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

Contradictions in Scientific Realism
A Playwright’s Progress 77
The source of the difficulty lies in two contradictions at the heart of the
realist’s artistic program. Emile Zola and other writers in the realistic
movement rightly claimed kinship to earlier artists who had defied convention
in an effort to expose the truth, but their program also offered
something entirely new. Their innovations, as George Becker outlines
them, were in three basic areas: philosophical premises, choice of subject
matter, and technique. The second two were outgrowths of the first. Their
premises were scientific, and their new paradigm for the proper function of
art was the scientific experiment—or more precisely scientific methodology,
for science developed similar techniques for study in the “field” where
genuine experiment is not possible. The first contradiction arises from the
attempt to apply techniques that have proved spectacularly productive in
one field of endeavor to another in which they are irrelevant. Art is not
science; specifically it is not the study and accumulation exclusively of
facts, either “controlled” in the laboratory or methodically documented in
the field. Art is not theory rigorously tested by fact but observation distilled
through the intelligence and imagination of an artist. The paradigm
breaks down in practice. Zola, who was not as extreme as he appears in his
more emphatic remarks, conceded as much when he observed that “a work
will never be more than a corner of nature seen through a temperament”
(198).
The scientific paradigm was compelling to Zola and his followers because
they were convinced that science was the only genuine path to the
truth, and if art was not to condemn itself to oblivion or triviality it must
capture the spirit and nature of science. Their mistake was not to limit
themselves to presenting the artistic interpretation of truths discovered
scientifically. But because they wanted to present the world revealed in
case studies, they gave in to the temptation to make their works look like
case studies and thus became purveyors of illusion. They then could be
justly accused of presenting falsehoods as facts and violating their own
principles.
Shaw did not make this mistake, but he sympathized with those who
did. He declared that he, like Zola, sought a “really scientific natural history”
as the basis of plays and novels (Pref. Three Plays by Brieux 1192).
But even in his first, “unpleasant” plays, Shaw’s method was distinctly
different from that of Zola and his followers. When he dealt with slums
and prostitution he showed us not the squalid life in the tenements and the
degradation of the brothel but the comfortable life of those who profit by