I had always known that civilization needs a religion
as a matter of life or death; and as the conception
of Creative Evolution developed I saw that we were
at last within reach of a faith which complied with
the first condition of all the religions that have
ever taken hold of humanity: namely, that it
must be, first and fundamentally, a science of metabiology.
This was a crucial point with me; for I had seen Bible
fetichism, after standing up to all the rationalistic
batteries of Hume, Voltaire, and the rest, collapse
before the onslaught of much less gifted Evolutionists,
solely because they discredited it as a biological
document; so that from that moment it lost its hold,
and left literate Christendom faithless. My own
Irish eighteenth-centuryism made it impossible for
me to believe anything until I could conceive it as
a scientific hypothesis, even though the abominations,
quackeries, impostures, venalities, credulities, and
delusions of the camp followers of science, and the
brazen lies and priestly pretensions of the pseudo-scientific
cure-mongers, all sedulously inculcated by modern
‘secondary education,’ were so monstrous
that I was sometimes forced to make a verbal distinction
between science and knowledge lest I should mislead
my readers. But I never forgot that without knowledge
even wisdom is more dangerous than mere opportunist
ignorance, and that somebody must take the Garden
of Eden in hand and weed it properly.
Accordingly, in 1901, I took the legend of Don Juan
in its Mozartian form and made it a dramatic parable
of Creative Evolution. But being then at the
height of my invention and comedic talent, I decorated
it too brilliantly and lavishly. I surrounded
it with a comedy of which it formed only one act,
and that act was so completely episodical (it was
a dream which did not affect the action of the piece)
that the comedy could be detached and played by itself:
indeed it could hardly be played at full length owing
to the enormous length of the entire work, though
that feat has been performed a few times in Scotland
by Mr Esme Percy, who led one of the forlorn hopes
of the advanced drama at that time. Also I supplied
the published work with an imposing framework consisting
of a preface, an appendix called The Revolutionist’s
Handbook, and a final display of aphoristic fireworks.
The effect was so vertiginous, apparently, that nobody
noticed the new religion in the centre of the intellectual
whirlpool. Now I protest I did not cut these cerebral
capers in mere inconsiderate exuberance. I did
it because the worst convention of the criticism of
the theatre current at that time was that intellectual
seriousness is out of place on the stage; that the
theatre is a place of shallow amusement; that people
go there to be soothed after the enormous intellectual
strain of a day in the city: in short, that a
playwright is a person whose business it is to make
unwholesome confectionery out of cheap emotions.
My answer to this was to put all my intellectual goods
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