



Produced by C. P. Boyko




The Theatrocrat

A TRAGIC PLAY OF CHURCH AND STAGE
BY
JOHN DAVIDSON

LONDON
E. GRANT RICHARDS
1905

TO THE GENERATION KNOCKING AT THE DOOR

Break--break it open; let the knocker rust:
Consider no "shalt not", and no man's "must":
And, being entered, promptly take the lead,
Setting aside tradition, custom, creed;
Nor watch the balance of the huckster's beam;
Declare your hardiest thought, your proudest dream:
Await no summons; laugh at all rebuff;
High hearts and youth are destiny enough.
The mystery and the power enshrined in you
Are old as time and as the moment new:
And none but you can tell what part you play,
Nor can you tell until you make assay,
For this alone, this always, will succeed,
The miracle and magic of the deed.
John Davidson.

INTRODUCTION
WORDSWORTH'S IMMORALITY AND MINE

Poetry is immoral. It will state any and every morality. It has done
so. There is no passion of man or passion of Matter outside its
province. It will expound with equal zest the twice incestuous
intrigue of Satan, Sin, and Death, and the discarnate adoration of
Dante for the most beatified lady in the world's record. There is no
horror of deluge, fire, plague, or war it does not rejoice to utter;
no evanescent hue, or scent, or sound, it cannot catch, secure, and
reproduce in word and rhythm. The worship of Aphrodite and the
worship of the Virgin are impossible without its ministration. It
will celebrate the triumph of the pride of life riding to victory
roughshod over friend and foe, and the flame-clad glory of the martyr
who lives in obloquy and dies in agony for an idea or a dream. Poetry
is a statement of the world and of the Universe as the world can know
it. Sometimes it is of its own time: sometimes it is ahead of time,
reaching forward to a new and newer understanding and
interpretation. In the latter case poetry is not only immoral in the
Universal order; but also in relation to its own division of time: a
great poet is very apt to be, for his own age and time, a great
immoralist. This is a hard saying in England, where the current
meaning of immorality is so narrow, nauseous, and stupid. I wish to
transmute this depreciated word, to make it so eminent that men shall
desire to be called immoralists. To be immoral is to be different:
that says it precisely, stripped of all accretions, barnacles and
seaweed, rust and slime: the keen keel swift to furrow the deep. The
difference is always one of conduct: there is no other difference
between man and man: from the first breath to the last, life in all
its being and doing is conduct. The difference may be as slight as a
change in the form of poetical expression or the mode of wearing the
hair; or it may be as important as the sayings of Christ, as vast
and significant as the French Revolution and the career of Napoleon.
Nothing in life is interesting except that differentiation which is
immorality: the world would be a putrid stagnation without it, and
greatness and glory impossible. Morality would never have founded the
British Empire in India; it was English piracy that wrested from
Iberia the control of the Spanish Main and the kingdom of the sea.
War is empowered immorality: poetry is a warfare.

What I mean by Wordsworth's immorality begins to appear. This most
naive and majestic person, leading the proudest, cleanest, sweetest
of lives, was, during all his poetical time, immoralist _sans tache_.
In his boyhood he can think of no other atonement for a slight
indignity done him than suicide; he is perverse and obstinate, defies
chastisement--is rather proud of it, and slashes his whip through
the family portrait; he breathes "among wild appetites and blind
desires": delights and exults in "motions of savage instinct":
sullen, wayward, intractable, nothing fascinates him except
"dangerous feats." Even when his poetical time is spent, he can still
do the thing that Wordsworth should do. Milton's watch being handed
round, he takes out his own, a procedure that makes the company
uneasy; and it is remembered against him by vulgar people who were
present and felt foolish; but Wordsworth would not have been
Wordsworth had he left this undone. In Paris of the Revolution he
"ranges the streets with an ardour previously unfelt