Not only with such interpretations, but even with Shaw's own dissection of his greatest play, I find it quite impossible to sympathize or to agree. Shaw seems merely to be taking a fling at the “Candidamaniacs,” as he called the play's admirers; his “analysis” strikes me as a batch of Shavian half-truths, rather than a fair estimate of the play's true significance. In answer to Mr. Huneker's question à propos of Candida's famous “shawl” speech, Shaw wrote:
“Don't ask me conundrums about that very immoral female Candida. Observe the entry of W. Burgess: 'You're the lady as hused to typewrite for him?' 'No.' 'Naaow: she was younger?' And therefore Candida sacked her. Prossy is a very highly selected young person indeed, devoted to Morell to the extent of helping in the kitchen, but to him the merest pet rabbit, unable to get the slightest hold on him. Candida is as unscrupulous as Siegfried:
Morell himself sees that 'no law will bind her.' She seduces Eugene just exactly as far as it is worth her while to seduce him. She is a woman without character in the conventional sense. Without brains and strength of mind she would be a wretched slattern or voluptuary. She is straight for natural reasons, not for conventional ethical ones. Nothing can be more cold-bloodedly reasonable than her farewell to Eugene. 'All very well, my lad; but I don't quite see myself at fifty with a husband of thirty-five. It is just this freedom from emotional slop, this unerring wisdom on the domestic plane, that makes her so completely mistress of the situation.
“Then consider the poet. She makes a man of him by showing him his own strength—that David must do without poor Uriah's wife. And then she pitches in her picture of the home, the onions, and the tradesmen, and the cossetting of big baby Morell. The New York Hausfrau thinks it a little paradise; but the poet rises up and says: 'Out, then, into the night with me'—Tristan's holy night. If this greasy fool's paradise is happiness, then I give it to you with both hands, 'life is nobler than that.' That is the 'poet's secret.' The young things in front weep to see the poor boy going out lonely and broken-hearted in the cold night to save the proprieties of New England Puritanism; but he is really a god going back to his heaven, proud, unspeakably contemptuous of the happiness he envied in the days of his blindness, clearly seeing that he has higher business on hand than Candida. She has a little quaint intuition of the completeness of his cure: she says: 'He has learnt to do without happiness.'”[177]
Candida quickly divines that Marchbanks is “falling in love with her,” and whilst fully conscious of her charms, she is equally conscious of the evil that may be wrought by unscrupulous use of them. She has too much respect for Marchbanks' passion to insult him with virtuous indignation. Her maternal insight enables her to sympathize with him in his aspirations and in his struggles.
Playbill of Candida.
Théâtre Royal du Parc, Brussels. Preceded by a conférence on The Theatre of Bernard Shaw,
by M. A. Hamon. Four “Matinées Littéraires,” February 7th, 14th, 17th, 21st, 1907.
First production of any of Shaw's plays in the French language.
It is quite true that Candida's standards are instinctively natural, not conventionally ethical: “Put your trust in my love, James, not in my conscience,” is her eminently sound point of view. It is her desire to save Eugene from future pain, to show him quite gently the hopelessness of his passion, that leads her to “seduce” him into perfect self-expression, to make clear to him that he is a “foolish boy” and that her love is not the inevitable reward for the triumph of his logic. Marchbanks' magnificent bid of “his soul's need” does not win her, because she loves Morell. Taught by Candida to recognize the difference between poetic vision and prosaic actuality, Marchbanks realizes that his hour has struck: it is the end of his youth. He has made the inevitable Shavian discovery that service, not happiness, is the nobler aim in life; and this episode in his soul's history, as Friedrich Düsel suggests, should be entitled, “Wie aus einem Knaben ein Mann wird.” He has learnt to do without happiness, not because he has been completely cured of love, but because he has learnt that his own love soars far above the unideal plane of Burgess—or is it bourgeois?—respectability. This, indeed, is the “secret in the poet's heart”; otherwise the golden-winged god of dreams shrivels up into a pitiful shape of egoism. Candida is a miracle of candour and sympathy; she lacks the one essential—true comprehension of his love. Possessing some sort of spiritual affinity with the Virgin of the Assumption, she lacks the faintest sympathy or concern with the art of Titian; feeling some sort of sympathy with Marchbanks and what is to her his comedy of calf-love, she lacks any true comprehension of the fineness and spirituality of his passion.[178]
Whatever interpretation may be adopted, this drama of disillusion is a work of true genius. In a series of productions by the Independent Theatre in the English provinces in the spring of 1897, and again in 1898, Janet Achurch (Mrs. Charles Charrington) “created” the rôle of Candida; the cast was notable, the parts of Morell and Marchbanks being taken by Mr. Charles Charrington and Mr. Courtenay Thorpe respectively. Doubtless Janet Achurch's interpretation of Candida as the serene clairvoyante remains unequalled to-day, even by Agnes Sorma or Lili Petri. The play has been patronizingly spoken of as an amusing little comedy; Oliver Herford, the humorist, hailed it with great enthusiasm as a “problem-farce”! But Candida has always appealed to me, as to Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, “not only as the noblest work of Mr. Shaw, but as one of the noblest, if not the noblest, of modern plays: a most square and manly piece of moral truth.”