Not only with such interpretations, but even with Shaw's own dissection of his greatest play, I find it quite impossible to sympathize or to agree. Shaw seems merely to be taking a fling at the “Candidamaniacs,” as he called the play's admirers; his “analysis” strikes me as a batch of Shavian half-truths, rather than a fair estimate of the play's true significance. In answer to Mr. Huneker's question à propos of Candida's famous “shawl” speech, Shaw wrote:

Candida quickly divines that Marchbanks is “falling in love with her,” and whilst fully conscious of her charms, she is equally conscious of the evil that may be wrought by unscrupulous use of them. She has too much respect for Marchbanks' passion to insult him with virtuous indignation. Her maternal insight enables her to sympathize with him in his aspirations and in his struggles.

Théâtre Royal du Parc, Brussels. Preceded by a conférence on The Theatre of Bernard Shaw,
by M. A. Hamon. Four “Matinées Littéraires,” February 7th, 14th, 17th, 21st, 1907.
First production of any of Shaw's plays in the French language.

It is quite true that Candida's standards are instinctively natural, not conventionally ethical: “Put your trust in my love, James, not in my conscience,” is her eminently sound point of view. It is her desire to save Eugene from future pain, to show him quite gently the hopelessness of his passion, that leads her to “seduce” him into perfect self-expression, to make clear to him that he is a “foolish boy” and that her love is not the inevitable reward for the triumph of his logic. Marchbanks' magnificent bid of “his soul's need” does not win her, because she loves Morell. Taught by Candida to recognize the difference between poetic vision and prosaic actuality, Marchbanks realizes that his hour has struck: it is the end of his youth. He has made the inevitable Shavian discovery that service, not happiness, is the nobler aim in life; and this episode in his soul's history, as Friedrich Düsel suggests, should be entitled, “Wie aus einem Knaben ein Mann wird.” He has learnt to do without happiness, not because he has been completely cured of love, but because he has learnt that his own love soars far above the unideal plane of Burgess—or is it bourgeois?—respectability. This, indeed, is the “secret in the poet's heart”; otherwise the golden-winged god of dreams shrivels up into a pitiful shape of egoism. Candida is a miracle of candour and sympathy; she lacks the one essential—true comprehension of his love. Possessing some sort of spiritual affinity with the Virgin of the Assumption, she lacks the faintest sympathy or concern with the art of Titian; feeling some sort of sympathy with Marchbanks and what is to her his comedy of calf-love, she lacks any true comprehension of the fineness and spirituality of his passion.[178]

Whatever interpretation may be adopted, this drama of disillusion is a work of true genius. In a series of productions by the Independent Theatre in the English provinces in the spring of 1897, and again in 1898, Janet Achurch (Mrs. Charles Charrington) “created” the rôle of Candida; the cast was notable, the parts of Morell and Marchbanks being taken by Mr. Charles Charrington and Mr. Courtenay Thorpe respectively. Doubtless Janet Achurch's interpretation of Candida as the serene clairvoyante remains unequalled to-day, even by Agnes Sorma or Lili Petri. The play has been patronizingly spoken of as an amusing little comedy; Oliver Herford, the humorist, hailed it with great enthusiasm as a “problem-farce”! But Candida has always appealed to me, as to Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, “not only as the noblest work of Mr. Shaw, but as one of the noblest, if not the noblest, of modern plays: a most square and manly piece of moral truth.”

The Devil's Disciple is the fourth and last play in the category of authentically dramatic pieces, ranking just below Candida in the subtlety of its character-delineation and the magnetic force of its appeal. The play had its genesis in a conversation between Shaw and that remarkable romantic actor, William Terriss. In Shaw's words:

The spontaneity and naturalness which characterize the dialogue of Shaw's plays are the results, in part, of his habit of writing his plays on scraps of paper at odd times. And in the case of The Devil's Disciple, Shaw achieved the incomparable feat of writing a brilliant play and “looking pleasant” at one and the same time! “A young lady I know,” relates Shaw, “wanted to make a portrait of me, sitting on the corner of a table, which is a favourite attitude of mine. So I wrote the play in a notebook to fill up the time.”

In that mock-modest preface, On Diabolonian Ethics, Shaw has confessed his indebtedness to literary history and openly acknowledged his thefts from the past. But in one place he quietly asserts that he has put something original into this play. “The Devil's Disciple has, in truth, a genuine novelty in it. Only, that novelty is not any invention of my own, but simply the novelty of the advanced thought of my own day.” How can one express more succinctly the end and aim of the modern dramatist? Goethe once said that the great aim of the modern intelligence should be to gain control over every means afforded by the past, in order thereby to enable himself to exhibit those features in which the modern world feels itself new and different and unique. A remarkably subtle travesty upon melodrama, The Devil's Disciple is a picture of life seen through the refractory temperament of a thoroughly modern intelligence.

The veiled satire underlying The Devil's Disciple is found in the fact that, whilst speciously purporting to be a melodrama, by individual and unique treatment the play gives the lie to the specific melodramatic formula. The comprehension of the dual rôle made this play as presented by Richard Mansfield peculiarly appreciated by American audiences; in England, the play was absurdly misunderstood, as related in one of Shaw's prefaces.

If we consider the crucial moments of the play, we observe the brilliant way in which Shaw has combined popular melodrama for the masses and Shavian satire upon melodrama for the discerning few. How the hardened old playgoer chuckles over his prevision of the situation that is to result after Dick is arrested and led off to prison! Of course, the minister will come back, Judith will waver between love for her husband and desire to save the noble altruist, the secret will be torn from her at last, her husband will prepare to go and take Dick's place. She will adjure him to save himself, but he will remain firm as adamant. What a tumult of passions, what a moving farewell, every eye is moist—the genuine scène à faire! What a sense of exquisite relief when Shaw has the minister take the natural, the business-like, and not the melodramatic course! Again, in the third act, when Judith, like a true Shakespearean heroine, disregards the convention of feminine fastidiousness in order to penetrate to the profoundest depths of Dick's heart, the melodramatic formula is clear: Dick will kneel at Judith's feet, pour out his burning love for her, the two will revel in the ecstasies of la grande passion. Reality is far subtler and more complex than melodrama—not a game of heroics, but a clash of natures, says Shaw.

“You know you did it for his sake,” charges Judith, “believing he was a more worthy man than yourself.”

“Oho! No,” laughs Dick in reply; “that's a very pretty reason, I must say; but I'm not so modest as that. No, it wasn't for his sake.”

Now she blushes, her heart beats painfully, and she asks softly: “Was it for my sake?” “Perhaps a little for your sake,” he indulgently admits; but when, emboldened by his words, she romantically charges him to save himself, that he may go with her, even to the ends of the earth, he takes hold of her firmly by the wrists, gazes steadily into her eyes, and says:

“If I said—to please you—that I did what I did ever so little for your sake, I lied as men always lie to women. You know how much I have lived with worthless men—aye, and worthless women too. Well, they could all rise to some sort of goodness and kindness when they were in love. That has taught me to set very little store by the goodness that only comes out red-hot. What I did last night, I did in cold blood, caring not half so much for your husband or for you as I do for myself. I had no motive and no interest: all I can tell you is that when it came to the point whether I would take my neck out of the noose and put another man's into it, I could not do it. I don't know why not: I see myself as a fool for my pains; but I could not, and I cannot. I have been brought up standing by the law of my own nature; and I may not go against it, gallows or no gallows. I should have done the same thing for any other man in the town, or any other man's wife. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” replies the stricken Judith; “you mean that you do not love me.”

“Is that all it means to you?” asks the revolted Richard, with fierce contempt.

“What more—what worse—can it mean to me?” are Judith's final words.

Last of all, Shaw indulges in his most hazardous stroke of satire in the scene of the military tribunal. Imagine the cloud of romantic gloom and melodramatic horror that the author of La Tosca would have cast over this valley of the shadow of death! Shaw ushers in an exquisite and urbane comedian to irradiate the gathering gloom with the sparks of his audacious speech and the scintillations of his heartless wit. Thus Shaw elevates the plane of the piece into a sublimated atmosphere of sheer satire.

In The Devil's Disciple, Shaw succeeds in humanizing the stock figures of melodrama, revealing in them a credible mixture of good and evil, of reality and romance. In life itself, Shaw finds no proof that a rake may not be generous, nor a blackguard tender to children, nor a minister virile and human. All mothers are not angels, all generals are not imposing dignitaries, all British soldiers are not Kitcheners in initiative or Gordons in heroism. That Dick scoffs at religion and breaks the social code does not prove that he is either naturally vicious or depraved. In the stern asceticism of his nature, he is a more genuine Puritan than his self-righteous mother. Under every trial is he always valid to himself, obedient to the law of his own nature; he might have chosen for his device the words of Luther: “Ich kann nicht anders.” The play was written for Richard Mansfield; and Mr. Shaw once told me that the part of Dudgeon was modelled upon Mansfield himself. On the stage, Dudgeon is usually represented either as the melodramatic type of hero, with white soft shirt and bared neck—e.g., Karl Wiene, in Vienna; or as the gay debonair rake, counterpart of the best type of those fascinating blades of Sheridan and the other writers of earlier English comedy—e.g., Richard Mansfield, in America. As a matter of fact, Dick is neither a conventional stage hero nor a dashing rake. “Dick Dudgeon is a Puritan of the Puritans,” says Shaw. “He is brought up in a household where the Puritan religion has died and become, in its corruption, an excuse for his mother's master-passion of hatred in all its phases of cruelty and envy. In such a home he finds himself starved of religion, which is the most clamorous need of his nature. With all his mother's indomitable selfishness, but with pity instead of hatred as his master-passion, he pities the devil, takes his side, and champions him, like a true Covenanter, against the world. He thus becomes, like all genuinely religious men, a reprobate and an outcast.” Unfortified by the power of a great love, unconsoled by hope of future reward, Dick makes the truly heroic sacrifice with all the sublime spirit of a Carton or a Cyrano. Of such stuff are made not stage, but real heroes. “He is in one word,” says Mr. J. T. Grein, “a man, spotted it is true, but a man, and, as such, perhaps the most human creature which native fancy has put on our modern stage.”

In The Devil's Disciple, as Hermann Bahr maintains, Shaw virtually asserts the modern dramatic principle that every situation of adventitious character, every external adventure which meets the hero like a vagabond upon the highway, is undramatic; the sole aim of modern drama is representation of the inner life, and all things must be transposed into the key of spiritual significance.[180] This principle is exemplified in the three leading characters. Like Raina in Arms and the Man, Judith learns by bitter experience to distrust the iridescent mirage of romance. Sentimental, spoiled, romantic, this refined Lydia Languish does not know whether to hate, to admire, or to love the fascinating, devil-may-care rake. In the briefest space of time, her husband has become in her eyes a coward and a poltroon. Her heart is in a tumult of emotions: like a willow she sways between duty to her husband and love for the dashing Dudgeon. And when she puts all to the touch, she discovers that her romance is only a pretty figment of her fancy, powerless before the omnipotent passion of obligation to self. And when her husband appears in the nick of time, and proves to be a hero after all, her love floods back to him. Dick must promise that he will never tell! Surely the figure of the minister's young wife, says Heinrich Stümcke, is one of the most delicate creations of the English stage. “In the recital of Judith's relations with Dick,” writes Dr. Brandes, “there is convincing irony, and rare insight into the idiosyncrasies and subtleties of the feminine heart.”

Among the minor excellences of the play, the figure of Burgoyne stands out in striking relief. In Shaw's view, his Burgoyne is not a conventional stage soldier, but “as faithful a portrait as it is in the nature of stage portraits to be”—whatever that may mean! In reality, Shaw's Burgoyne interests us, not at all as an historical personage, but as a distinct dramatic creation. “Gentleman Johnny,” suave, sarcastic, urbane—the high comedian with all the exquisite grace of the eighteenth century—delights us by exchanging rare repartee with Dick over the banal topic of the latter's death. Burgoyne's speech of Voltairean timbre, quite in the key of De Quincey's Murder as a Fine Art—beginning with “Let me persuade you to be hanged”—is the finest ironical touch in English drama since Sheridan. “The historic figure of the English General Burgoyne,” says Dr. Brandes, “though he holds only a subordinate place in the play, stands forth with a fresh and sparkling vitality, such as only great poets can impart to their creations.” Shaw once modestly averred that “the most effective situation on the modern stage occurs in my own play—The Devil's Disciple.” I have always had the feeling that the first act of this play, although actually delaying the beginning of the “love story” until the second act, is the most remarkable act Shaw has ever written—a genre picture eminently worthy of the hand of a Hogarth or a Dickens. And, to quote Dr. Brandes once more, “I consider The Devil's Disciple a masterpiece, whether viewed from the psychological or the dramatic standpoint. Well acted, it ought to create a furore.”