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

78 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
them. But he understood what Zola was doing and why he did it. Zola did
not want to tell pretty stories:
He wanted to tell the world the scientific truth about itself. His view
was that if you were going to legislate for agricultural laborers, or
deal with them or their business in any way, you had better know
what they are really like; and in supplying you with the necessary
information he did not tell you what you already knew, which included
pretty nearly all that could be decorously mentioned, but
what you did not know, which was that part of the truth that was
tabooed. For the same reason, when he found a generation whose
literary notions of Parisian cocotterie were founded on Marguerite
Gauthier, he felt it to be a duty to show them Nana. And it was a very
necessary thing to do. (Pref. Three Plays by Brieux 1192)
So Shaw had no sympathy with those who objected to the “nasty” concerns
of the naturalists; the unpleasant truths are precisely those that must
be exposed and proclaimed because their concealment only protects them.
Evil cannot be fought unless it is faced. But the preoccupation with filth,
he believed, became itself a convention or a fashion. “Their [Zola’s and
Ibsen’s] imitators assumed that unmentionability was an end in itself—
that to be decent was to be out of the movement” (1193). Shaw also had
limited faith in the usefulness of looking exclusively at the putrid underside
of society. Although necessary as an antidote to ignorance and illusion,
it could also distort.
The Real has always been a hard bird to catch. Plato did not succeed in
getting it under his hat until he had divested it of everything that is
real to the realists of noveldom to-day: these gentlemen are not Platonic
realists. They do not seem to have got much further than an
opinion that the romance of the drawing-room is less real than the
romance of the kitchen, the romance of the kitchen than that of the
slum, that of the slum than that of the sewer, and, generally, that
reality is always in inverse proportion to self-control, education,
health, and decency. (“Realism, Real and Unreal” 110)
Shaw was convinced that what often passed for realism was merely a romantic
treatment of a sordid subject. One can see the difference between
what is conventionally thought of as realistic and what Shaw imagined
realism to be about when one compares Mrs Warren’s Profession to Maupassant’s
novella Yvette. Realism should stimulate the mind, in Shaw’s