Читать книгу Candida & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play - Bernard Shaw - Страница 2

. . . I couldnt come in. All of a sudden it came to me that under the funny circumstances I should not be responsible for my impulses. When I saw you, I might have thrown my arms round your neck and hugged you! I might have been struck shy. The Lord knows what I might or might not have done, and I think H. I. [Henry Irving]might not have seen the joke! (He thinks me crazy, but “good.” It’s t’other way on!)

Would not you like to be somebody’s (anybody’s perhaps!) pleasure for a few moments? Well, you have been my sole delight for the last six weeks, and I’m ever gratefully yours. By the way though, you dont play fair. Your “Saturday” [Review article] was perfect, all but about E. T. You scolded her in private beautifully, but you should first have printed your letter to her. You know perfectly well that in the acting of this “Womanly woman” I’m pretty bad, and you might have said so in The Saturday plain and straight.

Yes. [My son] Ed’ard Gordon Craig can act, or will act. He had best be quick for he is a big boy for 7 and that’s his age.

Ah, let him act in something of yours. Heavens! He’s better than that other acty boy. Now when I’m clear of “velvet” friends who are flocking around me, I’m going to get to know the Strange Lady and to make acquaintance with a beautiful new tricycle I have, and to—oh! do ever so many nice things, when I’m less exhausted.

Arent you going to send me Candida? Only to read. I wont steal it, but I want to know her. Now there’s no need for you to write to me any more.

Oh aint it a dark day.

Good-bye

[Ellen Terry]

37/ To Ellen Terry

5th October 1896

I am at my wits’ end—telegrams every five minutes asking for articles about Morris [died on the 3rd October], and a million other worries. Last night I had to orate at Hornsey [Socialist Society]; and a young lady got up afterwards and said, “I don’t think what I have to ask belongs to the subject of the lecture; but will Mr Shaw tell us when his play will be produced at the Lyceum ?“

Happy Morris ! he is resting.

You remember the publication of [Clement] Scott’s criticisms of the Lyceum the other day. Well, I reviewed it: that was all. Not worth reading—dead and gone journalism.

When I read your remark about Peer Gynt, I fainted away stone dead. In Heaven’s name, how old is E.G.C. [Edward Gordon Craig]? What puts such audacious ideas into his infant head? If you’re serious, he must be either much too good or much too bad for me. I expect it will end in my having to teach him his alphabet.

I have just been asked to stay at Radlet from Saturday to Monday—for the 25th. What am I to do—read you “Candida”?—or did you say Radlet, or am I dreaming?

Oh, I can’t write, I can’t think, I am beaten, tired, wrecked. I should like to get away from this wretched place to some corner of heaven, and be rocked to sleep by you.

What did you say about Morris?—do you want an article about him? Look in the [Daily] Chronicle tomorrow, and ask me no more questions: my brain won’t work. I haven’t energy even to tear this letter up.

GBS

38/ To Ellen Terry

12th October 1896

. . . And now as to all my love affairs. One [Florence Farr] is just perishing under a bad attack of the Wandering Jew. Then there is my lady [Charlotte Payne-Townshend from the 1st June 1898 Mrs Bernard Shaw] with the light green eyes and the million of money, whom I have got to like so much that it would be superfluous to fall in love with her. Then there is Janet [Achurch], who, on hearing of the Irish rival, first demanded, with her husband [Charles Charrington] to witness my testimony, whether I still loved her, and then, on receiving the necessary assurance, relented and informed me that she had been faithless to me (with the said husband) to the extent of making “Candida” impossible until after next February, when she expects to become once more a mother. And then there are others whom I cannot recollect just at present, or whom you don’t know anything about. And finally there is Ellen, to whom I vow that I will try hard not to spoil my high regard, my worthy respect, my deep tenderness, by any of those philandering follies which make me so ridiculous, so troublesome, so vulgar with women. I swear it. Only, do as you have hitherto done with so wise an instinct: keep out of my reach. You see, nobody can write exactly as I write: my letters will always be a little bit original; but personally I shouldn’t be a bit original. All men are alike with a woman whom they admire. You must have been admired so much and so often—must know the symptoms so frightfully well. But now that I come to think of it, so have I. Up to the time I was 29, actually twentynine, I was too shabby for any woman to tolerate me. I stalked about in a decaying green coat, cuffs trimmed with the scissors, terrible boots, & so on. Then I got a job to do & bought a suit of clothes with the proceeds. A lady [Mrs Jane “Jenny” Patterson] immediately invited me to tea, threw her arms round me, and said she adored me. I permitted her to adore, being intensely curious on the subject. Never having regarded myself as an attractive man, I was surprised; but I kept up appearances successfully. Since that time, whenever I have been left alone in a room with a female, she has invariably thrown her arms round me and declared she adored sae. It is fate. Therefore beware. If you allow yourself to be left alone with me for a single moment, you will certainly throw your arms round me and declare you adore me; and I am not prepared to guarantee that my usual melancholy forbearance will be available in your case.

But I am really getting idiotic. All this time I have been trying to recollect something—oh, to be sure. The photographs! I return them with many thanks. The young man is excellent—good chin, good mouth, not too long upper lip, good brow, and plenty of head above his ears. . . .

If he [Ellen Terry’s son Gordon Craig] has a nimble tongue, he will make a good actor or a good anything else: perhaps he ought to be something else. There is not suffering enough in his face for the hero of “Candida”; but he might act that. Is the young lady [your daughter] Ailsa [Edith] Craig? I don’t recognise her, though I saw Ailsa in Pinero’s play [Bygones] & remember her very well. I shall finish this letter by instalments in the course of the week. By the way, what place did you say? Was it Radlett?

GBS

39/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

Some time in October 1896

. . . Well I wont write to-day, but shall take it out in thinking, and I shall talk to you to-night, when I come home from the theatre and have a quiet time with you. It’s quite pathetic, your last card, saying you want to finish your work, and not write “nonsensical letters,” and I suppose as long as I go on writing them, you’ll reply so as not to make me feel “left.” Well I wont post this until the end of the week so you will get some rest. You are very gentle and sweet to me. Sorry, though, you wont have the snuff-box with my picture in it.

But I’ve nothing you could ever “want and could get from no-one else,” and I want nothing from you, dear fellow—nothing more I mean. I’m in your debt and dont mind that in the least since I love you. I want to tell you that I very nearly trotted round to you after the play the other night (the first night), but I stuck to my post like a heroine and I helped Henry [Irving] with all the people, and oh, all the time I was just dying to go away to some quiet place—to you, or to hear some music from Nan Finch-Hatton, but you most of all, or something really nice. Glad I didnt now because of something you said in one of your blessed letters.

Wont you send me Candida one day next week? I’m dull and sick, very, and want an entertainment. Send it to me, like a good boy, as a reward for not letting you hear from me until the end of a week, and for not coming to Fitzroy Square [where Shaw lived at that time], and—well just because I want it. There! I am wanting something “only you can give me”! For just entertainment, no other purpose. Not for Teddy [Edward Craig], sir! I want to read you.

My curses of children have discovered your hand-writing now, and Mistress Edy [Edith Craig] is exceedingly pert to her aged mother. She has drawn your picture which she says is a speaking likeness, and requests me to wear it inside my bodice. I send it to you.

A splendid idea! I wish you’d marry her! Nobody else will. (The ninnies are frightened at her!) Then you’d belong to me, and I’d have her back if you didnt like her! E. (No answer needed.). . . .

[Ellen Terry]

40/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

18th October 1896

. . . I’m just going to read your Candida. I knew you’d send it me if I were ill. Women get everything if they’re sick enough! I cannot pretend to be ill (except just say it on paper) and so I never get anything. Truly at present I’m not fit to be out of bed (where I’ve been for the last 3 days) and here am I going to a big stupid dinner to-night. What a fool I am! By the way, why do you keep on calling yourself an “ass” to me? That’s different.

Now for your play.

Yours—yours

[Ellen Terry]

41/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

19th October 1896

I’ve cried my poor eyes out over your horrid play, your heavenly play. My dear, and now! How can I go out to dinner tonight? I must keep my blue glasses on all the while for my eyes are puffed up and burning. But I can scarce keep from reading it all over again. Henry [Irving] would not care for that play, I think. I know he would laugh. And that sort of thing makes me hate him sometimes. He would not understand it, the dear, clever silly. I cant understand what he understands.

Janet would look, and be, that Candida beautifully, but I could help her I know, to a lot of bottom in it. I could do some of it much better than she. She could do most of it better than I. Oh dear me, I love you more every minute. I cant help it, and I guessed it would be like that! And so we wont meet. But write more plays, my Dear, and let me read them. It has touched me more than I could tell of.

Yours E. T.

42/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

24th October 1896

Your Mrs Webb is a dear (as well as all the other I good things) I should say, but Candida “a sentimental prostitute”! Well! “Some said it thundered. Others that an Angel spake.” You may wear your rue with a difference! So your new play is “grim, gloomy, horrible, sordid” etc. etc. You have to do that I know. Yes: you have to do everything you will, if you dont waste yourself on trifles like me (All trifles are not as kind as I am). Anyway you are all dear, all very precious. You say “your tiredness and illness are my opportunity.” I do not quite understand that.

Now I’m going to read Candida once more, and again Mrs Webb’s explosion of opinion sets me a’thinking, and wondering whether—but there, you certainly will not benefit by knowing what I think. How much I do wish I could be invisible and see you at work.

Farewell E. T.

[PS] I passed your house yesterday on my way to see a poor little servant of mine of years ago. She’s dying. She liked to see me. I’ll never forget her look.

43/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

Later in October 1896

Mr Stanley Weyman. Yes, I think crowds of novelists now-a-days fancy they are the dear Musketeers all over again! I’ve just commenced reading The Seats of The Mighty [by Gilbert Parker] and feel certain it will be the same song over again.

My dear Sally Fairchild will meet you—this evening I imagine. A very sweet girl is Sally (Satty we call her in America), but it is detestable that she should be at Radlett on Sunday with you, and then come on Monday (and all the other days), from you to me. I told her I had a wilful hopeless passion for you, and had tendered you as a remembrance a snuff-box which you scorned and refused. Now I have given it to her. She’ll show it to you.

I am dying to read Candida to Teddy, to Satty Fairchild and Edy, and promise you I wont until you tell me I may. I will send you back the 3 precious acts by next Saturday, if I may keep them until then.

[Henry Vernon] Esmond could look Marjoribanks to perfection, and act it well, but Teddy would appear to be Marjoribanks. Do send me more to read.

E. T.

44/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

26th October 1896

Darling, I’ve not read your letter, but I must tell you I dislike folk who are not reserved, and will tell me of your Janets and things and make me mad, when I only want to know whether they think you would, if we met, have a horrible dislike of me when you found me such an old thing, and so different to the Ellen you’ve seen on the stage. I’m so pale when I’m off the stage, and rouge becomes me, and I know I shall have to take to it if I consent to let you see me. And it would be so pathetic, for not even the rouge would make you admire me away from the stage. Oh what a curse it is to be an actress!

Couldnt wait, and I’m half-way through your (horrid typewritten) letter. Idiot, do you suppose that Janet is the only “she” who’d love to get your play bit by bit? Why that is the charmingest of all ways to know a play.

Isnt Satty a sweet? If you read to Satty and Edy on Saturday evening I shall be thinking of it all the while I’m acting, I know.

I passed your house again to-day (on purpose, I confess it). I was going from St Pancras to Kensington and took a turn round your Square. I’d like to go when you are there! But no, all’s of no use. I cant compete ‘cos I’m not pretty. Edy, I do assure you, is nicest, cleverest, best of all. She never tried to compete for anyone, and so probably she’ll go to the wall unappreciated. She’d be a handful, but oh wouldnt I just be glad to get her back again if a man she chose wanted to get rid of her. I’d adore her to the scaffold.—Yours, you blessed thing,

Ellen

45/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

28th October 1896

. . . Off to Paris? Oh! With Janet [Achurch]? Or no incommoding females? Why dont you give yourself over to a play where there’s no smile round the corner, nor a teeny-weeny smile at all, at all? With heat, and with pain and with tears unable to come out, and the pen tearing along at a grand pace. I wonder what you would write then? You are as cold as ice and quizical (cant spell it) when you make girls invite boys to sit on hearth-rugs and “amuse” them. Of course I like that play too, but—. . .

So Janet really “loves” you! What do I do? Goodbye. Dont get a cold crossing the silly bit of water. I wish I were coming.

Yours very truly,

sweet sir, E.

46/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

29th October 1896

Just back home from your doorstep (from the young painter’s—Nellie Heath’s—doorstep). I couldnt help going there, and when I got there I could not go in. Felt such a fool, and felt so very ill. Went up the third flight of steps, got shy, and ran back to my shay. I had Candida with me, so sent up one act of her by a rum little boy who stood staring at me and longing to earn pennies.

Oh I’m ill. I’ll just go back to bed, and if you ever dare write me another unkind letter I promise you it shall not draw me out again into the cold and the hateful fog. I generally go and see Burne-Jones when there’s a fog. He looks so angelic, painting away there by candlelight. I’m studying Richard III. Whilst they are slaving at the Lyceum [Theatre] at that, I’m going to (will you come too?) to, to—of all places in the world, Monte Carlo! I never was there. Edy would like the fun, and I may chance to, or loathe it.

I’ve ghastly aches all over me, a cold in every inch of my body, and oh, I’m acting so badly. The Americans call you Mr Shore. Goodbye.

[Ellen Terry]

47/ To Ellen Terry

30th November 1896

. . . I am the centre of a boiling whirlpool of furious enquiries from insulted editors, indignant secretaries of public bodies (wanting orations) all over the country, the management of the Haymarket [Theatre], & innumerable private persons, who have written me letters upon letters, enclosing stamped envelopes, reply paid telegram forms, and every other engine for extracting instant replies in desperate emergencies. For months I haven’t answered one of them. Why? Because I could write to no one but Ellen, Ellen, Ellen: all other correspondence was intolerable when I could write to her instead. And what is the result? Why, that I am not killed with lecturing and with the writing of magazine articles. (What the pecuniary result will be presently I decline to think; but now that the play [The Devil’s Disciple] is finished (in the rough) I shall try to earn a little supplemental money—not that I really want it; but I have always been so poor as to coin that nothing can persuade me now that I am not on the verge of bankruptcy.) I am saved these last inches of fatigue which kept me chronically overworked for ten years. The Socialist papers denounce me bitterly—my very devotees call me aristocrat, Tory, capitalist scribe & so on; but it is really all Ellen, Ellen, Ellen, Ellen, Ellen, the happiness, the rest, the peace, the refuge, the consolation of loving (oh, dearest Ellen, add “and being loved by”—a lie costs so little) my great treasure Ellen.

What did I want so particularly to say?—oh yes: it was this. I have written to [William] Terriss to tell him that I have kept my promise to him & have “a strong drama” with a part for him; but I want your opinion; for I have never tried melodrama before; and this thing, with its heroic sacrifice, its impossible court martial, its execution (imagine W. T. hanged before the eyes of the Adelphi!), its sobbings & speeches & declamations, may possibly be the most monstrous piece of farcical absurdity that ever made an audience shriek with laughter. And yet I have honestly tried for dramatic effect. I think you could give me a really dry opinion on it; for it will not tickle you, like “Arms & The Man” & “You Never Can Tell,” nor get at your sympathetic side, like Candida (the heroine is not the hero of the piece this time); and you will have to drudge conscientiously through it like a stage carpenter & tell me whether it is a burlesque or not. . . .

GBS

48/ To Ellen Terry

7th March 1897

. . . Does H. I. [Henry Irving] really say that you are in love with me? For that be all his sins forgiven him! I will go to the Lyceum again and write an article proving him to be the greatest Richard [III] ever dreamed of. I am also touched by his refusing to believe that we have never met. No man of feeling could believe such heartlessness. . . .

G. B. S.

49/ To Ellen Terry

8th March 1897

Just time for three lines. Get anyone but me to read that play to you if you dare. What do they know about it? I dont believe all the brutal environment of that little story is real to you; but it is to me. Ted isnt brutal enough for Richard’s outbursts of savagery. Candida—a play which you’ve forgotten, but which you once read —has the part for him. The woman’s part is not so difficult where she has anything to say; but the listening to the court martial—the holding on to the horror through all the laughing—that will be the difficulty. No: I wont rewrite that last act unless you tell me exactly how: I’d rather write you another play.

Mrs Webb and Miss P. T. [Payne-Townshend] want to know whether you would really come to Woking and, if so, whom you’d like to have to meet you—a bishop or a politician or a philosopher. I can be sent up to town if necessary (I fancy I see myself going—just). They want to watch our embarrassment when we meet.

What ought I to do with that play? That is, if Forbes [Johnston Forbes-Robertson] wont have it?

Take care of your, reviving strength. I presumed on mine the other evening to ride eight or nine miles at wild speed on the bike; and next morning I was again a wreck.

Post hour—ever dearest—

G. B. S.

50/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

13th March 1897

. . . “Gentleman!” Oh that word! Some day define the term, not for me privately, but for your readers.

To me “Gentleman” has always meant the highest and best. I think it must mean differently to different people. . .

I’m back from Margate. Still not well. Isnt it maddening? And I’m longing to get my work by the throat. When do you go to Woking? Soft Woking, so sweetly smelling. I very nearly wrote and thanked those ladies for their kindness in wishing me to share the rest and quiet of the place. Then I remembered how once before I was idiot enough to simply believe you serious when you put your sad and distracted condition before me and how I so nearly ran round to Fitzroy Square, and actually did get as far as writing you a most heartshaken blithering idiot’s letter. Oh, I’ll never forgive myself nor will you ever forgive me for being so dull.

Only, only I dont in the least mind being laughed at by you! Oh, did you think I meant Ted when I said I thought T. would make a great effect in Richard? I meant [William] Terriss! He would not understand all the things he had to say (!) but (with the last act disciplined into shape) the Play and he together would be a frantic success. No, Master Bernie, I have not forgotten Candida, and you know it!

It appears to me your Haymarket Play is splendidly cast. (You told me if you remember.) That will be a great success. It must be.

Darling! I havent said that yet! And now I’ll say it again. Good-bye,

Darling!

[Ellen Terry]

51/ To an American stage actress Mrs Richard Mansfield née Beatrice Cameron

26th March 1897

My dear Mrs Mansfield

. . . As you say, I have no faith in anything or anybody. I am savage about “Candida” because it was Richard’s business to have made a good deal out of that play and out of Miss Achurch, instead of letting her make a good deal out of him, giving him nothing for it, and having grievance against him into the bargain. It was a mere matter of management, including the management of me. He should never let himself be associated with a breakdown of any kind. He should establish himself as the maker of success—other people’s success; the founder of reputations—other people’s reputations; the Bank of England of the whole profession. Then he wont have to fight his way to the centre: he will be the centre. But he doesn’t see this: he thinks that anybody can manage but that only a genius can act; whereas the truth is that anybody can act, but that only an able man can manage. . . .

yrs sincerely

G. Bernard Shaw

52/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

14th April 1897

Many thanks for your words about Edy [Edith Craig]. I fear I didnt make my meaning plain if you think I want you to “find an opening for her.” No, but I suppose you usually “cast” your own plays, and I want you only to MENTION Edith Craig as being fit for this or that ever-so-small-a-part. . . .

E.T.

53/ To Ellen Terry

16 April 1897

. . . Did I say “find an opening for Edy”? I apologize. I withdraw. I abase myself—you wretch: that was precisely what you ordered me to keep my eyes open for. She wants an opening ten times more than if she had no mother. Do you remember—or did you ever hear of—the obscurity of Mozart’s son? An amiable man, a clever musician, an excellent player; but hopelessly extinguished by his father’s reputation. How could any man do what was expected from Mozart’s son? Not Mozart himself even. Look at Siegfried Wagner. Ellen Terry’s daughter! Awful! Is Ted anything of a comedian? I want comedians.

Suppose this “You Never Can Tell” succeeds sufficiently to make it practically certain that a dozen matinees of a new cheap play by me would pay their way. Well, get somebody to finance a dozen matinees of “Candida” for Janet on condition that Ted [Edward Craig] plays Eugene and Edy Prossy—I told the Independent Theatre people that I’d let them do it if they could bank £1000. Or let them buy a fit-up and play “Arms & The Man” & “You Never Can Tell” in the provinces. (I have all the British rights of “Arms” & all but eleven No. 1 towns for “You Never Can Tell.”) Or let H. B. Irving & Ted, Dorothea Baird & Edy start a “Next Generation” theatre & play Othello & Iago, Emilia & Desdemona, on alternate nights. Or let them make up a nice little repertory & go round the world with it—that’s the way to get trained now.

It’s no use: I have nothing sensible to suggest. Teddy, though hypersenti- hypersensitized (got it that time!) and petulated by more luxury than was good for him in the way of a mammy seems highly and nervously intelligent. He wants ten years of stern adversity—not domestic squabble—to solidify him. Pity he’s married: why should he be a breeder of sinners?

What a Good Friday we’re having! Rain, wind, cold, skating on all the ponds, icicles hanging from the eaves and George Bernard the shepherd blowing his nail.

When are you coming into this neighborhood? I can bike over to Thames Ditton—if only I dare. Don’t let us break the spell—do let us break the spell—don’t, do, don’t, do, don’t, do, don’t—I resolved to let the end of the line decide it like Gretchen’s flower, and it has decided nothing. . . .

GBS

P.S. They’re going to elect me to the St Pancras Vestry (more public work); and I’m spending Easter on a Fabian Tract—“Employer’s Liability.” That’s why I’m so prosaic.

54/ To Reginald Golding Bright

7th May 1897

Dear Bright

. . . Things you may mention.—Work it up as news in your own way, not as communicated by me to the paper in the first person—you will know how to manage it.

1. I have been elected a member of the St Pancras Vestry. At the first general election of Vestries under the Local Government Act of 1894, it was urged that public-spirited men of some standing should come forward and offer to serve. I condescended to do this and was ignominiously defeated, my sympathy with Labour being considered disreputable by the workmen of St Pancras. Now the Conservatives and Unionists and Moderates and other respectables of the parish have returned me unopposed in spite of my vehement protests that I have no time for such work. I recognise, however, that there is better work to be done in the Vestry than in the theatre, and have submitted to take my turn.

2. I have resolved to accept an offer made me by Mr Grant Richards for the publication of my plays. I am not a disappointed dramatist, as the curiosity and interest shewn in my plays by managers, and their friendliness & accessibility for me, have exceeded anything I had any right to expect. But in the present condition of the theatre it is evident that a dramatist like [Henrik] Ibsen, who absolutely disregards the conditions which managers are subject to, and throws himself on the reading public, is taking the only course in which any serious advance a possible, expecially if his dramas demand much technical skill from the actors. So I have made up my mind to put my plays into print and trouble the theatre no further with them. The present proposal is to issue two volumes entitled “Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant.” Vol I, “Unpleasant” will contain “The Philanderer” and the appalling “Mrs Warren’s Profession” with perhaps a reprint of “Widowers’ Houses.” Vol II, “Pleasant,” will contain “Arms & The Man,” “Candida,” and “You Never Can Tell.” Possibly also “The Devil’s Disciple” and “The Man of Destiny.”

I decline to say anything more at present about Sir Henry Irving and “The Man of Destiny” except that the story, when I tell it—and I shall probably tell it very soon—will be quite as amusing as a Lyceum performance of the play would have been. None of the paragraphs in circulation convey the remotest approximation to the truth; and the statement that Sir Henry has returned the MS [manuscript] “with a handsome compliment and a present” is a particularly audacious invention. This is enough for one week, I think.

In haste,

yrs ever

G. Bernard Shaw

55/ To Ellen Terry

29th May 1897

Oh stupidest of created women, how can I answer such letters! I ask myself how I have ever consented to know a moral void—a vacuum. I am cured of arrogance: I no longer pretend to have written either “Candida” or the Wild Duck article [about Henrik Ibsen’s play Wild Duck in the Saturday Review]: I admit that you wrote them both. But mark the result of my humility. If “Candida” is ever done, it shall not be done by subscriptions collected for the performance of a play by Ibsen. Oh, stupid, stupid, stupid, STUPID woman: can you see nothing when the footlights are in your eyes? . . .

GBS

56/ To Ellen Terry

14th July 1897

. . . Charrington is taking out a Doll’s House tour; and he’s going to try “Candida” on the provincial dog. He wants somebody who can play Prossy (a character in “Candida” which you forget, probably) and Mrs Linden in the Ibsen play. I suggested Edy. Would she go, do you think?

It will be a pretty miserable tour—start at Aberdeen after 12 hours travelling; but she might pick up something from Charrington; and Janet would keep her in gossip for a twelve-month to come. . . .

GBS

57/ To Ellen Terry

20th July 1897

Edy is going to have a very difficult job of it with Mrs Linden, because Janet is so loathingly sick of rehearsing it with new Lindens that she wants Edy to get through with only one rehearsal. And the effort of swallowing all those words will be bad for Prossy. However, we must make the best of it.

The only difficulty about Prossy will be the usual difficulty—want of muscle in the enunciation of the words. When people intend to play the piano in public, they play scales for several hours a day for years. A pupil of [Theodor] Leschetitsky (Paderewski’s master) comes before the public with steel fingers, which give a quite peculiar quality and penetration even to pianissimo notes. An actress should practise her alphabet in just the same way, and come before the public able to drive a nail up to the head with one touch of a consonant. For want of this athleticism, people get driven to slow intonings, and woolly execution. Now for Prossy I want extreme snap in the execution: every consonant should have a ten pound gun hammer spring in it, also great rapidity & certainty of articulation. Of course Edy has not got all that yet; but I shall get more of it out of her than she dreams of troubling herself for at present. Young people don’t realize what a tremendous deal of work it takes to make a very small effect. But she starts with a good deal in hand that one looks in vain for elsewhere. Her expression is, if anything, too expressive normally, like Forbes Robertson’s. Her voice is quite her own. But she needs to work & use her head a good deal; for she is like a boy in her youth & virginity, and cannot fall back on “emotional” effects which are really only the incontinences of a hysterical and sexually abandoned woman, but which pull a great many worthless & stupid actresses through leading parts in vulgar drama. So she will—fortunately for herself—get nothing cheap. I have told her that if I can do anything for her in the way of going over the part with her I will make time to do it. . .

How are you?

In haste, ever dearest Ellen,

your

GBS

58/ To Janet Achurch

23rd July 1897

Wretch!—to drag me all the way to Islington for such an inconceivably bad performance. I declare before outraged Heaven that acting is to you and Charrington not an honest night’s work, but a form of reckless self-indulgence. You’d much better have got me to rehearse “A Doll’s House” than “Candida”: it’s all gone to the deepest devil. Rank is literally on his last legs: it is time for C.C. to change to Krogstad, and I strongly advise you to take a turn at Ellen. You have driven a red hot harrow over my heart & soul: I will never enter a theatre again.

GBS

59/ To Ellen Terry

27th July 1897

The “Candida” people are off to Aberdeen at last; and I have struck Saturday work for a month or two; so now I have nothing to do but get my seven plays through the press; write the prefaces to the two volumes; read the proof sheets of the Webbs’ great book “Problems of Democracy” (doesn’t it sound succulent?); answer two years’ arrears of letters; and write a play & a few articles & Fabian tracts or so before October. Holiday times, dearest Ellen, holiday times!

Johnston F.R. [Forbes-Robertson] is in tribulation over his “Hamlet.” He turned up here the other day beating his breast, and wanting to know whether I couldn’t write a nicer third act for “The Devil’s Disciple,” since Cleopatra was not ready for Campbell-patra [Mrs Patrick Campbell]. I wrote him out a lovely cast for “Hamlet,” including [your son] Teddy as Osric (if Edward [Gordon] Craig Esquire will so far condescend). Will you, however, give Ted this hint. Courtenay Thorpe lately played the Ghost, and made a hit in it. I put him down for it in my suggested cast; but I sincerely hope that F.R. won’t take the suggestion, because it is (or may be) important to me to have Thorpe free for “Candida.” In that case, Ted, with his pathetic voice, might play the Ghost himself, if Thorpe has broken the tradition sufficiently to make the notion acceptable. At all events, put it into Ted’s head that it is a possible thing; so that if he gets chatting with F. R. or anyone else in the affair, he may say that his three parts are Hamlet (of course), the Ghost & Osric.

I am certain I could make “Hamlet” a success by having it played as Shakspere meant it. H. I. [Henry Irving] makes it a sentimental affair of his own; and this generation has consequently never seen the real thing. However, I am afraid F. R. will do the usual dreary business in the old way, & play the bass clarinet for four hours on end, with disastrous results. Lord! how I would make that play jump along at the Lyceum [Theatre] if I were manager. I’d make short work of that everlasting “room in the castle.” You should have the most beautiful old English garden to go mad in, with the flowers to pluck fresh from the bushes, and a trout stream of the streamiest and ripplingest to drown yourself in. I’d make such a scene of “How all occasions do inform against me! “—Hamlet in his travelling furs on a heath like a polar desert, and Fortinbras and his men “going to their graves like beds”—as should never be forgotten. I’d make lightning & thunder (comedy & tragedy) of the second & third acts: the people should say they had never seen such a play before. I’d—but no matter.

I was at the opera last night: “Tristan [and Isolde].” O Ellen, Ellen, Ellen, think of it! [Jean] De Reszke, at 48, playing his second season of Tristan, to a perfectly crazy house, and cursing himself in his old age for not doing what I told him years ago when I cannonaded the Opera and himself just as I now cannonade the Lyceum & Henry. And now Henry capitulates and orders a play from the musical critic of The World (my successor [Robert] Hichens) and [Henry Duff] Traill. In a year or two or three, you and he will be doing what I have told you, and saying, like De Reszke, “Why, oh why didn’t we realize the godlike wisdom of this extraordinary man before!” . . .

GBS

60/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

28th July 1897

. . . I wonder what you are doing? I am wondering something about you two. How I do think and think of it. I am inane. To be obsessed by a thought is the way of so many women, and I’ve always noted it and guarded against it for it is ruin.

You couldnt be dull, could you? So strange many clever people dont see the sun shines in the sky.

Have you been down to see Candida yet? I had no idea it was to be done yet awhile and was surprised to get a newspaper telling of it. (Thanks by the way for the newscutting you sent me.) Is Johnston Forbes-Robertson going to do the Devil[’s Disciple]? Are you going to alter the last act?

I’m told you are going to Leamington. True? Edy is dying to do the Housekeeper in Rosmersholm [by Henrik Ibsen] when it is played. She tells me, “Miss Achurch has been very nice to me about my parts.” Edy with children is at her best, unselfish and devoted, so I’m delighted that little Nora (Charrington’s and Janet’s daughter) is about with her a good deal. I’m hoping they will all come near here, either Eastbourne or Brighton, for then I shall go there. Edy won’t write to me of Candida but says she will tell me when we meet.

I’m going to sleep! (in the hammock—just where I am!) although it is 12—noon—

Cant keep my eyes open! (Generally cant keep ‘em shut!)

Farewell, dearly beloved.

E. T.

61/ William Archer to Bernard Shaw

31st July 1897

‘For the performance of an unpleasant duty,’ says Mrs Porcher, in [Arthur Wing Pinero’s] The Hobby Horse, ‘no time can be inappropriate.’ Therefore, my dear G. B. S., I take this somewhat belated opportunity of informing you that I didn’t like your Man of Destiny a bit, and begging you not to make ducks-and-drakes of your dramatic talent in this wanton fashion. For you have dramatic talent, if only you would condescend to use, in place of abusing, it. You have falsified my prophecy of many years ago that you would never write a play. You have written one play, at least, and possible more. The one play I mean is neither Widower’s Houses, nor Arms and the Man. Were these and The Man of Destiny all your dramatic works, I should say you had fulfilled my prophecy, not falsified it. But you have written Candida—and the fact that it is known only by rumour to the playgoing public shows that there is something very rotten in the state of the theatre. Well, we are to see it in print in the autumn, along with other Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant, which as yet I do not know. This is well, since no better may be: but you really do not give the managers a chance to discover the error of their ways when you put your name to nondescript eccentricities like this Man of Destiny.

It was not very well acted when I saw it at Croydon [Theatre] the other afternoon. The performance was ‘the first on any stage’; the part of the Lieutenant had been taken, at short notice apparently, by a gentleman who was very shaky in his words; and his natural nervousness communicated itself to the other actors. I had intended to make this an excuse for saying nothing about it at present, and reserving my remarks until it is produced at a West End theatre. But playwrights of talent are not so plentiful on the English stage that we can afford to let one of them fritter himself away like this without a word of protest. I don’t for a moment suppose that you will listen to it, but I shall have done what I can, and, like the aforesaid Mrs Porcher, shall enjoy the reward of a good conscience. Pray forget, for the sake of argument, that you wrote The Man of Destiny. Forget that you are a playwright; remember that you are a critic. . . .

William Archer

62/ To Ellen Terry

5th August 1897

. . . Before I left town I got a letter from Charrington. He said that Edy was too sympathetic for my notion of Prossy, but that a Terry couldn’t be otherwise than sympathetic, and there was no use in trying to alter it. However, I am quite content with that account. I quite meant that the part should come out sympathetic in spite of itself, which is exactly what it seems to have done by C’s account. He is wrong about Edy: she can do a hard bit of character well enough: at least she did it in Pinero’s whatsitsname—“Bygones,” is it? He said that Janet was very good in the scenes with Morell in the second act (it was evident at rehearsal that she would be), but that in the great final speech she sat there articulating staccato, and religiously imitating my way of doing it until he could hardly hold himself back from getting up & stopping the play. Burgess, the comic father [Lionel Belmore], was the success of the evening; and the drunken scene in the third act carried Aberdeen off its feet so that every exit was followed by a minute’s uproarious applause. On the other hand, the poet was quite as misunderstood as he was in his own family, and this, Charrington says, was not Thorpe’s fault, but Aberdeen’s [theatregoers]. He says nothing about himself.

They are to play the piece at Eastbourne & Bournemouth. See it if you can, & tell me about it; probably I shant see it at all, though there is some question of my going over to Leamington with Miss P. T. [Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend later Mrs Bernard Shaw] What are you wondering about us? She is getting used to me now, I think. Down at Dorking there was a sort of earthquake, because she had been cherishing a charming project of at last making me a very generous & romantic proposal—saving it up as a sort of climax to the proofs she was giving me every day of her regard for me. When I received that golden moment with shuddering horror & wildly asked the fare to Australia, she was inexpressibly taken aback, and her pride, which is considerable, was much startled—Excuse me one moment: she is calling me from her window. Tableau.

* * * * *

Now I am all right. She threw me out two waterproof packets, looking like Army Stores. I found a hammock in each; and I have actually suspended them both from this tree, taking care to put one so high that nobody but myself will be able to get into it. And now I swinging in that hammock, with your letter to answer, and “Arm & The Man” to prepare for the printer as soon as I feel disposed to work.

The tiredness, by the way, is maladie du pays: it is wearing off; and in a day or two I shall be sublime.

Well, as I was saying, that revelation of my self centredness as a mere artistic machine was a shock; but now she says “What a curious person you are!” or “What an utter brute you are!” as the humor takes her; and we live an irreproachable life in the bosom of the Bo family [Sidney and Beatrice Webb]. By the way we have had one desertion—Graham Wallas has suddenly got engaged to a Miss [Ada] Radford. They all succumb sooner or later: I alone remain (and will die) faithful to myself and Ellen.

Just imagine this fifty pound business [Janet Achurch had loaned out £50 from Charlotte]. Can you imagine a more morally thriftless thing to do than to take advantage of a rich woman being fond of me and of a play of mine being in the repertory to extract money, knowing all the time what she must think of the transaction and what I must feel about it. We had a council of the family over it here when the fatal telegram arrived, Mrs Webb being absent (she has not come down yet). [Sidney] Webb was goodnatured & sensible—said “Yes: that’s about what it was bound to cost you if you wish to be friendly. I’d give a fiver myself under the circumstances, which is about the equivalent out of my income of £50 out of yours.” But I obstinately refused to consent not to withdraw “Candida” unless she [Charlotte] pledged herself to accept repayment from me out of my future profits (if any) as dramatic author; and I wrote to Janet to explain to her that she had sold her monopoly for £50 [£6,645.98 in 2020 according to Bank of England’s inflation calculator], as I should now have no right to allow any personal considerations to stand between that debt & its repayment, and will accept the first good offer I get for its production in London whether she is in the cast or not. On receiving this terrible intimation, Janet will weep, attempt suicide, write me an abusive letter, declare herself a wretch unworthy to live, and telegraph for £10 more to meet a pressing engagement. Is it not amazing—that histrionic character (or want of character) that appreciates every sort of heroism and nobility in the most exalted and affectionate spirit, and that cannot in its own proper person resist a five pound note any more than a cat can resist a penn’orth of fried fish.

Oh, I must do some work this morning. I have the proofs of “Mrs Warren” all but the last few pages. When they come I’ll send you a spare set; & you must tell me what you think of it. By the way, that stupid old “Widowers’ Houses” is not so bad as I thought: Ive made it quite presentable with a little touching up. Did you see Archer’s column of weary & disgusted vituperation of “The Man of Destiny” in “St Paul’s.” I intended to send it to you; but I find Ive left it in the pocket of a London coat. No news from Forbes [Johnston Forbes-Robertson]: he’ll never touch “The D.’s D.” unless he is driven to it by flat play-bankruptcy. Mustn’t begin another sheet—

ever—

GBS

63/ To Janet Achurch

19th August 1897

I had my doubts about the susceptibility of Leamington [Spa]; but the reason I didn’t go is that the labor of preparing the plays for the press has assumed unexpected and colossal dimensions. I have worked without intermission ever since I came here; and the result is, “Arms & The Man” and one act of “Candida” ready for the printer—not a line more, as I live by vegetables! Can you tell me roughly where the play wants mending; for I am now at work on it, and must make the alterations this month or never. I enclose you a memorandum of the changes I have made in the first act. The first one is to meet the objection that has always been made—that the children are sprung on the audience to their utter surprise in the last scene for the first time. The others speak for themselves. The rest of the work I have been doing consists in replacing the scenic specifications and stage directions by descriptions for the benefit of the general reader. For instance the beginning of the act is an elaborate description of the whole Hackney district; then a description of Victoria Park; and finally a description of the parsonage and the room. The passages of description which are meant to replace the effect of the acting will be most illuminating to theatrical posterity.

As to [Courtenay] Thorpe, there is nothing for it but to let him sow his wild oats in the part. Who else can you get? [Henry] Esmond wouldn’t go on tour with you: he will stick to London authorially and actorially. Lawrence Irving would hardly fit into your company either; and it is of the company you must think. You will find it hard to get a young leading man whose connexion with you will present so good a balance of advantage (over all the plays) for both sides. However, if you can better him, better him by all means. Only don’t throw him over for the sake of adding twopennorth to the effect of Candida; for he makes a good deal of difference in the other plays. . . .

There was a champion criticism of “Candida” in the Northern Figaro, so sincerely stupid that I have a mind to reprint it in my preface. Did you see it?

GBS

64/ To an actress, theatre director, producer and costume designer Edith Craig

20th August 1897

My dear Miss Craig

Will you send me a line to remind me of the business in the scene with Eugene at the place where you say “Pray are you flattering me or flattering yourself.” Do you go back to the typewriter at the end of that speech or at “I’ll leave the room, Mr Mb [Marchbanks]: I really will. It’s not proper.” I want to get it right for the printer.

Also, if you have accumulated any effective gags, you might let me have them for inclusion in the volume.

All the accounts I have received agree that you and Burgess saved the piece from utter ruin, and that Prossy (as [Charles] Wyndham foresaw) was the popular favorite.

Please make your mother [Ellen Terry] tell me what you thought of the performance; and then bring her to Eastbourne [to see it] so that she can tell me what she thinks herself.

yours sincerely

G.Bernard Shaw

65/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

30th August 1897

That work of art, [Courtenay] Thorpe, haunts me! He does every part so cleverly. Helmer [in A Doll House] or Eugene, the more difficult the thing to be done the better he does it. But I cant think it right to show as clever as that. Must one show all “the tricks of the trade” to be understood by an audience?

Well, I’ve seen Candida, and it comes out on the stage even better than when one reads it. It is absorbingly interesting every second, and I long for it to be done in London. Even the audience understood it all. I dont see how anything so simple and direct could fail to be understood by the dullest. Only one thing struck me at the time as wrong. Towards quite the end of a play to say “Now let’s sit down and talk the matter over.” Several people took out their watches and some of them left to catch a train, or a drink! And it interrupted the attention of all of us who stayed. Of course you may think it unnecessary to mention such a trifle. I’m going to write to Janet about one or two trifling things in her acting, suggestions which she may care, or not care, to try over. She is a dear thing.

I was very happy being able to be with Edy. I know she was glad to have me there. I went for a drive with Janet and Mr Charrington (I like him) but was so ill when they came to supper in the evening I could scarce sit up. My eyes were dazed with the pain in my head. I’m well again now. It was the great excitement of seeing Candida. I was all right the night before!

Darlingest are you well? and happy enough? Where are you? When does your holiday end? Are you most of your time working? I guess you are!

I begin a drive of ten days on the first or second of September. We go 226 miles (to Aylesbury first) and amongst other wonderful places I go to Tewkesbury. I wonder I dont turn into an Angel there, I feel so nice, and as if I could fly. I’m reading now all the time of Russia.

Let me press you to a jelly now, for I must go.

Your Ellen

66/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

4th September 1897

. . . I’m glad you are still in the fresh air. This London is lovely when one drives out as I did yesterday at 9 in the morning, but about noon a pall of heavy murkiness hangs over everything and it seems to crush in one’s head. Edy came from Folkestone Sunday morning and yesterday went on to Nottingham. I would advise you to see Candida before producing it in London. If it is to be done, when is it to be done? A clever friend of mine said to me yesterday—“If Edy stays long with the Independent Theatre Company she will get dull, heavy, conceited, frowsy, trollopy, and dirty! In fact will look moth-eaten! And no one will see her act, because nobody goes to their Theatre.” That’s lively news for Edy’s Mama, who is missing her all the while, and for you who have a play there. I have a frightful cold and am stuck in bed to-day. I’ll send Peter [Laurence Irving’s play Peter the Great] in a day or so. Oh, my muddled head. I think I’m fit for nothing. Look now! You and Miss P. T. [Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend later Mrs Shaw] live in a fine house in the country and I will “keep the Lodge”! And run out wet or shine and open the gates! And then sometimes you’ll come to tea with me. I can make delicious girdle-cakes and jam, fruitfools and Hominy cakes. Send me my letter my very precious Bernie!

E. T.

67/ To Richard Mansfield

8th September 1897

My dear Mansfield

In a month or two will appear, in England and America simultaneously, a couple of volumes of my plays, including Arms & the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny and You Never Can Tell, as well as three earlier plays, Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer, & Mrs Warren’s Profession. My description of Bluntschli [in Arms and the Man] will beat your best efforts off the stage, and as for Candida, your reputation will not survive the discovery of your monstrous error and sin in letting it slip through your fingers. . .

It is as an organizer of the theatre that you really interest me; and here I find you paralyzed by the ridiculous condition that the drama must always be a Mansfield exhibition. I wanted Candida done. Why didnt you send for Courtenay Thorpe, who has just ‘created’ Eugene here? If you set your mind to it you could teach all the necessary tricks to the first dozen able bodied human shells you meet in the street. I dont believe a bit in your own acting; you’re too clever, too positive, and have imagination instead of what people call ‘feeling’. Why not hire a specimen of the real actor-article—the true susceptible, hysterical, temperamental, somnambulistic, drunk-on-air nothingness—and put ideas into the creature’s head, and hypnotize him with a part. He’ll act your head off, because you have to be yourself, whereas he has no self and can only materialize himself in the delusive stuff spun out of another man’s fancy. For you acting is only intentional madness, like David drabbling in his beard. Harden your heart against, and manage, manage, manage. Bless you, I know by your letters: I miss the hollowness, the brainless void full of tremulously emotional chaos waiting for a phantom shape in a play—bah! it’s no profession for you. The people come because they are curious about the interesting man, Richard Mansfield, and because you have imagination enough to strike their imaginations with stage effects; but that’s quite another thing. You may as me whether these spooks of people will ever understand my plays. I reply that I dont want them to understand. If they did theyd he dumfoundered. Besides, my plays never will be played, though they can be. I’ll write them & print them; and the right people will understand. Meanwhile play the Devil’s Disciple, and then retire & write to the papers explaining (as above) why you scorn to act any longer, except in an emergency as Marcellus or Bernardo [characters in Hamlet] and devote the rest of your life to the organization of victory all over the States—ten companies at a time—instead of to broadsword combats.

Do not shew this letter to your wife: she will blow me up for allowing the winds of heaven to visit your face too harshly.

Irving’s son [Laurence] has written a play about Peter the Great of which I hear high praise. The younger generation is knocking at the door: nephew Alf has played Osric to [Herbert Beerbohm] Tree’s Hamlet here—at least I saw him announced for the part, I did not see the performance, as I am in the country for August & September.

Any chance of seeing you over here?

yrs sincerely

G. Bernard Shaw

68/ To Ellen Terry

8th September 1897

. . . Are you going to do Peter [the Great] on the road? You should. Think of how much anxiety it will save you if you have your difficulties with the words settled before the first night in London. Mansfield produces “The Devil’s Disciple” at the 5th Avenue Theatre on the 6th Oct, after an experiment or two with it in the provinces. Ah, if you only would play a matinee of it with Forbes[-Robertson], I would actually go to see it (a compliment I haven’t paid Candida). Besides, I would teach that rapscallionly flower girl of his something. “Caesar & Cleopatra” has been driven clean out of my head by a play I want to write for them in which he shall be a west end gentleman and she [Mrs Patrick Campbell] an east end dona in an apron and three orange and red ostrich feathers [a first reference to Pygmalion written during 1912 and 1913].

I see you wont tell me anything about Prossy. It would be seething the kid in its mother’s milk, I suppose; but still I do want to know in general terms whether my style of work fits her.

It is luncheon hour, and there’s a visitor.

That letter would not have surprised anybody at the hotel. Did you ever read “Rejected Addresses” [by the brothers James and Horace Smith]? I only remember three lines from “Lady Elizabeth Mugg.”

—for who would not slavery hug,

to spend but one exquisite hour

in the arms of Elizabeth Mugg!

I should write the same about you if there were any rhyme to Ellen. I love you soulfully & bodyfully, properly and improperly, every way that a woman can be loved.

GBS

69/ To Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend later Mrs Bernard Shaw

18th October 1897

. . . This morning came an appalling letter from my Italian lady [Candida Bartolucci]—“I have seen your play [Candida]. It is beautiful. I am coming to London to congratulate you.” I must rush off to the vestry committee.

GBS

P.S. I biked to Radlett yesterday with Wallas & Ada Radford. In your absence I think I shall fall in love with Mrs Phillimore [née Lucy Fitzpatrick].

70/ To Janet Achurch

1st November 1897

My dear Janet

Have you got among your press cuttings an agonized notice of “Candida” from the Northern Figaro? If you have, will you lend it to me: I’ve mislaid my copy.

I have for a long time wanted to remonstrate with you about two things. First, the way you destroy every chance of getting “Candida” produced by persistently telling the press that it is going to be done presently in London. Of course everybody concludes that the market is closed. If only you had played the game properly, and told everybody that nobody in London would touch the play, and that only for you and the I.T. [Independent Theatre] it would never have seen the light even in the provinces, you would have made such an interesting case of it that the way would have been clear by this time. But you will play Government tricks when you’re in opposition. Making all due allowance for congenital mendacity, I still think you ought to be able to see that the strength of your position lies in its commercial weakness, and its unequalled opportunities of making capital out of persecution.

Second, and more important, your diction is in such an unholy abyss of mannerism that London will not stand you unless you drop it. When I saw “Doll’s House” for the second time at Islington, you inflicted such torments on me with every syllable you uttered that my affection for you finally came out by the roots. I really cannot love a woman with a sawmill at each corner of her mouth. Miss P. T. [Payne-Townshend], who had been tremendously impressed by her first visit at the Globe [Theatre], was utterly confounded, and could not believe that it was the same woman. The last time I saw you everything went well until you made a scene about something—I forget what. Immediately you started both sawmills, fixed your eyes in a ghastly stare, and became a frightful ven-triloquizing somnambulist, like the ghost of Cleopatra. This is no doubt extremely thrilling to your own diaphragm; but the effect on the innocent spectator is atrocious: it deprived me of the power of remonstrating with you; removed me miles away; set me asking myself whether it was really you or some nightmarish simulacrum of the once adorable Janet. It is that that has prevented me from going to see “Candida”: I daren’t face it. It is all the fault of that cursed Cleopatra. You have begun to act; and now it’s all up with you. You complain of Thorpe’s want of simplicity and sincerity and then burlesque his worst artificialities.

I enclose you the prospectus of the plays, as it has an important bearing on “Candida.” The books will be out in the middle of January—at all events early in February. After that the novelty will be gone. . . .

GBS

71/ To Janet Achurch

9th December 1897

Janet, Janet, Janet

Is there any use in remonstrating?

Is Charrington to be ruined? Is [your daughter] Nora to make clinical observations when she comes back? Who is to play Candida?

Very well: I will tell everybody—tell Miss [Charlotte Payne-]Townshend, Mrs [Beatrice] Webb, Mrs [Lion] Phillimore, [William] Archer, Ellen Terry, everybody whose knowledge will inflict the most exquisite cruelty on you.

When you came in tonight you were Janet, desirable and adorable. After dinner you were a rowdy, unpresentable wretch. Finally you were inarticulate—nearly as inarticulate as the time before. And I came to propose that you should go to my dentist to be prepared for Manchester!!

. . . You talk of women suffering. When you see me like that, you will—if you ever cared for what I am—know what suffering is for the first time in your life. When I was a child of less than Nora’s age, I saw the process in my father; and I have never felt anything since. I learnt soon to laugh at it; and I have laughed at everything since. Presently, no doubt, I shall learn to laugh at you. What else can I do?

No use, dear Janet: I can’t be your taskmaster and schoolmaster any longer. If I could expend fifty pounds a week in keeping you luxuriously dulled and disciplined, with punctual splendours of dress and dinner and society to be faced in fine condition, I might be of some use. But as it is, I can only make myself uselessly disagreeable and load my heart with a crown of sword points. Let us drop the subject and say goodbye whilst there is still some Janet left to say goodbye to. The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself. The moment the image loses its elevation, then away with that friend: however remorseful he may be, he has become a malignant influence on your life. I held up the mirror in which Janet was beautiful as long as I could, in private and in print: now I’ve held it up with Janet inarticulate and rowdy. Avoid me now as you would the devil; for from this time I will destroy your self respect if you let me near you. Restore the image, and look at it in a new, clean mirror—the archangel’s with the purple wings, perhaps: mine is spoiled and done for. I am growing old and cowardly and selfish: it’s sufficient that I loved you when I was young. Now I can do nothing but harm unless I say farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell.

GBS

72/ William Archer to Bernard Shaw

14th January 1898

My dear Shaw

Though 50 is a number one uses vaguely for ‘a great many,’ I believe it was really within the mark— but remember my point was that Miss [Martha] Morton’s play [A Bachelor’s Romance] was contemptible, and that many plays might be better without being positively good. I quite agree with you (& have said again & again) that there is no case against the managers as a body, but only against the system which enslaves them as much as anyone. But of the fifty plays, I can think of only one at the present moment which I myself would with any confidence mount for a run—that is to say spend £1000 [£132,919.54 in 2020 according to Bank of England’s inflation calculator] on and stake my prestige—& that play is Candida. Even Carlyon [Sahib by Gilbert Murray], though it interests me, I wouldn’t dream of backing for a run. I forget the exact phrase I used & haven’t got the paper here; but I didn’t mean to convey that I blamed [John] Hare for producing the play. That he can do so shows that he has no literary intelligence, but no one ever suspected him of that. The play is, as I tried to suggest, just the sort of mild imbecility that goes down with a certain class of the public (especially the provincial public, I fancy) & simply as a manager Hare was probably quite right to pitch upon it. There is no case against the managers as a body, but there is against the critics, myself included, though I’m not one of the worst in that respect. We intimidate the managers by becoming ferociously critical the moment a play begins to have merit, while we’re all geniality & tolerance so long as it has no merit at all. This doesn’t apply to the mere imbeciles of the fraternity who really prefer the slush—it is a general tendency which it’s almost impossible to resist.

Dont be too much puffedup if I break to you the intelligence that you have won the approval of [John Mackinnon] Robertson. He has seen the Devil’s Disciple in Boston & writes of it with what is (for him) enthusiasm—‘the applause of the which one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others.’

Yours ever

W.A.

73/ Bernard Shaw’s article “The Comedy of Calf Love” contributed to a London weekly newspaper The Saturday Review

15th January 1898

The bitterest of prayers is the prayer that our prayers may not be granted; but it has been prayed ever since we discovered that the meanest trick our gods can play us is to take us at our word. This is not altogether because we so seldom know what is good for us: it just as often comes from our not liking what is good for us when we get it. My own case at present is worse even than this. I have unselfishly prayed for something that is good for the theatre; and now that the theatre has got it, it makes life bitterer to me. My prayer was that contemporary drama might be brought up to the level of contemporary fiction. I pointed out that even the romances written by governesses and read by parlormaids were more literate, more decent, more fanciful than the coarse pleasantries and maudlin sentimentalities concocted by obsolete Bohemians for festive undergraduates. Now that the substitution has been effected, I am more than justified; for the change is not only a very manifest improvement, but is much appreciated by the public; yet to say that I enjoy it would be to say the thing that is not. It is not in man’s nature to be grateful for negative mercies. When you have the toothache, the one happiness you desire is not to have it: when it is gone, you never dream of including its absence in your assets. Now that the pothouse drama no longer obtrudes its obscene existence on me, I find myself grumbling as much as ever at the deficiencies of the ladylike plays which have supplanted it.

My consolation is that ladylike drama, though it worries me as a critic, reassures me as a human being. The truth is, I am no longer what is invidiously called a young man. Like Mr [Arthur Wing] Pinero and his Princess [a character of his play The Princess and the Butterfly or the Fantastics], I have turned forty, and am somewhat worn by industry and eld. Yet I find, by the unanimous testimony of the women who, as purveyors of the newest new drama, are breaking down the male monopoly of dramatic authorship in all directions, that the older I get, and the more I wrinkle, and the faster my grey hairs multiply, and the more flabbily my feet shuffle and my ideas footle, the more I shall be adored by their sex. I used to think that calf love—the only love that deserves all the beautiful things the storybooks say about the tender passion—was peculiar to the human male, and was, indeed, a mark of his superiority. But now I learn, from the latest fashion in plays, that the modern woman’s dream is to be an old man’s darling. In Sweet Nancy [by Robert Williams Buchanan], revived last week at the Avenue [Theatre], there was still one drop of bitterness left for me, since the hero, though fifty, was military. But in A Bachelor’s Romance [by Miss Martha Morton], at the Globe [Theatre], the hero is not only an old fogey, but a literary man, with fads not altogether unlike my own. And the author is no unwomanly Ibsenite, but that womanliest of all women, the American woman. She was born in New York City; she received her education in a public school; and as a girl she contributed poetry and short stories to many magazines. Can anything be more womanly? If A Bachelor’s Romance were her first play, I might misdoubt me that it was no more than the sowing of her wild oats. But it is not so: Miss Martha Morton has produced at least six plays, all apparently successful, since her Refugee’s Daughter appeared eight years ago. Therefore I take the Globe play to be the expression of a mature, deliberate, experienced conviction that the most fascinating person in the world is a nice old literary gentleman between forty and sixty. Later on I may perhaps plead for an extension of these limits, encouraged by the fact that Mr [William Ewart] Gladstone was never positively adored until he turned seventy but for the present I am content to be just such an old dear as Mr [John] Hare [born John Joseph Fairs, 1844–1921] is now impersonating with a success that Don Juan has never attained. And, depend on it, this new dramatic theme will not be confined to one sex. It is in the air. There is a play called Candida, lately performed in the provinces by the Independent Theatre, in which the hero is under eighteen and the heroine a matron who confesses to “over thirty.” Calf love is the sentiment of the hour.

Miss Morton’s success as a playwright is, of course, founded on a clear gift of telling stories and conjuring up imaginary people. But her easy conquest of managerial favor is due to the aptitude with which she sketches congenial and easily acted parts for good actors to fill up, and to that sympathy catching disposition to be goodnatured at all costs, which is so very agreeable to the public just at present. I fancy if Mr Hare had to choose between playing for nothing in three extra performances of A Bachelor’s Romance and carrying his portmanteau from Somerset House to the Globe Theatre, he would unhesitatingly submit to the three perfor-mances. Yes, easy as his task is, he gets as much applause as if the author were taxing his powers as severely as [Henrik] Ibsen. Mr Frederick Kerr, too, achieves an impersonation which, to the very coloring of his face and the thinning on the top of his wig, is masterly, at a cost to himself comparable to the lifting of an egg by [Eugene] Sandow. Miss May Harvey, one of the cleverest actresses we have, is almost dangerously underparted, like a heavy charge in a light gun; and Miss Susie Vaughan would be all the better for a little more stuff in her part to steady her. I confess I grudge four such players to a work so far inside their capacity: I had rather see them all groaning under grievous burthens. And yet I do not see how this flimsy, pretty, amusing, rather tender sort of play is to be worked up to concert pitch without better acting than it is artistically worth. Its commercial value, when fine talents are liberally wasted on it, is beyond question, but as it is not my business to judge plays by the standards of the boardroom and box office, I need not deny that there were moments during A Bache-lor’s Romance when the cheapness and spuriousness of the sentiment provoked a spasm of critical indignation in me. For instance, since Mr Hare has dealt so handsomely with Miss Morton’s plays, she might surely have provided him with some more subtle, or at least more sensible means of securing the sympathy of the audience than handing sovereigns about to needy people like a Jack Tar in a Surreyside nautical melodrama. When Miss Susie Vaughan has to shew that the crusty old maid, Miss Clementina, has what London beggars call a feeling heart, she must be somewhat incommoded by having no more plausible statement to make on the subject than that when she wakes up in the morning she hears Sylvia singing under her window, and cannot tell which is the girl in the garden and which the lark in the heavens. This, I submit, is not poetry: it is gammon; and it destroys the verisimilitude of an otherwise passable character sketch. The play, in short, needs here and there just a little more sincerity to bring it up at all points even to its own impenitently romantic scale of illusion.

The second rank of the company is nearly as good as an ordinary West End front rank. Mr Gilbert Hare [1869–1951] amuses himself cleverly but nonsensically by playing a very old man, a sort of folly in which his father [John Hare] wasted too much of his prime. I challenge Mr Gilbert Hare to look at himself in the glass whilst he is doing that dance—“one, two, three: one, two, three”—in the third act, and to say whether any extremity of white wig and painted wrinkles could turn the quicksilver in his legs into chalkstones.

Will Miss Morton and other American authors please note that the art of writing plays without explanatory asides has been brought to perfection here, and that the English high-critical nose is apt to turn up at dramatists who have not mastered it. And will Mr Hare remonstrate seriously with his musical director for inflicting on an audience which never injured him a so-called “overture” entitled The Globe, consisting of an irritating string of national anthems, and finally dragging the audience out of their seats with God save the Queen. It did not inconvenience me personally, because even if I were the most loyal of subjects I should not stand up on my hind legs like a poodle for every person who waved a stick and played a tune at me; but the more compliant people can hardly enjoy being disturbed except on special occasions.

Sweet Nancy seemed to me a little stale at the Avenue [Theatre]: Miss [Annie] Hughes, with all her cleverness, played it on the first night as if she had had enough of it. Miss [Marion] Thornhill, the lessee, plays Mrs Huntly, presumably for practice. Miss Lena Ashwell is now the Barbara Gray. In the first act she does one of her wonderful exits, which almost bring the house after her with a rush; but the part is quite beneath her; and I deliberately came away at the end of the second act because I knew she would get round me in the pathetic bit in the third if I waited.

G. Bernard Shaw

74/ Reginald Golding Bright’s article THE PLAYS OF “G.B.S.” contributed to a newspaper the Weekly Sun

20th March 1898

Volume I consists of those plays which the author is pleased to term “unpleasant”—the unpleasantness lying in the fact that they convict the capitalistic phase of modern social organisation, and are written from the point of view of a Socialist who regards the basis of middle-class society as thoroughly rotten, economically and morally. Under this heading come “Widowers’ Houses,” “The Philanderer,” and “Mrs Warren’s Profession.”

The root idea of the first-named was the rich suburban villa standing on the rents of the foul rookery; of the second, a four-act topical comedy, the fashionable cults of Ibsenism and “New Womanism” on a basis of clandestine sensuality—the Independent Theatre refused to produce it on account of its “immorality”!; whilst in the third, Mrs Warren taxes society with her occupation. . . .

Volume II—“Pleasant Plays”—will comprise “Arms and the Man,” the sparkling comedy, in three acts, of youthful romance and disillusion, which was the despair of the critics on its production at the Avenue in 1894; “The Man of Destiny,” a one-act comedy, in which Sir Henry Irving had intended to appear as the youthful Napoleon; “You Never Can Tell,” a four-act modern comedy concerned with the adventures of a sparkling pair of twins; and “Candida,” a frankly sentimental play, which Mr Shaw hopes to find appreciated by women, if not by men.

R. G. B.

75/ To Charlotte Payne-Townshend

30th March 1898

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

Wrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr !

GBS

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

April 1898

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

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

R. G. B.

77/ To William Archer

21st April 1898

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

…………………………………………………………

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

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

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

[G. Bernard Shaw]