David Lean A Biography

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David Lean A Biography

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.
man." But anyone can make a metaphysic; it is a splendid image,
that of splitting logs. Thus we can prove easily that the world is a
Will to Death; for that indeed is the end of a pessimistic philosophy,
the suicide of the race. I have, myself, made and applied a perfect
metaphysic in the few hundred lines of the "Testament of a
Vivisector," where the thing in itself is represented as a Will to Know:

"It may be Matter in itself is pain

Sweetened in sexual love, that so mankind,
The medium of Matter's consciousness,
May never cease to know—the stolid bent
Of Matter, the infinite vanity
Of the Universe being evermore self-knowledge."

There was a passing gibe at theologians a moment ago, but one

has only to remember how great a thing it is they study, one has
only to descry for a moment the ancient and glorious realm in which
the minds and imaginations of theologians have their being, to know
and understand their integrity and passion. But theology is now, like
so many names, a misnomer. By the application of scientific methods
the more rigorous minds, although still speaking—I think, equivocally
—of theology, have really brought about a theonomy. Scientific
method destroyed astrology, and gave us in exchange for a
superstitious obsession, astronomy and the Universe. Scientific
method has destroyed theology. But the theologians, powerless to
admit it because most humanly reluctant to drop so sublime a thing,
have allowed themselves to gloze the Material God who made the
world, who sent His son to die for sinners, who reared high Heaven
and dug deep Hell—I say the theologians have thought away all this
that was so great, and have spun out, not the heart of it but the
husk of it, into a metaphysical idea of God; have, the more advanced
and veracious minds among them, set aside the incarnation and the
atonement, offering instead the engaging person and beautiful
immorality of Christ:—still an immorality, Christ's teaching; let
anyone attempt to turn the other cheek in any playground,
parliament, court of justice, college, exchange, club, or Convocation,
and he will know with a vengeance what it means to be immoral:—
and in the matter of Heaven and Hell, have, most honestly, nothing
to say; whereas the true theonomist finds the study of God to be a
branch of mythology. In my ballads I have employed this of God and
Sin and Heaven and Hell as the warp of myth in the loom of my
poetry, giving the myth also a new orientation as the weaver
changes the pattern of his web—an orientation which I have carried
to its utmost limit in the Judgment-day of the "Prime Minister"; but
no individual mind and imagination, and no general mind and
imagination of any class, mass, or mob of men can enter a fateful
battle in the name of a metaphysic, can live highly and die serenely
to the tune of a mere folklore. I cry aloud with the Bishop of St.
James's:—

"Who shall persuade the Kings that God is not,

The politicians, usurers, financiers,
Priests, warriors that depend on God to bear
The burden of their inhumanities?
All inhumanity that flings itself
On God's unsearchable device will fight
To the last drop of blood, last labouring sigh
For God and Heaven and Hell. And who shall teach
The orphans that their mothers are not; who
Unpeople heaven of lovers, children, saints?
Women will fight with babies at their breasts,
Old palsied hags, peace-makers, cripples, cowards,
When this is put to war! Their sons that died
In battle, where are they? Their enemies,
That should lament in Hell? The little child,
That lived a year and holds its parents' hearts
In dimpled hands for ever? Christ Himself
That pardoned wanton women, where is He?"

It was a great conception of the Universe; it made life intensely

interesting; and still dominates imagination. Even those who
understand that the material Other World in which the imagination
of our more immediate forefathers lived and moved and had so
great a being is as phantasmal as Olympus or Asgard, know well
that when the blood and the brain and the bones and the marrow
are fused together into an act of imagination by love, or war, by
some profound sorrow, some high ambition, some great self-
sacrifice, or some great crime, men immediately, and without effort,
become immortal soul, and clothe themselves as of old in God and
Sin and Heaven and Hell. As becomes one who proposes to furnish
imagination with a new abode, I now state what Heaven and Hell
and God and Sin are, and undertake to show that what I offer is
truly immoral, and of the evolving and devolving Universe.

II HEAVEN AND HELL

How is it that imagination lives with ease in a material Heaven and

Hell, although these are known to be impossible? What is the
meaning of that? It means that there is no Other World; that the
whole Universe consists of the same Matter as man; and therefore it
is that even the most upright minds, the most enfranchised souls,
the strongest and sanest temperaments in passionate moods and
times of stress, when imagination, expanding, must fill some
splendid place, fly, as to a city of refuge, having no other conception
of the Universe, to this concrete Heaven and Hell. Man is Matter;
mind and soul are material forces; there is no spiritual world as
distinct from the material world; all psychical phenomena are
material phenomena, the result of the operation of material forces;
hence, I say again, the imagination of man, being a complex of
material forces, cannot live in a metaphysical idea or an
acknowledged myth, but makes its Heaven and Hell concrete, and
itself immortal soul. What is the source of this immortal soul with its
flaming Hell and glowing Heaven?

Man being Matter, and thought and fancy being material forces,
we shall find in the history of Matter the origin of much that seems
obscure. Man consists of the following properties of Matter; oxygen,
hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, kalium, natrium, sulphur,
phosphorus, iron, magnesium, silicon, chlorine, fluorine, lithium,
manganese, copper, lead. I invite the reader to consider this with all
the material forces of his being. These forms of Matter with their
energies, of which the body, mind, and soul of man consist, have
always been; they burn in the farthest stars, they are knit up in the
texture—thinner than gossamer, than vapour, as imponderable as
fancy—of the primitive substance, the Ether, which fills the
interstellar spaces from moon to sun, from orbit to orbit, from galaxy
to galaxy, the exquisite material out of which the nebulae are
constringed in beads and drops and clots of Matter upon threads of
lightning, meteors, meteorites, that collide into flame, or by what
process soever, to become upon condensation, concentration,
contraction, systems and constellations, suns and planets. The whole
Matter of man, however mutable, is therefore everlasting, has no
beginning and will have no end; for Matter is indestructible. The
earths, metals, vapours, mysterious properties of the one mystery
Matter, which make up man, are in themselves supposed to be
unconscious: sensitive in every electron, but in all likelihood without
sensibility and therefore unconscious. Sensitive all forms of Matter
are; the elements have individuality, character, genius; have passions
—fierce passions, some of them; have memory, more or less
positive, far-reaching, and reliable. Oxygen seems to be the chief
male element, the sultan of Matter, with his seraglio of dazzling
metals, earths, vapours, not one of which he ever fails to remember;
it is he who knits up the rocks and ridges of the globe, the bones of
men and beasts; he supports all fires of suns and hearts; he is the
food of flame and the fibre of the shower which extinguishes flame;
and, by a miracle of male parthenogenesis, with lightning for
accoucheur in place of Vulcan and his hammer, it is he who brings
forth the crystalline virgin ozone to clear the air of the world.
Hydrogen, the ethereal and versatile vapour, whose passionate flame
is the light and heat of the most brilliant and the hottest stars,
whose delicate and fluent being is also the feminine principle in
water—the exquisite hermaphrodite that flows so wooingly about the
world—forgets not her way in the sea, nor ever foregoes her
purpose in plants and animals. Carbon, the workman among the
elements, the artist, the artificer, the labouring class, and the
proletariate of Matter, is the form one likes the best; he is coal and
the diamond, wine and blood, the seed of plants and animals, love
and poetry, lust and slaughter, wood and flesh, and bones and rocks;
the texture of all life; the human element, the diabolic element, the
divine element. These three highly individualized, genial, passionate
and many-sided forms, along with nitrogen, a loose-living, dissolute
gas whose will is to decay; phosphorus, white and red, the Jekyll
and Hyde of the elements; sulphur, a gold-hued wonder of twice
three transformations; calcium, silicon, iron, and the rest, constitute
the body of man; his energies, vital, reproductive, mental, and
spiritual, are the sums of the energies of these various forms of
Matter. Consider it! In this alone there is a new world of poetry, a
new world of humour. Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium,
phosphorus, sulphur, natrium, kalium, magnesium, iron, silicon, the
principal constituents of the whole of the Universe have become in
man subconscious, conscious, and self-conscious; it is infinitely
satisfying to know it, write it, say it, think it. These dozen mysterious
forms of Matter the Mysterious have become man; and all their
prodigious powers of expansion, cohesion, magnetic and electric
energies, intense and hungry chemical affinities, miraculous
transformations, radiations, isomerisms, allotropisms, and the
continuous, passionate, omnipresent pulses of molecular attraction
and interatomic motion are converted into vitality, generative power,
muscular energy, nervous energy, into cerebration, emotion, passion,
imagination, material forces all. This is a high and great thing, and
when the general mind and imagination live in it, the mood of the
world will undergo an unparagoned change.

I am now to answer the question, What is the source of this

immortal soul with its flaming Hell and glowing Heaven? These
dozen mysterious, mutable forms of Matter the indestructible, being
the principal constituents of the whole Universe, have become in
man conscious; and man, before he understands, calls this
indestructibility of the Matter of which he consists immortal soul.
Wordsworth has it wonderfully, building better than he knew, for it
was Matter that spoke when Wordsworth said—

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
 And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home;"

that is, from the all-pervading Ether, our primeval home, the
original form of Matter which fills space; the imponderable Ether in
which the suns and systems float, having evolved with all that they
contain from that very plasmic Ether. Again, all Matter having
memory, and man being Matter grown conscious—a metaphysic for
this would be the World as Memory rushing into Consciousness; but
however that be expressed, man's idea of the Universe before he
knows its true configuration or how it arose, is certain to contain
some suggestion of the actual becoming of things; and that
suggestion will naturally derive from subconscious recollections of
impressive events in the history of Matter. In the history of the solar
system after the unbegun period of its existence dissolved in the
plasmic Ether, the first impressive event is electrical evolution, when
the Matter of the sun and the planets overbrimmed solar space as a
globular or spiral nebula. Every particle of earth was all luminous in
that pristine light: the pen I write with, the paper I write on, my
hand that writes, and my brain that instructs my hand. The next
important event is the condensation and contraction of the nebula
with the segregation of the planets, when all the chemical affinities,
the energies of electricity and heat, radiative action, centrifugal and
centripetal forces and the force of gravitation kept up for millions of
years a war of the elements no atom of Matter can ever forget. The
blood, the brain, the bones, the flesh, and the marrow, retaining an
indelible impression of their placid existence in the unbegun Ether, of
the diaphanous light of the nebula, and of the terrific time of infernal
tumult when the solar system was evolved, suggested to man, when
his highly developed consciousness begat a still unenlightened idea
of the Universe, that splendour on high, his glowing Heaven of light,
and that horror below, his fiery Hell of torment. This is pure poetry.
Eloquence not being my purpose in this preface, I have expounded it
in strict Matter-of-fact prose; but being Matter of Imagination all
compact, a truer poetical form will be found in "The Testament of a
Prime Minister." (pp. 98-100.)

Heaven and Hell, then, are subconscious recollections of the peace

of the Ether, of the glory of the nebula, and of the condensation and
contraction suffered by the Matter of which man consists during the
millions of millions of years of the evolution of the solar system,
perdurable experiences impressed on every molecule, every atom,
every electron of the globe and of man; and when I invite the
imagination of the world to take up its abode in the actual poetry of
Matter, it is a true devolution I desire, comparable to the return of
Matter through vapour and lightning into the all-pervading Ether.

III INTERLUDE

I styled the Universe a Memory rushing into Consciousness. It may

also be called by as many metaphysics as there are properties and
qualities in Matter, and in Matter's accomplishment, man—a Will to
Happiness, a Will to Misery; a Will to be Hydrogen, fully developed in
all the hottest stars; a Will to Love, a Will to Hate; a Will to be
Lightning, into which everything devolves on its way back to the
Ether; a Will to Live, a Will to Die; a Will to Beauty, the metaphysic
of art; a Will to be the Ether, which everything was, and is, and will
again be. I say this to remind the reader that all mental and spiritual
qualities and properties are contained in the forms of Matter which
become at last fully conscious in man.

There was truth in astromancy. Man, consisting of the same

Matter as the stars, felt his kinship, and, being uninstructed, built up
assiduously his judicial astrology to explain, what every atom of his
body knew subconsciously, his identity with Sirius and Aldebaran.
There was truth in alchemy, more truth than in astrology. The prime
idea of alchemy, the transmutation of Matter, is absolutely true.
Uranium, thorium, radium, have been detected in the act of
secreting and producing other elements, which new elements, it is
almost certain, change, possibly by way of hydrogen, into electricity
—rapidly in the cases of uranium and thorium, very slowly in the
case of radium—and from electricity devolve back into the primitive
form of Matter, the Ether. And such is the history of all Matter: from
the Ether through cycles of change back to the Ether. Man, being
this transmutable, indestructible matter become conscious, had from
the beginning the knowledge of these properties of Matter within
him, and, while still uninstructed, conceived the ideas of the
transmutation of metals by the philosopher's stone, and of the
prolonging of life indefinitely by that same philosopher's stone
dissolved into the elixir of life: the one idea, practically true; the
other, a fantastic intimation of the indestructibility of the Matter of
which man consists. There was truth in witchcraft and sorcery.
Modern hypnotism can exhibit phenomena as wonderful as anything
recorded of black magic or white; and I am certain when I
remember the properties and qualities of the elements of which he is
compounded, that there are other material powers in man awaiting
discovery. I understand the list of human elements is correct as far
as it goes: about some eighteen are given, including those that are
barely traceable. I cannot conceive what further powers may be
discovered in man; but I allow myself an interlude to suggest that
there are other elements besides the current list in the Matter of
which he consists.

The rare gases recently discovered in the atmosphere, helium,

neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and the unknown members of that
group, certain to be found—have these zero gases, as they are
called, been sought for in man? Hitherto their story is a blank, as it
is impossible to unite them chemically with any element; but they
constitute one per cent. of the mechanical mixture of gases which
we breathe. What are they doing, then, in the air? Nitrogen alone is
a sufficient diluent of the necessary oxygen. Are these rare gases
purposeless? I am intensely curious about them. Are there outcasts
also among the elements? Are these gases dead elements? One of
them, helium, is a transmuted emanation of radium. Is it the ghost
of radium? Nitrogen, with which they are found mechanically
mingled, is the element of fermentation and decay. One feels upon
the brink of a notable discovery. These dead gases, these ghosts of
elements herding with the vapour of dissolution, nitrogen, cannot be
entirely ineffective. I hazard this poetical suggestion:—It is the
presence of these incommunicable elements that maintains the
mechanical mixture of the oxygen and the nitrogen of the air: were
their ghostly frontier eliminated, the two main members of the
atmosphere would unite chemically, forming protoxide of nitrogen,
which is laughing gas. Great Pan! How close we are to that rare old
fantasy, that the crack of doom will be a universal shout of laughter!

The names, affinities and energies of the elements of which man

consists should be more secure in every memory than the alphabet
and the multiplication table. This is a great part of my immorality,
that, instead of a myth, children should be told, as soon as they
begin to express their wonder, that they consist of oxygen,
hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, kalium, natrium, sulphur,
phosphorus, iron, magnesium, silicon; that the principal human
elements are also the principal constituents of the whole Universe,
and that all the elements are forms of one substance. They should
also be shown experimentally the qualities and properties of these
elements; and gradually, instead of catechisms and the grammars of
dead languages, obtain a knowledge of the poetry of evolution: a
poetry that does not require to be taught or learnt; that requires
only to be told and shown to be known, welcomed, and
remembered, because it is already subconscious in the Matter of
which we consist. Thus a child would know at once that there has
been no philosophy, no religion, no literature hitherto; that there is
nothing for him to learn; that every one must make for himself his
own philosophy, religion, literature. All that chemists, astronomers,
physicists, biologists, have discovered and suggested; all science and
all its speculations—these things that do not require to be learnt, but
only require to be shown to be known and delighted in, the child
would soon furnish himself with; just as he would light-heartedly
reject everything in the shape of system from Aristotle to Herbert
Spencer, and all doctrine from Buddha to Christ, and from Christ to
Nietzsche. The insane past of mankind is the incubus: the world is
really a virgin world awaking from a bad dream. ("The Testament of
a Man Forbid.")

These are some of the seeds of the new thing I bring, of the new
poetry which the world will make, Matter brooding on Matter for
centuries to come. Poetry is the flower of what all men are maturing
in thought and fancy; I reap a harvest as yet unsown; I come a
hundred years before the time—that time foreseen by Wordsworth,
"when what is now called science, familiarized to men, shall be
ready to put on a form of flesh and blood."

It is a profoundly satisfying thought that no serious pursuit of

man, no cherished conception, however erroneous in itself, is ever
based in error. Man is Matter, embodied sincerity, and cannot for any
length of time concern himself with what is not. I have shown a new
thing—that Heaven and Hell were memories of processes of
evolution struggling into consciousness; I have reminded the reader
that astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, and sorcery had, all of them,
roots in Material facts, and I have pointed out that these pseudo-
sciences and black and white magics were attempts of
unenlightened but conscious Matter to reveal itself and its powers. I
will now state the Material sources of the stupendous ideas of God
and Sin.

IV GOD AND SIN

Man is inhuman. Humanity is as fanciful an ideal as divinity. From

eternity the Matter of which man consists had an unconscious being
dissolved in the Ether; thereafter as lightning, and as various
Material forms which we call elements: and as these various Material
forms which we call elements, as lightning, and once again in the
Ether, the Matter of which man consists will have an unconscious
being to all eternity. I say an unconscious being: the likelihood that
the Matter of man after its devolution into the Ether will again
become conscious is inconsiderable. Further, in the event of so
remote a chance, it is even more unlikely that the Matter of man,
becoming conscious again, should have any recollection of its former
consciousness. The present interlude of his conscious being—in the
old image like the flight of a night-bird through an illumined hall
from darkness to darkness—is so brief, that on that account alone
man has had no time to become human. This is true of the
individual; and were mankind to end now, or a million years hence,
it would also, and still, be true of the race. A million years of
consciousness as man would not be an experience long and broad
and deep enough to humanize the Matter of which man consists,
because except in rare cases the same Matter is never more than
once incarnate. From crops grown, and cattle fed, on battlefields,
molecules of Matter that were once part of man may become part of
man again. Doubtless also cannibals have eaten cannibals, thus
giving the same Matter repeated avatars: an instance, however, that
does not make for humanity. Even if our earth were to heap
geological period upon geological period from our recent era of
tertiary and quaternary times to a futurity of centenary and millenary
ages, until in the course of a million million of years every electron of
the globe transmuted through all forms of Matter, had been
reincarnated as Man again and again, that would not be experience
enough to fix a permanent memory of humanity in the devolved
Matter of man: because this Matter that becomes man, like all
Matter, existed from all eternity—during the immeasurable and
inconceivable lapse of eternity, existed in the Ether, thereafter as
lightning, and as elements on fire, for periods compared with which
a million million years are as the time of a single heart-beat
compared with a million million years. Like thoughts of childhood in
old age, the memory of the diaphanous light of the nebula and of
the tumult and fire of its contraction, and the memory of the peace
and darkness of its primeval, ethereal being, would overcome all
impressions of consciousness in that unconscious memory which
Matter is: and even if living experience remained occult in the
oxygen and carbon, the hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium which had been
man, the tumult and fire of the new nebula into which the Matter of
man must devolve, will bray and burn out all sense of life in the
most passionate Matter that ever lived and fought, the peace and
darkness of the re-entered Ether, of the infinite Lethean Ether, will
restore an entire and pure unconsciousness to the Matter which was
Christ, to the Matter which was Nero, to the Matter which you are
and which I am. It is a new poetry I bring, a new poetry for the first
time in a thousand years: an abiding-place for the imagination of
man as matter-of-fact, as hard and fast, as ineluctable as Olympus
and Hades, Asgard and Hela, Heaven and Hell were for our
ancestors, and simpler and greater and more perdurable than these,
because it is no longer a dream of the Universe, but the Universe
itself, in which the imagination of man must now find its abode.

The Matter of man can never become human. A metaphysic or

metaphor of man is of two terms:—Man is a Will to an impossible
Divinity by way of an impossible Humanity. For four score years or
five score, a heart-beat between the two eternities, some dozen
elements are elected or doomed to consciousness as man: and to
this consciousness is imparted by the manner of his generation an
insignificant heritage of accumulated tendency, impulse and
impression: so insignificant, within recorded time, that it may be
ignored. It has been suggested that out of man, the descendant of a
lower animal, something higher than man may be evolved. The
suggestion does not commend itself to me. I know of no data that
can make the Evolution of Species from three or four originals by
Natural Selection a credible assumption. The age of miracles is past.
When we ask for a sign we are referred to the evolution of a new
species of louse. If any mortal thing, elephant or microscopic insect,
is still unprovided, by all means let it have its complement of lice: all-
bounteous nature is not likely to be wanting in that department.
That Matter should produce a new form of degenerate life in which it
is especially prolific is no proof of the Evolution of Species by Natural
Selection. The appearance of a new pedicular degraded-hemipterous
insect in a hitherto inverminate habitat ensures certainly a due
degree of phthiriasis where no phthiriasis was before—a
consummation to rejoice the moral order of pediculina, and
doubtless confirming the metaphysician of the parasitic world in his
doctrine of the Universe as a Will to be Suctorial; but such an
isolated phenomenon is not necessarily an illustration of the method
of evolution, and might be called with greater probability an act of
special creation. To me it is an instance of the material, poetic or
imaginative style of Matter in its mood of depravity—a mood
analogous to that in which literature produces Sinon, Tartuffe,
Parolles, Chivy Slyme. A poetical metaphysic or metaphor is that of
the Universe as Imagination becoming Phenomena. As in the Matter
of a poet—nourished by the past, productive in the present, and
sending forth aerial roots into the future—thoughts, imaginings,
shapes, and legends of infinite variety, uncalled arise, and
unlaboured become; so in the Matter of the earth—which is Matter
of the Universe, from all eternity to all eternity, which is all memory,
all imagination, all energy—life in infinite variety arises and becomes:
not by the breaking up of species, although that may be a side-show
at the world's fair, but by the appearance of species the staple of
evolution proceeds. If one speck or clot of protoplasm can arise and
become, and after becoming, can evolve an organism, millions of
specks of protoplasm can arise and become, each evolving a
different organism, and the whole constituting an unbroken chain of
being: not evolution in a straight line, but cubic evolution, a
pullulation of species. Consider it: there must be similarities without
any necessity for either lineal or collateral evolution, although these
are both thrown in by exuberant nature: if the organisms are
vertebrate, then they must all have backbones; if they are
invertebrate they will be, all of them, without backbones; if the
generation is viviparous the mother—plant or animal—will suckle her
young; if the generation is oviparous the mother—plum-tree, grain,
poultry, or spider—will produce eggs: but to suppose that a fish
changes into a bird, and a bird into a beast by Natural Selection, as
it is at present understood, is to demand from man a credulity that
could die a martyr's death to prove that the earth is flat. It is not a
wanton mark of interrogation which I place against the Darwinian
theory of the Origin of Species. What seems to me the subtle
beginning of the one thing to be dreaded, a new anthropomorphism,
demands resistance. On the threshold of Darwin's theory of the
Evolution of Species by Natural Selection a danger-signal warns the
jealous observer. The probability that allied species were descended
from a common parent had sunk deeply into Darwin's mind; "but for
some years," he writes, "I could not conceive how each form
became so excellently adapted to its habits of life. I then began
systematically to study domestic productions, and after a time saw
clearly that man's selective power was the most important agent."
(Darwin's Letter to Professor Haeckel of 8 October, 1864.) The italics
are mine. Man's selective power is the most important agent in the
breeding of domestic animals, therefore an analogous selective
power is exercised by nature! Darwin set himself to find out that this
was true, with unexampled patience certainly, but with a rooted and
evergrowing prepossession that what he sought was there, that he
would discover his own anthropical notion in an ananthropic world.
Is this not the inception of a new anthropomorphism? So men
sought for God; so men hunted after witchcraft. Whatever we search
for, we find; nothing is surer than that. We must, therefore, search
without seeking for; we must desire to find, not an echo or reflection
of our own thoughts, obtainable anywhere and at any time, but only
that which is. With Darwin Natural Selection amounted to a
metaphysic; it obsessed him with all the force of Other World; it
explained the phenomena considered and so must be the cause of
these phenomena! In human affairs circumstantial evidence is the
most reliable, in the affairs of the Universe the most misleading, as
all science, philosophy, and religion, directly attest. Natural Selection,
sexual and vital, accounts for much variation, but it is not sufficient
to bridge the gulf between the negro and the Teuton; to my mind it
is not even sufficient to bridge the gulf between the Jew and the
Gentile; and to trace man lineally through apes, marsupials, mudfish,
skull-less vertebrates, worms, and one-celled protozoa at twenty-five
removes from the monera is to propound a thing my intellect and
imagination reject. Environment, sexual inclination, and the struggle
for life, will not evolve a man from a rhizopod. Natural Selection, as
it is understood, cannot be the full mechanism of the evolution of
man. I want to know about the Chemical Selection; the difference
between the elemental constitution of man and the other animals;
the actual chemistry of animated Matter. Is there as much of the
Universe in the tiger as in man? Is there an element of self-
consciousness to be found only in man? A profound, a more Material
Selection, a fate, a doom, is yet to be discovered. Although
evolutionists insist that their Natural Selection is a mechanical
process, like Darwin himself they feel that it is insufficient; they may
not confess it to themselves, but they are sceptical. Scepticism being
the parent of superstition, Natural Selection assumes the desired
attributes, dynamic, theurgic. Natural Selection has usurped the
thoughts of evolutionists as a thing behind phenomena, as a kind of
god. The world is in danger of a new fanaticism, of a scientific
instead of a religious tyranny. This is my protest. In the course of
many ages the mind of man may be able to grasp the world
scientifically: in the meantime we can know it only poetically;
science is still a valley of dead bones till imagination breathes upon
them.

It is certain that Matter has not evolved a finer race of men than
the Caucasian; and it is certain that the Caucasian has not evolved a
finer breed than the Greeks, the Romans or the English. Maugre the
new louse—doubtless a most belated and strangely involved
occurrence, comparable to our war of the Heptarchy in South Africa
more than a thousand years behind the time—upon our earth the
evolution of species has ceased, except tentatively by unnatural
selection under the control of man. Unnatural is here a most relative
term: I do not forget that man is himself as much a force of nature
as a climate, or a season of the year, or any other environment.
Since in the Caucasian races of men Matter has become capable of
full self-consciousness, although it has not attained it yet, no further
evolution of life in an ascending scale is possible; therefore man
cannot become more human than he is. A fuller self-consciousness
will not achieve a greater humanity: on the contrary, as I intend to
show, a fuller self-consciousness entails a deeper integration, a
closer involution of man's inhumanity.

Man is inhuman, and cannot be other than inhuman, the

metaphysic or metaphor illustrative being—The Universe as a Will to
an impossible Divinity by way of an impossible Humanity. The
skeleton of man is a most inhuman thing; a skull is most inhuman;
bones are as inhuman as rocks. The flesh of man is inhuman; it is
not distinguishable from the flesh of swine. His sight, hearing, taste,
appetites, functions, are inhuman, being appropriaments of all
mammalia. Four important things he has which, by their quality,
differentiate him from the other animals—his thumb, his posture, his
brain, and his larynx; and these, the insignia of man, are the special
vehicles of a most profound inhumanity for which the catfish and the
wolverine, were they in power, would wipe the present lord of
creation from the face of the earth as utterly unfit to live. His
commanding posture, his opposable thumb, his spacious convoluted
brain, and his voice of terror and command, have enabled man to
invent, elaborate, and apply to man all the tortures of his imagined
Hell. The cat plays with the mouse, but that is the feline culinary art;
and the mouse is shortly killed. Nor is the mouse fastened; it has to
the last a chance of escape; and often the mouse gets away after a
rousing game in which the stake was its life. The spider weaves a
web, and the insect is caught; here the prey is fastened, but it is for
food, and often a stout fly will break the net, and at the worst he is
soon despatched. It was man who conceived the exquisite idea of
fastening people in order to hurt them at his will and pleasure. Not a
mammoth cat, insane and hunger-clung, ties up men and flogs them
underground to cook them quickly instead of employing the longer,
less brutal, and customary method with the mouse: it is man who
does this to man, and not for food, but upon principle. Not a Titanic
spider, but man, rove the strappado and stretched the rack in order
to hurt men in body, mind, and soul, in every organ, nerve and
sinew, joint and muscle, repeatedly and for long periods without
killing them: it was man who did this, and not because he was
starving and this the only way to secure and prepare food, but in
many cases only because there was between him and his victims a
difference of opinion upon an entirely immaterial point. It was not a
pack of wolves, having captured more game than they could dispose
of, and being quite sated with flesh and wanton with blood, who
chained up men and women and burned them alive: it was men who
did this to men as a religious duty. As soon as their queen has been
pleased, and the future of the hive is assured, the working-bees
destroy the drones. If merciful economy be a human attribute, the
bees are more human than men. Those who cannot work, and those
for whom there is nothing to do, the natural and artificial drones
among men, are interned in lunatic asylums, homes for incurables,
prisons, poorhouses. The cost of these would, I suppose, provide
old-age pensions for all the workers. The lethal chamber of the bee
is the porch of his straw-built citadel. Recently a humane man of
science, with courage and public spirit—so rare in England now!—
inquired for the lethal chambers of men. These are they: our
asylums, prisons, poorhouses; but the death we supply is slow—so
slow: why, one pleasant meal of five courses, with wine, coffee,
benedictine, and a cigar, would in one night dispose of all the old
men in a certain Home I know: indeed, they are living tombs rather
than lethal chambers, these institutions of ours. Among the bees it is
the queens and drones, among the ants the queens and kings, non-
workers in both cases, who produce the drudges and the soldiers.
The proletariate of the hive and of the cities of the emmet are more
human than men; they do not propagate their order: proletariate is
really a discourtesy title applied to working-bees and ants. In the
hive and the ant-hill the proletaneous order is the upper class: no
slave begets a slave among these swarming miracles. From ancient
times the working-bees and the working-ants, seeing that the
endless all-absorbing drudgery has to be done, gradually evolved, by
heroic human abstinence, their own sexlessness, leaving to the idle
classes the rapture, the sin, and the awful responsibility of producing
slaves: the humanity of the bees and ants, class and mass,
approaches divinity. Among men the idle and well-to-do classes,
instead of producing the workers and the soldiers, limited
themselves of old to the reproduction of their own order, the males
merely as an entertainment making sporadic incursions into the
colonies of the workers. Now, even reproduction of their own order,
in France, America, and more recently in England, begins to be
irksome to the idle and well-to-do classes; but instead of an honest,
honourable, and human abstinence, they adopt a dishonest,
dishonourable, and brutal artifice: nor have they any real idea of
regulating the future of the human race: it is only to keep their own
circumstances easy and the tide of pleasure flowing: this custom is
also extending, not so inhumanly, to the proletariate. With the
majority of animals, so far as they themselves are concerned, all the
seeds of life have fair play: and in the order of mammalia a
beautiful, a human chastity has been evolved which restricts to a
brief annual occurrence the nisus towards the future of their kind,
such inhuman animals as men, monkeys, and cats excepted: with
the exception of women also the females of all mammalia are
human; they suckle their young. The asceticism of the asexual
worker and soldier ants, the divinest thing in nature, had at one time
an analogue of a kind in our monasteries, nunneries, and orders of
military monks: that was the deadlift effort mankind made to attain
an impossible Divinity by way of an impossible Humanity; and it was
only a further dehumanization of the individual without any
evolutionary result: man is much too Material a being ever to
compass so human, so divine an event as the generation of sexless
beings to do the necessary drudgery of the world as devoutly as
lovers kiss: his ideal eunuch of the monastery, and his actual eunuch
of the seraglio are overwhelming proof of man's profound
inhumanity and of the abysmal indivinity of his nature.
 Man's consciousness of his inhumanity and indivinity are
transmuted in his uninstructed imagination into the monstrous
phantom—Sin; something so heinous and detestable
interpenetrating all his being, works and ways, that many of the
subtlest intelligences and most upright minds have found no relief
from its remorseful obsession except in the atonement of Christ and
faith in an immaterial future; or, more courageously, in a remorseless
despair and the resolute acceptance of the postulate that life is a
thing that should never have been. It has been left to me to show
that this inhumanity, this indivinity, this Sin, has, like all man's ideas,
conceptions, and fantasies, a Material source in the properties of the
forms of Matter of which man consists. In expounding my new
poetry I am at an immense disadvantage in one regard—that the
latent forces of expansion and chemical affinity, the active electrical,
magnetic, radiant and cohesive energies, and the perpetuity of
molecular and interatomical motions in the oxygen, carbon,
hydrogen, etc., of the Matter of man are as yet only vaguely
conceived, so far at least as they relate to himself, in the mind of the
reader. I must therefore reiterate that these forces, converted into
anabolic and katabolic activities, into vitality, nervous energy,
reproductive power, into love, hate, thought, imagination, into
consciousness and self-consciousness, are the fount of man's notion
that there is within him, and without, something other than Matter
and its properties of form and energy: it is these material forces that
man has ignorantly christened soul or spirit, with the immaterial
significance of these words. Now no one in love feels sinful; no one
in a passion of any kind feels sinful; no man gloriously drunk feels
sinful; no deep-set ambition ever accuses itself of sin; an entirely
healthy nature living a healthy life knows nothing of sin. Conviction
of Sin has always been a limited experience. There have been, are,
and will be, powerful and most Material natures, unaffected except
temporarily and superficially by bouts of debauchery, prolonged
mental strain, and the commission of every crime. Conviction of Sin,
alike in the offspring of worn-out stock—epileptics, consumptives,
neuropaths, mattoids, weak-bodied and weak-minded people
generally—as in ordinary healthy natures, is the effect of the
exhaustion of the Material forces of the Matter of man. The
exhaustion may proceed from dissipation, from prolonged domestic
or financial worry, or—not to multiply instances—it may be the result
of the enormous discharge of nervous energy and the upheaval of
the whole nature in the commission of a murder or the betrayal of a
friend. But no ordinary, healthy man is ever convicted of Sin before
the act, or in the act; the degenerate whose normal state is one of
conscious sinfulness, feels for the moment deified upon the sudden
access of energy that leads him into crime; and the outcast, when
he learns to say, "Evil, be thou my good," stumbles, although
unconsciously, upon the tremendous knowledge that the categoric
imperative is the discharge of the material forces of Matter, whether
the discharge be by the lightnings of the clouds, in the seismal
throes of earth, or through the passion and imagination of men and
women. Sin, then, is the exhaustion of the material forces of man.
Discharges of force in ways of pleasure, in moods of delight, in
trances of ecstasy, as well as discharges of force in feelings of
rancour, jealousy, and malice, in deeds of lust, slaughter, and
treachery, have alike to bear the unhallowed name of the succeeding
reaction. It is a species of vengeance, this transference of the title
Sin from the impotence of the spent Matter to the energy that was
expended. The degenerate suffers because his forefathers used up
the energies of the stock in enjoyment; the debauchee suffers by
the over-discharge of his own force; and both feel a vengeful
pleasure in transferring the moral nickname of their enfeebled
condition to the innocent, whole-hearted liberty and power of the
days of exuberant health. It is the meanest, most cowardly thing
man has done to call his courage Sin: by this vengeance the
enfeebled Matter of man obtains such pitiful satisfaction as an infant
does when it calls the floor upon which it has broken its brow "bad,"
and invites its nurse to whip the offender. An apologue:—A bee,
seized with an access of Quixotic daring, exhausted its sting in the
neck of a quite harmless tourist, and shortly lay buzzing its last and
lamenting its guilt. "What a sinner I have been!" the bee buzzed. A
hornet flounced up and asked the bee what ailed it. "I have sinned,"
the bee replied, "and deserve only death and hell." "Let's see," cried
the hornet, examining the bee; "why, you've no sting! You've used
up your sting!" "Ay!" sighed the bee; "I've used it up, sinner that I
am!" "Pooh!" replied the hornet, who was by way of being a casuist:
"that's not how to look at it! Your sting, look you—your sting itself
was the sin. Now, you are purged of that. Courage, mon camarade,
le diable est mort!" "Whatever do you mean?" rejoined the bee.
"When I was active and happy, confident and proud, with the power
of life and death in my tail, going about the delightful business of
the universe among the amorous flowers——" "Then you were
sinful," interrupted the hornet, determined that his cousin should not
die unconsoled: "now, since by the loss of your sting, which was
your sin par excellence, you being sexless, you are convicted of sin,
and have become penitent, your sin ceases, and you will go to
heaven." But the bee in the sudden illumination of death whispered
faintly but resolutely, "No, by heaven, and earth, and hell! None of
your tricks on travellers bound for the undiscovered country. It was
not until I lost my power to sin that I felt sinful; therefore I was
never a sinner, and I'm not a sinner now." Whereupon the bee with
a last effort flew into the bosom of a rose and died happy.

I now come to the Material source of the idea of God.

The Ether from which everything was evolved fills all space: it
interpenetrates all Matter so intimately that the electrons of an atom
swim in it with the liberty of fish in the sea. The Ether has never
been analysed, quantitatively, qualitatively, or volumetrically; it has
never been seen, heard, smelt, felt, tasted, or weighed.

A mathematician has suggested that the Ether is the unimaginable

world of four dimensions, including, interpenetrating and
transcending our cognizable Universe as a cube which is a world of
three dimensions includes and transcends a possible world of two
dimensions contained in a superficial square. Certain, if a world of
two dimensions can exist, a world of four dimensions is not
impossible; but we require to complete the series with a linear world
of one dimension and a punctual world of none, which is absurd.

Nevertheless, it is possible to form some idea of the nature of the

Ether. Its invisibility is not beyond our conception: this negative
quality is characteristic of many fluids, notably of the atmosphere;
but the atmosphere becomes apparent in the object-glass of the
telescope when the moon is seen like a white pebble in a rushing
stream. The imponderability of the Ether can also be conceived by
analogy with the atmosphere. Every man, knowing nothing of it,
carries upon his shoulders a column of air sixty miles high and
weighing many tons. In calm weather the very presence of this
voluminous vapour is unfelt: it is only when the wind rises that we
know how heavy its hand can be. Thus a poetical or concrete
conception of the Ether is not negatived by that which it is not. But
this omnipresent substance can be conceived positively, and the
most suitable analogue is the sea. The sea consists of two gases—
hydrogen and oxygen, united chemically to form water, and
containing in solution two or three hundred grains to the pint of
compounds of the following forms of Matter: Kalium, natrium,
magnesium, calcium, sulphur, carbon, chlorine, bromine, iodine, and
traces of everything soluble and partially soluble in water: it contains
also, dissolved in various salts and bases, the very elements,
hydrogen and oxygen, of which it is itself compounded. If a fluid so
simple as water, braided of only three molecules of Matter, two of
hydrogen and one of oxygen, can be so powerful a solvent, it follows
that a fluid so complex as the Ether, woven and interwoven of
molecules of all the elements, that is, of molecules of every form of
Matter, must be dynamic in the highest degree, must be an
omnipotent solvent: if water, consisting of only two elements, can
hold in solution, besides its own constituents, ten or a dozen other
elements, the Ether, consisting of all the elements, a fortiori can hold
in solution all these elements. Nor is the actual omnipresence of the
Ether altogether beyond our grasp. To say that every electron, every
atom, every molecule, every element or form of Matter, every planet,
sun, and system, floats in the Ether and is interpenetrated by it, is to
say that which seems improbable; but the analogy of water again
helps to a natural concrete image. To say that three-quarters by
weight of human flesh, three-eighths by weight of human bones,
consist of water, is to say that which seems improbable, but which is
nevertheless true. Thus we can guess the Ether in terms of our
Universe of three dimensions.

The esoteric nature of the Ether is more easily understood. I use

the word "esoteric" with my own meaning, implying nothing
mystical. By esoteric I mean here a thing known only to me. Upon
the publication of this book, the thing I am about to tell becomes
exoteric. I make no mystery. The Universe is all mystery: the
existence of a drop of water is as mysterious as the existence of
music.

Man is the Universe alive and conscious, and with the capacity of
entire self-consciousness. This capacity, undeveloped and
misunderstood, is the source of all man's misery, the hotbed of the
idea of Sin and the idea of God. Unable to comprehend it, the Greek
and the Norseman projected their trouble into Olympus and Hades,
Asgard and Nifelheim, gods and goddesses, titans, giants, furies,
valkyrs. Every people cast out and projected its self-consciousness
as Other World in some form. A unique race, the Jews, threw its
shadow on the Universe as Jehovah, the One God, jealous, vengeful,
inhuman. The European Aryans laid hold of this, but in a decadent,
Christianized form; and as they lacked in general the intense
individuality of the Hebrew, they soon brought it into a
deliquescence of the Trinity, the Mother of Heaven, Saints,
transubstantiation, the God of love, etc. The hardier northern races,
however, reverted to a more Hebraic form, preferring the God of
battles to the Madonna; and withal the idea of the One God
remained dominant in Christian countries, being recruited by the
sudden rise and rivalry of Islam, with its strident profession of
monotheism. The material source of this uneasy self-consciousness
which projects itself into Other World is twofold. One of these is the
Nature of Man, formerly called Original Sin, God and Sin being in this
regard convertible terms. I have stated this source clearly enough in
the "Prime Minister," in that passage where the protagonist
overcomes the desire to pray, conjuring himself to—
 "think
Instead what God is, sanely think; and what
The sanguine source of our immortal hope;
Think how some common drudging neighbour-wight
(Not Hercules nor a titan of the war
Venerean; no, but any honest Jack)
Could happily beget for fifty years
A hundred wholesome children annually:
How every rosy Jill encloisters germs
Of many thousand brats; think this and laugh
Aloud, delighted with the naive, the rich
Conceit of immortality and vast
Exuberance of the race that swells and throbs
In every man and woman, strings the nerves,
Ignites the brain and thunders in the heart
With God and life eternal."

The other source of the idea of God is in the Ether. I have not yet
dealt with this by name in any of my writings, and had intended to
reserve it for my "Testament of a Deliverer"; but having elected to
prepare a brief and general account of my message, I must at least
mention it here. My statement of the Ethereal source of the idea of
God is not nearly mature yet. Nevertheless, the idea is simple and
clear; it is indeed self-evident. Every molecule of which man consists
is not only saturated in the all-pervading Ether, but is kneaded of it,
visible, ponderable Matter being a condensation of the invisible,
imponderable Ether. In a last analysis, which takes us back to the
first synthesis, man is therefore the Ether become conscious. It is
not a question of bulk. Man is an inhabitant of the earth, which is
one of the smallest planets of one of the smallest systems in the
Universe; but man consists of the Universe, of the whole Universe in
its condensed form, and also of the whole Universe in its invisible,
imponderable form, being permeated and pervaded by the
omnipotent, omnipresent Ether, being soaked in it, being drunk with
it, being it. There is nothing anywhere higher than man; there can
be nothing higher than the Universe become self-conscious. In his
uninstructed time man called the Ether which permeates him, which
is his ecstasy, God and gods: "Out of God he came," he thought;
"and back to God he should return;" or he called it Nirvana and an
infinite peace. Imagination is the radiation of the omnipotent Ether.
Only the whole Universe become conscious could have imagined God
the Creator. Now man knows that there is no God; that nothing was
made; that all is a becoming; that he is the Ether, condensed,
evolved; and that he will devolve again into that invisible,
imponderable form of Matter: and this knowledge inherent in himself
is infinitely satisfying. All the imaginings about the source of his
being which man has maddened over, which he has clung to in good
report and ill, which he has died for in battle and at the stake, have
their roots in Material truth. The idea of the Trinity, for example, is
clearly the effort of the Universe become conscious in man to
express that visible and invisible being and that power, namely,
Ether, Matter, Energy, which we now know to be the triple form of
the Universe; and the sublime idea of the Immaculate Conception
has the same profound significance as the union of the gods with
the daughters of men in all mythologies; it means that man
procreates something more than man; it means that he procreates a
conscious Universe. I think it unlikely that Matter has become
conscious anywhere else than on our earth. In man the Ether and
the principal forms of Matter are conscious and self-conscious. It is
not conceivable that some other dozen elements might become
conscious; Matter cannot imagine life and consciousness without
carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus. It is not necessary that
other elements should become conscious, because every element is
a form of the one substance: therefore in man the whole Universe is
conscious. I should say that there is not now, that there has not
been at any time, a mate or a peer of man; and—I repeat it once
more—there cannot be anything higher than man, because man is
the whole Universe become conscious and self-conscious. This is a
great thing: it is the greatest thing that has been told to the world.
It will destroy all existing religions, governments, institutions,
morality and all moralities, all philosophy, all literature, all art. It puts
an end to man's mistaken effort towards an impossible Divinity by
way of an impossible Humanity: he will leave that henceforth to the
bees and the ants; he is higher than the bees and the ants; he is
more Material than they. But that prolonged, deadlift agony towards
an impossible Divinity by way of an impossible Humanity sprang, like
all man's travail, from a Material truth. Man's aim at something
higher than man meant that there is nothing anywhere higher than
man. There is nothing anywhere higher than man. The terror and
splendour of this will give the world pause; nor will the world yield to
it easily, for here is an actual new-birth at last: to know that there
can be no first cause, no metaphysic; that there can be no Other
World; that man is the Material Universe become conscious. A
thousand years' war would not be too terrible a travail for the birth
of the world's self-consciousness: thereafter man could be and do
something; heretofore he has been and done nothing.

The generative power of man and the all-pervading Ether,

conscious in him, are the Material sources of the idea of God. From
the first source there comes also the idea of Sin cognate and
isomeric with the idea of God. (The Devil, the personification of God
as Sin, has been so long a joke that he is out of court.) These twin
ideas God and Sin died together on Calvary two thousand years ago.
The history of Christendom is the history of the obsequies of these
ideas, of the devolution of these ideas. ("The Testament of a Prime
Minister," pp. 76-81.) Out of Matter the Myth of God and Sin and
Heaven and Hell arose. Return that myth in which the imagination of
Christendom still dwells in all serious moods and times of passion,
return it to its Material source, and let the world's imagination go
with it and be born again, to live no longer in a myth but in the
Universe itself. I say, with the Prime Minister, let

"the passionate heart of man,

The proud imagination and the dream
That hovers homeless as the myths decay,
Exempt from fabulous wonder, rooted deep
In Substance one and multiform, and breathed
In all the mystery of the things that are,
Create indomitable will to truth,
An open mind at home in space and time,
A stainless memory splendidly endowed
With actual knowledge, a Material soul
At one with the Material Universe."

With the Bishop of St. James's I watch the future, an actual world
wherein an actual man shall be and do greatly

"In majesty Material, the Nessus-shirt

Of spirit, warp and woof of legend, dyed
In many-coloured Sin, the mordant shame
That cankered life, and clung, a grafted hide
About his innocent flesh, fallen off, or flayed
With hideous woe, and in its proper filth
Corrupted into naught. Forthwith the world
Begins again, not even a pallid dream
Of legendary pasts to cloud the dawn.
I say it simply:—With the Universe
Man clothes himself; arrayed in time and space,
In darkness and in light, no lamp, no gleam
He follows, for the sun illumines him
And every sun his kinsmen in the skies,
The systems, constellations, galaxies.
At home in the empyrean, issuing thence,
His free imagination momently
Remembers flame pellucid, which it was
And will be in the nebula again
When all the orbs that stock the loins of night
Return into the sun, and fill with seed
Of chastest fire the impassioned womb of space."

To conclude for the present: Whence is the Universe and Why?

The Universe itself is the only answer to these questions. Whence is
the Universe? There is no whence; it fills space. Why is the
Universe? It cannot tell: it is neither necessary nor unnecessary: it
is. There are, properly, no answers to these questions; therefore
these questions are not. The Universe says always and only, "Here
and Now."

THE THEATROCRAT A TRAGIC PLAY OF CHURCH AND STAGE

"This is the freedom of the Universe"

Wordsworth

PERSONS
 Sir Tristram Sumner … Proprietor and Manager of the Grosvenor
Theatre.
Gervase Sackville … Bishop of St. James's.
Warwick Groom …}
Silas Orchard … } Actors.
Mark Belfry … An American Manager.
Hildreth … Sir Tristram's Secretary.
Abbot … Business Manager.
Salerne … Stage Manager.
Blyth … }
Boulder … } Commissionaires.
Temple … Sir Tristram's Dresser.
Rouse … Call-boy.
Two Doctors
Lady Sumner … Sir Tristram's Wife.
Europa Troop … An Actress.
Actors, Scene-shifters, Property-men.

Scene: London. Time: The Present A month elapses between the third
and fourth Acts.

THE THEATROCRAT

ACT I

Scene: Sir Tristram Sumner's study in his house in Piccadilly. Sir

Tristram is reading an old letter. When the door opens he puts the letter
hastily in his pocket.

Enter Lady Sumner.

 Sir T. Martha! You've come to trouble me; your eyes
Are lustreless and evil. Will it end
At all? Will you give over urging death?

Lady S. A visitor.

Sir T. Who is it?

Lady S. Warwick Groom.

Sir T. Impossible: at any time impossible.

I hate him, Martha.

Lady S. Hate? Hate Warwick Groom!

I thought you hated no one.

Sir T. So did I!
But him I hate; because—he was my friend.

Lady S. And would be still.

Sir T. Therefore I hate him more!

But that's not true: hate fathoms hate, and answers
Index-like, the searching current of its thought,
Down through the earth, or round it in the nerveless
Air. Deep he hates me; by my hate I know.
I tell you, Martha, were Warwick Groom and I
Alone together for an hour, the death
Of either or of both would testify
Our rooted rancour.

Lady S. I cannot understand!

True, he is wild, this Warwick Groom of ours,