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

Realism 31
to be tied down to textbook definitions. One may get a better idea of what
Shaw means by this oblique allusion to “Platonism” from his preface to
Three Plays by Brieux, where he discusses the nature and purpose of dramatic
realism. He thinks that Zola’s naturalism is self-defeating: Zola, he
says, added gratuitous elements to his fiction to make it appear more like
real events—that is, like things one might read in newspaper crime stories.
“To all artists and Platonists he made it thereby very unreal; for to the
Platonist all accidents are unreal and negligible; but to the people he
wanted to get at—the anti-artistic people—he made it readable” (xii). How
a “Platonist” artist would proceed we may gather from Shaw’s praise of
Brieux, whose method he contrasts to the true crime technique of Zola:
But the great dramatist has . . . to interpret life. . . . Life as it occurs is
senseless: a policeman may watch it . . . without learning as much of
it or from it as a child or a nun may learn from a single play by Brieux.
For it is the business of Brieux to pick out the significant incidents
from the chaos of daily happenings, and arrange them so that their
relation to one another becomes significant, thus changing us from
bewildered spectators of a monstrous confusion to men intelligently
conscious of the world and its destinies. (xxiv–xxv)
Thus the sense one gets from this preface (written in 1909) is that “Platonism”
for Shaw is a belief that the universe is orderly and comprehensible
and that it is the business of the artist-philosopher to describe the order,
not the accidents, of the world. The Quintessence and the comments about
Nietzsche tell us that one can come to understand that order only through
experience—through unreserved, intimate, and unqualified involvement.
Order must be derived totally from experience and must never be imposed
on experience. The task of the artist- philosopher is to get at those concrete
facts that reveal the essential and avoid those that are merely incidental
and accidental. Ideas are important, but their origin must be empirical, not
a priori. To insist that this is nothing of what Plato had in mind would
doubtless not give Shaw the least concern.
The question that should concern us is whether Shaw had already
adopted this particular form of “Platonism” in 1890 when he drafted what
was to become The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Several critics have maintained
that he had not. Wisenthal, Alfred Turco Jr., and others have argued
that, in Wisenthal’s words, “the general tendency in the 1891 Quintessence
is to dismiss or attack all of those who live in a world of ideas” but that
his attitude toward ideas, ideals, and idealists became increasingly favor-