Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

A Creed for Living 7
posed to the idolatry of science and democracy (and anything else, for that
matter), but the simpler and more shocking view has made the lasting impression.
Shaw once chided a “man of genius” for his lack of temper and
diplomacy in dealing with those of inferior vision, but he could well have
heeded the admonition himself (Pref. Apple Cart 6:276).
He seems to have concluded very early on that there was such a gap
between the way he saw things and the way the rest of humanity saw them
that straightforward communication would be impossible. Writing of the
hazards of autobiography in an early autobiographical essay he declared
that the difference between the way he saw the world and the way the rest
of humanity saw it was so great that he could not be certain whether he
was mad or sane (Sixteen Self Sketches 74).
In the preface to the Pleasant Plays (written in the same year, 1898)
Shaw again refers to the inability of the public to understand him. “I could
explain the matter easily enough if I chose; but the result would be that the
people who misunderstand the plays would misunderstand the explanation
ten times more” (1:383). Convinced that a straightforward exposition
of his ideas was impossible, he invented strategies to provoke the public,
not into accepting his view of the world but merely into looking in his
direction, into starting along a path that might someday lead them there.
By and large success evaded him.
The conviction that the public was incapable of understanding his ideas
may be at the root of one of the more curious Shavian contradictions. Although
Shaw was to use many farcical elements in his own plays, he
strongly objected to the conventional “farcical comedies” of the late nineteenth
century as being mechanical and fundamentally inhuman. He complained
of the Savoy Operas on much the same grounds but also objected
specifically to Gilbert’s “paradoxical wit,” declaring that he was “cursed”
with the same ability, and “could paradox Mr Gilbert’s head off were I not
convinced that such trifling is morally unjustifiable” (London Music in
1888–89 283).
Shaw was aware, of course, that his public would savor this remark as a
particularly exquisite paradox coming as it did from the pen of one of the
most extravagant paradoxers around. It is exquisite since the paradox is
used to explain the reason for Shavian paradox. His jests, he is saying, are
intensely serious. He is so serious as to be impatient with frivolous jesting
because of its moral irresponsibility. He even claimed that his paradoxical
wit was involuntary, a consequence of the intellectual gulf separating him
from the public: