free thought carried to a point to which no other sane
man would consent to carry it. Exactly what Shaw does not understand is
the paradox; the unavoidable paradox of childhood. Although this child
is much better than I, yet I must teach it. Although this being has much
purer passions than I, yet I must control it. Although Tommy is quite
right to rush towards a precipice, yet he must be stood in the corner
for doing it. This contradiction is the only possible condition of
having to do with children at all; anyone who talks about a child
without feeling this paradox might just as well be talking about a
merman. He has never even seen the animal. But this paradox Shaw in his
intellectual simplicity cannot see; he cannot see it because it is a
paradox. His only intellectual excitement is to carry one idea further
and further across the world. It never occurs to him that it might meet
another idea, and like the three winds in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, they
might make a night of it. His only paradox is to pull out one thread or
cord of truth longer and longer into waste and fantastic places. He does
not allow for that deeper sort of paradox by which two opposite cords of
truth become entangled in an inextricable knot. Still less can he be
made to realise that it is often this knot which ties safely together
the whole bundle of human life.

This blindness to paradox everywhere perplexes his outlook. He cannot
understand marriage because he will not understand the paradox of
marriage; that the woman is all the more the house for not being the
head of it. He cannot understand patriotism, because he will not
understand the paradox of patriotism; that one is all the more human for
not merely loving humanity. He does not understand Christianity because
he will not understand the paradox of Christianity; that we can only
really understand all myths when we know that one of them is true. I do
not under-rate him for this anti-paradoxical temper; I concede that much
of his finest and keenest work in the way of intellectual purification
would have been difficult or impossible without it. But I say that here
lies the limitation of that lucid and compelling mind; he cannot quite
understand life, because he will not accept its contradictions.

Nor is it by any means descriptive of Shaw to call him a Socialist; in
so far as that word can be extended to cover an ethical attitude. He is
the least social of all Socialists; and I pity the Socialis