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.