University of Virginia Library

Scene II:

—The drawing-room in the house of Ole Larum, the Mayor of Christianstadt. A joint committee of Inceptors of the Teutonic Religion, Reformers, and Neo-pagans. Present: Ole Larum, Tamberskelver, Ribolt, Crawford and others. Ole Larum presides; but the discussion is informal.
Tamberskelver.
The past is past, and Christendom dissolved;
The pious degradation of mankind
For ever ended. Therefore we begin
The cerebral secretion of a God,
And, uncreated, consciously create
Divinity in likeness of ourselves.
For me, I join with none who contravene
Inception of a new Teutonic myth.

Ribolt.
Inception of impossibility!
A myth becomes. Who now can crack a skull
That's kernelled with a goddess adult and armed,
Or integrate a man by synthesis
From elements whereof he is composed?
A mare's nest in a church with wind-eggs stored
Might tempt a brooding mind to incubate;
But he who stoutly sat to hatch a myth
Would doze till doomsday on the addled clutch.
A myth evolves, spontaneously preferred
As species are; matures, decays and dies.
The Christian myth, of senile gangrene sick,
Outlives its fame; Teutonic verity,
Though dispossessed in Thule, never died.
By fraud, by massacre, by torment, Heaven
Obscured our Asgard; Hell, our Nifelheim;
While Christ a-mumming came in Baldur's weeds.
But every day of that usurpature
Somewhere in Thule opposite the sun
A rainbow spanned the gulf, with lambent bridge
And seven-stringed arc of beauty diverse-hued,
The token of a covenant set up
Between the earth and Asgard, the shining way
To high Valhalla and the golden grove.
Vision and vigil in a night of dreams,
The turbulent centuries of Heaven and Hell,
Christ and his cross, are as they had not been.
Behind the phantom veil of Christendom
Unhappy ghosts of gods, the mournful Wanes
That were the deities of beaten men,
Frequented barren shores and stormy isles
In precincts and in purlieus of the sea
Beyond the reach of tidings; but at home,
In Thule, though we worshipped not, nor knew,
The thunder and the lightning kept their court;
Daily the Valkyrs galloped; Woden sat
Eternal and serene upon his throne
Watching the ages; Baldur slept in death
Heedless of him from Jewry who played his part;
The goddess of the mountains, Hulda, shone
With moonflowers wreathed; celestial Freya turned
Her golden spindle in the midnight sky;
And the earth-tree Igdrasil, watered well
By fateful ministrants, above the fount
Of Urd spread forth its branches evergreen
Where the high Regin sit and judge the world.

Tamberskelver.
I cannot listen longer! What state, what court
Does lightning keep? The meanest slave of man,
Compelled to prattle on a million dials
From post to post, and underneath the sea
Confined in cables; to whisper fact and fiction
Through wired and wireless winds, and gravely wear
In every land newspaper for a livery.

Ribolt.
Loki, the old-betrayer of the gods—

Tamberskelver.
Antique distraction! And your women-waves,
Your ladies of the lake, your river sprites;
Your water-music and your gurgling songs
That none could hear and unenchanted live?
Tortured in tubular boilers Neckan cries,
And Lorelei evaporates in steam.

Ribolt.
This servitude of gods in every age—

Tamberskelver.
You hear them in the tunnel and the fog:
The engine's whistle and the siren's shriek—
The Neckan and the Lorelei in pain.

Ribolt.
It may be that the gods—

Tamberskelver.
Delight in hell!

Ribolt.
I mean that Loki—

Tamberskelver.
And I swear by heaven,
And all your heavens, the time foretold has come—

Ribolt.
Though I must roar you down I will be heard!

Tamberskelver.
The bull out-bellowed Baldwin at the fair!

Ribolt.
And thunder silences the lion! Listen:—
Think you persistent fate, as sedulous
As virgin love, that, steeped in poverty,
Works double tides to furnish bridal gear,
Forbearing our tradition, would abdicate
Eternal power in Thule only; leave
The Aesir and the brood of Bergelmir
To stagnate in a dream because mankind
Had ceased to think of them? No, by the Norns,
That visit me with whispers ominous!
What error, what unworthiness befell
The water-wraiths and ladies of the lake
That they, imprisoned in the toil of men,
Should undergo intolerable pangs
(A recent penalty, remember) still
Remains unguessed, unpenetrated, unrevealed;
But that the swift and dazzling god of flame,
Loki, the lightning, should be bound once more
For new divine iniquity requires
No revelation to interpret. Foe
Of gods and men, his former blasphemies,
For which he lay strung on a pinnacled cliff
As on a giant rack with spikes engrailed,
While venom splashed upon his working brow
From the old serpent's jaws and furrowed fangs:
I say, his former expiated guilt
Was innocence and sanctity beside
The self-abandonment and utter sin
Atoned for now in execrable bonds.

Tamberskelver.
What hideous sin was that?

Larum.
Why here's a man
As passionate for things that never were
As we concerning those that are to be!

Tamberskelver.
This sin of Loki's, new, original,
Unparagoned?

Ribolt.
Betrayal, more obscene
Than any legend tells of Ahriman,
Of Satan, or the sons of Ouranos;
For Loki's golden lightning enchanted men,
Possessing science with the thought of him
As all in all; substance and force and life
In multitudinous forms, and sifted out,
By micrometric thought that can divide
The invisible, in nests of polar orbs,
Electrons, building up the atomic stuff
Whereof the universe consists: the gods,
The dwarfs, the giants, the very Regin trace
Descent, forsooth, from Loki, and live in him!
For which unhallowed treason Woden sent
The felon god to penitential toil
In mundane transit, fabric and lantern-work;
But chiefly in the labour of the net
He was the first to weave: now the strong mesh
Is metal and the draught sweeps land and sea,
A mammoth spider-web beaded with towns;
While Loki in the wires a thousand ways
At every moment torn, obeys a touch,
A whisper, carrying news, the slave of slaves,
The lackey of the liars of the world.

Crawford.
I marvel—and I marvel! All the gods,
By time devoured, are with the draff of things.
Cull from the evening air the rose's scent
In stoppered crystals for the market-place;
From earthshine and the dusk condense a star
To rival day with shadows of itself;
Invent alembics, menstruums, furnaces
That shall distil the light of yesterday
And brim with dewy rainbows cups of gold;
But never think to re-establish God,
Revive decayed mythology, or gloze
With renderings of the hour an ancient creed.

Tamberskelver.
Attempt instead to scribble on the sky
A prophecy with last year's thunderbolt!
But that new racial myth which we incept,
Uncatholic and Teutonic, alone amid
Opinions, nostrums, ologies and isms
That work the world with internecine thought,
Keeps promise, pregnant with futurity.

Ribolt.
Pregnant with maggots and the sepulchre!—

Larum.
I stop this quarrel—and the meeting. Come
Again at night; and in the interim think
A tortuous passage out of personal aims
To the high sea of common cause against
Gigantic tyranny.—Let no one speak.

[The meeting breaks up in silence.]