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

106 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
fool. . . . It was not for me to quarrel with His handiwork in the one case
more than in the other” (Candida 1:530). Indeed, Morell provides us with
one of our most important insights into Shaw’s view of the world. When
Prossy makes disparaging remarks about a certain group of people, Morell
startles her by protesting that they are his “near relatives.” She is relieved
to realize that he means “only” that they have the same Father in Heaven.
Morell sighs: “Ah, you dont believe it. Everybody says it: nobody believes
it: nobody” (1:519). The key to understanding Shaw is to know that he did
believe it, with a complete and unfailing faith.
“A perfect dramatic command,” Shaw told Archer in a letter about Candida,
“either of character or situation, can only be obtained from some
point of view that transcends both” (Collected Letters 2:33). The dramatist
does not takes sides, at least in the sense of attacking one side and defending
the other. Dramatic conflict, for Shaw, was the conflict of human nature
with itself in its struggle to become more than itself. It is not a conflict
between good people and bad, between the false and the true. It is like the
snake’s struggle to shed its old skin. Old aspirations, which began as manifestations
of the will and thus of divine purpose, become leathery corsets
that must strangle the growing will unless they are destroyed and discarded.
Shaw’s sympathies were always with the new, but truth must acknowledge
that the old skin once served the same purpose as the new and
even sheltered and protected its infancy.
Every artist with an unfamiliar vision requires unprecedented techniques.
New wine demands new bottles. The “interpreter of life” must do
more than argue a case if, like Shaw, his interpretation of life involves assumptions
so unfamiliar that the average spectator literally cannot see
them. For Shaw, that meant a rejection of the Manichean worldview in
which Right and Wrong are irreconcilable opposites, and Right must vanquish
Wrong for good to triumph. Shaw’s view assumes moral equality
but evolutionary inequality. We are all children of one father (in Barbara
Undershaft’s words), all trying to move in the same direction (albeit often
fiercely divided about the road to take), yet some of us are clearly further
along the way. Whatever Shaw had to say, whether on marriage and divorce,
parents and children, language and class, or doctors and patients, it
was imperative to say it in that context. The difficulty arises because Shaw
insists that there is indeed both evil and good in the world but that the
triumph of good is never brought about by blame and punishment. The
distinction is difficult to make, especially when dealing with the kinds of
social evils that are the subject of the “unpleasant plays.” It is difficult, as