Candida & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play. Bernard Shaw

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. . . .

      GBS

      30/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

      Later in August 1896

      I wish I could write neatly, tidily like you. Cant. Dear Gentleman I was very glad to see a letter from you to me, and I “kept it” till the last! What a muddle about this little play [The Man of Destiny]. I wish you’d just give it to him [Henry Irving] to do what he likes with it. He’ll play it quick enough, never fear, but I see what he is thinking, the silly old cautious thing. He is such a dear Donkey! Darling fellow. Stupid ass! I cant bother about him and the part I want him to play any more (As he only can play it). You ought to have come down here long ago and read Candida (Why, she’s a dancer!) [There was a Spanish dancer called Candida at this time in London.] to me. Now my holiday is just over and I’m only a ha’porth the better for it, and I might have been well, all along o’ you.

      Oh, but I’ve had the happiest time. A few visitors, and my 2 grandchildren all the time with me. You see I love benefiting things, and I can benefit the babies. I’m as alert as a fox-terrier when children are on my hands. Oh, I’d love to have a baby every year. I return to town on Saturday, and must put aside all thought of babies and sich like trash, and stick at work, rehearsing every day and every evening for a whole cussed month. The part of Imogen [in Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline] is not yet well fixed in my memory, and it is so difficult to get the words. The words! Panic will possess me the first moment each morning until I know those words.

      Did you sleep after Bayreuth? Last time you wrote, you were going to sleep, tired out. I wish I could sleep for a month. I’m generally worn out for want of the blessing, sleep. Why do you live in Fitzroy Square? Little Mrs Moscheles [Margaret Moscheles née Sobernheim] has been down here. You know her, dont you? I wish Cymbeline were “cut,” and I could read Candida. Drive down to Hampton Court some Saturday or Sunday and read it to me. Of course you are busy, but never mind. Let things slide and come before the fine warm days are fled. You’ll like reading me your own work and I shall like hearing it. At least I suppose I shall! Although I fear mine are very dull wits, and second times of reading are best.

      A heavenly day here. I wish you were here, and everyone else I like. Lord! There’d be “a damned party in a parlour”!

      Thank you for your letter. Dont think that I want to hurt Janet. I would help her (I have tried). But Candida, a Mother! Attractive to me, very. I’m good at Mothers, and Janet can do the Loveresses.

      Am I successful? You say so. I heard the other day you hated successful folk. I said “Fudge”!

      Oh—good-bye.

      E. T.

      31/ To Ellen Terry

      28th August 1896

      . . . Curiously—in view of “Candida”—you and Janet are the only women I ever met whose ideal of voluptuous delight was that life should be one long confinement from the cradle to the grave. If I make money out of my new play I will produce “Candida” at my own expense; and you & Janet shall play it on alternate nights. It must be a curious thing to be a mother. First the child is part of yourself; then it is your child; then it is its father’s child; then it is the child of some remote ancestor; finally it is an independent human being whom you have been the mere instrument of bringing into the world, and whom perhaps you would never have thought of caring for if anyone else had performed that accidental service. It must be an odd sensation looking on at these young people and being out of it, staring at their amazing callousness, and being tolerated and no doubt occasionally ridiculed by them before they have done anything whatsoever to justify them in presuming to the distinction of your friendship. Of the two lots, the woman’s lot of perpetual motherhood, and the man’s of perpetual babyhood, I prefer the man’s, I think.

      I dont hate successful people: just the contrary. But I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind. Then, too, I like fighting successful people; attacking them; rousing them; trying their mettle; kicking down their sand castles so as to make them build stone ones, and so on. It develops one’s muscles. Besides, one learns from it: a man never tells you anything until you contradict him. I hate failure. Only, it must be real success: real skill, real ability, real power, not mere newspaper popularity and money, nor wicked frivolity, like Nance Oldfield. I am a magnificently successful man myself, and so are my knot of friends—the Fabian old gang—but nobody knows it except we ourselves, and even we haven’t time to attend to it. . . .

      GBS

      32/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

      23rd September 1896

      Well, it was pretty bad again to-night. Only one scene better. I went to meet my love at Milford Haven really, instead of pretending. That was good. The rest pretty awful. Well, now an end of me, sweet sir, and thank you for your forbearance.

      Am I to hear or read Candida? I think I’d rather never meet you—in the flesh. You are such a Great Dear as you are! And you are such a worker, and I work too for other people. My kids, and Henry СКАЧАТЬ