Sir Charles Wyndham was once asked his opinion of the plays of Bernard Shaw. “Shaw's works are wonderful intellectual studies, but,” he replied firmly, “they are not plays!” And he continued: “At one time I saw a great deal of Shaw and had great hopes of him as a dramatist. But he wouldn't come down to earth, he wouldn't be practical. When he had just completed Candida he came and read it to me. I told him it was 'twenty years too soon for England.' Well, he put it on at a special matinée, and it was much applauded. Then Shaw went out and addressed the audience. 'I read the play to Wyndham,' he said in his speech, 'and he told me it was twenty years too soon. You have given the contradiction to that statement.'” Candida has been played on some of the greatest stages of Europe, as well as all over England and America, and leading critics have praised it as one of the most remarkable plays of this generation.[173]
Candida is an acute psychological observation upon the emotional reverberations in the souls of three clearly imagined, exquisitely realized characters; its connection with pre-Raphaelitism, as Mr. Shaw confessed to me, is purely superficial and extrinsic. Aside from its association with a certain stage in Shaw's own development, the character of Marchbanks might just as well have been linked with the name of Shelley,[174] or with the Celtic Renascence of to-day; but the whole atmosphere of the play makes it inconceivable at any time in the world's history save in the age of Ibsen. It bears marked resemblances to The Comedy of Love and The Lady from the Sea. Candida portrays the conflict between prose convention and poetic anarchy, concretely mirroring that conflict of human wills which Brunetière announced as the criterion of authentic drama. “Unity, however desirable in political agitations,” Shaw once wrote, in reference to this play, “is fatal to drama, since every drama must be the artistic presentation of a conflict. The end may be reconciliation or destruction, or, as in life itself, there may be no end; but the conflict is indispensable: no conflict, no drama.”
In striking contrast to many of Shaw's plays which are marked by a hyper-natural, almost blatant psychology, Candida reveals in Shaw a mastery of what may be termed profound psychological secrecy. “This is the play in which Bernard Shaw has tried to dig deepest, and has used his material with the greatest economy,” wrote Dr. Brandes, in 1902. “The quietude of the action, which works itself out purely in dialogue, is here akin to Ibsen's quietude.... There is great depth of thought in this play, and a knowledge of the human soul which penetrates far below the surface.” A domestic drama—little more than a “scene from private life”—Candida is the latest form of Diderot's invention, the bourgeois drama. Abounding in scenes and situations tense with emotional and dramatic power, it is stamped with the finish and restraint of great art. The characters in this play, so chameleon-like in its changing lustres, at every instant turn toward the light new facets of their natures. We catch the iridescent and ever-varying tints of life; and over all is a sparkle of fine and subtle humour, lightening the tension of soul-conflicts with touches of homely veracity.
The “auction scene” of the third act is transcendentally real, making an almost imperceptible transition from verisimilitude to fantasy.[175] Indulging his penchant for dialectic, Shaw here turns advocate, and argues the case with all the surety of the lawyer, the art of the littérateur. Men and women do not guide their actions in accordance with the dictates of pure reason; as Alceste says to Philinte in Le Misanthrope:
“'Tis true my reason tells me so each day;
Yet reason's not the power to govern love.”
And, after all, the auction scene is merely the scène à faire, leaving the situation absolutely unchanged. As Shaw himself once confessed: “It is an interesting sample of the way in which a scene, which should be conceived and written only by transcending the ordinary notion of the relations between the persons, nevertheless stirs the ordinary emotions to a very high degree, all the more because the language of the poet, to those who have not the clue to it, is mysterious and bewildering, and, therefore, worshipful. I divined it myself before I found out the whole truth about it.”
Playbill of Candida.
Théâtre des Arts, Paris. Director: Robert d'Humières. May 7th, 8th, 9th, 1908.
Twenty-five subsequent performances. Shaw's only play to be produced in France to date.
Candida well justifies its sub-title of a Mystery in the number of astounding interpretations given it by the critics. In France it was regarded as a new solution of the Feminist problem. Candida remains as the free companion of a weak man, we are told by certain foreign critics, because “she understands that she has a duty to fulfil to her big baby of a husband, who could no longer succeed in playing his rôle in society without the firm hand which sustains and guides him.” M. Maurice Muret, who wrote me that he was induced to read Candida by laudatory articles in the German Press after Agnes Sorma's production in Berlin, has thus betrayed his comic misunderstanding: “From the mass of femmes revoltées who encumber the contemporary drama, the personage of Candida stands out with happy distinction. Feminist literature has produced nothing comparable to this exquisite figure. A tardy, but brilliant revenge of the traditional ideal upon the new ideal, is this victory of la femme selon Titien over the Scandinavian virago, this triumph of Candida over Nora”![176] And one of the most eminent of German dramatic critics, after Lili Petri's production in Vienna, said in an open letter to Shaw: “It is not virtue; not prosaically bourgeois, nor vaguely romantic, feeling; nor even the strength of this Morell, but simply his weakness, which chains Candida to his side: because he needs her, the woman loves him more than the young poet, who may perhaps recover from his disappointment and learn to live without her. Shaw, Bernard, Irishman! I abjure thee!”