Shaw’s Irish Boyhood

(I)

SEVENTY years have passed since Bernard Shaw invaded England. “Invade,” of course, is the only possible word.^[1] There may have been no earth-tremors felt when the tall, thin, red-haired,^[2] keen-eyed youth of twenty walked down the gangway at Holyhead and set foot for the first time on British soil. No drums rolled; no guns blazed; the Fleet was not mobilized in the Irish Channel; there was not even a secret service agent about. All that happened was that a railway porter with a Welsh accent said: “Carry your bag, sir?”

So it happened that, instead of being repulsed, the invader was allowed to take the mail train to London and to proceed on his conquering way. That he was bent on conquest there can be no doubt. No Norman William ever surveyed the rolling Sussex Downs with a more possessive eye than that with which the beardless Irish stripling surveyed the flat English Midlands as his train thundered its way to the capital. Ireland was getting its own back. After enduring invasions for more than six centuries, she herself was sending out an invader; and one who was determined that he would not fail her. Nor did he. There had to be a good many reconnaissance flights; the land had to be spied out; the weak spots in the enemy’s defences had to be carefully noted. Then came the full force of the invasion; then did citadels, seemingly impregnable, fall; then did time-honoured institutions crumble into dust. It would seem as if the innocent-looking travelling-bag which the Welsh porter had offered to carry must have contained an atom bomb.

(II)

How did Ireland shape and equip this champion bastion-stormer? From what secret armoury did his weapons come? In what école militaire did he receive his training? From the loins of what mighty ancestor was he sprung?

The last question must be answered first. The man responsible was no less a personage than Shakespeare’s Macduff! Has not G.B.S. himself told us that he has traced his family’s more remote origins to “the third son of that immortal yet unborn Thane of Fife, who, invulnerable to normally accouched swordsmen, laid on and slew Macbeth”? “It was as good,” he added, “as being descended from Shakespeare, whom I had been unconsciously resolved to reincarnate from my cradle.”

But that is going a long way back. Let us jump a matter of three centuries or so and land on one of the pleasant green banks of the River Boyne at a spot where it winds its placid way through the County Meath. The year is 1690 and the ballad-makers have immortalized the date:

July the First, in Oldbridge town,
There was a grievous battle,
Where many a man lay on the ground
And the cannons, they did rattle.

A Dutchman and an Englishman were fighting for a throne on Irish soil, and in the Dutchman’s army, in addition to Hollanders, Danes, Prussians and French Huguenots, were two English cavalrymen, Sir Henry Ponsonby and William Shaw. Ponsonby was the son of a North-of-England man who had come to Ireland with Cromwell and who, after the Lord Protector in the course of that terrific visitation had dispatched the native Irish “to Hell or to Connaught,” settled down comfortably on the fat slice of rich Irish land with which his services were rewarded. Captain Shaw was a newcomer, a Puritan from Hampshire, who had arrived “with a sword in his hand and a Bible in his boots.” Dutch William won, saving Ireland from “popery, brass money and wooden shoes,” and Ponsonby and Shaw, who had fought shoulder-to-shoulder at the fording of the Boyne, got further fat rewards in the shape of spreading acres in the warm, comfortable, well-wooded County of Kilkenny.

The Ponsonbys prospered and consolidated their fortunes—no very difficult matter in a time of forfeiture and settlements—took their place in the Irish peerage as Earls of Bessborough, managed the King’s business in Ireland with complete efficiency, and gave their sons to the native Parliament, the Army, and the Protestant Church. Their neighbours, the Shaws, found in them patrons and protectors. Although they did not loom as large in Irish affairs as the great Ponsonbys, the Shaws lived a life of ease, comfort and security, a pleasant hunting-shooting-and-fishing life in the midst of rich pastures watered by the swift-flowing Nore. They may have been lesser gentry, but gentry they were, and part and parcel of England’s faithful Irish garrison. Their sons, too, became, as generation succeeded generation, soldiers, politicians, divines, or members of the more “respectable” professions. One of them, Robert Shaw, entered the Irish Parliament, displayed his independence and integrity by refusing a bribe to vote for the Union, founded a bank which came to be known as “Shaw’s Bank,” and was created a baronet in 1821.

Another Shaw—Bernard—who was a first cousin of Sir Robert, left the old home in Kilkenny somewhere in the seventeen-nineties, took up law, married a parson’s daughter in 1802, and died twenty-four years later, having begotten fifteen children in the interval, of whom eleven were living at the time of his death. Despite somewhat straitened circumstances, his widow carried on indomitably—helped by the wealthy Sir Robert who found her a cottage in a Dublin suburb called Terenure,^[3] not far from his own mansion at Bushy Park—and she brought up her eleven to believe in an Irish Protestant God, to remember that they were aristocrats to their finger-tips, and to revere the English connection.^[4] “There must,” G.B.S. wrote later apropos of her hard struggle, “have been some terribly lean years before the children got on their own feet. Certainly my father left me strongly under that impression.” Yet there was no actual poverty, for it was found possible to give the eldest son, William, a university education.

The third son, born on 30th December, 1814, was given the name George Carr. For him there was no university career nor is it likely that if he had been given one he would have gained very much from it. During the whole of his lifetime he was never seen to read anything more profound than a newspaper.^[5] He grew up to be a soft, easy-going man, with no sense of responsibility but with a heavily exaggerated sense of humour.^[6] His own misfortunes—and they were many—he regarded as some of the funniest things in life. He had a weak mouth, a pronounced squint—which Oscar Wilde’s father, Dublin’s most eminent oculist, vainly tried to cure^[7]—and a taste for the bottle. After losing his first job—a clerkship in an ironworks—he was pitchforked into a Government sinecure, but a few years later the sinecure was abolished and George Carr Shaw was pensioned off with £60 a year. Commuting the pension, he invested the proceeds in a small corn mill in an outlying part of Dublin called Dolphin’s Barn. Then, at the not unripe age of forty, he married Lucinda Elizabeth (“Bessie”) Gurley.

Bessie was the daughter of a County Dublin squireen who seemed to have stepped straight out of one of Charles Lever’s early novels.^[8] He had short ginger whiskers which are said to have “embroidered his neck rather than covered his chin and cheeks.” He could do anything with a horse, but nothing with money save squander it. When his wife died he handed over Bessie to an aunt for rearing. The aunt was a midget,^[9] a martinet, a woman of money, and a snob. She ruled Bessie autocratically, saw that she got the sort of education no Irish gentleman’s daughter should be without—which meant that she learnt to make no use whatever of her talents or her hands—and determined that she should marry at least an earl. “My mother,” wrote her son later, “was tyrannously taught French enough to recite one or two of La Fontaine’s fables; to play the piano the wrong way; to harmonize by rule from Logier’s Thoroughbass; to sit up straight and speak and dress and behave like a lady, and an Irish lady at that. She knew nothing of the value of money nor of housekeeping nor of hygiene nor of anything that could be left to servants or governesses or parents or solicitors or apothecaries or any other member of the retinue, indoor and outdoor, of a country house. She had great expectations from a humpbacked little aunt, a fairy-like creature with a will of iron, who had brought up her motherless niece with a firm determination to make her a paragon of good breeding, to achieve a distinguished marriage for her, and to leave her all her money as a dowry.” But Bessie proved a grievous disappointment; she revolted against the tyranny of little humpbacked Aunt Ellen and failed to become a duchess, or even a countess. Instead, on 19th June, 1852, she married George Carr Shaw. She was twenty-two.

The couple found a home at 3 (now 33), Synge Street, Dublin, and there, within four years, they produced three children—Lucy, Agnes and George Bernard. George Bernard was born on 26th July, 1856. A few days later he was baptized at the near-by St. Bride’s Church,^[10] where William George Carroll, who had married one of his maternal aunts, was rector. Another uncle, who had consented to be his godfather, having failed to turn up, the Rev. Mr. Carroll ordered the sexton to take his place.

There is no copy of the baptismal certificate in existence. St. Bride’s was taken over for secular uses many years ago and the other existing copy disappeared in the burning of the Four Courts in 1922.

(III)

Dublin, unlike Gaul, is divided into two parts, locally known as North Side and South Side. Even to-day the South Side, which lies on the left bank of the river, is regarded as the more respectable. In the ’sixties it was respectability itself. There, in such exclusive residential suburbs as Ballsbridge, Rathmines, Rathgar and Terenure, lived at least ninety per cent of Dublin’s well-to-do Protestant population. There, too, were to be found Dublin Castle, the seat of government, Trinity College, the two Protestant cathedrals, the National Gallery, St. Stephen’s Green, fashionable Grafton Street and the very fashionable Shelbourne Hotel. To cross Carlisle (not yet O’Connell) Bridge and rub shoulders with the Catholic residents of the North Side was a thing that Protestant old ladies would no more dream of doing than their early seventeenth-century ancestors would have dreamt of venturing beyond the city walls into the country of the ferocious O’Byrnes or O’Tooles. The Viceregal Lodge, to be sure, was in the Phœnix Park (which is North Side) but that could be reached in a closed carriage by a roundabout route.

The Dublin that young Bernard Shaw first opened his eyes upon was in every sense a garrison city. It contained six large military barracks, five prisons which were even larger, and a vast “Depot” in the Park, where members of that very efficient semi-military body, the Royal Irish Constabulary, might be seen at bayonet practice a couple of times a week. Ireland was still lying prostrated from the effects of the Great Famine of ’47, which had cost her more than a million dead, whilst nearly another million had fled across the Atlantic from a pestilence-stricken land. O’Connell and Repeal had passed away, the Young Irelanders were in exile, and Irish Nationalism had been reduced, in its most humiliating hour, to Sadlier and Keogh and “the Pope’s Brass Band.” But there were hidden fires burning; Fenianism was flowing through subterranean channels (it was to blaze out into open insurrection before young Shaw reached his twelfth birthday); and hardly a year passed in which the Habeas Corpus Act was not suspended. In 1856 Parnell was only ten years old and Gladstone, more concerned with Homeric literature than with Irish grievances, had not even begun to think of Irish Church Disestablishment or Home Rule.

Synge Street, of course, was South Side; no Shaw or Gurley would have lived anywhere else. But even in those days, when it was part of an outer and not, as it is to-day, of an inner suburb, it was not “good” South Side. With its five-roomed, kitchen-basement, yellow-brick houses and its location only a few hundred yards distant from the very ungreen banks of the Grand Canal, it could never have been anything except shabby genteel. The window-curtains might be clean and the door-knockers shining, but it was a street of city clerks,^[11] lower-grade civil servants, and not-so-well-to-do professional men. Number Three, Synge Street, was a world removed from the Big House at Bushy Park, Terenure^[12]—a mile or so farther on—where Sir Robert, soon to be succeeded by his brother, Sir Frederick, Recorder of Dublin, lived in ease and elegance.

(IV)

“I have,” G.B.S. has written, “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 count on my allegiance; I am English enough to be an inveterate Republican and Home Ruler. It is true that my grandfather was an Orangeman; but then his sister was an abbess, and his uncle, I am proud to say, was hanged as a rebel.”

That passage may help to explain some of the forces, hereditary and otherwise, that went to the making of Bernard Shaw; but it is very far from explaining everything. Shaw is no more a typical Irishman than Jonathan Swift or Theobald Wolfe Tone or Charles Stewart Parnell or Eamon de Valera. He is not even a typical Irish Protestant, nor was his upbringing that of a typically Irish Protestant home. On the other hand, he has very little in common with his Catholic and Nationalist fellow-countrymen; whoever it was said of him that “he was born on a bog and suckled on a shillelagh” was a thousand miles wide of the mark. Shaw never saw an Irish bog until he revisited Ireland for the first time some thirty years after leaving it, and shillelaghs had disappeared with Donnybrook Fair. Shaw is typical of nothing but Shaw.

His formative years were spent in an extraordinary atmosphere. The conditions at Synge Street had nothing about them of the rigid Irish Protestant convention: they were eccentric to the verge of anarchy (“anarchical,” indeed, is Shaw’s favourite description of them). Mrs. Shaw “went her own way with so complete a disregard and even unconsciousness of convention and scandal and prejudice that it was impossible to doubt her good faith and innocence, but it never occurred to her that other people, especially children, needed guidance or training, or that it mattered in the least what they ate or drank or what they did so long as they were not actively mischievous.” (G.B.S.) As for George Carr Shaw, he went from one drinking bout to another, continued to disgrace himself socially, paid occasional visits to the Corn Exchange, and watched his income dwindling slowly but steadily. His drinking was not done secretly or convivially: he neither kept a hidden store nor did he find congenial company at the local pub. “He was,” says his son, “a lonely drinker at the grocer-publican’s. He was never carried out blind; drink did not affect him that way, nor did he drink enough to take him quite off his legs. But he was quite unmistakably drunk, stupefied, apparently sleep-walking, and, if remonstrated with, apt to fly into sudden momentary rages in which he would snatch something up and dash it on the floor.” At other times when he had tippled too generously he would be moved to hilarity, and there was a comic occasion when he arrived home carrying a goose by the neck, mistook the gable wall for the front door, and was found outside laughing uproariously at his own blunder.^[13]

The social life of the Synge Street Shaws was severely circumscribed by the drinking habits of the head of the family. It was impossible to entertain a man who seldom arrived quite sober and who usually left quite disgracefully drunk. There was no welcome for him at Bushy Park House, where two butlers were kept, nor indeed at any of the other houses of the genteel Shaws. (Those who are interested in the wide periphery of G.B.S.’s uncles, aunts and cousins should consult that highly diverting—though not always accurate—book, Bernard’s Brethren, by Charles MacMahon Shaw, an Australian cousin, which is interleaved and pleasantly embellished with such comments by G.B.S. as: “Rubbish!”, “This is too silly,” “Charles, you are a liar!”) So the Synge Street establishment was thrown back upon its own resources and became self-centred and self-sufficient to an unusual degree.

There is no folk-lore about the boyhood of G.B.S. in Ireland—which is not surprising when we consider that he left it at twenty and that he has been away seventy years—but he himself has left plenty of material from which to reconstruct it, at any rate in its external aspects. Shaw has not indulged in auto-psychology to any great extent nor given us his little world depicted, in the modern autobiographical manner, within the limits of his personal movements and intimacies. Intimacies, indeed, were very few, for in a household where “there was neither hate nor love, fear or reverence,” each member of it naturally went his or her own way. The father tippled and laughed or raged, the mother, disillusioned from the beginning, soon devoted all her waking hours to what was to become her lifelong passion and her only salvation—music—and the children were handed over to nurses, governesses and apothecaries. Of intimate or emotional bonds between sisters and brother or between parents and children there appears to have been no trace whatever.

As a toddler, George Bernard was taken out by his nurse, who was supposed to bring him for walks along the canal banks or to show him the flowers in St. Stephen’s Green. But she came from the slums, and it was to slum tenements or to slum public-houses, where she met her friends and relations, that he was taken. A Dublin tenement is a very unlovely place to-day; what it must have been in the ’sixties is rather awful to contemplate. At any rate, those visits left an indelible impression on the child’s mind, instilling “a lifelong hatred of poverty, and the devotion of all my public life to the task of exterminating the poor and rendering their resurrection for ever impossible.”

His early education was partly the work of his uncle, the rector of St. Bride’s, and partly that of a governess, Miss Hill, who tried to give him a taste for poetry by reciting such lines as:

Stop: for thy tread is on an empire’s dust,

an attempt which, he says, only moved him and his sisters to derisive humour. She also taught him to add, subtract and multiply, but failed to teach him division, “because she kept saying ‘two into four, three into six,’ and so forth, without ever explaining what the word ‘into’ meant in this connection. This was explained to me on my first day at school, and I solemnly declare that it was the only thing I ever learnt at school.”^[14]

The school was called the Wesley Connexional (it is now Wesley College) but it was not by any means an exclusively Wesleyan establishment. It accepted pupils of all denominations except Catholics, and the majority of them, in fact, belonged to the still Established Church of Ireland. Shaw remembers it as a “damnable boy prison” and declares that his years there were a sheer waste of time. He went as a “day-boy,” not as a boarder, which meant that he had his afternoons free, and he hated it with a hatred which has not grown any less in retrospect. “Lessons were set me which I had to learn on pain of punishment not cruel enough to effect its purpose with boys who like me were free enough at home to have something more interesting to do than poring over unreadable school-books; but I was not taught manners or loyalties nor held to any standards of dress or care of my person. Discipline was confined to silence and sitting still, which did not prevent me from carrying on furtive conversations or fights with the boy sitting next, who might be a friend or foe.”

Shaw was no weakling at school and enjoyed his full share of fisticuffs in the playground and of juvenile gangsterdom in the streets. Untrammelled in any way by his “uncoercive” parents, he used his free half-day just as he liked, ignored his homework, and lied audaciously to his teachers when questioned about his negligence. His real education was being acquired elsewhere. At home there was a volume entitled The Manners and Tone of Good Society, and from it he learnt his table and company manners. And at home there was music—always music. His mother possessed an excellent mezzo-soprano voice, he himself and his two sisters could sing tolerably well, and there was, in addition to a piano, a profusion of other musical instruments always lying about.^[15] The front “parlour” at Synge Street was seldom silent of an evening and music came to play an all-important part—educative as well as recreational—in young Shaw’s life.

(V)

Suddenly a new figure appeared upon the scene, a man with the Victorian three-decker name of George John Vandaleur Lee. Lee lived in the next street and was a professional music-master. He was slightly lame, had black side-whiskers and a determined chin. His appearance at Synge Street was due to the fact that Mrs. Shaw had gone to him to have her voice trained.

Lee’s impact on the Shaw household was terrific. From the day of his arrival nothing counted save music. He was an indefatigable organizer of concerts and amateur opera and Mrs. Shaw he regarded as a discovery. Being a man of talent as well as a born teacher, he succeeded in getting the most out of her voice and soon she was appearing in all his productions as his prima donna and chorus-leader. Rehearsals were held regularly in the front parlour at Synge Street, to the increasing annoyance of the neighbours. Although the music, judged by contemporary standards in Dublin, was good, the din must have been fearful.^[16] Brass instruments were fashionable in those days and even before the coming of Lee there were weekly concerts at which Uncle William played the now-forgotten ophicleide, George Carr the trombone, Cousin Emily (daughter of the rector of St. Bride’s) the ’cello, and Aunt Charlotte the piano. It was enough to burst the walls of the little parlour asunder.^[17]

Something had to be done and the resolute and impetuous Lee did it. His brother with whom he shared a large house at Number One, Hatch Street, having died, he suggested to the Shaws that they should go and live with him. The proposal was accepted with alacrity, for the chaste flat-fronted Georgian house in Hatch Street—less than ten minutes’ walk from Synge Street—was large enough to prevent orchestral rehearsals becoming a terror to the neighbourhood. Besides, the arrangement was economical. So the Synge Street days came to an end and a very odd ménage à trois sprang into existence.^[18]

Young George Bernard took his part in all the feverish musical activities of Number One, Hatch Street. He had a good ear and although until he was fifteen, when the family broke up, he could neither play nor read a note of music he “could sing and whistle from end to end leading works by Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi.” He was, in fact, though he got no formal training whatever, steeped in music, and it would be difficult to overestimate the part that it played in moulding his intellect and his character. Other children were given fairy-tales in their cradles. To George Bernard they came, kindling his young imagination, through the operas of the great composers. Not only was Corno di Bassetto in the making, but that delicate sense of rhythm which is evident in every line that Shaw writes was being acquired.^[19]

The Lee-Shaw alliance was productive of another result which brought the youngster some of the happiest days of his boyhood. Eight or nine miles to the south of the city, on Dalkey Hill, there was a cottage for sale, and Lee bought it as a summer residence for Mrs. Shaw. The hill overlooks Killiney Bay and is one of the loveliest spots in a lovely coast-line. There, for the first time, young Shaw was able to drink in natural beauty without stint and he drank it in greedily. He roamed over the gorse-clad hill-side until every rock and every goat-path was familiar to him; he looked across the blue waters to where Howth Head pushes its whale-nose into the sea; entranced, he lay on the grassy summit contemplating the curving silver shore of the bay down below; a bay that Dubliners are fond of comparing with the Bay of Naples, usually to the latter’s disadvantage. On sultry days he would race down to a spot on the shingly strand known as the White Rock, strip, and plunge into the buoyant waves. It was on Killiney beach that he acquired the passion for bathing that he retained until he was nearly eighty.^[20]

A mile and a half to the north lay Kingstown Harbour, snug within its breakwater, one of the gateways of Ireland, its waters dotted with the white sails of yachts, its skies blotted out every now and then by the smoke of the Holyhead steamers. And, in a direct line to the east, some seventy miles beyond the mists of the Irish Channel, lay the other great island—John Bull’s Own—an island that had given him his ancestors, an island that claimed all the allegiance of the class from which he was sprung, an island that was beginning to enter more and more into his waking dreams.

(VI)

Two important events happened when he was fifteen. Lee went to London where he was followed shortly afterwards by Mrs. Shaw, who decided that she could earn a living there by teaching singing; George Bernard finished his schooling and got his first job.

The home was broken up. The youngest girl, Agnes, who had been ailing for a long time, was taken to the Isle of Wight, where she died in a sanatorium. Lucy went to live with her mother in the Fulham Road.^[21] The furniture at Hatch Street and the cottage at Dalkey were sold and George Carr and his son removed to lodgings at No. 61, Harcourt Street.

The whole current of George Bernard’s life was transformed by these sudden, sweeping changes. Although his afternoons were no longer free his evenings were entirely his own. His father, now elderly, had at last conquered his drinking habits and was, in fact, a rabid teetotaller. But the saving effected by his abstinence was more than offset by the almost entire disappearance of his income. The little that now came from the corn mill was barely sufficient to meet the Harcourt Street landlady’s weekly demands.

The job that had been found for George Bernard was that of junior clerk in an estate-agent’s office in Molesworth Street. Molesworth Street—South Side, of course—was, and still is, very respectable. Even to-day, with its Grand Lodge of Freemasons and its many buildings dedicated to Church of Ireland uses, it is what is called in Ireland “black Protestant.” The world that the new junior clerk found there was—to him—as alarming as it was strange. The monotonous daily routine, the endless preoccupation with figures and forms and ledgers, the sensation of finding that he had suddenly become a cog in a wheel—all that was disquieting to a youth who had come straight from an “anarchic” home. On the other hand, he saw wider horizons opening out. Argumentative from birth (his continual Why? Why? Why? as a child had nearly driven his father mad^[22]) and armed with a questing mind, he now found himself in a position for the first time where he could pit his wit and his knowledge and his theories against those of other young men. More often than not he had the best of the argument. In many things he was better informed than most of his fellow-clerks. Shakespeare and Bunyan, Byron and Shelley, these and a host of the other immortals he had read and re-read and his literary taste and æsthetic sense had matured with phenomenal rapidity. He could discuss art with a more than juvenile assurance, for he had taken to roaming through the halls and corridors of Ireland’s National Gallery, which even then was one of the world’s more important lesser collections, and to studying the masterpieces so nobly housed there. And when it came to music he could, of course, leave them all “standing.”

One subject constantly cropped up—religion. In a typically Shavian piece of exaggeration G.B.S. has declared that “he was a free-thinker before he knew how to think.” Actually, he was brought up to be a good little Irish Protestant and as a child he went to church and Sunday school and sang hymns and said his prayers, and learnt that all Catholics went to hell when they died. His early reverence for the Bible was so great that one day when he was buying a pennyworth of sweets in a little shop near Synge Street and saw the shopkeeper tear a leaf out of a battered copy of the Holy Book to wrap them up in, he was so horrified that he half expected to see the man struck by lightning. “All the same I took the sweets and ate them, for to my Protestant mind the shopkeeper, as a Roman Catholic, would go to hell as such, Bible or no Bible, and was no gentleman anyhow.”

It was his father’s peculiar method of imparting religious instruction that first undermined his belief. George Carr kept up the custom of family prayers until his son was about ten and would often read out Bible stories for the boy’s edification. But having done so he would, on occasion, moved by his love of anti-climax, hurl the book across the room, exclaiming: “It’s all a pack of damned lies!” So G.B.S., as he tells us, grew out of his early beliefs as he was promoted from petticoats to knickerbockers: “the rest of my development was in a family atmosphere so sceptical, Bohemian, anarchic, and on its educational side æsthetic, that in my teens I was a professed atheist, with no reverence whatever for the Trinity, but a profound and lasting respect for Michael Angelo and Raphael, for Handel, Mozart and Beethoven.” The whole theological structure which he had been brought up to believe as the most permanent of all things crashed to pieces one summer’s evening as he was wandering under the stars on Dalkey Hill. “I suddenly asked myself why I went on repeating my prayer every night, when, as I put it, I did not believe in it. Being thus brought to book by my intellectual conscience, I felt obliged in common honesty to refrain from superstitious practices; and that night, for the first time since I could speak, I did not say my prayers.”

The “boy atheist,” as can be imagined, created something of a minor sensation in Protestant Molesworth Street. His fellow-clerks, whatever they believed, were rigid respecters of the conventions and they were not a little shocked to hear a red-headed youth of fifteen or sixteen boldly proclaiming that there was no God and describing the Origin of Species as “Revelation.” When he calmly dissected the Thirty-Nine Articles and threw them in their faces with smiling audacity, there was little that they could do about it, for although he was younger than any of them he was more than their match in knowledge and quick-wittedness. He quoted Shelley and Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft at them, and there was no reply. All that they knew of Shelley was “Ode to a Skylark” which they had read in their school-books, and of the other two they had never even heard.^[23]

As time went on they left his convictions—or his lack of them—alone and were content to regard him as an uncommonly bright, provocative young man, with whom it was not safe to try an argument. At his job he was thoroughly efficient and his starting salary of eighteen shillings a month had increased by the time he was nineteen to £80 a year. He had mastered the problems of ledger work without any difficulty; he had changed his sloping schoolboy hand to the distinctive upright one we know to-day in order to achieve greater legibility in the cash-book; and although when his seniors were out he was not above conducting an amateur operatic class in the back office he was sufficiently well thought of by them to be given the post of cashier when it fell vacant.

Yet he was far from happy. The estate office might not be such a “damnable prison” as the Wesley Connexional School, but a prison it was for all that. His very success alarmed him; for he was making good in a job and an environment that had few attractions for him. Art was his only religion and it was shut out by the walls of his office. He wanted freedom, he wanted scope, he wanted escape from the routine and the narrowness of Molesworth Street into a vastly wider world; and he knew that he would not find that world in the Dublin of the ’seventies.

Already, although he did not know it, he had a means of escape in his hands; for did not Thomas of Ercledoune foretell the day when the grey goose-quill would rule the world?

When those noted revivalists, Moody and Sankey, visited Dublin in 1875, they created quite a sensation amongst the Protestant populace and young Shaw was amongst the big crowd that thronged to hear them. Having listened to their profound oratory and noted the reactions of the audience, he went home and composed a letter which he sent to the editor of Public Opinion. The editor, little aware that his unknown correspondent—who simply signed himself “S”—was a mere youth of eighteen and a half, printed it. It is worth giving in full:

Sir,

In reply to your correspondent “J.R.D.” as to the effect of the “wave of evangelism,” I beg to offer the following observations on the late “revival” in Dublin, of which I was a witness.

As the enormous audiences drawn to the evangelistic services have been referred to as a proof of their efficacy, I will enumerate some of the motives which induced many persons to go. It will then be seen that they were not of a religious, but of a secular, not to say profane, character.

Predominant was the curiosity excited by the great reputation of the evangelists and the stories widely circulated of the summary annihilation by epilepsy and otherwise of sceptics who had openly proclaimed their doubts of Mr. Moody’s divine mission.

Another motive exhibits a peculiar side of human nature. The services took place in the Exhibition Building, the entry to which was connected in the public mind with the expenditure of a certain sum of money. But Messrs. Moody and Sankey opened the building “for nothing,” and the novelty, combined with the curiosity, made the attraction irresistible.

I mention these influences particularly as I believe they have hitherto been almost ignored. The audiences were, as a rule, respectable; and as Mr. Moody’s orations were characterized by an excess of vehement assertion and a total absence of logic, respectable audiences were precisely those which were least likely to derive any benefit from them.

It is to the rough, to the outcast of the streets, that such “awakenings” should be addressed, and those members of the aristocracy who by their presence tend to raise the meetings above the sphere of such outcasts are merely diverting the evangelistic vein into channels where it is wasted, its place being already supplied; and as, in the dull routine of hard work, I think it would be well for clergymen, who are nothing if not conspicuous, to render themselves so, in this instance, by their absence.

The unreasoning mind of the people is too apt to connect a white tie with a dreary church service, capped by a sermon of platitudes, and it is more likely to appreciate “the gift of the gab”—the possession of which by Mr. Moody nobody will deny—than that of the Apostolic Succession, which he lacks.

Respecting the effect of the revival on individuals I may mention that it has a tendency to make them highly objectionable members of society, and induces their unconverted friends to desire a speedy reaction, which either soon takes place or the revived one relapses slowly into his previous benighted condition as the effect fades, and although many young men have been snatched from careers of dissipation by Mr. Moody’s exhortations, it remains doubtful whether the change is not merely in the nature of the excitement rather than in the moral nature of the individual. Hoping that these remarks may elucidate further opinions on the subject,

I remain, sir, yours, etc.,
S.

The writer of that letter, as remarkable for its maturity and ironic content as it was for its pungent, antithetic style, was obviously not destined to spend his days poring over ledgers and totting up rental accounts. Apart from his yearning for freedom, the youth must have been conscious of his own talents; conscious, too, that before he found an outlet for them a complete break would have to be made.^[24] Within less than a year after the publication of the letter he had come to a decision. He gave a month’s notice, and in the first week of April, 1876, he stepped on the Holyhead boat.

It was good-bye to Ireland—but there were no tears. Ireland had given him something: his sharp wit, his unconventional ideas, his realistic sense of life, his knowledge of music, his horror of poverty, his love of beauty, his contempt for shams, his brogue; maybe his red hair and his grey-blue eyes. But it held no links the breaking of which cost a single pang. He was young, the world was before him and his eyes were on the future. Yet, as the boat ploughed its way through the waters of Dublin Bay he must have looked back—as everybody looks back—at the country he was leaving. And the last things he saw were Killiney’s curving strand and the White Rock where he used to bathe and the summit of the gorse-clad hill where he had spent his happiest days and where, under God’s stars, he had renounced God.

(VII)

How would Shaw’s career have shaped itself if he had been content to live in the land of his birth? It is an interesting, if unprofitable, speculation.

Had the national spirit not been at its lowest ebb; had the tempest of the Parnellite movement come in the early ’seventies instead of the ’eighties to sweep away despair and lethargy; had the Celtic Renaissance, with its new creative impulses, arrived thirty years before it did, making Dublin one of the great cultural centres of the world; had Douglas Hyde and the Gaelic League been there to show Ireland her hidden antique treasures of song and folk-lore: had any of these things happened, the genius of Shaw might have found more than one outlet at home. But Yeats and Synge and the Abbey Theatre were still a long way off; the Gaelic cultural heritage was still the close preserve of scholars; James Joyce was unimagined and unimaginable; and the Ireland in which G.B.S. grew to young manhood had little or nothing to offer the artist. But even if it had it is extremely doubtful if it would have held him. Shaw is a natural Citizen of the World (although, characteristically, he has in recent years taken out Irish citizenship) and nothing less than the world is big enough to be his province.

Yet Ireland is proud that through all his days he has insisted on remaining an Irishman and to-day it associates itself with men of light and learning all over the world in sending him felicitations on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. No longer can he say, as he said with rueful cynicism forty years ago, that “the word ‘Shaw’ conveys nothing to my countrymen save a well-known brand of Limerick bacon.” A lot of water has flowed under the bridges of the Liffey since then. The country that is no longer John Bull’s Other Island has taken him to its heart; his books are a distinguished part of the Irish library; his lightest utterances are read with interest. Within the past few years a Bernard Shaw Society has sprung up in Dublin (all Ireland chuckled to see it helped on its way by what a Connaughtman would call “a left-handed kick” from the man in whose honour it was founded!). Bernard Shaw is “news” in the land of his birth as he is everywhere else.

There have been times when his irreverence has shocked us and when we have winced under the lash of his tongue—for he has, as we say in Ireland, “a tongue would clip a hedge”—but we are not behindhand in admiring his genius or recognizing his standing in the world of intellect and letters, nor have we forgotten how, at some vital and terrible moments of Ireland’s recent history, when many who might have spoken were silent, the voice of Bernard Shaw rang out, clear and courageous, in her defence. But, Ireland apart, Irishmen will join wholeheartedly in saluting a very great man, a man who has waged incessant war against oppression and injustice, who has always been ready to defend the weak against the strong, who has ruthlessly exposed sham and hypocrisy, and who has never once lent the support of his pen to a mean or unworthy cause.