Candida & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play. Bernard Shaw

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СКАЧАТЬ asking you what you were—a musical critic, a dramatic critic, a demagogue, a dramatist? Independent candidates stand a poor chance for Walhalla [a hall of fame that honours laudable and distinguished people in German history]. On which ticket are you going for election?’

      ‘I am all of them by turns,’ replied Mr Shaw. ‘Not long ago I was a musical critic, as you know. But when I began to write plays I recognised the necessity of getting into a position to slate other people’s plays. So I became a dramatic critic. Beyond that, nothing is changed. I am still a leader of the democracy, which still persists in taking no notice whatever of my teachings.’

      ‘Now,—speaking for a moment as a dramatic critic—what do you consider the chief faults of Mr G. Bernard Shaw, the playwright?’

      Mr Shaw took counsel with his beard.

      ‘It is very difficult to say,’ he said at length,—‘very difficult indeed. Speaking from my own point of view, of course I start miles ahead of anyone else, and keep there. But from the point of view of the public—well, perhaps, one of my faults is that I do not preach enough: I am not sufficiently didactic. The public want a dramatist to tell them ten minutes beforehand what he is going to do, then to do it, and then, ten minutes afterwards, to tell them what is the right moral to draw from it. The public,’ continued Mr Shaw, leaning forward confidentially, ‘want to be bored, and I am never a bore. That is one of my greatest failings. For the public are quite uncomfortable when they look for the moral in (say) Arms and the Man and can’t find one.’

      ‘Except, perhaps, that a true story seldom has any moral. Have you any other failings?’

      ‘The only other is a kindred one. It comes from my lack of experience in writing for the stage. When I get a good idea I have not had sufficient practice to work it for all it is worth and exhaust it. I have to run away from it, as it were, and take refuge in being brilliant and sparkling. With experience comes dulness. When I have written enough plays to grow dull I shall succeed. But at present I have only been a dramatist to amuse myself.’

      ‘And a demagogue to amuse other people?’

      ‘Exactly.’

      18/ Richard Mansfield to an American dramatic critic and author William Winter

      10th April 1895

      . . . I have discarded play after play, and I am in despair. I cannot present—I cannot act, the sickening rot the playwright of today turns out. Shaw’s Candida was sweet and clean—but he’s evidently got a religious turn—an awakening to Christianity; and it’s just two and one-half hours of preaching, and I fear the people don’t want that. Also, there is no part for me but a sickly youth, a poet who falls in love with Candida—who is a young lady of thirty-five and the wife of an honest clergyman, who is a socialist! There is no change of scene in three acts, and no action beyond moving from a chair to a sofa, and vice versa. O, ye Gods and little fishes! . . .

      [Richard Mansfield]

      19/ To Janet Achurch

      13th April 1895

      [My dear Janet]

      I have just come up from Beachy Head, where I am spending Easter week, for one night to see a piece at the Adelphi [The Girl I Left Behind Me by Franklyn Fyles and David Belasco]. I find a letter from you waiting for me—the one in which you describe Mansfield’s Bluntschli [in Arms and the Man] and so on: also his objection to put his head on Candida’s knees, which I propose to get over by putting his head beneath Candida’s feet presently. I have just ten minutes before post hour to send you a line.

      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.

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