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

A Playwright’s Progress 103
focused his dramatic energies on teaching his audiences to respect reality
rather than forcing them to view aspects of reality that few could respect.
Both techniques are reflections of his philosophy, but the latter reaches
more nearly to the core of it. Idealism is pernicious because it is a wall
erected between a sensitive conscience and reality. It protects the sensitivity
of the idealist from unbearable horrors, but it also protects the evil
from which the idealist is hiding. Only by facing evils can we combat them,
and social evils cannot be conquered by individuals but only by society.
Thus as members of society we must learn to face reality, to do without the
blinders of idealism, and to respect the truth as well as ourselves.
Respecting Reality: More Uncertain Beginnings
His first attempt in that direction—Arms and the Man—was, like his first
“realistic” play, enormously successful in drawing attention to the author
and a failure from the author’s point of view. Shaw was disappointed with
the first production of his premier “pleasant” play in part because of misunderstanding
on the part of the performers, but the difficulty is inherent
in the play itself. The point of Shaw’s endeavor was to inculcate a respect
for reality, not to deride idealists. He was not trying to present Sergius and
Raina as a pair of hollow pretenders but as people who are sincerely trying
to live up to artificial standards. The difference between them is that Sergius
is a thorough idealist whose self-respect depends on the attainment of
impossible and unnecessary standards, while Raina has sufficient self-confidence
to accept reality when it is plainly laid out for her. For Shaw, this
meant that Sergius is at least as tragic as he is ludicrous (Collected Letters
1:429). Today, when the heroic ideals he took so seriously are dead and
forgotten, it is extremely difficult to find an actor who can play Sergius as
anything but a pompous fool. Even at the time he wrote the part, Shaw
himself considered it to be “unsafe in second rate hands” (Collected Letters
1:442). Shaw was not trying to set up embodiments of popular ideals and
then punch them full of holes, although that is typically the effect of the
play, even today. Mockery is the attitude of the disillusioned idealist, not of
the realist.
Shavian Realism in Candida
The fully realized Shavian dramatic method emerges only with Candida.
This is the first play that decisively breaks with the technique of tricking
the spectators’ judgments, the juggling of the categories of good and evil