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

84 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
mits suicide but that she continues to live” (1193). Much of Shaw’s admiration
for Chekhov was prompted by the Russian’s ability to depict this
sort of ridiculously pathetic tragedy. When Shaw said that “the tragedy of
modern life is that nothing happens, and that the resultant dulness does
not kill” he might well have been describing Chekhov, although at the time
he was not acquainted with the Russian master (1194). Later, Shaw declared
that “everything we write in England seems sawdust after Tchekov
and the rest of them [the Russians]” (Collected Letters 3:439). Shaw objected
to the conventional happy ending as much as to the tragic one, and
his own comic endings, even when they might appear conventional, leave
something unresolved.
One reason for this objection to “endings” again shows his differences
with conventional realists. The curtain came down, he said, when the audience
had seen enough “to draw the moral”—or in other words, when they
had heard the conclusion of the argument. An “interpreter of life,” as he
insisted a dramatist must be, is someone who presents a case, even if the
argument is in the form of an imaginative recreation of living people in
real situations. “There is only one way of dramatizing an idea; and that is
by putting on the stage a human being possessed by that idea, yet none the
less a human being with all the human impulses which make him akin and
therefore interesting to us” (Perfect Wagnerite 28). The ideas that Shaw
wished to dramatize, however optimistic they might be, invariably contained
the urgent message that things are not acceptable as they are and
must be changed; the point of the traditional ending, whether tragic or
comic, was to leave the audience satisfied with the way things are. He was
opposed to “endings,” in the traditional sense, because they would deny
the truth of his message. In practice he often came close to a conventional
comic ending but only rarely approached the expectations the audience
had of tragedy, not merely because of his personal inclination to comedy
but as an expression of his philosophical outlook as well. He despaired of
the cynical pessimism which insisted that clear vision necessarily saw the
world as an irredeemable cesspool, always maintaining that “I see plenty
of good in the world working itself out as fast as the idealists will allow it”
(Pref. Pleasant Plays 1:385). He urged only that honest optimism replace
idealistic romantic conventions. Nowhere is the difference between the
Shavian view and the conventional view clearer than in the battle between
Shaw and the traditionalists over the ending of Pygmalion. To a realist, the
ending provided by Shaw is a happy ending—the only one possible—and
that engineered for Gabriel Pascal’s film version of the play is a recipe for