The Theatrocrat: A Tragic Play of Church and Stage

by John Davidson

"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.