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

A Playwright’s Progress 107
Shaw seems to have realized, to paint an evil without appearing to invite
your public to throw stones, either at individuals or at humanity in general.
After Candida Shaw generally took particular care to dwell not on the
evil but on the attempts to strive for the good. This is not an easy task; it is
a little like trying to show a conflict while portraying only one side. The
techniques he developed to do this became the mature Shavian style.
New Bottles for Shaw’s New Wine
Although Shaw’s plays came less and less to resemble the conventional
drama of his youth and became increasingly “amorphous” or “organic,”
depending on one’s view, it should not be thought that his use of the conventional
dramatic forms of his times was a compromise or “selling out” of
his larger aims. He was quite at home with the absurdities and outrageous
coincidences of farce and with the heroics and high moral passion of melodrama.
It is true that his use of farcical devices confuses some serious critics.
They are accustomed to absurdity used satirically, but when it is not
clearly attacking something, as is the case in You Never Can Tell, it is dismissed
as frivolity. Shaw was both serious and (in his own terms) a realist,
but he was not interested in realistic plots. He was not a materialistic determinist,
out to demonstrate the pervasive influence of environment on the
psyche, nor was he a concocter of well-made confections, intent on giving
an air of naturalness to elaborately artificial constructions. He was concerned
with the human will, its manifestations, its misunderstandings, its
triumphs, and its defeats. If the confrontations and conundrums his human
subjects meet with are brought about by outrageous contrivances of
the plot, so much the better. The fantastic air of farce is one in which unchallenged
social assumptions can be safely questioned and sacred moral
verities can be assaulted without sending the audience into panic. Plays
like Man of Destiny and You Never Can Tell, although far from being
major works, have much more to say than the popular fare on which they
are based, but their “frivolous” plot structures lead critics to dismiss them.
And although Shaw was deeply committed to honest character psychology,
his characters were never clinical studies but always elements in an
artistic composition, chosen and shaped to meet his aesthetic and didactic
aims. One can see this by examining the patterns of character portrayal in
his first ten plays, those that most obviously show the influence of popular
models. Each of those works is built around one of two themes that are
perennial audience favorites: romantic love and heroism in the face of