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

74 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
a joke. Still, he always insisted that his way of joking was to tell the absolute
truth, and there are instances when he asserted his realism as a playwright
without a perceptible twinkle in his eye.
When Shaw called himself a dramatic realist, he was using the term in a
unique and unconventional way. It was a Shavian joke: for the truth is that
Shaw’s notion of what constitutes realistic drama is worthier of the term
than its accepted meaning. It may be argued that Shaw’s use of the term—
no matter how sensible, appropriate, or logical—was idiosyncratic and
thus invalid; language is necessarily conventional, as Saussure made clear,
and even genius is not privileged. Humpty Dumpty was wrong: no individual
can make a word mean whatever he wants it to mean. There is no
answer to this argument; if you insist on the conventional (and thus legitimate)
meaning of “realism,” Shaw’s dramatic works do not qualify; or
rather, they meet the accepted standards up to a point and then fall short.
Even the critics who think that some of Shaw’s works are realistic do not
agree about which plays those are. An idiosyncratic meaning can gain acceptance
when three conditions are met: first, that it is a significant meaning
that is presently unfitted with an accepted word; second, that it is reasonably
close to an established usage; and third, that its variant use is made
explicit in the context—that the “term” is “defined.” As to the first condition,
Shaw’s version of realism not only lies at the heart of his dramatic
method (although it is by no means the whole of it) but also was a lifelong
way of seeing the world that pervaded his political, economic, religious,
and philosophical ideas. “Realism,” however it might be embellished with
fantasy, imagination, or merely the unfamiliar, is the very core of everything
that can be called Shavian. The second condition is also met, for as
improbable as it may seem, Shavian realism has in practice much in common
with the traditional literary theories, if not the practice, of Emile Zola
and his like. Shaw keeps to the essentials and merely discards that which is
untenable. Shaw failed the final condition; he did not make his meaning
clear, but if we look closely and take Shaw seriously we can clarify the
nature of Shavian dramatic realism.
This book is about Shaw’s view of the world and the way that view
dictated how he conducted his life, not an examination of his dramatic
work. But his view was different from that of others, and consequently he
had to develop his own style, his own form of dramatic art. That journey
toward a distinctly Shavian dramaturgy illuminates the philosophy which
guided it. What follows is intended to examine only the way the Shavian
style developed, not to examine it in its entirety.