. 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