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

A Playwright’s Progress 93
certain point of view, Shaw’s first four plays were failures. I do not mean
they are bad plays; on the contrary, their virtues are manifest and many.
The characterization is vivid and honest (as it is in his novels), the action
develops honestly from the interplay of character and circumstance, and
considerable wit is displayed in playing off honest situations and real
people against the conventions and stereotypical expectations of contemporary
theater. The plays failed from Shaw’s point of view because they
were unable to shatter the idealist eyeglasses of their audiences sufficiently
to let them actually see the real people in real situations that he had
offered. Shaw’s attempts to get past the blinding idealism of his audience
became the search for a definitive Shavian style (always only a means to an
end) that emerged finally with Candida.
His first play, Widowers’ Houses, is the most artless in this respect (although
I maintain that it is a better play than most critics imagine). The
dialogue provoked by its production between Shaw and his critics is revealing.
Shaw merely dismissed attacks on his “craftsmanship” or his “artistry.”
From our perspective they certainly seem as silly and beside the
point as Shaw must have thought them, but the assaults on his characterization
may have been more important to him. At least he took considerable
effort to answer these attacks. 2 Archer’s comments are especially illuminating,
first because his reactions are fairly typical, and second because
he is both lucid in expounding them and adroit in anticipating Shaw’s rebuttals.
Much of the criticism assumes that the point of the piece is a satirical
attack on the viciousness and inhuman cupidity of the middle class.
One critic (quoted by Shaw) gives the tenor of the rest: “The mere word
‘mortgage’ suffices to turn hero into rascal. Mr Shaw will say that is his
point—scratch a middle-class hero and you find a rascal” (“Author to Dramatic
Critics” 214). That is not Shaw’s point, and Archer knew it. He too
thought the characters to be uniformly vicious, but he understood that it
was not in Shaw’s interest to make them so: “Mr Shaw would only laugh if
I called it bad art; so let me say, what is equally true, that it is exceedingly
bad argument. You cannot effectively satirise a class by holding up to
odium a grotesquely exceptional case” (Evans 51–52). Shaw agreed entirely
with that last statement: “I certainly had no intention of spoiling the
moral of my play by making the characters at all singular” (“Author to
Dramatic Critics” 215). He clearly did not think they were singular, for he
had drawn them from life. But as an artist who wished to reach the public,
he had to address the fact that his audience generally found them not
merely singular but singularly unpleasant. Worse, this was as true of his