The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles

The increasing bewilderment of my journalist critics as to why I
should write such plays as The Simpleton culminated in New York in
February 1935, when I was described as a dignified old monkey
throwing coco-nuts at the public in pure senile devilment. This is
an amusing and graphic description of the effect I produce on the
newspapers; but as a scientific criticism it is open to the matter-
of-fact objection that a play is not a coco-nut nor I a monkey.
Yet there is an analogy. A coco-nut is impossible without a
suitable climate; and a play is impossible without a suitable
civilization. If author and journalist are both placid
Panglossians, convinced that their civilization is the best of all
possible civilizations, and their countrymen the greatest race on
earth: in short, if they have had a university education, there is
no trouble: the press notices are laudatory if the play is
entertaining. Even if the two are pessimists who agree with
Jeremiah that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and
desperately wicked, and with Shakespear that political authority
only transforms its wielders into angry apes, there is still no
misunderstanding; for that dismal view, or a familiar acquaintance
with it, is quite common.

Such perfect understanding covers much more than nine hundred and
ninety cases out of every thousand new plays. But it does not
cover the cases in which the author and the journalist are not
writing against the same background. The simplest are those in
which the journalist is ignorant and uncultivated, and the author
is assuming a high degree of knowledge and culture in his audience.
This occurs oftener than it should; for some newspaper editors
think that any reporter who has become stage struck by seeing half
a dozen crude melodramas is thereby qualified to deal with
Sophocles and Euripides, Shakespear and Goethe, Ibsen and
Strindberg, Tolstoy and Tchekov, to say nothing of myself. But the
case with which I am concerned here is one in which a reasonably
well equipped critic shoots wide because he cannot see the target
nor even conceive its existence. The two parties have not the same
vision of the world. This sort of vision varies enormously from
individual to individual. Between the superstatesman whose vision
embraces the whole politically organized world, or the astronomer
whose vision of the universe transcends the range of our utmost
telescopes, and the peasant who fiercely resists a main drainage
scheme for his village because others as well as he will benefit by
it, there are many degrees. The Abyssinian Danakil kills a
stranger at sight and is continually seeking for an excuse to kill
a friend to acquire trophies enough to attract a wife. Livingstone
risked his life in Africa every day to save a black man's soul.
Livingstone did not say to the sun colored tribesman "There is
between me and thee a gulf that nothing can fill": he proposed to
fill it by instructing the tribesman on the assumption that the
tribesman was as capable mentally as himself, but ignorant. That
is my attitude when I write prefaces. My newspaper critics may
seem incapable of anything better than the trash they write; but I
believe they are capable enough and only lack instruction.

I wonder how many of them have given serious thought to the curious
changes that take place in the operation of human credulity and
incredulity. I have pointed out on a former occasion that there is
just as much evidence for a law of the Conservation of Credulity as
of the Conservation of Energy. When we refuse to believe in the
miracles of religion for no better reason fundamentally than that
we are no longer in the humor for them we refill our minds with the
miracles of science, most of which the authors of the Bible would
have refused to believe. The humans who have lost their simple
childish faith in a flat earth and in Joshua's feat of stopping the
sun until he had finished his battle with the Amalekites, find no
difficulty in swallowing an expanding boomerang universe.

They will refuse to have their children baptized or circumcized,
and insist on their being vaccinated, in the teeth of overwhelming
evidence that vaccination has killed thousands of children in quite
a horrible way whereas no child has ever been a penny the worse for
baptism since John the Baptist recommended it. Religion is the
mother of scepticism: Science is the mother of credulity. There is
nothing that people will not believe nowadays if only it be
presented to them as Science, and nothing they will not disbelieve
if it be presented to them as religion.