St. J. My meaning; yes. Material Heaven and Hell, Olympus, Hades, Asgard, Nifelheim Are Matter's memories of pellucid fire It once was and will be, an evidence Of our material nature wrapped in myth Unconsciously. Imagination lives In Matter, being itself material power, Irradiant, telepathic, magical, Imponderable as lightning or the light, Ethereal essence of the Universe. To free this power from twenty centuries Of God and Sin; endow it with its own, The infinite Universe; to launch the world In space again upon a virgin track As though the foul old rut and blood-drenched way Had never been! Oh, Tristram! Help me--you! It can be done!
St. J. I want your stage. A while ago you said A people has a drama only once: From "Gorboduc" to "The Tempest" fifty years; And nothing since. The deadly truth of that Perturbed me; and I feared my eastern work-- A play I made wherein dynamic art Of Matter rives asunder all the scale Of being; restrings the lyre, and sets the tune Anew: I feared this work was wasted; now, Having thought it out--even while we talked, my mind Was labouring with it--that foolish fear is dead. Twice in the past transcendent drama flowered, A people's crowning glory. First in Greece: A mighty triad and a rhythmic scroll, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.
St. J. Matter knows nothing of decadence, a word Corrupt with spirit: only chance and change, Power and imagination. Let me speak.-- The war with Persia, Marathon, Salamis, Battles and victories by land and sea, Revived in Attic bosoms, Attic brains, Profound regard for things of Attica, With ardent interest in the Universe Whereof it felt itself the heart and soul. In England next after two thousand years, The most instinctive people in the world, The mightiest and the freest, having undone With axe and fire the strangling Roman creed, That like a caul about their fancy clung, Forthwith despatched to hell the rivalry Of Spain, redeemed the seas, began to stretch Their giant limbs in isles and continents, And take the measure of the quartered globe. Thus the imagination of these lands Became one living cord, whereon were strung All story, legend, lore; and like a birth Miraculous, divine dramatic art, Which to be truly great demands a great Impassioned people for an audience, rose From out the loftiest minds and shaped itself The mirror of a master people's pride. And now a greater England about to break The husk of Christendom, as in its youth It sloughed off Rome, begins the world anew, Imperial England of itself aware, And man, the conscience of the Universe. I mean to spend my fortune and my life In the high service of imagination For England's sake and man's. The dreams, the lore, The rags and rust of thirty centuries: To cast these wholly, and accoutre man In all the beauty, splendour, scope and power Of this material, eternal fate, The Universe, whereof he is the nerve-- The inmost fibre, flowering in brain and blood! For this I would give up my life in pain.