Read Ebook: The Theatrocrat: A Tragic Play of Church and Stage by Davidson John

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Ebook has 937 lines and 48961 words, and 19 pages

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.

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.

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 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 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. 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. 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!

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.

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!

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.

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