: The Theatrocrat: A Tragic Play of Church and Stage by Davidson John - Drama

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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.

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