George Bernard Shaw | Page 3

across a whole
landscape. Of the same nature are Irish bulls; they are summaries which
are too true to be consistent. The Irish make Irish bulls for the same
reason that they accept Papal bulls. It is because it is better to speak
wisdom foolishly, like the Saints, rather than to speak folly wisely, like
the Dons.
This is the truth about mystical dogmas and the truth about Irish bulls;
it is also the truth about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw. Each of them
is an argument impatiently shortened into an epigram. Each of them
represents a truth hammered and hardened, with an almost disdainful
violence until it is compressed into a small space, until it is made brief
and almost incomprehensible. The case of that curt remark about
Ireland and Yorkshire is a very typical one. If Mr. Shaw had really
attempted to set out all the sensible stages of his joke, the sentence
would have run something like this: "That I am an Irishman is a fact of
psychology which I can trace in many of the things that come out of me,
my fastidiousness, my frigid fierceness and my distrust of mere
pleasure. But the thing must be tested by what comes from me; do not
try on me the dodge of asking where I came from, how many batches of
three hundred and sixty-five days my family was in Ireland. Do not
play any games on me about whether I am a Celt, a word that is dim to

the anthropologist and utterly unmeaning to anybody else. Do not start
any drivelling discussions about whether the word Shaw is German or
Scandinavian or Iberian or Basque. You know you are human; I know I
am Irish. I know I belong to a certain type and temper of society; and I
know that all sorts of people of all sorts of blood live in that society and
by that society; and are therefore Irish. You can take your books of
anthropology to hell or to Oxford." Thus gently, elaborately and at
length, Mr. Shaw would have explained his meaning, if he had thought
it worth his while. As he did not he merely flung the symbolic, but very
complete sentence, "I am a typical Irishman; my family came from
Yorkshire."
What then is the colour of this Irish society of which Bernard Shaw,
with all his individual oddity, is yet an essential type? One
generalisation, I think, may at least be made. Ireland has in it a quality
which caused it (in the most ascetic age of Christianity) to be called the
"Land of Saints"; and which still might give it a claim to be called the
Land of Virgins. An Irish Catholic priest once said to me, "There is in
our people a fear of the passions which is older even than Christianity."
Everyone who has read Shaw's play upon Ireland will remember the
thing in the horror of the Irish girl at being kissed in the public streets.
But anyone who knows Shaw's work will recognize it in Shaw himself.
There exists by accident an early and beardless portrait of him which
really suggests in the severity and purity of its lines some of the early
ascetic pictures of the beardless Christ. However he may shout
profanities or seek to shatter the shrines, there is always something
about him which suggests that in a sweeter and more solid civilisation
he would have been a great saint. He would have been a saint of a
sternly ascetic, perhaps of a sternly negative type. But he has this
strange note of the saint in him: that he is literally unworldly.
Worldliness has no human magic for him; he is not bewitched by rank
nor drawn on by conviviality at all. He could not understand the
intellectual surrender of the snob. He is perhaps a defective character;
but he is not a mixed one. All the virtues he has are heroic virtues.
Shaw is like the Venus of Milo; all that there is of him is admirable.
But in any case this Irish innocence is peculiar and fundamental in him;

and strange as it may sound, I think that his innocence has a great deal
to do with his suggestions of sexual revolution. Such a man is
comparatively audacious in theory because he is comparatively clean in
thought. Powerful men who have powerful passions use much of their
strength in forging chains for themselves; they alone know how strong
the chains need to be. But there are other souls who walk the woods
like Diana, with a sort of wild chastity. I confess I think that this Irish
purity a little disables a critic in dealing, as Mr. Shaw has dealt, with
the roots and reality of the marriage law.