George Bernard Shaw | Page 7

it implies that some at least are willingly led by the leaders,
if only towards vulgarity and vice. There is only one word for the
minority in Ireland, and that is the word that public phraseology has
found; I mean the word "Garrison." The Irish are essentially right when
they talk as if all Protestant Unionists lived inside "The Castle." They
have all the virtues and limitations of a literal garrison in a fort. That is,

they are valiant, consistent, reliable in an obvious public sense; but
their curse is that they can only tread the flagstones of the courtyard or
the cold rock of the ramparts; they have never so much as set their foot
upon their native soil.
We have considered Bernard Shaw as an Irishman. The next step is to
consider him as an exile from Ireland living in Ireland; that, some
people would say, is a paradox after his own heart. But, indeed, such a
complication is not really difficult to expound. The great religion and
the great national tradition which have persisted for so many centuries
in Ireland have encouraged these clean and cutting elements; but they
have encouraged many other things which serve to balance them. The
Irish peasant has these qualities which are somewhat peculiar to Ireland,
a strange purity and a strange pugnacity. But the Irish peasant also has
qualities which are common to all peasants, and his nation has qualities
that are common to all healthy nations. I mean chiefly the things that
most of us absorb in childhood; especially the sense of the supernatural
and the sense of the natural; the love of the sky with its infinity of
vision, and the love of the soil with its strict hedges and solid shapes of
ownership. But here comes the paradox of Shaw; the greatest of all his
paradoxes and the one of which he is unconscious. These one or two
plain truths which quite stupid people learn at the beginning are exactly
the one or two truths which Bernard Shaw may not learn even at the
end. He is a daring pilgrim who has set out from the grave to find the
cradle. He started from points of view which no one else was clever
enough to discover, and he is at last discovering points of view which
no one else was ever stupid enough to ignore. This absence of the
red-hot truisms of boyhood; this sense that he is not rooted in the
ancient sagacities of infancy, has, I think, a great deal to do with his
position as a member of an alien minority in Ireland. He who has no
real country can have no real home. The average autochthonous
Irishman is close to patriotism because he is close to the earth; he is
close to domesticity because he is close to the earth; he is close to
doctrinal theology and elaborate ritual because he is close to the earth.
In short, he is close to the heavens because he is close to the earth. But
we must not expect any of these elemental and collective virtues in the
man of the garrison. He cannot be expected to exhibit the virtues of a

people, but only (as Ibsen would say) of an enemy of the people. Mr.
Shaw has no living traditions, no schoolboy tricks, no college customs,
to link him with other men. Nothing about him can be supposed to refer
to a family feud or to a family joke. He does not drink toasts; he does
not keep anniversaries; musical as he is I doubt if he would consent to
sing. All this has something in it of a tree with its roots in the air. The
best way to shorten winter is to prolong Christmas; and the only way to
enjoy the sun of April is to be an April Fool. When people asked
Bernard Shaw to attend the Stratford Tercentenary, he wrote back with
characteristic contempt: "I do not keep my own birthday, and I cannot
see why I should keep Shakespeare's." I think that if Mr. Shaw had
always kept his own birthday he would be better able to understand
Shakespeare's birthday-- and Shakespeare's poetry.
In conjecturally referring this negative side of the man, his lack of the
smaller charities of our common childhood, to his birth in the dominant
Irish sect, I do not write without historic memory or reference to other
cases. That minority of Protestant exiles which mainly represented
Ireland to England during the eighteenth century did contain some
specimens of the Irish lounger and even of the Irish blackguard;
Sheridan and even Goldsmith suggest the type. Even in their
irresponsibility these figures had a touch of Irish tartness and realism;
but the type has been too much insisted on to the