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

92 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
mechanism, which had been virtually an end in itself, becomes in Ibsen’s
hands a metaphor for the “whited sepulcher,” the facade of artificial respectability
hiding a diseased society. In other words, well-made construction
in its traditional manifestation represented the successful repression
of disorder by the restraints of bourgeois respectability, while Ibsen’s subversion
of it exposed it as a middle-class mask of respectability covering a
foul disease.
In the running dispute between Archer and Shaw about the value of
“construction” in drama, Archer seems most annoyed by Shaw’s insistence
that Ibsen (to say nothing of Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Molière)
was in the Shavian camp rather than that of the constructors. For Archer
the difference between “good” (that is, “crafted”) drama and the “amorphous”
kind Shaw produced was the difference between a cat and a jellyfish;
Shaw responded that the difference was that between a dead cat and a
live one (Collected Letters 3:836–37). Shaw fully recognized Ibsen’s craft
(Collected Letters 3:833); he merely insisted that what is important in
Ibsen resembles Shaw more than Sardou. “Ibsen’s method was the vital
method, not the mechanical one” (Collected Letters 3:837). The portrayal
of real people coming to grips with real problems, not the cleverness of plot
assemblage, makes Ibsen’s plays live. The structure that matters is that
produced by the natural unfolding of the action.
Uncertain Dramatic Beginnings: Widowers’ Houses
Shaw’s technique differs from Ibsen’s to the extent that his point of view is
different. Where Ibsen, the “pessimist” by “old habit” (Collected Letters
1:427), contrasts the painted mask with the decayed face, Shaw’s more
positive view is that the mask is unnecessary if only we can learn to respect
reality: expose the pallid face to fresh air and sunshine and it will become
robust and healthy. Shaw’s initial efforts as a playwright were in the vein
of Ibsen and Zola to the extent that he wished to expose social evils so that
they might be corrected. The difference in his way of seeing those evils
necessitated a different way of presenting them, a new dramatic technique
that was not easy to develop. On the one hand, it was simple for Shaw, with
his realist’s vision, to see that illusionism is irrelevant to naturalism and
that Zolaism could become a superstition when it came to believe that ugliness
is more real than beauty and police reporting more natural than
drawing-room conversation. On the other hand, it was more difficult to
find the aesthetic means to embody his own version of the truth. From a