FORE SCENETHE OVERWORLD[Enter the Ancient Spirit and Chorus of the Years, the Spiritand Chorus of the Pities, the Shade of the Earth, the SpiritsSinister and Ironic with their Choruses, Rumours, Spirit-Messengers, and Recording Angels.]SHADE OF THE EARTHWhat of the Immanent Will and Its designs?SPIRIT OF THE YEARSIt works unconsciously, as heretofore,Eternal artistries in Circumstance,Whose patterns, wrought by rapt aesthetic rote,Seem in themselves Its single listless aim,And not their consequence.CHORUS OF THE PITIES [aerial music]Still thus? Still thus?Ever unconscious!An automatic senseUnweeting why or whence?Be, then, the inevitable, as of old,Although that SO it be we dare not hold!SPIRIT OF THE YEARSHold what ye list, fond believing Sprites,You cannot swerve the pulsion of the Byss,Which thinking on, yet weighing not Its thought,Unchecks Its clock-like laws.SPIRIT SINISTER [aside]Good, as before.My little engines, then, will still have play.SPIRIT OF THE PITIESWhy doth It so and so, and ever so,This viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel?SPIRIT OF THE YEARSAs one sad story runs, It lends Its heedTo other worlds, being wearied out with this;Wherefore Its mindlessness of earthly woes.Some, too, have told at whiles that rightfullyIts warefulness, Its care, this planet lostWhen in her early growth and crudityBy bad mad acts of severance men contrived,Working such nescience by their own device.—Yea, so it stands in certain chronicles,Though not in mine.SPIRIT OF THE PITIESMeet is it, none the less,To bear in thought that though Its consciousnessMay be estranged, engrossed afar, or sealed,Sublunar shocks may wake Its watch anon?SPIRIT OF THE YEARSNay. In the Foretime, even to the germ of Being,Nothing appears of shape to indicateThat cognizance has marshalled things terrene,Or will [such is my thinking] in my span.Rather they show that, like a knitter drowsed,Whose fingers play in skilled unmindfulness,The Will has woven with an absent heedSince life first was; and ever will so weave.SPIRIT SINISTERHence we’ve rare dramas going—more so sinceIt wove Its web in the Ajaccian womb!SPIRIT OF THE YEARSWell, no more this on what no mind can mete.Our scope is but to register and watchBy means of this great gift accorded us—The free trajection of our entities.SPIRIT OF THE PITIESOn things terrene, then, I would say that thoughThe human news wherewith the Rumours stirred usMay please thy temper, Years, ’twere better farSuch deeds were nulled, and this strange man’s careerWound up, as making inharmonious jarsIn her creation whose meek wraith we know.The more that he, turned man of mere traditions,Now profits naught. For the large potenciesInstilled into his idiosyncrasy—To throne fair Liberty in Privilege’ room—Are taking taint, and sink to common plotsFor his own gain.SHADE OF THE EARTHAnd who, then, Cordial One,Wouldst substitute for this Intractable?CHORUS OF THE EARTHWe would establish those of kindlier build,In fair Compassions skilled,Men of deep art in life-development;Watchers and warders of thy varied lands,Men surfeited of laying heavy hands,Upon the innocent,The mild, the fragile, the obscure contentAmong the myriads of thy family.Those, too, who love the true, the excellent,And make their daily moves a melody.SHADE OF THE EARTHThey may come, will they. I am not averse.Yet know I am but the ineffectual ShadeOf her the Travailler, herself a thrallTo It; in all her labourings curbed and kinged!SPIRIT OF THE YEARSShall such be mooted now? Already changeHath played strange pranks since first I brooded here.But old Laws operate yet; and phase and phaseOf men’s dynastic and imperial moilsShape on accustomed lines. Though, as for me,I care not thy shape, or what they be.SPIRIT OF THE PITIESYou seem to have small sense of mercy, Sire?SPIRIT OF THE YEARSMercy I view, not urge;—nor more than markWhat designate your titles Good and Ill.’Tis not in me to feel with, or against,These flesh-hinged mannikins Its hand upwindsTo click-clack off Its preadjusted laws;But only through my centuries to beholdTheir aspects, and their movements, and their mould.SPIRIT OF THE PITIESThey are shapes that bleed, mere mannikins or no,And each has parcel in the total Will.SPIRIT OF THE YEARSWhich overrides them as a whole its partsIn other entities.SPIRIT SINISTER [aside]Limbs of Itself:Each one a jot of It in quaint disguise?I’ll fear all men henceforward!SPIRIT OF THE PITIESGo to. Let this terrestrial tragedy—SPIRIT IRONICNay, Comedy—SPIRIT OF THE PITIESLet this earth-tragedyWhereof we spake, afford a spectacleForthwith conned closelier than your custom is.—SPIRIT OF THE YEARSHow does it stand? [To a Recording Angel]Open and chant the pageThou’st lately writ, that sums these happenings,In brief reminder of their instant pointsSlighted by us amid our converse here.RECORDING ANGEL [from a book, in recitative]Now mellow-eyed Peace is made captive,And Vengeance is charteredTo deal forth its dooms on the PeoplesWith sword and with spear.Men’s musings are busy with forecastsOf muster and battle,And visions of shock and disasterRise red on the year.The easternmost ruler sits wistful,And tense he to midward;The King to the west mans his bordersIn front and in rear.While one they eye, flushed from his crowning,Ranks legions around himTo shake the enisled neighbour nationAnd close her career!SEMICHORUS I OF RUMOURS [aerial music]O woven-winged squadrons of ToulonAnd fellows of Rochefort,Wait, wait for a wind, and draw westwardEre Nelson be near!For he reads not your force, or your freightageOf warriors fell-handed,Or when they will join for the onset,Or whither they steer!SEMICHORUS IIO Nelson, so zealous a watcherThrough months-long of cruizing,Thy foes may elide thee a moment,Put forth, and get clear;And rendezvous westerly straightwayWith Spain’s aiding navies,And hasten to head violationOf Albion’s frontier!SPIRIT OF THE YEARSMethinks too much assurance thrills your noteOn secrets in my locker, gentle sprites;But it may serve.—Our thought being now reflexedTo forces operant on this English isle,Behoves it us to enter scene by scene,And watch the spectacle of Europe’s movesIn her embroil, as they were self-ordainedAccording to the naive and liberal creedOf our great-hearted young Compassionates,Forgetting the Prime Mover of the gear,As puppet-watchers him who pulls the strings.—You’ll mark the twitchings of this BonaparteAs he with other figures foots his reel,Until he twitch him into his lonely grave:Also regard the frail ones that his flingsHave made gyrate like animalculaIn tepid pools.—Hence to the precinct, then,And count as framework to the stageryYon architraves of sunbeam-smitten cloud.—So may ye judge Earth’s jackaclocks to beNo fugled by one Will, but function-free.[The nether sky opens, and Europe is disclosed as a prone andemaciated figure, the Alps shaping like a backbone, and thebranching mountain-chains like ribs, the peninsular plateau ofSpain forming a head. Broad and lengthy lowlands stretch fromthe north of France across Russia like a grey-green garment hemmedby the Ural mountains and the glistening Arctic Ocean.The point of view then sinks downwards through space, and drawsnear to the surface of the perturbed countries, where the peoples,distressed by events which they did not cause, are seen writhing,crawling, heaving, and vibrating in their various cities andnationalities.]SPIRIT OF THE YEARS [to the Spirit of the Pities]As key-scene to the whole, I first lay bareThe Will-webs of thy fearful questioning;For know that of my antique privilegesThis gift to visualize the Mode is one[Though by exhaustive strain and effort only].See, then, and learn, ere my power pass again.[A new and penetrating light descends on the spectacle, enduringmen and things with a seeming transparency, and exhibiting as oneorganism the anatomy of life and movement in all humanity andvitalized matter included in the display.]SPIRIT OF THE PITIESAmid this scene of bodies substantiveStrange waves I sight like winds grown visible,Which bear men’s forms on their innumerous coils,Twining and serpenting round and through.Also retracting threads like gossamers—Except in being irresistible—Which complicate with some, and balance all.SPIRIT OF THE YEARSThese are the Prime Volitions,—fibrils, veins,Will-tissues, nerves, and pulses of the Cause,That heave throughout the Earth’s compositure.Their sum is like the lobule of a BrainEvolving always that it wots not of;A Brain whose whole connotes the Everywhere,And whose procedure may but be discernedBy phantom eyes like ours; the while unguessedOf those it stirs, who [even as ye do] dreamTheir motions free, their orderings supreme;Each life apart from each, with power to meteIts own day’s measures; balanced, self complete;Though they subsist but atoms of the OneLabouring through all, divisible from none;But this no further now. Deem yet man’s deeds self-done.GENERAL CHORUS OF INTELLIGENCES [aerial music]We’ll close up Time, as a bird its van,We’ll traverse Space, as spirits can,Link pulses severed by leagues and years,Bring cradles into touch with biers;So that the far-off Consequence appearPrompt at the heel of foregone Cause.—The PRIME, that willed ere wareness was,Whose Brain perchance is Space, whose Thought its laws,Which we as threads and streams discern,We may but muse on, never learn.END OF THE FORE SCENE
THE OVERWORLD
[Enter the Ancient Spirit and Chorus of the Years, the Spiritand Chorus of the Pities, the Shade of the Earth, the SpiritsSinister and Ironic with their Choruses, Rumours, Spirit-Messengers, and Recording Angels.]
SHADE OF THE EARTHWhat of the Immanent Will and Its designs?
SPIRIT OF THE YEARSIt works unconsciously, as heretofore,Eternal artistries in Circumstance,Whose patterns, wrought by rapt aesthetic rote,Seem in themselves Its single listless aim,And not their consequence.
CHORUS OF THE PITIES [aerial music]Still thus? Still thus?Ever unconscious!An automatic senseUnweeting why or whence?Be, then, the inevitable, as of old,Although that SO it be we dare not hold!
SPIRIT OF THE YEARSHold what ye list, fond believing Sprites,You cannot swerve the pulsion of the Byss,Which thinking on, yet weighing not Its thought,Unchecks Its clock-like laws.
SPIRIT SINISTER [aside]Good, as before.My little engines, then, will still have play.
SPIRIT OF THE PITIESWhy doth It so and so, and ever so,This viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel?
SPIRIT OF THE YEARSAs one sad story runs, It lends Its heedTo other worlds, being wearied out with this;Wherefore Its mindlessness of earthly woes.Some, too, have told at whiles that rightfullyIts warefulness, Its care, this planet lostWhen in her early growth and crudityBy bad mad acts of severance men contrived,Working such nescience by their own device.—Yea, so it stands in certain chronicles,Though not in mine.
SPIRIT OF THE PITIESMeet is it, none the less,To bear in thought that though Its consciousnessMay be estranged, engrossed afar, or sealed,Sublunar shocks may wake Its watch anon?
SPIRIT OF THE YEARSNay. In the Foretime, even to the germ of Being,Nothing appears of shape to indicateThat cognizance has marshalled things terrene,Or will [such is my thinking] in my span.Rather they show that, like a knitter drowsed,Whose fingers play in skilled unmindfulness,The Will has woven with an absent heedSince life first was; and ever will so weave.
SPIRIT SINISTERHence we’ve rare dramas going—more so sinceIt wove Its web in the Ajaccian womb!
SPIRIT OF THE YEARSWell, no more this on what no mind can mete.Our scope is but to register and watchBy means of this great gift accorded us—The free trajection of our entities.
SPIRIT OF THE PITIESOn things terrene, then, I would say that thoughThe human news wherewith the Rumours stirred usMay please thy temper, Years, ’twere better farSuch deeds were nulled, and this strange man’s careerWound up, as making inharmonious jarsIn her creation whose meek wraith we know.The more that he, turned man of mere traditions,Now profits naught. For the large potenciesInstilled into his idiosyncrasy—To throne fair Liberty in Privilege’ room—Are taking taint, and sink to common plotsFor his own gain.
SHADE OF THE EARTHAnd who, then, Cordial One,Wouldst substitute for this Intractable?
CHORUS OF THE EARTHWe would establish those of kindlier build,In fair Compassions skilled,Men of deep art in life-development;Watchers and warders of thy varied lands,Men surfeited of laying heavy hands,Upon the innocent,The mild, the fragile, the obscure contentAmong the myriads of thy family.Those, too, who love the true, the excellent,And make their daily moves a melody.
SHADE OF THE EARTHThey may come, will they. I am not averse.Yet know I am but the ineffectual ShadeOf her the Travailler, herself a thrallTo It; in all her labourings curbed and kinged!
SPIRIT OF THE YEARSShall such be mooted now? Already changeHath played strange pranks since first I brooded here.But old Laws operate yet; and phase and phaseOf men’s dynastic and imperial moilsShape on accustomed lines. Though, as for me,I care not thy shape, or what they be.
SPIRIT OF THE PITIESYou seem to have small sense of mercy, Sire?
SPIRIT OF THE YEARSMercy I view, not urge;—nor more than markWhat designate your titles Good and Ill.’Tis not in me to feel with, or against,These flesh-hinged mannikins Its hand upwindsTo click-clack off Its preadjusted laws;But only through my centuries to beholdTheir aspects, and their movements, and their mould.
SPIRIT OF THE PITIESThey are shapes that bleed, mere mannikins or no,And each has parcel in the total Will.
SPIRIT OF THE YEARSWhich overrides them as a whole its partsIn other entities.
SPIRIT SINISTER [aside]Limbs of Itself:Each one a jot of It in quaint disguise?I’ll fear all men henceforward!
SPIRIT OF THE PITIESGo to. Let this terrestrial tragedy—
SPIRIT IRONICNay, Comedy—
SPIRIT OF THE PITIESLet this earth-tragedyWhereof we spake, afford a spectacleForthwith conned closelier than your custom is.—
SPIRIT OF THE YEARSHow does it stand? [To a Recording Angel]Open and chant the pageThou’st lately writ, that sums these happenings,In brief reminder of their instant pointsSlighted by us amid our converse here.
RECORDING ANGEL [from a book, in recitative]Now mellow-eyed Peace is made captive,And Vengeance is charteredTo deal forth its dooms on the PeoplesWith sword and with spear.Men’s musings are busy with forecastsOf muster and battle,And visions of shock and disasterRise red on the year.The easternmost ruler sits wistful,And tense he to midward;The King to the west mans his bordersIn front and in rear.While one they eye, flushed from his crowning,Ranks legions around himTo shake the enisled neighbour nationAnd close her career!
SEMICHORUS I OF RUMOURS [aerial music]O woven-winged squadrons of ToulonAnd fellows of Rochefort,Wait, wait for a wind, and draw westwardEre Nelson be near!For he reads not your force, or your freightageOf warriors fell-handed,Or when they will join for the onset,Or whither they steer!
SEMICHORUS IIO Nelson, so zealous a watcherThrough months-long of cruizing,Thy foes may elide thee a moment,Put forth, and get clear;And rendezvous westerly straightwayWith Spain’s aiding navies,And hasten to head violationOf Albion’s frontier!
SPIRIT OF THE YEARSMethinks too much assurance thrills your noteOn secrets in my locker, gentle sprites;But it may serve.—Our thought being now reflexedTo forces operant on this English isle,Behoves it us to enter scene by scene,And watch the spectacle of Europe’s movesIn her embroil, as they were self-ordainedAccording to the naive and liberal creedOf our great-hearted young Compassionates,Forgetting the Prime Mover of the gear,As puppet-watchers him who pulls the strings.—You’ll mark the twitchings of this BonaparteAs he with other figures foots his reel,Until he twitch him into his lonely grave:Also regard the frail ones that his flingsHave made gyrate like animalculaIn tepid pools.—Hence to the precinct, then,And count as framework to the stageryYon architraves of sunbeam-smitten cloud.—So may ye judge Earth’s jackaclocks to beNo fugled by one Will, but function-free.[The nether sky opens, and Europe is disclosed as a prone andemaciated figure, the Alps shaping like a backbone, and thebranching mountain-chains like ribs, the peninsular plateau ofSpain forming a head. Broad and lengthy lowlands stretch fromthe north of France across Russia like a grey-green garment hemmedby the Ural mountains and the glistening Arctic Ocean.The point of view then sinks downwards through space, and drawsnear to the surface of the perturbed countries, where the peoples,distressed by events which they did not cause, are seen writhing,crawling, heaving, and vibrating in their various cities andnationalities.]
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS [to the Spirit of the Pities]As key-scene to the whole, I first lay bareThe Will-webs of thy fearful questioning;For know that of my antique privilegesThis gift to visualize the Mode is one[Though by exhaustive strain and effort only].See, then, and learn, ere my power pass again.[A new and penetrating light descends on the spectacle, enduringmen and things with a seeming transparency, and exhibiting as oneorganism the anatomy of life and movement in all humanity andvitalized matter included in the display.]
SPIRIT OF THE PITIESAmid this scene of bodies substantiveStrange waves I sight like winds grown visible,Which bear men’s forms on their innumerous coils,Twining and serpenting round and through.Also retracting threads like gossamers—Except in being irresistible—Which complicate with some, and balance all.
SPIRIT OF THE YEARSThese are the Prime Volitions,—fibrils, veins,Will-tissues, nerves, and pulses of the Cause,That heave throughout the Earth’s compositure.Their sum is like the lobule of a BrainEvolving always that it wots not of;A Brain whose whole connotes the Everywhere,And whose procedure may but be discernedBy phantom eyes like ours; the while unguessedOf those it stirs, who [even as ye do] dreamTheir motions free, their orderings supreme;Each life apart from each, with power to meteIts own day’s measures; balanced, self complete;Though they subsist but atoms of the OneLabouring through all, divisible from none;But this no further now. Deem yet man’s deeds self-done.
GENERAL CHORUS OF INTELLIGENCES [aerial music]We’ll close up Time, as a bird its van,We’ll traverse Space, as spirits can,Link pulses severed by leagues and years,Bring cradles into touch with biers;So that the far-off Consequence appearPrompt at the heel of foregone Cause.—The PRIME, that willed ere wareness was,Whose Brain perchance is Space, whose Thought its laws,Which we as threads and streams discern,We may but muse on, never learn.
END OF THE FORE SCENE