The Theatrocrat: A Tragic Play of Church and StageDavidson, John
General
The Theatrocrat: A Tragic Play of Church and Stage
Davidson, John
Drama
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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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