ence to perceive it, has not the slow
patience to explain it. Mystical dogmas are much of this kind. Dogmas
are often spoken of as if they were signs of the slowness or endurance
of the human mind. As a matter of fact, they are marks of mental
promptitude and lucid impatience. A man will put his meaning mystically
because he cannot waste time in putting it rationally. Dogmas are not
dark and mysterious; rather a dogma is like a flash of lightning--an
instantaneous lucidity that opens across a whole landscape. Of the same
nature are Irish bulls; they are summaries which are too true to be
consistent. The Irish make Irish bulls for the same reason that they
accept Papal bulls. It is because it is better to speak wisdom
foolishly, like the Saints, rather than to speak folly wisely, like the
Dons.

This is the truth about mystical dogmas and the truth about Irish bulls;
it is also the truth about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw. Each of them
is an argument impatiently shortened into an epigram. Each of them
represents a truth hammered and hardened, with an almost disdainful
violence until it is compressed into a small space, until it is made
brief and almost incomprehensible. The case of that curt remark about
Ireland and Yorkshire is a very typical one. If Mr. Shaw had really
attempted to set out all the sensible stages of his joke, the sentence
would have run something like this: "That I am an Irishman is a fact of
psychology which I can trace in many of the things that come out of me,
my fastidiousness, my frigid fierceness and my distrust of mere
pleasure. But the thing must be tested by what comes from me; do not try
on me the dodge of asking where I came from, how many batches of three
hundred and sixty-five days my family was in Ireland. Do not play any
games on me about whether I am a Celt, a word that is dim to the
anthropologist and utterly unmeaning to anybody else. Do not start any
drivelling discussions about whether the word Shaw is German or
Scandinavian or Iberian or Basque. You know you are human; I know I am
Irish. I know I belong to a certain type and temper of society; and I
know that all sorts of people of all sorts of blood live in that society
and by that society; and are therefore Irish. You can take your books of
anthropology to hell or to Oxford." Thus gently, elaborately and at
length, Mr. Shaw would have explained his meaning, if he had thought it
worth his while. As he did not he merely flung the