George Bernard Shaw’s early works are problem or issue plays, the trouble being that the problems or issues seem so silly and shallow to us, 130 years later, that it’s hard to care about them very much. Also Shaw just doesn’t have the giant depth of Ibsen or the fierce intensity of Strindberg, the dazzling wit of Wilde or the humanity of Chekhov – so his plays feel, to me, like moderately attractive, wordy rambles.

This one is on that perennial subject, which goes back to the Greeks and still fuels countless soaps and novels today, the Love Triangle. This one is between:

1. James Morell, a 40-something vicar who works in the East End (his house overlooks Victoria Park)
2. his wife, 33-year-old Candida
3. and a pathetic drip of a pimply poet, 18-year-old Eugene Marchbanks, who mistakes teenage ineptitude and shyness for finer feelings, and is convinced that Candida really loves him

As with ‘Arms and the Man’ the supposed narrative, let alone the ‘issues’ the play ‘deals with’ (what does a woman want? what is marriage for? yadda yadda yadda) scarcely ruffled my mind. The most interesting thing about ‘Candida’ is the astonishing detail of Shaw’s set descriptions and stage descriptions.

The play opens with three very densely packed pages, comprising 1,200 words, describing the vicinity and contents of Victoria Park in East London, before zooming in to describe the exterior of Morell’s dwelling place, St. Dominic’s Parsonage. He gives us a minute description of the drawing room which is the set for most of the play before finally alighting, like the camera in an old-fashioned movie, on the male protagonist himself and proceeding to summarise the man Morell, his character and appearance, his career and attitudes, in prose which reads just like a novel. This is just part of this long description:

The Reverend James Mavor Morell is a Christian Socialist clergyman of the Church of England, and an active member of the Guild of St. Matthew and the Christian Social Union. A vigorous, genial, popular man of forty, robust and goodlooking, full of energy, with pleasant, hearty, considerate manners, and a sound, unaffected voice, which he uses with the clean, athletic articulation of a practised orator, and with a wide range and perfect command of expression. He is a first rate clergyman, able to say what he likes to whom he likes, to lecture people without setting himself up against them, to impose his authority on them without humiliating them, and to interfere in their business without impertinence. His well-spring of spiritual enthusiasm and sympathetic emotion has never run dry for a moment: he still eats and sleeps heartily enough to win the daily battle between exhaustion and recuperation triumphantly. Withal, a great baby, pardonably vain of his powers and unconsciously pleased with himself. He has a healthy complexion, a good forehead, with the brows somewhat blunt, and the eyes bright and eager, a mouth resolute, but not particularly well cut, and a substantial nose, with the mobile, spreading nostrils of the dramatic orator, but, like all his features, void of subtlety.

On their first appearances the text stops to give equally as detailed descriptions of the two other main characters, as well as ancillaries such as Morell’s snippy secretary, Miss Proserpine Garnett, and Candida’s comically Cockney father, Mr Burgess.

Mr. Burgess enters unannounced. He is a man of sixty, made coarse and sordid by the compulsory selfishness of petty commerce, and later on softened into sluggish bumptiousness by overfeeding and commercial success. A vulgar, ignorant, guzzling man, offensive and contemptuous to people whose labour is cheap, respectful to wealth and rank, and quite sincere and without rancour or envy in both attitudes. Finding him without talent, the world has offered him no decently paid work except ignoble work, and he has become in consequence, somewhat hoggish. But he has no suspicion of this himself, and honestly regards his commercial prosperity as the inevitable and socially wholesome triumph of the ability, industry, shrewdness and experience in business of a man who in private is easygoing, affectionate and humorously convivial to a fault. Corporeally, he is a podgy man, with a square, clean shaven face and a square beard under his chin; dust coloured, with a patch of grey in the centre, and small watery blue eyes with a plaintively sentimental expression, which he transfers easily to his voice by his habit of pompously intoning his sentences.

What these enormous descriptions convey, I think, is Shaw’s lofty superiority to his own characters. His brisk businesslike dismissal of them then carries in into the stage directions which often subtly mock and undermine them.

And it’s this (on the admittedly slender basis of having read just two of his plays) which gives Shaw’s plays their superficiality. He himself undermines their seriousness at every turn, not with comedy – as in Wilde – but with a kind of robust good-humoured mockery which is rarely actually funny but is facetious and unserious enough to prevent his characters acquiring real gravitas.

Act 1

We are introduced to the reverend Morell and his secretary, Proserpine, also to a young Oxford clergyman Morell has picked up, the Reverend Alexander Mill.

Then his father-in-law Mr Burgess arrives to make it up after they had an argument. Morell lost his temper with Burgess for winning a contract with the council by dint of paying his employees starvation wages. As a result Morell shamed the Guardians out of accepting Burgess’s bid and Burgess was miffed. Now Burgess announces that he’s got most of the work automated and raised the pay of the remaining workers. Morell is briefly overjoyed before Burgess explains that he only did it to win the contract i.e. not out of the kindness of his heart.

Onto this scene enters Morell’s wife Candida, aged 33, who’s arrived home from a trip somewhere. She’s arrived back along with Eugene Marchbanks, a slight, weedy, effeminate, shy, nervous scribbledehoy.

After a bit of politeness, Burgess and Candida exit leaving Morell and Marchbanks by themselves. Dialogue in which Marchbanks manages to massively insult Morell, by telling him all his ideas about life are wrong and that his wife doesn’t love him. Marchbanks is, we are told, a poet who believes all kinds of poetical things about love are true. He phrases them quite persuasively but the nub of the scene is he manages to anger even the kind-hearted tolerant Morell who eventually grabs him by the lapels and shouts at him to leave his house. Comically, it’s at this precise moment that Candida enters and insists that Eugene simply must stay for lunch, mustn’t he, John?

So that’s Act 1 but what impressed me, as usual, was the detail of the dialogue instructions.

(Eugene chafes intolerantly, repudiating the worth of his happiness. Morell, deeply insulted, controls himself with fine forbearance, and continues steadily, with great artistic beauty of delivery.)

MARCHBANKS: (unimpressed and remorseless, his boyish crudity of assertion telling sharply against Morell’s oratory)

MORELL: (redoubling his force of style under the stimulus of his genuine feeling and Eugene’s obduracy).

I’m fascinated by Shaw’s obsessive detailing of every aspect of his characters’ personality, history, gestures and tones of voice, which leaves almost nothing to the interpreter of the actor of the character, the director of the play or the reader.

Act 2

Same scene, later the same day, Eugene and Miss Proserpine. Eugene spills his naive thoughts about love:

MARCHBANKS: All the love in the world is longing to speak; only it dare not, because it is shy, shy, shy. That is the world’s tragedy.

Eugene keeps plugging away at Proserpine until he gets her to admit that she has feelings for Morell and loses her temper with his childish persistence. Which is just the moment when bluff old Mr Burgess enters. He, also, has an argument with Miss P who calls him a fat head – then realises she’s gone too far and repents when the bell goes and she exits.

Burgess tells Eugene he thinks Morell is mad because earlier this morning he called him a ‘scoundrel’. This obviously plays to Eugene’s recent argument with Morell.

Morell enters and Burgess complains that Proserpina called him a fat head. Morell laughs and tells him to forget it. Burgess says (aside) to Eugene, Told you so – mad! The scene is all about manual labour. When Morell says that Candida is filling the lamps both Burgess and Eugene are outraged, Eugene in particular can’t bear to think of her sullying her pretty white hands etc.

In the event Candida enters carrying one of the lamps she just filled which leads to melodramatic wailing from Eugene who says he has the horrors. Burgess comically thinks he’s talking about delirium tremens till Candida clarifies that Eugene is talking about the poetic horrors. Candida drags Eugene off to chop onions, leaving time for Burgess and Proserpine to spat a bit more. P wins and Burgess goes into the garden in a huff.

When Candida returns she makes Morell stop writing and come and sit and talk with her. She tells him the obvious fact that Prosperine is in love with her, just like all his previous secretaries – and the congregations at his church only come because he’s such a damn good sermon giver, a great performer, that it’s better than a play. But none of them believe in God or practice what he tells them.

This all leads to the notion that Morell receives love and adulation from his secretaries and flocks and yet love is desperately wanting for the one person who needs it, Eugene! She goes even further by revealing she knows that Eugene is ready to fall in love with her. Morell is shocked and upset that his wife is attracted to the young man he laid hands on for saying he loved her. Some kind of power is taking Candida away from him.

She goes even further in saying she hopes Eugene finds out about love from a good (kind, noble) woman and doesn’t degrade himself by finding out from a bad, fallen woman. And now she horrifies Morell by saying she would sacrifice her purity and duty for Eugene.

CANDIDA: Ah, James, how little you understand me, to talk of your confidence in my goodness and purity! I would give them both to poor Eugene as willingly as I would give my shawl to a beggar dying of cold, if there were nothing else to restrain me.

Candida’s mockery, and even her phraseology, directly echo Eugene’s, and when she clinches her speech by giving him a mocking kiss, it breaks Morell’s heart. He angrily pushes her away just as Eugene and Burgess re-enter, to be amazed by the couple arguing.

Marchbanks sits on the sofa and Candida goes to cheerily sit next to him but he is scandalised. His says he is upset because he can see how much Candida has hurt Morell.

MARCHBANKS (aside to her). It is your cruelty. I hate cruelty. It is a horrible thing to see one person make another suffer.

Burgess and Marchbanks are remonstrating with Candida when Lexy, Morell’s young assistant enters. He has a message from the Guild of St. Matthew. They have booked a hall and put up posters advertising that Morell will speak to them, but now…he has sent a telegram saying he won’t go and won’t speak.

I didn’t understand the timing of this. If Morell is meant to have had some change of heart because of his argument with Candida, that’s only just happened, and there’s been no time for him to send anyone a telegram. So it must have been a result of his earlier conversation with Eugene, where Eugene attacked his superficial speechifying and said he knew nothing of love.

All the other characters are disconcerted and amazed. Morell always keeps his speaking engagements. And letting a group down on the very evening of his talk is unprecedented. Candida tells him they’ll all come along to support him, they’ll sit on the stage and everything.

At which point Morell calls Miss Prosperine in and tells her to telegraph the Guild of St. Matthew to tell them that he will speak after all. Burgess is reluctant to attend until Morell tells him the chairman is on the Works Committee of the County Council and has some influence in the matter of contracts at which point, with comic effect, he reverses his decision. He’ll require Miss P and Lexy, as well.

But when Candida renews her offer to attend, Morell tells her no: she must stay at home and entertain Eugene. He goes so far as to say he is afraid of Eugene’s criticism and won’t be able to express himself, won’t speak freely if Eugene is watching.

MORELL: I should be afraid to let myself go before Eugene: he is so critical of sermons. (Looking at him.) He knows I am afraid of him: he told me as much this morning. Well, I shall show him how much afraid I am by leaving him here in your custody, Candida.
MARCHBANKS (to himself, with vivid feeling): That’s brave. That’s beautiful.

So…so he’s leaving Candida and Marchbanks alone together as a kind of test… This along with the characterisation of Candida, in fact the central triangle between Morell, Marchbanks and Candida is comprehensible just deeply improbable.

Act 3

Same scene past ten that evening. Eugene has been reading Candida poetry for two hours, ever since Morell left the house. With the result that Candida is slumped in an armchair gazing hypnotised at the tip of a poker she’s holding. Eugene stops reading and asks her what she thinks and has to ask several times to wake her from her trance. He is a bit hurt that she’s hasn’t been listening, she is remorseful.

She asks him to come closer. She is in an armchair and he lies on the hearthrug with his head on her lap. He says he has only one thing to say and repeats her name in an impassioned poetic way, says that repeating her name is like praying. She is kindly but also shrewd and sensible at the same time, asks if praying this prayer makes him happy and he says yes.

I’d have thought all this was advanced flirting and this is just the moment when when Morell comes in and sees them together. When Morell says the others have gone to dine somewhere Candida goes out to tell the maid she can go to bed, leaving Morell alone with Marchbanks.

Morell interrogates Eugene, in effect asking him whether he has seduced his wife, though it’s all expressed more obtusely than that. Eugene says his wife maintained a ‘flaming sword’ between them. The conflict between them is populated by subtle sentiments, clever turns of debate and conflicting interpretations of phrases, but the entire situation seems preposterous. This clergyman is allowing his young guest to see whether he can tempt and seduce his wife away from him…

To put it another way, both of these men dress up the process of falling in love, being in love, being married, maintaining a relationship, in a bluster of metaphors and allusions which are presented as sophisticated dialogue but feel really tiresome. The general idea is Marchbanks speaks in absurdly naive, over-the-top poetic flights of fancy while Morell is the straight man, providing the thumping bathos of reality.

MARCHBANKS (Dreamily): A woman like that has divine insight: she loves our souls, and not our follies and vanities and illusions, or our collars and coats, or any other of the rags and tatters we are rolled up in. (He reflects on this for an instant; then turns intently to question Morell.) What I want to know is how you got past the flaming sword that stopped me.
MORELL (meaningly): Perhaps because I was not interrupted at the end of ten minutes.
MARCHBANKS (taken aback): What!
MORELL: Man can climb to the highest summits; but he cannot dwell there long.
MARCHBANKS: It’s false: there can he dwell for ever and there only. It’s in the other moments that he can find no rest, no sense of the silent glory of life. Where would you have me spend my moments, if not on the summits?

There’s an interlude of broad comedy when Burgess, Lexy and Proserpine stumble into the living room having come from a champagne dinner bought by Burgess, each one a bit tipsy which exaggerates their basic characters.

Anyway, this larking about is a comic interlude before the climax of the play, arrived at in a roundabout, laboured way. This Great Climax is that Morell and Marchbanks both ask Candida to choose between them. Shaw makes a sort of feminist point that Candida finds both of them absurd, finding Marchbanks a pathetic child (sat on the sofa ‘like a guilty schoolboy on his best behaviour’) but just as disappointed by her husband who hesitates to assert that he is ‘master’ of the house.

Both men make set-piece speeches bidding for her love before Candida announces her decision. She says she gives herself to ‘the weaker of the two’. Morell, in his convention, literal way interprets this to mean Marchbanks who throughout the play and in his arguments with Morell has painted himself as a feeble weakling up against strong determined Morell, and I think the audience is intended to go along with this interpretation, too.

However, it is a conceit or gag or ploy. Marchbanks grasps it immediately but Candida has to spell it out to Morell that by this phrase she in fact means him. Then she delivers the Author’s Message which is that Morell only appears strong because all his life he has had other people (mostly women) to support him.

CANDIDA: Ask James’s mother and his three sisters what it cost to save James the trouble of doing anything but be strong and clever and happy. Ask ME what it costs to be James’s mother and three sisters and wife and mother to his children all in one. Ask Prossy and Maria how troublesome the house is even when we have no visitors to help us to slice the onions. Ask the tradesmen who want to worry James and spoil his beautiful sermons who it is that puts them off … I build a castle of comfort and indulgence and love for him, and stand sentinel always to keep little vulgar cares out. I make him master here, though he does not know it…

And once it’s pointed out to him, Morell instantly agrees, with rather sickening Victorian sentimentality.

MORELL (quite overcome, kneeling beside her chair and embracing her with boyish ingenuousness): It’s all true, every word. What I am you have made me with the labour of your hands and the love of your heart! You are my wife, my mother, my sisters: you are the sum of all loving care to me.

Somehow, by some alchemy which might work in the theatre but rings very hollow on the page, Candida’s choice and her explanation transform Marchbanks. Instead of the pathetic weed he’s been for all the play up to now, he is at a stroke transformed into a man. He even sounds like a man:

MARCHBANKS (with the ring of a man’s voice—no longer a boy’s—in the words). I know the hour when it strikes. I am impatient to do what must be done.

He declares that this morning he was 18 whereas now, having gone through whatever process Shaw has in mind, he feels ‘as old as the world’, and the play closes in some kind of climax of Victorian high-mindedness which I’ll quote in full to give you the preposterous pompous flavour:

CANDIDA (going to him, and standing behind him with one hand caressingly on his shoulder): Eighteen! Will you, for my sake, make a little poem out of the two sentences I am going to say to you? And will you promise to repeat it to yourself whenever you think of me?
MARCHBANKS (without moving): Say the sentences.
CANDIDA: When I am thirty, she will be forty-five. When I am sixty, she will be seventy-five.
MARCHBANKS (turning to her): In a hundred years, we shall be the same age. But I have a better secret than that in my heart. Let me go now. The night outside grows impatient.

‘The night outside grows impatient,’ yes.

Thoughts

An Ibsen play moves through a carefully structured series of revelations which shake the audience and the characters’ sense of themselves. Strindberg’s characters torment each other with an intensity which bites the imagination. But Shaw describes his characters in such excruciating detail on their first appearance that he destroys any sense of mystery or surprise as he puts his totally-explained mannequins through the motions.

Long before the end I was exasperated with the footling histrionic Marchbanks, but also immensely frustrated with Morell’s inability to simply kick the cuckoo out of his nest. I think we’re intended to sympathise with Candida, I think she’s meant to be a Modern Woman and a variation on Ibsen’s great Nora Helmer. But she, and the play in general, have absolutely none of Ibsen’s depth. Instead, her insistence on playing up to Marchbanks, her insistence at the end of Act 1 that he stays for lunch even though he and her husband have just come to blows; her toying with him at the start of Act 3, all this just seems wilful and silly and superficial, especially when it becomes plain how much it’s hurting the husband she claims to care for.

All three of them seem to hurt each other but not for the deep reasons of Ibsen or Strindberg but just because Shaw wills it so for our entertainment. The reversal on the penultimate page where Candida proves that Morell is the weaker of the two doesn’t feel like the revelation of a great truth, the solution of an issue we can all relate to, but a cheap gag at the end of a rather tiresome entertainment.

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Credit

‘Candida’ by George Bernard Shaw was first staged in 1894 and published in 1898 as part of Shaw’s ‘Plays Pleasant’ volume, which also included ‘Arms and the Man’, ‘You Never Can Tell’, and ‘The Man of Destiny’. I read the 1946 Penguin paperback edition, 1964 reprint.

Related links

• Candida online

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