Part 1 — FORE SCENE

THE OVERWORLD

[Enter the Ancient Spirit and Chorus of the Years, the Spirit and Chorus of the Pities, the Shade of the Earth, the Spirits Sinister and Ironic with their Choruses, Rumours, Spirit- Messengers, and Recording Angels.]

SHADE OF THE EARTH What of the Immanent Will and Its designs?

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS It 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 sense Unweeting why or whence? Be, then, the inevitable, as of old, Although that SO it be we dare not hold!

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS Hold 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 PITIES Why doth It so and so, and ever so, This viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel?

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS As one sad story runs, It lends Its heed To other worlds, being wearied out with this; Wherefore Its mindlessness of earthly woes. Some, too, have told at whiles that rightfully Its warefulness, Its care, this planet lost When in her early growth and crudity By 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 PITIES Meet is it, none the less, To bear in thought that though Its consciousness May be estranged, engrossed afar, or sealed, Sublunar shocks may wake Its watch anon?

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS Nay. In the Foretime, even to the germ of Being, Nothing appears of shape to indicate That 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 heed Since life first was; and ever will so weave.

SPIRIT SINISTER Hence we’ve rare dramas going—more so since It wove Its web in the Ajaccian womb!

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS Well, no more this on what no mind can mete. Our scope is but to register and watch By means of this great gift accorded us— The free trajection of our entities.

SPIRIT OF THE PITIES On things terrene, then, I would say that though The human news wherewith the Rumours stirred us May please thy temper, Years, ’twere better far Such deeds were nulled, and this strange man’s career Wound up, as making inharmonious jars In her creation whose meek wraith we know. The more that he, turned man of mere traditions, Now profits naught. For the large potencies Instilled into his idiosyncrasy— To throne fair Liberty in Privilege’ room— Are taking taint, and sink to common plots For his own gain.

SHADE OF THE EARTH And who, then, Cordial One, Wouldst substitute for this Intractable?

CHORUS OF THE EARTH We 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 content Among the myriads of thy family. Those, too, who love the true, the excellent, And make their daily moves a melody.

SHADE OF THE EARTH They may come, will they. I am not averse. Yet know I am but the ineffectual Shade Of her the Travailler, herself a thrall To It; in all her labourings curbed and kinged!

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS Shall such be mooted now? Already change Hath played strange pranks since first I brooded here. But old Laws operate yet; and phase and phase Of men’s dynastic and imperial moils Shape on accustomed lines. Though, as for me, I care not thy shape, or what they be.

SPIRIT OF THE PITIES You seem to have small sense of mercy, Sire?

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS Mercy I view, not urge;—nor more than mark What designate your titles Good and Ill. ’Tis not in me to feel with, or against, These flesh-hinged mannikins Its hand upwinds To click-clack off Its preadjusted laws; But only through my centuries to behold Their aspects, and their movements, and their mould.

SPIRIT OF THE PITIES They are shapes that bleed, mere mannikins or no, And each has parcel in the total Will.

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS Which overrides them as a whole its parts In 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 PITIES Go to. Let this terrestrial tragedy—

SPIRIT IRONIC Nay, Comedy—

SPIRIT OF THE PITIES Let this earth-tragedy Whereof we spake, afford a spectacle Forthwith conned closelier than your custom is.—

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS How does it stand? [To a Recording Angel] Open and chant the page Thou’st lately writ, that sums these happenings, In brief reminder of their instant points Slighted by us amid our converse here.

RECORDING ANGEL [from a book, in recitative] Now mellow-eyed Peace is made captive, And Vengeance is chartered To deal forth its dooms on the Peoples With sword and with spear. Men’s musings are busy with forecasts Of muster and battle, And visions of shock and disaster Rise red on the year. The easternmost ruler sits wistful, And tense he to midward; The King to the west mans his borders In front and in rear. While one they eye, flushed from his crowning, Ranks legions around him To shake the enisled neighbour nation And close her career!

SEMICHORUS I OF RUMOURS [aerial music] O woven-winged squadrons of Toulon And fellows of Rochefort, Wait, wait for a wind, and draw westward Ere Nelson be near! For he reads not your force, or your freightage Of warriors fell-handed, Or when they will join for the onset, Or whither they steer!

SEMICHORUS II O Nelson, so zealous a watcher Through months-long of cruizing, Thy foes may elide thee a moment, Put forth, and get clear; And rendezvous westerly straightway With Spain’s aiding navies, And hasten to head violation Of Albion’s frontier!

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS Methinks too much assurance thrills your note On secrets in my locker, gentle sprites; But it may serve.—Our thought being now reflexed To forces operant on this English isle, Behoves it us to enter scene by scene, And watch the spectacle of Europe’s moves In her embroil, as they were self-ordained According to the naive and liberal creed Of 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 Bonaparte As he with other figures foots his reel, Until he twitch him into his lonely grave: Also regard the frail ones that his flings Have made gyrate like animalcula In tepid pools.—Hence to the precinct, then, And count as framework to the stagery Yon architraves of sunbeam-smitten cloud.— So may ye judge Earth’s jackaclocks to be No fugled by one Will, but function-free. [The nether sky opens, and Europe is disclosed as a prone and emaciated figure, the Alps shaping like a backbone, and the branching mountain-chains like ribs, the peninsular plateau of Spain forming a head. Broad and lengthy lowlands stretch from the north of France across Russia like a grey-green garment hemmed by the Ural mountains and the glistening Arctic Ocean. The point of view then sinks downwards through space, and draws near 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 and nationalities.]

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS [to the Spirit of the Pities] As key-scene to the whole, I first lay bare The Will-webs of thy fearful questioning; For know that of my antique privileges This 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, enduring men and things with a seeming transparency, and exhibiting as one organism the anatomy of life and movement in all humanity and vitalized matter included in the display.]

SPIRIT OF THE PITIES Amid this scene of bodies substantive Strange 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 YEARS These 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 Brain Evolving always that it wots not of; A Brain whose whole connotes the Everywhere, And whose procedure may but be discerned By phantom eyes like ours; the while unguessed Of those it stirs, who [even as ye do] dream Their motions free, their orderings supreme; Each life apart from each, with power to mete Its own day’s measures; balanced, self complete; Though they subsist but atoms of the One Labouring 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 appear Prompt 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.