r 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 bus