Candida & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play

I was very happy being able to be with Edy. I know she was glad to have me there. I went for a drive with Janet and Mr Charrington (I like him) but was so ill when they came to supper in the evening I could scarce sit up. My eyes were dazed with the pain in my head. I’m well again now. It was the great excitement of seeing Candida. I was all right the night before!

Darlingest are you well? and happy enough? Where are you? When does your holiday end? Are you most of your time working? I guess you are!

I begin a drive of ten days on the first or second of September. We go 226 miles (to Aylesbury first) and amongst other wonderful places I go to Tewkesbury. I wonder I dont turn into an Angel there, I feel so nice, and as if I could fly. I’m reading now all the time of Russia.

Let me press you to a jelly now, for I must go.

Your Ellen

66/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

4th September 1897

. . . I’m glad you are still in the fresh air. This London is lovely when one drives out as I did yesterday at 9 in the morning, but about noon a pall of heavy murkiness hangs over everything and it seems to crush in one’s head. Edy came from Folkestone Sunday morning and yesterday went on to Nottingham. I would advise you to see Candida before producing it in London. If it is to be done, when is it to be done? A clever friend of mine said to me yesterday—“If Edy stays long with the Independent Theatre Company she will get dull, heavy, conceited, frowsy, trollopy, and dirty! In fact will look moth-eaten! And no one will see her act, because nobody goes to their Theatre.” That’s lively news for Edy’s Mama, who is missing her all the while, and for you who have a play there. I have a frightful cold and am stuck in bed to-day. I’ll send Peter [Laurence Irving’s play Peter the Great] in a day or so. Oh, my muddled head. I think I’m fit for nothing. Look now! You and Miss P. T. [Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend later Mrs Shaw] live in a fine house in the country and I will “keep the Lodge”! And run out wet or shine and open the gates! And then sometimes you’ll come to tea with me. I can make delicious girdle-cakes and jam, fruitfools and Hominy cakes. Send me my letter my very precious Bernie!

E. T.

67/ To Richard Mansfield

8th September 1897

My dear Mansfield

In a month or two will appear, in England and America simultaneously, a couple of volumes of my plays, including Arms & the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny and You Never Can Tell, as well as three earlier plays, Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer, & Mrs Warren’s Profession. My description of Bluntschli [in Arms and the Man] will beat your best efforts off the stage, and as for Candida, your reputation will not survive the discovery of your monstrous error and sin in letting it slip through your fingers. . .

It is as an organizer of the theatre that you really interest me; and here I find you paralyzed by the ridiculous condition that the drama must always be a Mansfield exhibition. I wanted Candida done. Why didnt you send for Courtenay Thorpe, who has just ‘created’ Eugene here? If you set your mind to it you could teach all the necessary tricks to the first dozen able bodied human shells you meet in the street. I dont believe a bit in your own acting; you’re too clever, too positive, and have imagination instead of what people call ‘feeling’. Why not hire a specimen of the real actor-article—the true susceptible, hysterical, temperamental, somnambulistic, drunk-on-air nothingness—and put ideas into the creature’s head, and hypnotize him with a part. He’ll act your head off, because you have to be yourself, whereas he has no self and can only materialize himself in the delusive stuff spun out of another man’s fancy. For you acting is only intentional madness, like David drabbling in his beard. Harden your heart against, and manage, manage, manage. Bless you, I know by your letters: I miss the hollowness, the brainless void full of tremulously emotional chaos waiting for a phantom shape in a play—bah! it’s no profession for you. The people come because they are curious about the interesting man, Richard Mansfield, and because you have imagination enough to strike their imaginations with stage effects; but that’s quite another thing. You may as me whether these spooks of people will ever understand my plays. I reply that I dont want them to understand. If they did theyd he dumfoundered. Besides, my plays never will be played, though they can be. I’ll write them & print them; and the right people will understand. Meanwhile play the Devil’s Disciple, and then retire & write to the papers explaining (as above) why you scorn to act any longer, except in an emergency as Marcellus or Bernardo [characters in Hamlet] and devote the rest of your life to the organization of victory all over the States—ten companies at a time—instead of to broadsword combats.

Do not shew this letter to your wife: she will blow me up for allowing the winds of heaven to visit your face too harshly.

Irving’s son [Laurence] has written a play about Peter the Great of which I hear high praise. The younger generation is knocking at the door: nephew Alf has played Osric to [Herbert Beerbohm] Tree’s Hamlet here—at least I saw him announced for the part, I did not see the performance, as I am in the country for August & September.

Any chance of seeing you over here?

yrs sincerely

G. Bernard Shaw

68/ To Ellen Terry

8th September 1897

. . . Are you going to do Peter [the Great] on the road? You should. Think of how much anxiety it will save you if you have your difficulties with the words settled before the first night in London. Mansfield produces “The Devil’s Disciple” at the 5th Avenue Theatre on the 6th Oct, after an experiment or two with it in the provinces. Ah, if you only would play a matinee of it with Forbes[-Robertson], I would actually go to see it (a compliment I haven’t paid Candida). Besides, I would teach that rapscallionly flower girl of his something. “Caesar & Cleopatra” has been driven clean out of my head by a play I want to write for them in which he shall be a west end gentleman and she [Mrs Patrick Campbell] an east end dona in an apron and three orange and red ostrich feathers [a first reference to Pygmalion written during 1912 and 1913].

I see you wont tell me anything about Prossy. It would be seething the kid in its mother’s milk, I suppose; but still I do want to know in general terms whether my style of work fits her.

It is luncheon hour, and there’s a visitor.

That letter would not have surprised anybody at the hotel. Did you ever read “Rejected Addresses” [by the brothers James and Horace Smith]? I only remember three lines from “Lady Elizabeth Mugg.”

—for who would not slavery hug,

to spend but one exquisite hour

in the arms of Elizabeth Mugg!

I should write the same about you if there were any rhyme to Ellen. I love you soulfully & bodyfully, properly and improperly, every way that a woman can be loved.

GBS

69/ To Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend later Mrs Bernard Shaw

18th October 1897

. . . This morning came an appalling letter from my Italian lady [Candida Bartolucci]—“I have seen your play [Candida]. It is beautiful. I am coming to London to congratulate you.” I must rush off to the vestry committee.

GBS

P.S. I biked to Radlett yesterday with Wallas & Ada Radford. In your absence I think I shall fall in love with Mrs Phillimore [née Lucy Fitzpatrick].

70/ To Janet Achurch

1st November 1897

My dear Janet

Have you got among your press cuttings an agonized notice of “Candida” from the Northern Figaro? If you have, will you lend it to me: I’ve mislaid my copy.

I have for a long time wanted to remonstrate with you about two things. First, the way you destroy every chance of getting “Candida” produced by persistently telling the press that it is going to be done presently in London. Of course everybody concludes that the market is closed. If only you had played the game properly, and told everybody that nobody in London would touch the play, and that only for you and the I.T. [Independent Theatre] it would never have seen the light even in the provinces, you would have made such an interesting case of it that the way would have been clear by this time. But you will play Government tricks when you’re in opposition. Making all due allowance for congenital mendacity, I still think you ought to be able to see that the strength of your position lies in its commercial weakness, and its unequalled opportunities of making capital out of persecution.

Second, and more important, your diction is in such an unholy abyss of mannerism that London will not stand you unless you drop it. When I saw “Doll’s House” for the second time at Islington, you inflicted such torments on me with every syllable you uttered that my affection for you finally came out by the roots. I really cannot love a woman with a sawmill at each corner of her mouth. Miss P. T. [Payne-Townshend], who had been tremendously impressed by her first visit at the Globe [Theatre], was utterly confounded, and could not believe that it was the same woman. The last time I saw you everything went well until you made a scene about something—I forget what. Immediately you started both sawmills, fixed your eyes in a ghastly stare, and became a frightful ven-triloquizing somnambulist, like the ghost of Cleopatra. This is no doubt extremely thrilling to your own diaphragm; but the effect on the innocent spectator is atrocious: it deprived me of the power of remonstrating with you; removed me miles away; set me asking myself whether it was really you or some nightmarish simulacrum of the once adorable Janet. It is that that has prevented me from going to see “Candida”: I daren’t face it. It is all the fault of that cursed Cleopatra. You have begun to act; and now it’s all up with you. You complain of Thorpe’s want of simplicity and sincerity and then burlesque his worst artificialities.

I enclose you the prospectus of the plays, as it has an important bearing on “Candida.” The books will be out in the middle of January—at all events early in February. After that the novelty will be gone. . . .

GBS

71/ To Janet Achurch

9th December 1897

Janet, Janet, Janet

Is there any use in remonstrating?

Is Charrington to be ruined? Is [your daughter] Nora to make clinical observations when she comes back? Who is to play Candida?

Very well: I will tell everybody—tell Miss [Charlotte Payne-]Townshend, Mrs [Beatrice] Webb, Mrs [Lion] Phillimore, [William] Archer, Ellen Terry, everybody whose knowledge will inflict the most exquisite cruelty on you.

When you came in tonight you were Janet, desirable and adorable. After dinner you were a rowdy, unpresentable wretch. Finally you were inarticulate—nearly as inarticulate as the time before. And I came to propose that you should go to my dentist to be prepared for Manchester!!

. . . You talk of women suffering. When you see me like that, you will—if you ever cared for what I am—know what suffering is for the first time in your life. When I was a child of less than Nora’s age, I saw the process in my father; and I have never felt anything since. I learnt soon to laugh at it; and I have laughed at everything since. Presently, no doubt, I shall learn to laugh at you. What else can I do?

No use, dear Janet: I can’t be your taskmaster and schoolmaster any longer. If I could expend fifty pounds a week in keeping you luxuriously dulled and disciplined, with punctual splendours of dress and dinner and society to be faced in fine condition, I might be of some use. But as it is, I can only make myself uselessly disagreeable and load my heart with a crown of sword points. Let us drop the subject and say goodbye whilst there is still some Janet left to say goodbye to. The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself. The moment the image loses its elevation, then away with that friend: however remorseful he may be, he has become a malignant influence on your life. I held up the mirror in which Janet was beautiful as long as I could, in private and in print: now I’ve held it up with Janet inarticulate and rowdy. Avoid me now as you would the devil; for from this time I will destroy your self respect if you let me near you. Restore the image, and look at it in a new, clean mirror—the archangel’s with the purple wings, perhaps: mine is spoiled and done for. I am growing old and cowardly and selfish: it’s sufficient that I loved you when I was young. Now I can do nothing but harm unless I say farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell.

GBS

72/ William Archer to Bernard Shaw

14th January 1898

My dear Shaw

Though 50 is a number one uses vaguely for ‘a great many,’ I believe it was really within the mark— but remember my point was that Miss [Martha] Morton’s play [A Bachelor’s Romance] was contemptible, and that many plays might be better without being positively good. I quite agree with you (& have said again & again) that there is no case against the managers as a body, but only against the system which enslaves them as much as anyone. But of the fifty plays, I can think of only one at the present moment which I myself would with any confidence mount for a run—that is to say spend £1000 [£132,919.54 in 2020 according to Bank of England’s inflation calculator] on and stake my prestige—& that play is Candida. Even Carlyon [Sahib by Gilbert Murray], though it interests me, I wouldn’t dream of backing for a run. I forget the exact phrase I used & haven’t got the paper here; but I didn’t mean to convey that I blamed [John] Hare for producing the play. That he can do so shows that he has no literary intelligence, but no one ever suspected him of that. The play is, as I tried to suggest, just the sort of mild imbecility that goes down with a certain class of the public (especially the provincial public, I fancy) & simply as a manager Hare was probably quite right to pitch upon it. There is no case against the managers as a body, but there is against the critics, myself included, though I’m not one of the worst in that respect. We intimidate the managers by becoming ferociously critical the moment a play begins to have merit, while we’re all geniality & tolerance so long as it has no merit at all. This doesn’t apply to the mere imbeciles of the fraternity who really prefer the slush—it is a general tendency which it’s almost impossible to resist.

Dont be too much puffedup if I break to you the intelligence that you have won the approval of [John Mackinnon] Robertson. He has seen the Devil’s Disciple in Boston & writes of it with what is (for him) enthusiasm—‘the applause of the which one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others.’

Yours ever

W.A.

73/ Bernard Shaw’s article “The Comedy of Calf Love” contributed to a London weekly newspaper The Saturday Review

15th January 1898

The bitterest of prayers is the prayer that our prayers may not be granted; but it has been prayed ever since we discovered that the meanest trick our gods can play us is to take us at our word. This is not altogether because we so seldom know what is good for us: it just as often comes from our not liking what is good for us when we get it. My own case at present is worse even than this. I have unselfishly prayed for something that is good for the theatre; and now that the theatre has got it, it makes life bitterer to me. My prayer was that contemporary drama might be brought up to the level of contemporary fiction. I pointed out that even the romances written by governesses and read by parlormaids were more literate, more decent, more fanciful than the coarse pleasantries and maudlin sentimentalities concocted by obsolete Bohemians for festive undergraduates. Now that the substitution has been effected, I am more than justified; for the change is not only a very manifest improvement, but is much appreciated by the public; yet to say that I enjoy it would be to say the thing that is not. It is not in man’s nature to be grateful for negative mercies. When you have the toothache, the one happiness you desire is not to have it: when it is gone, you never dream of including its absence in your assets. Now that the pothouse drama no longer obtrudes its obscene existence on me, I find myself grumbling as much as ever at the deficiencies of the ladylike plays which have supplanted it.

My consolation is that ladylike drama, though it worries me as a critic, reassures me as a human being. The truth is, I am no longer what is invidiously called a young man. Like Mr [Arthur Wing] Pinero and his Princess [a character of his play The Princess and the Butterfly or the Fantastics], I have turned forty, and am somewhat worn by industry and eld. Yet I find, by the unanimous testimony of the women who, as purveyors of the newest new drama, are breaking down the male monopoly of dramatic authorship in all directions, that the older I get, and the more I wrinkle, and the faster my grey hairs multiply, and the more flabbily my feet shuffle and my ideas footle, the more I shall be adored by their sex. I used to think that calf love—the only love that deserves all the beautiful things the storybooks say about the tender passion—was peculiar to the human male, and was, indeed, a mark of his superiority. But now I learn, from the latest fashion in plays, that the modern woman’s dream is to be an old man’s darling. In Sweet Nancy [by Robert Williams Buchanan], revived last week at the Avenue [Theatre], there was still one drop of bitterness left for me, since the hero, though fifty, was military. But in A Bachelor’s Romance [by Miss Martha Morton], at the Globe [Theatre], the hero is not only an old fogey, but a literary man, with fads not altogether unlike my own. And the author is no unwomanly Ibsenite, but that womanliest of all women, the American woman. She was born in New York City; she received her education in a public school; and as a girl she contributed poetry and short stories to many magazines. Can anything be more womanly? If A Bachelor’s Romance were her first play, I might misdoubt me that it was no more than the sowing of her wild oats. But it is not so: Miss Martha Morton has produced at least six plays, all apparently successful, since her Refugee’s Daughter appeared eight years ago. Therefore I take the Globe play to be the expression of a mature, deliberate, experienced conviction that the most fascinating person in the world is a nice old literary gentleman between forty and sixty. Later on I may perhaps plead for an extension of these limits, encouraged by the fact that Mr [William Ewart] Gladstone was never positively adored until he turned seventy but for the present I am content to be just such an old dear as Mr [John] Hare [born John Joseph Fairs, 1844–1921] is now impersonating with a success that Don Juan has never attained. And, depend on it, this new dramatic theme will not be confined to one sex. It is in the air. There is a play called Candida, lately performed in the provinces by the Independent Theatre, in which the hero is under eighteen and the heroine a matron who confesses to “over thirty.” Calf love is the sentiment of the hour.

Miss Morton’s success as a playwright is, of course, founded on a clear gift of telling stories and conjuring up imaginary people. But her easy conquest of managerial favor is due to the aptitude with which she sketches congenial and easily acted parts for good actors to fill up, and to that sympathy catching disposition to be goodnatured at all costs, which is so very agreeable to the public just at present. I fancy if Mr Hare had to choose between playing for nothing in three extra performances of A Bachelor’s Romance and carrying his portmanteau from Somerset House to the Globe Theatre, he would unhesitatingly submit to the three perfor-mances. Yes, easy as his task is, he gets as much applause as if the author were taxing his powers as severely as [Henrik] Ibsen. Mr Frederick Kerr, too, achieves an impersonation which, to the very coloring of his face and the thinning on the top of his wig, is masterly, at a cost to himself comparable to the lifting of an egg by [Eugene] Sandow. Miss May Harvey, one of the cleverest actresses we have, is almost dangerously underparted, like a heavy charge in a light gun; and Miss Susie Vaughan would be all the better for a little more stuff in her part to steady her. I confess I grudge four such players to a work so far inside their capacity: I had rather see them all groaning under grievous burthens. And yet I do not see how this flimsy, pretty, amusing, rather tender sort of play is to be worked up to concert pitch without better acting than it is artistically worth. Its commercial value, when fine talents are liberally wasted on it, is beyond question, but as it is not my business to judge plays by the standards of the boardroom and box office, I need not deny that there were moments during A Bache-lor’s Romance when the cheapness and spuriousness of the sentiment provoked a spasm of critical indignation in me. For instance, since Mr Hare has dealt so handsomely with Miss Morton’s plays, she might surely have provided him with some more subtle, or at least more sensible means of securing the sympathy of the audience than handing sovereigns about to needy people like a Jack Tar in a Surreyside nautical melodrama. When Miss Susie Vaughan has to shew that the crusty old maid, Miss Clementina, has what London beggars call a feeling heart, she must be somewhat incommoded by having no more plausible statement to make on the subject than that when she wakes up in the morning she hears Sylvia singing under her window, and cannot tell which is the girl in the garden and which the lark in the heavens. This, I submit, is not poetry: it is gammon; and it destroys the verisimilitude of an otherwise passable character sketch. The play, in short, needs here and there just a little more sincerity to bring it up at all points even to its own impenitently romantic scale of illusion.

The second rank of the company is nearly as good as an ordinary West End front rank. Mr Gilbert Hare [1869–1951] amuses himself cleverly but nonsensically by playing a very old man, a sort of folly in which his father [John Hare] wasted too much of his prime. I challenge Mr Gilbert Hare to look at himself in the glass whilst he is doing that dance—“one, two, three: one, two, three”—in the third act, and to say whether any extremity of white wig and painted wrinkles could turn the quicksilver in his legs into chalkstones.

Will Miss Morton and other American authors please note that the art of writing plays without explanatory asides has been brought to perfection here, and that the English high-critical nose is apt to turn up at dramatists who have not mastered it. And will Mr Hare remonstrate seriously with his musical director for inflicting on an audience which never injured him a so-called “overture” entitled The Globe, consisting of an irritating string of national anthems, and finally dragging the audience out of their seats with God save the Queen. It did not inconvenience me personally, because even if I were the most loyal of subjects I should not stand up on my hind legs like a poodle for every person who waved a stick and played a tune at me; but the more compliant people can hardly enjoy being disturbed except on special occasions.

Sweet Nancy seemed to me a little stale at the Avenue [Theatre]: Miss [Annie] Hughes, with all her cleverness, played it on the first night as if she had had enough of it. Miss [Marion] Thornhill, the lessee, plays Mrs Huntly, presumably for practice. Miss Lena Ashwell is now the Barbara Gray. In the first act she does one of her wonderful exits, which almost bring the house after her with a rush; but the part is quite beneath her; and I deliberately came away at the end of the second act because I knew she would get round me in the pathetic bit in the third if I waited.

G. Bernard Shaw

74/ Reginald Golding Bright’s article THE PLAYS OF “G.B.S.” contributed to a newspaper the Weekly Sun

20th March 1898

Volume I consists of those plays which the author is pleased to term “unpleasant”—the unpleasantness lying in the fact that they convict the capitalistic phase of modern social organisation, and are written from the point of view of a Socialist who regards the basis of middle-class society as thoroughly rotten, economically and morally. Under this heading come “Widowers’ Houses,” “The Philanderer,” and “Mrs Warren’s Profession.”

The root idea of the first-named was the rich suburban villa standing on the rents of the foul rookery; of the second, a four-act topical comedy, the fashionable cults of Ibsenism and “New Womanism” on a basis of clandestine sensuality—the Independent Theatre refused to produce it on account of its “immorality”!; whilst in the third, Mrs Warren taxes society with her occupation. . . .

Volume II—“Pleasant Plays”—will comprise “Arms and the Man,” the sparkling comedy, in three acts, of youthful romance and disillusion, which was the despair of the critics on its production at the Avenue in 1894; “The Man of Destiny,” a one-act comedy, in which Sir Henry Irving had intended to appear as the youthful Napoleon; “You Never Can Tell,” a four-act modern comedy concerned with the adventures of a sparkling pair of twins; and “Candida,” a frankly sentimental play, which Mr Shaw hopes to find appreciated by women, if not by men.

R. G. B.

75/ To Charlotte Payne-Townshend

30th March 1898

. . . No: I didn’t go to see “Candida.” Janet [Archer] says she got hold of the last scene for the first time: in fact, the whole play seems to have come off in an unprecedented manner. There is no hurry about the D’s D. It will not be produced until May; and it must run, successful or not, for eight weeks; so if you are back in June it will do. If you come back before it is produced, you will find me in a ferocious and damnable temper, as indeed I am at present. I bully Mrs [Kate] Salt brutally; and [Charles] Charrington says that though my lecture was fine, I never relaxed a fierce frown from one end of it to the other. No matter: I am no longer unhappy, and no longer happy: I am myself. I am gathering myself up for the rehearsals. It is close to midnight: I must stalk off into the path round the park, to embrace my true mistress the Night. I hope this letter will make the other Charlotte YELL with anguish—little enough to expiate my centuries of slavery & misery.

Wrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr !

GBS

76/ Reginald Golding Bright’s article THE GOSPEL OF “G.B.S.” contributed to the Weekly Sun

April 1898

. . . There remains “Candida,” and, for the sake of its purity and strength, one would willingly forget the remaining works—good, bad, and indifferent. It is because Mr Shaw has, for once, not been ashamed to figure as a man of sentiment that he has succeeded in writing a really beautiful play where he failed before through excess of brainishness. In Candida he has depicted the real product of the New Woman movement—a noble-minded, graceful woman of dignity and resource, strong where her husband is weak, a Christian Socialist. The author’s reasons for making the Rev. J. M. Morell, active member of the C.S.U. [Christian Social Union], the Guild of St Matthew, etc., a weak-kneed, windbag rhetorician are not obvious, but in every other respect the play is quite a faultless work of art. If only Mr Shaw would give himself up more frequently to this mood, the reproach that we have no serious drama in England would soon be a gibe of the past.

But which way do his thoughts naturally tend? “It was as Punch that I emerged from obscurity,” he tells his readers in one of his diverting prefaces, and they may be driven to the belief that he prefers to go down to posterity in the same role. Certainly they will not lack material for this view, since, within a few pages of each other, he has made elaborate defences of such parasites on the modern drama as the Censor of Plays and the actor-manager. After that, he who would pluck out the heart of Mr Shaw’s mystery must own himself beaten, but no one can afford to neglect the attempt. These plays, both in idea and treatment, inaugurate a new departure, and, if anyone should fear for their reception in the theatre, let him take comfort from the author’s paradoxical assertion that “it is quite possible for a piece to enjoy the most sensational success on the basis of a complete misunderstanding of its philosophy.” On this assumption a fortune should be in store for the manager who would hazard the production of any one of these plays—save “Candida.”

R. G. B.

77/ To William Archer

21st April 1898

When Eugene, with his apprehensive faculty raised to the highest sensitiveness by his emotional state, hears that long speech of Candida’s about the household, he takes the whole thing in, grasps for the first time what it really means, what the conditions of such love are, and how it is essentially the creature of limitations which are far transcended in his own nature. He sees at once that no such life and no such love are possible for him, and instantly leaves them all far behind him. To put it another way, he jumps to the position from which the Master builder [a character of Henrik Ibsen’s play with the same name] that it was all over with the building of happy homes for human beings. He looks at the comfort and sweetness and happiness that has just been placed before him at its best, and turns away from it, exclaiming with absolute conviction, “Life is nobler than that.” Thus Candida’s sympathy with his supposed sorrow is entirely thrown away. If she were to alter her decision and offer herself to him he would be unspeakably embarrassed and terrified. When he says “Out into the night with me,” he does not mean the night of despair and darkness, but the free air and holy starlight which is so much more natural an atmosphere to him than this stuffy fireside warmth of mothers and sisters and wives and so on. It may be that this exposition may seem to you to destroy all the pathos and sanity of the scene; but from no other point of view could it have been written. A perfect dramatic command, either of character or situation, can only be obtained from some point of view that transcends both. The absolute fitness which is the secret of the effectiveness of the ending of “Candida,” would be a mere sham if it meant nothing more than a success for Morell at the cost of a privation for Eugene. Further, any such privation would take all the point from Candida’s sub-consciousness of the real state of affairs; for you will observe that Candida knows all along perfectly well that she is no mate for Eugene, and instinctively relies on that solid fact to pull him through when he is going off, as she thinks, broken-hearted. The final touch of comedy is the femininely practical reason that she gives for their incompatibility.