Title: Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch
Author: Shaw, Bernard
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch" ***


BACK TO METHUSELAH

A Metabiological Pentateuch

by

BERNARD SHAW

1921



Contents


The Infidel Half Century
  The Dawn of Darwinism
  The Advent of the Neo-Darwinians
  Political Inadequacy of the Human Animal
  Cowardice of the Irreligious
  Is there any Hope in Education?
  Homeopathic Education
  The Diabolical Efficiency of Technical Education
  Flimsiness of Civilization
  Creative Evolution
  Voluntary Longevity
  The Early Evolutionists
  The Advent of the Neo-Lamarckians
  How Acquirements are Inherited
  The Miracle of Condensed Recapitulation
  Heredity an Old Story
  Discovery Anticipated by Divination
  Corrected Dates for the Discovery of Evolution
  Defying the Lightning: a Frustrated Experiment
  In Quest of the First Cause
  Paley's Watch
  The Irresistible Cry of Order, Order!
  The Moment and the Man
  The Brink of the Bottomless Pit
  Why Darwin Converted the Crowd
  How we Rushed Down a Steep Place
  Darwinism not Finally Refutable
  Three Blind Mice
  The Greatest of These is Self-Control
  A Sample of Lamarcko-Shavian Invective
  The Humanitarians and the Problem of Evil
  How One Touch of Darwin makes the Whole World Kin
  Why Darwin Pleased the Socialists
  Darwin and Karl Marx
  Why Darwin pleased the Profiteers also
  The Poetry and Purity of Materialism
  The Viceroys of the King of Kings
  Political Opportunism in Excelsis
  The Betrayal of Western Civilization
  Circumstantial Selection in Finance
  The Homeopathic Reaction against Darwinism
  Religion and Romance
  The Danger of Reaction
  A Touchstone for Dogma
  What to do with the Legends
  A Lesson from Science to the Churches
  The Religious Art of the Twentieth Century
  The Artist-Prophets
  Evolution in the Theatre
  My Own Part in the Matter
In the Beginning: B.C. 4004 (In the Garden of Eden)
The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas: Present Day
The Thing Happens: A.D. 2170
Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman: A.D. 3000
As Far as Thought Can Reach: A.D. 31,920



PREFACE

The Infidel Half Century


THE DAWN OF DARWINISM

One day early in the eighteen hundred and sixties, I, being then a
small boy, was with my nurse, buying something in the shop of a petty
newsagent, bookseller, and stationer in Camden Street, Dublin, when
there entered an elderly man, weighty and solemn, who advanced to the
counter, and said pompously, 'Have you the works of the celebrated
Buffoon?'

My own works were at that time unwritten, or it is possible that the
shop assistant might have misunderstood me so far as to produce a copy
of Man and Superman. As it was, she knew quite well what he wanted; for
this was before the Education Act of 1870 had produced shop assistants
who know how to read and know nothing else. The celebrated Buffoon was
not a humorist, but the famous naturalist Buffon. Every literate child
at that time knew Buffon's Natural History as well as Esop's Fables. And
no living child had heard the name that has since obliterated Buffon's
in the popular consciousness: the name of Darwin.

Ten years elapsed. The celebrated Buffoon was forgotten; I had doubled
my years and my length; and I had discarded the religion of my
forefathers. One day the richest and consequently most dogmatic of my
uncles came into a restaurant where I was dining, and found himself,
much against his will, in conversation with the most questionable of his
nephews. By way of making myself agreeable, I spoke of modern thought
and Darwin. He said, 'Oh, thats the fellow who wants to make out that we
all have tails like monkeys.' I tried to explain that what Darwin had
insisted on in this connection was that some monkeys have no tails.
But my uncle was as impervious to what Darwin really said as any
Neo-Darwinian nowadays. He died impenitent, and did not mention me in
his will.

Twenty years elapsed. If my uncle had been alive, he would have known
all about Darwin, and known it all wrong. In spite of the efforts of
Grant Allen to set him right, he would have accepted Darwin as the
discoverer of Evolution, of Heredity, and of modification of species by
Selection. For the pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a Dark
Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a standard
scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were Galileo's
demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci's simple remark that the earth is
a moon of the sun, Newton's theory of gravitation, Sir Humphry Davy's
invention of the safety-lamp, the discovery of electricity, the
application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post. It was
just the same in other subjects. Thus Nietzsche, by the two or three who
had come across his writings, was supposed to have been the first man
to whom it occurred that mere morality and legality and urbanity lead
nowhere, as if Bunyan had never written Badman. Schopenhauer was
credited with inventing the distinction between the Covenant of Grace
and the Covenant of Works which troubled Cromwell on his deathbed.
People talked as if there had been no dramatic or descriptive music
before Wagner; no impressionist painting before Whistler; whilst as to
myself, I was finding that the surest way to produce an effect of daring
innovation and originality was to revive the ancient attraction of long
rhetorical speeches; to stick closely to the methods of Molière; and to
lift characters bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens.


THE ADVENT OF THE NEO-DARWINIANS

This particular sort of ignorance does not always or often matter. But
in Darwin's case it did matter. If Darwin had really led the world at
one bound from the book of Genesis to Heredity, to Modification of
Species by Selection, and to Evolution, he would have been a philosopher
and a prophet as well as an eminent professional naturalist, with
geology as a hobby. The delusion that he had actually achieved this
feat did no harm at first, because if people's views are sound, about
evolution or anything else, it does not make two straws difference
whether they call the revealer of their views Tom or Dick. But later on
such apparently negligible errors have awkward consequences. Darwin was
given an imposing reputation as not only an Evolutionist, but as _the_
Evolutionist, with the immense majority who never read his books.
The few who never read any others were led by them to concentrate
exclusively on Circumstantial Selection as the explanation of all the
transformations and adaptations which were the evidence for Evolution.
And they presently found themselves so cut off by this specialization
from the majority who knew Darwin only by his spurious reputation, that
they were obliged to distinguish themselves, not as Darwinians, but as
Neo-Darwinians.

Before ten more years had elapsed, the Neo-Darwinians were practically
running current Science. It was 1906; I was fifty; I published my own
view of evolution in a play called Man and Superman; and I found that
most people were unable to understand how I could be an Evolutionist
and not a Neo-Darwinian, or why I habitually derided Neo-Darwinism as
a ghastly idiocy, and would fall on its professors slaughterously in
public discussions. It was in the hope of making me clear the matter up
that the Fabian Society, which was then organizing a series of lectures
on Prophets of the Nineteenth Century, asked me to deliver a lecture
on the prophet Darwin. I did so; and scraps of that lecture, which was
never published, variegate these pages.


POLITICAL INADEQUACY OF THE HUMAN ANIMAL

Ten more years elapsed. Neo-Darwinism in politics had produced a
European catastrophe of a magnitude so appalling, and a scope so
unpredictable, that as I write these lines in 1920, it is still far from
certain whether our civilization will survive it. The circumstances
of this catastrophe, the boyish cinema-fed romanticism which made it
possible to impose it on the people as a crusade, and especially the
ignorance and errors of the victors of Western Europe when its violent
phase had passed and the time for reconstruction arrived, confirmed a
doubt which had grown steadily in my mind during my forty years public
work as a Socialist: namely, whether the human animal, as he exists at
present, is capable of solving the social problems raised by his own
aggregation, or, as he calls it, his civilization.


COWARDICE OF THE IRRELIGIOUS

Another observation I had made was that goodnatured unambitious men are
cowards when they have no religion. They are dominated and exploited not
only by greedy and often half-witted and half-alive weaklings who will
do anything for cigars, champagne, motor cars, and the more childish and
selfish uses of money, but by able and sound administrators who can do
nothing else with them than dominate and exploit them. Government and
exploitation become synonymous under such circumstances; and the world
is finally ruled by the childish, the brigands, and the blackguards.
Those who refuse to stand in with them are persecuted and occasionally
executed when they give any trouble to the exploiters. They fall into
poverty when they lack lucrative specific talents. At the present moment
one half of Europe, having knocked the other half down, is trying to
kick it to death, and may succeed: a procedure which is, logically,
sound Neo-Darwinism. And the goodnatured majority are looking on
in helpless horror, or allowing themselves to be persuaded by the
newspapers of their exploiters that the kicking is not only a sound
commercial investment, but an act of divine justice of which they are
the ardent instruments.

But if Man is really incapable of organizing a big civilization, and
cannot organize even a village or a tribe any too well, what is the use
of giving him a religion? A religion may make him hunger and thirst for
righteousness; but will it endow him with the practical capacity to
satisfy that appetite? Good intentions do not carry with them a grain of
political science, which is a very complicated one. The most devoted and
indefatigable, the most able and disinterested students of this science
in England, as far as I know, are my friends Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
It has taken them forty years of preliminary work, in the course of
which they have published several treatises comparable to Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations, to formulate a political constitution adequate to
existing needs. If this is the measure of what can be done in a
lifetime by extraordinary ability, keen natural aptitude, exceptional
opportunities, and freedom from the preoccupations of bread-winning,
what are we to expect from the parliament man to whom political science
is as remote and distasteful as the differential calculus, and to whom
such an elementary but vital point as the law of economic rent is a
_pons asinorum_ never to be approached, much less crossed? Or from the
common voter who is mostly so hard at work all day earning a living that
he cannot keep awake for five minutes over a book?


IS THERE ANY HOPE IN EDUCATION?

The usual answer is that we must educate our masters: that is,
ourselves. We must teach citizenship and political science at school.
But must we? There is no must about it, the hard fact being that we must
_not_ teach political science or citizenship at school. The schoolmaster
who attempted it would soon find himself penniless in the streets
without pupils, if not in the dock pleading to a pompously worded
indictment for sedition against the exploiters. Our schools teach the
morality of feudalism corrupted by commercialism, and hold up the
military conqueror, the robber baron, and the profiteer, as models of
the illustrious and the successful. In vain do the prophets who see
through this imposture preach and teach a better gospel: the individuals
whom they convert are doomed to pass away in a few years; and the new
generations are dragged back in the schools to the morality of the
fifteenth century, and think themselves Liberal when they are defending
the ideas of Henry VII, and gentlemanly when they are opposing to them
the ideas of Richard III. Thus the educated man is a greater nuisance
than the uneducated one: indeed it is the inefficiency and sham of the
educational side of our schools (to which, except under compulsion,
children would not be sent by their parents at all if they did not act
as prisons in which the immature are kept from worrying the mature) that
save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of
drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance. There is no way out
through the schoolmaster.


HOMEOPATHIC EDUCATION

In truth, mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or any
other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It is
said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or
may not be true: what is certain is that if you teach a man anything he
will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease he will be unable
to cure himself the next time it attacks him. Therefore, if you want
to see a cat clean, you throw a bucket of mud over it, when it will
immediately take extraordinary pains to lick the mud off, and finally be
cleaner than it was before. In the same way doctors who are up-to-date
(BURGE-LUBIN per cent of all the registered practitioners, and 20 per
cent of the unregistered ones), when they want to rid you of a disease
or a symptom, inoculate you with that disease or give you a drug that
produces that symptom, in order to provoke you to resist it as the mud
provokes the cat to wash itself.

Now an acute person will ask me why, if this be so, our false education
does not provoke our scholars to find out the truth. My answer is that
it sometimes does. Voltaire was a pupil of the Jesuits; Samuel Butler
was the pupil of a hopelessly conventional and erroneous country parson.
But then Voltaire was Voltaire, and Butler was Butler: that is, their
minds were so abnormally strong that they could throw off the doses of
poison that paralyse ordinary minds. When the doctors inoculate you and
the homeopathists dose you, they give you an infinitesimally attenuated
dose. If they gave you the virus at full strength it would overcome your
resistance and produce its direct effect. The doses of false doctrine
given at public schools and universities are so big that they overwhelm
the resistance that a tiny dose would provoke. The normal student is
corrupted beyond redemption, and will drive the genius who resists out
of the country if he can. Byron and Shelley had to fly to Italy, whilst
Castlereagh and Eldon ruled the roost at home. Rousseau was hunted from
frontier to frontier; Karl Marx starved in exile in a Soho lodging;
Ruskin's articles were refused by the magazines (he was too rich to be
otherwise persecuted); whilst mindless forgotten nonentities governed
the land; sent men to the prison or the gallows for blasphemy and
sedition (meaning the truth about Church and State); and sedulously
stored up the social disease and corruption which explode from time to
time in gigantic boils that have to be lanced by a million bayonets.
This is the result of allopathic education. Homeopathic education has
not yet been officially tried, and would obviously be a delicate
matter if it were. A body of schoolmasters inciting their pupils to
infinitesimal peccadilloes with the object of provoking them to exclaim,
'Get thee behind me, Satan,' or telling them white lies about history
for the sake of being contradicted, insulted, and refuted, would
certainly do less harm than our present educational allopaths do; but
then nobody will advocate homeopathic education. Allopathy has produced
the poisonous illusion that it enlightens instead of darkening. The
suggestion may, however, explain why, whilst most people's minds succumb
to inculcation and environment, a few react vigorously: honest and
decent people coming from thievish slums, and sceptics and realists from
country parsonages.


THE DIABOLICAL EFFICIENCY OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION

But meanwhile--and here comes the horror of it--our technical
instruction is honest and efficient. The public schoolboy who is
carefully blinded, duped, and corrupted as to the nature of a society
based on profiteering, and is taught to honor parasitic idleness and
luxury, learns to shoot and ride and keep fit with all the assistance
and guidance that can be procured for him by the most anxiously sincere
desire that he may do these things well, and if possible superlatively
well. In the army he learns to fly; to drop bombs; to use machine-guns
to the utmost of his capacity. The discovery of high explosives is
rewarded and dignified: instruction in the manufacture of the weapons,
battleships, submarines, and land batteries by which they are applied
destructively, is quite genuine: the instructors know their business,
and really mean the learners to succeed. The result is that powers
of destruction that could hardly without uneasiness be entrusted to
infinite wisdom and infinite benevolence are placed in the hands of
romantic schoolboy patriots who, however generous by nature, are by
education ignoramuses, dupes, snobs, and sportsmen to whom fighting is a
religion and killing an accomplishment; whilst political power, useless
under such circumstances except to militarist imperialists in chronic
terror of invasion and subjugation, pompous tufthunting fools,
commercial adventurers to whom the organization by the nation of its own
industrial services would mean checkmate, financial parasites on the
money market, and stupid people who cling to the status quo merely
because they are used to it, is obtained by heredity, by simple
purchase, by keeping newspapers and pretending that they are organs of
public opinion, by the wiles of seductive women, and by prostituting
ambitious talent to the service of the profiteers, who call the tune
because, having secured all the spare plunder, they alone can afford
to pay the piper. Neither the rulers nor the ruled understand high
politics. They do not even know that there is such a branch of knowledge
as political science; but between them they can coerce and enslave
with the deadliest efficiency, even to the wiping out of civilization,
because their education as slayers has been honestly and thoroughly
carried out. Essentially the rulers are all defectives; and there is
nothing worse than government by defectives who wield irresistible
powers of physical coercion. The commonplace sound people submit, and
compel the rest to submit, because they have been taught to do so as
an article of religion and a point of honor. Those in whom natural
enlightenment has reacted against artificial education submit because
they are compelled; but they would resist, and finally resist
effectively, if they were not cowards. And they are cowards because they
have neither an officially accredited and established religion nor a
generally recognized point of honor, and are all at sixes and sevens
with their various private speculations, sending their children perforce
to the schools where they will be corrupted for want of any other
schools. The rulers are equally intimidated by the immense extension
and cheapening of the means of slaughter and destruction. The British
Government is more afraid of Ireland now that submarines, bombs, and
poison gas are cheap and easily made than it was of the German Empire
before the war; consequently the old British custom which maintained a
balance of power through command of the sea is intensified into a terror
that sees security in nothing short of absolute military mastery of the
entire globe: that is, in an impossibility that will yet seem possible
in detail to soldiers and to parochial and insular patriotic civilians.


FLIMSINESS OF CIVILIZATION

This situation has occurred so often before, always with the same result
of a collapse of civilization (Professor Flinders Petrie has let out the
secret of previous collapses), that the rich are instinctively crying
'Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die,' and the poor, 'How long, O
Lord, how long?' But the pitiless reply still is that God helps those
who help themselves. This does not mean that if Man cannot find the
remedy no remedy will be found. The power that produced Man when the
monkey was not up to the mark, can produce a higher creature than Man if
Man does not come up to the mark. What it means is that if Man is to be
saved, Man must save himself. There seems no compelling reason why he
should be saved. He is by no means an ideal creature. At his present
best many of his ways are so unpleasant that they are unmentionable in
polite society, and so painful that he is compelled to pretend that pain
is often a good. Nature holds no brief for the human experiment: it must
stand or fall by its results. If Man will not serve, Nature will try
another experiment.

What hope is there then of human improvement? According to the
Neo-Darwinists, to the Mechanists, no hope whatever, because improvement
can come only through some senseless accident which must, on the
statistical average of accidents, be presently wiped out by some other
equally senseless accident.


CREATIVE EVOLUTION

But this dismal creed does not discourage those who believe that the
impulse that produces evolution is creative. They have observed the
simple fact that the will to do anything can and does, at a certain
pitch of intensity set up by conviction of its necessity, create and
organize new tissue to do it with. To them therefore mankind is by no
means played out yet. If the weight lifter, under the trivial stimulus
of an athletic competition, can 'put up a muscle,' it seems reasonable
to believe that an equally earnest and convinced philosopher could 'put
up a brain.' Both are directions of vitality to a certain end. Evolution
shews us this direction of vitality doing all sorts of things: providing
the centipede with a hundred legs, and ridding the fish of any legs at
all; building lungs and arms for the land and gills and fins for the
sea; enabling the mammal to gestate its young inside its body, and the
fowl to incubate hers outside it; offering us, we may say, our choice of
any sort of bodily contrivance to maintain our activity and increase our
resources.


VOLUNTARY LONGEVITY

Among other matters apparently changeable at will is the duration of
individual life. Weismann, a very clever and suggestive biologist who
was unhappily reduced to idiocy by Neo-Darwinism, pointed out that death
is not an eternal condition of life, but an expedient introduced to
provide for continual renewal without overcrowding. Now Circumstantial
Selection does not account for natural death: it accounts only for the
survival of species in which the individuals have sense enough to decay
and die on purpose. But the individuals do not seem to have calculated
very reasonably: nobody can explain why a parrot should live ten times
as long as a dog, and a turtle be almost immortal. In the case of man,
the operation has overshot its mark: men do not live long enough: they
are, for all the purposes of high civilization, mere children when they
die; and our Prime Ministers, though rated as mature, divide their
time between the golf course and the Treasury Bench in parliament.
Presumably, however, the same power that made this mistake can remedy
it. If on opportunist grounds Man now fixes the term of his life at
three score and ten years, he can equally fix it at three hundred, or
three thousand, or even at the genuine Circumstantial Selection limit,
which would be until a sooner-or-later-inevitable fatal accident makes
an end of the individual. All that is necessary to make him extend his
present span is that tremendous catastrophes such as the late war shall
convince him of the necessity of at least outliving his taste for
golf and cigars if the race is to be saved. This is not fantastic
speculation: it is deductive biology, if there is such a science as
biology. Here, then, is a stone that we have left unturned, and that may
be worth turning. To make the suggestion more entertaining than it would
be to most people in the form of a biological treatise, I have written
Back to Methuselah as a contribution to the modern Bible.

Many people, however, can read treatises and cannot read Bibles. Darwin
could not read Shakespear. Some who can read both, like to learn the
history of their ideas. Some are so entangled in the current confusion
of Creative Evolution with Circumstantial Selection by their historical
ignorance that they are puzzled by any distinction between the two.
For all their sakes I must give here a little history of the conflict
between the view of Evolution taken by the Darwinians (though not
altogether by Darwin himself) and called Natural Selection, and that
which is emerging, under the title of Creative Evolution, as the
genuinely scientific religion for which all wise men are now anxiously
looking.


THE EARLY EVOLUTIONISTS

The idea of Evolution, or Transformation as it is now sometimes called,
was not first conceived by Charles Darwin, nor by Alfred Russel Wallace,
who observed the operation of Circumstantial Selection simultaneously
with Charles. The celebrated Buffoon was a better Evolutionist than
either of them; and two thousand years before Buffon was born, the Greek
philosopher Empedocles opined that all forms of life are transformations
of four elements, Fire, Air, Earth, and Water, effected by the two
innate forces of attraction and repulsion, or love and hate. As lately
as 1860 I myself was taught as a child that everything was made out of
these four elements. Both the Empedocleans and the Evolutionists were
opposed to those who believed in the separate creation of all forms
of life as described in the book of Genesis. This 'conflict between
religion and science', as the phrase went then, did not perplex my
infant mind in the least: I knew perfectly well, without knowing that I
knew it, that the validity of a story is not the same as the occurrence
of a fact. But as I grew up I found that I had to choose between
Evolution and Genesis. If you believed that dogs and cats and snakes
and birds and beetles and oysters and whales and men and women were all
separately designed and made and named in Eden garden at the beginning
of things, and have since survived simply by reproducing their kind,
then you were not an Evolutionist. If you believed, on the contrary,
that all the different species are modifications, variations, and
elaborations of one primal stock, or even of a few primal stocks, then
you were an Evolutionist. But you were not necessarily a Darwinian; for
you might have been a modern Evolutionist twenty years before Charles
Darwin was born, and a whole lifetime before he published his Origin of
Species. For that matter, when Aristotle grouped animals with backbones
as blood relations, he began the sort of classification which, when
extended by Darwin to monkeys and men, so shocked my uncle.

Genesis had held the field until the time (1707-1778) of Linnaeus the
famous botanist. In the meantime the microscope had been invented. It
revealed a new world of hitherto invisible creatures called Infusorians,
as common water was found to be an infusion of them. In the eighteenth
century naturalists were very keen on the Infusorian Amoebas, and were
much struck by the way in which the members of this old family behaved
and developed. But it was still possible for Linnaeus to begin a
treatise by saying 'There are just so many species as there were forms
created in the beginning,' though there were hundreds of commonplace
Scotch gardeners, pigeon fanciers, and stock breeders then living who
knew better. Linnaeus himself knew better before he died. In the
last edition of his System of Nature, he began to wonder whether the
transmutation of species by variation might not be possible. Then came
the great poet who jumped over the facts to the conclusion. Goethe said
that all the shapes of creation were cousins; that there must be some
common stock from which all the species had sprung; that it was the
environment of air that had produced the eagle, of water the seal, and
of earth the mole. He could not say how this happened; but he divined
that it did happen. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, carried
the environment theory much further, pointing out instance after
instance of modifications made in species apparently to adapt it to
circumstances and environment: for instance, that the brilliant colors
of the leopard, which make it so conspicuous in Regent's Park, conceal
it in a tropical jungle. Finally he wrote, as his declaration of faith,
'The world has been evolved, not created: it has arisen little by little
from a small beginning, and has increased through the activity of the
elemental forces embodied in itself, and so has rather grown than come
into being at an almighty word. What a sublime idea of the infinite
might of the great Architect, the Cause of all causes, the Father of all
fathers, the Ens Entium! For if we would compare the Infinite, it would
surely require a greater Infinite to cause the causes of effects than to
produce the effects themselves.' In this, published in the year 1794,
you have nineteenth-century Evolution precisely defined. And Erasmus
Darwin was by no means its only apostle. It was in the air then. A
German biologist named Treviranus, whose book was published in 1802,
wrote, 'In every living being there exists a capacity for endless
diversity of form. Each possesses the power of adapting its organization
to the variations of the external world; and it is this power, called
into activity by cosmic changes, which has enabled the simple zoophytes
of the primitive world to climb to higher and higher stages of
organization, and has brought endless variety into nature.' There you
have your evolution of Man from the amoeba all complete whilst Nelson
was still alive on the seas. And in 1809, before the battle of Waterloo,
a French soldier named Lamarck, who had beaten his musket into a
microscope and turned zoologist, declared that species were an illusion
produced by the shortness of our individual lives, and that they were
constantly changing and melting into one another and into new forms as
surely as the hand of a clock is continually moving, though it moves so
slowly that it looks stationary to us. We have since come to think that
its industry is less continuous: that the clock stops for a long time,
and then is suddenly 'put on' by a mysterious finger. But never mind
that just at present.


THE ADVENT OF THE NEO-LAMARCKIANS

I call your special attention to Lamarck, because later on there were
Neo-Lamarckians as well as Neo-Darwinians. I was a Neo-Lamarckian.
Lamarck passed on from the conception of Evolution as a general law to
Charles Darwin's department of it, which was the method of Evolution.
Lamarck, whilst making many ingenious suggestions as to the reaction
of external causes on life and habit, such as changes of climate,
food supply, geological upheavals and so forth, really held as his
fundamental proposition that living organisms changed because they
wanted to. As he stated it, the great factor in Evolution is use and
disuse. If you have no eyes, and want to see, and keep trying to see,
you will finally get eyes. If, like a mole or a subterranean fish, you
have eyes and dont want to see, you will lose your eyes. If you like
eating the tender tops of trees enough to make you concentrate all your
energies on the stretching of your neck, you will finally get a long
neck, like the giraffe. This seems absurd to inconsiderate people at the
first blush; but it is within the personal experience of all of us that
it is just by this process that a child tumbling about the floor becomes
a boy walking erect; and that a man sprawling on the road with a bruised
chin, or supine on the ice with a bashed occiput, becomes a bicyclist
and a skater. The process is not continuous, as it would be if mere
practice had anything to do with it; for though you may improve at each
bicycling lesson _during_ the lesson, when you begin your next lesson
you do not begin at the point at which you left off: you relapse
apparently to the beginning. Finally, you succeed quite suddenly, and do
not relapse again. More miraculous still, you at once exercise the new
power unconsciously. Although you are adapting your front wheel to your
balance so elaborately and actively that the accidental locking of your
handle bars for a second will throw you off; though five minutes before
you could not do it at all, yet now you do it as unconsciously as you
grow your finger nails. You have a new faculty, and must have created
some new bodily tissue as its organ. And you have done it solely by
willing. For here there can be no question of Circumstantial Selection,
or the survival of the fittest. The man who is learning how to ride
a bicycle has no advantage over the non-cyclist in the struggle for
existence: quite the contrary. He has acquired a new habit, an automatic
unconscious habit, solely because he wanted to, and kept trying until it
was added unto him.


HOW ACQUIREMENTS ARE INHERITED

But when your son tries to skate or bicycle in his turn, he does not
pick up the accomplishment where you left it, any more than he is born
six feet high with a beard and a tall hat. The set-back that occurred
between your lessons occurs again. The race learns exactly as the
individual learns. Your son relapses, not to the very beginning, but to
a point which no mortal method of measurement can distinguish from the
beginning. Now this is odd; for certain other habits of yours, equally
acquired (to the Evolutionist, of course, all habits are acquired),
equally unconscious, equally automatic, are transmitted without any
perceptible relapse. For instance, the very first act of your son
when he enters the world as a separate individual is to yell with
indignation: that yell which Shakespear thought the most tragic and
piteous of all sounds. In the act of yelling he begins to breathe:
another habit, and not even a necessary one, as the object of breathing
can be achieved in other ways, as by deep sea fishes. He circulates his
blood by pumping it with his heart. He demands a meal, and proceeds at
once to perform the most elaborate chemical operations on the food he
swallows. He manufactures teeth; discards them; and replaces them with
fresh ones. Compared to these habitual feats, walking, standing upright,
and bicycling are the merest trifles; yet it is only by going through
the wanting, trying process that he can stand, walk, or cycle, whereas
in the other and far more difficult and complex habits he not only does
not consciously want nor consciously try, but actually consciously
objects very strongly. Take that early habit of cutting the teeth: would
he do that if he could help it? Take that later habit of decaying and
eliminating himself by death--equally an acquired habit, remember--how
he abhors it! Yet the habit has become so rooted, so automatic, that he
must do it in spite of himself, even to his own destruction.

We have here a routine which, given time enough for it to operate, will
finally produce the most elaborate forms of organized life on Lamarckian
lines without the intervention of Circumstantial Selection at all. If
you can turn a pedestrian into a cyclist, and a cyclist into a pianist
or violinist, without the intervention of Circumstantial Selection, you
can turn an amoeba into a man, or a man into a superman, without it. All
of which is rank heresy to the Neo-Darwinian, who imagines that if
you stop Circumstantial Selection, you not only stop development but
inaugurate a rapid and disastrous degeneration.

Let us fix the Lamarckian evolutionary process well in our minds. You
are alive; and you want to be more alive. You want an extension of
consciousness and of power. You want, consequently, additional organs,
or additional uses of your existing organs: that is, additional habits.
You get them because you want them badly enough to keep trying for them
until they come. Nobody knows how: nobody knows why: all we know is that
the thing actually takes place. We relapse miserably from effort to
effort until the old organ is modified or the new one created, when
suddenly the impossible becomes possible and the habit is formed. The
moment we form it we want to get rid of the consciousness of it so as
to economize our consciousness for fresh conquests of life; as all
consciousness means preoccupation and obstruction. If we had to think
about breathing or digesting or circulating our blood we should have
no attention to spare for anything else, as we find to our cost when
anything goes wrong with these operations. We want to be unconscious of
them just as we wanted to acquire them; and we finally win what we want.
But we win unconsciousness of our habits at the cost of losing our
control of them; and we also build one habit and its corresponding
functional modification of our organs on another, and so become
dependent on our old habits. Consequently we have to persist in them
even when they hurt us. We cannot stop breathing to avoid an attack of
asthma, or to escape drowning. We can lose a habit and discard an organ
when we no longer need them, just as we acquired them; but this process
is slow and broken by relapses; and relics of the organ and the habit
long survive its utility. And if other and still indispensable habits
and modifications have been built on the ones we wish to discard, we
must provide a new foundation for them before we demolish the old one.
This is also a slow process and a very curious one.


THE MIRACLE OF CONDENSED RECAPITULATION

The relapses between the efforts to acquire a habit are important
because, as we have seen, they recur not only from effort to effort in
the case of the individual, but from generation to generation in the
case of the race. This relapsing from generation to generation is an
invariable characteristic of the evolutionary process. For instance,
Raphael, though descended from eight uninterrupted generations of
painters, had to learn to paint apparently as if no Sanzio had ever
handled a brush before. But he had also to learn to breathe, and digest,
and circulate his blood. Although his father and mother were fully grown
adults when he was conceived, he was not conceived or even born fully
grown: he had to go back and begin as a speck of protoplasm, and to
struggle through an embryonic lifetime, during part of which he was
indistinguishable from an embryonic dog, and had neither a skull nor a
backbone. When he at last acquired these articles, he was for some time
doubtful whether he was a bird or a fish. He had to compress untold
centuries of development into nine months before he was human enough
to break loose as an independent being. And even then he was still so
incomplete that his parents might well have exclaimed 'Good Heavens!
have you learnt nothing from our experience that you come into the world
in this ridiculously elementary state? Why cant you talk and walk and
paint and behave decently?' To that question Baby Raphael had no answer.
All he could have said was that this is how evolution or transformation
happens. The time may come when the same force that compressed the
development of millions of years into nine months may pack many more
millions into even a shorter space; so that Raphaels may be born
painters as they are now born breathers and blood circulators. But they
will still begin as specks of protoplasm, and acquire the faculty of
painting in their mother's womb at quite a late stage of their embryonic
life. They must recapitulate the history of mankind in their own
persons, however briefly they may condense it.

Nothing was so astonishing and significant in the discoveries of the
embryologists, nor anything so absurdly little appreciated, as this
recapitulation, as it is now called: this power of hurrying up into
months a process which was once so long and tedious that the mere
contemplation of it is unendurable by men whose span of life is
three-score-and-ten. It widened human possibilities to the extent of
enabling us to hope that the most prolonged and difficult operation of
our minds may yet become instantaneous, or, as we call it, instinctive.
It also directed our attention to examples of this packing up of
centuries into seconds which were staring us in the face in all
directions. As I write these lines the newspapers are occupied by the
exploits of a child of eight, who has just defeated twenty adult chess
players in twenty games played simultaneously, and has been able
afterwards to reconstruct all the twenty games without any apparent
effort of memory. Most people, including myself, play chess (when they
play it at all) from hand to mouth, and can hardly recall the last move
but one, or foresee the next but two. Also, when I have to make an
arithmetical calculation, I have to do it step by step with pencil and
paper, slowly, reluctantly, and with so little confidence in the result
that I dare not act on it without 'proving' the sum by a further
calculation involving more ciphering. But there are men who can neither
read, write, nor cipher, to whom the answer to such sums as I can do
is instantly obvious without any conscious calculation at all; and the
result is infallible. Yet some of these natural arithmeticians have but
a small vocabulary; are at a loss when they have to find words for any
but the simplest everyday occasions; and cannot for the life of them
describe mechanical operations which they perform daily in the course of
their trade; whereas to me the whole vocabulary of English literature,
from Shakespear to the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
is so completely and instantaneously at my call that I have never had
to consult even a thesaurus except once or twice when for some reason I
wanted a third or fourth synonym. Again, though I have tried and failed
to draw recognizable portraits of persons I have seen every day for
years, Mr Bernard Partridge, having seen a man once, will, without more
strain than is involved in eating a sandwich, draw him to the life. The
keyboard of a piano is a device I have never been able to master; yet Mr
Cyril Scott uses it exactly as I use my own fingers; and to Sir Edward
Elgar an orchestral score is as instantaneously intelligible at sight as
a page of Shakespear is to me. One man cannot, after trying for years,
finger the flute fluently. Another will take up a flute with a newly
invented arrangement of keys on it, and play it at once with hardly a
mistake. We find people to whom writing is so difficult that they prefer
to sign their name with a mark, and beside them men who master systems
of shorthand and improvise new systems of their own as easily as they
learnt the alphabet. These contrasts are to be seen on all hands, and
have nothing to do with variations in general intelligence, nor even
in the specialized intelligence proper to the faculty in question: for
example, no composer or dramatic poet has ever pretended to be able to
perform all the parts he writes for the singers, actors, and players who
are his executants. One might as well expect Napoleon to be a fencer, or
the Astronomer Royal to know how many beans make five any better than
his bookkeeper. Even exceptional command of language does not imply the
possession of ideas to express; Mezzofanti, the master of fifty-eight
languages, had less to say in them than Shakespear with his little Latin
and less Greek; and public life is the paradise of voluble windbags.

All these examples, which might be multiplied by millions, are cases in
which a long, laborious, conscious, detailed process of acquirement has
been condensed into an instinctive and unconscious inborn one. Factors
which formerly had to be considered one by one in succession are
integrated into what seems a single simple factor. Chains of hardly
soluble problems have coalesced in one problem which solves itself
the moment it is raised. What is more, they have been pushed back (or
forward, if you like) from post-natal to pre-natal ones. The child
in the womb may take some time over them; but it is a miraculously
shortened time.

The time phenomena involved are curious, and suggest that we are either
wrong about our history or else that we enormously exaggerate the
periods required for the pre-natal acquirement of habits. In the
nineteenth century we talked very glibly about geological periods, and
flung millions of eons about in the most lordly manner in our reaction
against Archbishop Ussher's chronology. We had a craze for big figures,
and positively liked to believe that the progress made by the child in
the womb in a month was represented in prehistoric time by ages and
ages. We insisted that Evolution advanced more slowly than any snail
ever crawled, and that Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds. This
was all very well as long as we were dealing with such acquired habits
as breathing or digestion. It was possible to believe that dozens of
epochs had gone to the slow building up of these habits. But when we
have to consider the case of a man born not only as an accomplished
metabolist, but with such an aptitude for shorthand and keyboard
manipulation that he is a stenographer or pianist at least five sixths
ready-made as soon as he can control his hands intelligently, we
are forced to suspect either that keyboards and shorthand are older
inventions than we suppose, or else that acquirements can be assimilated
and stored as congenital qualifications in a shorter time than we think;
so that, as between Lyell and Archbishop Ussher, the laugh may not be
with Lyell quite so uproariously as it seemed fifty years ago.


HEREDITY AN OLD STORY

It is evident that the evolutionary process is a hereditary one, or,
to put it less drily, that human life is continuous and immortal. The
Evolutionists took heredity for granted. So did everybody. The human
mind has been soaked in heredity as long back as we can trace its
thought. Hereditary peers, hereditary monarchs, hereditary castes and
trades and classes were the best known of social institutions, and in
some cases of public nuisances. Pedigree men counted pedigree dogs and
pedigree horses among their most cherished possessions. Far from being
unconscious of heredity, or sceptical, men were insanely credulous about
it: they not only believed in the transmission of qualities and habits
from generation to generation, but expected the son to begin mentally
where the father left off.

This belief in heredity led naturally to the practice of Intentional
Selection. Good blood and breeding were eagerly sought after in human
marriage. In dealing with plants and animals, selection with a view to
the production of new varieties and the improvement and modification of
species had been practised ever since men began to cultivate them. My
pre-Darwinian uncle knew as well as Darwin that the race-horse and the
dray-horse are not separate creations from the Garden of Eden, but
adaptations by deliberate human selection of the medieval war-horse to
modern racing and industrial haulage. He knew that there are nearly
two hundred different sorts of dogs, all capable of breeding with one
another and of producing cross varieties unknown to Adam. He knew that
the same thing is true of pigeons. He knew that gardeners had spent
their lives trying to breed black tulips and green carnations and
unheard-of orchids, and had actually produced flowers just as strange
to Eve. His quarrel with the Evolutionists was not a quarrel with the
evidence for Evolution: he had accepted enough of it to prove Evolution
ten times over before he ever heard of it. What he repudiated was
cousinship with the ape, and the implied suspicion of a rudimentary
tail, because it was offensive to his sense of his own dignity, and
because he thought that apes were ridiculous, and tails diabolical when
associated with the erect posture. Also he believed that Evolution was
a heresy which involved the destruction of Christianity, of which, as
a member of the Irish Church (the pseudo-Protestant one), he conceived
himself a pillar. But this was only his ignorance; for man may deny his
descent from an ape and be eligible as a churchwarden without being any
the less a convinced Evolutionist.


DISCOVERY ANTICIPATED BY DIVINATION

What is more, the religious folk can claim to be among the pioneers of
Evolutionism. Weismann, Neo-Darwinist though he was, devoted a long
passage in his History of Evolution to the Nature Philosophy of Lorenz
Oken, published in 1809. Oken defined natural science as 'the science
of the everlasting transmutations of the Holy Ghost in the world.' His
religion had started him on the right track, and not only led him to
think out a whole scheme of Evolution in abstract terms, but guided his
aim in a significantly good scientific shot which brought him within the
scope of Weismann. He not only defined the original substance from which
all forms of life have developed as protoplasm, or, as he called it,
primitive slime (_Urschleim_), but actually declared that this slime
took the form of vesicles out of which the universe was built. Here was
the modern cell morphology guessed by a religious thinker long before
the microscope and the scalpel forced it on the vision of mere
laboratory workers who could not think and had no religion. They worked
hard to discover the vital secrets of the glands by opening up dogs
and cutting out the glands, or tying up their ducts, or severing their
nerves, thereby learning, negatively, that the governors of our vital
forces do not hold their incessant conversations through the nerves,
and, positively, how miserably a horribly injured dog can die, leaving
us to infer that we shall probably perish likewise if we grudge our
guineas to Harley Street. Lorenz Oken _thought_ very hard to find out
what was happening to the Holy Ghost, and thereby made a contribution of
extraordinary importance to our understanding of uninjured creatures.
The man who was scientific enough to see that the Holy Ghost is a
scientific fact got easily in front of the blockheads who could only
sin against it. Hence my uncle was turning his back on very respectable
company when he derided Evolution, and would probably have recanted and
apologized at once had anybody pointed out to him what a solecism he was
committing.

The metaphysical side of Evolution was thus no novelty when Darwin
arrived. Had Oken never lived, there would still have been millions of
persons trained from their childhood to believe that we are continually
urged upwards by a force called the Will of God. In 1819 Schopenhauer
published his treatise on The World as Will, which is the metaphysical
complement to Lamarck's natural history, as it demonstrates that the
driving force behind Evolution is a will-to-live, and to live, as Christ
said long before, more abundantly. And the earlier philosophers, from
Plato to Leibniz, had kept the human mind open for the thought of
the universe as one idea behind all its physically apprehensible
transformations.


CORRECTED DATES FOR THE DISCOVERY OF EVOLUTION

All this, remember, is the state of things in the pre-Darwin period,
which so many of us still think of as a pre-evolutionary period.
Evolutionism was the rage before Queen Victoria came to the throne. To
fix this chronology, let me repeat the story told by Weismann of the
July revolution in Paris in 1830, when the French got rid of Charles the
Tenth. Goethe was then still living; and a French friend of his called
on him and found him wildly excited. 'What do you think of the great
event?' said Goethe. 'The volcano is in eruption; and all is in flames.
There can no longer be discussion with closed doors.' The Frenchman
replied that no doubt it was a terrible business; but what could they
expect with such a ministry and such a king? 'Stuff!' said Goethe: 'I
am not thinking of these people at all, but of the open rupture in
the French Academy between Cuvier and St Hilaire. It is of the utmost
importance to science,' The rupture Goethe meant was about Evolution,
Cuvier contending that there were four species, and St Hilaire that
there was only one.

From 1830, when Darwin was an apparently unpromising lad of twenty-one,
until 1859, when he turned the world upside down by his Origin of
Species, there was a slump in Evolutionism. The first generation of its
enthusiasts was ageing and dying out; and their successors were being
taught from the Book of Genesis, just as Edward VI was (and Edward VII
too, for that matter). Nobody who knew the theory was adding anything to
it. This slump not only heightened the impression of entire novelty when
Darwin brought the subject to the front again: it probably prevented
him from realizing how much had been done before, even by his own
grandfather, to whom he was accused of being unjust. Besides, he was
not really carrying on the family business. He was an entirely original
worker; and he was on a new tack, as we shall see presently. And he
would not in any case have thought much, as a practical naturalist, of
the more or less mystical intellectual speculations of the Deists of
1790-1830. Scientific workers were very tired of Deism just then. They
had given up the riddle of the Great First Cause as insoluble, and were
calling themselves, accordingly, Agnostics. They had turned from the
inscrutable question of Why things existed, to the spade work of
discovering What was really occurring in the world and How it really
occurred.

With all his attention bent in this new direction, Darwin soon noticed
that a good deal was occurring in an entirely unmystical and even
unmeaning way of which the older speculative Deist-Evolutionists had
taken little or no account. Nowadays, when we are turning in weary
disgust and disillusion from Neo-Darwinism and Mechanism to Vitalism and
Creative Evolution, it is difficult to imagine how this new departure of
Darwin's could possibly have appealed to his contemporaries as exciting,
agreeable, above all as hopeful. Let me therefore try to bring back
something of the atmosphere of that time by describing a scene, very
characteristic of its superstitions, in which I took what was then
considered an unspeakably shocking part.


DEFYING THE LIGHTNING: A FRUSTRATED EXPERIMENT

One evening in 1878 or thereabouts, I, being then in my earliest
twenties, was at a bachelor party of young men of the professional class
in the house of a doctor in the Kensingtonian quarter of London. They
fell to talking about religious revivals; and an anecdote was related of
a man who, having incautiously scoffed at the mission of Messrs Moody
and Sankey, a then famous firm of American evangelists, was subsequently
carried home on a shutter, slain by divine vengeance as a blasphemer.
A timid minority, without quite venturing to question the truth of the
incident--for they naturally did not care to run the risk of going home
on shutters themselves--nevertheless shewed a certain disposition to
cavil at those who exulted in it; and something approaching to an
argument began. At last it was alleged by the most evangelical of the
disputants that Charles Bradlaugh, the most formidable atheist on the
Secularist platform, had taken out his watch publicly and challenged the
Almighty to strike him dead in five minutes if he really existed and
disapproved of atheism. The leader of the cavillers, with great heat,
repudiated this as a gross calumny, declaring that Bradlaugh had
repeatedly and indignantly contradicted it, and implying that the
atheist champion was far too pious a man to commit such a blasphemy.
This exquisite confusion of ideas roused my sense of comedy. It was
clear to me that the challenge attributed to Charles Bradlaugh was a
scientific experiment of a quite simple, straightforward, and proper
kind to ascertain whether the expression of atheistic opinions really
did involve any personal risk. It was certainly the method taught in the
Bible, Elijah having confuted the prophets of Baal in precisely that
way, with every circumstance of bitter mockery of their god when he
failed to send down fire from heaven. Accordingly I said that if the
question at issue were whether the penalty of questioning the theology
of Messrs Moody and Sankey was to be struck dead on the spot by an
incensed deity, nothing could effect a more convincing settlement of it
than the very obvious experiment attributed to Mr Bradlaugh, and that
consequently if he had not tried it, he ought to have tried it. The
omission, I added, was one which could easily be remedied there and
then, as I happened to share Mr Bradlaugh's views as to the absurdity of
the belief in these violent interferences with the order of nature by a
short-tempered and thin-skinned supernatural deity. Therefore--and at
that point I took out my watch.

The effect was electrical. Neither sceptics nor devotees were prepared
to abide the result of the experiment. In vain did I urge the pious to
trust in the accuracy of their deity's aim with a thunderbolt, and the
justice of his discrimination between the innocent and the guilty. In
vain did I appeal to the sceptics to accept the logical outcome of their
scepticism: it soon appeared that when thunderbolts were in question
there were no sceptics. Our host, seeing that his guests would vanish
precipitately if the impious challenge were uttered, leaving him alone
with a solitary infidel under sentence of extermination in five minutes,
interposed and forbade the experiment, pleading at the same time for
a change of subject. I of course complied, but could not refrain from
remarking that though the dreadful words had not been uttered, yet, as
the thought had been formulated in my mind, it was very doubtful whether
the consequences could be averted by sealing my lips. However, the rest
appeared to feel that the game would be played according to the rules,
and that it mattered very little what I thought so long as I said
nothing. Only the leader of the evangelical party, I thought, was a
little preoccupied until five minutes had elapsed and the weather was
still calm.


IN QUEST OF THE FIRST CAUSE

Another reminiscence. In those days we thought in terms of time and
space, of cause and effect, as we still do; but we do not now demand
from a religion that it shall explain the universe completely in terms
of cause and effect, and present the world to us as a manufactured
article and as the private property of its Manufacturer. We did then. We
were invited to pity the delusion of certain heathens who held that
the world is supported by an elephant who is supported by a tortoise.
Mahomet decided that the mountains are great weights to keep the world
from being blown away into space. But we refuted these orientals by
asking triumphantly what the tortoise stands on? Freethinkers asked
which came first: the owl or the egg. Nobody thought of saying that
the ultimate problem of existence, being clearly insoluble and even
unthinkable on causation lines, could not be a causation problem. To
pious people this would have been flat atheism, because they assumed
that God must be a Cause, and sometimes called him The Great First
Cause, or, in still choicer language, The Primal Cause. To the
Rationalists it would have been a renunciation of reason. Here and there
a man would confess that he stood as with a dim lantern in a dense fog,
and could see but a little way in any direction into infinity. But he
did not really believe that infinity was infinite or that the eternal
was also sempiternal: he assumed that all things, known and unknown,
were caused.

Hence it was that I found myself one day towards the end of the
eighteen-seventies in a cell in the old Brompton Oratory arguing with
Father Addis, who had been called by one of his flock to attempt my
conversion to Roman Catholicism. The universe exists, said the father:
somebody must have made it. If that somebody exists, said I, somebody
must have made him. I grant that for the sake of argument, said the
Oratorian. I grant you a maker of God. I grant you a maker of the maker
of God. I grant you as long a line of makers as you please; but an
infinity of makers is unthinkable and extravagant: it is no harder to
believe in number one than in number fifty thousand or fifty million; so
why not accept number one and stop there, since no attempt to get behind
him will remove your logical difficulty? By your leave, said I, it is as
easy for me to believe that the universe made itself as that a maker of
the universe made himself: in fact much easier; for the universe visibly
exists and makes itself as it goes along, whereas a maker for it is a
hypothesis. Of course we could get no further on these lines. He rose
and said that we were like two men working a saw, he pushing it forward
and I pushing it back, and cutting nothing; but when we had dropped the
subject and were walking through the refectory, he returned to it for a
moment to say that he should go mad if he lost his belief. I, glorying
in the robust callousness of youth and the comedic spirit, felt quite
comfortable and said so; though I was touched, too, by his evident
sincerity.

These two anecdotes are superficially trivial and even comic; but there
is an abyss of horror beneath them. They reveal a condition so utterly
irreligious that religion means nothing but belief in a nursery bogey,
and its inadequacy is demonstrated by a toy logical dilemma, neither
the bogey nor the dilemma having anything to do with religion, or being
serious enough to impose on or confuse any properly educated child
over the age of six. One hardly knows which is the more appalling: the
abjectness of the credulity or the flippancy of the scepticism. The
result was inevitable. All who were strong-minded enough not to be
terrified by the bogey were left stranded in empty contemptuous
negation, and argued, when they argued at all, as I argued with Father
Addis. But their position was not intellectually comfortable. A member
of parliament expressed their discomfort when, objecting to the
admission of Charles Bradlaugh into parliament, he said 'Hang it all, a
man should believe in something or somebody.' It was easy to throw the
bogey into the dustbin; but none the less the world, our corner of the
universe, did not look like a pure accident: it presented evidences of
design in every direction. There was mind and purpose behind it. As the
anti-Bradlaugh member would have put it, there must be somebody behind
the something: no atheist could get over that.


PALEY'S WATCH

Paley had put the argument in an apparently unanswerable form. If you
found a watch, full of mechanism exquisitely adapted to produce a series
of operations all leading to the fulfilment of one central purpose of
measuring for mankind the march of the day and night, could you believe
that it was not the work of a cunning artificer who had designed and
contrived it all to that end? And here was a far more wonderful thing
than a watch, a man with all his organs ingeniously contrived, cords and
levers, girders and kingposts, circulating systems of pipes and valves,
dialysing membranes, chemical retorts, carburettors, ventilators, inlets
and outlets, telephone transmitters in his ears, light recorders and
lenses in his eye: was it conceivable that this was the work of chance?
that no artificer had wrought here? that there was no purpose in this,
no design, no guiding intelligence? The thing was incredible. In vain
did Helmholtz declare that 'the eye has every possible defect that can
be found in an optical instrument, and even some peculiar to itself,'
and that 'if an optician tried to sell me an instrument which had all
these defects I should think myself quite justified in blaming
his carelessness in the strongest terms, and sending him back his
instrument.' To discredit the optician's skill was not to get rid of the
optician. The eye might not be so cleverly made as Paley thought, but it
was made somehow, by somebody.

And then my argument with Father Addis began all over again. It was
easy enough to say that every man makes his own eyes: indeed the
embryologists had actually caught him doing it. But what about the very
evident purpose that prompted him to do it? Why did he want to see, if
not to extend his consciousness and his knowledge and his power? That
purpose was at work everywhere, and must be something bigger than the
individual eye-making man. Only the stupidest muckrakers could fail to
see this, and even to know it as part of their own consciousness. Yet to
admit it seemed to involve letting the bogey come back, so inextricably
had we managed to mix up belief in the bogey's existence with belief in
the existence of design in the universe.


THE IRRESISTIBLE CRY OF ORDER, ORDER!

Our scornful young scientific and philosophic lions of today must not
blame the Church of England for this confusion of thought. In 1562 the
Church, in convocation in London 'for the avoiding of diversities of
opinions and for the establishment of consent touching true religion,'
proclaimed in their first utterance, and as an Article of Religion,
that God is 'without body, parts, or passions,' or, as we say, an _Elan
Vital_ or Life Force. Unfortunately neither parents, parsons, nor
pedagogues could be induced to adopt that article. St John might say
that 'God is spirit' as pointedly as he pleased; our Sovereign Lady
Elizabeth might ratify the Article again and again; serious divines
might feel as deeply as they could that a God with body, parts, and
passions could be nothing but an anthropomorphic idol: no matter: people
at large could not conceive a God who was not anthropomorphic: they
stood by the Old Testament legends of a God whose parts had been seen by
one of the patriarchs, and finally set up as against the Church a God
who, far from being without body, parts, or passions, was composed of
nothing else, and of very evil passions too. They imposed this idol
in practice on the Church itself, in spite of the First Article, and
thereby homeopathically produced the atheist, whose denial of God was
simply a denial of the idol and a demonstration against an unbearable
and most unchristian idolatry. The idol was, as Shelley had been
expelled from Oxford for pointing out, an almighty fiend, with a petty
character and unlimited power, spiteful, cruel, jealous, vindictive,
and physically violent. The most villainous schoolmasters, the most
tyrannical parents, fell far short in their attempts to imitate it.
But it was not its social vices that brought it low. What made it
scientifically intolerable was that it was ready at a moment's notice to
upset the whole order of the universe on the most trumpery provocation,
whether by stopping the sun in the valley of Ajalon or sending an
atheist home dead on a shutter (the shutter was indispensable because
it marked the utter unpreparedness of the atheist, who, unable to save
himself by a deathbed repentance, was subsequently roasted through all
eternity in blazing brimstone). It was this disorderliness, this refusal
to obey its own laws of nature, that created a scientific need for its
destruction. Science could stand a cruel and unjust god; for nature was
full of suffering and injustice. But a disorderly god was impossible. In
the Middle Ages a compromise had been made by which two different orders
of truth, religious and scientific, had been recognized, in order that a
schoolman might say that two and two make four without being burnt for
heresy. But the nineteenth century, steeped in a meddling, presumptuous,
reading-and-writing, socially and politically powerful ignorance
inconceivable by Thomas Aquinas or even Roger Bacon, was incapable of
so convenient an arrangement; and science was strangled by bigoted
ignoramuses claiming infallibility for their interpretation of the
Bible, which was regarded, not as a literature nor even as a book, but
partly as an oracle which answered and settled all questions, and partly
as a talisman to be carried by soldiers in their breast pockets or
placed under the pillows of persons who were afraid of ghosts. The tract
shops exhibited in their windows bullet-dinted testaments, mothers'
gifts to their soldier sons whose lives had been saved by it; for the
muzzle-loaders of those days could not drive a projectile through so
many pages.


THE MOMENT AND THE MAN

This superstition of a continual capricious disorder in nature, of a
lawgiver who was also a lawbreaker, made atheists in all directions
among clever and lightminded people. But atheism did not account for
Paley's watch. Atheism accounted for nothing; and it was the business of
science to account for everything that was plainly accountable. Science
had no use for mere negation: what was desired by it above all things
just then was a demonstration that the evidences of design could be
explained without resort to the hypothesis of a personal designer. If
only some genius, whilst admitting Paley's facts, could knock the brains
out of Paley by the discovery of a method whereby watches could happen
without watchmakers, that genius was assured of such a welcome from the
thought of his day as no natural philosopher had ever enjoyed before.

The time being thus ripe, the genius appeared; and his name was Charles
Darwin. And now, what did Darwin really discover?

Here, I am afraid, I shall require once more the assistance of the
giraffe, or, as he was called in the days of the celebrated Buffoon,
the camelopard (by children, cammyleopard). I do not remember how this
animal imposed himself illustratively on the Evolution controversy; but
there was no getting away from him then; and I am old-fashioned enough
to be unable to get away from him now. How did he come by his long neck?
Lamarck would have said, by wanting to get at the tender leaves high
up on the tree, and trying until he succeeded in wishing the necessary
length of neck into existence. Another answer was also possible: namely,
that some prehistoric stockbreeder, wishing to produce a natural
curiosity, selected the longest-necked animals he could find, and bred
from them until at last an animal with an abnormally long neck was
evolved by intentional selection, just as the race-horse or the fantail
pigeon has been evolved. Both these explanations, you will observe,
involve consciousness, will, design, purpose, either on the part of the
animal itself or on the part of a superior intelligence controlling its
destiny. Darwin pointed out--and this and no more was Darwin's famous
discovery--that a third explanation, involving neither will nor purpose
nor design either in the animal or anyone else, was on the cards. If
your neck is too short to reach your food, you die. That may be the
simple explanation of the fact that all the surviving animals that feed
on foliage have necks or trunks long enough to reach it. So bang goes
your belief that the necks must have been designed to reach the food.
But Lamarck did not believe that the necks were so designed in the
beginning: he believed that the long necks were evolved by wanting
and trying. Not necessarily, said Darwin. Consider the effect on the
giraffes of the natural multiplication of their numbers, as insisted on
by Malthus. Suppose the average height of the foliage-eating animals is
four feet, and that they increase in numbers until a time comes when all
the trees are eaten away to within four feet of the ground. Then the
animals who happen to be an inch or two short of the average will die
of starvation. All the animals who happen to be an inch or so above
the average will be better fed and stronger than the others. They will
secure the strongest and tallest mates; and their progeny will survive
whilst the average ones and the sub-average ones will die out. This
process, by which the species gains, say, an inch in reach, will repeat
itself until the giraffe's neck is so long that he can always find
food enough within his reach, at which point, of course, the selective
process stops and the length of the giraffe's neck stops with it.
Otherwise, he would grow until he could browse off the trees in the
moon. And this, mark you, without the intervention of any stockbreeder,
human or divine, and without will, purpose, design, or even
consciousness beyond the blind will to satisfy hunger. It is true that
this blind will, being in effect a will to live, gives away the whole
case; but still, as compared to the open-eyed intelligent wanting and
trying of Lamarck, the Darwinian process may be described as a chapter
of accidents. As such, it seems simple, because you do not at first
realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns on
you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous
fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and
intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration, to such
casually picturesque changes as an avalanche may make in a mountain
landscape, or a railway accident in a human figure. To call this Natural
Selection is a blasphemy, possible to many for whom Nature is nothing
but a casual aggregation of inert and dead matter, but eternally
impossible to the spirits and souls of the righteous. If it be no
blasphemy, but a truth of science, then the stars of heaven, the showers
and dew, the winter and summer, the fire and heat, the mountains and
hills, may no longer be called to exalt the Lord with us by praise;
their work is to modify all things by blindly starving and murdering
everything that is not lucky enough to survive in the universal struggle
for hogwash.


THE BRINK OF THE BOTTOMLESS PIT

Thus did the neck of the giraffe reach out across the whole heavens and
make men believe that what they saw there was a gloaming of the gods.
For if this sort of selection could turn an antelope into a giraffe, it
could conceivably turn a pond full of amoebas into the French
Academy. Though Lamarck's way, the way of life, will, aspiration, and
achievement, remained still possible, this newly shewn way of hunger,
death, stupidity, delusion, chance, and bare survival was also possible:
was indeed most certainly the way in which many apparently intelligently
designed transformations had actually come to pass. Had I not preluded
with the apparently idle story of my revival of the controversial
methods of Elijah, I should be asked how it was that the explorer who
opened up this gulf of despair, far from being stoned or crucified as
the destroyer of the honor of the race and the purpose of the world, was
hailed as Deliverer, Savior, Prophet, Redeemer, Enlightener, Rescuer,
Hope Giver, and Epoch Maker; whilst poor Lamarck was swept aside as a
crude and exploded guesser hardly worthy to be named as his erroneous
forerunner. In the light of my anecdote, the explanation is obvious. The
first thing the gulf did was to swallow up Paley, and the Disorderly
Designer, and Shelley's Almighty Fiend, and all the rest of the
pseudo-religious rubbish that had blocked every upward and onward path
since the hopes of men had turned to Science as their true Savior. It
seemed such a convenient grave that nobody at first noticed that it was
nothing less than the bottomless pit, now become a very real terror. For
though Darwin left a path round it for his soul, his followers presently
dug it right across the whole width of the way. Yet for the moment,
there was nothing but wild rejoicing: a sort of scientific mafficking.
We had been so oppressed by the notion that everything that happened in
the world was the arbitrary personal act of an arbitrary personal god
of dangerously jealous and cruel personal character, so that even the
relief of the pains of childbirth and the operating table by chloroform
was objected to as an interference with his arrangements which he would
probably resent, that we just jumped at Darwin. When Napoleon was asked
what would happen when he died, he said that Europe would express its
intense relief with a great 'Ouf!': Well, when Darwin killed the god who
objected to chloroform, everybody who had ever thought about it said
'Ouf!' Paley was buried fathoms deep with his watch, now fully accounted
for without any divine artificer at all. We were so glad to be rid of
both that we never gave a thought to the consequences. When a prisoner
sees the door of his dungeon open, he dashes for it without stopping to
think where he shall get his dinner outside. The moment we found that we
could do without Shelley's almighty fiend intellectually, he went into
the gulf that seemed only a dustbin with a suddenness that made our own
lives one of the most astonishing periods in history. If I had told that
uncle of mine that within thirty years from the date of our conversation
I should be exposing myself to suspicions of the grossest superstition
by questioning the sufficiency of Darwin; maintaining the reality of the
Holy Ghost; declaring that the phenomenon of the Word becoming Flesh
was occurring daily, he would have regarded me as the most extravagant
madman our family had ever produced. Yet it was so. In 1906 I might
have vituperated Jehovah more heartily than ever Shelley did without
eliciting a protest in any circle of thinkers, or shocking any public
audience accustomed to modern discussion; but when I described Darwin
as 'an intelligent and industrious pigeon fancier,' that blasphemous
levity, as it seemed, was received with horror and indignation. The tide
has now turned; and every puny whipster may say what he likes about
Darwin; but anyone who wants to know what it was to be a Lamarckian
during the last quarter of the nineteenth century has only to read Mr
Festing Jones's memoir of Samuel Butler to learn how completely even a
man of genius could isolate himself by antagonizing Darwin on the one
hand and the Church on the other.


WHY DARWIN CONVERTED THE CROWD

I am well aware that in describing the effect of Darwin's discovery on
naturalists and on persons capable of serious reflection on the nature
and attributes of God, I am leaving the vast mass of the British public
out of account. I have pointed out elsewhere that the British nation
does not consist of atheists and Plymouth Brothers; and I am not now
going to pretend that it ever consisted of Darwinians and Lamarckians.
The average citizen is irreligious and unscientific: you talk to him
about cricket and golf, market prices and party politics, not about
evolution and relativity, transubstantiation and predestination. Nothing
will knock into his head the fateful distinction between Evolution as
promulgated by Erasmus Darwin, and Circumstantial (so-called Natural)
Selection as revealed by his grandson. Yet the doctrine of Charles
reached him, though the doctrine of Erasmus had passed over his head.
Why did not Erasmus Darwin popularize the word Evolution as effectively
as Charles?

The reason was, I think, that Circumstantial Selection is easier to
understand, more visible and concrete, than Lamarckian evolution.
Evolution as a philosophy and physiology of the will is a mystical
process, which can be apprehended only by a trained, apt, and
comprehensive thinker. Though the phenomena of use and disuse, of
wanting and trying, of the manufacture of weight lifters and wrestlers
from men of ordinary strength, are familiar enough as facts, they are
extremely puzzling as subjects of thought, and lead you into metaphysics
the moment you try to account for them. But pigeon fanciers, dog
fanciers, gardeners, stock breeders, or stud grooms, can understand
Circumstantial Selection, because it is their business to produce
transformation by imposing on flowers and animals a Selection From
Without. All that Darwin had to say to them was that the mere chapter of
accidents is always doing on a huge scale what they themselves are doing
on a very small scale. There is hardly a laborer attached to an English
country house who has not taken a litter of kittens or puppies to the
bucket, and drowned all of them except the one he thinks the most
promising. Such a man has nothing to learn about the survival of the
fittest except that it acts in more ways than he has yet noticed; for he
knows quite well, as you will find if you are not too proud to talk to
him, that this sort of selection occurs naturally (in Darwin's sense)
too: that, for instance, a hard winter will kill off a weakly child as
the bucket kills off a weakly puppy. Then there is the farm laborer.
Shakespear's Touchstone, a court-bred fool, was shocked to find in the
shepherd a natural philosopher, and opined that he would be damned for
the part he took in the sexual selection of sheep. As to the production
of new species by the selection of variations, that is no news to your
gardener. Now if you are familiar with these three processes: the
survival of the fittest, sexual selection, and variation leading to new
kinds, there is nothing to puzzle you in Darwinism.

That was the secret of Darwin's popularity. He never puzzled anybody. If
very few of us have read The Origin of Species from end to end, it is
not because it overtaxes our mind, but because we take in the whole case
and are prepared to accept it long before we have come to the end of
the innumerable instances and illustrations of which the book mainly
consists. Darwin becomes tedious in the manner of a man who insists
on continuing to prove his innocence after he has been acquitted. You
assure him that there is not a stain on his character, and beg him to
leave the court; but he will not be content with enough evidence: he
will have you listen to all the evidence that exists in the world.
Darwin's industry was enormous. His patience, his perseverance, his
conscientiousness reached the human limit. But he never got deeper
beneath or higher above his facts than an ordinary man could follow
him. He was not conscious of having raised a stupendous issue, because,
though it arose instantly, it was not his business. He was conscious of
having discovered a process of transformation and modification which
accounted for a great deal of natural history. But he did not put it
forward as accounting for the whole of natural history. He included it
under the heading of Evolution, though it was only pseudo-evolution at
best; but he revealed it as _a_ method of evolution, not as _the_ method
of evolution. He did not pretend that it excluded other methods, or
that it was the chief method. Though he demonstrated that many
transformations which had been taken as functional adaptations (the
current phrase for Lamarckian evolution) either certainly were or
conceivably might be due to Circumstantial Selection, he was careful
not to claim that he had superseded Lamarck or disproved Functional
Adaptation. In short, he was not a Darwinian, but an honest naturalist
working away at his job with so little preoccupation with theological
speculation that he never quarrelled with the theistic Unitarianism into
which he was born, and remained to the end the engagingly simple and
socially easy-going soul he had been in his boyhood, when his elders
doubted whether he would ever be of much use in the world.


HOW WE RUSHED DOWN A STEEP PLACE

Not so the rest of us intellectuals. We all began going to the devil
with the utmost cheerfulness. Everyone who had a mind to change, changed
it. Only Samuel Butler, on whom Darwin had acted homeopathically,
reacted against him furiously; ran up the Lamarckian flag to the
top-gallant peak; declared with penetrating accuracy that Darwin had
'banished mind from the universe'; and even attacked Darwin's personal
character, unable to bear the fact that the author of so abhorrent a
doctrine was an amiable and upright man. Nobody would listen to him. He
was so completely submerged by the flowing tide of Darwinism that when
Darwin wanted to clear up the misunderstanding on which Butler was
basing his personal attacks, Darwin's friends, very foolishly and
snobbishly, persuaded him that Butler was too ill-conditioned and
negligible to be answered. That they could not recognize in Butler a
man of genius mattered little: what did matter was that they could not
understand the provocation under which he was raging. They actually
regarded the banishment of mind from the universe as a glorious
enlightenment and emancipation for which he was ignorantly ungrateful.
Even now, when Butler's eminence is unchallenged, and his biographer, Mr
Festing Jones, is enjoying a vogue like that of Boswell or Lockhart, his
memoirs shew him rather as a shocking example of the bad controversial
manners of our country parsonages than as a prophet who tried to head
us back when we were gaily dancing to our damnation across the rainbow
bridge which Darwinism had thrown over the gulf which separates life and
hope from death and despair. We were intellectually intoxicated with the
idea that the world could make itself without design, purpose, skill,
or intelligence: in short, without life. We completely overlooked the
difference between the modification of species by adaptation to their
environment and the appearance of new species: we just threw in the word
'variations' or the word 'sports' (fancy a man of science talking of
an unknown factor as a sport instead of as _x_!) and left them to
'accumulate' and account for the difference between a cockatoo and a
hippopotamus. Such phrases set us free to revel in demonstrating to the
Vitalists and Bible worshippers that if we once admit the existence of
any kind of force, however unintelligent, and stretch out the past to
unlimited time for such force to operate accidentally in, that force may
conceivably, by the action of Circumstantial Selection, produce a world
in which every function has an organ perfectly adapted to perform it,
and therefore presents every appearance of having been designed, like
Paley's watch, by a conscious and intelligent artificer for the purpose.
We took a perverse pleasure in arguing, without the least suspicion
that we were reducing ourselves to absurdity, that all the books in the
British Museum library might have been written word for word as they
stand on the shelves if no human being had ever been conscious, just
as the trees stand in the forest doing wonderful things without
consciousness.

And the Darwinians went far beyond denying consciousness to trees.
Weismann insisted that the chick breaks out of its eggshell
automatically; that the butterfly, springing into the air to avoid the
pounce of the lizard, 'does not wish to avoid death; knows nothing about
death,' what has happened being simply that a flight instinct evolved by
Circumstantial Selection reacts promptly to a visual impression produced
by the lizard's movement. His proof is that the butterfly immediately
settles again on the flower, and repeats the performance every time the
lizard springs, thus shewing that it learns nothing from experience,
and--Weismann concludes--is not conscious of what it does.

It should hardly have escaped so curious an observer that when the cat
jumps up on the dinner table, and you put it down, it instantly jumps
up again, and finally establishes its right to a place on the cloth by
convincing you that if you put it down a hundred times it will jump up a
hundred and one times; so that if you desire its company at dinner you
can have it only on its own terms. If Weismann really thought that
cats act thus without any consciousness or any purpose, immediate or
ulterior, he must have known very little about cats. But a thoroughgoing
Weismannite, if any such still survive from those mad days, would
contend that I am not at present necessarily conscious of what I am
doing; that my writing of these lines, and your reading of them, are
effects of Circumstantial Selection; that I heed know no more about
Darwinism than a butterfly knows of a lizard's appetite; and that the
proof that I actually am doing it unconsciously is that as I have spent
forty years in writing in this fashion without, as far as I can see,
producing any visible effect on public opinion, I must be incapable of
learning from experience, and am therefore a mere automaton. And
the Weismannite demonstration of this would of course be an equally
unconscious effect of Circumstantial Selection.


DARWINISM NOT FINALLY REFUTABLE

Do not too hastily say that this is inconceivable. To Circumstantial
Selection all mechanical and chemical reactions are possible, provided
you accept the geologists' estimates of the great age of the earth, and
therefore allow time enough for the circumstances to operate. It is true
that mere survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence plus
sexual selection fail as hopelessly to account for Darwin's own life
work as for my conquest of the bicycle; but who can prove that there
are not other soulless factors, unnoticed or undiscovered, which only
require imagination enough to fit them to the evolution of an automatic
Jesus or Shakespear? When a man tells you that you are a product of
Circumstantial Selection solely, you cannot finally disprove it. You can
only tell him out of the depths of your inner conviction that he is a
fool and a liar. But as this, though British, is uncivil, it is wiser to
offer him the counter-assurance that you are the product of Lamarckian
evolution, formerly called Functional Adaptation and now Creative
Evolution, and challenge him to disprove _that_, which he can no more
do than you can disprove Circumstantial Selection, both forces being
conceivably able to produce anything if you only give them rope enough.
You may also defy him to act for a single hour on the assumption that he
may safely cross Oxford Street in a state of unconsciousness, trusting
to his dodging reflexes to react automatically and promptly enough
to the visual impression produced by a motor bus, and the audible
impression produced by its hooter. But if you allow yourself to defy him
to explain any particular action of yours by Circumstantial Selection,
he should always be able to find some explanation that will fit the case
if only he is ingenious enough and goes far enough to find it. Darwin
found several such explanations in his controversies. Anybody who really
wants to believe that the universe has been produced by Circumstantial
Selection co-operating with a force as inhuman as we conceive magnetism
to be can find a logical excuse for his belief if he tries hard enough.



THREE BLIND MICE

The stultification and damnation which ensued are illustrated by a
comparison of the ease and certainty with which Butler's mind moved to
humane and inspiring conclusions with the grotesque stupidities and
cruelties of the idle and silly controversy which arose among the
Darwinians as to whether acquired habits can be transmitted from parents
to offspring. Consider, for example, how Weismann set to work on that
subject. An Evolutionist with a live mind would first have dropped the
popular expression 'acquired habits,' because to an Evolutionist there
are no other habits and can be no others, a man being only an amoeba
with acquirements. He would then have considered carefully the process
by which he himself had acquired his habits. He would have assumed that
the habits with which he was born must have been acquired by a similar
process. He would have known what a habit is: that is, an Action
voluntarily attempted until it has become more or less automatic and
involuntary; and it would never have occurred to him that injuries or
accidents coming from external sources against the will of the victim
could possibly establish a habit; that, for instance, a family could
acquire a habit of being killed in railway accidents.

And yet Weismann began to investigate the point by behaving like the
butcher's wife in the old catch. He got a colony of mice, and cut off
their tails. Then he waited to see whether their children would be born
without tails. They were not, as Butler could have told him beforehand.
He then cut off the children's tails, and waited to see whether the
grandchildren would be born with at least rather short tails. They were
not, as I could have told him beforehand. So with the patience and
industry on which men of science pride themselves, he cut off the
grandchildren's tails too, and waited, full of hope, for the birth of
curtailed great-grandchildren. But their tails were quite up to the
mark, as any fool could have told him beforehand. Weismann then gravely
drew the inference that acquired habits cannot be transmitted. And yet
Weismann was not a born imbecile. He was an exceptionally clever and
studious man, not without roots of imagination and philosophy in him
which Darwinism killed as weeds.

How was it that he did not see that he was not experimenting with habits
or characteristics at all? How had he overlooked the glaring fact that
his experiment had been tried for many generations in China on the feet
of Chinese women without producing the smallest tendency on their part
to be born with abnormally small feet? He must have known about the
bound feet even if he knew nothing of the mutilations, the clipped ears
and docked tails, practised by dog fanciers and horse breeders on many
generations of the unfortunate animals they deal in. Such amazing
blindness and stupidity on the part of a man who was naturally
neither blind nor stupid is a telling illustration of what Darwin
unintentionally did to the minds of his disciples by turning their
attention so exclusively towards the part played in Evolution by
accident and violence operating with entire callousness to suffering and
sentiment.

A vital conception of Evolution would have taught Weismann that
biological problems are not to be solved by assaults on mice. The
scientific form of his experiment would have been something like this.
First, he should have procured a colony of mice highly susceptible to
hypnotic suggestion. He should then have hypnotized them into an
urgent conviction that the fate of the musque world depended on
the disappearance of its tail, just as some ancient and forgotten
experimenter seems to have convinced the cats of the Isle of Man. Having
thus made the mice desire to lose their tails with a life-or-death
intensity, he would very soon have seen a few mice born with little or
no tail. These would be recognized by the other mice as superior
beings, and privileged in the division of food and in sexual selection.
Ultimately the tailed mice would be put to death as monsters by their
fellows, and the miracle of the tailless mouse completely achieved.

The objection to this experiment is not that it seems too funny to be
taken seriously, and is not cruel enough to overawe the mob, but simply
that it is impossible because the human experimenter cannot get at the
mouse's mind. And that is what is wrong with all the barren cruelties of
the laboratories. Darwin's followers did not think of this. Their only
idea of investigation was to imitate 'Nature' by perpetrating violent
and senseless cruelties, and watch the effect of them with a paralyzing
fatalism which forbade the smallest effort to use their minds instead of
their knives and eyes, and established an abominable tradition that the
man who hesitates to be as cruel as Circumstantial Selection itself is a
traitor to science. For Weismann's experiment upon the mice was a mere
joke compared to the atrocities committed by other Darwinians in their
attempts to prove that mutilations could not be transmitted. No doubt
the worst of these experiments were not really experiments at all, but
cruelties committed by cruel men who were attracted to the laboratory by
the fact that it was a secret refuge left by law and public superstition
for the amateur of passionate torture. But there is no reason to suspect
Weismann of Sadism. Cutting off the tails of several generations of mice
is not voluptuous enough to tempt a scientific Nero. It was a mere piece
of one-eyedness; and it was Darwin who put out Weismann's humane and
sensible eye. He blinded many another eye and paralyzed many another
will also. Ever since he set up Circumstantial Selection as the creator
and ruler of the universe, the scientific world has been the very
citadel of stupidity and cruelty. Fearful as the tribal god of the
Hebrews was, nobody ever shuddered as they passed even his meanest and
narrowest Little Bethel or his proudest war-consecrating cathedral as we
shudder now when we pass a physiological laboratory. If we dreaded and
mistrusted the priest, we could at least keep him out of the house; but
what of the modern Darwinist surgeon whom we dread and mistrust ten
times more, but into whose hands we must all give ourselves from time
to time? Miserably as religion had been debased, it did at least still
proclaim that our relation to one another was that of a fellowship
in which we were all equal and members one of another before the
judgment-seat of our common father. Darwinism proclaimed that our true
relation is that of competitors and combatants in a struggle for mere
survival, and that every act of pity or loyalty to the old fellowship is
a vain and mischievous attempt to lessen the severity of the struggle
and preserve inferior varieties from the efforts of Nature to weed them
out. Even in Socialist Societies which existed solely to substitute
the law of fellowship for the law of competition, and the method of
providence and wisdom for the method of rushing violently down a steep
place into the sea, I found myself regarded as a blasphemer and an
ignorant sentimentalist because whenever the Neo-Darwinian doctrine was
preached there I made no attempt to conceal my intellectual contempt for
its blind coarseness and shallow logic, or my natural abhorrence of its
sickening inhumanity.


THE GREATEST OF THESE IS SELF-CONTROL

As there is no place in Darwinism for free will, or any other sort
of will, the Neo-Darwinists held that there is no such thing as
self-control. Yet self-control is just the one quality of survival value
which Circumstantial Selection must invariably and inevitably develop in
the long run. Uncontrolled qualities may be selected for survival and
development for certain periods and under certain circumstances. For
instance, since it is the ungovernable gluttons who strive the hardest
to get food and drink, their efforts would develop their strength and
cunning in a period of such scarcity that the utmost they could do would
not enable them to over-eat themselves. But a change of circumstances
involving a plentiful supply of food would destroy them. We see this
very thing happening often enough in the case of the healthy and
vigorous poor man who becomes a millionaire by one of the accidents of
our competitive commerce, and immediately proceeds to dig his grave with
his teeth. But the self-controlled man survives all such changes of
circumstance, because he adapts himself to them, and eats neither as
much as he can hold nor as little as he can scrape along on, but as much
as is good for him. What is self-control? It is nothing but a highly
developed vital sense, dominating and regulating the mere appetites. To
overlook the very existence of this supreme sense; to miss the obvious
inference that it is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to
survive; to omit, in short, the highest moral claim of Evolutionary
Selection: all this, which the Neo-Darwinians did in the name of Natural
Selection, shewed the most pitiable want of mastery of their own
subject, the dullest lack of observation of the forces upon which
Natural Selection works.


A SAMPLE OF LAMARCKO-SHAVIAN INVECTIVE

The Vitalist philosophers made no such mistakes. Nietzsche, for example,
thinking out the great central truth of the Will to Power instead of
cutting off mouse-tails, had no difficulty in concluding that the final
objective of this Will was power over self, and that the seekers after
power over others and material possessions were on a false scent.

The stultification naturally became much worse as the first Darwinians
died out. The prestige of these pioneers, who had the older evolutionary
culture to build on, and were in fact no more Darwinian in the modern
sense than Darwin himself, ceased to dazzle us when Huxley and Tyndall
and Spencer and Darwin passed away, and we were left with the smaller
people who began with Darwin and took in nothing else. Accordingly, I
find that in the year 1906 I indulged my temper by hurling invectives at
the Neo-Darwinians in the following terms.

'I really do not wish to be abusive; but when I think of these poor
little dullards, with their precarious hold of just that corner of
evolution that a blackbeetle can understand--with their retinue of
twopenny-halfpenny Torquemadas wallowing in the infamies of the
vivisector's laboratory, and solemnly offering us as epoch-making
discoveries their demonstrations that dogs get weaker and die if you
give them no food; that intense pain makes mice sweat; and that if you
cut off a dog's leg the three-legged dog will have a four-legged puppy,
I ask myself what spell has fallen on intelligent and humane men
that they allow themselves to be imposed on by this rabble of dolts,
blackguards, impostors, quacks, liars, and, worst of all, credulous
conscientious fools. Better a thousand times Moses and Spurgeon [a then
famous preacher] back again. After all, you cannot understand Moses
without imagination nor Spurgeon without metaphysics; but you can be a
thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics,
poetry, conscience, or decency. For "Natural Selection" has no moral
significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose,
no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental
selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is
more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole
universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals
could bear to live.'


THE HUMANITARIANS AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Yet the humanitarians were as delighted as anybody with Darwinism at
first. They had been perplexed by the Problem of Evil and the Cruelty of
Nature. They were Shelleyists, but not atheists. Those who believed in
God were at a terrible disadvantage with the atheist. They could not
deny the existence of natural facts so cruel that to attribute them to
the will of God is to make God a demon. Belief in God was impossible to
any thoughtful person without belief in the Devil as well. The painted
Devil, with his horns, his barbed tail, and his abode of burning
brimstone, was an incredible bogey; but the evil attributed to him was
real enough; and the atheists argued that the author of evil, if he
exists, must be strong enough to overcome God, else God is morally
responsible for everything he permits the Devil to do. Neither
conclusion delivered us from the horror of attributing the cruelty of
nature to the workings of an evil will, or could reconcile it with our
impulses towards justice, mercy, and a higher life.

A complete deliverance was offered by the discovery of Circumstantial
Selection: that is to say, of a method by which horrors having every
appearance of being elaborately planned by some intelligent contriver
are only accidents without any moral significance at all. Suppose a
watcher from the stars saw a frightful accident produced by two crowded
trains at full speed crashing into one another! How could he conceive
that a catastrophe brought about by such elaborate machinery, such
ingenious preparation, such skilled direction, such vigilant industry,
was quite unintentional? Would he not conclude that the signal-men were
devils?

Well, Circumstantial Selection is largely a theory of collisions: that
is, a theory of the innocence of much apparently designed devilry. In
this way Darwin brought intense relief as well as an enlarged knowledge
of facts to the humanitarians. He destroyed the omnipotence of God for
them; but he also exonerated God from a hideous charge of cruelty.
Granted that the comfort was shallow, and that deeper reflection was
bound to shew that worse than all conceivable devil-deities is a blind,
deaf, dumb, heartless, senseless mob of forces that strike as a tree
does when it is blown down by the wind, or as the tree itself is struck
by lightning. That did not occur to the humanitarians at the moment:
people do not reflect deeply when they are in the first happiness of
escape from an intolerably oppressive situation. Like Bunyan's pilgrim
they could not see the wicket gate, nor the Slough of Despond, nor the
castle of Giant Despair; but they saw the shining light at the end of
the path, and so started gaily towards it as Evolutionists.

And they were right; for the problem of evil yields very easily to
Creative Evolution. If the driving power behind Evolution is omnipotent
only in the sense that there seems no limit to its final achievement;
and if it must meanwhile struggle with matter and circumstance by
the method of trial and error, then the world must be full of its
unsuccessful experiments. Christ may meet a tiger, or a High Priest
arm-in-arm with a Roman Governor, and be the unfittest to survive under
the circumstances. Mozart may have a genius that prevails against
Emperors and Archbishops, and a lung that succumbs to some obscure and
noxious property of foul air. If all our calamities are either accidents
or sincerely repented mistakes, there is no malice in the Cruelty
of Nature and no Problem of Evil in the Victorian sense at all. The
theology of the women who told us that they became atheists when they
sat by the cradles of their children and saw them strangled by the hand
of God is succeeded by the theology of Blanco Posnet, with his 'It was
early days when He made the croup, I guess. It was the best He could
think of then; but when it turned out wrong on His hands He made you and
me to fight the croup for Him.'


HOW ONE TOUCH OF DARWIN MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD KIN

Another humanitarian interest in Darwinism was that Darwin popularized
Evolution generally, as well as making his own special contribution to
it. Now the general conception of Evolution provides the humanitarian
with a scientific basis, because it establishes the fundamental equality
of all living things. It makes the killing of an animal murder in
exactly the same sense as the killing of a man is murder. It is
sometimes necessary to kill men as it is always necessary to kill
tigers; but the old theoretic distinction between the two acts has been
obliterated by Evolution. When I was a child and was told that our dog
and our parrot, with whom I was on intimate terms, were not creatures
like myself, but were brutal whilst I was reasonable, I not only did not
believe it, but quite consciously and intellectually formed the opinion
that the distinction was false; so that afterwards, when Darwin's views
were first unfolded to me, I promptly said that I had found out all that
for myself before I was ten years old; and I am far from sure that my
youthful arrogance was not justified; for this sense of the kinship of
all forms of life is all that is needed to make Evolution not only a
conceivable theory, but an inspiring one. St Anthony was ripe for the
Evolution theory when he preached to the fishes, and St Francis when
he called the birds his little brothers. Our vanity, and our snobbish
conception of Godhead as being, like earthly kingship, a supreme class
distinction instead of the rock on which Equality is built, had led us
to insist on God offering us special terms by placing us apart from and
above all the rest of his creatures. Evolution took that conceit out of
us; and now, though we may kill a flea without the smallest remorse, we
at all events know that we are killing our cousin. No doubt it shocks
the flea when the creature that an almighty Celestial Flea created
expressly for the food of fleas, destroys the jumping lord of creation
with his sharp and enormous thumbnail; but no flea will ever be so
foolish as to preach that in slaying fleas Man is applying a method of
Natural Selection which will finally evolve a flea so swift that no man
can catch him, and so hardy of constitution that Insect Powder will have
no more effect on him than strychnine on an elephant.


WHY DARWIN PLEASED THE SOCIALISTS

The Humanitarians were not alone among the agitators in their welcome to
Darwin. He had the luck to please everybody who had an axe to grind. The
Militarists were as enthusiastic as the Humanitarians, the Socialists as
the Capitalists. The Socialists were specially encouraged by Darwin's
insistence on the influence of environment. Perhaps the strongest moral
bulwark of Capitalism is the belief in the efficacy of individual
righteousness. Robert Owen made desperate efforts to convince England
that her criminals, her drunkards, her ignorant and stupid masses, were
the victims of circumstance: that if we would only establish his new
moral world we should find that the masses born into an educated and
moralized community would be themselves educated and moralized. The
stock reply to this is to be found in Lewes's Life of Goethe. Lewes
scorned the notion that circumstances govern character. He pointed
to the variety of character in the governing rich class to prove the
contrary. Similarity of circumstance can hardly be carried to a more
desolating dead level than in the case of the individuals who are born
and bred in English country houses, and sent first to Eton or Harrow,
and then to Oxford or Cambridge, to have their minds and habits formed.
Such a routine would destroy individuality if anything could. Yet
individuals come out from it as different as Pitt from Fox, as Lord
Russell from Lord Gurzon, as Mr Winston Churchill from Lord Robert
Cecil. This acceptance of the congenital character of the individual
as the determining factor in his destiny had been reinforced by the
Lamarckian view of Evolution. If the giraffe can develop his neck by
wanting and trying, a man can develop his character in the same way. The
old saying, 'Where there is a will, there is a way,' condenses Lamarck's
theory of functional adaptation into a proverb. This felt bracingly
moral to strong minds, and reassuringly pious to feeble ones. There was
no more effective retort to the Socialist than to tell him to reform
himself before he pretends to reform society. If you were rich, how
pleasant it was to feel that you owed your riches to the superiority
of your own character! The industrial revolution had turned numbers
of greedy dullards into monstrously rich men. Nothing could be more
humiliating and threatening to them than the view that the falling of a
shower of gold into their pockets was as pure an accident as the falling
of a shower of hail on their umbrellas, and happened alike to the just
and unjust. Nothing could be more flattering and fortifying to them than
the assumption that they were rich because they were virtuous.

Now Darwinism made a clean sweep of all such self-righteousness. It
more than justified Robert Owen by discovering in the environment of an
organism an influence on it more potent than Owen had ever claimed. It
implied that street arabs are produced by slums and not by original sin:
that prostitutes are produced by starvation wages and not by feminine
concupiscence. It threw the authority of science on the side of the
Socialist who said that he who would reform himself must first reform
society. It suggested that if we want healthy and wealthy citizens we
must have healthy and wealthy towns; and that these can exist only in
healthy and wealthy countries. It could be led to the conclusion that
the type of character which remains indifferent to the welfare of its
neighbors as long as its own personal appetite is satisfied is the
disastrous type, and the type which is deeply concerned about its
environment the only possible type for a permanently prosperous
community. It shewed that the surprising changes which Robert Owen had
produced in factory children by a change in their circumstances which
does not seem any too generous to us nowadays were as nothing to the
changes--changes not only of habits but of species, not only of species
but of orders--which might conceivably be the work of environment acting
on individuals without any character or intellectual consciousness
whatever. No wonder the Socialists received Darwin with open arms.


DARWIN AND KARL MARX

Besides, the Socialists had an evolutionary prophet of their own, who
had discredited Manchester as Darwin discredited the Garden of Eden.
Karl Marx had proclaimed in his Communist Manifesto of 1848 (now
enjoying Scriptural authority in Russia) that civilization is an
organism evolving irresistibly by circumstantial selection; and he
published the first volume of his Das Kapital in 1867. The revolt
against anthropomorphic idolatry, which was, as we have seen, the secret
of Darwin's success, had been accompanied by a revolt against the
conventional respectability which covered not only the brigandage and
piracy of the feudal barons, but the hypocrisy, inhumanity, snobbery,
and greed of the bourgeoisie, who were utterly corrupted by an
essentially diabolical identification of success in life with big
profits. The moment Marx shewed that the relation of the bourgeoisie to
society was grossly immoral and disastrous, and that the whited wall of
starched shirt fronts concealed and defended the most infamous of all
tyrannies and the basest of all robberies, he became an inspired prophet
in the mind of every generous soul whom his book reached. He had said
and proved what they wanted to have proved; and they would hear nothing
against him. Now Marx was by no means infallible: his economics, half
borrowed, and half home-made by a literary amateur, were not, when
strictly followed up, even favorable to Socialism. His theory of
civilisation had been promulgated already in Buckle's History of
Civilization, a book as epoch-making in the minds of its readers as Das
Kapital. There was nothing about Socialism in the widely read first
volume of Das Kapital: every reference it made to workers and
capitalists shewed that Marx had never breathed industrial air, and had
dug his case out of bluebooks in the British Museum. Compared to Darwin,
he seemed to have no power of observation: there was not a fact in Das
Kapital that had not been taken out of a book, nor a discussion that had
not been opened by somebody else's pamphlet. No matter: he exposed the
bourgeoisie and made an end of its moral prestige. That was enough: like
Darwin he had for the moment the World Will by the ear. Marx had, too,
what Darwin had not: implacability and a fine Jewish literary gift,
with terrible powers of hatred, invective, irony, and all the bitter
qualities bred, first in the oppression of a rather pampered young
genius (Marx was the spoilt child of a well-to-do family) by a social
system utterly uncongenial to him, and later on by exile and poverty.
Thus Marx and Darwin between them toppled over two closely related
idols, and became the prophets of two new creeds.


WHY DARWIN PLEASED THE PROFITEERS ALSO

But how, at this rate, did Darwin succeed with the capitalists too? It
is not easy to make the best of both worlds when one of the worlds is
preaching a Class War, and the other vigorously practising it. The
explanation is that Darwinism was so closely related to Capitalism that
Marx regarded it as an economic product rather than as a biological
theory. Darwin got his main postulate, the pressure of population on
the available means of subsistence, from the treatise of Malthus
on Population, just as he got his other postulate of a practically
unlimited time for that pressure to operate from the geologist Lyell,
who made an end of Archbishop Ussher's Biblical estimate of the age
of the earth as 4004 B.C. plus A.D. The treatises of the Ricardian
economists on the Law of Diminishing Return, which was only the
Manchester School's version of the giraffe and the trees, were all very
fiercely discussed when Darwin was a young man. In fact the discovery in
the eighteenth century by the French Physiocrats of the economic
effects of Commercial Selection in soils and sites, and by Malthus of
a competition for subsistence which he attributed to pressure of
population on available subsistence, had already brought political
science into that unbreathable atmosphere of fatalism which is the
characteristic blight of Darwinism. Long before Darwin published a line,
the Ricardo-Malthusian economists were preaching the fatalistic Wages
Fund doctrine, and assuring the workers that Trade Unionism is a vain
defiance of the inexorable laws of political economy, just as the
Neo-Darwinians were presently assuring us that Temperance Legislation is
a vain defiance of Natural Selection, and that the true way to deal with
drunkenness is to flood the country with cheap gin and let the fittest
survive. Cobdenism is, after all, nothing but the abandonment of trade
to Circumstantial Selection.

It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of this preparation
for Darwinism by a vast political and clerical propaganda of its moral
atmosphere. Never in history, as far as we know, had there been such a
determined, richly subsidized, politically organized attempt to persuade
the human race that all progress, all prosperity, all salvation,
individual and social, depend on an unrestrained conflict for food and
money, on the suppression and elimination of the weak by the strong,
on Free Trade, Free Contract, Free Competition, Natural Liberty,
Laisser-faire: in short, on 'doing the other fellow down' with impunity,
all interference by a guiding government, all organization except police
organization to protect legalized fraud against fisticuffs, all
attempt to introduce human purpose and design and forethought into the
industrial welter, being 'contrary to the laws of political economy.'
Even the proletariat sympathized, though to them Capitalist liberty
meant only wage slavery without the legal safeguards of chattel slavery.
People were tired of governments and kings and priests and providences,
and wanted to find out how Nature would arrange matters if she were let
alone. And they found it out to their cost in the days when Lancashire
used up nine generations of wage slaves in one generation of their
masters. But their masters, becoming richer and richer, were very well
satisfied, and Bastiat proved convincingly that Nature had arranged
Economic Harmonies which would settle social questions far better than
theocracies or aristocracies or mobocracies, the real _deus ex machina_
being unrestrained plutocracy.


THE POETRY AND PURITY OF MATERIALISM

Thus the stars in their courses fought for Darwin. Every faction drew a
moral from him; every catholic hater of faction founded a hope on him;
every blackguard felt justified by him; and every saint felt encouraged
by him. The notion that any harm could come of so splendid an
enlightenment seemed as silly as the notion that the atheists would
steal all our spoons. The physicists went further than the Darwinians.
Tyndall declared that he saw in Matter the promise and potency of all
forms of life, and with his Irish graphic lucidity made a picture of a
world of magnetic atoms, each atom with a positive and a negative pole,
arranging itself by attraction and repulsion in orderly crystalline
structure. Such a picture is dangerously fascinating to thinkers
oppressed by the bloody disorders of the living world. Craving for purer
subjects of thought, they find in the contemplation of crystals and
magnets a happiness more dramatic and less childish than the happiness
found by the mathematicians in abstract numbers, because they see in the
crystals beauty and movement without the corrupting appetites of fleshly
vitality. In such Materialism as that of Lucretius and Tyndall there
is a nobility which produces poetry: John Davidson found his highest
inspiration in it. Even its pessimism as it faces the cooling of the
sun and the return of the ice-caps does not degrade the pessimist: for
example, the Quincy Adamses, with their insistence on modern democratic
degradation as an inevitable result of solar shrinkage, are not
dehumanized as the vivisectionists are. Perhaps nobody is at heart fool
enough to believe that life is at the mercy of temperature: Dante was
not troubled by the objection that Brunetto could not have lived in the
fire nor Ugolino in the ice.

But the physicists found their intellectual vision of the world
incommunicable to those who were not born with it. It came to the public
simply as Materialism; and Materialism lost its peculiar purity and
dignity when it entered into the Darwinian reaction against Bible
fetichism. Between the two of them religion was knocked to pieces; and
where there had been a god, a cause, a faith that the universe was
ordered however inexplicable by us its order might be, and therefore a
sense of moral responsibility as part of that order, there was now an
utter void. Chaos had come again. The first effect was exhilarating:
we had the runaway child's sense of freedom before it gets hungry and
lonely and frightened. In this phase we did not desire our God back
again. We printed the verses in which William Blake, the most religious
of our great poets, called the anthropomorphic idol Old Nobodaddy, and
gibed at him in terms which the printer had to leave us to guess from
his blank spaces. We had heard the parson droning that God is not
mocked; and it was great fun to mock Him to our hearts' content and not
be a penny the worse. It did not occur to us that Old Nobodaddy, instead
of being a ridiculous fiction, might be only an impostor, and that the
exposure of this Koepenik Captain of the heavens, far from proving that
there was no real captain, rather proved the contrary: that, in short,
Nobodaddy could not have impersonated anybody if there had not been
Somebodaddy to impersonate. We did not see the significance of the
fact that on the last occasion on which God had been 'expelled with a
pitchfork,' men so different as Voltaire and Robespierre had said, the
one that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him, and
the other that after an honest attempt to dispense with a Supreme
Being in practical politics, some such hypothesis had been found quite
indispensable, and could not be replaced by a mere Goddess of Reason. If
these two opinions were quoted at all, they were quoted as jokes at the
expense of Nobodaddy. We were quite sure for the moment that whatever
lingering superstition might have daunted these men of the eighteenth
century, we Darwinians could do without God, and had made a good
riddance of Him.


THE VICEROYS OF THE KING OF KINGS

Now in politics it is much easier to do without God than to do without
his viceroys and vicars and lieutenants; and we begin to miss the
lieutenants long before we begin to miss their principal. Roman
Catholics do what their confessors advise without troubling God; and
Royalists are content to worship the King and ask the policeman. But
God's trustiest lieutenants often lack official credentials. They may be
professed atheists who are also men of honor and high public spirit.
The old belief that it matters dreadfully to God whether a man thinks
himself an atheist or not, and that the extent to which it matters can
be stated with exactness as one single damn, was an error: for the
divinity is in the honor and public spirit, not in the mouthed _credo_
or _non credo_. The consequences of this error became grave when the
fitness of a man for public trust was tested, not by his honor and
public spirit, but by asking him whether he believed in Nobodaddy or
not. If he said yes, he was held fit to be a Prime Minister, though,
as our ablest Churchman has said, the real implication was that he was
either a fool, a bigot, or a liar. Darwin destroyed this test; but when
it was only thoughtlessly dropped, there was no test at all; and the
door to public trust was open to the man who had no sense of God because
he had no sense of anything beyond his own business interests and
personal appetites and ambitions. As a result, the people who did
not feel in the least inconvenienced by being no longer governed by
Nobodaddy soon found themselves very acutely inconvenienced by being
governed by fools and commercial adventurers. They had forgotten not
only God but Goldsmith, who had warned them that 'honor sinks where
commerce long prevails.'

The lieutenants of God are not always persons: some of them are
legal and parliamentary fictions. One of them is Public Opinion. The
pre-Darwinian statesmen and publicists were not restrained directly by
God; but they restrained themselves by setting up an image of a Public
Opinion which would not tolerate any attempt to tamper with British
liberties. Their favorite way of putting it was that any Government
which proposed such and such an infringement of such and such a British
liberty would be hurled from office in a week. This was not true: there
was no such public opinion, no limit to what the British people would
put up with in the abstract, and no hardship short of immediate and
sudden starvation that it would not and did not put up with in the
concrete. But this very helplessness of the people had forced their
rulers to pretend that they were not helpless, and that the certainty of
a sturdy and unconquerable popular resistance forbade any trifling with
Magna Carta or the Petition of Rights or the authority of parliament.
Now the reality behind this fiction was the divine sense that liberty
is a need vital to human growth. Accordingly, though it was difficult
enough to effect a political reform, yet, once parliament had passed it,
its wildest opponent had no hope that the Government would cancel it,
or shelve it, or be bought off from executing it. From Walpole to
Campbell-Bannerman there was no Prime Minister to whom such renagueing
or trafficking would ever have occurred, though there were plenty who
employed corruption unsparingly to procure the votes of members of
parliament for their policy.


POLITICAL OPPORTUNISM IN EXCELSIS

The moment Nobodaddy was slain by Darwin, Public Opinion, as divine
deputy, lost its sanctity. Politicians no longer told themselves that
the British public would never suffer this or that: they allowed
themselves to know that for their own personal purposes, which are
limited to their ten or twenty years on the front benches in parliament,
the British public can be humbugged and coerced into believing and
suffering everything that it pays to impose on them, and that any false
excuse for an unpopular step will serve if it can be kept in countenance
for a fortnight: that is, until the terms of the excuse are forgotten.
The people, untaught or mistaught, are so ignorant and incapable
politically that this in itself would not greatly matter; for a
statesman who told them the truth would not be understood, and would in
effect mislead them more completely than if he dealt with them according
to their blindness instead of to his own wisdom. But though there is no
difference in this respect between the best demagogue and the worst,
both of them having to present their cases equally in terms of
melodrama, there is all the difference in the world between the
statesman who is humbugging the people into allowing him to do the
will of God, in whatever disguise it may come to him, and one who is
humbugging them into furthering his personal ambition and the commercial
interests of the plutocrats who own the newspapers and support him on
reciprocal terms. And there is almost as great a difference between
the statesman who does this naively and automatically, or even does it
telling himself that he is ambitious and selfish and unscrupulous, and
the one who does it on principle, believing that if everyone takes the
line of least material resistance the result will be the survival of the
fittest in a perfectly harmonious universe. Once produce an atmosphere
of fatalism on principle, and it matters little what the opinions or
superstitions of the individual statesmen concerned may be. A Kaiser
who is a devout reader of sermons, a Prime Minister who is an emotional
singer of hymns, and a General who is a bigoted Roman Catholic may be
the executants of the policy; but the policy itself will be one of
unprincipled opportunism; and all the Governments will be like the tramp
who walks always with the wind and ends as a pauper, or the stone that
rolls down the hill and ends as an avalanche: their way is the way to
destruction.


THE BETRAYAL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

Within sixty years from the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species
political opportunism had brought parliaments into contempt; created
a popular demand for direct action by the organized industries
('Syndicalism'); and wrecked the centre of Europe in a paroxysm of that
chronic terror of one another, that cowardice of the irreligious, which,
masked in the bravado of militarist patriotism, had ridden the Powers
like a nightmare since the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. The sturdy
old cosmopolitan Liberalism vanished almost unnoticed. At the present
moment all the new ordinances for the government of our Grown Colonies
contain, as a matter of course, prohibitions of all criticism, spoken or
written, of their ruling officials, which would have scandalized George
III and elicited Liberal pamphlets from Catherine II. Statesmen are
afraid of the suburbs, of the newspapers, of the profiteers, of the
diplomatists, of the militarists, of the country houses, of the trade
unions, of everything ephemeral on earth except the revolutions they
are provoking; and they would be afraid of these if they were not too
ignorant of society and history to appreciate the risk, and to know that
a revolution always seems hopeless and impossible the day before it
breaks out, and indeed never does break out until it seems hopeless and
impossible; for rulers who think it possible take care to insure the
risk by ruling reasonably. This brings about a condition fatal to all
political stability: namely, that you never know where to have the
politicians. If the fear of God was in them it might be possible to come
to some general understanding as to what God disapproves of; and Europe
might pull together on that basis. But the present panic, in which Prime
Ministers drift from election to election, either fighting or running
away from everybody who shakes a fist at them, makes a European
civilization impossible. Such peace and prosperity as we enjoyed before
the war depended on the loyalty of the Western States to their own
civilization. That loyalty could find practical expression only in an
alliance of the highly civilized Western Powers against the primitive
tyrannies of the East. Britain, Germany, France, and the United States
of America could have imposed peace on the world, and nursed modern
civilization in Russia, Turkey, and the Balkans. Every meaner
consideration should have given way to this need for the solidarity of
the higher civilization. What actually happened was that France and
England, through their clerks the diplomatists, made an alliance with
Russia to defend themselves against Germany; Germany made an alliance
with Turkey to defend herself against the three; and the two unnatural
and suicidal combinations fell on one another in a war that came nearer
to being a war of extermination than any wars since those of Timur the
Tartar; whilst the United States held aloof as long as they could, and
the other States either did the same or joined in the fray through
compulsion, bribery, or their judgment as to which side their bread was
buttered. And at the present moment, though the main fighting has ceased
through the surrender of Germany on terms which the victors have never
dreamt of observing, the extermination by blockade and famine, which
was what forced Germany to surrender, still continues, although it is
certain that if the vanquished starve the victors will starve too, and
Europe will liquidate its affairs by going, not into bankruptcy, but
into chaos.

Now all this, it will be noticed, was fundamentally nothing but an
idiotic attempt on the part of each belligerent State to secure
for itself the advantage of the survival of the fittest through
Circumstantial Selection. If the Western Powers had selected their
allies in the Lamarckian manner intelligently, purposely, and vitally,
_ad majorem Dei gloriam_, as what Nietzsche called good Europeans,
there would have been a League of Nations and no war. But because the
selection relied on was purely circumstantial opportunist selection, so
that the alliances were mere marriages of convenience, they have turned
out, not merely as badly as might have been expected, but far worse than
the blackest pessimist had ever imagined possible.



CIRCUMSTANTIAL SELECTION IN FINANCE

How it will all end we do not yet know. When wolves combine to kill a
horse, the death of the horse only sets them fighting one another for
the choicest morsels. Men are no better than wolves if they have no
better principles: accordingly, we find that the Armistice and the
Treaty have not extricated us from the war. A handful of Serbian
regicides flung us into it as a sporting navvy throws a bull pup at a
cat; but the Supreme Council, with all its victorious legions and all
its prestige, cannot get us out of it, though we are heartily sick and
tired of the whole business, and know now very well that it should never
have been allowed to happen. But we are helpless before a slate scrawled
with figures of National Debts. As there is no money to pay them because
it was all spent on the war (wars have to be paid for on the nail) the
sensible thing to do is to wipe the slate and let the wrangling States
distribute what they can spare, on the sound communist principle of from
each according to his ability, to each according to his need. But no:
we have no principles left, not even commercial ones; for what sane
commercialist would decree that France must not pay for her failure to
defend her own soil; that Germany must pay for her success in carrying
the war into the enemy's country; and that as Germany has not the money
to pay, and under our commercial system can make it only by becoming
once more a commercial competitor of England and France, which neither
of them will allow, she must borrow the money from England, or America,
or even from France: an arrangement by which the victorious creditors
will pay one another, and wait to get their money back until Germany is
either strong enough to refuse to pay or ruined beyond the possibility
of paying? Meanwhile Russia, reduced to a scrap of fish and a pint of
cabbage soup a day, has fallen into the hands of rulers who perceive
that Materialist Communism is at all events more effective than
Materialist Nihilism, and are attempting to move in an intelligent and
ordered manner, practising a very strenuous Intentional Selection of
workers as fitter to survive than idlers; whilst the Western Powers are
drifting and colliding and running on the rocks, in the hope that if
they continue to do their worst they will get Naturally Selected for
survival without the trouble of thinking about it.


THE HOMEOPATHIC REACTION AGAINST DARWINISM

When, like the Russians, our Nihilists have it urgently borne in on
them, by the brute force of rising wages that never overtake rising
prices, that they are being Naturally Selected for destruction, they
will perhaps remember that 'Dont Care came to a bad end,' and begin to
look round for a religion. And the whole purpose of this book is to
shew them where to look. For, throughout all the godless welter of the
infidel half-century, Darwinism has been acting not only directly but
homeopathically, its poison rallying our vital forces not only to resist
it and cast it out, but to achieve a new Reformation and put a credible
and healthy religion in its place. Samuel Butler was the pioneer of the
reaction as far as the casting out was concerned; but the issue was
confused by the physiologists, who were divided on the question into
Mechanists and Vitalists. The Mechanists said that life is nothing but
physical and chemical action; that they have demonstrated this in many
cases of so-called vital phenomena; and that there is no reason to doubt
that with improved methods they will presently be able to demonstrate it
in all of them. The Vitalists said that a dead body and a live one are
physically and chemically identical, and that the difference can be
accounted for only by the existence of a Vital Force. This seems simple;
but the Anti-Mechanists objected to be called Vitalists (obviously the
right name for them) on two contradictory grounds. First, that vitality
is scientifically inadmissible, because it cannot be isolated and
experimented with in the laboratory. Second, that force, being by
definition anything that can alter the speed or direction of matter
in motion (briefly, that can overcome inertia), is essentially a
mechanistic conception. Here we had the New Vitalist only half
extricated from the Old Mechanist, objecting to be called either, and
unable to give a clear lead in the new direction. And there was a deeper
antagonism. The Old Vitalists, in postulating a Vital Force, were
setting up a comparatively mechanical conception as against the divine
idea of the life breathed into the clay nostrils of Adam, whereby he
became a living soul. The New Vitalists, filled by their laboratory
researches with a sense of the miraculousness of life that went far
beyond the comparatively uninformed imaginations of the authors of the
Book of Genesis, regarded the Old Vitalists as Mechanists who had tried
to fill up the gulf between life and death with an empty phrase denoting
an imaginary physical force.

These professional faction fights are ephemeral, and need not trouble us
here. The Old Vitalist, who was essentially a Materialist, has evolved
into the New Vitalist, who is, as every genuine scientist must be,
finally a metaphysician. And as the New Vitalist turns from the disputes
of his youth to the future of his science, he will cease to boggle at
the name Vitalist, or at the inevitable, ancient, popular, and quite
correct use of the term Force to denote metaphysical as well as physical
overcomers of inertia.

Since the discovery of Evolution as the method of the Life Force the
religion of metaphysical Vitalism has been gaining the definiteness and
concreteness needed to make it assimilable by the educated critical man.
But it has always been with us. The popular religions, disgraced by
their Opportunist cardinals and bishops, have been kept in credit by
canonized saints whose secret was their conception of themselves as the
instruments and vehicles of divine power and aspiration: a conception
which at moments becomes an actual experience of ecstatic possession by
that power. And above and below all have been millions of humble and
obscure persons, sometimes totally illiterate, sometimes unconscious of
having any religion at all, sometimes believing in their simplicity
that the gods and temples and priests of their district stood for their
instinctive righteousness, who have kept sweet the tradition that good
people follow a light that shines within and above and ahead of them,
that bad people care only for themselves, and that the good are saved
and blessed and the bad damned and miserable. Protestantism was a
movement towards the pursuit of a light called an inner light because
every man must see it with his own eyes and not take any priest's word
for it or any Church's account of it. In short, there is no question
of a new religion, but rather of redistilling the eternal spirit
of religion and thus extricating it from the sludgy residue of
temporalities and legends that are making belief impossible, though they
are the stock-in-trade of all the Churches and all the Schools.


RELIGION AND ROMANCE

It is the adulteration of religion by the romance of miracles and
paradises and torture chambers that makes it reel at the impact of every
advance in science, instead of being clarified by it. If you take an
English village lad, and teach him that religion means believing that
the stories of Noah's Ark and the Garden of Eden are literally true on
the authority of God himself, and if that boy becomes an artisan and
goes into the town among the sceptical city proletariat, then, when the
jibes of his mates set him thinking, and he sees that these stories
cannot be literally true, and learns that no candid prelate now pretends
to believe them, he does not make any fine distinctions: he declares at
once that religion is a fraud, and parsons and teachers hypocrites and
liars. He becomes indifferent to religion if he has little conscience,
and indignantly hostile to it if he has a good deal.

The same revolt against wantonly false teaching is happening daily
in the professional classes whose recreation is reading and whose
intellectual sport is controversy. They banish the Bible from their
houses, and sometimes put into the hands of their unfortunate children
Ethical and Rationalist tracts of the deadliest dullness, compelling
these wretched infants to sit out the discourses of Secularist lecturers
(I have delivered some of them myself), who bore them at a length now
forbidden by custom in the established pulpit. Our minds have reacted so
violently towards provable logical theorems and demonstrable mechanical
or chemical facts that we have become incapable of metaphysical truth,
and try to cast out incredible and silly lies by credible and clever
ones, calling in Satan to cast out Satan, and getting more into his
clutches than ever in the process. Thus the world is kept sane less by
the saints than by the vast mass of the indifferent, who neither act nor
react in the matter. Butler's preaching of the gospel of Laodicea was a
piece of common sense founded on his observation of this.

But indifference will not guide nations through civilization to the
establishment of the perfect city of God. An indifferent statesman is a
contradiction in terms; and a statesman who is indifferent on principle,
a Laisser-faire or Muddle-Through doctrinaire, plays the deuce with us
in the long run. Our statesmen must get a religion by hook or crook; and
as we are committed to Adult Suffrage it must be a religion capable of
vulgarization. The thought first put into words by the Mills when they
said 'There is no God; but this is a family secret,' and long held
unspoken by aristocratic statesmen and diplomatists, will not serve now;
for the revival of civilization after the war cannot be effected by
artificial breathing: the driving force of an undeluded popular consent
is indispensable, and will be impossible until the statesman can appeal
to the vital instincts of the people in terms of a common religion. The
success of the Hang the Kaiser cry at the last General Election shews
us very terrifyingly how a common irreligion can be used by myopic
demagogy; and common irreligion will destroy civilization unless it is
countered by common religion.


THE DANGER OF REACTION

And here arises the danger that when we realize this we shall do just
what we did half a century ago, and what Pliable did in The Pilgrim's
Progress when Christian landed him in the Slough of Despond: that is,
run back in terror to our old superstitions. We jumped out of the
frying-pan into the fire; and we are just as likely to jump back again,
now that we feel hotter than ever. History records very little in the
way of mental activity on the part of the mass of mankind except a
series of stampedes from affirmative errors into negative ones and back
again. It must therefore be said very precisely and clearly that the
bankruptcy of Darwinism does not mean that Nobodaddy was Somebodaddy
_with_ 'body, parts, and passions' after all; that the world was made
in the year 4004 B.C.; that damnation means a eternity of blazing
brimstone; that the Immaculate Conception means that sex is sinful and
that Christ was parthenogenetically brought forth by a virgin descended
in like manner from a line of virgins right back to Eve; that the
Trinity is an anthropomorphic monster with three heads which are yet
only one head; that in Rome the bread and wine on the altar become flesh
and blood, and in England, in a still more mystical manner, they do
and they do not; that the Bible is an infallible scientific manual, an
accurate historical chronicle, and a complete guide to conduct; that we
may lie and cheat and murder and then wash ourselves innocent in the
blood of the lamb on Sunday at the cost of a _credo_ and a penny in the
plate, and so on and so forth. Civilization cannot be saved by people
not only crude enough to believe these things, but irreligious enough
to believe that such belief constitutes a religion. The education of
children cannot safely be left in their hands. If dwindling sects like
the Church of England, the Church of Rome, the Greek Church, and the
rest, persist in trying to cramp the human mind within the limits of
these grotesque perversions of natural truths and poetic metaphors, then
they must be ruthlessly banished from the schools until they either
perish in general contempt or discover the soul that is hidden in every
dogma. The real Class War will be a war of intellectual classes; and its
conquest will be the souls of the children.


A TOUCHSTONE FOR DOGMA

The test of a dogma is its universality. As long as the Church of
England preaches a single doctrine that the Brahman, the Buddhist, the
Mussulman, the Parsee, and all the other sectarians who are British
subjects cannot accept, it has no legitimate place in the counsels of
the British Commonwealth, and will remain what it is at present, a
corrupter of youth, a danger to the State, and an obstruction to the
Fellowship of the Holy Ghost. This has never been more strongly felt
than at present, after a war in which the Church failed grossly in the
courage of its profession, and sold its lilies for the laurels of the
soldiers of the Victoria Cross. All the cocks in Christendom have been
crowing shame on it ever since; and it will not be spared for the sake
of the two or three faithful who were found even among the bishops. Let
the Church take it on authority, even my authority (as a professional
legend maker) if it cannot see the truth by its own light: no dogma can
be a legend. A legend can pass an ethnical frontier as a legend, but not
as a truth; whilst the only frontier to the currency of a sound dogma as
such is the frontier of capacity for understanding it.

This does not mean that we should throw away legend and parable and
drama: they are the natural vehicles of dogma; but woe to the Churches
and rulers who substitute the legend for the dogma, the parable for the
history, the drama for the religion! Better by far declare the throne
of God empty than set a liar and a fool on it. What are called wars of
religion are always wars to destroy religion by affirming the historical
truth or material substantiality of some legend, and killing those who
refuse to accept it as historical or substantial. But who has ever
refused to accept a good legend with delight as a legend? The legends,
the parables, the dramas, are among the choicest treasures of mankind.
No one is ever tired of stories of miracles. In vain did Mahomet
repudiate the miracles ascribed to him: in vain did Christ furiously
scold those who asked him to give them an exhibition as a conjurer: in
vain did the saints declare that God chose them not for their powers but
for their weaknesses; that the humble might be exalted, and the proud
rebuked. People will have their miracles, their stories, their heroes
and heroines and saints and martyrs and divinities to exercise their
gifts of affection, admiration, wonder, and worship, and their Judases
and devils to enable them to be angry and yet feel that they do well to
be angry. Every one of these legends is the common heritage of the human
race; and there is only one inexorable condition attached to their
healthy enjoyment, which is that no one shall believe them literally.
The reading of stories and delighting in them made Don Quixote a
gentleman: the believing them literally made him a madman who slew
lambs instead of feeding them. In England today good books of Eastern
religious legends are read eagerly; and Protestants and Atheists read
Roman Catholic legends of the Saints with pleasure. But such fare is
shirked by Indians and Roman Catholics. Freethinkers read the Bible:
indeed they seem to be its only readers now except the reluctant
parsons at the church lecterns, who communicate their discomfort to the
congregation by gargling the words in their throats in an unnatural
manner that is as repulsive as it is unintelligible. And this is because
the imposition of the legends as literal truths at once changes them
from parables into falsehoods. The feeling against the Bible has become
so strong at last that educated people not only refuse to outrage their
intellectual consciences by reading the legend of Noah's Ark, with its
funny beginning about the animals and its exquisite end about the birds:
they will not read even the chronicles of King David, which may
very well be true, and are certainly more candid than the official
biographies of our contemporary monarchs.


WHAT TO DO WITH THE LEGENDS

What we should do, then, is to pool our legends and make a delightful
stock of religious folk-lore on an honest basis for all mankind. With
our minds freed from pretence and falsehood we could enter into the
heritage of all the faiths. China would share her sages with Spain, and
Spain her saints with China. The Ulster man who now gives his son an
unmerciful thrashing if the boy is so tactless as to ask how the evening
and the morning could be the first day before the sun was created, or
to betray an innocent calf-love for the Virgin Mary, would buy him a
bookful of legends of the creation and of mothers of God from all parts
of the world, and be very glad to find his laddie as interested in such
things as in marbles or Police and Robbers. That would be better
than beating all good feeling towards religion out of the child, and
blackening his mind by teaching him that the worshippers of the holy
virgins, whether of the Parthenon or St Peter's, are fire-doomed
heathens and idolaters. All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to
the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their
fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither
intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and
the teachers teach in vain. And nothing stands between the people and
the fictions except the silly falsehood that the fictions are literal
truths, and that there is nothing in religion but fiction.


A LESSON FROM SCIENCE TO THE CHURCHES

Let the Churches ask themselves why there is no revolt against the
dogmas of mathematics though there is one against the dogmas
of religion. It is not that the mathematical dogmas are more
comprehensible. The law of inverse squares is as incomprehensible to the
common man as the Athanasian creed. It is not that science is free from
legends, witchcraft, miracles, biographic boostings of quacks as heroes
and saints, and of barren scoundrels as explorers and discoverers. On
the contrary, the iconography and hagiology of Scientism are as copious
as they are mostly squalid. But no student of science has yet been
taught that specific gravity consists in the belief that Archimedes
jumped out of his bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse
shouting Eureka, Eureka, or that the law of inverse squares must be
discarded if anyone can prove that Newton was never in an orchard in his
life. When some unusually conscientious or enterprising bacteriologist
reads the pamphlets of Jenner, and discovers that they might have been
written by an ignorant but curious and observant nurserymaid, and could
not possibly have been written by any person with a scientifically
trained mind, he does not feel that the whole edifice of science has
collapsed and crumbled, and that there is no such thing as smallpox.
It may come to that yet; for hygiene, as it forces its way into our
schools, is being taught as falsely as religion is taught there; but in
mathematics and physics the faith is still kept pure, and you may take
the law and leave the legends without suspicion of heresy. Accordingly,
the tower of the mathematician stands unshaken whilst the temple of the
priest rocks to its foundation.


THE RELIGIOUS ART OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Creative Evolution is already a religion, and is indeed now
unmistakeably the religion of the twentieth century, newly arisen
from the ashes of pseudo-Christianity, of mere scepticism, and of
the soulless affirmations and blind negations of the Mechanists and
Neo-Darwinians. But it cannot become a popular religion until it has its
legends, its parables, its miracles. And when I say popular I do not
mean apprehensible by villagers only. I mean apprehensible by Cabinet
Ministers as well. It is unreasonable to look to the professional
politician and administrator for light and leading in religion. He
is neither a philosopher nor a prophet: if he were, he would be
philosophizing and prophesying, and not neglecting both for the drudgery
of practical government. Socrates and Coleridge did not remain soldiers,
nor could John Stuart Mill remain the representative of Westminster in
the House of Commons even when he was willing. The Westminster electors
admired Mill for telling them that much of the difficulty of dealing
with them arose from their being inveterate liars. But they would not
vote a second time for the man who was not afraid to break the crust of
mendacity on which they were all dancing; for it seemed to them
that there was a volcanic abyss beneath, not having his philosophic
conviction that the truth is the solidest standing ground in the end.
Your front bench man will always be an exploiter of the popular religion
or irreligion. Not being an expert, he must take it as he finds it; and
before he can take it, he must have been told stories about it in his
childhood and had before him all his life an elaborate iconography of it
produced by writers, painters, sculptors, temple architects, and artists
of all the higher sorts. Even if, as sometimes happens, he is a bit of
an amateur in metaphysics as well as a professional politician, he must
still govern according to the popular iconography, and not according to
his own personal interpretations if these happen to be heterodox.

It will be seen then that the revival of religion on a scientific basis
does not mean the death of art, but a glorious rebirth of it. Indeed art
has never been great when it was not providing an iconography for a live
religion. And it has never been quite contemptible except when imitating
the iconography after the religion had become a superstition. Italian
painting from Giotto to Carpaccio is all religious painting; and it
moves us deeply and has real greatness. Compare with it the attempts of
our painters a century ago to achieve the effects of the old masters by
imitation when they should have been illustrating a faith of their own.
Contemplate, if you can bear it, the dull daubs of Hilton and Haydon,
who knew so much more about drawing and scumbling and glazing and
perspective and anatomy and 'marvellous foreshortening' than Giotto,
the latchet of whose shoe they were nevertheless not worthy to unloose.
Compare Mozart's Magic Flute, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Wagner's Ring,
all of them reachings-forward to the new Vitalist art, with the dreary
pseudo-sacred oratorios and cantatas which were produced for no better
reason than that Handel had formerly made splendid thunder in that way,
and with the stale confectionery, mostly too would-be pious to be even
cheerfully toothsome, of Spohr and Mendelssohn, Stainer and Parry, which
spread indigestion at our musical festivals until I publicly told Parry
the bludgeoning truth about his Job and woke him to conviction of sin.
Compare Flaxman and Thorwaldsen and Gibson with Phidias and Praxiteles,
Stevens with Michael Angelo, Bouguereau's Virgin with Cimabue's, or the
best operatic Christs of Scheffer and Müller with the worst Christs that
the worst painters could paint before the end of the fifteenth century,
and you must feel that until we have a great religious movement we
cannot hope for a great artistic one. The disillusioned Raphael could
paint a mother and child, but not a queen of Heaven as much less skilful
men had done in the days of his great-grandfather; yet he could reach
forward to the twentieth century and paint a Transfiguration of the Son
of Man as they could not. Also, please note, he could decorate a house
of pleasure for a cardinal very beautifully with voluptuous pictures of
Cupid and Psyche; for this simple sort of Vitalism is always with
us, and, like portrait painting, keeps the artist supplied with
subject-matter in the intervals between the ages of faith; so that your
sceptical Rembrandts and Velasquezs are at least not compelled to paint
shop fronts for want of anything else to paint in which they can really
believe.


THE ARTIST-PROPHETS

And there are always certain rare but intensely interesting
anticipations. Michael Angelo could not very well believe in Julius
II or Leo X, or in much that they believed in; but he could paint
the Superman three hundred years before Nietzsche wrote Also Sprach
Zarathustra and Strauss set it to music. Michael Angelo won the primacy
among all modern painters and sculptors solely by his power of shewing
us superhuman persons. On the strength of his decoration and color alone
he would hardly have survived his own death twenty years; and even his
design would have had only an academic interest; but as a painter of
prophets and sibyls he is greatest among the very greatest in his craft,
because we aspire to a world of prophets and sibyls. Beethoven never
heard of radioactivity nor of electrons dancing in vortices of
inconceivable energy; but pray can anyone explain the last movement of
his Hammerklavier Sonata, Opus 106, otherwise than as a musical picture
of these whirling electrons? His contemporaries said he was mad, partly
perhaps because the movement was so hard to play; but we, who can make a
pianola play it to us over and over until it is as familiar as Pop
Goes the Weasel, know that it is sane and methodical. As such, it
must represent something; and as all Beethoven's serious compositions
represent some process within himself, some nerve storm or soul storm,
and the storm here is clearly one of physical movement, I should much
like to know what other storm than the atomic storm could have driven
him to this oddest of all those many expressions of cyclonic energy
which have given him the same distinction among musicians that Michael
Angelo has among draughtsmen.

In Beethoven's day the business of art was held to be 'the sublime and
beautiful.' In our day it has fallen to be the imitative and voluptuous.
In both periods the word passionate has been freely employed; but in the
eighteenth century passion meant irresistible impulse of the loftiest
kind: for example, a passion for astronomy or for truth. For us it has
come to mean concupiscence and nothing else. One might say to the art of
Europe what Antony said to the corpse of Caesar: 'Are all thy conquests,
glories, triumphs, spoils, shrunk to this little measure?' But in fact
it is the mind of Europe that has shrunk, being, as we have seen, wholly
preoccupied with a busy spring-cleaning to get rid of its superstitions
before readjusting itself to the new conception of Evolution.


EVOLUTION IN THE THEATRE

On the stage (and here I come at last to my own particular function in
the matter), Comedy, as a destructive, derisory, critical, negative art,
kept the theatre open when sublime tragedy perished. From Molière to
Oscar Wilde we had a line of comedic playwrights who, if they had
nothing fundamentally positive to say, were at least in revolt against
falsehood and imposture, and were not only, as they claimed, 'chastening
morals by ridicule,' but, in Johnson's phrase, clearing our minds of
cant, and thereby shewing an uneasiness in the presence of error which
is the surest symptom of intellectual vitality. Meanwhile the name of
Tragedy was assumed by plays in which everyone was killed in the last
act, just as, in spite of Molière, plays in which everyone was married
in the last act called themselves comedies. Now neither tragedies nor
comedies can be produced according to a prescription which gives only
the last moments of the last act. Shakespear did not make Hamlet out of
its final butchery, nor Twelfth Night out of its final matrimony. And he
could not become the conscious iconographer of a religion because he had
no conscious religion. He had therefore to exercise his extraordinary
natural gifts in the very entertaining art of mimicry, giving us the
famous 'delineation of character' which makes his plays, like the novels
of Scott, Dumas, and Dickens, so delightful. Also, he developed that
curious and questionable art of building us a refuge from despair by
disguising the cruelties of Nature as jokes. But with all his gifts, the
fact remains that he never found the inspiration to write an original
play. He furbished up old plays, and adapted popular stories, and
chapters of history from Holinshed's Chronicle and Plutarch's
biographies, to the stage. All this he did (or did not; for there are
minus quantities in the algebra of art) with a recklessness which shewed
that his trade lay far from his conscience. It is true that he never
takes his characters from the borrowed story, because it was less
trouble and more fun to him to create them afresh; but none the less
he heaps the murders and villainies of the borrowed story on his own
essentially gentle creations without scruple, no matter how incongruous
they may be. And all the time his vital need for a philosophy drives
him to seek one by the quaint professional method of introducing
philosophers as characters into his plays, and even of making his heroes
philosophers; but when they come on the stage they have no philosophy
to expound: they are only pessimists and railers; and their occasional
would-be philosophic speeches, such as The Seven Ages of Man and The
Soliloquy on Suicide, shew how deeply in the dark Shakespear was as
to what philosophy means. He forced himself in among the greatest of
playwrights without having once entered that region in which Michael
Angelo, Beethoven, Goethe, and the antique Athenian stage poets are
great. He would really not be great at all if it were not that he had
religion enough to be aware that his religionless condition was one of
despair. His towering King Lear would be only a melodrama were it not
for its express admission that if there is nothing more to be said of
the universe than Hamlet has to say, then 'as flies to wanton boys are
we to the gods: they kill us for their sport.'

Ever since Shakespear, playwrights have been struggling with the same
lack of religion; and many of them were forced to become mere panders
and sensation-mongers because, though they had higher ambitions, they
could find no better subject-matter. From Congreve to Sheridan they were
so sterile in spite of their wit that they did not achieve between them
the output of Molière's single lifetime; and they were all (not without
reason) ashamed of their profession, and preferred to be regarded as
mere men of fashion with a rakish hobby. Goldsmith's was the only saved
soul in that pandemonium.

The leaders among my own contemporaries (now veterans) snatched at minor
social problems rather than write entirely without any wider purpose
than to win money and fame. One of them expressed to me his envy of the
ancient Greek playwrights because the Athenians asked them, not for some
'new and original' disguise of the half-dozen threadbare plots of the
modern theatre, but for the deepest lesson they could draw from the
familiar and sacred legends of their country. 'Let us all,' he said,
'write an Electra, an Antigone, an Agamemnon, and shew what we can do
with it.' But he did not write any of them, because these legends are
no longer religious: Aphrodite and Artemis and Poseidon are deader than
their statues. Another, with a commanding position and every trick of
British farce and Parisian drama at his fingers' ends, finally could
not write without a sermon to preach, and yet could not find texts more
fundamental than the hypocrisies of sham Puritanism, or the matrimonial
speculation which makes our young actresses as careful of their
reputations as of their complexions. A third, too tenderhearted to break
our spirits with the realities of a bitter experience, coaxed a wistful
pathos and a dainty fun out of the fairy cloudland that lay between him
and the empty heavens. The giants of the theatre of our time, Ibsen and
Strindberg, had no greater comfort for the world than we: indeed much
less; for they refused us even the Shakespearian-Dickensian consolation
of laughter at mischief, accurately called comic relief. Our emancipated
young successors scorn us, very properly. But they will be able to do no
better whilst the drama remains pre-Evolutionist. Let them consider the
great exception of Goethe. He, no richer than Shakespear, Ibsen, or
Strindberg in specific talent as a playwright, is in the empyrean whilst
they are gnashing their teeth in impotent fury in the mud, or at best
finding an acid enjoyment in the irony of their predicament. Goethe is
Olympian: the other giants are infernal in everything but their veracity
and their repudiation of the irreligion of their time: that is, they are
bitter and hopeless. It is not a question of mere dates. Goethe was
an Evolutionist in 1830: many playwrights, even young ones, are still
untouched by Creative Evolution in 1920. Ibsen was Darwinized to the
extent of exploiting heredity on the stage much as the ancient Athenian
playwrights exploited the Eumenides; but there is no trace in his
plays of any faith in or knowledge of Creative Evolution as a modern
scientific fact. True, the poetic aspiration is plain enough in his
Emperor or Galilean; but it is one of Ibsen's distinctions that nothing
was valid for him but science; and he left that vision of the future
which his Roman seer calls 'the third Empire' behind him as a Utopian
dream when he settled down to his serious grapple with realities in
those plays of modern life with which he overcame Europe, and broke
the dusty windows of every dry-rotten theatre in it from Moscow to
Manchester.


MY OWN PART IN THE MATTER

In my own activities as a playwright I found this state of things
intolerable. The fashionable theatre prescribed one serious subject:
clandestine adultery: the dullest of all subjects for a serious author,
whatever it may be for audiences who read the police intelligence
and skip the reviews and leading articles. I tried slum-landlordism,
doctrinaire Free Love (pseudo-Ibsenism), prostitution, militarism,
marriage, history, current politics, natural Christianity, national
and individual character, paradoxes of conventional society, husband
hunting, questions of conscience, professional delusions and impostures,
all worked into a series of comedies of manners in the classic fashion,
which was then very much out of fashion, the mechanical tricks of
Parisian 'construction' being _de rigueur_ in the theatre. But this,
though it occupied me and established me professionally, did not
constitute me an iconographer of the religion of my time, and thus
fulfil my natural function as an artist. I was quite conscious of this;
for I had always known that civilization needs a religion as a matter of
life or death; and as the conception of Creative Evolution developed I
saw that we were at last within reach of a faith which complied with
the first condition of all the religions that have ever taken hold of
humanity: namely, that it must be, first and fundamentally, a science
of metabiology. This was a crucial point with me; for I had seen Bible
fetichism, after standing up to all the rationalistic batteries of Hume,
Voltaire, and the rest, collapse before the onslaught of much less
gifted Evolutionists, solely because they discredited it as a biological
document; so that from that moment it lost its hold, and left literate
Christendom faithless. My own Irish eighteenth-centuryism made it
impossible for me to believe anything until I could conceive it as
a scientific hypothesis, even though the abominations, quackeries,
impostures, venalities, credulities, and delusions of the camp followers
of science, and the brazen lies and priestly pretensions of the
pseudo-scientific cure-mongers, all sedulously inculcated by modern
'secondary education,' were so monstrous that I was sometimes forced to
make a verbal distinction between science and knowledge lest I should
mislead my readers. But I never forgot that without knowledge even
wisdom is more dangerous than mere opportunist ignorance, and that
somebody must take the Garden of Eden in hand and weed it properly.

Accordingly, in 1901, I took the legend of Don Juan in its Mozartian
form and made it a dramatic parable of Creative Evolution. But being
then at the height of my invention and comedic talent, I decorated it
too brilliantly and lavishly. I surrounded it with a comedy of which it
formed only one act, and that act was so completely episodical (it was
a dream which did not affect the action of the piece) that the comedy
could be detached and played by itself: indeed it could hardly be played
at full length owing to the enormous length of the entire work, though
that feat has been performed a few times in Scotland by Mr Esme Percy,
who led one of the forlorn hopes of the advanced drama at that time.
Also I supplied the published work with an imposing framework consisting
of a preface, an appendix called The Revolutionist's Handbook, and a
final display of aphoristic fireworks. The effect was so vertiginous,
apparently, that nobody noticed the new religion in the centre of the
intellectual whirlpool. Now I protest I did not cut these cerebral
capers in mere inconsiderate exuberance. I did it because the worst
convention of the criticism of the theatre current at that time was that
intellectual seriousness is out of place on the stage; that the theatre
is a place of shallow amusement; that people go there to be soothed
after the enormous intellectual strain of a day in the city: in short,
that a playwright is a person whose business it is to make unwholesome
confectionery out of cheap emotions. My answer to this was to put all
my intellectual goods in the shop window under the sign of Man and
Superman. That part of my design succeeded. By good luck and acting, the
comedy triumphed on the stage; and the book was a good deal discussed.
Since then the sweet-shop view of the theatre has been out of
countenance; and its critical exponents have been driven to take an
intellectual pose which, though often more trying than their old
intellectually nihilistic vulgarity, at least concedes the dignity
of the theatre, not to mention the usefulness of those who live by
criticizing it. And the younger playwrights are not only taking their
art seriously, but being taken seriously themselves. The critic who
ought to be a newsboy is now comparatively rare.

I now find myself inspired to make a second legend of Creative Evolution
without distractions and embellishments. My sands are running out; the
exuberance of 1901 has aged into the garrulity of 1930; and the war has
been a stern intimation that the matter is not one to be trifled with. I
abandon the legend of Don Juan with its erotic associations, and go back
to the legend of the Garden of Eden. I exploit the eternal interest of
the philosopher's stone which enables men to live for ever. I am not, I
hope, under more illusion than is humanly inevitable as to the crudity
of this my beginning of a Bible for Creative Evolution. I am doing the
best I can at my age. My powers are waning; but so much the better for
those who found me unbearably brilliant when I was in my prime. It is
my hope that a hundred apter and more elegant parables by younger hands
will soon leave mine as far behind as the religious pictures of the
fifteenth century left behind the first attempts of the early Christians
at iconography. In that hope I withdraw and ring up the curtain.



BACK TO METHUSELAH.

PART I

In the Beginning

ACT I


_The Garden of Eden. Afternoon. An immense serpent is sleeping with
her head buried in a thick bed of Johnswort, and her body coiled in
apparently endless rings through the branches of a tree, which is
already well grown; for the days of creation have been longer than our
reckoning. She is not yet visible to anyone unaware of her presence, as
her colors of green and brown make a perfect camouflage. Near her head a
low rock shows above the Johnswort.

The rock and tree are on the border of a glade in which lies a dead fawn
all awry, its neck being broken. Adam, crouching with one hand on the
rock, is staring in consternation at the dead body. He has not noticed
the serpent on his left hand. He turns his face to his right and calls
excitedly._

ADAM. Eve! Eve!

EVE'S VOICE. What is it, Adam?

ADAM. Come here. Quick. Something has happened.

EVE [_running in_] What? Where? [_Adam points to the fawn_]. Oh! [_She
goes to it; and he is emboldened to go with her_]. What is the matter
with its eyes?

ADAM. It is not only its eyes. Look. [_He kicks it._]

EVE. Oh don't! Why doesn't it wake?

ADAM. I don't know. It is not asleep.

EVE. Not asleep?

ADAM. Try.

EVE [_trying to shake it and roll it over_] It is stiff and cold.

ADAM. Nothing will wake it.

EVE. It has a queer smell. Pah! [_She dusts her hands, and draws away
from it_]. Did you find it like that?

ADAM. No. It was playing about; and it tripped and went head over heels.
It never stirred again. Its neck is wrong [_he stoops to lift the neck
and shew her_].

EVE. Dont touch it. Come away from it.

_They both retreat, and contemplate it from a few steps' distance with
growing repulsion._

EVE. Adam.

ADAM. Yes?

EVE. Suppose you were to trip and fall, would you go like that?

ADAM. Ugh! [_He shudders and sits down on the rock_].

EVE [_throwing herself on the ground beside him, and grasping his knee_]
You must be careful. Promise me you will be careful.

ADAM. What is the good of being careful? We have to live here for ever.
Think of what for ever means! Sooner or later I shall trip and fall. It
may be tomorrow; it may be after as many days as there are leaves in
the garden and grains of sand by the river. No matter: some day I shall
forget and stumble.

EVE. I too.

ADAM [_horrified_] Oh no, no. I should be alone. Alone for ever. You
must never put yourself in danger of stumbling. You must not move about.
You must sit still. I will take care of you and bring you what you want.

EVE [_turning away from him with a shrug, and hugging her ankles_] I
should soon get tired of that. Besides, if it happened to you, _I_
should be alone. I could not sit still then. And at last it would happen
to me too.

ADAM. And then?

EVE. Then we should be no more. There would be only the things on all
fours, and the birds, and the snakes.

ADAM. That must not be.

EVE. Yes: that must not be. But it might be.

ADAM. No. I tell you it must not be. I know that it must not be.

EVE. We both know it. How do we know it?

ADAM. There is a voice in the garden that tells me things.

EVE. The garden is full of voices sometimes. They put all sorts of
thoughts into my head.

ADAM. To me there is only one voice. It is very low; but it is so near
that it is like a whisper from within myself. There is no mistaking it
for any voice of the birds or beasts, or for your voice.

EVE. It is strange that I should hear voices from all sides and you only
one from within. But I have some thoughts that come from within me and
not from the voices. The thought that we must not cease to be comes from
within.

ADAM [_despairingly_] But we shall cease to be. We shall fall like the
fawn and be broken. [_Rising and moving about in his agitation_]. I
cannot bear this knowledge. I will not have it. It must not be, I tell
you. Yet I do not know how to prevent it.

EVE. That is just what I feel; but it is very strange that you should
say so: there is no pleasing you. You change your mind so often.

ADAM [_scolding her_] Why do you say that? How have I changed my mind?

EVE. You say we must not cease to exist. But you used to complain
of having to exist always and for ever. You sometimes sit for hours
brooding and silent, hating me in your heart. When I ask you what I have
done to you, you say you are not thinking of me, but of the horror of
having to be here for ever. But I know very well that what you mean is
the horror of having to be here with me for ever.

ADAM. Oh! That is what you think, is it? Well, you are wrong. [_He sits
down again, sulkily_]. It is the horror of having to be with myself for
ever. I like you; but I do not like myself. I want to be different; to
be better, to begin again and again; to shed myself as a snake sheds its
skin. I am tired of myself. And yet I must endure myself, not for a day
or for many days, but for ever. That is a dreadful thought. That is what
makes me sit brooding and silent and hateful. Do you never think of
that?

EVE. No: I do not think about myself: what is the use? I am what I am:
nothing can alter that. I think about you.

ADAM. You should not. You are always spying on me. I can never be alone.
You always want to know what I have been doing. It is a burden. You
should try to have an existence of your own, instead of occupying
yourself with my existence.

EVE. I _have_ to think about you. You are lazy: you are dirty: you
neglect yourself: you are always dreaming: you would eat bad food and
become disgusting if I did not watch you and occupy myself with you. And
now some day, in spite of all my care, you will fall on your head and
become dead.

ADAM. Dead? What word is that?

EVE [_pointing to the fawn_] Like that. I call it dead.

ADAM [_rising and approaching it slowly_] There is something uncanny
about it.

EVE [_joining him_] Oh! It is changing into little white worms.

ADAM. Throw it into the river. It is unbearable.

EVE. I dare not touch it.

ADAM. Then I must, though I loathe it. It is poisoning the air. [_He
gathers its hooves in his hand and carries it away in the direction from
which Eve came, holding it as far from him as possible_].

Eve looks after them for a moment; then, with a shiver of disgust, sits
down on the rock, brooding. The body of the serpent becomes visible,
glowing with wonderful new colors. She rears her head slowly from the
bed of Johnswort, and speaks into Eve's ear in a strange seductively
musical whisper.

THE SERPENT. Eve.

EVE [_startled_] Who is that?

THE SERPENT. It is I. I have come to shew you my beautiful new hood. See
[_she spreads a magnificent amethystine hood_]!

EVE [_admiring it_] Oh! But who taught you to speak?

THE SERPENT. You and Adam. I have crept through the grass, and hidden,
and listened to you.

EVE. That was wonderfully clever of you.

THE SERPENT. I am the most subtle of all the creatures of the field.

EVE. Your hood is most lovely. [_She strokes it and pets the serpent_].
Pretty thing! Do you love your godmother Eve?

THE SERPENT. I adore her. [_She licks Eve's neck with her double
tongue_].

EVE [_petting her_] Eve's wonderful darling snake. Eve will never be
lonely now that her snake can talk to her.

THE SNAKE. I can talk of many things. I am very wise. It was I who
whispered the word to you that you did not know. Dead. Death. Die.

EVE [_shuddering_] Why do you remind me of it? I forgot it when I saw
your beautiful hood. You must not remind me of unhappy things.

THE SERPENT. Death is not an unhappy thing when you have learnt how to
conquer it.

EVE. How can I conquer it?

THE SERPENT. By another thing, called birth.

EVE. What? [_Trying to pronounce it_] B-birth?

THE SERPENT. Yes, birth.

EVE. What is birth?

THE SERPENT. The serpent never dies. Some day you shall see me come out
of this beautiful skin, a new snake with a new and lovelier skin. That
is birth.

EVE. I have seen that. It is wonderful.

THE SERPENT. If I can do that, what can I not do? I tell you I am very
subtle. When you and Adam talk, I hear you say 'Why?' Always 'Why?' You
see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I
say 'Why not?' I made the word dead to describe my old skin that I cast
when I am renewed. I call that renewal being born.

EVE. Born is a beautiful word.

THE SERPENT. Why not be born again and again as I am, new and beautiful
every time?

EVE. I! It does not happen: that is why.

THE SERPENT. That is how; but it is not why. Why not?

EVE. But I should not like it. It would be nice to be new again; but my
old skin would lie on the ground looking just like me; and Adam would
see it shrivel up and--

THE SERPENT. No. He need not. There is a second birth.

EVE. A second birth?

THE SERPENT. Listen. I will tell you a great secret. I am very subtle;
and I have thought and thought and thought. And I am very wilful, and
must have what I want; and I have willed and willed and willed. And I
have eaten strange things: stones and apples that you are afraid to eat.

EVE. You dared!

THE SERPENT. I dared everything. And at last I found a way of gathering
together a part of the life in my body--

EVE. What is the life?

THE SERPENT. That which makes the difference between the dead fawn and
the live one.

EVE. What a beautiful word! And what a wonderful thing! Life is the
loveliest of all the new words.

THE SERPENT. Yes: it was by meditating on Life that I gained the power
to do miracles.

EVE. Miracles? Another new word.

THE SERPENT. A miracle is an impossible thing that is nevertheless
possible. Something that never could happen, and yet does happen.

EVE. Tell me some miracle that you have done.

THE SERPENT. I gathered a part of the life in my body, and shut it into
a tiny white case made of the stones I had eaten.

EVE. And what good was that?

THE SERPENT. I shewed the little case to the sun, and left it in its
warmth. And it burst; and a little snake came out; and it became bigger
and bigger from day to day until it was as big as I. That was the second
birth.

EVE. Oh! That is too wonderful. It stirs inside me. It hurts.

THE SERPENT. It nearly tore me asunder. Yet I am alive, and can burst my
skin and renew myself as before. Soon there will be as many snakes in
Eden as there are scales on my body. Then death will not matter: this
snake and that snake will die; but the snakes will live.

EVE. But the rest of us will die sooner or later, like the fawn. And
then there will be nothing but snakes, snakes, snakes everywhere.

THE SERPENT. That must not be. I worship you, Eve. I must have something
to worship. Something quite different to myself, like you. There must be
something greater than the snake.

EVE. Yes: it must not be. Adam must not perish. You are very subtle:
tell me what to do.

THE SERPENT. Think. Will. Eat the dust. Lick the white stone: bite the
apple you dread. The sun will give life.

EVE. I do not trust the sun. I will give life myself. I will tear.
another Adam from my body if I tear my body to pieces in the act.

THE SERPENT. Do. Dare it. Everything is possible: everything. Listen.
I am old. I am the old serpent, older than Adam, older than Eve. I
remember Lilith, who came before Adam and Eve. I was her darling as I am
yours. She was alone: there was no man with her. She saw death as you
saw it when the fawn fell; and she knew then that she must find out how
to renew herself and cast the skin like me. She had a mighty will: she
strove and strove and willed and willed for more moons than there are
leaves on all the trees of the garden. Her pangs were terrible: her
groans drove sleep from Eden. She said it must never be again: that the
burden of renewing life was past bearing: that it was too much for one.
And when she cast the skin, lo! there was not one new Lilith but two:
one like herself, the other like Adam. You were the one: Adam was the
other.

EVE. But why did she divide into two, and make us different?

THE SERPENT. I tell you the labor is too much for one. Two must share
it.

EVE. Do you mean that Adam must share it with me? He will not. He cannot
bear pain, nor take trouble with his body.

THE SERPENT. He need not. There will be no pain for him. He will implore
you to let him do his share. He will be in your power through his
desire.

EVE. Then I will do it. But how? How did Lilith work this miracle?

THE SERPENT. She imagined it.

EVE. What is imagined?

THE SERPENT. She told it to me as a marvellous story of something that
never happened to a Lilith that never was. She did not know then that
imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire;
you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.

EVE. How can I create out of nothing?

THE SERPENT. Everything must have been created out of nothing. Look at
that thick roll of hard flesh on your strong arm! That was not always
there: you could not climb a tree when I first saw you. But you willed
and tried and willed and tried; and your will created out of nothing the
roll on your arm until you had your desire, and could draw yourself up
with one hand and seat yourself on the bough that was above your head.

EVE. That was practice.

THE SERPENT. Things wear out by practice: they do not grow by it. Your
hair streams in the wind as if it were trying to stretch itself further
and further. But it does not grow longer for all its practice in
streaming, because you have not willed it so. When Lilith told me what
she had imagined in our silent language (for there were no words then) I
bade her desire it and will it; and then, to our great wonder, the thing
she had desired and willed created itself in her under the urging of her
will. Then I too willed to renew myself as two instead of one; and after
many days the miracle happened, and I burst from my skin another snake
interlaced with me; and now there are two imaginations, two desires, two
wills to create with.

EVE. To desire, to imagine, to will, to create. That is too long a
story. Find me one word for it all: you, who are so clever at words.

THE SERPENT. In one word, to conceive. That is the word that means both
the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.

EVE. Find me a word for the story Lilith imagined and told you in your
silent language: the story that was too wonderful to be true, and yet
came true.

THE SERPENT. A poem.

EVE. Find me another word for what Lilith was to me.

THE SERPENT. She was your mother.

EVE. And Adam's mother?

THE SERPENT. Yes.

EVE [_about to rise_] I will go and tell Adam to conceive.

THE SERPENT [_laughs_]!!!

EVE [_jarred and startled_] What a hateful noise! What is the matter
with you? No one has ever uttered such a sound before.

THE SERPENT. Adam cannot conceive.

EVE. Why?

THE SERPENT. Lilith did not imagine him so. He can imagine: he can
will: he can desire: he can gather his life together for a great spring
towards creation: he can create all things except one; and that one is
his own kind.

EVE. Why did Lilith keep this from him?

THE SERPENT. Because if he could do that he could do without Eve.

EVE. That is true. It is I who must conceive.

THE SERPENT. Yes. By that he is tied to you.

EVE. And I to him!

THE SERPENT. Yes, until you create another Adam.

EVE. I had not thought of that. You are very subtle. But if I create
another Eve he may turn to her and do without me. I will not create any
Eves, only Adams.

THE SERPENT. They cannot renew themselves without Eves. Sooner or later
you will die like the fawn; and the new Adams will be unable to create
without new Eves. You can imagine such an end; but you cannot desire it,
therefore cannot will it, therefore cannot create Adams only.

EVE. If I am to die like the fawn, why should not the rest die too? What
do I care?

THE SERPENT. Life must not cease. That comes before everything. It is
silly to say you do not care. You do care. It is that care that
will prompt your imagination; inflame your desires; make your will
irresistible; and create out of nothing.

EVE [_thoughtfully_] There can be no such thing as nothing. The garden
is full, not empty.

THE SERPENT. I had not thought of that. That is a great thought. Yes:
there is no such thing as nothing, only things we cannot see. The
chameleon eats the air.

EVE. I have another thought: I must tell it to Adam. [_Calling_] Adam!
Adam! Coo-ee!

ADAM'S VOICE. Coo-ee!

EVE. This will please him, and cure his fits of melancholy.

THE SERPENT. Do not tell him yet. I have not told you the great secret.

EVE. What more is there to tell? It is I who have to do the miracle.

THE SERPENT. No: he, too, must desire and will. But he must give his
desire and his will to you.

EVE. How?

THE SERPENT. That is the great secret. Hush! he is coming.

ADAM [_returning_] Is there another voice in the garden besides our
voices and the Voice? I heard a new voice.

EVE [_rising and running to him_] Only think, Adam! Our snake has learnt
to speak by listening to us.

ADAM [_delighted_] Is it so? [_He goes past her to the stone, and
fondles the serpent_].

THE SERPENT [_responding affectionately_] It is so, dear Adam.

EVE. But I have more wonderful news than that. Adam: we need not live
for ever.

ADAM [_dropping the snake's head in his excitement_] What! Eve: do not
play with me about this. If only there may be an end some day, and yet
no end! If only I can be relieved of the horror of having to endure
myself for ever! If only the care of this terrible garden may pass on
to some other gardener! If only the sentinel set by the Voice can be
relieved! If only the rest and sleep that enable me to bear it from
day to day could grow after many days into an eternal rest, an eternal
sleep, then I could face my days, however long they may last. Only,
there must be some end, some end: I am not strong enough to bear
eternity.

THE SERPENT. You need not live to see another summer; and yet there
shall be no end.

ADAM. That cannot be.

THE SERPENT. It can be.

EVE. It shall be.

THE SERPENT. It is. Kill me; and you will find another snake in the
garden tomorrow. You will find more snakes than there are fingers on
your hands.

EVE. I will make other Adams, other Eves.

ADAM. I tell you you must not make up stories about this. It cannot
happen.

THE SERPENT. I can remember when you were yourself a thing that could
not happen. Yet you are.

ADAM [_struck_] That must be true. [_He sits down on the stone_].

THE SERPENT. I will tell Eve the secret; and she will tell it to you.

ADAM. The secret! [_He turns quickly towards the serpent, and in doing
so puts his foot on something sharp_]. Oh!

EVE. What is it?

ADAM [_rubbing his foot_] A thistle. And there, next to it, a briar. And
nettles, too! I am tired of pulling these things up to keep the garden
pleasant for us for ever.

THE SERPENT. They do not grow very fast. They will not overrun the whole
garden for a long time: not until you have laid down your burden and
gone to sleep for ever. Why should you trouble yourself? Let the new
Adams clear a place for themselves.

ADAM. That is very true. You must tell us your secret. You see, Eve,
what a splendid thing it is not to have to live for ever.

EVE [_throwing herself down discontentedly and plucking at the grass_]
That is so like a man. The moment you find we need not last for ever,
you talk as if we were going to end today. You must clear away some of
those horrid things, or we shall be scratched and stung whenever we
forget to look where we are stepping.

ADAM. Oh yes, some of them, of course. But only some. I will clear them
away tomorrow.

THE SERPENT [_laughs_]!!!

ADAM. That is a funny noise to make. I like it.

EVE. I do not. Why do you make it again?

THE SERPENT. Adam has invented something new. He has invented tomorrow.
You will invent things every day now that the burden of immortality is
lifted from you.

EVE. Immortality? What is that?

THE SERPENT. My new word for having to live for ever.

EVE. The serpent has made a beautiful word for being. Living.

ADAM. Make me a beautiful word for doing things tomorrow; for that
surely is a great and blessed invention.

THE SERPENT. Procrastination.

EVE. That is a sweet word. I wish I had a serpent's tongue.

THE SERPENT. That may come too. Everything is possible.

ADAM [_springing up in sudden terror_] Oh!

EVE. What is the matter now?

ADAM. My rest! My escape from life!

THE SERPENT. Death. That is the word.

ADAM. There is a terrible danger in this procrastination.

EVE. What danger?

ADAM. If I put off death until tomorrow, I shall never die. There is no
such day as tomorrow, and never can be.

THE SERPENT. I am very subtle; but Man is deeper in his thought than
I am. The woman knows that there is no such thing as nothing: the man
knows that there is no such day as tomorrow. I do well to worship them.

ADAM. If I am to overtake death, I must appoint a real day, not a
tomorrow. When shall I die?

EVE. You may die when I have made another Adam. Not before. But then,
as soon as you like. [_She rises, and passing behind him, strolls off
carelessly to the tree and leans against it, stroking a ring of the
snake_].

ADAM. There need be no hurry even then.

EVE. I see you will put it off until tomorrow.

ADAM. And you? Will you die the moment you have made a new Eve?

EVE. Why should I? Are you eager to be rid of me? Only just now you
wanted me to sit still and never move lest I should stumble and die like
the fawn. Now you no longer care.

ADAM. It does not matter so much now.

EVE [_angrily to the snake_] This death that you have brought into the
garden is an evil thing. He wants me to die.

THE SERPENT [_to Adam_] Do you want her to die?

ADAM. No. It is I who am to die. Eve must not die before me. I should be
lonely.

EVE. You could get one of the new Eves.

ADAM. That is true. But they might not be quite the same. They could
not: I feel sure of that. They would not have the same memories. They
would be--I want a word for them.

THE SERPENT. Strangers.

ADAM. Yes: that is a good hard word. Strangers.

EVE. When there are new Adams and new Eves we shall live in a garden of
strangers. We shall need each other. [_She comes quickly behind him and
turns up his face to her_]. Do not forget that, Adam. Never forget it.

ADAM. Why should I forget it? It is I who have thought of it.

EVE. I, too, have thought of something. The fawn stumbled and fell and
died. But you could come softly up behind me and [_she suddenly pounces
on his shoulders and throws him forward on his face_] throw me down so
that I should die. I should not dare to sleep if there were no reason
why you should not make me die.

ADAM [_scrambling up in horror_] Make you die!!! What a frightful
thought!

THE SERPENT. Kill, kill, kill, kill. That is the word.

EVE. The new Adams and Eves might kill us. I shall not make them. [_She
sits on the rock and pulls him down beside her, clasping him to her with
her right arm_].

THE SERPENT. You must. For if you do not there will be an end.

ADAM. No: they will not kill us: they will feel as I do. There is
something against it. The Voice in the garden will tell them that they
must not kill, as it tells me.

THE SERPENT. The voice in the garden is your own voice.

ADAM. It is; and it is not. It is something greater than me: I am only a
part of it.

EVE. The Voice does not tell me not to kill you. Yet I do not want you
to die before me. No voice is needed to make me feel that.

ADAM [_throwing his arm round her shoulder with an expression of
anguish_] Oh no: that is plain without any voice. There is something
that holds us together, something that has no word--

THE SERPENT. Love. Love. Love.

ADAM. That is too short a word for so long a thing.

THE SERPENT [_laughs_]!!!

EVE [_turning impatiently to the snake_] That heart-biting sound again!
Do not do it. Why do you do it?

THE SERPENT. Love may be too long a word for so short a thing soon. But
when it is short it will be very sweet.

ADAM [_ruminating_] You puzzle me. My old trouble was heavy; but it was
simple. These wonders that you promise to do may tangle up my being
before they bring me the gift of death. I was troubled with the burden
of eternal being; but I was not confused in my mind. If I did not know
that I loved Eve, at least I did not know that she might cease to love
me, and come to love some other Adam and desire my death. Can you find a
name for that knowledge?

THE SERPENT. Jealousy. Jealousy. Jealousy.

ADAM. A hideous word.

EVE [_shaking him_] Adam: you must not brood. You think too much.

ADAM [_angrily_] How can I help brooding when the future has become
uncertain? Anything is better than uncertainty. Life has become
uncertain. Love is uncertain. Have you a word for this new misery?

THE SERPENT. Fear. Fear. Fear.

ADAM. Have you a remedy for it?

THE SERPENT. Yes. Hope. Hope. Hope.

ADAM. What is hope?

THE SERPENT. As long as you do not know the future you do not know that
it will not be happier than the past. That is hope.

ADAM. It does not console me. Fear is stronger in me than hope. I must
have certainty. [_He rises threateningly_]. Give it to me; or I will
kill you when next I catch you asleep.

EVE [_throwing her arms round the serpent_] My beautiful snake. Oh no.
How can you even think such a horror?

ADAM. Fear will drive me to anything. The serpent gave me fear. Let it
now give me certainty or go in fear of me.

THE SERPENT. Bind the future by your will. Make a vow.

ADAM. What is a vow?

THE SERPENT. Choose a day for your death; and resolve to die on that
day. Then death is no longer uncertain but certain. Let Eve vow to love
you until your death. Then love will be no longer uncertain.

ADAM. Yes: that is splendid: that will bind the future.

EVE [_displeased, turning away from the serpent_] But it will destroy
hope.

ADAM [_angrily_] Be silent, woman. Hope is wicked. Happiness is wicked.
Certainty is blessed.

THE SERPENT. What is wicked? You have invented a word.

ADAM. Whatever I fear to do is wicked. Listen to me, Eve; and you,
snake, listen too, that your memory may hold my vow. I will live a
thousand sets of the four seasons--

THE SERPENT. Years. Years.

ADAM. I will live a thousand years; and then I will endure no more: I
will die and take my rest. And I will love Eve all that time and no
other woman.

EVE. And if Adam keeps his vow I will love no other man until he dies.

THE SERPENT. You have both invented marriage. And what he will be to you
and not to any other woman is husband; and what you will be to him and
not to any other man is wife.

ADAM [_instinctively moving his hand towards her_] Husband and wife.

EVE [_slipping her hand into his_] Wife and husband.

THE SERPENT [_laughs_]!!!

EVE [_snatching herself loose from Adam_] Do not make that odious noise,
I tell you.

ADAM. Do not listen to her: the noise is good: it lightens my heart.
You are a jolly snake. But you have not made a vow yet. What vow do you
make?

THE SERPENT. I make no vows. I take my chance.

ADAM. Chance? What does that mean?

THE SERPENT. It means that I fear certainty as you fear uncertainty. It
means that nothing is certain but uncertainty. If I bind the future I
bind my will. If I bind my will I strangle creation.

EVE. Creation must not be strangled. I tell you I will create, though I
tear myself to pieces in the act.

ADAM. Be silent, both of you. I _will_ bind the future. I will be
delivered from fear. [_To Eve_] We have made our vows; and if you must
create, you shall create within the bounds of those vows. You shall not
listen to that snake any more. Come [_he seizes her by the hair to drag
her away_].

EVE. Let me go, you fool. It has not yet told me the secret.

ADAM [_releasing her_] That is true. What is a fool?

EVE. I do not know: the word came to me. It is what you are when you
forget and brood and are filled with fear. Let us listen to the snake.

ADAM. No: I am afraid of it. I feel as if the ground were giving way
under my feet when it speaks. Do you stay and listen to it.

THE SERPENT [_laughs_]!!!

ADAM [_brightening_] That noise takes away fear. Funny. The snake and
the woman are going to whisper secrets. [_He chuckles and goes away
slowly, laughing his first laugh_].

EVE. Now the secret. The secret. [_She sits on the rock and throws her
arms round the serpent, who begins whispering to her_].

_Eve's face lights up with intense interest, which increases until an
expression of overwhelming repugnance takes its place. She buries her
face in her hands_.



ACT II


_A few centuries later. Morning. An oasis in Mesopotamia. Close at hand
the end of a log house abuts on a kitchen garden. Adam is digging in the
middle of the garden. On his right, Eve sits on a stool in the shadow
of a tree by the doorway, spinning flax. Her wheel, which she turns by
hand, is a large disc of heavy wood, practically a flywheel. At the
opposite side of the garden is a thorn brake with a passage through it
barred by a hurdle.

The two are scantily and carelessly dressed in rough linen and leaves.
They have lost their youth and grace; and Adam has an unkempt beard and
jaggedly cut hair; but they are strong and in the prime of life. Adam
looks worried, like a farmer. Eve, better humored (having given up
worrying), sits and spins and thinks._

A MAN'S VOICE. Hallo, mother!

EVE [_looking across the garden towards the hurdle_] Here is Cain.

ADAM [_uttering a grunt of disgust_]!!! [_He goes on digging without
raising his head_].

_Cain kicks the hurdle out of his way, and strides into the garden. In
pose, voice, and dress he is insistently warlike. He is equipped with
huge spear and broad brass-bound leather shield; his casque is a tiger's
head with bull's horns; he wears a scarlet cloak with gold brooch over a
lion's skin with the claws dangling; his feet are in sandals with brass
ornaments; his shins are in brass greaves; and his bristling military
moustache glistens with oil. To his parents he has the self-assertive,
not-quite-at-ease manner of a revolted son who knows that he is not
forgiven nor approved of._

CAIN [_to Adam_] Still digging? Always dig, dig, dig. Sticking in the
old furrow. No progress! no advanced ideas! no adventures! What should I
be if I had stuck to the digging you taught me?

ADAM. What are you now, with your shield and spear, and your brother's
blood crying from the ground against you?

CAIN. I am the first murderer: you are only the first man. Anybody could
be the first man: it is as easy as to be the first cabbage. To be the
first murderer one must be a man of spirit.

ADAM. Begone. Leave us in peace. The world is wide enough to keep us
apart.

EVE. Why do you want to drive him away? He is mine. I made him out of my
own body. I want to see my work sometimes.

ADAM. You made Abel also. He killed Abel. Can you bear to look at him
after that?

CAIN. Whose fault was it that I killed Abel? Who invented killing? Did
I? No: he invented it himself. I followed your teaching. I dug and dug
and dug. I cleared away the thistles and briars. I ate the fruits of the
earth. I lived in the sweat of my brow, as you do. I was a fool. But
Abel was a discoverer, a man of ideas, of spirit: a true Progressive. He
was the discoverer of blood. He was the inventor of killing. He found
out that the fire of the sun could be brought down by a dewdrop. He
invented the altar to keep the fire alive. He changed the beasts he
killed into meat by the fire on the altar. He kept himself alive by
eating meat. His meal cost him a day's glorious health-giving sport and
an hour's amusing play with the fire. You learnt nothing from him: you
drudged and drudged and drudged, and dug and dug and dug, and made me do
the same. I envied his happiness, his freedom. I despised myself for
not doing as he did instead of what you did. He became so happy that he
shared his meal with the Voice that had whispered all his inventions to
him. He said that the Voice was the voice of the fire that cooked his
food, and that the fire that could cook could also eat. It was true: I
saw the fire consume the food on his altar. Then I, too, made an altar,
and offered my food on it, my grains, my roots, my fruit. Useless:
nothing happened. He laughed at me; and then came my great idea: why not
kill him as he killed the beasts? I struck; and he died, just as they
did. Then I gave up your old silly drudging ways, and lived as he had
lived, by the chase, by the killing, and by the fire. Am I not better
than you? stronger, happier, freer?

ADAM. You are not stronger: you are shorter in the wind: you cannot
endure. You have made the beasts afraid of us; and the snake has
invented poison to protect herself against you. I fear you myself. If
you take a step towards your mother with that spear of yours I will
strike you with my spade as you struck Abel.

EVE. He will not strike me. He loves me.

ADAM. He loved his brother. But he killed him.

CAIN. I do not want to kill women. I do not want to kill my mother. And
for her sake I will not kill you, though I could send this spear through
you without coming within reach of your spade. But for her, I could not
resist the sport of trying to kill you, in spite of my fear that you
would kill me. I have striven with a boar and with a lion as to which of
us should kill the other. I have striven with a man: spear to spear and
shield to shield. It is terrible; but there is no joy like it. I call
it fighting. He who has never fought has never lived. That is what has
brought me to my mother today.

ADAM. What have you to do with one another now? She is the creator, you
the destroyer.

CAIN. How can I destroy unless she creates? I want her to create more
and more men: aye, and more and more women, that they may in turn create
more men. I have imagined a glorious poem of many men, of more men than
there are leaves on a thousand trees. I will divide them into two great
hosts. One of them I will lead; and the other will be led by the man I
fear most and desire to fight and kill most. And each host shall try
to kill the other host. Think of that! all those multitudes of men
fighting, fighting, killing, killing! The four rivers running with
blood! The shouts of triumph! the howls of rage! the curses of despair!
the shrieks of torment! That will be life indeed: life lived to the very
marrow: burning, overwhelming life. Every man who has not seen it, heard
it, felt it, risked it, will feel a humbled fool in the presence of the
man who has.

EVE. And I! I am to be a mere convenience to make men for you to kill!

ADAM. Or to kill you, you fool.

CAIN. Mother: the making of men is your right, your risk, your agony,
your glory, your triumph. You make my father here your mere convenience,
as you call it, for that. He has to dig for you, sweat for you, plod
for you, like the ox who helps him to tear up the ground or the ass who
carries his burdens for him. No woman shall make me live my father's
life. I will hunt: I will fight and strive to the very bursting of my
sinews. When I have slain the boar at the risk of my life, I will throw
it to my woman to cook, and give her a morsel of it for her pains. She
shall have no other food; and that will make her my slave. And the man
that slays me shall have her for his booty. Man shall be the master of
Woman, not her baby and her drudge.

_Adam throws down his spade, and stands looking darkly at Eve._

EVE. Are you tempted, Adam? Does this seem a better thing to you than
love between us?

CAIN. What does he know of love? Only when he has fought, when he has
faced terror and death, when he has striven to the spending of the last
rally of his strength, can he know what it is to rest in love in the
arms of a woman. Ask that woman whom you made, who is also my wife,
whether she would have me as I was in the days when I followed the ways
of Adam, and was a digger and a drudge?

EVE [_angrily throwing down her distaff_] What! You dare come here
boasting about that good-for-nothing Lua, the worst of daughters and the
worst of wives! You her master! You are more her slave than Adam's ox or
your own sheepdog. Forsooth, when you have slain the boar at the risk
of your life, you will throw her a morsel of it for her pains! Ha! Poor
wretch: do you think I do not know her, and know you, better than that?
Do you risk your life when you trap the ermine and the sable and the
blue fox to hang on her lazy shoulders and make her look more like an
animal than a woman? When you have to snare the little tender birds
because it is too much trouble for her to chew honest food, how much of
a great warrior do you feel then? You slay the tiger at the risk of your
life; but who gets the striped skin you have run that risk for? She
takes it to lie on, and flings you the carrion flesh you cannot eat. You
fight because you think that your fighting makes her admire and desire
you. Fool: she makes you fight because you bring her the ornaments and
the treasures of those you have slain, and because she is courted and
propitiated with power and gold by the people who fear you. You say that
I make a mere convenience of Adam: I who spin and keep the house, and
bear and rear children, and am a woman and not a pet animal to please
men and prey on them! What are you, you poor slave of a painted face and
a bundle of skunk's fur? You were a man-child when I bore you. Lua was a
woman-child when I bore her. What have you made of yourselves?

CAIN [_letting his spear fall into the crook of his shield arm, and
twirling his moustache_] There is something higher than man. There is
hero and superman.

EVE. Superman! You are no superman: you are Anti-Man: you are to other
men what the stoat is to the rabbit; and she is to you what the leech is
to the stoat. You despise your father; but when he dies the world will
be the richer because he lived. When you die, men will say, 'He was a
great warrior; but it would have been better for the world if he had
never been born.' And of Lua they will say nothing; but when they think
of her they will spit.

CAIN. She is a better sort of woman to live with than you. If Lua nagged
at me as you are nagging, and as you nag at Adam, I would beat her black
and blue from head to foot. I have done it too, slave as you say I am.

EVE. Yes, because she looked at another man. And then you grovelled at
her feet, and cried, and begged her to forgive you, and were ten times
more her slave than ever; and she, when she had finished screaming and
the pain went off a little, she forgave you, did she not?

CAIN. She loved me more than ever. That is the true nature of woman.

EVE [_now pitying him maternally_] Love! You call that love! You call
that the nature of woman! My boy: this is neither man nor woman nor love
nor life. You have no real strength in your bones nor sap in your flesh.

CAIN. Ha! [_he seizes his spear and swings it muscularly_].

EVE. Yes: you have to twirl a stick to feel your strength: you cannot
taste life without making it bitter and boiling hot: you cannot love
Lua until her face is painted, nor feel the natural warmth of her flesh
until you have stuck a squirrel's fur on it. You can feel nothing but a
torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to
look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten
miles to see a fight or a death.

ADAM. Enough said. Let the boy alone.

CAIN. Boy! Ha! ha!

EVE [_to Adam_] You think, perhaps, that his way of life may be better
than yours after all. You are still tempted. Well, will you pamper me as
he pampers his woman? Will you kill tigers and bears until I have a heap
of their skins to lounge on? Shall I paint my face and let my arms waste
into pretty softness, and eat partridges and doves, and the flesh of
kids whose milk you will steal for me?

ADAM. You are hard enough to bear with as you are. Stay as you are; and
I will stay as I am.

CAIN. You neither of you know anything about life. You are simple
country folk. You are the nurses and valets of the oxen and dogs and
asses you have tamed to work for you. I can raise you out of that. I
have a plan. Why not tame men and women to work for us? Why not bring
them up from childhood never to know any other lot, so that they may
believe that we are gods, and that they are here only to make life
glorious for us?

ADAM [_impressed_] That is a great thought, certainly.

EVE [_contemptuously_] Great thought!

ADAM. Well, as the serpent used to say, why not?

EVE. Because I would not have such wretches in my house. Because I hate
creatures with two heads, or with withered limbs, or that are distorted
and perverted and unnatural. I have told Cain already that he is not a
man and that Lua is not a woman: they are monsters. And now you want to
make still more unnatural monsters, so that you may be utterly lazy and
worthless, and that your tamed human animals may find work a blasting
curse. A fine dream, truly! [_To Cain_] Your father is a fool skin deep;
but you are a fool to your very marrow; and your baggage of a wife is
worse.

ADAM. Why am I a fool? How am I a greater fool than you?

EVE. You said there would be no killing because the Voice would tell our
children that they must not kill. Why did it not tell Cain that?

CAIN. It did; but I am not a child to be afraid of a Voice. The Voice
thought I was nothing but my brother's keeper. It found that I was
myself, and that it was for Abel to be himself also, and look to
himself. He was not my keeper any more than I was his: why did he not
kill me? There was no more to prevent him than there was to prevent me:
it was man to man; and I won. I was the first conqueror.

ADAM. What did the Voice say to you when you thought all that?

CAIN. Why, it gave me right. It said that my deed was as a mark on me, a
burnt-in mark such as Abel put on his sheep, that no man should slay me.
And here I stand unslain, whilst the cowards who have never slain, the
men who are content to be their brothers' keepers instead of their
masters, are despised and rejected, and slain like rabbits. He who bears
the brand of Cain shall rule the earth. When he falls, he shall be
avenged sevenfold: the Voice has said it; so beware how you plot against
me, you and all the rest.

ADAM. Cease your boasting and bullying, and tell the truth. Does not the
Voice tell you that as no man dare slay you for murdering your brother,
you ought to slay yourself?

CAIN. No.

ADAM. Then there is no such thing as divine justice, unless you are
lying.

CAIN. I am not lying: I dare all truths. There is divine justice. For
the Voice tells me that I must offer myself to every man to be killed if
he can kill me. Without danger I cannot be great. That is how I pay for
Abel's blood. Danger and fear follow my steps everywhere. Without them
courage would have no sense. And it is courage, courage, courage, that
raises the blood of life to crimson splendor.

ADAM [_picking up his spade and preparing to dig again_] Take yourself
off then. This splendid life of yours does not last for a thousand
years; and I must last for a thousand years. When you fighters do not
get killed in fighting one another or fighting the beasts, you die from
mere evil in yourselves. Your flesh ceases to grow like man's flesh: it
grows like a fungus on a tree. Instead of breathing you sneeze, or cough
up your insides, and wither and perish. Your bowels become rotten; your
hair falls from you; your teeth blacken and drop out; and you die before
your time, not because you will, but because you must. I will dig, and
live.

CAIN. And pray, what use is this thousand years of life to you, you
old vegetable? Do you dig any better because you have been digging for
hundreds of years? I have not lived as long as you; but I know all there
is to be known of the craft of digging. By quitting it I have set myself
free to learn nobler crafts of which you know nothing. I know the craft
of fighting and of hunting: in a word, the craft of killing. What
certainty have you of your thousand years? I could kill both of you; and
you could no more defend yourselves than a couple of sheep. I spare you;
but others may kill you. Why not live bravely, and die early and make
room for others? Why, I--I! that know many more crafts than either of
you, am tired of myself when I am not fighting or hunting. Sooner than
face a thousand years of it I should kill myself, as the Voice sometimes
tempts me to do already.

ADAM. Liar: you denied just now that it called on you to pay for Abel's
life with your own.

CAIN. The Voice does not speak to me as it does to you. I am a man: you
are only a grown-up child. One does not speak to a child as to a man.
And a man does not listen and tremble in silence. He replies: he makes
the Voice respect him: in the end he dictates what the Voice shall say.

ADAM. May your tongue be accurst for such blasphemy!

EVE. Keep a guard on your own tongue; and do not curse my son. It was
Lilith who did wrong when she shared the labor of creation so unequally
between man and wife. If you, Cain, had had the trouble of making Abel,
or had had to make another man to replace him when he was gone, you
would not have killed him: you would have risked your own life to save
his. That is why all this empty talk of yours, which tempted Adam just
now when he threw down his spade and listened to you for a while, went
by me like foul wind that has passed over a dead body. That is why there
is enmity between Woman the creator and Man the destroyer. I know you: I
am your mother. You are idle: you are selfish. It is long and hard and
painful to create life: it is short and easy to steal the life others
have made. When you dug, you made the earth live and bring forth as I
live and bring forth. It was for that that Lilith set you free from the
travail of women, not for theft and murder.

CAIN. The Devil thank her for it! I can make better use of my time than
to play the husband to the clay beneath my feet.

ADAM. Devil? What new word is that?

CAIN. Hearken to me, old fool. I have never in my soul listened
willingly when you have told me of the Voice that whispers to you. There
must be two Voices: one that gulls and despises you, and another that
trusts and respects me. I call yours the Devil. Mine I call the Voice of
God.

ADAM. Mine is the Voice of Life: yours the Voice of Death.

CAIN. Be it so. For it whispers to me that death is not really death:
that it is the gate of another life: a life infinitely splendid and
intense: a life of the soul alone: a life without clods or spades,
hunger or fatigue--

EVE. Selfish and idle, Cain. I know.

CAIN. Selfish, yes: a life in which no man is his brother's keeper,
because his brother can keep himself. But am I idle? In rejecting your
drudgery, have I not embraced evils and agonies of which you know
nothing? The arrow is lighter in the hand than the spade; but the energy
that drives it through the breast of a fighter is as fire to water
compared with the strength that drives the spade into the harmless dirty
clay. My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.

ADAM. What is that word? What is pure?

CAIN. Turned from the clay. Turned upward to the sun, to the clear clean
heavens.

ADAM. The heavens are empty, child. The earth is fruitful. The earth
feeds us. It gives us the strength by which we made you and all mankind.
Cut off from the clay which you despise, you would perish miserably.

CAIN. I revolt against the clay. I revolt against the food. You say it
gives us strength: does it not also turn into filth and smite us with
diseases? I revolt against these births that you and mother are so proud
of. They drag us down to the level of the beasts. If that is to be the
last thing as it has been the first, let mankind perish. If I am to
eat like a bear, if Lua is to bring forth cubs like a bear, then I had
rather be a bear than a man; for the bear is not ashamed: he knows no
better. If you are content, like the bear, I am not. Stay with the woman
who gives you children: I will go to the woman who gives me dreams.
Grope in the ground for your food: I will bring it from the skies with
my arrows, or strike it down as it roams the earth in the pride of its
life. If I must have food or die, I will at least have it at as far a
remove from the earth as I can. The ox shall make it something nobler
than grass before it comes to me. And as the man is nobler than the ox,
I shall some day let my enemy eat the ox; and then I will slay and eat
him.

ADAM. Monster! You hear this, Eve?

EVE. So that is what comes of turning your face to the clean clear
heavens! Man-eating! Child-eating! For that is what it would come to,
just as it came to lambs and kids when Abel began with sheep and goats.
You are a poor silly creature after all. Do you think I never have these
thoughts: I! who have the labor of the child-bearing: I! who have the
drudgery of preparing the food? I thought for a moment that perhaps this
strong brave son of mine, who could imagine something better, and could
desire what he imagined, might also be able to will what he desired
until he created it. And all that comes of it is that he wants to be a
bear and eat children. Even a bear would not eat a man if it could get
honey instead.

CAIN. I do not want to be a bear. I do not want to eat children. I do
not know what I want, except that I want to be something higher and
nobler than this stupid old digger whom Lilith made to help you to bring
me into the world, and whom you despise now that he has served your
turn.

ADAM [_in sullen rage_] I have half a mind to shew you that my spade can
split your undutiful head open, in spite of your spear.

CAIN. Undutiful! Ha! ha! [_Flourishing his spear_] Try it, old
everybody's father. Try a taste of fighting.

EVE. Peace, peace, you two fools. Sit down and be quiet; and listen to
me. [_Adam, with a weary shrug, throws down his spade. Cain, with
a laughing one, throws down his shield and spear. Both sit on the
ground_]. I hardly know which of you satisfies me least, you with your
dirty digging, or he with his dirty killing. I cannot think it was for
either of these cheap ways of life that Lilith set you free. [_To Adam_]
You dig roots and coax grains out of the earth: why do you not draw down
a divine sustenance from the skies? He steals and kills for his food;
and makes up idle poems of life after death; and dresses up his
terror-ridden life with fine words and his disease-ridden body with fine
clothes, so that men may glorify and honor him instead of cursing him as
murderer and thief. All you men, except only Adam, are my sons, or my
sons' sons, or my sons' sons' sons: you all come to see me: you all shew
off before me: all your little wisdoms and accomplishments are trotted
out before mother Eve. The diggers come: the fighters and killers come:
they are both very dull; for they either complain to me of the last
harvest, or boast to me of the last fight; and one harvest is just like
another, and the last fight only a repetition of the first. Oh, I have
heard it all a thousand times. They tell me too of their last-born:
the clever thing the darling child said yesterday, and how much more
wonderful or witty or quaint it is than any child that ever was born
before. And I have to pretend to be surprised, delighted, interested;
though the last child is like the first, and has said and done nothing
that did not delight Adam and me when you and Abel said it. For you were
the first children in the world, and filled us with such wonder and
delight as no couple can ever again feel while the world lasts. When I
can bear no more, I go to our old garden, that is now a mass of nettles
and thistles, in the hope of finding the serpent to talk to. But you
have made the serpent our enemy: she has left the garden, or is dead: I
never see her now. So I have to come back and listen to Adam saying the
same thing for the ten-thousandth time, or to receive a visit from the
last great-great-grandson who has grown up and wants to impress me with
his importance. Oh, it is dreary, dreary! And there is yet nearly seven
hundred years of it to endure.

CAIN. Poor mother! You see, life is too long. One tires of everything.
There is nothing new under the sun.

ADAM [_to Eve, grumpily_] Why do you live on, if you can find nothing
better to do than complain?

EVE. Because there is still hope.

CAIN. Of what?

EVE. Of the coming true of your dreams and mine. Of newly created
things. Of better things. My sons and my son's sons are not all diggers
and fighters. Some of them will neither dig nor fight: they are more
useless than either of you: they are weaklings and cowards: they are
vain; yet they are dirty and will not take the trouble to cut their
hair. They borrow and never pay; but one gives them what they want,
because they tell beautiful lies in beautiful words. They can remember
their dreams. They can dream without sleeping. They have not will enough
to create instead of dreaming; but the serpent said that every dream
could be willed into creation by those strong enough to believe in it.
There are others who cut reeds of different lengths and blow through
them, making lovely patterns of sound in the air; and some of them can
weave the patterns together, sounding three reeds at the same time, and
raising my soul to things for which I have no words. And others make
little mammoths out of clay, or make faces appear on flat stones, and
ask me to create women for them with such faces. I have watched those
faces and willed; and then I have made a woman-child that has grown up
quite like them. And others think of numbers without having to count on
their fingers, and watch the sky at night, and give names to the stars,
and can foretell when the sun will be covered with a black saucepan lid.
And there is Tubal, who made this wheel for me which has saved me so
much labor. And there is Enoch, who walks on the hills, and hears the
Voice continually, and has given up his will to do the will of the
Voice, and has some of the Voice's greatness. When they come, there is
always some new wonder, or some new hope: something to live for. They
never want to die, because they are always learning and always creating
either things or wisdom, or at least dreaming of them. And then you,
Cain, come to me with your stupid fighting and destroying, and your
foolish boasting; and you want me to tell you that it is all splendid,
and that you are heroic, and that nothing but death or the dread of
death makes life worth living. Away with you, naughty child; and do you,
Adam, go on with your work and not waste your time listening to him.

CAIN. I am not, perhaps, very clever; but--

EVE [_interrupting him_] Perhaps not; but do not begin to boast of that.
It is no credit to you.

CAIN. For all that, mother, I have an instinct which tells me that death
plays its part in life. Tell me this: who invented death?

_Adam springs to his feet. Eve drops her distaff. Both shew the greatest
consternation._

CAIN. What is the matter with you both?

ADAM. Boy: you have asked us a terrible question.

EVE. You invented murder. Let that be enough for you.

CAIN. Murder is not death. You know what I mean. Those whom I slay would
die if I spared them. If I am not slain, yet I shall die. Who put this
upon me? I say, who invented death?

ADAM. Be reasonable, boy. Could you bear to live for ever? You think you
could, because you know that you will never have to make your thought
good. But I have known what it is to sit and brood under the terror of
eternity, of immortality. Think of it, man: to have no escape! to be
Adam, Adam, Adam through more days than there are grains of sand by the
two rivers, and then be as far from the end as ever! I, who have so much
in me that I hate and long to cast off! Be thankful to your parents, who
enabled you to hand on your burden to new and better men, and won for
you an eternal rest; for it was we who invented death.

CAIN [_rising_] You did well: I, too, do not want to live for ever. But
if you invented death, why do you blame me, who am a minister of death?

ADAM. I do not blame you. Go in peace. Leave me to my digging, and your
mother to her spinning.

CAIN. Well, I will leave you to it, though I have shewn you a better
way. [_He picks up his shield and spear_]. I will go back to my brave
warrior friends and their splendid women. [_He strides to the thorn
brake_]. When Adam delved and Eve span, where was then the gentleman?
[_He goes away roaring with laughter, which ceases as he cries from the
distance_] Goodbye, mother.

ADAM [_grumbling_] He might have put the hurdle back, lazy hound! [_He
replaces the hurdle across the passage_].

EVE. Through him and his like, death is gaining on life. Already most of
our grandchildren die before they have sense enough to know how to live.

ADAM. No matter. [_He spits on his hands, and takes up the spade
again_]. Life is still long enough to learn to dig, short as they are
making it.

EVE [_musing_] Yes, to dig. And to fight. But is it long enough for the
other things, the great things? Will they live long enough to eat manna?

ADAM. What is manna?

EVE. Food drawn down from heaven, made out of the air, not dug dirtily
from the earth. Will they learn all the ways of all the stars in their
little time? It took Enoch two hundred years to learn to interpret the
will of the Voice. When he was a mere child of eighty, his babyish
attempts to understand the Voice were more dangerous than the wrath of
Cain. If they shorten their lives, they will dig and fight and kill and
die; and their baby Enochs will tell them that it is the will of the
Voice that they should dig and fight and kill and die for ever.

ADAM. If they are lazy and have a will towards death I cannot help it.
I will live my thousand years: if they will not, let them die and be
damned.

EVE. Damned? What is that?

ADAM. The state of them that love death more than life. Go on with your
spinning; and do not sit there idle while I am straining my muscles for
you.

EVE [_slowly taking up her distaff_] If you were not a fool you would
find something better for both of us to live by than this spinning and
digging.

ADAM. Go on with your work, I tell you; or you shall go without bread.

EVE. Man need not always live by bread alone. There is something else.
We do not yet know what it is; but some day we shall find out; and then
we will live on that alone; and there shall be no more digging nor
spinning, nor fighting nor killing.

_She spins resignedly; he digs impatiently._



PART II

The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas


_In the first years after the war an impressive-looking gentleman of 50
is seated writing in a well-furnished spacious study. He is dressed in
black. His coat is a frock-coat; his tie is white; and his waistcoat,
though it is not quite a clergyman's waistcoat, and his collar, though
it buttons in front instead of behind, combine with the prosperity
indicated by his surroundings, and his air of personal distinction, to
suggest the clerical dignitary. Still, he is clearly neither dean nor
bishop; he is rather too starkly intellectual for a popular Free Church
enthusiast; and he is not careworn enough to be a great headmaster.

The study windows, which have broad comfortable window seats, overlook
Hampstead Heath towards London. Consequently, it being a fine afternoon
in spring, the room is sunny. As you face these windows, you have on
your right the fireplace, with a few logs smouldering in it, and a
couple of comfortable library chairs on the hearthrug; beyond it and
beside it the door; before you the writing-table, at which the clerical
gentleman sits a little to your left facing the door with his right
profile presented to you; on your left a settee; and on your right a
couple of Chippendale chairs. There is also an upholstered square stool
in the middle of the room, against the writing-table. The walls are
covered with bookshelves above and lockers beneath.

The door opens; and another gentleman, shorter than the clerical one,
within a year or two of the same age, dressed in a well-worn tweed
lounge suit, with a short beard and much less style in his bearing and
carriage, looks in._

THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN [_familiar and by no means cordial_] Hallo! I
didn't expect you until the five o'clock train.

THE TWEEDED GENTLEMAN [_coming in very slowly_] I have something on my
mind. I thought I'd come early.

THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN [_throwing down his pen_] What is on your mind?

THE TWEEDED GENTLEMAN [_sitting down on the stool, heavily preoccupied
with his thought_] I have made up my mind at last about the time. I make
it three hundred years.

THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN [_sitting up energetically_] Now that is
extraordinary. Most extraordinary. The very last words I wrote when you
interrupted me were 'at least three centuries.' [_He snatches up his
manuscript, and points to it_]. Here it is: [_reading_] 'the term of
human life must be extended to at least three centuries.'

THE TWEEDED GENTLEMAN. How did you arrive at it?

_A parlor maid opens the door, ushering in a young clergyman._

THE PARLOR MAID. Mr Haslam. [_She withdraws_].

_The visitor is so very unwelcome that his host forgets to rise; and
the two brothers stare at the intruder, quite unable to conceal their
dismay. Haslam, who has nothing clerical about him except his collar,
and wears a snuff-colored suit, smiles with a frank school-boyishness
that makes it impossible to be unkind to him, and explodes into
obviously unpremeditated speech._

HASLAM. I'm afraid I'm an awful nuisance. I'm the rector; and I suppose
one ought to call on people.

THE TWEEDED GENTLEMAN [_in ghostly tones_] We're not Church people, you
know.

HASLAM. Oh, I don't mind that, if you don't. The Church people here are
mostly as dull as ditch-water. I have heard such a lot about you; and
there are so jolly few people to talk to. I thought you perhaps wouldn't
mind. _Do_ you mind? for of course I'll go like a shot if I'm in the
way.

THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN [_rising, disarmed_] Sit down, Mr--er?

HASLAM. Haslam.

THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN. Mr Haslam.

THE TWEEDED GENTLEMAN [_rising and offering him the stool_] Sit down.
[_He retreats towards the Chippendale chairs_].

HASLAM [_sitting down on the stool_] Thanks awfully.

THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN [_resuming his seat_] This is my brother Conrad,
Professor of Biology at Jarrowfields University: Dr. Conrad Barnabas. My
name is Franklyn: Franklyn Barnabas. I was in the Church myself for some
years.

HASLAM [_sympathizing_] Yes: one cant help it. If theres a living in
the family, or one's Governor knows a patron, one gets shoved into the
Church by one's parents.

CONRAD [_sitting down on the furthest Chippendale with a snort of
amusement_] Mp!

FRANKLYN. One gets shoved out of it, sometimes, by one's conscience.

HASLAM. Oh yes; but where is a chap like me to go? I'm afraid I'm not
intellectual enough to split straws when theres a job in front of me,
and nothing better for me to do. I daresay the Church was a bit thick
for you; but it's good enough for me. It will last my time, anyhow [_he
laughs good-humoredly_].

FRANKLYN [_with renewed energy_] There again! You see, Con. It will last
his time. Life is too short for men to take it seriously.

HASLAM. Thats a way of looking at it, certainly.

FRANKLYN. I was not shoved into the Church, Mr Haslam: I felt it to be
my vocation to walk with God, like Enoch. After twenty years of it I
realized that I was walking with my own ignorance and self-conceit, and
that I was not within a hundred and fifty years of the experience and
wisdom I was pretending to.

HASLAM. Now I come to think of it, old Methuselah must have had to think
twice before he took on anything for life. If I thought I was going to
live nine hundred and sixty years, I don't think I should stay in the
Church.

FRANKLYN. If men lived even a third of that time, the Church would be
very different from the thing it is.

CONRAD. If I could count on nine hundred and sixty years I could make
myself a real biologist, instead of what I am now: a child trying to
walk. Are you sure you might not become a good clergyman if you had a
few centuries to do it in?

HASLAM. Oh, theres nothing much the matter with _me_: it's quite easy to
be a decent parson. It's the Church that chokes me off. I couldnt stick
it for nine hundred years. I should chuck it. You know, sometimes, when
the bishop, who is the most priceless of fossils, lets off something
more than usually out-of-date, the bird starts in my garden.

FRANKLYN. The bird?

HASLAM. Oh yes. Theres a bird there that keeps on singing 'Stick it or
chuck it: stick it or chuck it'--just like that--for an hour on end in
the spring. I wish my father had found some other shop for me.

_The parlor maid comes back._

THE PARLOR MAID. Any letters for the post, sir?

FRANKLYN. These. [_He proffers a basket of letters. She comes to the
table and takes them_].

HASLAM [_to the maid_] Have you told Mr Barnabas yet?

THE PARLOR MAID [_flinching a little_] No, sir.

FRANKLYN. Told me what?

HASLAM. She is going to leave you?

FRANKLYN. Indeed? I'm sorry. Is it our fault, Mr Haslam?

HASLAM. Not a bit. She is jolly well off here.

THE PARLOR MAID [_reddening_] I have never denied it, sir: I couldnt ask
for a better place. But I have only one life to live; and I maynt get
a second chance. Excuse me, sir; but the letters must go to catch the
post. [_She goes out with the letters._]

_The two brothers look inquiringly at Haslam._

HASLAM. Silly girl! Going to marry a village woodman and live in a hovel
with him and a lot of kids tumbling over one another, just because the
fellow has poetic-looking eyes and a moustache.

CONRAD [_demurring_] She said it was because she had only one life.

HASLAM. Same thing, poor girl! The fellow persuaded her to chuck it; and
when she marries him she'll have to stick it. Rotten state of things, I
call it.

CONRAD. You see, she hasnt time to find out what life really means. She
has to die before she knows.

HASLAM [_agreeably_] Thats it.

FRANKLYN. She hasnt time to form a well-instructed conscience.

HASLAM [_still more cheerfully_] Quite.

FRANKLYN. It goes deeper. She hasnt time to form a genuine conscience
at all. Some romantic points of honor and a few conventions. A world
without conscience: that is the horror of our condition.

HASLAM [_beaming_] Simply fatuous. [_Rising_] Well, I suppose I'd better
be going. It's most awfully good of you to put up with my calling.

CONRAD [_in his former low ghostly tone_] You neednt go, you know, if
you are really interested.

HASLAM [_fed up_] Well, I'm afraid I ought to--I really must get back--I
have something to do in the--

FRANKLYN [_smiling benignly and rising to proffer his hand_] Goodbye.

CONRAD [_gruffly, giving him up as a bad job_] Goodbye.

HASLAM. Goodbye. Sorry--er--

_As the rector moves to shake hands with Franklyn, feeling that he is
making a frightful mess of his departure, a vigorous sunburnt young lady
with hazel hair cut to the level of her neck, like an Italian youth in a
Gozzoli picture, comes in impetuously. She seems to have nothing on but
her short skirt, her blouse, her stockings, and a pair of Norwegian
shoes: in short, she is a Simple-Lifer._

THE SIMPLE-LIFER [_swooping on Conrad and kissing him_] Hallo, Nunk.
Youre before your time.

CONRAD. Behave yourself. Theres a visitor.

_She turns quickly and sees the rector. She instinctively switches at
her Gozzoli fringe with her fingers, but gives it up as hopeless._

FRANKLYN. Mr Haslam, our new rector. [_To Haslam_] My daughter Cynthia.

CONRAD. Usually called Savvy, short for Savage.

SAVVY. I usually call Mr Haslam Bill, short for William. [_She strolls
to the hearthrug, and surveys them calmly from that commanding
position_].

FRANKLYN. You know him?

SAVVY. Rather. Sit down, Bill.

FRANKLYN. Mr Haslam is going, Savvy. He has an engagement.

SAVVY. I know. I'm the engagement.

CONRAD. In that case, would you mind taking him into the garden while I
talk to your father?

SAVVY [_to Haslam_] Tennis?

HASLAM. Rather!

SAVVY. Come on. [_She dances out. He runs boyishly after her_].

FRANKLYN [_leaving his table and beginning to walk up and down the room
discontentedly_] Savvy's manners jar on me. They would have horrified
her grandmother.

CONRAD [_obstinately_] They are happier manners than Mother's manners.

FRANKLYN. Yes: they are franker, wholesomer, better in a hundred ways.
And yet I squirm at them. I cannot get it out of my head that Mother was
a well-mannered woman, and that Savvy has no manners at all.

CONRAD. There wasnt any pleasure in Mother's fine manners. That makes a
biological difference.

FRANKLYN. But there was beauty in Mother's manners, grace in them, style
in them: above all, decision in them. Savvy is such a cub.

CONRAD. So she ought to be, at her age.

FRANKLYN. There it comes again! Her age! her age!

CONRAD. You want her to be fully grown at eighteen. You want to force
her into a stuck-up, artificial, premature self-possession before she
has any self to possess. You just let her alone: she is right enough for
her years.

FRANKLYN. I have let her alone; and look at the result! Like all the
other young people who have been let alone, she becomes a Socialist.
That is, she becomes hopelessly demoralized.

CONRAD. Well, arnt you a Socialist?

FRANKLYN. Yes; but that is not the same thing. You and I were brought
up in the old bourgeois morality. We were taught bourgeois manners and
bourgeois points of honor. Bourgeois manners may be snobbish manners:
there may be no pleasure in them, as you say; but they are better than
no manners. Many bourgeois points of honor may be false; but at least
they exist. The women know what to expect and what is expected of
them. Savvy doesn't. She is a Bolshevist and nothing else. She has to
improvise her manners and her conduct as she goes along. It's often
charming, no doubt; but sometimes she puts her foot in it frightfully;
and then I feel that she is blaming me for not teaching her better.

CONRAD. Well, you have something better to teach her now, at all events.

FRANKLYN. Yes: but it is too late. She doesn't trust me now. She doesn't
talk about such things to me. She doesnt read anything I write. She
never comes to hear me lecture. I am out of it as far as Savvy is
concerned. [_He resumes his seat at the writing-table_].

CONRAD. I must have a talk to her.

FRANKLYN. Perhaps she will listen to you. You are not her father.

CONRAD. I sent her my last book. I can break the ice by asking her what
she made of it.

FRANKLYN. When she heard you were coming, she asked me whether all the
leaves were cut, in case it fell into your hands. She hasnt read a word
of it.

CONRAD [_rising indignantly_] What!

FRANKLYN [_inexorably_] Not a word of it.

CONRAD [_beaten_] Well, I suppose it's only natural. Biology is a dry
subject for a girl; and I am a pretty dry old codger.

[_He sits down again resignedly_].

FRANKLYN. Brother: if that is so; if biology as you have worked at it,
and religion as I have worked at it, are dry subjects like the old stuff
they taught under these names, and we two are dry old codgers, like the
old preachers and professors, then the Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas
is a delusion. Unless this withered thing religion, and this dry thing
science, have come alive in our hands, alive and intensely interesting,
we may just as well go out and dig the garden until it is time to dig
our graves. [_The parlor maid returns. Franklyn is impatient at the
interruption_]. Well? what is it now?

THE PARLOR MAID. Mr Joyce Burge on the telephone, sir. He wants to speak
to you.

FRANKLYN [_astonished_] Mr Joyce Burge!

THE PARLOR MAID. Yes, sir.

FRANKLYN [_to Conrad_] What on earth does this mean? I havnt heard from
him nor exchanged a word with him for years. I resigned the chairmanship
of the Liberal Association and shook the dust of party politics from
my feet before he was Prime Minister in the Coalition. Of course, he
dropped me like a hot potato.

CONRAD. Well, now that the Coalition has chucked him out, and he is only
one of the half-dozen leaders of the Opposition, perhaps he wants to
pick you up again.

THE PARLOR MAID [_warningly_] He is holding the line, sir.

FRANKLYN. Yes: all right [_he hurries out_].

_The parlor maid goes to the hearthrug to make up the fire. Conrad
rises and strolls to the middle of the room, where he stops and looks
quizzically down at her._

CONRAD. So you have only one life to live, eh?

THE PARLOR MAID [_dropping on her knees in consternation_] I meant no
offence, sir.

CONRAD. You didn't give any. But you know you could live a devil of a
long life if you really wanted to.

THE PARLOR MAID [_sitting down on her heels_] Oh, dont say that, sir.
It's so unsettling.

CONRAD. Why? Have you been thinking about it?

THE PARLOR MAID. It would never have come into my head if you hadnt put
it there, sir. Me and cook had a look at your book.

CONRAD. What!


   You and cook
   Had a look
   At my book!


And my niece wouldn't open it! The prophet is without honor in his own
family. Well, what do you think of living for several hundred years? Are
you going to have a try for it?

THE PARLOR MAID. Well, of course youre not in earnest, sir. But it does
set one thinking, especially when one is going to be married.

CONRAD. What has that to do with it? He may live as long as you, you
know.

THE PARLOR MAID. Thats just it, sir. You see, he must take me for better
for worse, til death do us part. Do you think he would be so ready to do
that, sir, if he thought it might be for several hundred years?

CONRAD. Thats true. And what about yourself?

THE PARLOR MAID. Oh, I tell you straight out, sir, I'd never
promise to live with the same man as long as that. I wouldnt put
up with my own children as long as that. Why, cook figured it
out, sir, that when you were only 200, you might marry your own
great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson and not even know who he
was.

CONRAD. Well, why not? For all you know, the man you are going to
marry may be your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother's
great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson.

THE PARLOR MAID. But do you think it would ever be thought respectable,
sir?

CONRAD. My good girl, all biological necessities have to be made
respectable whether we like it or not; so you neednt worry yourself
about that.

_Franklyn returns and crosses the room to his chair, but does not sit
down. The parlor maid goes out._

CONRAD. Well, what does Joyce Burge want?

FRANKLYN. Oh, a silly misunderstanding. I have promised to address a
meeting in Middlesborough; and some fool has put it into the papers that
I am 'coming to Middlesborough,' without any explanation. Of course, now
that we are on the eve of a general election, political people think I
am coming there to contest the parliamentary seat. Burge knows that I
have a following, and thinks I could get into the House of Commons and
head a group there. So he insists on coming to see me. He is staying
with some people at Dollis Hill, and can be here in five or ten minutes,
he says.

CONRAD. But didn't you tell him that it's a false alarm?

FRANKLYN. Of course I did; but he wont believe me.

CONRAD. Called you a liar, in fact?

FRANKLYN. No: I wish he had: any sort of plain speaking is better than
the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for
shop use. He pretends to believe me, and assures me his visit is quite
disinterested; but why should he come if he has no axe to grind? These
chaps never believe anything they say themselves; and naturally they
cannot believe anything anyone else says.

CONRAD [_rising_] Well, I shall clear out. It was hard enough to stand
the party politicians before the war; but now that they have managed to
half kill Europe between them, I cant be civil to them, and I dont see
why I should be.

FRANKLYN. Wait a bit. We have to find out how the world will take our
new gospel. [_Conrad sits down again_]. Party politicians are still
unfortunately an important part of the world. Suppose we try it on Joyce
Burge.

CONRAD. How can you? You can tell things only to people who can listen.
Joyce Burge has talked so much that he has lost the power of listening.
He doesnt listen even in the House of Commons.

_Savvy rushes in breathless, followed by Haslam, who remains timidly
just inside the door._

SAVVY [_running to Franklyn_] I say! Who do you think has just driven up
in a big car?

FRANKLYN. Mr Joyce Burge, perhaps.

SAVVY [_disappointed_] Oh, they know, Bill. Why didnt you tell us he was
coming? I have nothing on.

HASLAM. I'd better go, hadnt I?

CONRAD. You just wait here, both of you. When you start yawning, Joyce
Burge will take the hint, perhaps.

SAVVY [_to Franklyn_] May we?

FRANKLYN. Yes, if you promise to behave yourself.

SAVVY [_making a wry face_] That will be a treat, wont it?

THE PARLOR MAID [_entering and announcing_] Mr Joyce Burge.

_Haslam hastily moves to the fireplace; and the parlor maid goes out and
shuts the door when the visitor has passed in._

FRANKLYN [_hurrying past Savvy to his guest with the false cordiality he
has just been denouncing_] Oh! Here you are. Delighted to see you. [_He
shakes Burge's hand, and introduces Savvy_] My daughter.

SAVVY [_not daring to approach_] Very kind of you to come.

_Joyce Burge stands fast and says nothing; but he screws up his cheeks
into a smile at each introduction, and makes his eyes shine in a very
winning manner. He is a well-fed man turned fifty, with broad forehead,
and grey hair which, his neck being short, falls almost to his collar._

FRANKLYN. Mr Haslam, our rector.

_Burge conveys an impression of shining like a church window; and Haslam
seizes the nearest library chair on the hearth, and swings it round for
Burge between the stool and Conrad. He then retires to the window seat
at the other side of the room, and is joined by Savvy. They sit there,
side by side, hunched up with their elbows on their knees and their
chins on their hands, providing Burge with a sort of Stranger's Gallery
during the ensuing sitting._

FRANKLYN. I forget whether you know my brother Conrad. He is a
biologist.

BURGE [_suddenly bursting into energetic action and shaking hands
heartily with Conrad_] By reputation only, but very well, of course.
How I wish I could have devoted myself to biology! I have always been
interested in rocks and strata and volcanoes and so forth: they throw
such a light on the age of the earth. [_With conviction_] There is
nothing like biology. 'The cloud-capped towers, the solemn binnacles,
the gorgeous temples, the great globe itself: yea, all that it inherit
shall dissolve, and, like this influential pageant faded, leave not a
rack behind.' Thats biology, you know: good sound biology. [_He sits
down. So do the others, Franklyn on the stool, and Conrad on his
Chippendale_]. Well, my dear Barnabas, what do you think of the
situation? Dont you think the time has come for us to make a move?

FRANKLYN. The time has always come to make a move.

BURGE. How true! But what is the move to be? You are a man of enormous
influence. We know that. Weve always known it. We have to consult you
whether we like it or not. We--

FRANKLYN [_interrupting firmly_] I never meddle in party politics now.

SAVVY. It's no use saying you have no influence, daddy. Heaps of people
swear by you.

BURGE [_shining at her_] Of course they do. Come! let me prove to you
what we think of you. Shall we find you a first-rate constituency
to contest at the next election? One that wont cost you a penny. A
metropolitan seat. What do you say to the Strand?

FRANKLYN. My dear Burge, I am not a child. Why do you go on wasting your
party funds on the Strand? You know you cannot win it.

BURGE. We cannot win it; but you--

FRANKLYN. Oh, please!

SAVVY. The Strand's no use, Mr Burge. I once canvassed for a Socialist
there. Cheese it.

BURGE. Cheese it!

HASLAM [_spluttering with suppressed laughter_] Priceless!

SAVVY. Well, I suppose I shouldnt say cheese it to a Right Honorable.
But the Strand, you know! Do come off it.

FRANKLYN. You must excuse my daughter's shocking manners, Burge; but I
agree with her that popular democratic statesmen soon come to believe
that everyone they speak to is an ignorant dupe and a born fool into the
bargain.

BURGE [_laughing genially_] You old aristocrat, you! But believe me, the
instinct of the people is sound--

CONRAD [_cutting in sharply_] Then why are you in the Opposition instead
of in the Government?

BURGE [_shewing signs of temper under this heckling_] I deny that I
am in the Opposition _morally_. The Government does not represent the
country. I was chucked out of the Coalition by a Tory conspiracy. The
people want me back. I dont want to go back.

FRANKLYN [_gently remonstrant_] My dear Burge: of course you do.

BURGE [_turning on him_] Not a bit of it. I want to cultivate my garden.
I am not interested in politics: I am interested in roses. I havnt a
scrap of ambition. I went into politics because my wife shoved me into
them, bless her! But I want to serve my country. What else am I for? I
want to save my country from the Tories. They dont represent the people.
The man they have made Prime Minister has never represented the people;
and you know it. Lord Dunreen is the bitterest old Tory left alive. What
has he to offer to the people?

FRANKLYN [_cutting in before Burge can proceed--as he evidently
intends--to answer his own question_] I will tell you. He has
ascertainable beliefs and principles to offer. The people know where
they are with Lord Dunreen. They know what he thinks right and what he
thinks wrong. With your followers they never know where they are. With
you they never know where they are.

BURGE [_amazed_] With me!

FRANKLYN. Well, where are you? What are you?

BURGE. Barnabas: you must be mad. You ask me what I am?

FRANKLYN. I do.

BURGE. I am, if I mistake not, Joyce Burge, pretty well known throughout
Europe, and indeed throughout the world, as the man who--unworthily
perhaps, but not quite unsuccessfully--held the helm when the ship
of State weathered the mightiest hurricane that has ever burst with
earth-shaking violence on the land of our fathers.

FRANKLYN. I know that. I know who you are. And the earth-shaking part of
it to me is that though you were placed in that enormously responsible
position, neither I nor anyone else knows what your beliefs are, or even
whether you have either beliefs or principles. What we did know was that
your Government was formed largely of men who regarded you as a robber
of henroosts, and whom you regarded as enemies of the people.

BURGE [_adroitly, as he thinks_] I agree with you. I agree with you
absolutely. I dont believe in coalition governments.

FRANKLYN. Precisely. Yet you formed two.

BURGE. Why? Because we were at war. That is what you fellows never would
realize. The Hun was at the gate. Our country, our lives, the honor of
our wives and mothers and daughters, the tender flesh of our innocent
babes, were at stake. Was that a time to argue about principles?

FRANKLYN. I should say it was the time of all others to confirm the
resolution of our own men and gain the confidence and support of public
opinion throughout the world by a declaration of principle. Do you think
the Hun would ever have come to the gate if he had known that it would
be shut in his face on principle? Did he not hold his own against you
until America boldly affirmed the democratic principle and came to our
rescue? Why did you let America snatch that honor from England?

BURGE. Barnabas: America was carried away by words, and had to eat them
at the Peace Conference. Beware of eloquence: it is the bane of popular
speakers like you.


   FRANKLYN} [_exclaiming_]{Well!!
   SAVVY} [_all_]{I like that!
   HASLAM} [_together_]{Priceless!


BURGE [_continuing remorselessly_] Come down to facts. It wasn't
principle that won the war: it was the British fleet and the blockade.
America found the talk: I found the shells. You cannot win wars by
principles; but you _can_ win elections by them. There I am with you.
You want the next election to be fought on principles: that is what it
comes to, doesnt it?

FRANKLYN. I dont want it to be fought at all! An election is a moral
horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood: a mud bath for every
soul concerned in it. You know very well that it will not be fought on
principle.

BURGE. On the contrary it will be fought on nothing else. I believe a
program is a mistake. I agree with you that principle is what we want.

FRANKLYN. Principle without program, eh?

BURGE. Exactly. There it is in three words.

FRANKLYN. Why not in one word? Platitudes. That is what principle
without program means.

BURGE [_puzzled but patient, trying to get at Franklyn's drift in order
to ascertain his price_] I have not made myself clear. Listen. I am
agreeing with you. I am on your side. I am accepting your proposal.
There isnt going to be any more coalition. This time there wont be a
Tory in the Cabinet. Every candidate will have to pledge himself to Free
Trade, slightly modified by consideration for our Overseas Dominions; to
Disestablishment; to Reform of the House of Lords; to a revised scheme
of Taxation of Land Values; and to doing something or other to keep the
Irish quiet. Does that satisfy you?

FRANKLYN. It does not even interest me. Suppose your friends do commit
themselves to all this! What does it prove about them except that they
are hopelessly out of date even in party politics? that they have learnt
nothing and forgotten nothing since 1885? What is it to me that they
hate the Church and hate the landed gentry; that they are jealous of the
nobility, and have shipping shares instead of manufacturing businesses
in the Midlands? I can find you hundreds of the most sordid rascals, or
the most densely stupid reactionaries, with all these qualifications.

BURGE. Personal abuse proves nothing. Do you suppose the Tories are all
angels because they are all members of the Church of England?

FRANKLYN. No; but they stand together as members of the Church of
England, whereas your people, in attacking the Church, are all over the
shop. The supporters of the Church are of one mind about religion: its
enemies are of a dozen minds. The Churchmen are a phalanx: your people
are a mob in which atheists are jostled by Plymouth Brethren, and
Positivists by Pillars of Fire. You have with you all the crudest
unbelievers and all the crudest fanatics.

BURGE. We stand, as Cromwell did, for liberty of conscience, if that is
what you mean.

FRANKLYN. How can you talk such rubbish over the graves of your
conscientious objectors? All law limits liberty of conscience: if a
man's conscience allows him to steal your watch or to shirk military
service, how much liberty do you allow it? Liberty of conscience is not
my point.

BURGE [_testily_] I wish you would come to your point. Half the time
you are saying that you must have principles; and when I offer you
principles you say they wont work.

FRANKLYN. You have not offered me any principles. Your party shibboleths
are not principles. If you get into power again you will find yourself
at the head of a rabble of Socialists and anti-Socialists, of Jingo
Imperialists and Little Englanders, of cast-iron Materialists
and ecstatic Quakers, of Christian Scientists and Compulsory
Inoculationists, of Syndicalists and Bureaucrats: in short, of men
differing fiercely and irreconcilably on every principle that goes to
the root of human society and destiny; and the impossibility of keeping
such a team together will force you to sell the pass again to the solid
Conservative Opposition.

BURGE [_rising in wrath_] Sell the pass again! You accuse me of having
sold the pass!

FRANKLYN. When the terrible impact of real warfare swept your
parliamentary sham warfare into the dustbin, you had to go behind the
backs of your followers and make a secret agreement with the leaders of
the Opposition to keep you in power on condition that you dropped all
legislation of which they did not approve. And you could not even hold
them to their bargain; for they presently betrayed the secret and forced
the coalition on you.

BURGE. I solemnly declare that this is a false and monstrous accusation.

FRANKLYN. Do you deny that the thing occurred? Were the uncontradicted
reports false? Were the published letters forgeries?

BURGE. Certainly not. But _I_ did not do it. I was not Prime Minister
then. It was that old dotard, that played-out old humbug Lubin. He was
Prime Minister then, not I.

FRANKLYN. Do you mean to say you did not know?

BURGE [_sitting down again with a shrug_] Oh, I had to be told. But what
could I do? If we had refused we might have had to go out of office.

FRANKLYN. Precisely.

BURGE. Well, could we desert the country at such a crisis? The Hun was
at the gate. Everyone has to make sacrifices for the sake of the country
at such moments. We had to rise above party; and I am proud to say we
never gave party a second thought. We stuck to--

CONRAD. Office?

SURGE [_turning on him_] Yes, sir, to office: that is, to
responsibility, to danger, to heart-sickening toil, to abuse and
misunderstanding, to a martyrdom that made us envy the very soldiers in
the trenches. If you had had to live for months on aspirin and bromide
of potassium to get a wink of sleep, you wouldn't talk about office as
if it were a catch.

FRANKLYN. Still, you admit that under our parliamentary system Lubin
could not have helped himself?

BURGE. On that subject my lips are closed. Nothing will induce me to say
one word against the old man. I never have; and I never will. Lubin is
old: he has never been a real statesman: he is as lazy as a cat on
a hearthrug: you cant get him to attend to anything: he is good for
nothing but getting up and making speeches with a peroration that goes
down with the back benches. But I say nothing against him. I gather that
you do not think much of me as a statesman; but at all events I can get
things done. I can hustle: even you will admit that. But Lubin! Oh my
stars, Lubin!! If you only knew--

_The parlor maid opens the door and announces a visitor._

THE PARLOR MAID. Mr Lubin.

SURGE [_bounding from his chair_] Lubin! Is this a conspiracy?

_They all rise in amazement, staring at the door. Lubin enters: a man
at the end of his sixties, a Yorkshireman with the last traces of
Scandinavian flax still in his white hair, undistinguished in stature,
unassuming in his manner, and taking his simple dignity for granted,
but wonderfully comfortable and quite self-assured in contrast to
the intellectual restlessness of Franklyn and the mesmeric
self-assertiveness of Burge. His presence suddenly brings out the fact
that they are unhappy men, ill at ease, square pegs in round holes,
whilst he flourishes like a primrose.

The parlor maid withdraws._

LUBIN [_coming to Franklyn_] How do you do, Mr Barnabas? [_He speaks
very comfortably and kindly, much as if he were the host, and Franklyn
an embarrassed but welcome guest_]. I had the pleasure of meeting you
once at the Mansion House. I think it was to celebrate the conclusion of
the hundred years peace with America.

FRANKLYN [_shaking hands_] It was long before that: a meeting about
Venezuela, when we were on the point of going to war with America.

LUBIN [_not at all put out_] Yes: you are quite right. I knew it was
something about America. [_He pats Franklyn's hand_]. And how have you
been all this time? Well, eh?

FRANKLYN [_smiling to soften the sarcasm_] A few vicissitudes of health
naturally in so long a time.

LUBIN. Just so. Just so. [_Looking round at Savvy_] The young lady is--?

FRANKLYN. My daughter, Savvy.

_Savvy comes from the window between her father and Lubin._

LUBIN [_taking her hand affectionately in both his_] And why has she
never come to see us?

BURGE. I don't know whether you have noticed, Lubin, that I am present.

_Savvy takes advantage of this diversion to slip away to the settee,
where she is stealthily joined by Haslam, who sits down on her left._

LUBIN [_seating himself in Burge's chair with ineffable
comfortableness_] My dear Burge: if you imagine that it is possible to
be within ten miles of your energetic presence without being acutely
aware of it, you do yourself the greatest injustice. How are you?
And how are your good newspaper friends? [_Burge makes an explosive
movement; but Lubin goes on calmly and sweetly_] And what are you doing
here with my old friend Barnabas, if I may ask?

BURGE [_sitting down in Conrad's chair, leaving him standing uneasily in
the corner_] Well, just what you are doing, if you want to know. I am
trying to enlist Mr Barnabas's valuable support for my party.

LUBIN. Your party, eh? The newspaper party?

BURGE. The Liberal Party. The party of which I have the honor to be
leader.

LUBIN. Have you now? Thats very interesting; for I thought _I_ was the
leader of the Liberal Party. However, it is very kind of you to take it
off my hands, if the party will let you.

BURGE. Do you suggest that I have not the support and confidence of the
party?

LUBIN. I dont suggest anything, my dear Burge. Mr Barnabas will tell you
that we all think very highly of you. The country owes you a great deal.
During the war, you did very creditably over the munitions; and if you
were not quite so successful with the peace, nobody doubted that you
meant well.

BURGE. Very kind of you, Lubin. Let me remark that you cannot lead a
progressive party without getting a move on.

LUBIN. You mean you cannot. I did it for ten years without the least
difficulty. And very comfortable, prosperous, pleasant years they were.

BURGE. Yes; but what did they end in?

LUBIN. In you, Burge. You don't complain of that, do you?

BURGE [_fiercely_] In plague, pestilence, and famine; battle, murder,
and sudden death.

LUBIN [_with an appreciative chuckle_] The Nonconformist can quote the
prayer-book for his own purposes, I see. How you enjoyed yourself over
that business, Burge! Do you remember the Knock-Out Blow?

BURGE. It came off: don't forget that. Do _you_ remember fighting to the
last drop of your blood?

LUBIN [_unruffled, to Franklyn_] By the way, I remember your brother
Conrad--a wonderful brain and a dear good fellow--explaining to me that
I couldn't fight to the last drop of my blood, because I should be dead
long before I came to it. Most interesting, and quite true. He was
introduced to me at a meeting where the suffragettes kept disturbing me.
They had to be carried out kicking and making a horrid disturbance.

CONRAD. No: it was later, at a meeting to support the Franchise Bill
which gave them the vote.

LUBIN [_discovering Conrad's presence for the first time_] Youre right:
it was. I knew it had something to do with women. My memory never
deceives me. Thank you. Will you introduce me to this gentleman,
Barnabas?

CONRAD [_not at all affably_] I am the Conrad in question. [_He sits
down in dudgeon on the vacant Chippendale_].

LUBIN. Are you? [_Looking at him pleasantly_] Yes: of course you are. I
never forget a face. But [_with an arch turn of his eyes to Savvy_] your
pretty niece engaged all my powers of vision.

BURGE. I wish youd be serious, Lubin. God knows we have passed through
times terrible enough to make any man serious.

LUBIN. I do not think I need to be reminded of that. In peace time
I used to keep myself fresh for my work by banishing all worldly
considerations from my mind on Sundays; but war has no respect for the
Sabbath; and there have been Sundays within the last few years on which
I have had to play as many as sixty-six games of bridge to keep my mind
off the news from the front.

BURGE [_scandalized_] Sixty-six games of bridge on Sunday!!!

LUBIN. You probably sang sixty-six hymns. But as I cannot boast either
your admirable voice or your spiritual fervor, I had to fall back on
bridge.

FRANKLYN. If I may go back to the subject of your visit, it seems to me
that you may both be completely superseded by the Labor Party.

BURGE. But I am in the truest sense myself a Labor leader. I--[_he
stops, as Lubin has risen with a half-suppressed yawn, and is already
talking calmly, but without a pretence of interest_].

LUBIN. The Labor Party! Oh no, Mr Barnabas. No, no, no, no, no. [_He
moves in Savvy's direction_]. There will be no trouble about that. Of
course we must give them a few seats: more, I quite admit, than we
should have dreamt of leaving to them before the war; but--[_by this
time he has reached the sofa where Savvy and Haslam are seated. He sits
down between them; takes her hand; and drops the subject of Labor_].
Well, my dear young lady? What is the latest news? Whats going on? Have
you seen Shoddy's new play? Tell me all about it, and all about the
latest books, and all about everything.

SAVVY. You have not met Mr Haslam. Our Rector.

LUBIN [_who has quite overlooked Haslam_] Never heard of him. Is he any
good?

FRANKLYN. I was introducing him. This is Mr Haslam.

HASLAM. How d'ye do?

LUBIN. I beg your pardon, Mr Haslam. Delighted to meet you. [_To Savvy_]
Well, now, how many books have you written?

SAVVY [_rather overwhelmed but attracted_] None. I don't write.

LUBIN. You dont say so; Well, what do you do? Music? Skirt-dancing?

SAVVY. I dont do anything.

LUBIN. Thank God! You and I were born for one another. Who is your
favorite poet, Sally?

SAVVY. Savvy.

LUBIN. Savvy! I never heard of him. Tell me all about him. Keep me up to
date.

SAVVY. It's not a poet. _I_ am Savvy, not Sally.

LUBIN. Savvy! Thats a funny name, and very pretty. Savvy. It sounds
Chinese. What does it mean?

CONRAD. Short for Savage.

LUBIN [_patting her hand_] La belle Sauvage.

HASLAM [_rising and surrendering Savvy to Lubin by crossing to the
fireplace_] I suppose the Church is out of it as far as progressive
politics are concerned.

BURGE. Nonsense! That notion about the Church being unprogressive is one
of those shibboleths that our party must drop. The Church is all right
essentially. Get rid of the establishment; get rid of the bishops; get
rid of the candlesticks; get rid of the 39 articles; and the Church of
England is just as good as any other Church; and I don't care who hears
me say so.

LUBIN. It doesn't matter a bit who hears you say so, my dear Burge. [_To
Savvy_] Who did you say your favorite poet was?

SAVVY. I dont make pets of poets. Who's yours?

LUBIN. Horace.

SAVVY. Horace who?

LUBIN. Quintus Horatius Flaccus: the noblest Roman of them all, my dear.

SAVVY. Oh, if he is dead, that explains it. I have a theory that all the
dead people we feel especially interested in must have been ourselves.
You must be Horace's reincarnation.

LUBIN [_delighted_] That is the very most charming and penetrating and
intelligent thing that has ever been said to me. Barnabas: will you
exchange daughters with me? I can give you your choice of two.

FRANKLYN. Man proposes. Savvy disposes.

LUBIN. What does Savvy say?

BURGE. Lubin: I came here to talk politics.

LUBIN. Yes: you have only one subject, Burge. I came here to talk to
Savvy. Take Burge into the next room, Barnabas; and let him rip.

BURGE [_half-angry, half-indulgent_] No; but really, Lubin, we are at a
crisis--

LUBIN. My dear Burge, life is a disease; and the only difference between
one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You
are always at the crisis; I am always in the convalescent stage. I enjoy
convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

SAVVY [_half-rising_] Perhaps I'd better run away. I am distracting you.

LUBIN [_making her sit down again_] Not at all, my dear. You are only
distracting Burge. Jolly good thing for him to be distracted by a pretty
girl. Just what he needs.

BURGE. I sometimes envy you, Lubin. The great movement of mankind, the
giant sweep of the ages, passes you by and leaves you standing.

LUBIN. It leaves me sitting, and quite comfortable, thank you. Go on
sweeping. When you are tired of it, come back; and you will find England
where it was, and me in my accustomed place, with Miss Savvy telling me
all sorts of interesting things.

SAVVY [_who has been growing more and more restless_] Dont let him shut
you up, Mr Burge. You know, Mr Lubin, I am frightfully interested in the
Labor movement, and in Theosophy, and in reconstruction after the war,
and all sorts of things. I daresay the flappers in your smart set are
tremendously flattered when you sit beside them and are nice to them
as you are being nice to me; but I am not smart; and I am no use as
a flapper. I am dowdy and serious. I want you to be serious. If you
refuse, I shall go and sit beside Mr Burge, and ask him to hold my hand.

LUBIN. He wouldnt know how to do it, my dear. Burge has a reputation as
a profligate--

BURGE [_starting_] Lubin: this is monstrous. I--

LUBIN [_continuing_]--but he is really a model of domesticity. His name
is coupled with all the most celebrated beauties; but for him there is
only one woman; and that is not you, my dear, but his very charming
wife.

BURGE. You are destroying my character in the act of pretending to save
it. Have the goodness to confine yourself to your own character and your
own wife. Both of them need all your attention.

LUBIN. I have the privilege of my age and of my transparent innocence. I
have not to struggle with your volcanic energy.

BURGE [_with an immense sense of power_] No, by George!

FRANKLYN. I think I shall speak both for my brother and myself, and
possibly also for my daughter, if I say that since the object of your
visit and Mr Joyce Burge's is to some extent political, we should hear
with great interest something about your political aims, Mr Lubin.

LUBIN [_assenting with complete good humor, and becoming attentive,
clear, and businesslike in his tone_] By all means, Mr Barnabas. What
we have to consider first, I take it, is what prospect there is of our
finding you beside us in the House after the next election.

FRANKLYN. When I speak of politics, Mr Lubin, I am not thinking of
elections, or available seats, or party funds, or the registers, or
even, I am sorry to have to add, of parliament as it exists at present.
I had much rather you talked about bridge than about electioneering: it
is the more interesting game of the two.

BURGE. He wants to discuss principles, Lubin.

LUBIN [_very cool and clear_] I understand Mr Barnabas quite well. But
elections are unsettled things; principles are settled things.

CONRAD [_impatiently_] Great Heavens!--

LUBIN [_interrupting him with quiet authority_] One moment, Dr Barnabas.
The main principles on which modern civilized society is founded
are pretty well understood among educated people. That is what our
dangerously half-educated masses and their pet demagogues--if Burge will
excuse that expression--

BURGE. Dont mind me. Go on. I shall have something to say presently.

LUBIN.--that is what our dangerously half-educated people do not
realize. Take all this fuss about the Labor Party, with its imaginary
new principles and new politics. The Labor members will find that
the immutable laws of political economy take no more notice of their
ambitions and aspirations than the law of gravitation. I speak, if I may
say so, with knowledge; for I have made a special, study of the Labor
question.

FRANKLYN [_with interest and some surprise_] Indeed?

LUBIN. Yes. It occurred quite at the beginning of my career. I was asked
to deliver an address to the students at the Working Men's College; and
I was strongly advised to comply, as Gladstone and Morley and others
were doing that sort of thing at the moment. It was rather a troublesome
job, because I had not gone into political economy at the time. As you
know, at the university I was a classical scholar; and my profession
was the Law. But I looked up the text-books, and got up the case most
carefully. I found that the correct view is that all this Trade Unionism
and Socialism and so forth is founded on the ignorant delusion that
wages and the production and distribution of wealth can be controlled by
legislation or by any human action whatever. They obey fixed scientific
laws, which have been ascertained and settled finally by the highest
economic authorities. Naturally I do not at this distance of time
remember the exact process of reasoning; but I can get up the case again
at any time in a couple of days; and you may rely on me absolutely,
should the occasion arise, to deal with all these ignorant and
unpractical people in a conclusive and convincing way, except, of
course, as far as it may be advisable to indulge and flatter them a
little so as to let them down without creating ill feeling in the
working-class electorate. In short, I can get that lecture up again
almost at a moment's notice.

SAVVY. But, Mr Lubin, I have had a university education too; and all
this about wages and distribution being fixed by immutable laws of
political economy is obsolete rot.

FRANKLYN [_shocked_] Oh, my dear! That is not polite.

LUBIN. No, no, no. Dont scold her. She mustnt be scolded. [_To Savvy_] I
understand. You are a disciple of Karl Marx.

SAVVY. No, no. Karl Marx's economics are all rot.

LUBIN [_at last a little taken aback_] Dear me!

SAVVY. You must excuse me, Mr Lubin; but it's like hearing a man talk
about the Garden of Eden.

CONRAD. Why shouldnt he talk about the Garden of Eden? It was a first
attempt at biology anyhow.

LUBIN [_recovering his self-possession_] I am sound on the Garden of
Eden. I have heard of Darwin.

SAVVY. But Darwin is all rot.

LUBIN. What! Already!

SAVVY. It's no good your smiling at me like a Cheshire cat, Mr Lubin;
and I am not going to sit here mumchance like an old-fashioned goody
goody wife while you men monopolize the conversation and pay out the
very ghastliest exploded drivel as the latest thing in politics. I am
not giving you my own ideas, Mr Lubin, but just the regular orthodox
science of today. Only the most awful old fossils think that Socialism
is bad economics and that Darwin invented Evolution. Ask Papa. Ask
Uncle. Ask the first person you meet in the street. [_She rises and
crosses to Haslam_]. Give me a cigaret, Bill, will you?

HASLAM. Priceless. [_He complies_].

FRANKLYN. Savvy has not lived long enough to have any manners, Mr Lubin;
but that is where you stand with the younger generation. Dont smoke,
dear.

_Savvy, with a shrug of rather mutinous resignation, throws the cigaret
into the fire. Haslam, on the point of lighting one for himself, changes
his mind._

LUBIN [_shrewd and serious_] Mr Barnabas: I confess I am surprised; and
I will not pretend that I am convinced. But I am open to conviction. I
may be wrong.

BURGE [_in a burst of irony_] Oh no. Impossible! Impossible!

LUBIN. Yes, Mr Barnabas, though I do not possess Burge's genius for
being always wrong, I have been in that position once or twice. I could
not conceal from you, even if I wished to, that my time has been so
completely filled by my professional work as a lawyer, and later on
by my duties as leader of the House of Commons in the days when Prime
Ministers were also leaders--

BURGE [_stung_] Not to mention bridge and smart society.

LUBIN.--not to mention the continual and trying effort to make Burge
behave himself, that I have not been able to keep my academic reading up
to date. I have kept my classics brushed up out of sheer love for them;
but my economics and my science, such as they were, may possibly be a
little rusty. Yet I think I may say that if you and your brother will
be so good as to put me on the track of the necessary documents, I will
undertake to put the case to the House or to the country to your entire
satisfaction. You see, as long as you can shew these troublesome
half-educated people who want to turn the world upside down that they
are talking nonsense, it really does not matter very much whether you do
it in terms of what Miss Barnabas calls obsolete rot or in terms of
what her granddaughter will probably call unmitigated tosh. I have no
objection whatever to denounce Karl Marx. Anything I can say against
Darwin will please a large body of sincerely pious voters. If it will be
easier to carry on the business of the country on the understanding
that the present state of things is to be called Socialism, I have no
objection in the world to call it Socialism. There is the precedent
of the Emperor Constantine, who saved the society of his own day by
agreeing to call his Imperialism Christianity. Mind: I must not go ahead
of the electorate. You must not call a voter a Socialist until--

FRANKLYN. Until he is a Socialist. Agreed.

LUBIN. Oh, not at all. You need not wait for that. You must not call
him a Socialist until he wishes to be called a Socialist: that is all.
Surely you would not say that I must not address my constituents as
gentlemen until they are gentlemen. I address them as gentlemen because
they wish to be so addressed. [_He rises from the sofa and goes to
Franklyn, placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder_]. Do not be afraid
of Socialism, Mr Barnabas. You need not tremble for your property or
your position or your dignity. England will remain what England is, no
matter what new political names may come into vogue. I do not intend to
resist the transition to Socialism. You may depend on me to guide it, to
lead it, to give suitable expression to its aspirations, and to steer it
clear of Utopian absurdities. I can honestly ask for your support on the
most advanced Socialist grounds no less than on the soundest Liberal
ones.

BURGE. In short, Lubin, youre incorrigible. You dont believe anything
is going to change. The millions are still to toil--the people--my
people--for I am a man of the people--

LUBIN [_interrupting him contemptuously_] Dont be ridiculous, Burge. You
are a country solicitor, further removed from the people, more foreign
to them, more jealous of letting them up to your level, than any duke or
any archbishop.

BURGE [_hotly_] I deny it. You think I have never been poor. You think
I have never cleaned my own boots. You think my fingers have never come
out through the soles when I was cleaning them. You think--

LUBIN. I think you fall into the very common mistake of supposing that
it is poverty that makes the proletarian and money that makes the
gentleman. You are quite wrong. You never belonged to the people: you
belonged to the impecunious. Impecuniosity and broken boots are the lot
of the unsuccessful middle class, and the commonplaces of the early
struggles of the professional and younger son class. I defy you to find
a farm laborer in England with broken boots. Call a mechanic one of the
poor, and he'll punch your head. When you talk to your constituents
about the toiling millions, they don't consider that you are referring
to them. They are all third cousins of somebody with a title or a park.
I am a Yorkshireman, my friend. I know England; and you don't. If you
did you would know--

SURGE. What do you know that I don't know?

LUBIN. I know that we are taking up too much of Mr Barnabas's time.
[_Franklyn rises_]. May I take it, my dear Barnabas, that I may count
on your support if we succeed in forcing an election before the new
register is in full working order?

SURGE [_rising also_] May the party count on your support? I say nothing
about myself. Can the party depend on you? Is there any question of
yours that I have left unanswered?


CONRAD. We havnt asked you any, you know.

BURGE. May I take that as a mark of confidence?

CONRAD. If I were a laborer in your constituency, I should ask you a
biological question?

LUBIN. No you wouldnt, my dear Doctor. Laborers never ask questions.

BURGE. Ask it now. I have never flinched from being heckled. Out with
it. Is it about the land?

CONRAD. No.

SURGE. Is it about the Church?

CONRAD. No.

BURGE. Is it about the House of Lords?

CONRAD. No.

BURGE. Is it about Proportional Representation?

CONRAD. No.

SURGE. Is it about Free Trade?

CONRAD. No.

SURGE. Is it about the priest in the school?

CONRAD. No.

BURGE. Is it about Ireland?

CONRAD. No.

BURGE. Is it about Germany?

CONRAD. No.

BURGE. Well, is it about Republicanism? Come! I wont flinch. Is it about
the Monarchy?

CONRAD. No.

SURGE. Well, what the devil is it about, then?

CONRAD. You understand that I am asking the question in the character of
a laborer who earned thirteen shillings a week before the war and earns
thirty now, when he can get it?

BURGE. Yes: I understand that. I am ready for you. Out with it.

CONRAD. And whom you propose to represent n parliament?

SURGE. Yes, yes, yes. Come on.

CONRAD. The question is this. Would you allow your son to marry my
daughter, or your daughter to marry my son?

BURGE [_taken aback_] Oh, come! Thats not a political question.

CONRAD. Then, as a biologist, I don't take the slightest interest in
your politics; and I shall not walk across the street to vote for you or
anyone else at the election. Good evening.

LUBIN. Serve you right, Burge! Dr Barnabas: you have my assurance that
my daughter shall marry the man of her choice, whether he be lord or
laborer. May _I_ count on your support?

SURGE [_hurling the epithet at him_] Humbug!

SAVVY. Stop. [_They all stop short in the movement of leave-taking to
look at her_]. Daddy: are you going to let them off like this? How are
they to know anything if nobody ever tells them? If you don't, I will.

CONRAD. You cant. You didn't read my book; and you know nothing about
it. You just hold your tongue.

SAVVY. I just wont, Nunk. I shall have a vote when I am thirty; and I
ought to have it now. Why are these two ridiculous people to be allowed
to come in and walk over us as if the world existed only to play their
silly parliamentary game?

FRANKLYN [_severely_] Savvy: you really must not be uncivil to our
guests.

SAVVY. I'm sorry. But Mr Lubin didn't stand on much ceremony with me,
did he? And Mr Burge hasnt addressed a single word to me. I'm not going
to stand it. You and Nunk have a much better program than either of
them. It's the only one we are going to vote for; and they ought to be
told about it for the credit of the family and the good of their own
souls. You just tip them a chapter from the gospel of the brothers
Barnabas, Daddy.

_Lubin and Burge turn inquiringly to Franklyn, suspecting a move to form
a new party._

FRANKLYN. It is quite true, Mr Lubin, that I and my brother have a
little program of our own which--

CONRAD [_interrupting_] It's not a little program: it's an almighty big
one. It's not our own: it's the program of the whole of civilization.

BURGE. Then why split the party before you have put it to us? For God's
sake let us have no more splits. I am here to learn. I am here to gather
your opinions and represent them. I invite you to put your views before
me. I offer myself to be heckled. You have asked me only an absurd
non-political question.

FRANKLYN. Candidly, I fear our program will be thrown away on you. It
would not interest you.

BURGE [_with challenging audacity_] Try. Lubin can go if he likes; but I
am still open to new ideas, if only I can find them.

FRANKLYN [_to Lubin_] Are you prepared to listen, Mr Lubin; or shall I
thank you for your very kind and welcome visit, and say good evening?

LUBIN [_sitting down resignedly on the settee, but involuntarily making
a movement which looks like the stifling of a yawn_] With pleasure, Mr
Barnabas. Of course you know that before I can adopt any new plank
in the party platform, it will have to reach me through the National
Liberal Federation, which you can approach through your local Liberal
and Radical Association.

FRANKLYN. I could recall to you several instances of the addition
to your party program of measures of which no local branch of your
Federation had ever dreamt. But I understand that you are not really
interested. I will spare you, and drop the subject.

LUBIN [_waking up a little_] You quite misunderstand me. Please do not
take it in that way. I only--

BURGE [_talking him down_] Never mind the Federation: _I_ will answer
for the Federation. Go on, Barnabas: go on. Never mind Lubin [_he sits
down in the chair from which Lubin first displaced him_].

FRANKLYN. Our program is only that the term of human life shall be
extended to three hundred years.

LUBIN [_softly_] Eh?

BURGE [_explosively_] What!

SAVVY. Our election cry is 'Back to Methuselah!'

HASLAM. Priceless!

_Lubin and Surge look at one another._

CONRAD. No. We are not mad.

SAVVY. Theyre not joking either. They mean it.

LUBIN [_cautiously_] Assuming that, in some sense which I am for the
moment unable to fathom, you are in earnest, Mr Barnabas, may I ask what
this has to do with politics?

FRANKLYN. The connection is very evident. You are now, Mr Lubin, within
immediate reach of your seventieth year. Mr Joyce Surge is your junior
by about eleven years. You will go down to posterity as one of a
European group of immature statesmen and monarchs who, doing the very
best for your respective countries of which you were capable, succeeded
in all-but-wrecking the civilization of Europe, and did, in effect, wipe
out of existence many millions of its inhabitants.

BURGE. Less than a million.

FRANKLYN. That was our loss alone.

BURGE. Oh, if you count foreigners--!

HAS LAM. God counts foreigners, you know.

SAVVY [_with intense satisfaction_] Well said, Bill.

FRANKLYN. I am not blaming you. Your task was beyond human capacity.
What with our huge armaments, our terrible engines of destruction, our
systems of coercion manned by an irresistible police, you were called on
to control powers so gigantic that one shudders at the thought of their
being entrusted even to an infinitely experienced and benevolent God,
much less to mortal men whose whole life does not last a hundred years.

BURGE. We won the war: don't forget that.

FRANKLYN. No: the soldiers and sailors won it, and left you to finish
it. And you were so utterly incompetent that the multitudes of children
slain by hunger in the first years of peace made us all wish we were at
war again.

CONRAD. It's no use arguing about it. It is now absolutely certain that
the political and social problems raised by our civilization cannot be
solved by mere human mushrooms who decay and die when they are just
beginning to have a glimmer of the wisdom and knowledge needed for their
own government.

LUBIN. Quite an interesting idea, Doctor. Extravagant. Fantastic. But
quite interesting. When I was young I used to feel my human limitations
very acutely.

BURGE. God knows I have often felt that I could not go on if it had not
been for the sense that I was only an instrument in the hands of a Power
above us.

CONRAD. I'm glad you both agree with us, and with one another.

LUBIN. I have not gone so far as that, I think. After all, we have had
many very able political leaders even within your recollection and mine.

FRANKLYN. Have you read the recent biographies--Dilke's, for
instance--which revealed the truth about them?

LUBIN. I did not discover any new truth revealed in these books, Mr
Barnabas.

FRANKLYN. What! Not the truth that England was governed all that time by
a little woman who knew her own mind?

SAVVY. Hear, hear!

LUBIN. That often happens. Which woman do you mean?

FRANKLYN. Queen Victoria, to whom your Prime Ministers stood in the
relation of naughty children whose heads she knocked together when their
tempers and quarrels became intolerable. Within thirteen years of her
death Europe became a hell.

SURGE. Quite true. That was because she was piously brought up, and
regarded herself as an instrument. If a statesman remembers that he is
only an instrument, and feels quite sure that he is rightly interpreting
the divine purpose, he will come out all right, you know.

FRANKLYN. The Kaiser felt like that. Did he come out all right?

SURGE. Well, let us be fair, even to the Kaiser. Let us be fair.

FRANKLYN. Were you fair to him when you won an election on the program
of hanging him?

SURGE. Stuff! I am the last man alive to hang anybody; but the people
wouldnt listen to reason. Besides, I knew the Dutch wouldnt give him up.

SAVVY. Oh, don't start arguing about poor old Bill. Stick to our point.
Let these two gentlemen settle the question for themselves. Mr Burge: do
you think Mr Lubin is fit to govern England?

SURGE. No. Frankly, I dont.

LUBIN [_remonstrant_] Really!

CONRAD. Why?

BURGE. Because he has no conscience: thats why.

LUBIN [_shocked and amazed_] Oh!

FRANKLYN. Mr Lubin: do you consider Joyce Burge qualified to govern
England?

LUBIN [_with dignified emotion, wounded, but without bitterness_] Excuse
me, Mr Barnabas; but before I answer that question I want to say this.
Burge: we have had differences of opinion; and your newspaper friends
have said hard things of me. But we worked together for years; and I
hope I have done nothing to justify you in the amazing accusation you
have just brought against me. Do you realize that you said that I have
no conscience?

BURGE. Lubin: I am very accessible to an appeal to my emotions; and you
are very cunning in making such appeals. I will meet you to this extent.
I dont mean that you are a bad man. I dont mean that I dislike you, in
spite of your continual attempts to discourage and depress me. But you
have a mind like a looking-glass. You are very clear and smooth and
lucid as to what is standing in front of you. But you have no foresight
and no hindsight. You have no vision and no memory. You have no
continuity; and a man without continuity can have neither conscience nor
honor from one day to another. The result is that you have always been
a damned bad minister; and you have sometimes been a damned bad friend.
Now you can answer Barnabas's question and take it out of me to your
heart's content. He asked you was I fit to govern England.

LUBIN [_recovering himself_] After what has just passed I sincerely
wish I could honestly say yes, Burge. But it seems to me that you have
condemned yourself out of your own mouth. You represent something which
has had far too much influence and popularity in this country since
Joseph Chamberlain set the fashion; and that is mere energy without
intellect and without knowledge. Your mind is not a trained mind: it has
not been stored with the best information, nor cultivated by intercourse
with educated minds at any of our great seats of learning. As I happen
to have enjoyed that advantage, it follows that you do not understand my
mind. Candidly, I think that disqualifies you. The peace found out your
weaknesses.

BURGE. Oh! What did it find out in you?

LUBIN. You and your newspaper confederates took the peace out of my
hands. The peace did not find me out because it did not find me in.

FRANKLYN. Come! Confess, both of you! You were only flies on the wheel.
The war went England's way; but the peace went its own way, and not
England's way nor any of the ways you had so glibly appointed for it.
Your peace treaty was a scrap of paper before the ink dried on it. The
statesmen of Europe were incapable of governing Europe. What they needed
was a couple of hundred years training and experience: what they had
actually had was a few years at the bar or in a counting-house or on
the grouse moors and golf courses. And now we are waiting, with monster
cannons trained on every city and seaport, and huge aeroplanes ready to
spring into the air and drop bombs every one of which will obliterate a
whole street, and poison gases that will strike multitudes dead with a
breath, until one of you gentlemen rises in his helplessness to tell us,
who are as helpless as himself, that we are at war again.

CONRAD. Aha! What consolation will it be for us then that you two are
able to tell off one another's defects so cleverly in your afternoon
chat?

BURGE [_angrily_] If you come to that, what consolation will it be that
you two can sit there and tell both of us off? you, who have had no
responsibility! you, who havnt lifted a finger, as far as I know, to
help us through this awful crisis which has left me ten years older than
my proper age! Can you tell me a single thing you did to help us during
the whole infernal business?

CONRAD. We're not blaming you: you hadnt lived long enough. No more had
we. Cant you see that three-score-and-ten, though it may be long
enough for a very crude sort of village life, isnt long enough for a
complicated civilization like ours? Flinders Petrie has counted nine
attempts at civilization made by people exactly like us; and every one
of them failed just as ours is failing. They failed because the citizens
and statesmen died of old age or over-eating before they had grown out
of schoolboy games and savage sports and cigars and champagne. The signs
of the end are always the same: Democracy, Socialism, and Votes for
Women. We shall go to smash within the lifetime of men now living unless
we recognize that we must live longer.

LUBIN. I am glad you agree with me that Socialism and Votes for Women
are signs of decay.

FRANKLYN. Not at all: they are only the difficulties that overtax your
capacity. If you cannot organize Socialism you cannot organize civilized
life; and you will relapse into barbarism accordingly.

SAVVY. Hear, hear!

SURGE. A useful point. We cannot put back the clock.

HASLAM. _I_ can. Ive often done it.

LUBIN. Tut tut! My dear Burge: what are you dreaming of? Mr Barnabas: I
am a very patient man. But will you tell me what earthly use or interest
there is in a conclusion that cannot be realized? I grant you that if
we could live three hundred years we should all be, perhaps wiser,
certainly older. You will grant me in return, I hope, that if the sky
fell we should all catch larks.

FRANKLYN. Your turn now, Conrad. Go ahead.

CONRAD. I don't think it's any good. I don't think they want to live
longer than usual.

LUBIN. Although I am a mere child of 69, I am old enough to have lost,
the habit of crying for the moon.

BURGE. Have you discovered the elixir of life or have you not? If not, I
agree with Lubin that you are wasting our time.

CONRAD. Is your time of any value?

SURGE [_unable to believe his ears_] My time of any value! What do you
mean?

LUBIN [_smiling comfortably_] From your high scientific point of view,
I daresay, none whatever, Professor. In any case I think a little
perfectly idle discussion would do Burge good. After all, we might as
well hear about the elixir of life as read novels, or whatever Burge
does when he is not playing golf on Walton Heath. What is your elixir,
Dr Barnabas? Lemons? Sour milk? Or what is the latest?

SURGE. We were just beginning to talk seriously; and now you snatch at
the chance of talking rot. [_He rises_]. Good evening. [_He turns to the
door_].

CONRAD [_rudely_] Die as soon as you like. Good evening.

BURGE [_hesitating_] Look here. I took sour milk twice a day until
Metchnikoff died. He thought it would keep him alive for ever; and he
died of it.

CONRAD. You might as well have taken sour beer.

BURGE. You believe in lemons?

CONRAD. I wouldn't eat a lemon for ten pounds.

BURGE [_sitting down again_] What do you recommend?

CONRAD [_rising with a gesture of despair_] Whats the use of going on,
Frank? Because I am a doctor, and because they think I have a bottle to
give them that will make them live for ever, they are listening to me
for the first time with their mouths open and their eyes shut. Thats
their notion of science.

SAVVY. Steady, Nunk! Hold the fort.

CONRAD [_growls and sits down_]!!!

LUBIN. You volunteered the consultation, Doctor. I may tell you that,
far from sharing the credulity as to science which is now the fashion, I
am prepared to demonstrate that during the last fifty years, though the
Church has often been wrong, and even the Liberal Party has not been
infallible, the men of science have always been wrong.

CONRAD. Yes: the fellows you call men of science. The people who make
money by it, and their medical hangers-on. But has anybody been right?

LUBIN. The poets and story tellers, especially the classical poets and
story tellers, have been, in the main, right. I will ask you not
to repeat this as my opinion outside; for the vote of the medical
profession and its worshippers is not to be trifled with.

FRANKLYN. You are quite right: the poem is our real clue to biological
science. The most scientific document we possess at present is, as your
grandmother would have told you quite truly, the story of the Garden of
Eden.

BURGE [_pricking up his ears_] Whats that? If you can establish that,
Barnabas, I am prepared to hear you out with my very best attention. I
am listening. Go on.

FRANKLYN. Well, you remember, don't you, that in the Garden of Eden Adam
and Eve were not created mortal, and that natural death, as we call it,
was not a part of life, but a later and quite separate invention?

SURGE. Now you mention it, thats true. Death came afterwards.

LUBIN. What about accidental death? That was always possible.

FRANKLYN. Precisely. Adam and Eve were hung up between two frightful
possibilities. One was the extinction of mankind by their accidental
death. The other was the prospect of living for ever. They could bear
neither. They decided that they would just take a short turn of a
thousand years, and meanwhile hand on their work to a new pair.
Consequently, they had to invent natural birth and natural death, which
are, after all, only modes of perpetuating life without putting on any
single creature the terrible burden of immortality.

LUBIN. I see. The old must make room for the new.

SURGE. Death is nothing but making room. Thats all there is in it or
ever has been in it.

FRANKLYN. Yes; but the old must not desert their posts until the new are
ripe for them. They desert them now two hundred years too soon.

SAVVY. I believe the old people are the new people reincarnated, Nunk.
I suspect I am Eve. I am very fond of apples; and they always disagree
with me.

CONRAD. You are Eve, in a sense. The Eternal Life persists; only It
wears out Its bodies and minds and gets new ones, like new clothes. You
are only a new hat and frock on Eve.

FRANKLYN. Yes. Bodies and minds ever better and better fitted to carry
out Its eternal pursuit.

LUBIN [_with quiet scepticism_] What pursuit, may one ask, Mr Barnabas?

FRANKLYN. The pursuit of omnipotence and omniscience. Greater power and
greater knowledge: these are what we are all pursuing even at the risk
of our lives and the sacrifice of our pleasures. Evolution is that
pursuit and nothing else. It is the path to godhead. A man differs from
a microbe only in being further on the path.

LUBIN. And how soon do you expect this modest end to be reached?

FRANKLYN. Never, thank God! As there is no limit to power and knowledge
there can be no end. 'The power and the glory, world without end': have
those words meant nothing to you?

BURGE [_pulling out an old envelope_] I should like to make a note of
that. [_He does so_].

CONRAD. There will always be something to live for.

SURGE [_pocketing his envelope and becoming more and more businesslike_]
Right: I have got that. Now what about sin? What about the Fall? How do
you work them in?

CONRAD. I don't work in the Fall. The Fall is outside Science. But I
daresay Frank can work it in for you.

SURGE [_to Franklyn_] I wish you would, you know. It's important. Very
important.

FRANKLYN. Well, consider it this way. It is clear that when Adam and
Eve were immortal it was necessary that they should make the earth an
extremely comfortable place to live in.

BURGE. True. If you take a house on a ninety-nine years lease, you
spend a good deal of money on it. If you take it for three months you
generally have a bill for dilapidations to pay at the end of them.

FRANKLYN. Just so. Consequently, when Adam had the Garden of Eden on a
lease for ever, he took care to make it what the house agents call a
highly desirable country residence. But the moment he invented death,
and became a tenant for life only, the place was no longer worth the
trouble. It was then that he let the thistles grow. Life was so short
that it was no longer worth his while to do anything thoroughly well.

BURGE. Do you think that is enough to constitute what an average elector
would consider a Fall? Is it tragic enough?

FRANKLYN. That is only the first step of the Fall. Adam did not fall
down that step only: he fell down a whole flight. For instance, before
he invented birth he dared not have lost his temper; for if he had
killed Eve he would have been lonely and barren to all eternity. But
when he invented birth, and anyone who was killed could be replaced, he
could afford to let himself go. He undoubtedly invented wife-beating;
and that was another step down. One of his sons invented meat-eating.
The other was horrified at the innovation. With the ferocity which
is still characteristic of bulls and other vegetarians, he slew his
beefsteak-eating brother, and thus invented murder. That was a very
steep step. It was so exciting that all the others began to kill one
another for sport, and thus invented war, the steepest step of all. They
even took to killing animals as a means of killing time, and then, of
course, ate them to save the long and difficult labor of agriculture. I
ask you to contemplate our fathers as they came crashing down all the
steps of this Jacob's ladder that reached from paradise to a hell on
earth in which they had multiplied the chances of death from violence,
accident, and disease until they could hardly count on three score and
ten years of life, much less the thousand that Adam had been ready to
face! With that picture before you, will you now ask me where was the
Fall? You might as well stand at the foot of Snowdon and ask me where is
the mountain. The very children see it so plainly that they compress its
history into a two line epic:


    Old Daddy Long Legs wouldn't say his prayers:
    Take him by the hind legs and throw him downstairs.


LUBIN [_still immovably sceptical_] And what does Science say to this
fairy tale, Doctor Barnabas? Surely Science knows nothing of Genesis, or
of Adam and Eve.

CONRAD. Then it isnt Science: thats all. Science has to account for
everything; and everything includes the Bible.

FRANKLYN. The Book of Genesis is a part of nature like any other part of
nature. The fact that the tale of the Garden of Eden has survived and
held the imagination of men spellbound for centuries, whilst hundreds
of much more plausible and amusing stories have gone out of fashion
and perished like last year's popular song, is a scientific fact; and
Science is bound to explain it. You tell me that Science knows nothing
of it. Then Science is more ignorant than the children at any village
school.

CONRAD. Of course if you think it more scientific to say that what we
are discussing is not Adam and Eve and Eden, but the phylogeny of the
blastoderm--

SAVVY. You neednt swear, Nunk.

CONRAD. Shut up, you: I am not swearing. [_To Lubin_] If you want the
professional humbug of rewriting the Bible in words of four syllables,
and pretending it's something new, I can humbug you to your heart's
content. I can call Genesis Phylogenesis. Let the Creator say, if you
like, 'I will establish an antipathetic symbiosis between thee and the
female, and between thy blastoderm and her blastoderm.' Nobody will
understand you; and Savvy will think you are swearing. The meaning is
the same.

HASLAM. Priceless. But it's quite simple. The one version is poetry: the
other is science.

FRANKLYN. The one is classroom jargon: the other is inspired human
language.

LUBIN [_calmly reminiscent_] One of the few modern authors into whom
I have occasionally glanced is Rousseau, who was a sort of Deist like
Burge--

BURGE [_interrupting him forcibly_] Lubin: has this stupendously
important communication which Professor Barnabas has just made to us: a
communication for which I shall be indebted to him all my life long: has
this, I say, no deeper effect on you than to set you pulling my leg by
trying to make out that I am an infidel?

LUBIN. It's very interesting and amusing, Burge; and I think I see a
case in it. I think I could undertake to argue it in an ecclesiastical
court. But important is hardly a word I should attach to it.

BURGE. Good God! Here is this professor: a man utterly removed from the
turmoil of our political life: devoted to pure learning in its most
abstract phases; and I solemnly declare he is the greatest politician,
the most inspired party leader, in the kingdom. I take off my hat to
him. I, Joyce Burge, give him best. And you sit there purring like an
Angora cat, and can see nothing in it!

CONRAD [_opening his eyes widely_] Hallo! What have I done to deserve
this tribute?

SURGE. Done! You have put the Liberal Party into power for the next
thirty years, Doctor: thats what you've done.

CONRAD. God forbid!

BURGE. It's all up with the Church now. Thanks to you, we go to the
country with one cry and one only. Back to the Bible! Think of the
effect on the Nonconformist vote. You gather that in with one hand; and
you gather in the modern scientific sceptical professional vote with the
other. The village atheist and the first cornet in the local Salvation
Army band meet on the village green and shake hands. You take your
school children, your Bible class under the Cowper-Temple clause, into
the museum. You shew the kids the Piltdown skull; and you say, 'Thats
Adam. Thats Eve's husband.' You take the spectacled science student
from the laboratory in Owens College; and when he asks you for a truly
scientific history of Evolution, you put into his hand The Pilgrim's
Progress. You--[_Savvy and Haslam explode into shrieks of merriment_].
What are you two laughing at?

SAVVY. Oh, go on, Mr Burge. Dont stop.

HASLAM. Priceless!

FRANKLYN. Would thirty years of office for the Liberal Party seem so
important to you, Mr Burge, if you had another two and a half centuries
to live?

BURGE [_decisively_] No. You will have to drop that part of it. The
constituencies wont swallow it.

LUBIN [_seriously_] I am not so sure of that, Burge. I am not sure that
it may not prove the only point they will swallow.

BURGE. It will be no use to us even if they do. It's not a party point.
It's as good for the other side as for us.

LUBIN. Not necessarily. If we get in first with it, it will be
associated in the public mind with our party. Suppose I put it forward
as a plank in our program that we advocate the extension of human life
to three hundred years! Dunreen, as leader of the opposite party, will
be bound to oppose me: to denounce me as a visionary and so forth. By
doing so he will place himself in the position of wanting to rob the
people of two hundred and thirty years of their natural life. The
Unionists will become the party of Premature Death; and we shall become
the Longevity party.

BURGE [_shaken_] You really think the electorate would swallow it?

LUBIN. My dear Burge: is there anything the electorate will not swallow
if it is judiciously put to them? But we must make sure of our ground.
We must have the support of the men of science. Is there serious
agreement among them, Doctor, as to the possibility of such an evolution
as you have described?

CONRAD. Yes. Ever since the reaction against Darwin set in at the
beginning of the present century, all scientific opinion worth counting
has been converging rapidly upon Creative Evolution.

FRANKLYN. Poetry has been converging on it: philosophy has been
converging on it: religion has been converging on it. It is going to
be the religion of the twentieth century: a religion that has its
intellectual roots in philosophy and science just as medieval
Christianity had its intellectual roots in Aristotle.

LUBIN. But surely any change would be so extremely gradual that--

CONRAD. Dont deceive yourself. It's only the politicians who improve the
world so gradually that nobody can see the improvement. The notion that
Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible
lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps.
She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when
she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new
age.

LUBIN [_impressed_] Fancy my being leader of the party for the next
three hundred years!

BURGE. What!!

LUBIN. Perhaps hard on some of the younger men. I think in fairness I
shall have to step aside to make room after another century or so: that
is, if Mimi can be persuaded to give up Downing Street.

BURGE. This is too much. Your colossal conceit blinds you to the most
obvious necessity of the political situation.

LUBIN. You mean my retirement. I really cannot see that it is a
necessity. I could not see it when I was almost an old man--or at least
an elderly one. Now that it appears that I am a young man, the case
for it breaks down completely. [_To Conrad_] May I ask are there any
alternative theories? Is there a scientific Opposition?

CONRAD. Well, some authorities hold that the human race is a failure,
and that a new form of life, better adapted to high civilization, will
supersede us as we have superseded the ape and the elephant.

BURGE. The superman: eh!

CONRAD. No. Some being quite different from us.

LUBIN. Is that altogether desirable?

FRANKLYN. I fear so. However that may be, we may be quite sure of one
thing. We shall not be let alone. The force behind evolution, call it
what you will, is determined to solve the problem of civilization; and
if it cannot do it through us, it will produce some more capable agents.
Man is not God's last word: God can still create. If you cannot do His
work He will produce some being who can.

BURGE [_with zealous reverence_] What do we know about Him, Barnabas?
What does anyone know about Him?

CONRAD. We know this about Him with absolute certainty. The power my
brother calls God proceeds by the method of Trial and Error; and if we
turn out to be one of the errors, we shall go the way of the mastodon
and the megatherium and all the other scrapped experiments.

LUBIN [_rising and beginning to walk up and down the room with his
considering cap on_] I admit that I am impressed, gentlemen. I will go
so far as to say that your theory is likely to prove more interesting
than ever Welsh Disestablishment was. But as a practical politician--hm!
Eh, Burge?

CONRAD. We are not practical politicians. We are out to get something
done. Practical politicians are people who have mastered the art of
using parliament to prevent anything being done.

FRANKLYN. When we get matured statesmen and citizens--

LUBIN [_stopping short_] Citizens! Oh! Are the citizens to live three
hundred years as well as the statesmen?

CONRAD. Of course.

LUBIN. I confess that had not occurred to me [_he sits down abruptly,
evidently very unfavorably affected by this new light_].

_Savvy and Haslam look at one another with unspeakable feelings._

BURGE. Do you think it would be wise to go quite so far at first? Surely
it would be more prudent to begin with the best men.

FRANKLYN. You need not be anxious about that. It will begin with the
best men.

LUBIN. I am glad to hear you say so. You see, we must put this into a
practical parliamentary shape.

BURGE. We shall have to draft a Bill: that is the long and the short of
it. Until you have your Bill drafted you don't know what you are really
doing: that is my experience.

LUBIN. Quite so. My idea is that whilst we should interest the
electorate in this as a sort of religious aspiration and personal hope,
using it at the same time to remove their prejudices against those of us
who are getting on in years, it would be in the last degree upsetting
and even dangerous to enable everyone to live longer than usual.
Take the mere question of the manufacture of the specific, whatever
it may be! There are forty millions of people in the country. Let
me assume for the sake of illustration that each person would
have to consume, say, five ounces a day of the elixir. That
would be--let me see--five times three hundred and sixty-five
is--um--twenty-five--thirty-two--eighteen--eighteen hundred and
twenty-five ounces a year: just two ounces over the hundredweight.

BURGE. Two million tons a year, in round numbers, of stuff that everyone
would clamor for: that men would trample down women and children in the
streets to get at. You couldnt produce it. There would be blue murder.
It's out of the question. We must keep the actual secret to ourselves.

CONRAD [_staring at them_] The actual secret! What on earth is the man
talking about?

BURGE. The stuff. The powder. The bottle. The tabloid. Whatever it is.
You said it wasnt lemons.

CONRAD. My good sir: I have no powder, no bottle, no tabloid. I am not a
quack: I am a biologist. This is a thing thats going to happen.

LUBIN [_completely let down_] Going to happen! Oh! Is that all? [_He
looks at his watch_].

BURGE. Going to happen! What do you mean? Do you mean that you cant make
it happen?

CONRAD. No more than I could have made you happen.

FRANKLYN. We can put it into men's heads that there is nothing to
prevent its happening but their own will to die before their work is
done, and their own ignorance of the splendid work there is for them to
do.

CONRAD. Spread that knowledge and that conviction; and as surely as the
sun will rise tomorrow, the thing will happen.

FRANKLYN. We don't know where or when or to whom it will happen. It may
happen first to someone in this room.

HASLAM. It wont happen to me: thats jolly sure.

CONRAD. It might happen to anyone. It might happen to the parlor maid.
How do we know?

SAVVY. The parlor maid! Oh, thats nonsense, Nunk.

LUBIN [_once more quite comfortable_] I think Miss Savvy has delivered
the final verdict.

BURGE. Do you mean to say that you have nothing more practical to offer
than the mere wish to live longer? Why, if people could live by merely
wishing to, we should all be living for ever already! Everybody would
like to live for ever. Why don't they?

CONRAD. Pshaw! Everybody would like to have a million of money. Why
havnt they? Because the men who would like to be millionaires wont save
sixpence even with the chance of starvation staring them in the face.
The men who want to live for ever wont cut off a glass of beer or a pipe
of tobacco, though they believe the teetotallers and non-smokers live
longer. That sort of liking is not willing. See what they do when they
know they must.

FRANKLYN. Do not mistake mere idle fancies for the tremendous
miracle-working force of Will nerved to creation by a conviction of
Necessity. I tell you men capable of such willing, and realizing its
necessity, will do it reluctantly, under inner compulsion, as all great
efforts are made. They will hide what they are doing from themselves:
they will take care not to know what they are doing. They will live
three hundred years, not because they would like to, but because the
soul deep down in them will know that they must, if the world is to be
saved.

LUBIN [_turning to Franklyn and patting him almost paternally_] Well,
my dear Barnabas, for the last thirty years the post has brought me at
least once a week a plan from some crank or other for the establishment
of the millennium. I think you are the maddest of all the cranks; but
you are much the most interesting. I am conscious of a very curious
mixture of relief and disappointment in finding that your plan is all
moonshine, and that you have nothing practical to offer us. But what
a pity! It is such a fascinating idea! I think you are too hard on us
practical men; but there are men in every Government, even on the Front
Bench, who deserve all you say. And now, before dropping the subject,
may I put just one question to you? An idle question, since nothing can
come of it; but still--

FRANKLYN. Ask your question.

LUBIN. Why do you fix three hundred years as the exact figure?

FRANKLYN. Because we must fix some figure. Less would not be enough; and
more would be more than we dare as yet face.

LUBIN. Pooh! I am quite prepared to face three thousand, not to say
three million.

CONRAD. Yes, because you don't believe you Will be called on to make
good your word.

FRANKLYN [_gently_] Also, perhaps, because you have never been troubled
much by vision of the future.

BURGE [_with intense conviction_] The future does not exist for Henry
Hopkins Lubin.

LUBIN. If by the future you mean the millennial delusions which you
use as a bunch of carrots to lure the uneducated British donkey to the
polling booth to vote for you, it certainly does not.

SURGE. I can see the future not only because, if I may say so in all
humility, I have been gifted with a certain power of spiritual vision,
but because I have practised as a solicitor. A solicitor has to advise
families. He has to think of the future and know the past. His office is
the real modern confessional. Among other things he has to make people's
wills for them. He has to shew them how to provide for their daughters
after their deaths. Has it occurred to you, Lubin, that if you live
three hundred years, your daughters will have to wait a devilish long
time for their money?

FRANKLYN. The money may not wait for them. Few investments flourish for
three hundred years.

SAVVY. And what about before your death? Suppose they didn't get
married! Imagine a girl living at home with her mother and on her father
for three hundred years! Theyd murder her if she didn't murder them
first.

LUBIN. By the way, Barnabas, is your daughter to keep her good looks all
the time?

FRANKLYN. Will it matter? Can you conceive the most hardened flirt going
on flirting for three centuries? At the end of half the time we shall
hardly notice whether it is a woman or a man we are speaking to.

LUBIN [_not quite relishing this ascetic prospect_] Hm! [_He rises_].
Ah, well: you must come and tell my wife and my young people all about
it; and you will bring your daughter with you, of course. [_He shakes
hands with Savvy_]. Goodbye. [_He shakes hands with Franklyn_]. Goodbye,
Doctor. [_He shakes hands with Conrad_]. Come on, Burge: you must
really tell me what line you are going to take about the Church at the
election?

BURGE. Havnt you heard? Havnt you taken in the revelation that has been
vouchsafed to us? The line I am going to take is Back to Methuselah.

LUBIN [_decisively_] Dont be ridiculous, Burge. You don't suppose, do
you, that our friends here are in earnest, or that our very pleasant
conversation has had anything to do with practical politics! They have
just been pulling our legs very wittily. Come along. [_He goes out,
Franklyn politely going with him, but shaking his head in mute
protest_].

BURGE [_shaking Conrad's hand_] It's beyond the old man, Doctor. No
spiritual side to him: only a sort of classical side that goes down with
his own set. Besides, he's done, gone, past, burnt out, burst up; thinks
he is our leader and is only our rag and bottle department. But you may
depend on me. I will work this stunt of yours in. I see its value. [_He
begins moving towards the door with Conrad_]. Of course I cant put it
exactly in your way; but you are quite right about our needing something
fresh; and I believe an election can be fought on the death rate and on
Adam and Eve as scientific facts. It will take the Opposition right out
of its depth. And if we win there will be an O.M. for somebody when the
first honors list comes round [_by this time he has talked himself out
of the room and out of earshot, Conrad accompanying him_].

_Savvy and Haslam, left alone, seize each other in an ecstasy of
amusement, and jazz to the settee, where they sit down again side by
side._

HASLAM [_caressing her_] Darling! what a priceless humbug old Lubin is!

SAVVY. Oh, sweet old thing! I love him. Burge is a flaming fraud if you
like.

HASLAM. Did you notice one thing? It struck me as rather curious.

SAVVY. What?

HASLAM. Lubin and your father have both survived the war. But their sons
were killed in it.

SAVVY [_sobered_] Yes. Jim's death killed mother.

HASLAM. And they never said a word about it!

SAVVY. Well, why should they? The subject didn't come up. _I_ forgot
about it too; and I was very fond of Jim.

HASLAM. _I_ didn't forget it, because I'm of military age; and if I
hadnt been a parson I'd have had to go out and be killed too. To me the
awful thing about their political incompetence was that they had to
kill their own sons. It was the war casualty lists and the starvation
afterwards that finished me up with politics and the Church and
everything else except you.

SAVVY. Oh, I was just as bad as any of them. I sold flags in the streets
in my best clothes; and--hsh! [_she jumps up and pretends to be looking
for a book on the shelves behind the settee_].

_Franklyn and Conrad return, looking weary and glum._

CONRAD. Well, thats how the gospel of the brothers Barnabas is going to
be received! [_He drops into Burge's chair_].

FRANKLYN [_going back to his seat at the table_] It's no use. Were you
convinced, Mr Haslam?

HASLAM. About our being able to live three hundred years? Frankly no.

CONRAD [_to Savvy_] Nor you, I suppose?

SAVVY. Oh, I don't know. I thought I was for a moment. I can believe, in
a sort of way, that people might live for three hundred years. But when
you came down to tin tacks, and said that the parlor maid might, then I
saw how absurd it was.

FRANKLYN. Just so. We had better hold our tongues about it, Con. We
should only be laughed at, and lose the little credit we earned on false
pretences in the days of our ignorance.

CONRAD. I daresay. But Creative Evolution doesnt stop while people are
laughing. Laughing may even lubricate its job.

SAVVY. What does that mean?

CONRAD. It means that the first man to live three hundred years maynt
have the slightest notion that he is going to do it, and may be the
loudest laugher of the lot.

SAVVY. Or the first woman?

CONRAD [_assenting_] Or the first woman.

HASLAM. Well, it wont be one of us, anyhow.

FRANKLYN. How do you know?

_This is unanswerable. None of them have anything more to say._



PART III

The Thing Happens


_A summer afternoon in the year 2170 A.D. The official parlor of the
President of the British Islands. A board table, long enough for three
chairs at each side besides the presidential chair at the head and an
ordinary chair at the foot, occupies the breadth of the room. On the
table, opposite every chair, a small switchboard with a dial. There is
no fireplace. The end wall is a silvery screen nearly as large as a pair
of folding doors. The door is on your left as you face the screen; and
there is a row of thick pegs, padded and covered with velvet, beside it.

A stoutish middle-aged man, good-looking and breezily genial, dressed
in a silk smock, stockings, handsomely ornamented sandals, and a gold
fillet round his brows, comes in. He is like Joyce Burge, yet also like
Lubin, as if Nature had made a composite photograph of the two men.
He takes off the fillet and hangs it on a peg; then sits down in the
presidential chair at the head of the table, which is at the end
farthest from the door. He puts a peg into his switchboard; turns
the pointer on the dial; puts another peg in; and presses a button.
Immediately the silvery screen vanishes; and in its place appears, in
reverse from right to left, another office similarly furnished, with a
thin, unamiable man similarly dressed, but in duller colors, turning
over some documents at the table. His gold fillet is hanging up on a
similar peg beside the door. He is rather like Conrad Barnabas, but
younger, and much more commonplace._

BURGE-LUBIN. Hallo, Barnabas!

BARNABAS [_without looking round_] What number?

BURGE-LUBIN. Five double x three two gamma. Burge-Lubin.

_Barnabas puts a plug in number five; turns his pointer to double x; and
another plug in 32; presses a button and looks round at Burge-Lubin, who
is now visible to him as well as audible._

BARNABAS [_curtly_] Oh! That you, President?

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes. They told me you wanted me to ring you up. Anything
wrong?

BARNABAS [_harsh and querulous_] I wish to make a protest.

BURGE-LUBIN [_good-humored and mocking_] What! Another protest! Whats
wrong now?

BARNABAS. If you only knew all the protests I havnt made, you would be
surprised at my patience. It is you who are always treating me with the
grossest want of consideration.

BURGE-LUBIN. What have I done now?

BARNABAS. You have put me down to go to the Record Office today to
receive that American fellow, and do the honors of a ridiculous cinema
show. That is not the business of the Accountant General: it is the
business of the President. It is an outrageous waste of my time, and an
unjustifiable shirking of your duty at my expense. I refuse to go. You
must go.

BURGE-LUBIN. My dear boy, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to
take the job off your hands--

BARNABAS. Then do it. Thats all I want [_he is about to switch off_].

BURGE-LUBIN. Dont switch off. Listen. This American has invented a
method of breathing under water.

BARNABAS. What do I care? I don't want to breathe under water.

BURGE-LUBIN. You may, my dear Barnabas, at any time. You know you never
look where you are going when you are immersed in your calculations.
Some day you will walk into the Serpentine. This man's invention may
save your life.

BARNABAS [_angrily_] Will you tell me what that has to do with your
putting your ceremonial duties on to my shoulders? I will not be trifled
[_he vanishes and is replaced by the blank screen_]--

BURGE-LUBIN [_indignantly holding down his button_] Dont cut us off,
please: we have not finished. I am the President, speaking to the
Accountant General. What are you dreaming of?

A WOMAN'S VOICE. Sorry. [_The screen shews Barnabas as before_].

BURGE-LUBIN. Since you take it that way, I will go in your place. It's a
pity, because, you see, this American thinks you are the greatest living
authority on the duration of human life; and--

BARNABAS [_interrupting_] The American thinks! What do you mean? I am
the greatest living authority on the duration of human life. Who dares
dispute it?

BURGE-LUBIN. Nobody, dear lad, nobody. Dont fly out at me. It is evident
that you have not read the American's book.

BARNABAS. Dont tell me that you have, or that you have read any book
except a novel for the last twenty years; for I wont believe you.

BURGE-LUBIN. Quite right, dear old fellow: I havnt read it. But I have
read what The Times Literary Supplement says about it.

BARNABAS. I don't care two straws what it says about it. Does it say
anything about me?

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes.

BARNABAS. Oh, does it? What?

BURGE-LUBIN. It points out that an extraordinary number of first-rate
persons like you and me have died by drowning during the last two
centuries, and that when this invention of breathing under water takes
effect, your estimate of the average duration of human life will be
upset.

BARNABAS [_alarmed_] Upset my estimate! Gracious Heavens! Does the fool
realize what that means? Do you realize what that means?

BURGE-LUBIN. I suppose it means that we shall have to amend the Act.

BARNABAS. Amend my Act! Monstrous!

BURGE-LUBIN. But we must. We cant ask people to go on working until they
are forty-three unless our figures are unchallengeable. You know what
a row there was over those last three years, and how nearly the
too-old-at-forty people won.

BARNABAS. They would have made the British Islands bankrupt if theyd
won. But you dont care for that; you care for nothing but being popular.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, well: I shouldn't worry if I were you; for most people
complain that there is not enough work for them, and would be only too
glad to stick on instead of retiring at forty-three, if only they were
asked as a favor instead of having to.

BARNABAS. Thank you: I need no consolation. [_He rises determinedly and
puts on his fillet_].

BURGE-LUBIN. Are you off? Where are you going to?

BARNABAS. To that cinema tomfoolery, of course. I shall put this
American impostor in his place. [_He goes out_].

BURGE-LUBIN [_calling after him_] God bless you, dear old chap! [_With
a chuckle, he switches off; and the screen becomes blank. He presses a
button and holds it down while he calls_] Hallo!

A WOMAN'S VOICE. Hallo!

BURGE-LUBIN [_formally_] The President respectfully solicits the
privilege of an interview with the Chief Secretary, and holds himself
entirely at his honor's august disposal.

A CHINESE VOICE. He is coming.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh! That you, Confucius? So good of you. Come along [_he
releases the button_].

_A man in a yellow gown, presenting the general appearance of a Chinese
sage, enters._

BURGE-LUBIN [_jocularly_] Well, illustrious Sage-&-Onions, how are your
poor sore feet?

CONFUCIUS [_gravely_] I thank you for your kind inquiries. I am well.

BURGE-LUBIN. Thats right. Sit down and make yourself comfortable. Any
business for me today?

CONFUCIUS [_sitting down on the first chair round the corner of the
table to the President's right_] None.

BURGE-LUBIN. Have you heard the result of the bye-election?

CONFUCIUS. A walk-over. Only one candidate.

BURGE-LUBIN. Any good?

CONFUCIUS. He was released from the County Lunatic Asylum a fortnight
ago. Not mad enough for the lethal chamber: not sane enough for any
place but the division lobby. A very popular speaker.

BURGE-LUBIN. I wish the people would take a serious interest in
politics.

CONFUCIUS. I do not agree. The Englishman is not fitted by nature to
understand politics. Ever since the public services have been manned by
Chinese, the country has been well and honestly governed. What more is
needed?

BURGE-LUBIN. What I cant make out is that China is one of the worst
governed countries on earth.

CONFUCIUS. No. It was badly governed twenty years ago; but since we
forbade any Chinaman to take part in our public services, and imported
natives of Scotland for that purpose, we have done well. Your
information here is always twenty years out of date.

BURGE-LUBIN. People don't seem to be able to govern themselves. I cant
understand it. Why should it be so?

CONFUCIUS. Justice is impartiality. Only strangers are impartial.

BURGE-LUBIN. It ends in the public services being so good that the
Government has nothing to do but think.

CONFUCIUS. Were it otherwise, the Government would have too much to do
to think.

BURGE-LUBIN. Is that any excuse for the English people electing a
parliament of lunatics?

CONFUCIUS. The English people always did elect parliaments of lunatics.
What does it matter if your permanent officials are honest and
competent?

BURGE-LUBIN. You do not know the history of this country. What would my
ancestors have said to the menagerie of degenerates that is still called
the House of Commons? Confucius: you will not believe me; and I do not
blame you for it; but England once saved the liberties of the world by
inventing parliamentary government, which was her peculiar and supreme
glory.

CONFUCIUS. I know the history of your country perfectly well. It proves
the exact contrary.

BURGE-LUBIN. How do you make that out?

CONFUCIUS. The only power your parliament ever had was the power of
withholding supplies from the king.

BURGE-LUBIN. Precisely. That great Englishman Simon de Montfort--

CONFUCIUS. He was not an Englishman: he was a Frenchman. He imported
parliaments from France.

BURGE-LUBIN [_surprised_] You dont say so!

CONFUCIUS. The king and his loyal subjects killed Simon for forcing his
French parliament on them. The first thing British parliaments always
did was to grant supplies to the king for life with enthusiastic
expressions of loyalty, lest they should have any real power, and be
expected to do something.

BURGE-LUBIN. Look here, Confucius: you know more history than I do, of
course; but democracy--

CONFUCIUS. An institution peculiar to China. And it was never really a
success there.

BURGE-LUBIN. But the Habeas Corpus Act!

CONFUCIUS. The English always suspended it when it threatened to be of
the slightest use.

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, trial by jury: you cant deny that we established
that?

CONFUCIUS. All cases that were dangerous to the governing classes were
tried in the Star Chamber or by Court Martial, except when the prisoner
was not tried at all, but executed after calling him names enough to
make him unpopular.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, bother! You may be right in these little details; but
in the large we have managed to hold our own as a great race. Well,
people who could do nothing couldnt have done that, you know.

CONFUCIUS. I did not say you could do nothing. You could fight. You
could eat. You could drink. Until the twentieth century you could
produce children. You could play games. You could work when you were
forced to. But you could not govern yourselves.

BURGE-LUBIN. Then how did we get our reputation as the pioneers of
liberty?

CONFUCIUS. By your steadfast refusal to be governed at all. A horse that
kicks everyone who tries to harness and guide him may be a pioneer of
liberty; but he is not a pioneer of government. In China he would be
shot.

BURGE-LUBIN. Stuff! Do you imply that the administration of which I am
president is no Government?

CONFUCIUS. I do. _I_ am the Government.

BURGE-LUBIN. You! You!! You fat yellow lump of conceit!

CONFUCIUS. Only an Englishman could be so ignorant of the nature of
government as to suppose that a capable statesman cannot be fat, yellow,
and conceited. Many Englishmen are slim, red-nosed, and modest. Put them
in my place, and within a year you will be back in the anarchy and chaos
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, if you go back to the dark ages, I have nothing more to
say. But we did not perish. We extricated ourselves from that chaos. We
are now the best governed country in the world. How did we manage that
if we are such fools as you pretend?

CONFUCIUS. You did not do it until the slaughter and ruin produced by
your anarchy forced you at last to recognize two inexorable facts.
First, that government is absolutely necessary to civilization, and that
you could not maintain civilization by merely doing down your neighbor,
as you called it, and cutting off the head of your king whenever he
happened to be a logical Scot and tried to take his position seriously.
Second, that government is an art of which you are congenitally
incapable. Accordingly, you imported educated negresses and Chinese to
govern you. Since then you have done very well.

BURGE-LUBIN. So have you, you old humbug. All the same, I don't know
how you stand the work you do. You seem to me positively to like public
business. Why wont you let me take you down to the coast some week-end
and teach you marine golf?

CONFUCIUS. It does not interest me. I am not a barbarian.

BURGE-LUBIN. You mean that I am?

CONFUCIUS. That is evident.

BURGE-LUBIN. How?

CONFUCIUS. People like you. They like cheerful goodnatured barbarians.
They have elected you President five times in succession. They will
elect you five times more. _I_ like you. You are better company than a
dog or a horse because you can speak.

BURGE-LUBIN. Am I a barbarian because you like me?

CONFUCIUS. Surely. Nobody likes me: I am held in awe. Capable persons
are never liked. I am not likeable; but I am indispensable.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, cheer up, old man: theres nothing so disagreeable about
you as all that. I don't dislike you; and if you think I'm afraid of
you, you jolly well don't know Burge-Lubin: thats all.

CONFUCIUS. You are brave: yes. It is a form of stupidity.

BURGE-LUBIN. You may not be brave: one doesn't expect it from a Chink.
But you have the devil's own cheek.

CONFUCIUS. I have the assured certainty of the man who sees and knows.
Your genial bluster, your cheery self-confidence, are pleasant, like the
open air. But they are blind: they are vain. I seem to see a great dog
wag his tail and bark joyously. But if he leaves my heel he is lost.

BURGE-LUBIN. Thank you for a handsome compliment. I have a big dog; and
he is the best fellow I know. If you knew how much uglier you are than a
chow, you wouldn't start those comparisons, though. [_Rising_] Well, if
you have nothing for me to do, I am going to leave your heel for the
rest of the day and enjoy myself. What would you recommend me to do with
myself?

CONFUCIUS. Give yourself up to contemplation; and great thoughts will
come to you.

BURGE-LUBIN. Will they? If you think I am going to sit here on a fine
day like this with my legs crossed waiting for great thoughts, you
exaggerate my taste for them. I prefer marine golf. [_Stopping short_]
Oh, by the way, I forgot something. I have a word or two to say to the
Minister of health. [_He goes back to his chair_].

CONFUCIUS. Her number is--

BURGE-LUBIN. I know it.

CONFUCIUS [_rising_] I cannot understand her attraction for you. For me
a woman who is not yellow does not exist, save as an official. [_He goes
out_].

_Burge-Lubin operates his switchboard as before. The screen vanishes:
and a dainty room with a bed, a wardrobe, and a dressing-table with a
mirror and a switch on it, appears. Seated at it a handsome negress is
trying on a brilliant head scarf. Her dressing-gown is thrown back
from her shoulders to her chair. She is in corset, knickers, and silk
stockings._

BURGE-LUBIN [_horrified_] I beg your pardon a thousand times--[_The
startled negress snatches the peg out of her switchboard and vanishes_].

THE NEGRESS'S VOICE. Who is it?

BURGE-LUBIN. Me. The President. Burge-Lubin. I had no idea your bedroom
switch was in. I beg your pardon.

_The negress reappears. She has pulled the dressing-gown perfunctorily
over her shoulders, and continues her experiments with the scarf, not at
all put out, and rather amused by Surge's prudery._

THE NEGRESS. Stupid of me. I was talking to another lady this morning;
and I left the peg in.

BURGE-LUBIN. But I am so sorry.

THE NEGRESS [_sunnily: still busy with the scarf_] Why? It was my fault.

BURGE-LUBIN [_embarrassed_] Well--er--But I suppose you were used to it
in Africa.

THE NEGRESS. Your delicacy is very touching, Mr President. It would be
funny if it were not so unpleasant, because, like all white delicacy, it
is in the wrong place. How do you think this suits my complexion?

BURGE-LUBIN. How can any really vivid color go wrong with a black satin
skin? It is our women's wretched pale faces that have to be matched and
lighted. Yours is always right.

THE NEGRESS. Yes: it is a pity your white beauties have all the same
ashy faces, the same colorless drab, the same age. But look at their
beautiful noses and little lips! They are physically insipid: they have
no beauty: you cannot love them; but how elegant!

BURGE-LUBIN. Cant you find an official pretext for coming to see me?
Isnt it ridiculous that we have never met? It's so tantalizing to see
you and talk to you, and to know all the time that you are two hundred
miles away, and that I cant touch you?

THE NEGRESS. I cannot live on the East Coast: it is hard enough to keep
my blood warm here. Besides, my friend, it would not be safe. These
distant flirtations are very charming; and they teach self-control.

BURGE-LUBIN. Damn self-control! I want to hold you in my arms--to--[_the
negress snatches out the peg from the switchboard and vanishes. She
is still heard laughing_]. Black devil! [_He snatches out his peg
furiously: her laugh is no longer heard_]. Oh, these sex episodes! Why
can I not resist them? Disgraceful!

_Confucius returns._

CONFUCIUS. I forgot. There is something for you to do this morning. You
have to go to the Record Office to receive the American barbarian.

BURGE-LUBIN. Confucius: once for all, I object to this Chinese habit of
describing white men as barbarians.

CONFUCIUS [_standing formally at the end of the table with his hands
palm to palm_] I make a mental note that you do not wish the Americans
to be described as barbarians.

BURGE-LUBIN. Not at all. The Americans are barbarians. But we are not. I
suppose the particular barbarian you are speaking of is the American who
has invented a means of breathing under water.

CONFUCIUS. He says he has invented such a method. For some reason which
is not intelligible in China, Englishmen always believe any statement
made by an American inventor, especially one who has never invented
anything. Therefore you believe this person and have given him a public
reception. Today the Record Office is entertaining him with a display of
the cinematographic records of all the eminent Englishmen who have lost
their lives by drowning since the cinema was invented. Why not go to see
it if you are at a loss for something to do?

BURGE-LUBIN. What earthly interest is there in looking at a moving
picture of a lot of people merely because they were drowned? If they had
had any sense, they would not have been drowned, probably.

CONFUCIUS. That is not so. It has never been noticed before; but the
Record Office has just made two remarkable discoveries about the public
men and women who have displayed extraordinary ability during the
past century. One is that they retained unusual youthfulness up to an
advanced age. The other is that they all met their death by drowning.

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes: I know. Can you explain it?

CONFUCIUS. It cannot be explained. It is not reasonable. Therefore I do
not believe it.

_The Accountant General rushes in, looking ghastly. He staggers to the
middle of the table._

BURGE-LUBIN. Whats the matter? Are you ill?

BARNABAS [_choking_] No. I--[_he collapses into the middle chair_]. I
must speak to you in private.

_Confucius calmly withdraws._

BURGE-LUBIN. What on earth is it? Have some oxygen.

BARNABAS. I have had some. Go to the Record Office. You will see men
fainting there again and again, and being revived with oxygen, as I have
been. They have seen with their own eyes as I have.

BURGE-LUBIN. Seen what?

BARNABAS. Seen the Archbishop of York.

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, why shouldn't they see the Archbishop of York? What
are they fainting for? Has he been murdered?

BARNABAS. No: he has been drowned.

BURGE-LUBIN. Good God! Where? When? How? Poor fellow!

BARNABAS. Poor fellow! Poor thief! Poor swindler! Poor robber of his
country's Exchequer! Poor fellow indeed! Wait til I catch him.

BURGE-LUBIN. How can you catch him when he is dead? Youre mad.

BARNABAS. Dead! Who said he was dead?

BURGE-LUBIN. You did. Drowned.

BARNABAS [_exasperated_] Will you listen to me? Was old Archbishop
Haslam, the present man's last predecessor but four, drowned or not?

BURGE-LUBIN. I don't know. Look him up in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

BARNABAS. Yah! Was Archbishop Stickit, who wrote Stickit on the Psalms,
drowned or not?

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes, mercifully. He deserved it.

BARNABAS. Was President Dickenson drowned? Was General Bullyboy drowned?

BURGE-LUBIN. Who is denying it?

BARNABAS. Well, wave had moving pictures of all four put on the screen
today for this American; and they and the Archbishop are the same man.
Now tell me I am mad.

BURGE-LUBIN. I do tell you you are mad. Stark raving mad.

BARNABAS. Am I to believe my own eyes or am I not?

BURGE-LUBIN. You can do as you please. All I can tell you is that _I_
don't believe your eyes if they cant see any difference between a live
archbishop and two dead ones. [_The apparatus rings, he holds the button
down_]. Yes?

THE WOMAN'S VOICE. The Archbishop of York, to see the President.

BARNABAS [_hoarse with rage_] Have him in. I'll talk to the scoundrel.

BURGE-LUBIN [_releasing the button_] Not while you are in this state.

BARNABAS [_reaching furiously for his button and holding it down_] Send
the Archbishop in at once.

BURGE-LUBIN. If you lose your temper, Barnabas, remember that we shall
be two to one.

_The Archbishop enters. He has a white band round his throat, set in a
black stock. He wears a sort of kilt of black ribbons, and soft black
boots that button high up on his calves. His costume does not differ
otherwise from that of the President and the Accountant General; but
its color scheme is black and white. He is older than the Reverend Bill
Haslam was when he wooed Miss Savvy Barnabas; but he is recognizably the
same man. He does not look a day over fifty, and is very well preserved
even at that; but his boyishness of manner is quite gone: he now has
complete authority and self-possession: in fact the President is a
little afraid of him; and it seems quite natural and inevitable that he
should speak fast._

THE ARCHBISHOP. Good day, Mr President.

BURGE-LUBIN. Good day, Mr Archbishop. Be seated.

THE ARCHBISHOP [_sitting down between them_] Good day, Mr Accountant
General.

BARNABAS [_malevolently_] Good day to you. I have a question to put to
you, if you don't mind.

THE ARCHBISHOP [_looking curiously at him, jarred by his uncivil tone_]
Certainly. What is it?

BARNABAS. What is your definition of a thief?

THE ARCHBISHOP. Rather an old-fashioned word, is it not?

BARNABAS. It survives officially in my department.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Our departments are full of survivals. Look at my tie!
my apron! my boots! They are all mere survivals; yet it seems that
without them I cannot be a proper Archbishop.

BARNABAS. Indeed! Well, in my department the word thief survives,
because in the community the thing thief survives. And a very despicable
and dishonorable thing he is, too.

THE ARCHBISHOP [_coolly_] I daresay.

BARNABAS. In my department, sir, a thief is a person who lives longer
than the statutory expectation of life entitles him to, and goes on
drawing public money when, if he were an honest man, he would be dead.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Then let me say, sir, that your department does not
understand its own business. If you have miscalculated the duration of
human life, that is not the fault of the persons whose longevity you
have miscalculated. And if they continue to work and produce, they pay
their way, even if they live two or three centuries.

BARNABAS. I know nothing about their working and producing. That is not
the business of my department. I am concerned with their expectation of
life; and I say that no man has any right to go on living and drawing
money when he ought to be dead.

THE ARCHBISHOP. You do not comprehend the relation between income and
production.

BARNABAS. I understand my own department.

THE ARCHBISHOP. That is not enough. Your department is part of a
synthesis which embraces all the departments.

BURGE-LUBIN. Synthesis! This is an intellectual difficulty. This is a
job for Confucius. I heard him use that very word the other day; and I
wondered what the devil he meant. [_Switching on_] Hallo! Put me through
to the Chief Secretary.

CONFUCIUS'S VOICE. You are speaking to him.

BURGE-LUBIN. An intellectual difficulty, old man. Something we don't
understand. Come and help us out.

THE ARCHBISHOP. May I ask how the question has arisen?

BARNABAS. Ah! You begin to smell a rat, do you? You thought yourself
pretty safe. You--

BURGE-LUBIN. Steady, Barnabas. Dont be in a hurry.

_Confucius enters._

THE ARCHBISHOP [_rising_] Good morning, Mr Chief Secretary.

BURGE-LUBIN [_rising in instinctive imitation of the Archbishop_] Honor
us by taking a seat, O sage.

CONFUCIUS. Ceremony is needless. [_He bows to the company, and takes the
chair at the foot of the table_].

_The President and the Archbishop resume their seats._

BURGE-LUBIN. We wish to put a case to you, Confucius. Suppose a man,
instead of conforming to the official estimate of his expectation of
life, were to live for more than two centuries and a half, would the
Accountant General be justified in calling him a thief?

CONFUCIUS. No. He would be justified in calling him a liar.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I think not, Mr Chief Secretary. What do you suppose my
age is?

CONFUCIUS. Fifty.

BURGE-LUBIN. You don't look it. Forty-five; and young for your age.

THE ARCHBISHOP. My age is two hundred and eighty-three.

BARNABAS [_morosely triumphant_] Hmp! Mad, am I?

BURGE-LUBIN. Youre both mad. Excuse me, Archbishop; but this is getting
a bit--well--

THE ARCHBISHOP [_to Confucius_] Mr Chief Secretary: will you, to oblige
me, assume that I have lived nearly three centuries? As a hypothesis?

BURGE-LUBIN. What is a hypothesis?

CONFUCIUS. It does not matter. I understand. [To _the Archbishop_] Am I
to assume that you have lived in your ancestors, or by metempsychosis--

BURGE-LUBIN. Met--Emp--Sy--Good Lord! What a brain, Confucius! What a
brain!

THE ARCHBISHOP. Nothing of that kind. Assume in the ordinary sense that
I was born in the year 1887, and that I have worked continuously in one
profession or another since the year 1910. Am I a thief?

CONFUCIUS. I do not know. Was that one of your professions?

THE ARCHBISHOP. No. I have been nothing worse than an Archbishop, a
President, and a General.

BARNABAS. Has he or has he not robbed the Exchequer by drawing five or
six incomes when he was only entitled to one? Answer me that.

CONFUCIUS. Certainly not. The hypothesis is that he has worked
continuously since 1910. We are now in the year 2170. What is the
official lifetime?

BARNABAS. Seventy-eight. Of course it's an average; and we don't mind a
man here and there going on to ninety, or even, as a curiosity, becoming
a centenarian. But I say that a man who goes beyond that is a swindler.

CONFUCIUS. Seventy-eight into two hundred and eighty-three goes more
than three and a half times. Your department owes the Archbishop two and
a half educations and three and a half retiring pensions.

BARNABAS. Stuff! How can that be?

CONFUCIUS. At what age do your people begin to work for the community?

BURGE-LUBIN. Three. They do certain things every day when they are
three. Just to break them in, you know. But they become self-supporting,
or nearly so, at thirteen.

CONFUCIUS. And at what age do they retire?

BARNABAS. Forty-three.

CONFUCIUS. That is, they do thirty years' work; and they receive
maintenance and education, without working, for thirteen years of
childhood and thirty-five years of superannuation, forty-eight years
in all, for each thirty years' work. The Archbishop has given you 260
years' work, and has received only one education and no superannuation.
You therefore owe him over 300 years of leisure and nearly eight
educations. You are thus heavily in his debt. In other words, he has
effected an enormous national economy by living so long; and you, by
living only seventy-eight years, are profiting at his expense. He is the
benefactor: you are the thief. [_Half rising_] May I now withdraw and
return to my serious business, as my own span is comparatively short?

BURGE-LUBIN. Dont be in a hurry, old chap. [_Confucius sits down
again_]. This hypothecary, or whatever you call it, is put up seriously.
I don't believe it; but if the Archbishop and the Accountant General are
going to insist that it's true, we shall have either to lock them up or
to see the thing through.

BARNABAS. It's no use trying these Chinese subtleties on me. I'm a plain
man; and though I don't understand metaphysics, and don't believe in
them, I understand figures; and if the Archbishop is only entitled to
seventy-eight years, and he takes 283, I say he takes more than he is
entitled to. Get over that if you can.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I have not taken 283 years: I have taken 23 and given
260.

CONFUCIUS. Do your accounts shew a deficiency or a surplus?

BARNABAS. A surplus. Thats what I cant make out. Thats the artfulness of
these people.

BURGE-LUBIN. That settles it. Whats the use of arguing? The Chink says
you are wrong; and theres an end of it.

BARNABAS. I say nothing against the Chink's arguments. But what about my
facts?

CONFUCIUS. If your facts include a case of a man living 283 years, I
advise you to take a few weeks at the seaside.

BARNABAS. Let there be an end of this hinting that I am out of my mind.
Come and look at the cinema record. I tell you this man is Archbishop
Haslam, Archbishop Stickit, President Dickenson, General Bullyboy and
himself into the bargain; all five of them.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I do not deny it. I never have denied it. Nobody has
ever asked me.

BURGE-LUBIN. But damn it, man--I beg your pardon, Archbishop; but
really, really--

THE ARCHBISHOP. Dont mention it. What were you going to say?

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, you were drowned four times over. You are not a cat,
you know.

THE ARCHBISHOP. That is very easy to understand. Consider my situation
when I first made the amazing discovery that I was destined to live
three hundred years! I--

CONFUCIUS [_interrupting him_] Pardon me. Such a discovery was
impossible. You have not made it yet. You may live a million years
if you have already lived two hundred. There is no question of three
hundred years. You have made a slip at the very beginning of your fairy
tale, Mr Archbishop.

BURGE-LUBIN. Good, Confucius! [_To the Archbishop_] He has you there. I
don't see how you can get over that.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes: it is quite a good point. But if the Accountant
General will go to the British Museum library, and search the catalogue,
he will find under his own name a curious and now forgotten book, dated
1924, entitled The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas. That gospel was that
men must live three hundred years if civilization is to be saved. It
shewed that this extension of individual human life was possible, and
how it was likely to come about. I married the daughter of one of the
brothers.

BARNABAS. Do you mean to say you claim to be a connection of mine?

THE ARCHBISHOP. I claim nothing. As I have by this time perhaps three or
four million cousins of one degree or another, I have ceased to call on
the family.

BURGE-LUBIN. Gracious heavens! Four million relatives! Is that
calculation correct, Confucius?

CONFUCIUS. In China it might be forty millions if there were no checks
on population.

BURGE-LUBIN. This is a staggerer. It brings home to one--but
[_recovering_] it isnt true, you know. Let us keep sane.

CONFUCIUS [_to the Archbishop_] You wish us to understand that the
illustrious ancestors of the Accountant General communicated to you a
secret by which you could attain the age of three hundred years.

THE ARCHBISHOP. No. Nothing of the kind. They simply believed that
mankind could live any length of time it knew to be absolutely necessary
to save civilization from extinction. I did not share their belief: at
least I was not conscious of sharing it: I thought I was only amused by
it. To me my father-in-law and his brother were a pair of clever
cranks who had talked one another into a fixed idea which had become a
monomania with them. It was not until I got into serious difficulties
with the pension authorities after turning seventy that I began to
suspect the truth.

CONFUCIUS. The truth?

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes, Mr Chief Secretary: the truth. Like all
revolutionary truths, it began as a joke. As I shewed no signs of ageing
after forty-five, my wife used to make fun of me by saying that I was
certainly going to live three hundred years. She was sixty-eight when
she died; and the last thing she said to me, as I sat by her bedside
holding her hand, was 'Bill: you really don't look fifty. I wonder--'
She broke off, and fell asleep wondering, and never awoke. Then I began
to wonder too. That is the explanation of the three hundred years, Mr
Secretary.

CONFUCIUS. It is very ingenious, Mr Archbishop. And very well told.

BURGE-LUBIN. Of course you understand that _I_ don't for a moment
suggest the very faintest doubt of your absolute veracity, Archbishop.
You know that, don't you?

THE ARCHBISHOP. Quite, Mr President. Only you don't believe me: that is
all. I do not expect you to. In your place I should not believe. You had
better have a look at the films. [_Pointing to the Accountant General_]
He believes.

BURGE-LUBIN. But the drowning? What about the drowning? A man might get
drowned once, or even twice if he was exceptionally careless. But he
couldn't be drowned four times. He would run away from water like a mad
dog.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Perhaps Mr Chief Secretary can guess the explanation of
that.

CONFUCIUS. To keep your secret, you had to die.

BURGE-LUBIN. But dash it all, man, he isn't dead.

CONFUCIUS. It is socially impossible not to do what everybody else does.
One must die at the usual time.

BARNABAS. Of course. A simple point of honour.

CONFUCIUS. Not at all. A simple necessity.

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, I'm hanged if I see it. I should jolly well live for
ever if I could.

THE ARCHBISHOP. It is not so easy as you think. You, Mr Chief Secretary,
have grasped the difficulties of the position. Let me remind you,
Mr President, that I was over eighty before the 1969 Act for the
Redistribution of Income entitled me to a handsome retiring pension.
Owing to my youthful appearance I was prosecuted for attempting to
obtain public money on false pretences when I claimed it. I could prove
nothing; for the register of my birth had been blown to pieces by a bomb
dropped on a village church years before in the first of the big modern
wars. I was ordered back to work as a man of forty, and had to work for
fifteen years more, the retiring age being then fifty-five.

BURGE-LUBIN. As late as fifty-five! How did people stand it?

THE ARCHBISHOP. They made difficulties about letting me go even then, I
still looked so young. For some years I was in continual trouble. The
industrial police rounded me up again and again, refusing to believe
that I was over age. They began to call me The Wandering Jew. You see
how impossible my position was. I foresaw that in twenty years more my
official record would prove me to be seventy-five; my appearance would
make it impossible to believe that I was more than forty-five; and my
real age would be one hundred and seventeen. What was I to do? Bleach
my hair? Hobble about on two sticks? Mimic the voice of a centenarian?
Better have killed myself.

BARNABAS. You ought to have killed yourself. As an honest man you were
entitled to no more than an honest man's expectation of life.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I did kill myself. It was quite easy. I left a suit of
clothes by the seashore during the bathing season, with documents in the
pockets to identify me. I then turned up in a strange place, pretending
that I had lost my memory, and did not know my name or my age or
anything about myself. Under treatment I recovered my health, but not my
memory. I have had several careers since I began this routine of life
and death. I have been an archbishop three times. When I persuaded
the authorities to knock down all our towns and rebuild them from the
foundations, or move them, I went into the artillery, and became a
general. I have been President.

BURGE-LUBIN. Dickenson?

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes.

BURGE-LUBIN. But they found Dickenson's body: its ashes are buried in St
Paul's.

THE ARCHBISHOP. They almost always found the body. During the bathing
season there are plenty of bodies. I have been cremated again and again.
At first I used to attend my own funeral in disguise, because I had read
about a man doing that in an old romance by an author named Bennett,
from whom I remember borrowing five pounds in 1912. But I got tired of
that. I would not cross the street now to read my latest epitaph.

_The Chief Secretary and the President look very glum. Their incredulity
is vanquished at last._

BURGE-LUBIN. Look here. Do you chaps realize how awful this is? Here we
are sitting calmly in the presence of a man whose death is overdue by
two centuries. He may crumble into dust before our eyes at any moment.

BARNABAS. Not he. He'll go on drawing his pension until the end of the
world.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Not quite that. My expectation of life is only three
hundred years.

BARNABAS. You will last out my time anyhow: that's enough for me.

THE ARCHBISHOP [_coolly_] How do you know?

BARNABAS [_taken aback_] How do I know!

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes: how do you know? I did not begin even to suspect
until I was nearly seventy. I was only vain of my youthful appearance.
I was not quite serious about it until I was ninety. Even now I am not
sure from one moment to another, though I have given you my reason
for thinking that I have quite unintentionally committed myself to a
lifetime of three hundred years.

BURGE-LUBIN. But how do you do it? Is it lemons? Is it Soya beans? Is
it--

THE ARCHBISHOP. I do not do it. It happens. It may happen to anyone. It
may happen to you.

BURGE-LUBIN [_the full significance of this for himself dawning on him_]
Then we three may be in the same boat with you, for all we know?

THE ARCHBISHOP. You may. Therefore I advise you to be very careful how
you take any step that will make my position uncomfortable.

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, I'm dashed! One of my secretaries was remarking
only this morning how well and young I am looking. Barnabas: I have an
absolute conviction that I am one of the--the--shall I say one of the
victims?--of this strange destiny.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather
formed the same conviction when he was between sixty and seventy. I knew
him.

BURGE-LUBIN [_depressed_] Ah! But he died.

THE ARCHBISHOP. No.

BURGE-LUBIN [_hopefully_] Do you mean to say he is still alive?

THE ARCHBISHOP. No. He was shot. Under the influence of his belief that
he was going to live three hundred years he became a changed man. He
began to tell people the truth; and they disliked it so much that they
took advantage of certain clauses of an Act of Parliament he had himself
passed during the Four Years War, and had purposely forgotten to repeal
afterwards. They took him to the Tower of London and shot him.

_The apparatus rings._

CONFUCIUS [_answering_] Yes? [_He listens_].

A WOMAN'S VOICE. The Domestic Minister has called.

BURGE-LUBIN [_not quite catching the answer_] Who does she say has
called?

CONFUCIUS. The Domestic Minister.

BARNABAS. Oh, dash it! That awful woman!

BURGE-LUBIN. She certainly is a bit of a terror. I don't exactly know
why; for she is not at all bad-looking.

BARNABAS [_out of patience_] For Heaven's sake, don't be frivolous.

THE ARCHBISHOP. He cannot help it, Mr Accountant General. Three of his
sixteen great-great-great-grandfathers married Lubins.

BURGE-LUBIN. Tut tut! I am not frivolling. _I_ did not ask the lady
here. Which of you did?

CONFUCIUS. It is her official duty to report personally to the President
once a quarter.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, that. Then I suppose it's my official duty to receive
her. Theyd better send her in. You don't mind, do you? She will bring us
back to real life. I don't know how you fellows feel; but I'm just going
dotty.

CONFUCIUS [_into the telephone_] The President will receive the Domestic
Minister at once.

_They watch the door in silence for the entrance of the Domestic
Minister._

BURGE-LUBIN [_suddenly, to the Archbishop_] I suppose you have been
married over and over again.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Once. You do not make vows until death when death is
three hundred years off.

_They relapse into uneasy silence. The Domestic Minister enters. She is
a handsome woman, apparently in the prime of life, with elegant, tense,
well held-up figure, and the walk of a goddess. Her expression and
deportment are grave, swift, decisive, awful, unanswerable. She wears a
Dianesque tunic instead of a blouse, and a silver coronet instead of a
gold fillet. Her dress otherwise is not markedly different from that
of the men, who rise as she enters, and incline their heads with
instinctive awe. She comes to the vacant chair between Barnabas and
Confucius._

BURGE-LUBIN [_resolutely genial and gallant_] Delighted to see you, Mrs
Lutestring.

CONFUCIUS. We are honored by your celestial presence.

BARNABAS. Good day, madam.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I have not had the pleasure of meeting you before. I am
the Archbishop of York.

MRS LUTESTRING. Surely we have met, Mr Archbishop. I remember your face.
We--[_she checks herself suddenly_] Ah, no: I remember now: it was
someone else. [_She sits down_]. They all sit down.

THE ARCHBISHOP [_also puzzled_] Are you sure you are mistaken? I also
have some association with your face, Mrs Lutestring. Something like a
door opening continually and revealing you. And a smile of welcome when
you recognized me. Did you ever open a door for me, I wonder?

MRS LUTESTRING. I often opened a door for the person you have just
reminded me of. But he has been dead many years. The rest, except the
Archbishop, look at one another quickly.

CONFUCIUS. May I ask how many years?

MRS LUTESTRING [_struck by his tone, looks at him for a moment with some
displeasure; then replies_] It does not matter. A long time.

BURGE-LUBIN. You mustnt rush to conclusions about the Archbishop, Mrs
Lutestring. He is an older bird than you think. Older than you, at all
events.

MRS LUTESTRING [_with a melancholy smile_] I think not, Mr President.
But the subject is a delicate one. I had rather not pursue it.

CONFUCIUS. There is a question which has not been asked.

MRS LUTESTRING [_very decisively_] If it is a question about my age, Mr
Chief Secretary, it had better not be asked. All that concerns you about
my personal affairs can be found in the books of the Accountant General.

CONFUCIUS. The question I was thinking of will not be addressed to you.
But let me say that your sensitiveness on the point is very strange,
coming from a woman so superior to all common weaknesses as we know you
to be.

MRS LUTESTRING. I may have reasons which have nothing to do with common
weaknesses, Mr Chief Secretary. I hope you will respect them.

CONFUCIUS [_after bowing to her in assent_] I will now put my question.
Have you, Mr Archbishop, any ground for assuming, as you seem to do,
that what has happened to you has not happened to other people as well?

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes, by George! I never thought of that.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I have never met any case but my own.

CONFUCIUS. How do you know?

THE ARCHBISHOP. Well, no one has ever told me that they were in this
extraordinary position.

CONFUCIUS. That proves nothing. Did you ever tell anybody that you were
in it? You never told us. Why did you never tell us?

THE ARCHBISHOP. I am surprised at the question, coming from so astute a
mind as yours, Mr Secretary. When you reach the age I reached before I
discovered what was happening to me, I was old enough to know and fear
the ferocious hatred with which human animals, like all other animals,
turn upon any unhappy individual who has the misfortune to be unlike
themselves in every respect: to be unnatural, as they call it. You will
still find, among the tales of that twentieth-century classic, Wells,
a story of a race of men who grew twice as big as their fellows, and
another story of a man who fell into the hands of a race of blind men.
The big people had to fight the little people for their lives; and the
man with eyes would have had his eyes put out by the blind had he not
fled to the desert, where he perished miserably. Wells's teaching, on
that and other matters, was not lost on me. By the way, he lent me five
pounds once which I never repaid; and it still troubles my conscience.

CONFUCIUS. And were you the only reader of Wells? If there were others
like you, had they not the same reason for keeping the secret?

THE ARCHBISHOP. That is true. But I should know. You short-lived people
are so childish. If I met a man of my own age I should recognize him at
once. I have never done so.

MRS LUTESTRING. Would you recognize a woman of your age, do you think?

THE ARCHBISHOP. I--[_He stops and turns upon her with a searching look,
startled by the suggestion and the suspicion it rouses_].

MRS LUTESTRING. What is your age, Mr Archbishop?

BURGE-LUBIN. Two hundred and eighty-three, he says. That is his little
joke. Do you know, Mrs Lutestring, he had almost talked us into
believing him when you came in and cleared the air with your robust
common sense.

MRS LUTESTRING. Do you really feel that, Mr President? I hear the note
of breezy assertion in your voice. I miss the note of conviction.

BURGE-LUBIN [_jumping up_] Look here. Let us stop talking damned
nonsense. I don't wish to be disagreeable; but it's getting on my
nerves. The best joke won't bear being pushed beyond a certain point.
That point has been reached. I--I'm rather busy this morning. We all
have our hands pretty full. Confucius here will tell you that I have a
heavy day before me.

BARNABAS. Have you anything more important than this thing, if it's
true?

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, if if, if it's true! But it isn't true.

BARNABAS. Have you anything at all to do?

BURGE-LUBIN. Anything to do! Have you forgotten, Barnabas, that I happen
to be President, and that the weight of the entire public business of
this country is on my shoulders?

BARNABAS. Has he anything to do, Confucius?

CONFUCIUS. He has to be President.

BARNABAS. That means that he has nothing to do.

BURGE-LUBIN [_sulkily_] Very well, Barnabas. Go on making a fool of
yourself. [_He sits down_]. Go on.

BARNABAS. I am not going to leave this room until we get to the bottom
of this swindle.

MRS LUTESTRING [_turning with deadly gravity on the Accountant General_]
This what, did you say?

CONFUCIUS. These expressions cannot be sustained. You obscure the
discussion in using them.

BARNABAS [_glad to escape from her gaze by addressing Confucius_] Well,
this unnatural horror. Will that satisfy you?

CONFUCIUS. That is in order. But we do not commit ourselves to the
implications of the word horror.

THE ARCHBISHOP. By the word horror the Accountant General means only
something unusual.

CONFUCIUS. I notice that the honorable Domestic Minister, on learning
the advanced age of the venerable prelate, shews no sign of surprise or
incredulity.

BURGE-LUBIN. She doesn't take it seriously. Who would? Eh, Mrs
Lutestring?

MRS LUTESTRING. I take it very seriously indeed, Mr President. I see now
that I was not mistaken at first. I have met the Archbishop before.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I felt sure of it. This vision of a door opening to me,
and a woman's face welcoming me, must be a reminiscence of something
that really happened; though I see it now as an angel opening the gate
of heaven.

MRS LUTESTRING. Or a parlor maid opening the door of the house of the
young woman you were in love with?

THE ARCHBISHOP [_making a wry face_] Is that the reality? How these
things grow in our imagination! But may I say, Mrs Lutestring, that the
transfiguration of a parlor maid to an angel is not more amazing than
her transfiguration to the very dignified and able Domestic Minister I
am addressing. I recognize the angel in you. Frankly, I do not recognize
the parlor maid.

BURGE-LUBIN. Whats a parlor maid?

MRS LUTESTRING. An extinct species. A woman in a black dress and white
apron, who opened the house door when people knocked or rang, and was
either your tyrant or your slave. I was a parlor maid in the house of
one of the Accountant General's remote ancestors. [_To Confucius_] You
asked me my age, Mr Chief Secretary, I am two hundred and seventy-four.

BURGE-LUBIN [_gallantly_] You don't look it. You really don't look it.

MRS LUTESTRING [_turning her face gravely towards him_] Look again, Mr
President.

BURGE-LUBIN [_looking at her bravely until the smile fades from his
face, and he suddenly covers his eyes with his hands_] Yes: you do
look it. I am convinced. It's true. Now call up the Lunatic Asylum,
Confucius; and tell them to send an ambulance for me.

MRS LUTESTRING [_to the Archbishop_] Why have you given away your
secret? our secret?

THE ARCHBISHOP. They found it out. The cinema records betrayed me. But I
never dreamt that there were others. Did you?

MRS LUTESTRING. I knew one other. She was a cook. She grew tired, and
killed herself.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Dear me! However, her death simplifies the situation, as
I have been able to convince these gentlemen that the matter had better
go no further.

MRS LUTESTRING. What! When the President knows! It will be all over the
place before the end of the week.

BURGE-LUBIN [_injured_] Really, Mrs Lutestring! You speak as if I were a
notoriously indiscreet person. Barnabas: have I such a reputation?

BARNABAS [_resignedly_] It cant be helped. It's constitutional.

CONFUCIUS. It is utterly unconstitutional. But, as you say, it cannot be
helped.

BURGE-LUBIN [_solemnly_] I deny that a secret of State has ever passed
my lips--except perhaps to the Minister of Health, who is discretion
personified. People think, because she is a negress--

MRS LUTESTRING. It does not matter much now. Once, it would have
mattered a great deal. But my children are all dead.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes: the children must have been a terrible difficulty.
Fortunately for me, I had none.

MRS LUTESTRING. There was one daughter who was the child of my very
heart. Some years after my first drowning I learnt that she had lost her
sight. I went to her. She was an old woman of ninety-six, blind. She
asked me to sit and talk with her because my voice was like the voice of
her dead mother.

BURGE-LUBIN. The complications must be frightful. Really I hardly know
whether I do want to live much longer than other people.

MRS LUTESTRING. You can always kill yourself, as cook did; but that
was influenza. Long life is complicated, and even terrible; but it is
glorious all the same. I would no more change places with an ordinary
woman than with a mayfly that lives only an hour.

THE ARCHBISHOP. What set you thinking of it first?

MRS LUTESTRING. Conrad Barnabas's book. Your wife told me it was more
wonderful than Napoleon's Book of Fate and Old Moore's Almanac, which
cook and I used to read. I was very ignorant: it did not seem so
impossible to me as to an educated woman. Yet I forgot all about it, and
married and drudged as a poor man's wife, and brought up children, and
looked twenty years older than I really was, until one day, long after
my husband died and my children were out in the world working for
themselves, I noticed that I looked twenty years younger than I really
was. The truth came to me in a flash.

BURGE-LUBIN. An amazing moment. Your feelings must have been beyond
description. What was your first thought?

MRS LUTESTRING. Pure terror. I saw that the little money I had laid up
would not last, and that I must go out and: work again. They had things
called Old Age Pensions then: miserable pittances for worn-out old
laborers to die on. I thought I should be found out if I went on drawing
it too long. The horror of facing another lifetime of drudgery, of
missing my hard-earned rest and losing my poor little savings, drove
everything else out of my mind. You people nowadays can have no
conception of the dread of poverty that hung over us then, or of the
utter tiredness of forty years' unending overwork and striving to make a
shilling do the work of a pound.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I wonder you did not kill yourself. I often wonder why
the poor in those evil old times did not kill themselves. They did not
even kill other people.

MRS LUTESTRING. You never kill yourself, because you always may as well
wait until tomorrow. And you have not energy or conviction enough to
kill the others. Besides, how can you blame them when you would do as
they do if you were in their place?

BURGE-LUBIN. Devilish poor consolation, that.

MRS LUTESTRING. There were other consolations in those days for people
like me. We drank preparations of alcohol to relieve the strain of
living and give us an artificial happiness.

BURGE-LUBIN {[[_all together,_]} Alcohol! CONFUCIUS {[_making_] } Pfff
...! BARNABAS {[_wry faces_]] } Disgusting.

MRS LUTESTRING. A little alcohol would improve your temper and manners,
and make you much easier to live with, Mr Accountant General.

BURGE-LUBIN [_laughing_] By George, I believe you! Try it, Barnabas.

CONFUCIUS. No. Try tea. It is the more civilized poison of the two.

MRS LUTESTRING. You, Mr President, were born intoxicated with your own
well-fed natural exuberance. You cannot imagine what alcohol was to an
underfed poor woman. I had carefully arranged my little savings so that
I could get drunk, as we called it, once a week; and my only pleasure
was looking forward to that poor little debauch. That is what saved
me from suicide. I could not bear to miss my next carouse. But when
I stopped working, and lived on my pension, the fatigue of my life's
drudgery began to wear off, because, you see, I was not really old. I
recuperated. I looked younger and younger. And at last I was rested
enough to have courage and strength to begin life again. Besides,
political changes were making it easier: life was a little better worth
living for the nine-tenths of the people who used to be mere drudges.
After that, I never turned back or faltered. My only regret now is that
I shall die when I am three hundred or thereabouts. There was only one
thing that made life hard; and that is gone now.

CONFUCIUS. May we ask what that was?

MRS LUTESTRING. Perhaps you will be offended if I tell you.

BURGE-LUBIN. Offended! My dear lady, do you suppose, after such
a stupendous revelation, that anything short of a blow from a
sledge-hammer could produce the smallest impression on any of us?

MRS LUTESTRING. Well, you see, it has been so hard on me never to meet a
grown-up person. You are all such children. And I never was very fond of
children, except that one girl who woke up the mother passion in me. I
have been very lonely sometimes.

BURGE-LUBIN [_again gallant_] But surely, Mrs Lutestring, that has been
your own fault. If I may say so, a lady of your attractions need never
have been lonely.

MRS LUTESTRING. Why?

BURGE-LUBIN. Why! Well--. Well, er--. Well, er er--. Well! [_he gives it
up_].

THE ARCHBISHOP. He means that you might have married. Curious, how
little they understand our position.

MRS LUTESTRING. I did marry. I married again on my hundred and first
birthday. But of course I had to marry an elderly man: a man over sixty.
He was a great painter. On his deathbed he said to me 'It has taken me
fifty years to learn my trade, and to paint all the foolish pictures a
man must paint and get rid of before he comes through them to the
great things he ought to paint. And now that my foot is at last on the
threshold of the temple I find that it is also the threshold of my
tomb.' That man would have been the greatest painter of all time if he
could have lived as long as I. I saw him die of old age whilst he
was still, as he said himself, a gentleman amateur, like all modern
painters.

BURGE-LUBIN. But why had you to marry an elderly man? Why not marry a
young one? or shall I say a middle-aged one? If my own affections were
not already engaged; and if, to tell the truth, I were not a
little afraid of you--for you are a very superior woman, as we all
acknowledge--I should esteem myself happy in--er--er--

MRS LUTESTRING. Mr President: have you ever tried to take advantage of
the innocence of a little child for the gratification of your senses?

BURGE-LUBIN. Good Heavens, madam, what do you take me for? What right
have you to ask me such a question?

MRS LUTESTRING. I am at present in my two hundred and seventy-fifth
year. You suggest that I should take advantage of the innocence of a
child of thirty, and marry it.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Can you shortlived people not understand that as the
confusion and immaturity and primitive animalism in which we live for
the first hundred years of our life is worse in this matter of sex than
in any other, you are intolerable to us in that relation?

BURGE-LUBIN. Do you mean to say, Mrs Lutestring, that you regard me as a
child?

MRS LUTESTRING. Do you expect me to regard you as a completed soul? Oh,
you may well be afraid of me. There are moments when your levity, your
ingratitude, your shallow jollity, make my gorge rise so against you
that if I could not remind myself that you are a child I should be
tempted to doubt your right to live at all.

CONFUCIUS. Do you grudge us the few years we have? you who have three
hundred!

BURGE-LUBIN. You accuse me of levity! Must I remind you, madam, that I
am the President, and that you are only the head of a department?

BARNABAS. Ingratitude too! You draw a pension for three hundred years
when we owe you only seventy-eight; and you call us ungrateful!

MRS LUTESTRING. I do. When I think of the blessings that have been
showered on you, and contrast them with the poverty! the humiliations!
the anxieties! the heartbreak! the insolence and tyranny that were the
daily lot of mankind when I was learning to suffer instead of learning
to live! when I see how lightly you take it all! how you quarrel over
the crumpled leaves in your beds of roses! how you are so dainty about
your work that unless it is made either interesting or delightful to you
you leave it to negresses and Chinamen, I ask myself whether even
three hundred years of thought and experience can save you from being
superseded by the Power that created you and put you on your trial.

BURGE-LUBIN. My dear lady: our Chinese and colored friends are perfectly
happy. They are twenty times better off here than they would be in China
or Liberia. They do their work admirably; and in doing it they set us
free for higher employments.

THE ARCHBISHOP [_who has caught the infection of her indignation_] What
higher employments are you capable of? you that are superannuated at
seventy and dead at eighty!

MRS LUTESTRING. You are not really doing higher work. You are supposed
to make the decisions and give the orders; but the negresses and the
Chinese make up your minds for you and tell you what orders to give,
just as my brother, who was a sergeant in the Guards, used to prompt his
officers in the old days. When I want to get anything done at the Health
Ministry I do not come to you: I go to the black lady who has been the
real president during your present term of office, or to Confucius, who
goes on for ever while presidents come and presidents go.

BURGE-LUBIN. This is outrageous. This is treason to the white race. And
let me tell you, madam, that I have never in my life met the Minister
of Health, and that I protest against the vulgar color prejudice which
disparages her great ability and her eminent services to the State. My
relations with her are purely telephonic, gramophonic, photophonic, and,
may I add, platonic.

THE ARCHBISHOP. There is no reason why you should be ashamed of them in
any case, Mr President. But let us look at the position impersonally.
Can you deny that what is happening is that the English people have
become a Joint Stock Company admitting Asiatics and Africans as
shareholders?

BARNABAS. Nothing like it. I know all about the old joint stock
companies. The shareholders did no work.

THE ARCHBISHOP. That is true; but we, like them, get our dividends
whether we work or not. We work partly because we know there would be no
dividends if we did not, and partly because if we refuse we are regarded
as mentally deficient and put into a lethal chamber. But what do we work
at? Before the few changes we were forced to make by the revolutions
that followed the Four Years War, our governing classes had been so
rich, as it was called, that they had become the most intellectually
lazy and fat-headed people on the face of the earth. There is a good
deal of that fat still clinging to us.

BURGE-LUBIN. As President, I must not listen to unpatriotic criticisms
of our national character, Mr Archbishop.

THE ARCHBISHOP. As Archbishop, Mr President, it is my official duty to
criticize the national character unsparingly. At the canonization of
Saint Henrik Ibsen, you yourself unveiled the monument to him which
bears on its pedestal the noble inscription, 'I came not to call
sinners, but the righteous, to repentance.' The proof of what I say
is that our routine work, and what may be called our ornamental and
figure-head work, is being more and more sought after by the English;
whilst the thinking, organizing, calculating, directing work is done by
yellow brains, brown brains, and black brains, just as it was done in
my early days by Jewish brains, Scottish brains, Italian brains, German
brains. The only white men who still do serious work are those who, like
the Accountant General, have no capacity for enjoyment, and no social
gifts to make them welcome outside their offices.

BARNABAS. Confound your impudence! I had gifts enough to find you out,
anyhow.

THE ARCHBISHOP [_disregarding this outburst_] If you were to kill me as
I stand here, you would have to appoint an Indian to succeed me. I take
precedence today not as an Englishman, but as a man with more than a
century and a half of fully adult experience. We are letting all the
power slip into the hands of the colored people. In another hundred
years we shall be simply their household pets.

BURGE-LUBIN [_reacting buoyantly_] Not the least danger of it. I grant
you we leave the most troublesome part of the labor of the nation to
them. And a good job too: why should we drudge at it? But think of the
activities of our leisure! Is there a jollier place on earth to live
in than England out of office hours? And to whom do we owe that? To
ourselves, not to the niggers. The nigger and the Chink are all right
from Tuesday to Friday; but from Friday to Tuesday they are simply
nowhere; and the real life of England is from Friday to Tuesday.

THE ARCHBISHOP. That is terribly true. In devising brainless amusements;
in pursuing them with enormous vigor, and taking them with eager
seriousness, our English people are the wonder of the world. They always
were. And it is just as well; for otherwise their sensuality would
become morbid and destroy them. What appals me is that their amusements
should amuse them. They are the amusements of boys and girls. They
are pardonable up to the age of fifty or sixty: after that they are
ridiculous. I tell you, what is wrong with us is that we are a non-adult
race; and the Irish and the Scots, and the niggers and Chinks, as you
call them, though their lifetime is as short as ours, or shorter, yet do
somehow contrive to grow up a little before they die. We die in boyhood:
the maturity that should make us the greatest of all the nations lies
beyond the grave for us. Either we shall go under as greybeards with
golf clubs in our hands, or we must will to live longer.

MRS LUTESTRING. Yes: that is it. I could not have expressed it in words;
but you have expressed it for me. I felt, even when I was an ignorant
domestic slave, that we had the possibility of becoming a great nation
within us; but our faults and follies drove me to cynical hopelessness.
We all ended then like that. It is the highest creatures who take the
longest to mature, and are the most helpless during their immaturity. I
know now that it took me a whole century to grow up. I began my serious
life when I was a hundred and twenty. Asiatics cannot control me: I am
not a child in their hands, as you are, Mr President. Neither, I am
sure, is the Archbishop. They respect me. You are not grown up enough
even for that, though you were kind enough to say that I frighten you.

BURGE-LUBIN. Honestly, you do. And will you think me very rude if I
say that if I must choose between a white woman old enough to be my
great-grandmother and a black woman of my own age, I shall probably find
the black woman more sympathetic?

MRS LUTESTRING. And more attractive in color, perhaps?

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes. Since you ask me, more--well, not more attractive:
I do not deny that you have an excellent appearance--but I will say,
richer. More Venetian. Tropical. 'The shadowed livery of the burnished
sun.'

MRS LUTESTRING. Our women, and their favorite story writers, begin
already to talk about men with golden complexions.

CONFUCIUS [_expanding into a smile all across both face and body_]
A-a-a-a-a-h!

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, what of it, madam? Have you read a very interesting
book by the librarian of the Biological Society suggesting that the
future of the world lies with the Mulatto?

MRS LUTESTRING [_rising_] Mr Archbishop: if the white race is to be
saved, our destiny is apparent.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes: our duty is pretty clear.

MRS LUTESTRING. Have you time to come home with me and discuss the
matter?

THE ARCHBISHOP [_rising_] With pleasure.

BARNABAS [_rising also and rushing past Mrs Lutestring to the door,
where he turns to bar her way_] No you don't. Burge: you understand,
don't you?

BURGE-LUBIN. No. What is it?

BARNABAS. These two are going to marry.

BURGE-LUBIN. Why shouldn't they, if they want to?

BARNABAS. They don't want to. They will do it in cold blood because
their children will live three hundred years. It mustnt be allowed.

CONFUCIUS. You cannot prevent it. There is no law that gives you power
to interfere with them.

BARNABAS. If they force me to it I will obtain legislation against
marriages above the age of seventy-eight.

THE ARCHBISHOP. There is not time for that before we are married, Mr
Accountant General. Be good enough to get out of the lady's way.

BARNABAS. There is time to send the lady to the lethal chamber before
anything comes of your marriage. Dont forget that.

MRS LUTESTRING. What nonsense, Mr Accountant General! Good afternoon,
Mr President. Good afternoon, Mr Chief Secretary. [_They rise and
acknowledge her salutation with bows. She walks straight at the
Accountant General, who instinctively shrinks out of her way as she
leaves the room_].

THE ARCHBISHOP. I am surprised at you, Mr Barnabas. Your tone was like
an echo from the Dark Ages. [_He follows the Domestic Minister_].

_Confucius, shaking his head and clucking with his tongue in deprecation
of this painful episode, moves to the chair just vacated by the
Archbishop and stands behind it with folded palms, looking at the
President. The Accountant General shakes his fist after the departed
visitors, and bursts into savage abuse of them._

BARNABAS. Thieves! Cursed thieves! Vampires! What are you going to do,
Burge?

BURGE-LUBIN. Do?

BARNABAS. Yes, do. There must be dozens of these people in existence.
Are you going to let them do what the two who have just left us mean to
do, and crowd us off the face of the earth?

BURGE-LUBIN [_sitting down_] Oh, come, Barnabas! What harm are they
doing? Arnt you interested in them? Dont you like them?

BARNABAS. Like them! I hate them. They are monsters, unnatural monsters.
They are poison to me.

BURGE-LUBIN. What possible objection can there be to their living as
long as they can? It does not shorten our lives, does it?

BARNABAS. If I have to die when I am seventy-eight, I don't see
why another man should be privileged to live to be two hundred and
seventy-eight. It does shorten my life, relatively. It makes us
ridiculous. If they grew to be twelve feet high they would make us all
dwarfs. They talked to us as if we were children. There is no love lost
between us: their hatred of us came out soon enough. You heard what the
woman said, and how the Archbishop backed her up?

BURGE-LUBIN. But what can we do to them?

BARNABAS. Kill them.

BURGE-LUBIN. Nonsense!

BARNABAS. Lock them up. Sterilize them somehow, anyhow.

BURGE-LUBIN. But what reason could we give?

BARNABAS. What reason can you give for killing a snake? Nature tells you
to do it.

BURGE-LUBIN. My dear Barnabas, you are out of your mind.

BARNABAS. Havnt you said that once too often already this morning?

BURGE-LUBIN. I don't believe you will carry a single soul with you.

BARNABAS. I understand. I know you. You think you are one of them.

CONFUCIUS. Mr Accountant General: you may be one of them.

BARNABAS. How dare you accuse me of such a thing? I am an honest man,
not a monster. I won my place in public life by demonstrating that the
true expectation of human life is seventy-eight point six. And I will
resist any attempt to alter or upset it to the last drop of my blood if
need be.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, tut tut! Come, come! Pull yourself together. How can
you, a descendant of the great Conrad Barnabas, the man who is still
remembered by his masterly Biography of a Black Beetle, be so absurd?

BARNABAS. You had better go and write the autobiography of a jackass. I
am going to raise the country against this horror, and against you, if
you shew the slightest sign of weakness about it.

CONFUCIUS [_very impressively_] You will regret it if you do.

BARNABAS. What is to make me regret it?

CONFUCIUS. Every mortal man and woman in the community will begin to
count on living for three centuries. Things will happen which you do not
foresee: terrible things. The family will dissolve: parents and children
will be no longer the old and the young: brothers and sisters will meet
as strangers after a hundred years separation: the ties of blood will
lose their innocence. The imaginations of men, let loose over the
possibilities of three centuries of life, will drive them mad and wreck
human society. This discovery must be kept a dead secret. [_He sits
down_].

BARNABAS. And if I refuse to keep the secret?

CONFUCIUS. I shall have you safe in a lunatic asylum the day after you
blab.

BARNABAS. You forget that I can produce the Archbishop to prove my
statement.

CONFUCIUS. So can I. Which of us do you think he will support when I
explain to him that your object in revealing his age is to get him
killed?

BARNABAS [_desperate_] Burge: are you going to back up this yellow
abomination against me? Are we public men and members of the Government?
or are we damned blackguards?

CONFUCIUS [_unmoved_] Have you ever known a public man who was not what
vituperative people called a damned blackguard when some inconsiderate
person wanted to tell the public more than was good for it?

BARNABAS. Hold your tongue, you insolent heathen. Burge: I spoke to you.

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, you know, my dear Barnabas, Confucius is a very
long-headed chap. I see his point.

BARNABAS. Do you? Then let me tell you that, except officially, I will
never speak to you again. Do you hear?

BURGE-LUBIN [_cheerfully_] You will. You will.

BARNABAS. And don't you ever dare speak to me again. Do you hear? [_He
turns to the door_].

BURGE-LUBIN. I will. I will. Goodbye, Barnabas. God bless you.

BARNABAS. May you live forever, and be the laughingstock of the whole
world! [_he dashes out in a fury_].

BURGE-LUBIN [_laughing indulgently_] He will keep the secret all right.
I know Barnabas. You neednt worry.

CONFUCIUS [_troubled and grave_] There are no secrets except the secrets
that keep themselves. Consider. There are those films at the Record
Office. We have no power to prevent the Master of the Records from
publishing this discovery made in his department. We cannot silence the
American--who can silence an American?--nor the people who were there
today to receive him. Fortunately, a film can prove nothing but a
resemblance.

BURGE-LUBIN. Thats very true. After all, the whole thing is confounded
nonsense, isnt it?

CONFUCIUS [_raising his head to look at him_] You have decided not to
believe it now that you realize its inconveniences. That is the English
method. It may not work in this case.

BURGE-LUBIN. English be hanged! It's common sense. You know, those two
people got us hypnotized: not a doubt of it. They must have been kidding
us. They were, werent they?

CONFUCIUS. You looked into that woman's face; and you believed.

BURGE-LUBIN. Just so. Thats where she had me. I shouldn't have believed
her a bit if she'd turned her back to me.

CONFUCIUS [_shakes his head slowly and repeatedly_]???

BURGE-LUBIN. You really think--? [_he hesitates_].

CONFUCIUS. The Archbishop has always been a puzzle to me. Ever since
I learnt to distinguish between one English face and another I have
noticed what the woman pointed out: that the English face is not an
adult face, just as the English mind is not an adult mind.

BURGE-LUBIN. Stow it, John Chinaman. If ever there was a race divinely
appointed to take charge of the non-adult races and guide them and train
them and keep them out of mischief until they grow up to be capable of
adopting our institutions, that race is the English race. It is the only
race in the world that has that characteristic. Now!

CONFUCIUS. That is the fancy of a child nursing a doll. But it is ten
times more childish of you to dispute the highest compliment ever paid
you.

BURGE-LUBIN. You call it a compliment to class us as grown-up children.

CONFUCIUS. Not grown-up children, children at fifty, sixty, seventy.
Your maturity is so late that you never attain to it. You have to be
governed by races which are mature at forty. That means that you are
potentially the most highly developed race on earth, and would be
actually the greatest if you could live long enough to attain to
maturity.

BURGE-LUBIN [_grasping the idea at last_] By George, Confucius, youre
right! I never thought of that. That explains everything. We are just
a lot of schoolboys: theres no denying it. Talk to an Englishman about
anything serious, and he listens to you curiously for a moment just as
he listens to a chap playing classical music. Then he goes back to
his marine golf, or motoring, or flying, or women, just like a bit of
stretched elastic when you let it go. [_Soaring to the height of his
theme_] Oh, youre quite right. We are only in our infancy. I ought to
be in a perambulator, with a nurse shoving me along. It's true: it's
absolutely true. But some day we'll grow up; and then, by Jingo, we'll
shew em.

CONFUCIUS. The Archbishop is an adult. When I was a child I was
dominated and intimidated by people whom I now know to have been weaker
and sillier than I, because there was some mysterious quality in their
mere age that overawed me. I confess that, though I have kept up
appearances, I have always been afraid of the Archbishop.

BURGE-LUBIN. Between ourselves, Confucius, so have I.

CONFUCIUS. It is this that convinced me. It was this in the woman's face
that convinced you. Their new departure in the history of the race is no
fraud. It does not even surprise me.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, come! Not surprise you! It's your pose never to be
surprised at anything; but if you are not surprised at this you are not
human.

CONFUCIUS. I am staggered, just as a man may be staggered by an
explosion for which he has himself laid the charge and lighted the fuse.
But I am not surprised, because, as a philosopher and a student of
evolutionary biology, I have come to regard some such development as
this as inevitable. If I had not thus prepared myself to be credulous,
no mere evidence of films and well-told tales would have persuaded me to
believe. As it is, I do believe.

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, that being settled, what the devil is to happen next?
Whats the next move for us?

CONFUCIUS. We do not make the next move. The next move will be made by
the Archbishop and the woman.

BURGE-LUBIN. Their marriage?

CONFUCIUS. More than that. They have made the momentous discovery that
they are not alone in the world.

BURGE-LUBIN. You think there are others?

CONFUCIUS. There must be many others. Each of them believes that he or
she is the only one to whom the miracle has happened. But the Archbishop
knows better now. He will advertise in terms which only the longlived
people will understand. He will bring them together and organize them.
They will hasten from all parts of the earth. They will become a great
Power.

BURGE-LUBIN [_a little alarmed_] I say, will they? I suppose they will.
I wonder is Barnabas right after all? Ought we to allow it?

CONFUCIUS. Nothing that we can do will stop it. We cannot in our souls
really want to stop it: the vital force that has produced this change
would paralyse our opposition to it, if we were mad enough to oppose.
But we will not oppose. You and I may be of the elect, too.

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes: thats what gets us every time. What the deuce ought we
to do? Something must be done about it, you know.

CONFUCIUS. Let us sit still, and meditate in silence on the vistas
before us.

BURGE-LUBIN. By George, I believe youre right. Let us.

_They sit meditating, the Chinaman naturally, the President with visible
effort and intensity. He is positively glaring into the future when the
voice of the Negress is heard._

THE NEGRESS. Mr President.

BURGE-LUBIN [_joyfully_] Yes. [_Taking up a peg_] Are you at home?

THE NEGRESS. No. Omega, zero, x squared.

_The President rapidly puts the peg in the switchboard; works the dial;
and presses the button. The screen becomes transparent; and the Negress,
brilliantly dressed, appears on what looks like the bridge of a steam
yacht in glorious sea weather. The installation with which she is
communicating is beside the binnacle._

CONFUCIUS [_looking round, and recoiling with a shriek of disgust_] Ach!
Avaunt! Avaunt! [_He rushes from the room_].

BURGE-LUBIN. What part of the coast is that?

THE NEGRESS. Fishguard Bay. Why not run over and join me for the
afternoon? I am disposed to be approachable at last.

BURGE-LUBIN. But Fishguard! Two hundred and seventy miles!

THE NEGRESS. There is a lightning express on the Irish Air Service at
half-past sixteen. They will drop you by a parachute in the bay. The
dip will do you good. I will pick you up and dry you and give you a
first-rate time.

BURGE-LUBIN. Delightful. But a little risky, isnt it?

THE NEGRESS. Risky! I thought you were afraid of nothing.

BURGE-LUBIN. I am not exactly afraid; but--

THE NEGRESS [_offended_] But you think it is not good enough. Very well
[_she raises her hand to take the peg out of her switchboard_].

BURGE-LUBIN [_imploringly_] No: stop: let me explain: hold the line just
one moment. Oh, please.

THE NEGRESS [_waiting with her hand poised over the peg_] Well?

BURGE-LUBIN. The fact is, I have been behaving very recklessly for some
time past under the impression that my life would be so short that
it was not worth bothering about. But I have just learnt that I may
live--well, much longer than I expected. I am sure your good sense will
tell you that this alters the case. I--

THE NEGRESS [_with suppressed rage_] Oh, quite. Pray don't risk your
precious, life on my account. Sorry for troubling you. Goodbye. [_She
snatches out her peg and vanishes_].

BURGE-LUBIN [_urgently_] No: please hold on. I can convince you--[_a
loud buzz-uzz-uzz_]. Engaged! Who is she calling up now? [_Represses the
button and calls_] The Chief Secretary. Say I want to see him again,
just for a moment.

CONFUCIUS'S VOICE. Is the woman gone?

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes, yes: it's all right. Just a moment, if--[_Confucius
returns_] Confucius: I have some important business at Fishguard. The
Irish Air Service can drop me in the bay by parachute. I suppose it's
quite safe, isnt it?

CONFUCIUS. Nothing is quite safe. The air service is as safe as any
other travelling service. The parachute is safe. But the water is not
safe.

BURGE-LUBIN. Why? They will give me an unsinkable tunic, wont they?

CONFUCIUS. You will not sink; but the sea is very cold. You may get
rheumatism for life.

BURGE-LUBIN. For life! That settles it: I wont risk it.

CONFUCIUS. Good. You have at last become prudent: you are no longer what
you call a sportsman: you are a sensible coward, almost a grown-up man.
I congratulate you.

BURGE-LUBIN [_resolutely_] Coward or no coward, I will not face an
eternity of rheumatism for any woman that ever was born. [_He rises and
goes to the rack for his fillet_] I have changed my mind: I am going
home. [_He cocks the fillet rakishly_] Good evening.

CONFUCIUS. So early? If the Minister of Health rings you up, what shall
I tell her?

BURGE-LUBIN. Tell her to go to the devil. [_He goes out_].

CONFUCIUS [_shaking his head, shocked at the President's impoliteness_]
No. No, no, no, no, no. Oh, these English! these crude young
civilizations! Their manners! Hogs. Hogs.



PART IV

Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman


ACT I


_Burrin pier on the south shore of Galway Bay in Ireland, a region of
stone-capped hills and granite fields. It is a fine summer day in the
year 3000 A.D. On an ancient stone stump, about three feet thick and
three feet high, used for securing ships by ropes to the shore, and
called a bollard or holdfast, an elderly gentleman sits facing the land
with his head bowed and his face in his hands, sobbing. His sunburnt
skin contrasts with his white whiskers and eyebrows. He wears a black
frock-coat, a white waistcoat, lavender trousers, a brilliant silk
cravat with a jewelled pin stuck in it, a tall hat of grey felt, and
patent leather boots with white spats. His starched linen cuffs protrude
from his coat sleeves; and his collar, also of starched white linen, is
Gladstonian. On his right, three or four full sacks, lying side by side
on the flags, suggest that the pier, unlike many remote Irish piers,
is occasionally useful as well as romantic. On his left, behind him, a
flight of stone steps descends out of sight to the sea level.

A woman in a silk tunic and sandals, wearing little else except a cap
with the number 2 on it in gold, comes up the steps from the sea, and
stares in astonishment at the sobbing man. Her age cannot be guessed:
her face is firm and chiselled like a young face; but her expression is
unyouthful in its severity and determination._

THE WOMAN. What is the matter?

_The elderly gentleman looks up; hastily pulls himself together; takes
out a silk handkerchief and dries his tears lightly with a brave attempt
to smile through them; and tries to rise gallantly, but sinks back._

THE WOMAN. Do you need assistance?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. No. Thank you very much. No. Nothing. The heat.
[_He punctuates with sniffs, and dabs with his handkerchief at his eyes
and nose._] Hay fever.

THE WOMAN. You are a foreigner, are you not?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. No. You must not regard me as a foreigner. I am a
Briton.

THE WOMAN. You come from some part of the British Commonwealth?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_amiably pompous_] From its capital, madam.

THE WOMAN. From Baghdad?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Yes. You may not be aware, madam, that these
islands were once the centre of the British Commonwealth, during a
period now known as The Exile. They were its headquarters a thousand
years ago. Few people know this interesting circumstance now; but I
assure you it is true. I have come here on a pious pilgrimage to one of
the numerous lands of my fathers. We are of the same stock, you and I.
Blood is thicker than water. We are cousins.

THE WOMAN. I do not understand. You say you have come here on a pious
pilgrimage. Is that some new means of transport?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_again shewing signs of distress_] I find it
very difficult to make myself understood here. I was not referring to a
machine, but to a--a--a sentimental journey.

THE WOMAN. I am afraid I am as much in the dark as before. You said also
that blood is thicker than water. No doubt it is; but what of it?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Its meaning is obvious.

THE WOMAN. Perfectly. But I assure you I am quite aware that blood is
thicker than water.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_sniffing: almost in tears again_] We will leave
it at that, madam.

THE WOMAN [going _nearer to him and scrutinizing him with some concern_]
I am afraid you are not well. Were you not warned that it is dangerous
for shortlived people to come to this country? There is a deadly disease
called discouragement, against which shortlived people have to take very
strict precautions. Intercourse with us puts too great a strain on them.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_pulling himself together huffily_] It has no
effect on me, madam. I fear my conversation does not interest you. If
not, the remedy is in your own hands.

THE WOMAN [_looking at her hands, and then looking inquiringly at him_]
Where?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_breaking down_] Oh, this is dreadful. No
understanding, no intelligence, no sympathy--[_his sobs choke him_].

THE WOMAN. You see, you are ill.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_nerved by indignation_] I am not ill. I have
never had a day's illness in my life.

THE WOMAN. May I advise you?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I have no need of a lady doctor, thank you,
madam.

THE WOMAN [_shaking her head_] I am afraid I do not understand. I said
nothing about a butterfly.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Well, _I_ said nothing about a butterfly.

THE WOMAN. You spoke of a lady doctor. The word is known here only as
the name of a butterfly.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_insanely_] I give up. I can bear this no longer.
It is easier to go out of my mind at once. [_He rises and dances about,
singing_]


    I'd be a butterfly, born in a bower,
    Making apple dumplings without any flour.


THE WOMAN [_smiling gravely_] It must be at least a hundred and fifty
years since I last laughed. But if you do that any more I shall
certainly break out like a primary of sixty. Your dress is so
extraordinarily ridiculous.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_halting abruptly in his antics_] My dress
ridiculous! I may not be dressed like a Foreign Office clerk; but
my clothes are perfectly in fashion in my native metropolis, where
yours--pardon my saying so--would be considered extremely unusual and
hardly decent.

THE WOMAN. Decent? There is no such word in our language. What does it
mean?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. It would not be decent for me to explain. Decency
cannot be discussed without indecency.

THE WOMAN. I cannot understand you at all. I fear you have not been
observing the rules laid down for shortlived visitors.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Surely, madam, they do not apply to persons of my
age and standing. I am not a child, nor an agricultural laborer.

THE WOMAN [_severely_] They apply to you very strictly. You are expected
to confine yourself to the society of children under sixty. You
are absolutely forbidden to approach fully adult natives under any
circumstances. You cannot converse with persons of my age for long
without bringing on a dangerous attack of discouragement. Do you realize
that you are already shewing grave symptoms of that very distressing and
usually fatal complaint?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Certainly not, madam. I am fortunately in no
danger of contracting it. I am quite accustomed to converse intimately
and at the greatest length with the most distinguished persons. If you
cannot discriminate between hay fever and imbecility, I can only say
that your advanced years carry with them the inevitable penalty of
dotage.

THE WOMAN. I am one of the guardians of this district; and I am
responsible for your welfare--

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. The Guardians! Do you take me for a pauper?

THE WOMAN. I do not know what a pauper is. You must tell me who you are,
if it is possible for you to express yourself intelligibly--

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_snorts indignantly_]!

THE WOMAN [_continuing_]--and why you are wandering here alone without a
nurse.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_outraged_] Nurse!

THE WOMAN. Shortlived visitors are not allowed to go about here without
nurses. Do you not know that rules are meant to be kept?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. By the lower classes, no doubt. But to persons
in my position there are certain courtesies which are never denied by
well-bred people; and--

THE WOMAN. There are only two human classes here: the shortlived and
the normal. The rules apply to the shortlived, and are for their own
protection. Now tell me at once who you are.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_impressively_] Madam, I am a retired gentleman,
formerly Chairman of the All-British Synthetic Egg and Vegetable Cheese
Trust in Baghdad, and now President of the British Historical and
Archaeological Society, and a Vice-President of the Travellers' Club.

THE WOMAN. All that does not matter.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_again snorting_] Hm! Indeed!

THE WOMAN. Have you been sent here to make your mind flexible?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. What an extraordinary question! Pray do you find
my mind noticeably stiff?

THE WOMAN. Perhaps you do not know that you are on the west coast of
Ireland, and that it is the practice among natives of the Eastern Island
to spend some years here to acquire mental flexibility. The climate has
that effect.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_haughtily_] I was born, not in the Eastern
Island, but, thank God, in dear old British Baghdad; and I am not in
need of a mental health resort.

THE WOMAN. Then why are you here?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Am I trespassing? I was not aware of it.

THE WOMAN. Trespassing? I do not understand the word.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Is this land private property? If so, I make no
claim. I proffer a shilling in satisfaction of damage (if any), and am
ready to withdraw if you will be good enough to shew me the nearest way.
[_He offers her a shilling_].

THE WOMAN [_taking it and examining it without much interest_] I do not
understand a single word of what you have just said.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I am speaking the plainest English. Are you the
landlord?

THE WOMAN [_shaking her head_] There is a tradition in this part of the
country of an animal with a name like that. It used to be hunted and
shot in the barbarous ages. It is quite extinct now.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_breaking down again_] It is a dreadful thing to
be in a country where nobody understands civilized institutions. [_He
collapses on the bollard, struggling with his rising sobs_]. Excuse me.
Hay fever.

THE WOMAN [_taking a tuning-fork from her girdle and holding it to her
ear; then speaking into space on one note, like a chorister intoning
a psalm_] Burrin Pier Galway please send someone to take charge of a
discouraged shortliver who has escaped from his nurse male harmless
babbles unintelligibly with moments of sense distressed hysterical
foreign dress very funny has curious fringe of white sea-weed under his
chin.

THE GENTLEMAN. This is a gross impertinence. An insult.

THE WOMAN [_replacing her tuning-fork and addressing the elderly
gentleman_] These words mean nothing to me. In what capacity are you
here? How did you obtain permission to visit us?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_importantly_] Our Prime Minister, Mr Badger
Bluebin, has come to consult the oracle. He is my son-in-law. We are
accompanied by his wife and daughter: my daughter and granddaughter. I
may mention that General Aufsteig, who is one of our party, is really
the Emperor of Turania travelling incognito. I understand he has a
question to put to the oracle informally. I have come solely to visit
the country.

THE WOMAN. Why should you come to a place where you have no business?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Great Heavens, madam, can anything be more
natural? I shall be the only member of the Travellers' Club who has set
foot on these shores. Think of that! My position will be unique.

THE WOMAN. Is that an advantage? We have a person here who has lost both
legs in an accident. His position is unique. But he would much rather be
like everyone else.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. This is maddening. There is no analogy whatever
between the two cases.

THE WOMAN. They are both unique.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Conversation in this place seems to consist of
ridiculous quibbles. I am heartily tired of them.

THE WOMAN. I conclude that your Travellers' Club is an assembly of
persons who wish to be able to say that they have been in some place
where nobody else has been.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Of Course if you wish to sneer at us--

THE WOMAN. What is sneer?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_with a wild sob_] I shall drown myself.

_He makes desperately for the edge of the pier, but is confronted by
a man with the number one on his cap, who comes up the steps and
intercepts him. He is dressed like the woman, but a slight moustache
proclaims his sex._

THE MAN [_to the elderly gentleman_] Ah, here you are. I shall really
have to put a collar and lead on you if you persist in giving me the
slip like this.

THE WOMAN. Are you this stranger's nurse?

THE MAN. Yes. I am very tired of him. If I take my eyes off him for a
moment, he runs away and talks to everybody.

THE WOMAN [_after taking out her tuning-fork and sounding it, intones as
before_] Burrin Pier. Wash out. [_She puts up the fork, and addresses
the man_]. I sent a call for someone to take care of him. I have been
trying to talk to him; but I can understand very little of what he says.
You must take better care of him: he is badly discouraged already. If
I can be of any further use, Fusima, Gort, will find me. [_She goes
away_].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Any further use! She has been of no use to me.
She spoke to me without any introduction, like any improper female. And
she has made off with my shilling.

THE MAN. Please speak slowly. I cannot follow. What is a shilling? What
is an introduction? Improper female doesnt make sense.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Nothing seems to make sense here. All I can tell
you is that she was the most impenetrably stupid woman I have ever met
in the whole course of my life.

THE MAN. That cannot be. She cannot appear stupid to you. She is a
secondary, and getting on for a tertiary at that.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. What is a tertiary? Everybody here keeps talking
to me about primaries and secondaries and tertiaries as if people were
geological strata.

THE MAN. The primaries are in their first century. The secondaries are
in their second century. I am still classed as a primary [_he points to
his number_]; but I may almost call myself a secondary, as I shall be
ninety-five next January. The tertiaries are in their third century. Did
you not see the number two on her badge? She is an advanced secondary.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. That accounts for it. She is in her second
childhood.

THE MAN. Her second childhood! She is in her fifth childhood.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_again resorting to the bollard_] Oh! I cannot
bear these unnatural arrangements.

THE MAN [_impatient and helpless_] You shouldn't have come among us.
This is no place for you.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_nerved by indignation_] May I ask why? I am a
Vice-President of the Travellers' Club. I have been everywhere: I hold
the record in the Club for civilized countries.

THE MAN. What is a civilized country?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. It is--well, it is a civilized country.
[_Desperately_] I don't know: I--I--I--I shall go mad if you keep on
asking me to tell you things that everybody knows. Countries where you
can travel comfortably. Where there are good hotels. Excuse me; but,
though you say you are ninety-four, you are worse company than a child
of five with your eternal questions. Why not call me Daddy at once?

THE MAN. I did not know your name was Daddy.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. My name is Joseph Popham Bolge Bluebin Barlow,
O.M.

THE MAN. That is five men's names. Daddy is shorter. And O.M. will not
do here. It is our name for certain wild creatures, descendants of
the aboriginal inhabitants of this coast. They used to be called the
O'Mulligans. We will stick to Daddy.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. People will think I am your father.

THE MAN [_shocked_] Sh-sh! People here never allude to such
relationships. It is not quite delicate, is it? What does it matter
whether you are my father or not?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. My worthy nonagenarian friend: your faculties are
totally decayed. Could you not find me a guide of my own age?

THE MAN. A young person?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Certainly not. I cannot go about with a young
person.

THE MAN. Why?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Why! Why!! Why!!! Have you no moral sense?

THE MAN. I shall have to give you up. I cannot understand you.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. But you meant a young woman, didn't you?

THE MAN. I meant simply somebody of your own age. What difference does
it make whether the person is a man or a woman?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I could not have believed in the existence of
such scandalous insensibility to the elementary decencies of human
intercourse.

THE MAN. What are decencies?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_shrieking_] Everyone asks me that.

THE MAN [_taking out a tuning-fork and using it as the woman did_] Zozim
on Burrin Pier to Zoo Ennistymon I have found the discouraged shortliver
he has been talking to a secondary and is much worse I am too old he is
asking for someone of his own age or younger come if you can. [_He puts
up his fork and turns to the Elderly Gentleman_]. Zoo is a girl of
fifty, and rather childish at that. So perhaps she may make you happy.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Make me happy! A bluestocking of fifty! Thank
you.

THE MAN. Bluestocking? The effort to make out your meaning is fatiguing.
Besides, you are talking too much to me: I am old enough to discourage
you. Let us be silent until Zoo comes. [_He turns his back on the
Elderly Gentleman, and sits down on the edge of the pier, with his legs
dangling over the water_].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Certainly. I have no wish to force my
conversation on any man who does not desire it. Perhaps you would like
to take a nap. If so, pray do not stand on ceremony.

THE MAN. What is a nap?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_exasperated, going to him and speaking with
great precision and distinctness_] A nap, my friend, is a brief period
of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to
entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures. Sleep.
Sleep. [_Bawling into his ear_] Sleep.

THE MAN. I tell you I am nearly a secondary. I never sleep.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_awestruck_] Good Heavens!

_A young woman with the number one on her cap arrives by land. She looks
no older than Savvy Barnabas, whom she somewhat resembles, looked a
thousand years before. Younger, if anything._

THE YOUNG WOMAN. Is this the patient?

THE MAN [_scrambling up_] This is Zoo. [_To Zoo_] Call him Daddy.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_vehemently_] No.

THE MAN [_ignoring the interruption_] Bless you for taking him off my
hands! I have had as much of him as I can bear. [_He goes down the steps
and disappears_].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_ironically taking off his hat and making a
sweeping bow from the edge of the pier in the direction of the
Atlantic Ocean_] Good afternoon, sir; and thank you very much for your
extraordinary politeness, your exquisite consideration for my feelings,
your courtly manners. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. [_Clapping
his hat on again_] Pig! Ass!

ZOO [_laughs very heartily at him_]!!!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_turning sharply on her_] Good afternoon, madam.
I am sorry to have had to put your friend in his place; but I find that
here as elsewhere it is necessary to assert myself if I am to be treated
with proper consideration. I had hoped that my position as a guest would
protect me from insult.

ZOO. Putting my friend in his place. That is some poetic expression, is
it not? What does it mean?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Pray, is there no one in these islands who
understands plain English?

ZOO. Well, nobody except the oracles. They have to make a special
historical study of what we call the dead thought.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Dead thought! I have heard of the dead languages,
but never of the dead thought.

ZOO. Well, thoughts die sooner than languages. I understand your
language; but I do not always understand your thought. The oracles will
understand you perfectly. Have you had your consultation yet?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I did not come to consult the oracle, madam. I am
here simply as a gentleman travelling for pleasure in the company of my
daughter, who is the wife of the British Prime Minister, and of General
Aufsteig, who, I may tell you in confidence, is really the Emperor of
Turania, the greatest military genius of the age.

ZOO. Why should you travel for pleasure! Can you not enjoy yourself at
home?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I wish to see the World.

ZOO. It is too big. You can see a bit of it anywhere.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_out of patience_] Damn it, madam, you don't want
to spend your life looking at the same bit of it! [_Checking himself_] I
beg your pardon for swearing in your presence.

ZOO. Oh! That is swearing, is it? I have read about that. It sounds
quite pretty. Dammitmaddam, dammitmaddam, dammitmaddam, dammitmaddam.
Say it as often as you please: I like it.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_expanding with intense relief_] Bless you for
those profane but familiar words! Thank you, thank you. For the first
time since I landed in this terrible country I begin to feel at home.
The strain which was driving me mad relaxes: I feel almost as if I were
at the club. Excuse my taking the only available seat: I am not so young
as I was. [_He sits on the bollard_]. Promise me that you will not hand
me over to one of these dreadful tertiaries or secondaries or whatever
you call them.

ZOO. Never fear. They had no business to give you in charge to Zozim.
You see he is just on the verge of becoming a secondary; and these
adolescents will give themselves the airs of tertiaries. You naturally
feel more at home with a flapper like me. [_She makes herself
comfortable on the sacks_].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Flapper? What does that mean?

ZOO. It is an archaic word which we still use to describe a female who
is no longer a girl and is not yet quite adult.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. A very agreeable age to associate with, I find. I
am recovering rapidly. I have a sense of blossoming like a flower. May I
ask your name?

ZOO. Zoo.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Miss Zoo.

ZOO. Not Miss Zoo. Zoo.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Precisely. Er--Zoo what?

ZOO. No. Not Zoo What. Zoo. Nothing but Zoo.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_puzzled_] Mrs Zoo, perhaps.

ZOO. No. Zoo. Cant you catch it? Zoo.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Of course. Believe me, I did not really think you
were married: you are obviously too young; but here it is so hard to
feel sure--er--

ZOO [_hopelessly puzzled_] What?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Marriage makes a difference, you know. One can
say things to a married lady that would perhaps be in questionable taste
to anyone without that experience.

ZOO. You are getting out of my depth: I dont understand a word you are
saying. Married and questionable taste convey nothing to me. Stop,
though. Is married an old form of the word mothered?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Very likely. Let us drop the subject. Pardon me
for embarrassing you. I should not have mentioned it.

ZOO. What does embarrassing mean?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Well, really! I should have thought that so
natural and common a condition would be understood as long as human
nature lasted. To embarrass is to bring a blush to the cheek.

ZOO. What is a blush?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_amazed_] Dont you blush???

ZOO. Never heard of it. We have a word flush, meaning a rush of blood to
the skin. I have noticed it in my babies, but not after the age of two.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Your babies!!! I fear I am treading on very
delicate ground; but your appearance is extremely youthful; and if I may
ask how many--?

ZOO. Only four as yet. It is a long business with us. I specialize in
babies. My first was such a success that they made me go on. I--

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_reeling on the bollard_] Oh! dear!

ZOO. Whats the matter? Anything wrong?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. In Heaven's name, madam, how old are you?

ZOO. Fifty-six.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. My knees are trembling. I fear I am really ill.
Not so young as I was.

ZOO. I noticed that you are not strong on your legs yet. You have many
of the ways and weaknesses of a baby. No doubt that is why I feel called
on to mother you. You certainly are a very silly little Daddy.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_stimulated by indignation_] My name, I repeat,
is Joseph Popham Bolge Bluebin Barlow, O.M.

ZOO. What a ridiculously long name! I cant call you all that. What did
your mother call you?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. You recall the bitterest struggles of my
childhood. I was sensitive on the point. Children suffer greatly from
absurd nicknames. My mother thoughtlessly called me Iddy Toodles. I
was called Iddy until I went to school, when I made my first stand for
children's rights by insisting on being called at least Joe. At fifteen
I refused to answer to anything shorter than Joseph. At eighteen I
discovered that the name Joseph was supposed to indicate an unmanly
prudery because of some old story about a Joseph who rejected the
advances of his employer's wife: very properly in my opinion. I then
became Popham to my family and intimate friends, and Mister Barlow
to the rest of the world. My mother slipped back into Iddy when her
faculties began to fail her, poor woman; but I could not resent that, at
her age.

ZOO. Do you mean to say that your mother bothered about you after you
were ten?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Naturally, madam. She was my mother. What would
you have had her do?

ZOO. Go on to the next, of course. After eight or nine children become
quite uninteresting, except to themselves. I shouldnt know my two eldest
if I met them.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_again drooping_] I am dying. Let me die. I wish
to die.

ZOO [_going to him quickly and supporting him_] Hold up. Sit up
straight. Whats the matter?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_faintly_] My spine, I think. Shock. Concussion.

ZOO [_maternally_] Pow wow wow! What is there to shock you? [_Shaking
him playfully_] There! Sit up; and be good.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_still feebly_] Thank you. I am better now.

ZOO [_resuming her seat on the sacks_] But what was all the rest of that
long name for? There was a lot more of it. Blops Booby or something.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_impressively_] Bolge Bluebin, madam: a
historical name. Let me inform you that I can trace my family back for
more than a thousand years, from the Eastern Empire to its ancient seat
in these islands, to a time when two of my ancestors, Joyce Bolge
and Hengist Horsa Bluebin, wrestled with one another for the prime
ministership of the British Empire, and occupied that position
successively with a glory of which we can in these degenerate days form
but a faint conception. When I think of these mighty men, lions in war,
sages in peace, not babblers and charlatans like the pigmies who now
occupy their places in Baghdad, but strong silent men, ruling an empire
on which the sun never set, my eyes fill with tears: my heart bursts
with emotion: I feel that to have lived but to the dawn of manhood in
their day, and then died for them, would have been a nobler and happier
lot than the ignominious ease of my present longevity.

ZOO. Longevity! [_she laughs_].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Yes, madam, relative longevity. As it is, I have
to be content and proud to know that I am descended from both those
heroes.

ZOO. You must be descended from every Briton who was alive in their
time. Dont you know that?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Do not quibble, madam. I bear their names, Bolge
and Bluebin; and I hope I have inherited something of their majestic
spirit. Well, they were born in these islands. I repeat, these islands
were then, incredible as it now seems, the centre of the British Empire.
When that centre shifted to Baghdad, and the Englishman at last returned
to the true cradle of his race in Mesopotamia, the western islands were
cast off, as they had been before by the Roman Empire. But it was to the
British race, and in these islands, that the greatest miracle in history
occurred.

ZOO. Miracle?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Yes: the first man to live three hundred years
was an Englishman. The first, that is, since the contemporaries of
Methuselah.

ZOO. Oh, that!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Yes, that, as you call it so flippantly. Are you
aware, madam, that at that immortal moment the English race had lost
intellectual credit to such an extent that they habitually spoke of
one another as fatheads? Yet England is now a sacred grove to which
statesmen from all over the earth come to consult English sages who
speak with the experience of two and a half centuries of life. The land
that once exported cotton shirts and hardware now exports nothing but
wisdom. You see before you, madam, a man utterly weary of the week-end
riverside hotels of the Euphrates, the minstrels and pierrots on the
sands of the Persian Gulf, the toboggans and funiculars of the Hindoo
Koosh. Can you wonder that I turn, with a hungry heart, to the mystery
and beauty of these haunted islands, thronged with spectres from a magic
past, made holy by the footsteps of the wise men of the West. Consider
this island on which we stand, the last foothold of man on this side
of the Atlantic: this Ireland, described by the earliest bards as an
emerald gem set in a silver sea! Can I, a scion of the illustrious
British race, ever forget that when the Empire transferred its seat to
the East, and said to the turbulent Irish race which it had oppressed
but never conquered, 'At last we leave you to yourselves; and much good
may it do you,' the Irish as one man uttered the historic shout 'No:
we'll be damned if you do,' and emigrated to the countries where there
was still a Nationalist question, to India, Persia, and Corea, to
Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli. In these countries they were ever
foremost in the struggle for national independence; and the world rang
continually with the story of their sufferings and wrongs. And what poem
can do justice to the end, when it came at last? Hardly two hundred
years had elapsed when the claims of nationality were so universally
conceded that there was no longer a single country on the face of the
earth with a national grievance or a national movement. Think of the
position of the Irish, who had lost all their political faculties by
disuse except that of nationalist agitation, and who owed their position
as the most interesting race on earth solely to their sufferings! The
very countries they had helped to set free boycotted them as intolerable
bores. The communities which had once idolized them as the incarnation
of all that is adorable in the warm heart and witty brain, fled from
them as from a pestilence. To regain their lost prestige, the Irish
claimed the city of Jerusalem, on the ground that they were the lost
tribes of Israel; but on their approach the Jews abandoned the city
and redistributed themselves throughout Europe. It was then that these
devoted Irishmen, not one of whom had ever seen Ireland, were counselled
by an English Archbishop, the father of the oracles, to go back to their
own country. This had never once occurred to them, because there was
nothing to prevent them and nobody to forbid them. They jumped at the
suggestion. They landed here: here in Galway Bay, on this very ground.
When they reached the shore the older men and women flung themselves
down and passionately kissed the soil of Ireland, calling on the young
to embrace the earth that had borne their ancestors. But the young
looked gloomily on, and said 'There is no earth, only stone.' You will
see by looking round you why they said that: the fields here are of
stone: the hills are capped with granite. They all left for England next
day; and no Irishman ever again confessed to being Irish, even to his
own children; so that when that generation passed away the Irish race
vanished from human knowledge. And the dispersed Jews did the same lest
they should be sent back to Palestine. Since then the world, bereft of
its Jews and its Irish, has been a tame dull place. Is there no pathos
for you in this story? Can you not understand now why I am come to visit
the scene of this tragic effacement of a race of heroes and poets?

ZOO. We still tell our little children stories like that, to help them
to understand. But such things do not happen really. That scene of the
Irish landing here and kissing the ground might have happened to a
hundred people. It couldn't have happened to a hundred thousand: you
know that as well as I do. And what a ridiculous thing to call people
Irish because they live in Ireland! you might as well call them Airish
because they live in air. They must be just the same as other people.
Why do you shortlivers persist in making up silly stories about the
world and trying to act as if they were true? Contact with truth hurts
and frightens you: you escape from it into an imaginary vacuum in which
you can indulge your desires and hopes and loves and hates without any
obstruction from the solid facts of life. You love to throw dust in your
own eyes.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. It is my turn now, madam, to inform you that I do
not understand a single word you are saying. I should have thought that
the use of a vacuum for removing dust was a mark of civilization rather
than of savagery.

ZOO [_giving him up as hopeless_] Oh, Daddy, Daddy: I can hardly believe
that you are human, you are so stupid. It was well said of your people
in the olden days, 'Dust thou art; and to dust thou shalt return.'

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_nobly_] My body is dust, madam: not my soul.
What does it matter what my body is made of? the dust of the ground,
the particles of the air, or even the slime of the ditch? The important
thing is that when my Creator took it, whatever it was, He breathed into
its nostrils the breath of life; and Man became a living soul. Yes,
madam, a living soul. I am not the dust of the ground: I am a living
soul. That is an exalting, a magnificent thought. It is also a great
scientific fact. I am not interested in the chemicals and the microbes:
I leave them to the chumps and noodles, to the blockheads and the
muckrakers who are incapable of their own glorious destiny, and
unconscious of their own divinity. They tell me there are leucocytes
in my blood, and sodium and carbon in my flesh. I thank them for the
information, and tell them that there are blackbeetles in my kitchen,
washing soda in my laundry, and coal in my cellar. I do not deny their
existence; but I keep them in their proper place, which is not, if I may
be allowed to use an antiquated form of expression, the temple of the
Holy Ghost. No doubt you think me behind the times; but I rejoice in my
enlightenment; and I recoil from your ignorance, your blindness, your
imbecility. Humanly I pity you. Intellectually I despise you.

ZOO. Bravo, Daddy! You have the root of the matter in you. You will not
die of discouragement after all.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I have not the smallest intention of doing so,
madam. I am no longer young; and I have moments of weakness; but when
I approach this subject the divine spark in me kindles and glows, the
corruptible becomes incorruptible, and the mortal Bolge Bluebin Barlow
puts on immortality. On this ground I am your equal, even if you survive
me by ten thousand years.

ZOO. Yes; but what do we know about this breath of life that puffs you
up so exaltedly? Just nothing. So let us shake hands as cultivated
Agnostics, and change the subject.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Cultivated fiddlesticks, madam! You cannot change
this subject until the heavens and the earth pass away. I am not an
Agnostic: I am a gentleman. When I believe a thing I say I believe it:
when I don't believe it I say I don't believe it. I do not shirk my
responsibilities by pretending that I know nothing and therefore can
believe nothing. We cannot disclaim knowledge and shirk responsibility.
We must proceed on assumptions of some sort or we cannot form a human
society.

ZOO. The assumptions must be scientific, Daddy. We must live by science
in the long run.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I have the utmost respect, madam, for the
magnificent discoveries which we owe to science. But any fool can make
a discovery. Every baby has to discover more in the first years of its
life than Roger Bacon ever discovered in his laboratory. When I was
seven years old I discovered the sting of the wasp. But I do not ask
you to worship me on that account. I assure you, madam, the merest
mediocrities can discover the most surprising facts about the physical
universe as soon as they are civilized enough to have time to study
these things, and to invent instruments and apparatus for research. But
what is the consequence? Their discoveries discredit the simple stories
of our religion. At first we had no idea of astronomical space. We
believed the sky to be only the ceiling of a room as large as the earth,
with another room on top of it. Death was to us a going upstairs into
that room, or, if we did not obey the priests, going downstairs into
the coal cellar. We founded our religion, our morality, our laws, our
lessons, our poems, our prayers, on that simple belief. Well, the moment
men became astronomers and made telescopes, their belief perished. When
they could no longer believe in the sky, they found that they could no
longer believe in their Deity, because they had always thought of him
as living in the sky. When the priests themselves ceased to believe in
their Deity and began to believe in astronomy, they changed their name
and their dress, and called themselves doctors and men of science. They
set up a new religion in which there was no Deity, but only wonders
and miracles, with scientific instruments and apparatus as the wonder
workers. Instead of worshipping the greatness and wisdom of the Deity,
men gaped foolishly at the million billion miles of space and worshipped
the astronomer as infallible and omniscient. They built temples for his
telescopes. Then they looked into their own bodies with microscopes, and
found there, not the soul they had formerly believed in, but millions of
micro-organisms; so they gaped at these as foolishly as at the millions
of miles, and built microscope temples in which horrible sacrifices
were offered. They even gave their own bodies to be sacrificed by the
microscope man, who was worshipped, like the astronomer, as infallible
and omniscient. Thus our discoveries instead of increasing our wisdom,
only destroyed the little childish wisdom we had. All I can grant you is
that they increased our knowledge.

ZOO. Nonsense! Consciousness of a fact is not knowledge of it: if it
were, the fish would know more of the sea than the geographers and the
naturalists.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. That is an extremely acute remark, madam. The
dullest fish could not possibly know less of the majesty of the ocean
than many geographers and naturalists of my acquaintance.

ZOO. Just so. And the greatest fool on earth, by merely looking at a
mariners' compass, may become conscious of the fact that the needle
turns always to the pole. Is he any the less a fool with that
consciousness than he was without it?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Only a more conceited one, madam, no doubt.
Still, I do not quite see how you can be aware of the existence of a
thing without knowing it.

ZOO. Well, you can see a man without knowing him, can you not?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_illuminated_] Oh how true! Of course, of course.
There is a member of the Travellers' Club who has questioned the
veracity of an experience of mine at the South Pole. I see that man
almost every day when I am at home. But I refuse to know him.

ZOO. If you could see him much more distinctly through a magnifying
glass, or examine a drop of his blood through a microscope, or dissect
out all his organs and analyze them chemically, would you know him then?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Certainly not. Any such investigation could
only increase the disgust with which he inspires me, and make me more
determined than ever not to know him on any terms.

ZOO. Yet you would be much more conscious of him, would you not?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I should not allow that to commit me to any
familiarity with the fellow. I have been twice at the Summer Sports at
the South Pole; and this man pretended he had been to the North Pole,
which can hardly be said to exist, as it is in the middle of the sea. He
declared he had hung his hat on it.

ZOO [_laughing_] He knew that travellers are amusing only when they are
telling lies. Perhaps if you looked at that man through a microscope you
would find some good in him.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I do not want to find any good in him. Besides,
madam, what you have just said encourages me to utter an opinion of
mine which is so advanced! so intellectually daring! that I have never
ventured to confess to it before, lest I should be imprisoned for
blasphemy, or even burnt alive.

ZOO. Indeed! What opinion is that?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_after looking cautiously round_] I do not
approve of microscopes. I never have.

ZOO. You call that advanced! Oh, Daddy, that is pure obscurantism.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Call it so if you will, madam; but I maintain
that it is dangerous to shew too much to people who do not know what
they are looking at. I think that a man who is sane as long as he looks
at the world through his own eyes is very likely to become a dangerous
madman if he takes to looking at the world through telescopes and
microscopes. Even when he is telling fairy stories about giants and
dwarfs, the giants had better not be too big nor the dwarfs too small
and too malicious. Before the microscope came, our fairy stories only
made the children's flesh creep pleasantly, and did not frighten
grown-up persons at all. But the microscope men terrified themselves and
everyone else out of their wits with the invisible monsters they saw:
poor harmless little things that die at the touch of a ray of sunshine,
and are themselves the victims of all the diseases they are supposed to
produce! Whatever the scientific people may say, imagination without
microscopes was kindly and often courageous, because it worked on things
of which it had some real knowledge. But imagination with microscopes,
working on a terrifying spectacle of millions of grotesque creatures
of whose nature it had no knowledge, became a cruel, terror-stricken,
persecuting delirium. Are you aware, madam, that a general massacre
of men of science took place in the twenty-first century of the
pseudo-Christian era, when all their laboratories were demolished, and
all their apparatus destroyed?

ZOO. Yes: the shortlived are as savage in their advances as in their
relapses. But when Science crept back, it had been taught its place. The
mere collectors of anatomical or chemical facts were not supposed to
know more about Science than the collector of used postage stamps about
international trade or literature. The scientific terrorist who was
afraid to use a spoon or a tumbler until he had dipt it in some
poisonous acid to kill the microbes, was no longer given titles,
pensions, and monstrous powers over the bodies of other people: he was
sent to an asylum, and treated there until his recovery. But all that is
an old story: the extension of life to three hundred years has provided
the human race with capable leaders, and made short work of such
childish stuff.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_pettishly_] You seem to credit every advance in
civilization to your inordinately long lives. Do you not know that this
question was familiar to men who died before they had reached my own
age?

ZOO. Oh yes: one or two of them hinted at it in a feeble way. An
ancient writer whose name has come down to us in several forms, such
as Shakespear, Shelley, Sheridan, and Shoddy, has a remarkable passage
about your dispositions being horridly shaken by thoughts beyond the
reaches of your souls. That does not come to much, does it?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. At all events, madam, I may remind you, if you
come to capping ages, that whatever your secondaries and tertiaries may
be, you are younger than I am.

ZOO. Yes, Daddy; but it is not the number of years we have behind us,
but the number we have before us, that makes us careful and responsible
and determined to find out the truth about everything. What does it
matter to you whether anything is true or not? your flesh is as grass:
you come up like a flower, and wither in your second childhood. A lie
will last your time: it will not last mine. If I knew I had to die in
twenty years it would not be worth my while to educate myself: I should
not bother about anything but having a little pleasure while I lasted.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Young woman: you are mistaken. Shortlived as we
are, we--the best of us, I mean--regard civilization and learning, art
and science, as an ever-burning torch, which passes from the hand of one
generation to the hand of the next, each generation kindling it to a
brighter, prouder flame. Thus each lifetime, however short, contributes
a brick to a vast and growing edifice, a page to a sacred volume, a
chapter to a Bible, a Bible to a literature. We may be insects; but like
the coral insect we build islands which become continents: like the bee
we store sustenance for future communities. The individual perishes;
but the race is immortal. The acorn of today is the oak of the next
millennium. I throw my stone on the cairn and die; but later comers add
another stone and yet another; and lo! a mountain. I--

ZOO [_interrupts him by laughing heartily at him_]!!!!!!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_with offended dignity_] May I ask what I have
said that calls for this merriment?

ZOO. Oh, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, you are a funny little man, with your
torches, and your flames, and your bricks and edifices and pages and
volumes and chapters and coral insects and bees and acorns and stones
and mountains.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Metaphors, madam. Metaphors merely.

ZOO. Images, images, images. I was talking about men, not about images.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I was illustrating--not, I hope, quite
infelicitously--the great march of Progress. I was shewing you how,
shortlived as we orientals are, mankind gains in stature from generation
to generation, from epoch to epoch, from barbarism to civilization, from
civilization to perfection.

ZOO. I see. The father grows to be six feet high, and hands on his six
feet to his son, who adds another six feet and becomes twelve feet high,
and hands his twelve feet on to his son, who is full-grown at eighteen
feet, and so on. In a thousand years you would all be three or four
miles high. At that rate your ancestors Bilge and Bluebeard, whom you
call giants, must have been about quarter of an inch high.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I am not here to bandy quibbles and paradoxes
with a girl who blunders over the greatest names in history. I am in
earnest. I am treating a solemn theme seriously. I never said that the
son of a man six feet high would be twelve feet high.

ZOO. You didn't mean that?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Most certainly not.

ZOO. Then you didn't mean anything. Now listen to me, you little
ephemeral thing. I knew quite well what you meant by your torch handed
on from generation to generation. But every time that torch is handed
on, it dies down to the tiniest spark; and the man who gets it can
rekindle it only by his own light. You are no taller than Bilge or
Bluebeard; and you are no wiser. Their wisdom, such as it was, perished
with them: so did their strength, if their strength ever existed outside
your imagination. I do not know how old you are: you look about five
hundred--

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Five hundred! Really, madam--

ZOO [_continuing_]; but I know, of course, that you are an ordinary
shortliver. Well, your wisdom is only such wisdom as a man can have
before he has had experience enough to distinguish his wisdom from his
folly, his destiny from his delusions, his--

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. In short, such wisdom as your own.

ZOO. No, no, no, no. How often must I tell you that we are made wise not
by the recollections of our past, but by the responsibilities of our
future. I shall be more reckless when I am a tertiary than I am today.
If you cannot understand that, at least you must admit that I have
learnt from tertiaries. I have seen their work and lived under their
institutions. Like all young things I rebelled against them; and in
their hunger for new lights and new ideas they listened to me and
encouraged me to rebel. But my ways did not work; and theirs did; and
they were able to tell me why. They have no power over me except that
power: they refuse all other power; and the consequence is that there
are no limits to their power except the limits they set themselves. You
are a child governed by children, who make so many mistakes and are so
naughty that you are in continual rebellion against them; and as they
can never convince you that they are right: they can govern you only by
beating you, imprisoning you, torturing you, killing you if you disobey
them without being strong enough to kill or torture them.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. That may be an unfortunate fact. I condemn it and
deplore it. But our minds are greater than the facts. We know better.
The greatest ancient teachers, followed by the galaxy of Christs who
arose in the twentieth century, not to mention such comparatively modern
spiritual leaders as Blitherinjam, Tosh, and Spiffkins, all taught that
punishment and revenge, coercion and militarism, are mistakes, and that
the golden rule--

ZOO. [_interrupting_] Yes, yes, yes, Daddy: we longlived people know
that quite well. But did any of their disciples ever succeed in
governing you for a single day on their Christ-like principles? It
is not enough to know what is good: you must be able to do it. They
couldn't do it because they did not live long enough to find out how
to do it, or to outlive the childish passions that prevented them from
really wanting to do it. You know very well that they could only keep
order--such as it was--by the very coercion and militarism they were
denouncing and deploring. They had actually to kill one another for
preaching their own gospel, or be killed themselves.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. The blood of the martyrs, madam, is the seed of
the Church.

ZOO. More images, Daddy! The blood of the shortlived falls on stony
ground.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_rising, very testy_] You are simply mad on the
subject of longevity. I wish you would change it. It is rather personal
and in bad taste. Human nature is human nature, longlived or shortlived,
and always will be.

ZOO. Then you give up the idea of progress? You cry off the torch, and
the brick, and the acorn, and all the rest of it?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I do nothing of the sort. I stand for progress
and for freedom broadening down from precedent to precedent.

ZOO. You are certainly a true Briton.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I am proud of it. But in your mouth I feel that
the compliment hides some insult; so I do not thank you for it.

ZOO. All I meant was that though Britons sometimes say quite clever
things and deep things as well as silly and shallow things, they always
forget them ten minutes after they have uttered them.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Leave it at that, madam: leave it at that.
[_He sits down again_]. Even a Pope is not expected to be continually
pontificating. Our flashes of inspiration shew that our hearts are in
the right place.

ZOO. Of course. You cannot keep your heart in any place but the right
place.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Tcha!

ZOO. But you can keep your hands in the wrong place. In your neighbor's
pockets, for example. So, you see, it is your hands that really matter.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_exhausted_] Well, a woman must have the last
word. I will not dispute it with you.

ZOO. Good. Now let us go back to the really interesting subject of our
discussion. You remember? The slavery of the shortlived to images and
metaphors.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_aghast_] Do you mean to say, madam, that after
having talked my head off, and reduced me to despair and silence by your
intolerable loquacity, you actually propose to begin all over again? I
shall leave you at once.

ZOO. You must not. I am your nurse; and you must stay with me.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I absolutely decline to do anything of the sort
[_he rises and walks away with marked dignity_].

ZOO [_using her tuning-fork_] Zoo on Burrin Pier to Oracle Police at
Ennistymon have you got me?... What?... I am picking you up now but you
are flat to my pitch.... Just a shade sharper.... That's better: still a
little more.... Got you: right. Isolate Burrin Pier quick.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_is heard to yell_] Oh!

ZOO [_still intoning_] Thanks.... Oh nothing serious I am nursing a
shortliver and the silly creature has run away he has discouraged
himself very badly by gadding about and talking to secondaries and I
must keep him strictly to heel.

_The Elderly Gentleman returns, indignant._

ZOO. Here he is you can release the Pier thanks. Goodbye. [_She puts up
her tuning-fork_].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. This is outrageous. When I tried to step off the
pier on to the road, I received a shock, followed by an attack of pins
and needles which ceased only when I stepped back on to the stones.

ZOO. Yes: there is an electric hedge there. It is a very old and very
crude method of keeping animals from straying.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. We are perfectly familiar with it in Baghdad,
madam; but I little thought I should live to have it ignominiously
applied to myself. You have actually Kiplingized me.

ZOO. Kiplingized! What is that?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. About a thousand years ago there were two authors
named Kipling. One was an eastern and a writer of merit: the other,
being a western, was of course only an amusing barbarian. He is said to
have invented the electric hedge. I consider that in using it on me you
have taken a very great liberty.

ZOO. What is a liberty?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_exasperated_] I shall not explain, madam. I
believe you know as well as I do. [_He sits down on the bollard in
dudgeon_].

ZOO. No: even you can tell me things I do not know. Havnt you noticed
that all the time you have been here we have been asking you questions?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Noticed it! It has almost driven me mad. Do you
see my white hair? It was hardly grey when I landed: there were patches
of its original auburn still distinctly discernible.

ZOO. That is one of the symptoms of discouragement. But have you noticed
something much more important to yourself: that is, that you have never
asked us any questions, although we know so much more than you do?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I am not a child, madam. I believe I have had
occasion to say that before. And I am an experienced traveller. I know
that what the traveller observes must really exist, or he could not
observe it. But what the natives tell him is invariably pure fiction.

ZOO. Not here, Daddy. With us life is too long for telling lies. They
all get found out. Youd better ask me questions while you have the
chance.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. If I have occasion to consult the oracle I shall
address myself to a proper one: to a tertiary: not to a primary flapper
playing at being an oracle. If you are a nurserymaid, attend to your
duties; and do not presume to ape your elders.

ZOO. [_rising ominously and reddening_] You silly--

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_thundering_] Silence! Do you hear! Hold your
tongue.

ZOO. Something very disagreeable is happening to me. I feel hot all
over. I have a horrible impulse to injure you. What have you done to me?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_triumphant_] Aha! I have made you blush. Now you
know what blushing means. Blushing with shame!

ZOO. Whatever you are doing, it is something so utterly evil that if you
do not stop I will kill you.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_apprehending his danger_] Doubtless you think it
safe to threaten an old man--

ZOO [_fiercely_] Old! You are a child: an evil child. We kill evil
children here. We do it even against our own wills by instinct. Take
care.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_rising with crestfallen courtesy_] I did not
mean to hurt your feelings. I--[_swallowing the apology with an effort_]
I beg your pardon. [_He takes off his hat, and bows_].

ZOO. What does that mean?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I withdraw what I said.

ZOO. How can you withdraw what you said?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I can say no more than that I am sorry.

ZOO. You have reason to be. That hideous sensation you gave me is
subsiding; but you have had a very narrow escape. Do not attempt to kill
me again; for at the first sign in your voice or face I shall strike you
dead.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. _I_ attempt to kill you! What a monstrous
accusation!

ZOO [_frowns_]!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_prudently correcting himself_] I mean
misunderstanding. I never dreamt of such a thing. Surely you cannot
believe that I am a murderer.

ZOO. I know you are a murderer. It is not merely that you threw words at
me as if they were stones, meaning to hurt me. It was the instinct to
kill that you roused in me. I did not know it was in my nature: never
before has it wakened and sprung out at me, warning me to kill or be
killed. I must now reconsider my whole political position. I am no
longer a Conservative.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_dropping his hat_] Gracious Heavens! you have
lost your senses. I am at the mercy of a madwoman: I might have known it
from the beginning. I can bear no more of this. [_Offering his chest for
the sacrifice_] Kill me at once; and much good may my death do you!

ZOO. It would be useless unless all the other shortlivers were killed
at the same time. Besides, it is a measure which should be taken
politically and constitutionally, not privately. However, I am prepared
to discuss it with you.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. No, no, no. I had much rather discuss your
intention of withdrawing from the Conservative party. How the
Conservatives have tolerated your opinions so far is more than I can
imagine: I can only conjecture that you have contributed very liberally
to the party funds. [_He picks up his hat, and sits down again_].

ZOO. Do not babble so senselessly: our chief political controversy is
the most momentous in the world for you and your like.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_interested_] Indeed? Pray, may I ask what it is?
I am a keen politician, and may perhaps be of some use. [_He puts on his
hat, cocking it slightly_].

ZOO. We have two great parties: the Conservative party and the
Colonization party. The Colonizers are of opinion that we should
increase our numbers and colonize. The Conservatives hold that we should
stay as we are, confined to these islands, a race apart, wrapped up in
the majesty of our wisdom on a soil held as holy ground for us by an
adoring world, with our sacred frontier traced beyond dispute by the
sea. They contend that it is our destiny to rule the world, and that
even when we were shortlived we did so. They say that our power and our
peace depend on our remoteness, our exclusiveness, our separation, and
the restriction of our numbers. Five minutes ago that was my political
faith. Now I do not think there should be any shortlived people at all.
[_She throws herself again carelessly on the sacks_].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Am I to infer that you deny my right to live
because I allowed myself--perhaps injudiciously--to give you a slight
scolding?

ZOO. Is it worth living for so short a time? Are you any good to
yourself?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_stupent_] Well, upon my soul!

ZOO. It is such a very little soul. You only encourage the sin of pride
in us, and keep us looking down at you instead of up to something higher
than ourselves.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Is not that a selfish view, madam? Think of the
good you do us by your oracular counsels!

ZOO. What good have our counsels ever done you? You come to us for
advice when you know you are in difficulties. But you never know you are
in difficulties until twenty years after you have made the mistakes that
led to them; and then it is too late. You cannot understand our advice:
you often do more mischief by trying to act on it than if you had been
left to your own childish devices. If you were not childish you would
not come to us at all: you would learn from experience that your
consultations of the oracle are never of any real help to you. You draw
wonderful imaginary pictures of us, and write fictitious tales and poems
about our beneficent operations in the past, our wisdom, our justice,
our mercy: stories in which we often appear as sentimental dupes of your
prayers and sacrifices; but you do it only to conceal from yourselves
the truth that you are incapable of being helped by us. Your Prime
Minister pretends that he has come to be guided by the oracle; but we
are not deceived: we know quite well that he has come here so that
when he goes back he may have the authority and dignity of one who has
visited the holy islands and spoken face to face with the ineffable
ones. He will pretend that all the measures he wishes to take for his
own purposes have been enjoined on him by the oracle.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. But you forget that the answers of the oracle
cannot be kept secret or misrepresented. They are written and
promulgated. The Leader of the Opposition can obtain copies. All the
nations know them. Secret diplomacy has been totally abolished.

ZOO. Yes: you publish documents; but they are garbled or forged. And
even if you published our real answers it would make no difference,
because the shortlived cannot interpret the plainest writings. Your
scriptures command you in the plainest terms to do exactly the contrary
of everything your own laws and chosen rulers command and execute. You
cannot defy Nature. It is a law of Nature that there is a fixed relation
between conduct and length of life.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I have never heard of any such law, madam.

ZOO. Well, you are hearing of it now.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Let me tell you that we shortlivers, as you call
us, have lengthened our lives very considerably.

ZOO. How?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. By saving time. By enabling men to cross the
ocean in an afternoon, and to see and speak to one another when they are
thousands of miles apart. We hope shortly to organize their labor, and
press natural forces into their service, so scientifically that the
burden of labor will cease to be perceptible, leaving common men more
leisure than they will know what to do with.

ZOO. Daddy: the man whose life is lengthened in this way may be busier
than a savage; but the difference between such men living seventy years
and those living three hundred would be all the greater; for to a
shortliver increase of years is only increase of sorrow; but to a
long-liver every extra year is a prospect which forces him to stretch
his faculties to the utmost to face it. Therefore I say that we who
live three hundred years can be of no use to you who live less than a
hundred, and that our true destiny is not to advise and govern you, but
to supplant and supersede you. In that faith I now declare myself a
Colonizer and an Exterminator.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Oh, steady! steady! Pray! pray! Reflect, I
implore you. It is possible to colonize without exterminating the
natives. Would you treat us less mercifully than our barbarous
forefathers treated the Redskin and the Negro? Are we not, as Britons,
entitled at least to some reservations?

ZOO. What is the use of prolonging the agony? You would perish slowly
in our presence, no matter what we did to preserve you. You were almost
dead when I took charge of you today, merely because you had talked for
a few minutes to a secondary. Besides, we have our own experience to go
upon. Have you never heard that our children occasionally revert to the
ancestral type, and are born shortlived?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_eagerly_] Never. I hope you will not be offended
if I say that it would be a great comfort to me if I could be placed in
charge of one of those normal individuals.

ZOO. Abnormal, you mean. What you ask is impossible: we weed them all
out.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. When you say that you weed them out, you send
a cold shiver down my spine. I hope you don't mean that you--that
you--that you assist Nature in any way?

ZOO. Why not? Have you not heard the saying of the Chinese sage Dee
Ning, that a good garden needs weeding? But it is not necessary for us
to interfere. We are naturally rather particular as to the conditions on
which we consent to live. One does not mind the accidental loss of an
arm or a leg or an eye: after all, no one with two legs is unhappy
because he has not three; so why should a man with one be unhappy
because he has not two? But infirmities of mind and temper are quite
another matter. If one of us has no self-control, or is too weak to bear
the strain of our truthful life without wincing, or is tormented by
depraved appetites and superstitions, or is unable to keep free from
pain and depression, he naturally becomes discouraged, and refuses to
live.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Good Lord! Cuts his throat, do you mean?

ZOO. No: why should he cut his throat? He simply dies. He wants to. He
is out of countenance, as we call it.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Well!!! But suppose he is depraved enough not to
want to die, and to settle the difficulty by killing all the rest of
you?

ZOO. Oh, he is one of the thoroughly degenerate shortlivers whom we
occasionally produce. He emigrates.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. And what becomes of him then?

ZOO. You shortlived people always think very highly of him. You accept
him as what you call a great man.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. You astonish me; and yet I must admit that what
you tell me accounts for a great deal of the little I know of the
private life of our great men. We must be very convenient to you as a
dumping place for your failures.

ZOO. I admit that.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Good. Then if you carry out your plan of
colonization, and leave no shortlived countries in the world, what will
you do with your undesirables?

ZOO. Kill them. Our tertiaries are not at all squeamish about killing.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Gracious Powers!

ZOO [_glancing up at the sun_] Come. It is just sixteen o'clock; and you
have to join your party at half-past in the temple in Galway.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_rising_] Galway! Shall I at last be able to
boast of having seen that magnificent city?

ZOO. You will be disappointed: we have no cities. There is a temple of
the oracle: that is all.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Alas! and I came here to fulfil two
long-cherished dreams. One was to see Galway. It has been said, 'See
Galway and die.' The other was to contemplate the ruins of London.

ZOO. Ruins! We do not tolerate ruins. Was London a place of any
importance?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_amazed_] What! London! It was the mightiest city
of antiquity. [_Rhetorically_] Situate just where the Dover Road crosses
the Thames, it--

ZOO [_curtly interrupting_] There is nothing there now. Why should
anybody pitch on such a spot to live? The nearest houses are at a place
called Strand-on-the-Green: it is very old. Come. We shall go across the
water. [_She goes down the steps_].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Sic transit gloria mundi!

ZOO [_from below_] What did you say?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_despairingly_] Nothing. You would not
understand. [_He goes down the steps_].



ACT II


_A courtyard before the columned portico of a temple. The temple door
is in the middle of the portico. A veiled and robed woman of majestic
carriage passes along behind the columns towards the entrance. From the
opposite direction a man of compact figure, clean-shaven, saturnine, and
self-centred: in short, very like Napoleon I, and wearing a military
uniform of Napoleonic cut, marches with measured steps; places his hand
in his lapel in the traditional manner; and fixes the woman with his
eye. She stops, her attitude expressing haughty amazement at his
audacity. He is on her right: she on his left._

NAPOLEON [_impressively_] I am the Man of Destiny.

THE VEILED WOMAN [_unimpressed_] How did you get in here?

NAPOLEON. I walked in. I go on until I am stopped. I never am stopped. I
tell you I am the Man of Destiny.

THE VEILED WOMAN. You will be a man of very short destiny if you wander
about here without one of our children to guide you. I suppose you
belong to the Baghdad envoy.

NAPOLEON. I came with him; but I do not belong to him. I belong to
myself. Direct me to the oracle if you can. If not, do not waste my
time.

THE VEILED WOMAN. Your time, poor creature, is short. I will not waste
it. Your envoy and his party will be here presently. The consultation of
the oracle is arranged for them, and will take place according to the
prescribed ritual. You can wait here until they come [_she turns to go
into the temple_].

NAPOLEON. I never wait. [_She stops_]. The prescribed ritual is,
I believe, the classical one of the pythoness on her tripod, the
intoxicating fumes arising from the abyss, the convulsions of the
priestess as she delivers the message of the God, and so on. That sort
of thing does not impose on me: I use it myself to impose on simpletons.
I believe that what is, is. I know that what is not, is not. The antics
of a woman sitting on a tripod and pretending to be drunk do not
interest me. Her words are put into her mouth, not by a god, but by a
man three hundred years old, who has had the capacity to profit by his
experience. I wish to speak to that man face to face, without mummery or
imposture.

THE VEILED WOMAN. You seem to be an unusually sensible person. But there
is no old man. I am the oracle on duty today. I am on my way to take my
place on the tripod, and go through the usual mummery, as you rightly
call it, to impress your friend the envoy. As you are superior to that
kind of thing, you may consult me now. [_She leads the way into the
middle of the courtyard_]. What do you want to know?

NAPOLEON [_following her_] Madam: I have not come all this way to
discuss matters of State with a woman. I must ask you to direct me to
one of your oldest and ablest men.

THE ORACLE. None of our oldest and ablest men or women would dream of
wasting their time on you. You would die of discouragement in their
presence in less than three hours.

NAPOLEON. You can keep this idle fable of discouragement for people
credulous enough to be intimidated by it, madam. I do not believe in
metaphysical forces.

THE ORACLE. No one asks you to. A field is something physical, is it
not. Well, I have a field.

NAPOLEON. I have several million fields. I am Emperor of Turania.

THE ORACLE. You do not understand. I am not speaking of an agricultural
field. Do you not know that every mass of matter in motion carries with
it an invisible gravitational field, every magnet an invisible magnetic
field, and every living organism a mesmeric field? Even you have a
perceptible mesmeric field. Feeble as it is, it is the strongest I have
yet observed in a shortliver.

NAPOLEON. By no means feeble, madam. I understand you now; and I may
tell you that the strongest characters blench in my presence, and submit
to my domination. But I do not call that a physical force.

THE ORACLE. What else do you call it, pray? Our physicists deal with it.
Our mathematicians express its measurements in algebraic equations.

NAPOLEON. Do you mean that they could measure mine?

THE ORACLE. Yes: by a figure infinitely near to zero. Even in us the
force is negligible during our first century of life. In our second it
develops quickly, and becomes dangerous to shortlivers who venture into
its field. If I were not veiled and robed in insulating material you
could not endure my presence; and I am still a young woman: one hundred
and seventy if you wish to know exactly.

NAPOLEON [_folding his arms_] I am not intimidated: no woman alive, old
or young, can put me out of countenance. Unveil, madam. Disrobe. You
will move this temple as easily as shake me.

THE ORACLE. Very well [_she throws back her veil_].

NAPOLEON [_shrieking, staggering, and covering his eyes_] No. Stop. Hide
your face again. [_Shutting his eyes and distractedly clutching at his
throat and heart_] Let me go. Help! I am dying.

THE ORACLE. Do you still wish to consult an older person?

NAPOLEON. No, no. The veil, the veil, I beg you.

THE ORACLE [_replacing the veil_] So.

NAPOLEON. Ouf! One cannot always be at one's best. Twice before in my
life I have lost my nerve and behaved like a poltroon. But I warn you
not to judge my quality by these involuntary moments.

THE ORACLE. I have no occasion to judge of your quality. You want my
advice. Speak quickly; or I shall go about my business.

NAPOLEON [_After a moment's hesitation, sinks respectfully on one knee_]
I--

THE ORACLE. Oh, rise, rise. Are you so foolish as to offer me this
mummery which even you despise?

NAPOLEON [_rising_] I knelt in spite of myself. I compliment you on your
impressiveness, madam.

THE ORACLE [_impatiently_] Time! time! time! time!

NAPOLEON. You will not grudge me the necessary time, madam, when you
know my case. I am a man gifted with a certain specific talent in a
degree altogether extraordinary. I am not otherwise a very extraordinary
person: my family is not influential; and without this talent I should
cut no particular figure in the world.

THE ORACLE. Why cut a figure in the world?

NAPOLEON. Superiority will make itself felt, madam. But when I say I
possess this talent I do not express myself accurately. The truth is
that my talent possesses me. It is genius. It drives me to exercise it.
I must exercise it. I am great when I exercise it. At other moments I am
nobody.

THE ORACLE. Well, exercise it. Do you need an oracle to tell you that?

NAPOLEON. Wait. This talent involves the shedding of human blood.

THE ORACLE. Are you a surgeon, or a dentist?

NAPOLEON. Psha! You do not appreciate me, madam. I mean the shedding of
oceans of blood, the death of millions of men.

THE ORACLE. They object, I suppose.

NAPOLEON. Not at all. They adore me.

THE ORACLE. Indeed!

NAPOLEON. I have never shed blood with my own hand. They kill each
other: they die with shouts of triumph on their lips. Those who die
cursing do not curse me. My talent is to organize this slaughter; to
give mankind this terrible joy which they call glory; to let loose the
devil in them that peace has bound in chains.

THE ORACLE. And you? Do you share their joy?

NAPOLEON. Not at all. What satisfaction is it to me to see one fool
pierce the entrails of another with a bayonet? I am a man of princely
character, but of simple personal tastes and habits. I have the virtues
of a laborer: industry and indifference to personal comfort. But I must
rule, because I am so superior to other men that it is intolerable to
me to be misruled by them. Yet only as a slayer can I become a ruler. I
cannot be great as a writer: I have tried and failed. I have no talent
as a sculptor or painter; and as lawyer, preacher, doctor, or actor,
scores of second-rate men can do as well as I, or better. I am not even
a diplomatist: I can only play my trump card of force. What I can do
is to organize war. Look at me! I seem a man like other men, because
nine-tenths of me is common humanity. But the other tenth is a faculty
for seeing things as they are that no other man possesses.

THE ORACLE. You mean that you have no imagination?

NAPOLEON [_forcibly_] I mean that I have the only imagination worth
having: the power of imagining things as they are, even when I cannot
see them. You feel yourself my superior, I know: nay, you are my
superior: have I not bowed my knee to you by instinct? Yet I challenge
you to a test of our respective powers. Can you calculate what the
methematicians call vectors, without putting a single algebraic symbol
on paper? Can you launch ten thousand men across a frontier and a chain
of mountains and know to a mile exactly where they will be at the end
of seven weeks? The rest is nothing: I got it all from the books at my
military school. Now this great game of war, this playing with armies
as other men play with bowls and skittles, is one which I must go on
playing, partly because a man must do what he can and not what he would
like to do, and partly because, if I stop, I immediately lose my power
and become a beggar in the land where I now make men drunk with glory.

THE ORACLE. No doubt then you wish to know how to extricate yourself
from this unfortunate position?

NAPOLEON. It is not generally considered unfortunate, madam. Supremely
fortunate rather.

THE ORACLE. If you think so, go on making them drunk with glory. Why
trouble me with their folly and your vectors?

NAPOLEON. Unluckily, madam, men are not only heroes: they are also
cowards. They desire glory; but they dread death.

THE ORACLE. Why should they? Their lives are too short to be worth
living. That is why they think your game of war worth playing.

NAPOLEON. They do not look at it quite in that way. The most worthless
soldier wants to live for ever. To make him risk being killed by the
enemy I have to convince him that if he hesitates he will inevitably be
shot at dawn by his own comrades for cowardice.

THE ORACLE. And if his comrades refuse to shoot him?

NAPOLEON. They will be shot too, of course.

THE ORACLE. By whom?

NAPOLEON. By their comrades.

THE ORACLE. And if they refuse?

NAPOLEON. Up to a certain point they do not refuse.

THE ORACLE. But when that point is reached, you have to do the shooting
yourself, eh?

NAPOLEON. Unfortunately, madam, when that point is reached, they shoot
me.

THE ORACLE. Mf! It seems to me they might as well shoot you first as
last. Why don't they?

NAPOLEON. Because their love of fighting, their desire for glory, their
shame of being branded as dastards, their instinct to test themselves in
terrible trials, their fear of being killed or enslaved by the enemy,
their belief that they are defending their hearths and homes, overcome
their natural cowardice, and make them willing not only to risk their
own lives but to kill everyone who refuses to take that risk. But if war
continues too long, there comes a time when the soldiers, and also the
taxpayers who are supporting and munitioning them, reach a condition
which they describe as being fed up. The troops have proved their
courage, and want to go home and enjoy in peace the glory it has earned
them. Besides, the risk of death for each soldier becomes a certainty if
the fighting goes on for ever: he hopes to escape for six months, but
knows he cannot escape for six years. The risk of bankruptcy for the
citizen becomes a certainty in the same way. Now what does this mean for
me?

THE ORACLE. Does that matter in the midst of such calamity?

NAPOLEON. Psha! madam: it is the only thing that matters: the value
of human life is the value of the greatest living man. Cut off that
infinitesimal layer of grey matter which distinguishes my brain from
that of the common man, and you cut down the stature of humanity from
that of a giant to that of a nobody. I matter supremely: my soldiers do
not matter at all: there are plenty more where they came from. If you
kill me, or put a stop to my activity (it is the same thing), the
nobler part of human life perishes. You must save the world from
that catastrophe, madam. War has made me popular, powerful, famous,
historically immortal. But I foresee that if I go on to the end it will
leave me execrated, dethroned, imprisoned, perhaps executed. Yet if I
stop fighting I commit suicide as a great man and become a common one.
How am I to escape the horns of this tragic dilemma? Victory I
can guarantee: I am invincible. But the cost of victory is the
demoralization, the depopulation, the ruin of the victors no less than
of the vanquished. How am I to satisfy my genius by fighting until I
die? that is my question to you.

THE ORACLE. Were you not rash to venture into these sacred islands with
such a question on your lips? Warriors are not popular here, my friend.

NAPOLEON. If a soldier were restrained by such a consideration, madam,
he would no longer be a soldier. Besides [_he produces a pistol_], I
have not come unarmed.

THE ORACLE. What is that thing?

NAPOLEON. It is an instrument of my profession, madam. I raise this
hammer; I point the barrel at you; I pull this trigger that is against
my forefinger; and you fall dead.

THE ORACLE. Shew it to me [_she puts out her hand to take it from him_].

NAPOLEON [_retreating a step_] Pardon me, madam. I never trust my life
in the hands of a person over whom I have no control.

THE ORACLE [_sternly_] Give it to me [_she raises her hand to her
veil_].

NAPOLEON [_dropping the pistol and covering his eyes_] Quarter! Kamerad!
Take it, madam [_he kicks it towards her_]: I surrender.

THE ORACLE. Give me that thing. Do you expect me to stoop for it?

NAPOLEON [_taking his hands from his eyes with an effort_] A poor
victory, madam [_he picks up the pistol and hands it to her_]: there was
no vector strategy needed to win it. [Making a pose of his humiliation]
But enjoy your triumph: you have made me--ME! Cain Adamson Charles
Napoleon! Emperor of Turania! cry for quarter.

THE ORACLE. The way out of your difficulty, Cain Adamson, is very
simple.

NAPOLEON [_eagerly_] Good. What is it?

THE ORACLE. To die before the tide of glory turns. Allow me [_she shoots
him_].

_He falls with a shriek. She throws the pistol away and goes haughtily
into the temple._

NAPOLEON [_scrambling to his feet_] Murderess! Monster! She-devil!
Unnatural, inhuman wretch! You deserve to be hanged, guillotined, broken
on the wheel, burnt alive. No sense of the sacredness of human life! No
thought for my wife and children! Bitch! Sow! Wanton! [_He picks up the
pistol_]. And missed me at five yards! Thats a woman all over.

_He is going away whence he came when Zoo arrives and confronts him
at the head of a party consisting of the British Envoy, the Elderly
Gentleman, the Envoy's wife, and her daughter, aged about eighteen. The
envoy, a typical politician, looks like an imperfectly reformed criminal
disguised by a good tailor. The dress of the ladies is coeval with that
of the Elderly Gentleman, and suitable for public official ceremonies in
western capitals at the XVIII-XIX fin de siècle._

_They file in under the portico. Zoo immediately comes out imperiously
to Napoleon's right, whilst the Envoy's wife hurries effusively to his
left. The Envoy meanwhile passes along behind the columns to the door,
followed by his daughter. The Elderly Gentleman stops just where he
entered, to see why Zoo has swooped so abruptly on the Emperor of
Turania._

ZOO [_to Napoleon, severely_] What are you doing here by yourself? You
have no business to go about here alone. What was that noise just now?
What is that in your hand?

_Napoleon glares at her in speechless fury; pockets the pistol; and
produces a whistle._

THE ENVOY'S WIFE. Arnt you coming with us to the oracle, sire?

NAPOLEON. To hell with the oracle, and with you too [_he turns to go_]!


    THE ENVOY'S WIFE} [_together_] {Oh, sire!!
    ZOO} {Where are you going?}


NAPOLEON. To fetch the police. [_He goes out past Zoo, almost jostling
her, and blowing piercing blasts on his whistle_].

ZOO [_whipping out her tuning-fork and intoning_] Hallo Galway Central.
[_The whistling continues_]. Stand by to isolate. [_To the Elderly
Gentleman, who is staring after the whistling Emperor_] How far has he
gone?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. To that curious statue of a fat old man.

ZOO [_quickly, intoning_] Isolate the Falstaff monument isolate hard.
Paralyze--[_the whistling stops_]. Thank you. [_She puts up her
tuning-fork_]. He shall not move a muscle until I come to fetch him.

THE ENVOY'S WIFE. Oh! he will be frightfully angry! Did you hear what he
said to me?

ZOO. Much we care for his anger!

THE DAUGHTER [_coming forward between her mother and Zoo_]. Please,
madam, whose statue is it? and where can I buy a picture postcard of it?
It is so funny. I will take a snapshot when we are coming back; but they
come out so badly sometimes.

ZOO. They will give you pictures and toys in the temple to take away
with you. The story of the statue is too long. It would bore you [_she
goes past them across the courtyard to get rid of them_].

THE WIFE [_gushing_] Oh no, I assure you.

THE DAUGHTER [_copying her mother_] We should be so interested.

ZOO. Nonsense! All I can tell you about it is that a thousand years ago,
when the whole world was given over to you shortlived people, there was
a war called the War to end War. In the war which followed it about ten
years later, hardly any soldiers were killed; but seven of the capital
cities of Europe were wiped out of existence. It seems to have been a
great joke: for the statesmen who thought they had sent ten million
common men to their deaths were themselves blown into fragments with
their houses and families, while the ten million men lay snugly in the
caves they had dug for themselves. Later on even the houses escaped; but
their inhabitants were poisoned by gas that spared no living soul.
Of course the soldiers starved and ran wild; and that was the end of
pseudo-Christian civilization. The last civilized thing that happened
was that the statesmen discovered that cowardice was a great patriotic
virtue; and a public monument was erected to its first preacher, an
ancient and very fat sage called Sir John Falstaff. Well [_pointing_],
thats Falstaff.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_coming from the portico to his granddaughter's
right_] Great Heavens! And at the base of this monstrous poltroon's
statue the War God of Turania is now gibbering impotently.

ZOO. Serve him right! War God indeed!

THE ENVOY [_coming between his wife and Zoo_] I don't know any history:
a modern Prime Minister has something better to do than sit reading
books; but--

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_interrupting him encouragingly_] You make
history, Ambrose.

THE ENVOY. Well, perhaps I do; and perhaps history makes me. I hardly
recognize myself in the newspapers sometimes, though I suppose leading
articles are the materials of history, as you might say. But what I want
to know is, how did war come back again? and how did they make those
poisonous gases you speak of? We should be glad to know; for they might
come in very handy if we have to fight Turania. Of course I am all for
peace, and don't hold with the race of armaments in principle; still, we
must keep ahead or be wiped out.

ZOO. You can make the gases for yourselves when your chemists find out
how. Then you will do as you did before: poison each other until there
are no chemists left, and no civilization. You will then begin all over
again as half-starved ignorant savages, and fight with boomerangs
and poisoned arrows until you work up to the poison gases and high
explosives once more, with the same result. That is, unless we have
sense enough to make an end of this ridiculous game by destroying you.

THE ENVOY [_aghast_] Destroying us!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I told you, Ambrose. I warned you.

THE ENVOY. But--

ZOO [_impatiently_] I wonder what Zozim is doing. He ought to be here to
receive you.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Do you mean that rather insufferable young man
whom you found boring me on the pier?

ZOO. Yes. He has to dress-up in a Druid's robe, and put on a wig and a
long false beard, to impress you silly people. I have to put on a purple
mantle. I have no patience with such mummery; but you expect it from us;
so I suppose it must be kept up. Will you wait here until Zozim comes,
please [_she turns to enter the temple_].

THE ENVOY. My good lady, is it worth while dressing-up and putting on
false beards for us if you tell us beforehand that it is all humbug?

ZOO. One would not think so; but if you wont believe in anyone who is
not dressed-up, why, we must dress-up for you. It was you who invented
all this nonsense, not we.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. But do you expect us to be impressed after this?

ZOO. I don't expect anything. I know, as a matter of experience, that
you will be impressed. The oracle will frighten you out of your wits.
[_She goes into the temple_].

THE WIFE. These people treat us as if we were dirt beneath their feet. I
wonder at you putting up with it, Amby. It would serve them right if we
went home at once: wouldnt it, Eth?

THE DAUGHTER. Yes, mamma. But perhaps they wouldnt mind.

THE ENVOY. No use talking like that, Molly. Ive got to see this oracle.
The folks at home wont know how we have been treated: all theyll know
is that Ive stood face to face with the oracle and had the straight tip
from her. I hope this Zozim chap is not going to keep us waiting much
longer; for I feel far from comfortable about the approaching interview;
and thats the honest truth.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I never thought I should want to see that man
again; but now I wish he would take charge of us instead of Zoo. She was
charming at first: quite charming; but she turned into a fiend because I
had a few words with her. You would not believe: she very nearly killed
me. You heard what she said just now. She belongs to a party here which
wants to have us all killed.

THE WIFE [_terrified_] Us! But we have done nothing: we have been as
nice to them as nice could be. Oh, Amby, come away, come away: there is
something dreadful about this place and these people.

THE ENVOY. There is, and no mistake. But youre safe with me: you ought
to have sense enough to know that.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I am sorry to say, Molly, that it is not merely
us four poor weak creatures they want to kill, but the entire race of
Man, except themselves.

THE ENVOY. Not so poor neither, Poppa. Nor so weak, if you are going to
take in all the Powers. If it comes to killing, two can play at that
game, longlived or shortlived.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. No, Ambrose: we should have no chance. We are
worms beside these fearful people: mere worms.

_Zozim comes from the temple, robed majestically, and wearing a wreath
of mistletoe in his flowing white wig. His false beard reaches almost to
his waist. He carries a staff with a curiously carved top._

ZOZIM [_in the doorway, impressively_] Hail, strangers!

ALL [_reverently_] Hail!

ZOZIM. Are ye prepared?

THE ENVOY. We are.

ZOZIM [_unexpectedly becoming conversational, and strolling down
carelessly to the middle of the group between the two ladies_] Well, I'm
sorry to say the oracle is not. She was delayed by some member of your
party who got loose; and as the show takes a bit of arranging, you will
have to wait a few minutes. The ladies can go inside and look round the
entrance hall and get pictures and things if they want them.


                              {Thank you.}
    THE WIFE}    [_together_] {I should like to,} [_They go into_]
    THE DAUGHTER}             {very much.}        [_the temple_]


THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_in dignified rebuke of Zozim's levity_] Taken in
this spirit, sir, the show, as you call it, becomes almost an insult to
our common sense.

ZOZIM. Quite, I should say. You need not keep it up with me.

THE ENVOY [_suddenly making himself very agreeable_] Just so: just so.
We can wait as long as you please. And now, if I may be allowed to seize
the opportunity of a few minutes' friendly chat--?

ZOZIM. By all means, if only you will talk about things I can
understand.

THE ENVOY. Well, about this colonizing plan of yours. My father-in-law
here has been telling me something about it; and he has just now let out
that you want not only to colonize us, but to--to--to--well, shall we
say to supersede us? Now why supersede us? Why not live and let live?
Theres not a scrap of ill-feeling on our side. We should welcome a
colony of immortals--we may almost call you that--in the British Middle
East. No doubt the Turanian Empire, with its Mahometan traditions,
overshadows us now. We have had to bring the Emperor with us on this
expedition, though of course you know as well as I do that he has
imposed himself on my party just to spy on me. I dont deny that he has
the whip hand of us to some extent, because if it came to a war none of
our generals could stand up against him. I give him best at that game:
he is the finest soldier in the world. Besides, he is an emperor and
an autocrat; and I am only an elected representative of the British
democracy. Not that our British democrats wont fight: they will fight
the heads off all the Turanians that ever walked; but then it takes so
long to work them up to it, while he has only to say the word and march.
But you people would never get on with him. Believe me, you would not be
as comfortable in Turania as you would be with us. We understand you. We
like you. We are easy-going people; and we are rich people. That will
appeal to you. Turania is a poor place when all is said. Five-eighths of
it is desert. They dont irrigate as we do. Besides--now I am sure this
will appeal to you and to all right-minded men--we are Christians.

ZOZIM. The old uns prefer Mahometans.

THE ENVOY [_shocked_] What!

ZOZIM [_distinctly_] They prefer Mahometans. Whats wrong with that?

THE ENVOY. Well, of all the disgraceful--

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_diplomatically interrupting his scandalized
son-in-law_] There can be no doubt, I am afraid, that by clinging too
long to the obsolete features of the old pseudo-Christian Churches we
allowed the Mahometans to get ahead of us at a very critical period of
the development of the Eastern world. When the Mahometan Reformation
took place, it left its followers with the enormous advantage of having
the only established religion in the world in whose articles of faith
any intelligent and educated person could believe.

THE ENVOY. But what about our Reformation? Dont give the show away,
Poppa. We followed suit, didnt we?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Unfortunately, Ambrose, we could not follow suit
very rapidly. We had not only a religion to deal with, but a Church.

ZOZIM. What is a Church?

THE ENVOY. Not know what a Church is! Well!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. You must excuse me; but if I attempted to explain
you would only ask me what a bishop is; and that is a question that no
mortal man can answer. All I can tell you is that Mahomet was a truly
wise man; for he founded a religion without a Church; consequently when
the time came for a Reformation of the mosques there were no bishops and
priests to obstruct it. Our bishops and priests prevented us for two
hundred years from following suit; and we have never recovered the start
we lost then. I can only plead that we did reform our Church at last. No
doubt we had to make a few compromises as a matter of good taste;
but there is now very little in our Articles of Religion that is not
accepted as at least allegorically true by our Higher Criticism.

THE ENVOY [_encouragingly_] Besides, does it matter? Why, _I_ have never
read the Articles in my life; and I am Prime Minister! Come! if my
services in arranging for the reception of a colonizing party would be
acceptable, they are at your disposal. And when I say a reception I mean
a reception. Royal honors, mind you! A salute of a hundred and one guns!
The streets lined with troops! The Guards turned out at the Palace!
Dinner at the Guildhall!

ZOZIM. Discourage me if I know what youre talking about! I wish Zoo
would come: she understands these things. All I can tell you is that
the general opinion among the Colonizers is in favor of beginning in a
country where the people are of a different color from us; so that we
can make short work without any risk of mistakes.

THE ENVOY. What do you mean by short work? I hope--

ZOZIM [_with obviously feigned geniality_] Oh, nothing, nothing,
nothing. We are thinking of trying North America: thats all. You see,
the Red Men of that country used to be white. They passed through a
period of sallow complexions, followed by a period of no complexions
at all, into the red characteristic of their climate. Besides, several
cases of long life have occurred in North America. They joined us here;
and their stock soon reverted to the original white of these islands.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. But have you considered the possibility of your
colony turning red?

ZOZIM. That wont matter. We are not particular about our pigmentation.
The old books mention red-faced Englishmen: they appear to have been
common objects at one time.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_very persuasively_] But do you think you would
be popular in North America? It seems to me, if I may say so, that on
your own shewing you need a country in which society is organized in a
series of highly exclusive circles, in which the privacy of private life
is very jealously guarded, and in which no one presumes to speak to
anyone else without an introduction following a strict examination of
social credentials. It is only in such a country that persons of special
tastes and attainments can form a little world of their own, and protect
themselves absolutely from intrusion by common persons. I think I may
claim that our British society has developed this exclusiveness to
perfection. If you would pay us a visit and see the working of our caste
system, our club system, our guild system, you would admit that nowhere
else in the world, least of all, perhaps in North America, which has a
regrettable tradition of social promiscuity, could you keep yourselves
so entirely to yourselves.

ZOZIM [_good-naturedly embarrassed_] Look here. There is no good
discussing this. I had rather not explain; but it wont make any
difference to our Colonizers what sort of short-livers they come across.
We shall arrange all that. Never mind how. Let us join the ladies.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_throwing off his diplomatic attitude and
abandoning himself to despair_] We understand you only too well, sir.
Well, kill us. End the lives you have made miserably unhappy by opening
up to us the possibility that any of us may live three hundred years. I
solemnly curse that possibility. To you it may be a blessing, because
you do live three hundred years. To us, who live less than a hundred,
whose flesh is as grass, it is the most unbearable burden our poor
tortured humanity has ever groaned under.

THE ENVOY. Hullo, Poppa! Steady! How do you make that out?

ZOZIM. What is three hundred years? Short enough, if you ask me. Why, in
the old days you people lived on the assumption that you were going to
last out for ever and ever and ever. Immortal, you thought yourselves.
Were you any happier then?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. As President of the Baghdad Historical Society
I am in a position to inform you that the communities which took this
monstrous pretension seriously were the most wretched of which we have
any record. My Society has printed an editio princeps of the works of
the father of history, Thucyderodotus Macolly-buckle. Have you read his
account of what was blasphemously called the Perfect City of God, and
the attempt made to reproduce it in the northern part of these islands
by Jonhobsnoxius, called the Leviathan? Those misguided people
sacrificed the fragment of life that was granted to them to an imaginary
immortality. They crucified the prophet who told them to take no thought
for the morrow, and that here and now was their Australia: Australia
being a term signifying paradise, or an eternity of bliss. They tried
to produce a condition of death in life: to mortify the flesh, as they
called it.

ZOZIM. Well, you are not suffering from that, are you? You have not a
mortified air.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Naturally we are not absolutely insane and
suicidal. Nevertheless we impose on ourselves abstinences and
disciplines and studies that are meant to prepare us for living three
centuries. And we seldom live one. My childhood was made unnecessarily
painful, my boyhood unnecessarily laborious, by ridiculous preparations
for a length of days which the chances were fifty thousand to one
against my ever attaining. I have been cheated out of the natural joys
and freedoms of my life by this dream to which the existence of these
islands and their oracles gives a delusive possibility of realization.
I curse the day when long life was invented, just as the victims of
Jonhobsnoxius cursed the day when eternal life was invented.

ZOZIM. Pooh! You could live three centuries if you chose.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. That is what the fortunate always say to the
unfortunate. Well, I do not choose. I accept my three score and ten
years. If they are filled with usefulness, with justice, with mercy,
with good-will: if they are the lifetime of a soul that never loses its
honor and a brain that never loses its eagerness, they are enough for
me, because these things are infinite and eternal, and can make ten of
my years as long as thirty of yours. I shall not conclude by saying live
as long as you like and be damned to you, because I have risen for the
moment far above any ill-will to you or to any fellow-creature; but I
am your equal before that eternity in which the difference between your
lifetime and mine is as the difference between one drop of water
and three in the eyes of the Almighty Power from which we have both
proceeded.

ZOZIM [_impressed_] You spoke that piece very well, Daddy. I couldnt
talk like that if I tried. It sounded fine. Ah! here comes the ladies.

_To his relief, they have just appeared on the threshold of the temple._

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_passing from exaltation to distress_] It means
nothing to him: in this land of discouragement the sublime has become
the ridiculous. [_Turning on the hopelessly puzzled Zozim_] 'Behold,
thou hast made my days as it were a span long; and mine age is even as
nothing in respect of thee.'


                              {Poppa, Poppa: dont look like
    THE WIFE.}    [_running_] {that.
    THE DAUGHTER.}[_to him_] {Oh, granpa, whats the matter?


ZOZIM [_with a shrug_] Discouragement!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_throwing off the women with a superb gesture_]
Liar! [_Recollecting himself, he adds, with noble courtesy, raising his
hat and bowing_] I beg your pardon, sir; but I am NOT discouraged.

_A burst of orchestral music, through which a powerful gong sounds, is
heard from the temple. Zoo, in a purple robe, appears in the doorway._

ZOO. Come. The oracle is ready.

_Zozim motions them to the threshold with a wave of his staff. The Envoy
and the Elderly Gentleman take off their hats and go into the temple on
tiptoe, Zoo leading the way. The Wife and Daughter, frightened as they
are, raise their heads uppishly and follow flatfooted, sustained by a
sense of their Sunday clothes and social consequence. Zozim remains in
the portico, alone._

ZOZIM [_taking off his wig, beard, and robe, and bundling them under his
arm_] Ouf! [He goes home].



ACT III


_Inside the temple. A gallery overhanging an abyss. Dead silence. The
gallery is brightly lighted; but beyond is a vast gloom, continually
changing in intensity. A shaft of violet light shoots upward; and a very
harmonious and silvery carillon chimes. When it ceases the violet ray
vanishes._

_Zoo comes along the gallery, followed by the Envoy's daughter, his
wife, the Envoy himself, and the Elderly Gentleman. The two men are
holding their hats with the brims near their noses, as if prepared to
pray into them at a moment's notice. Zoo halts: they all follow her
example. They contemplate the void with awe. Organ music of the kind
called sacred in the nineteenth century begins. Their awe deepens. The
violet ray, now a diffused mist, rises again from the abyss._

THE WIFE [_to Zoo, in a reverent whisper_] Shall we kneel?

ZOO [_loudly_] Yes, if you want to. You can stand on your head if you
like. [_She sits down carelessly on the gallery railing, with her back
to the abyss_].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_jarred by her callousness_] We desire to behave
in a becoming manner.

ZOO. Very well. Behave just as you feel. It doesn't matter how you
behave. But keep your wits about you when the pythoness ascends, or you
will forget the questions you have come to ask her.


     THE ENVOY}               {[[_very nervous, takes out a paper to_]
              } [[_simul-_]   {[_refresh his memory_]] Ahem!
  THE DAUGHTER} [_taneously_]]{[[_alarmed_]] The pythoness? Is she
              }               {a snake?


THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Tch-ch! The priestess of the oracle. A sybil. A
prophetess. Not a snake.

THE WIFE. How awful!

ZOO. I'm glad you think so.

THE WIFE. Oh dear! Dont you think so?

ZOO. No. This sort of thing is got up to impress you, not to impress me.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I wish you would let it impress us, then, madam.
I am deeply impressed; but you are spoiling the effect.

ZOO. You just wait. All this business with colored lights and chords on
that old organ is only tomfoolery. Wait til you see the pythoness.

_The Envoy's wife falls on her knees, and takes refuge in prayer._

THE DAUGHTER [_trembling_] Are we really going to see a woman who has
lived three hundred years?

ZOO. Stuff! Youd drop dead if a tertiary as much as looked at you. The
oracle is only a hundred and seventy; and you'll find it hard enough to
stand her.

THE DAUGHTER [_piteously_] Oh! [_she falls on her knees_].

THE ENVOY. Whew! Stand by me, Poppa. This is a little more than I
bargained for. Are you going to kneel; or how?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Perhaps it would be in better taste.

_The two men kneel._

_The vapor of the abyss thickens; and a distant roll of thunder seems to
come from its depths. The pythoness, seated on her tripod, rises slowly
from it. She has discarded the insulating robe and veil in which she
conversed with Napoleon, and is now draped and hooded in voluminous
folds of a single piece of grey-white stuff. Something supernatural
about her terrifies the beholders, who throw themselves on their faces.
Her outline flows and waves: she is almost distinct at moments, and
again vague and shadowy: above all, she is larger than life-size, not
enough to be measured by the flustered congregation, but enough to
affect them with a dreadful sense of her supernaturalness._

ZOO. Get up, get up. Do pull yourselves together, you people.

_The Envoy and his family, by shuddering negatively, intimate that it
is impossible. The Elderly Gentleman manages to get on his hands and
knees._

ZOO. Come on, Daddy: you are not afraid. Speak to her. She wont wait
here all day for you, you know.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_rising very deferentially to his feet_] Madam:
you will excuse my very natural nervousness in addressing, for the first
time in my life, a--a--a--a goddess. My friend and relative the Envoy is
unhinged. I throw myself upon your indulgence--

ZOO [_interrupting him intolerantly_] Dont throw yourself on anything
belonging to her or you will go right through her and break your neck.
She isnt solid, like you.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I was speaking figuratively--

ZOO. You have been told not to do it. Ask her what you want to know; and
be quick about it.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_stooping and taking the prostrate Envoy by the
shoulders_] Ambrose: you must make an effort. You cannot go back to
Baghdad without the answers to your questions.

THE ENVOY [_rising to his knees_] I shall be only too glad to get back
alive on any terms. If my legs would support me I'd just do a bunk
straight for the ship.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. No, no. Remember: your dignity--

THE ENVOY. Dignity be damned! I'm terrified. Take me away, for God's
sake.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_producing a brandy flask and taking the cap
off_] Try some of this. It is still nearly full, thank goodness!

THE ENVOY [_clutching it and drinking eagerly_] Ah! Thats better. [_He
tries to drink again. Finding that he has emptied it, he hands it back
to his father-in-law upside down_].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_taking it_] Great heavens! He has swallowed
half-a-pint of neat brandy. [_Much perturbed, he screws the cap on
again, and pockets the flask_].

THE ENVOY [_staggering to his feet; pulling a paper from his pocket; and
speaking with boisterous confidence_] Get up, Molly. Up with you, Eth.

_The two women rise to their knees._

THE ENVOY. What I want to ask is this. [_He refers to the paper_]. Ahem!
Civilization has reached a crisis. We are at the parting of the ways. We
stand on the brink of the Rubicon. Shall we take the plunge? Already a
leaf has been torn out of the book of the Sybil. Shall we wait until the
whole volume is consumed? On our right is the crater of the volcano: on
our left the precipice. One false step, and we go down to annihilation
dragging the whole human race with us. [_He pauses for breath_].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_recovering his spirits under the familiar
stimulus of political oratory_] Hear, hear!

ZOO. What are you raving about? Ask your question while you have the
chance. What is it you want to know?

THE ENVOY [_patronizing her in the manner of a Premier debating with a
very young member of the Opposition_] A young woman asks me a question.
I am always glad to see the young taking an interest in politics. It is
an impatient question; but it is a practical question, an intelligent
question. She asks why we seek to lift a corner of the veil that shrouds
the future from our feeble vision.

ZOO. I don't. I ask you to tell the oracle what you want, and not keep
her sitting there all day.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_warmly_] Order, order!

ZOO. What does 'Order, order!' mean?

THE ENVOY. I ask the august oracle to listen to my voice--

ZOO. You people seem never to tire of listening to your voices; but it
doesn't amuse us. What do you want?

THE ENVOY. I want, young woman, to be allowed to proceed without
unseemly interruptions.

_A low roll of thunder comes from the abyss._

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. There! Even the oracle is indignant. [_To the
Envoy_] Do not allow yourself to be put down by this lady's rude clamor,
Ambrose. Take no notice. Proceed.

THE ENVOY'S WIFE. I cant bear this much longer, Amby. Remember: I havn't
had any brandy.

HIS DAUGHTER [_trembling_] There are serpents curling in the vapor. I am
afraid of the lightning. Finish it, Papa; or I shall die.

THE ENVOY [_sternly_] Silence. The destiny of British civilization is at
stake. Trust me. I am not afraid. As I was saying--where was I?

ZOO. I don't know. Does anybody?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_tactfully_] You were just coming to the
election, I think.

THE ENVOY [_reassured_] Just so. The election. Now what we want to
know is this: ought we to dissolve in August, or put it off until next
spring?

ZOO. Dissolve? In what? [_Thunder_]. Oh! My fault this time. That means
that the oracle understands you, and desires me to hold my tongue.

THE ENVOY [_fervently_] I thank the oracle.

THE WIFE [_to Zoo_] Serve you right!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Before the oracle replies, I should like to be
allowed to state a few of the reasons why, in my opinion, the Government
should hold on until the spring. In the first--

_Terrific lightning and thunder. The Elderly Gentleman is knocked flat;
but as he immediately sits up again dazedly it is clear that he is none
the worse for the shock. The ladies cower in terror. The Envoy's hat is
blown off; but he seizes it just as it quits his temples, and holds it
on with both hands. He is recklessly drunk, but quite articulate, as he
seldom speaks in public without taking stimulants beforehand._

THE ENVOY [_taking one hand from his hat to make a gesture of stilling
the tempest_] Thats enough. We know how to take a hint. I'll put the
case in three words. I am the leader of the Potterbill party. My party
is in power. I am Prime Minister. The Opposition--the Rotterjacks--have
won every bye-election for the last six months. They--

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_scrambling heatedly to his feet_] Not by fair
means. By bribery, by misrepresentation, by pandering to the vilest
prejudices [_muttered thunder_]--I beg your pardon [_he is silent_].

THE ENVOY. Never mind the bribery and lies. The oracle knows all about
that. The point is that though our five years will not expire until the
year after next, our majority will be eaten away at the bye-elections
by about Easter. We can't wait: we must start some question that will
excite the public, and go to the country on it. But some of us say do it
now. Others say wait til the spring. We cant make up our minds one way
or the other. Which would you advise?

ZOO. But what is the question that is to excite your public?

THE ENVOY. That doesnt matter. I dont know yet. We will find a question
all right enough. The oracle can foresee the future: we cannot.
[_Thunder_]. What does that mean? What have I done now?

ZOO. [_severely_] How often must you be told that we cannot foresee the
future? There is no such thing as the future until it is the present.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Allow me to point out, madam, that when the
Potterbill party sent to consult the oracle fifteen years ago, the
oracle prophesied that the Potterbills would be victorious at the
General Election; and they were. So it is evident that the oracle can
foresee the future, and is sometimes willing to reveal it.

THE ENVOY. Quite true. Thank you, Poppa. I appeal now, over your head,
young woman, direct to the August Oracle, to repeat the signal favor
conferred on my illustrious predecessor, Sir Fuller Eastwind, and to
answer me exactly as he was answered.

_The oracle raises her hands to command silence._

ALL. Sh-sh-sh!

_Invisible trombones utter three solemn blasts in the manner of Die
Zauberflöte._

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. May I--

ZOO [_quickly_] Hush. The oracle is going to speak.

THE ORACLE. Go home, poor fool.

_She vanishes; and the atmosphere changes to prosaic daylight. Zoo comes
off the railing; throws off her robe; makes a bundle of it; and tucks it
under her arm. The magic and mystery are gone. The women rise to their
feet. The Envoy's party stare at one another helplessly._

ZOO. The same reply, word for word, that your illustrious predecessor,
as you call him, got fifteen years ago. You asked for it; and you got
it. And just think of all the important questions you might have asked.
She would have answered them, you know. It is always like that. I
will go and arrange to have you sent home: you can wait for me in the
entrance hall [_she goes out_].

THE ENVOY. What possessed me to ask for the same answer old Eastwind
got?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. But it was not the same answer. The answer to
Eastwind was an inspiration to our party for years. It won us the
election.

THE ENVOY'S DAUGHTER. I learnt it at school, granpa. It wasn't the same
at all. I can repeat it. [_She quotes_] 'When Britain was cradled in the
west, the east wind hardened her and made her great. Whilst the east
wind prevails Britain shall prosper. The east wind shall wither
Britain's enemies in the day of contest. Let the Rotterjacks look to
it.'

THE ENVOY. The old man invented that. I see it all. He was a doddering
old ass when he came to consult the oracle. The oracle naturally said
'Go home, poor fool.' There was no sense in saying that to me; but as
that girl said, I asked for it. What else could the poor old chap do but
fake up an answer fit for publication? There were whispers about it; but
nobody believed them. I believe them now.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Oh, I cannot admit that Sir Fuller Eastwind was
capable of such a fraud.

THE ENVOY. He was capable of anything: I knew his private secretary.
And now what are we going to say? You don't suppose I am going back to
Baghdad to tell the British Empire that the oracle called me a fool, do
you?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Surely we must tell the truth, however painful it
may be to our feelings.

THE ENVOY. I am not thinking of my feelings: I am not so selfish as
that, thank God. I am thinking of the country: of our party. The truth,
as you call it, would put the Rotterjacks in for the next twenty years.
It would be the end of me politically. Not that I care for that: I am
only too willing to retire if you can find a better man. Dont hesitate
on my account.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. No, Ambrose: you are indispensable. There is no
one else.

THE ENVOY. Very well, then. What are you going to do?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. My dear Ambrose, you are the leader of the party,
not I. What are you going to do?

THE ENVOY. I am going to tell the exact truth; thats what I'm going to
do. Do you take me for a liar?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_puzzled_] Oh. I beg your pardon. I understood
you to say--

THE ENVOY [_cutting him short_] You understood me to say that I am going
back to Baghdad to tell the British electorate that the oracle repeated
to me, word for word, what it said to Sir Fuller Eastwind fifteen years
ago. Molly and Ethel can bear me out. So must you, if you are an honest
man. Come on.

_He goes out, followed by his wife and daughter._

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [_left alone and shrinking into an old and
desolate figure_] What am I to do? I am a most perplexed and wretched
man. [_He falls on his knees, and stretches his hands in entreaty over
the abyss_]. I invoke the oracle. I cannot go back and connive at a
blasphemous lie. I implore guidance.

_The Pythoness walks in on the gallery behind him, and touches him on
the shoulder. Her size is now natural. Her face is hidden by her hood.
He flinches as if from an electric shock; turns to her; and cowers,
covering his eyes in terror._

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. No: not close to me. I'm afraid I can't bear it.

THE ORACLE [_with grave pity_] Come: look at me. I am my natural size
now: what you saw there was only a foolish picture of me thrown on a
cloud by a lantern. How can I help you?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. They have gone back to lie about your answer. I
cannot go with them. I cannot live among people to whom nothing is real.
I have become incapable of it through my stay here. I implore to be
allowed to stay.

THE ORACLE. My friend: if you stay with us you will die of
discouragement.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. If I go back I shall die of disgust and despair.
I take the nobler risk. I beg you, do not cast me out.

_He catches her robe and holds her._

THE ORACLE. Take care. I have been here one hundred and seventy years.
Your death does not mean to me what it means to you.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. It is the meaning of life, not of death, that
makes banishment so terrible to me.

THE ORACLE. Be it so, then. You may stay.

_She offers him her hands. He grasps them and raises himself a little by
clinging to her. She looks steadily into his face. He stiffens; a little
convulsion shakes him; his grasp relaxes; and he falls dead._

THE ORACLE [_looking down at the body_] Poor shortlived thing! What else
could I do for you?



PART V.

As Far as Thought can Reach


_Summer afternoon in the year 31,920 A.D. A sunlit glade at the southern
foot of a thickly wooded hill. On the west side of it, the steps and
columned porch of a dainty little classic temple. Between it and the
hill, a rising path to the wooded heights begins with rough steps of
stones in the moss. On the opposite side, a grove. In the middle of the
glade, an altar in the form of a low marble table as long as a man, set
parallel to the temple steps and pointing to the hill. Curved marble
benches radiate from it into the foreground; but they are not joined to
it: there is plenty of space to pass between the altar and the benches.

A dance of youths and maidens is in progress. The music is provided by a
few fluteplayers seated carelessly on the steps of the temple. There are
no children; and none of the dancers seems younger than eighteen. Some
of the youths have beards. Their dress, like the architecture of the
theatre and the design of the altar and curved seats, resembles Grecian
of the fourth century B.C., freely handled. They move with perfect
balance and remarkable grace, racing through a figure like a farandole.
They neither romp nor hug in our manner.

At the first full close they clap their hands to stop the musicians, who
recommence with a saraband, during which a strange figure appears on the
path beyond the temple. He is deep in thought, with his eyes closed
and his feet feeling automatically for the rough irregular steps as he
slowly descends them. Except for a sort of linen kilt consisting mainly
of a girdle carrying a sporran and a few minor pockets, he is naked. In
physical hardihood and uprightness he seems to be in the prime of life;
and his eyes and mouth shew no signs of age; but his face, though fully
and firmly fleshed, bears a network of lines, varying from furrows to
hairbreadth reticulations, as if Time had worked over every inch of it
incessantly through whole geologic periods. His head is finely domed
and utterly bald. Except for his eyelashes he is quite hairless. He is
unconscious of his surroundings, and walks right into one of the dancing
couples, separating them. He wakes up and stares about him. The couple
stop indignantly. The rest stop. The music stops. The youth whom he has
jostled accosts him without malice, but without anything that we should
call manners._

THE YOUTH. Now, then, ancient sleepwalker, why don't you keep your eyes
open and mind where you are going?

THE ANCIENT [_mild, bland, and indulgent_] I did not know there was a
nursery here, or I should not have turned my face in this direction.
Such accidents cannot always be avoided. Go on with your play: I will
turn back.

THE YOUTH. Why not stay with us and enjoy life for once in a way? We
will teach you to dance.

THE ANCIENT. No, thank you. I danced when I was a child like you.
Dancing is a very crude attempt to get into the rhythm of life. It would
be painful to me to go back from that rhythm to your babyish gambols: in
fact I could not do it if I tried. But at your age it is pleasant: and I
am sorry I disturbed you.

THE YOUTH. Come! own up: arnt you very unhappy? It's dreadful to see
you ancients going about by yourselves, never noticing anything, never
dancing, never laughing, never singing, never getting anything out of
life. None of us are going to be like that when we grow up. It's a dog's
life.

THE ANCIENT. Not at all. You repeat that old phrase without knowing
that there was once a creature on earth called a dog. Those who are
interested in extinct forms of life will tell you that it loved the
sound of its own voice and bounded about when it was happy, just as you
are doing here. It is you, my children, who are living the dog's life.

THE YOUTH. The dog must have been a good sensible creature: it set you
a very wise example. You should let yourself go occasionally and have a
good time.

THE ANCIENT. My children: be content to let us ancients go our ways and
enjoy ourselves in our own fashion.

_He turns to go._

THE MAIDEN. But wait a moment. Why will you not tell us how you enjoy
yourself? You must have secret pleasures that you hide from us, and that
you never get tired of. I get tired of all our dances and all our tunes.
I get tired of all my partners.

THE YOUTH [_suspiciously_] Do you? I shall bear that in mind.

_They all look at one another as if there were some sinister
significance in what she has said._

THE MAIDEN. We all do: what is the use of pretending we don't? It is
natural.

SEVERAL YOUNG PEOPLE. No, no. We don't. It is not natural.

THE ANCIENT. You are older than he is, I see. You are growing up.

THE MAIDEN. How do you know? I do not look so much older, do I?

THE ANCIENT. Oh, I was not looking at you. Your looks do not interest
me.

THE MAIDEN. Thank you.

_They all laugh._

THE YOUTH. You old fish! I believe you don't know the difference between
a man and a woman.

THE ANCIENT. It has long ceased to interest me in the way it interests
you. And when anything no longer interests us we no longer know it.

THE MAIDEN. You havnt told me how I shew my age. That is what I want to
know. As a matter of fact I am older than this boy here: older than he
thinks. How did you find that out?

THE ANCIENT. Easily enough. You are ceasing to pretend that these
childish games--this dancing and singing and mating--do not become
tiresome and unsatisfying after a while. And you no longer care to
pretend that you are younger than you are. These are the signs of
adolescence. And then, see these fantastic rags with which you have
draped yourself. [_He takes up a piece of her draperies in his hand_].
It is rather badly worn here. Why do you not get a new one?

THE MAIDEN. Oh, I did not notice it. Besides, it is too much trouble.
Clothes are a nuisance. I think I shall do without them some day, as you
ancients do.

THE ANCIENT. Signs of maturity. Soon you will give up all these toys and
games and sweets.

THE YOUTH. What! And be as miserable as you?

THE ANCIENT. Infant: one moment of the ecstasy of life as we live it
would strike you dead. [_He stalks gravely out through the grove_].

_They stare after him, much damped._

THE YOUTH [_to the musicians_] Let us have another dance.

_The musicians shake their heads; get up from their seats on the steps;
and troop away into the temple. The others follow them, except the
Maiden, who sits down on the altar._

A MAIDEN [_as she goes_] There! The ancient has put them out of
countenance. It is your fault, Strephon, for provoking him. [_She
leaves, much disappointed_].

A YOUTH. Why need you have cheeked him like that? [_He goes grumbling_].

STREPHON [_calling after him_] I thought it was understood that we are
always to cheek the ancients on principle.

ANOTHER YOUTH. Quite right too! There would be no holding them if we
didn't. [_He goes_].

THE MAIDEN. Why don't you really stand up to them? _I_ did.

ANOTHER YOUTH. Sheer, abject, pusillanimous, dastardly cowardice. Thats
why. Face the filthy truth. [_He goes_].

ANOTHER YOUTH [_turning on the steps as he goes out_] And don't you
forget, infant, that one moment of the ecstasy of life as I live it
would strike you dead. Haha!

STREPHON [_now the only one left, except the Maiden_] Arnt you coming,
Chloe?

THE MAIDEN [_shakes her head_]!

THE YOUTH [_hurrying back to her_] What is the matter?

THE MAIDEN [_tragically pensive_] I dont know.

THE YOUTH. Then there is something the matter. Is that what you mean?

THE MAIDEN. Yes. Something is happening to me. I dont know what.

THE YOUTH. You no longer love me. I have seen it for a month past.

THE MAIDEN. Dont you think all that is rather silly? We cannot go on as
if this kind of thing, this dancing and sweethearting, were everything.

THE YOUTH. What is there better? What else is there worth living for?

THE MAIDEN. Oh, stuff! Dont be frivolous.

THE YOUTH. Something horrible is happening to you. You are losing all
heart, all feeling. [_He sits on the altar beside her and buries his
face in his hands_]. I am bitterly unhappy.

THE MAIDEN. Unhappy! Really, you must have a very empty head if there is
nothing in it but a dance with one girl who is no better than any of the
other girls.

THE YOUTH. You did not always think so. You used to be vexed if I as
much as looked at another girl.

THE MAIDEN. What does it matter what I did when I was a baby? Nothing
existed for me then except what I tasted and touched and saw; and I
wanted all that for myself, just as I wanted the moon to play with. Now
the world is opening out for me. More than the world: the universe. Even
little things are turning out to be great things, and becoming intensely
interesting. Have you ever thought about the properties of numbers?

THE YOUTH [_sitting up, markedly disenchanted_] Numbers!!! I cannot
imagine anything drier or more repulsive.

THE MAIDEN. They are fascinating, just fascinating. I want to get away
from our eternal dancing and music, and just sit down by myself and
think about numbers.

THE YOUTH [_rising indignantly_] Oh, this is too much. I have suspected
you for some time past. We have all suspected you. All the girls
say that you have deceived us as to your age: that you are getting
flat-chested: that you are bored with us; that you talk to the ancients
when you get the chance. Tell me the truth: how old are you?

THE MAIDEN. Just twice your age, my poor boy.

THE YOUTH. Twice my age! Do you mean to say you are four?

THE MAIDEN. Very nearly four.

THE YOUTH [_collapsing on the altar with a groan_] Oh!

THE MAIDEN. My poor Strephon: I pretended I was only two for your sake.
I was two when you were born. I saw you break from your shell; and
you were such a charming child! You ran round and talked to us all so
prettily, and were so handsome and well grown, that I lost my heart to
you at once. But now I seem to have lost it altogether: bigger things
are taking possession of me. Still, we were very happy in our childish
way for the first year, werent we?

STREPHON. I was happy until you began cooling towards me.

THE MAIDEN. Not towards you, but towards all the trivialities of our
life here. Just think. I have hundreds of years to live: perhaps
thousands. Do you suppose I can spend centuries dancing; listening to
flutes ringing changes on a few tunes and a few notes; raving about the
beauty of a few pillars and arches; making jingles with words; lying
about with your arms round me, which is really neither comfortable nor
convenient; everlastingly choosing colors for dresses, and putting them
on, and washing; making a business of sitting together at fixed hours
to absorb our nourishment; taking little poisons with it to make us
delirious enough to imagine we are enjoying ourselves; and then having
to pass the nights in shelters lying in cots and losing half our lives
in a state of unconsciousness. Sleep is a shameful thing: I have not
slept at all for weeks past. I have stolen out at night when you were
all lying insensible--quite disgusting, I call it--and wandered about
the woods, thinking, thinking, thinking; grasping the world; taking it
to pieces; building it up again; devising methods; planning experiments
to test the methods; and having a glorious time. Every morning I have
come back here with greater and greater reluctance; and I know that the
time will soon come--perhaps it has come already--when I shall not come
back at all.

STREPHON. How horribly cold and uncomfortable!

THE MAIDEN. Oh, don't talk to me of comfort! Life is not worth living if
you have to bother about comfort. Comfort makes winter a torture,
spring an illness, summer an oppression, and autumn only a respite. The
ancients could make life one long frowsty comfort if they chose. But
they never lift a finger to make themselves comfortable. They will not
sleep under a roof. They will not clothe themselves: a girdle with a few
pockets hanging to it to carry things about in is all they wear: they
will sit down on the wet moss or in a gorse bush when there is dry
heather within two yards of them. Two years ago, when you were born, I
did not understand this. Now I feel that I would not put myself to the
trouble of walking two paces for all the comfort in the world.

STREPHON. But you don't know what this means to me. It means that you
are dying to me: yes, just dying. Listen to me [_he puts his arm around
her_].

THE MAIDEN [_extricating herself_] Dont. We can talk quite as well
without touching one another.

STREPHON [_horrified_] Chloe! Oh, this is the worst symptom of all! The
ancients never touch one another.

THE MAIDEN. Why should they?

STREPHON. Oh, I don't know. But don't you want to touch me? You used to.

THE MAIDEN. Yes: that is true: I used to. We used to think it would be
nice to sleep in one another's arms; but we never could go to sleep
because our weight stopped our circulations just above the elbows. Then
somehow my feeling began to change bit by bit. I kept a sort of interest
in your head and arms long after I lost interest in your whole body. And
now that has gone.

STREPHON. You no longer care for me at all, then?

THE MAIDEN. Nonsense! I care for you much more seriously than before;
though perhaps not so much for you in particular. I mean I care more for
everybody. But I don't want to touch you unnecessarily; and I certainly
don't want you to touch me.

STREPHON [_rising decisively_] That finishes it. You dislike me.

THE MAIDEN [_impatiently_] I tell you again, I do not dislike you; but
you bore me when you cannot understand; and I think I shall be happier
by myself in future. You had better get a new companion. What about the
girl who is to be born today?

STREPHON. I do not want the girl who is to be born today. How do I know
what she will be like? I want you.

THE MAIDEN. You cannot have me. You must recognize facts and face them.
It is no use running after a woman twice your age. I cannot make my
childhood last to please you. The age of love is sweet; but it is short;
and I must pay nature's debt. You no longer attract me; and I no longer
care to attract you. Growth is too rapid at my age: I am maturing from
week to week.

STREPHON. You are maturing, as you call it--I call it ageing--from
minute to minute. You are going much further than you did when we began
this conversation.

THE MAIDEN. It is not the ageing that is so rapid. It is the realization
of it when it has actually happened. Now that I have made up my mind to
the fact that I have left childhood behind me, it comes home to me in
leaps and bounds with every word you say.

STREPHON. But your vow. Have you forgotten that? We all swore together
in that temple: the temple of love. You were more earnest than any of
us.

THE MAIDEN [_with a grim smile_] Never to let our hearts grow cold!
Never to become as the ancients! Never to let the sacred lamp be
extinguished! Never to change or forget! To be remembered for ever as
the first company of true lovers faithful to this vow so often made and
broken by past generations! Ha! ha! Oh, dear!

STREPHON. Well, you need not laugh. It is a beautiful and holy compact;
and I will keep it whilst I live. Are you going to break it?

THE MAIDEN. Dear child: it has broken itself. The change has come in
spite of my childish vow. [_She rises_]. Do you mind if I go into the
woods for a walk by myself? This chat of ours seems to me an unbearable
waste of time. I have so much to think of.

STREPHON [_again collapsing on the altar and covering his eyes with his
hands_] My heart is broken. [_He weeps_].

THE MAIDEN [_with a shrug_] I have luckily got through my childhood
without that experience. It shews how wise I was to choose a lover half
my age. [_She goes towards the grove, and is disappearing among the
trees, when another youth, older and manlier than Strephon, with crisp
hair and firm arms, comes from the temple, and calls to her from the
threshold_].

THE TEMPLE YOUTH. I say, Chloe. Is there any sign of the Ancient yet?
The hour of birth is overdue. The baby is kicking like mad. She will
break her shell prematurely.

THE MAIDEN [_looks across to the hill path; then points up it, and
says_] She is coming, Acis.

_The Maiden turns away through the grove and is lost to sight among the
trees._

Acis [_coming to Strephon_] Whats the matter? Has Chloe been unkind?

STREPHON. She has grown up in spite of all her promises. She deceived us
about her age. She is four.

ACIS. Four! I am sorry, Strephon. I am getting on for three myself;
and I know what old age is. I hate to say 'I told you so'; but she was
getting a little hard set and flat-chested and thin on the top, wasn't
she?

STREPHON [_breaking down_] Dont.

ACIS. You must pull yourself together. This is going to be a busy day.
First the birth. Then the Festival of the Artists.

STREPHON [_rising_] What is the use of being born if we have to decay
into unnatural, heartless, loveless, joyless monsters in four short
years? What use are the artists if they cannot bring their beautiful
creations to life? I have a great mind to die and have done with it
all. [_He moves away to the corner of the curved seat farthest from the
theatre, and throws himself moodily into it_].

_An Ancient Woman has descended the hill path during Strephon's lament,
and has heard most of it. She is like the He-Ancient, equally bald,
and equally without sexual charm, but intensely interesting and rather
terrifying. Her sex is discoverable only by her voice, as her breasts
are manly, and her figure otherwise not very different. She wears no
clothes, but has draped herself rather perfunctorily with a ceremonial
robe, and carries two implements like long slender saws. She comes to
the altar between the two young men._

THE SHE-ANCIENT [_to Strephon_] Infant: you are only at the beginning of
it all. [_To Acis_] Is the child ready to be born?

ACIS. More than ready, Ancient. Shouting and kicking and cursing. We
have called to her to be quiet and wait until you come; but of course
she only half understands, and is very impatient.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Very well. Bring her out into the sun.

ACIS [_going quickly into the temple_] All ready. Come along.

_Joyous processional music strikes up in the temple._

THE SHE-ANCIENT [_going close to Strephon_]. Look at me.

STREPHON [_sulkily keeping his face _averted] Thank you; but I don't
want to be cured. I had rather be miserable in my own way than callous
in yours.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. You like being miserable? You will soon grow out of
that. [_She returns to the altar_].

_The procession, headed by Acis, emerges from the temple. Six youths
carry on their shoulders a burden covered with a gorgeous but light
pall. Before them certain official maidens carry a new tunic, ewers of
water, silver dishes pierced with holes, cloths, and immense sponges.
The rest carry wands with ribbons, and strew flowers. The burden is
deposited on the altar, and the pall removed. It is a huge egg._

THE SHE-ANCIENT [_freeing her arms from her robe, and placing her saws
on the altar ready to her hand in a businesslike manner_] A girl, I
think you said?

ACIS. Yes.

THE TUNIC BEARER. It is a shame. Why cant we have more boys?

SEVERAL YOUTHS [_protesting_] Not at all. More girls. We want new girls.

A GIRL'S VOICE FROM THE EGG. Let me out. Let me out. I want to be born.
I want to be born. [_The egg rocks_].

ACIS [_snatching a wand from one of the others and whacking the egg with
it_] Be quiet, I tell you. Wait. You will be born presently.

THE EGG. No, no: at once, at once. I want to be born: I want to be born.
[_Violent kicking within the egg, which rocks so hard that it has to be
held on the altar by the bearers_].

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Silence. [_The music stops; and the egg behaves
itself_].

_The She-Ancient takes her two saws, and with a couple of strokes rips
the egg open. The Newly Born, a pretty girl who would have been guessed
as seventeen in our day, sits up in the broken shell, exquisitely fresh
and rosy, but with filaments of spare albumen clinging to her here and
there._

THE NEWLY BORN [_as the world bursts on her vision_] Oh! Oh!!
Oh!!! Oh!!!! [_She continues this ad libitum during the following
remonstrances_].

ACIS. Hold your noise, will you?

_The washing begins. The Newly Born shrieks and struggles._

A YOUTH. Lie quiet, you clammy little devil.

A MAIDEN. You must be washed, dear. Now quiet, quiet, quiet: be good.

ACIS. Shut your mouth, or I'll shove the sponge in it.

THE MAIDEN. Shut your eyes. Itll hurt if you don't.

ANOTHER MAIDEN. Dont be silly. One would think nobody had ever been born
before.

THE NEWLY BORN [_yells_]!!!!!!

ACIS. Serve you right! You were told to shut your eyes.

THE YOUTH. Dry her off quick. I can hardly hold her. Shut it, will you;
or I'll smack you into a pickled cabbage.

_The dressing begins. The Newly Born chuckles with delight._

THE MAIDEN. Your arms go here, dear. Isnt it pretty? Youll look lovely.

THE NEWLY BORN [_rapturously_] Oh! Oh!! Oh!!! Oh!!!!

ANOTHER YOUTH. No: the other arm: youre putting it on back to front. You
are a silly little beast.

ACIS. Here! Thats it. Now youre clean and decent. Up with you! Oopsh!
[_He hauls her to her feet. She cannot walk at first, but masters it
after a few steps_]. Now then: march. Here she is, Ancient: put her
through the catechism.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. What name have you chosen for her?

ACIS. Amaryllis.

THE SHE-ANCIENT [_to the Newly Born_] Your name is Amaryllis.

THE NEWLY BORN. What does it mean?

A YOUTH. Love.

A MAIDEN. Mother.

ANOTHER YOUTH. Lilies.

THE NEWLY BORN [_to Acis_] What is your name?

ACIS. Acis.

THE NEWLY BORN. I love you, Acis. I must have you all to myself. Take me
in your arms.

ACIS. Steady, young one. I am three years old.

THE NEWLY BORN. What has that to do with it? I love you; and I must have
you or I will go back into my shell again.

ACIS. You cant. It's broken. Look here [_pointing to Strephon, who has
remained in his seal without looking round at the birth, wrapped up in
his sorrow_]! Look at this poor fellow!

THE NEWLY BORN. What is the matter with him?

ACIS. When he was born he chose a girl two years old for his sweetheart.
He is two years old now himself; and already his heart is broken because
she is four. That means that she has grown up like this Ancient here,
and has left him. If you choose me, we shall have only a year's
happiness before I break your heart by growing up. Better choose the
youngest you can find.

THE NEWLY BORN. I will not choose anyone but you. You must not grow up.
We will love one another for ever. [_They all laugh_]. What are you
laughing at?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Listen, child--

THE NEWLY BORN. Do not come near me, you dreadful old creature. You
frighten me.

ACIS. Just give her another moment. She is not quite reasonable yet.
What can you expect from a child less than five minutes old?

THE NEWLY BORN. I think I feel a little more reasonable now. Of course I
was rather young when I said that; but the inside of my head is changing
very rapidly. I should like to have things explained to me.

ACIS [_to the She-Ancient_] Is she all right, do you think?

_The She-Ancient looks at the Newly Born critically; feels her bumps
like a phrenologist; grips her muscles and shakes her limbs; examines
her teeth; looks into her eyes for a moment; and finally relinquishes
her with an air of having finished her job._

THE SHE-ANCIENT. She will do. She may live.

_They all wave their hands and shout for joy._

THE NEWLY BORN [_indignant_] I may live! Suppose there had been anything
wrong with me?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Children with anything wrong do not live here, my
child. Life is not cheap with us. But you would not have felt anything.

THE NEWLY BORN. You mean that you would have murdered me!

THE SHE-ANCIENT. That is one of the funny words the newly born bring
with them out of the past. You will forget it tomorrow. Now listen. You
have four years of childhood before you. You will not be very happy; but
you will be interested and amused by the novelty of the world; and your
companions here will teach you how to keep up an imitation of happiness
during your four years by what they call arts and sports and pleasures.
The worst of your troubles is already over.

THE NEWLY BORN. What! In five minutes?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. No: you have been growing for two years in the egg. You
began by being several sorts of creatures that no longer exist, though
we have fossils of them. Then you became human; and you passed in
fifteen months through a development that once cost human beings twenty
years of awkward stumbling immaturity after they were born. They had to
spend fifty years more in the sort of childhood you will complete in
four years. And then they died of decay. But you need not die until your
accident comes.

THE NEWLY BORN. What is my accident?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Sooner or later you will fall and break your neck; or a
tree will fall on you; or you will be struck by lightning. Something or
other must make an end of you some day.

THE NEWLY BORN. But why should any of these things happen to me?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. There is no why. They do. Everything happens to
everybody sooner or later if there is time enough. And with us there is
eternity.

THE NEWLY BORN. Nothing need happen. I never heard such nonsense in all
my life. I shall know how to take care of myself.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. So you think.

THE NEWLY BORN. I don't think: I know. I shall enjoy life for ever and
ever.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. If you should turn out to be a person of infinite
capacity, you will no doubt find life infinitely interesting. However,
all you have to do now is to play with your companions. They have many
pretty toys, as you see: a playhouse, pictures, images, flowers, bright
fabrics, music: above all, themselves; for the most amusing child's toy
is another child. At the end of four years, your mind will change: you
will become wise; and then you will be entrusted with power.

THE NEWLY BORN. But I want power now.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. No doubt you do; so that you could play with the world
by tearing it to pieces.

THE NEWLY BORN. Only to see how it is made. I should put it all together
again much better than before.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. There was a time when children were given the world to
play with because they promised to improve it. They did not improve it;
and they would have wrecked it had their power been as great as that
which you will wield when you are no longer a child. Until then your
young companions will instruct you in whatever is necessary. You are not
forbidden to speak to the ancients; but you had better not do so, as
most of them have long ago exhausted all the interest there is in
observing children and conversing with them. [_She turns to go_].

THE NEWLY BORN. Wait. Tell me some things that I ought to do and ought
not to do. I feel the need of education. They all laugh at her, except
the She-Ancient.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. You will have grown out of that by tomorrow. Do what
you please. [_She goes away up the hill path_].

_The officials take their paraphernalia and the fragments of the egg
back into the temple._

ACIS. Just fancy: that old girl has been going for seven hundred years
and hasnt had her fatal accident yet; and she is not a bit tired of it
all.

THE NEWLY BORN. How could anyone ever get tired of life?

ACIS. They do. That is, of the same life. They manage to change
themselves in a wonderful way. You meet them sometimes with a lot of
extra heads and arms and legs: they make you split laughing at them.
Most of them have forgotten how to speak: the ones that attend to us
have to brush up their knowledge of the language once a year or so.
Nothing makes any difference to them that I can see. They never enjoy
themselves. I don't know how they can stand it. They don't even come to
our festivals of the arts. That old one who saw you out of your shell
has gone off to moodle about doing nothing; though she knows that this
is Festival Day?

THE NEWLY BORN. What is Festival Day?

ACIS. Two of our greatest sculptors are bringing us their latest
masterpieces; and we are going to crown them with flowers and sing
dithyrambs to them and dance round them.

THE NEWLY BORN. How jolly! What is a sculptor?

ACIS. Listen here, young one. You must find out things for yourself, and
not ask questions. For the first day or two you must keep your eyes and
ears open and your mouth shut. Children should be seen and not heard.

THE NEWLY BORN. Who are you calling a child? I am fully a quarter of
an hour old [_She sits down on the curved bench near Strephon with her
maturest air_].

VOICES IN THE TEMPLE [_all expressing protest, disappointment, disgust_]
Oh! Oh! Scandalous. Shameful. Disgraceful. What filth! Is this a joke?
Why, theyre ancients! Ss-s-s-sss! Are you mad, Arjillax? This is an
outrage. An insult. Yah! etc. etc. etc. [_The malcontents appear on the
steps, grumbling_].

ACIS. Hullo: whats the matter? [_He goes to the steps of the temple_].

_The two sculptors issue from the temple. One has a beard two feet long:
the other is beardless. Between them comes a handsome nymph with marked
features, dark hair richly waved, and authoritative bearing._

THE AUTHORITATIVE NYMPH [_swooping down to the centre of the glade with
the sculptors, between Acis and the Newly Born_] Do not try to browbeat
me, Arjillax, merely because you are clever with your hands. Can you
play the flute?

ARJILLAX [_the bearded sculptor on her right_] No, Ecrasia: I cannot.
What has that to do with it? [_He is half derisive, half impatient,
wholly resolved not to take her seriously in spite of her beauty and
imposing tone_].

ECRASIA. Well, have you ever hesitated to criticize our best flute
players, and to declare whether their music is good or bad? Pray have I
not the same right to criticize your busts, though I cannot make images
anymore than you can play?

ARJILLAX. Any fool can play the flute, or play anything else, if he
practises enough; but sculpture is a creative art, not a mere business
of whistling into a pipe. The sculptor must have something of the god
in him. From his hand comes a form which reflects a spirit. He does not
make it to please you, nor even to please himself, but because he must.
You must take what he gives you, or leave it if you are not worthy of
it.

ECRASIA [_scornfully_] Not worthy of it! Ho! May I not leave it because
it is not worthy of me?

ARJILLAX. Of you! Hold your silly tongue, you conceited humbug. What do
you know about it?

ECRASIA. I know what every person of culture knows: that the business of
the artist is to create beauty. Until today your works have been full of
beauty; and I have been the first to point that out.

ARJILLAX. Thank you for nothing. People have eyes, havnt they, to see
what is as plain as the sun in the heavens without your pointing it out?

ECRASIA. You were very glad to have it pointed out. You did not call me
a conceited humbug then. You stifled me with caresses. You modelled me
as the genius of art presiding over the infancy of your master here
[_indicating the other sculptor_], Martellus.

MARTELLUS [_a silent and meditative listener, shudders and shakes his
head, but says nothing_].

ARJILLAX [_quarrelsomely_] I was taken in by your talk.

ECRASIA. I discovered your genius before anyone else did. Is that true,
or is it not?

ARJILLAX. Everybody knew I was an extraordinary person. When I was born
my beard was three feet long.

ECRASIA. Yes; and it has shrunk from three feet to two. Your genius
seems to have been in the last foot of your beard; for you have lost
both.

MARTELLUS [_with a short sardonic cachinnation_] Ha! My beard was three
and a half feet long when I was born; and a flash of lightning burnt it
off and killed the ancient who was delivering me. Without a hair on my
chin I became the greatest sculptor in ten generations.

ECRASIA. And yet you come to us today with empty hands. We shall
actually have to crown Arjillax here because no other sculptor is
exhibiting.

ACIS [_returning from the temple steps to behind the curved seat on the
right of the three_] Whats the row, Ecrasia? Why have you fallen out
with Arjillax?

ECRASIA. He has insulted us! outraged us! profaned his art! You know
how much we hoped from the twelve busts he placed in the temple to be
unveiled today. Well, go in and look at them. That is all I have to
say. [_She sweeps to the curved seat, and sits down just where Acis is
leaning over it_].

ACIS. I am no great judge of sculpture. Art is not my line. What is
wrong with the busts?

ECRASIA. Wrong with them! Instead of being ideally beautiful nymphs and
youths, they are horribly realistic studies of--but I really cannot
bring my lips to utter it.

_The Newly Born, full of curiosity, runs to the temple, and peeps in._

ACIS. Oh, stow it, Ecrasia. Your lips are not so squeamish as all that.
Studies of what?

THE NEWLY BORN [_from the temple steps_] Ancients.

ACIS [_surprised but not scandalized_] Ancients!

ECRASIA. Yes, ancients. The one subject that is by the universal consent
of all connoisseurs absolutely excluded from the fine arts. [_To
Arjillax_] How can you defend such a proceeding?

ARJILLAX. If you come to that, what interest can you find in the statues
of smirking nymphs and posturing youths you stick up all over the place?

ECRASIA. You did not ask that when your hand was still skilful enough to
model them.

ARJILLAX. Skilful! You high-nosed idiot, I could turn such things out by
the score with my eyes bandaged and one hand tied behind me. But what
use would they be? They would bore me; and they would bore you if you
had any sense. Go in and look at my busts. Look at them again and yet
again until you receive the full impression of the intensity of
mind that is stamped on them; and then go back to the pretty-pretty
confectionery you call sculpture, and see whether you can endure its
vapid emptiness. [_He mounts the altar impetuously_] Listen to me, all
of you; and do you, Ecrasia, be silent if you are capable of silence.

ECRASIA. Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn. Scorn! That is
what I feel for your revolting busts.

ARJILLAX. Fool: the busts are only the beginning of a mighty design.
Listen.

ACIS. Go ahead, old sport. We are listening.

_Martellus stretches himself on the sward beside the altar. The Newly
Born sits on the temple steps with her chin on her hands, ready to
devour the first oration she has ever heard. The rest sit or stand at
ease._

ARJILLAX. In the records which generations of children have rescued from
the stupid neglect of the ancients, there has come down to us a fable
which, like many fables, is not a thing that was done in the past, but a
thing that is to be done in the future. It is a legend of a supernatural
being called the Archangel Michael.

THE NEWLY BORN. Is this a story? I want to hear a story. [_She runs down
the steps and sits on the altar at Arjillax's feet_].

ARJILLAX. The Archangel Michael was a mighty sculptor and painter. He
found in the centre of the world a temple erected to the goddess of the
centre, called Mediterranea. This temple was full of silly pictures of
pretty children, such as Ecrasia approves.

ACIS. Fair play, Arjillax! If she is to keep silent, let her alone.

ECRASIA. I shall not interrupt, Acis. Why should I not prefer youth and
beauty to age and ugliness?

ARJILLAX. Just so. Well, the Archangel Michael was of my opinion, not
yours. He began by painting on the ceiling the newly born in all their
childish beauty. But when he had done this he was not satisfied; for the
temple was no more impressive than it had been before, except that there
was a strength and promise of greater things about his newly born ones
than any other artist had attained to. So he painted all round these
newly born a company of ancients, who were in those days called prophets
and sybils, whose majesty was that of the mind alone at its intensest.
And this painting was acknowledged through ages and ages to be the
summit and masterpiece of art. Of course we cannot believe such a tale
literally. It is only a legend. We do not believe in archangels; and the
notion that thirty thousand years ago sculpture and painting existed,
and had even reached the glorious perfection they have reached with us,
is absurd. But what men cannot realize they can at least aspire to. They
please themselves by pretending that it was realized in a golden age of
the past. This splendid legend endured because it lived as a desire in
the hearts of the greatest artists. The temple of Mediterranea never was
built in the past, nor did Michael the Archangel exist. But today the
temple is here [_he points to the porch_]; and the man is here [_he
slaps himself on the chest_]. I, Arjillax, am the man. I will place
in your theatre such images of the newly born as must satisfy even
Ecrasia's appetite for beauty; and I will surround them with ancients
more august than any who walk through our woods.

MARTELLUS [_as before_] Ha!

ARJILLAX [_stung_] Why do you laugh, you who have come empty-handed,
and, it seems, empty-headed?

ECRASIA [_rising indignantly_] Oh, shame! You dare disparage Martellus,
twenty times your master.

ACIS. Be quiet, will you [_he seizes her shoulders and thrusts her back
into her seat_].

MARTELLUS. Let him disparage his fill, Ecrasia. [_Sitting up_] My poor
Arjillax, I too had this dream. I too found one day that my images of
loveliness had become vapid, uninteresting, tedious, a waste of time
and material. I too lost my desire to model limbs, and retained only my
interest in heads and faces. I, too, made busts of ancients; but I had
not your courage: I made them in secret, and hid them from you all.

ARJILLAX [_jumping down from the altar behind Martellus in his surprise
and excitement_] You made busts of ancients! Where are they, man? Will
you be talked out of your inspiration by Ecrasia and the fools who
imagine she speaks with authority? Let us have them all set up beside
mine in the theatre. I have opened the way for you; and you see I am
none the worse.

MARTELLUS. Impossible. They are all smashed. [_He rises, laughing_].

ALL. Smashed!

ARJILLAX. Who smashed them?

MARTELLUS. I did. That is why I laughed at you just now. You will smash
yours before you have completed a dozen of them. [_He goes to the end of
the altar and sits down beside the Newly Born_].

ARJILLAX. But why?

MARTELLUS. Because you cannot give them life. A live ancient is better
than a dead statue. [_He takes the Newly Born on his knee: she is
flattered and voluptuously responsive_]. Anything alive is better than
anything that is only pretending to be alive. [_To Arjillax_] Your
disillusion with your works of beauty is only the beginning of your
disillusion with images of all sorts. As your hand became more skilful
and your chisel cut deeper, you strove to get nearer and nearer to truth
and reality, discarding the fleeting fleshly lure, and making images of
the mind that fascinates to the end. But how can so noble an inspiration
be satisfied with any image, even an image of the truth? In the end the
intellectual conscience that tore you away from the fleeting in art to
the eternal must tear you away from art altogether, because art is false
and life alone is true.

THE NEWLY BORN [_flings her arms round his neck and kisses him
enthusiastically_].

MARTELLUS [_rises; carries her to the curved bench on his left; deposits
her beside Strephon as if she were his overcoat; and continues without
the least change of tone_] Shape it as you will, marble remains marble,
and the graven image an idol. As I have broken my idols, and cast away
my chisel and modelling tools, so will you too break these busts of
yours.

ARJILLAX. Never.

MARTELLUS. Wait, my friend. I do not come empty-handed today, as you
imagined. On the contrary, I bring with me such a work of art as you
have never seen, and an artist who has surpassed both you and me further
than we have surpassed all our competitors.

ECRASIA. Impossible. The greatest things in art can never be surpassed.

ARJILLAX. Who is this paragon whom you declare greater than I?

MARTELLUS. I declare him greater than myself, Arjillax.

ARJILLAX [_frowning_] I understand. Sooner than not drown me, you are
willing to clasp me round the waist and jump overboard with me.

ACIS. Oh, stop squabbling. That is the worst of you artists. You are
always in little squabbling cliques; and the worst cliques are those
which consist of one man. Who is this new fellow you are throwing in one
another's teeth?

ARJILLAX. Ask Martellus: do not ask me. I know nothing of him. [_He
leaves Martellus, and sits down beside Ecrasia, on her left_].

MARTELLUS. You know him quite well. Pygmalion.

ECRASIA [_indignantly_] Pygmalion! That soulless creature! A scientist!
A laboratory person!

ARJILLAX. Pygmalion produce a work of art! You have lost your artistic
senses. The man is utterly incapable of modelling a thumb nail, let
alone a human figure.

MARTELLUS. That does not matter: I have done the modelling for him.

ARJILLAX. What on earth do you mean?

MARTELLUS [_calling_] Pygmalion: come forth.

_Pygmalion, a square-fingered youth with his face laid out in horizontal
blocks, and a perpetual smile of eager benevolent interest in
everything, and expectation of equal interest from everybody else, comes
from the temple to the centre of the group, who regard him for the most
part with dismay, as dreading that he will bore them. Ecrasia is openly
contemptuous._

MARTELLUS. Friends: it is unfortunate that Pygmalion is constitutionally
incapable of exhibiting anything without first giving a lecture about
it to explain it; but I promise you that if you will be patient he will
shew you the two most wonderful works of art in the world, and that they
will contain some of my own very best workmanship. Let me add that they
will inspire a loathing that will cure you of the lunacy of art for
ever. [_He sits down next the Newly Born, who pouts and turns a very
cold right shoulder to him, a demonstration utterly lost on him_].

_Pygmalion, with the smile of a simpleton, and the eager confidence of a
fanatical scientist, climbs awkwardly on to the altar. They prepare for
the worst._

PYGMALION. My friends: I will omit the algebra--

ACIS. Thank God!

PYGMALION [_continuing_]--because Martellus has made me promise to do
so. To come to the point, I have succeeded in making artificial human
beings. Real live ones, I mean.

INCREDULOUS VOICES. Oh, come! Tell us another. Really, Pyg! Get out. You
havnt. What a lie!

PYGMALION. I tell you I have. I will shew them to you. It has been done
before. One of the very oldest documents we possess mentions a tradition
of a biologist who extracted certain unspecified minerals from the earth
and, as it quaintly expresses it, 'breathed into their nostrils the
breath of life.' This is the only tradition from the primitive ages
which we can regard as really scientific. There are later documents
which specify the minerals with great precision, even to their atomic
weights; but they are utterly unscientific, because they overlook the
element of life which makes all the difference between a mere mixture of
salts and gases and a living organism. These mixtures were made over
and over again in the crude laboratories of the Silly-Clever Ages; but
nothing came of them until the ingredient which the old chronicler
called the breath of life was added by this very remarkable early
experimenter. In my view he was the founder of biological science.

ARJILLAX. Is that all we know about him? It doesnt amount to very much,
does it?

PYGMALION. There are some fragments of pictures and documents which
represent him as walking in a garden and advising people to cultivate
their gardens. His name has come down to us in several forms. One of
them is Jove. Another is Voltaire.

ECRASIA. You are boring us to distraction with your Voltaire. What about
your human beings?

ARJILLAX. Aye: come to them.

PYGMALION. I assure you that these details are intensely interesting.
[_Cries of_ No! They are not! Come to the human beings! Conspuez
Voltaire! Cut it short, Pyg! _interrupt him from all sides_]. You will
see their bearing presently. I promise you I will not detain you long.
We know, we children of science, that the universe is full of forces and
powers and energies of one kind and another. The sap rising in a tree,
the stone holding together in a definite crystalline structure, the
thought of a philosopher holding his brain in form and operation with an
inconceivably powerful grip, the urge of evolution: all these forces can
be used by us. For instance, I use the force of gravitation when I put a
stone on my tunic to prevent it being blown away when I am bathing. By
substituting appropriate machines for the stone we have made not only
gravitation our slave, but also electricity and magnetism, atomic
attraction, repulsion, polarization, and so forth. But hitherto the
vital force has eluded us; so it has had to create machinery for itself.
It has created and developed bony structures of the requisite strength,
and clothed them with cellular tissue of such amazing sensitiveness that
the organs it forms will adapt their action to all the normal variations
in the air they breathe, the food they digest, and the circumstances
about which they have to think. Yet, as these live bodies, as we call
them, are only machines after all, it must be possible to construct them
mechanically.

ARJILLAX. Everything is possible. Have you done it? that is the
question.

PYGMALION. Yes. But that is a mere fact. What is interesting is the
explanation of the fact. Forgive my saying so; but it is such a pity
that you artists have no intellect.

ECRASIA [_sententiously_] I do not admit that. The artist divines by
inspiration all the truths that the so-called scientist grubs up in his
laboratory slowly and stupidly long afterwards.

ARJILLAX [_to Ecrasia, quarrelsomely_] What do you know about it? You
are not an artist.

ACIS. Shut your heads, both of you. Let us have the artificial men. Trot
them out, Pygmalion.

PYGMALION. It is a man and a woman. But I really must explain first.

ALL [_groaning_]!!!

PYGMALION. Yes: I--

ACIS. We want results, not explanations.

PYGMALION [_hurt_] I see I am boring you. Not one of you takes the least
interest in science. Goodbye. [_He descends from the altar and makes for
the temple_].

SEVERAL YOUTHS AND MAIDENS [_rising and rushing to him_] No, no. Dont
go. Dont be offended. We want to see the artificial pair. We will
listen. We are tremendously interested. Tell us all about it.

PYGMALION [_relenting_] I shall not detain you two minutes.

ALL. Half an hour if you like. Please go on, Pygmalion. [_They rush him
back to the altar, and hoist him on to it_]. Up you go.

_They return to their former places._

PYGMALION. As I told you, lots of attempts were made to produce
protoplasm in the laboratory. Why were these synthetic plasms, as they
called them, no use?

ECRASIA. We are waiting for you to tell us.

THE NEWLY BORN [_modelling herself on Ecrasia, and trying to outdo her
intellectually_] Clearly because they were dead.

PYGMALION. Not bad for a baby, my pet. But dead and alive are very loose
terms. You are not half as much alive as you will be in another month or
so. What was wrong with the synthetic protoplasm was that it could
not fix and conduct the Life Force. It was like a wooden magnet or a
lightning conductor made of silk: it would not take the current.

ACIS. Nobody but a fool would make a wooden magnet, and expect it to
attract anything.

PYGMALION. He might if he were so ignorant as not to be able to
distinguish between wood and soft iron. In those days they were very
ignorant of the differences between things, because their methods of
analysis were crude. They mixed up messes that were so like protoplasm
that they could not tell the difference. But the difference was there,
though their analysis was too superficial and incomplete to detect it.
You must remember that these poor devils were very little better than
our idiots: we should never dream of letting one of them survive the day
of its birth. Why, the Newly Born there already knows by instinct many
things that their greatest physicists could hardly arrive at by forty
years of strenuous study. Her simple direct sense of space-time and
quantity unconsciously solves problems which cost their most famous
mathematicians years of prolonged and laborious calculations requiring
such intense mental application that they frequently forgot to breathe
when engaged in them, and almost suffocated themselves in consequence.

ECRASIA. Leave these obscure prehistoric abortions; and come back to
your synthetic man and woman.

PYGMALION. When I undertook the task of making synthetic men, I did
not waste my time on protoplasm. It was evident to me that if it were
possible to make protoplasm in the laboratory, it must be equally
possible to begin higher up and make fully evolved muscular and nervous
tissues, bone, and so forth. Why make the seed when the making of the
flower would be no greater miracle? I tried thousands of combinations
before I succeeded in producing anything that would fix high-potential
Life Force.

ARJILLAX. High what?

PYGMALION. High-po-tential. The Life Force is not so simple as you
think. A high-potential current of it will turn a bit of dead tissue
into a philosopher's brain. A low-potential current will reduce the same
bit of tissue to a mass of corruption. Will you believe me when I tell
you that, even in man himself, the Life Force used to slip suddenly down
from its human level to that of a fungus, so that men found their flesh
no longer growing as flesh, but proliferating horribly in a lower form
which was called cancer, until the lower form of life killed the higher,
and both perished together miserably?

MARTELLUS. Keep off the primitive tribes, Pygmalion. They interest you;
but they bore these young things.

PYGMALION. I am only trying to make you understand. There was the Life
Force raging all round me: there was I, trying to make organs that would
capture it as a battery captures electricity, and tissues that would
conduct it and operate it. It was easy enough to make eyes more perfect
than our own, and ears with a larger range of sound; but they could
neither see nor hear, because they were not susceptible to the Life
Force. But it was far worse when I discovered how to make them
susceptible; for the first thing that happened was that they ceased to
be eyes and ears and turned into heaps of maggots.

ECRASIA. Disgusting! Please stop.

ACIS. If you don't want to hear, go away. You go ahead, Pyg.

PYGMALION. I went ahead. You see, the lower potentials of the Life Force
could make maggots, but not human eyes or ears. I improved the tissue
until it was susceptible to a higher potential.

ARJILLAX [_intensely interested_] Yes; and then?

PYGMALION. Then the eyes and ears turned into cancers.

ECRASIA. Oh, hideous!

PYGMALION. Not at all. That was a great advance. It encouraged me so
much that I put aside the eyes and ears, and made a brain. It wouldn't
take the Life Force at all until I had altered its constitution a dozen
times; but when it did, it took a much higher potential, and did not
dissolve; and neither did the eyes and ears when I connected them up
with the brain. I was able to make a sort of monster: a thing without
arms or legs; and it really and truly lived for half-an-hour.

THE NEWLY BORN. Half-an-hour! What good was that? Why did it die?

PYGMALION. Its blood went wrong. But I got that right; and then I went
ahead with a complete human body: arms and legs and all. He was my first
man.

ARJILLAX. Who modelled him?

PYGMALION. I did.

MARTELLUS. Do you mean to say you tried your own hand before you sent
for me?

PYGMALION. Bless you, yes, several times. My first man was the
ghastliest creature: a more dreadful mixture of horror and absurdity
than you who have not seen him can conceive.

ARJILLAX. If you modelled him, he must indeed have been a spectacle.

PYGMALION. Oh, it was not his shape. You see I did not invent that. I
took actual measurements and moulds from my own body. Sculptors do that
sometimes, you know; though they pretend they don't.

MARTELLUS. Hm!

ARJILLAX. Hah!

PYGMALION. He was all right to look at, at first, or nearly so. But he
behaved in the most appalling manner; and the subsequent developments
were so disgusting that I really cannot describe them to you. He seized
all sorts of things and swallowed them. He drank every fluid in the
laboratory. I tried to explain to him that he must take nothing that he
could not digest and assimilate completely; but of course he could not
understand me. He assimilated a little of what he swallowed; but the
process left horrible residues which he had no means of getting rid of.
His blood turned to poison; and he perished in torments, howling. I then
perceived that I had produced a prehistoric man; for there are certain
traces in our own bodies of arrangements which enabled the earlier forms
of mankind to renew their bodies by swallowing flesh and grains and
vegetables and all sorts of unnatural and hideous foods, and getting rid
of what they could not digest.

ECRASIA. But what a pity he died! What a glimpse of the past we have
lost! He could have told us stories of the Golden Age.

PYGMALION. Not he. He was a most dangerous beast. He was afraid of me,
and actually tried to kill me by snatching up things and striking at me
with them. I had to give him two or three pretty severe shocks before I
convinced him that he was at my mercy.

THE NEWLY BORN. Why did you not make a woman instead of a man? She would
have known how to behave herself.

MARTELLUS. Why did you not make a man and a woman? Their children would
have been interesting.

PYGMALION. I intended to make a woman; but after my experience with the
man it was out of the question.

ECRASIA. Pray why?

PYGMALION. Well, it is difficult to explain if you have not studied
prehistoric methods of reproduction. You see the only sort of men and
women I could make were men and women just like us as far as their
bodies were concerned. That was how I killed the poor beast of a man. I
hadnt provided for his horrible prehistoric methods of feeding himself.
Suppose the woman had reproduced in some prehistoric way instead of
being oviparous as we are? She couldn't have done it with a modern
female body. Besides, the experiment might have been painful.

ECRASIA. Then you have nothing to shew us at all?

PYGMALION. Oh yes I have. I am not so easily beaten as that. I set to
work again for months to find out how to make a digestive system that
would deal with waste products and a reproductive system capable of
internal nourishment and incubation.

ECRASIA. Why did you not find out how to make them like us?

STREPHON [_crying out in his grief for the first time_] Why did you not
make a woman whom you could love? That was the secret you needed.

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh yes. How true! How great of you, darling Strephon!
[_She kisses him impulsively_].

STREPHON [_passionately_] Let me alone.

MARTELLUS. Control your reflexes, child.

THE NEWLY BORN. My what!

MARTELLUS. Your reflexes. The things you do without thinking. Pygmalion
is going to shew you a pair of human creatures who are all reflexes and
nothing else. Take warning by them.

THE NEWLY BORN. But wont they be alive, like us?

PYGMALION. That is a very difficult question to answer, my dear. I
confess I thought at first I had created living creatures; but Martellus
declares they are only automata. But then Martellus is a mystic: _I_
am a man of science. He draws a line between an automaton and a living
organism. I cannot draw that line to my own satisfaction.

MARTELLUS. Your artificial men have no self-control. They only respond
to stimuli from without.

PYGMALION. But they are conscious. I have taught them to talk and read;
and now they tell lies. That is so very lifelike.

MARTELLUS. Not at all. If they were alive they would tell the truth. You
can provoke them to tell any silly lie; and you can foresee exactly the
sort of lie they will tell. Give them a clip below the knee, and they
will jerk their foot forward. Give them a clip in their appetites or
vanities or any of their lusts and greeds, and they will boast and lie,
and affirm and deny, and hate and love without the slightest regard to
the facts that are staring them in the face, or to their own obvious
limitations. That proves that they are automata.

PYGMALION [_unconvinced_] I know, dear old chap; but there really is
some evidence that we are descended from creatures quite as limited
and absurd as these. After all, the baby there is three-quarters an
automaton. Look at the way she has been going on!

THE NEWLY BORN [_indignantly_] What do you mean? How have I been going
on?

ECRASIA. If they have no regard for truth, they can have no real
vitality.

PYGMALION. Truth is sometimes so artificial: so relative, as we say in
the scientific world, that it is very hard to feel quite sure that what
is false and even ridiculous to us may not be true to them.

ECRASIA. I ask you again, why did you not make them like us? Would any
true artist be content with less than the best?

PYGMALION. I couldnt. I tried. I failed. I am convinced that what I
am about to shew you is the very highest living organism that can be
produced in the laboratory. The best tissues we can manufacture will not
take as high potentials as the natural product: that is where Nature
beats us. You dont seem to understand, any of you, what an enormous
triumph it was to produce consciousness at all.

ACIS. Cut the cackle; and come to the synthetic couple.

SEVERAL YOUTHS AND MAIDENS. Yes, yes. No more talking. Let us have them.
Dry up, Pyg; and fetch them along. Come on: out with them! The synthetic
couple.

PYGMALION [_waving his hands to appease them_] Very well, very well.
Will you please whistle for them? They respond to the stimulus of a
whistle.

_All who can, whistle like streetboys._

ECRASIA [_makes a wry face and puts her fingers in her ears_]!

PYGMALION. Sh-sh-sh! Thats enough: thats enough: thats enough.
[_Silence_]. Now let us have some music. A dance tune. Not too fast.

_The flutists play a quiet dance._

MARTELLUS. Prepare yourselves for something ghastly.

_Two figures, a man and woman of noble appearance, beautifully modelled
and splendidly attired, emerge hand in hand from the temple. Seeing
that all eyes are fixed on them, they halt on the steps, smiling with
gratified vanity. The woman is on the man's left._

PYGMALION [_rubbing his hands with the purring satisfaction of a
creator_] This way, please.

_The Figures advance condescendingly and pose themselves centrally
between the curved seats._

PYGMALION. Now if you will be so good as to oblige us with a little
something. You dance so beautifully, you know. [_He sits down next
Martellus, and whispers to him_] It is extraordinary how sensitive they
are to the stimulus of flattery.

_The Figures, with a gracious air, dance pompously, but very passably.
At the close they bow to one another._

ON ALL HANDS [_clapping_] Bravo! Thank you. Wonderful! Splendid.
Perfect.

_The Figures acknowledge the applause in an obvious condition of swelled
head._

THE NEWLY BORN. Can they make love?

PYGMALION. Yes: they can respond to every stimulus. They have all the
reflexes. Put your arm round the man's neck, and he will put his arm
round your body. He cannot help it.

THE FEMALE FIGURE [_frowning_] Round mine, you mean.

PYGMALION. Yours, too, of course, if the stimulus comes from you.

ECRASIA. Cannot he do anything original?

PYGMALION. No. But then, you know, I do not admit that any of us can do
anything really original, though Martellus thinks we can.

ACIS. Can he answer a question?

PYGMALION. Oh yes. A question is a stimulus, you know. Ask him one.

ACIS [_to the Male Figure_] What do you think of what you see around
you? Of us, for instance, and our ways and doings?

THE MALE FIGURE. I have not seen the newspaper today.

THE FEMALE FIGURE. How can you expect my husband to know what to think
of you if you give him his breakfast without his paper?

MARTELLUS. You see. He is a mere automaton.

THE NEWLY BORN. I don't think I should like him to put his arm round
my neck. I don't like them. [_The Male Figure looks offended, and the
Female jealous_]. Oh, I thought they couldn't understand. Have they
feelings?

PYGMALION. Of course they have. I tell you they have all the reflexes.

THE NEWLY BORN. But feelings are not reflexes.

PYGMALION. They are sensations. When the rays of light enter their eyes
and make a picture on their retinas, their brains become conscious of
the picture and they act accordingly. When the waves of sound started by
your speaking enter their ears and record a disparaging remark on their
keyboards, their brains become conscious of the disparagement and resent
it accordingly. If you did not disparage them they would not resent it.
They are merely responding to a stimulus.

THE MALE FIGURE. We are part of a cosmic system. Free will is an
illusion. We are the children of Cause and Effect. We are the
Unalterable, the Irresistible, the Irresponsible, the Inevitable.


    My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
    Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.


_There is a general stir of curiosity at this._

ACIS. What the dickens does he mean?

THE MALE FIGURE. Silence, base accident of Nature. This [_taking the
hand of the Female Figure and introducing her_] is Cleopatra-Semiramis,
consort of the king of kings, and therefore queen of queens. Ye are
things hatched from eggs by the brainless sun and the blind fire; but
the king of kings and queen of queens are not accidents of the egg: they
are thought-out and hand-made to receive the sacred Life Force. There is
one person of the king and one of the queen; but the Life Force of the
king and queen is all one: the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal. Such
as the king is so is the queen, the king thought-out and hand-made, the
queen thought-out and hand-made. The actions of the king are caused, and
therefore determined, from the beginning of the world to the end;
and the actions of the queen are likewise. The king logical and
predetermined and inevitable, and the queen logical and predetermined
and inevitable. And yet they are not two logical and predetermined and
inevitable, but one logical and predetermined and inevitable. Therefore
confound not the persons, nor divide the substance: but worship us twain
as one throne, two in one and one in two, lest by error ye fall into
irretrievable damnation.

THE FEMALE FIGURE. And if any say unto you 'Which one?' remember that
though there is one person of the king and one of the queen, yet these
two persons are not alike, but are woman and man, and that as woman was
created after man, the skill and practice gained in making him were
added to her, wherefore she is to be exalted above him in all personal
respects, and--

THE MALE FIGURE. Peace, woman; for this is a damnable heresy. Both Man
and Woman are what they are and must do what they must according to the
eternal laws of Cause and Effect. Look to your words; for if they enter
my ear and jar too repugnantly on my sensorium, who knows that the
inevitable response to that stimulus may not be a message to my muscles
to snatch up some heavy object and break you in pieces.

_The Female Figure picks up a stone and is about to throw it at her
consort._

ARJILLAX [_springing up and shouting to Pygmalion, who is fondly
watching the Male Figure_] Look out, Pygmalion! Look at the woman!

_Pygmalion, seeing what is happening, hurls himself on the Female Figure
and wrenches the stone out of her hand. All spring up in consternation._

ARJILLAX. She meant to kill him.

STREPHON. This is horrible.

THE FEMALE FIGURE [_wrestling with Pygmalion_] Let me go. Let me go,
will you [_she bites his hand_].

PYGMALION [_releasing her and staggering_] Oh!

_A general shriek of horror echoes his exclamation. He turns deadly
pale, and supports himself against the end of the curved seat._

THE FEMALE FIGURE [_to her consort_] You would stand there and let me be
treated like this, you unmanly coward.

_Pygmalion falls dead._

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh! Whats the matter? Why did he fall! What has happened
to him?

_They look on anxiously as Martellus kneels down and examines the body
of Pygmalion._

MARTELLUS. She has bitten a piece out of his hand nearly as large as a
finger nail: enough to kill ten men. There is no pulse, no breath.

ECRASIA. But his thumb is clinched.

MARTELLUS. No: it has just straightened out. See! He has gone. Poor
Pygmalion!

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh! [_She weeps_].

STREPHON. Hush, dear: thats childish.

THE NEWLY BORN [_subsiding with a sniff_]!!

MARTELLUS [_rising_] Dead in his third year. What a loss to Science!

ARJILLAX. Who cares about Science? Serve him right for making that pair
of horrors!

THE MALE FIGURE [_glaring_] Ha!

THE FEMALE FIGURE. Keep a civil tongue in your head, you.

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh, do not be so unkind, Arjillax. You will make water
come out of my eyes again.

MARTELLUS [_contemplating the Figures_] Just look at these two devils.
I modelled them out of the stuff Pygmalion made for them. They are
masterpieces of art. And see what they have done! Does that convince you
of the value of art, Arjillax!

STREPHON. They look dangerous. Keep away from them.

ECRASIA. No need to tell us that, Strephon. Pf! They poison the air.

THE MALE FIGURE. Beware, woman. The wrath of Ozymandias strikes like the
lightning.

THE FEMALE FIGURE. You just say that again if you dare, you filthy
creature.

ACIS. What are you going to do with them, Martellus? You are responsible
for them, now that Pygmalion has gone.

MARTELLUS. If they were marble it would be simple enough: I could smash
them. As it is, how am I to kill them without making a horrible mess?

THE MALE FIGURE [_posing heroically_] Ha! [_He declaims_]


    Come one: come all: this rock shall fly
    From its firm base as soon as I.


THE FEMALE FIGURE [_fondly_] My man! My hero husband! I am proud of you.
I love you.

MARTELLUS. We must send out a message for an ancient.

ACIS. Need we bother an ancient about such a trifle? It will take less
than half a second to reduce our poor Pygmalion to a pinch of dust. Why
not calcine the two along with him?

MARTELLUS. No: the two automata are trifles; but the use of our powers
of destruction is never a trifle. I had rather have the case judged.

_The He-Ancient emerges from the grove. The Figures are panic-stricken._

THE HE-ANCIENT [_mildly_] Am I wanted? I feel called. [_Seeing the body
of Pygmalion, and immediately taking a sterner tone_] What! A child
lost! A life wasted! How has this happened?

THE FEMALE FIGURE [_frantically_] I didn't do it. It was not me. May
I be struck dead if I touched him! It was he [_pointing to the Male
Figure_].

ALL [amazed at the lie] Oh!

THE MALE FIGURE. Liar. You bit him. Everyone here saw you do it.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Silence. [_Going between the Figures_] Who made these
two loathsome dolls?

THE MALE FIGURE [_trying to assert himself with his knees knocking_] My
name is Ozymandias, king of--

THE HE-ANCIENT [_with a contemptuous gesture_] Pooh!

THE MALE FIGURE [_falling on his knees_] Oh dont, sir. Dont. She did it,
sir: indeed she did.

THE FEMALE FIGURE [_howling lamentably_] Boohoo! oo! ooh!

THE HE-ANCIENT. Silence, I say.

_He knocks the Male Automaton upright by a very light flip under
the chin. The Female Automaton hardly dares to sob. The immortals
contemplate them with shame and loathing. The She-Ancient comes from the
trees opposite the temple._

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Somebody wants me. What is the matter? [_She comes to
the left hand of the Female Figure, not seeing the body of Pygmalion_].
Pf! [_Severely_] You have been making dolls. You must not: they are not
only disgusting: they are dangerous.

THE FEMALE FIGURE [_snivelling piteously_] I'm not a doll, mam. I'm only
poor Cleopatra-Semiramis, queen of queens. [_Covering her face with her
hands_] Oh, don't look at me like that, mam. I meant no harm. He hurt
me: indeed he did.

THE HE-ANCIENT. The creature has killed that poor youth.

THE SHE-ANCIENT [_seeing the body of Pygmalion_] What! This clever
child, who promised so well!

THE FEMALE FIGURE. He made me. I had as much right to kill him as he had
to make me. And how was I to know that a little thing like that would
kill him? I shouldn't die if he cut off my arm or leg.

ECRASIA. What nonsense!

MARTELLUS. It may not be nonsense. I daresay if you cut off her leg she
would grow another, like the lobsters and the little lizards.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Did this dead boy make these two things?

MARTELLUS. He made them in his laboratory. I moulded their limbs. I am
sorry. I was thoughtless: I did not foresee that they would kill and
pretend to be persons they were not, and declare things that were false,
and wish evil. I thought they would be merely mechanical fools.

THE MALE FIGURE. Do you blame us for our human nature?

THE FEMALE FIGURE. We are flesh and blood and not angels.

THE MALE FIGURE. Have you no hearts?

ARJILLAX. They are mad as well as mischievous. May we not destroy them?

STREPHON. We abhor them.

THE NEWLY BORN. We loathe them.

ECRASIA. They are noisome.

ACIS. I don't want to be hard on the poor devils; but they are making me
feel uneasy in my inside. I never had such a sensation before.

MARTELLUS. I took a lot of trouble with them. But as far as I am
concerned, destroy them by all means. I loathed them from the beginning.

ALL. Yes, yes: we all loathe them. Let us calcine them.

THE FEMALE FIGURE. Oh, don't be so cruel. I'm not fit to die. I will
never bite anyone again. I will tell the truth. I will do good. Is it my
fault if I was not made properly? Kill him; but spare me.

THE MALE FIGURE. No! I have done no harm: she has. Kill her if you like:
you have no right to kill me.

THE NEWLY BORN. Do you hear that? They want to have one another killed.

ARJILLAX. Monstrous! Kill them both.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Silence. These things are mere automata: they cannot
help shrinking from death at any cost. You see that they have no
self-control, and are merely shuddering through a series of reflexes.
Let us see whether we cannot put a little more life into them. [_He
takes the Male Figure by the hand, and places his disengaged hand on
its head_]. Now listen. One of you two is to be destroyed. Which of you
shall it be?

THE MALE FIGURE [_after a slight convulsion during which his eyes are
fixed on the He-Ancient_] Spare her; and kill me.

STREPHON. Thats better.

THE NEWLY BORN. Much better.

THE SHE-ANCIENT [_handling the Female Automaton in the same manner_]
Which of you shall we kill?

THE FEMALE FIGURE. Kill us both. How could either of us live without the
other?

ECRASIA. The woman is more sensible than the man.

_The Ancients release the Automata._

THE MALE FIGURE [_sinking to the ground_] I am discouraged. Life is too
heavy a burden.

THE FEMALE FIGURE [_collapsing_] I am dying. I am glad. I am afraid to
live.

THE NEWLY BORN. I think it would be nice to give the poor things a
little music.

ARJILLAX. Why?

THE NEWLY BORN. I don't know. But it would.

_The Musicians play._

THE FEMALE FIGURE. Ozymandias: do you hear that? [_She rises on her
knees and looks raptly into space_] Queen of queens! [_She dies_].

THE MALE FIGURE [_crawling feebly towards her until he reaches her
hand_] I knew I was really a king of kings. [_To the others_] Illusions,
farewell: we are going to our thrones. [_He dies_].

_The music stops. There is dead silence for a moment._

THE NEWLY BORN. That was funny.

STREPHON. It was. Even the Ancients are smiling.

THE NEWLY BORN. Just a little.

THE SHE-ANCIENT [_quickly recovering her grave and peremptory manner_]
Take these two abominations away to Pygmalion's laboratory, and destroy
them with the rest of the laboratory refuse. [_Some of them move to
_obey]. Take care: do not touch their flesh: it is noxious: lift them by
their robes. Carry Pygmalion into the temple; and dispose of his remains
in the usual way.

_The three bodies are carried out as directed, Pygmalion into the temple
by his bare arms and legs, and the two Figures through the grove by
their clothes. Martellus superintends the removal of the Figures, Acis
that of Pygmalion. Ecrasia, Arjillax, Strephon, and the Newly Born sit
down as before, but on contrary benches; so that Strephon and the Newly
Born now face the grove, and Ecrasia and Arjillax the temple. The
Ancients remain standing at the altar._

ECRASIA [_as she sits down_] Oh for a breeze from the hills!

STREPHON. Or the wind from the sea at the turn of the tide!

THE NEWLY BORN. I want some clean air.

THE HE-ANCIENT. The air will be clean in a moment. This doll flesh that
children make decomposes quickly at best; but when it is shaken by such
passions as the creatures are capable of, it breaks up at once and
becomes horribly tainted.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Let it be a lesson to you all to be content with
lifeless toys, and not attempt to make living ones. What would you think
of us ancients if we made toys of you children?

THE NEWLY BORN [_coaxingly_] Why do you not make toys of us? Then you
would play with us; and that would be very nice.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. It would not amuse us. When you play with one another
you play with your bodies, and that makes you supple and strong; but if
we played with you we should play with your minds, and perhaps deform
them.

STREPHON. You are a ghastly lot, you ancients. I shall kill myself when
I am four years old. What do you live for?

THE HE-ANCIENT. You will find out when you grow up. You will not kill
yourself.

STREPHON. If you make me believe that, I shall kill myself now.

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh no. I want you. I love you.

STREPHON. I love someone else. And she has gone old, old. Lost to me for
ever.

THE HE-ANCIENT. How old?

STREPHON. You saw her when you barged into us as we were dancing. She is
four.

THE NEWLY BORN. How I should have hated her twenty minutes ago! But I
have grown out of that now.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Good. That hatred is called jealousy, the worst of our
childish complaints.

_Martellus, dusting his hands and puffing, returns from the grove._

MARTELLUS. Ouf! [_He sits down next the Newly Born_] That job's
finished.

ARJILLAX. Ancients: I should like to make a few studies of you. Not
portraits, of course: I shall idealize you a little. I have come to the
conclusion that you ancients are the most interesting subjects after
all.

MARTELLUS. What! Have those two horrors, whose ashes I have just
deposited with peculiar pleasure in poor Pygmalion's dustbin, not cured
you of this silly image-making!

ARJILLAX. Why did you model them as young things, you fool? If Pygmalion
had come to me, I should have made ancients of them for him. Not that I
should have modelled them any better. I have always said that no one
can beat you at your best as far as handwork is concerned. But this job
required brains. That is where I should have come in.

MARTELLUS. Well, my brainy boy, you are welcome to try your hand. There
are two of Pygmalion's pupils at the laboratory who helped him to
manufacture the bones and tissues and all the rest of it. They can turn
out a couple of new automatons; and you can model them as ancients if
this venerable pair will sit for you.

ECRASIA [_decisively_] No. No more automata. They are too disgusting.

ACIS [_returning from the temple_] Well, thats done. Poor old Pyg!

ECRASIA. Only fancy, Acis! Arjillax wants to make more of those
abominable things, and to destroy even their artistic character by
making ancients of them.

THE NEWLY BORN. You wont sit for them, will you? Please dont.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Children, listen.

ACIS [_striding down the steps to the bench and seating himself next
Ecrasia_] What! Even the Ancient wants to make a speech! Give it mouth,
O Sage.

STREPHON. For heaven's sake don't tell us that the earth was once
inhabited by Ozymandiases and Cleopatras. Life is hard enough for us as
it is.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take
courage: it can be delightful. What I wanted to tell you is that ever
since men existed, children have played with dolls.

ECRASIA. You keep using that word. What are dolls, pray?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. What you call works of art. Images. We call them dolls.

ARJILLAX. Just so. You have no sense of art; and you instinctively
insult it.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Children have been known to make dolls out of rags, and
to caress them with the deepest fondness.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Eight centuries ago, when I was a child, I made a rag
doll. The rag doll is the dearest of all.

THE NEWLY BORN [_eagerly interested_] Oh! Have you got it still?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. I kept it a full week.

ECRASIA. Even in your childhood, then, you did not understand high art,
and adored your own amateur crudities.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. How old are you?

ECRASIA. Eight months.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. When you have lived as long as I have--

ECRASIA [_interrupting rudely_] I shall worship rag dolls, perhaps.
Thank heaven I am still in my prime.

THE HE-ANCIENT. You are still capable of thanking, though you do not
know what you thank. You are a thanking little animal, a blaming little
animal, a--

ACIS. A gushing little animal.

ARJILLAX. And, as she thinks, an artistic little animal.

ECRASIA [_nettled_] I am an animated being with a reasonable soul and
human flesh subsisting. If your Automata had been properly animated,
Martellus, they would have been more successful.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. That is where you are wrong, my child. If those two
loathsome things had been rag dolls, they would have been amusing and
lovable. The Newly Born here would have played with them; and you would
all have laughed and played with them too until you had torn them to
pieces; and then you would have laughed more than ever.

THE NEWLY BORN. Of course we should. Isnt that funny?

THE HE-ANCIENT. When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth.

STREPHON. Yes; and take all the fun out of it.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Do not be so embittered because your sweetheart has
outgrown her love for you. The Newly Born will make amends.

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh yes: I will be more than she could ever have been.

STREPHON. Psha! Jealous!

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh no. I have grown out of that. I love her now because
she loved you, and because you love her.

THE HE-ANCIENT. That is the next stage. You are getting on very nicely,
my child.

MARTELLUS. Come! what is the truth that was hidden in the rag doll?

THE HE-ANCIENT. Well, consider why you are not content with the rag
doll, and must have something more closely resembling a real living
creature. As you grow up you make images and paint pictures. Those of
you who cannot do that make stories about imaginary dolls. Or you dress
yourselves up as dolls and act plays about them.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. And, to deceive yourself the more completely, you take
them so very very seriously that Ecrasia here declares that the making
of dolls is the holiest work of creation, and the words you put into
the mouths of dolls the sacredest of scriptures and the noblest of
utterances.

ECRASIA. Tush!

ARJILLAX. Tosh!

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Yet the more beautiful they become the further they
retreat from you. You cannot caress them as you caress the rag doll. You
cannot cry for them when they are broken or lost, or when you pretend
they have been unkind to you, as you could when you played with rag
dolls.

THE HE-ANCIENT. At last, like Pygmalion, you demand from your dolls the
final perfection of resemblance to life. They must move and speak.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. They must love and hate.

THE HE-ANCIENT. They must think that they think.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. They must have soft flesh and warm, blood.

THE HE-ANCIENT. And then, when you have achieved this as Pygmalion did;
when the marble masterpiece is dethroned by the automaton and the homo
by the homunculus; when the body and the brain, the reasonable soul and
human flesh subsisting, as Ecrasia says, stand before you unmasked as
mere machinery, and your impulses are shewn to be nothing but reflexes,
you are filled with horror and loathing, and would give worlds to be
young enough to play with your rag doll again, since every step away
from it has been a step away from love and happiness. Is it not true?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Speak, Martellus: you who have travelled the whole
path.

MARTELLUS. It is true. With fierce joy I turned a temperature of a
million degrees on those two things I had modelled, and saw them vanish
in an instant into inoffensive dust.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Speak, Arjillax: you who have advanced from imitating
the lightly living child to the intensely living ancient. Is it true, so
far?

ARJILLAX. It is partly true: I cannot pretend to be satisfied now with
modelling pretty children.

THE HE-ANCIENT. And you, Ecrasia: you cling to your highly artistic
dolls as the noblest projections of the Life Force, do you not?

ECRASIA. Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world
unbearable.

THE NEWLY BORN [_anticipating the She-Ancient, who is evidently going
to challenge her_] Now you are coming to me, because I am the latest
arrival. But I don't understand your art and your dolls at all. I want
to caress my darling Strephon, not to play with dolls.

ACIS. I am in my fourth year; and I have got on very well without your
dolls. I had rather walk up a mountain and down again than look at all
the statues Martellus and Arjillax ever made. You prefer a statue to an
automaton, and a rag doll to a statue. So do I; but I prefer a man to a
rag doll. Give me friends, not dolls.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Yet I have seen you walking over the mountains alone.
Have you not found your best friend in yourself?

ACIS. What are you driving at, old one? What does all this lead to?

THE HE-ANCIENT. It leads, young man, to the truth that you can create
nothing but yourself.

ACIS [_musing_] I can create nothing but myself. Ecrasia: you are
clever. Do you understand it? I don't.

ECRASIA. It is as easy to understand as any other ignorant error. What
artist is as great as his own works? He can create masterpieces; but he
cannot improve the shape of his own nose.

ACIS. There! What have you to say to that, old one?

THE HE-ANCIENT. He can alter the shape of his own soul. He could alter
the shape of his nose if the difference between a turned-up nose and a
turned-down one were worth the effort. One does not face the throes of
creation for trifles.

ACIS. What have you to say to that, Ecrasia?

ECRASIA. I say that if the ancients had thoroughly grasped the theory of
fine art they would understand that the difference between a beautiful
nose and an ugly one is of supreme importance: that it is indeed the
only thing that matters.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. That is, they would understand something they could not
believe, and that you do not believe.

ACIS. Just so, mam. Art is not honest: that is why I never could stand
much of it. It is all make-believe. Ecrasia never really says things:
she only rattles her teeth in her mouth.

ECRASIA. Acis: you are rude.

ACIS. You mean that I wont play the game of make-believe. Well, I don't
ask you to play it with me; so why should you expect me to play it with
you?

ECRASIA. You have no right to say that I am not sincere. I have found a
happiness in art that real life has never given me. I am intensely in
earnest about art. There is a magic and mystery in art that you know
nothing of.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Yes, child: art is the magic mirror you make to reflect
your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see
your face: you use works of art to see your soul. But we who are older
use neither glass mirrors nor works of art. We have a direct sense of
life. When you gain that you will put aside your mirrors and statues,
your toys and your dolls.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Yet we too have our toys and our dolls. That is the
trouble of the ancients.

ARJILLAX. What! The ancients have their troubles! It is the first time I
ever heard one of them confess it.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Look at us. Look at me. This is my body, my blood,
my brain; but it is not me. I am the eternal life, the perpetual
resurrection; but [_striking his body_] this structure, this organism,
this makeshift, can be made by a boy in a laboratory, and is held back
from dissolution only by my use of it. Worse still, it can be broken by
a slip of the foot, drowned by a cramp in the stomach, destroyed by a
flash from the clouds. Sooner or later, its destruction is certain.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Yes: this body is the last doll to be discarded. When I
was a child, Ecrasia, I, too, was an artist, like your sculptor friends
there, striving to create perfection in things outside myself. I made
statues: I painted pictures: I tried to worship them.

THE HE-ANCIENT. I had no such skill; but I, like Acis, sought perfection
in friends, in lovers, in nature, in things outside myself. Alas! I
could not create if. I could only imagine it.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. I, like Arjillax, found out that my statues of bodily
beauty were no longer even beautiful to me; and I pressed on and made
statues and pictures of men and women of genius, like those in the old
fable of Michael Angelo. Like Martellus, I smashed them when I saw that
there was no life in them: that they were so dead that they would not
even dissolve as a dead body does.

THE HE-ANCIENT. And I, like Acis, ceased to walk over the mountains with
my friends, and walked alone; for I found that I had creative power
over myself but none over my friends. And then I ceased to walk on the
mountains; for I saw that the mountains were dead.

ACIS [_protesting vehemently_] No. I grant you about the friends
perhaps; but the mountains are still the mountains, each with its name,
its individuality, its upstanding strength and majesty, its beauty--

ECRASIA. What! Acis among the rhapsodists!

THE HE-ANCIENT. Mere metaphor, my poor boy: the mountains are corpses.

ALL THE YOUNG [_repelled_] Oh!

THE HE-ANCIENT. Yes. In the hardpressed heart of the earth, where the
inconceivable heat of the sun still glows, the stone lives in fierce
atomic convulsion, as we live in our slower way. When it is cast out to
the surface it dies like deep-sea fish: what you see is only its cold
dead body. We have tapped that central heat as prehistoric man tapped
water springs; but nothing has come up alive from those flaming depths:
your landscapes, your mountains, are only the world's cast skins and
decaying teeth on which we live like microbes.

ECRASIA. Ancient: you blaspheme against Nature and against Man.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Child, child, how much enthusiasm will you have for man
when you have endured eight centuries of him, as I have, and seen him
perish by an empty mischance that is yet a certainty? When I discarded
my dolls as he discarded his friends and his mountains, it was to myself
I turned as to the final reality. Here, and here alone, I could shape
and create. When my arm was weak and I willed it to be strong, I could
create a roll of muscle on it; and when I understood that, I understood
that I could without any greater miracle give myself ten arms and three
heads.

THE HE-ANCIENT. I also came to understand such miracles. For fifty years
I sat contemplating this power in myself and concentrating my will.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. So did I; and for five more years I made myself into
all sorts of fantastic monsters. I walked upon a dozen legs: I worked
with twenty hands and a hundred fingers: I looked to the four quarters
of the compass with eight eyes out of four heads. Children fled in
amazement from me until I had to hide myself from them; and the
ancients, who had forgotten how to laugh, smiled grimly when they
passed.

THE HE-ANCIENT. We have all committed these follies. You will all commit
them.

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh, do grow a lot of arms and legs and heads for us. It
would be so funny.

THE HE-ANCIENT. My child: I am just as well as I am. I would not lift my
finger now to have a thousand heads.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. But what would I not give to have no head at all?

ALL THE YOUNG. Whats that? No head at all? Why? How?

THE HE-ANCIENT. Can you not understand?

ALL THE YOUNG [_shaking their heads_] No.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. One day, when I was tired of learning to walk forward
with some of my feet and backwards with others and sideways with the
rest all at once, I sat on a rock with my four chins resting on four
of my palms, and four or my elbows resting on four of my knees. And
suddenly it came into my mind that this monstrous machinery of heads and
limbs was no more me than my statues had been me, and that it was only
an automaton that I had enslaved.

MARTELLUS. Enslaved? What does that mean?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. A thing that must do what you command it is a slave;
and its commander is its master. These are words you will learn when
your turn comes.

THE HE-ANCIENT. You will also learn that when the master has come to do
everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he
cannot live without him.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. And so I perceived that I had made myself the slave of
a slave.

THE HE-ANCIENT. When we discovered that, we shed our superfluous heads
and legs and arms until we had our old shapes again, and no longer
startled the children.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. But still I am the slave of this slave, my body. How am
I to be delivered from it?

THE HE-ANCIENT. That, children, is the trouble of the ancients. For
whilst we are tied to this tyrannous body we are subject to its death,
and our destiny is not achieved.

THE NEWLY BORN. What is your destiny?

THE HE-ANCIENT. To be immortal.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. The day will come when there will be no people, only
thought.

THE HE-ANCIENT. And that will be life eternal.

ECRASIA. I trust I shall meet my fatal accident before that day dawns.

ARJILLAX. For once, Ecrasia, I agree with you. A world in which there
were nothing plastic would be an utterly miserable one.

ECRASIA. No limbs, no contours, no exquisite lines and elegant shapes,
no worship of beautiful bodies, no poetic embraces in which cultivated
lovers pretend that their caressing hands are wandering over celestial
hills and enchanted valleys, no--

ACIS [_interrupting her disgustedly_] What an inhuman mind you have,
Ecrasia!

ECRASIA. Inhuman!

ACIS. Yes: inhuman. Why don't you fall in love with someone?

ECRASIA. I! I have been in love all my life. I burned with it even in
the egg.

ACIS. Not a bit of it. You and Arjillax are just as hard as two stones.

ECRASIA. You did not always think so, Acis.

ACIS. Oh, I know. I offered you my love once, and asked for yours.

ECRASIA. And did I deny it to you, Acis?

ACIS. You didn't even know what love was.

ECRASIA. Oh! I adored you, you stupid oaf, until I found that you were a
mere animal.

ACIS. And I made no end of a fool of myself about you until I discovered
that you were a mere artist. You appreciated my contours! I was plastic,
as Arjillax says. I wasn't a man to you: I was a masterpiece appealing
to your tastes and your senses. Your tastes and senses had overlaid the
direct impulse of life in you. And because I cared only for our life,
and went straight to it, and was bored by your calling my limbs fancy
names and mapping me into mountains and valleys and all the rest of it,
you called me an animal. Well, I am an animal, if you call a live man an
animal.

ECRASIA. You need not explain. You refused to be refined. I did my
best to lift your prehistoric impulses on to the plane of beauty, of
imagination, of romance, of poetry, of art, of--

ACIS. These things are all very well in their way and in their proper
places. But they are not love. They are an unnatural adulteration of
love. Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and
not an illusion. Art is an illusion.

ARJILLAX. That is false. The statue comes to life always. The statues of
today are the men and women of the next incubation. I hold up the marble
figure before the mother and say, 'This is the model you must copy.' We
produce what we see. Let no man dare to create in art a thing that he
would not have exist in life.

MARTELLUS. Yes: I have been through all that. But you yourself are
making statues of ancients instead of beautiful nymphs and swains. And
Ecrasia is right about the ancients being inartistic. They are damnably
inartistic.

ECRASIA [_triumphant_] Ah! Our greatest artist vindicates me. Thanks,
Martellus.

MARTELLUS. The body always ends by being a bore. Nothing remains
beautiful and interesting except thought, because the thought is the
life. Which is just what this old gentleman and this old lady seem to
think too.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Quite so.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Precisely.

THE NEWLY BORN [_to the He-Ancient_] But you cant be nothing. What do
you want to be?

THE HE-ANCIENT. A vortex.

THE NEWLY BORN. A what?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. A vortex. I began as a vortex: why should I not end as
one?

ECRASIA. Oh! That is what you old people are, Vorticists.

ACIS. But if life is thought, can you live without a head?

THE HE-ANCIENT. Not now perhaps. But prehistoric men thought they could
not live without tails. I can live without a tail. Why should I not live
without a head?

THE NEWLY BORN. What is a tail?

THE HE-ANCIENT A habit of which your ancestors managed to pure
themselves.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. None of us now believe that all this machinery of flesh
and blood is necessary. It dies.

THE HE-ANCIENT. It imprisons us on this petty planet and forbids us to
range through the stars.

ACIS. But even a vortex is a vortex in something. You cant have a
whirlpool without water; and you cant have a vortex without gas, or
molecules or atoms or ions or electrons or something, not nothing.

THE HE-ANCIENT. No: the vortex is not the water nor the gas nor the
atoms: it is a power over these things.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. The body was the slave of the vortex; but the slave has
become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. It is
this stuff [_indicating her body_], this flesh and blood and bone and
all the rest of it, that is intolerable. Even prehistoric man dreamed of
what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the
body of this death.

ACIS [_evidently out of his depth_] I shouldn't think too much about it
if I were you. You have to keep sane, you know.

_The two Ancients look at one another; shrug their shoulders; and
address themselves to their departure._

THE HE-ANCIENT. We are staying too long with you, children. We must go.

_All the young people rise rather eagerly._

ARJILLAX. Dont mention it.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. It is tiresome for us, too. You see, children, we have
to put things very crudely to you to make ourselves intelligible.

THE HE-ANCIENT. And I am afraid we do not quite succeed.

STREPHON. Very kind of you to come at all and talk to us, I'm sure.

ECRASIA. Why do the other ancients never come and give us a turn?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. It is difficult for them. They have forgotten how
to speak; how to read; even how to think in your fashion. We do not
communicate with one another in that way or apprehend the world as you
do.

THE HE-ANCIENT. I find it more and more difficult to keep up your
language. Another century or two and it will be impossible. I shall have
to be relieved by a younger shepherd.

ACIS. Of course we are always delighted to see you; but still, if it
tries you very severely, we could manage pretty well by ourselves, you
know.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Tell me, Acis: do you ever think of yourself as having
to live perhaps for thousands of years?

ACIS. Oh, don't talk about it. Why, I know very well that I have only
four years of what any reasonable person would call living; and three
and a half of them are already gone.

ECRASIA. You must not mind our saying so; but really you cannot call
being an ancient living.

THE NEWLY BORN [_almost in tears_] Oh, this dreadful shortness of our
lives! I cannot bear it.

STREPHON. I made up my mind on that subject long ago. When I am three
years and fifty weeks old, I shall have my fatal accident. And it will
not be an accident.

THE HE-ANCIENT. We are very tired of this subject. I must leave you.

THE NEWLY BORN. What is being tired?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. The penalty of attending to children. Farewell.

_The two Ancients go away severally, she into the grove, he up to the
hills behind the temple._

ALL. Ouf! [_A great sigh of relief_].

ECRASIA. Dreadful people!

STREPHON. Bores!

MARTELLUS. Yet one would like to follow them; to enter into their life;
to grasp their thought; to comprehend the universe as they must.

ARJILLAX. Getting old, Martellus?

MARTELLUS. Well, I have finished with the dolls; and I am no longer
jealous of you. That looks like the end. Two hours sleep is enough for
me. I am afraid I am beginning to find you all rather silly.

STREPHON. I know. My girl went off this morning. She hadnt slept for
weeks. And she found mathematics more interesting than me.

MARTELLUS. There is a prehistoric saying that has come down to us from a
famous woman teacher. She said: 'Leave women; and study mathematics.'
It is the only remaining fragment of a lost scripture called The
Confessions of St Augustin, the English Opium Eater. That primitive
savage must have been a great woman, to say a thing that still lives
after three hundred centuries. I too will leave women and study
mathematics, which I have neglected too long. Farewell, children, my old
playmates. I almost wish I could feel sentimental about parting from
you; but the cold truth is that you bore me. Do not be angry with me:
your turn will come. [_He passes away gravely into the grove_].

ARJILLAX. There goes a great spirit. What a sculptor he was! And now,
nothing! It is as if he had cut off his hands.

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh, will you all leave me as he has left you?

ECRASIA. Never. We have sworn it.

STREPHON. What is the use of swearing? She swore. He swore. You have
sworn. They have sworn.

ECRASIA. You speak like a grammar.

STREPHON. That is how one ought to speak, isnt it? We shall all be
forsworn.

THE NEWLY BORN. Do not talk like that. You are saddening us; and you are
chasing the light away. It is growing dark.

ACIS. Night is falling. The light will come back tomorrow.

THE NEWLY BORN. What is tomorrow?

ACIS. The day that never comes. [_He turns towards the temple_].

_All begin trooping into the temple._

THE NEWLY BORN [_holding Acis back_] That is no answer. What--

ARJILLAX. Silence. Little children should be seen and not heard.

THE NEWLY BORN [_putting out her tongue at him_]!

ECRASIA. Ungraceful. You must not do that.

THE NEWLY BORN. I will do what I like. But there is something the matter
with me. I want to lie down. I cannot keep my eyes open.

ECRASIA. You are falling asleep. You will wake up again.

THE NEWLY BORN [_drowsily_] What is sleep?

ACIS. Ask no questions; and you will be told no lies. [_He takes her by
the ear, and leads her firmly towards the temple_].

THE NEWLY BORN. Ai! oi! ai! Dont. I want to be carried. [_She reels into
the arms of Acts, who carries her into the temple_].

ECRASIA. Come, Arjillax: you at least are still an artist. I adore you.

ARJILLAX. Do you? Unfortunately for you, I am not still a child. I have
grown out of cuddling. I can only appreciate your figure. Does that
satisfy you?

ECRASIA. At what distance?

ARJILLAX. Arm's length or more.

ECRASIA. Thank you: not for me. [_She turns away from him_].

ARJILLAX. Ha! ha! [_He strides off into the temple_].

ECRASIA [_calling to Strephon, who is on the threshold of the temple,
going in_] Strephon.

STREPHON. No. My heart is broken. [_He goes into the temple_].

ECRASIA. Must I pass the night alone? [_She looks round, seeking another
partner; but they have all gone_]. After all, I can imagine a lover
nobler than any of you. [_She goes into the temple_].

_It is now quite dark. A vague radiance appears near the temple and
shapes itself into the ghost of Adam._

A WOMAN'S VOICE [_in the grove_] Who is that?

ADAM. The ghost of Adam, the first father of mankind. Who are you?

THE VOICE. The ghost of Eve, the first mother of mankind.

ADAM. Come forth, wife; and shew yourself to me.

EVE [_appearing near the grove_] Here I am, husband. You are very old.

A VOICE [_in the hills_] Ha! ha! ha!

ADAM. Who laughs? Who dares laugh at Adam?

EVE. Who has the heart to laugh at Eve?

THE VOICE. The ghost of Cain, the first child, and the first murderer.
[_He appears between them; and as he does so there is a prolonged
hiss_]. Who dares hiss at Cain, the lord of death?

A VOICE. The ghost of the serpent, that lived before Adam and before
Eve, and taught them how to bring forth Cain. [_She becomes visible,
coiled in the trees_].

A VOICE. There is one that came before the serpent.

THE SERPENT. That is the voice of Lilith, in whom the father and mother
were one. Hail, Lilith!

_Lilith becomes visible between Cain and Adam._

LILITH. I suffered unspeakably; I tore myself asunder; I lost my life,
to make of my one flesh these twain, man and woman. And this is what has
come of it. What do you make of it, Adam, my son?

ADAM. I made the earth bring forth by my labor, and the woman bring
forth by my love. And this is what has come of it. What do you make of
it, Eve, my wife?

EVE. I nourished the egg in my body and fed it with my blood. And now
they let it fall as the birds did, and suffer not at all. What do you
make of it, Cain, my first-born?

CAIN. I invented killing and conquest and mastery and the winnowing out
of the weak by the strong. And now the strong have slain one another;
and the weak live for ever; and their deeds do nothing for the doer more
than for another. What do you make of it, snake?

THE SERPENT. I am justified. For I chose wisdom and the knowledge of
good and evil; and now there is no evil; and wisdom and good are one. It
is enough. [_She vanishes_].

CAIN. There is no place for me on earth any longer. You cannot deny
that mine was a splendid game while it lasted. But now! Out, out, brief
candle! [_He vanishes_].

EVE. The clever ones were always my favorites. The diggers and the
fighters have dug themselves in with the worms. My clever ones have
inherited the earth. All's well. [_She fades away_].

ADAM. I can make nothing of it, neither head nor tail. What is it all
for? Why? Whither? Whence? We were well enough in the garden. And now
the fools have killed all the animals; and they are dissatisfied because
they cannot be bothered with their bodies! Foolishness, I call it. [_He
disappears_].

LILITH. They have accepted the burden of eternal life. They have taken
the agony from birth; and their life does not fail them even in the hour
of their destruction. Their breasts are without milk: their bowels are
gone: the very shapes of them are only ornaments for their children to
admire and caress without understanding. Is this enough; or shall I
labor again? Shall I bring forth something that will sweep them away and
make an end of them as they have swept away the beasts of the garden,
and made an end of the crawling things and the flying things and of all
them that refuse to live for ever? I had patience with them for many
ages: they tried me very sorely. They did terrible things: they embraced
death, and said that eternal life was a fable. I stood amazed at the
malice and destructiveness of the things I had made: Mars blushed as he
looked down on the shame of his sister planet: cruelty and hypocrisy
became so hideous that the face of the earth was pitted with the graves
of little children among which living skeletons crawled in search of
horrible food. The pangs of another birth were already upon me when one
man repented and lived three hundred years; and I waited to see what
would come of that. And so much came of it that the horrors of that time
seem now but an evil dream. They have redeemed themselves from their
vileness, and turned away from their sins. Best of all, they are still
not satisfied: the impulse I gave them in that day when I sundered
myself in twain and launched Man and Woman on the earth still urges
them: after passing a million goals they press on to the goal of
redemption from the flesh, to the vortex freed from matter, to the
whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a
whirlpool in pure force. And though all that they have done seems
but the first hour of the infinite work of creation, yet I will not
supersede them until they have forded this last stream that lies between
flesh and spirit, and disentangled their life from the matter that has
always mocked it. I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the
eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her
seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have
waited always to see what they will do tomorrow. Let them feed that
appetite well for me. I say, let them dread, of all things, stagnation;
for from the moment I, Lilith, lose hope and faith in them, they are
doomed. In that hope and faith I have let them live for a moment; and in
that moment I have spared them many times. But mightier creatures than
they have killed hope and faith, and perished from the earth; and I may
not spare them for ever. I am Lilith: I brought life into the whirlpool
of force, and compelled my enemy, Matter, to obey a living soul. But in
enslaving Life's enemy I made him Life's master; for that is the end
of all slavery; and now I shall see the slave set free and the enemy
reconciled, the whirlpool become all life and no matter. And because
these infants that call themselves ancients are reaching out towards
that, I will have patience with them still; though I know well that
when they attain it they shall become one with me and supersede me, and
Lilith will be only a legend and a lay that has lost its meaning. Of
Life only is there no end; and though of its million starry mansions
many are empty and many still unbuilt, and though its vast domain is
as yet unbearably desert, my seed shall one day fill it and master
its matter to its uttermost confines. And for what may be beyond, the
eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond.
[_She vanishes_].




*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.