ance
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