Excerpt from George Bernard Shaw: A Critical Study
A few years ago I was invited to break a courteous lance with Mr G. K. Chesterton. The ensuing experience - the uncomfortable feeling that one was wasting good blows on a display of fireworks - is instinctively recalled by an invitation to discuss Mr G. B. Shaw. One needs, however, little acquaintance with the two to discover a large and important difference. In Chesterton"s work it is difficult to dissociate the wit from the thought; in Shaw the pyrotechnic element is but the advertisement of a very serious and original view of life, which existed before the humour, and can easily be formulated apart from it. The common habit of linking the names of the two humorists as "birds of paradox" is unsound. Paradox is truth disguised as untruth; and the disguise must be something subtler than exaggeration and more frivolous than honest error. But most of what is regarded as paradox in Shaw"s personal expressions is either a strategical exaggeration of what he believes to be a fact or a sincere conviction which is so unusual as to seem insincere.
Shaw has a set of entirely original first principles, and these send their branching arteries through the whole mass of his publications and pronouncements.
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