ACT I

The Theatrocrat

A TRAGIC PLAY OF CHURCH AND STAGE

BY

JOHN DAVIDSON

LONDON

E. GRANT RICHARDS

1905

TO THE GENERATION KNOCKING AT THE DOOR

Break--break it open; let the knocker rust:

Consider no "shalt not", and no man's "must":

And, being entered, promptly take the lead,

Setting aside tradition, custom, creed;

Nor watch the balance of the huckster's beam;

Declare your hardiest thought, your proudest dream:

Await no summons; laugh at all rebuff;

High hearts and youth are destiny enough.

The mystery and the power enshrined in you

Are old as time and as the moment new:

And none but you can tell what part you play,

Nor can you tell until you make assay,

For this alone, this always, will succeed,

The miracle and magic of the deed.

John Davidson.

INTRODUCTION

WORDSWORTH'S IMMORALITY AND MINE

Poetry is immoral. It will state any and every morality. It has done

so. There is no passion of man or passion of Matter outside its

province. It will expound with equal zest the twice incestuous

intrigue of Satan, Sin, and Death, and the discarnate adoration of

Dante for the most beatified lady in the world's record. There is no

horror of deluge, fire, plague, or war it does not rejoice to utter;

no evanescent hue, or scent, or sound, it cannot catch, secure, and

reproduce in word and rhythm. The worship of Aphrodite and the

worship of the Virgin are impossible without its ministration. It

will celebrate the triumph of the pride of life riding to victory

roughshod over friend and foe, and the flame-clad glory of the martyr

who lives in obloquy and dies in agony for an idea or a dream. Poetry

is a statement of the world and of the Universe as the world can know

it. Sometimes it is of its own time: sometimes it is ahead of time,

reaching forward to a new and newer understanding and

interpretation. In the latter case poetry is not only immoral in the

Universal order; but also in relation to its own division of time: a

great poet is very apt to be, for his own age and time, a great

immoralist. This is a hard saying in England, where the current

meaning of immorality is so narrow, nauseous, and stupid. I wish to

transmute this depreciated word, to make it so eminent that men shall

desire to be called immoralists. To be immoral is to be different:

that says it precisely, stripped of all accretions, barnacles and

seaweed, rust and slime: the keen keel swift to furrow the deep. The

difference is always one of conduct: there is no other difference

between man and man: from the first breath to the last, life in all

its being and doing is conduct. The difference may be as slight as a

change in the form of poetical expression or the mode of wearing the

hair; or it may be as important as the sayings of Christ, as vast

and significant as the French Revolution and the career of Napoleon.

Nothing in life is interesting except that differentiation which is

immorality: the world would be a putrid stagnation without it, and

greatness and glory impossible. Morality would never have founded the

British Empire in India; it was English piracy that wrested from

Iberia the control of the Spanish Main and the kingdom of the sea.

War is empowered immorality: poetry is a warfare.

What I mean by Wordsworth's immorality begins to appear. This most

naive and majestic person, leading the proudest, cleanest, sweetest

of lives, was, during all his poetical time, immoralist _sans tache_.

In his boyhood he can think of no other atonement for a slight

indignity done him than suicide; he is perverse and obstinate, defies

chastisement--is rather proud of it, and slashes his whip through

the family portrait; he breathes "among wild appetites and blind

desires": delights and exults in "motions of savage instinct":

sullen, wayward, intractable, nothing fascinates him except

"dangerous feats." Even when his poetical time is spent, he can still

do the thing that Wordsworth should do. Milton's watch being handed

round, he takes out his own, a procedure that makes the company

uneasy; and it is remembered against him by vulgar people who were

present and felt foolish; but Wordsworth would not have been

Wordsworth had he left this undone. In Paris of the Revolution he

"ranges the streets with an ardour previously unfelt," and

remembers that the destiny of man has always hung upon a few

individuals. Why should not he lead the Jacobins, carry freedom

through Europe, and be the master of the world? He withdraws,

however, and tells himself at the time it is lack of means; but "The

Prelude," that miracle of self-knowledge and inferior blank verse,

is more explicit:--

"An insignificant stranger and obscure,

And one moreover little graced with power

Of eloquence even in my native speech,

And all unfit for turmoil or intrigue."

Another "insignificant stranger and obscure," as "little graced

with power of eloquence," ranged the streets of Paris devouring his

heart about the same time as Wordsworth--devouring his heart and

considering whether the Seine at once might not be his best goal. Had

Wordsworth remained in Paris to contest the dictatorship with

Napoleon? It is a dazzling might-have-been. Carlyle's remark on

Wordsworth comes to mind at once:--

"He was essentially a cold, hard, silent, practical man, who, if

he had not fallen into poetry, would have done effectual work of some

sort in the world. This was the impression one got of him as he

looked out of his stern blue eyes superior to men and circumstances

... a man of immense head and great jaws like a crocodile's, cast

in a mould designed for prodigious work."

Carlyle's hatred of pleasure--an experience constitutionally

impossible to himself; and his dyspeptic, neurasthenic distrust of

happiness generally, corrupt all his judgments of men, and especially

stultify his opinions of poets and poetry. His insane jealousy of all

his contemporaries, which gave him a vision of Tennyson "sitting

among his dead dogs"; in fine, his damnable Scotch-peasant's

hypocrisy and agonized self-conceit as of a sinless and impotent

Holy Willy, require to be cancelled ruthlessly after a scrupulous

calculation, if we wish to disengage the actual features from the

masterful caricature, lurid colour, violent gesture, false lights and

falser shades, that mark his portraits. Having struck out Carlyle's

contempt of Wordsworth as poet--poetry being an art Thomas

himself had failed in; and having perceived the coldness, the

hardness, the silence, and the stern look in the blue eyes, to be the

necessary configuration of Wordsworth's intercourse with a

personality so antagonistic to his own as Carlyle's, we have

remaining a being of great power and presence, whose magnitude and

influence are more convincing in Carlyle's sketch than in any other

account of the man, because of the limner's absolute standard,

because of his passionate veracity, and because of the deep grudge

overcome. Could Wordsworth, then, have been in any effective way

the rival of Napoleon? Could he even have held together a strong

opposition to be the bulwark of Napoleon's power? the cradle, nursery

and academe of an enduring Napoleonic dynasty? It is the debated

question of genius: is genius the gift of perfect conduct that may be

bestowed, as circumstances determine, in war or poetry, in art or

commerce? Men of the greatest ability have thought so, or said so,

Carlyle among them, and therefore it is that I pause a moment,

although on the very swell of this last interrogation--made, also,

as if I had never inquired it of the fates before--I felt the answer

to be an everlasting no. Caesar wrote good journalistic prose, being

his own war-correspondent, but his hexameters were of the same mark

as Cicero's; Dante possessed all the eloquence Wordsworth lacked,

and in his "De Monarchia" exhibits the very soul of sovereignty, but

his diplomacy and soldiership ended in bitter bread and death by

heartbreak; therefore Caesar could have indited a monumental poem,

and Dante could have conquered Gaul and overthrown Pompey!

It is not probable that Wordsworth at any period in his youth

would rather have been Caesar than Dante. To have the world at one's

absolute commandment for power and pleasure is the desire of most

virile natures, and a desire seldom renounced by the highest

intelligences, however closely disgrace and misery may dog them to

the end. Accordingly, when intellect, health, and strength abdicate

their heritage of the world we look for some tragic circumstance

compulsive. In the case of Wordsworth we look in vain. The worst that

befell him was the failure of his hopes in the French Revolution. He

never sent down a personal root into the busy world at all: but had

from the beginning a primitive-Christian contempt for power and

wealth. His reluctance--it lasted for two years--to take up the

burden of poetry is to be ascribed to the shame and horror of their

destiny which great poets feel. A great poet fights against his fate

as high women fight against passion. There is degradation and dismay

in the ministration of poetry as in "the ruddy offices of love"; but

both the woman and the poet yield: for love and poetry, being of the

race, are stronger than the individual.

Wordsworth's immorality, like all dynamic immorality, was what

is called a return to nature. He wrote with perfect insight

concerning poetry. There are many pregnant and convincing passages in

his letters and prefaces: but I question if he ever found the terms

characteristic of his own innovation. He said: "It may be safely

affirmed that there neither is nor can be any essential difference

between the language of prose and metrical composition." Boldly, but

not safely; and the substitution of "metrical composition" for

"poetry" is distinctly equivocal. The discovery Wordsworth made was

this:--That poetry is the least artificial of the arts; that,

compared with music, painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry is not

an art at all. Given an artist, the first condition of the arts

proper is the possession of mechanical means. But the poet requires

none; no pencils, colours, canvas, compasses, strings, or pipes.

Language, the vehicle of his no-art, is part of the poet's, as of all

men's, birthright; like food and air, he has it. And when he requires

to supplement the language with which the conditions of existence

endue him, the founts are ready: there are no grapes to gather: that

is not the winepress the poet must tread: he has only to drink from

the sources of utterance. Thus poetry, like an artesian well,

broaches the heart of Matter directly, and is its most intimate

expression. It is almost sacrilegious to call poetry an art.

Without any intermediary of violins, drums, trumpets, oils, palettes,

brushes, mallets, chisels, furnaces, scaffolds, and conditioned only

by language, the poet can utter that which is: the heart and the

brain, the flesh, the bones and the marrow--Matter become

subconscious, conscious, and self-conscious--are the orchestra and

canvas of the poet's music and vision; marble and bronze, the

Parthenon and Notre Dame, are misleading, unstable, and fleeting

expressions of man and nature compared with poetry. The more I think

of the true substance of poetry, the more impossible it is for me

to see the necessity of Wordsworth's affirmation: and his own poetry,

as has long been recognized, gives it the lie effectually.

As soon as he perceived the true nature of poetry, Wordsworth

began to write it as if no one had ever written it before--an

adventure commonly resented by the moralists of art, and in the case

of Wordsworth attended by a lifetime of detraction. Why did not the

literary world rise up as one man and crown the poet who wrote in

1798, in his twenty-eighth year, the lines on Tintern Abbey? Why was

Wordsworth left without an audience, driven back into himself, and

thwarted in all his purposes, so that we have only--in "The Prelude"

and "The Excursion"--the gateway, porch, and raw material of the

city he meant to build? Why, but because he was an immoralist--he,

and not Byron--saying in a new manner that which had not been said

before: meaning something that schools and churches, theatres and

institutions, the periodical press and the literature of the day, did

not mean. Wordsworth had to think and imagine the world and the

universe for himself: for him the creeds were outworn; for him "the

smug routine and things allowed," in which the common mind and

imagination and the estates of the realm live in most ages, were a

dungeon and miasma. The imagination of Wordsworth could not breathe

in any Greek mythology, any Christian Heaven and Hell, or theological

system of the Universe. Out of all the mythologies, pagan and

Christian, he culled this one thing only--the idea of spirit: which

he whittled down finally in the ninth book of "The Excursion" to an

"active principle"--no longer a poetical but a metaphysical idea.

Now, metaphysic is an aborted poetry. Poetry is concrete, requiring

the exercise of all the material powers of body, mind, and soul,

which, co-operating, are imagination. I have to use these words

"mind" and "soul," because for what I wish to say there is as yet no

language. I hold that men can think and imagine things for which

there are no words: and that men must attend upon the expression of

these things before all others: that these unsaid things are of more

moment than all the literature and religion of the past: and that

these things can in the first instance be said only by the poet, by

one who makes words mean what he, that is, what Matter chooses. The

mind, separating itself from the body and the soul, can transmute a

figure of speech into a category; indeed, there is probably no

figure of speech that could not be petrified into a metaphysic:

metaphysics are the fossil remains of dead poetries. Also, the soul

can separate itself from the body and the mind, and petrify a figure

of speech into a theology: creeds are the fossil remains of dead

religions. The body, the static and dynamic integer of which mind and

soul are only exponents, is held in profound disesteem by both

metaphysic and theology. The metaphysician says, "The Universe is

thought"; the theologian says, "The Universe is soul." It is as if

one were to say "amber is electricity," or "iron is sound," or "the

spindrift is the sea," or "this sure and firm-set earth is a word":

all possible figures of speech, and therefore all liable in the hands

of a pedant to be erected into a dogma. That was the tragedy of

Wordsworth; his poetry became a pedantry. It was not age--a man may

be a poet at eighty; it was not disease, as Wordsworth's health

lasted to the end--besides, having once known what health and

strength are, a man may be a poet although glued to the floor with

consumption of the spinal marrow; it was not poverty, for Wordsworth

was frugal, nor ever knew the hell it is to have to write for

bread--besides, a man may be a poet starving in a London suburb: it

was the want of a great audience and the world's applause that left

Wordsworth to the pernicious obsession of a metaphysic, dried up his

poetry and made him at last little better than a moralist. But

whenever imagination had its way, when his powers of body, mind, and

soul were in equipollence and co-operating, Wordsworth's immorality

could be as free as Shakespeare's or Burns's, and could disport

itself with a _naïveté_, as in "The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale,"

impossible to Shakespeare and Burns, who were, both of them, men of

the world; and no speech of Falstaff or of Hamlet, no song of the

Jolly Beggars, approaches the stark utterance in "Rob Roy's Grave" of

that immutable immorality which is the inmost complexion of the world.

What was it Wordsworth really wanted? He wanted what all great

poets want, to extend his self-consciousness into the

self-consciousness of the world. At whatever cost to himself, his

actual and avowed aim was to live in the imagination of posterity to

the end of time. In effect his poetry says, and his prefaces and his

letters:--"What I desire--I make a present of it to all the

humorists; I love them, and I wish I were a humorist: I make a

present of it to all the wits; I love them also, and I would that I

were witty: I make a present of it to all the fools, whom I love the

most, for there I belong by reason of my _naïveté_ and unworldliness:

and, further, I make a present of it to all the impertinents and to

all the malignants, whom I do not hate, for they are part of the

whole--what I desire is to substitute for Christendom a William

Wordsworthdom." The two potentates of English literature in the

nineteenth century, Carlyle and Wordsworth, had the same

ambition--to furnish imagination with a new abiding-place: the

Carlyledom, which the first would have substituted for Christendom,

he called Hero-worship: Wordsworthdom is a Nature-worship.

Carlyle took the world of great men for his province. His

Mirabeau, Mahomet, Cromwell, Frederick, have a somewhat closer

resemblance to their historical originals than Shakespeare's Hamlet

bears to the Hamlet of Saxo Grammaticus, the Hamlet who accomplished

an unhesitating revenge, married two wives, and died in battle: yet

into his chosen heroes Carlyle projected himself as passionately as

Shakespeare projected himself into Macbeth and Lear, and his

Cagliostro is as sympathetically drawn as his Burns. But men reject

Carlyledom. Willing enough, temporarily, to worship themselves in

Mahomet or Cromwell, they find the cult of great men so pursued to

end in all unhappiness; which is intolerable. Two men did try to live

in Carlyledom--Ruskin and Froude: and the end of them was

asphyxiation: Carlyle had exhausted the air: they had only his breath

to breathe. Carlyledom is a strait-jacket for the world, and a dusty

way to death and to the dull hell of the drill-sergeant and the

knout. "Declined with thanks," says mankind.

Wordsworth's worship was of a higher strain than Carlyle's. He

projected his own beauty of soul and his own strength of character

into the world and into the universe. Tenderly he enters the delight

of the daffodils: through the mountains he smites his powerful

spirit. Into all beauty and into all grandeur he pours his own love

and greatness, now an "eternal soul" clothed with the "unwearied joy"

of the brook "dancing down its waterbreaks," now apparelled in "the

Mighty Being" that

"doth with his eternal motion make

A sound like thunder everlastingly."

The Solitary Reaper, singing a Gaelic song, becomes, under the spell

of Wordsworth, a living presence and a power as of an incarnate

melody: and the same prodigious spell inspires the gaunt and dreadful

Leech-gatherer. Conceive how harsh, how crude an image, however

powerful, Balzac would have given of this, one of the most appalling

figures in all literature; but Wordsworth so inspires his terrible

Leech-gatherer with his own antique virtue, and so invests him with

his own extraordinary majesty, that it is only now as I point it out

you recognize the indwelling horror of a portrait beside which the

outcasts of the Russian realists lose all significance. But men

reject Wordsworthdom. Two did try to live in it-- John Stuart Mill

and Matthew Arnold: but these were men of inferior temperament: and

Mill also lacked imagination, while in Matthew Arnold imagination was

a thing trained, as a tendon may, by special exercise, be developed

into a muscle. Further, neither Mill nor Arnold had any childhood:

they were never boys. Nowhere in Wordsworthdom is there any actual

room for that which, failing a known surname, we still call by the

"fond, adoptious Christendom" of Romance: there is little scope in

Wordsworthdom for Napoleon or Wagner, for a great tragedy or a

great triumph: nor is the universe the projection of a

Wordsworthian humanity into space. Generation after generation may

visit Carlyledom and Wordsworthdom, and there may always be a few

vengeful or placid minds to make, or to try to make, a permanent

abode in the frowning donjon of the one, or the pastoral peace of the

other: but neither is an enduring habitation for the spirit of an era.

And now I come to my own immorality.

My four Testaments, "The Vivisector," "The Man Forbid," "The

Empire Builder," and "The Prime Minister," may be likened to statues

with subsidiary groups about their feet, and with panels in relief on

the four sides of the pedestals. As a fresco in the series of my

Testaments, and in order to bring home the matter contained in them

by a closer application to life than is possible in dramatic

monologue, also desiring to extend the circle of my readers and the

effect of my message, I wrote in the autumn of 1904 "The Theatrocrat:

a Tragic Play of Church and Stage." My hope was to have this tragedy

published and another ready by this time; but like my own Knight of

the Phoenix, "delays" are

"the lackeys circumstance

Provides abundantly for all my schemes."

On the night I finished "The Theatrocrat," being unable to sleep,

I searched about for an anodyne, and fell upon Wordsworth, whom I had

not looked into for twenty years. Remembering the tedium and general

drowsiness of "The Excursion," I turned to it--to the last book,

which I had not come within six of before. The pleasant catalogue of

the opening began to operate when suddenly, like one hoist with his

own petard, I sat up more than broad awake upon the perusal of the

sixteenth line--

"This is the freedom of the Universe."

I had written this line twice in "The Theatrocrat"! My memory is

as treacherous as most memories, and although I had never read the

last book of "The Excursion," I must in early days have read this

line in scholastic writings on Wordsworth. Promptly I turned to my

manuscript to change the line: but how could I? It was my meaning.

Instead, I retained it; and placed it also on the title-page as my

motto. A poet shall use that which belongs to him: it is the first

characteristic of his genius that he cannot learn: he can only use;

whether it be his own experience or the experience of others, he

takes everywhere the matter and form that suit him.

Some account of "The Theatrocrat" and of how I came to write it

seems necessary. My relations with the theatre are rather unusual. At

a time when I was occupied with ballads and eclogues, Mr. Forbes

Robertson, having looked into the volume of plays I wrote in

Scotland, surprised me with an invitation to prepare a version of a

French poetical play. It is no mere fashion of speech to say

"surprised": during the five years I had been in London, I had only

once visited a theatre, and although I considered drama my true

province, my calling and election had not yet become effectual, and I

certainly had never dreamt of entering these regions under a foreign

flag. But the proposal gratified me, was also suitable in several

ways, and the play interesting. On the production of my adaptation

at the Lyceum, the success of Mr. Robertson and Mrs. Patrick Campbell

in the parts they played attracted the attention of managers to the

adapter, and various proposals for versions were made: but no one as

yet thought of giving me a commission for an original play: an

adaptation of mine had succeeded, or seemed to succeed: therefore I

was to be an adapter. Being somewhat mollified by seeming

success--it was, as I said, Mr. Robertson and Mrs. Campbell who had

actually succeeded--I began again upon a French play with

considerable license of adaptation: but this license I overstepped,

and the matter fell through. I then wrote a play of my own, and read

it in succession to three managers, who listened politely: I

afterwards published this play. Again I made a play of my own, this

time upon commission, for the theatre is gallant, and likes

perseverance: but the actor-manager for whom I wrote it, deemed it

unsuitable, and again I published. Being now under the lash of

necessity, and not yet ready to die, having my Testaments and

Tragedies to write, I accepted commissions for adaptations, and in

due course made versions of five foreign dramatic pieces, and an

adaptation of a French novel, besides writing, also upon commission,

but at my own urgency, two original plays. This is an unusual record,

and the comedy of it lies here:--Not one of these adaptations was in

any degree of my own initiation, nor although I prepared them all

faithfully and some of them _con amore_, would I have chosen any of

them; yet it is by them my ability as a playwright has been tested:

while my own plays, "Godfrida," "Self's the Man," "The Knight of the

Maypole," and an unpublished Arthurian play remain unproduced. The

dismay of it is this:--That my Testaments and Tragedies--the matter

wherewith I propose to change the mood of the world--remain, those

that are issued, unknown; and those that should be written,

unwritten: whereas the successful production of my four plays, the

likeliest poetical plays written for the English stage in these

times, would have placed me in an independent and dominant position

from which all my writings could have come with that adventitious

authority the world is powerless to disregard.

After the playgoing public had failed to appreciate an

adaptation of mine, despite Mr. Lewis Waller's greatness in the part

he played, and an adorable queen of Mrs. Patrick Campbell's, I

discovered, upon various attempts, appeals, and challenges, that the

stage would be well pleased to do without me in the meantime, and

under these auspices, which I took to be the true evolutionary

determinant, I began upon my own tragedies and wrote "The

Theatrocrat: a Tragic Play of Church and Stage." This play derives

its title from the rank and vocation of the protagonist, Sir

Tristram Sumner, proprietor and manager of the Grosvenor Theatre. The

meaning of the title will best appear in Sir Tristram's own words

addressed to his friend and patron, the Bishop of St. James's. "I,"

says Sir Tristram,

"Became at last an artist: think of it!

I found myself the master of the mood,

Enchanting folk and playing on their nerves

As though an audience were a zither; made

A name far-sounding; and, by your good will,

Am now--Heaven save the mark! the banal end!--

Am now Sir Tristram Sumner, nominal,

As well as actual, theatrocrat;"

and the significance of the sub-title will come home to the reader in

the following extract from the diatribe of an exasperated actor

addressed to Sir Tristram himself:--

"When plays were damned

By churchmen, and the player a citizen

Of rascaldom on sufferance living only,

Great was the stage ...

When the monarch set

The lethal signet on the theatre

Of gross respectability, knighting you,

Sir Tristram, and other players unfortunate,

Ranking you in the state with grocers, brewers,

Distillers, lawyers, vicars, aldermen,

He dealt a double blow at church and stage,

And both are bleeding from the wound."

The reader notes the special application here, and distinguishes

also between religion and the church, remembering the religious

import of the Attic drama. The plot of the play is simple. Sir

Tristram Sumner, a man of remarkable ability, having led an

inharmonious life, has reached that period when the material powers

of mind and soul begin to rebel against the over-indulged body, and

are apt to declare themselves in megalomaniacal obsessions. His

instinct, once infallible, misleads him, and he determines, against

all advice, to produce Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida." His

wife, originally a beautiful and healthy woman, has shared her

husband's sensuality, and is now haggard and neurotic, her ill-used

soul asserting itself discordantly in trances and telepathic visions.

She is haunted by the fancy that the play will succeed if Warwick

Groom, a disgraced actor of genius, takes the part of Troilus. Sir

Tristram, who knows that Lady Sumner had loved Warwick in her youth,

has developed a fierce jealousy of his former rival and a deadly hate

for his wife; but his financial position is so perilous, and his

wife's premonitions have been hitherto so reliable, that he dare not

disregard her brain-sick counsel. Warwick Groom's besetting vice,

drunkenness, prevents his appearance as Troilus, and the play

fails. Bankruptcy and the end have come. But now the Bishop of St.

James's intervenes, and finances Sir Tristram in order to produce a

play of his own. St. James's has a message to deliver, and prefers

the theatre to the pulpit. On the night of the production of his play

he himself is to introduce it in a guarded speech: but soon--a true

propagandist--

"He stands entranced,

With face uplifted like a seraph, pealing

Material music, from his prologue worlds

Away."

At last the incensed audience, led by a "fighting parson" from

the stalls, invades the stage. St. James's is mobbed and dies of his

injuries. Of Sir Tristram's _liaison_ with Europa Troop, an American

actress; of Lady Sumner's suicide, and the murder of Sir Tristram by

Warwick Groom, I say nothing here. My present concern is with St.

James's message, which is also mine: my statement of the world, and

of the Universe as the world can know it. I should add that there is

no key to "The Theatrocrat": all the people in it are made

essentially out of the good and evil in myself. My statement of the

world and of the Universe as the world can know it has offended and

will offend; but I have no purpose of offence; nor am I concerned to

please: my purpose is to say that which is, to speak for the

Universe. I mean nothing occult or mystical; only the natural mystery

of Matter. Man consists of the same Matter as the sun and the stars

and the omnipresent Ether; he is therefore the Universe become

conscious; in him the Universe thinks and imagines; and every man who

trusts himself trusts the Universe, and can say that which is. I

announced at the outset that I wished to transmute the depreciated

word "immorality," and admitted the difficulty of such a feat of

verbal alchemy in England, where the current meaning of immorality is

so narrow, nauseous, and stupid. And yet nothing could be simpler

than such a transmutation. We know now that there is no moral order

of the Universe, but that everything is constantly changing and

becoming and returning to its first condition in a perpetual round of

evolution and devolution; and this eternal tide of Matter, this

restless ebb and flow, I call Immorality. All men and things have a

Will to be Moral, have a Will to Righteousness--the metaphysic of

religion. The omnipresent Ether would fain be an established moral

order of Ether, pure, imponderable, invisible, constant; but that

thorn in the flesh, electricity, evolves from the Ether while still

interpenetrated by it, and the moral order of the Ether is at end.

Electricity, the first analysable form of Matter, for we have not yet

isolated a sample of the Ether, would fain be electricity, pure and

perfect bi-sexuality and nothing else; but hardly has it had time to

adjust its negative and positive poles when it begins to secrete

hydrogen, and this wanton seminary of Matter once opened, some

seventy or eighty elements are soon scored against the demoralized

electricity. Among men there is the same intense Will to Morality.

How slowly a moral order decays! Apollo and Aphrodite are still

alive in the fancy of men! The massacre of Saint Bartholomew, the

depletion of the manhood of France by the revocation of the edict of

Nantes, the war of the Fronde, the horrors of the Revolution, of the

wars of Napoleon, of the Franco-German war and of the Commune, which

were the evolution of the French Republic, witness the tenacity of an

old order, and how utterly regardless of the cost of its

establishment a new order is. The Universe is immoral, and no sooner

has a morality of any order established itself than the Universe

begins to undo it. To me the centuries of Christendom are only as a

moment of time which has ended, and in my heart I believe

"Terrific war

Will burst the chrysalis, the Christendom,

That hangs in rags about the eager soul,

Already wing'd and rich with crimson stains,

With sulphur plumes and violet, green and gold,

Psyche at last, pure Matter of itself!"

I have repeatedly attempted to speak this that I am writing, and

have always failed, coming out of it in a dumb rage. It is true that

no man, great or small, was ever so tongue-tied as I am; but it is

also true that the people one talks with who are consciously

interested in the Universe are almost always either theologians or

metaphysicians, men of dogma and system who can neither think nor

imagine beyond their rubrics: poetry to them is on the other side of

the hedge; it may be a vineyard, but they are tethered in their own

plot of thistles, and very well satisfied too. I have no system; I

have no dogma: it is a new poetry I bring. For me there is nothing

immaterial; for me everything matters; for me there is nothing behind

phenomena: the very "thing in itself" is phenomenon; phenomena _are_

the Universe. I, doubtless, prefer to drop such words as

"phenomenon," such phrases as "thing in itself," specialized out of

all meaning, precisely as the Bishop of St. James's and I drop all

legends

"Of dead men come alive, and signs and shows

Of tongues and thunders, cures and stigmata,

Which are no mystery but the quaint alarm

Of ignorance, that harnessed vision against

The things that be in sterile dreams of spirit,

As banal, venomous-moral, hard and fast

As Matter is mysterious, fluent, pure,

Filling the Universe with miracle,

Filling and being the Universe itself."

I am not an atheist. The words atheist and atheism, infidel and

infidelity, seem to me misnomers, mere childish nicknames,

unpoetical, inapplicable, feebly malignant; you cannot disbelieve in

what is not; so violent a reaction as disbelief intimates the

existence of that which is antagonized: one might as well say, "There

is no Hamlet; there is no Don Quixote," as affirm the nonentity of

God. Indeed and indeed there has been nothing but God for many a

century. For the active world, the money-making, breeding,

pleasure-seeking, power-loving world, the rulers, artists, poets,

merchants, soldiers, the great world as distinguished from the

studious faction of scientists, theologians, philosophers, and men of

letters--an insignificant and negligible minority in this

particular: for this great world, God sums imagination; not an idea;

no, the Ancient of Days, the Almighty; called a spirit, but a most

Material, most poetical God, who created the world out of nothing,

with the sun to light it by day and the moon and stars by night; who

made man in His own image; who sent His son to atone for His

creatures' backslidings; and who provided Heaven for the repentant

sinner, and Hell for the unregenerate; for God and Sin and Heaven and

Hell that _are_ not

"Are yet the very texture of the world,

Kings, magistracies, warriors, wisdom, love,

Being knit in Heaven and Hell, in God and Sin,

Like blood, nerve, sinew, bone in living flesh."

But a minority are no longer knit up in this divine texture. When

science found out that the world and man had not been created at

all--could not possibly have been created or made in any sense of

these terms; that instead of the sun being specially prepared as a

lantern to light the earth, the earth is really an offscouring of the

sun; and when it searched the Universe and sampled it with its

telescope, discovering although it plunged vision through thousands

of millions of miles that there was no lodge anywhere for Heaven, no

pit to be the continent of Hell, but only illimitable tracts of

incandescent orbs, each the centre of a system to which our solar

nook of space is as a little room by candle-light compared with that

very sunlit space itself, then science knew, as I know, that the

theological system of the Universe is an error of man's ignorance: an

error so wonderful and so significant that I still attend upon the

adequate expression of its true intention. In the Matter of God and

Sin and Heaven and Hell, men of letters are apt to be lukewarm--not

all, but the majority. I exclude poets from the class of men of

letters. Men of letters are humane, moral, civilized, cultured,

sceptical; whereas poets are inhuman, immoral, barbaric, imaginative,

and trustful. With most literary critics, publicists, journalists,

dealers in the humanities, and professional people generally, God and

Sin and Heaven and Hell are not debateable subjects. Why should

anyone nowadays concern himself about these things? If they are not

dead and done with, it is bad taste to discuss them in a secular

work; if they are dead and done with, it is worse taste, and a waste

of time to lug them into the light of day: arguments that seem to

me unanswerable; but here am I with these dead things to bury, and my

message to deliver.

What the theologian calls God, the metaphysician calls by

various names. One will tell you that the world is a Will to Live

rushing into being. Another will say, "That does not account for man:

if a Will to Live is the thing in itself, man is _de trop_, for man is

the greatest foe life has. Other animals kill only to satisfy hunger;

but man, although for food and for sport he preserves life, yet for

sport, for food, for adornment, and to make room for himself, man has

destroyed, and continues to destroy, life by whole species, including

those of his own kind. No, there is something behind the Will to

Live, and that is the Will to Power. A Will to Power accounts for

man; man, the tamer of the tide, of the lion and the lightning; and

man, the tamer of man." But anyone can make a metaphysic; it is a

splendid image, that of splitting logs. Thus we can prove easily

that the world is a Will to Death; for that indeed is the end of a

pessimistic philosophy, the suicide of the race. I have, myself,

made and applied a perfect metaphysic in the few hundred lines of the

"Testament of a Vivisector," where the thing in itself is represented

as a Will to Know:

"It may be Matter in itself is pain

Sweetened in sexual love, that so mankind,

The medium of Matter's consciousness,

May never cease to know--the stolid bent

Of Matter, the infinite vanity

Of the Universe being evermore self-knowledge."

There was a passing gibe at theologians a moment ago, but one has

only to remember how great a thing it is they study, one has only to

descry for a moment the ancient and glorious realm in which the minds

and imaginations of theologians have their being, to know and

understand their integrity and passion. But theology is now, like

so many names, a misnomer. By the application of scientific methods

the more rigorous minds, although still speaking--I think,

equivocally--of theology, have really brought about a theonomy.

Scientific method destroyed astrology, and gave us in exchange for

a superstitious obsession, astronomy and the Universe. Scientific

method has destroyed theology. But the theologians, powerless to

admit it because most humanly reluctant to drop so sublime a thing,

have allowed themselves to gloze the Material God who made the world,

who sent His son to die for sinners, who reared high Heaven and dug

deep Hell--I say the theologians have thought away all this that was

so great, and have spun out, not the heart of it but the husk of it,

into a metaphysical idea of God; have, the more advanced and

veracious minds among them, set aside the incarnation and the

atonement, offering instead the engaging person and beautiful

immorality of Christ:--still an immorality, Christ's teaching; let

anyone attempt to turn the other cheek in any playground, parliament,

court of justice, college, exchange, club, or Convocation, and he

will know with a vengeance what it means to be immoral:--and in the

matter of Heaven and Hell, have, most honestly, nothing to say;

whereas the true theonomist finds the study of God to be a branch of

mythology. In my ballads I have employed this of God and Sin and

Heaven and Hell as the warp of myth in the loom of my poetry, giving

the myth also a new orientation as the weaver changes the pattern of

his web--an orientation which I have carried to its utmost limit in

the Judgment-day of the "Prime Minister"; but no individual mind and

imagination, and no general mind and imagination of any class,

mass, or mob of men can enter a fateful battle in the name of a

metaphysic, can live highly and die serenely to the tune of a mere

folklore. I cry aloud with the Bishop of St. James's:--

"Who shall persuade the Kings that God is not,

The politicians, usurers, financiers,

Priests, warriors that depend on God to bear

The burden of their inhumanities?

All inhumanity that flings itself

On God's unsearchable device will fight

To the last drop of blood, last labouring sigh

For God and Heaven and Hell. And who shall teach

The orphans that their mothers are not; who

Unpeople heaven of lovers, children, saints?

Women will fight with babies at their breasts,

Old palsied hags, peace-makers, cripples, cowards,

When this is put to war! Their sons that died

In battle, where are they? Their enemies,

That should lament in Hell? The little child,

That lived a year and holds its parents' hearts

In dimpled hands for ever? Christ Himself

That pardoned wanton women, where is He?"

It was a great conception of the Universe; it made life intensely

interesting; and still dominates imagination. Even those who

understand that the material Other World in which the imagination of

our more immediate forefathers lived and moved and had so great a

being is as phantasmal as Olympus or Asgard, know well that when the

blood and the brain and the bones and the marrow are fused together

into an act of imagination by love, or war, by some profound sorrow,

some high ambition, some great self-sacrifice, or some great crime,

men immediately, and without effort, become immortal soul, and clothe

themselves as of old in God and Sin and Heaven and Hell. As becomes

one who proposes to furnish imagination with a new abode, I now state

what Heaven and Hell and God and Sin are, and undertake to show that

what I offer is truly immoral, and of the evolving and devolving

Universe.

II

HEAVEN AND HELL

How is it that imagination lives with ease in a material Heaven and

Hell, although these are known to be impossible? What is the meaning

of that? It means that there is no Other World; that the whole

Universe consists of the same Matter as man; and therefore it is that

even the most upright minds, the most enfranchised souls, the

strongest and sanest temperaments in passionate moods and times of

stress, when imagination, expanding, must fill some splendid place,

fly, as to a city of refuge, having no other conception of the

Universe, to this concrete Heaven and Hell. Man is Matter; mind and

soul are material forces; there is no spiritual world as distinct

from the material world; all psychical phenomena are material

phenomena, the result of the operation of material forces; hence, I

say again, the imagination of man, being a complex of material

forces, cannot live in a metaphysical idea or an acknowledged myth,

but makes its Heaven and Hell concrete, and itself immortal soul.

What is the source of this immortal soul with its flaming Hell and

glowing Heaven?

Man being Matter, and thought and fancy being material forces, we

shall find in the history of Matter the origin of much that seems

obscure. Man consists of the following properties of Matter; oxygen,

hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, kalium, natrium, sulphur,

phosphorus, iron, magnesium, silicon, chlorine, fluorine, lithium,

manganese, copper, lead. I invite the reader to consider this with

all the material forces of his being. These forms of Matter with

their energies, of which the body, mind, and soul of man consist,

have always been; they burn in the farthest stars, they are knit up

in the texture--thinner than gossamer, than vapour, as

imponderable as fancy--of the primitive substance, the Ether,

which fills the interstellar spaces from moon to sun, from orbit to

orbit, from galaxy to galaxy, the exquisite material out of which the

nebulae are constringed in beads and drops and clots of Matter upon

threads of lightning, meteors, meteorites, that collide into flame,

or by what process soever, to become upon condensation,

concentration, contraction, systems and constellations, suns and

planets. The whole Matter of man, however mutable, is therefore

everlasting, has no beginning and will have no end; for Matter is

indestructible. The earths, metals, vapours, mysterious properties of

the one mystery Matter, which make up man, are in themselves supposed

to be unconscious: sensitive in every electron, but in all likelihood

without sensibility and therefore unconscious. Sensitive all forms of

Matter are; the elements have individuality, character, genius;

have passions--fierce passions, some of them; have memory, more or

less positive, far-reaching, and reliable. Oxygen seems to be the

chief male element, the sultan of Matter, with his seraglio of

dazzling metals, earths, vapours, not one of which he ever fails to

remember; it is he who knits up the rocks and ridges of the globe,

the bones of men and beasts; he supports all fires of suns and

hearts; he is the food of flame and the fibre of the shower which

extinguishes flame; and, by a miracle of male parthenogenesis, with

lightning for accoucheur in place of Vulcan and his hammer, it is he

who brings forth the crystalline virgin ozone to clear the air of the

world. Hydrogen, the ethereal and versatile vapour, whose passionate

flame is the light and heat of the most brilliant and the hottest

stars, whose delicate and fluent being is also the feminine principle

in water--the exquisite hermaphrodite that flows so wooingly about

the world--forgets not her way in the sea, nor ever foregoes her

purpose in plants and animals. Carbon, the workman among the

elements, the artist, the artificer, the labouring class, and the

proletariate of Matter, is the form one likes the best; he is coal

and the diamond, wine and blood, the seed of plants and animals, love

and poetry, lust and slaughter, wood and flesh, and bones and rocks;

the texture of all life; the human element, the diabolic element, the

divine element. These three highly individualized, genial, passionate

and many-sided forms, along with nitrogen, a loose-living, dissolute

gas whose will is to decay; phosphorus, white and red, the Jekyll and

Hyde of the elements; sulphur, a gold-hued wonder of twice three

transformations; calcium, silicon, iron, and the rest, constitute the

body of man; his energies, vital, reproductive, mental, and

spiritual, are the sums of the energies of these various forms of

Matter. Consider it! In this alone there is a new world of poetry, a

new world of humour. Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium,

phosphorus, sulphur, natrium, kalium, magnesium, iron, silicon, the

principal constituents of the whole of the Universe have become

in man subconscious, conscious, and self-conscious; it is infinitely

satisfying to know it, write it, say it, think it. These dozen

mysterious forms of Matter the Mysterious have become man; and all

their prodigious powers of expansion, cohesion, magnetic and

electric energies, intense and hungry chemical affinities, miraculous

transformations, radiations, isomerisms, allotropisms, and the

continuous, passionate, omnipresent pulses of molecular attraction

and interatomic motion are converted into vitality, generative power,

muscular energy, nervous energy, into cerebration, emotion,

passion, imagination, material forces all. This is a high and great

thing, and when the general mind and imagination live in it, the mood

of the world will undergo an unparagoned change.

I am now to answer the question, What is the source of this

immortal soul with its flaming Hell and glowing Heaven? These dozen

mysterious, mutable forms of Matter the indestructible, being the

principal constituents of the whole Universe, have become in man

conscious; and man, before he understands, calls this

indestructibility of the Matter of which he consists immortal soul.

Wordsworth has it wonderfully, building better than he knew, for it

was Matter that spoke when Wordsworth said--

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting

And cometh from afar.

Not in entire forgetfulness

And not in utter nakedness

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God who is our home;"

that is, from the all-pervading Ether, our primeval home, the

original form of Matter which fills space; the imponderable Ether in

which the suns and systems float, having evolved with all that they

contain from that very plasmic Ether. Again, all Matter having

memory, and man being Matter grown conscious--a metaphysic for this

would be the World as Memory rushing into Consciousness; but however

that be expressed, man's idea of the Universe before he knows its

true configuration or how it arose, is certain to contain some

suggestion of the actual becoming of things; and that suggestion will

naturally derive from subconscious recollections of impressive events

in the history of Matter. In the history of the solar system after

the unbegun period of its existence dissolved in the plasmic Ether,

the first impressive event is electrical evolution, when the Matter

of the sun and the planets overbrimmed solar space as a globular or

spiral nebula. Every particle of earth was all luminous in that

pristine light: the pen I write with, the paper I write on, my hand

that writes, and my brain that instructs my hand. The next important

event is the condensation and contraction of the nebula with the

segregation of the planets, when all the chemical affinities, the

energies of electricity and heat, radiative action, centrifugal and

centripetal forces and the force of gravitation kept up for millions

of years a war of the elements no atom of Matter can ever forget. The

blood, the brain, the bones, the flesh, and the marrow, retaining an

indelible impression of their placid existence in the unbegun

Ether, of the diaphanous light of the nebula, and of the terrific

time of infernal tumult when the solar system was evolved,

suggested to man, when his highly developed consciousness begat a

still unenlightened idea of the Universe, that splendour on high, his

glowing Heaven of light, and that horror below, his fiery Hell of

torment. This is pure poetry. Eloquence not being my purpose in this

preface, I have expounded it in strict Matter-of-fact prose; but

being Matter of Imagination all compact, a truer poetical form will

be found in "The Testament of a Prime Minister." (pp. 98-100.)

Heaven and Hell, then, are subconscious recollections of the

peace of the Ether, of the glory of the nebula, and of the

condensation and contraction suffered by the Matter of which man

consists during the millions of millions of years of the evolution of

the solar system, perdurable experiences impressed on every molecule,

every atom, every electron of the globe and of man; and when I invite

the imagination of the world to take up its abode in the actual

poetry of Matter, it is a true devolution I desire, comparable to

the return of Matter through vapour and lightning into the

all-pervading Ether.

III

INTERLUDE

I styled the Universe a Memory rushing into Consciousness. It may

also be called by as many metaphysics as there are properties and

qualities in Matter, and in Matter's accomplishment, man--a Will to

Happiness, a Will to Misery; a Will to be Hydrogen, fully developed

in all the hottest stars; a Will to Love, a Will to Hate; a Will to

be Lightning, into which everything devolves on its way back to the

Ether; a Will to Live, a Will to Die; a Will to Beauty, the

metaphysic of art; a Will to be the Ether, which everything was, and

is, and will again be. I say this to remind the reader that all

mental and spiritual qualities and properties are contained in the

forms of Matter which become at last fully conscious in man.

There was truth in astromancy. Man, consisting of the same

Matter as the stars, felt his kinship, and, being uninstructed, built

up assiduously his judicial astrology to explain, what every atom

of his body knew subconsciously, his identity with Sirius and

Aldebaran. There was truth in alchemy, more truth than in astrology.

The prime idea of alchemy, the transmutation of Matter, is absolutely

true. Uranium, thorium, radium, have been detected in the act of

secreting and producing other elements, which new elements, it is

almost certain, change, possibly by way of hydrogen, into

electricity--rapidly in the cases of uranium and thorium, very

slowly in the case of radium--and from electricity devolve back into

the primitive form of Matter, the Ether. And such is the history of

all Matter: from the Ether through cycles of change back to the

Ether. Man, being this transmutable, indestructible matter become

conscious, had from the beginning the knowledge of these properties

of Matter within him, and, while still uninstructed, conceived the

ideas of the transmutation of metals by the philosopher's stone, and

of the prolonging of life indefinitely by that same philosopher's

stone dissolved into the elixir of life: the one idea, practically

true; the other, a fantastic intimation of the indestructibility of

the Matter of which man consists. There was truth in witchcraft and

sorcery. Modern hypnotism can exhibit phenomena as wonderful as

anything recorded of black magic or white; and I am certain when I

remember the properties and qualities of the elements of which he is

compounded, that there are other material powers in man awaiting

discovery. I understand the list of human elements is correct as far

as it goes: about some eighteen are given, including those that are

barely traceable. I cannot conceive what further powers may be

discovered in man; but I allow myself an interlude to suggest that

there are other elements besides the current list in the Matter of

which he consists.

The rare gases recently discovered in the atmosphere, helium,

neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and the unknown members of that group,

certain to be found--have these zero gases, as they are called, been

sought for in man? Hitherto their story is a blank, as it is

impossible to unite them chemically with any element; but they

constitute one per cent. of the mechanical mixture of gases which

we breathe. What are they doing, then, in the air? Nitrogen alone is

a sufficient diluent of the necessary oxygen. Are these rare gases

purposeless? I am intensely curious about them. Are there outcasts

also among the elements? Are these gases dead elements? One of

them, helium, is a transmuted emanation of radium. Is it the ghost of

radium? Nitrogen, with which they are found mechanically mingled, is

the element of fermentation and decay. One feels upon the brink of a

notable discovery. These dead gases, these ghosts of elements

herding with the vapour of dissolution, nitrogen, cannot be

entirely ineffective. I hazard this poetical suggestion:--It is the

presence of these incommunicable elements that maintains the

mechanical mixture of the oxygen and the nitrogen of the air: were

their ghostly frontier eliminated, the two main members of the

atmosphere would unite chemically, forming protoxide of nitrogen,

which is laughing gas. Great Pan! How close we are to that rare old

fantasy, that the crack of doom will be a universal shout of laughter!

The names, affinities and energies of the elements of which man

consists should be more secure in every memory than the alphabet and

the multiplication table. This is a great part of my immorality,

that, instead of a myth, children should be told, as soon as they

begin to express their wonder, that they consist of oxygen,

hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, kalium, natrium, sulphur,

phosphorus, iron, magnesium, silicon; that the principal human

elements are also the principal constituents of the whole Universe,

and that all the elements are forms of one substance. They should

also be shown experimentally the qualities and properties of these

elements; and gradually, instead of catechisms and the grammars of

dead languages, obtain a knowledge of the poetry of evolution: a

poetry that does not require to be taught or learnt; that requires

only to be told and shown to be known, welcomed, and remembered,

because it is already subconscious in the Matter of which we consist.

Thus a child would know at once that there has been no philosophy,

no religion, no literature hitherto; that there is nothing for him to

learn; that every one must make for himself his own philosophy,

religion, literature. All that chemists, astronomers, physicists,

biologists, have discovered and suggested; all science and all its

speculations--these things that do not require to be learnt, but

only require to be shown to be known and delighted in, the child

would soon furnish himself with; just as he would light-heartedly

reject everything in the shape of system from Aristotle to Herbert

Spencer, and all doctrine from Buddha to Christ, and from Christ to

Nietzsche. The insane past of mankind is the incubus: the world is

really a virgin world awaking from a bad dream. ("The Testament of a

Man Forbid.")

These are some of the seeds of the new thing I bring, of the new

poetry which the world will make, Matter brooding on Matter for

centuries to come. Poetry is the flower of what all men are maturing

in thought and fancy; I reap a harvest as yet unsown; I come a

hundred years before the time--that time foreseen by Wordsworth,

"when what is now called science, familiarized to men, shall be ready

to put on a form of flesh and blood."

It is a profoundly satisfying thought that no serious pursuit of

man, no cherished conception, however erroneous in itself, is ever

based in error. Man is Matter, embodied sincerity, and cannot for any

length of time concern himself with what is not. I have shown a new

thing--that Heaven and Hell were memories of processes of evolution

struggling into consciousness; I have reminded the reader that

astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, and sorcery had, all of them, roots

in Material facts, and I have pointed out that these pseudo-sciences

and black and white magics were attempts of unenlightened but

conscious Matter to reveal itself and its powers. I will now state

the Material sources of the stupendous ideas of God and Sin.

IV

GOD AND SIN

Man is inhuman. Humanity is as fanciful an ideal as divinity. From

eternity the Matter of which man consists had an unconscious being

dissolved in the Ether; thereafter as lightning, and as various

Material forms which we call elements: and as these various Material

forms which we call elements, as lightning, and once again in the

Ether, the Matter of which man consists will have an unconscious

being to all eternity. I say an unconscious being: the likelihood

that the Matter of man after its devolution into the Ether will

again become conscious is inconsiderable. Further, in the event of so

remote a chance, it is even more unlikely that the Matter of man,

becoming conscious again, should have any recollection of its

former consciousness. The present interlude of his conscious

being--in the old image like the flight of a night-bird through an

illumined hall from darkness to darkness--is so brief, that on that

account alone man has had no time to become human. This is true of

the individual; and were mankind to end now, or a million years

hence, it would also, and still, be true of the race. A million years

of consciousness as man would not be an experience long and broad and

deep enough to humanize the Matter of which man consists, because

except in rare cases the same Matter is never more than once

incarnate. From crops grown, and cattle fed, on battlefields,

molecules of Matter that were once part of man may become part of man

again. Doubtless also cannibals have eaten cannibals, thus giving the

same Matter repeated avatars: an instance, however, that does not

make for humanity. Even if our earth were to heap geological period

upon geological period from our recent era of tertiary and quaternary

times to a futurity of centenary and millenary ages, until in the

course of a million million of years every electron of the globe

transmuted through all forms of Matter, had been reincarnated as

Man again and again, that would not be experience enough to fix a

permanent memory of humanity in the devolved Matter of man: because

this Matter that becomes man, like all Matter, existed from all

eternity--during the immeasurable and inconceivable lapse of

eternity, existed in the Ether, thereafter as lightning, and as

elements on fire, for periods compared with which a million million

years are as the time of a single heart-beat compared with a million

million years. Like thoughts of childhood in old age, the memory of

the diaphanous light of the nebula and of the tumult and fire of its

contraction, and the memory of the peace and darkness of its

primeval, ethereal being, would overcome all impressions of

consciousness in that unconscious memory which Matter is: and even if

living experience remained occult in the oxygen and carbon, the

hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium which had been man, the tumult and fire

of the new nebula into which the Matter of man must devolve, will

bray and burn out all sense of life in the most passionate Matter

that ever lived and fought, the peace and darkness of the re-entered

Ether, of the infinite Lethean Ether, will restore an entire and pure

unconsciousness to the Matter which was Christ, to the Matter which

was Nero, to the Matter which you are and which I am. It is a new

poetry I bring, a new poetry for the first time in a thousand years:

an abiding-place for the imagination of man as matter-of-fact, as

hard and fast, as ineluctable as Olympus and Hades, Asgard and Hela,

Heaven and Hell were for our ancestors, and simpler and greater and

more perdurable than these, because it is no longer a dream of the

Universe, but the Universe itself, in which the imagination of man

must now find its abode.

The Matter of man can never become human. A metaphysic or metaphor

of man is of two terms:--Man is a Will to an impossible Divinity by

way of an impossible Humanity. For four score years or five score, a

heart-beat between the two eternities, some dozen elements are

elected or doomed to consciousness as man: and to this consciousness

is imparted by the manner of his generation an insignificant heritage

of accumulated tendency, impulse and impression: so insignificant,

within recorded time, that it may be ignored. It has been suggested

that out of man, the descendant of a lower animal, something higher

than man may be evolved. The suggestion does not commend itself to

me. I know of no data that can make the Evolution of Species from

three or four originals by Natural Selection a credible assumption.

The age of miracles is past. When we ask for a sign we are referred

to the evolution of a new species of louse. If any mortal thing,

elephant or microscopic insect, is still unprovided, by all means

let it have its complement of lice: all-bounteous nature is not

likely to be wanting in that department. That Matter should produce

a new form of degenerate life in which it is especially prolific is

no proof of the Evolution of Species by Natural Selection. The

appearance of a new pedicular degraded-hemipterous insect in a

hitherto inverminate habitat ensures certainly a due degree of

phthiriasis where no phthiriasis was before--a consummation to

rejoice the moral order of pediculina, and doubtless confirming the

metaphysician of the parasitic world in his doctrine of the

Universe as a Will to be Suctorial; but such an isolated phenomenon

is not necessarily an illustration of the method of evolution, and

might be called with greater probability an act of special creation.

To me it is an instance of the material, poetic or imaginative style

of Matter in its mood of depravity--a mood analogous to that in

which literature produces Sinon, Tartuffe, Parolles, Chivy Slyme. A

poetical metaphysic or metaphor is that of the Universe as

Imagination becoming Phenomena. As in the Matter of a

poet--nourished by the past, productive in the present, and

sending forth aerial roots into the future--thoughts, imaginings,

shapes, and legends of infinite variety, uncalled arise, and

unlaboured become; so in the Matter of the earth--which is Matter of

the Universe, from all eternity to all eternity, which is all memory,

all imagination, all energy--life in infinite variety arises and

becomes: not by the breaking up of species, although that may be a

side-show at the world's fair, but by the appearance of species the

staple of evolution proceeds. If one speck or clot of protoplasm can

arise and become, and after becoming, can evolve an organism,

millions of specks of protoplasm can arise and become, each evolving

a different organism, and the whole constituting an unbroken chain of

being: not evolution in a straight line, but cubic evolution, a

pullulation of species. Consider it: there must be similarities

without any necessity for either lineal or collateral evolution,

although these are both thrown in by exuberant nature: if the

organisms are vertebrate, then they must all have backbones; if they

are invertebrate they will be, all of them, without backbones; if the

generation is viviparous the mother--plant or animal--will suckle

her young; if the generation is oviparous the mother--plum-tree,

grain, poultry, or spider--will produce eggs: but to suppose that a

fish changes into a bird, and a bird into a beast by Natural

Selection, as it is at present understood, is to demand from man a

credulity that could die a martyr's death to prove that the earth is

flat. It is not a wanton mark of interrogation which I place

against the Darwinian theory of the Origin of Species. What seems to

me the subtle beginning of the one thing to be dreaded, a new

anthropomorphism, demands resistance. On the threshold of Darwin's

theory of the Evolution of Species by Natural Selection a

danger-signal warns the jealous observer. The probability that allied

species were descended from a common parent had sunk deeply into

Darwin's mind; "but for some years," he writes, "I could not conceive

how each form became so excellently adapted to its habits of life. I

then began systematically to study domestic productions, and after

a time saw clearly that _man's selective power was the most important

agent_." (Darwin's Letter to Professor Haeckel of 8 October, 1864.)

The italics are mine. Man's selective power is the most important

agent in the breeding of domestic animals, therefore an analogous

selective power is exercised by nature! Darwin set himself to find

out that this was true, with unexampled patience certainly, but with

a rooted and evergrowing prepossession that what he sought was

there, that he would discover his own anthropical notion in an

ananthropic world. Is this not the inception of a new

anthropomorphism? So men sought for God; so men hunted after

witchcraft. Whatever we search for, we find; nothing is surer than

that. We must, therefore, search without seeking for; we must desire

to find, not an echo or reflection of our own thoughts, obtainable

anywhere and at any time, but only that which is. With Darwin

Natural Selection amounted to a metaphysic; it obsessed him with all

the force of Other World; it explained the phenomena considered and

so must be the cause of these phenomena! In human affairs

circumstantial evidence is the most reliable, in the affairs of the

Universe the most misleading, as all science, philosophy, and

religion, directly attest. Natural Selection, sexual and vital,

accounts for much variation, but it is not sufficient to bridge the

gulf between the negro and the Teuton; to my mind it is not even

sufficient to bridge the gulf between the Jew and the Gentile; and to

trace man lineally through apes, marsupials, mudfish, skull-less

vertebrates, worms, and one-celled protozoa at twenty-five removes

from the monera is to propound a thing my intellect and imagination

reject. Environment, sexual inclination, and the struggle for life,

will not evolve a man from a rhizopod. Natural Selection, as it is

understood, cannot be the full mechanism of the evolution of man. I

want to know about the Chemical Selection; the difference between

the elemental constitution of man and the other animals; the actual

chemistry of animated Matter. Is there as much of the Universe in the

tiger as in man? Is there an element of self-consciousness to be

found only in man? A profound, a more Material Selection, a fate, a

doom, is yet to be discovered. Although evolutionists insist that

their Natural Selection is a mechanical process, like Darwin himself

they feel that it is insufficient; they may not confess it to

themselves, but they are sceptical. Scepticism being the parent of

superstition, Natural Selection assumes the desired attributes,

dynamic, theurgic. Natural Selection has usurped the thoughts of

evolutionists as a thing behind phenomena, as a kind of god. The

world is in danger of a new fanaticism, of a scientific instead of a

religious tyranny. This is my protest. In the course of many ages the

mind of man may be able to grasp the world scientifically: in the

meantime we can know it only poetically; science is still a valley of

dead bones till imagination breathes upon them.

It is certain that Matter has not evolved a finer race of men than

the Caucasian; and it is certain that the Caucasian has not evolved a

finer breed than the Greeks, the Romans or the English. Maugre the

new louse--doubtless a most belated and strangely involved

occurrence, comparable to our war of the Heptarchy in South Africa

more than a thousand years behind the time--upon our earth the

evolution of species has ceased, except tentatively by unnatural

selection under the control of man. Unnatural is here a most

relative term: I do not forget that man is himself as much a force of

nature as a climate, or a season of the year, or any other

environment. Since in the Caucasian races of men Matter has become

capable of full self-consciousness, although it has not attained it

yet, no further evolution of life in an ascending scale is possible;

therefore man cannot become more human than he is. A fuller

self-consciousness will not achieve a greater humanity: on the

contrary, as I intend to show, a fuller self-consciousness entails a

deeper integration, a closer involution of man's inhumanity.

Man is inhuman, and cannot be other than inhuman, the metaphysic

or metaphor illustrative being--The Universe as a Will to an

impossible Divinity by way of an impossible Humanity. The skeleton of

man is a most inhuman thing; a skull is most inhuman; bones are as

inhuman as rocks. The flesh of man is inhuman; it is not

distinguishable from the flesh of swine. His sight, hearing, taste,

appetites, functions, are inhuman, being appropriaments of all

mammalia. Four important things he has which, by their quality,

differentiate him from the other animals--his thumb, his posture,

his brain, and his larynx; and these, the insignia of man, are the

special vehicles of a most profound inhumanity for which the catfish

and the wolverine, were they in power, would wipe the present lord of

creation from the face of the earth as utterly unfit to live. His

commanding posture, his opposable thumb, his spacious convoluted

brain, and his voice of terror and command, have enabled man to

invent, elaborate, and apply to man all the tortures of his imagined

Hell. The cat plays with the mouse, but that is the feline culinary

art; and the mouse is shortly killed. Nor is the mouse fastened; it

has to the last a chance of escape; and often the mouse gets away

after a rousing game in which the stake was its life. The spider

weaves a web, and the insect is caught; here the prey is fastened,

but it is for food, and often a stout fly will break the net, and at

the worst he is soon despatched. It was man who conceived the

exquisite idea of fastening people in order to hurt them at his will

and pleasure. Not a mammoth cat, insane and hunger-clung, ties up men

and flogs them underground to cook them quickly instead of employing

the longer, less brutal, and customary method with the mouse: it is

man who does this to man, and not for food, but upon principle. Not a

Titanic spider, but man, rove the strappado and stretched the rack in

order to hurt men in body, mind, and soul, in every organ, nerve and

sinew, joint and muscle, repeatedly and for long periods without

killing them: it was man who did this, and not because he was

starving and this the only way to secure and prepare food, but in

many cases only because there was between him and his victims a

difference of opinion upon an entirely immaterial point. It was not a

pack of wolves, having captured more game than they could dispose of,

and being quite sated with flesh and wanton with blood, who chained

up men and women and burned them alive: it was men who did this to

men as a religious duty. As soon as their queen has been pleased,

and the future of the hive is assured, the working-bees destroy the

drones. If merciful economy be a human attribute, the bees are more

human than men. Those who cannot work, and those for whom there is

nothing to do, the natural and artificial drones among men, are

interned in lunatic asylums, homes for incurables, prisons,

poorhouses. The cost of these would, I suppose, provide old-age

pensions for all the workers. The lethal chamber of the bee is the

porch of his straw-built citadel. Recently a humane man of science,

with courage and public spirit--so rare in England now!--inquired

for the lethal chambers of men. These are they: our asylums, prisons,

poorhouses; but the death we supply is slow--so slow: why, one

pleasant meal of five courses, with wine, coffee, benedictine, and a

cigar, would in one night dispose of all the old men in a certain

_Home_ I know: indeed, they are living tombs rather than lethal

chambers, these institutions of ours. Among the bees it is the queens

and drones, among the ants the queens and kings, non-workers in both

cases, who produce the drudges and the soldiers. The proletariate

of the hive and of the cities of the emmet are more human than men;

they do not propagate their order: proletariate is really a

discourtesy title applied to working-bees and ants. In the hive and

the ant-hill the proletaneous order is the upper class: no slave

begets a slave among these swarming miracles. From ancient times the

working-bees and the working-ants, seeing that the endless

all-absorbing drudgery has to be done, gradually evolved, by heroic

human abstinence, their own sexlessness, leaving to the idle classes

the rapture, the sin, and the awful responsibility of producing

slaves: the humanity of the bees and ants, class and mass, approaches

divinity. Among men the idle and well-to-do classes, instead of

producing the workers and the soldiers, limited themselves of old to

the reproduction of their own order, the males merely as an

entertainment making sporadic incursions into the colonies of the

workers. Now, even reproduction of their own order, in France,

America, and more recently in England, begins to be irksome to the

idle and well-to-do classes; but instead of an honest, honourable,

and human abstinence, they adopt a dishonest, dishonourable, and

brutal artifice: nor have they any real idea of regulating the future

of the human race: it is only to keep their own circumstances easy

and the tide of pleasure flowing: this custom is also extending, not

so inhumanly, to the proletariate. With the majority of animals, so

far as they themselves are concerned, all the seeds of life have fair

play: and in the order of mammalia a beautiful, a human chastity has

been evolved which restricts to a brief annual occurrence the nisus

towards the future of their kind, such inhuman animals as men,

monkeys, and cats excepted: with the exception of women also the

females of all mammalia are human; they suckle their young. The

asceticism of the asexual worker and soldier ants, the divinest thing

in nature, had at one time an analogue of a kind in our monasteries,

nunneries, and orders of military monks: that was the deadlift

effort mankind made to attain an impossible Divinity by way of an

impossible Humanity; and it was only a further dehumanization of the

individual without any evolutionary result: man is much too

Material a being ever to compass so human, so divine an event as the

generation of sexless beings to do the necessary drudgery of the

world as devoutly as lovers kiss: his ideal eunuch of the monastery,

and his actual eunuch of the seraglio are overwhelming proof of man's

profound inhumanity and of the abysmal indivinity of his nature.

Man's consciousness of his inhumanity and indivinity are

transmuted in his uninstructed imagination into the monstrous

phantom--Sin; something so heinous and detestable interpenetrating

all his being, works and ways, that many of the subtlest

intelligences and most upright minds have found no relief from its

remorseful obsession except in the atonement of Christ and faith in

an immaterial future; or, more courageously, in a remorseless

despair and the resolute acceptance of the postulate that life is a

thing that should never have been. It has been left to me to show

that this inhumanity, this indivinity, this Sin, has, like all man's

ideas, conceptions, and fantasies, a Material source in the

properties of the forms of Matter of which man consists. In

expounding my new poetry I am at an immense disadvantage in one

regard--that the latent forces of expansion and chemical affinity,

the active electrical, magnetic, radiant and cohesive energies, and

the perpetuity of molecular and interatomical motions in the oxygen,

carbon, hydrogen, etc., of the Matter of man are as yet only vaguely

conceived, so far at least as they relate to himself, in the mind of

the reader. I must therefore reiterate that these forces, converted

into anabolic and katabolic activities, into vitality, nervous

energy, reproductive power, into love, hate, thought, imagination,

into consciousness and self-consciousness, are the fount of man's

notion that there is within him, and without, something other than

Matter and its properties of form and energy: it is these material

forces that man has ignorantly christened soul or spirit, with the

immaterial significance of these words. Now no one in love feels

sinful; no one in a passion of any kind feels sinful; no man

gloriously drunk feels sinful; no deep-set ambition ever accuses

itself of sin; an entirely healthy nature living a healthy life knows

nothing of sin. Conviction of Sin has always been a limited

experience. There have been, are, and will be, powerful and most

Material natures, unaffected except temporarily and superficially by

bouts of debauchery, prolonged mental strain, and the commission of

every crime. Conviction of Sin, alike in the offspring of worn-out

stock--epileptics, consumptives, neuropaths, mattoids, weak-bodied

and weak-minded people generally--as in ordinary healthy natures, is

the effect of the exhaustion of the Material forces of the Matter of

man. The exhaustion may proceed from dissipation, from prolonged

domestic or financial worry, or--not to multiply instances--it may

be the result of the enormous discharge of nervous energy and the

upheaval of the whole nature in the commission of a murder or the

betrayal of a friend. But no ordinary, healthy man is ever convicted

of Sin before the act, or in the act; the degenerate whose normal

state is one of conscious sinfulness, feels for the moment deified

upon the sudden access of energy that leads him into crime; and the

outcast, when he learns to say, "Evil, be thou my good," stumbles,

although unconsciously, upon the tremendous knowledge that the

categoric imperative is the discharge of the material forces of

Matter, whether the discharge be by the lightnings of the clouds, in

the seismal throes of earth, or through the passion and imagination

of men and women. Sin, then, is the exhaustion of the material forces

of man. Discharges of force in ways of pleasure, in moods of delight,

in trances of ecstasy, as well as discharges of force in feelings

of rancour, jealousy, and malice, in deeds of lust, slaughter, and

treachery, have alike to bear the unhallowed name of the succeeding

reaction. It is a species of vengeance, this transference of the

title Sin from the impotence of the spent Matter to the energy that

was expended. The degenerate suffers because his forefathers used up

the energies of the stock in enjoyment; the debauchee suffers by the

over-discharge of his own force; and both feel a vengeful pleasure in

transferring the moral nickname of their enfeebled condition to the

innocent, whole-hearted liberty and power of the days of exuberant

health. It is the meanest, most cowardly thing man has done to call

his courage Sin: by this vengeance the enfeebled Matter of man

obtains such pitiful satisfaction as an infant does when it calls the

floor upon which it has broken its brow "bad," and invites its nurse

to whip the offender. An apologue:--A bee, seized with an access of

Quixotic daring, exhausted its sting in the neck of a quite harmless

tourist, and shortly lay buzzing its last and lamenting its guilt.

"What a sinner I have been!" the bee buzzed. A hornet flounced up and

asked the bee what ailed it. "I have sinned," the bee replied, "and

deserve only death and hell." "Let's see," cried the hornet,

examining the bee; "why, you've no sting! You've used up your

sting!" "Ay!" sighed the bee; "I've used it up, sinner that I am!"

"Pooh!" replied the hornet, who was by way of being a casuist:

"that's not how to look at it! Your sting, look you--your sting

itself was the sin. Now, you are purged of that. _Courage, mon

camarade, le diable est mort!_" "Whatever do you mean?" rejoined the

bee. "When I was active and happy, confident and proud, with the

power of life and death in my tail, going about the delightful

business of the universe among the amorous flowers----" "Then you

were sinful," interrupted the hornet, determined that his cousin

should not die unconsoled: "now, since by the loss of your sting,

which was your sin _par excellence_, you being sexless, you are

convicted of sin, and have become penitent, your sin ceases, and you

will go to heaven." But the bee in the sudden illumination of death

whispered faintly but resolutely, "No, by heaven, and earth, and

hell! None of your tricks on travellers bound for the undiscovered

country. It was not until I lost my power to sin that I felt sinful;

therefore I was never a sinner, and I'm not a sinner now." Whereupon

the bee with a last effort flew into the bosom of a rose and died

happy.

I now come to the Material source of the idea of God.

The Ether from which everything was evolved fills all space: it

interpenetrates all Matter so intimately that the electrons of an

atom swim in it with the liberty of fish in the sea. The Ether has

never been analysed, quantitatively, qualitatively, or

volumetrically; it has never been seen, heard, smelt, felt, tasted,

or weighed.

A mathematician has suggested that the Ether is the unimaginable

world of four dimensions, including, interpenetrating and

transcending our cognizable Universe as a cube which is a world of

three dimensions includes and transcends a possible world of two

dimensions contained in a superficial square. Certain, if a world of

two dimensions can exist, a world of four dimensions is not

impossible; but we require to complete the series with a linear world

of one dimension and a punctual world of none, which is absurd.

Nevertheless, it is possible to form some idea of the nature of

the Ether. Its invisibility is not beyond our conception: this

negative quality is characteristic of many fluids, notably of the

atmosphere; but the atmosphere becomes apparent in the object-glass

of the telescope when the moon is seen like a white pebble in a

rushing stream. The imponderability of the Ether can also be

conceived by analogy with the atmosphere. Every man, knowing nothing

of it, carries upon his shoulders a column of air sixty miles high

and weighing many tons. In calm weather the very presence of this

voluminous vapour is unfelt: it is only when the wind rises that we

know how heavy its hand can be. Thus a poetical or concrete

conception of the Ether is not negatived by that which it is not. But

this omnipresent substance can be conceived positively, and the

most suitable analogue is the sea. The sea consists of two

gases--hydrogen and oxygen, united chemically to form water, and

containing in solution two or three hundred grains to the pint of

compounds of the following forms of Matter: Kalium, natrium,

magnesium, calcium, sulphur, carbon, chlorine, bromine, iodine, and

traces of everything soluble and partially soluble in water: it

contains also, dissolved in various salts and bases, the very

elements, hydrogen and oxygen, of which it is itself compounded. If a

fluid so simple as water, braided of only three molecules of Matter,

two of hydrogen and one of oxygen, can be so powerful a solvent, it

follows that a fluid so complex as the Ether, woven and interwoven of

molecules of all the elements, that is, of molecules of every form of

Matter, must be dynamic in the highest degree, must be an omnipotent

solvent: if water, consisting of only two elements, can hold in

solution, besides its own constituents, ten or a dozen other

elements, the Ether, consisting of all the elements, _a fortiori_ can

hold in solution all these elements. Nor is the actual omnipresence

of the Ether altogether beyond our grasp. To say that every

electron, every atom, every molecule, every element or form of

Matter, every planet, sun, and system, floats in the Ether and is

interpenetrated by it, is to say that which seems improbable; but the

analogy of water again helps to a natural concrete image. To say that

three-quarters by weight of human flesh, three-eighths by weight of

human bones, consist of water, is to say that which seems improbable,

but which is nevertheless true. Thus we can guess the Ether in terms

of our Universe of three dimensions.

The esoteric nature of the Ether is more easily understood. I use

the word "esoteric" with my own meaning, implying nothing mystical.

By esoteric I mean here a thing known only to me. Upon the

publication of this book, the thing I am about to tell becomes

exoteric. I _make_ no mystery. The Universe is all mystery: the

existence of a drop of water is as mysterious as the existence of

music.

Man is the Universe alive and conscious, and with the capacity of

entire self-consciousness. This capacity, undeveloped and

misunderstood, is the source of all man's misery, the hotbed of the

idea of Sin and the idea of God. Unable to comprehend it, the Greek

and the Norseman projected their trouble into Olympus and Hades,

Asgard and Nifelheim, gods and goddesses, titans, giants, furies,

valkyrs. Every people cast out and projected its self-consciousness

as Other World in some form. A unique race, the Jews, threw its

shadow on the Universe as Jehovah, the One God, jealous, vengeful,

inhuman. The European Aryans laid hold of this, but in a decadent,

Christianized form; and as they lacked in general the intense

individuality of the Hebrew, they soon brought it into a

deliquescence of the Trinity, the Mother of Heaven, Saints,

transubstantiation, the God of love, etc. The hardier northern races,

however, reverted to a more Hebraic form, preferring the God of

battles to the Madonna; and withal the idea of the One God remained

dominant in Christian countries, being recruited by the sudden rise

and rivalry of Islam, with its strident profession of monotheism. The

material source of this uneasy self-consciousness which projects

itself into Other World is twofold. One of these is the Nature of

Man, formerly called Original Sin, God and Sin being in this regard

convertible terms. I have stated this source clearly enough in the

"Prime Minister," in that passage where the protagonist overcomes

the desire to pray, conjuring himself to--

"think

Instead what God is, sanely think; and what

The sanguine source of our immortal hope;

Think how some common drudging neighbour-wight

(Not Hercules nor a titan of the war

Venerean; no, but any honest Jack)

Could happily beget for fifty years

A hundred wholesome children annually:

How every rosy Jill encloisters germs

Of many thousand brats; think this and laugh

Aloud, delighted with the naive, the rich

Conceit of immortality and vast

Exuberance of the race that swells and throbs

In every man and woman, strings the nerves,

Ignites the brain and thunders in the heart

With God and life eternal."

The other source of the idea of God is in the Ether. I have not

yet dealt with this by name in any of my writings, and had intended

to reserve it for my "Testament of a Deliverer"; but having elected

to prepare a brief and general account of my message, I must at least

mention it here. My statement of the Ethereal source of the idea of

God is not nearly mature yet. Nevertheless, the idea is simple and

clear; it is indeed self-evident. Every molecule of which man

consists is not only saturated in the all-pervading Ether, but is

kneaded of it, visible, ponderable Matter being a condensation of the

invisible, imponderable Ether. In a last analysis, which takes us

back to the first synthesis, man is therefore the Ether become

conscious. It is not a question of bulk. Man is an inhabitant of the

earth, which is one of the smallest planets of one of the smallest

systems in the Universe; but man consists of the Universe, of the

whole Universe in its condensed form, and also of the whole Universe

in its invisible, imponderable form, being permeated and pervaded

by the omnipotent, omnipresent Ether, being soaked in it, being drunk

with it, being it. There _is_ nothing anywhere higher than man; there

can be nothing higher than the Universe become self-conscious. In his

uninstructed time man called the Ether which permeates him, which is

his ecstasy, God and gods: "Out of God he came," he thought; "and

back to God he should return;" or he called it Nirvana and an

infinite peace. Imagination is the radiation of the omnipotent Ether.

Only the whole Universe become conscious could have imagined God the

Creator. Now man knows that there is no God; that nothing was made;

that all is a becoming; that he is the Ether, condensed, evolved; and

that he will devolve again into that invisible, imponderable form of

Matter: and this knowledge inherent in himself is infinitely

satisfying. All the imaginings about the source of his being which

man has maddened over, which he has clung to in good report and ill,

which he has died for in battle and at the stake, have their roots in

Material truth. The idea of the Trinity, for example, is clearly the

effort of the Universe become conscious in man to express that

visible and invisible being and that power, namely, Ether, Matter,

Energy, which we now know to be the triple form of the Universe; and

the sublime idea of the Immaculate Conception has the same profound

significance as the union of the gods with the daughters of men in

all mythologies; it means that man procreates something more than

man; it means that he procreates a conscious Universe. I think it

unlikely that Matter has become conscious anywhere else than on our

earth. In man the Ether and the principal forms of Matter are

conscious and self-conscious. It is not conceivable that some other

dozen elements might become conscious; Matter cannot imagine life and

consciousness without carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus. It is not

necessary that other elements should become conscious, because every

element is a form of the one substance: therefore in man the whole

Universe is conscious. I should say that there is not now, that there

has not been at any time, a mate or a peer of man; and--I repeat it

once more--there cannot be anything higher than man, because man is

the whole Universe become conscious and self-conscious. This is a

great thing: it is the greatest thing that has been told to the

world. It will destroy all existing religions, governments,

institutions, morality and all moralities, all philosophy, all

literature, all art. It puts an end to man's mistaken effort

towards an impossible Divinity by way of an impossible Humanity: he

will leave that henceforth to the bees and the ants; he is higher

than the bees and the ants; he is more Material than they. But that

prolonged, deadlift agony towards an impossible Divinity by way of an

impossible Humanity sprang, like all man's travail, from a Material

truth. Man's aim at something higher than man meant that there is

nothing anywhere higher than man. There is nothing anywhere higher

than man. The terror and splendour of this will give the world pause;

nor will the world yield to it easily, for here is an actual

new-birth at last: to know that there can be no first cause, no

metaphysic; that there can be no Other World; that man is the

Material Universe become conscious. A thousand years' war would not

be too terrible a travail for the birth of the world's

self-consciousness: thereafter man could be and do something;

heretofore he has been and done nothing.

The generative power of man and the all-pervading Ether, conscious

in him, are the Material sources of the idea of God. From the first

source there comes also the idea of Sin cognate and isomeric with the

idea of God. (The Devil, the personification of God as Sin, has been

so long a joke that he is out of court.) These twin ideas God and Sin

died together on Calvary two thousand years ago. The history of

Christendom is the history of the obsequies of these ideas, of the

devolution of these ideas. ("The Testament of a Prime Minister," pp.

76-81.) Out of Matter the Myth of God and Sin and Heaven and Hell

arose. Return that myth in which the imagination of Christendom still

dwells in all serious moods and times of passion, return it to its

Material source, and let the world's imagination go with it and be

born again, to live no longer in a myth but in the Universe itself. I

say, with the Prime Minister, let

"the passionate heart of man,

The proud imagination and the dream

That hovers homeless as the myths decay,

Exempt from fabulous wonder, rooted deep

In Substance one and multiform, and breathed

In all the mystery of the things that are,

Create indomitable will to truth,

An open mind at home in space and time,

A stainless memory splendidly endowed

With actual knowledge, a Material soul

At one with the Material Universe."

With the Bishop of St. James's I watch the future, an actual world

wherein an actual man shall be and do greatly

"In majesty Material, the Nessus-shirt

Of spirit, warp and woof of legend, dyed

In many-coloured Sin, the mordant shame

That cankered life, and clung, a grafted hide

About his innocent flesh, fallen off, or flayed

With hideous woe, and in its proper filth

Corrupted into naught. Forthwith the world

Begins again, not even a pallid dream

Of legendary pasts to cloud the dawn.

I say it simply:--With the Universe

Man clothes himself; arrayed in time and space,

In darkness and in light, no lamp, no gleam

He follows, for the sun illumines him

And every sun his kinsmen in the skies,

The systems, constellations, galaxies.

At home in the empyrean, issuing thence,

His free imagination momently

Remembers flame pellucid, which it was

And will be in the nebula again

When all the orbs that stock the loins of night

Return into the sun, and fill with seed

Of chastest fire the impassioned womb of space."

To conclude for the present: Whence is the Universe and Why? The

Universe itself is the only answer to these questions. Whence is the

Universe? There is no whence; it fills space. Why is the Universe? It

cannot tell: it is neither necessary nor unnecessary: it is. There

are, properly, no answers to these questions; therefore these

questions are not. The Universe says always and only, "Here and Now."

THE THEATROCRAT

A TRAGIC PLAY OF CHURCH AND STAGE

"This is the freedom of the Universe"

Wordsworth

PERSONS

Sir Tristram Sumner ... Proprietor and Manager of the Grosvenor

Theatre.

Gervase Sackville ... Bishop of St. James's.

Warwick Groom ...}

Silas Orchard ... } Actors.

Mark Belfry ... An American Manager.

Hildreth ... Sir Tristram's Secretary.

Abbot ... Business Manager.

Salerne ... Stage Manager.

Blyth ... }

Boulder ... } Commissionaires.

Temple ... Sir Tristram's Dresser.

Rouse ... Call-boy.

Two Doctors

Lady Sumner ... Sir Tristram's Wife.

Europa Troop ... An Actress.

Actors, Scene-shifters, Property-men.

Scene: London. Time: The Present

A month elapses between the third and fourth Acts.

THE THEATROCRAT

ACT I

Scene: Sir Tristram Sumner's study in his house in Piccadilly. Sir

Tristram is reading an old letter. When the door opens he puts the

letter hastily in his pocket.

Enter Lady Sumner.

Sir T. Martha! You've come to trouble me; your eyes

Are lustreless and evil. Will it end

At all? Will you give over urging death?

Lady S. A visitor.

Sir T. Who is it?

Lady S. Warwick Groom.

Sir T. Impossible: at any time impossible.

I hate him, Martha.

Lady S. Hate? Hate Warwick Groom!

I thought you hated no one.

Sir T. So did I!

But him I hate; because--he was my friend.

Lady S. And would be still.

Sir T. Therefore I hate him more!

But that's not true: hate fathoms hate, and answers

Index-like, the searching current of its thought,

Down through the earth, or round it in the nerveless

Air. Deep he hates me; by my hate I know.

I tell you, Martha, were Warwick Groom and I

Alone together for an hour, the death

Of either or of both would testify

Our rooted rancour.

Lady S. I cannot understand!

True, he is wild, this Warwick Groom of ours,

And doors are shut against him; but a braver

Artist starves not anywhere.

Sir T. Starves? Let him starve.

Lady S. This is so new, so sudden, Tristram!

Sir T. No;

Nothing is sudden that the heart brings forth.

The mushroom spawn of passing loves and hates

By thunder-showers and puddles quickly bred,

To rot as quickly, in sequestered nooks

Or by the trodden highways, are nothing--nothing

But rashes on the skin.

Lady S. You change the figure:

The very rhapsody of Warwick Groom!

Sir T. Plastic as molten metal! Living hate

Mine is, a deeply struck deliberate cancer

In the heart, and half as old as I: half

Of my life it is: I know it now mature

That knew it not a-growing: wholesome hate!

A wholesome cancer, a resourceful pain,

A fount of passion!

Lady S. You forget yourself;

For now you stare and pant like some insane

Unhappy woman, sick with jealousy,

Her strangled voice and prayer, "Oh, just to crush

"My rival like a flea!"

Sir T. So would I do!

Lady S. I cannot understand you.

Sir T. I understand.

We know each other, Warwick Groom and I.

No legendary friendship ever wove

The lives of men in such a gallant web

As ours displayed: the secrets of our hearts

Were interchanged like goodly gifts that made

The giver and receiver ache with joy:

Our thoughts, our deeds, our sins were known and loved

Of either; nothing irksome, trivial, dull

Could happen day or night to him or me

Since telling of it gave it import, grave

Or humorous, subtle, sweet, or sad. Too well,

Too infinitely well we knew each other!

Grudge, longing, foible, vanity, conceit,

Ambition, terror, cowardice, fancy, whim

Revealed themselves in either's consciousness

Beyond the scope and verge of comely minds,

That there might still be something to confide,

Some proof of new affection: once, at least,

Two men should know each other inside out!

To cut and carve a specimen, a corpse,

A limbless, headless trunk, malodorous, foul,

O'er-hacked, o'er-handled by anatomists,

Tyros and demonstrators, makes a job

Cleaner than knowing truly inside out

The heart of man, the actual heart of man,

Not in a general mass of studies culled

From books, but in particular, one's friend.

Had fortune not divided us I know

Both had gone mad. He hates the thought of me,

As I the thought of him--the natural end

Of every intimacy pushed outside

The limit. Souls are clad and should be seen

In vestments only: things and thoughts there are

We must not think: forbidden is the tree

Of knowledge still to those that love themselves,

Their friends, their art, their people and the world.

This is a righteous hate in him and me.

Lady S. It desolates my heart to think it true!

What shall I say to him?

Sir T. Give him some food,

Some drink, some money.

Lady S. But he comes with news!

Oh, I forgot; you moved me so! Your Troilus,

It seems, is ill.

Sir T. Ah; so. He looked consumptive.

The understudy is letter-perfect.

Lady S. Yes;

But think: the first of such a play--so harsh,

So questionable.

Sir T. Interest follows Troilus:

This is a blow; but not a deadly one.

Lady S. And fortune's blows may prove caresses. Warwick

Can play the part.

Sir T. Groom? In my theatre? Martha!

Lady S. I once had leave to counsel you, though now

You shun me, Tristram----

Sir T. Martha!

Lady S. Yes, you do;

And take the mind of every one but me.

Tristram, you know my heart. Is it unclean

Like Warwick Groom's? You loved me once: has love

Fermented, like your friendship, into hate?

Sir T. Should not a woman's heart escape the probe

Men search each other with, the fathom line,

The dredge, the sunken shaft that brings to light

No pearls of price, no gems, nor golden ore,

But wreck and rust, drowned hopes and dead men's bones?

Lady S. There's terror in your mind: terror for me,

And terror for yourself!--But this is vain.--

I think that help has come; I yet may live.

The play, the play! No question Warwick Groom

Is Troilus to the accent. Have you lost

Your love of art along with other loves?

Sir T. Martha!

Lady S. Forgive me that.--Europa Troop:

It's not for love, the world and I know well,

You tossed her Cressida. The wanton salt

Of her, so loathsome to a passionate mind,

Is admirable here; and art demands

This sacrifice besides, since it may be

That you should give the hated Warwick Groom

A part predicting him, so like a glove

It fits him.

Sir T. Let me think; and you--think you:

Will "Troilus and Cressida" succeed?

Lady S. I think it will; if you salute what chance

Provides, a perfect Troilus.

Sir T. Do you feel

The fit upon you--your telepathic mood?

Lady S. I hardly know: I think the play is safe.

Sir T. If Groom plays Troilus?

Lady S. If Groom plays Troilus.

Sir T. You say he knows the part. How can that be?

Lady S. That you must ask him.

Sir T. Martha!

Lady S. Fate--it's fate.

Sir T. What's his condition? Is he well put on?

Drunk--sober--maudlin? How?

Lady S. Sober and trim;

Pallid and beautiful.

Sir T. You loved him once.

Lady S. Tristram!

Sir T. I mean, he was in love with you.

Lady S. You knew that from the first.

Sir T. But never knew

If you loved him.

Lady S. You never asked me that!

Sir T. It never troubled me; nor does it now:

But every question that a man may put,

Or may not put a woman, shapes itself

Some time or other; and the chastest mind,

When love begins to mellow, and passion falls,

A ripened friendship from the tree of life,

Thinks of his wife one time at least, "_had_ I

Her maidenhead?"

Lady S. Tristram!

Sir T. The word escaped.

Lady S. Oh, you are crude and cruel! But I am for you:--

Not every husband; some men marry widows;

Some marry harlots; some----

Sir T. Yes; some?

Lady S. It seems

Some marry virgins and are none the wiser.

Sir T. That's not like dying.

Lady S. No. And Warwick Groom?

Sir T. Yes; but remain. Not him alone with me.

Lady S. There's something in your mind more than you say.

Sir T. Without a doubt. No man can speak his mind.

Lady S. But every woman can, I think.

Sir T. And does?

Lady S. If she be gently asked.

Sir T. What shall I ask?

Lady S. Ask? Anything. But you are harassed, ill.

Let me conclude with Groom.

Sir T. No; bring him in.

[Sir Tristram at the telephone communicates with his business

manager, Abbot, while Lady Sumner goes out and re-enters with Warwick.]

Groom. Tristram!

Sir T. [At the telephone] Warwick!--old friend! (No, Abbot;

wait.)

Groom. You'll give me this?

Sir T. You know the part?

Groom. I know it.

Lady S. We'll test him, Tristram.

[Takes up a copy of Troilus and Cressida.]

Sir T. Shame! (Yes? Sumner. No.

A dozen Heidsieck? Yes, at once; from me.

Send him my love; tell him he shall get well.)

You never played it?

Groom. No; I studied it

When you announced the play a year ago;

And when you placed it in rehearsal----

Sir T. Yes;

You wrote me, I remember.

Groom. And received

No answer.

Lady S. Tristram!

Sir T. Hateful oversight!

Forgive me, Warwick. Having cast the part,

Not knowing you were free ... (Yes. Sumner. What?

Yes; let the understudy dress. No. Yes.

Perhaps we'll have another Troilus. Groom.

To-night. Oh no! I think. A great success.)

Lady S. And now I'll test him.

Sir T. Women are merciless!

Lady S. And that's the cue! I speak for Hector, Warwick.

"Unarm thee, go; and doubt thou not, brave boy,

"I'll stand to-day for thee and me and Troy."

Groom. "Brother, you have a vice of mercy in you

"Which better fits a lion than a man."

Lady S. "What vice is that, good Troilus? Chide me for it."

Groom. "When many times the captive Grecians fall,

"Even in the fan and wind of your fair sword,

"You bid them rise and live."

Lady S. "O, 'tis fair play!"

Groom. "Fool's play"--I'll not go on, for I have asked

Like courteous mercy, Tristram.

Sir T. You have brought

Mercy to us, boy--a Troilus unmatched

From swift Scamander to the lordly Thames.

Groom. Then am I happy. Tristram, Martha, years

How many have I wasted; ten, a dozen,

Despairing up and down the railways, caught

And imprisoned, like some adventurer

Forlorn, in dreary tunnels, stations, inns,

Provincial companies and theatres,

The dismallest labyrinth where every step

Stumbles at skeletons of dead ambitions

And dying reputations; as close to London

As the suburbs are, further away, that is,

Than hell from heaven, and bitterer than hell.

Be hung upon the fringe of paradise,

Stewing in brimstone with the spicy scent

Of asphodel to lave the sulphurous air,

And envy Tantalus his pleasant lines

For ever and a day!

Sir T. You keep your zest

Of talk, your thunder and lightning.

Groom. Let me talk

A minute! It's a dozen lifetimes since

We met. The luck of some! the luck! Old gag,

The luck! It seems but yesterday that I

Beheld the Parthenon, one towering wave

Of wild delight from stalls to gallery, break

At my feet, the vanguard of a tide

Of triumph, governed by the moon of hearts,

The world's applause, that should have borne me on

To the trade winds and harbours of success.

One season--only one in London town!

Two failures after, and with finer parts

Than that that seemed to place me, cast me out

Provincial and suburban derelict.

Nightly to play upon the blood and brain

Of London!--Tristram! Martha!--On the best,

Most beautiful and bravest folk on earth!--

Ah, let them sneer that fail! I never fail

Although I seem to, for I love the world,

And all that's in it, and what's best I love

The best!--To play on London's sense and heart

With passion and emotion, tears and flame,

Laughter and anguish, terror, splendour, might--

As you do, Tristram, and as I could do:

Is there vocation, mission, martyrdom

That equals it? Oh, every night to act

A part of power, and feel a thousand hearts

Beat stroke for stroke with yours, in heaven, in hell,

In London--nowhere else!--in London town,

The core of the world: ten years of that--three--one,

Then any death in rags and hospitals,

Garrets and dens and drunkenness, disgraced,

Forgotten, but my inmost will achieved!

Sir T. Your pulses hum with youth, and scarce two years

Between us!

Lady S. Scarce a year!

Groom. And that makes less

Than nothing 'twixt the tropics where we are,

The equatorial forties.

Sir T. Less than nothing.

Lady S. This, then, is Troilus, Tristram?

Sir T. Troilus? Yes!

Off to the theatre; dress; rehearse all day,

And fire the town at night.

Groom. I'll play the part

As ne'er I played! Thanks from my soul, deep thanks,

Tristram and Martha. Till the call-boy calls!

[Goes out.]

Sir T. Still more excitable, more frenzied. Not----?

Lady S. Oh, no! the febrile genius of the man.

Some wine he had from me, so worn he seemed:

One glass; it lit him like a torch.

Sir T. [At the telephone] (Yes. Groom:

He takes the part. My great regret express

To all the principals, because to-day

I break their well-earned rest: pick out your words:

Summon them promptly to rehearse with Groom.

What? Surely. Fifty. See him when he comes.

No; extra: mornings, extra. Tut! I can't give less.

Yes; keep the understudy under arms.

Myself? At three. Box-office; libraries?

That's good ... Ah! ... Dubious: time will tell.)

Booked for a week, and there it stops!

Lady S. Oh, Tristram!

Let me see! [She presses one hand to her eyes and grasps the copy of

"Troilus and Cressida" tightly in the other.] Clear! Yes; if Groom

plays Troilus!

Sir T. If Groom plays----

Lady S. Hush! Again I see and hear!

[Throws away the book and uncovers her eyes.]

Psychic, or magic, out of heaven or hell

That message comes: "If Warwick Groom plays Troilus."

Sir T. It rings with menace.

Lady S. Terror! Should we fail?--

Oh, we are ruined, Tristram!

Sir T. Once for all!

That I am facing.

Lady S. They will help you yet!

Sir T. Not now. Failure to-night begins the end.

My personal triumph and the theatre's

Cannot be questioned----

Lady S. Who would dare!

Sir T. But debt

Increases like a tide when sun and moon

Uplift the mass of waters and the west

Scourges the huge Atlantic. Now you laugh:

That's best. My guarantors withdraw their names

To-night, if failure knells the curtain down.

Lady S. Tristram!--our own account!--that's overdrawn!

Sir T. And overdrawn again!

Lady S. The tragedy!

The only tragedy! The end of love,

The loss of children, snuffing out of hope,

Decay of soul is happiness itself

Beside the want of means--with our desires,

Experience, fancies, dreams.

Sir T. Yes, but you laughed;

And you must laugh again and yet again.

Why, Martha, with a roof above our heads,

A crust to eat, we will be what we are,

The essence of ourselves, in every fate.

Lady S. Live poor again? Not for a moment, Tristram!

No man can be himself in poverty,

Nor woman either: all the world knows that,

And sweats and aches and lies and sins for wealth.

No, Tristram; but the old deliverance.

Sir T. What?

Lady S. [Takes a vial from her pocket] This, that so often set our

hearts at rest.

Sir T. Have I not told you never to show me that?

Lady S. Yes; but I show it. Is your courage gone?

Are you afraid to look upon the past?

Sir T. What purpose can it serve?

Lady S. It eases me

To talk of it. Do you remember, Tristram?

Sir T. What ghouls you are, you women! What hyenas,

Digging for ever in the past!

Lady S. Have _you_

Forgotten? Is your memory such a sieve?

Sir T. No! I remember many heady times

When although fortune scowled and fate undid

Our utmost toil, yet love and tranquil sleep

Fulfilled the night with this beneath our pillow,

And certain death at any moment ours.

Lady S. And always then the sombre clouds dispersed,

And fate began to build us up again.

Sir T. We slept together ...

Lady S. Yes ...

Sir T. Well, we shall see.

Lady S. [Takes up the book of the play and covers her eyes again]

I see the theatre--what was Warwick's brag?--

One tidal wave of wild humanity

From stalls to gallery, surging at your feet,

If Warwick Groom plays Troilus? Why that "if"?

Sir T. There's menace there!

Lady S. Why can't I hear it say,

"_Since_ Warwick Groom plays Troilus"? ... Can't we die

At once? If you would only care to die!

I should be glad to die: I am very tired.

Sir T. If failure rings the curtain down, perhaps

That way as well as any.

Lady S. Will you promise?

Sir T. No; I'll not promise! A thousand things may chance.

Lady S. A thousand things? Yes; should a foe of yours

Or Warwick's--Tristram, they may drown his wits

In all good fellowship! Then where are we?

Will you not go and guard him?

Sir T. Presently.

I have a thing to settle in my mind.

Lady S. May I go, Tristram?

Sir T. If you think it well.

Lady S. Oh, better than well, I think it.

[Knocking.]

Not for me I hope. [Opens the door] What? Who? The Bishop of St.

James's!

Sir T. St. James's! Come--come in!

[Enter Gervase Sackville, Bishop of St. James's.]

I thought the east

Had held you captive for another month.

St. J. I finished what I gave myself to do

In half the time I judged the work would take.

Lady S. Oh, welcome, Gervase! Like a single sorrow

You come to bless us: wonder at my words;

They have the sweetest meaning. Fortune comes

With Gervase, Tristram--how, I cannot tell:

Or short, or long, it comes: I feel it here;

But yet I go to guard the ark.

St. J. The ark?

Lady S. The theatre, the play, the purse--our lives!

[Goes out.]

St. J. My cousin's moody, Tristram.

Sir T. I never thought

To need a friend for the last rite of friendship,

The revelation and unbosoming

Of weakness. Had you come a day, an hour,

Some heart-beats later, business, theatre, world,

With permanent eclipse of insight, soul,

Of something nameless yet, had spared you this

That I am going to tell you. Will you sit,

Or must you walk about?

St. J. The highest mood

Is stillest.

[They sit.]

Sir T. Still as death! I loved my wife,

And she loved me: she loves me strangely yet

In some dispassionate absorbing way

That tortures her. I do not love her now;

And why I know: we have no children.

St. J. What!

Sir T. There must be fruit of love, if love's to last.

St. J. Now you perplex me, Tristram.

Sir T. There were children:

You christened four--and buried them. Ah, yes;

If they had lived!

St. J. If they had lived? What then?

Sir T. Profound affection for the hallowed womb

That gave my passion form and brought to light

Its ecstasy in boys and girls of mine:

Desire had changed to deep affection then;

But often now I loathe this childless woman,

And think with horror how she knows my heart,

My tendernesses, selfishnesses, thoughts

Inchoate, wanton follies, baby talk:

My wife became my mistress in the end.

St. J. Oh now I see into the depths of it!

Sir T. When our last child had died and she and I

Were raw with grief, unhinged by wild despair,

A fount and flame of lust arose in both,

As though we had eaten of some forbidden fruit,

Or swallowed magic earth, or been bewitched,

Or drenched with aphrodisiac. At the time

My fame was in the nadir, and our lives'

Duration insignificant to us:

So every night with poison in a vial

Beneath our pillow to end it when we chose,

A letch that never seemed to sate itself

Drained us of all humanity; but I,

Refined and tempered in the heat and cold,

Desire and languor, languor and desire,

The rhythm of this, by natural sorcery

Became at last an artist: think of it!

I found myself the master of the mood,

Enchanting folk and playing on their nerves

As though an audience were a zither; made

A name far-sounding; and, by your goodwill, too

Am now--Heaven save the mark, the banal end!--

Am now, Sir Tristram Sumner, nominal,

As well as actual theatrocrat.

St. J. Do I speak now?

Sir T. Not yet. A jealousy

More sombre than my hate--a thing to note,

That love is never jealous of the past--

A sombre jealousy begot by hate

Began to whisper "Strike her; wound her; kill."

St. J. Your wife and I are cousins.

Sir T. Therefore I speak.

She has no kin but you to help her now.

Shall I go on?

St. J. Go on.

Sir T. My first of friends

Was Warwick Groom. Upon my marriage-morning

This letter came:--"Do you know that Warwick

"Groom and Martha Sackville were lovers? She

"visited him every night in his dressing-room at the

"Parthenon when he played Romeo; and the reason

"why he insisted on beginning the fourth act with

"the fifth scene of the third act was the reason you

"guess at once: it gave them time. But that was

"not the only place in the play where they performed

"their private intermede. How this was managed?

"Ask old Odham, Groom's dresser."

St. J. Malicious, were it not so impotent.

Sir T. Perhaps so; but I kept it.

St. J. So I see.

Whom have you shown it to?

Sir T. To none but you.

St. J. Burn it.

Sir T. [Placing the letter in his pocket again] I can't; I feel it

tells the truth.

St. J. Never believe it, Tristram! Martha Sackville,

Stately and unapproachable, and chaste

As fire and snow--whatever Martha Sumner

May be now.

Sir T. The wantonest women veil

Their lust with dignity; or knowing it not,

Feel it, and are constrained and awkward: broach

It once, then lechery rushes out unstopped

By----

St. J. Hush! Why have you told me this?

Sir T. Advice--

I want advice.

St. J. Tell me the rest.

Sir T. I thought

For half an hour when this came, reasoning thus:

"Martha is chaste: against my eyes and ears

"That I will die for"--I was deep in love.

"And if she dropped a stitch, what's that to me?

"Women are sensual, full of seed like men;

"But me she loves--a different fire from that

"Uneasy prurience wondering girls and boys

"Alike give facile way to, now and then.

"Have I no past? If she has hers, we both

"Begin the world anew." And best and worst

This Odham died upon my marriage-day.

St. J. What kind of man was he?

Sir T. A wastrel, prime

And perfect; a vocation--genius for it:

A parson's son, of course: acted himself

A while, then fell to dressing unperturbed.

He died of alcohol.--We played a week,--

He, Romeo, I, Mercutio; failed and lost

Three thousand pounds or so. But he and I

Were marked and sought for. Of the two I think

Groom was the abler actor, and certainly

Beyond comparison popular. Bidding high

After my marriage I declined to play

Except with mediocrities, having felt

Rather than recognised, how much depends

Upon the pathos of inequality,

The very essence of the theatre.

Groom was my rival in the public mind;

Therefore I made my book against him--he,

Against me, doubtless, burrowing underground.

Armed with advantage all unknown to him--

'Varsity, Policy, Church--I kept him out

Wherever I came in: not difficult

Without advantage even, he being then

As now, his own worst enemy, debauched

And drunken, with relapses of remorse.

In one relapse----

St. J. Relapse!

Sir T. ----he stormed the town

Then failed and failed again; while I became

The representative actor of my time.

My fame is rooted in his infamy:

Especially in his; and in the fame

Eclipsed of every actor--which to me

Would be the blackest infamy.

St. J. So harsh!

Sir T. Truth, Gervase; it's the truth; no pleasure, power,

Glory, applause, but strikes its cancerous roots

Deep in the hearts of men; for what is fame

But envy by a virtuous title saved

From dying of chagrin, transmuted echo

Of curses and of sighs!

St. J. Come to the crux.

Sir T. I hate my wife. She forces Warwick on me

To play the part of Troilus. Suddenly

The nebulous past contracts to this: my wife

Was Warwick's mistress before she married me;

And I could kill them both. What must I do?

St. J. You must not kill them, and you must deny

That Martha was Warwick's mistress: deny it now.

Sir T. Deny the roundness of a woman's limbs,

Deny the sexes and that blood is red!

Well, I deny it, since I have no proof.

What next?

St. J. A simple thing. I long have thought

That marriages should end when love is dead--

On either side: the marriage vow should be

"Till love is dead," not "till death do us part";

And sacrament might end it solemnly,

As it began. The Church is backward there:

Its grip might fasten on the world again

If once divorce became a sacrament.

Sir T. Divorce?

St. J. Do you remember how I pled

Against your marriage?

Sir T. I remember.

St. J. Judged

My hidden purpose snobbish I suppose?

Sir T. I thought there underlay your argument

A dread of misalliance.

St. J. Wrong: my plea

Was candid. I maintained and still maintain

The artist should be celibate; a priest

Exempt from human ties.

Sir T. I think so too;

Though when I married Martha I desired

Experience of the noble cares of life,

As the true discipline and academe

Of art. How foolish! how insane! for art

Is like religion, only undefiled

In perfect freedom and abandonment.

St. J. You hang upon a verge of perilous truth:

Religion is the very art of art.

But that can wait: I have much to say on that.--

I hold it deadly sin, if anything

Is to be christened sin, for you and her

To live together longer, love being dead.

I counsel you to leave her; and I myself,

Who married you, will privately pronounce

A precept of divorce.

Sir T. But Martha's fate?

St. J. Her life will be most beautiful: refined

By love--by lust that purifies the soul

More certainly than any chastisement;

Disordered by the loss of all her children--

A doom that makes the deeds done in the flesh

Pernicious to the mind, to fancy noisome;

She shall become a perfect bride of Heaven--

Bride of the Universe.

Sir T. Gervase--how strange!

You counsel separation?

St. J. Before the law;

Before the Universe, divorce.

Sir T. Again,

The Universe!

St. J. News that can wait a while.

Sir T. And I should be the minister of art,

Unfettered by a single private tie,

A public votary. Yes; but how? the means?

Who will provide for Martha? And myself!

Who will provide for me? The day we part,

My creditors and hers--they ruin us.

St. J. And that is grave; yet may be overcome.

Sir T. But what a sordid hell we welter in!

Art is inhuman, Gervase.

St. J. Yes, all art,

And all religion and the life of man:

Inhuman, Tristram. Is it news to you?

Sir T. Then is there no humanity in men?

St. J. None, Tristram; none! Humanity! a dream

Phantasmal as divinity itself.

Sir T. Humanity, divinity--ideals?

Do you believe in nothing, Gervase?

St. J. No.

Belief---- But that can wait.

Sir T. Wait! what can wait?

That is your cry to-day. What, and till when?

Is it a revelation?

St. J. Now you laugh;

And that is sane and good: the bitterest grin

Is hopeful. What I have to say can wait

Until---- Why do you reproduce to-night

This decadent, mordant, hateful travesty?

Sir T. "Troilus and Cressida"? It is my mood:

Man as he is--and woman. Oh, I stalk

A theory here! Heaven help us, and the cat!

I play Ulysses.

[The telephone rings.]

St. J. Shall I go?

Sir T. [At the telephone] No, Gervase!

What are you dubious of? (Yes. Martha! Well?

Groom? Drinking--drunk. How horrible? No. Yes.)

I'm ruined, Gervase! Martha saw and heard

Our fate to-night in that magnetic mood

She will solicit. (Yes. I come at once.)

We conquer if Warwick Groom plays Troilus;

If not our curtain's down, our lights are out,

My last part played.

[Both have reached the door hurriedly and are about to go out.]

St. J. Not though your bitterest foe

Is satisfied to-night: for "fortune comes

"With me." So said your prophetess.

Sir T. She did!

The day is young: the thing may be retrieved.

When shall I see you?

St. J. After the play.

Sir T. Till then?

St. J. I also have my art.

Sir T. You in your church,

I in my theatre.

St. J. One purpose serve?