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

A Playwright’s Progress 81
horror or scandal actually occurred, that real people are shedding real
blood and real tears, is indispensable to their enjoyment. (1190)
So Zola indulged in a particular kind of illusionism in order to reach his
audience, but it meant that he had to add extraneous sensational elements
to his fiction, even though such abnormalities were not part of his real
business, which was to convey general, and genuinely scientific, truths.
Shaw sought to reach a different audience, one whose views of the world
were shaped by the playhouse. He naturally chose, as Martin Meisel abundantly
demonstrated, to adapt the familiar forms and conventions of the
contemporary theater. He still had to give his audiences the truth as he saw
it and convince them it was indeed true. His first attempts were not fully
satisfactory. Strindberg observed that whenever what Shaw called scientific
natural history was simply poured into the old dramatic forms, “the
new wine has burst the old bottles” (395). The development of a new form,
sufficiently familiar to be recognized and enjoyed but robust enough to
convey the strong new potion, meant the evolution of a distinctive Shavian
style.
Shaw was thus sympathetic to the first of the contradictions that ensnared
naturalism because he recognized that it arose from the need to
make unpalatable truths pleasant or interesting enough to be swallowed.
That Zola sought to achieve that end through a kind of illusionism that
Shaw rather conspicuously avoided is important only if one makes the
mistake of believing that illusions are the essence and purpose of realism.
Zola’s “police intelligence” illusionism and Shaw’s theatricalism have the
same purpose: to engage the audience. They are different sugarcoatings for
the pill of realism.
The second contradiction concerns the true heart of realism as both
Shaw and Zola understood it. George Becker points out that
the basic ideal of the movement was and is rigorous objectivity; in
spite of this it was almost impossible not to take a position, at least
implicitly, about man and his fate, particularly since the whole climate
of thought in which realism flourished was one of scientism. As
Arthur McDowall says, “Realism in art undoubtedly refers us back to
a physical, existing reality,” which is anterior to and independent of
the individual mind. It is sceptical of . . . the events which escape the
otherwise ineluctable laws of causality. It is this last term which is
the key to the realist position: the universe is observably subject to