Bernard Shaw - Candida & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play

G.B.S.

11/ To Janet Achurch

20th March 1895

[My dear Janet]

I see that the mail goes tonight, and that the next one is two days off. Therefore I interrupt my Saturday Review work to send you a hasty line on one or two matters which I forgot to mention to you.

First, and most important, you are, immediately on receipt of this letter, to send for a barber, and have your head shaved absolutely bald. Then get a brown wig, of the natural color of your own hair. Candida with gold hair is improbable; but Candida with artificially gold hair is impossible. Further, you must not be fringy or fluffy. Send to a photograph shop for a picture of some Roman bust—say that of Julia, daughter of Augustus and wife of Agrippa, from the Uffizi [Galleries] in Florence—and take that as your model, or rather as your point of departure. You must part your hair in the middle, and be sweet, sensible, comely, dignified, and Madonna like. If you condescend to the vulgarity of being a pretty woman, much less a flashy one (as in that fatal supper scene in Clever Alice which was the true cause of the divine wrath that extinguished you for so long afterwards) you are lost. There are ten indispensable qualities which must underlie all your play: to wit, 1, Dignity, 2, Dignity, 3, Dignity, 4, Dignity, 5, Dignity, 6, Dignity, 7, Dignity, 8, Dignity, 9, Dignity, and 10, Dignity. And the least attempt on your part to be dignified will be utterly fatal.

Observe, Janet Achurch, what you have to do is to play the part. You have not to make a success. New York must notice nothing: it must say “Of course,” and go home quietly. If it says “Hooray” then you will be a mere popular actress, a sort of person whom I utterly decline to know. You must confine yourself strictly to your business, and do that punctually and faithfully, undisturbed by any covetings of success for yourself or me or the play. It does not matter whether the play fails or not, or whether you are admired or not: it is sufficient if you gain the respect of the public and your fellow artists, which you cannot fail to do if only you will keep yourself to the point. If Candida does not please the people, then go on to the next play without being disconcerted. This is the way to win the two main things needed: quiet sleep and efficient digestion.

Don’t take any undigested advice. On any point you are more likely to be right than anyone else once you have considered it. I urge you to go to church once a day at least to tranquillise your nerves. If you feel inclined to cry, go and meditate and pray . The religious life is the only one possible for you. Read the gospel of St John and the lives of the saints: they will do everything for you that morphia only pretends to do. Watch and pray and fast and be humbly proud; and all the rest shall be added to you.

Charrington [Janet’s husband] has burst out into an exceeding splendor of raiment, like a bridegroom. He has just been here devising a telegraph code for you. I went to see [Herbert] Flemming at the Independent Theatre after we parted at Waterloo, and have written a long notice of him for the Saturday [the 23rd March] which will please him and perhaps be of some use to him. He was so amazingly like you in his play that I have serious thoughts of getting him to play Candida at the copyrighting performance, unless I can persuade Ellen Terry, who has just written me a letter about another matter. [Herbert Beerbohm] Tree, writing from Chicago, wants the Philanderer ; but no doubt Mansfield has mentioned that to you.

I said something to [Charles] Charrington about getting Marion Lea to play Prossy; but I did not mean it seriously, as I think that there would be no room for her in a company with you and Mrs Mansfield [née Beatrice Cameron] in it. I mention this as a matter of prudence; for Mansfield is so Napoleonic in his swoops at any suggestion that he is quite capable of telegraphing to her straight off. I shall write to him by the next mail. It is on the verge of six o’clock; so I must break off and make for the post.

Remember—the religious life. No ambition, and no golden hair. I know that you will understand my advice, and take it—for ten minutes or so.

GBS

12/ To Janet Achurch

23rd March 1895

My dear Janet

. . . I sometimes think over the matter coolly, and check my tendency to think that genius must beat all abuses, by deliberately recalling many an instance in which stimulants had beaten genius. Finally the millstones catch Janet and grind her remorselessly. I break through the fascination and get to a more human feeling for her. I have been no saint myself—have hunted after one form of happiness occasionally. Janet recreates me with an emotion which lifts me high out of that. I become a saint at once and write a drama in which I idealise Janet. I have a horrible fear that if I lecture her, she will detest me; but her soul, which has come to life, or rather awakened from its sleep since the night of the Novelty Theatre, is worth wrestling for; and I do brutal things—put money into her pocket secretly in order purposely to produce a scene with her husband. Janet at last wakes to the emotion under which I have abstained; and for a while she rapidly begins to draw on rich stores of life, becomes beautiful, becomes real, becomes almost saintly, looks at me with eyes that have no glamor of morphia in them, and with an affection that is not hysterical, though in the middle of it all she stabs me to the heart by dyeing her hair a refulgent yellow. The question is how am I to make Janet religious, so that she may recreate herself and feel no need of stimulants. That is the question that obsesses me.

Now you have my theory brought home to yourself. Now you know what I conceive as wanting for Candida, and what Eugene means when he says, “I no longer desire happiness: life is nobler than that.” That is the language of the man recreated by a flash of religion.

It is drawing near post hour—12 midnight on Saturday to catch the German mail tomorrow morning. Let me hastily add that I have purposely abstained from worrying about your acting. Charrington is so nervous as to your interests that he is almost convinced that if you breathe the way you do at home, it will be an ungraceful trick. But you cannot help yourself by taking care not to do this or that. If only you occupy every moment of the play with Candida, you will not drop into any tricks that do not belong to her. And the time for pupilage is past: you must be left now to your own vigilance and conscience as an artist. Sweep all concern about little tricks and mannerisms away from your mind; and be generous to yourself as well as to the rest—for you must be generous to them, and make their points for them if necessary, since they will all be in much greater danger than you. In short, dearest Janet, be entirely magnanimous and beautiful in your thoughts and never mind the success of the play or of yourself. Believe me, it is not success that lies in our hands—yours or mine. Success is only an aspect that certain results of our work—not the work itself—bear in the eyes of others. Take it quietly and see what will happen.

There is a great deal for you to forgive in this letter. I have rambled into it without intending it: indeed I have quite got away from what I supposed I was going to say when I began.

GBS

13/ To Richard Mansfield

27th March 1895

My dear Mansfield

I wish I had time to write; but I haven’t. I hoped to get an interview into “Town Topics” [magazine] before Easter; but I am afraid I shall not be able to write it. This copyrighting performance [of Candida at the Theatre Royal] (program of which I enclose) with all its attendant arrangements and expenses, and a thousand other things besides my literary work (you haven’t the least idea what a lot of it I have to do to earn £6 a week and act as referee by cable in your combats with Janet) has left me without a moment. For Heaven’s sake star everybody who wants to be starred. Star the callboy; see that everybody else in the theatre has his name printed in letters three inches longer than your own; bribe the press to interview the entire staff; publish albums of their photographs taken at various periods of their march from the cradle to the grave; polish Janet’s boots and cast Mrs Mansfield for old women exclusively; only act and make them act within an inch of their lives. It is good business to star Janet; what is the use of giving a woman fifty pounds a week if you are not going to run her for all she is worth? Star her until she begs you for God’s sake not to raise any more expectations. She comes from Manchester: she will grab everything you try to keep from her. Treat her as the Roman soldiers treated the woman who asked for the gold things on their arms: crush her beneath the weight of your shield. Give her everything she dares ask; and make her understand that she has got to prove herself worth it on the 15th April. The performance must come off then: it is all over the press here already; and if it breaks down it will be impossible to avoid explanations. Never mind starring yourself: you are, or ought to be, hors concours. I told Janet to offer to be content with a line in diamond type in the bill, and then win her position: if she cannot rise to that, why, have a new fount of type cast for her, six feet high, and paint the town hell color with her name. These follies drive me stark mad: I hereby authorise you to announce her as the authoress of the play, if that will please her. . .