John Davidson

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 will celebrate the triumph of the pride of life riding to victory roughshod over friend and foe, and the flame-clad glory of the martyr who lives in obloquy and dies in agony for an idea or a dream. Poetry is a statement of the world and of the Universe as the world can know it. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Language, the vehicle of his no-art, is part of the poet's, as of all men's, birthright; like food and air, he has it. And when he requires to supplement the language with which the conditions of existence endue him, the founts are ready: there are no grapes to gather: that is not the winepress the poet must tread: he has only to drink from the sources of utterance. Thus poetry, like an artesian well, broaches the heart of Matter directly, and is its most intimate expression. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The body, the static and dynamic integer of which mind and soul are only exponents, is held in profound disesteem by both metaphysic and theology. The metaphysician says, "The Universe is thought"; the theologian says, "The Universe is soul." It is as if one were to say "amber is electricity," or "iron is sound," or "the spindrift is the sea," or "this sure and firm-set earth is a word": all possible figures of speech, and therefore all liable in the hands of a pedant to be erected into a dogma. That was the tragedy of Wordsworth; his poetry became a pedantry. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Oh, Tristram!
St. J. Martha!... Tristram, take her hand!
[Sir Tristram and Lady Sumner join hands.]
The speech of men is so corrupt with dreams,
Forgotten alchemy and astral lies,
So rank with spirit and the cult of God
That nothing can be said as it is known. ”

“ His reluctance—it lasted for two years—to take up the burden of poetry is to be ascribed to the shame and horror of their destiny which great poets feel. A great poet fights against his fate as high women fight against passion. There is degradation and dismay in the ministration of poetry as in "the ruddy offices of love"; but both the woman and the poet yield: for love and poetry, being of the race, are stronger than the individual.
Wordsworth's immorality, like all dynamic immorality, was what is called a return to nature. He wrote with perfect insight concerning poetry. ”

“ 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. ”

“ INTRODUCTION WORDSWORTH'S IMMORALITY AND MINE Poetry is immoral. It will state any and every morality. It has done so. There is no passion of man or passion of Matter outside its province. It will expound with equal zest the twice incestuous intrigue of Satan, Sin, and Death, and the discarnate adoration of Dante for the most beatified lady in the world's record. There is no horror of deluge, fire, plague, or war it does not rejoice to utter; no evanescent hue, or scent, or sound, it cannot catch, secure, and reproduce in word and rhythm. ”

“ In the latter case poetry is not only immoral in the Universal order; but also in relation to its own division of time: a great poet is very apt to be, for his own age and time, a great immoralist. This is a hard saying in England, where the current meaning of immorality is so narrow, nauseous, and stupid. I wish to transmute this depreciated word, to make it so eminent that men shall desire to be called immoralists. To be immoral is to be different: that says it precisely, stripped of all accretions, barnacles and seaweed, rust and slime: the keen keel swift to furrow the deep. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It is not probable that Wordsworth at any period in his youth would rather have been Caesar than Dante. To have the world at one's absolute commandment for power and pleasure is the desire of most virile natures, and a desire seldom renounced by the highest intelligences, however closely disgrace and misery may dog them to the end. Accordingly, when intellect, health, and strength abdicate their heritage of the world we look for some tragic circumstance compulsive. In the case of Wordsworth we look in vain. ”

“ Nothing in life is interesting except that differentiation which is immorality: the world would be a putrid stagnation without it, and greatness and glory impossible. Morality would never have founded the British Empire in India; it was English piracy that wrested from Iberia the control of the Spanish Main and the kingdom of the sea. War is empowered immorality: poetry is a warfare.
What I mean by Wordsworth's immorality begins to appear. This most naive and majestic person, leading the proudest, cleanest, sweetest of lives, was, during all his poetical time, immoralist sans tache. ”

“ The imagination of Wordsworth could not breathe in any Greek mythology, any Christian Heaven and Hell, or theological system of the Universe. Out of all the mythologies, pagan and Christian, he culled this one thing only—the idea of spirit: which he whittled down finally in the ninth book of "The Excursion" to an "active principle"—no longer a poetical but a metaphysical idea. Now, metaphysic is an aborted poetry. Poetry is concrete, requiring the exercise of all the material powers of body, mind, and soul, which, co-operating, are imagination. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”