Sir T. I know, I know! And then the modern play!
Sir T. Only once it seems A people has a theatre. Drama leaps To instant being, power, supremacy: From "Gorboduc" to "The Tempest" fifty years; And nothing since. Nor can it come again, Imagination being an outcast now, Unsceptred, unrefreshed, unclad, unknown In palace, hut, or hermitage: no home; A wandering bedlam. When the world believed In miracles of sorcery, potent drugs Alchemical, and constellated fate In heaven hung, then fancy had a lodge----
Sir T. Be patient! Here I snatch A moment's ease, as in an interval Of torture. While the worn-out squaws repose, (Harpies or fiends: the laugh twists on my mouth!) Devising keener pangs, I hear again The fabulous music of the crystalline Accordant spheres; so let this perfume fade, Wind-wafted fragrance of a love-lorn scarf Bidding farewell for ever and a day. When elves and fairies haunted brakes and bowers, And gods and goddesses were visitors Hesternal at the latest; when Heaven and Hell Was as a casket closed about the earth, The universal jewel; and man himself The awful judge of angels and the mate Of God, worthy divine redemption, then There broke a drama great and beautiful Fresh from the dulcet brains and pregnant heart Of England. Soul was clad; the mind, informed; Imagination, armed, anointed, crowned; But now all naked, empty, abject, stripped And flayed! You understand?
St. J. I understand. Men know there is no God, no Heaven and Hell: They welcomed that in secret--all who thought. But, God away, the Universe becomes A vacuum, and the welcome turns to cursing. They thought, "We need no God; we have our art, "Our poetry: God is gone." But all else went When God went: 'twas the breath of God that filled The pipe of Pan, the bosom and the sigh Of Aphrodite; goblins, loreleis, Enchantments, witchcraft, ghosts, transcendent deeds, Amazement, terror, beauty, rapture, tears, Intolerable passions, agonies Were of the warp and woof of God: God summed Imagination.
St. J. No God to speak of: the idea of God-- That's for the schoolmen: for the fatherless, The girls that drown their bastards, broken hearts, Incapables, incurables, castaways, Endurers, heroes, poets, artists, kings, Classes or masses, all who love their lives-- It helps them much to tell them of a God Evolving slowly in the mind of man!