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 ha