George Bernard Shaw | Page 6

almost certainly
influenced him for good. Ireland is a country in which the political
conflicts are at least genuine; they are about something. They are about
patriotism, about religion, or about money: the three great realities. In

other words, they are concerned with what commonwealth a man lives
in or with what universe a man lives in or with how he is to manage to
live in either. But they are not concerned with which of two wealthy
cousins in the same governing class shall be allowed to bring in the
same Parish Councils Bill; there is no party system in Ireland. The
party system in England is an enormous and most efficient machine for
preventing political conflicts. The party system is arranged on the same
principle as a three-legged race: the principle that union is not always
strength and is never activity. Nobody asks for what he really wants.
But in Ireland the loyalist is just as ready to throw over the King as the
Fenian to throw over Mr. Gladstone; each will throw over anything
except the thing that he wants. Hence it happens that even the follies or
the frauds of Irish politics are more genuine as symptoms and more
honourable as symbols than the lumbering hypocrisies of the
prosperous Parliamentarian. The very lies of Dublin and Belfast are
truer than the truisms of Westminster. They have an object; they refer
to a state of things. There was more honesty, in the sense of actuality,
about Piggott's letters than about the Times' leading articles on them.
When Parnell said calmly before the Royal Commission that he had
made a certain remark "in order to mislead the House" he proved
himself to be one of the few truthful men of his time. An ordinary
British statesman would never have made the confession, because he
would have grown quite accustomed to committing the crime. The
party system itself implies a habit of stating something other than the
actual truth. A Leader of the House means a Misleader of the House.
Bernard Shaw was born outside all this; and he carries that freedom
upon his face. Whether what he heard in boyhood was violent
Nationalism or virulent Unionism, it was at least something which
wanted a certain principle to be in force, not a certain clique to be in
office. Of him the great Gilbertian generalisation is untrue; he was not
born either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative. He did not, like
most of us, pass through the stage of being a good party man on his
way to the difficult business of being a good man. He came to stare at
our general elections as a Red Indian might stare at the Oxford and
Cambridge boat-race, blind to all its irrelevant sentimentalities and to
some of its legitimate sentiments. Bernard Shaw entered England as an

alien, as an invader, as a conqueror. In other words, he entered England
as an Irishman.
* * * *
The Puritan
IT has been said in the first section that Bernard Shaw draws from his
own nation two unquestionable qualities, a kind of intellectual chastity,
and the fighting spirit. He is so much of an idealist about his ideals that
he can be a ruthless realist in his methods. His soul has (in short) the
virginity and the violence of Ireland. But Bernard Shaw is not merely
an Irishman; he is not even a typical one. He is a certain separated and
peculiar kind of Irishman, which is not easy to describe. Some
Nationalist Irishmen have referred to him contemptuously as a "West
Briton." But this is really unfair; for whatever Mr. Shaw's mental faults
may be, the easy adoption of an unmeaning phrase like "Briton" is
certainly not one of them. It would be much nearer the truth to put the
thing in the bold and bald terms of the old Irish song, and to call him
"The anti-Irish Irishman." But it is only fair to say that the description
is far less of a monstrosity than the anti-English Englishman would be;
because the Irish are so much stronger in self-criticism. Compared with
the constant self-flattery of the English, nearly every Irishman is an
anti-Irish Irishman. But here again popular phraseology hits the right
word. This fairly educated and fairly wealthy Protestant wedge which is
driven into the country at Dublin and elsewhere is a thing not easy
superficially to summarise in any term. It cannot be described merely
as a minority; for a minority means the part of a nation which is
conquered. But this thing means something that conquers, and is not
entirely part of a nation. Nor can one even fall back on the phrase of
aristocracy. For an aristocracy implies at least some chorus of snobbish
enthusiasm;