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

88 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
asserting a writer’s obligation to “always incline to the mean, to the general
rule” (25). The naturalists gravitated to the lowest common human
denominator because that brought them, they thought, “nearer to nature
and the savage state” (24). Shaw sought his subjects among the more intelligent,
witty, articulate, and creative specimens of humankind. One of his
reasons was a sound naturalistic one: he was painting the people he knew.
His portraits were drawn from nature, and he had the good fortune to
know intimately many fascinating and exceptional people (Collected Letters
2:34). But the more profound reason is that Shaw saw the higher type,
not the lower, as closer to the heart of nature. Healthy, fully nourished
souls are closer to the truth about the human spirit than are brutalized and
degraded specimens. Also, since Shaw was concerned with the springs of
human behavior, seen from the point of view of the subject, it helped to
choose subjects who were particularly articulate.
We thus come to another point of divergence from conventional realism.
In his early years as a playwright, Shaw proclaimed his realism because
his audiences were bewildered by the attempt to “substitute natural
history for conventional ethics and romantic logic,” but he knew that by
the time they became familiar with the novelty of real characters, they
would also see his “stage tricks” and “stage puppets” for what they were
(Pref. Plays for Puritans 2:47). Two years after his defense of the realism of
Arms and the Man, he made a distinction between the first three “unpleasant”
plays, which “were what people call realistic,” and the following
four “pleasant” plays, which “are not ‘realistic’ plays” (Collected Letters
1:632). The phrasing and the quotation marks around the second “realistic”
suggest that his own view of realism was different from the conventional
one. In later years he was more forthright, confessing that he had
never “been what you call a representationalist or realist. I was always in
the classic tradition, recognizing that stage characters must be endowed by
the author with a conscious self-knowledge and power of expression, and
. . . a freedom from inhibitions, which in real life would make them monsters
of genius. It is the power to do this that differentiates me (or Shakespear)
from a gramophone and a camera” (Shaw on Theatre 185). In the
same vein he claimed that “it is the business of the stage to make its figures
more intelligible to themselves than they would be in real life; for by no
other means can they be made intelligible to the audience” (Pref. Saint
Joan 6:73). He once referred to his “practice of making my characters say
not what in real life they could never bring themselves to say, even if they
understood themselves clearly enough, but the naked soul truth, quite ob-