Ideas, like dukes in Mr. Gilbert's opera, are two a
penny. We are such stuff as dreams, not manuals
of logic, are made of. " Why did I love my friend ? "
asks Montaigne, and gives the only true answer:
" Because it was he, because it was I." By system-
atically ignoring this all-important side of life, all its
subconscious and unconscious elements, by repre-
senting life in general and love in particular as based
upon ratiocination, Mr. Shaw obtains most amusing
results.
Thus in Candida he takes the familiar dramatic
situation of a woman between two men, but his
peculiar treatment makes the familiar situation some-
thing quite new and strange and diverting. The
lady is beloved by her clerical husband, who has a
clergyman's ideas, and also by a young poet, who
has a poet's ideas. At a given moment the clergy-
man takes the poet by the coat-collar and gives
him a good shaking. The poet, so soon as he has
recovered his breath, shouts out : " I'm not afraid
of a clergyman's ideas. I'll fight your ideas. I'll
rescue her [Candida, the parson's wife] from her
slavery to them ; I'll pit my own ideas against them.
You are driving me out of the house because you
daren't let her choose between your ideas and mine."
In an ordinary play, of course, in a representation of
life, this would merely be a speech " in character " —
the speech of a man who, being hit, cannot hit back
with his fists, but hits back with his rhetoric. But Mr.
Shaw actually means it ; it is the very thesis of his play.
