MR. SHAW'S NEW BOOK.*

To deal with the facts first, Back to Methuselah is a collection of five one-act plays, each with a thread connecting it loosely to

the next.

In the last words of the preface Mr. Shaw apologizes for his play :—

"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."

As a matter of fact, this is in the main untrue. The only sign of age, or rather of increased maturity, in Mr. Shaw is a certain softening, an increased kindness in his attitude to Man. Swift said of himself that though he loved Tom, Dick, and Harry, he hated Mankind. Of the earlier Mr. Shaw it would almost have been true to say that though he hated Mankind, his loathing for Tom, Dick, and Harry was still greater. He seemed without one great quality, a quality whose absence his particular political view made singularly unfortunate ; he was a Socialist absolutely without sympathy for the common, average man. He had no tenderness for his sorrows and stupidities, his weariness and bewilderment, only hatred for the pomposity and self-assertion with which he tried to medicine them. But just before Mr. Shaw wrote the present book he seemed suddenly to have discovered that there is, after all, something pitiful about the strivings and futilities of the human race. And this new discovery he has chosen to wrap for himself in the pleasant and fantastic symbol of a statement that we are none of us adult when we die. He no longer girds with bitter ingenuity at the grown-up man who plays games with little white balls or privily drinks and eats things that he knows are bad for him with the irresistible greed of the schoolboy, or at the woman who, without thought of whence she came or whither

she is hurrying, spends her time in adorning herself with bright pebbles, the furs of animals, and the feathers of birds. Back to Methuselah—that is now his cry. Incidentally, it is a "caption" worthy of John Bull. Let us see if we cannot live three hundred

years and acknowledge frankly that throughout the first seventy or eighty years of our life we are foolish and generally naughty children. Now, if the reader objects—" this is all very nice,

but will Mr. Shaw kindly tell us how we are to bring this about? "- and protests that the discussion is academic until Mr. Shaw can produce some sort of stuff out of a bottle which• will do the

longevity trick—I shall protest that he is asking Mr. Shaw to do something which he as an artist never undertook to do and never ought to undertake to do. It is the business of the artist and the philosopher to direct us on our way, to point out worthy goals to us, not to provide us with the necessary Seven. Leagueboots, motor scooters, calf muscles or what not that will actually take us there. Mr. Shaw is really doing more than his cuntract demands when he suggests to us that as an athlete can

"raise a muscle" at will in almost any part of the body—i.e., direct the metabolism of his body towards a certain end—as a scientist or a musician can train his faculties to appreciate the finest differences in weight or the lightest divergence in tone, so • Bach to Methuselah. By Bernard Shaw. London : Constable. [10s, net.' surelythe race of man, if-theywould come to realize that civiliza- tion depended on it, could gradually increase their span of life.

Mr. Shaw argues in a fascinating Garden of Eden scene that Man invented Birth and Death to save him from the intolerable weight of an unending personal existence on the one hand, and the instinctively antipathetic notion of the extinction of the human race on the other. But when he invented Birth he overdid it, there were too many births, and so men and women hurried themselves off the stage too quickly to make room for the oncoming tide of the newly-born. Li this First Act of Adam and Eve Mr. Shaw has once more demonstrated the fact that he is probably the most dexterous master of the stage who ever lived, greater than Ben Jenson, Congreve, or Otway, in many ways greater than Ibsen. The technical perfection of this scene and its suitability to the theatre are extraordinary. The curtain rises upon Adam ; he has found a fawn that has fallen off a jutting rock and broken its neck. Neither of the primal pair has ever seen Death ,before. They shrink instinctively from it, and, after a moment or two, the implication of what has happened to the fawn comes to them :— " 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."

But that is no solution. Adam's time would come and Eve's too ; they would 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."

They know that such an event is intolerable, because the voices of which the garden is full had told it them :-

- "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 points out how odd his point of view is, because, before, he has always complained of the horror of having to exist for ever and ever. She is afraid, she says, that he means the horror of having to be with her for ever and ever :- Adam. "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."

Adam goes off to bury the fawn, and to Eve as she sits alone the serpent suggests the phoenix mysteries of Birth and Death. The serpent explains that it has learned "to gather a tiny part of the life" of its body and shut it into a white case, and show tho little case to the sun and leave it to its warmth, and it bursts and a little snake comes out. Now Death does not matter, "this snake and that snake will die, but the snakes will live." Eve, sure that Adam must not perish, resolves that she will "tear another Adam from her body," if she tear her body to bits in the act.

In the Second Act of this first part Adam is delving and Eve spinning, and Cain comes to see them. It is long since he killed Abel ; he has not exactly repented his deed, but he has become a warrior, and his view of honour—a view in which we are made to feel he is really unconsciously expiating Abel's death—is that he must never refuse battle to man or beast who will fight him. Adam, who digs the earth, and Eve, who of the agony of her body gave life to all Mankind, scorn him, and at last Cain in self-defence asks who invented Death. His parents are horror- struck at the question and begin to excuse themselves, to explain what a burden the thought of living for ever and ever had been. Cain's apologia is, of course, that he is really only the minister of the Death, that they invented it, and that he only brings it nearer. It was they who made Death inevitable. They feel dumbly that his plea does not hold, and here we have the first foreshadowing of one of Mr. Shaw's main theses—i.e., that now Death comes before a, man has learnt wisdom. The whole of Part L is admirable and impressive. In the next section we are given a scene in which two men of science, who have come to the conclusion that Man in the long run has only to will long life sufficiently in order to have it, try to explain their doctrine to two puppets who are caricatured portraits of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith. A great deal of this is very amusing, but I think that most readers will agree with me that it is at a lower level of excellence than the first part, which has a sort of epic grandeur and contains arguments which are to justify the ways of the Life Urge to man, rather like some of the philosophical passages of Androcles and the Lion, but on a much larger scale. Part III, takes us in the near future when it is revealed that one or two people actually have succeeded in living three hundred years. Parts IV. and V. are attempts to reconstruct two further stages in the future evolution of Man along Self Creative lines, but these, though, like the rest of the book, deeply religious in tone, seem to me dramatically to fall very flat. I must, however, except one delightfully humorous passage, an example of one of the numerous excursions made by Ms. Shaw in his best Mr. Bye-Ends vein. An elderly gentle- man is recapitulating the lessons of history :— " Consider this island on which we stand, the last foothold of man on this side of the Atlantic : this Ireland, described by tho earliest bards as an emerald gem set in a silver sea I 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 mart 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 Cores, 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 sugges- tion. 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 hero 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, oven 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."

In conclusion, perhaps the thing that marks out Back to Methuselah from among most of Mr. Shaw's works as being in many ways his most mature and most serious book, is the fact that its object is for once not purely negative. Here is Mr. Shaw affirming something—something quite other than even the best justified disagreement with the rest of mankind ; stating, in fact, the personal religion of a mind subtle and refined beyond