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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Theatrocrat, by John Davidson
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-Title: The Theatrocrat
-       A Tragic Play of Church and Stage
-
-Author: John Davidson
-
-Release Date: January 11, 2017 [EBook #53941]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THEATROCRAT ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by C. P. Boyko
-
-
-
-
-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?
-
-
-ACT II
-
-Scene: The stage of the Grosvenor Theatre, set for the first act of
-"Troilus and Cressida." Warwick Groom as Troilus and Silas Orchard
-as Pandarus are seated in the entrance to Priam's castle. Each has a
-bottle of wine and a silver drinking-cup, and Groom is turning over a
-book of the play.
-
-Abbot, Salerne, Actors and Scene-shifters, at the back and in the
-wings.
-
-Lady Sumner passes at the back, wringing her hands.
-
-
-Groom. Pandar--Prince Pandarus of Troy!--why you,
-You are the very spirit of the stage!
-
-Orchard. You mean the part I play, not me myself.
-
-Groom. What other meaning could I have? You _are_
-The part you play, and nothing else besides.
-
-Orchard. Now there you're wrong; I'm very much myself.
-
-Groom. There's not a dozen actors in the town
-Who can be anything but the part they play.
-You are a glove, my prince, fit or misfit:
-Suave to the fingers like a second skin;
-Pushed on with wetted index, grunt, grimace;
-Or like the gauntlet of a dwarf that splits
-Upon a giant's thumb.
-
-Orchard.          And so are you!
-
-Groom. So they would make me; but I'll be a hand--
-As I have been. This play was made for me--
-For Troilus; and I'll have the business changed,
-Prince Pandarus of Troy. What kind of ape
-Was he that played your Troilus? Heavens!--A glove
-Would have rebelled. The whole rehearsed and drilled
-For Cressida, Ulysses, Hector, Helen!
-And Troilus--in the book at blood-heat--stuck
-In the shade to freeze; cut, mangled, hanged, drawn, quartered!
-I'll have my lines restored, my scenes rehearsed
-According to their import. Pandar, room,
-By your leave, for Troilus! Stand, Diomed!
-Unmanned abortion, bowelless coward, stand!
-Prince Pandarus of Troy, you are the stage,
-The inner spirit and the outward man.
-For what's the theatre but a splendid bawd--
-A little passive recreation pitched
-To span the abyss from dinner time till supper;
-To season minds of maidens and of wives
-With spice of marriage and adultery;
-The shoeing-horn of whoredom and the nest
-Of cuckolds.
-
-[Abbot comes down with Salerne and several scene-shifters.]
-
-Abbot.   Now----
-
-Groom.          Avaunt, Sir Abbot! Fly!
-
-Abbot. Sir Tristram may be any instant here.
-Now, will you go, or must we help you?
-
-Groom.                              Go?
-Go where?
-
-Abbot. To your dressing-room.
-
-Groom.                        But I am dressed.
-
-Abbot. The last time:--Will you go?
-
-Groom.                              When I have played
-My scene.
-
-Abbot. Quick, men; away with him.
-
-Groom. [Beating them off with his sword] Away
-With _you_. D'ye take me for a property,
-Thrice sodden shifters? Abbot--friar John,
-Go, mop your tonsure. Skip about! Shift, shift,
-Inevitable vermin of the stage!
-
-Abbot. By God, sir, you'll remember this! You cur!
-
-Groom. You'll not forget it either, business bug!
-Your discounts, claims, commissions, premiums--ha!
-My unjust steward, we must cork it in,
-This honest indignation, righteous bile,
-The rancour lacing all our thoughts, or else,
-By rent and vent, the lining of our pokes,
-Like treacherous entrails, Judas' viscera
-To wit, may fundamentally escape,
-And leave us poorer than we were before.
-Go down--to the box-office!
-
-Abbot.                     Thank the lord, Sir Tristram!
-
-[Enter Sir Tristram Sumner.]
-
-'Twas not my fault, at all; I did my best.
-They treated him; he treated them: the wine's
-Above the tide-mark, and the fat in the fire.
-
-Sir T. Orchard?
-
-Orchard.       Oh, very well, Sir Tristram! Off
-I go. Send for me if you want me: none
-Shall say that Silas Orchard overstayed
-His welcome.
-[Goes out.]
-
-Sir T.    Send a line to Orchard's rooms:
-See that the messenger is there before him:
-No man in England can play the part like him.
-
-[Abbot and Salerne, etc., go out.]
-
-Now what's the matter, Warwick?
-
-Groom.                        This gutted play!
-You've cut the very things I want to say.
-Here in my first scene comes your pruning-hook,
-Your harvester, and shears my poppied patch:--
-"Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl":--
-Why man, it's poetry: I want to say it.
-Then here----
-
-Sir T.    Yes, yes; but this? Why this? You make
-My theatre a pothouse.
-
-Groom.              Pothouse? [Drinks] Why,
-Your theatre's well enough to drink in, Knight.
-Knight? Vain, deluded, damned theatrocrat!
-
-Sir T. What, Warwick! What!
-
-Groom.                       An actor knighted! Once
-The actor was an artist here in England.
-When England in Queen Bess's time became
-A world above the world, and felt itself
-Adult and masculine, then lightly came
-The actor and the act, outside the state,
-Authentic and alone.
-
-Sir T.             Enough of that!
-We know your fantasies. Will you attempt
-The part; or are you spoiled for this time, Warwick?
-
-Groom. I'll speak this matter out. When plays were damned
-By churchmen, and the player a citizen
-Of rascaldom on sufferance living only,
-Great was the stage, a lover of all life,
-The friend of sinners and the home of sin,
-A city of refuge for humanity
-Escaping from religion and the curses
-Of the law; for church and stage are deadly foes;
-They can be strong only in enmity;
-And both were shrines of art when either shunned
-The other, or met in battle: now that they mix,
-Illicit lovers and against the lust
-Of nature, sterile hybrids mock their couch;
-And soon the lofty strain of either ends
-In mere abortion. 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, painters, aldermen,
-He dealt a double blow at church and stage
-And both are bleeding from the wound.
-
-Sir T.                               Why this
-To me--me specially?
-
-Groom.            Because you haunt
-The clergy, and the clergy fawn on you,
-Singling you out: the Bishop of St. James's
-Is fast your friend: and nonconformists--Hell!
-Have sung your praise in public. I maintain
-The stage must stand alone like all things great,
-Unspotted of the church, the state, the world.
-
-Sir T. You try my patience. This is so--all this,
-And endless matter to a like intent.
-
-Groom. But who has grasped the meaning? who perceives
-That these luxurious theatres of ours
-Are only living graves--the ornate tomb
-Of drama?
-
-Sir T.    I perceive it. Hopeful men
-Are always digging graves unwittingly;
-Cathedrals--noble cenotaphs of faith
-Long dead: academies--of plastic art
-The tomb; our ancient universities--
-The mausoleum and the monument
-Of learning; justice in the law-courts buried
-Lies most worshipfully; soon our sculptured banks--
-To make an end--will be the sepulchre
-Of all finance: is not the whole world bankrupt?
-
-Groom. Turn it to ribaldry! I love the stage,
-And hate to see it made the prostitute
-Of crafty godliness that's mainly this--
-The rancid odour of a worn-out sex.
-To see the stage that should be sweet, humane,
-More tolerant than art, freer than sin--
-Let me say sin to mean all human scope,
-The utmost license of unbridled mirth,
-The noble freedom of the tragic mood,
-A perfect liberty of drift and range,
-The universal mind and deed of man:
-To see the stage corrupted by the church,
-Debauched by bland religion, venomous
-Betrayer of the spirit; and foul with creed,
-The helpless necessary excrement
-Wherewith religion sullies everything:
-To see this loathsome doom of what I love
-Is deadlier to me than blank despair,
-Than death and everlasting obloquy!
-
-Sir T. To me it means the element I use,
-For church and stage are dramaturgy both:
-The one inspires a happy will to death;
-The other floods the soul of man with life.
-If you must carp against the stage, attack
-The usury that leads it on a chain,
-Exploiting all that's base: there's loads of gold
-In flattered meannesses; the public pays
-To be degraded: easiest escape
-Is downward to the abyss; the greasy plank
-Requires no effort.
-
-Groom.         Tristram of the times,
-The creature of infectious decadence
-That triumphs everywhere: a harvest home
-Of mellow, putrid autumns; afternoon
-And twilight of the state, the church, the stage.
-By heaven and earth, the syndicated shows
-That pay the big percentages are sweet
-Beside a gelded Shakespeare, and the priest
-Pronouncing benediction from the stalls!
-
-Sir T. The decadence is everywhere?--perhaps;
-But how should that concern the decadents?
-Their function is to hasten the decay.
-It has been held, it has been proved that life
-Is but the decadence of matter, soul
-The decadence of life; now, soul itself,
-The parasite that drains the sap of life,
-Begins _its_ decadence. But what of that?
-We must go through with it.--Come, will you play
-Prince Troilus, boy; or, flatly, are you drunk?
-
-Groom. [Drinks] I cannot tell; perhaps: I love to drink:
- The dingy world becomes a crystal orb
-Revealing truth when wine enlightens me--
-Truth like a sumptuous vision in a bell
-Of dew, a magic bubble blown to film
-That melts and bursts, a passion of delight,
-A shimmering womb of diverse stains and deep.
-By Bacchus and his panthers, I believe
-A great career of drunkenness were worth
-A man's ambition! Alcohol's as good
-As law, the church, the army, or the stage!
-Henceforth my business and my art will be
-To drink and to be drunken. [Drinks] Odours faint
-Of pallid wayside roses, heavier scents
-Of roses of the garden, deeper snares
-Of bowls of roses ripe and faded, bowls
-Of leaves of roses, faded, dark and sweet,
-The last aroma! Clusters of the vine,
-Mature, deep-bosomed, umbered with the sun;
-Old dregs and essences of happiness,
-Of women's pulses wound like springs of steel,
-Of sanguine wars, of sinews, swords, of hearts
-As hard as nether millstones, burning love
-Like molten adamant! Oh, heaven and hell
-Are wed and wanton in a cup of wine,
-Bouquet and ichor of eternity!
-I shall go out and cry it in the streets.
-
-Sir T. [To the Actors in the wings]
-Go with him to his room. Let him drink on
-Until he sleeps. That is the end of this.
-
-[Groom goes out, accompanied by the Actors.]
-
-Lady S. [Coming down quickly]
-And this the end for us, Sir Tristram. Drink.
-
-Sir T. [Taking the vial which Lady Sumner offers]
-Are you insane? You have not drunk?
-
-Lady S.                           Not yet.
-Here on your stage we two must die together--
-An ever famous tragedy of art
-In this uncouth commercial age of ours.
-I hear it still: "If Warwick Groom plays Troilus."
-He cannot play it now--poor Warwick Groom!
-Ambiguous poison in that "if"; but death
-Will end all ambiguity. Tristram, drink.
-
-Sir T. Your eyes are wandering, pale and beggarly;
-Your voice is phantom-like, far off and chill:
-Martha, you have gone mad.
-
-Lady S.                  We both were mad;
-But I am sane at last: I cannot live.
-Be sane, and drink.
-
-Sir T.            Not here, not now, not ever.
-
-Lady S. Not? But defeat is here, is everywhere;
-Behind the scenes, in front, and in our hearts.
-You promised me a hundred thousand times
-You never would survive defeat.
-
-Sir T.                        We loved
-Each other then; and were you now to say,
-"If failure rings the curtain down to-night,
-"Let us two, having loved each other well,
-"Having discharged ourselves of all our love,
-"Die in each other's arms", I should assent;
-Forget these years of dull estrangement; snatch
-You off to Venice or Palermo; end
-Defeat and triumph, and the world and time
-In one superb and golden aftermath,
-A full-eared harvest-moon of winnowed love.
-
-Lady S. Your words are like a smoky gust of heat
-Across a wilderness of snow! Shame! shame!
-
-Sir T. I cannot love where I am not beloved,
-And will not die to please an unloved wife.
-
-Lady S. But I do love you, Tristram! Love you? Oh,
-Did I not give you all the love I had?
-I love you now with something more than love;
-And never shall I rest until my dust,
-Cold, senseless, passionless, inanimate,
-Divinely rotted into virgin mould,
-Is mixed with yours to all eternity.
-
-Sir T. A deadly love--that has the ring of hate!
-
-Lady S. It is a kind of hate. I cannot live!
-I cannot live! I cannot let you live!
-Remember, Tristram, how like frantic beasts
-We toiled at love. Oh! ... Oh! ... How long I fought
-This grinding passion of remorse, how strove
-To deem the noxious beautiful! A fan
-Against a storm! The wind is up; my boat
-Beats on the breakers; all is swamped and lost.
-
-Sir T. But beauty sanctioned all our frantic love.
-Sometimes a moment's nausea--yes, sometimes
-I shudder when I think; but hurl it off
-Because I know the meaning: I am tired,
-Depressed, too solitary; or forget
-To eat, absorbed in study: food and wine
-Replenish all my powers, and straightway sex
-Becomes the purest wonder in the world.
-
-Lady S. My sex is dead: it dies in women, sex.
-I sinned; my life was sin; and since the power
-To sin is dead, the sinner must die too.
-
-Sir T. But I have still the power, the will to sin.
-
-Lady S. How hateful! Oh, how hateful! Tristram, think!
-Failure, defeat, disgrace--certain, to-night:
-I see it, feel it, know it; and never yet
-Has my delivered mood brought back to me
-A lying message. Better instant death!
-
-Sir T. But fortune came with Gervase--so you said.
-
-Lady S. I felt a sudden lifting of despair
-When Gervase came; but that was death: he brought
-Religion, resignation, denial, death.
-Oh, we must die! Conceive what failure means!
-Eyes of commiseration, scornful lips,
-Emphatic pressure of a pitying hand,
-Thrice gracious bows, and triple-hatted shrugs,
-Sugared contempt, and rancour heavy-spiced
-Must never greet us, Tristram: we must die.
-You would not have our special enemy,
-The whipper-in of anti-Sumnerites,
-In print and prattle triumph nauseously?
-
-Sir T. A change, by heaven! Are you not she who held
-No jargon ever writ or babbled hurt
-An artist or an artist's wife?
-
-Lady S.                  I did,
-Being sick and sore and wounded to the quick:
-Who talks of jargon says "my soul is stung".
-The mask is off, Sir Tristram. I'm going to die;
-And mean to tell the truth right on from now
-Until we drink that draught together. Choose:
-A flood of truth about the world and us,
-Or death immediately. Let it be death.
-The pain it is to me to live! Oh, Tristram!
-
-Sir T. I mean to live; and so do you. Defeat
-Is not so sure: at least, my own success
-Is certain always, though the play may fail--
-As plays have failed before and will again.
-
-Lady S. Not this time: _you_ will fail: you will be hissed!
-
-Sir T. Martha!
-
-Lady S.       I saw and heard: I hear it now.
-The long hiss from the gallery like a scourge,
-A skilful hiss that flicks the proper sore:
-You only, not the play. Your race is run;
-Come, be a man and die. After to-night
-What life is ours? First, bankruptcy: the court,
-Exposure of our choice extravagance,
-That seemed so needful to our finer souls;
-The sale of our belongings next, friends, foes
-Bidding for things that are a part of us:
-Oh, I would just as soon walk naked down
-The Strand, as have my skirts and linen tossed
-And fingered by the women-folk I know!
-Give me the poison if you will not drink;
-I'll die alone. Give it me, when I ask!
-Will you not give it me? And afterwards--
-Oh afterwards! The provinces! What said
-Poor Warwick? I remember: "Stations, inns,
-"Provincial companies and theatres,
-"The dismallest labyrinth where every step
-"Stumbles at skeletons of dead ambitions!"
-Give me my vial, Tristram; give it me.
-
-Sir T. You know the play will fail! you hear that hiss?
-
-Lady S. Nothing is surer.
-
-Sir T.                      Then we must not die,
-For should we die we make your vision vain.
-
-Lady S. How can you jest! Oh, hateful! Oh, unkind!
-
-Sir T. Not so: I say your augury mistakes;
-I challenge you to live and find it false.
-
-Lady S. You know it is not false. I speak the truth,
-Nothing but truth!
-
-Sir T.          Why, then, an intermede!
-_Had_ I your maidenhead?
-
-Lady S.               Ah--h--h!
-
-Sir T.                               Tell the truth.
-
-Lady S. Unholy beast! give me the poison, quick!
-I want to die; I want to die alone!
-
-Sir T. That might be well; but not just now, nor here.
-
-Lady S. I wonder ... Could I drown myself? Alone?
-[Goes out]
-
-Sir T. Salerne! Salerne!
-
-[Re-enter Salerne.]
-
-                         The understudy's dressed?
-
-Salerne. He is.
-
-Sir T.          And Groom? Asleep?
-
-Salerne.                              As sound as Noah.
-
-Sir T. Have him sent home.
-
-Salerne.                      The other principals?
-
-Sir T. Detain them still. I must rehearse the play.
-
-
-ACT III
-
-Scene: Sir Tristram Sumner's Reception-room in the Grosvenor Theatre.
-At the back a door opens into a business-room. On the left is the
-Dressing-room. The entrance to the Reception-room is on the right.
-Hildreth is writing at a table when the act begins.
-
-Enter Abbot.
-
-
-Hildreth. What? Is the curtain down?
-
-Abbot.                              Not yet.
-
-Hildreth.                                    The play?
-
-Abbot. Still-born: so dead a house I never saw.
-To-day's rehearsal sealed our doom. I pled--
-I prayed him on my knees to touch no tone,
-No movement, entrance, exit, gesture, pause,
-Procession, picture, colour, light or shade;
-But that she-devil and walking-ghost, his wife,
-Had roused a deadlier devil in him: our chief
-Undoes a month's fine artistry in three
-Sick hours of mischief.
-
-Hildreth.            I've seen the thing before:
-Rehearsal is the purgatory of plays;
-It fits them for beatitude; but turn
-Rehearsal into hell, then farewell heaven.
-
-Abbot. A pin-prick does it.
-
-[Enter Salerne.]
-
-                        Well, Salerne--Heaven, hell,
-And purgatory, what's the matter, man?
-Why, you're as grey as putty!
-
-Salerne.                  Where were you?
-
-Abbot. When?
-
-Salerne.      When the curtain fell.
-
-Abbot.                             I sheltered here.
-I'm barometric: I predicted frost,
-And feared I might catch cold.
-
-Salerne.                  Your death of cold.
-The chief was hissed.
-
-Abbot.            Sir Tristram Sumner hissed?
-Impossible!
-
-Hildreth. He was not hissed!
-
-Salerne.                     He was.
-A solitary hiss at first; and then
-The gallery caught it up and let it loose,
-Like gas escaping from an old-time batten.
-
-Abbot. But was it meant for him?
-
-Salerne.                        Straight at his head
-And not a hand to drown it.
-
-Hildreth.               No applause?
-
-Salerne. Before the hiss a little civil noise,
-But not a cry, no cheer, no name, no call.
-
-Hildreth. Why did he come before the curtain then?
-
-Salerne. Fatuitous: his instinct failed him quite.
-
-Abbot. He thought his personality might win
-A vote of confidence against the play.
-
-Salerne. That was his hope, no doubt. Ah, here he comes!
-
-[Enter Sir Tristram Sumner as Ulysses. His dresser, Temple, follows
-him, carrying a portmanteau, which he sets on a chair. While Sir
-Tristram is changing he sometimes stands in the doorway of his
-dressing-room and sometimes speaks from within. Temple takes from the
-portmanteau Sir Tristram's evening dress and goes into the
-dressing-room.]
-
-Sir T. Who had the gallery to-night?
-
-Abbot.                            A man
-Appointed yesterday.
-
-Sir T.            A novice?
-
-Abbot.                     No,
-Sir Tristram; from the Parthenon.
-
-Sir T.                        A soldier?--
-The tables and the wine? Is all prepared?
-
-Salerne. Yes; everything.
-
-Sir T.                    See that they set it out
-Courageously.--
-
-[Salerne goes out.]
-
-             A soldier, did you say?
-
-Abbot. In Egypt and the Transvaal.
-
-Sir T.                             Intelligent?
-
-Abbot. I think he is.
-
-Sir T.              Send for him.
-
-[Abbot goes out.]
-
-                                Letters, Hildreth?
-Ah, what are these? The bank, the law. No stamp;
-Not posted; sent by hand.
-
-Hildreth.             An hour ago.
-
-Sir T. Well, we have scorned such documents before.
-Set them aside unopened.--Did you hear?
-
-Hildreth. Hear? No.
-
-Sir T.               They hissed me, Hildreth.
-
-Hildreth.                                    Glad I am
-I did not hear.
-
-Sir T.      The foulest, meanest sound,
-The hatefullest! How nauseous men can be!
-I think I sooner would be hissed than hiss.
-The paltriness, the impotence of one
-Who hisses! It hurts; it kills: a hiss can kill:
-I think a hiss could kill. A curious thing,
-That impotence should have the power to kill!
-A strange beast, man!
-
-[The telephone rings.
-
-Hildreth. [At the telephone] Mark Belfry wants to see you.
-
-Sir T. Oh! ... Let him come.
-
-Hildreth. [At the telephone] (Yes. Now.)
-
-Sir T.                                  I needed this--
-To be well hissed: a shower-bath for the soul:
-It strengthens me. An actor can't be great?
-I think he can.
-
-[Enter Mark Belfry.]
-
-            Well Belfry, how are you?
-
-Belfry. In health, Sir Tristram.
-
-Sir T.                        Have you come to buy
-The theatre?
-
-Belfry.   I have.
-
-Sir T.            It's not for sale.
-
-Belfry. It will be soon.
-
-Sir T.                 As soon as I am dead.
-
-Belfry. What are you going to do?
-
-Sir T.                           This lasts a week.
-To-morrow I rehearse an old success.
-
-Belfry. And after that?
-
-Sir T.                I cannot tell.
-
-Belfry.                           I can.
-
-Sir T. Predict.
-
-Belfry.        I shall provide you with a play.
-
-Sir T. Never!
-
-Belfry.      I take the risk.
-
-Sir T.                     No name but mine
-Shall flourish on my bills whilst I am here.
-I hate your Yankee style, your affectation:
-"Presents Sir Tristram Sumner!" No, Mark Belfry!
-
-Belfry. That I forego. I want your theatre. Yes;
-I mean to have it. Any kind of hold
-To start with! Oh, I'll own the Grosvenor yet!
-I fight in the open. I'll finance you; flood
-Your desert, for I guess your Nile's dried up;
-I'll gild the wolf's clean teeth, and flesh them too,
-With prime American dentistry. No name
-But yours; and no condition but my play.
-It gallops hard at home; there's money in it;
-A part to fit you; colours, crowds and kings.
-It's curious how it came to be, this play.
-One of your poets wrote upon commission----
-
-Sir T. For you?
-
-Belfry.         For me.
-
-Sir T.                  A poet, Belfry!
-
-Belfry.                              Well,
-The sketch was good; I liked it and the man.
-The play was good, too--better than the stuff
-We're acting; but I saw how out of it,
-Instead of something that would crown his fame----
-
-Sir T. The poet's?
-
-Belfry.           Yes, the poet's! Out of his play,
-That might have been a stage-mark for a brace
-Of centuries or so, I saw there could be shaped
-A popular success to overrun
-The English-speaking world for just two years,
-Extract a ton of money, and be forgotten
-For ever after: which is what we want.
-
-Sir T. Indubitably.
-
-Belfry.            A commodious hack
-I keep, transferred the scene, the folk, to Spain
-From England, changed the age, and vulgarized
-The whole. The trick was done; the money flows.
-
-Sir T. And what about the poet?
-
-Belfry.                        He trusted me;
-He has no claim.
-
-Sir T.         I think the law----
-
-Belfry.                        We all
-Risk that.
-
-Sir T. You shameful Yankee salesman! Play
-Your tricks elsewhere.
-
-Belfry.            Don't hear you; business first.
-
-Sir T. I've some here to attend to. Will you join
-The others on the stage? No? Well; good night.
-
-Belfry. I'll have your theatre yet!
-[Goes out.]
-
-Sir T.                            Never. Good night.
-
-[Re-enter Abbot with Boulder.]
-
-Are you the gallery?
-
-Boulder.          I am, Sir Tristram.
-
-Sir T. What did it? Is there anything to tell?
-
-Boulder. There is, Sir Tristram.
-
-Sir T.                        Tell it, please.
-
-Boulder.                                    Before
-The curtain fell I saw a woman's head,
-A lady's, on the stair.
-
-Sir T.            What do you mean?
-
-Boulder. It seemed to rest upon the topmost step
-From where I stood and watched.
-
-Abbot.                        The lady climbed
-No further than the middle of the stair--
-That's what he means, I think. Her head
-Appeared just in the entrance.
-
-Boulder.                  My meaning, sir.
-The palest face I ever saw: her eyeballs
-Turned about and showed the whites; she gasped
-For breath and drew a deep one. While I watched,
-Wondering what might be right, her eyes came down,
-Dull, dead, and horrible, and she hissed like hell.
-Then everybody hissed. I hissed myself.
-I beg your pardon: I could no more keep
-From hissing than I could from crying out
-When once a dervish stabbed me at Khartoum.
-The gallery felt the same; I asked those near
-What set them on it, and they said they heard
-A hideous hiss that made them hiss like hell.
-
-Sir T. So. And the lady?
-
-Boulder.               Vanished into space.
-
-Sir T. Or down the stair. You knew her?
-
-Boulder.                              No, Sir Tristram.
-
-Sir T. Of course; your first night here.
-
-Boulder.                             I couldn't help
-The hissing. Like something in a battle, hiss
-It went and everybody hissed.
-
-Sir T.                     No need
-To trouble; I conceive the thing.
-
-Boulder.                    We hissed
-Because we couldn't help it.
-
-Sir T.                   Say the word
-Again, and I'll hiss too! Good night, my man.
-
-Boulder. Good night, Sir Tristram.
-[Goes out.]
-
-Sir T.                             Hildreth, Abbot; come.--
-About this lady not a word remember.--
-I'll ask you something; did you ever see
-A woman's soul?
-
-Hildreth.      I never did, Sir Tristram.
-
-Sir T. Abbot?
-
-Salerne.      Nor I.
-
-Sir T.              And never may you need to!
-Once on a time I saw a woman's soul.
-I looked and looked, expecting colours, flowers,
-A perfume and an opal. I found instead
-A sooty cobweb diapered with limbs
-And empty hulls of captives long undone.
-I shook it, but the spider made no sign:
-It, too, was dead. I brushed the film away,
-And where it hung a mortal crevice yawned,
-Obscene and dark and barren as the grave.--
-How late it is! My guests will all be gone.
-Come, quickly.--Prophecies fulfil themselves.
-
-[The three go out.]
-[Temple re-enters from the Dressing-room, packs the clothes Sir
-Tristram had been wearing during the day, closes the portmanteau and
-goes out.]
-[Enter Blyth, carrying a lady's hat and clothes. He looks about, and
-then beckons at the door of the Reception-room.]
-[Enter Europa Troop, as Cressida.]
-
-Blyth. [Pointing to the Business-room]
-In there.
-
-Europa. Turn up the light.
-
-[Blyth lights up the Business-room.]
-
-                         A smell of leather;
-Ledgers; business-smell; red ink and copying-ink--
-The faintest spice: I feel them in the air.
-Turn out the light.
-
-[Blyth extinguishes the light in the Business-room.]
-
-                The smells are out as well.
-I saw the books, the pots. Turn up the light.
-
-[Blyth lights up the Business-room.]
-
-The smells again. The senses, Blyth, are glued
-Together. Did you ever see a smell?
-
-Blyth. Fumes?
-
-Europa.      Oh, yes!--fumes. Now Blyth, is this correct?
-Won't Abbot and his clerks be here again?
-
-Blyth. That's not the counting-house. Sir Tristram's own.
-
-Europa. Sir Tristram's own?
-
-Blyth.                     His private business-room.
-
-Europa. This is the most palatial theatre!
-Dispose my things--there, on the roll-top desk.
-
-[Blyth does so.]
-
-I'll risk it, Blyth.
-
-[Gives Blyth money.]
-
-Blyth. [Counting the money] One short. You promised five.
-
-Europa. [Gives a fifth sovereign] I know I did. I thought you'd
-let me off.
-
-Blyth. You'll know me better next time.
-
-Europa.                              That's the style!
-_We_ can collaborate.
-
-Blyth.           What are you getting at?
-What do you want to know?
-
-Europa.                 I'll tell you, Blyth.
-I want to know what makes this theatre feel
-Uncanny. All the time I'm like a ghost
-Astray in some mirage.
-
-Blyth.               A plump one, lady;
-A very handsome one.
-
-Europa.            Thanks, Blyth; I'm fit.
-I'll tell you something else, because I like you:
-I want to take possession of Sir Tristram;
-I have it in me, Blyth. What do you think?
-
-Blyth. Sir Tristram's married and a gentleman.
-
-Europa. And I'm an actress: an actress, do you see?
-And furthermore, and most, there's not a crowd
-Of actresses in London, or in the world.
-
-Blyth. A many actresses have tried it on.
-
-Europa. And all have failed, and all were bound to fail;
-But every one prepared Europa's path.
-
-Blyth. Sir Tristram's reputation's not that kind.
-He's most respectable in every way:
-The clergy patronize him.
-
-Europa.                I know all that.--
-Well, kiss me, Blyth; my cheek. You're handsomer
-Than Tristram. What! Are _you_ respectable?
-
-Blyth. No; but the money. I stick to that, you know.
-
-Europa. Oha! Ohe! Why, there's another lot;
-[Gives him money and kisses him.]
-And this for being so smart a simpleton.
-You're mine, remember; body and soul, you're mine.
-
-Blyth. I'm yours.
-
-Europa.          Now hurry, Blyth, or you'll be missed.
-
-[Blyth goes out.]
-
-And I'll be mistress here, or know who is.
-Blyth, Blyth! Come back!
-
-[Re-enter Blyth.]
-
-Blyth.                  For God's sake, not so loud!
-
-Europa. Some day, I'll shout.--What do they think of me?
-You heard them pass remarks.
-
-Blyth.                      I heard them say
-Europa's just the best thing in the show.
-
-Europa. That's what I like to hear! Dear Blyth! Be off!
-
-[Blyth goes out.]
-
-The best thing in the show--Europa just,
-Who caught and held Sir Tristram's eyes to-day
-Until he fathomed hers. I think we said,
-If looks can speak, "I'm ready when you like."
-A footstep and a skirt. Sir Tristram's wife?
-
-[Closes the door, leaving it ajar. Turns out the light in the
-Business-room.]
-[Enter Lady Sumner. Opening the portmanteau she searches her husband's
-pockets.]
-
-Lady S. Is this the place? No; better in the house;
-Best in his bed; the moment he comes home!
-Oh, beautifully done to drink it there
-And then! And with my dying breath to curse
-My husband for a coward that killed my soul,
-And feared himself to die. I'm not afraid.
-After I'm dead I'll come to life again,
-And tell him what he asked; and when I'm dead
-Indeed, my wraith will haunt him, whispering still
-The thing he asked: who had my earliest kiss
-Of love; who woke my heart and strung my soul
-To ecstasy _he_ withered with his lust.
-I'll hiss it nightly in his waking ear;
-Torture him too with dreams. Not every night;
-But now and then to wear him out with doubt:
-I'll madden him and kill him patiently.
-[She finds the letter as well as the vial.]
-What faded letter's this? [Reads] "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."
-
-                        He must have known
-The day he married me! My head will burst!
-"She visited him every night in his dressing-room."
-He knew this and he married me! My soul
-It is that struggles in my wasted womb,
-And cannot be brought forth but by my death,
-A still-born soul and posthumous, since God
-Is not! I have been nothing--worse than nothing:
-A bed-mate, a convenience! Hell, hell, hell!
-[Goes out.]
-
-Europa. [At the door of the Business-room]
-If I could act like that! But good, my luck!
-Sweet luck and succulent! Dear luck of mine!
-Plumb in the prime-joint of their mystery sticks
-My fork! The venison's hung and high! I'll cut
-And come again! Soul? Talk of soul! Give me
-My will, my body and my clean-run brains,
-Me and my purposes!
-
-Sir T. [Without]   I'll not go home
-To-night.
-
-Europa. Sir Tristram's voice!
-[Closes the door and turns out the light.]
-
-St. J.              [Without] What will you do?
-
-[Enter Sir Tristram and St. James's.]
-
-Sir T. Sleep at the club. Sit down awhile and talk.
-
-[Sir Tristram takes from a cabinet a spirit-frame, a syphon, and a
-box of cigars, and helps St. James's and himself. Sir Tristram
-reclines on a couch. St. James's remains on his feet throughout the
-scene, sometimes pacing, sometimes standing still.]
-
-St. J. But should your wife be left alone?
-
-Sir T.                                 For her,
-The safest way: she's bent upon my death,
-And while I keep alive she lives, I think.
-Best, too, for me.
-
-St. J.         How is it best for you?
-
-Sir T. Because it's touch and go to live or die.
-My life's no prize to me--worth this cigar
-Perhaps; and when her stealthy whine assails
-Me, begging death, I'm tempted to the point.
-A little tenderness in her, a look
-Of womanhood, or honey in her voice,
-And there might then have been no play to-night,
-But love and endless sleep. That exit's closed:
-I could not die consorted with my wife,
-My resolute enemy.
-
-St. J.             This sudden crash--
-It jarred to-day already--is strange in you,
-As my remembrance notes you.
-
-Sir T.                       There can be
-No reconcilement now. She prophesied
-To-night's disaster, and to make all sure
-Began the hissing on the gallery stairs.
-
-St. J. She didn't!
-
-Sir T.            But she did: none other, she.
-
-St. J. How horrible!
-
-Sir T.               Oh, worse than horrible!
-The woman whom I chose has now become
-A scaly leprosy about my life.
-
-St. J. That's damnable! No more of that! Your wife
-Is deeply in the right: your corpses only
-Could fill the breach that opens up between you:
-It is the grave that gapes. If you're to live
-It must be by divorce. Do you consent?
-
-Sir T. That also means the grave; for if we break
-Our home up, bankruptcy and ruin come:
-Indeed they're here already. Look at these.
-[Hands St. James's the two letters.]
-
-St. J. [Having read one of the letters]
-That's nothing but a seeming urgent threat,
-And very vilely-civilly worded too:
-Lawyer and gentleman are synonyms,
-But the law's not a gentleman.
-[Having opened the second letter.]
-                           What's this?
- Your bankers?--Ah!--"and if"--
-
-Sir T.                        Don't read it out.
-
-St. J. [Having read the second letter]
-If this is met you have a breathing-space?
-
-Sir T. I can go on again.
-
-St. J.                  Then this I'll meet.
-
-Sir T. Oh, Gervase!
-
-St. J.               Not disinterested alone:
-Infinite things to talk of! First of all,
-Why do you set so small a price on life?
-You once were proud of your vocation, knew
-The meaning of the theatre, felt its wide
-Domain.
-
-Sir T. Yes, but I know it now too well,
-Even as I know my wife and Warwick Groom.
-Let me not know you well, Gervase, not well:
-Show me the best in minims and in grams,
-But hide the bulk and flood in clouds of dawn,
-In silvery mists, the nimbus and the shrine
-Of air and sky: the soul should not be seen,
-Though mine be naked now.
-
-St. J.                     You suffer, Tristram.
-Naked your soul is, wounded----
-
-Sir T.                        Flayed alive!
-Oh, Gervase, what a spirit of delight,
-Of fragrant hope, of fervent faith in men,
-I brought incarnate to the theatre!
-
-St. J. Full of vocation, I remember you:
-Chiefly in Wytham Wood one afternoon----
-
-Sir T. Ah, how we beat our academic wings
-In woods, on hilltops, longing for the world
-And to take up our destiny! It took
-Me up, and laid me down, and racked and flayed
-With unremitting care.
-
-St. J.               You held the stage
-To be the true adventure of the times.
-The earth was known, you said: if magic isles,
-Orchards of Hesperus; or queens asleep
-For centuries; or that supreme emprise,
-The middle passage of the maze of streams,
-Acheron, Phlegethon, Cocytus, Styx,
-And the return alive from Dis's hall
-Through groves of poplar, whispered madnesses,
-Obsequious willows, cries, the wild lament
-Of old companions, and the doleful shriek
-Of her, the best-belov'd, to utter woe
-Abandoned: had such high renown been still
-Achievable, then had you hoisted sail
-And led the way; but since the whole sad world
-Was now become mere shop and market-place,
-The stage remained the one way of escape,
-The one adventure for the adventurous.
-
-Sir T. I thought so; I believed so. But I found
-The most ignoble strife; a jug of asps,
-Where envy, vanity, avarice, wanton spite
-Torment and are tormented; with such a gloss
-Of tolerance and of fellowship--humour, tears,
-That soothe the grit of misery into pearl!
-
-St. J. Men cross to fortune on the stepping-stones
-Of ruined rivals; matter exploits us so;
-But which is better off, who triumphs most,
-The ruined or the ruiner? That's reserved.
-
-Sir T. I know, I know! And then the modern play!
-
-St. J. Let us not think it!
-
-Sir T.                  Only once it seems
-A people has a theatre. Drama leaps
-To instant being, power, supremacy:
-From "Gorboduc" to "The Tempest" fifty years;
-And nothing since. Nor can it come again,
-Imagination being an outcast now,
-Unsceptred, unrefreshed, unclad, unknown
-In palace, hut, or hermitage: no home;
-A wandering bedlam. When the world believed
-In miracles of sorcery, potent drugs
-Alchemical, and constellated fate
-In heaven hung, then fancy had a lodge----
-
-St. J. All this is so----
-
-Sir T.                Be patient! Here I snatch
-A moment's ease, as in an interval
-Of torture. While the worn-out squaws repose,
-(Harpies or fiends: the laugh twists on my mouth!)
-Devising keener pangs, I hear again
-The fabulous music of the crystalline
-Accordant spheres; so let this perfume fade,
-Wind-wafted fragrance of a love-lorn scarf
-Bidding farewell for ever and a day.
-When elves and fairies haunted brakes and bowers,
-And gods and goddesses were visitors
-Hesternal at the latest; when Heaven and Hell
-Was as a casket closed about the earth,
-The universal jewel; and man himself
-The awful judge of angels and the mate
-Of God, worthy divine redemption, then
-There broke a drama great and beautiful
-Fresh from the dulcet brains and pregnant heart
-Of England. Soul was clad; the mind, informed;
-Imagination, armed, anointed, crowned;
-But now all naked, empty, abject, stripped
-And flayed! You understand?
-
-St. J.                     I understand.
-Men know there is no God, no Heaven and Hell:
-They welcomed that in secret--all who thought.
-But, God away, the Universe becomes
-A vacuum, and the welcome turns to cursing.
-They thought, "We need no God; we have our art,
-"Our poetry: God is gone." But all else went
-When God went: 'twas the breath of God that filled
-The pipe of Pan, the bosom and the sigh
-Of Aphrodite; goblins, loreleis,
-Enchantments, witchcraft, ghosts, transcendent deeds,
-Amazement, terror, beauty, rapture, tears,
-Intolerable passions, agonies
-Were of the warp and woof of God: God summed
-Imagination.
-
-Sir T.     And there's no such God!
-
-St. J. No God to speak of: the idea of God--
-That's for the schoolmen: for the fatherless,
-The girls that drown their bastards, broken hearts,
-Incapables, incurables, castaways,
-Endurers, heroes, poets, artists, kings,
-Classes or masses, all who love their lives--
-It helps them much to tell them of a God
-Evolving slowly in the mind of man!
-
-Sir T. But Christ, the man of sorrows?
-
-St. J.                                I never preach
-The man of sorrows now.... I grasp my theme:
-Give me your eye and ear, your heart and brain.
-Jesus of Nazareth--no, the Son of Man;
-Because this Jesus is a sloppy word,
-Mainly a sponge to wipe the tiresome tears
-Of foolish people. He, then, the Son of Man----
-
-Sir T. But this you never preached in Westminster?
-
-St. J. Never directly; nor shall I preach it there.
-Not of the pulpit; of the stage, this theme
-Demands a crowded theatre and the mood
-Expectant, tyrannous of the gallery, not
-The mood submissive of the worshipper.
-
-Sir T. My nerves begin to tingle, telepaths
-Of coming wonder. Till I hear it all
-You shall not leave the theatre.
-[At the telephone]
-                           (Blyth, I stay
-Awhile. What do you say? What lady? Oh!--
-My wife went home! Yes, you may go. My key?
-I have it. True. Goodnight.) Now, Gervase, speak
-As if it were the judgment-day!
-
-St. J.                       It is--
-It always is; and could we hear it peal,
-Each moment, heavy with eternal doom,
-Thunders in every heart.
-
-Sir T.               Then speak to me
-As one about to die.
-
-St. J.            I speak as one
-About to live!
-
-Sir T.      To one about to live!
-
-St. J. This question like an automatic rack
-Seized me and stretched me: "Will you teach a lie?"
-"Behold," I cried; "I have a tender heart--
-"Soft-hearted am I; let a harder man
-"Confront this problem, lead the great revolt.
-"Though this of God and Sin and Heaven and Hell
- "Be now worn out, yet have I nothing new
-"To traffic for it: let a stronger man
-"Become protagonist and martyr; I
-"Already faint: let this cup pass from me."
-Oh it was good to say to broken hearts--
-The faded women and the old worn men--
-"Come unto me and I will give you rest."
-
-Sir T. 'Tis easy comforting the poor with heaven,
-And those that never tasted delicate meats,
-Soft music, murmurs, vintages mature,
-And savoury ecstasy of man and woman.
-
-St. J. Kings, conquerors, artists, poets, power and wealth
-Demand a concrete heaven, just like the poor.--
-Still the rack wrenched me, "Will you teach a lie?"
-So tortured, I betook me to the east,
-The womb and cradle, nurse and school of thought,
-Of knowledge, poetry, religion, art.
-There in the desert, insufferable beams
-Their daily meaning smote through every sense;
-By night the deep immensity of heaven
-Revealed its wonder: all the centuries,
-The tattered stoles and finery of Time,
-Departed from me, and I knew myself
-Material in a Universe of pure
-Material substance, conscious mystery throned
-On the eternal moment that becomes
-For ever new. "This is for me," I thought:
-"Enough that one man once should so transcend:
-"Let the world now decay." But the last pangs
-Of Hell laid instant hold on me and put
-Me to the question: "Will you teach a lie?"
-"What must I teach?" I cried. "Teach thou the truth,"
-The answer came, "the pure, material truth;
-"But firstly _know_ the truth about the lie."
-
-Sir T. What is the truth about it, Gervase?
-
-St. J.                                     This:--
-That Christianity is the foe of life,
-Of health, of wealth, of intellect and strength;
-The friend of all the feeble, the diseased,
-The low, the loathsome, the depraved, the dirt,
-The offal of mankind. Instinctively the strong
-Laid hands upon it and wove imperial power
-Out of its filthy rags: a purple star
-Of high unchristian sovereignty in Rome;
-In England here an aristocracy
-Of brains and culture. Long they kept in check,
-The churchdoms did, with Hell and Heaven for sword
-And buckler, and a sense of sin to salt
-The wounds they dealt--how long they kept in check
-Dynamic pressure of the Christian lie
-That men are equal in the sight of God!
-
-Sir T. Men are not equal, and there is no God.
-
-St. J. They are not equal, and there is no God.
-And when the myth of Heaven-and-Hell--the valves
-Wherein the world lay like an oyster pearled
-With the soul of man: when this great fable gaped
-And fell away, the lethal meaning, hid
-In Christian tenets, like a serpent brood
-Uncoiled, as rancour, decadence, despair,
-In revolutions, anarchies, nihilisms,
-A will to end the world. There stand we now,
-Naked against the Universe.
-
-Sir T.                    The truth
-About the lie! The double carapace
-Of Heaven-and-Hell sloughed off, mankind remains
-A houseless mollusc.
-
-St. J.             Pitiful to see!
-Imagination--let me use that word
-Instead of soul; and let it mean entire
-The powers of blood and nerve, of heart and brain,
-And aught occult and undiscovered yet
-In carnate matter: Imagination, not
-Conceiving what has happened in the world,
-Much wonders at the darkness and the cold.
-How simple, how appalling, how secure
-Were Heaven and Hell; what fathomless content
-In that deep home of penitential fire,
-That everlasting, joyful holiday
-In golden streets lit by the glory of God!
-
-Sir T. Will the great heart of the world be great enough
-To bid that dream avaunt once and for ever?
-
-St. J. It will, it must, though it should come with wars,
-Convulsions, burnings, tortures, massacres,
-With centuries of woe employing all
-Prodigious powers of slaughter, powers of pain,
-Wherein our civilized self-consciousness
-Outdoes barbarity and instinct far
-Beyond comparisons of Heaven and Hell.
-
-Sir T. With wars, with woes? You think the change will be
-A long elaborate travail?
-
-St. J.                 I cannot tell.
-
-Sir T. But God and Sin and Heaven and Hell that _are_ not
-Are yet the very texture of the world.
-
-St. J. Kings, magistracies, warriors, learning, love
-Being knit in Heaven and Hell, in God and Sin,
-Like blood, nerve, sinew, bone in living flesh,
-It may be that the change will come about
-As human bodies alter in seven years time----
-
-Sir T. In seven years' time!
-
-St. J.                     No, no; no prophecy!
-I mean the change may be a growth unfelt,
-Or else the whole world may collapse at once,
-(The rotten flesh unable to sustain
-The bones, enmesh the nerves, confine the blood)
-And cease to be--ashamed to be
-Less than immortal and the special care
-Of God, Omnipotent, Omniscient; God,
-Lover, avenger, maker and destroyer.
-
-Sir T. No! man is greater than to make an end
-Because his God forsook him.
-
-St. J.                     I think so, too;
-And in my heart believe terrific war
-Will burst the chrysalis, the Christendom
-That hangs in rags about the eager soul,
-Already winged and rich with crimson stains,
-With sulphur plumes and violet, green and gold,
-Psyche at last, pure Matter of itself.
-
-Sir T. Psyche? Imagination.
-
-St. J.                       It was my word:
-Imagination be it!
-
-Sir T.         Naked against
-A godless universe, with what, by whom
-Must we be clothed?
-
-St. J.            Heaven, Hell and God and Sin
-Were but a symbol of the Universe,
-A lie wherein to wrap the babyhood
-Of man's imagination, which is itself
-The Universe become self-conscious. That's
-The whole; there is no more to say: with all
-The Universe, which _is_ imagination
-Become in life a consciousness, in soul
-Self-conscious (still I say it, and again,
-And yet again it must be said): with all
-The Universe itself, no symbols now,
-Imagination must be clad and armed.
-
-Sir T. The terror and the splendour of it thrill
-Me through and through. I feel it: this is great;
-This is the greatest.
-
-St. J.            Great and most terrible!
-I shrink, I quail; the burden weighs me down;
-The agony dissolves me: this is fear;
-This, mystery. Legends of creation, tales--
-(As if the Universe could have been _made_
-In any sense mankind can give the word!)
-Fantastic myths of virgins bearing boys,
-And of a desperate God who gave his son
-To die upon a tree--how foul a thing!--
-Of dead men come alive, and signs and shows
-Of tongues and thunders, cures and stigmata:
-These 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.
-
-Sir T. This makes my whole life horrible.
-
-St. J.                                    Most lives,
-Confronting this, will shrivel into dust.
-
-Sir T. I've never lived.
-
-St. J.                  That is, you've never thought,
-Never imagined.
-
-Sir T.         Never! A phantom life,
-The actor's; spell-bound drudgery chained
-And eyeless. What a ruthless tyrant public
-Opinion is--an armed automaton
-That fells its victims blindly! Entertain
-A motley audience for a livelihood
-You never make; be this, be that--a fop,
-A fool, a hero, or a villain; lose
-Conceit of everything except applause;
-Be certain of success when self-contempt
-Assures you that you play a popular part;
-Be courteous to the bully, bland with fools--
-The dreadful folk that haunt celebrities,
-That haunt theatrical celebrities;
-Be genial with the newsman--glad to see him;
-Civil to greedy playwrights, artists, cads
-And cadgers, leeches, lice and vampire-bats
-That bleed the theatre; everybody's body;
-Charity, politics, church--their humble servant;
-And nightly the performance in the cage
-Before the assorted multitude
-Of people, people, people: this, and worse;
-Then death and swift oblivion: nothing done;
-Nothing at all to be remembered by:
-No other noise so big as stage renown
-Is silenced utterly by death.
-
-St. J.                    No fame
-Outlasts the world: there lives the hope of man:
-Death's meaning is that consciousness shall cease,
-The earth be purged of life; thus in the end
-All men are equal, matter pure from taint
-Of anguish; in the nebula become
-Essential fire, free from solicitude.
-This is the freedom of the Universe.
-
-Sir T. Matter grown anxious: that is very man.
-
-St. J. Therefore the player's is an envied lot:
-No other artist so intensely lives
-In the world's consciousness.
-
-Sir T.                     But after death?
-
-St. J. Dread nothing that can happen after death:
-The world will cease: live in that thought, that mood,
-Upon the eternal moment.
-
-Sir T.                  But to mark
-The world before one dies!
-
-St. J.                  The inmost hope
-Of all men! I believe that you and I
-Could orientate the world's imagination;
-And that would make a mark.
-
-Sir T.                     Tell me of that!
-The whole thing stirs me: tell me more of that!
-First have I grasped your meaning? All the past,
-Religion, drama, art is dead to us,
-Because we know that all is Matter, all
-Imagination, beauty, passion, power
-Through time and times and changing suns and orbs
-From spacious nebula to nebula.
-This is the freedom of the Universe
-Wherein imagination must delight,
-Now that Olympus, Asgard, Heaven and Hell,
-Gods, God and separate soul are dead and done.
-
-St. J. My meaning; yes. Material Heaven and Hell,
-Olympus, Hades, Asgard, Nifelheim
-Are Matter's memories of pellucid fire
-It once was and will be, an evidence
-Of our material nature wrapped in myth
-Unconsciously. Imagination lives
-In Matter, being itself material power,
-Irradiant, telepathic, magical,
-Imponderable as lightning or the light,
-Ethereal essence of the Universe.
-To free this power from twenty centuries
-Of God and Sin; endow it with its own,
-The infinite Universe; to launch the world
-In space again upon a virgin track
-As though the foul old rut and blood-drenched way
-Had never been! Oh, Tristram! Help me--you!
-It can be done!
-
-Sir T.      How can I help you, Gervase?
-
-St. J. I want your stage. A while ago you said
-A people has a drama only once:
-From "Gorboduc" to "The Tempest" fifty years;
-And nothing since. The deadly truth of that
-Perturbed me; and I feared my eastern work--
-A play I made wherein dynamic art
-Of Matter rives asunder all the scale
-Of being; restrings the lyre, and sets the tune
-Anew: I feared this work was wasted; now,
-Having thought it out--even while we talked, my mind
-Was labouring with it--that foolish fear is dead.
-Twice in the past transcendent drama flowered,
-A people's crowning glory. First in Greece:
-A mighty triad and a rhythmic scroll,
-Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.
-
-Sir T. Euripides? A decadent, I thought.
-
-St. J. Matter knows nothing of decadence, a word
-Corrupt with spirit: only chance and change,
-Power and imagination. Let me speak.--
-The war with Persia, Marathon, Salamis,
-Battles and victories by land and sea,
-Revived in Attic bosoms, Attic brains,
-Profound regard for things of Attica,
-With ardent interest in the Universe
-Whereof it felt itself the heart and soul.
-In England next after two thousand years,
-The most instinctive people in the world,
-The mightiest and the freest, having undone
-With axe and fire the strangling Roman creed,
-That like a caul about their fancy clung,
-Forthwith despatched to hell the rivalry
-Of Spain, redeemed the seas, began to stretch
-Their giant limbs in isles and continents,
-And take the measure of the quartered globe.
-Thus the imagination of these lands
-Became one living cord, whereon were strung
-All story, legend, lore; and like a birth
-Miraculous, divine dramatic art,
-Which to be truly great demands a great
-Impassioned people for an audience, rose
-From out the loftiest minds and shaped itself
-The mirror of a master people's pride.
-And now a greater England about to break
-The husk of Christendom, as in its youth
-It sloughed off Rome, begins the world anew,
-Imperial England of itself aware,
-And man, the conscience of the Universe.
-I mean to spend my fortune and my life
-In the high service of imagination
-For England's sake and man's. The dreams, the lore,
-The rags and rust of thirty centuries:
-To cast these wholly, and accoutre man
-In all the beauty, splendour, scope and power
-Of this material, eternal fate,
-The Universe, whereof he is the nerve--
-The inmost fibre, flowering in brain and blood!
-For this I would give up my life in pain.
-
-Sir T. This will I help you in with all my power:
-It dazzles me; it seizes on my soul.
-
-St. J. A greater drama than the world has known
-Is shrouded here in darkness.
-
-Sir T.                     We must knead
-The public mind into the shape of this
-To make it possible. The play's the thing!
-
-St. J. Yes; not the pulpit, not the press: the play,
-Loftier and broader than religious rites,
-The mirror of an empire's pride, of man's
-Imagination, from the past released,
-Dowered with the freedom of the Universe.
-
-Sir T. What will this drama be?
-
-St. J.                          I cannot tell.
-My own play is the first step in a path
-Untrodden. At the journey's end I see
-A new world purged of God and purged of Sin,
-Where men are healthy, women beautiful,
-All men, all women, beautiful and strong.
-
-[Re-enter Lady Sumner.]
-
-Sir T. Martha! How like a ghost you steal upon us!
-Where have you been?
-
-Lady S.             The streets, the squares, the river;
-No home to go to! Wandering in the night
-I saw your windows lit, and knew: I knew
-You plotted here. What will you do? You're not
-About to send me anywhere! I'll die;
-I mean to die. I wanted Tristram too;
-But I can die alone: time--give me time!
-It's hard, it's very hard: you wish me gone,
-And cannot understand how hard it is:
-I have no children, and my husband hates me.
-
-St. J. You _have_ your children.
-
-Lady S.                     Mock me not with that:
-You know as well as I that death ends all.
-
-St. J. Nothing can end. The mystery Matter, lasts
-For ever.
-
-Lady S. Am I mad, indeed, or you?
-What are you talking of? My soul--my soul
-It is, that's up in arms against the world.
-
-St. J. If death ends all, what is the soul?
-
-Lady S.                               My soul
-Is me, one aching nerve from head to foot.
-
-St. J. How is it clad, your soul? What atmosphere
-Environs it, wherein does it consist?
-
-Lady S. Naked my soul is; and it cannot breathe
-For lack of air; and it consists in sin.
-
-St. J. In sin?
-
-Lady S.      Dead sin, it cannot now commit.
-
-Sir T. Now Gervase; put your message to the test.
-
-St. J. There is no sin. Be silent, Martha! Fear,
-Despondency, decay, the will to die
-Should neither speak nor think, but fling themselves
-Upon the Universe. Be silent! Let
-My meaning touch your nerves. Attempt not
-Apprehension: feel what I say.--This sense
-Of sin is ignorance only; every voice
-Must thunder that, and every intellect
-Record it, every heart delight to hoard
-The knowledge till the tissue of the world,
-Engrained with truth, be guiltless in conceit
-As in effect it is. Here we are left
-Unfriended on the surface, far from home;
-And that imagination which we are,
-Betrayed and lost on this outlandish earth,
-Believes itself to blame; but neither man
-Nor Matter's answerable: the Universe
-Is a becoming, a passion and a pain,
-A rapt imagination. Purge yourself
-Of God, of Heaven and Hell, of soul and sin,
-Of small humanities, fantastic moods,
-Putridities of spirit, posies, myths;
-For all these dreams will leave you when you die.
-Be Matter pure as flame.
-
-Lady S.               My soul, my soul!
-It springs from God: there once was God.
-
-St. J.                                 No God:
-God hitherto has been the world's excuse,
-The shadow of man that tripped him everywhere,
-A phantom cul-de-sac in the Universe,
-A dog in the manger. Men need no excuse:
-If they must be, they must be what they are.
-
-Lady S. And what are they?
-
-St. J.                      I told you: Matter, once
-Inherent in the nebula that cooled,
-Contracted, and became the sun and us.
-Out of the bowels of the earth we rise:
-Though in that thought at home and happy enough,
-Yet there imagination feels itself
-The merest parvenu when it recalls
-Incalculable ages throbbed away
-Within the glistering fire diaphanous
-That filled the deep conceiving womb of space;
-And on the earth, upon the surface here,
-No longer than a week-end visit seems
-Its spectral period hitherto, beside
-That sojourn in the cooling globe, and date
-Without beginning in the pristine fire.
-
-Lady S. I feel a meaning, Gervase, I feel a power
-More beautiful than God. How stale God seems
-Upon a sudden and how ugly!
-
-St. J.                      Of a truth
-God is an ugly dream, whate'er it meant
-At one time.
-
-Lady S.    Who made us then?
-
-St. J.                        We were not made.
-I told you, Martha; it is man that makes--
-And birds and beavers, spiders, bees and ants;
-All conscious Matter makes and mars a little:
-But of the staple of the Universe,
-Unconscious Matter, what we know is this:
-That it becomes in systems, suns and earths,
-In plants and beasts and men, a Universe.
-
-Lady S. That seems more wonderful than to be made:
-I feel it may be true. But, oh, dear Gervase,
-What is the use, what is the end of it?
-
-St. J. No end, and no beginning anywhere:
-Only eternity, eternal Matter
-And Matter's form, imagination--No;
-Not form: how metaphysic tarnishes
-A simple word! Only imagination,
-The most exalted name of Matter, wrought
-From flame to ice, from ice again to flame
-Through suns and planets, verdure, battle, blood,
-Degrees of being, and miracles of change.
-
-Lady S. Why should it be? What purpose can it serve?
-
-St. J. It must be, since it is; and must be _so_,
-Or certainly it would be otherwise.
-It serves no purpose, it is beautiful:
-That is the whole. Your children, dead, had no
-Beginning and will have no end. They once
-Were fire; that fire, transmuted into love,
-Distilled them from your womb, and was
-Itself your children: cooled again, it rests
-In earth, and will be limpid fire once more,
-When all the orbs that hang about the sun
-Return into its bosom, or other radiant
-Passion of Matter impregnate space anew.
-
-Lady S. I need not die then, since I cannot end?
-
-St. J. Oh now my brain rejoices! Terror lurked
-Beneath that white austerity of mine,
-Lest when I tried my message in the fire--
-The first time: true; but with a woman, and one
-Whom dread of death and fancied need of death
-Kindles to any news and change of mood:
-I say, I feared lest your intense despair,
-That gilds my truth at once, should burn it up.
-But now you think there never can be need
-For terror, doubt, or agony of mind
-In presence of a sinless Universe,
-Where all is mystery, all imagination,
-All beauty, passion, power unending, all
-The purest Matter.
-
-Lady S.        I can live; but where?
-Where can I find a home for this new thought?
-Not in the theatre, not in the church,
-Not in the houses or the books of men!
-
-St. J. I have a mansion in a forest-aisle
-Where a deep silence, intimately felt,
-And poignant as a perfume, like a mode
-Of subtle splendour evermore becomes.
-A green and branching honeycomb of glades,
-A sylvan city clusters round my house;
-And near it in an arbour sancro-sanct,
-A chapelle ardent of the forest, lies
-In state a famous memory. There it was
-The queen of the Iceni stood at bay,
-A desperate hind against the Roman pack,
-In that last battle of her overthrow.
-The trench she dug, the mound she reared are held
-By oak and beech; but in this inmost bower
-Beside her camp forlorn, this secret haunt
-Of emerald shadow, emerald light, a crypt
-Of living silence, sculptured boscage, turf
-That gathers incense from the generous earth,
-There on this virgin ground, a green and bronze
-Carpet of fragrancies and couch of state,
-These doomed things are enshrined.
-
-Lady S.                        I might begin
-To live again in such a woodland haven,
-If I were free.
-
-St. J.      What freedom can you want
-More than the freedom of the universe?
-
-Lady S. The freedom of the Universe!
-
-St. J.                                 Whereof
-My message is the charter.
-
-Lady S.               But my husband?
-
-Sir T. You have no husband now. Let Gervase speak
-His precept of divorce.
-
-Lady S.            No husband now?
-
-Sir T. A prophetess of failure who fulfils
-Her prophecy against her husband, severs
-The marriage-bond.
-
-Lady S.         I knew not what I did!
-Oh, Tristram!
-
-St. J.      Martha!... Tristram, take her hand!
-
-[Sir Tristram and Lady Sumner join hands.]
-
-The speech of men is so corrupt with dreams,
-Forgotten alchemy and astral lies,
-So rank with spirit and the cult of God
-That nothing can be said as it is known.
-In the pure matter of sex, befouled with words
-Of sanction supererogant, I use
-The most material language to pronounce
-Divorce between you. Since the pride of life
-Is dead in you, the woman, and your seed
-Restored to that profound unconsciousness
-Which is the general mode of the Universe,
-Nothing constrains you to consider him
-With whom you spent yourself courageously:
-Mind and imagination now are one
-With Matter; and this privilege is yours,
-To know alive the deep delight of death.
-For you, the man, in whom the pride of life
-Intensely burns, this woman is no mate.
-Your art will claim you body, brain, and sex
-Without a rival henceforth.--Man and wife
-You are no longer. Let your hands disjoined
-Witness divorce between you.
-
-[Sir Tristram releases Lady Sumner's hand.]
-
-Lady S.                   Was there once
-A thing called love? Oh, love! Death--death and hell.
-
-St. J. You drink the dead sea.
-
-Lady S.                      Dead.
-
-St. J.                              Yet you will live.
-My car is waiting: through the silent town,
-The silent city and the lamplit night,
-Watched by the star-attended moon, half seen
-Behind her cloudy lattice in the skies,
-Our wind-shod wheels shall bear us speedily.
-
-Lady S. What call have I to go?
-
-St. J.                          The call of night,
-By sleepless fancies heard and souls set free.
-The forest calls you in your blood and brain:
-Like spell-bound tides the billowy woodlands sleep;
-Through labyrinthine thickets pencilled beams
-Explode in silvery silence; far withdrawn
-Behind the darknesses of clustered boles
-The emerald forest moonshine glances clear,
-Imprisoned wells of light. Come, Martha, come.
-
-Lady S. The woods will cover me and hide me close.
-
-St. J. Come, sister, come.
-
-Lady S.                   I come.
-
-St. J.                           Good night.
-
-Sir T.                                       Good night.
-To-morrow, Gervase, bring your tragedy.
-
-St. J. My play? No tragedy; a triumph, Tristram.
-
-Sir T. A triumph may it be! Again, good night.
-
-St. J. Good night.
-
-Lady S.         Farewell.
-
-Sir T.                      Farewell. Be free; be happy.
-
-[St. James's and Lady Sumner go out.]
-
-I must have money.
-
-[Opens the door of the Business-room, turns up the light, and
-discovers EUROPA asleep.]
-
-                Pride of life, pure sex,
-Dreaming and roseate! Trick of the night, and sleep
-Pretended? Smiles! ..... Europa! No; she breathes
-With parted lips, her nostrils, carved and sweet
-As immortelles of pearl, too delicate
-To fill in slumber's heedless anarchy
-Her rhythmic bosom's vaulted depths; her arms
-Hang listless, and her limbs beneath her gown
-Are like the gates of heaven, ajar. Superb
-She-creature this! She looked desire to-day;
-To-night her will effects the shortest way.
-I must have money.
-
-[Having removed Europa's clothes from the desk he is about to open
-it, when Europa wakens and looks about.]
-
-                Beautiful of you
-To be here on the instant that my life
-Begins again! You overheard?
-
-Europa.                   Not all;
-I slept. Your bishop with the sorcerer's voice
-Of silver thrilled me first, then charmed my heart
-With deep material news that brought to life
-Dead dreams of mine. I want to be myself
-For this one night; not the smart actress, vulgar
-Business-woman that fights or smooths her way
-With scorn or kisses as the battle bends,
-But Matter, pure and passionate--as I am.
-
-Sir T. St. James's message falls on fertile ground!
-
-Europa. He says a thing there that will move the world.
-
-Sir T. Where shall I take you to?
-
-Europa.                         Come home with me.
-
-Sir T. You think that will be best? Why do you wear
-Your costume still?
-
-Europa.         I am a woman such
-As Cressid was, an amateur of men;
-Never inconstant while her passion lasts,
-But not to be compelled by love or law.
-The name I hate most in the world is wife;
-And the professional drudgery of the blood
-Which marriage is, seems to me hell on earth.
-
-Sir T. Not always hell. What do you know of marriage?
-
-Europa. I had a husband in the States.
-
-Sir T.                                Divorced?
-
-Europa. Better than that: killed in the Cuban war.
-
-Sir T. Why do you wear your costume still?
-
-Europa.                                   Because
-The drapery becomes me; and I meant
-To change its folds for other clinging folds
-Before I dressed.
-
-Sir T.          Here in the theatre?
-
-Europa. How could I tell you would be free to spend
-The night with me?
-
-Sir T.            Am I the kind of man
-You take me for?
-
-Europa.       What do I take you for?
-
-Sir T. A fool, I think.
-
-Europa.                Oh, have I overdone it?
-I thought you loved the pure Material truth.
-I will be difficult at once!
-
-Sir T.                  Too late,
-Europa.
-
-Europa. Why? What can you not forgive?
-I came; you found me sleeping, and were glad.
-
-Sir T. The sweetest action may be spoiled by speech:
-A thing no woman ever understands.
-
-Europa. What _have_ I said? Correct me, punish me!
-I spoke too soon; my mind is scarce awake.
-
-Sir T. How brutal women are, how cynical!
-I've never known a tender-hearted woman.
-
-Europa. Hard as a diamond am I; and my love
-A jewelled flame: high hearts are always hard.
-Souls lapped in cotton wool are not for me!
-
-Sir T. Now comes the diatribe! No woman yet
-Could keep her temper past a word or two!
-
-Europa. You struck the flint and you shall feel the fire.
-I find you as I find the rest of men,
-Obtuse, distrustful, flabby, impotent;
-Fit to beget a fool or two at home,
-And dribble out uncomfortable lives
-In parliaments and stalls and smoking-rooms.
-It's iron women love--Damascus blades,
-Not bludgeons of the theatre stuffed with rags.
-
-Sir T. How often have you said that? Reel-and-rote,
-A parrot speech! So all viragoes scold
-Since Eve dared Adam. Come; a different tune.
-
-Europa. What? _Are_ you strong, Sir Tristram? _Are_ you strong?
-Power in a man I worship: show me power.
-
-Sir T. Go to your room and leave your costume there.
-
-Europa. Give me my clothes, then.
-
-Sir T.                              No; come back for them.
-
-Europa. But I shall be half naked.
-
-Sir T.                           What of that?
-
-Europa. Will you attend me to my room?
-
-Sir T.                                    Not I.
-
-Europa. The passages are dark.
-
-Sir T.                          You know the way.
-
-Europa. I know the way! This is a kind of strength;
-But, sir, I'm not defeated.
-
-Sir T.                No?
-
-Europa.                  Not yet.
-When I return we shall resume the fight:
-Since you're so masterful, I must be won.
-[Goes out.]
-
-Sir T. The cureless wound of sex that nature dealt
-Gives man the victory still. If women knew
-The tenth part of their power while passion lasts!
-
-[Opens the desk and takes from a secret drawer a handful of
-bank-notes.]
-
-
-A MONTH ELAPSES
-
-
-ACT IV
-
-Scene: Sir Tristram Sumner's Reception-room in the Grosvenor Theatre,
-as in Act III. Hildreth is sitting at a table with letters. Enter
-Abbot.
-
-
-Abbot. Not yet?
-
-Hildreth.        No, Abbot.
-
-[Enter Salerne.]
-
-Salerne.                     Has he come?
-
-Hildreth.                                 Not yet.
-
-Salerne. What says your mercury, Abbot?
-
-Abbot.                                    Zero, zero!
-
-Salerne. I think myself the play will fail.
-
-Hildreth.                               I don't.
-The naivety, novelty, audacity;
-The this, the that that people prattle of;
-The Bishop's name, the scandal, and the cry,
-The noise of the event will bring it off.
-
-Abbot. I doubt it; and I think Sir Tristram scents
-Disaster in the air.
-
-Salerne.        Never before
-Do I remember such a slipshod time
-As this vile month has been. Sir Tristram's hand
-Is out: his eye untrue; such staging, such
-A tangled skein, dropped stitches everywhere;
-Warped wood and crumbling walls! The play's quite good;
-But for the cast, the acting and the scene--
-Give me a fit-up company astray
-And starving in the potteries, and I'll whip
-The top to such a purpose in a week
-That this fine Grosvenor corps would drown itself
-En masse to see such art in castaways.
-
-Hildreth. Salerne, you've been with Groom! I know the sound;
-That man's a malady; a passing thought
-Of him will sometimes start the dullest brain
-On venturous speeches.
-
-Salerne.             Start the dullest brain?
-
-Hildreth. Like mine, I mean.
-
-Salerne.                     Ah.--Yes; I've been with Groom.
-He's drinking Burgundy in the "Rose and Crown."
-Poor Groom! The one great actor of our time.
-Finest since Garrick I should say.
-
-Abbot.                        And I.
-
-Hildreth. Come, come; no treason! Groom is very well;
-But we're Sir Tristram's men.
-
-Salerne.                   And loyal still!
-
-Abbot. Oh, loyal enough! Sir Tristram needs it too.
-I'd burn his bishop in Smithfield if I could.
-[Goes out.]
-
-Salerne. Why is he late?
-
-Hildreth.               You know as much as I.
-
-Salerne. Infer as much?
-
-Hildreth.               I'll not discuss the matter.
-
-Salerne. You're too devoted, Hildreth. Some one comes.
-
-Hildreth. That's not his step.
-
-Salerne. [Looking out]        The Bishop! Curse his cloth!
-[Goes out]
-
-[Enter St. James's.]
-
-St. J. Good evening, Hildreth. Is Sir Tristram here?
-
-Hildreth. Not yet, my lord.
-
-St. J.                     At what time is he due?
-
-Hildreth. He's overdue, my lord.
-
-St. J.                           Unlike him that.
-
-Hildreth. Unlike him? Yes; a month ago.
-
-St. J.                                   A month?
-
-Hildreth. May I speak freely?
-
-St. J.                        Speak without reserve
-If it concerns the welfare of my friend.
-
-Hildreth. My lord, most intimately. For a month
-His leading lady has led him by the nose.
-
-St. J. Europa Troop: familiar at rehearsal;
-But that I thought the method of the stage.
-
-Hildreth. Oh no, my lord. Sir Tristram kept a state
-About him always till the change began.
-
-St. J. What change?
-
-Hildreth.           The change from promptitude and ease
-To absence, fear, perplexity in all
-He does.
-
-St. J. Unjust! Consideration, care,
-An artist's terror; but mastery of his work.
-
-Hildreth. Pardon, my lord. I love him, and I know.
-The definite purpose, the consummate skill
-That made his management a royal game
-Have left him; and he stumbles to the goal,
-Which once he reached unerring and direct
-As wireless news or planetary light.
-
-St. J. Fine of you, Hildreth! But I think the play
-Replies for all Sir Tristram's hesitance.
-
-Hildreth. Partly, my lord: the play is difficult.
-
-St. J. Where is he now?
-
-Hildreth.               None of us know, my lord.
-I dread mischance.
-
-St. J.           On what conjecture, Hildreth?
-
-Hildreth. The vaguest: at his house, no word of him;
-And at his club, no word.
-
-St. J.                  That means no more
-Than this: he was not home nor at his club.
-
-Hildreth. Yes, but, my lord, the first night of a play!
-Not in the history of the theatre----
-
-[Enter Sir Tristram]
-
-St. J. No more foreboding, Hildreth!
-
-Sir T.                              Gervase! High
-On Heaven's dark brow we'll hang your name to-night.
-[Looking over the letters.]
-Bills: invitations. Why should people charge
-Each other for the things they need; and why
-Should one man want to meet another man?
-We know what men are. In a million, one
-May have the right to meet his fellows--No;
-Not one in twenty millions! Men deserve
-Each other's scorn.--There's nothing, Hildreth, nothing.
-
-Hildreth. Sir Tristram, I implore you!
-
-Sir T.                               Leave us, Hildreth.
-You shall command me when the curtain falls.
-You please me always, Hildreth.
-
-[Hildreth goes out]
-
-St. J.                         So distraught!
-You're like a woman, Tristram.
-
-Sir T.                      A woman? True:
-Old men are like old women. Don't we know
-How age makes neuters of us? All alike
-Unhappy; cold and bloodless, curst and shrill!
-
-St. J. I understand! The black rings round your eyes--
-Court mourning for a day of passion, spent
-In some shameless bosom! Once you could drain
-The fount of energy as genial men
-Will do, may do; but when the world appears
-Thereafter like a desolate seaboard stripped
-At ebb of tide, men must begin to spare
-Their native power: the nerves are perilous things
-To sport with: palsy a price exorbitant
-For passing pleasure: to adventure youth
-Throughout one's life--why, Tristram, that's
-To burn the candle in the middle too!
-
-Sir T.                            I burnt
-A torch to-day to Aphrodite: yes;
-And burnt it out: the more fool I; for love
-Should leave a gathering coal. I know, I know!
-But fear not you; my unclogged intellect
-Will fling the prophet's part I play to-night
-Across the footlights like a shower of stars,
-Of falling stars.
-
-St. J.        Distort not hazardous tropes
-To evil omens!
-
-Sir T.       Expect no triumph, Gervase.
-A stormy night; shipwreck, perhaps.
-
-St. J.                           At least
-My prologue will compel a tolerant mood.
-
-Sir T. A paying audience tolerant! Money's worth;
-They come to be arrested, entertained.
-Your speech will goad a curiosity
-Already piqued. The play's a great event,
-No doubt; but your success may be the world's
-Defeat.
-
-St. J. The world's defeat?
-
-Sir T.                   By which I mean
-You come a hundred years before your time.
-
-St. J. You must not think, nor feel that! Heart and brain
-The world is with us, waiting for our word.
-
-Sir T. The world is waiting always for the word
-It must obey, the news it must believe;
-But never recognizes what it needs,
-And worships only craft and jugglery.
-It loves to see a well-known trick performed
-Another way, to hear an old lie told
-Divertingly in some fresh parable.
-
-St. J. That's not the great mood, Tristram.
-
-Sir T.                                   No; it's war:
-Behind, the great idea; here, in front,
-The petty detail and order of the night.
-Remember your prediction: You believe
-Terrific war will burst the chrysalis,
-The Christendom that hangs in filthy rags
-About the eager soul already winged
-With crimson plumes and violet, green and gold,
-Psyche at last, pure Matter of itself,
-Imagination, free of the Universe.
-With words and shows equipped we wage great war,
-And here to-night deliver battle. Temple!
-
-[Enter Temple from the Dressing-room.]
-
-                                      Wine,
-Heroic brandy, or the water of life? ...
-Champagne for me.... Nothing? To toast the play!
-
-St. J. That's not my mood at all!
-
-Sir T.                           Nor is it mine!
-The shimmering surface of the player's life
-Is all he flaunts when most his soul is stirred.
-He turns the silver lining to the world;
-The tempest and the darkness where he breeds
-His high ostents and subtleties of art
-Are hidden. Who can tell what tragic mirth
-May occupy the other side of the moon?
-
-St. J. Fill up for me too, Temple! I forget
-In this erect and seminal thought of mine
-That men are many-sided. I toast the war
-Our play proclaims to-night.
-
-[Temple, having filled two tumblers with champagne, returns to the
-Dressing-room. Sir Tristram and St. James's drink.]
-
-Sir T.                    The war of wars!
-
-St. J. A century, a millennium of war
-Against the sin and sacro-sanctity
-That holds the world in thrall and hides from man
-His true material being.
-
-[Rouse appears at the door of the Reception-room.]
-
-Rouse.              The overture,
-My lord.
-[Disappears.]
-
-St. J. I come, I come.--Strange fear perturbs
-Me suddenly.
-
-Sir T.       But that's a certain sign
-Of perfect power. The house will welcome you:
-We love frank courage still.
-
-St. J.                    Courage? What courage?
-Having some gift of oratory, I
-Deliver my own prologue. Courage once
-Took heart in men when those who thought and spake
-Were racked and roasted: this attempt
-Exacts effrontery: not courage.
-
-Sir T.                     Say
-Effrontery: you do it; it is yours;
-A piece of you: accept it; love it therefore.
-
-St. J. A shamefulness attends this thing. The house
-Will hiss me, Tristram.
-
-Sir T.               No; your fervid voice
-Will mould and temper to delight the crude
-Anticipation of the audience. Speak
-Like one inspired; speak, Gervase, like yourself.
-
-[St. James's goes out.]
-
-Now, Temple, quickly!
-
-[As Sir Tristram crosses to his Dressing-room Europa Troop enters,
-dressed for her part.]
-
-Europa.             Tristram! Tristram! See
-How beautiful I am! Not dressed yet! Fie!
-Kiss me; my bosom. Are you tired of me?
-I pout then! Dear, to-day: so good you were
-That I can think of nothing in the world
-But to be yours; and you must come to-night!
-My love is inexhaustible: as like
-Irradiant metal that scatters momently
-Its multitudinous lustre, as summer-time
-Is like the month of June: the more it spends
-The more it has to spend.
-
-[Opens the door of the Business-room and turns up the light.]
-
-                     And, dear, I need
-Some money; men with bills molested me
-As I came up the stairs; the attendants here
-Relax their duties sadly: I believe
-They're not above a bribe.
-
-[Sir Tristram closes the door of his Dressing-room, and takes from
-the secret drawer in the Business-room some bank-notes, which he
-hands to Europa.]
-
-                       How much?
-
-Sir T.                              The whole!
-You've had it all. This was a treacherous hoard,
-And rightly spent on you. In any way
-Of honest business, or dishonest art,
-It had been worse than lost, like fairy gold
-That turns to shreds of flint when daylight kills
-Its phantom glory. It was wisely spent.
-We have obliged each other.
-
-[Sir Tristram enters his Dressing-room, and speaks from it unseen.]
-
-Europa.                 How hard you are!
-Harder than me. But you will come to-night?
-
-Sir T. Perhaps. You know this splendid play will fail.
-
-Europa. Our parts will save it, Tristram; you and I.
-What chiming prattle do we love to hear--
-"The play is nothing; but the acting? Ah,
-"Sir Tristram! Oh, Europa!" Stupid plays
-Are what we want, with skeletons to drape
-In flesh and blood of us. You'll come to-night?
-
-Sir T. If the play fails?
-
-Europa.                Can't I console you, Tristram?
-
-Sir T. If it succeeds?
-
-Europa.             You triumph in my arms.
-
-Sir T. Not tired of me?
-
-Europa.                Not nearly! Hateful word!
-Are _you_ tired, Tristram?
-
-Sir T.               A little, of myself.
-
-Europa. Come home with me to-night, and you shall fall
-In love with Tristram Sumner. I have charms
-Beyond belief to make men love themselves.
-You come?
-
-Sir T.    I come.
-
-Europa.         The coda, Tristram! Quick!
-Clang, clash, sapristi, pomb! The overture
-Is over. I must hear St. James's speak
-His prologue.
-
-Sir T.      Do. And send me word at once
-How they receive him.
-
-Europa.             I shall send my love
-A message of episcopal debuts,
-Episcopal debuts, episcopal----
-[Goes out]
-
-[Enter Lady Sumner.]
-
-Sir T. [Still from his Dressing-room]
-That some one?
-
-Lady S.      Yes.
-
-Sir T.            Who is it?
-
-Lady S.                   One you wished
-Never to see again.
-
-Sir T.            My wife!
-
-Lady S.                   That was.
-I came in haste. I had a deep resolve;
-But all my purpose crumbled as I passed
-Europa Troop in the corridor.
-
-Sir T. [At the door of his Dressing-room] Who else!
-What other actress could you hope to meet?
-She takes the heroine in our play to-night.
-
-Lady S. Your mistress, Tristram: I could tell at once.
-
-Sir T. After the play: I cannot see you now.
-[Withdraws into the Dressing-room.]
-
-Lady S. "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----"
-
-Sir T.
-[Entering the Reception-room and closing the door of the
-Dressing-room.]
-Give me that letter!
-
-Lady S.          It's bitten in my brain.--
-"--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."
-
-Sir T. You stole that letter.
-
-Lady S.                  I stole it.
-
-Sir T.                              Give it me.
-
-Lady S. I burnt it in the forest: the flame of it
-Was like a passion-flower.
-
-Sir T.                   That crude account
-Of nauseous lust!
-
-Lady S.        Nothing is nauseous men
-And women do in any mood at all.
-But to be old and done--that's nauseous; worse
-Than death. Why can't we die by taking thought?
-
-Sir T. Who wrote it?
-
-Lady S.             Odham himself. I knew his hand.
-
-Sir T. How was this managed? Um? You won't? You must!
-Odham, being ill and bribed, you took his place,
-A substitute, in male attire?
-
-Lady S.                 I did!
-How have you guessed it, Tristram?
-
-Sir T.                          Could there be
-A way besides as simple--and secure!
-The infantile device of Cupid, blind
-Betrayer of himself! Old Odham spied:
-He saw you in Warwick's arms between the acts.
-A pleasant memory!
-
-Lady S.         I have faced it all.
-
-Sir T. Why are you come?
-
-Lady S.                  I came like destiny,
-Prepared and armed with power and purpose, gained
-In the forest. But I met your mistress: fate
-Of worlds and women is shifted by such straws.
-
-[Re-enter Hildreth.]
-
-Sir T. Back to the forest, then.--What is it, Hildreth?
-
-Hildreth. St. James's triumphs.
-
-Sir T.                        And without offence?
-No protest?
-
-Hildreth. None. A section seemed at first
-In tune for ribaldry; but soon his clear
-Goodwill, the nerve and music of his voice,
-His gracious looks and speech secured the house.
-The gallery points his periods with applause;
-The stalls sit purring like a catshow charmed
-With extra cream or chin adroitly scratched;
-And women from the boxes lean and listen
-Like cows across a gate at milking-time.
-
-Sir T. The house is fused then?
-
-Hildreth.                     Mob at once, well pleased
-With anything.
-
-Sir T.        And well begun's half done!
-The prologue's over?
-
-Hildreth.          No. I meant to note
-The finish; but Europa Troop despatched
-Immediate news. She said----
-
-[Re-enter Europa Troop.]
-
-Europa.               Too soon, too soon!
-Oh, Tristram!--Pardon, madam--Applause has whirled
-St. James's to the skies. He stands entranced,
-With face uplifted like a seraph, pealing
-Material music, from his prologue worlds
-Away. Into the nebula! The house
-Sits up and holds its breath.
-
-[Re-enter Abbot.]
-
-Abbot.                  Sir Tristram, come!
-In Heaven's name come! St. James's spreads himself
-Worse than we ever heard him; miles beyond
-The limits of the play! He must be stopped!
-
-[Re-enter Salerne.]
-
-Salerne. You've told him?
-
-Abbot.                  Yes. The Bishop's broken loose,
-Discoursing Matter like a thunderstorm;
-A thick brocade and silvery web of rain,
-With crash of bells and bolts, while through the loom
-A random shuttle of golden lightning plays--
-As Warwick might have said.
-
-Salerne.                   Amenity
-To what is happening! "All is Matter, all,"
-The Bishop cried, when from the gallery dropped
-A question like a bomb, "Hi! What price God?"
-
-Sir T. Olympus felt itself neglected. Well?
-
-Salerne. Then all the blasphemy we've heard him speak
-Came trolling forth, "The shutters of the mind;
-"A fire-proof curtain: ghastly cul-de-sac;
-"A last excuse; sublime taboo; a tip;
-"A patent medicine: an accepted lie."
-"Atheist!" they cry, "blasphemer!" scourging him
-To reckless opposition. There he stands
-At every lull in the tempest knelling out
-His dogma like a tocsin. What to do
-Surpasses me!
-
-[Enter Mark Belfry.]
-
-Belfry.      God! Crowds believe in God!
-My cats, Sir Tristram, what a fool you are!
-A fighting parson crossed the floats and all
-The stalls came after bellowing--men I mean.
-The pittites followed and the gallery boys
-Are breaking forms and shying splinters. "God!
-"For God!" they roar, parson and moneylender,
-Broker and banker, counterjumper, peer.
-The women, too; they all believe in God;
-Duchesses, milliners, wives and prostitutes,
-They scream for God. God pays! you bet! God pays!
-They'll wreck your theatre, Tristram; but I'll buy it!
-The Grosvenor? Yes; in ruins! I want it. Name
-Your figure, Tristram.
-
-Sir T.             Where's St. James's?
-
-Belfry.                                 Dead,
-I guess, by this time; trampled into pulp.
-
-[Lady Sumner sinks fainting on the couch unnoticed by the others.]
-
-Sir T. My Gervase! God forbid! Abbot, Salerne,
-Darken the theatre. Let the orchestra
-Strike up a blaring march. We'll clear the stage,
-And play St. James's play. Come after me!
-
-Belfry. Cash, Tristram, cash! You know you're ruined. Name
-Your price. I want the Grosvenor Theatre--and I'll----
-
-[Sir Tristram goes out, followed by everybody except Lady Sumner.]
-
-[Enter Warwick Groom.]
-
-Groom. Martha! To meet you here! ... Sleeping? A swoon!
-
-[He raises her to a sitting posture, and she begins to revive. As she
-breathes with difficulty he unfastens her cloak, and finds her
-dressed like a boy.]
-
-Lady S. Oh, Warwick, are we dead? My throat is parched
-Enough for hell.
-
-[He breaks the neck of a bottle of champagne, fills a tumbler, and
-gives her to drink]
-
-              Alive still in the world
-Of lust and lush! Oh, Warwick, strike me, hurt me!
-My withered fancy flounders in the mire;
-My memory chooses words I never loved,
-Ideas foreign to my prime. Pure pain,
-Absorbing every sense, would clean my soul.--
-Is this the Parthenon or the Grosvenor, Warwick?
-
-Groom. The Grosvenor, Martha.
-
-Lady S.                         Something is happening here.
-
-Groom. Something abnormal for the stage! I passed
-Unnoticed in the tumult!
-
-Lady S.               Listen, Warwick,
-As if you were the Universe itself.
-No one would give an ear, or understand;
-But you will, Warwick; I belong to you;
-You had the bloom and scent, the flower of me.
-I think of that unhallowed, holy week
-A hundred times a day, a hundred times.
-You were my lover, Warwick, and my friend;
-My child, my doll: I used to dress you, dear.
-I live in that: that wonder-working time,
-When all my senses and my soul, aroused
-From the sweet slumber of virginity,
-Became one instinct and ardour of womanhood.
-Lay your proud head upon my bosom, love--
-My faded bosom.--Now, my dear, now, now!
-If we could fall asleep and never waken.--
-Why did I marry Tristram! Why? Not once
-Have you demanded that.
-
-Groom.               Because I guessed.
-He showed me to you----
-
-Lady S.   Hush! He did: and more--
-He told me you were any woman's man.
-
-Groom. That was true, too.
-
-Lady S.                  But you adored me, Warwick?
-You had a passion for me, a passion, Warwick?
-
-Groom. I loved you then as truly as I love
-You now; haggard and worn, or fresh and sweet,
-You were and are the woman of my choice;
-You only, Martha.
-
-Lady S.        And you, my man of men.
-Give me some wine again. Will you not drink?
-
-[They drink; and Lady Sumner sings.]
-
-When I had found a gem I lost
-   Where none would ever think,
-My heart became a cup of wine
-   I gave my love to drink.
-
-My voice is cracked; but, Warwick, do you know,
-There's not a happier woman in the world.
-You wonder at my dress? Sit here by me:
-I'll tell you pleasantly the whole romance.
-And smoke! Do you remember how we quarrelled
-About tobacco? You loved it best, you said--
-To plague me, Warwick: better than women or wine.
-But when I wept you tossed a box away
-Of Delicadedzas worth their weight in gold.
-
-[While Groom turns to the cabinet to choose a cigar, Lady Sumner
-pours the contents of the vial into her wine. GROOM then sits
-beside her.]
-
-This is the story, Warwick. My husband knew:
-Blackmail, or wanton mischief, Odham meant,
-And wrote him; but he died, old Odham did,
-If you remember, on my wedding-day.
-My husband never told me. A month ago
-I found old Odham's letter, and knew by it
-The fire and fuel of my husband's hate.
-My husband loved me long; and I loved him,
-Although I married him in a pique at you:
-People are made that way: a man and woman
-That pig together come to love each other.
-Blister my tongue! It is not I that speak--
-Only the ruins of me, the broken bits.--
-My husband's love being dead and mine being dead--
-That kind of love dies out, and when it dies
-It's dead indeed, in women: dead love being turned
-To festering jealousy and hate in him
-By reason of the letter he ignored
-When I was young and queen of hearts--I used
-To think it beautiful of me to keep
-Myself for Tristram: I had, you know,
-A thousand lovers, Warwick: is it true
-I was as tempting as they said and sang?
-
-Groom. All men adored you, Martha: doubt it not.
-Your shape, your walk, your talk, your mouth, your eyes,
-Body and soul, all men desired you, dear.
-
-Lady S. I shall die happy, Warwick.--My husband's hate,
-My horror of myself were killing me,
-When Gervase came, my cousin Gervase; he
-Whose play it is to-night. Did some one say
-They're trampling him to death? But that can't be!
-
-Groom. Oh, that's impossible!
-
-Lady S.                     I dreamt it, Warwick.--
-My cousin Gervase, bishop and genius, best
-Of angels always, with a wonderful
-Injunction from the Universe, a most
-Authentic mandate, severed us; and me
-He carried to the forest, there to clothe
-My naked fancy with the Universe,
-A sinless, Godless Universe of his.
-It seems to me a matter of little moment
-Whether there is a God or not; but Sin
-Is great--the greatest: all is death save Sin:
-That is _my_ message, Warwick! Every one
-Must have a message now: the only way
-To individualize. Warwick, have _you_
-A message?
-
-Groom. I have a message, Martha; one
-I shall deliver shortly.
-
-Lady S.            Tell it now.
-
-Groom. Not now; and not to you.
-
-Lady S.                          In everything,
-My dearest love, you shall be absolute Warwick,
-And tell me not, or tell me as you choose.
-
-Groom. I see how much you need to talk. My heart
-Is listening: speak your heart out, child.
-
-Lady S. I roamed the forest day and night and fixed
-My fancy in the nebula at first.
-Profound relief it was to breathe no more
-The breath of man and woman, love and hate,
-Desire, despair, Heaven, Hell, and God, and Sin:
-To be pure soullessness awaiting chance,
-My cousin told me of, when all the orbs
-That hang about the Sun, and me and mine
-Shall fall into its bosom, or other radiant
-Passion of Matter impregnate space anew.
-But life was not so easily rebuked:
-I had that letter; and through the nebula,
-As potent rays will pierce substantial things,
-It seared itself upon my heart and brain.
-My sin tormented me; and everywhere
-Nothing but Sin I saw: concupiscence
-Of insect, bird, and beast: bloodstained besides;
-Not only foxes, weasels, falcons, rats,
-But blackbirds, thrushes, robins drenched with blood
-Of helpless prey and raving drunken songs.
-In candelabra where the scented oil
-Of honeysuckle burned, I found a crowd
-Of shameless couples, male and female, paired--
-A brothel of midges, Warwick; in tender bells
-Of chaste convolvuluses spider-wolves
-Attacked unhappy bees; and once I saw
-A cheerful skylark chewing a grasshopper
-That wriggled like a man being sawn asunder.
-I thought of business, policy, pleasure, war,
-Where folk devour each other; and in a flash
-I understood that it must still be so:
-No man or woman can ever lift a foot
-Except to tread and splash in someone's heart.
-And out of that my dazzling message sprang,
-That Life is the Sin of the Universe. You see?
-_We_ do not sin; we _are_ Sin, Warwick. Yes!
-It makes the whole world beautiful, I think.
-The Sin is great and splendid, deep and high,
-Exquisite Sin: physicians feel like this,
-Studying a perfect fever, or some disease
-It palsies one to think of. Life is Sin,
-The wonderful wild Sin of the Universe.--
-[Rises, and walks to the door and back.]
-Where was I, Warwick?
-
-Groom. [Rises]       In the forest, Martha.
-Why did you leave it?
-
-Lady S.            For a purpose, high
-And tender. I took upon myself the Sin
-Of the Universe as far as the Universe has sinned
-In me; repented of it, and straightway came
-To Tristram, intending to confess and be
-Forgiven. First I went home, and dressed myself
-Once more in these, the wrappage of my sin,
-My special sin, my passionate, wilful sin:--
-We are the sin of the Universe; but Sin
-Itself can sin? Perhaps; I cannot tell.
-
-Groom. You kept these?
-
-Lady S.               In a wardrobe, fresh as spring
-With yearly lavender. A fitting garb
-Of penitence it seemed; a punishment,
-A pang, indeed, to show myself to him,
-My husband, in the vesture of my love!
-
-Groom. And did you not?
-
-Lady S.                  No, Warwick, for I met
-His mistress at the door, and gentleness
-Became malignity.
-
-Groom.         But afterwards?
-What end did you propose?
-
-Lady S.                My death, my death!
-Oh, love, I wish to die: I mean to die--
-Alone, without regret. That week of Sin
-I came here to repent envelopes all
-The past and all the future in a cloud
-Of glory. At the sight of you my mind,
-And that imagination which I am--
-Let me remember that: the Universe
-Is pure imagination conscious in us:
-Most beautiful! The Universe becomes
-That week of passionate Sin and hides my soul
-As in the pristine fire. Take off my cloak.
-
-[She advances to the centre of the room. Groom follows and removes
-her cloak.]
-
-Am I not beautiful again?
-
-Groom.               As fresh
-As hawthorn buds, desirable as wine
-In summer droughts and molten calentures,
-As sweet as bread and meat to starving men!
-What miracle is this?
-
-Lady S.          The miracle
-Of Life triumphant. Drink to Life and Love.
-
-[They drink.]
-
-It stings a little! ... Help me, Warwick! Oh!
-
-[He supports her to the couch, and she sits.]
-
-Groom. You've taken poison? Have I drunk it, too?
-
-Lady S. No, Warwick; I took it all. I want to die.
-Help me; embrace me; hold me! Oh, what pain!
-Let me lie down.
-
-[He lays her on the couch.]
-
-               Inflexible as love,
-Death rends and hurts at first; but soon its way
-Is like a summer voyage in the south.
-What bells are these? That music in the air?
-I know!--the stealthy hansoms jingling past
-With doors half open, nightly traps to catch
-Adventurous lovers. Cafés disengage
-Self-centred diners fed and flushed to dream
-Of deeds of love in glimmering theatres,
-The woman and the man, till it be time
-To take each other sweetly. Kiss me, Warwick.
-You have your arms about me?
-
-Groom.                    Yes.
-
-Lady S.                         I die
-Wrapped round about with youth and love and life.
-The earth is like a chariot of fire
-Wheeling into the Sun. Good night.
-[Dies.]
-
-Groom.                          Good night.
-Nothing is wonderful since all is wonder.
-
-[He covers Lady Sumner's body with her cloak. Then he takes from his
-breast-pocket a long sheath-knife.]
-
-Now for _my_ message.
-[Goes out.]
-
-
-ACT V
-
-Scene: The stage of the Grosvenor Theatre. The curtain is down.
-Scene-shifters struggle with wrecked scenery, and Property-men carry
-out broken furniture. On the left, his head supported by Europa
-Troop, St. James's lies unconscious: two Doctors attend him. Sir
-Tristram, whose clothes are torn and whose face is bruised and
-bloody, is talking with Mark Belfry on the right. The Orchestra is
-playing fortissimo. Above the music an occasional whistle or cry is
-heard as the last of the audience leave the theatre. When the music
-ceases Warwick Groom enters on the left, and waits his opportunity
-unseen by the others.
-
-
-Belfry. [Writing with a fountain-pen in a cheque-book.]
-By judgment, instinct, sense and common-sense
-Deserted! Stagger me, Tristram! What, what? Why,
-There's reams of print on crowd-psychology,
-If quarter a century of the footlights left you
-Ignorant of the hickory-hearted truth
-That God's the popular voice, the public mind!
-[Offers Sir Tristram a cheque.]
-You deal?
-
-Sir T. [Taking the cheque.] On terms. What play must I produce?
-
-Belfry. No terms. [Takes out his pocket-book and writes in it.]
-                  I buy the theatre. Take Europa
-To Monte Carlo, or live a decent life
-At home here on the balance: it reaches that.
-I want the Grosvenor.
-
-Sir T.             Do you mean--retire?
-
-Belfry. You hit the white. The man that staged a play
-To make the Lord sit up in a theatre
-Is--fundamentally disqualified.
-The man that stands Mark Belfry's impudence
-Will take Mark Belfry's money: it never fails.
-[Tears from his pocket-book the page on which he has been writing and
-offers it to Sir Tristram.]
-Your signature?
-
-Sir T. [Declines the proffered document and tears up the cheque.]
-            No; not for twice the sum.
-But treble it, and the Grosvenor Theatre's yours.
-
-Belfry. I want the Grosvenor.
-[He writes another cheque and another receipt. Sir Tristram takes the
-one, endorses it, and signs the other.]
-                           So? You don't inquire?
-
-Sir T. No, Belfry.
-
-Belfry.         I possess the Grosvenor now,
-The premier theatre in London. Well,
-I'm going to change it to a music-hall.
-
-Sir T. You won't do that?
-
-Belfry.                  I will. The drama's done.
-This is a new thing I determine. Say:
-I've fifty theatres in America,
-And six in London; and I know. It pays,
-Variety business pays: the public makes
-Its entertainment, and it makes it that.
-
-Sir T. Drama will flourish while there's love and hate.
-
-Belfry. Although you wrote it in all the copy-books
-'Twould still be true, Sir Tristram--as true as this,
-That there must be religion while there's life.
-But fashions wear, customs and costumes fade,
-And change comes jesting like a conjurer.
-The music-hall begins the world again
-In Anglo-American drama:--not a joint
-Of evolution about it; that's to come:--
-A clean solution of continuity
-Between the theatre about to be
-And that which was. Your Bishop knew a thing:
-It's Matter people want. Spirit's played out
-For entertainment. Don't attack it, though!
-You've had a lesson here to-night to last
-A year or two.
-
-Sir T.      I shall not now retire,
-But build another theatre. Death or life,
-Labour or leisure balance the scales: again
-A splendid stage, a strenuous time, because
-You purpose to undo the thing I did.
-
-Belfry. Build me a dozen, and I'll buy them all,
-And fill them nightly with variety shows:
-I'm at the heart of this and understand.
-
-Sir T. You don't believe this, Belfry?
-
-Belfry.                             Don't I? Say:
-You reckon that your English Church is dead
-Three hundred years or so, for all the state
-It keeps, the wealth it grips?
-
-Sir T.                   As dead as Pharaoh;
-A mummy spiced and gilded.
-
-Belfry.                    So's your drama!
-I've heard you say it, and you know it's true;
-The play to-night allowed it--the prologue did.
-Theocracy and theatrocracy:
-The one long dead; the other----
-
-Sir T.                  Well?
-
-Belfry.                       Stillborn!
-Two things there are alive in England now,
-As red as blood, as hot as fire: your crude
-Salvation Army and your Music-Hall.
-The first's no trade of mine; the other is;
-And here's my theory of it. Your civilization
-Evolves as barbarism in modern cities,
-A highly decorated barbarism.
-Your houses are merely wigwams where you sleep--
-Sometimes. You dine abroad in crowds; then lug
-Your indigestion to your music-hall
-To drowse and smoke at ease. A play demands
-A little intellect--which you hate to use:
-Your music-hall assails your muscles mainly,
-With ground and lofty tumbling, gymnasts, tramps,
-Antipodists, weight-lifters, wrestlers; tricks
-That gibe at gravitation; monkeys, dogs;
-Illusions; jugglers, bipeds, quadrupeds;
-Prodigious force and skill of man and beast,
-Trained effort and sustained the savage loves
-And feels his muscles pacified to watch.
-The muscle business first: then comic turns;
-Singers and dancers, bounders, jesters, cranks,
-That make your savage laugh: he loves to laugh;
-For what's your laughter but a free discharge
-Of muscular energy under a pleased
-Constraint. As for his slumbering fantasy,
-The multitudinous rhythm and massive hues
-Of Leicester Square's magnific ballets flood
-The channels of his sense with undefined
-Voluptuousness: your savage loves to dream
-Obscure delights, uncertain glories.... What!
-I tire you, Tristram? But I like the theme;
-It takes me by the throat.
-
-Sir T.                The music-hall
-Is utterly obscene, a heinous mart
-Of alcohol and meretricious flesh.
-
-Belfry. A prime, barbaric entertainment, fit
-For gorged barbarians!
-
-Sir T.               But the theatre--
-
-Belfry. Extinct: an anteroom to the nursery;
-Annex to the lecture-hall; a mothers' meeting;
-A kindergarten: men forsaken it quite.
-Out of the music-hall a drama springs,
-Naive, natural, splendid; hidden, impossible,
-But happily conceived when he arrives
-Who shall beget it. You talk of messages,
-Of orientation: there's my Yankee mite--
-A budding drama in the music-hall.
-I think I've read somewhere that once before
-Dramatic monologue became a play--
-When Aeschylus turned up in Attica!
-You grant the halls are fairly Dionysian----
-
-Groom. [Stabs Sir Tristram.]
-I thought of this upon your wedding-day,
-And every summer since.
-
-Sir T.         [Falls] Help, Hildreth, help!
-
-Belfry. [Seizes Groom, who makes no resistance]
-You murdering hound! Why--Groom! Of all men, Groom!
-Prince of good fellows and of actors! Groom!
-
-[Enter Hildreth, Salerne, and Abbot. Their clothes are torn and their
-faces scratched and bruised. Hildreth kneels by Sir Tristram. Salerne
-and Abbot take charge of Groom.]
-
-Hildreth. Tristram! My friend! My chief!
-
-Sir T.                                   Hildreth! Good lad!
-
-Europa. You fool; you dull, dull groom! Let _me_; let _me!_
-
-[Europa and Hildreth support Sir Tristram while one of the Doctors
-attends to his wound.]
-
-Tristram, you need me now!
-
-Sir T.                  Europa! Yes;
-I love to have a woman near me.--Death,
-Sudden as I desired: but one regret--
-One only; my theatre. If you had struck
-Before I sold it!
-
-Groom.        Curse me, can't you, Tristram!
-
-Belfry. [To himself]
-He'll want the bargain cancelled. Shall I? No;
-I need the Grosvenor, and the Grosvenor's mine.
-[Goes out quickly.]
-
-Sir T. [Giving Hildreth the cheque]
-Yet I die solvent, Hildreth. Belfry's cheque:
-It rings a merry peal. Unless--By Heaven!
-Belfry, you'll not exact this now!
-
-Hildreth.                     He's gone,
-Sir Tristram.
-
-Sir T.     Fearing the appeal of death,
-I verily believe.--A music-hall?
-It matters nothing what comes after me:
-I had my day.
-
-Groom.    Abuse, deride, provoke
-Me back to madness: thought and deed are seas
-Asunder: I would lay my own life down
-Not to have struck. Machines we are, wound up
-To weave we know not what. I languish now
-Like wing'd exasperation that expends
-A virulent dart, and, hebetated, dies.
-
-[Enter Temple.]
-
-Temple. Sir Tristram! Where's my master?
-
-Salerne.                                  Silence, fool!
-
-Temple. But something terrible has come to pass.
-
-Sir T. Something extravagant since Temple shouts.
-
-Temple. Are _you_ dead also, sir?
-
-Sir T.                           Not dead yet, Temple.
-Who else is dead or dying? Is Gervase gone?
-
-1st Doctor. The Bishop breathes again; but cannot live,
-Though consciousness returns.
-
-Sir T.                     Lay me beside him:
-We two should die together.--Let Temple speak
-Before you move me.--Temple, what's the matter?
-
-Temple. Your lady, sir; she's dead; and on the floor
-I found this vial.
-
-Sir T.         She lies at peace?
-
-Temple.                          She seemed
-Asleep. I tiptoed to the dressing-room
-Afraid to wake her. Then I felt a ghost
-Or something near me. Peeping out, I saw
-No motion on the couch; the lady dead,
-Her face like paper and her lips all blue.
-
-Groom. I saw her die as sweetly as she lived,
-A sacrifice forlorn. She should have been
-A worshipped wife, a mother guarded close
-With children: what she was we made her--you
-And I----
-
-Sir T. Enough of that!
-
-Groom.               Enough; it serves
-My purpose gallantly! I feel again
-The murderer in my nerves, not to be purged
-Until the rope swings taut: out of the earth,
-Through the foundations of your theatre,
-It mounts into my brain, a seething fire.
-How good it was to kill you--you that stood
-Between me and the world!
-
-Sir T.                 You took your chance
-With others.
-
-Groom.   No; I left it all to chance,
-And trusted to my genius.
-
-Sir T.                 I relied
-On friendship and the world's goodwill.
-
-Groom.                             Cheats, both!
-You were my friend, and therefore you betrayed me;
-Only a friend it is that can betray;
-And every friend's a traitor, first and last.
-
-Sir T. Friendship and treachery synonymous?
-Mine was the stronger nature.
-
-Groom.                   The craftier!
-You stole my love, you robbed me of my place,
-Applause, consideration, ease, renown,
-Riches and power that come of eminence;
-And this you did by every mean device--
-Sad revelation, innuendo, shrug,
-Suggestive pity, supercilious smile----
-
-Sir T. And you?
-
-Groom.          Oh!--I ... I was magnanimous:
-I wished to kill; but to the very last
-Hugged the idea of a great eclipse
-Of you and yours to send you sighing down
-The bitter road, my foot upon the neck
-Of all your fame.
-
-Sir T.          You lost the hope of that?
-
-Groom. Therefore I struck.
-
-Sir T.                      A candid murderer.
-
-Groom.                                      Men
-Should kill each other. God, how it satisfies!
-
-2nd Doctor. You must not talk, Sir Tristram.--Will you remove
-That most unhappy man?
-
-[Salerne and Abbot, attended by Blyth and Boulder, who have entered,
-take Groom up stage.]
-
-Groom.               Murder him; stab
-The intimate friend, the inevitable foe!
-I shall proclaim it from the prisoner's dock:
-This is a gospel worth a thousand lies
-Of tolerance and love. Did men cut off
-The troublers of the world offence would cease.
-When bland dissimulation paves a way
-With broken pride that was its honest peer,
-And chuckling craft destroys us unperceived
-High time it is for men to kill outright!
-
-[Groom is taken out.]
-
-St. J. What dreadful voice is that?
-
-2nd Doctor.                      A murderer's.
-
-St. J.                                          Whose?
-
-2nd Doctor. One Warwick Groom.
-
-St. J.                             The actor, Tristram's friend?
-
-2nd Doctor. The same, my lord.
-
-St. J.                           Whom has he slain?
-
-2nd Doctor.                                       His friend.
-
-St. J. Is Tristram dead?
-
-Sir T.                  I lie here dying, Gervase.--
-Ah! Ah! Why torture me! I cannot live.
-
-1st Doctor. It is the order of our art----
-
-Sir T.                              Desist!
-Desist, I say, at once; and damn your art.--
-Pardon me, Doctor: I never could endure
-A scratch with patience: let me die at ease.
-
-1st Doctor. I might preserve your life a little while.
-
-Sir T. How long?--Reply!
-
-1st Doctor.              I cannot say.
-
-Sir T.                                A year?
-
-1st Doctor. Oh no! Until the morning at the most.
-
-Sir T. Take me to Gervase, Hildreth: quickly, Hildreth.
-
-[Hildreth, Europa, and the Doctors bring St. James's and Sir Tristram
-together, and support them, that they may see each other while they
-converse.]
-
-They've killed you, Gervase.
-
-St. J.                     I wished to set them free.
-This war will last a thousand years.
-
-Sir T.                           For us
-The war is over: notwithstanding, speak
-Your errand once again. Things in my life
-There are I would forget: your message wipes
-The world out.
-
-St. J.      All the past, both good and ill,
-My message clears away.
-
-Sir T.                 Leaving pure Matter:
-I love it!--And a world begun anew:
-That moved me most of all:--to launch the world
-In space again upon a virgin track,
-As though the foul old rut and blood-drenched way
-Had never been. I feel it, as I die,
-So deeply: actual world, and actual man.
-
-St. J. Yes; let us watch that man! I see him stand
-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.
-
-Sir T. We fill the abyss, left in the Universe
-By cancelling God, with the Universe itself.
-Great is it, Gervase; but the terror of it!
-
-St. J. Terror and splendour, Tristram! Who shall tell--
-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-lovers, 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?
-
-Sir T. It cannot be undone!
-
-St. J.                     It can, it will!
-For through the mist of tears and blood I see
-A greater breed of men, a nobler world,
-An independent power in the Universe,
-The Universe itself become aware.
-
-Sir T. The Universe itself become aware.
-
-[Neither speaks again, and shortly both die within a few moments of
-each other.]
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
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