symbolic, but very
complete sentence, "I am a typical Irishman; my family came from
Yorkshire."

What then is the colour of this Irish society of which Bernard Shaw,
with all his individual oddity, is yet an essential type? One
generalisation, I think, may at least be made. Ireland has in it a
quality which caused it (in the most ascetic age of Christianity) to be
called the "Land of Saints"; and which still might give it a claim to be
called the Land of Virgins. An Irish Catholic priest once said to me,
"There is in our people a fear of the passions which is older even than
Christianity." Everyone who has read Shaw's play upon Ireland will
remember the thing in the horror of the Irish girl at being kissed in
the public streets. But anyone who knows Shaw's work will recognize it
in Shaw himself. There exists by accident an early and beardless
portrait of him which really suggests in the severity and purity of its
lines some of the early ascetic pictures of the beardless Christ.
However he may shout profanities or seek to shatter the shrines, there
is always something about him which suggests that in a sweeter and more
solid civilisation he would have been a great saint. He would have been
a saint of a sternly ascetic, perhaps of a sternly negative type. But he
has this strange note of the saint in him: that he is literally
unworldly. Worldliness has no human magic for him; he is not bewitched
by rank nor drawn on by conviviality at all. He could not understand
the intellectual surrender of the snob. He is perhaps a defective
character; but he is not a mixed one. All the virtues he has are heroic
virtues. Shaw is like the Venus of Milo; all that there is of him is
admirable.

But in any case this Irish innocence is peculiar and fundamental in him;
and strange as it may sound, I think that his innocence has a great deal
to do with his suggestions of sexual revolution. Such a man is
comparatively audacious in theory because he is comparatively clean in
thought. Powerful men who have powerful passions use much of their
strength in forging chains for themselves; they alone know how strong
the chains need to be. But there are other souls who walk the woods like
Diana, with a sort of wild chastity. I confess I think that this Irish
purity a little disables a critic in dealing, as Mr. Shaw has dealt,
with the roots and reality of the marriage law. He forgets that those
fierce and elementary functions which drive the universe