CANDIDA” is a latter-day essay in feminine psychology after the fashion of “A Doll’s House,” “Monna Vanna” and “Hedda Gabler.” Candida Morell, the heroine, is a clergyman’s wife, who, lacking an acquaintance with the philosophies and face to face with the problem of earning her daily bread, might have gone the muddy way of Mrs. Warren. As it is, she exercises her fascinations upon a moony poet, arouses him to the mad-dog stage of passion, drives her husband to the verge of suicide—and then, with bland complacency and unanswerable logic, reads both an excellent lecture, turns the poet out of doors, and falls into her husband’s arms, still chemically pure. It is an edifying example of the influence of mind over matter.
Arnold Daly’s heroic production of the play, at the little Berkeley Lyceum, in New York City, served as the foundation of the present vogue of Shaw in the United States, and in consequence “Candida” has been the theme of many metropolitan and provincial philosophers and critics. At the start the vast majority of them muddled the play hopelessly. Candida, they decided, was a sublime type of the virtuous wife and mother—a good woman whose thoughts were as innocent as her acts. It remained for Shaw—and he is usually his own best critic—to set them right. Candida, he explained, was a “very immoral female ... who, without brains and strength of mind ... would be a wretched slattern or voluptuary.” In other words (as he tried to make clear) she remained virtuous, not because there was aught of the vestal or altruist about her, but because she had discovered that it was possible to enjoy all of the ecstatic excitement of a fall from grace, and still, by holding back at the actual brink of the precipice, to retain, in full measure, her reputation as a pattern of fidelity and virtue. She solved the problem of being immoral and respectable at the same time.
The play is well built and thoroughly balanced and mature. Its every scene shows that it is the work of a dramatist whose genius has been mellowed and whose hand has been made sure by experience. The action moves with that certain, natural air peculiar to many of Ibsen’s plays. The characters are not sketches, but definitive, finished portraits. They are not obvious types, perhaps, but even the poet, with all his extravagances, is strangely human.
The Rev. James Morell, Candida’s husband, is a Christian-socialist of a sort not uncommon on either side of the Atlantic. He has a parish in an unfashionable part of London, and beside the usual futilities of a conscientious clergyman’s daily labor, finds time to make frequent addresses to the masses and classes upon the problems of the hour. In his make-up, there is much of the unconscious make-believe of the actor off the stage, though his own belief in himself is unshaken. Public speaking seems to have this uncanny effect upon many men. Beginning in all sincerity, they gradually lay stress upon the manner of saying a thing at the expense of the matter. Their aim is to make an effect by means of the spoken word and in the end, without realizing it, they become stagey and unnatural. Such a man is Morell. By no means, it will be observed, is he to be mistaken for a hypocrite.
Into his home, by some mad, altruistic impulse, he brings Eugene Marchbanks, a moon-struck young man with the romantic ideals and day dreams of a medieval Edgar Allan Poe and the practical common-sense of an infant. Eugene is eighteen. He inhabits a world a mile or so above the pink clouds of the sunset and writes vague, immaterial verses of the sort that all of us invent and some of us set down in pen-and-ink when we are young. At the start, in all probability, Candida regards him as a nuisance. But by the time the play opens she has already lured him on to the rocks. It is pleasant to sit by the fire and listen to his hazy verses. He is a relief from the honest beefiness of Morell. And so Candida has her entertainment and Eugene, poor boy! falls in love with her.
Now, loving another man’s wife, since the beginning of written history, has always presupposed or developed a rather ungenial attitude toward that other man, and Eugene, studying Morell, comes to the conclusion that he is a mere vaporish windbag—a silly bundle of stale platitudes, trite ponderosities and pulpit puerilities. Having the valor of youth, he makes open confession.
“I love your wife,” he says to Morell, “... a woman with a great soul craving reality, truth, freedom, and being fed on metaphors, sermons, stale perorations, mere rhetoric. Do you think a woman’s soul can live on your talent for preaching?...”
Morell is staggered, not by Eugene’s frank avowal of his love for Candida, but by the other things he has said. What if it is true that she is stifled by the atmosphere of the Morell home? What if it is true that she has tired of being shadow and drudge to an obscure, over-earnest clergyman in a semi-slum and has turned her fancy toward the poet?
“It is easy, terribly easy,” he says pathetically, “to break a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work. Take care of what you are doing. Take care....”
It is a time of torment for the preacher and he sees his house of cards trembling as if for a fall. Eugene, all the while, is defiant and belligerent. He adds the virtue of rescuing Candida to the pleasure of possessing her, and the two together work his swift undoing.
“Send for her!” he roars. “Send for her and let her choose between us!”
Aha, my masters! what a scene is this!—what a scene of mad passion for the gallery to linger over breathlessly, for the orchestra to greet with stares and for the critics to belabor and dissect in the morning!
Candida comes in and the two bid for her heart and helping hand.
“I have nothing to offer you,” says Morell, with proud humility, “but my strength for your defense, my honesty of purpose for your surety, my ability and industry for your livelihood, and my authority and position for your dignity. That is all it becomes a man to offer a woman.”
“And you, Eugene?” asks Candida quietly. “What do you offer?”
“My weakness!” exclaims the poet passionately. “My desolation! My heart’s need!”
“That’s a good bid,” says Candida judicially. “Now I know how to make my choice.”
Then she pauses and looks curiously from one to the other, as if weighing them. Morell, whose lofty confidence has once more changed into heart-breaking dread, loses all power over himself and in a suffocating voice—the appeal bursting from the depths of his anguish—cries “Candida!”
“Coward!” shrieks Eugene, divining the victory in the surrender. And Candida—O most virtuous of wives!—says blandly, “I give myself to the weaker of the two” and falls into her husband’s arms. It is a situation that struck the first night audience at the Berkeley Lyceum as one eminently agreeable and refined.
As Shaw explains, the poet, despite the fact that “his face whitens like steel in a furnace that cannot melt it,” is a gainer by Candida’s choice. He enters the Morell home a sentimental boy yearning for an emotional outlet. He leaves it a man who has shouldered his cross and felt the unutterable stimulus of sacrifice. Candida makes a man of him, says Shaw, by showing him his strength. David finds that he must do without Uriah’s wife.
The dramatist makes Candida essay a most remarkable analysis of her own motives. It is after Morell has reproached her, sick at heart and consumed by a nameless fear, to learn if Eugene’s fiery onslaught has been born of any unrest that may be stirring within her. She explains freely and frankly, with more genuine honesty and self-revelation, perhaps, than she knows. Eugene, she says, is like a shivering beggar asking for her shawl. He needs love but scarcely knows it, and she conceives it her duty to teach him the value of love, that no worse woman may teach him its pains later on.
“Will he forgive me,” she says, “for not teaching him myself? For abandoning him to the bad women for the sake of my goodness—my purity, as you call it? Ah, James, how little you understand me, to talk of your confidence in my goodness and purity. I would give them both to Eugene as willingly as I would give my shawl to a beggar dying of cold, if there was nothing else to restrain me....”
“Here,” says Huneker, “is one of the most audacious speeches in any modern play. It has been passed over by most critics who saw in ‘Candida’ merely an attempt to make a clergyman ridiculous, not realizing that the theme is profound and far-reaching, the question put being no more or no less than: Shall a married man expect his wife’s love without working for it, without deserving it?” To this may be added another and more familiar question: May not the woman who lives in the odor of sanctity be more thoroughly immoral, at heart, than the worst of her erring sisters?
The play has a number of extremely exciting “grand” scenes and in general is admirably suitable for public performance. The minor characters are but three in number—Candida’s wine-buying vulgarian of a father, Morell’s curate and Proserpine, his typewriter. Proserpine is admirable, and her hopeless love for Morell—a complaint not uncommon among the women he knows—gives the play a note of homely sentiment that keeps it to earth.
As a piece of workmanship “Candida” is Shaw at his best; as a study in the workings of the feminine mind it deserves to rank with some of the best plays the modern stage has to offer.