Chapter I: Introduction: Wordsworth's Immorality and Mine (1)

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.