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

A Playwright’s Progress 119
culties. On that level The Philanderer is as successful as Arms and the
Man; it is vital and amusing because it shows us real people with real passions
in an intensely farcical situation. The mechanism collapses to reveal
human souls; a similar collapse in a conventional farcical comedy would
leave nothing, for the characters are only gears and levers of the machine.
Organic Structure
So Shaw’s use of traditional forms never compromised his larger purposes;
he used them precisely to the extent that they served him. Whenever they
threatened to conflict with his primary aims, he abandoned them, so the
first of the three threads mentioned earlier is unnecessary. The other two
threads of his dramatic fabric are a different matter. Both were essential,
yet there is a potential conflict between Shaw’s method of letting the characters
dictate the story to him and his insistence that the artist be an interpreter
of life. The former was his natural bent. Shaw is at his most carelessly
charming when he is chatting to us about the stories his characters
press on him. We are not used to seeing this side of Shaw in its pure form.
It prevails in the early novels and the late extravaganzas, but in his bestknown
work it emerges only occasionally, as in the epilogue to Pygmalion,
which Shaw admits at the outset ought to be irrelevant. But the plays after
Saint Joan, however didactic, all have an air of inviting us to enter into an
intellectual looking-glass world, following wherever these more or less
fantastic characters choose to lead us. We see Shaw following his characters
without regard for his ostensible mission at the beginning of his novella
The Adventures of the Black Girl, where Shaw precedes his parable and
morality tale with a delightful but largely irrelevant story about the spiritual
odyssey of a well-meaning missionary. After the Plays for Puritans—
successful attempts, like Candida, to integrate Shavian purpose into traditional
forms—we begin to see a more relaxed style, a Bernard Shaw who
has become confident as a playwright and is more completely following his
own bent.
The next two plays, Man and Superman and John Bull’s Other Island,
abundantly show the qualities Archer called amorphousness and Shaw
thought of as vitality and natural growth. Archer was looking for balance
and symmetry, virtues natural to a building, where a wall on one side of
the roof must be countered by a wall on the other if the building is to stand.
The builder rightly plans his entire structure before he lays a brick or ham-