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Bernard Shaw

Candida & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play

Edited by Vitaly Baziyan

The play Candida, created by Bernard Shaw during 1894 and 1895, was first published 19 April 1898 by a small British publishing house that was founded by the writer Grant Richards simultaneously with American edition published by Herbert S. Stone and Company, Chicago and New York: Plays Pleasant, Volume II (Arms and the Man, Candida, the Man of Destiny, You Never Can Tell). This publication from a revised edition Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant. By Bernard Shaw. The Second Volume, containing the four Pleasant Plays published by Constable and Company Ltd., London: 1920 is a handmade reproduction from the original edition, and remains as true to the original work as possible. The original edition was processed manually by means of a classic editing which ensures the quality of publications and the unrestricted enjoyment of reading.

The selected correspondence of Bernard Shaw relating to the play Candida contains 249 letters and entries, written between 1889 and 1950. Sources of this collection are prior publications Collected Letters of Bernard Shaw published by Max Reinhardt; Bernard Shaw’s Letters to Siegfried Trebitsch published by Stanford University Press; Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: a correspondence and Our Theatres in the Nineties published by Constable and Company Ltd., London; Shaw on Theatre published by Hill and Wang, New York; Bernard Shaw’s Letters to Granville Barker published by Theatre Arts Books, New York; Shaw on Language published by Philosophical Library, New York; Advice to a Young Critic published by Peter Owen Limited, London; The Diary of Beatrice Webb, Vol. III, 1905 – 1924 “The Power to Alter Things” and Vol. IV: 1924 – 1943 “The Wheel of Life” published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; Beatrice Webb’s diaries, 1924 – 1932 published by Longmans, Green and Co Ltd, London; The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb: Volume II published by Cambridge University Press;The Playwright & the Pirate. Bernard Shaw and Frank Harris: A Correspondence, and Bernard Shaw: The Drama Observed, and Bernard Shaw: The Diaries, 1885 – 1897 published by Pennsylvania State University Press; To A Young Actress: the Letters of Bernard Shaw to Molly Tompkins published by Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. Publisher, New York; edition of letters published by University of Toronto Press.

The book represents a significant addition to modern-day understanding of Shaw’s play Candida and reveals his thoughts on a wide variety of issues, love affairs und relationships with contemporaries. Bernard Shaw’s punctuation and spelling were mostly kept by the editor. Christian names, surnames, positions and ranks were added in square brackets when they were omitted but are necessary for a better understanding. Cuts of a few words are indicated by three dots and longer omissions by four dots.

The ebook cover was created by the editor using the picture of Sir John Everett Millais.

The play Candida was given a copyright performance at the Theatre Royal, South Shields on March 30th 1895. The copyright performance was staged in the United Kingdom for the purpose of securing the author’s copyright over the text. There was a fear that according to the Dramatic Literary Property Act 1833, if a play’s text was published, or a rival production staged, before its official premiere, then the author’s rights would be lost.

Characters in order of appearance:

The Reverend James Mavor Morell, a clergyman and Candida’s husband – George Young

Miss Proserpine Garnett, Morell’s secretary – Ethel Verne

The Reverend Alexander (Lexy) Mill – J. Daniels

Mr Burgess, Candida’s father – Fred Cremlin

Candida – Lilian M. Revell

Eugene Marchbanks – Albert Edwin Drinkwater

Producer – Albert Edwin Drinkwater

The play Candida was first presented in public by the Independent Theatre Company at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, July 30, 1897.

Characters in order of appearance:

The Reverend James Mavor Morell, a clergyman and Candida’s husband – Charles Charrington

Miss Proserpine Garnett, Morell’s secretary – Edith Craig

The Reverend Alexander (Lexy) Mill – Robert Farquharson

Mr Burgess, Candida’s father – Lionel Belmore

Candida – Janet Achurch

Eugene Marchbanks – Courtney Thorpe

Producer – Charles Charrington

Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play Candida

1/ Bernard Shaw’s diary entry for 14th August 1889

. . . —Last day to send in article on the opera season (2500 words) to the Scottish Art Review, 294 St. Vincent St., Glasgow (James Mavor [Morell’s godfather], editor). See Monday. Last day to send in Bayreuth article to the English Illustrated Magazine. . . .

[G. Bernard Shaw]

2/ To an English dramatist Henry Arthur Jones

2nd December 1894

My dear H. A. J.

Here I am at the seaside between the finishing of one play [Candida] and the beginning of another [The Man of Destiny], just the time to send back the ball to you.

All that you say is quite true statically. Dynamically, it is of no virtue whatever. Like you, I write plays because I like it, and because I cannot remember any period in my life when I could help inventing people and scenes. I am not a storyteller: things occur to me as scenes, with action and dialogue—as moments, developing themselves out of their own vitality. I believe you will see as I go on that the conception of me as a doctrinaire, or as a sort of theatrical Joyce (of Scientific Dialogues fame), is a wrong one. On the contrary, my quarrel with the conventional drama is that it is doctrinaire to the uttermost extreme of dogmatism—that the dramatist is so strait-jacketted in theories of conduct that he cannot even state his conventional solution clearly, but leaves it to be vaguely understood, and so for the life of him cannot write a decent last act. I find that when I present a drama of pure feeling, wittily expressed, the effect when read by me to a picked audience of people in a room is excellent. But in a theatre, the mass of the people, too stupid to relish the wit, and too convention-ridden to sympathise with real as distinct from theatrical feeling, simply cannot see any drama or fun there at all; whilst the clever people feel the discrepancy between the real and theatrical feeling only as a Gilbertian satire on the latter, and, appreciating the wit well enough, are eager to shew their cleverness by proclaiming me as a monstrously clever sparkler in the cynical line. These clever people predominate in a first night audience; and, accordingly, in “Arms and The Man,” I had the curious experience of witnessing an apparently insane success, with the actors and actresses almost losing their heads with the intoxication of laugh after laugh, and of going before the curtain to tremendous applause, the only person in the theatre who knew that the whole affair was a ghastly failure. The same thing is occurring now in Boston, Philadelphia, &c—there is about as much of me in the affair as there is of Shakespere in Garrick’s “Katherine and Petruchio.” Here and there, of course, I come across a person who was moved by the play, or by such portions of it as got played any better than a pantomime opening; but for the general paying public there needs a long fight, during which my plays will have to be produced in spite of all economic considerations, sometimes because the parts are too fascinating to be resisted, sometimes because Pinero is not ready with his commissioned play, sometimes because I am willing to forgo an advance, sometimes because Nature not submit wholly to the box office.

Now here you will at once detect an enormous assumption on my part that I am a man of genius. But what can I do—on what other assumption am I to proceed if I am to write plays at all? You will detect the further assumption that the public, which will still be the public twenty years hence, will nevertheless see feeling and reality where they see nothing now but mere intellectual swordplay and satire. But that is what always happens. . . .

G. Bernard Shaw

3/ To Reginald Golding Bright, a young theatre critic at that time and later a manager of London office of an American theatrical and literary agent and producer Elizabeth Marbury

2nd December 1894

Dear Sir

The best service I can do you is to take your notice and jot down on it without ceremony the comments which occur to me. You will find first certain alterations in black ink. In them I have tried to say, as well as I can off-hand, what you were trying to say: that is, since it was evident you were dodging round some point or other, I have considered the only point that there was to make, and have made it. It came quite easy when I had altered your statement about Frenchmen at large to what you really meant—the conventional stage Frenchman. Always find out rigidly and exactly what you mean, and never strike an attitude, whether national or moral or critical or anything else. You struck a national attitude when you wrote that about the Frenchman and Enlishman; and you struck a moral attitude when you wrote “She has sunk low enough in all conscience.” Get your facts right first: that is the foundation of all style, because style is the expression of yourself; and you cannot express yourself genuinely except on a basis of precise reality.

In red ink you will find some criticisms which you may confidently take as expressing what an experienced editor would think of your sample of work.

You have not at all taken in my recommendation to you to write a book. You say you are scarcely competent to write books just yet. That is just why I recommed you to learn. If I advised you to learn to skate, you would not reply that your balance was scarcely good enough yet. A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed, he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself. You will never write a good book until you have written some bad ones. If they have sent you my Scottish article, you will see that I began by writing some abominably bad criticisms. I wrote five long books before I started again on press work. William Archer wrote a long magnum opus on the life and works of Richard Wagner, a huge novel, and a book on the drama, besides an essay on [Henry] Irving and a good deal of leader work for a Scotch paper, before he began his victorious career on The World. He also perpetrated about four plays in his early days. (By the way, you mustn’t publish this information.) You must go through the mill, too; and you can’t possibly start too soon. Write a thousand words a day for the next five years for at least nine months every year. Read all the great critics—[John] Ruskin, Richard Wagner, [Gotthold Ephraim] Lessing, [Charles] Lamb and [William] Hazlitt. Get a ticket for the British Museum reading room, and live there as much as you can. Go to all the first-rate orchestral concerts and to the opera, as well as to the theatres. Join debating societies and learn to speak in public. Haunt little Sunday evening political meetings and exercise that accomplishment. Study men and politics in this way. As long as you stay in the office, try and be the smartest hand in it: I spent four and a half years in an office before I was twenty. Be a teetotaller; don’t gamble; don’t lend; don’t borrow; don’t for your life get married; make the attainment of EFFICIENCY your sole object for the next fifteen years; and if the City can teach you nothing more, or demands more time than you can spare from your apprenticeship, tell your father that you prefer to cut loose and starve, and do it. But it will take you at least a year or two of tough work before you will be able to build up for yourself either the courage or the right to take heroic measures. Finally, since I have given you all this advice, I add this crowning precept, the most valuable of all. NEVER TAKE ANYBODY’S ADVICE.

And now, to abandon the role of your guide, philosopher and friend, which I don’t propose to revert to again until you report progress in ten years or so, let me thank you for the paragraph in The Sun, which was quite right and appropriate. I have no more news at present, except that I have nearly finished a new play [Candida], the leading part in which I hope to see played by Miss Janet Achurch, of whose genius I have always had a very high opinion. It is quite a sentimental play, which I hope to find understood by women, if not by men; and it is so straightforward that I expect to find it pronounced a miracle of perversity. This is my fifth dramatic composition. The first was “Widowers’ Houses,” of Independent Theatre fame. The second was “The Philanderer,” a topical comedy in which the New Woman figured before Mr. [Sydney] Grundy discovered her. The third was “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” a play with a purpose, the purpose being much the same as that of my celebrated letter to the Pall Mall Gazette on the Empire controversy. The fourth was “Arms and the Man,” which was so completely misunderstood that it made my reputation as a playwright both here and in New York. The Independent Theatre has already announced “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” for its forthcoming season. “The Philanderer” was written originally for that society; but on its completion I threw it aside and wrote another more suitable for the purposes of the society—Mrs. Warren. [Charles] Wyndham asked me to do something for him on seeing “Arms and the Man”; and I tried to persuade him to play “The Philanderer”; but whilst the project was under consideration, Wyndham made such a decisive success with “[The Case of] Rebellious Susan” that he resolved to follow up the vein of comedy opened by Henry Arthur Jones to the end before venturing upon the Shavian quicksand. But this involved so long a delay that I withdrew the play, and am now looking round to see whether the world contains another actor who can philander as well as Wyndham. As I have always said that if I did not write six plays before I was forty I would never write one after, I must finish the work now in hand and another as well before the 26th July, 1896; but I hope to do much more than that, since I have managed to get through the present play within three months, during which I have had to take an active part in the Schoolboard and Vestry elections, to keep up my work in the Fabian Society, to deliver nearly two dozen lectures in London and the provinces, and to fire off various articles and criticisms. The fact is, I took a good holiday this autumn in Germany, Italy, and in Surrey; and I accumulated a stack of health which I am dissipating at a frightful rate. The Christmas holidays will come just in time to save my life.

If any of this stuff is of use to you for paragraphing purposes —and remember that the world will not stand too much Bernard Shaw—you are welcome to work it up by all means when it suits you. Only, don’t quote it as having been said by me. That is an easy way out which I bar. I find that you have got an atrociously long letter out of me. I have been blazing away on the platform this evening for an hour and a half, and ought to be in bed instead of clattering at this machine.

Yours, half asleep,

G. Bernard Shaw

4/ To an English stage actress and actor-manager Janet Achurch

22nd December 1894

Here I am, taking the sea air with Wallas. The sea air travels at the rate to of 120 miles an hour and goes through clothes, flesh, bone, spirit tut and all, so that one walks against it like a naked soul, exhilarated, but teeming at the nose. We are in an immense hotel, with 180 rooms and few guests, who have nothing to do, and are miserable exceedingly having come down expressly to be happy. I shall begin a new play presently. The last having been so happily inspired by you, I look about Folkestone for some new inspiratrice, but in vain: every woman in the place either strikes me cheerfully prosaic at a glance, or else makes me boil with ten-philander-power cynicism. Everybody is quoting Stevenson’s dictum about the height of happiness being attained when you live in the open air with the woman you love. Convinced as I am that love is hopelessly vulgar and happiness insufferably tedious to those who have once gained the heights, I nevertheless find that these material heights—these windswept cliffs—make me robustly vulgar, greedy and ambitious. If you by any chance tumble off the heights yourself ever, you will understand how vigorously despicable I am under these circumstances. The ozone offers an immense opportunity to any thoroughly abandoned female who would like to become the heroine of a play as black as “Candida” is white. . . .

I am, as you will observe, in an entirely worthless humour. That is the result of health, fresh air, plenty of food, early rising, long walk and the rest of the bracing delusions.

GBS

5/ To an Scottish writer, theatre critic, critic, playwright, Henrik Ibsen’s translator and early friend William Archer

28th December 1894

I return to town tomorrow afternoon to take up the duties, fairly forced on me by [Frank] Harris, of dramatic critic to the Saturday Review; so do not send on any more proofs to Folkestone. It is questionable whether it is quite decent for a dramatic author to be also a dramatic critic; but my extreme reluctance to make myself dependent for my bread and butter on the acceptance of my plays by managers tempts me to hold to the position that my real profession is that by which I can earn my bread in security. Anyhow, I am prepared to do anything which will enable me to keep my plays for twenty years with perfect tranquillity if it takes that time to educate the public into wanting them.

I read ‘Candida’ to [George] Alexander before I came down here. He instantly perceived that it was Marchbank’s & Candida’s (that is, [Henry] Esmond’s & Janet’s) play and not his. He said he would produce it if he could get down to the poet’s age; but he would not play Morell. He had acted that sort of part, he said, until people were declaring that he could not act. By so doing he has made money enough to make him independent of playing anything but parts which will give him, as he put it, a property in himself as well as in his theatre. This, being intelligent, delighted me, and I took off ‘Candida’ in high spirits. However, as he said he wanted to act a clever man, I suggested The Philanderer, who is an extremely clever man. He asked me to let him read it. I sent it to him & have not heard from him since. He said he wanted a play, because neither [Henry Arthur] Jones nor [Arthur Wing] Pinero was ready. He meant ready to step in on the failure of Henry James’s play; but naturally he did not say so. I am desperately floored by your confounded proofs. A year or two ago, when there was some question of republishing my World articles, I looked through a few of them, and found them, apart from the context of time and place for which they were originally designed, quite impossibly dull, stale and ineffective. I will not go so far as to say that your articles are so afflicting; but they are sufficiently damnable. Who now cares for a discussion of the probability of the plot of ‘A Bunch of Violets’ [by Sydney Grundy]? What further use to Carte [‘s Savoy Theatre] is your attempt to make yourself agreeable, kindly & tolerant over such a ghastly and foredoomed insanity as Mirette [a comic opera by Michel Carré and André Messager]? Is it tolerable to have [Henrik Johan] Ibsen and [Eleonora] Duse, not to mention myself, cut into strips by twothousandword lengths of mere regurgitation of the year’s refuse, which is sufficiently chronicled elsewhere in the Dramatic Year [Book] & the files of the Era? I am in utter despair: I dont know what to write by way of preface. If your laziness had led you to follow my example & leave the articles buried, I could not have complained; but I am now more than ever convinced that you should either let your year’s work alone or else rearrange it all as an annual article having the same excellence as its parts originally had as weekly articles. You tell me that the experiment of last year was not a financial success. I tear my hair and desperately ask you, why should it? I declare before high Heaven that [Walter] Scott is a fool, and you a shirk, to publish a book that is no book. If it paid you, you would have some excuse; but it doesnt. . . .

GBS

6/ To Janet Achurch

25th January 1895

I have made an appointment with [a popular London actor Lewis] Waller to read “Candida”; but I shall read Eugene for all he is worth, as to sacrifice him would be to sacrifice the play. The only chance is in the fact that Waller is at an earlier phase of actor-management than [George] Alexander, and may play for a managerial and financial success at the cost of playing Morell. But I am not sanguine. If he refuses, I shall try him with the Philanderer ([Charles] Hawtrey in the title part) sooner than leave that stone unturned; and if he sees money in that, Miss [Julia] Neilson is clearly out of the question for Julia, a part which I still think you could do yourself good by playing, as it would put you to the height of your cleverness and technical skill to play it; and these are the qualities for which you most need to gain credit. Nobody has seen you play a really keen comedy part, finished up to the finger nails. Clever Alice & Becky Sharp were only tomfooleries. Besides, with Paula Tanqueray in everyone’s head as a great acting part, the public & the critics will have their cue for Julia. If you could pull off that part well, you would have no more trouble with Pinero: I know exactly what he thinks about you at present. What he thinks is all wrong; but you must do a piece of fine filagree work to convert him.

I am not surprised about Mrs Daintry. Waller’s perfectly right; the ending is not the sort of thing for his audience. Besides, it is not really good drama: it is only good acting. After the revelation about the daughter, the play, dramatically speaking, stops as completely as “Candida” stops after the Erklarung in the third act. . . .

GBS

7/ To an English actor-manager Richard Mansfield

22nd February 1895

My dear Mansfield

. . . Now let me ask you whether you can play a boy of eighteen—a strange creature—a poet—a bundle of nerves—a genius—and a rattling good part. The actor-managers here can’t get down to the age. The play, which is called Candida, is the most fascinating work in the world—my latest—in three acts, one cheap scene, and with six characters. The woman’s part divides the interest and the necessary genius with the poet’s. There are only two people in the world possible for it: Janet Achurch, for whom it was written, and Mrs [Madge] Kendal. If Janet creates it here, will you pay her fare out and back and give her 300 dollars a week or so for the sake of covering yourself with new and strange fascinations as the poet? By the way, there’s probably money in the piece; but it’s a charming work of art; and the money would fly somehow. . . .

P.S. Since “Candida” is such a cheap and simple play, why not fly over here in the thick of the season; take a theatre for half a dozen matinées; play the poet to Janet’s Candida; set all London talking & wondering; & disappear in a flash of blue fire? That would be immensely in character.

yours sincerely

G. Bernard Shaw

8/ To Richard Mansfield

9th March 1895

My dear Mansfield

. . . I am working away as hard as I can at the stage business of Candida. I will get the parts copied out here if there is time as well as the script; so that there may not be a moment’s delay in getting to work at the other side. Meanwhile I had better tell you what you will want for the play. There are six parts only. One of them is an old man, vulgar, like Eccles in Caste [a comedy drama by Thomas William Robertson], only not a drunken waster, but a comfortably well off vestryman who has made money in trade. He must be a genuinely funny low comedian, able to talk vulgar English—drop his Hs and so forth. And he must be really a middleaged or elderly man and not a young man made up old, which is one of the most depressing things known to the stage. Then there is a young woman of the standing of a female clerk, rather a little spitfire, a bit common, but with some comic force and a touch of feeling when needed. She must not be slowtongued: the part requires smart, pert utterance. If you know any pair who could play Eccles and Polly Eccles thoroughly well, you may engage them straight off for Candida. Then there is a curate. Any solemn young walking gentleman who can speak well will do for him. The other three parts are, yourself, Janet, and your leading man, who must be equal to a very strong part which would be the star part if there were not the other part to relegate it to important utility. The character is a strong, genial clergyman (Candida’s husband) with much weight and popular force of style. I have not seen the Scandinavian [Albert Gran] whom Felix is bringing out; so cannot say whether he looks likely to suit the part.

I must break off: it is post hour. There will be plenty of time to arrange the dresses and the one scene, which presents no difficulty. The Philanderer must now wait: it would be madness to produce it before Candida. I will keep Candida for you in London, and am quite disposed to hold over other plays for you if you can arrange to conquer the two worlds within a reasonable time. More of that afterwards.

G.B.S.

9/ To Richard Mansfield

16th March 1895

My dear Mansfield

. . . Felix, in addition to my blessing, which is probably not copyrightable in America, has the full score of Candida and the band parts (all except the first violin, which Janet took to study on the way, and which she will no doubt lose), conscientiously read through and corrected by me—a labor which will leave its marks on my constitution until the last trumpet. It has been impossible for me to send out the contract with them: it must wait until next week. Terms, practically the same as before, except for a stipulation about the cast to secure to Janet the vested interest in the part which I promised her during its gestation. The understanding is that if it succeeds in New York, I am to hold the London rights for you for, say, a year, on the New York terms. However, I shall make fresh demands for London as to the cast. Unless you manage to get a very unlikely supply of talent for the New York production, it will be better for us all to cast the piece here strongly from the London point of view: that is, with some well known leading man (Waring, for instance) as Morell, Kate Phillips as Prossy (unless Mrs Bancroft would like to try it), and a popular low comedian as Burgess. I saw Gran this morning at the station, and was very favorably impressed by him; but he is too young, and not English enough, to play Morell here. The question of age is quite exceptionally important in this instance. You may, by sheer skill, succeed in making yourself appear a boy of eighteen in contrast to a man of your own real age; but beside a man of half your age made up for double that figure, the artificiality would be terrible. Gran has the pleasant frank style, and something of the physique for the part; and if he can hide his accent, his foreignness would not matter in New York, where the Church of England parson is an unknown quantity; so that I should not at all demur if you thought, after reckoning him up, that he would do Morell for you at the 5th Avenue [Theatre] as well as the best other man available; but for this country Morell must be ultra-home made.

If you find at rehearsal that any of the lines cannot be made to go, sack the whole company at once and get in others. I have tested every line of it in my readings of the play; and there is a way of making every bit of it worth doing. There are no points: the entire work is one sustained point from beginning to end.

In some respects I want my stage management and business stuck to with tolerable closeness. For instance, in the second act there are certain places where you must efface yourself whilst Burgess and Morell are spreading themselves. This is essential to the effect of your breaking in again. I have put you on a chair with your back to the audience during the first of these intervals; and I urge you not to alter this, as I have very slender faith in your powers of self suppression (I don’t question your goodwill) if the audience can see what in my present shattered condition you will perhaps excuse me for calling your mug. Later on, though you have hardly anything to say except the flash “That’s brave: that’s beautiful,” it is important that your face should be seen. The passage where you put your hand on your heart with a sympathetic sense of the stab Morell has suffered is cribbed from Wagner’s Parsifal.

If the play is not successful, fatten Janet, engage a Living Skeleton, buy a drum, and take to the road.

If it is successful, play Oswald in Ibsen’s “Ghosts.” Try Lovborg in Hedda Gabler anyhow: nobody has ever touched the part here; and Janet would be a perfect Hedda.

I can no more. I hope Mrs Mansfield has quite recovered from her shaking.

By the way, unless there is a great Bernard Shaw catch-on over Candida, as to the likelihood of which I am rather sceptical, the Philanderer had better lie quiet for a while. . . .

yours—wrecked

G. Bernard Shaw

10/ To William Archer

18th March 1895

[Dear Archer]

The ‘division of wealth’ passage is all right. If only he [Arthur Wing Pinero] had used the word, ‘distribution’ he would have cleared the reef.

I am greatly dissatisfied with my article on the play. I was in the middle of the worry and overwork thrown on me by the necessity of getting Candida ready for the boat on Saturday, with the parts all corrected and the full score provided with a minutely detailed plan of the stage action and so on. The production of the play on Wednesday rushed me mercilessly, as the paper has to be ready to catch the foreign mails on Friday afternoon; so that I was quite unable to get into a sympathetic, humane mood, and could only express the — in short, what I did express. However, I should not at all mind seeing Pinero driven back into the comic line. It is in that line alone that he shews the smallest fertility. [Pinero’s play The Notorious] Mrs Ebbsmith, like the other two wouldbe serious plays, not only shews awkwardness, constraint, and impotence on its intellectual side, but apparent exhaustion and sterility on its inventive side. All the characters in it bundled together, and squeezed in a wine press would not produce blood enough to make Dick Phenyl [a character of another Pinero’s play]. ‘The Hobby Horse’ is a masterpiece of humor and fancy in comparison. It seems to me that it is only by the frankest abandonment of himself to his own real tastes and capacities that he can do anything worth doing now on the stage. . . .

G.B.S.

11/ To Janet Achurch

20th March 1895

[My dear Janet]

I see that the mail goes tonight, and that the next one is two days off. Therefore I interrupt my Saturday Review work to send you a hasty line on one or two matters which I forgot to mention to you.

First, and most important, you are, immediately on receipt of this letter, to send for a barber, and have your head shaved absolutely bald. Then get a brown wig, of the natural color of your own hair. Candida with gold hair is improbable; but Candida with artificially gold hair is impossible. Further, you must not be fringy or fluffy. Send to a photograph shop for a picture of some Roman bust—say that of Julia, daughter of Augustus and wife of Agrippa, from the Uffizi in Florence—and take that as your model, or rather as your point of departure. You must part your hair in the middle, and be sweet, sensible, comely, dignified, and Madonna like. If you condescend to the vulgarity of being a pretty woman, much less a flashy one (as in that fatal supper scene in Clever Alice which was the true cause of the divine wrath that extinguished you for so long afterwards) you are lost. There are ten indispensable qualities which must underlie all your play: to wit, 1, Dignity, 2, Dignity, 3, Dignity, 4, Dignity, 5, Dignity, 6, Dignity, 7, Dignity, 8, Dignity, 9, Dignity, and 10, Dignity. And the least attempt on your part to be dignified will be utterly fatal.

Observe, Janet Achurch, what you have to do is to play the part. You have not to make a success. New York must notice nothing: it must say “Of course,” and go home quietly. If it says “Hooray” then you will be a mere popular actress, a sort of person whom I utterly decline to know. You must confine yourself strictly to your business, and do that punctually and faithfully, undisturbed by any covetings of success for yourself or me or the play. It does not matter whether the play fails or not, or whether you are admired or not: it is sufficient if you gain the respect of the public and your fellow artists, which you cannot fail to do if only you will keep yourself to the point. If Candida does not please the people, then go on to the next play without being disconcerted. This is the way to win the two main things needed: quiet sleep and efficient digestion.

Don’t take any undigested advice. On any point you are more likely to be right than anyone else once you have considered it. I urge you to go to church once a day at least to tranquillise your nerves. If you feel inclined to cry, go and meditate and pray. The religious life is the only one possible for you. Read the gospel of St John and the lives of the saints: they will do everything for you that morphia only pretends to do. Watch and pray and fast and be humbly proud; and all the rest shall be added to you.

Charrington [Janet’s husband] has burst out into an exceeding splendor of raiment, like a bridegroom. He has just been here devising a telegraph code for you. I went to see [Herbert] Flemming at the Independent Theatre after we parted at Waterloo, and have written a long notice of him for the Saturday [23rd March] which will please him and perhaps be of some use to him. He was so amazingly like you in his play that I have serious thoughts of getting him to play Candida at the copyrighting performance, unless I can persuade Ellen Terry, who has just written me a letter about another matter. [Herbert Beerbohm] Tree, writing from Chicago, wants the Philanderer; but no doubt Mansfield has mentioned that to you.

I said something to [Charles] Charrington about getting Marion Lea to play Prossy; but I did not mean it seriously, as I think that there would be no room for her in a company with you and Mrs Mansfield in it. I mention this as a matter of prudence; for Mansfield is so Napoleonic in his swoops at any suggestion that he is quite capable of telegraphing to her straight off. I shall write to him by the next mail. It is on the verge of six o’clock; so I must break off and make for the post.

Remember—the religious life. No ambition, and no golden hair. I know that you will understand my advice, and take it—for ten minutes or so.

GBS

12/ To Janet Achurch

23rd March 1895

My dear Janet

. . . I sometimes think over the matter coolly, and check my tendency to think that genius must beat all abuses, by deliberately recalling many an instance in which stimulants had beaten genius. Finally the millstones catch Janet and grind her remorselessly. I break through the fascination and get to a more human feeling for her. I have been no saint myself—have hunted after one form of happiness occasionally. Janet recreates me with an emotion which lifts me high out of that. I become a saint at once and write a drama in which I idealise Janet. I have a horrible fear that if I lecture her, she will detest me; but her soul, which has come to life, or rather awakened from its sleep since the night of the Novelty Theatre, is worth wrestling for; and I do brutal things—put money into her pocket secretly in order purposely to produce a scene with her husband. Janet at last wakes to the emotion under which I have abstained; and for a while she rapidly begins to draw on rich stores of life, becomes beautiful, becomes real, becomes almost saintly, looks at me with eyes that have no glamor of morphia in them, and with an affection that is not hysterical, though in the middle of it all she stabs me to the heart by dyeing her hair a refulgent yellow. The question is how am I to make Janet religious, so that she may recreate herself and feel no need of stimulants. That is the question that obsesses me.

Now you have my theory brought home to yourself. Now you know what I conceive as wanting for Candida, and what Eugene means when he says, “I no longer desire happiness: life is nobler than that.” That is the language of the man recreated by a flash of religion.

It is drawing near post hour—12 midnight on Saturday to catch the German mail tomorrow morning. Let me hastily add that I have purposely abstained from worrying about your acting. Charrington is so nervous as to your interests that he is almost convinced that if you breathe the way you do at home, it will be an ungraceful trick. But you cannot help yourself by taking care not to do this or that. If only you occupy every moment of the play with Candida, you will not drop into any tricks that do not belong to her. And the time for pupilage is past: you must be left now to your own vigilance and conscience as an artist. Sweep all concern about little tricks and mannerisms away from your mind; and be generous to yourself as well as to the rest—for you must be generous to them, and make their points for them if necessary, since they will all be in much greater danger than you. In short, dearest Janet, be entirely magnanimous and beautiful in your thoughts and never mind the success of the play or of yourself. Believe me, it is not success that lies in our hands—yours or mine. Success is only an aspect that certain results of our work—not the work itself—bear in the eyes of others. Take it quietly and see what will happen.

There is a great deal for you to forgive in this letter. I have rambled into it without intending it: indeed I have quite got away from what I supposed I was going to say when I began.

GBS

13/ To Richard Mansfield

27th March 1895

My dear Mansfield

I wish I had time to write; but I haven’t. I hoped to get an interview into “Town Topics” before Easter; but I am afraid I shall not be able to write it. This copyrighting performance [of Candida at the Theatre Royal] (program of which I enclose) with all its attendant arrangements and expenses, and a thousand other things besides my literary work (you haven’t the least idea what a lot of it I have to do to earn £6 a week and act as referee by cable in your combats with Janet) has left me without a moment. For Heaven’s sake star everybody who wants to be starred. Star the callboy; see that everybody else in the theatre has his name printed in letters three inches longer than your own; bribe the press to interview the entire staff; publish albums of their photographs taken at various periods of their march from the cradle to the grave; polish Janet’s boots and cast Mrs Mansfield for old women exclusively; only act and make them act within an inch of their lives. It is good business to star Janet; what is the use of giving a woman fifty pounds a week if you are not going to run her for all she is worth? Star her until she begs you for God’s sake not to raise any more expectations. She comes from Manchester: she will grab everything you try to keep from her. Treat her as the Roman soldiers treated the woman who asked for the gold things on their arms: crush her beneath the weight of your shield. Give her everything she dares ask; and make her understand that she has got to prove herself worth it on the 15th April. The performance must come off then: it is all over the press here already; and if it breaks down it will be impossible to avoid explanations. Never mind starring yourself: you are, or ought to be, hors concours. I told Janet to offer to be content with a line in diamond type in the bill, and then win her position: if she cannot rise to that, why, have a new fount of type cast for her, six feet high, and paint the town hell color with her name. These follies drive me stark mad: I hereby authorise you to announce her as the authoress of the play, if that will please her. . . .

No fair play here for you or anyone else. Who wants fair play? London is a fortress in which every man must, as an outsider, batter a breach for himself. Then in, sword in hand. Success, achievement, fruition, is death. Fortunately, they fight you from behind barricades in every street when you have carried the wall; so that there is always an obstacle, and, consequently, an object in life.

All the same, no nonsense this time about an August season. The season is over by the middle of July. Don’t be in a hurry: Candida can wait until next year if it proves worth going on with at all. Immer Muth!

In haste

G. Bernard Shaw

14/ To Janet Achurch

30th March 1895

[My dear Janet]

I am sending by this mail an interview to “Town Topics,” which they may or may not insert. I am so addled by want of exercise, and ceaseless clatter, clatter, clatter at this machine, that I am incapable of writing anything that has not a hysterical air about it. . . . I have a frightful feeling that my previous letters have been all morbid. However, no matter. The spring is germinating; this mail finishes all I can do with regard to “Candida” in America; the copyrighting performance is over at last; the Easter holiday is at hand; life rises in me and conscience wanes; and there is animation in my style even as I sing

But what are vernal joys to me?

Where thou art not, no spring can be.

I shall never be able to begin a new play until I fall in love with somebody else. Charrington called yesterday. He said you wouldn’t sign a contract, he was sure of that; you would rather not bind yourself. But my own feeling is that you had a stronger interest in getting a contract than Mansfield has in giving it to you. Suppose “Candida,” as is probable—more probable than any other event—is a success on the first night, a “succes d’estime” for the following fortnight, and then vanishes from the New York stage. Mansfield, in disgust at the whole business, may say that you have failed, and that you are not worth the fifty pounds a week. . . .

On the other hand, if you get your two years contract, what will happen then? You will of course stipulate for leading parts (with a reasonable regard for Mrs Mansfield); and you will then be sure of work and fifty pounds a week for two years, during which you can save and look about you with a view to campaigning on your own account afterwards. No doubt two years seems a long time to you, who have been accustomed to start operations in a fortnight; but how have they succeeded? What are you afraid of in the transaction? Is it that Mansfield will not pay you? He must; he cannot exist without considerable property as a theatrical manager; and whilst the property is there, the law can force him to pay your salary. Or is it that he will give you no parts, and prevent you by injunction from playing for anyone else? Do you think people behave that way when it costs them fifty pounds a week?

But you may be dreaming that “Candida” will be such a success that it will place New York at your feet. It won’t; and even if it does, it will not place Boston and Chicago and so on at your feet without Mansfield. It will really be a success of the combination of yourself with Mansfield; and it is absolutely impossible for it to justify you in feeling sure that you would maintain your lead without him. You may say that [Charles] Frohmann or somebody will say “Come and be my leading lady at a hundred a week.” Well, the chance of that contingency is just good enough to enable you to extract a two years contract from Mansfield now; but it is not good enough to risk going without a contract for. Besides, it was Mansfield, not Frohmann or another, that gave you your chance; and he is entitled to the full profit of it if it turns out well. And he has “Candida,” subject, it is true, to the condition of playing it fifty times a year with you in the title part, but morally entitled, if you go to another manager for purely commercial reasons, to demand the substitution of—say Ellen Terry. What plays have the other managers got that would shew you to the fullest advantage?

All this you must ponder carefully. In telling Mansfield to let you have your own way, I am running the great risk that he will comply, and that your way will be the old ruinous way. The summing up of the case is this. Either you intend to make your career in America as some manager’s leading lady, or you intend to make it as your own entrepreneur. Well, you cannot begin the latter at once because you have no money; and you must once for all give up the old plan of throwing your friends’ savings into enterprises that are as ill considered as enterprises conducted with other peoples’ money usually are. Therefore, you must work for a salary for a few years at least. Are you going to let the certainty of a two years engagement at fifty pounds a week (excellent pay) slip through your fingers on the chance of “Candida” being successful enough to bring you a better offer?

That’s the question you have to face. I don’t advise you one way or the other; I simply take care that the case in favour of a contract shall be put clearly before you. Probably Charrington will put the other side with equal eloquence.

GBS

15/ To Janet Achurch

3rd April 1895

[My dear Janet]

I had looked forward to writing you a long letter; but your cable to Charrington saying that Candida is withdrawn has dropped here with explosive force, Charrington being all for an immediate departure as a stowaway on the next liner to New York. However, I shall cable to Mansfield; for he must produce “Candida” now, and produce it at once too, or else there will be forty thousand fiends to pay; for the newspaper boom here is immense—two interviews with me this week, paragraphs innumerable, quotations from the passage about you and Ellen Terry in my preface to Archer’s book, altogether such an outburst of interest that the fact of the advent of Candida under Mansfield’s management with you in the title part is nailed into the public mind. [Clement] Scott ignores it and announces another project of Mansfield’s. If there is any failure, he will jump at the chance of alluding to “misleading statements” and so forth; and then woe to those who trifle with me; for the explanations will lose none of their picturesqueness if I have to make them. It will be an advertisement for me and the play in any case, one which may perhaps end, if Mansfield leaves me in the lurch, in the rapid production of “Candida” here, with “The Philanderer” on top of it. When I learn that you are not busy rehearsing with all your might, remorse leaves me.

I forget whether I told you that the clause in the agreement relating to you runs as follows:

“The Manager shall engage Miss Janet Achurch and shall cast her for the title part of Candida at all performances given under this agreement and shall not permit Miss Janet Achurch to perform publicly in America on any occasion prior to her appearance as Candida.” . . .

GBS

16/ To Janet Achurch

5th April 1895

My dear Janet