ther is that great last scene in
_Candida_ where the wife, stung into final speech, declared her purpose
of remaining with the strong man because he is the weak man. The wife is
asked to decide between two men, one a strenuous self-confident popular
preacher, her husband, the other a wild and weak young poet, logically
futile and physically timid, her lover; and she chooses the former
because he has more weakness and more need of her. Even among the plain
and ringing paradoxes of the Shaw play this is one of the best reversals
or turnovers ever effected. A paradoxical writer like Bernard Shaw is
perpetually and tiresomely told that he stands on his head. But all
romance and all religion consist in making the whole universe stand on
its head. That reversal is the whole idea of virtue; that the last shall
be first and the first last. Considered as a pure piece of Shaw
therefore, the thing is of the best. But it is also something much
better than Shaw. The writer touches certain realities commonly outside
his scope; especially the reality of the normal wife's attitude to the
normal husband, an attitude which is not romantic but which is yet quite
quixotic; which is insanely unselfish and yet quite cynically
clear-sighted. It involves human sacrifice without in the least
involving idolatry.

The truth is that in this place Bernard Shaw comes within an inch of
expressing something that is not properly expressed anywhere else; the
idea of marriage. Marriage is not a mere chain upon love as the
anarchists say; nor is it a mere crown upon love as the sentimentalists
say. Marriage is a fact, an actual human relation like that of
motherhood which has certain human habits and loyalties, except in a few
monstrous cases where it is turned to torture by special insanity and
sin. A marriage is neither an ecstasy nor a slavery; it is a
commonwealth; it is a separate working and fighting thing like a nation.
Kings and diplomatists talk of "forming alliances" when they make
weddings; but indeed every wedding is primarily an alliance. The family
is a fact even when it is not an agreeable fact, and a man is part of
his wife even when he wishes he wasn't. The twain are one flesh--yes,
even when they are not one spirit. Man is duplex. Man is a quadruped.

Of this ancient and essential relation there are certain emotional
results, which are subtle, like all the growths of nature. And one of
them is the attitude of the wife to the husband, wh