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

120 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
mers a nail, but Shaw, at his most Shavian, allowed his dramatic inspiration
(which was always also a philosophical one) to grow while he followed
where it led. The result is not formless, as Archer thought, but the form is
that of a tree rather than a table. This is clear in John Bull’s Other Island, a
play in which the most sympathetic characters are largely passive, watching
helplessly as the idiotic (in Shaw’s sense) Englishman takes control
almost as a rolling snowball grows. It ends in an oddly inconclusive way,
with the three main characters looking out on the Irish landscape and into
a future only the Philistine can find satisfactory. Man and Superman, in
contrast, seems at first like a conventional comedy with an awkward and
cumbersome philosophical debate improbably grafted onto it, like a large if
benign tumor that must be amputated to make the patient presentable in
public.
The two plays are strangely complementary, for though they take very
different routes, their destinations are sadly alike. The prevailing mood of
John Bull’s Other Island is one of frustration and stagnation, impossible
dreams in a deadlock with intolerable realities; that of Man and Superman
is bustle and movement and action and vitality. Yet in both we are left with
only dreams and hopes, not clear plans for reaching them. The revolutionist’s
rhetoric is as useless, practically, as the mad priest’s dream. Man
and Superman is like the Irish play in that it is actually an organic growth,
not the careless patching together of two unrelated forms that some see in
it. Even without the Don Juan sequence, Man and Superman does not have
the expected architectural shape. The flight to Grenada does not satisfy a
taste for architectural symmetry, but it is a perfect expression of the action
of the play. The dream sequence is also a natural growth, for as Tanner’s
flight through the Sierra Nevada is a flight from responsibility and social
integration in the form of marriage, the dream is the transition that makes
his final capitulation fully intelligible. The dream is not reallly about Don
Juan in Hell (the title given by others to the sequence) but about how Don
Juan, having furiously sought Hell, found it not to his taste and leaves for
Heaven. Hell is the home of the idiots (that is, the individualists), of the
seekers after pleasure and freedom from responsibility. The segment
would more accurately be called “Don Juan Renounces Hell,” which means
that he embraces hope. Freedom from hope, as the Statue tells us, is one of
Hell’s greatest attractions because it is freedom from responsibility
(2:642). Consequently, hope (not boredom) is Heaven’s supreme terror.
Hope means embarking into unknown waters without illusion about either
the dangers to be faced or your own limitations in facing them, know-