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Miss Marbury has, I suppose, told you, as I asked her to, that you can now cable to “Socialist, London,” which is my registered address. I have sent you a couple of cables—no, perhaps only one—addressed “Candida, New York”; but C. C. [Charles Charrington] did not tell me to put Via Commercial on it. Anyhow, it was only about the letter which I addressed to the New Copenhagen Hotel instead of New Amsterdam.
C.C. told me the other day that you cabled him about shewing “Candida” to Mrs [Madge] Kendal. Ah, if you dare, Janet Achurch, IF YOU DARE. Shew it to whom you please; but part with it to nobody; and remember, no Janet, no Candida. You had better get some intelligent manager to engage you and [Henry] Esmond and [Herbert] Waring for the winter season to produce the play.
This is a horribly slow method of corresponding: letters are obsolete before they arrive.
At Beachy Head I have been trying to learn the bicycle; and after a desperate struggle, renewed on two successive days, I will do twenty yards and a destructive fall against any professional in England. My God, the stiffness, the blisters, the bruises, the pains in every twisted muscle, the crashes against the chalk road that I have endured—and at my age too. But I shall come like gold from the furnace: I will not be beaten by that hellish machine. When you return, you will be proud of my ability to sit gracefully on a wheel; and you need not trouble about my health.
Oh, the spring, the spring, and Janet miles and miles away.
C. C. telegraphs that he is coming at midnight to see me. He will tell me a lot of news no doubt. I will write again when I get back to Beachy Head.
GBS
20/ Richard Mansfield to Bernard Shaw
14th April 1895
My dear Shaw.
If we,—by we I mean [my wife] Beatrice and I,—had lost a very near and dear friend we could not have sorrowed more than when we discovered ‘Candida’ to be of , the impossible.
It has been read—read—read—read,—and reading it would revive our courage,—rehearsed and hope, faith & even charity dropped below zero. My personal regard for you (—which reckoned by the average consideration one male being will bear for another in these business times is really extra-ordinary—) could carry me a long way into the domain of folly and would undoubtedly have slipped me across the frontier in this instance—if dire necessity, and a crisis, hadnt just in the (to you perhaps) unfortunate nick of time built a doublerow prickly-pear hedge which won’t let ‘Candida’ thro’. Shaw—my light is perhaps very small and very dim—a mere farthing rush or a tallow dip—but viewed by it, and I have no other to view it by,—your play of Candida is lacking in all the essential qualities.
The stage is not for sermons—Not my stage—no matter how charming—how bright—how clever—how trenchant those sermons may be—
Candida is charming—it is more than charming—it is delightful, and I can well see how you have put into it much that is the best of yourself—but—pardon me—it is not a play—at least I do not think that it is a play—which thinking does not make it any more or any less of a play—it’s just only what I think and I happen to be skipper of this ship at this time of thinking. Here are three long acts of talk—talk—talk—no matter how clever that talk is—it is talk—talk—talk.
There isn’t a creature who seeing the play would not apply Eugene’s observations concerning Morell’s lecturing propensities to the play itself. If you think a bustling—striving—hustling—pushing—stirring American audience will sit out calmly two hours of deliberate talk you are mistaken—and I’m not to be sacrificed to their just vengeance.
It isn’t right to try and build a play out of a mere incident. Candida is only an incident—it doesn’t matter how you wad it or pad it or dress it or bedizen it—it’s an incident—nothing more. All the world is crying out for deeds—for action! When I step upon the stage I want to act—I’m willing to talk a little to oblige a man like you—but I must act—and hugging my ankles for three mortal hours won’t satisfy me in this regard. I can’t fool myself and I can’t fool my audience. I will gather together any afternoon you please a charming assemblage at our Garrick Theatre and read your play to them or play it—as best we may—but I can’t put it on for dinner in the evening—people are not satisfied with only the hors d’oeuvres at dinner—where is the soup & the fish & the roast & the game and the salad and the fruit? Shaw—if you will write for me a strong, hearty—earnest—noble—genuine play—I’ll play it. Plays used to be written for actors—actors who could stir and thrill—and that is what I want now—because I can do that—the world is tired of theories and arguments and philosophy and morbid sentiment. To be frank & to go further—I am not in sympathy with a young, delicate, morbid and altogether exceptional young man who falls in love with a massive middleaged lady who peels onions. I couldn’t have made love to your Candida (Miss Janet Achurch) if I had taken ether.
I never fall in love with fuzzy-haired persons who purr and are businesslike and take a drop when they feel disposed and have weak feminine voices. My ideal is something quite different. I detest an aroma of stale tobacco and gin. I detest intrigue and slyness and sham ambitions. I don’t like women who sit on the floor—or kneel by your side and have designs on your shirtbosom—I don’t like women who comb their tawny locks with their fingers, and claw their necks and scratch the air with their chins.
You’ll have to write a play that a man can play and about a woman that heroes fought for and a bit of ribbon that a knight tied to his lance.
The stage is for romance and love and truth and honor. To make men better and nobler. To cheer them on the way—
Life is real. Life is earnest. And the grave is not its goal.
.. . . . .
Be not like dumb, driven cattle
Be a hero in the fight!
Go on, Shaw; Beatrice & I are with you—you will be always as welcome as a brother.—We want a great work from you.—
Candida is beautiful—don’t mistake me—we both understand it and we both appreciate it—There are fine things here—but—we are paid—alas—Shaw—we are paid to act.
Yours, Shaw, truly
Richard Mansfield
[PS] I am perfectly aware that you will not read this letter—you will gather that I am not about to produce Candida—& there your interest will cease—you would like to have Candida presented—if I don’t present it—I’m damned—but also—I’m damned if I do. Ah Shaw Wir hatten gebauet ein stattleches Haus [German commercium song from 1819]. I don’t want to ruin it all.
21/ To a British actor-manager and a barrister Charles Charrington
16th April 1895
Telegram just received from Mansfield “Am opening Garrick with Arms and the Man [on the 23rd April] will produce Candida if I need not appear.” The benevolent object here is to produce the play with a bad cast, and by making it a failure, at one stroke prevent any other manager from getting it and prevent Janet from making a success in New York. I have not yet made up my mind whether to cable, or to leave Miss Marbury to carry out her instructions & get the play from him. Probably I shall cable to her & not to him at all. The effect will be, anyhow, that he may not now produce the play on any terms whatever. Am posting this bit of news to Janet. Back tomorrow evening.
GBS
22/ To Janet Achurch
19th April 1895
My dear Janet
. . . A paragraph has been going the rounds here stating that I not only insisted on your being engaged for Candida, but stipulated that you should have 50 pounds a month. I do not usually contradict the mistakes of the press in these matters; but as the inference here would be that the £50 [£6,723.26 in 2020 according to Bank of England’s inflation calculator] is an artificially high salary given under pressure from me, I have written to the Era pouring vitriol on the blunderer in such a way as to bring out clearly that your salary is a matter of your market value, and that I should no more dream of meddling about it than you presumably would interfere in the matter of my royalties. I also wrote privately to the Weekly Sun man asking him to take some opportunity of contradicting the report. He telegraphs begging for more information. The Era letter will no doubt be in tomorrow’s issue.
Yesterday a cablegram came from Richard as follows:—“Since you insist (which I didn’t: I positively forbade) will produce Candida now cable [Elisabeth] Marbury deliver manuscript.” To which I replied, “Withdrawal final.” This morning another telegram came, this time from Miss Marbury:—“Will you authorise me to place Candida with good actress Minnie Seligman on terms named Lux) advance 5 per cent first £600 7 per cent next £400 ten above weekly gross reply by wire immediately.” Which I did, as follows :—“Paralogize palmitic without Achurch,” which, being translated through Lowe’s cable code (which you had perhaps better get, as it is useful for American messages, and cannot be confused with the Unicode Latin words) means “Offer declined nothing can be done at present without Achurch.” This caused me a heart pang, not because of the hundred pounds, but because of the brutality of calling you Achurch instead of my darling Janet.
By the way, have you added anything to the private code we arranged? I have nothing in mine after VERETRUM.
Now as to the letters from Richard and Felix. It was just as well that Felix wrote; for his letter was written with the sweetest consideration for my feelings towards you, and I was therefore able to read it to Charrington, whereas Richard’s, the existence of which I concealed from C. C. [Charles Charrington] in order to avert his rushing out by the next Cunarder and having Richard’s blood, was childishly indiscreet in its allusions to you. He accuses you of being fuzzy haired, of purring, of being businesslike, of smoking, of sitting on the floor, of combing your tawny locks with your fingers, of clawing your neck and scratching the air with your chin, and of being unfallable-in-love-with on all these accounts. On the subject of your acting, he maintains an eloquent silence. This, by the way, is much the most sensible part of his letter, which I wish I had time to quote more extensively. The play is not a play—it is all talk—it is lacking in all essential qualities—the stage is not for sermons—the American public would not stand it—and so forth, the whole being intersentenced with the most pathetic expressions of eternal friendship and admiration: for example, “Go on, Shaw: [my wife] Beatrice and I are with you: you will always be welcome as a brother. We want a great work from you.” Felix pleads nobly for his brother, and writes a really respectable letter, with four postscripts, as follows, 1. Beatrice was charmed with your letter. 2. Beatrice says you have just hit Dick’s position at home to a T (I had said that he was an abject domestic slave). 3. Beatrice says she must have a play. 4. Beatrice says “Come over.” 5. Beatrice sends love. My reply to Richard, which goes by this mail, is as follows, “My dear Mansfield, Your letter has arrived at last. I confess that I waited for it with somewhat fell intentions as to my reply; but now that the hour of vengeance has come, I find myself in perfect goodhumor, and can do nothing but laugh. I have not the slightest respect left for you; and your acquaintance with my future plays will be acquired in the course of visits to other people’s theatres; but my personal liking for you remains where it was.” I wrote kindly to Felix, but gave him a remorseless analysis of the whole case. Do not shew this to anyone. I am getting jealous of [dramatic critic of the Evening Sun] Acton Davies; and so is C [Charrington].
GBS
23/ To a renowned English actress and actor-manager Ellen Terry
28th November 1895
My dear Miss Terry
Very well: here is the Strange Lady [The Man of Destiny] for you, by book post. It is of no use now that it is written, because nobody can act it. Mind you bring it safely back to me; for if you leave it behind you in the train or in your dressing room, somebody will give a surreptitious performance of it: and then bang goes my copyright. If the responsibility of protecting it is irksome, tear it up. I have a vague recollection of curl papers in Nance Oldfield [by Charles Reade] for which it might be useful. I have other copies.
This is not one of my great plays, you must know: it is only a display of my knowledge of stage tricks—a commercial traveller’s sample. You would like my Candida much better; but I never let people read that: I always read it to them. They can be heard sobbing three streets off.
By the way—I forget whether I asked you this before —if that villain Mansfield plays Arms and the Man anywhere within your reach, will you go and see it and tell me whether they murder it or not? And your petitioner will ever pray &c. &c.
G. Bernard Shaw
24/ To Janet Achurch
23rd December 1895
My dear Janet
. . . Does it ever occur to you that if you became the leading English actress you would have to represent your art with dignity among Stanleys [after Rosalind Frances Howard née Stanley] and other such people, and that you would be severely handicapped if they remembered how you had called in Aunt Mary’s brougham [after Lady Mary Henrietta Howard, a person who belongs to the aristocracy] and told them fibs and tried to get money out of them. However, it is useless to remonstrate. You will appreciate the magnanimity of soul which I recommend; but you won’t practise it. Therefore I must act myself—I, who haven’t a wife and child, and have not the means of excusing myself. If the I.T. [Independent Theatre] can get the money to do “Candida” properly, it shall have “Candida” (unless I hit on a better way). But if the least farthing of the money has to be touted for—that’s the hideous right word—touted for by you—if any shareholder is seduced into subscribing by the sight of as much as a lock of your hair or a cast off glove of yours—if there is to be any gift in the matter except our gift of our work, then I swear by the keen cold of this northern wind on my face and the glowing fire of it in my bones, there shall be no “Candida” at the I.T. You may contribute to its success as much as you like by making people love you, or fear you, or admire you, or be interested, fascinated, tantalised, or what not by you. But if you coin the love, fear, interest, admiration or fascination into drachmas, then I cannot have any part in the bargain. If Rothschild or the Prince of Wales want boxes, they know where they can be bought, just as they know where the Saturday Review can be bought. It is inconceivable that such measures should be congenial to you when your mind is properly strung; and you will get better all the faster if you put them behind you. . .
It is a curious thing to me that you should express such remorse about trifles and follies that everybody commits in some form or other, and that strong people laugh at, whilst you are all the time doing things that are physically ruinous and planning things that you ought to hang yourself sooner than stoop to. There is only one physical crime that can destroy you—brandy: only one moral one—Aunt Mary’s brougham.
I cannot lock up the brandy—but I can poison it. You must stop now: the change in your appearance shews that you are just at the point where that accursed stimulating diet must be dropped at all hazards. All through your illness you were beautiful and young; now you are beginning to look, not nourished but—steel yourself for another savage word—bloated. Do, for heaven’s sake, go back to the innocent diet of the invalid—porridge made of “miller’s pride” oatmeal and boiled all night into oatmeal jelly, rice, tomatoes, macaroni, without milk or eggs or other “nourishing” producers of indigestion. You can’t drink brandy with wholesome food; and if you take exercise you won’t want so much morphia. Eat stewed fruit and hovis. If you have any difficulty in digesting walnuts (for instance) nibble a grain of ginger glace with them and chew them and you will have no trouble. You will eventually strike out a decent diet for yourself. Anyhow, save your soul and body alive, and don’t turn me into granite.
GBS
25/ Bernard Shaw’s diary
Preliminary Notes 1895
Still living at 29 Fitzroy Square.
I began the year by taking the post of dramatic critic to The Saturday Review, under the editorship of Frank Harris. This was the first regular appointment I ever held as a critic of the theatres. Salary £6 [£806.79 in 2020 according to Bank of England’s inflation calculator] a week.
During my stay with the Webbs [Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb née Potter] at the Argoed in August and September I wrote a play in one act about Napoleon entitled The Man of Destiny. At the end of December I began another play title as yet unknown to me [You Never Can Tell]. During the Easter holidays with the Webbs, [Charles] Trevelyan, etc, at Beachy Head. I learnt to ride the bicycle and got much more exercise during the year than usual, with advantage to my health so far. I kept up the habit of going to the Webbs for lunch every Sunday.
It was agreed between myself and Richard Mansfield that he should produce my play Candida in New York; and he actually engaged Janet Achurch for the part. She went out; but Mansfield then changed his mind; No I withdrew the play.
In November Janet, when playing The New Magdalen [by William Wilkie Collins] for the week at the Metropole Theatre in Camberwell, caught typhoid fever, and her illness occupied me a good deal during the last two months of the year, partly because of its bearing on all possible plans for the production of Candida, and partly because I have come into relations of intimate friendship with the Charringtons [Charles Charrington and his wife Janet Achurch] during the past two years or so.
Frank Harris tried to establish a regular lunch every Monday for choosing members of the Saturday Review staff at the Café Royale. I attended them for some time. Harold Frederic, Mrs Devereux [Pember], Marriott Watson and others used to come. Oscar Wilde came once, immediately before the Queensberry trial, with young [Alfred] Douglas. They left in some indignation because Harris refused to appear as a witness—a literary expert witness—to the high artistic character of Wilde’s book Dorian Gray. These lunches wasted my time and were rather apt to degenerate into bawdy talk. When a play called The Home Secretary [by Richard Claude Carton] was produced at the Criterion Theatre, I took the opportunity to protest against the attempt in the play to trade on the Anarchism bogey, my object being to call attention to some hard features in the case of Charles [Fred Charles Slaughter], “the Walsall Anarchist.” Harris alarmed by this, cut the passage out of the article. This incident brought my growing impatience with the brag and bawdry of the lunches to a head; and I never went again. They seem to have fallen through afterwards.
26/ To Charles Charrington
16th March 1896
Dear Charrington
Before you go committing yourself to Morell, I want to put before you the case on the other side—the case which has always prevented me from looking to you for Morell as I look to Janet for Candida.
Imprimis, you are only attracted by the universal human element in the man, and not by his specific individuality. That’s very dangerous to begin with; and I am by no means sure that you would not overcome the obvious misfit of Eugene’s age and build more successfully than that of Morell’s character & temperament.
Morell is a very glib, sanguine, cocksure, popular sort of man. His utter want of shyness; his readiness to boss people spiritually; his certainty that his own ideas, being the right ideas, must be good for them: all this belongs to the vulgarity which makes him laugh at Eugene’s revelation, and talk of “calf love.” It is nothing to the point that he is also goodnatured, frank, sympathetic, and capable of admitting Candida’s position finally when it is presented to his feeling, in spite of the fact that he would have disputed it hotly had it been presented to him as a purely intellectual position. That rescues him from the odium which would otherwise attach to him as, intellectually and normally, a clerical bounder; but it does not assimilate him in any way to the parts which lie nearest to you. I can see you well enough in the heartstricken passages; but I do not see you facile, cheery, spontaneous, fluent, emphatic, unhesitating and bumptious in the early scenes with Prossy & Burgess & Eugene (before the explosion) in which the whole specific part of his individuality has to be fixed; I don’t hear your boisterous cheery laugh, which should not be refined out of the part merely because I have to refine it out myself in reading the play from sheer incapacity to get quite into that coarse part of his skin; I don’t see Candida carrying conviction when she tells you that you are the idol of a Victoria Park congregation, the contrast in everything to the hunted Eugene; I don’t see you as the spoiled child, the superficial optimist, the man who, in spite of his power of carrying everything before him by the mere rush and light & warmth of his goodnature & conviction, is stopped by the least resistance.
Granted that all this could be got over by sheer acting, is there the smallest likelihood of your making such an arduous and unnatural effort as the feat would require? And suppose you failed—suppose your Morellism carried no conviction to the audience—have you considered how complicatedly damning the failure would be both to yourself and Janet? If you stood quite alone, the effect of a return to the stage with the particular sort of failure—the failure that spoils a play sympathetic enough to make the audience angrily resent its being spoiled—would be bad enough from your own point of view as an individual unattached actor. But there is something worse to be apprehended. If people get the idea that they can’t have Janet without also having you thrust into a part for which you are unsuited, it will be all up with Janet and with you. And that is just what I am afraid of. . . The question, therefore, is not whether you can get through Morell passably by putting in a few stomach tones, and (by indulging in genuine emotion) making yourself diabolically ugly at the moment when Candida is telling you that the women cannot look at you without adoration, but whether you could play him with such absolute conviction, fitness, and spontaneity that all question as to the propriety of your casting yourself for the part would fall to the ground without a word.
My own opinion on the point has already been completely betrayed to you by the fact that I have never treated the part as your property, in spite of the very discouraging quality of the practicable alternatives to you. Take any of those alternatives—[Herbert] Waring or anyone else—let us call him XYZ. XYZ will not exactly fail: he will only underplay; and all the papers will treat him with great politeness. You will either fail or succeed; and if you fail, the result will be damnation. XYZ’s underplaying will not hurt Janet: it will have absolutely no reactions of any importance. Your failure, if you fail, will have the most disastrous reactions in all directions, on her, on the I.T. [Independent Theatre], on me, on yourself as a manager as apart from an actor, and devil knows what else besides. Consequently you present yourself, as compared with XYZ, as a frightfully risky Morell at a point in our game where we cannot afford to throw away a single chance. Now what probability is there of your being as transcendently better a Morell, if you succeed, than XYZ, as to justify you in casting yourself for it at such odds? Hast thou these things well considered? . . .
GBS
27/ To Ellen Terry
6th April 1896
. . . You boast that you are a fool—it is at bottom, oh, such a tremendous boast (do you know that in Wagner’s last drama, “Parsifal,” the redeemer is “der reine Thor,” “the pure fool”?) but you have the wisdom of the heart, which makes it possible to say deep things to you. You say I’d be sick of you in a week; but this is another boast: it implies that you could entertain me for a whole week. Good heavens! with what? With art?—with politics?—with philosophy?—or with any other department of culture? I’ve written more about them all (for my living) than you ever thought about them. On that plane I would exhaust you before you began, and could bore you dead with my own views in two hours. But one does not get tired of adoring the Virgin Mother. Bless me! you will say, the man is a Roman Catholic. Not at all: the man is the author of Candida; and Candida, between you and me, is the Virgin Mother and nobody else. And my present difficulty is that I want to reincarnate her—to write another Candida play for You. Only, it won’t come. Candida came easily enough; but after her came that atrocious “Man of Destiny,” a mere stage brutality, and my present play brings life and art together and strikes showers of sparks from them as if they were a knife and a grindstone. Heaven knows how many plays I shall have to write before I earn one that belongs of divine right to you. Someday, when you have two hours to spare, you must let me read Candida to you. You will find me a disagreeably cruel looking middle aged Irishman with a red beard; but that cannot be helped. . . .
The Independent Theatre people, having had “Little Eyolf” [by Henrik Ibsen] snatched back from their grasp by Miss Elizabeth Robins (who will produce it next October, probably, in partnership with Waring), want to produce Candida. Janet wants me to consent. I must be cruel only to be kind; and I insist on their having £1000 to finance it with, eves for eight matinees spread over a month. They have only £400; so I think I am safe for the present; but they may get the money. If so, Candida may be the first thing you see on your return to these shores. But then, alas! I shall have no excuse for reading it to you.
GBS
28/ To Reginald Golding Bright
10th June 1896
Dear Bright
No: there’s no ring: there never really is. Since “Arms & The Man” I have written three plays, one of them only a one-act historical piece about Napoleon. The first of these was “Candida”; and there are obvious reasons for its not being produced—my insistence on Miss Achurch for the heroine, the fact that the best man’s part in it is too young for any of our actor managers ([Henry] Esmond appears to be the only possible man for it), and the character of the play itself, which is fitter for a dozen select matinée than for the evening bill. . . .
The facts are rather funny, in a way. My first three plays, “Widowers’ Houses,” “The Philanderer,” and “Mrs Warren’s Profession,” were what people call realistic. They were dramatic pictures of middle-class society from the point of view of a Socialist who regards the basis of that society as thoroughly rotten, economically and morally. In “Widowers’ Houses” you had the rich suburban villa standing on the rents of the foul rookery. In “The Philanderer” you had the fashionable cult of Ibsenism and “New Womanism” on a real basis of clandestine sensuality. In “Mrs Warren’s Profession” you had the procuress, the organiser of prostitution, convicting society of her occupation. All three plays were criticisms of a special phase, the capitalist phase, of modern organisation, and their purpose was to make people thoroughly uncomfortable whilst entertaining them artistically.
But my four subsequent plays, “Arms & The Man,” “Candida,” “The Man of Destiny” (the one-act Napoleon piece) and the unnamed four act comedy just finished, are not “realistic” plays. They deal with life at large, with human nature as it presents itself through all economic & social phases. “Arms & The Man” is the comedy of youthful romance & disillusion; “Candida” is the poetry of the Wife & Mother—Virgin Mother in the true sense; & so on & so forth. Now for funny part of it. These later plays are of course infinitely more pleasing, more charming, more popular than the earlier three. And of cource the I.T. [Independent Theatre] now wants one of these pleasant plays to make a popular success with, instead of sticking to its own special business & venturing on the realistic ones. It refuses to produce “The Philanderer” (written specially for it) because it is vulgar and immoral and cynically disrespectful to ladies and gentlemen; and it wants “Candida” or one the later plays, which I of course refuse to let it have unless it is prepared to put it up in first rate style for a London run on ordinary business terms. Consequently there is no likelihood of any work by me being produced by the I.T., although “Mrs Warren” is still talked of on both sides as eligible. You must understand, however, that we are all on the friendliest terms, and that I am rather flattered than otherwise at the preference of my friends for those plays of mine which have no purpose except the purpose of all poets & dramatists as against those which are exposures of the bad side of our social system.
Excuse this long & hasty scrawl. I let you into these matters because the man who gossips best in print about them is the man who knows what is behind the gossip.
yrs sincerely
G. Bernard Shaw
29/ To Ellen Terry
Later in August 1896
. . . you like to play at your profession on the stage, and to exercise your real powers in actual life. It is all very well for you to say that you want a Mother Play; but why didn’t you tell me that in time? I have written THE Mother Play—“Candida”—and I cannot repeat a masterpiece, nor can I take away Janet’s one ewe lamb from her. She told me the other day that I had been consistently treacherous about it from the beginning, because I would not let the Independent Theatre produce it with a capital of £400! What would she say if I handed it over to the most enviable & successful of her competitors—the only one, as she well knows, who has the secret of it in her nature? Besides, you probably wouldn’t play it even if I did: you would rather trifle with your washerwomen & Nance Oldfields & Imogens & nonsense of that kind. I have no patience with this perverse world. . . .
