ave quoted, it is a very curious fact that
Bernard Shaw is almost entirely without paradox. Moreover, he cannot
even understand a paradox. And more than this, paradox is about the only
thing in the world that he does not understand. All his splendid vistas
and startling suggestions arise from carrying some one clear principle
further than it has yet been carried. His madness is all consistency,
not inconsistency. As the point can hardly be made clear without
examples, let us take one example, the subject of education. Shaw has
been all his life preaching to grown-up people the profound truth that
liberty and responsibility go together; that the reason why freedom is
so often easily withheld, is simply that it is a terrible nuisance. This
is true, though not the whole truth, of citizens; and so when Shaw
comes to children he can only apply to them the same principle that he
has already applied to citizens. He begins to play with the Herbert
Spencer idea of teaching children by experience; perhaps the most
fatuously silly idea that was ever gravely put down in print. On that
there is no need to dwell; one has only to ask how the experimental
method is to be applied to a precipice; and the theory no longer exists.
But Shaw effected a further development, if possible more fantastic. He
said that one should never tell a child anything without letting him
hear the opposite opinion. That is to say, when you tell Tommy not to
hit his sick sister on the temple, you must make sure of the presence of
some Nietzscheite professor, who will explain to him that such a course
might possibly serve to eliminate the unfit. When you are in the act of
telling Susan not to drink out of the bottle labelled "poison," you must
telegraph for a Christian Scientist, who will be ready to maintain that
without her own consent it cannot do her any harm. What would happen to
a child brought up on Shaw's principle I cannot conceive; I should think
he would commit suicide in his bath. But that is not here the question.
The point is that this proposition seems quite sufficiently wild and
startling to ensure that its author, if he escapes Hanwell, would reach
the front rank of journalists, demagogues, or public entertainers. It is
a perfect paradox, if a paradox only means something that makes one
jump. But it is not a paradox at all in the sense of a contradiction. It
is not a contradiction, but an enormous and outrageous consistency, the
one principle of