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

86 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
moral equality, the logical result of seeing that moral epithets are only
distorting lenses with which we obscure our vision of real human beings.
He equated the “inevitable return to nature” of all good literary art with
the elimination of heroes and villains (Quintessence 214). He summed up
the defense of his realism in Arms and the Man by declaring that “the
whole novelty” of the play “lies in the fact that it is void of malice to my
fellow creatures, and laboriously exact as to all essential facts” (“Dramatic
Realist” 339). In the same vein, he insisted in a letter to Archer that his
“whole secret is that I have got clean through the old categories of good &
evil, and no longer use them even for dramatic effect.” He implies that this
makes him more a realist than Ibsen, who, he says, “is by old habit a pessimist”
(Collected Letters 1:427). This notion is most eloquently expressed
when he lectures audiences on how to understand the characters of the
new drama: “When you have called Mrs Alving an emancipated woman or
an unprincipled one, Alving a debauchee or a victim of society, Nora a fearless
and noble-hearted woman or a shocking little liar and an unnatural
mother, Helmer a selfish hound or a model husband and father, according
to your bias, you have said something which is at once true and false, and
in both cases perfectly idle” (Quintessence 198). For Shaw, this is the core
and essence of dramatic realism. A painter with astigmatism will produce
distorted works of art, and a playwright who sees people as “selfish
hounds” or “model husbands” will produce distorted characters and thus
unrealistic plays. The dramatist—and the actor—must create the part
“from its own point of view” (Drama Observed 2:488). When you start
out with judgments you set a dark glass of moralism between you and
your subject which will prevent an honest depiction. Shaw was right to
believe that the fact that “with reasonably sound specimens, the more intimately
I know people the better I like them” is what allowed him to be a
realistic dramatist because the opposite inclination is what leads one to
prefer “stage monsters—walking catalogues of the systematised virtues—
to his own species” (“Dramatic Realist” 326). Such monsters might as well
be catalogs of vices, which is the point of Shaw’s criticism of Sir Arthur
Wing Pinero in his oft-quoted observation about The Second Mrs. Tanqueray:
“The moment the point is reached at which the comparatively
common gift of ‘an eye for character’ has to be supplemented by the higher
dramatic gift of sympathy with character—of the power of seeing the
world from the point of view of others instead of merely describing or
judging them from one’s own point of view in terms of the conventional
systems of morals, Mr Pinero breaks down” (Drama Observed 1:271).