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

A Playwright’s Progress 79
view, not stir the passions with a pungent mixture of sensuality, cynicism,
and romantic sympathy: the romance of the tawdry brothel.
There is a further unfortunate tendency to make attractive the evils one
should portray as repellent, for if a writer “takes a culpable prostitute for
his heroine, he makes a heroine of a culpable prostitute; and no mechanical
heaping of infamy and disease upon her in the third volume will quite
despoil her of that glamour” (111). This is clearly not what the sincere
naturalist (as opposed to the merely fashionable one) aims for; he professes
to expose evils that they might be eliminated. Shaw differed from
even the sincere naturalists in his skepticism that needed reform could
ever really be effected in this way.
The corruption of society to-day is caused by evils which can be remedied
only by the aspiration of the masses toward better things and
not by the shrinking of the classes from horror known to them only
by clever descriptions. . . . When, on any definite issue, the apathy or
selfishness of the classes stands in the way of needed reform, then
have at their consciences by all means, without the very slightest
regard for their “delicacy.” But to persist in showing the classes repulsive
pictures of evils which they are powerless to abolish, without
ever striving to show the masses the better conditions which they
have the power to make real as soon as they have the will, is shallow
policy put forward as an excuse for coarse art. (111)
Here we approach the heart of Shaw’s philosophical differences with more
conventional realists. The realists’ faith in heredity and environment led
them to portray human beings as creations of circumstances, even to
thinking of the most degraded specimens as somehow closer to nature and
the ultimate truth about humanity (Becker 24). Reform was to be effected
by changing their circumstances. For Shaw, any form of progress or evolution
was dependent on the growth of human will. To the extent that that
could be produced by sensitizing the consciences of the privileged, well and
good, but a more urgent task is to awaken the souls of the exploited to
desire better things. Shaw diverged from the naturalists at the same juncture
where he parts with traditional socialists. Marx believed that the proletariat
already burned with higher aspirations and the determination to
achieve them. Shaw knew better, which is the point of Undershaft’s message
to his daughter. One cannot expect high aspirations and the courage to
achieve them from people who have been systematically degraded. Shaw
insisted that “the working-man can alter the present system if he chooses,