Candida & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play. Bernard Shaw

twins; and “Candida,” a frankly sentimental play, which Mr Shaw hopes to find appreciated by women, if not by men.

      R. G. B.

      75/ To Charlotte Payne-Townshend

      30th March 1898

       . . . No: I didn’t go to see “Candida.” Janet [Archer] says she got hold of the last scene for the first time: in fact, the whole play seems to have come off in an unprecedented manner. There is no hurry about the D’s D. It will not be produced until May; and it must run, successful or not, for eight weeks; so if you are back in June it will do. If you come back before it is produced, you will find me in a ferocious and damnable temper, as indeed I am at present. I bully Mrs [Kate] Salt brutally; and [Charles] Charrington says that though my lecture was fine, I never relaxed a fierce frown from one end of it to the other. No matter: I am no longer unhappy, and no longer happy: I am myself. I am gathering myself up for the rehearsals. It is close to midnight: I must stalk off into the path round the park, to embrace my true mistress the Night. I hope this letter will make the other Charlotte YELL with anguish—little enough to expiate my centuries of slavery & misery.

      Wrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr !

      GBS

      76/ Reginald Golding Bright’s article THE GOSPEL OF “G.B.S.” contributed to the Weekly Sun

      April 1898

      . . . There remains “Candida,” and, for the sake of its purity and strength, one would willingly forget the remaining works—good, bad, and indifferent. It is because Mr Shaw has, for once, not been ashamed to figure as a man of sentiment that he has succeeded in writing a really beautiful play where he failed before through excess of brainishness. In Candida he has depicted the real product of the New Woman movement—a noble-minded, graceful woman of dignity and resource, strong where her husband is weak, a Christian Socialist. The author’s reasons for making the Rev. J. M. Morell, active member of the C.S.U. [Christian Social Union], the Guild of St Matthew, etc., a weak-kneed, windbag rhetorician are not obvious, but in every other respect the play is quite a faultless work of art. If only Mr Shaw would give himself up more frequently to this mood, the reproach that we have no serious drama in England would soon be a gibe of the past.

      But which way do his thoughts naturally tend? “It was as Punch that I emerged from obscurity,” he tells his readers in one of his diverting prefaces, and they may be driven to the belief that he prefers to go down to posterity in the same role. Certainly they will not lack material for this view, since, within a few pages of each other, he has made elaborate defences of such parasites on the modern drama as the Censor of Plays and the actor-manager. After that, he who would pluck out the heart of Mr Shaw’s mystery must own himself beaten, but no one can afford to neglect the attempt. These plays, both in idea and treatment, inaugurate a new departure, and, if anyone should fear for their reception in the theatre, let him take comfort from the author’s paradoxical assertion that “it is quite possible for a piece to enjoy the most sensational success on the basis of a complete misunderstanding of its philosophy.” On this assumption a fortune should be in store for the manager who would hazard the production of any one of these plays—save “Candida.”

      R. G. B.

      77/ To William Archer

      21st April 1898

      When Eugene, with his apprehensive faculty raised to the highest sensitiveness by his emotional state, hears that long speech of Candida’s about the household, he takes the whole thing in, grasps for the first time what it really means, what the conditions of such love are, and how it is essentially the creature of limitations which are far transcended in his own nature. He sees at once that no such life and no such love are possible for him, and instantly leaves them all far behind him. To put it another way, he jumps to the position from which the Master builder [a character of Henrik Ibsen’s play with the same name] that it was all over with the building of happy homes for human beings. He looks at the comfort and sweetness and happiness that has just been placed before him at its best, and turns away from it, exclaiming with absolute conviction, “Life is nobler than that.” Thus Candida’s sympathy with his supposed sorrow is entirely thrown away. If she were to alter her decision and offer herself to him he would be unspeakably embarrassed and terrified. When he says “Out into the night with me,” he does not mean the night of despair and darkness, but the free air and holy starlight which is so much more natural an atmosphere to him than this stuffy fireside warmth of mothers and sisters and wives and so on. It may be that this exposition may seem to you to destroy all the pathos and sanity of the scene; but from no other point of view could it have been written. A perfect dramatic command, either of character or situation, can only be obtained from some point of view that transcends both. The absolute fitness which is the secret of the effectiveness of the ending of “Candida,” would be a mere sham if it meant nothing more than a success for Morell at the cost of a privation for Eugene. Further, any such privation would take all the point from Candida’s sub-consciousness of the real state of affairs; for you will observe that Candida knows all along perfectly well that she is no mate for Eugene, and instinctively relies on that solid fact to pull him through when he is going off, as she thinks, broken-hearted. The final touch of comedy is the femininely practical reason that she gives for their incompatibility.

       …………………………………………………………

      P.S. It may interest you to know some of the people who have, or might have, served me as models.

      Candida—Ellen Terry, Mrs H. M. [Henry Morton] Stanley [née Dorothy Tennant], Mrs [Laura] Ormiston Chant. . .

      Burgess, and Prossy were very definitely suggested to me by the outward aspect of certain individuals who are not necessarily at all like them in character. . . .

      [G. Bernard Shaw]