Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch
by . New York: Brentano’s. 1921. 12mo., cvi+300 pp. $2.25.
As one reads the successive parts of Back To Methuselah, one is reminded of a remark of Lady Utterword’s in Heartbreak House. ‘There are only two classes in good society in England,’ says she: ‘the equestrian classes, and the neurotic classes.’ Evidently Methuselah’s society is much like the British, except that there are no equestrians. Of all the characters in the book, the least neurotic is Confucius, and the most neurotic is the ‘He-Ancient’ still living in the year 31,920 A.D., who wants, more than all else, to ‘be a vortex.’ The most nearly equestrian character is Cain, who hunts; and the most picturesque is by all odds the Snake.
When the first act opens pleasantly upon the Garden of Eden, the snake, with a certain comfortable air of domesticity, 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.’ She has come to show Eve her beautiful new amethystine hood —a magnificent bit of stage-business in itself. From this moment on, the book is exciting reading for the stage-manager. Each of the five parts has its capital acting scenes: Napoleon shot by the Oracle in Ireland; Pygmalion slain by a bite from Cleopatra; the ghost of Lilith chanting in the last act, by the altar.
Methuselah himself does not appear, except as an ideal. Longevity such as his, however, is the touchstone for testing the world’s realities and shams. If you are to live for three centuries, or for a thousand years, how shall you look at property, comfort, love, government, behavior? The people thirty thousand years from now have learned Methuselah’s secret, and have won, in their latter centuries, a scale of values. ‘With us,’ says one of them, ‘life is too long for telling lies. They all get found out.’ The real Ancients rarely laugh. ‘When a thing is funny,’ says the He-Ancient, ‘search it for a hidden truth.’
In much this spirit, we keep a weather eye on all the lines of this diverting work. There are luminous prophetic moments, ‘The British, tired of the Irish question, move to the Persian Gulf, saying to the Irish, ‘ At last we leave you to yourselves; and much good may it do you.’ Whereupon the Irish shout, ‘No; we ll be damned if you do,’ and emigrate to India, Persia, Jerusalem — anywhere, to find a field still open for Nationalist agitation.
Prophecy is not exclusively political. The lady who wishes suddenly to telegraph does so by ‘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.’ But one of the most ironic passages is the act in which Adam and Eve and ‘Eve’s wonderful darling snake’ are working up a joint vocabulary. The Serpent invents the words love, stranger, life, birth, death, jealousy, years, chance, fear, marriage, hope — and the act of laughing. Adam invents the word to-morrow. Eve invents the word fool, and applies it to Adam. Cain invents the Devil.
The book as a whole, says Brentano’s on the cover, is ‘Mr. Shaw’s scientific, political, and religious creed.’ As such, we shall have to think it over. At one point, indeed, it seems that Shaw is ready to give us the whole truth, scientific, political, and religious, through the lips of a long-lived heroine, named Zoo. But at the very brink of plenary revelation, the Elderly Gentleman, to whom Zoo is lecturing, springs up and begins to dance about in great disquiet of spirit, crying, ‘I can bear this no longer. It is easier to go out of my mind at once.’
FRANCES LESTER WARNER.