George Bernard Shaw | Page 5

smooth social and historical tides
and tendencies which carry Radicals and Labour members comfortably
off their feet. He goes on asking for a thing because he wants it; and he
tries really to hurt his enemies because they are his enemies. This is the
first of the queer confusions which make the hard Irishman look soft.
He seems to us wild and unreasonable because he is really much too
reasonable to be anything but fierce when he is fighting.
In all this it will not be difficult to see the Irishman in Bernard Shaw.
Though personally one of the kindest men in the world, he has often
written really in order to hurt; not because he hated any particular men
(he is hardly hot and animal enough for that), but because he really
hated certain ideas even unto slaying. He provokes; he will not let
people alone. One might even say that he bullies, only that this would
be unfair, because he always wishes the other man to hit back. At least
he always challenges, like a true Green Islander. An even stronger
instance of this national trait can be found in another eminent Irishman,
Oscar Wilde. His philosophy (which was vile) was a philosophy of ease,
of acceptance, and luxurious illusion; yet, being Irish, he could not help
putting it in pugnacious and propagandist epigrams. He preached his
softness with hard decision; he praised pleasure in the words most
calculated to give pain. This armed insolence, which was the noblest
thing about him, was also the Irish thing; he challenged all comers. It is
a good instance of how right popular tradition is even when it is most
wrong, that the English have perceived and preserved this essential trait
of Ireland in a proverbial phrase. It is true that the Irishman says, "Who
will tread on the tail of my coat?"
But there is a second cause which creates the English fallacy that the
Irish are weak and emotional. This again springs from the very fact that
the Irish are lucid and logical. For being logical they strictly separate
poetry from prose; and as in prose they are strictly prosaic, so in poetry
they are purely poetical. In this, as in one or two other things, they
resemble the French, who make their gardens beautiful because they
are gardens, but their fields ugly because they are only fields. An
Irishman may like romance, but he will say, to use a frequent Shavian

phrase, that it is "only romance." A great part of the English energy in
fiction arises from the very fact that their fiction half deceives them. If
Rudyard Kipling, for instance, had written his short stories in France,
they would have been praised as cool, clever little works of art, rather
cruel, and very nervous and feminine; Kipling's short stories would
have been appreciated like Maupassant's short stories. In England they
were not appreciated but believed. They were taken seriously by a
startled nation as a true picture of the empire and the universe. The
English people made haste to abandon England in favour of Mr.
Kipling and his imaginary colonies; they made haste to abandon
Christianity in favour of Mr. Kipling's rather morbid version of
Judaism. Such a moral boom of a book would be almost impossible in
Ireland, because the Irish mind distinguishes between life and literature.
Mr. Bernard Shaw himself summed this up as he sums up so many
things in a compact sentence which he uttered in conversation with the
present writer, "An Irishman has two eyes." He meant that with one eye
an Irishman saw that a dream was inspiring, bewitching, or sublime,
and with the other eye that after all it was a dream. Both the humour
and the sentiment of an Englishman cause him to wink the other eye.
Two other small examples will illustrate the English mistake. Take, for
instance, that noble survival from a nobler age of politics--I mean Irish
oratory. The English imagine that Irish politicians are so hot-headed
and poetical that they have to pour out a torrent of burning words. The
truth is that the Irish are so clear-headed and critical that they still
regard rhetoric as a distinct art, as the ancients did. Thus a man makes a
speech as a man plays a violin, not necessarily without feeling, but
chiefly because he knows how to do it. Another instance of the same
thing is that quality which is always called the Irish charm. The Irish
are agreeable, not because they are particularly emotional, but because
they are very highly civilised. Blarney is a ritual; as much of a ritual as
kissing the Blarney Stone.
Lastly, there is one general truth about Ireland which may very well
have influenced Bernard Shaw from the first; and