long run deplorably stigmatised as a saint--there is a flood of
light let in upon all manner of traditional poses, literary
insincerities that have crept into life. There are few things of more
value in a commonwealth than such a searching faculty of laughter. Like
Sheridan, Mr. Shaw lives in England, and uses his comic gift for the
most part on subjects suggested to him by English conditions of life,
but with a strength of intellectual purpose that Sheridan never
possessed. Irishmen may wish that he found his material in Ireland. But
an artist must take what his hand finds, and there is no work in the
world more full of the Scottish spirit or the Scottish humour than
Carlyle's _French Revolution_. If it be asked whether Mr. Shaw's humour
is typically Irish, I must reply by another question: "Could his plays
have conceivably been written by any but an Irishman?"

Is there, in fact, a distinctively Irish humour? In a sense, yes, no
doubt, just as the English humour is of a different quality from the
Greek or the French. But nobody wants to pin down English humour to the
formula of a definition; no one wants to say, Thus far shalt thou go,
and beyond that shalt cease to be English. Moreover, a leading
characteristic of the Irish type is just its variety--its continual
deviation from the normal. How, then, to find a description that will
apply to a certain quality of mind throughout a variable race; that
quality being in its essence the most complete expression of an
individuality, in its difference from other individualities, since a
man's humour is the most individual thing about him? Description is
perhaps more possible than definition. One may say that the Irish humour
is kindly and lavish; that it tends to express itself in an exuberance
of phrase, a wild riot of comparisons; that it amplifies rather than
retrenches, finding its effects by an accumulation of traits, and not by
a concentration. The vernacular Irish literature is there to prove that
Irish fancy gives too much rather than too little. One may observe,
again, that a nation laughs habitually over its besetting weakness; and
if the French find their mirth by preference in dubious adventures, it
cannot be denied that much Irish humour has a pronounced alcoholic
flavour. But it is better neither to define nor to describe; there is
more harmful misunderstanding caused by setting down this or that
quality, this or that person, as typically French, typically Engli