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

A Playwright’s Progress 83
My plays are studies in the natural history of mankind: I am simply
a dramatic Buffon or St Hilaire. When you read Buffon’s description
of the Horse you do not begin to ask whether Buffon regarded the
Horse as a triumph of speed, or a triumph of traction power, or a
triumph of fidelity; you understand that he is simply trying to shew
you what sort of animal a horse is. Well, in Candida I am simply
trying to shew you the sort of animal the people in Candida are. I take
a great interest in animals of that sort, just as Buffon did in animals
in general; and I write for the gratification of people who share my
interest. (Collected Letters 2:668)
This passage shows his differences as well as his similarities, for while he
presents himself as a “naturalist,” his first concern is with human “animals”
in and of themselves, while a Zola would be at least as interested in
the environmental forces that (presumably) made them what they are. The
assumptions that an artist brings to his work must affect his perceptions of
the objects of his study. As Zola said, “A work of art will never be more
than a corner of life seen through a temperament” (198). When Shaw
looked at the sort of “animal the people in Candida are,” he saw not puppets
helplessly shaped by a relentlessly mechanistic universe but agents
of something mysterious called a “will,” which obeys its own rules and
shapes its surroundings at least as much as the environment shapes will.
He saw manifestations of the Life Force, imperfect but divine.
Slice-of-Life
Shaw even praised the technique of the “slice-of-life,” by which he meant
the absence of neat, satisfying endings, and not the sort of fiction that pretends
to exhibit to the public a kind of arbitrary “core sample” of life as it
is lived. For Shaw, “slice-of-life” meant plays without either “catastrophes”
or endings. By “catastrophe” he meant the sort of sensational abnormality
familiar to fans of crime stories. The “endings” were the traditional
weddings and slaughters: “The moment the dramatist gives up accidents
and catastrophes, and takes ‘slices of life’ as his material, he finds himself
committed to plays that have no endings. The curtain no longer comes
down on a hero slain or married: it comes down when the audience has
seen enough of the life presented to it to draw the moral, and must either
leave the theatre or miss its last train” (Pref. Three Plays by Brieux 1194).
On more than one occasion Shaw took Ibsen to task for concluding his
plays with corpses. “The tragedy of Hedda in real life is not that she com-