George Bernard Shaw | Page 8

exclusion of others
equally national and interesting. To one of these it is worth while to
draw attention. At intervals during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries there has appeared a peculiar kind of Irishman. He is so
unlike the English image of Ireland that the English have actually fallen
back on the pretence that he was not Irish at all. The type is commonly
Protestant; and sometimes seems to be almost anti-national in its acrid
instinct for judging itself. Its nationalism only appears when it flings
itself with even bitterer pleasure into judging the foreigner or the
invader. The first and greatest of such figures was Swift. Thackeray
simply denied that Swift was an Irishman, because he was not a stage
Irishman. He was not (in the English novelist's opinion) winning and
agreeable enough to be Irish. The truth is that Swift was much too
harsh and disagreeable to be English. There is a great deal of Jonathan
Swift in Bernard Shaw. Shaw is like Swift, for instance, in combining

extravagant fancy with a curious sort of coldness. But he is most like
Swift in that very quality which Thackeray said was impossible in an
Irishman, benevolent bullying, a pity touched with contempt, and a
habit of knocking men down for their own good. Characters in novels
are often described as so amiable that they hate to be thanked. It is not
an amiable quality, and it is an extremely rare one; but Swift possessed
it. When Swift was buried the Dublin poor came in crowds and wept by
the grave of the broadest and most freehanded of their benefactors.
Swift deserved the public tribute; but he might have writhed and kicked
in his grave at the thought of receiving it. There is in G. B. S.
something of the same inhumane humanity. Irish history has offered a
third instance of this particular type of educated and Protestant
Irishman, sincere, unsympathetic, aggressive, alone. I mean Parnell;
and with him also a bewildered England tried the desperate dodge of
saying that he was not Irish at all. As if any thinkable sensible snobbish
law-abiding Englishman would ever have defied all the drawing-rooms
by disdaining the House of Commons! Despite the difference between
taciturnity and a torrent of fluency there is much in common also
between Shaw and Parnell; something in common even in the figures
of the two men, in the bony bearded faces with their almost Satanic
self-possession. It will not do to pretend that none of these three men
belong to their own nation; but it is true that they belonged to one
special, though recurring, type of that nation. And they all three have
this peculiar mark, that while Nationalists in their various ways they all
give to the more genial English one common impression; I mean the
impression that they do not so much love Ireland as hate England.
I will not dogmatise upon the difficult question as to whether there is
any religious significance in the fact that these three rather ruthless
Irishmen were Protestant Irishmen. I incline to think myself that the
Catholic Church has added charity and gentleness to the virtues of a
people which would otherwise have been too keen and contemptuous,
too aristocratic. But however this may be, there can surely be no
question that Bernard Shaw's Protestant education in a Catholic country
has made a great deal of difference to his mind. It has affected it in two
ways, the first negative and the second positive. It has affected him by
cutting him off (as we have said) from the fields and fountains of his

real home and history; by making him an Orangeman. And it has
affected him by the particular colour of the particular religion which he
received; by making him a Puritan.
In one of his numerous prefaces he says, "I have always been on the
side of the Puritans in the matter of Art"; and a closer study will, I think,
reveal that he is on the side of the Puritans in almost everything.
Puritanism was not a mere code of cruel regulations, though some of its
regulations were more cruel than any that have disgraced Europe. Nor
was Puritanism a mere nightmare, an evil shadow of eastern gloom and
fatalism, though this element did enter it, and was as it were the
symptom and punishment of its essential error. Something much nobler
(even if almost equally mistaken) was the original energy in the Puritan
creed. And it must be defined with a little more delicacy if we are really
to understand the attitude of G. B. S., who is the greatest of the modern
Puritans and perhaps the last.
I should roughly define the first spirit in Puritanism thus. It was a
refusal to contemplate God or goodness