



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," 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