iness 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 g