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

118 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
Club, a den of iniquitous ideas, where sexual propriety is systematically
challenged, but in the realm of fashionable avant-garde ideology rather
than extramarital flings. The joke is amusing, but it is only a joke; the thrill
of threatened exposure and the satisfaction of its evasion are absent. Shaw
is showing that the real scandal is the stupidity of marriage laws that force
people into unnecessary evasions and unhealthy relationships. He attacks
the very premises on which farcical comedy is built. The new wine naturally
bursts the old bottle; that is its purpose. Another way to look at it is to
observe that while The Devil’s Disciple works as a melodrama, The Philanderer
does not work as farcical comedy. It is instead a clever attack on both
the form and the social institutions that made it possible, although it is
dated because the targets of its satire are deceased: marriage laws and their
enforcing ideals have changed, farcical comedy has become quaint and tiresome,
and Ibsenism is hardly the current essence of political correctness
among progressive intellectuals.
The process of demolition is most clearly seen in Shaw’s treatment of
that essential premise of farcical comedy: the absolute necessity of suppressing
all evidence that deviates in the slightest from conventional propriety.
To get the full benefit of what farcical comedy has to offer, you must
accept the idea that the world will come to an end if the truth comes to
light. The exposure of the least impropriety must be regarded as the
equivalent, to continue the previous metaphor, of falling out of the roller
coaster. Such a notion is useful to a realist only as a target, and that is how
Shaw uses it. The Philanderer begins with the moral tangles that are the
meat of ordinary farcical comedy. People are brought together who want
desperately to stay apart, and the usual lies, flights, and evasions ensue, but
at the curtain of the first act, when exposure seems imminent and the situation
is normally “saved” by yet another evasion, Shaw simply blurts out
the truth. And of course, nothing happens. There is a similar trick in Arms
and the Man. The device of the photograph which Raina imprudently and
romantically autographed and slipped into her father’s coat in the expectation
that Bluntschli would find it is classic material for well-made farcical
comedy. There are the usual—and most amusing—juggling tricks performed
to keep the young lady’s father from discovering the incriminating
photo, but in the end, when we would expect the successful destruction of
the damning evidence, it is brought baldly into the open. The jig is up. And
again, nothing happens. Nothing, that is, except that the characters are
brought a little closer to a real, rather than artificial, solution to their diffi-