the will and not of the
environment. It never crosses the modern mind to fancy that perhaps a
people is chiefly influenced by how that people has chosen to behave. If
I have to choose between race and weather I prefer race; I would rather
be imprisoned and compelled by ancestors who were once alive than by mud
and mists which never were. But I do not propose to be controlled by
either; to me my national history is a chain of multitudinous choices.
It is neither blood nor rain that has made England, but hope, the thing
that all those dead men have desired. France was not France because she
was made to be by the skulls of the Celts or by the sun of Gaul. France
was France because she chose.

I have stepped on one side from the immediate subject because this is as
good an instance as any we are likely to come across of a certain almost
extraneous fault which does deface the work of Bernard Shaw. It is a
fault only to be mentioned when we have made the solidity of the merits
quite clear. To say that Shaw is merely making game of people is
demonstrably ridiculous; at least a fairly systematic philosophy can be
traced through all his jokes, and one would not insist on such a unity
in all the songs of Mr. Dan Leno. I have already pointed out that the
genius of Shaw is really too harsh and earnest rather than too merry and
irresponsible. I shall have occasion to point out later that Shaw is, in
one very serious sense, the very opposite of paradoxical. In any case if
any real student of Shaw says that Shaw is only making a fool of him, we
can only say that of that student it is very superfluous for anyone to
make a fool. But though the dramatist's jests are always serious and
generally obvious, he is really affected from time to time by a certain
spirit of which that climate theory is a case--a spirit that can only be
called one of senseless ingenuity. I suppose it is a sort of nemesis of
wit; the skidding of a wheel in the height of its speed. Perhaps it is
connected with the nomadic nature of his mind. That lack of roots, this
remoteness from ancient instincts and traditions is responsible for a
certain bleak and heartless extravagance of statement on certain
subjects which makes the author really unconvincing as well as
exaggerative; satires that are _saugrenu_, jokes that are rather silly
than wild, statements which even considered as lies have no symbolic
relation to truth. They are exaggerations of something that does not