The dramatist makes Candida essay a most remarkable analysis of her own motives. It is after Morell has reproached her, sick at heart and consumed by a nameless fear, to learn if Eugene’s fiery onslaught has been born of any unrest that may be stirring within her. She explains freely and frankly, with more genuine honesty and self-revelation, perhaps, than she knows. Eugene, she says, is like a shivering beggar asking for her shawl. He needs love but scarcely knows it, and she conceives it her duty to teach him the value of love, that no worse woman may teach him its pains later on.
“Will he forgive me,” she says, “for not teaching him myself? For abandoning him to the bad women for the sake of my goodness—my purity, as you call it? Ah, James, how little you understand me, to talk of your confidence in my goodness and purity. I would give them both to Eugene as willingly as I would give my shawl to a beggar dying of cold, if there was nothing else to restrain me....”
“Here,” says Huneker, “is one of the most audacious speeches in any modern play. It has been passed over by most critics who saw in ‘Candida’ merely an attempt to make a clergyman ridiculous, not realizing that the theme is profound and far-reaching, the question put being no more or no less than: Shall a married man expect his wife’s love without working for it, without deserving it?” To this may be added another and more familiar question: May not the woman who lives in the odor of sanctity be more thoroughly immoral, at heart, than the worst of her erring sisters?
The play has a number of extremely exciting “grand” scenes and in general is admirably suitable for public performance. The minor characters are but three in number—Candida’s wine-buying vulgarian of a father, Morell’s curate and Proserpine, his typewriter. Proserpine is admirable, and her hopeless love for Morell—a complaint not uncommon among the women he knows—gives the play a note of homely sentiment that keeps it to earth.
As a piece of workmanship “Candida” is Shaw at his best; as a study in the workings of the feminine mind it deserves to rank with some of the best plays the modern stage has to offer.
“HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND”
How He Lied to Her Husband” is a one-act bit of foolery that Shaw wrote for Arnold Daly after “Candida” had made a success in New York. It was presented for the first time on the evening of Sept. 26, 1904, and during the ensuing week was more vociferously discussed than any other one-act play that ever graced the boards of an American theater.
As he made fun of the vaporing Ibsenites of the early ’90’s in “The Philanderer,” just so Shaw got his joke at the expense of his own ecstatic followers in this little appendix to “Candida.” The latter had been presented with huge profit, and thousands of honest playgoers, alert for mysterious “symbolism” and subtle “purposes” had seen in its heroine a great many of the qualities they formerly sought and discovered in the much-mauled Ibsen women. Candida, in brief, became the high priestess of the advanced cult, in all its warring denominational variety. It became a sign of intellectual vigor to go to the Berkeley Lyceum and compare her with Nora Helmer, Hedda Gabler and their company. And so Shaw indited “How He Lied to Her Husband.”
The characters in the little farce are a fashionable young poet named Henry Upjohn, an untamed American husband named Bumpus, and his wife, Aurora Bumpus, a young woman with yearnings. Aurora and Henry have seen a performance of “Candida” and have come away with a feeling that an intrigue after the fashion of Candida and Eugene, is one of those things that no really advanced poet or modern wife should be without. So Henry writes a sheaf of sonnets to Aurora and being determined to play the game according to the rules, proposes that they run off together. They are about to depart, conscientiously leaving the Bumpus diamonds behind, when Aurora, at the brink of the precipice, draws back.