[54] George Bernard Shaw: _The Sanity of Art_. By courtesy of the publishers, Boni & Liveright.
The problem of giving directions for making or doing something, or of explaining the working of an organization, is not always easy to solve. Most difficulties, however, occur through lack of considering just what the problem involves, and through lack of sufficiently simplifying the material. Thus, when you ask an old man in a strange city where the post-office is, he is likely to reply somewhat as follows: "You keep on just as you are going for a little ways, and then turn down a narrow street on the right and go along for four blocks, and then turn to your left and go until you come to a square, and then go across it and down a side street and through an office building, and then it's the stone building on the corner of the second street to your right." You stroke your chin, meditate a bit, and, if you are polite, thank your informant for his kind intentions. Then you ask the next person whom you meet to tell you where the post-office is. The old man meant well, of course, but he failed to simplify. So did the author of the little book that Johnny received for Christmas mean well when he explained how to make a beautiful chemical effect. But Johnny, who was a fairly impetuous youth, did not stop to read the footnote at the end which warned against working near a fire. When he was seraphically pouring his chemicals together near the old oil lamp in the "shop" there came a flash, a deafening roar--and little Johnny had no time either to examine footnotes or, after the smoke had cleared, for _post-mortem_ complaints. The trouble lay in the fact that the author did not give Johnny the necessary information at the essential time.
It seems that neither piety nor wit will suffice to locate post-offices or direct experiments or explain machines. Better than either of these is the ability to make the mechanism, the process, the organization transparently clear, with each bit of information given at exactly the proper moment. For, since the object of such explanation as attempts to make clear is primarily information, the main quality of the writing should be clearness. Everything that stands in the way of this quality should be made to surrender to explanation. If the subject is itself interesting or remarkable, the facts may speak for themselves, as in an account of the nebular hypothesis; if the subject is merely common, as for example the force pump, the primary aim should be clearness. Pleasing presentation, however desirable, is secondary. No amount of pleasant reading on the subject of making photographs, the working of periscopes, the organization of literary societies will be of value if at the end the reader has not a well-ordered idea of how to go to work or of how the thing of which you treat is operated.