It’s no use: I have nothing sensible to suggest. Teddy, though hypersenti- hypersensitized (got it that time!) and petulated by more luxury than was good for him in the way of a mammy seems highly and nervously intelligent. He wants ten years of stern adversity—not domestic squabble—to solidify him. Pity he’s married: why should he be a breeder of sinners?
What a Good Friday we’re having! Rain, wind, cold, skating on all the ponds, icicles hanging from the eaves and George Bernard the shepherd blowing his nail.
When are you coming into this neighborhood? I can bike over to Thames Ditton—if only I dare. Don’t let us break the spell—do let us break the spell—don’t, do, don’t, do, don’t, do, don’t—I resolved to let the end of the line decide it like Gretchen’s flower, and it has decided nothing. . . .
GBS
P.S. They’re going to elect me to the St Pancras Vestry (more public work); and I’m spending Easter on a Fabian Tract—“Employer’s Liability.” That’s why I’m so prosaic.
54/ To Reginald Golding Bright
7th May 1897
Dear Bright
. . . Things you may mention.—Work it up as news in your own way, not as communicated by me to the paper in the first person—you will know how to manage it.
1. I have been elected a member of the St Pancras Vestry. At the first general election of Vestries under the Local Government Act of 1894, it was urged that public-spirited men of some standing should come forward and offer to serve. I condescended to do this and was ignominiously defeated, my sympathy with Labour being considered disreputable by the workmen of St Pancras. Now the Conservatives and Unionists and Moderates and other respectables of the parish have returned me unopposed in spite of my vehement protests that I have no time for such work. I recognise, however, that there is better work to be done in the Vestry than in the theatre, and have submitted to take my turn.
2. I have resolved to accept an offer made me by Mr Grant Richards for the publication of my plays. I am not a disappointed dramatist, as the curiosity and interest shewn in my plays by managers, and their friendliness & accessibility for me, have exceeded anything I had any right to expect. But in the present condition of the theatre it is evident that a dramatist like [Henrik] Ibsen, who absolutely disregards the conditions which managers are subject to, and throws himself on the reading public, is taking the only course in which any serious advance a possible, expecially if his dramas demand much technical skill from the actors. So I have made up my mind to put my plays into print and trouble the theatre no further with them. The present proposal is to issue two volumes entitled “Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant.” Vol I, “Unpleasant” will contain “The Philanderer” and the appalling “Mrs Warren’s Profession” with perhaps a reprint of “Widowers’ Houses.” Vol II, “Pleasant,” will contain “Arms & The Man,” “Candida,” and “You Never Can Tell.” Possibly also “The Devil’s Disciple” and “The Man of Destiny.”
I decline to say anything more at present about Sir Henry Irving and “The Man of Destiny” except that the story, when I tell it—and I shall probably tell it very soon—will be quite as amusing as a Lyceum performance of the play would have been. None of the paragraphs in circulation convey the remotest approximation to the truth; and the statement that Sir Henry has returned the MS [manuscript] “with a handsome compliment and a present” is a particularly audacious invention. This is enough for one week, I think.
In haste,
yrs ever
G. Bernard Shaw
55/ To Ellen Terry
29th May 1897
Oh stupidest of created women, how can I answer such letters! I ask myself how I have ever consented to know a moral void—a vacuum. I am cured of arrogance: I no longer pretend to have written either “Candida” or the Wild Duck article [about Henrik Ibsen’s play Wild Duck in the Saturday Review]: I admit that you wrote them both. But mark the result of my humility. If “Candida” is ever done, it shall not be done by subscriptions collected for the performance of a play by Ibsen. Oh, stupid, stupid, stupid, STUPID woman: can you see nothing when the footlights are in your eyes? . . .
GBS
56/ To Ellen Terry
14th July 1897
. . . Charrington is taking out a Doll’s House tour; and he’s going to try “Candida” on the provincial dog. He wants somebody who can play Prossy (a character in “Candida” which you forget, probably) and Mrs Linden in the Ibsen play. I suggested Edy. Would she go, do you think?
It will be a pretty miserable tour—start at Aberdeen after 12 hours travelling; but she might pick up something from Charrington; and Janet would keep her in gossip for a twelve-month to come. . . .
GBS
57/ To Ellen Terry
20th July 1897
Edy is going to have a very difficult job of it with Mrs Linden, because Janet is so loathingly sick of rehearsing it with new Lindens that she wants Edy to get through with only one rehearsal. And the effort of swallowing all those words will be bad for Prossy. However, we must make the best of it.
The only difficulty about Prossy will be the usual difficulty—want of muscle in the enunciation of the words. When people intend to play the piano in public, they play scales for several hours a day for years. A pupil of [Theodor] Leschetitsky (Paderewski’s master) comes before the public with steel fingers, which give a quite peculiar quality and penetration even to pianissimo notes. An actress should practise her alphabet in just the same way, and come before the public able to drive a nail up to the head with one touch of a consonant. For want of this athleticism, people get driven to slow intonings, and woolly execution. Now for Prossy I want extreme snap in the execution: every consonant should have a ten pound gun hammer spring in it, also great rapidity & certainty of articulation. Of course Edy has not got all that yet; but I shall get more of it out of her than she dreams of troubling herself for at present. Young people don’t realize what a tremendous deal of work it takes to make a very small effect. But she starts with a good deal in hand that one looks in vain for elsewhere. Her expression is, if anything, too expressive normally, like Forbes Robertson’s. Her voice is quite her own. But she needs to work & use her head a good deal; for she is like a boy in her youth & virginity, and cannot fall back on “emotional” effects which are really only the incontinences of a hysterical and sexually abandoned woman, but which pull a great many worthless & stupid actresses through leading parts in vulgar drama. So she will—fortunately for herself—get nothing cheap. I have told her that if I can do anything for her in the way of going over the part with her I will make time to do it. . .
How are you?
In haste, ever dearest Ellen,
your
GBS
58/ To Janet Achurch
23rd July 1897
Wretch!—to drag me all the way to Islington for such an inconceivably bad performance. I declare before outraged Heaven that acting is to you and Charrington not an honest night’s work, but a form of reckless self-indulgence. You’d much better have got me to rehearse “A Doll’s House” than “Candida”: it’s all gone to the deepest