George Bernard Shaw | Page 4

He forgets that those fierce
and elementary functions which drive the universe have an impetus
which goes beyond itself and cannot always easily be recovered. So the
healthiest men may often erect a law to watch them, just as the
healthiest sleepers may want an alarum clock to wake them up.
However this may be, Bernard Shaw certainly has all the virtues and all
the powers that go with this original quality in Ireland. One of them is a
sort of awful elegance; a dangerous and somewhat inhuman daintiness
of taste which sometimes seems to shrink from matter itself, as though
it were mud. Of the many sincere things Mr. Shaw has said he never
said a more sincere one than when he stated he was a vegetarian, not
because eating meat was bad morality, but because it was bad taste. It
would be fanciful to say that Mr. Shaw is a vegetarian because he
comes of a race of vegetarians, of peasants who are compelled to accept
the simple life in the shape of potatoes. But I am sure that his fierce
fastidiousness in such matters is one of the allotropic forms of the Irish
purity; it is to the virtue of Father Matthew what a coal is to a diamond.
It has, of course, the quality common to all special and unbalanced
types of virtue, that you never know where it will stop. I can feel what
Mr. Shaw probably means when he says that it is disgusting to feast off
dead bodies, or to cut lumps off what was once a living thing. But I can
never know at what moment he may not feel in the same way that it is
disgusting to mutilate a pear-tree, or to root out of the earth those
miserable mandrakes which cannot even groan. There is no natural
limit to this rush and riotous gallop of refinement.
But it is not this physical and fantastic purity which I should chiefly
count among the legacies of the old Irish morality. A much more
important gift is that which all the saints declared to be the reward of

chastity: a queer clearness of the intellect, like the hard clearness of a
crystal. This certainly Mr. Shaw possesses; in such degree that at
certain times the hardness seems rather clearer than the clearness. But
so it does in all the most typical Irish characters and Irish attitudes of
mind. This is probably why Irishmen succeed so much in such
professions as require a certain crystalline realism, especially about
results. Such professions are the soldier and the lawyer; these give
ample opportunity for crimes but not much for mere illusions. If you
have composed a bad opera you may persuade yourself that it is a good
one; if you have carved a bad statue you can think yourself better than
Michael Angelo. But if you have lost a battle you cannot believe you
have won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have
got him off.
There must be some sense in every popular prejudice, even about
foreigners. And the English people certainly have somehow got an
impression and a tradition that the Irishman is genial, unreasonable, and
sentimental. This legend of the tender, irresponsible Paddy has two
roots; there are two elements in the Irish which made the mistake
possible. First, the very logic of the Irishman makes him regard war or
revolution as extra-logical, an ultima ratio which is beyond reason.
When fighting a powerful enemy he no more worries whether all his
charges are exact or all his attitudes dignified than a soldier worries
whether a cannon-ball is shapely or a plan of campaign picturesque. He
is aggressive; he attacks. He seems merely to be rowdy in Ireland when
he is really carrying the war into Africa--or England. A Dublin
tradesman printed his name and trade in archaic Erse on his cart. He
knew that hardly anybody could read it; he did it to annoy. In his
position I think he was quite right. When one is oppressed it is a mark
of chivalry to hurt oneself in order to hurt the oppressor. But the
English (never having had a real revolution since the Middle Ages) find
it very hard to understand this steady passion for being a nuisance, and
mistake it for mere whimsical impulsiveness and folly. When an Irish
member holds up the whole business of the House of Commons by
talking of his bleeding country for five or six hours, the simple English
members suppose that he is a sentimentalist. The truth is that he is a
scornful realist who alone remains unaffected by the sentimentalism of

the House of Commons. The Irishman is neither poet enough nor snob
enough to be swept away by those