Desmond MacCarthy, whom I tried to persuade to write a new appreciation of Shaw in old age, noticed a real deterioration in Shaw himself. The Shaw who had praised Mussolini and justified Hitler grew increasingly irresponsible in suggesting that people who were a nuisance should be killed. This strain in Shaw, and his characteristic inconsistency when he dropped back suddenly into individualism, after maintaining the State's right to liquidate anyone it disapproved of, had been growing steadily stronger from Major Barbara onwards. He ceased to have a genuine humanism such as he had shown in the splendid preface to John Bull's Other Island. In general, re-reading Shaw, MacCarthy said he could find nothing but "a chaos of clear ideas".

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Desmond MacCarthy, whom I tried to persuade to write a new appreciation of Shaw in old age, noticed a real deterioration in Shaw himself. The Shaw who had praised Mussolini and justified Hitler grew increasingly irresponsible in suggesting that people who were a nuisance should be killed. This strain in Shaw, and his characteristic inconsistency when he dropped back suddenly into individualism, after maintaining the State's right to liquidate anyone it disapproved of, had been growing steadily stronger from Major Barbara onwards. He ceased to have a genuine humanism such as he had shown in the splendid preface to John Bull's Other Island. In general, re-reading Shaw, MacCarthy said he could find nothing but "a chaos of clear ideas"." in the context of "Kingsley Martin, Editor: A Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931-45 (1968), p. 110" to mean that wisdom is timeless.