me kind of significance which they have
for Bernard Shaw himself. Thus, if I had simply said that Shaw was born
in Dublin the average reader might exclaim, "Ah yes--a wild Irishman,
gay, emotional and untrustworthy." The wrong note would be struck at the
start. I have attempted to give some idea of what being born in Ireland
meant to the man who was really born there. Now therefore for the first
time I may be permitted to confess that Bernard Shaw was, like other
men, born. He was born in Dublin on the 26th of July, 1856.

Just as his birth can only be appreciated through some vision of
Ireland, so his family can only be appreciated by some realisation of
the Puritan. He was the youngest son of one George Carr Shaw, who had
been a civil servant and was afterwards a somewhat unsuccessful
business man. If I had merely said that his family was Protestant (which
in Ireland means Puritan) it might have been passed over as a quite
colourless detail. But if the reader will keep in mind what has been
said about the degeneration of Calvinism into a few clumsy vetoes, he
will see in its full and frightful significance such a sentence as this
which comes from Shaw himself: "My father was in theory a vehement
teetotaler, but in practice often a furtive drinker." The two things of
course rest upon exactly the same philosophy; the philosophy of the
taboo. There is a mystical substance, and it can give monstrous
pleasures or call down monstrous punishments. The dipsomaniac and the
abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same
mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink. But if I
had mentioned that fragment of family information without any ethical
preface, people would have begun at once to talk nonsense about artistic
heredity and Celtic weakness, and would have gained the general
impression that Bernard Shaw was an Irish wastrel and the child of Irish
wastrels. Whereas it is the whole point of the matter that Bernard Shaw
comes of a Puritan middle-class family of the most solid
respectability; and the only admission of error arises from the fact
that one member of that Puritan family took a particularly Puritan view
of strong drink. That is, he regarded it generally as a poison and
sometimes as a medicine, if only a mental medicine. But a poison and a
medicine are very closely akin, as the nearest chemist knows; and they
are chiefly akin in this; that no one will drink either of them for fun.
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