University of Virginia Library

Scene I:

—A morning room in the Royal Palace, Christianstadt. It is lit with electric light and a fire burns in the grate. Through the open window a faint glow preceding the dawn is visible in the sky. Oswald and Florimond, who carries a portfolio, stand at the fire, regarding each other moodily, while servants set breakfast.
Mammon
[entering quickly].
Good morning, Oswald. Good morning, Florimond.
[Sits down to breakfast.
Oswald, you've thought of that?

Oswald.
Of what, King Mammon?

Mammon.
Your dukedom, man! What else should you remember?
Your dukedom, and your friends who shall become
Your generals and mine:—have you arranged
Their order?

Prounice enters, and the servants and she set Guendolen's breakfast upon a salver.
Mammon.
The Queen will breakfast in her room.
That's not enough: food's the great fount of passion.
[Places various dishes on the salver.
Say to the Queen by the nine stars of love
To think of me with every bite she eats.

Prounice goes out with the salver; and the servants also leave the room.
Mammon.
How many generals, Oswald?

Oswald.
Only two
Are fit for high command of last night's guard.

Mammon.
The others shall be captains. Their titles, Oswald?
Earls? Viscounts?

Florimond.
Such advancement suddenly
Announced, and of so many names unknown
To the world, would rouse intense suspicion, King.

Mammon.
Suspicion, Florimond! What should folk suspect?

Florimond.
Imaginary things: the public dreams,
The press expounds its dream, and ere we know
A fate is fashioned.

Mammon.
While I live and rule
The public will have little time to dream;
For every day a new deed shall be done,
Beyond the reach of public dreams or private.

Florimond.
These are untested men, King Mammon—soldiers
On approval. Your father's veterans, war-worn
To an edge and lustre, keen as frosty light,
(Pardon an old man's eulogy of age)
Were worthier of promotion.

Mammon.
Loyal worth
Shall not be overlooked in any service;
But, bringing something new into the world,
I must have youth to shape to my design.
I trust myself, my fortune, and my fate:
Oswald and I were friends; his comrades, too,
Were mine: therefore they cannot be unfit.
It is the constant luck of greatest men
To have at hand their proper implements;
In everything the universal will
Deflects the world to their meridian.—
Oswald, you shall be Duke of Christianstadt.

Oswald.
Most loyally I thank you, gracious King;
And being gracious, grant me one request;—
Let me remove the bodies to the chapel.

Mammon.
Why, Oswald?

Oswald.
Rumour in the city rings
Insane alarms already, and turbulent priests,
Instructed by the Abbot, urge the people
Against the murderers.

Mammon.
Murderers! Who's been murdered?

Oswald.
Those that lie dead in Olaf's Hall, they say.

Mammon.
And you would hide the bodies! Set them high
Upon the platform that the world may see.
I'll hear no question. Do it; do it now.

Oswald goes out.
Mammon
[continuing his breakfast].
Well, Florimond; you want me?

Florimond
[opening his portfolio].
I have here
Requests for audience of Prince Mammon: all
Our sects and parties build themselves on you;
And delegates who sought you yesterday,
Moved by your zealous summons for the dawn,
Are in attendance now, to see the King.

Mammon.
So; this may help. Who are they, Florimond?

Florimond
[reading from a paper].
“The Will-to-Power Men of the Nietzsche Guild.”

Mammon.
Ah! that insane belov'd philosopher!
Some say he is the spirit of the age.
What think you, Florimond?

Florimond.
I cannot tell:
My mind was set before his boom began.

Mammon.
He posed as Zoroaster, and led us back
To Dionysos: not our mark at all;
The past is past. And, for his prophecy?—
Why, Florimond, this Nietzsche was a Christian;
And that transvaluation of all values
Was neither more nor less than transmutation
Of transubstantiation:—grin, but grasp it:—
His Antichrist is Christ, whose body and blood
And doctrine of miraculous rebirth,
Became the Overman: Back-of-beyond,
Or—what's the phrase?—Outside good-and-evil:
That's his millennium, and we'll none of it.
I want the world to be much more the world;
Men to be men; and women, women—all
Adventure, courage, instinct, passion, power.—
Who next?

Florimond
[reading from a paper].
“Staff-captain Hakonsson.”

Mammon.
Salvation Army!
The old saint-soldier of the Isles I know,
Nietzsche the brave I know—world-people both,
And wonderful; but not their followers.

Florimond
[exhibiting several papers].
Pressmen.

Mammon.
Give them the King's regards, and bid them note
My speech to-day in every syllable.

Florimond.
[turning over a sheaf of papers].
Denominations, guildries, unions, clubs.

Mammon.
Let them have places in the hall.

Florimond
[handing Mammon a paper].


Mammon.
What's this?
[Reading.]
“A Root-and-branch Reformer from the Isles:”—
I'll see him, Florimond, and his company:
The Queen's compatriot.—None of all the rest.

Florimond
[handing Mammon a paper].
The Mayor of Christianstadt, and citizens
Conjoined with him, desire—

Mammon.
Admit them now.
What!—more?

Florimond
[handing Mammon a paper].
Strange men have come this morning, clad
In ancient armour: from the western coast
They hail: they worship Woden and profess
A Neo-paganism.

Mammon.
I'll see them, too.
The Mayor; this Island Revolutionist;
The Neo-pagans; and in that order. These
Are their papers? Very well. I'll broach
The heart and soul of Thule, and pick its brains,
That I may shape my speech to Thule's need:
These chosen three will sample everything.

Florimond goes out.
Mammon
[having finished breakfast leaves the table and stands at the fire.]
Napoleon lost his head in the Orangery—
Bewildered in the labyrinth of fate:
His brother saved him: I ... I have no brother.
Christ, when he might have driven his message straight
To the heart of Rome, stood silent, in a stupor,
Stunned like the prophet's sheep before the shearers:
Soul of the Universe, what a chance he missed!
Cæsar himself, thrice proven, wise as time,
Flung all away, declining royal honour,
In whose effulgence traitors and treachery,
Like darkness and the shadows of the night,
Disperse and cease to be: he lost the world
Through fear to lose it: had he crowned himself,
Conspiracy could scarce have breathed an hour
In presence of the courage and the deep
Resource betokened in the lofty act;
Or if the Ides of March had seen the end,
He then had done the thing for which he died.
Am I like these men? Will the human clot,
That palsies genius in the nick of time,
Upon the turning point of destiny
Occlude my brain, and stand me swooning there,
A monument of dumb distress before
The bodies of my father and my brother?

Florimond re-enters with Ole Larum, Tamberskelver, Vibbe, and the other Inceptors of the Teutonic Religion.
Mammon.
Thrice welcome, Master Mayor.—Now let me see:
[Sits and consults the Mayor's petition.
“Inceptors of a new religion”:—come!
Your businesses, municipal affairs,
Your families, prospects, pleasures, sickness, health—
Are not these all you need?

Larum.
Oh, no, King Mammon!
In times and tides of happiness and woe
We must give thanks, we must solicit strength:
The soul of man subsists in prayer and praise.

Mammon.
Now, I remember: you are nonconformist,
Proud of a purer creed, a broader mind.

Larum.
Loathing a dead creed and a narrow mind.

Mammon.
All creeds must die: why have a creed at all?

Larum.
King, we must worship something. Furthermore,
Eternity in front of us extorts
The world-cry of the spirit, “whither? whither?”
We are religious, and immortal soul
Turns to a fount immortal as itself.

Mammon.
But I deny your immortality:
Immortal mayors, immortal aldermen!
Think of the being you despise the most—
Some jack-in-office, parasite or pimp:
Would you have him immortal?—except in Hell:
You see!—But you are earnest men: expound
This new religion briefly.

Larum.
Tamberskelver,
Our Head-inceptor, is our spokesman.

Mammon.
Speak,
Head-inceptor Tamberskelver.

Tamberskelver.
King Mammon,
Our confident appeal is dashed at once
If you deny man's immortality.
Our aspiration and our travail soar
Aloft, and toil towards everlasting life
For every individual soul of man.

Mammon.
And whence arose this confidence in me?

Tamberskelver.
You walked, deliberate, out of Christendom,
The first of princes to disown the past.

Mammon.
That's the whole past, man's immortality:
'Twas out of that I came.

Tamberskelver.
Have you not studied
My treatises on soul?

Mammon.
I've never seen them.

Tamberskelver.
I sent them.—And my letters? Were they not read?

Mammon.
I never had your letters.

Tamberskelver.
They went unsigned.
You would not know them mine.

Mammon.
A vagrant mass
Of anonymity from every land
Followed me round the world.—You, Master Mayor,
Speak you. Your Tamberskelver misses fire.

Larum.
But all I know I learnt from Tamberskelver.

Mammon.
That matters nothing: a foolish husbandman
May sow a fertile plot; a bird, a wind
Impregnate homely soil with brilliant flowers.
Come, Master Mayor.

Larum.
My statement will be crude.

Mammon.
The better! I love all crudeness: truth is crude.

Larum.
It's difficult.—On both sides of the Atlantic
Teutonic folk, and in the southern seas
And lands afar, are ripe to have a god
Of their own race: pubescence of the soul—
That's our great phrase:—

Mammon.
Ah! Tamberskelver's?

Larum.
Yes.
This spiritual puberty of ours
Will sow the Universe with God: it must
Beget a God, or waste the seed of soul
In worshipping dead gods—which is a sort
Of psychic sodomy. We of the north
From age to age, since Olaf set the cross up,
Continued this unnatural vice (like all
The rest of Christendom), protesting still
Against the lusciousness of incense; art
In the church—immoral music, coloured glass;
The prurience of confession; virgin-worship,
Saints, transubstantiation, and the pomp
Whereby the wretched Latin races make
A mistress of religion: (although I change
The metaphor I keep within the sphere
Of sex, for that's illuminative in things
Religious). A decent, necessary wife
Our worship was; but now she's dead, and we,
A few determined burghers of Christianstadt,
Refuse to bake our bread in a cold oven.

Mammon.
Audacious!—What killed her, Master Mayor?

Larum.
Her womb
Prolapsed: that is to say—out of the Christian
Theory of creation the bottom fell;
And when your theory of creation goes
Your God goes.

Mammon.
Certain! I like you, Master Mayor.

Larum.
A foreign God, too, at the best, was ours—
Jehovah, one and single once, but one
And triple since, a kind of Cerberus.
We're tired of that—all that: we're tired of it.
And the long gestant Teuton vengeance, cognate
With puberty of soul that swells our thought,
Dethrones the decadent neo-Hebraism
Which Christianity is, and with its new
Cosmogony of uncreated worlds
Begins to shape a non-creating God.

Mammon.
All this intrigues me. And this God of yours?

Larum.
That's Tamberskelver's great discovery. Gods
Are racial; and as long as races are,
We cannot have a world-god. Languages
Are races: that's understood; blood's little; words
Are most when gods are canvassed or incept.

Mammon.
Incept?—Begetters of a God may risk
Neologisms.—Proceed!

Larum.
The gods of old
Evolved unconsciously in racial speech,
And are, in every cult, naive, human monsters,
Of incoherent and incongruous parts
Miraculously knit. For the first time
In the world's record, we of Christianstadt,
Unworthy but resolved inceptors, start
A God whose evolution shall be conscious:
No world-god, but a god Teutonic, foe
Of Latin races, Slavs and yellow men,
Of negroes, Hebrews, every other folk
A god whom we can worship, being ours,
And only ours. We did our best to like
The God converted negroes pray to, Celts,
Italians, Spaniards—people we despise:
But none of us could stomach it: a God
Common to all the world is too debased,
Too vulgar, too adulterous for us.
In days and nights of prayer we steeped our souls,
And blanched them clear of preconception—

Mammon.
Yes, Master Mayor. I know enough now. Gods
Are at a discount: Tamberskelver's plan
Is proof and pudding of it. A machine-made God?
A fattened god—a pâté de fois gras
For overnice religious epicures!
An end of divination! If any sign
Were wanting that the day of gods is done,
'Tis just this scheme to grow one locally
Under a forcing-frame. What the world needs
Is change: it's tired—as tired as you and I
Of all the past. But he who speaks to you
Is change incarnate, operant and crowned;
And you shall hear to-day when I address
The states the word you wait for. I approve
Your earnestness, your courage, your direct
Intelligence, authentic characters.—
Our revolutionists now.

Tamberskelver.
There must be God!
Teuton, we call him: Teuton, God of us!
Pubescent soul in every age and clime
Produces God—

Mammon.
You think so since you must.
But who would worship Tamberskelver's God?
Try and unthink that, friend.

Larum, Tamberskelver, and the other Inceptors go out.
Mammon.
My rebels now,
My worthy enemies.

Florimond.
They call themselves
Reformers. Worthy? No reform is worth
A king's applause.

Crawford, Vibbe, Jelke and the other Reformers enter.
Mammon.
He from the Isles—which is he?

Crawford.
I, King Mammon.

Mammon.
Why did you leave your country?

Crawford.
Because reform is automatic there:
Nothing can drive it on, nothing delay:
The caucuses between them grind it out;
Upper or nether stone alternately,
According as the surly islanders
Abuse their power and change the thing at will.
In Thule we expect catastrophe.

Mammon.
And you're the man for that?

Crawford.
For action, King.

Mammon.
What do you want?

Crawford.
In our memorial, all
Is well set out.

Mammon.
I haven't read it yet;
Nor shall I.—Speak: what do you want, you five?

Crawford.
We want the Revolution.

Mammon.
State it, then.
An end of kings, of course. And afterwards?

Crawford.
More than an end of kings. We want an end
Of lordship, titles, all gentility;
We want an end of punishment, of crime;
We want an end of service and respect;
Of property and poverty; of war—

Mammon.
Yes, yes; an end of everything: I know;
For when the king goes all goes at the last.
What do you want begun?

Crawford.
We want the world
Begun anew.

Mammon.
And so do I, and so
Does every man. Having the world in hand,
What follows?

Crawford.
Comfort follows first of all:
Food, shelter, clothes for every being born,
Insane or criminal, unfit or fit,
Idle or diligent—a corporate duty
That undertakes responsibility
In all relations: happiness itself,
For every human being as he is.

Mammon.
What right have rascals to be happy?

Crawford.
Right
And wrong are nothing: there they are, alive—
Desirous, envious, hungry, lustful men—
By no choice of their own.

Mammon.
That I deny,
For men beget themselves; they are the passion
Of their parentage.—Well, after happiness
For every blessed body, what ensues?

Crawford.
The breeding of a higher type of man.

Mammon.
By what device?

Crawford.
Unnatural selection:
I mean to say, by mating men and women
As horses are and cattle, poultry, dogs,
Instead of that old natural selection
By passionate love. Then, sterilizing fools,
Degenerates, weaklings, all who should not breed.

Mammon.
And what of happiness?

Crawford.
Oh, folk may pair
And have the satisfaction of their senses
In barren beds by means well known to all!

Mammon.
Most loathsome! What a hideous tyranny
Your world would be!—Why have you come to me?

Crawford.
We thought you were an anarch.

Mammon.
An anarch? I?
The stark unchristened foe of anarchy!

Jelke.
I take you for an evolutionist.
In our memorial you will find it said,
“The Christian times being past, there now begins
The new Darwinian era.” We desire—

Mammon.
'Tis I shall give a title to the age.
An evolutionist? No more than he
Who makes religion serve him in the world
May be pronounced a saint. This evolution,
The errantry of nature, is known, is caught:
Soon, tamed, apprenticed, disciplined and drilled,
'Twill be our most obedient minister.

Vibbe.
But has our King no passion for the poor;
No settled mind to dower disabled age;
To ease the burden on the back of labour
That every decade doubles; to provide
An equal chance for every man; to draw
The poison-fangs of bloated capital,
That python gorged with proletary prey?

Mammon.
That python gorged with proletary prey!
Park-eloquence, good friend. The world of men
Is as an organism:—a python?—true;
It sheds an annual slough of idlers, sots,
Incompetents, degenerates, criminals;
Or since the tissue of the macrocosm
You call society is knit of men,
As men are knit of divers plasmic cells,
I take the failures for the excrement,
The defecation of the commonwealth.
In antique times such human garbage strewed
With other ordure populous streets, but now,
Express as drainage in our more alert,
More wholesome, more elaborate period, hides
Our household refuse out of sight and mind,
The hospital, asylum, poorhouse, jail,
Sewers and cesspools of the social world,
Relieve our towns of waste humanity,
And keep the urban air as fresh as fresh.

Crawford.
But there must be no waste humanity!

Mammon.
No life then; only constipated death,
A world by its own feculence undone.

Crawford.
Are we the feculence—

Mammon.
Dispose of waste
Becomingly—ever more decently
As knowledge grows; but have it out, and hence.

Crawford.
Are we the feculence of the world, Sir King?

Mammon.
You dabble in it. A traveller of the Isles,
Your famous Gulliver, in Laputa found
A yellow-faced projector up to the eyes
In merd, pursuing the most ancient study
Of all Laputan science, how to reduce
The excrement of men to food again:
A symbol of your socialists, who smear
The proud and wealthy world with nastiness,
Still fumbling at the emunctories of the state
(I mean its economic processes)
And churning up the stuff of the latrines
(The broken men, the skilless and unskilled,
The unemployed, the unemployable)
In quest of menstruums to decoct from dung
The sweetness of the rose, spindles to twist
A silken fibre from putrescence, art
And a cunning culture, a magic spell
To rear in filth the unsown staff of life,
To raise the dead and make perdition pay.

Crawford.
You slander men, King Mammon; the rich, the poor,
The wise, the foolish, all are equal.

Mammon.
Yes?
All men are equal. ... You were going to say?

Crawford.
I was about to say, in the sight of God.

Mammon.
But not in yours?

Crawford.
No, not in any man's;
Therefore we say, in God's.

Mammon.
Therefore you say
In God's: that is, in Fairyland, in Heaven,
In limbo, in Utopia—anywhere
Save in this actual world of life and power!
There is no other thing to say. I love
Your honesty, and hope to make you mine;
But not as Socialists—or Isocrats
Of any breed. Isocracy: a rule
Of all for all? Impossible while men
Like Cæsar, like Napoleon, like myself,
Are born into the world.

Crawford.
But we would have
Us all Napoleon, King.

Mammon.
And if you had,
Forthwith would come a greater than Napoleon.
The world's magnificent; and plot by plot
To turn it into routine on behalf
Of weaker folk, incapable beyond
A jog-trot use-and-wont, evaporates
In presence of a monarch. Kill a whale
With pin-pricks; whistle on a lion; catch
A golden eagle in a spider's web!
This socialism is mere misanthropy
Erected to a creed; the evil smell
Of Christendom, long dead and rotten, kept
In salts and sponges to resuscitate
The hopes of hungry malice; the fishy glow
Upon the putrid carcass of religion—

Crawford.
Oh, King, oh, King, I cry red shame upon you!

Mammon.
Bold, and I need such comrades! None the less,
The children of revulsion, of revolution—
Communist, anarchist, nihilist—all these
Are wriggling maggots in the fetid corpse
Of Christendom: their sayings Jesus said—
A futile message to a beaten race
Under the heel of Rome; but not for us,
The master people of the earth—nor yet
For them, instinctive Jews that killed Him. I—
You hear that word—I, Mammon, mean to make
This mighty world a hundredfold itself.
There shall be deeper depths of poverty,
A more distressing toil, more warlike war,
An agony of spirit deadlier
Than that which drenched Gethsemane in blood;
A rapture of dominion hitherto
Unfelt by conquerors, kings or priests; a power,
A beauty and a glory of the world
Emerged from Christendom, like love's belov'd
With April from the wrinkled womb of death,
Delivered fresh to Aphrodite's arms.
The omnisolvent ether melt that image
For ever from my mind! My meaning hides
Behind the past like truth behind the veil
In Isis' temple.—I thank you, gentlemen,—
Or men, or fellow-men; you make me know
What I must say. Soon in St. Olaf's Hall
I shall announce to Thule and the world
The very secret and the soul of me.
Await me there.—Our Neo-pagans now.

Crawford, Vibbe, Jelke and the other Reformers go out.
Ribolt, Rolf and the Neo-Pagans enter, and prostrate themselves before Mammon.
Mammon.
What mummery is this? Rise; rise, I say!
No man must kneel to me. Though I am king
And absolute, the grosser adulation
Angers me.—Will you stand up, sirs! Florimond,
Are these men deaf?

Florimond.
Not deaf, but mad, I think.

Ribolt, Rolf and the others raise their heads, but remain upon their knees.
Mammon.
A powerful face! Yes; you that look so strong,
Why do you kneel? You also are a man,
Of the same matter as the stars and me.

Ribolt.
Hail, Baldur, Woden's son, and god of light.

Mammon.
Fantastic man!

Ribolt
[to Rolf and the others].
Did I not talk of this?

Rolf.
You told how Baldur would not know himself.

Ribolt.
I said it; and you see.—Unconscious God,
The fatal Norns who nightly haunt my pillow,
Command me to reveal to you your godhead,
Baldur, the winsomest, the most belov'd
Among immortals and the sons of men.
Behold the dreary twilight of the gods,
The twenty centuries of Christendom,
Expiring now, the golden age returns,
With you, our fairest god, to reign on earth
A thousand years. First of the Neo-pagans,
We kneel before you, desiring for ourselves
To be your priests, your guards, your ministers.

Mammon.
How did your sect arise among the many
That gnaw the rotten bones of Christendom?

Ribolt.
A fisherman, religious, old and wistful,
Bent on eternity far-seeing eyes
Of healthy age, and no asylum found,
No house, no harbour for a soul like his,
Salt as the sea and rough with storm and toil,
In any petty chapel-and-drawing-room
Apocalyptic Heaven of mother-church.
The saga of the north, in fragments known,
Beset his quickened mind: Hymir he loved
That splintered granite columns with his glance;
Woden and Thor, and Surtur of Muspelheim
Whose fervent sword set fire to the Universe,
When gods and giants met at Ragnarök.
But chief in fancy's aftermath there grew
A great uplifted vision of war-worn heroes
Winning Valhalla by a fiery death
When battle failed them.

Mammon.
And did he? Did he?

Ribolt.
What,
Oh, Baldur, god of light?

Mammon.
This moves me, grips
Me firmly! Did he die like the old vikings,
Upon his funeral pyre sailing the sea?

Ribolt.
He died even so.

Mammon.
When was this greatness wrought?

Ribolt.
Last night, oh sinless one!

Mammon.
So men should die!
It shall become again a shameful thing
To wait in debile age, a pap-fed dotard,
Shunning disdainful death. Men enter life
Unconscious, but the power accrues to leave it,
Hale, sane and self-possessed; therefore they should.
My pagans, you are welcomest to me
Of all my folk. I feel how you became:
Such dreams I had in boyhood. I understand
Your thought of me as Baldur, and love you well
For bringing me such beauty from the past,
Such elemental strength of the old time—
Which never yet was old, nor will be old!
But I am I, not Baldur: I am the king,
Greater than Baldur, greater than all the gods,
The first of men to be self-conscious. Man
Has come! The former cry was, or the hope,
The gods arrive, the heroes at their heels;
But I announce, at last, self-conscious man,
Greater than devil, angel, hero, god.

Ribolt
[to Rolf and the others].
Baldur, or Mammon? King or God?

Rolf.
We want
A god again!

The Others.
We want a god! a god!

Mammon.
You shall have me. Await me in the hall.
Give them a special place that I may see them.

Ribolt, Rolf and the others rise and go out, accompanied by Florimond.
Mammon.
Why did I set them out? The madness! Need
There is to be foolhardy in the things
That hap without inventing ambuscades
To trip and throttle us! I've made a morgue
Of Olaf's Hall! It seemed so great last night:—
And great it is; and I am fit for it.
If they should bleed! An ancient fallacy,
A Christian thing:—but they were Christians!—therefore
They'll bleed? Let them! And let them point at me,
And wink with sluggish lids and sightless eyes
As murdered folk were wont to do—in books!
I would be tested every way to learn
What limits shackle my material soul—
If there be limits to the power of one.
Who knows himself unhuman.—Where am I now?
What mincemeat do I make? To argue out
A question like a Christian casuist doomed
For ever to eschew instinctive deeds!
I shame myself when not the utter shame
Of being ashamed should shame me. May it be
That I'm too young, and not adjusted yet
In mood and mind to my polarity?
'Twas in his thirtieth year the Son of Man
Began to turn the water into wine—
Napoleon's age when first he challenged fate
And leapt into the saddle of the world;
Mohammed knew the gauge of forty years
Before he set himself against mankind;
And Cæsar, when he crossed the Rubicon,
Was old—an old, old man compared with me,
Who am not twenty-five. The Macedon?—
Yes, young and seminal, but sowing seed
At second-hand, a cultured person. I
Alone, since time began, bring with me news.
No mate I find among the mighty dead;
The greatest man of all the ages, youth
Commends me to my happy destiny:
No doubt perturbs me; prosperously I shall
Adjust the world's polarity to mine.

[Goes out.