Shaw's Choice

BACK TO METHUSELAH (261 pp.)--Bernard Shaw--World's Classics Galaxy Edition--Oxford ($1.50).

When the Oxford Press asked Bernard Shaw to name one of his works for, its World's Classics series, he chose this agile old fantasy of faith in Creative Evolution. He chipped at the famous preface, juggled the text a little, and added a postscript declaring that it is "a world classic or it is nothing." Oxford is now publishing all this for the first time in the U.S. as No. 1 in a new Galaxy Edition, larger and more legible than the old World's Classics books.

Back to Methuselah, which the Theatre Guild produced on Broadway in 1922, is saved only by the Shavian graces from talking itself dizzy. Of all Shaw's plays it depends the least on his wise dramatic energy and the most on what he thinks of First and Last Things. But the unmatchable writing lavished on it cannot make a reader feel that he has got his hands on something--or an audience feel that anything has actually occurred.

The classic part of Back to Methuselah, as a play, is the first part, a beautiful Shavian comedy of the Garden of Eden. The second part is second-rate drawing-room Shaw, and most of the rest is cerebral claptrap in settings of 2170 A.D., 3000 A.D. and 31,920 A.D. If the comic spirit were not alive in these scenes they would almost fall into the class of Wellsian monstrosity.

The theme of the play has as much (and no more) validity in 1947 as it had in 1921: we should aspire to live longer if we wish to live, and govern, well. Our statesmen are "not old enough for their jobs." Now an irrepressible 90, Bernard Shaw adds in his postscript:

"Though I am very far from being as clever and well informed as people think, I am not below the average in political capacity ... I am no more fit to rule millions of men than a boy of twelve. Physically I am failing: my senses, my locomotive powers, my memory, are decaying at a rate which threatens to make a Struldbrug* of me if I persist in living; yet my mind still feels capable of growth . . . [if] the Life Force would give me a body as durable as my mind ... I might begin a political career as a junior civil servant and evolve into a capable Cabinet minister in another hundred years or so."

* One of the decrepit beings in Swift's Gulliver's Travels. They were born with a mark on their foreheads and supported at public expense in the Kingdom of Luggnagg after they reached the age of 80.

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