Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

A Playwright’s Progress 105
Candida is also about disillusionment, but the effect is distinctly different.
Both Morell and Marchbanks idealize Candida, and both ideals are
shattered, but the point is not to make us despise the reality. Morell’s ideal
marriage is shattered so that he might learn to appreciate and respect the
real one. For his part, Marchbanks emphatically rejects that same reality,
but it is made clear that his choice has only relative validity. He must seek
his own way. Here is the essential difference between A Doll’s House and
Candida: one rejects the old ideal as something soiled and fraudulent and
offers a tentative hope for a shining new ideal, while the other substitutes
two realities for the discarded ideal, one a prosaic but admirable present,
the other a hope for an advance in the future. Marchbanks may represent,
for Shaw, a vision superior to that of Morell, but he saw them as merely
adjacent rungs of a ladder rather than opposites. Shaw’s discussion of this
play in the preface to the Pleasant Plays revolves about the question of
how to derive conflict from a fundamental unity. “There is only one religion,
though there are a hundred versions of it.” Drama, however, requires
conflict; Shaw’s task was to portray the conflict without betraying the underlying
unity: “To distil the quintessential drama from pre-Raphaelitism,
medieval or modern, it must be shewn at its best in conflict with the first
broken, nervous, stumbling attempts to formulate its own revolt against
itself as it develops into something higher.” In all of this enigmatic discussion
of the play, Shaw never alludes to the title role. The play is not
about Candida but about the conflict between Morell and Marchbanks, a
struggle of “pre-Raphaelitism . . . in revolt against itself.”
“Here, then, was the higher but vaguer and timider vision, the incoherent,
mischievous, and even ridiculous unpracticalness, which offered me
a dramatic antagonist for the clear, bold, sure, sensible, benevolent, salutarily
shortsighted Christian Socialist idealism” (Pref. Pleasant Plays
1:374–75). Shaw makes every effort to place Morell in a sympathetic light,
both first and last. His humble acceptance of Candida’s loving but lightly
mocking judgment at the end of the play is, at least in the hands of a
capable actor, invariably moving. True, Shaw once referred to him as the
“butt” of the play and said that Marchbanks represents a higher, if less
coherent, vision of the truth, but in a sense Morell’s more mature personality
expresses better the unity essential to Shaw’s message. He may be, as
his name suggests, a “moral” idealist, but he does not moralize, in the
sense of dispensing damning judgments on those who differ with him. He
tells Burgess, despite his loathing for the older man’s economic activities,
that “God made you what I call a scoundrel as He made me what you call a