Candida & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play. Bernard Shaw
because [Arthur Wing] Pinero is not ready with his commissioned play, sometimes because I am willing to forgo an advance, sometimes because Nature not submit wholly to the box office.
Now here you will at once detect an enormous assumption on my part that I am a man of genius. But what can I do—on what other assumption am I to proceed if I am to write plays at all? You will detect the further assumption that the public, which will still be the public twenty years hence, will nevertheless see feeling and reality where they see nothing now but mere intellectual swordplay and satire. But that is what always happens. . . .
G. Bernard Shaw
3/ To Reginald Golding Bright, a young theatre critic at that time and later a manager of London office of an American theatrical and literary agent and producer Elizabeth Marbury
2nd December 1894
Dear Sir
The best service I can do you is to take your notice and jot down on it without ceremony the comments which occur to me. You will find first certain alterations in black ink. In them I have tried to say, as well as I can off-hand, what you were trying to say: that is, since it was evident you were dodging round some point or other, I have considered the only point that there was to make, and have made it. It came quite easy when I had altered your statement about Frenchmen at large to what you really meant—the conventional stage Frenchman. Always find out rigidly and exactly what you mean, and never strike an attitude, whether national or moral or critical or anything else. You struck a national attitude when you wrote that about the Frenchman and Enlishman; and you struck a moral attitude when you wrote “She has sunk low enough in all conscience.” Get your facts right first: that is the foundation of all style, because style is the expression of yourself; and you cannot express yourself genuinely except on a basis of precise reality.
In red ink you will find some criticisms which you may confidently take as expressing what an experienced editor would think of your sample of work.
You have not at all taken in my recommendation to you to write a book. You say you are scarcely competent to write books just yet. That is just why I recommed you to learn. If I advised you to learn to skate, you would not reply that your balance was scarcely good enough yet. A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed, he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself. You will never write a good book until you have written some bad ones. If they have sent you my Scottish article, you will see that I began by writing some abominably bad criticisms. I wrote five long books before I started again on press work. William Archer wrote a long magnum opus on the life and works of Richard Wagner, a huge novel, and a book on the drama, besides an essay on [Henry] Irving and a good deal of leader work for a Scotch paper, before he began his victorious career on The World. He also perpetrated about four plays in his early days. (By the way, you mustn’t publish this information.) You must go through the mill, too; and you can’t possibly start too soon. Write a thousand words a day for the next five years for at least nine months every year. Read all the great critics—[John] Ruskin, Richard Wagner, [Gotthold Ephraim] Lessing, [Charles] Lamb and [William] Hazlitt. Get a ticket for the British Museum reading room, and live there as much as you can. Go to all the first-rate orchestral concerts and to the opera, as well as to the theatres. Join debating societies and learn to speak in public. Haunt little Sunday evening political meetings and exercise that accomplishment. Study men and politics in this way. As long as you stay in the office, try and be the smartest hand in it: I spent four and a half years in an office before I was twenty. Be a teetotaller; don’t gamble; don’t lend; don’t borrow; don’t for your life get married; make the attainment of EFFICIENCY your sole object for the next fifteen years; and if the City can teach you nothing more, or demands more time than you can spare from your apprenticeship, tell your father that you prefer to cut loose and starve, and do it. But it will take you at least a year or two of tough work before you will be able to build up for yourself either the courage or the right to take heroic measures. Finally, since I have given you all this advice, I add this crowning precept, the most valuable of all. NEVER TAKE ANYBODY’S ADVICE.
And now, to abandon the role of your guide, philosopher and friend, which I don’t propose to revert to again until you report progress in ten years or so, let me thank you for the paragraph in The Sun, which was quite right and appropriate. I have no more news at present, except that I have nearly finished a new play [Candida], the leading part in which I hope to see played by Miss Janet Achurch, of whose genius I have always had a very high opinion. It is quite a sentimental play, which I hope to find understood by women, if not by men; and it is so straightforward that I expect to find it pronounced a miracle of perversity. This is my fifth dramatic composition. The first was “Widowers’ Houses,” of Independent Theatre fame. The second was “The Philanderer,” a topical comedy in which the New Woman figured before Mr [Sydney] Grundy discovered her. The third was “Mrs Warren’s Profession,” a play with a purpose, the purpose being much the same as that of my celebrated letter to the Pall Mall Gazette on the Empire controversy. The fourth was “Arms and the Man,” which was so completely misunderstood that it made my reputation as a playwright both here and in New York. The Independent Theatre has already announced “Mrs Warren’s Profession” for its forthcoming season. “The Philanderer” was written originally for that society; but on its completion I threw it aside and wrote another more suitable for the purposes of the society—Mrs Warren. [Charles] Wyndham asked me to do something for him on seeing “Arms and the Man”; and I tried to persuade him to play “The Philanderer”; but whilst the project was under consideration, Wyndham made such a decisive success with “[The Case of] Rebellious Susan” that he resolved to follow up the vein of comedy opened by Henry Arthur Jones to the end before venturing upon the Shavian quicksand. But this involved so long a delay that I withdrew the play, and am now looking round to see whether the world contains another actor who can philander as well as Wyndham. As I have always said that if I did not write six plays before I was forty I would never write one after, I must finish the work now in hand and another as well before the 26th July, 1896; but I hope to do much more than that, since I have managed to get through the present play within three months, during which I have had to take an active part in the Schoolboard and Vestry elections, to keep up my work in the Fabian Society, to deliver nearly two dozen lectures in London and the provinces, and to fire off various articles and criticisms. The fact is, I took a good holiday this autumn in Germany, Italy, and in Surrey; and I accumulated a stack of health which I am dissipating at a frightful rate. The Christmas holidays will come just in time to save my life.
If any of this stuff is of use to you for paragraphing purposes—and remember that the world will not stand too much Bernard Shaw—you are welcome to work it up by all means when it suits you. Only, don’t quote it as having been said by me. That is an easy way out which I bar. I find that you have got an atrociously long letter out of me. I have been blazing away on the platform this evening for an hour and a half, and ought to be in bed instead of clattering at this machine.
Yours, half asleep,
G. Bernard Shaw
4/ To an English stage actress and actor-manager Janet Achurch
22nd December 1894
Here I am, taking the sea air with Wallas. The sea air travels at the rate to of 120 miles an hour and goes through clothes, flesh, bone, spirit tut and all, so that one walks against it like a naked soul, exhilarated, but teeming at the nose. We are in an immense hotel, with 180 rooms and few guests, who have nothing to do, and are miserable exceedingly having come down expressly to be happy. I shall begin a new play presently. The last having been so happily inspired by you, I look about Folkestone for some new inspiratrice, but in vain: every woman in the place either strikes me cheerfully prosaic at a glance, or else makes me boil with ten-philander-power cynicism. Everybody is quoting [Robert Louis] Stevenson’s dictum about the height of happiness being attained when you live in the open air with the woman you love. Convinced as I am that love is hopelessly vulgar and happiness insufferably tedious to those who have once gained the heights, I nevertheless find that these material heights—these windswept cliffs—make me robustly vulgar, greedy