In the second scene ‘a few centuries later’ at an oasis in Mesopotamia, Adam and Eve have given birth to their family. What had taken place is a series of moral descents. The moment Adam invented death, it was ‘no longer worth his while to do anything thoroughly well’. That was the first step of the Fall; the second came as a result of inventing birth, before which Adam dared not risk killing Eve because he would have been ‘lonely and barren to all eternity’. But the invention of birth has meant that anyone who is killed can be replaced. One of Adam’s sons ‘invented meat-eating. The other... 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.’
Which is the stage reached in Mesopotamia in 4004 BC. Adam’s fear has stopped his development with the invention of the spade. Cain is an early example of the Superman who sets the standards for further human advancement. Like his brother Abel, whom he envied, copied and killed, he is ‘a discoverer, a man of ideas, a true Progressive’. From his father he has inherited fear which he overwhelms daily with acts of courage and the ecstasy of fighting. From his mother, he has taken hope, but he has no imagination to make creative use of his will and daring. ‘I do not know what I want,’ he tells Eve, ‘except that I want to be something higher and nobler than this stupid old digger.’ In Cain, the first murderer, Shaw embodies his belief that what we have learnt to call evil is technically an error in the experimental process of trial and error by which the Life Force must advance.
Cain is the dominant man. His fearful inventions of murder and war are reducing life to its new brevity. ‘Through him and his like,’ Eve declares, ‘death is gaining on life.’ She blames Lilith’s miscalculation in sharing the labour of creating so unequally between man and woman. ‘That is why there is enmity between Woman the creator and Man the destroyer.’
The twentieth century is largely populated by Adam’s successors. In ‘The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas’, the second part of his cycle, Shaw stages his revenge on these mean material people whom he typifies in Joyce Burge and Henry Hopkins Lubin, his lampoons of Asquith and Lloyd George. These are his contemporary idealists. They have one quality, which is Will, necessary to the Life Force. But it is Will without imagination, loveless, and by itself destructive. ‘The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas’ is designed as a humiliation of these two Liberal leaders who arrive at Franklyn Barnabas’s house as a couple of campaigning political candidates. They have come on fools’ errands, having carefully read between the lines of several newspaper reports and made the erroneous conclusion that Barnabas is going to enter politics and contest the approaching general election. Almost everything they hear they misunderstand; almost everything they say is trivial or untrue.
The play demonstrates the incompatibility between Adam’s offspring and the children of Eve – that incompatibility which Shaw felt to be his own inheritance. Lubin and Burge cannot take a long view even of the possibilities of longevity. They imagine the gospel of Creative Evolution to be a marketable elixir (‘The stuff. The powder. The bottle. The tabloid. Whatever it is. You said it wasnt lemons’) which must be kept secret. When they discover it to be an idea (or ‘moonshine’), they have no further use for it.
For half an hour in the third part of the cycle, ‘The Thing Happens’, almost no progress is detectable. We have edged forward another 250 years. The Lilliputian President of the British Islands is named Burge-Lubin, symbol of soldered fixity. Equally unchangeable is Barnabas, the Accountant-General with a likeness to his ancestor Conrad Barnabas, a bureaucrat who has made a god of statistics. Two other characters resemble figures in the previous play of the cycle: the Archbishop of York is ‘recognizably the same man’ as the Reverend William Haslam who was engaged to Franklyn Barnabas’s daughter Cynthia; and the Domestic Minister, Mrs Lutestring, seems remarkably similar to Franklyn Barnabas’s parlourmaid. A statistical survey leads accidentally to the dramatic revelation that they are indeed the same people, and since, ‘like all revolutionary truths, it [longevity] began as a joke’, this gives Shaw’s absurdist talent excellent scope. He chose for this experiment two of the least promising candidates from ‘The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas’ so as to demonstrate that the change would not take place as the result of individual self-interest. ‘If the geniuses live 300 years,’ Shaw explains, ‘so will the chumps.’ Since there are more chumps than geniuses, most of those to whom the thing happens will be ordinary people, like the parlourmaid.
It is the story of Adam and Eve once again, with a vital difference. When this new word is made flesh, the mother and father of the long-lived (their own ages presently totalling more than 557 years) are animated solely by hope. These two long-livers have experienced a hostility and strangeness among the short-lived that reflects Shaw’s own isolation. ‘I have been very lonely sometimes,’ reflects Mrs Lutestring; and the Archbishop reveals that it is ‘in this matter of sex [more] than in any other, you are intolerable to us’.
All this is reversed in the fourth part of the cycle, ‘The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman’, which propels us forward to a colony of long-lived people at Galway Bay in the year AD 3000. The deputation of short-lived visitors has come to consult their oracle. Among them is Napoleon, ‘the finest soldier in the world’ and Cain’s most perfect descendant. ‘War has made me popular, powerful, famous, historically immortal,’ he explains. ‘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.’ The Oracle answers that his only escape is death, and he is immobilized. For this scene Shaw developed the electric emanation, Vril, with which the subterranean sages of Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (a favourite book of his boyhood) slayed at sight. The invisible mesmeric field, naturally accumulating round the long-lived, is that same fantasy of intellectual power that Captain Shotover had struggled to invent. By using this force finally to arrest the progress of his own ‘Man of Destiny’, Shaw seals the destiny of the shortlived.
‘The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman’ is perhaps the weakest play of the cycle. It explains differences between the two species that could be more imaginatively charted through the use of differing languages. Shaw recognized this growing challenge of vocabulary: he would get round it in the final play by having an 800-year-old She-Ancient tell a three-year-old that ‘we have to put things very crudely to you to make ourselves intelligible’. Yet the short tragi-comic scene with which the fourth play ends is peculiarly effective. This introduces the Elderly Gentleman who is Shaw’s partial self-portrait. In the short-lived world he has prided himself on daringly advanced thinking which, in the long perspective, becomes mere obscurantism. At home in neither world, he must choose between the despair of living among people to whom nothing is real, and consenting to be phased out among the superior long-lived. ‘I take the nobler risk,’ he decides, like Gulliver seeking to escape the Yahoos. The Oracle 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 Elderly Gentleman’s grasping of hands is a commitment to the spiritual future set out in the fifth and last play of the cycle. ‘As Far as Thought Can Reach’ combines past, present and future as paraded before a viewing platform set in the year AD 31,920. We are given ‘a glimpse of the past’ through a grotesque puppet play performed by two ‘artificial human beings’ that have been manufactured in the laboratory. This synthetic couple proclaim themselves to be the products of Cause and Effect, and offer a pantomime of the determinists’ concept of human life. They are ourselves, motivated by fear, enveloped in illusions, playing fantastic tricks that kill their Frankenstein-creator, the fanatical scientist Pygmalion, and finally, though shrinking from death at any cost, dying of terror and discouragement.
The future is a stateless society inhabited entirely by the long-lived. They have been born from artificially hatched eggs in which they were incubated for two years, developing from all sorts of creatures that no longer exist, to emerge as newly-born human beings roughly equivalent to our sixteen-year-olds. Before them stretch four years of what is called childhood, devoted to arts, sports and emotional pleasures, during which they pass through the immaturity that members of the audience begin to shed at the age of fifty. But whereas the short-lived audience will soon die of decay, the long-lived cast are like the original Adam and Eve, and will evolve over hundreds of years into a breed of intellectual voluptuaries known as the Ancients, who are Shaw’s version of Swift’s Houyhnhnms.
Such a prospect appals the children, just as it appals the audience, for we cannot sense anything in the existence of these Olympians to enchant us. Shaw’s artistic problem is one experienced by many creators of Utopias. ‘I could not shew the life of the long livers, because, being a short liver, I could not conceive it,’ he wrote. The imaginative effect is handed over to the actors, directors and designers.
In the final minutes of Back to Methuselah the ghosts of Lilith, Adam and Eve, Cain and the Serpent appear. Cain acknowledges that there is no future role for his offspring in the world; Adam too can make nothing of a place where matter does not rule the mind. But the Serpent feels justified. She has chosen the knowledge of good and evil, and she sees a new world in which, hope having vanquished fear, ‘there is no evil’. Eve too concludes that all is well: ‘My clever ones have inherited the earth.’ Finally, as an epitome of the whole cycle, Lilith delivers her testament.
‘Is this enough; or must I labor again?... They did terrible things... I stood amazed at the malice and destructiveness of the things I had made... The pangs of another birth were already upon me when one man repented and...so much came of it that the horrors of that time seem now but an evil dream... Best of all, they are still not satisfied... they press on to... the whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a whirlpool in pure force... when they attain it they shall become one with me and supersede me, and Lilith will be only a legend... Of Life only is there no end... for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond.’
Earlier in the play, the She-Ancient defined art as a ‘magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures’. Lilith’s speech is Shaw’s magic mirror. Following his courting of disorder in Heartbreak House, he had made a greater effort than in any play since Major Barbara towards a new coherence. The end of Back to Methuselah foretells the dissolution of matter and, with it, all that had vexed his mind. He sent his optimistic signal infinitely far beyond personal experience. The distant echo he received underscores Lilith’s words with a poignancy that against all odds makes them perhaps the most moving of all Shaw’s speeches for the theatre.
*
‘The sale of the book here and in America has been greater than that of any other of my works,’ Shaw told Karel Musek, his translator into the Bohemian language. Back to Methuselah seemed to answer a need of the times. ‘Your mind was never more infernally agile, your intellectual muscle was never better,’ William Archer reassured G.B.S. ‘...When a man can walk on a tightrope over the Falls of Niagara, turning three somersaults to a minute, it’s no use his appealing to the census paper to prove himself decrepit.’ More surprising was Max Beerbohm’s opinion – that Back to Methuselah was the best book Shaw had written because he had got away ‘from representation of actual things... and thought out a genuine work of art’.
Shaw sent complimentary copies of the book to any number of old friends and comrades, including one inscribed to Lenin. Lenin seems to have found in the Preface confirmation of his view that Shaw was ‘a good man fallen among Fabians’. In those places where the shortcomings of capitalism were exposed, Lenin wrote his favourite expression – ‘Bien dit!’ – in the margin. But where Shaw appeared to be ‘in the power of his Utopian illusions there are marks of disapproval’.
Almost everyone agreed with Shaw’s eventual view that ‘I was too damned discursive’. In the critical opinion of T. S. Eliot such garrulity had been a product of the ‘potent ju-ju of the Life Force [which] is a gross superstition’. This ‘master of a lucid and witty dialogue prose hardly equalled since Congreve, and of a certain power of observation,’ he wrote, was now ‘squandering these gifts in the service of worn out home-made theories, as in the lamentable Methuselah’.
Shaw had not counted on a performance in the theatre. He had calculated, however, without the ‘lunatic’ founder of the American Theatre Guild, Lawrence Langner, who came to Adelphi Terrace in the spring of 1921. He was examined, as Trebitsch had been, by Charlotte: ‘a gentle gracious lady with plain, pleasant features,’ Langner observed, ‘of medium height and comfortable build’. G.B.S. had introduced her ‘in the grand manner’ as if she were a prima donna, then ostentatiously seated her in a chair and stayed unfamiliarly quiet. Once her mystic scrutiny of Langner was over, Shaw sprang from his chair and dashed ‘like a sprinter to the door’ which he held open ‘with a deep bow until she had passed into the hall’. Herself being favourably impressed, Himself was free to give Langner a brief synopsis of his play, lasting two hours, at the end of which Langner concluded that ‘Shaw had more than a touch of the fanatic about him’. But between fanatic and lunatic an oddly effective partnership developed. Heartbreak House, Shaw cautioned Langner, was like ‘a musical comedy’ compared with Back to Methuselah. But despite its eight changes of scene, a cast of forty-five characters, and a duration exceeding twelve hours, Langner decided it was ‘just the kind of thing for the Theatre Guild to do’.
The rehearsals, which began early in 1922, called for a group of actors who were sufficiently talented to play several parts, and sufficiently flexible not only to play them on succeeding weeks but to rehearse them almost simultaneously – ‘much as the Grand Central Station had to be built while the trains were run’. Back to Methuselah opened in New York on 27 February 1922 with a matinée of Part I and evening performance of Part II. The cycle was completed over three weeks. Over nine weeks, twenty-five performances of the complete cycle were given, at the end of which the financial loss had risen to $20,000. On the other hand, the Theatre Guild had nearly doubled its subscribers. ‘The Garrick Theater was too small for us to make money out of the play,’ Langner explained. ‘If we had had a theater twice the size, there would have been a profit instead of a loss.’ ‘It isn’t likely that any other lunatic will want to produce Back to Methuselah!’ Shaw concluded.
He had seriously underrated his attraction for lunatics. Going up to Birmingham in 1923 for a matinée of Heartbreak House he met Barry Jackson, known locally as ‘the Butter King’ after the Birmingham Maypole Dairies founded by his father, from which he derived a large private income. Jackson’s madness took the form of philanthropy: over a period of twenty-one years he was to spend more than £100,000 (over £2 million in 1997) of his own money on the Birmingham Repertory Theatre which he had founded in 1913. Jackson had been disenchanted by the fashion machine of the London West End theatre. His repertory staged both classical and contemporary plays including continental expressionist drama – he put on Georg Kaiser’s Gas and the Čapeks’ Insect Play. Heartbreak House was the ninth of Shaw’s plays to be produced there since its opening, and Jackson now proposed a tenth, the impossible Methuselah. ‘I asked him was he mad,’ Shaw remembered. ‘...I demanded further whether he wished his wife and children to die in the workhouse. He replied that he was not married. I began to scent a patron.’
Barry Jackson’s patronage between the wars became the equivalent in England of Lawrence Langner’s promotion of Shaw’s plays through the Theatre Guild in the United States. Almost twenty-five years younger than G.B.S., Jackson inherited Granville-Barker’s kinship of the stage. ‘Elegant, urbane, unselfconsciously dominating, always seeming to be a head taller tha
n his companions’, he appeared like one of the superior long-lived among the short-lived inhabitants of Birmingham. Though his theatre was one of the happiest places in which to work, it offended Birmingham’s respect for profit-making.
Jackson appealed to Shaw as someone whose speciality was to make the impossible take place: a conjuror converting dreams into reality. He therefore handed over Back to Methuselah! (which at that time ended with an exclamation mark) and saw it staged in the autumn of 1923, with sets by Paul Shelving and featuring a cast of ‘provincial nobodies’ that included Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Cedric Hardwicke, Raymond Huntley and Edith Evans (who played the Serpent, the Oracle, and the She-Ancient). ‘It is a mighty work,’ Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies wrote during the rehearsals, ‘...but opinion is divided about it in the theatre... I do not myself know whether it will be as enthralling to see as it is to read.’
Four consecutively played cycles were performed at Birmingham and produced a loss of around £2,500 (equivalent to £62,000 in 1997), of which a little was recovered from a further four cycles put on at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square early the following year. But Shaw was happy. ‘This has been the most extraordinary experience of my life,’ he declared after the first performance.
From the sequence of secrets and revelations in the Garden of Eden to the terrible cry of the Elderly Gentleman receding into the distance, there were thrilling moments. Desmond MacCarthy, who had been told that, though marvellous, the play was rather boring, listened with riveted attention to the final part. He had learnt that those of Shaw’s ideas which ‘first struck me as silliest were the ones which I subsequently found had modified my thoughts most’, and he recognized that G.B.S. was placing his ghostly faith out of reach of human discouragement. This kind of drama, with its chords of inspiration, flashes of moral passion, and searching chaos, was rare in the theatre. ‘The superb merit of the play is that it is the work of an artist who has asked himself, with far greater seriousness and courage than all but a few, what is the least he must believe and hope for if he is to feel life is worth living.’
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