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

Ethics, Economics, and Government 153
liness of conscience, malice, and the makeshifts and moral crutches
of law and order which accompany them. Such a character appears
extraordinarily fascinating and exhilarating to our guilty and conscience-ridden
generations, however little they may understand him.
The world has always delighted in the man who is delivered from
conscience. (57)
Shaw’s own Siegfrieds have little in common besides freedom from the
tyranny of the superego. Such freedom, however exhilarating and even
awe-inspiring to observe, is no guarantee that its possessor is at the highest
possible evolutionary level. The public generally assumes the reverse,
and the public is not always wrong. The examples that Shaw provided were
usually on the advanced side of the scale (Louis Dubedat in The Doctor’s
Dilemma being a notable exception); he was not interested in satisfying
the taste for conscience-free villainy. But they are not alike, and they do
not resonate at the same pitch on the evolutionary scale. Candida is an
excellent case in point. In a famous letter Shaw called her “that very immoral
female” (Collected Letters 2:414). This supreme compliment from
the author to his creation has unaccountably been regarded as a repudiation.
Her immorality links her not only with Siegfried but with Andrew
Undershaft, his daughter Barbara, Lady Cicely Waynflete, Julius Caesar,
Epifania Ognisanti di Parerga, and Saint Joan of Arc. It is the source of her
fascination, the light that so blinds the men who worship her that they
imagine her to be something impossible: an Ideal Woman. This ravishing
defect in her character conceals from Morell, Marchbanks, and the various
“Candidamaniacs” in the audience the fact that she is otherwise a very
ordinary person: a Philistine, as Arthur Nethercot has correctly if provocatively
said (14). Critics are right to object to this epithet, if, and only if, it is
interpreted as a pejorative. Objectively speaking, Candida is a Philistine.
She has no sympathy with art, no interest in poetry (not even Eugene’s),
and is thoroughly happy catering to the needs of the big baby Morell while
reigning over what Eugene comes to see as a “greasy fool’s paradise” (Collected
Letters 2:415). She is also a thoroughly amiable, intelligent, and interesting
person. Shaw was doubtless fond of her, and if he betrayed a certain
impatience in exposing her true nature, it was inspired by annoyance,
not with her but with those who insist on idolizing her despite the insistent
and transparent lesson of the play: that such idolatry is folly.
Shaw stressed that “without brains and strength of mind she would be
a wretched slattern & voluptuary” (Collected Letters 2:415). The world is
not to be saved by the immoralists, however needed they are to save us