[171] On account of the vagueness of the story in certain details, Mr. John Corbin has taken Shaw to task for not stating “who the Lady is and why she was so heroically bent on rescuing Napoleon from himself.” It suffices to know that she is Josephine's emissary, sent to intercept the incriminating letter. Her duel with Napoleon is a heroic effort, not to “rescue Napoleon from himself,” but, by playing upon his boundless ambition, to prevent him from discovering the extent of Josephine's perfidy, and to rescue Josephine from the consequences of her indiscretion. That the Lady in the end proves faithless to her trust merely transposes the key from tragedy to comedy; and the dramatic excellence of the play is no whit impaired by this characteristically Shawesque conclusion.
[172] I believe that Shaw's Napoleon has never been adequately interpreted save possibly by Max Reinhardt in Berlin. The impersonation I saw at the Court Theatre, London, in June, 1907, was an egregious failure.
[173] Mr. W. K. Tarpey, who called Candida “one of the masterpieces of the world,” relates that some time at the end of 1894, or beginning of 1895, Shaw fell into a calm slumber; in a vision an angel carrying a roll of manuscript appeared unto him. To Shaw, who was no whit abashed, the angel thus spoke: “Look here, Shaw! wouldn't it be rather a good idea if you were to produce a work of absolute genius?” Shaw granted that the idea was not half a bad one, although he did not see how it could be carried out. Then the angel resolved his doubts: “I've got a good play here, that is to say, good for one of us angels to have written. We want it produced in London. The author does not wish to have his name known.” “Oh!” replied Shaw, “I'll father it with pleasure; it is not up to my form, but I don't care much for my reputation.” Shaw undertook the business side of the matter, put in the comic relief, and named the play Candida: a Mystery!
[174] Mr. Arnold Daly was in the habit of opening the third act of Candida by reading the familiar verses of Shelley to an unnamed love:
“One word is too oft profaned
For me to profane it;
One feeling too falsely disclaimed
For thee to disclaim it.
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.
“I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the heavens reject not,
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?”
[175] In a notable conférence on Candida at the Théâtre des Arts, in Paris, preceding a production of that play, during the latter part of May, 1908, Mme. Georgette Le Blanc-Maeterlinck said: “La situation du mari n'est pas neuve, mais elle se présente ordinairement au troisième acte, et elle est toujours tranchée sans que la conscience intervienne, elle est tranchée par la jalousie, par la douleur et la mort. Ici, nous avons affaire à des intelligences meilleures, à des êtres qui essayent de se conduire d'après leur raison et leur volonté la plus haute.... C'est leur effort de sagesse qui les rend absolument illogiques, les soustrait à l'analyse et les rend presque inadmissibles à la lecture; mais c'est parce qu'ils sont illogiques, comme nous tous, qu'ils sont si vivants, si curieux en scène.”—Le Figaro, May 30th, 1908; also L'Art Moderne, September 20th and 27th, 1908.
[176] De Nora à Candida, by Maurice Muret; Journal des Débats, No. 544, June 24th, 1904, pp. 1216-1218.
[177] The Truth about Candida, by James Huneker, Metropolitan Magazine, August, 1904.
[178] Hermann Bahr has acutely observed: “In the Germanic world, the woman wields power over the man only so long as he feels her to be a higher being, almost a saint: so Candida is the transcendent, the immaculate, the pure—the heaven, the stars, the eternal light. And this Candida? There is no doubt that she is an angel. The only question is in which heaven she dwells. There is a first heaven, and a second heaven, and so on up to the seventh heaven. In the seventh heaven, as you well know, Shaw, dwell only the poets; and of the seventh heaven must the woman be, before the worshipful Marchbanks will once kneel to her, if, indeed, it can be said that a poet ever kneels. But your beloved Candida is of a lower heaven—a lesser alp, a thousand metres below, in the region of the respectable bourgeoisie. There is she the saint the Germanic mannikin needs. There she shines—shines for the Morells, the good people who inculcate virtue and solve social questions every Sunday. And it is there that she belongs.”
[179] Vornehmlich über mich selbst, in Program No. 88 of the Schiller Theater, Berlin. This Plauderei appeared originally in the Vienna Zeit in February, 1903, shortly before the production of Teufelskerl in Vienna.