carved a bad statue you can think yourself better than
Michael Angelo. But if you have lost a battle you cannot believe you
have won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have
got him off.

There must be some sense in every popular prejudice, even about
foreigners. And the English people certainly have somehow got an
impression and a tradition that the Irishman is genial, unreasonable,
and sentimental. This legend of the tender, irresponsible Paddy has two
roots; there are two elements in the Irish which made the mistake
possible. First, the very logic of the Irishman makes him regard war or
revolution as extra-logical, an _ultima ratio_ which is beyond reason.
When fighting a powerful enemy he no more worries whether all his
charges are exact or all his attitudes dignified than a soldier worries
whether a cannon-ball is shapely or a plan of campaign picturesque. He
is aggressive; he attacks. He seems merely to be rowdy in Ireland when
he is really carrying the war into Africa--or England. A Dublin
tradesman printed his name and trade in archaic Erse on his cart. He
knew that hardly anybody could read it; he did it to annoy. In his
position I think he was quite right. When one is oppressed it is a mark
of chivalry to hurt oneself in order to hurt the oppressor. But the
English (never having had a real revolution since the Middle Ages) find
it very hard to understand this steady passion for being a nuisance, and
mistake it for mere whimsical impulsiveness and folly. When an Irish
member holds up the whole business of the House of Commons by talking of
his bleeding country for five or six hours, the simple English members
suppose that he is a sentimentalist. The truth is that he is a scornful
realist who alone remains unaffected by the sentimentalism of the House
of Commons. The Irishman is neither poet enough nor snob enough to be
swept away by those 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 me