eland; but
never just to Ireland. They will speak to Ireland; they will speak for
Ireland; but they will not hear Ireland speak. All the real amiability
which most Englishmen undoubtedly feel towards Irishmen is lavished upon
a class of Irishmen which unfortunately does not exist. The Irishman of
the English farce, with his brogue, his buoyancy, and his tender-hearted
irresponsibility, is a man who ought to have been thoroughly pampered
with praise and sympathy, if he had only existed to receive them.
Unfortunately, all the time that we were creating a comic Irishman in
fiction, we were creating a tragic Irishman in fact. Never perhaps has
there been a situation of such excruciating cross-purposes even in the
three-act farce. The more we saw in the Irishman a sort of warm and weak
fidelity, the more he regarded us with a sort of icy anger. The more the
oppressor looked down with an amiable pity, the more did the oppressed
look down with a somewhat unamiable contempt. But, indeed, it is
needless to say that such comic cross-purposes could be put into a play;
they have been put into a play. They have been put into what is perhaps
the most real of Mr. Bernard Shaw's plays, _John Bull's Other Island_.

It is somewhat absurd to imagine that any one who has not read a play by
Mr. Shaw will be reading a book about him. But if it comes to that it is
(as I clearly perceive) absurd to be writing a book about Mr. Bernard
Shaw at all. It is indefensibly foolish to attempt to explain a man
whose whole object through life has been to explain himself. But even in
nonsense there is a need for logic and consistency; therefore let us
proceed on the assumption that when I say that all Mr. Shaw's blood and
origin may be found in _John Bull's Other Island_, some reader may
answer that he does not know the play. Besides, it is more important to
put the reader right about England and Ireland even than to put him
right about Shaw. If he reminds me that this is a book about Shaw, I can
only assure him that I will reasonably, and at proper intervals,
remember the fact.

Mr. Shaw himself said once, "I am a typical Irishman; my family came
from Yorkshire." Scarcely anyone but a typical Irishman could have made
the remark. It is in fact a bull, a conscious bull. A bull is only a
paradox which people are too stupid to understand. It is the rapid
summary of something which is at once so true and so complex that the
speaker who has the swift intellig