seems to have occurred to him that the true key to
national differentiations is the key of