University of Virginia Library

Scene II:

—A room in the Royal Palace.
Mammon
[to an unseen attendant as he enters].
Tell Florimond to send the legate here.—
It drives me breathless onward. Will it hurl
Me headlong to my ruin? Am I mad—
So hounded, scourged, hallooed? If one profound,
Religious soul, ambitious, able, learned,
Would understand me! Oswald loves and serves
In fear and wonder. Guendolen adores;
But when her passion cloys, her mind, relaxed,
Will sink supinely on her Saviour's breast.
Only by fire, by slaughter can the earth
Be purged of Christendom. By talk, by books,
By argument, apparent things are done;
But actual change by war alone arrives.
Yet still I try what eloquence can do:
I have this letch of speech, this power of vision.
Were Anselm mine—the legate; could I turn
A man of such a temper, so refined
A worldliness, so certain of himself,
From the state polity he calls his God,
To Mammon, me and my great universe,
Then might the bloody torrent I behold
Sweeping the serried crosses from the world
Sink in the earth, and in my wounded thought
Ebb and be staunched, and the fierce fire put out
That roars and rustles in my heart and brain.

Anselm enters.
Mammon.
Anselm, in damning me you overreached
Yourself: your dislocated will must pain
You, like a twisted ankle.

Anselm.
Yes; to-day,
In every country crucified, the church
Endures the utmost spite of men.

Mammon.
I like
The church of Rome.

Anselm.
How dare you say it, King!—
God's enemy and man's?

Mammon.
It puzzles you?
I am the enemy of God and man—
The European-Yankee man, who thinks
In terms of God and Christ and other world;
And yet I say I like your church of Rome.
That puzzles? Yes.—Are you a Jesuit, father?

Anselm.
I am a Jesuit.

Mammon.
Most romantic tribe,
That failed in everything they undertook.
And why?

Anselm.
Because of meannesses in men.

Mammon.
Because they used, abused and multiplied
The meannesses of men! Men are not mean,
Though meanness may by meanness be induced,
As ghosts are raised by self-deluded seers.
All men are great—all men: I say, all men.
Your greatness I appeal to. Centuries
Ago your decadent Catholic Church
Had peremptory notice to be gone;
Yet still it haunts the world, the subtlest power,
The sweetest and the strongest. Rome's a vase,
Empty, discoloured, dusty, chipped and cracked,
So full of roseleaves once, of martyrdoms,
Of blood, of tears and of the wine of life,
That its memorial savour, unexpired,
Enthrals the doting world.

Anselm.
The faithful world,
That finds in Holy Rood the tree of life.

Mammon.
It was the tree of life for many an age.
Sprung from a little seed in Bethlehem,
It flourished high and higher, and broad as Heaven,
Hiding the stars; its roots in every heart;
Its foliage fed with fragrant breath of prayer;
Its blossom and its harvest, the opulent
Imaginings of two millenniums.

Anselm.
O king, you speak with most inspiring sense
Of greatness and of glory in the church!
The tree is for the healing of the nations;
Beneath its arms—

Mammon.
Bad shelter in a storm.—
You interrupted me.—A long-lived tree;
But now it's dead. Its bole, a crypt of dust;
Its withered, creaking boughs, shored up and braced
Against tempestuous time and old decay.

Anselm.
Yet nations shelter in its branches!

Mammon.
Yes;
Imagination knows no other home.
But I am here to fell the hollow trunk,
To faggot all the dry wind-shaken limbs,
To stub the twisted, earth-shot roots that sprawl
The pathway o'er, tripping adventurous feet;
And in that old symbolic stead divulge
The matter of the universe itself.

Anselm regards Mammon disdainfully.
Mammon.
They say you are a master mind, instinct
With science and the culture of the schools,
And one to whom the facets of man's soul,
The ways of fate, the labyrinthine world,
Are known enigmas. Such a friend I want.

Anselm.
An honest-hearted man of single mind,
I walk with God as closely as I may.

Mammon.
But I would have you march in step with me.

Anselm.
The road you travel strikes across God's path.

Mammon.
Not so; my road begins where God's leaves off.
The narrow way men trod with bleeding feet—
Where think you does it lead?

Anselm.
It leads to heaven.

Mammon.
Say so; but what is heaven?

Anselm.
The abode of bliss,
Where ransomed souls enjoy the glory of God.

Mammon.
And where is that?

Anselm.
Above, beyond the stars.

Mammon.
I think so, too; but I materialise.
The narrow way, unluckiest, longest lane
In man's itinerary hitherto,
Turns off at last with me, the first to reach
The turning, straight into the broad one, heaven
On earth—which is the one and only heaven.

Anselm.
The narrow way leads straight into the broad one?

Mammon.
Yes, father; that's the world's eternal route.
I see the turning at the long lane's end,
A twilight avenue of tangled thorn;
Its curving spines blood-stained; its flinty path
With purple mottled; gloom and doleful sounds
About its porch of writhen boughs, wherethrough
A crowd of pallid cheeks and eyes amazed
Come halting from the hideous byway, straight
Upon the broad, green thoroughfare of kings,
Adventurers, warriors, dancers, pleasant folk
Among the joyful birds and summer flowers.
So ends at last the Christian era; so
Does every era end. Recurrent time,
The vagrant bedesman of the infinite,
Through many a Hades and the trough of Hell,
Over Olympian heights, and past the jasper
Walls of the golden city, homeward-bound
Instinctively, in every period gains
The broad way of the earth: there are we now,
After the centuries of Christendom—
Which mean to me a moment's madness only;
And here am I, with power to alter time
From that old wiseacre of scythe and sand,
To youth and favour, beauty and delight,
A damsel mantled in eternity,
Who takes no turning into narrow ways,
But singing clearly in the constant dawn,
Before the splendid world by royal roads
Moves ever onward to an unknown goal.

Anselm.
Get thee behind me, Satan!

Mammon.
I reach your heart?
I touch your understanding?

Anselm.
Seduction rides
Upon your tongue, King Mammon, and youth and grace
Perturb my soul: old men like me, forbid
The joys of life, love, offspring, tender cares,
Forget themselves when striplings woo their thoughts.
But God is not forgotten. You are supposed
A murderer, and I think it.

Mammon.
No murderer, priest:
But were I worse than murderer, how should blood
Belie the truth of what I have to tell?
No more than turning rods to serpents shows
That two and two make five. Suppose I say,
“The earth is flat, and I shall prove the same
By raising from the grave a man long dead?”
The Jew Appella or a Scottish Kelt
Would not be taken in! A man might spill
A life a day, yet be a good logician,
And play a sweet adagio on the flute.—
I am keen to make you mine.

Anselm.
That cannot be.
You deal in images:—when you can turn
A negro white by argument, reverse
The sexes by transfusion, or evolve
Baboons from men by grafting tails, expect
To change my faith.

Mammon.
Were you upon my side
The world would pause before condemning me:
I must have old men, wise, renowned and good.
Father, I shall convert you to my thought,
Show you my vision of the Universe,
And pluck you from the burning; in your own terms
I'll do it:—your exaltation of the Host,
Your triune God, your ardent Heaven and Hell,
Your wonderful parthenogenesis.

Anselm.
Why shame and torture me with blasphemy?

Mammon.
No word of blasphemy shall pass my lips.
Know father that the wildest thoughts of men
Are true as true, for matter cannot lie,
And men and thoughts are matter: material truth
Behind the immaterial symbol hides,
As priests conceive of God behind the veil.
Self-consciousness, imagination, soul
Are forms of matter as the lightning is,
As gold and phosphorus and gases are—
Matter eternal, diverse, mutable.
Like all the mythic intercourse of Heaven,
Adonai's commerce with the virgin means
That man is more than man, and with his bride
Engenders righteously the manifold
Illimitable universe itself,
Continuing in sense and consciousness
The ether and the substance of the stars.
Immaculate conception intimates
The purity of women in all their functions—
Wonderful partners, virginal every month,
Sweet votarists of the moon. Celestial glory?
Remembrances of being unbegun
In old ethereal eternities.
The intolerable tragedy of Hell?
Encaustic records of the pristine fire
In every passionate ion branded: these,
Achieving consciousness in man, reveal
His pure material nature. You exalt
The Host, and eat the body of the Lord
In ecstasy of adoration: great,
And in the very essence of it true!
How just and right that out of all the Christian
Travail of Calvary, and Martyrdoms
Forgotten by the thousand, this issue leapt
To sheer pre-eminence:—“Is that bless'd bread
The body of God or not?” The body of God!
It is the sun, the earth, the elements,
Sirius and Aldebaran and Mazzaroth,
The ether, and the lightning and the light,
The whole illimitable universe.
O father, see you not how great it is!
The rapture and the glory of the Mass
Predicted me, and the high news I bring.

Anselm.
Dismiss me, King! To listen is to sin!

Mammon.
I move you, Anselm? I can make you mine!
Carbon, and those aerial potentates—
Azote, which men call nitrogen; the virile
Sultan of all the elements, oxygen;
The brilliant vapour of the hottest stars,
The lady of the water: principal
Components of the visible Universe,
And the main fibres of infinitude,
Are we, our food, our drink; and every meal
Is eucharist, and every dining-room
A temple.

Anselm.
Gracious images, King Mammon;
Most immaterial figures! How can one
So specially endowed with fancy choose
A disenchanted world?

Mammon.
You mark me not.
I rend in twain the old moth-eaten veil
You Christians juggled with, and show mankind
The enchanting matter of the Universe.
All ancient fantasies of spirit things
Are types of matter. Take your triune God,
The effort of the conscious Universe,
Not yet self-conscious, to enunciate
The triple form of matter:—Dynamic ether,
First person of the Trinity whence all
Derives;—the polar tension couched and wed
In every atom—Force, the Holy Spirit;—
The ponderable elements whereof
The galaxies and systems, beasts and men,
Stars, flowers, amœbas, lichens, lice consist
Are each and all the well-belovëd Son.

Anselm.
Why change it then, this old belief in God,
So hallowed, pregnant, satisfying, true?

Mammon.
To-day a damnable and damning lie!
We know there is no God—no God who made
The world and man, pitched high above us heaven,
And underneath sunk Hell. The wistful hearts
That meditate emasculate immanence
In place of the Almighty overthrown,
Degrade the world below the darkest age.
The inbred fault and meanness of the time
In art, in thought, in polity, in trade,
I charge directly to the ruined will
That neither takes nor leaves the Omnipotent
Creator, the immortal soul of man,
Heaven, Hell, the Cross of Christ, and all that once
Was great in Christendom when God meant God.

Anselm.
God is a fact for me and for my church.

Mammon.
What was a fact has now become a symbol;
And in a symbol only phantoms live,
Gigantic Brocken spectres, Boygs, mobs,
Anarchic spiritisms, democracies,
Denationalisation of the world.
I want a home for greatness, and I take
The Universe wherein to be and do:
I and my people shall eclipse renown.

Anselm.
God makes men great: without God man's a beast.

Mammon.
I say so too:—Without God man's a beast.
Back to the beast! We must get back to the beast:
“Get thee behind me, God!” shall be our cry.
From lower forms of life out of the ether,
By way of lightning and the nebula,
The king of all the beasts arrived at last.
There I begin again as if no time
Had ever been: no metaphysical
Consideration, myth or wonderworld
Installed in space by sorrow and ignorance;
No moral law insidiously wrought
To play the pandar to malignity;
No gyves of right and wrong to shackle power.

Anselm.
O King, though many an honest conscience breaks
The frame and form of Christianity,
The ethic heart of it remains to sway
Behaviour and to point the heavenward path.

Mammon.
Ultimate cowardice and hypocrisy!
The Christian ethic and the Christian creed
Are head and heart of the anatomy:
Dissect out either and you have for guide
A withered skull labelled beneath a glass,
Or sodden preparation in a jar.
Four centuries of sects, denominations,
Of hydra-headed variance and protest loud,
Broke up the showy coffin, undid the cloths,
And tore the stuffing forth—to find no God
Inside the thing or out. Aghast and hushed
In droning compromise, fain would they use
The old embalmment, all its virtue gone,
Fain swathe and join again the empty limbs
With tattered cerements crumbling into dust.
Alone the church of Rome continues still
Your perfect mummy, gilded, painted, spiced;
Alone, and worthy in unworthiness,
Lives in its vision of the Universe,
The stage complete:—Heaven, Hell, the earth between,
A righteous God, a sinful man, and Christ
To make atonement while the Virgin prays.
Not in an emblem of the Universe,
A tale, a coarse archaic mythologue,
But in the matter symbolized I mean
To root the mind of man. The priceless earth,
That like a pearl within an oyster lay
Between your Heaven and Hell, I shall transmute
To adamant; and for your jewel-box,
Your closed and padlocked Hell and Heaven that choke
Imagination, I shall give mankind
The spacious casket of the Universe
For ever open—systems, wastes of stars,
Room for a million million sinful worlds,
Ethereal room for every wandering thought.

Anselm.
In God's great name sully my soul no more!
You tempt me not—except to scorn. By heaven,
I sin too much in converse with a wretch
Under the greater excommunication!
How long, O Lord, how long is power withheld?
When shall Thy Churchmen, militant again,
With necks of kings for stirrups conquering ride?

Mammon.
“With necks of kings for stirrups! The sound I like!
Ambition, jealousy, revengeful lust,
The scouted moods I mean to make so great,
Material essences of action! You
I want, and all the power and pride of Rome,
The wilful, passionate, executive
Fraternity of kings and warriors. Folk
That live in every bodily organ hard
As driven machinery on a record run;
That ask and take no less than just the whole
Great Universe itself, as due to them,
As being them and theirs; for them I'll spread
The banquet, carve the world, and set the time—
The first hour of a known eternity.

Anselm.
O King, material voices fail to reach
The portal of the spirit's audience! God,
For some high purpose fixed ere time began,
Withholds His favour and relinquishes
The kingdom of the soul, permitting wrong.
But when this pregnant age and travail fierce
(Religion's Chastisement) determine, look
For prophecy fulfilled, and God's great dream,
Which our so seeming solid matter is,
Sublimed, installed, accomplished and assured
Eternally in substance spiritual—
New Heaven, new Earth beyond the grasp of sense.

Mammon.
This is the huge insanity of the world,
The time-old morbid mind that fears itself,
Unknowing and unknown. How great are men
To fashion out of ignorance and dread
Such greatness! For I know your spirit-world
Better than any prophet, poet, priest,
Philosopher, occultist, mystic, seer.
Hear me expound your dual universe:—
Man is a spirit, and his various life,
A bodying forth of the invisible;
The Universe and forms of time and space—
The garment and the symbolism of God;
The elements, the stars, earth and its brood—
The self-analysis, precipitation,
Pomp and deployment of the absolute:
The visible's the immaterial;
And only spirit's matter and momentous.
A noble Universe whose furthest nook
Is still a suburb of the City of God;
Where every star and every blade of grass,
Where every pulse and every thought reveals
The hallowed presence of divinity!

Anselm.
You sin against the light knowing so well
What apparition matter is, and all
The Universe a mere similitude
And mutable appurtenance of God.

Mammon.
No God; no spirit; only matter. God?
The cowardice of men flung forth to fill
With welcome shadow an imagined void—
Which never was, which by no chance can be.
The unconscious ether fills the universe,
Omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent:
No interstice in matter anywhere
Even for the daintiest elf of other world;
And in the infinite no interval
To harbour alien immaterial dreams.

Anselm.
But spirit, God, may be material stuff,
Of the same substance as the stars and us.

Mammon.
Not spirit, then; not God. You know!

Anselm.
I do.
And may God pardon me my flash of sin!

Mammon.
Afraid of mystery men explained the unknown
As something immaterial—spirit, God.
But there's no mystery hidden in the unknown;
There's nothing in the unknown; there's no unknown.

Anselm.
O King, the darkness! There the unknown hides!

Mammon.
Darkness?—negation; nil. Light?—wonder; woven
Magnificence of seven mysterious stains,
Ethereal substance of the universe.

Anselm.
Bethink you, King; the silence of the night—

Mammon.
Silence that misanthropes have praised so, golden
Against the silver sound of speech, is dull
Inanity: the mystery of the whole resides
In music—substance of the ether tuned
To audible enchantment. Time's a lie,
And space a trick. Eternity's the truth:
Infinitude, the all-dynamic vast,
Mystery of mysteries, known to any one,
The everlasting durability
Of the immeasurable universe;
For all is matter, all is mystery, all
Is known: we are the universe become
Self-conscious; and nothing anywhere exists
Not us. All men are great, all men: unmade,
Incomparable, immeasurable, free—
The eternal Universe become self-conscious.
I'll have you understand this here and now,
Accept its truth and change the world with me.
My patience ends: I bring the greatest news;
I'll have it welcomed. We ourselves are fate;
We are the universe; we are all that is:
Outside of us nothing that is not us
Can be at all. No room! The universe
Is full of us, the matter of the stars;
The all-pervading ether seen as light,
Elaborate purity of rainbows; heard
As music, woven of elemental sounds;
And smelt in perfume, the poetry of flowers
Exhaled from sex, which in all plants and beasts
Secretes and sows the ethereal universe.
Seen in the light, in music heard, and smelt
In subtle odour of a thousand flowers,
In us the ether consciously becomes
Imagination, thought, religion, art.
We are the ether, we are the universe,
We are eternity: not sense, not spirit,
But matter; but the whole become self-conscious.
Whatever Heaven there is, whatever Hell,
Here now we have it; and I cannot wait
On God, the nothing, and his damned event
That mocked the world for sixty centuries;
Nor will I linger eating out my heart
While this new proxy of divinity
Your specious evolution, blunders on
From tedious age to age. I'll carve the world
In my own image, I, the first of men
To comprehend the greatness of mankind;
I'll melt the earth and cast it in my mould,
The form and beauty of the universe.
Say after me “Get thee behind me, God;
“I follow Mammon.” Say it, say it!

Anselm.
God
Is God, eternal and unchangeable,
The God of my salvation.

Mammon
[seizes Anselm by the throat].
Hideous liar,
Abominably old and impotent!
You know there is no God, no soul at all,
But only matter, ether polarised,
Condensed and shown and felt and understood,
Beholding, feeling, thinking, comprehending,
The subject-object of the Universe.
“Get thee behind me, God; I follow Mammon.”
Say it, before I fling you at my feet,
Abhorred senility, and stubborn past
Of the world! Say it, antiquity!

Anselm.
Release
Me, King.

Mammon flings Anselm from him violently.
Anselm staggers and falls with a loud cry.
Mammon.
Old craven heart of man, from truth
Divorced, God's creature, famulus and fool,
Go back to Rome and tell the triple-crown—

Florimond
[who has entered quickly and is kneeling beside Anselm].
He'll ne'er see Rome again: the legate's dead.

Mammon.
Dead! Anselm dead! How dead? Dead in the spirit—
Like all the world to all material truth,
Senseless and dead.

Florimond.
Dead as a carcase, King.
How quickly he grows cold!

Mammon.
Why should he die?
A wine-glass falls and breaks. Is human stuff
As brittle? Come; help him to his feet.

Florimond.
The man is dead. His heart: to-day the world
Trembles with broken hearts; the pace of life
Exceeds our staying power.

[Rises.
Mammon.
I'm glad he's dead,
He was so old: old age is horrible.
I gripped his skinny throat; his yellow eyes
Bulged from their sodden wrinkles; between his jaws
His false teeth clattered; I shook him and he fell.
He would not say, “Get thee behind me, God;
I follow Mammon.”—You say that, Florimond.

Florimond.
If the King commands.

Mammon.
O, but you'll mean it too!

Florimond.
Except the King's commands I have no meaning.

Mammon.
Say it; mean it.

Florimond.
In presence of the dead?

Mammon.
Why not in presence of the dead?

Florimond.
There hangs
A mystery in the air: the unseen—felt,
And almost heard.

Mammon.
Mystery of mysteries, death!
The ether to the ether whence it came
Returns again; to darkness, silence, peace,
The wide oblivion of the universe,
The rapture of the infinite.

Florimond.
O King,
There may be God and judgment! I am old—
Like him that lies there; and my heart's worn out;
But in some part of me a fibre wakes
Rekindled at the quickening thought of death.
How can I say and mean so utterly
Against the ancient texture of my soul?
To turn a river at its outflow, cast
The entrails and the vitals of the mind
At threescore years and ten—

Mammon.
Dispute with me?
Pronounce my formula!

Florimond.
“Get thee behind—”

Mammon.
Hush, Florimond!—Three corpses on the floor!
I gave the order for their burial! Look!
They should be underground! Who brought them here?
And left them naked?

Florimond.
His eyes expand like lights
That issue from the darkness, growing great!
What are you glaring at?

Mammon.
See, Florimond!
Some one's been widening their wounds: what hand
Profaned the dead and Thule's royalty?
Their wounds like leeches seem to feel about!
They writhe, they mutter, and they suck the air!
Ugh! Hide them, hide them!
[Throws the table cover over the body of Anselm.
One! There's only one
Beneath the cover! Lift it, Florimond.

Florimond removes the cover.
Mammon.
I saw them, plainer than I see the legate's,
The corpses of my father and my brother—
All mapped with wounds and diapered with blood,
Like some torn fabric full of holes and stained.
I say they lay there on the carpet stretched
Beside the legate. Are you the conjurer?
Craft more inexplicable, nightly plied
By jugglers in the street for pence, is known
To be no medium-work, but sleight-of-hand
Acquirable by fools. Where are the bodies?

Florimond.
What bodies, King?

Mammon.
What bodies, cavilling echo! Those
That lay there by the legate's, which I named.

[Opens the door and beckons.
Two attendants enter.
Mammon.
Your fraud again; but let me see it done.
Although their wounds be knots of serpents yet
I'll gaze on them and handle them unhurt.
You stare at me, interrogate each other
With shamefast looks like petty culprits caught,
And stand about as awkwardly as boys
Expecting punishment. Repeat the trick;
Bring in the bodies! It shall not be said
That like some conscience-stricken murderer
I see things!

Florimond.
You've seen things, then, King Mammon?

Mammon.
Nothing but what was there. Lay them again
Beside the legate.

[Crosses to Anselm's body.
Attendant
[To Florimond].
Will your good lordship say
Our business here?

Florimond.
Be silent;—and begone.

[The attendants go out.
Mammon.
They lay here side by side. ... Where are they now,
These fellows? Have they vanished?

Florimond.
I bade them go.

Mammon.
Then bid them back again!

Florimond.
I risk your wrath.
O King, regard yourself!

Mammon.
To have it told
That spirits hounded me into my grave!
Not ghosts, I tell you, Florimond; ghosts move;
Ghosts come and go, gliding with bodily motion.
They lay there, still as corpses—as themselves,
Being themselves, dead bodies, as dead as dead.

Florimond.
Shrouded and coffined in the royal vault
Your father and your brother buried lie.

Mammon.
And yet I saw them; not their ghosts; themselves,
By jugglery laid out and whipped away.
Their bosomed wounds awry, and sweating blood,
Like features of a monster with harpoons torn.
Find out the malefactors.—Will you go!

Florimond goes out.
Mammon.
To spread it further, stir it and froth it up!
[At the door which he opens]
Florimond! Florimond!—let this business rest.
I saw them; but it seems they were not there.
Count it miraculous or a fantasy.
And give these fellows money—a handful each.
Right! Money!—I forgot: I must have money.
Bring it at dinner.

Florimond
[at the door].
King Mammon—

Mammon.
But you must!
Bring all there is: empty the treasury.
[Closes the door.]
The legate! How they hang about my neck,
Dead bodies!—But to see things! Dreams I've had,
Like all men:—does your waking vision spell
Degenerate mind? This was not in my bargain.—
I see them now!—not there; but in my brain—
A photograph of corpses meshed with wounds.
I've heard of lifeless and astonished eyes
Retaining pictures of events beheld
Upon the very article of death:
Alive, mine keep corroded records etched
Through crystalline humour and vitreous, net and nerve,
Upon the tingling marrow of conceit,
Because I looked so long:—my flesh and blood
Upon a trestle; my people's eyes on me,
To fix in mine the pregnant negative
For reproduction in the shadow of death,
As in a dark room—where the legate's corpse
Revealed the latent image. But nothing dwells
Herein, integrant or of any import:
Vision, a polished surface of the mind
(Even less detached) evades our moral power—
Delicate, not degenerate.—What terror once
In damned hallucination lurked when men
Believed in ghosts and necromantic art!
I'll study this delusion when it comes;
Anatomise my visionary dead;
Compel serenity; let thought prevail;
With sights of beauty cleanse, and daily scour
With virtuous deeds, the surface of my mind.
No pause for me henceforth until the end,
Or till I win this world from other world,
And set upon the throne material man
So long deposed by phantoms of his fear.

[Goes out.