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The Secret of a Successful Drama
“The Secret of a Successful Drama,” By Helen Bartlett Bridgman —
a review of a production of Candida, a play by Bernard Shaw —
in Good Housekeeping (June 1905) : 632-633
U Chicago copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
Cornell copy/scan (via google books) : link
paragraph numeration added, to assist in transcription and referencing.
- During a long disastrous theatrical season, one little play held its own in New York without let or hindrance, in an auditorium small, ill-ventilated, uncomfortable and without the slightest attraction in the way of mechanical effects. This play was a comparatively unknown domestic drama, Candida. Previous to the fall of 1903 a few cultivated people in this country had read the play, possibly a few others had seen it on the stage in England, but by the great American public both Bernard Shaw and his literary offspring had never been heard of.
- Candida is a boldly simple play, preserving the Greek unities of time and place, and rich only in wit, philosophy and human nature. The persons of the drama are six in number and of these but half are vital to the story, though the others are entirely relevant and capitally drawn as well as admirably acted. There are three acts, representing the morning, afternoon and evening of a critical day in a London middle class household; there is no change of scene or costume from the opening to the close; it is all as quiet and unforced in outward form as any ordinary day in any ordinary home. Underneath this unobtrusive exterior there exists a strenuous issue, the subtle enactment of which, by a company of extraordinarily capable players, constitutes a great matrimonial lesson. That is why the theater, day after day and night after night, was filled to the doors. Candida has appealed with tremendous force to the American woman.
- In this play the curtain rises on the Reverend James Morell, hard at work in northeast London on his endless lectures and sermons, as much absorbed in this occupation as any American business man in the pursuit of the elusive dollar; whose double, indeed, he might be, except for that slight pomposity of expression which goes with the cloth, even though the incumbent be a man of socialistic tendencies, working among the so-called plain people. Candida, whose advent we look forward to with keen anticipation, caught as she is in the whirl of general masculine approval, is momentarily expected from the country, to the delight of her husband, who is extremely fond and proud of her, though accepting her devotion as a matter of course. There are two other important inmates of the household: Proserpine, the stenographer, a keen, snappy maiden lady, secretly adoring her master and jealous of his wife; and a young poet, Eugene Marchbanks, estranged from his parents and discovered one night by Morell sleeping upon the embankment, not knowing enough of the practicalities to keep himself alive.
- This boy, only eighteen, has grown to love Candida, whose kindly, sympathetic and noticeably maternal heart goes out to him as to a friendless child, with possibly a hint of something more. Marchbanks is shy, sensitive, awkward, but he does love truth, and so he boldly tells the unsuspecting clergyman of the situation — that he loves his wife. In the moment, first of incredulity, then of rage, brutishness gets ahead of convention, and Candida’s husband attempts to strangle Candida’s lover. The entrance of Candida herself interrupts a nasty scene. Apparently oblivious of the state of things, the woman quietly adjusts the necktie which she perceives is awry and smooths the rumpled hair, causing the grateful boy to kiss her hand and exclaim, “I am the happiest of men.”
- The great scene in the second act, which has been discussed till the skyscrapers have rung with the echoes, is that in which Candida, kneeling affectionately by her husband before the fire, rallies him, first on the fact that his success in the pulpit is not on account of his eloquence and ideas, but because of the adoration of the women in the congregation, and then proceeds to tell him that she knows Eugene to be in love with herself, though she believes him quite unconscious of the fact. Finally, in speaking of the boy’s heart-hunger, how he has never been loved by anybody, either father, mother, brothers or sisters, [633] while her own husband has been spoiled with love; how it distresses her to think he may sometime be taught love by a bad woman and then will never forgive her for not letting him learn it from one who was good; she winds up with these words: “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. Put your trust in my love for you, James, for if that went I should care very little for your sermons — mere phrases that you cheat yourself and others with every day.”
- The shock that went through the audience, as well as the Reverend James Mavor Morell, when that phrase about the shawl and the beggar was uttered, is only to be compared to the general inability to perceive their meaning.
- In the concluding scene of the drama, after permitting things to drift, Candida assumes an attitude of just indignation. Because Marchbanks and Morell agree that she shall choose between them, she considers herself put up at auction, and with cutting irony asks each what he will bid. In the meantime, she sums up her own excellent qualities and achievements as the mistress of Morell’s home: how she has kept his house attractive with but one servant; stood between him and importunate tradesmen; looked carefully after the children; been as nearest of kin not less than bond wife to him; and generally built “a castle of comfort and indulgence and love for him” — while his only anxiety in case she should leave him is, what will become of her?
- Candida decides to stay by her husband, saying that she gives herself “to the weaker of the two.” The story is told in a new, piquant, twentieth century way, with high technical skill and infinite humor, and the modern woman rises to it as a trout to the fly. It is the old story of the overworked husband; the wife who misses her romance, and the friend who understands.
—
- Does not the lesson lie deeper? Is not Mr Shaw trying to bring out the transcendent power of the passion of motherly pity in a lofty type of woman? May this not be a plea for good women to be allowed to exercise their influence upon men, to teach them by contrast the difference between a good woman and an inferior one who will drag them down?
[Editor.
What a strange editorial intervention!
The story brings to (this) mind Kenneth Fuessle, his “The Wife of the Man of God,” The Smart Set (October 1921) : 31-40
archive.org (digitized from microfilm) : link
another scan, also archive.org : link
Here, as in her 1925 novel The Last Passion, seems to be much self knowledge and (bitter) experience.
2 July 2025