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