Ireland [1913] by Richard Arnold Bermann

Author:Richard Arnold Bermann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cork University Press
Published: 2021-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

George Bernard Shaw, Irishman

Many great English men are of Irish origin. Almost all great Irish men are of English origin. Oliver Goldsmith, the author of The Vicar of Wakefield, lived in Killaloe, but he was Protestant, and therefore not a true Irishman. The great satirist Swift was dean of the Anglican St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, where he was also buried. If, during his lifetime, someone had said to him that he was Irish, someone from the despised Catholic rabble, he would have taken it as quite an insult. He stemmed from the Protestants planted in Ireland to rule over the Irish, and to his mind he was as Irish as his Gulliver was Lilliputian in Lilliput. And yet the Irish honour him as their great poet. Nor could he help it – he imbibed an Irish temperament from the disdainful climate, he absorbed the derisive spirit of the oppressed and the utopian dreams of the enslaved. And in the end, he also lived long enough to make a famous political plea for disenfranchised Ireland, while still quietly continuing to despise the Irish. But on the other hand, he was an Irishman, just as *Beethoven was German and not Dutch, just as Nietzsche was German and not Polish, and just as Dumas was French and not a negro.

The *Duke of Wellington was Irish and Protestant, Parnell – the great leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party – was Irish and Protestant. All of these men had English blood flowing through their veins because only very few true Irishmen converted to Protestantism. The same applies to today’s great Irishman, our favourite poet George Bernard Shaw. He is a descendant of the English colonists – and a man of Ireland.

He says so himself in the book he wrote on the Irish cultural question. He writes the following about his ancestors: *‘My extraction is the extraction of most Englishmen: that is, I have no trace in me of the *commercially imported North Spanish strain which passes for aboriginal Irish: I am a genuine typical Irishman of the Danish, Norman, Cromwellian, and (of course) Scotch invasions. I am violently and arrogantly Protestant by family tradition; but let no English Government therefore counter my allegiance: I am English enough to be an inveterate Republican and Home Ruler. It is true that one of my grandfathers was an Orangeman; but then his sister was an abbess; and his uncle, I am proud to say, was hanged as a rebel.’ And so it is that Bernard Shaw was also born a rebel. This disposition stems from the Irish climate, while his English blood provides him with the strength to see his rebellious nature through. Perhaps he is today one of the loudest advocates of old Irishness exactly because his forefathers were English colonialists – the ancient Celtic dreams do not attenuate his voice. Indeed, he says this himself: miscegenation is more or less the same in Ireland as it is in England. There were Celts in England, too, in ancient times, while Scandinavians, Anglo-Saxons and Normans also settled in Ireland.

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