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

A Playwright’s Progress 121
ing that your failure, although fearfully probable, will necessarily be laid
to no charge but your own. The difference between the marriage of Violet
and Hector and that of Ann and Tanner is the difference between those
who see marriage as the font of happiness and those for whom it is a yoke
of responsibility. For Violet and Hector, with their unconventionally conventional
hearthside dreams, marriage is the wonderful Hell of happiness;
for Tanner and Ann it is the terrifying Heaven of responsibility and reality.
That is why Tanner flees while Hector seeks it out. As Bernard Dukore
points out, the dream sequence contains several stark contrasts to the
frame play, the most notable of which is that in the frame John Tanner
loses, and in the dream Juan wins (Bernard Shaw, Playwright 170). Tanner
is a victim who loses freedom; Juan is a visionary who chooses responsibility.
4 The dream in the dry open air of the Sierra Nevada provides the counterpoint
necessary fully to understand the play. Cut that, and, despite the
abundance of wittily philosophical dialogue, the story is just one of a successfully
predatory female and her silly-clever prey. It is a pleasant tale
that works well in the playhouse, but it is not the whole story.
The difference in the tones that conclude John Bull and Man and Superman
belies the similarity of their viewpoints. The melancholy of the first is
a chord produced by three sad notes: the shallow triumph of the practical
Englishman, Broadbent, the coldhearted cynicism of the anglicized
Irishman, Larry, and the hollow dream of the mad visionary, Keegan. But it
is Keegan’s vision we are left with: the dream of unity for a world so gapingly
divided. Although the conclusion of Man and Superman reverberates
with comedy’s traditional promise of fecundity and new life, the final
note is the hollow sound of Tanner’s impotent rhetoric: “Go on talking,”
says Ann, confident of the harmlessness of his words. Both plays point
hopefully to the future without providing a map to take us there. The
madman’s dream of material and spiritual unity that ends John Bull’s
Other Island is like the apotheosis of the Life Force in Man and Superman:
both must be taken on faith, like Divine Providence. The call for the Superman
has the ring of crying for the moon, like the madman’s dream. In any
case, to submit to Providence is to eschew responsibility and bow to a
higher power. That is clearly not enough for the Shavian religion, in which
“the priest is the worshipper and the worshipper the worshipped” (John
Bull 2:1021). The Life Force is not a transcendent deity, an all-controlling
Father who envelopes us in His protecting embrace. It is an immanent and
imperfect force, a Becoming rather than a Being.
Shaw was a dramatic realist whose subject was the living human will: