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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.

"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.

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.

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:--

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."

"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!"

"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."

"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.

"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."

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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