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Bernard Shaw

Candida & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play

Edited by Vitaly Baziyan

A mystery Candida, created by Bernard Shaw during 1894 and 1895, was first published on the 19th April 1898 by a small British publishing house that was founded by the writer Grant Richards simultaneously with American edition published by Herbert S. Stone and Company, Chicago and New York: Plays Pleasant, Volume II (Arms and the Man, Candida, the Man of Destiny, You Never Can Tell). This publication from a revised edition Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant. By Bernard Shaw. The Second Volume, containing the four Pleasant Plays published by Constable and Company Ltd., London: 1920 is a handmade reproduction from the original edition, and remains as true to the original work as possible. The original edition was processed manually by means of a classic editing which ensures the quality of publications and the unrestricted enjoyment of reading.

The selected correspondence of Bernard Shaw relating to the play Candida contains 249 letters and entries written between 1889 and 1950. Sources of this collection are prior publications Collected Letters of Bernard Shaw published by Max Reinhardt; Bernard Shaw’s Letters to Siegfried Trebitsch published by Stanford University Press; Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: a correspondence and Our Theatres in the Nineties published by Constable and Company Ltd., London; Shaw on Theatre published by Hill and Wang, New York; Bernard Shaw’s Letters to Granville Barker published by Theatre Arts Books, New York; Shaw on Language published by Philosophical Library, New York; Advice to a Young Critic published by Peter Owen Limited, London; The Diary of Beatrice Webb, Vol. III, 1905 – 1924 “The Power to Alter Things” and Vol. IV: 1924 – 1943 “The Wheel of Life” published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; Beatrice Webb’s diaries, 1924 – 1932 published by Longmans, Green and Co Ltd, London; The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb: Volume II published by Cambridge University Press;The Playwright & the Pirate. Bernard Shaw and Frank Harris: A Correspondence, Bernard Shaw: The Drama Observed, and Bernard Shaw: The Diaries, 1885 – 1897 published by Pennsylvania State University Press; To A Young Actress: the Letters of Bernard Shaw to Molly Tompkins published by Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. Publisher, New York; edition of letters published by University of Toronto Press; Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography, in Two Volumes, Band 1 published by Oxford University Press.

George Bernard Shaw won The Nobel Prize in Literature for 1925 “for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty.”

George Bernard Shaw won the Oscar in 1939 for Best Screenplay and Dialogue for his role in adapting his play Pygmalion for the screen.

The book represents a significant addition to modern-day understanding of Shaw’s play Candida and reveals his thoughts on a wide variety of issues, love affairs und relationships with contemporaries. Bernard Shaw’s punctuation and spelling were mostly kept by the editor. Italics were used for plays titles, books, newspapers and unfamiliar foreign words or phrases. Christian names, surnames, positions and ranks were added in square brackets when they were omitted but are necessary for a better understanding. Cuts of a few words are indicated by three dots and longer omissions by four dots.

The ebook cover was created by the editor using the picture of Sir John Everett Millais.

The play Candida was given a copyright performance at the Theatre Royal in South Shields on the 30th March 1895. The copyright performance was staged in the United Kingdom for the purpose of securing the author’s copyright over the text. There was a fear that according to the Dramatic Literary Property Act 1833, if a play’s text was published, or a rival production staged, before its official premiere, then the author’s rights would be lost.

Characters in order of appearance:

The Reverend James Mavor Morell, a clergyman and Candida’s husband – George Young

Miss Proserpine Garnett, Morell’s secretary – Ethel Verne

The Reverend Alexander (Lexy) Mill – J. Daniels

Mr Burgess, Candida’s father – Fred Cremlin

Candida – Lilian M. Revell

Eugene Marchbanks – Albert Edwin Drinkwater

Producer – Albert Edwin Drinkwater

The play Candida was first presented in public by the Independent Theatre Company at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Aberdeen on the 30th July 30 1897.

Characters in order of appearance:

The Reverend James Mavor Morell, a clergyman and Candida’s husband – Charles Charrington

Miss Proserpine Garnett, Morell’s secretary – Edith Craig

The Reverend Alexander (Lexy) Mill – Robert Farquharson

Mr Burgess, Candida’s father – Lionel Belmore

Candida – Janet Achurch

Eugene Marchbanks – Courtney Thorpe

Producer – Charles Charrington

Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play Candida

1/ Bernard Shaw’s diary entry for 14th August 1889

. . . Last day to send in article on the opera season (2500 words) to the Scottish Art Review, 294 St. Vincent St., Glasgow (James Mavor [Morell’s godfather], editor). See Monday. Last day to send in Bayreuth article to the English Illustrated Magazine. . . .

[G. Bernard Shaw]

2/ To an English dramatist Henry Arthur Jones

2nd December 1894

My dear H. A. J.

Here I am at the seaside between the finishing of one play [Candida] and the beginning of another [The Man of Destiny], just the time to send back the ball to you.

All that you say is quite true statically. Dynamically, it is of no virtue whatever. Like you, I write plays because I like it, and because I cannot remember any period in my life when I could help inventing people and scenes. I am not a storyteller: things occur to me as scenes, with action and dialogue—as moments, developing themselves out of their own vitality. I believe you will see as I go on that the conception of me as a doctrinaire, or as a sort of theatrical [Jeremiah] Joyce (of Scientific Dialogues fame), is a wrong one. On the contrary, my quarrel with the conventional drama is that it is doctrinaire to the uttermost extreme of dogmatism—that the dramatist is so strait-jacketted in theories of conduct that he cannot even state his conventional solution clearly, but leaves it to be vaguely understood, and so for the life of him cannot write a decent last act. I find that when I present a drama of pure feeling, wittily expressed, the effect when read by me to a picked audience of people in a room is excellent. But in a theatre, the mass of the people, too stupid to relish the wit, and too convention-ridden to sympathise with real as distinct from theatrical feeling, simply cannot see any drama or fun there at all; whilst the clever people feel the discrepancy between the real and theatrical feeling only as a Gilbertian satire on the latter, and, appreciating the wit well enough, are eager to shew their cleverness by proclaiming me as a monstrously clever sparkler in the cynical line. These clever people predominate in a first night audience; and, accordingly, in “Arms and The Man,” I had the curious experience of witnessing an apparently insane success, with the actors and actresses almost losing their heads with the intoxication of laugh after laugh, and of going before the curtain to tremendous applause, the only person in the theatre who knew that the whole affair was a ghastly failure. The same thing is occurring now in Boston, Philadelphia, &c—there is about as much of me in the affair as there is of Shakespere in [David] Garrick’s “Katherine and Petruchio.” Here and there, of course, I come across a person who was moved by the play, or by such portions of it as got played any better than a pantomime opening; but for the general paying public there needs a long fight, during which my plays will have to be produced in spite of all economic considerations, sometimes because the parts are too fascinating to be resisted, sometimes because [Arthur Wing] Pinero is not ready with his commissioned play, sometimes because I am willing to forgo an advance, sometimes because Nature not submit wholly to the box office.

Now here you will at once detect an enormous assumption on my part that I am a man of genius. But what can I do—on what other assumption am I to proceed if I am to write plays at all? You will detect the further assumption that the public, which will still be the public twenty years hence, will nevertheless see feeling and reality where they see nothing now but mere intellectual swordplay and satire. But that is what always happens. . . .

G. Bernard Shaw

3/ To Reginald Golding Bright, a young theatre critic at that time and later a manager of London office of an American theatrical and literary agent and producer Elizabeth Marbury

2nd December 1894

Dear Sir

The best service I can do you is to take your notice and jot down on it without ceremony the comments which occur to me. You will find first certain alterations in black ink. In them I have tried to say, as well as I can off-hand, what you were trying to say: that is, since it was evident you were dodging round some point or other, I have considered the only point that there was to make, and have made it. It came quite easy when I had altered your statement about Frenchmen at large to what you really meant—the conventional stage Frenchman. Always find out rigidly and exactly what you mean, and never strike an attitude, whether national or moral or critical or anything else. You struck a national attitude when you wrote that about the Frenchman and Enlishman; and you struck a moral attitude when you wrote “She has sunk low enough in all conscience.” Get your facts right first: that is the foundation of all style, because style is the expression of yourself; and you cannot express yourself genuinely except on a basis of precise reality.

In red ink you will find some criticisms which you may confidently take as expressing what an experienced editor would think of your sample of work.

You have not at all taken in my recommendation to you to write a book. You say you are scarcely competent to write books just yet. That is just why I recommed you to learn. If I advised you to learn to skate, you would not reply that your balance was scarcely good enough yet. A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed, he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself. You will never write a good book until you have written some bad ones. If they have sent you my Scottish article, you will see that I began by writing some abominably bad criticisms. I wrote five long books before I started again on press work. William Archer wrote a long magnum opus on the life and works of Richard Wagner, a huge novel, and a book on the drama, besides an essay on [Henry] Irving and a good deal of leader work for a Scotch paper, before he began his victorious career on The World. He also perpetrated about four plays in his early days. (By the way, you mustn’t publish this information.) You must go through the mill, too; and you can’t possibly start too soon. Write a thousand words a day for the next five years for at least nine months every year. Read all the great critics—[John] Ruskin, Richard Wagner, [Gotthold Ephraim] Lessing, [Charles] Lamb and [William] Hazlitt. Get a ticket for the British Museum reading room, and live there as much as you can. Go to all the first-rate orchestral concerts and to the opera, as well as to the theatres. Join debating societies and learn to speak in public. Haunt little Sunday evening political meetings and exercise that accomplishment. Study men and politics in this way. As long as you stay in the office, try and be the smartest hand in it: I spent four and a half years in an office before I was twenty. Be a teetotaller; don’t gamble; don’t lend; don’t borrow; don’t for your life get married; make the attainment of EFFICIENCY your sole object for the next fifteen years; and if the City can teach you nothing more, or demands more time than you can spare from your apprenticeship, tell your father that you prefer to cut loose and starve, and do it. But it will take you at least a year or two of tough work before you will be able to build up for yourself either the courage or the right to take heroic measures. Finally, since I have given you all this advice, I add this crowning precept, the most valuable of all. NEVER TAKE ANYBODY’S ADVICE.

And now, to abandon the role of your guide, philosopher and friend, which I don’t propose to revert to again until you report progress in ten years or so, let me thank you for the paragraph in The Sun, which was quite right and appropriate. I have no more news at present, except that I have nearly finished a new play [Candida], the leading part in which I hope to see played by Miss Janet Achurch, of whose genius I have always had a very high opinion. It is quite a sentimental play, which I hope to find understood by women, if not by men; and it is so straightforward that I expect to find it pronounced a miracle of perversity. This is my fifth dramatic composition. The first was “Widowers’ Houses,” of Independent Theatre fame. The second was “The Philanderer,” a topical comedy in which the New Woman figured before Mr [Sydney] Grundy discovered her. The third was “Mrs Warren’s Profession,” a play with a purpose, the purpose being much the same as that of my celebrated letter to the Pall Mall Gazette on the Empire controversy. The fourth was “Arms and the Man,” which was so completely misunderstood that it made my reputation as a playwright both here and in New York. The Independent Theatre has already announced “Mrs Warren’s Profession” for its forthcoming season. “The Philanderer” was written originally for that society; but on its completion I threw it aside and wrote another more suitable for the purposes of the society—Mrs Warren. [Charles] Wyndham asked me to do something for him on seeing “Arms and the Man”; and I tried to persuade him to play “The Philanderer”; but whilst the project was under consideration, Wyndham made such a decisive success with “[The Case of] Rebellious Susan” that he resolved to follow up the vein of comedy opened by Henry Arthur Jones to the end before venturing upon the Shavian quicksand. But this involved so long a delay that I withdrew the play, and am now looking round to see whether the world contains another actor who can philander as well as Wyndham. As I have always said that if I did not write six plays before I was forty I would never write one after, I must finish the work now in hand and another as well before the 26th July, 1896; but I hope to do much more than that, since I have managed to get through the present play within three months, during which I have had to take an active part in the Schoolboard and Vestry elections, to keep up my work in the Fabian Society, to deliver nearly two dozen lectures in London and the provinces, and to fire off various articles and criticisms. The fact is, I took a good holiday this autumn in Germany, Italy, and in Surrey; and I accumulated a stack of health which I am dissipating at a frightful rate. The Christmas holidays will come just in time to save my life.

If any of this stuff is of use to you for paragraphing purposes—and remember that the world will not stand too much Bernard Shaw—you are welcome to work it up by all means when it suits you. Only, don’t quote it as having been said by me. That is an easy way out which I bar. I find that you have got an atrociously long letter out of me. I have been blazing away on the platform this evening for an hour and a half, and ought to be in bed instead of clattering at this machine.

Yours, half asleep,

G. Bernard Shaw

4/ To an English stage actress and actor-manager Janet Achurch

22nd December 1894

Here I am, taking the sea air with Wallas. The sea air travels at the rate to of 120 miles an hour and goes through clothes, flesh, bone, spirit tut and all, so that one walks against it like a naked soul, exhilarated, but teeming at the nose. We are in an immense hotel, with 180 rooms and few guests, who have nothing to do, and are miserable exceedingly having come down expressly to be happy. I shall begin a new play presently. The last having been so happily inspired by you, I look about Folkestone for some new inspiratrice, but in vain: every woman in the place either strikes me cheerfully prosaic at a glance, or else makes me boil with ten-philander-power cynicism. Everybody is quoting [Robert Louis] Stevenson’s dictum about the height of happiness being attained when you live in the open air with the woman you love. Convinced as I am that love is hopelessly vulgar and happiness insufferably tedious to those who have once gained the heights, I nevertheless find that these material heights—these windswept cliffs—make me robustly vulgar, greedy and ambitious. If you by any chance tumble off the heights yourself ever, you will understand how vigorously despicable I am under these circumstances. The ozone offers an immense opportunity to any thoroughly abandoned female who would like to become the heroine of a play as black as “Candida” is white. . . .

I am, as you will observe, in an entirely worthless humour. That is the result of health, fresh air, plenty of food, early rising, long walk and the rest of the bracing delusions.

GBS

5/ To an Scottish writer, theatre critic, critic, playwright, Henrik Ibsen’s translator and early friend William Archer

28th December 1894

I return to town tomorrow afternoon to take up the duties, fairly forced on me by [Frank] Harris, of dramatic critic to the Saturday Review; so do not send on any more proofs to Folkestone. It is questionable whether it is quite decent for a dramatic author to be also a dramatic critic; but my extreme reluctance to make myself dependent for my bread and butter on the acceptance of my plays by managers tempts me to hold to the position that my real profession is that by which I can earn my bread in security. Anyhow, I am prepared to do anything which will enable me to keep my plays for twenty years with perfect tranquillity if it takes that time to educate the public into wanting them.

I read ‘Candida’ to [George] Alexander before I came down here. He instantly perceived that it was Marchbank’s & Candida’s (that is, [Henry] Esmond’s & Janet’s) play and not his. He said he would produce it if he could get down to the poet’s age; but he would not play Morell. He had acted that sort of part, he said, until people were declaring that he could not act. By so doing he has made money enough to make him independent of playing anything but parts which will give him, as he put it, a property in himself as well as in his theatre. This, being intelligent, delighted me, and I took off ‘Candida’ in high spirits. However, as he said he wanted to act a clever man, I suggested The Philanderer, who is an extremely clever man. He asked me to let him read it. I sent it to him & have not heard from him since. He said he wanted a play, because neither [Henry Arthur] Jones nor [Arthur Wing] Pinero was ready. He meant ready to step in on the failure of Henry James’s play; but naturally he did not say so. I am desperately floored by your confounded proofs. A year or two ago, when there was some question of republishing my World articles, I looked through a few of them, and found them, apart from the context of time and place for which they were originally designed, quite impossibly dull, stale and ineffective. I will not go so far as to say that your articles are so afflicting; but they are sufficiently damnable. Who now cares for a discussion of the probability of the plot of ‘A Bunch of Violets’ [by Sydney Grundy]? What further use to Carte [‘s Savoy Theatre] is your attempt to make yourself agreeable, kindly & tolerant over such a ghastly and foredoomed insanity as Mirette [a comic opera by Michel Carré and André Messager]? Is it tolerable to have [Henrik Johan] Ibsen and [Eleonora] Duse, not to mention myself, cut into strips by twothousandword lengths of mere regurgitation of the year’s refuse, which is sufficiently chronicled elsewhere in the Dramatic Year [Book] & the files of the [British weekly paper] Era? I am in utter despair: I dont know what to write by way of preface. If your laziness had led you to follow my example & leave the articles buried, I could not have complained; but I am now more than ever convinced that you should either let your year’s work alone or else rearrange it all as an annual article having the same excellence as its parts originally had as weekly articles. You tell me that the experiment of last year was not a financial success. I tear my hair and desperately ask you, why should it? I declare before high Heaven that [Walter] Scott is a fool, and you a shirk, to publish a book that is no book. If it paid you, you would have some excuse; but it doesnt. . . .

GBS

6/ To Janet Achurch

25th January 1895

I have made an appointment with [a popular London actor Lewis] Waller to read “Candida”; but I shall read Eugene for all he is worth, as to sacrifice him would be to sacrifice the play. The only chance is in the fact that Waller is at an earlier phase of actor-management than [George] Alexander, and may play for a managerial and financial success at the cost of playing Morell. But I am not sanguine. If he refuses, I shall try him with the Philanderer ([Charles] Hawtrey in the title part) sooner than leave that stone unturned; and if he sees money in that, Miss [Julia] Neilson is clearly out of the question for Julia, a part which I still think you could do yourself good by playing, as it would put you to the height of your cleverness and technical skill to play it; and these are the qualities for which you most need to gain credit. Nobody has seen you play a really keen comedy part, finished up to the finger nails. Clever Alice [in Clever Alice – Walter Brandon Thomas’ adaptation of Adolf von Wilbrandt’s Die Maler] & Becky Sharp [in Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray] were only tomfooleries. Besides, with Paula Tanqueray [in The Second Mrs Tanqueray by Arthur Wing Pinero] in everyone’s head as a great acting part, the public & the critics will have their cue for Julia. If you could pull off that part well, you would have no more trouble with Pinero: I know exactly what he thinks about you at present. What he thinks is all wrong; but you must do a piece of fine filagree work to convert him.

I am not surprised about Mrs Daintry [in Mrs Warren’s Profession]. Waller’s perfectly right; the ending is not the sort of thing for his audience. Besides, it is not really good drama: it is only good acting. After the revelation about the daughter, the play, dramatically speaking, stops as completely as “Candida” stops after the Erklarung in the third act. . . .

GBS

7/ To an English actor-manager Richard Mansfield

22nd February 1895

My dear Mansfield

. . . Now let me ask you whether you can play a boy of eighteen—a strange creature—a poet—a bundle of nerves—a genius—and a rattling good part. The actor-managers here can’t get down to the age. The play, which is called Candida, is the most fascinating work in the world—my latest—in three acts, one cheap scene, and with six characters. The woman’s part divides the interest and the necessary genius with the poet’s. There are only two people in the world possible for it: Janet Achurch, for whom it was written, and Mrs [Madge] Kendal. If Janet creates it here, will you pay her fare out and back and give her 300 dollars a week or so for the sake of covering yourself with new and strange fascinations as the poet? By the way, there’s probably money in the piece; but it’s a charming work of art; and the money would fly somehow. . . .

P.S. Since “Candida” is such a cheap and simple play, why not fly over here in the thick of the season; take a theatre for half a dozen matinées; play the poet to Janet’s Candida; set all London talking & wondering; & disappear in a flash of blue fire? That would be immensely in character.

yours sincerely

G. Bernard Shaw

8/ To Richard Mansfield

9th March 1895

My dear Mansfield

. . . I am working away as hard as I can at the stage business of Candida. I will get the parts copied out here if there is time as well as the script; so that there may not be a moment’s delay in getting to work at the other side. Meanwhile I had better tell you what you will want for the play. There are six parts only. One of them is an old man, vulgar, like Eccles in Caste [a comedy drama by Thomas William Robertson], only not a drunken waster, but a comfortably well off vestryman who has made money in trade. He must be a genuinely funny low comedian, able to talk vulgar English—drop his Hs and so forth. And he must be really a middleaged or elderly man and not a young man made up old, which is one of the most depressing things known to the stage. Then there is a young woman of the standing of a female clerk, rather a little spitfire, a bit common, but with some comic force and a touch of feeling when needed. She must not be slowtongued: the part requires smart, pert utterance. If you know any pair who could play Eccles and Polly Eccles thoroughly well, you may engage them straight off for Candida. Then there is a curate. Any solemn young walking gentleman who can speak well will do for him. The other three parts are, yourself, Janet, and your leading man, who must be equal to a very strong part which would be the star part if there were not the other part to relegate it to important utility. The character is a strong, genial clergyman (Candida’s husband) with much weight and popular force of style. I have not seen the Scandinavian [Albert Gran] whom Felix [Mansfield] is bringing out; so cannot say whether he looks likely to suit the part.

I must break off: it is post hour. There will be plenty of time to arrange the dresses and the one scene, which presents no difficulty. The Philanderer must now wait: it would be madness to produce it before Candida. I will keep Candida for you in London, and am quite disposed to hold over other plays for you if you can arrange to conquer the two worlds within a reasonable time. More of that afterwards.

G.B.S.

9/ To Richard Mansfield

16th March 1895

My dear Mansfield

. . . [Your brother] Felix, in addition to my blessing, which is probably not copyrightable in America, has the full score of Candida and the band parts (all except the first violin, which Janet took to study on the way, and which she will no doubt lose), conscientiously read through and corrected by me—a labor which will leave its marks on my constitution until the last trumpet. It has been impossible for me to send out the contract with them: it must wait until next week. Terms, practically the same as before, except for a stipulation about the cast to secure to Janet the vested interest in the part which I promised her during its gestation. The understanding is that if it succeeds in New York, I am to hold the London rights for you for, say, a year, on the New York terms. However, I shall make fresh demands for London as to the cast. Unless you manage to get a very unlikely supply of talent for the New York production, it will be better for us all to cast the piece here strongly from the London point of view: that is, with some well known leading man ([Herbert] Waring, for instance) as Morell, Kate Phillips as Prossy (unless Mrs Bancroft [Marie Wilton] would like to try it), and a popular low comedian as Burgess. I saw [Albert] Gran this morning at the station, and was very favorably impressed by him; but he is too young, and not English enough, to play Morell here. The question of age is quite exceptionally important in this instance. You may, by sheer skill, succeed in making yourself appear a boy of eighteen in contrast to a man of your own real age; but beside a man of half your age made up for double that figure, the artificiality would be terrible. Gran has the pleasant frank style, and something of the physique for the part; and if he can hide his accent, his foreignness would not matter in New York, where the Church of England parson is an unknown quantity; so that I should not at all demur if you thought, after reckoning him up, that he would do Morell for you at the 5th Avenue [Theatre] as well as the best other man available; but for this country Morell must be ultra-home made.

If you find at rehearsal that any of the lines cannot be made to go, sack the whole company at once and get in others. I have tested every line of it in my readings of the play; and there is a way of making every bit of it worth doing. There are no points: the entire work is one sustained point from beginning to end.

In some respects I want my stage management and business stuck to with tolerable closeness. For instance, in the second act there are certain places where you must efface yourself whilst Burgess and Morell are spreading themselves. This is essential to the effect of your breaking in again. I have put you on a chair with your back to the audience during the first of these intervals; and I urge you not to alter this, as I have very slender faith in your powers of self suppression (I don’t question your goodwill) if the audience can see what in my present shattered condition you will perhaps excuse me for calling your mug. Later on, though you have hardly anything to say except the flash “That’s brave: that’s beautiful,” it is important that your face should be seen. The passage where you put your hand on your heart with a sympathetic sense of the stab Morell has suffered is cribbed from Wagner’s Parsifal.

If the play is not successful, fatten Janet, engage a Living Skeleton, buy a drum, and take to the road.

If it is successful, play Oswald in Ibsen’s “Ghosts.” Try Lovborg in Hedda Gabler anyhow: nobody has ever touched the part here; and Janet would be a perfect Hedda.

I can no more. I hope Mrs Mansfield has quite recovered from her shaking.

By the way, unless there is a great Bernard Shaw catch-on over Candida, as to the likelihood of which I am rather sceptical, the Philanderer had better lie quiet for a while. . . .

yours—wrecked

G. Bernard Shaw

10/ To William Archer

18th March 1895

[Dear Archer]

The ‘division of wealth’ passage is all right. If only he [Arthur Wing Pinero] had used the word, ‘distribution’ he would have cleared the reef.

I am greatly dissatisfied with my article on the play. I was in the middle of the worry and overwork thrown on me by the necessity of getting Candida ready for the boat on Saturday, with the parts all corrected and the full score provided with a minutely detailed plan of the stage action and so on. The production of the play on Wednesday rushed me mercilessly, as the paper has to be ready to catch the foreign mails on Friday afternoon; so that I was quite unable to get into a sympathetic, humane mood, and could only express the— in short, what I did express. However, I should not at all mind seeing Pinero driven back into the comic line. It is in that line alone that he shews the smallest fertility. [Pinero’s play The Notorious] Mrs Ebbsmith, like the other two wouldbe serious plays, not only shews awkwardness, constraint, and impotence on its intellectual side, but apparent exhaustion and sterility on its inventive side. All the characters in it bundled together, and squeezed in a wine press would not produce blood enough to make Dick Phenyl [a character of another Pinero’s play Sweet Lavender]. ‘The Hobby Horse’ is a masterpiece of humor and fancy in comparison. It seems to me that it is only by the frankest abandonment of himself to his own real tastes and capacities that he can do anything worth doing now on the stage. . . .

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. . .

No fair play here for you or anyone else. Who wants fair play? London is a fortress in which every man must, as an outsider, batter a breach for himself. Then in, sword in hand. Success, achievement, fruition, is death. Fortunately, they fight you from behind barricades in every street when you have carried the wall; so that there is always an obstacle, and, consequently, an object in life.

All the same, no nonsense this time about an August season. The season is over by the middle of July. Don’t be in a hurry: Candida can wait until next year if it proves worth going on with at all. Immer Mut!

In haste

G. Bernard Shaw

14/ To Janet Achurch

30th March 1895

[My dear Janet]

I am sending by this mail an interview to “Town Topics,” which they may or may not insert. I am so addled by want of exercise, and ceaseless clatter, clatter, clatter at this machine, that I am incapable of writing anything that has not a hysterical air about it. . . I have a frightful feeling that my previous letters have been all morbid. However, no matter. The spring is germinating; this mail finishes all I can do with regard to “Candida” in America; the copyrighting performance is over at last; the Easter holiday is at hand; life rises in me and conscience wanes; and there is animation in my style even as I sing

But what are vernal joys to me?

Where thou art not, no spring can be.

I shall never be able to begin a new play until I fall in love with somebody else. Charrington called yesterday. He said you wouldn’t sign a contract, he was sure of that; you would rather not bind yourself. But my own feeling is that you had a stronger interest in getting a contract than Mansfield has in giving it to you. Suppose “Candida,” as is probable—more probable than any other event—is a success on the first night, a “succes d’estime” for the following fortnight, and then vanishes from the New York stage. Mansfield, in disgust at the whole business, may say that you have failed, and that you are not worth the fifty pounds a week. . .

On the other hand, if you get your two years contract, what will happen then? You will of course stipulate for leading parts (with a reasonable regard for Mrs Mansfield); and you will then be sure of work and fifty pounds a week for two years, during which you can save and look about you with a view to campaigning on your own account afterwards. No doubt two years seems a long time to you, who have been accustomed to start operations in a fortnight; but how have they succeeded? What are you afraid of in the transaction? Is it that Mansfield will not pay you? He must; he cannot exist without considerable property as a theatrical manager; and whilst the property is there, the law can force him to pay your salary. Or is it that he will give you no parts, and prevent you by injunction from playing for anyone else? Do you think people behave that way when it costs them fifty pounds a week?

But you may be dreaming that “Candida” will be such a success that it will place New York at your feet. It won’t; and even if it does, it will not place Boston and Chicago and so on at your feet without Mansfield. It will really be a success of the combination of yourself with Mansfield; and it is absolutely impossible for it to justify you in feeling sure that you would maintain your lead without him. You may say that [Charles] Frohmann or somebody will say “Come and be my leading lady at a hundred a week.” Well, the chance of that contingency is just good enough to enable you to extract a two years contract from Mansfield now; but it is not good enough to risk going without a contract for. Besides, it was Mansfield, not Frohmann or another, that gave you your chance; and he is entitled to the full profit of it if it turns out well. And he has “Candida,” subject, it is true, to the condition of playing it fifty times a year with you in the title part, but morally entitled, if you go to another manager for purely commercial reasons, to demand the substitution of—say Ellen Terry. What plays have the other managers got that would shew you to the fullest advantage?

All this you must ponder carefully. In telling Mansfield to let you have your own way, I am running the great risk that he will comply, and that your way will be the old ruinous way. The summing up of the case is this. Either you intend to make your career in America as some manager’s leading lady, or you intend to make it as your own entrepreneur. Well, you cannot begin the latter at once because you have no money; and you must once for all give up the old plan of throwing your friends’ savings into enterprises that are as ill considered as enterprises conducted with other peoples’ money usually are. Therefore, you must work for a salary for a few years at least. Are you going to let the certainty of a two years engagement at fifty pounds a week (excellent pay) slip through your fingers on the chance of “Candida” being successful enough to bring you a better offer?

That’s the question you have to face. I don’t advise you one way or the other; I simply take care that the case in favour of a contract shall be put clearly before you. Probably [your husband Charles] Charrington will put the other side with equal eloquence.

GBS

15/ To Janet Achurch

3rd April 1895

[My dear Janet]

I had looked forward to writing you a long letter; but your cable to Charrington saying that Candida is withdrawn has dropped here with explosive force, Charrington being all for an immediate departure as a stowaway on the next liner to New York. However, I shall cable to Mansfield; for he must produce “Candida” now, and produce it at once too, or else there will be forty thousand fiends to pay; for the newspaper boom here is immense—two interviews with me this week, paragraphs innumerable, quotations from the passage about you and Ellen Terry in my preface to [William] Archer’s book, altogether such an outburst of interest that the fact of the advent of Candida under Mansfield’s management with you in the title part is nailed into the public mind. [Clement] Scott ignores it and announces another project of Mansfield’s. If there is any failure, he will jump at the chance of alluding to “misleading statements” and so forth; and then woe to those who trifle with me; for the explanations will lose none of their picturesqueness if I have to make them. It will be an advertisement for me and the play in any case, one which may perhaps end, if Mansfield leaves me in the lurch, in the rapid production of “Candida” here, with “The Philanderer” on top of it. When I learn that you are not busy rehearsing with all your might, remorse leaves me.

I forget whether I told you that the clause in the agreement relating to you runs as follows:

“The Manager shall engage Miss Janet Achurch and shall cast her for the title part of Candida at all performances given under this agreement and shall not permit Miss Janet Achurch to perform publicly in America on any occasion prior to her appearance as Candida.” . . .

GBS

16/ To Janet Achurch

5th April 1895

My dear Janet

I have played my last card, and am beaten, as far as I can see, without remedy. I have done what I could; I have scamped none of the work, stinted none of the minutes or sixpences; I have worked the press; I have privately flattered Mansfield and abused you; I have concentrated every force that I could bring to bear to secure you a good show with Candida. Can I do anything more? And how long must I keep my temper with these rotten levers that break in my hands the moment the dead lift comes? It is the distance that has defeated me. If only I were in New York, with one hand on his throat, and the other on the public pulse through the interviewers, I would play him a scene from the life of Wellington that would astonish him. Never has man yet made such a sacrifice for a woman as I am making now in not letting fly at him by this mail. But I have so laid things out to force him for his own credit to keep faith with me, that I cannot be certain that he may not tomorrow realize that he had better do Candida after all. He will get letters of mine that are on their way, and may guess from them that my smile has a Saturday Review set of teeth behind it. He may lose heart over whatever other play he intends to open with. He may receive a visit from an angel in the night warning him that Charrington is on the seas after his scalp. If I fire a shot now that cannot strike him for eight days, it may strike you by upsetting some new arrangement made in the meantime. I am tied hand and foot—not a bad thing for a man in a rage—and can only grind my teeth to you privately. If this were a big misfortune I should not mind: if you had dropped all the existing copies of the play accidentally into the Atlantic, it would have wrinkled my brow less than it would have wrinkled the Atlantic: the infuriating thing is that it is an annoyance, and no misfortune at all. I have my play; I have you for the part; I have a huge extra advertisement; I have not a single false step to regret all through. But this only sets my conscience perfectly free to boil over with the impatience of the capable workman who finds a trumpery job spoiled by the breaking of the tool he is using. Besides, my deepest humanity is revolted by his skulking in his throne room and refusing to see you and treat with you as one artist of the first rank with another. The compromise he has made is simply a payment to you to give him the power of preventing you from appearing in New York this season. —But this is waste of time: let me talk sense.

By this mail I write to Miss [Elisabeth] Marbury, my agent (Empire Theatre Building, 40th St. and Broadway), instructing her to get the script and parts of Candida, and the script of The Philanderer from Mansfield, if he has not changed his mind by the time my letter arrives. I have further instructed her to give the parts to you, and to send me back the script. You will therefore have the set of parts as well as a prompt copy in your possession, in case of need. But as I still think Candida a valuable chance for you, I will not let you throw away the first performance of it except on a thoroughly serious occasion. C. C. [Charles Charrington] starts tonight for Liverpool to join the Cunarder which sails tomorrow. He insists on going as an emigrant; and as there seems to me to be something in his contention that he will be too seasick to care where or how he travels—oh, here he is; and he is not going after all: your cablegram has stopped him. . . .

GBS

17/ Bernard Shaw’s interview with Lady Colin Campbell née Gertrude Elizabeth Blood published by her newspaper Realm “Candida: a Talk with Mr Bernard Shaw”

5th April 1895

Now, Mr Shaw, as himself avers, writes plays more by accident than design. An idea occurs to him on a bus; and presently the idea has—quite fortuitously—spread itself into a play. It was about the latest accident—Candida—that we were talking—and about its author.

‘I am the most conventional of men,’ sighed Mr Shaw, somewhat regretfully.

‘And yet,’ I suggested, ‘there is an impression abroad that any work of yours is likely to be unconventional.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ said Mr Shaw, ‘that the conventional play has never been written?’

‘I suppose the conventional reply would be that the conventional play is “all over the stage”.’

‘Not at all. The play “all over the stage” is the play in which the convention is violated. It is not the convention, but the violation of it, which is the subject of the play. That is what the playwright and the public wallow in. The convention is really only an assumption that what the characters are doing is extremely wrong. It is never explained or argued for a moment why it’s wrong, or what the conventional position really is. The author assumes it, the public assumes it, all for the sake of a bit of tragedy—and there you are. Now, it occurred to me that, as the really conventional play remained to be written, I was just the sort of man to write it.’

It was a hard saying. I pleaded for more light.

‘In Candida,’ explained Mr Shaw, ‘the convention is the subject of the play.’

‘What convention?’

‘I beg your pardon—the wife-and-mother convention. The strongest and best position a woman can occupy, you know, is that of a wife and a mother.’

‘Then, you accept the convention as valid?’

‘Of course, there is a truth in that, as in every other convention. Not that every woman is in her right place as a wife and a mother. Some women in that predicament are in a hopelessly wrong position. They are married to the wrong man; they have no genius for motherhood; there are a thousand and one ways in which they may be out of their plane. But my heroine happens to be precisely in the right position. That, you perceive, is an absolutely original and yet a completely conventional situation for a heroine.’

‘But do you find it a thrillingly dramatic one?’

‘That’s a home question, in more senses than one. And a question that must be answered by the public. For myself, I have found it, as a dramatist, a sufficiently dramatic situation. I have found in it a motive which completely satisfies my dramatic sense.’

‘And what of the plot? Does the heroine never get out of this original and conventional situation?’

‘If I told you the plot, you would think it the dullest affair you had ever heard. There is a clergyman and his wife—who is Candida, the heroine.’

‘Who is the villain of the piece?’

‘I never deal in villainy. The nearest thing I have got to it is a minor poet, who falls in love with the heroine.’

‘Ah! And then what happens?’

‘Some conversations. That’s all.’

‘Absolutely nothing more than that?’

‘No more than that. But such conversations!’

‘Doesn’t the heroine even run away with the minor poet—or—or anything?’

‘No—nothing. She stays at home with her husband. Rather a good idea—isn’t it?’

‘Yes—conventional in real life, and novel on the stage. Really, I suppose lots of wives stay with their husbands. Only, it’s a point that the modern drama has missed.’

Thereupon it struck me that I might clear up a matter which has been bothering people a good deal for the last few years. There is no category for Mr Bernard Shaw. We like to be able to stick a label on a man, put him in a pigeon-hole, and be certain of always finding him there.

‘Some time ago,’ I said, ‘I remember asking you what you were—a musical critic, a dramatic critic, a demagogue, a dramatist? Independent candidates stand a poor chance for Walhalla [a hall of fame that honours laudable and distinguished people in German history]. On which ticket are you going for election?’

‘I am all of them by turns,’ replied Mr Shaw. ‘Not long ago I was a musical critic, as you know. But when I began to write plays I recognised the necessity of getting into a position to slate other people’s plays. So I became a dramatic critic. Beyond that, nothing is changed. I am still a leader of the democracy, which still persists in taking no notice whatever of my teachings.’

‘Now,—speaking for a moment as a dramatic critic—what do you consider the chief faults of Mr G. Bernard Shaw, the playwright?’

Mr Shaw took counsel with his beard.

‘It is very difficult to say,’ he said at length,—‘very difficult indeed. Speaking from my own point of view, of course I start miles ahead of anyone else, and keep there. But from the point of view of the public—well, perhaps, one of my faults is that I do not preach enough: I am not sufficiently didactic. The public want a dramatist to tell them ten minutes beforehand what he is going to do, then to do it, and then, ten minutes afterwards, to tell them what is the right moral to draw from it. The public,’ continued Mr Shaw, leaning forward confidentially, ‘want to be bored, and I am never a bore. That is one of my greatest failings. For the public are quite uncomfortable when they look for the moral in (say) Arms and the Man and can’t find one.’

‘Except, perhaps, that a true story seldom has any moral. Have you any other failings?’

‘The only other is a kindred one. It comes from my lack of experience in writing for the stage. When I get a good idea I have not had sufficient practice to work it for all it is worth and exhaust it. I have to run away from it, as it were, and take refuge in being brilliant and sparkling. With experience comes dulness. When I have written enough plays to grow dull I shall succeed. But at present I have only been a dramatist to amuse myself.’

‘And a demagogue to amuse other people?’

‘Exactly.’

18/ Richard Mansfield to an American dramatic critic and author William Winter

10th April 1895

. . . I have discarded play after play, and I am in despair. I cannot present—I cannot act, the sickening rot the playwright of today turns out. Shaw’s Candida was sweet and clean—but he’s evidently got a religious turn—an awakening to Christianity; and it’s just two and one-half hours of preaching, and I fear the people don’t want that. Also, there is no part for me but a sickly youth, a poet who falls in love with Candida—who is a young lady of thirty-five and the wife of an honest clergyman, who is a socialist! There is no change of scene in three acts, and no action beyond moving from a chair to a sofa, and vice versa. O, ye Gods and little fishes! . . .

[Richard Mansfield]

19/ To Janet Achurch

13th April 1895

[My dear Janet]

I have just come up from Beachy Head, where I am spending Easter week, for one night to see a piece at the Adelphi [The Girl I Left Behind Me by Franklyn Fyles and David Belasco]. I find a letter from you waiting for me—the one in which you describe Mansfield’s Bluntschli [in Arms and the Man] and so on: also his objection to put his head on Candida’s knees, which I propose to get over by putting his head beneath Candida’s feet presently. I have just ten minutes before post hour to send you a line.

Miss Marbury has, I suppose, told you, as I asked her to, that you can now cable to “Socialist, London,” which is my registered address. I have sent you a couple of cables—no, perhaps only one—addressed “Candida, New York”; but C. C. [Charles Charrington] did not tell me to put Via Commercial on it. Anyhow, it was only about the letter which I addressed to the New Copenhagen Hotel instead of New Amsterdam.

C.C. told me the other day that you cabled him about shewing “Candida” to Mrs [Madge] Kendal. Ah, if you dare, Janet Achurch, IF YOU DARE. Shew it to whom you please; but part with it to nobody; and remember, no Janet, no Candida. You had better get some intelligent manager to engage you and [Henry] Esmond and [Herbert] Waring for the winter season to produce the play.

This is a horribly slow method of corresponding: letters are obsolete before they arrive.

At Beachy Head I have been trying to learn the bicycle; and after a desperate struggle, renewed on two successive days, I will do twenty yards and a destructive fall against any professional in England. My God, the stiffness, the blisters, the bruises, the pains in every twisted muscle, the crashes against the chalk road that I have endured—and at my age too. But I shall come like gold from the furnace: I will not be beaten by that hellish machine. When you return, you will be proud of my ability to sit gracefully on a wheel; and you need not trouble about my health.

Oh, the spring, the spring, and Janet miles and miles away.

C. C. telegraphs that he is coming at midnight to see me. He will tell me a lot of news no doubt. I will write again when I get back to Beachy Head.

GBS

20/ Richard Mansfield to Bernard Shaw

14th April 1895

My dear Shaw.

If we,—by we I mean [my wife] Beatrice and I,—had lost a very near and dear friend we could not have sorrowed more than when we discovered ‘Candida’ to be of , the impossible.

It has been read—read—read—read,—and reading it would revive our courage,—rehearsed and hope, faith & even charity dropped below zero. My personal regard for you (—which reckoned by the average consideration one male being will bear for another in these business times is really extra-ordinary—) could carry me a long way into the domain of folly and would undoubtedly have slipped me across the frontier in this instance—if dire necessity, and a crisis, hadnt just in the (to you perhaps) unfortunate nick of time built a doublerow prickly-pear hedge which won’t let ‘Candida’ thro’. Shaw—my light is perhaps very small and very dim—a mere farthing rush or a tallow dip—but viewed by it, and I have no other to view it by,—your play of Candida is lacking in all the essential qualities.

The stage is not for sermons—Not my stage—no matter how charming—how bright—how clever—how trenchant those sermons may be—

Candida is charming—it is more than charming—it is delightful, and I can well see how you have put into it much that is the best of yourself—but—pardon me—it is not a play—at least I do not think that it is a play—which thinking does not make it any more or any less of a play—it’s just only what I think and I happen to be skipper of this ship at this time of thinking. Here are three long acts of talk—talk—talk—no matter how clever that talk is—it is talk—talk—talk.

There isn’t a creature who seeing the play would not apply Eugene’s observations concerning Morell’s lecturing propensities to the play itself. If you think a bustling—striving—hustling—pushing—stirring American audience will sit out calmly two hours of deliberate talk you are mistaken—and I’m not to be sacrificed to their just vengeance.

It isn’t right to try and build a play out of a mere incident. Candida is only an incident—it doesn’t matter how you wad it or pad it or dress it or bedizen it—it’s an incident—nothing more. All the world is crying out for deeds—for action! When I step upon the stage I want to act—I’m willing to talk a little to oblige a man like you—but I must act—and hugging my ankles for three mortal hours won’t satisfy me in this regard. I can’t fool myself and I can’t fool my audience. I will gather together any afternoon you please a charming assemblage at our Garrick Theatre and read your play to them or play it—as best we may—but I can’t put it on for dinner in the evening—people are not satisfied with only the hors d’oeuvres at dinner—where is the soup & the fish & the roast & the game and the salad and the fruit? Shaw—if you will write for me a strong, hearty—earnest—noble—genuine play—I’ll play it. Plays used to be written for actors—actors who could stir and thrill—and that is what I want now—because I can do that—the world is tired of theories and arguments and philosophy and morbid sentiment. To be frank & to go further—I am not in sympathy with a young, delicate, morbid and altogether exceptional young man who falls in love with a massive middleaged lady who peels onions. I couldn’t have made love to your Candida (Miss Janet Achurch) if I had taken ether.

I never fall in love with fuzzy-haired persons who purr and are businesslike and take a drop when they feel disposed and have weak feminine voices. My ideal is something quite different. I detest an aroma of stale tobacco and gin. I detest intrigue and slyness and sham ambitions. I don’t like women who sit on the floor—or kneel by your side and have designs on your shirtbosom—I don’t like women who comb their tawny locks with their fingers, and claw their necks and scratch the air with their chins.

You’ll have to write a play that a man can play and about a woman that heroes fought for and a bit of ribbon that a knight tied to his lance.

The stage is for romance and love and truth and honor. To make men better and nobler. To cheer them on the way—

Life is real. Life is earnest. And the grave is not its goal.

.. . . . .

Be not like dumb, driven cattle

Be a hero in the fight!

Go on, Shaw; Beatrice & I are with you—you will be always as welcome as a brother.—We want a great work from you.—

Candida is beautiful—don’t mistake me—we both understand it and we both appreciate it—There are fine things here—but—we are paid—alas—Shaw—we are paid to act.

Yours, Shaw, truly

Richard Mansfield

[PS] I am perfectly aware that you will not read this letter—you will gather that I am not about to produce Candida—& there your interest will cease—you would like to have Candida presented—if I don’t present it—I’m damned—but also—I’m damned if I do. Ah Shaw Wir hatten gebauet ein stattleches Haus [German commercium song from 1819]. I don’t want to ruin it all.

21/ To a British actor-manager and a barrister Charles Charrington

16th April 1895

Telegram just received from Mansfield “Am opening Garrick with Arms and the Man [on the 23rd April] will produce Candida if I need not appear.” The benevolent object here is to produce the play with a bad cast, and by making it a failure, at one stroke prevent any other manager from getting it and prevent Janet from making a success in New York. I have not yet made up my mind whether to cable, or to leave Miss Marbury to carry out her instructions & get the play from him. Probably I shall cable to her & not to him at all. The effect will be, anyhow, that he may not now produce the play on any terms whatever. Am posting this bit of news to Janet. Back tomorrow evening.

GBS

22/ To Janet Achurch

19th April 1895

My dear Janet

. . . A paragraph has been going the rounds here stating that I not only insisted on your being engaged for Candida, but stipulated that you should have 50 pounds a month. I do not usually contradict the mistakes of the press in these matters; but as the inference here would be that the £50 [£6,723.26 in 2020 according to Bank of England’s inflation calculator] is an artificially high salary given under pressure from me, I have written to the Era pouring vitriol on the blunderer in such a way as to bring out clearly that your salary is a matter of your market value, and that I should no more dream of meddling about it than you presumably would interfere in the matter of my royalties. I also wrote privately to the Weekly Sun man asking him to take some opportunity of contradicting the report. He telegraphs begging for more information. The Era letter will no doubt be in tomorrow’s issue.

Yesterday a cablegram came from Richard as follows:—“Since you insist (which I didn’t: I positively forbade) will produce Candida now cable [Elisabeth] Marbury deliver manuscript.” To which I replied, “Withdrawal final.” This morning another telegram came, this time from Miss Marbury:—“Will you authorise me to place Candida with good actress Minnie Seligman on terms named Lux) advance 5 per cent first £600 7 per cent next £400 ten above weekly gross reply by wire immediately.” Which I did, as follows :—“Paralogize palmitic without Achurch,” which, being translated through Lowe’s cable code (which you had perhaps better get, as it is useful for American messages, and cannot be confused with the Unicode Latin words) means “Offer declined nothing can be done at present without Achurch.” This caused me a heart pang, not because of the hundred pounds, but because of the brutality of calling you Achurch instead of my darling Janet.

By the way, have you added anything to the private code we arranged? I have nothing in mine after VERETRUM.

Now as to the letters from Richard and Felix. It was just as well that Felix wrote; for his letter was written with the sweetest consideration for my feelings towards you, and I was therefore able to read it to Charrington, whereas Richard’s, the existence of which I concealed from C. C. [Charles Charrington] in order to avert his rushing out by the next Cunarder and having Richard’s blood, was childishly indiscreet in its allusions to you. He accuses you of being fuzzy haired, of purring, of being businesslike, of smoking, of sitting on the floor, of combing your tawny locks with your fingers, of clawing your neck and scratching the air with your chin, and of being unfallable-in-love-with on all these accounts. On the subject of your acting, he maintains an eloquent silence. This, by the way, is much the most sensible part of his letter, which I wish I had time to quote more extensively. The play is not a play—it is all talk—it is lacking in all essential qualities—the stage is not for sermons—the American public would not stand it—and so forth, the whole being intersentenced with the most pathetic expressions of eternal friendship and admiration: for example, “Go on, Shaw: [my wife] Beatrice and I are with you: you will always be welcome as a brother. We want a great work from you.” Felix pleads nobly for his brother, and writes a really respectable letter, with four postscripts, as follows, 1. Beatrice was charmed with your letter. 2. Beatrice says you have just hit Dick’s position at home to a T (I had said that he was an abject domestic slave). 3. Beatrice says she must have a play. 4. Beatrice says “Come over.” 5. Beatrice sends love. My reply to Richard, which goes by this mail, is as follows, “My dear Mansfield, Your letter has arrived at last. I confess that I waited for it with somewhat fell intentions as to my reply; but now that the hour of vengeance has come, I find myself in perfect goodhumor, and can do nothing but laugh. I have not the slightest respect left for you; and your acquaintance with my future plays will be acquired in the course of visits to other people’s theatres; but my personal liking for you remains where it was.” I wrote kindly to Felix, but gave him a remorseless analysis of the whole case. Do not shew this to anyone. I am getting jealous of [dramatic critic of the Evening Sun] Acton Davies; and so is C [Charrington].

GBS

23/ To a renowned English actress and actor-manager Ellen Terry

28th November 1895

My dear Miss Terry

Very well: here is the Strange Lady [The Man of Destiny] for you, by book post. It is of no use now that it is written, because nobody can act it. Mind you bring it safely back to me; for if you leave it behind you in the train or in your dressing room, somebody will give a surreptitious performance of it: and then bang goes my copyright. If the responsibility of protecting it is irksome, tear it up. I have a vague recollection of curl papers in Nance Oldfield [by Charles Reade] for which it might be useful. I have other copies.

This is not one of my great plays, you must know: it is only a display of my knowledge of stage tricks—a commercial traveller’s sample. You would like my Candida much better; but I never let people read that: I always read it to them. They can be heard sobbing three streets off.

By the way—I forget whether I asked you this before —if that villain Mansfield plays Arms and the Man anywhere within your reach, will you go and see it and tell me whether they murder it or not? And your petitioner will ever pray &c. &c.

G. Bernard Shaw

24/ To Janet Achurch

23rd December 1895

My dear Janet

. . . Does it ever occur to you that if you became the leading English actress you would have to represent your art with dignity among Stanleys [after Rosalind Frances Howard née Stanley] and other such people, and that you would be severely handicapped if they remembered how you had called in Aunt Mary’s brougham [after Lady Mary Henrietta Howard, a person who belongs to the aristocracy] and told them fibs and tried to get money out of them. However, it is useless to remonstrate. You will appreciate the magnanimity of soul which I recommend; but you won’t practise it. Therefore I must act myself—I, who haven’t a wife and child, and have not the means of excusing myself. If the I.T. [Independent Theatre] can get the money to do “Candida” properly, it shall have “Candida” (unless I hit on a better way). But if the least farthing of the money has to be touted for—that’s the hideous right word—touted for by you—if any shareholder is seduced into subscribing by the sight of as much as a lock of your hair or a cast off glove of yours—if there is to be any gift in the matter except our gift of our work, then I swear by the keen cold of this northern wind on my face and the glowing fire of it in my bones, there shall be no “Candida” at the I.T. You may contribute to its success as much as you like by making people love you, or fear you, or admire you, or be interested, fascinated, tantalised, or what not by you. But if you coin the love, fear, interest, admiration or fascination into drachmas, then I cannot have any part in the bargain. If Rothschild or the Prince of Wales want boxes, they know where they can be bought, just as they know where the Saturday Review can be bought. It is inconceivable that such measures should be congenial to you when your mind is properly strung; and you will get better all the faster if you put them behind you. . .

It is a curious thing to me that you should express such remorse about trifles and follies that everybody commits in some form or other, and that strong people laugh at, whilst you are all the time doing things that are physically ruinous and planning things that you ought to hang yourself sooner than stoop to. There is only one physical crime that can destroy you—brandy: only one moral one—Aunt Mary’s brougham.

I cannot lock up the brandy—but I can poison it. You must stop now: the change in your appearance shews that you are just at the point where that accursed stimulating diet must be dropped at all hazards. All through your illness you were beautiful and young; now you are beginning to look, not nourished but—steel yourself for another savage word—bloated. Do, for heaven’s sake, go back to the innocent diet of the invalid—porridge made of “miller’s pride” oatmeal and boiled all night into oatmeal jelly, rice, tomatoes, macaroni, without milk or eggs or other “nourishing” producers of indigestion. You can’t drink brandy with wholesome food; and if you take exercise you won’t want so much morphia. Eat stewed fruit and hovis. If you have any difficulty in digesting walnuts (for instance) nibble a grain of ginger glace with them and chew them and you will have no trouble. You will eventually strike out a decent diet for yourself. Anyhow, save your soul and body alive, and don’t turn me into granite.

GBS

25/ Bernard Shaw’s diary

Preliminary Notes 1895

Still living at 29 Fitzroy Square.

I began the year by taking the post of dramatic critic to The Saturday Review, under the editorship of Frank Harris. This was the first regular appointment I ever held as a critic of the theatres. Salary £6 [£806.79 in 2020 according to Bank of England’s inflation calculator] a week.

During my stay with the Webbs [Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb née Potter] at the Argoed in August and September I wrote a play in one act about Napoleon entitled The Man of Destiny. At the end of December I began another play title as yet unknown to me [You Never Can Tell]. During the Easter holidays with the Webbs, [Charles] Trevelyan, etc, at Beachy Head. I learnt to ride the bicycle and got much more exercise during the year than usual, with advantage to my health so far. I kept up the habit of going to the Webbs for lunch every Sunday.

It was agreed between myself and Richard Mansfield that he should produce my play Candida in New York; and he actually engaged Janet Achurch for the part. She went out; but Mansfield then changed his mind; No I withdrew the play.

In November Janet, when playing The New Magdalen [by William Wilkie Collins] for the week at the Metropole Theatre in Camberwell, caught typhoid fever, and her illness occupied me a good deal during the last two months of the year, partly because of its bearing on all possible plans for the production of Candida, and partly because I have come into relations of intimate friendship with the Charringtons [Charles Charrington and his wife Janet Achurch] during the past two years or so.

Frank Harris tried to establish a regular lunch every Monday for choosing members of the Saturday Review staff at the Café Royale. I attended them for some time. Harold Frederic, Mrs Devereux [Pember], Marriott Watson and others used to come. Oscar Wilde came once, immediately before the Queensberry trial, with young [Alfred] Douglas. They left in some indignation because Harris refused to appear as a witness—a literary expert witness—to the high artistic character of Wilde’s book Dorian Gray. These lunches wasted my time and were rather apt to degenerate into bawdy talk. When a play called The Home Secretary [by Richard Claude Carton] was produced at the Criterion Theatre, I took the opportunity to protest against the attempt in the play to trade on the Anarchism bogey, my object being to call attention to some hard features in the case of Charles [Fred Charles Slaughter], “the Walsall Anarchist.” Harris alarmed by this, cut the passage out of the article. This incident brought my growing impatience with the brag and bawdry of the lunches to a head; and I never went again. They seem to have fallen through afterwards.

26/ To Charles Charrington

16th March 1896

Dear Charrington

Before you go committing yourself to Morell, I want to put before you the case on the other side—the case which has always prevented me from looking to you for Morell as I look to Janet for Candida.

Imprimis, you are only attracted by the universal human element in the man, and not by his specific individuality. That’s very dangerous to begin with; and I am by no means sure that you would not overcome the obvious misfit of Eugene’s age and build more successfully than that of Morell’s character & temperament.

Morell is a very glib, sanguine, cocksure, popular sort of man. His utter want of shyness; his readiness to boss people spiritually; his certainty that his own ideas, being the right ideas, must be good for them: all this belongs to the vulgarity which makes him laugh at Eugene’s revelation, and talk of “calf love.” It is nothing to the point that he is also goodnatured, frank, sympathetic, and capable of admitting Candida’s position finally when it is presented to his feeling, in spite of the fact that he would have disputed it hotly had it been presented to him as a purely intellectual position. That rescues him from the odium which would otherwise attach to him as, intellectually and normally, a clerical bounder; but it does not assimilate him in any way to the parts which lie nearest to you. I can see you well enough in the heartstricken passages; but I do not see you facile, cheery, spontaneous, fluent, emphatic, unhesitating and bumptious in the early scenes with Prossy & Burgess & Eugene (before the explosion) in which the whole specific part of his individuality has to be fixed; I don’t hear your boisterous cheery laugh, which should not be refined out of the part merely because I have to refine it out myself in reading the play from sheer incapacity to get quite into that coarse part of his skin; I don’t see Candida carrying conviction when she tells you that you are the idol of a Victoria Park congregation, the contrast in everything to the hunted Eugene; I don’t see you as the spoiled child, the superficial optimist, the man who, in spite of his power of carrying everything before him by the mere rush and light & warmth of his goodnature & conviction, is stopped by the least resistance.

Granted that all this could be got over by sheer acting, is there the smallest likelihood of your making such an arduous and unnatural effort as the feat would require? And suppose you failed—suppose your Morellism carried no conviction to the audience—have you considered how complicatedly damning the failure would be both to yourself and Janet? If you stood quite alone, the effect of a return to the stage with the particular sort of failure—the failure that spoils a play sympathetic enough to make the audience angrily resent its being spoiled—would be bad enough from your own point of view as an individual unattached actor. But there is something worse to be apprehended. If people get the idea that they can’t have Janet without also having you thrust into a part for which you are unsuited, it will be all up with Janet and with you. And that is just what I am afraid of. . . The question, therefore, is not whether you can get through Morell passably by putting in a few stomach tones, and (by indulging in genuine emotion) making yourself diabolically ugly at the moment when Candida is telling you that the women cannot look at you without adoration, but whether you could play him with such absolute conviction, fitness, and spontaneity that all question as to the propriety of your casting yourself for the part would fall to the ground without a word.

My own opinion on the point has already been completely betrayed to you by the fact that I have never treated the part as your property, in spite of the very discouraging quality of the practicable alternatives to you. Take any of those alternatives—[Herbert] Waring or anyone else—let us call him XYZ. XYZ will not exactly fail: he will only underplay; and all the papers will treat him with great politeness. You will either fail or succeed; and if you fail, the result will be damnation. XYZ’s underplaying will not hurt Janet: it will have absolutely no reactions of any importance. Your failure, if you fail, will have the most disastrous reactions in all directions, on her, on the I.T. [Independent Theatre], on me, on yourself as a manager as apart from an actor, and devil knows what else besides. Consequently you present yourself, as compared with XYZ, as a frightfully risky Morell at a point in our game where we cannot afford to throw away a single chance. Now what probability is there of your being as transcendently better a Morell, if you succeed, than XYZ, as to justify you in casting yourself for it at such odds? Hast thou these things well considered? . . .

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.

Did you sleep after Bayreuth? Last time you wrote, you were going to sleep, tired out. I wish I could sleep for a month. I’m generally worn out for want of the blessing, sleep. Why do you live in Fitzroy Square? Little Mrs Moscheles [Margaret Moscheles née Sobernheim] has been down here. You know her, dont you? I wish Cymbeline were “cut,” and I could read Candida. Drive down to Hampton Court some Saturday or Sunday and read it to me. Of course you are busy, but never mind. Let things slide and come before the fine warm days are fled. You’ll like reading me your own work and I shall like hearing it. At least I suppose I shall! Although I fear mine are very dull wits, and second times of reading are best.

A heavenly day here. I wish you were here, and everyone else I like. Lord! There’d be “a damned party in a parlour”!

Thank you for your letter. Dont think that I want to hurt Janet. I would help her (I have tried). But Candida, a Mother! Attractive to me, very. I’m good at Mothers, and Janet can do the Loveresses.

Am I successful? You say so. I heard the other day you hated successful folk. I said “Fudge”!

Oh—good-bye.

E. T.

31/ To Ellen Terry

28th August 1896

. . . Curiously—in view of “Candida”—you and Janet are the only women I ever met whose ideal of voluptuous delight was that life should be one long confinement from the cradle to the grave. If I make money out of my new play I will produce “Candida” at my own expense; and you & Janet shall play it on alternate nights. It must be a curious thing to be a mother. First the child is part of yourself; then it is your child; then it is its father’s child; then it is the child of some remote ancestor; finally it is an independent human being whom you have been the mere instrument of bringing into the world, and whom perhaps you would never have thought of caring for if anyone else had performed that accidental service. It must be an odd sensation looking on at these young people and being out of it, staring at their amazing callousness, and being tolerated and no doubt occasionally ridiculed by them before they have done anything whatsoever to justify them in presuming to the distinction of your friendship. Of the two lots, the woman’s lot of perpetual motherhood, and the man’s of perpetual babyhood, I prefer the man’s, I think.

I dont hate successful people: just the contrary. But I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind. Then, too, I like fighting successful people; attacking them; rousing them; trying their mettle; kicking down their sand castles so as to make them build stone ones, and so on. It develops one’s muscles. Besides, one learns from it: a man never tells you anything until you contradict him. I hate failure. Only, it must be real success: real skill, real ability, real power, not mere newspaper popularity and money, nor wicked frivolity, like Nance Oldfield. I am a magnificently successful man myself, and so are my knot of friends—the Fabian old gang—but nobody knows it except we ourselves, and even we haven’t time to attend to it. . . .

GBS

32/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

23rd September 1896

Well, it was pretty bad again to-night. Only one scene better. I went to meet my love at Milford Haven really, instead of pretending. That was good. The rest pretty awful. Well, now an end of me, sweet sir, and thank you for your forbearance.

Am I to hear or read Candida? I think I’d rather never meet you—in the flesh. You are such a Great Dear as you are! And you are such a worker, and I work too for other people. My kids, and Henry [Irving], and my friends. And we both are always busy, and of use!

Next Sunday I go with Henry’s cousin and perhaps H. to Richmond or Hampton Court (3 is a crowd!). I must get air, or I’ll die. I’m thinking how kind you’ve been to me, and now I’ll to bed, for I’m beat.—Yours, yours,

E. T.

33/ To Ellen Terry

25th September 1896

. . . Very well, you shant meet me in flesh if you’d rather not. There is something deeply touching in that. Did you never meet a man who could bear meeting and knowing? Perhaps you’re right: Oscar Wilde said of me: “An excellent man: he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.” And that’s quite true they dont like me; but they are my friends, and some of them love me. If you value a man’s regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper, and despise it. I had rather you remembered one thing I said for three days than liked me (only) for 300,000,000,000,000,000 years. How would you like to be an amiable woman, with semicircular eyebrows?

Candida doesnt matter. I begin to think it an overrated play, especially in comparison to the one [The Devil’s Disciple] I have just begun. You simply couldnt read it: the first scene would bore you to death and you would never take it up again. Unless I read it to you, you must wait until it is produced, if it ever is. However, that can be managed without utter disillusion. You can be blindfolded, and then I can enter the room and get behind a screen and read away. This plan will have the enormous advantage that if you dont like the play you can slip out after the first speech or two, and slip back again and cough (to prove your presence) just before the end. I will promise not to utter a single word outside the play, and not to peep round the screen.

G. B. S.

34/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

26th September 1896

Oh you perfectly charming being. You are just a Duck! Your letter here for supper with my cold chicken pie, and I have not left off laughing all the while. I had been amused before I left the “workhouse” by hearing from H. I. [Henry Irving], that you were to meet to-morrow at 12.30. Then he brought me home here, but didnt come in, and then your letter, and “the [Saturday] Review” to-morrow!!

Dont misunderstand my words, and call me up in your mind’s eye as a sweetly pathetic picture who “Never met a man worth meeting and knowing”! That’s not so. I’ve only ever met fine fellows and found they were all worth knowing, and have loved them all (dont misunderstand me) and I’m all tired out with caring and caring, and I never leave off (which is so absurd). But I must hear your plays. Maynt I have Candida? Do you think I’ll run away with her?

Well—it’s just what I am. “An amiable woman.” I have been told so of many. Ugh! Good-night, you poor old dear. You’re splendid! Oh to be there to-morrow morning at 12.30, and I cant be. But I know H. will drive up here directly afterwards and tell me all about you, from his point of view! But he is such a clever old silly, and when we know people together, he sees ‘em through my eyes. Except critics!

Just read you again, and am bubbling with laughter. Thank God I’m alone here. The clock strikes one. Good-night—and good-morning.

You Pet!

[Ellen Terry]

35/ To Ellen Terry

2nd October 1896

This is a nice way to behave. You coax everything you want out of me—my notions about Imogen, my play, and a beautiful notice in the Saturday [Review], and then instantly turn on your heel and leave me there cursing the perfidy of your sex. However, it opened my eyes to the abject condition I was drifting into. I positively missed your letters—I, I, Bernard Shaw, MISSED the letters of a mere mortal woman. But I pulled myself together. I will not be the slave of a designing female. Henceforth I shall regard my morning’s mail with the most profound indifference, the coldest calm. Let me tell you, Ellen Terry, that you make a great mistake in supposing that I am that sort of man. I am not: why should I be? What difference does it make to me whether you write to me or not? You should curb this propensity to personal vanity. This well ordered bosom is insensible to your flatteries. Oh my dear blessed Ellen, let me stop talking nonsense for a moment. . . .

You cannot read “Candida”: you know very well that you have been strictly ordered not to read until your eyes are better. Wild horses shall not tear that script from me, especially after your atrocious conduct in being at the Lyceum [Theatre] that Saturday and not coming in. There was no danger of your kissing me: no woman, however audacious & abandoned, would dare take such a liberty with a man of my majestic presence. I liked Henry [Irving], though he is without exception absolutely the stupidest man I ever met—simply no brains—nothing but character & temperament. Curious, how little use mere brains are: I have a very fine set; and yet I learnt more from the first stupid woman who fell in love with me than ever they taught me.

I won’t WONT, WONT, WONT, WONT, WONT, WON’T let you read “Candida.” I must read it to you, if I have to do it through the keyhole. But I, too, fear to break the spell: remorses, presentiments, all sorts of tendernesses wring my heart at the thought of materialising this beautiful friendship of ours by a meeting. You were quite right not to come in on Saturday: all would have been lost. In some lonely place, by starlight—stop: I am getting idiotic. Miss Terry: your servant!

GBS

36/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

2nd October 1896

Candida & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play

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