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

A Playwright’s Progress 87
Shaw is not accusing Pinero, who was unquestionably talented at painting
what he saw, of being an unskilled observer, and the fact that his audiences
generally wore lenses of the same moral tint as his meant that his reputation
for faithful portrayal was—as far as it went—perfectly justified. Shaw
admits this: “Mr. Pinero . . . is . . . simply an adroit describer of people as the
ordinary man sees and judges them” (272). The reason Shaw’s characters
still seem vivid and alive after nearly one hundred years and Pinero’s (by
and large) do not is simply because we have changed the color of our lenses
(not, alas, that we have dispensed with them). The advantage of portraying
characters from their own point of view is not that you prevent the audience
from seeing them through spectacles of conventional ideas, for you
cannot stop them. You might provide details that will be difficult to fit into
preconceived notions and even provoke some change in attitudes. You can
certainly avoid flattering conventional prejudices. Ultimately people will
observe your characters through the same moral eyeglasses as they do real
people but only if you have presented them as real people. If you have
designed them for a particular style of lens, they will appear false when the
style changes, even though for the moment the average person will declare
them to be more accurate depictions than those painted without distortions
at all.
To portray a character from her own point of view is not the same as to
show her in the kind of flattering setting and dressed in the self-justifying
moral garments she might herself have chosen for a formal portrait. You
must observe her carefully and paint what you see rather than how you
feel about what you see. You must also ask why she does what she does but
must never couch the answer in moralistic terms. The answer to “Why did
she leave her husband?” cannot be “Because she is a faithless wretch” (or,
for that matter, “fearless idealist”). The scientific realist objects that to
delve into personal motivation is to go beyond what can actually be observed
onto the subjective grounds of interpretation; Shaw answers that
no artist can avoid interpreting according to his understanding and assumptions
and that it cannot be helped in any case, for the spring of human
action lies in human motivation.
Realism and the Higher Type
Shaw’s concern with motivation explains another difference between him
and the realists of Zola’s school. Becker claims that realism “seems to contain
a kind of implicit Benthamite assumption that the life lived by the
greatest number is somehow the most real” and quotes Maupassant as