Bernard Shaw - Candida & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play

GBS

27/ To Ellen Terry

6th April 1896

. . . You boast that you are a fool—it is at bottom, oh, such a tremendous boast (do you know that in Wagner’s last drama, “Parsifal,” the redeemer is “der reine Thor,” “the pure fool”?) but you have the wisdom of the heart, which makes it possible to say deep things to you. You say I’d be sick of you in a week; but this is another boast: it implies that you could entertain me for a whole week. Good heavens! with what? With art?—with politics?—with philosophy?—or with any other department of culture? I’ve written more about them all (for my living) than you ever thought about them. On that plane I would exhaust you before you began, and could bore you dead with my own views in two hours. But one does not get tired of adoring the Virgin Mother. Bless me! you will say, the man is a Roman Catholic. Not at all: the man is the author of Candida; and Candida, between you and me, is the Virgin Mother and nobody else. And my present difficulty is that I want to reincarnate her—to write another Candida play for You. Only, it won’t come. Candida came easily enough; but after her came that atrocious “Man of Destiny,” a mere stage brutality, and my present play brings life and art together and strikes showers of sparks from them as if they were a knife and a grindstone. Heaven knows how many plays I shall have to write before I earn one that belongs of divine right to you. Someday, when you have two hours to spare, you must let me read Candida to you. You will find me a disagreeably cruel looking middle aged Irishman with a red beard; but that cannot be helped. . . .

The Independent Theatre people, having had “Little Eyolf” [by Henrik Ibsen] snatched back from their grasp by Miss Elizabeth Robins (who will produce it next October, probably, in partnership with Waring), want to produce Candida. Janet wants me to consent. I must be cruel only to be kind; and I insist on their having £1000 to finance it with, eves for eight matinees spread over a month. They have only £400; so I think I am safe for the present; but they may get the money. If so, Candida may be the first thing you see on your return to these shores. But then, alas! I shall have no excuse for reading it to you.

GBS

28/ To Reginald Golding Bright

10th June 1896

Dear Bright

No: there’s no ring: there never really is. Since “Arms & The Man” I have written three plays, one of them only a one-act historical piece about Napoleon. The first of these was “Candida”; and there are obvious reasons for its not being produced—my insistence on Miss Achurch for the heroine, the fact that the best man’s part in it is too young for any of our actor managers ([Henry] Esmond appears to be the only possible man for it), and the character of the play itself, which is fitter for a dozen select matinée than for the evening bill. . . .

The facts are rather funny, in a way. My first three plays, “ Widowers’ Houses ,” “ The Philanderer ,” and “ Mrs Warren’s Profession ,” were what people call realistic. They were dramatic pictures of middle-class society from the point of view of a Socialist who regards the basis of that society as thoroughly rotten, economically and morally. In “ Widowers’ Houses ” you had the rich suburban villa standing on the rents of the foul rookery. In “ The Philanderer ” you had the fashionable cult of Ibsenism and “New Womanism” on a real basis of clandestine sensuality. In “ Mrs Warren’s Profession ” you had the procuress, the organiser of prostitution, convicting society of her occupation. All three plays were criticisms of a special phase, the capitalist phase, of modern organisation, and their purpose was to make people thoroughly uncomfortable whilst entertaining them artistically.

But my four subsequent plays, “ Arms & The Man ,” “ Candida ,” “ The Man of Destiny ” (the one-act Napoleon piece) and the unnamed four act comedy just finished, are not “realistic” plays. They deal with life at large, with human nature as it presents itself through all economic & social phases. “ Arms & The Man ” is the comedy of youthful romance & disillusion; “ Candida ” is the poetry of the Wife & Mother—Virgin Mother in the true sense; & so on & so forth. Now for funny part of it. These later plays are of course infinitely more pleasing, more charming, more popular than the earlier three. And of cource the I.T. [Independent Theatre] now wants one of these pleasant plays to make a popular success with, instead of sticking to its own special business & venturing on the realistic ones. It refuses to produce “ The Philanderer ” (written specially for it) because it is vulgar and immoral and cynically disrespectful to ladies and gentlemen; and it wants “ Candida ” or one the later plays, which I of course refuse to let it have unless it is prepared to put it up in first rate style for a London run on ordinary business terms. Consequently there is no likelihood of any work by me being produced by the I.T., although “ Mrs Warren ” is still talked of on both sides as eligible. You must understand, however, that we are all on the friendliest terms, and that I am rather flattered than otherwise at the preference of my friends for those plays of mine which have no purpose except the purpose of all poets & dramatists as against those which are exposures of the bad side of our social system.

Excuse this long & hasty scrawl. I let you into these matters because the man who gossips best in print about them is the man who knows what is behind the gossip.

yrs sincerely

G. Bernard Shaw

29/ To Ellen Terry

Later in August 1896

. . . you like to play at your profession on the stage, and to exercise your real powers in actual life. It is all very well for you to say that you want a Mother Play; but why didn’t you tell me that in time? I have written THE Mother Play—“Candida”—and I cannot repeat a masterpiece, nor can I take away Janet’s one ewe lamb from her. She told me the other day that I had been consistently treacherous about it from the beginning, because I would not let the Independent Theatre produce it with a capital of £400! What would she say if I handed it over to the most enviable & successful of her competitors—the only one, as she well knows, who has the secret of it in her nature? Besides, you probably wouldn’t play it even if I did: you would rather trifle with your washerwomen & Nance Oldfields & Imogens & nonsense of that kind. I have no patience with this perverse world. . . .

GBS

30/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

Later in August 1896

I wish I could write neatly, tidily like you. Cant . Dear Gentleman I was very glad to see a letter from you to me, and I “kept it” till the last! What a muddle about this little play [ The Man of Destiny ]. I wish you’d just give it to him [Henry Irving] to do what he likes with it. He’ll play it quick enough, never fear, but I see what he is thinking, the silly old cautious thing. He is such a dear Donkey! Darling fellow. Stupid ass! I cant bother about him and the part I want him to play any more (As he only can play it). You ought to have come down here long ago and read Candida (Why, she’s a dancer!) [There was a Spanish dancer called Candida at this time in London.] to me. Now my holiday is just over and I’m only a ha’porth the better for it, and I might have been well, all along o’ you.

Oh, but I’ve had the happiest time. A few visitors, and my 2 grandchildren all the time with me. You see I love benefiting things, and I can benefit the babies. I’m as alert as a fox-terrier when children are on my hands. Oh, I’d love to have a baby every year. I return to town on Saturday, and must put aside all thought of babies and sich like trash, and stick at work, rehearsing every day and every evening for a whole cussed month. The part of Imogen [in Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline ] is not yet well fixed in my memory, and it is so difficult to get the words. The words! Panic will possess me the first moment each morning until I know those words.