5
A.D. 31,920
Summer afternoon in the year 31,920 A.D. A sunlit glade at the southern foot of a thickly wooded hill. On the west side of it, the steps and columned porch of a dainty little classic temple. Between it and the hill, a rising path to the wooded heights begins with rough steps of stones in the moss. On the opposite side, a grove. In the middle of the glade, an altar in the form of a low marble table as long as a man, set parallel to the temple steps and pointing to the hill. Curved marble benches radiate from it into the foreground; but they are not joined to it: there is plenty of space to pass between the altar and the benches.
A dance of youths and maidens is in progress. The music is provided by a few fluteplayers seated carelessly on the steps of the temple. There are no children; and none of the dancers seems younger than eighteen. Some of the youths have beards. Their dress, like the architecture of the theatre and the design of the altar and curved seats, resembles Grecian of the fourth century B.C., freely handled. They move with perfect balance and remarkable grace, racing through a figure like a farandole. They neither romp nor hug in our manner.
At the first full close they clap their hands to stop the musicians, who recommence with a saraband, during which a strange figure appears on the path beyond the temple. He is deep in thought, with his eyes closed and his feet feeling automatically for the rough irregular steps as he slowly descends them. Except for a sort of linen kilt consisting mainly of a girdle carrying a sporran and a few minor pockets, he is naked. In physical hardihood and uprightness he seems to be in the prime of life; and his eyes and mouth shew no signs of age; but his face, though fully and firmly fleshed, bears a network of lines, varying from furrows to hairbreadth reticulations, as if Time had worked over every inch of it incessantly through whole geologic periods. His head is finely domed and utterly bald. Except for his eyelashes he is quite hairless. He is unconscious of his surroundings, and walks right into one of the dancing couples, separating them. He wakes up and stares about him. The couple stop indignantly. The rest stop. The music stops. The youth whom he has jostled accosts him without malice, but without anything that we should call manners.
THE YOUTH. Now, then, ancient sleepwalker, why don’t you keep your eyes open and mind where you are going?
THE ANCIENT [mild, bland, and indulgent] I did not know there was a nursery here, or I should not have turned my face in this direction. Such accidents cannot always be avoided. Go on with your play: I will turn back.
THE YOUTH. Why not stay with us and enjoy life for once in a way? We will teach you to dance.
THE ANCIENT. No, thank you. I danced when I was a child like you. Dancing is a very crude attempt to get into the rhythm of life. It would be painful to me to go back from that rhythm to your babyish gambols: in fact I could not do it if I tried. But at your age it is pleasant: and I am sorry I disturbed you.
THE YOUTH. Come! own up: arnt you very unhappy? It’s dreadful to see you ancients going about by yourselves, never noticing anything, never dancing, never laughing, never singing, never getting anything out of life. None of us are going to be like that when we grow up. It’s a dog’s life.
THE ANCIENT. Not at all. You repeat that old phrase without knowing that there was once a creature on earth called a dog. Those who are interested in extinct forms of life will tell you that it loved the sound of its own voice and bounded about when it was happy, just as you are doing here. It is you, my children, who are living the dog’s life.
THE YOUTH. The dog must have been a good sensible creature: it set you a very wise example. You should let yourself go occasionally and have a good time.
THE ANCIENT. My children: be content to let us ancients go our ways and enjoy ourselves in our own fashion.
He turns to go.
THE MAIDEN. But wait a moment. Why will you not tell us how you enjoy yourself? You must have secret pleasures that you hide from us, and that you never get tired of. I get tired of all our dances and all our tunes. I get tired of all my partners.
THE YOUTH [suspiciously] Do you? I shall bear that in mind.
They all look at one another as if there were some sinister significance in what she has said.
THE MAIDEN. We all do: what is the use of pretending we don’t? It is natural.
SEVERAL YOUNG PEOPLE. No, no. We don’t. It is not natural.
THE ANCIENT. You are older than he is, I see. You are growing up.
THE MAIDEN. How do you know? I do not look so much older, do I?
THE ANCIENT. Oh, I was not looking at you. Your looks do not interest me.
THE MAIDEN. Thank you.
They all laugh.
THE YOUTH. You old fish! I believe you don’t know the difference between a man and a woman.
THE ANCIENT. It has long ceased to interest me in the way it interests you. And when anything no longer interests us we no longer know it.
THE MAIDEN. You havnt told me how I shew my age. That is what I want to know. As a matter of fact I am older than this boy here: older than he thinks. How did you find that out?
THE ANCIENT. Easily enough. You are ceasing to pretend that these childish games–this dancing and singing and mating–do not become tiresome and unsatisfying after a while. And you no longer care to pretend that you are younger than you are. These are the signs of adolescence. And then, see these fantastic rags with which you have draped yourself. [He takes up a piece of her draperies in his hand]. It is rather badly worn here. Why do you not get a new one?
THE MAIDEN. Oh, I did not notice it. Besides, it is too much trouble. Clothes are a nuisance. I think I shall do without them some day, as you ancients do.
THE ANCIENT. Signs of maturity. Soon you will give up all these toys and games and sweets.
THE YOUTH. What! And be as miserable as you?
THE ANCIENT. Infant: one moment of the ecstasy of life as we live it would strike you dead. [He stalks gravely out through the grove].
They stare after him, much damped.
THE YOUTH [to the musicians] Let us have another dance.
The musicians shake their heads; get up from their seats on the steps; and troop away into the temple. The others follow them, except the Maiden, who sits down on the altar.
A MAIDEN [as she goes] There! The ancient has put them out of countenance. It is your fault, Strephon, for provoking him. [She leaves, much disappointed].
A YOUTH. Why need you have cheeked him like that? [He goes grumbling].
STREPHON [calling after him] I thought it was understood that we are always to cheek the ancients on principle.
ANOTHER YOUTH. Quite right too! There would be no holding them if we didn’t. [He goes].
THE MAIDEN. Why don’t you really stand up to them? I did.
ANOTHER YOUTH. Sheer, abject, pusillanimous, dastardly cowardice. Thats why. Face the filthy truth. [He goes].
ANOTHER YOUTH [turning on the steps as he goes out] And don’t you forget, infant, that one moment of the ecstasy of life as I live it would strike you dead. Haha!
STREPHON [now the only one left, except the Maiden] Arnt you coming, Chloe?
THE MAIDEN [shakes her head]!
THE YOUTH [hurrying back to her] What is the matter?
THE MAIDEN [tragically pensive] I dont know.
THE YOUTH. Then there is something the matter. Is that what you mean?
THE MAIDEN. Yes. Something is happening to me. I dont know what.
THE YOUTH. You no longer love me. I have seen it for a month past.
THE MAIDEN. Dont you think all that is rather silly? We cannot go on as if this kind of thing, this dancing and sweethearting, were everything.
THE YOUTH. What is there better? What else is there worth living for?
THE MAIDEN. Oh, stuff! Dont be frivolous.
THE YOUTH. Something horrible is happening to you. You are losing all heart, all feeling. [He sits on the altar beside her and buries his face in his hands]. I am bitterly unhappy.
THE MAIDEN. Unhappy! Really, you must have a very empty head if there is nothing in it but a dance with one girl who is no better than any of the other girls.
THE YOUTH. You did not always think so. You used to be vexed if I as much as looked at another girl.
THE MAIDEN. What does it matter what I did when I was a baby? Nothing existed for me then except what I tasted and touched and saw; and I wanted all that for myself, just as I wanted the moon to play with. Now the world is opening out for me. More than the world: the universe. Even little things are turning out to be great things, and becoming intensely interesting. Have you ever thought about the properties of numbers?
THE YOUTH [sitting up, markedly disenchanted] Numbers!!! I cannot imagine anything drier or more repulsive.
THE MAIDEN. They are fascinating, just fascinating. I want to get away from our eternal dancing and music, and just sit down by myself and think about numbers.
THE YOUTH [rising indignantly] Oh, this is too much. I have suspected you for some time past. We have all suspected you. All the girls say that you have deceived us as to your age: that you are getting flat-chested: that you are bored with us; that you talk to the ancients when you get the chance. Tell me the truth: how old are you?
THE MAIDEN. Just twice your age, my poor boy.
THE YOUTH. Twice my age! Do you mean to say you are four?
THE MAIDEN. Very nearly four.
THE YOUTH [collapsing on the altar with a groan] Oh!
THE MAIDEN. My poor Strephon: I pretended I was only two for your sake. I was two when you were born. I saw you break from your shell; and you were such a charming child! You ran round and talked to us all so prettily, and were so handsome and well grown, that I lost my heart to you at once. But now I seem to have lost it altogether: bigger things are taking possession of me. Still, we were very happy in our childish way for the first year, werent we?
STREPHON. I was happy until you began cooling towards me.
THE MAIDEN. Not towards you, but towards all the trivialities of our life here. Just think. I have hundreds of years to live: perhaps thousands. Do you suppose I can spend centuries dancing; listening to flutes ringing changes on a few tunes and a few notes; raving about the beauty of a few pillars and arches; making jingles with words; lying about with your arms round me, which is really neither comfortable nor convenient; everlastingly choosing colors for dresses, and putting them on, and washing; making a business of sitting together at fixed hours to absorb our nourishment; taking little poisons with it to make us delirious enough to imagine we are enjoying ourselves; and then having to pass the nights in shelters lying in cots and losing half our lives in a state of unconsciousness. Sleep is a shameful thing: I have not slept at all for weeks past. I have stolen out at night when you were all lying insensible–quite disgusting, I call it–and wandered about the woods, thinking, thinking, thinking; grasping the world; taking it to pieces; building it up again; devising methods; planning experiments to test the methods; and having a glorious time. Every morning I have come back here with greater and greater reluctance; and I know that the time will soon come–perhaps it has come already–when I shall not come back at all.
STREPHON. How horribly cold and uncomfortable!
THE MAIDEN. Oh, don’t talk to me of comfort! Life is not worth living if you have to bother about comfort. Comfort makes winter a torture, spring an illness, summer an oppression, and autumn only a respite. The ancients could make life one long frowsty comfort if they chose. But they never lift a finger to make themselves comfortable. They will not sleep under a roof. They will not clothe themselves: a girdle with a few pockets hanging to it to carry things about in is all they wear: they will sit down on the wet moss or in a gorse bush when there is dry heather within two yards of them. Two years ago, when you were born, I did not understand this. Now I feel that I would not put myself to the trouble of walking two paces for all the comfort in the world.
STREPHON. But you don’t know what this means to me. It means that you are dying to me: yes, just dying. Listen to me [he puts his arm around her].
THE MAIDEN [extricating herself] Dont. We can talk quite as well without touching one another.
STREPHON [horrified] Chloe! Oh, this is the worst symptom of all! The ancients never touch one another.
THE MAIDEN. Why should they?
STREPHON. Oh, I don’t know. But don’t you want to touch me? You used to.
THE MAIDEN. Yes: that is true: I used to. We used to think it would be nice to sleep in one another’s arms; but we never could go to sleep because our weight stopped our circulations just above the elbows. Then somehow my feeling began to change bit by bit. I kept a sort of interest in your head and arms long after I lost interest in your whole body. And now that has gone.
STREPHON. You no longer care for me at all, then?
THE MAIDEN. Nonsense! I care for you much more seriously than before; though perhaps not so much for you in particular. I mean I care more for everybody. But I don’t want to touch you unnecessarily; and I certainly don’t want you to touch me.
STREPHON [rising decisively] That finishes it. You dislike me.
THE MAIDEN [impatiently] I tell you again, I do not dislike you; but you bore me when you cannot understand; and I think I shall be happier by myself in future. You had better get a new companion. What about the girl who is to be born today?
STREPHON. I do not want the girl who is to be born today. How do I know what she will be like? I want you.
THE MAIDEN. You cannot have me. You must recognize facts and face them. It is no use running after a woman twice your age. I cannot make my childhood last to please you. The age of love is sweet; but it is short; and I must pay nature’s debt. You no longer attract me; and I no longer care to attract you. Growth is too rapid at my age: I am maturing from week to week.
STREPHON. You are maturing, as you call it–I call it ageing–from minute to minute. You are going much further than you did when we began this conversation.
THE MAIDEN. It is not the ageing that is so rapid. It is the realization of it when it has actually happened. Now that I have made up my mind to the fact that I have left childhood behind me, it comes home to me in leaps and bounds with every word you say.
STREPHON. But your vow. Have you forgotten that? We all swore together in that temple: the temple of love. You were more earnest than any of us.
THE MAIDEN [with a grim smile] Never to let our hearts grow cold! Never to become as the ancients! Never to let the sacred lamp be extinguished! Never to change or forget! To be remembered for ever as the first company of true lovers faithful to this vow so often made and broken by past generations! Ha! ha! Oh, dear!
STREPHON. Well, you need not laugh. It is a beautiful and holy compact; and I will keep it whilst I live. Are you going to break it?
THE MAIDEN. Dear child: it has broken itself. The change has come in spite of my childish vow. [She rises]. Do you mind if I go into the woods for a walk by myself? This chat of ours seems to me an unbearable waste of time. I have so much to think of.
STREPHON [again collapsing on the altar and covering his eyes with his hands] My heart is broken. [He weeps].
THE MAIDEN [with a shrug] I have luckily got through my childhood without that experience. It shews how wise I was to choose a lover half my age. [She goes towards the grove, and is disappearing among the trees, when another youth, older and manlier than Strephon, with crisp hair and firm arms, comes from the temple, and calls to her from the threshold].
THE TEMPLE YOUTH. I say, Chloe. Is there any sign of the Ancient yet? The hour of birth is overdue. The baby is kicking like mad. She will break her shell prematurely.
THE MAIDEN [looks across to the hill path; then points up it, and says] She is coming, Acis.
The Maiden turns away through the grove and is lost to sight among the trees.
Acis [coming to Strephon] Whats the matter? Has Chloe been unkind?
STREPHON. She has grown up in spite of all her promises. She deceived us about her age. She is four.
ACIS. Four! I am sorry, Strephon. I am getting on for three myself; and I know what old age is. I hate to say ‘I told you so’; but she was getting a little hard set and flat-chested and thin on the top, wasn’t she?
STREPHON [breaking down] Dont.
ACIS. You must pull yourself together. This is going to be a busy day. First the birth. Then the Festival of the Artists.
STREPHON [rising] What is the use of being born if we have to decay into unnatural, heartless, loveless, joyless monsters in four short years? What use are the artists if they cannot bring their beautiful creations to life? I have a great mind to die and have done with it all. [He moves away to the corner of the curved seat farthest from the theatre, and throws himself moodily into it].
An Ancient Woman has descended the hill path during Strephon’s lament, and has heard most of it. She is like the He-Ancient, equally bald, and equally without sexual charm, but intensely interesting and rather terrifying. Her sex is discoverable only by her voice, as her breasts are manly, and her figure otherwise not very different. She wears no clothes, but has draped herself rather perfunctorily with a ceremonial robe, and carries two implements like long slender saws. She comes to the altar between the two young men.
THE SHE-ANCIENT [to Strephon] Infant: you are only at the beginning of it all. [To Acis] Is the child ready to be born?
ACIS. More than ready, Ancient. Shouting and kicking and cursing. We have called to her to be quiet and wait until you come; but of course she only half understands, and is very impatient.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Very well. Bring her out into the sun.
ACIS [going quickly into the temple] All ready. Come along.
Joyous processional music strikes up in the temple.
THE SHE-ANCIENT [going close to Strephon]. Look at me.
STREPHON [sulkily keeping his face averted] Thank you; but I don’t want to be cured. I had rather be miserable in my own way than callous in yours.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. You like being miserable? You will soon grow out of that. [She returns to the altar].
The procession, headed by Acis, emerges from the temple. Six youths carry on their shoulders a burden covered with a gorgeous but light pall. Before them certain official maidens carry a new tunic, ewers of water, silver dishes pierced with holes, cloths, and immense sponges. The rest carry wands with ribbons, and strew flowers. The burden is deposited on the altar, and the pall removed. It is a huge egg.
THE SHE-ANCIENT [freeing her arms from her robe, and placing her saws on the altar ready to her hand in a businesslike manner] A girl, I think you said?
ACIS. Yes.
THE TUNIC BEARER. It is a shame. Why cant we have more boys?
SEVERAL YOUTHS [protesting] Not at all. More girls. We want new girls.
A GIRL’S VOICE FROM THE EGG. Let me out. Let me out. I want to be born. I want to be born. [The egg rocks].
ACIS [snatching a wand from one of the others and whacking the egg with it] Be quiet, I tell you. Wait. You will be born presently.
THE EGG. No, no: at once, at once. I want to be born: I want to be born. [Violent kicking within the egg, which rocks so hard that it has to be held on the altar by the bearers].
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Silence. [The music stops; and the egg behaves itself].
The She-Ancient takes her two saws, and with a couple of strokes rips the egg open. The Newly Born, a pretty girl who would have been guessed as seventeen in our day, sits up in the broken shell, exquisitely fresh and rosy, but with filaments of spare albumen clinging to her here and there.
THE NEWLY BORN [as the world bursts on her vision] Oh! Oh!! Oh!!! Oh!!!! [She continues this ad libitum during the following remonstrances].
ACIS. Hold your noise, will you?
The washing begins. The Newly Born shrieks and struggles.
A YOUTH. Lie quiet, you clammy little devil.
A MAIDEN. You must be washed, dear. Now quiet, quiet, quiet: be good.
ACIS. Shut your mouth, or I’ll shove the sponge in it.
THE MAIDEN. Shut your eyes. Itll hurt if you don’t.
ANOTHER MAIDEN. Dont be silly. One would think nobody had ever been born before.
THE NEWLY BORN [yells]!!!!!!
ACIS. Serve you right! You were told to shut your eyes.
THE YOUTH. Dry her off quick. I can hardly hold her. Shut it, will you; or I’ll smack you into a pickled cabbage.
The dressing begins. The Newly Born chuckles with delight.
THE MAIDEN. Your arms go here, dear. Isnt it pretty? Youll look lovely.
THE NEWLY BORN [rapturously] Oh! Oh!! Oh!!! Oh!!!!
ANOTHER YOUTH. No: the other arm: youre putting it on back to front. You are a silly little beast.
ACIS. Here! Thats it. Now youre clean and decent. Up with you! Oopsh! [He hauls her to her feet. She cannot walk at first, but masters it after a few steps]. Now then: march. Here she is, Ancient: put her through the catechism.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. What name have you chosen for her?
ACIS. Amaryllis.
THE SHE-ANCIENT [to the Newly Born] Your name is Amaryllis.
THE NEWLY BORN. What does it mean?
A YOUTH. Love.
A MAIDEN. Mother.
ANOTHER YOUTH. Lilies.
THE NEWLY BORN [to Acis] What is your name?
ACIS. Acis.
THE NEWLY BORN. I love you, Acis. I must have you all to myself. Take me in your arms.
ACIS. Steady, young one. I am three years old.
THE NEWLY BORN. What has that to do with it? I love you; and I must have you or I will go back into my shell again.
ACIS. You cant. It’s broken. Look here [pointing to Strephon, who has remained in his seal without looking round at the birth, wrapped up in his sorrow]! Look at this poor fellow!
THE NEWLY BORN. What is the matter with him?
ACIS. When he was born he chose a girl two years old for his sweetheart. He is two years old now himself; and already his heart is broken because she is four. That means that she has grown up like this Ancient here, and has left him. If you choose me, we shall have only a year’s happiness before I break your heart by growing up. Better choose the youngest you can find.
THE NEWLY BORN. I will not choose anyone but you. You must not grow up. We will love one another for ever. [They all laugh]. What are you laughing at?
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Listen, child–
THE NEWLY BORN. Do not come near me, you dreadful old creature. You frighten me.
ACIS. Just give her another moment. She is not quite reasonable yet. What can you expect from a child less than five minutes old?
THE NEWLY BORN. I think I feel a little more reasonable now. Of course I was rather young when I said that; but the inside of my head is changing very rapidly. I should like to have things explained to me.
ACIS [to the She-Ancient] Is she all right, do you think?
The She-Ancient looks at the Newly Born critically; feels her bumps like a phrenologist; grips her muscles and shakes her limbs; examines her teeth; looks into her eyes for a moment; and finally relinquishes her with an air of having finished her job.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. She will do. She may live.
They all wave their hands and shout for joy.
THE NEWLY BORN [indignant] I may live! Suppose there had been anything wrong with me?
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Children with anything wrong do not live here, my child. Life is not cheap with us. But you would not have felt anything.
THE NEWLY BORN. You mean that you would have murdered me!
THE SHE-ANCIENT. That is one of the funny words the newly born bring with them out of the past. You will forget it tomorrow. Now listen. You have four years of childhood before you. You will not be very happy; but you will be interested and amused by the novelty of the world; and your companions here will teach you how to keep up an imitation of happiness during your four years by what they call arts and sports and pleasures. The worst of your troubles is already over.
THE NEWLY BORN. What! In five minutes?
THE SHE-ANCIENT. No: you have been growing for two years in the egg. You began by being several sorts of creatures that no longer exist, though we have fossils of them. Then you became human; and you passed in fifteen months through a development that once cost human beings twenty years of awkward stumbling immaturity after they were born. They had to spend fifty years more in the sort of childhood you will complete in four years. And then they died of decay. But you need not die until your accident comes.
THE NEWLY BORN. What is my accident?
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Sooner or later you will fall and break your neck; or a tree will fall on you; or you will be struck by lightning. Something or other must make an end of you some day.
THE NEWLY BORN. But why should any of these things happen to me?
THE SHE-ANCIENT. There is no why. They do. Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough. And with us there is eternity.
THE NEWLY BORN. Nothing need happen. I never heard such nonsense in all my life. I shall know how to take care of myself.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. So you think.
THE NEWLY BORN. I don’t think: I know. I shall enjoy life for ever and ever.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. If you should turn out to be a person of infinite capacity, you will no doubt find life infinitely interesting. However, all you have to do now is to play with your companions. They have many pretty toys, as you see: a playhouse, pictures, images, flowers, bright fabrics, music: above all, themselves; for the most amusing child’s toy is another child. At the end of four years, your mind will change: you will become wise; and then you will be entrusted with power.
THE NEWLY BORN. But I want power now.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. No doubt you do; so that you could play with the world by tearing it to pieces.
THE NEWLY BORN. Only to see how it is made. I should put it all together again much better than before.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. There was a time when children were given the world to play with because they promised to improve it. They did not improve it; and they would have wrecked it had their power been as great as that which you will wield when you are no longer a child. Until then your young companions will instruct you in whatever is necessary. You are not forbidden to speak to the ancients; but you had better not do so, as most of them have long ago exhausted all the interest there is in observing children and conversing with them. [She turns to go].
THE NEWLY BORN. Wait. Tell me some things that I ought to do and ought not to do. I feel the need of education. They all laugh at her, except the She-Ancient.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. You will have grown out of that by tomorrow. Do what you please. [She goes away up the hill path].
The officials take their paraphernalia and the fragments of the egg back into the temple.
ACIS. Just fancy: that old girl has been going for seven hundred years and hasnt had her fatal accident yet; and she is not a bit tired of it all.
THE NEWLY BORN. How could anyone ever get tired of life?
ACIS. They do. That is, of the same life. They manage to change themselves in a wonderful way. You meet them sometimes with a lot of extra heads and arms and legs: they make you split laughing at them. Most of them have forgotten how to speak: the ones that attend to us have to brush up their knowledge of the language once a year or so. Nothing makes any difference to them that I can see. They never enjoy themselves. I don’t know how they can stand it. They don’t even come to our festivals of the arts. That old one who saw you out of your shell has gone off to moodle about doing nothing; though she knows that this is Festival Day?
THE NEWLY BORN. What is Festival Day?
ACIS. Two of our greatest sculptors are bringing us their latest masterpieces; and we are going to crown them with flowers and sing dithyrambs to them and dance round them.
THE NEWLY BORN. How jolly! What is a sculptor?
ACIS. Listen here, young one. You must find out things for yourself, and not ask questions. For the first day or two you must keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut. Children should be seen and not heard.
THE NEWLY BORN. Who are you calling a child? I am fully a quarter of an hour old [She sits down on the curved bench near Strephon with her maturest air].
VOICES IN THE TEMPLE [all expressing protest, disappointment, disgust] Oh! Oh! Scandalous. Shameful. Disgraceful. What filth! Is this a joke? Why, theyre ancients! Ss-s-s-sss! Are you mad, Arjillax? This is an outrage. An insult. Yah! etc. etc. etc. [The malcontents appear on the steps, grumbling].
ACIS. Hullo: whats the matter? [He goes to the steps of the temple].
The two sculptors issue from the temple. One has a beard two feet long: the other is beardless. Between them comes a handsome nymph with marked features, dark hair richly waved, and authoritative bearing.
THE AUTHORITATIVE NYMPH [swooping down to the centre of the glade with the sculptors, between Acis and the Newly Born] Do not try to browbeat me, Arjillax, merely because you are clever with your hands. Can you play the flute?
ARJILLAX [the bearded sculptor on her right] No, Ecrasia: I cannot. What has that to do with it? [He is half derisive, half impatient, wholly resolved not to take her seriously in spite of her beauty and imposing tone].
ECRASIA. Well, have you ever hesitated to criticize our best flute players, and to declare whether their music is good or bad? Pray have I not the same right to criticize your busts, though I cannot make images anymore than you can play?
ARJILLAX. Any fool can play the flute, or play anything else, if he practises enough; but sculpture is a creative art, not a mere business of whistling into a pipe. The sculptor must have something of the god in him. From his hand comes a form which reflects a spirit. He does not make it to please you, nor even to please himself, but because he must. You must take what he gives you, or leave it if you are not worthy of it.
ECRASIA [scornfully] Not worthy of it! Ho! May I not leave it because it is not worthy of me?
ARJILLAX. Of you! Hold your silly tongue, you conceited humbug. What do you know about it?
ECRASIA. I know what every person of culture knows: that the business of the artist is to create beauty. Until today your works have been full of beauty; and I have been the first to point that out.
ARJILLAX. Thank you for nothing. People have eyes, havnt they, to see what is as plain as the sun in the heavens without your pointing it out?
ECRASIA. You were very glad to have it pointed out. You did not call me a conceited humbug then. You stifled me with caresses. You modelled me as the genius of art presiding over the infancy of your master here [indicating the other sculptor], Martellus.
MARTELLUS [a silent and meditative listener, shudders and shakes his head, but says nothing].
ARJILLAX [quarrelsomely] I was taken in by your talk.
ECRASIA. I discovered your genius before anyone else did. Is that true, or is it not?
ARJILLAX. Everybody knew I was an extraordinary person. When I was born my beard was three feet long.
ECRASIA. Yes; and it has shrunk from three feet to two. Your genius seems to have been in the last foot of your beard; for you have lost both.
MARTELLUS [with a short sardonic cachinnation] Ha! My beard was three and a half feet long when I was born; and a flash of lightning burnt it off and killed the ancient who was delivering me. Without a hair on my chin I became the greatest sculptor in ten generations.
ECRASIA. And yet you come to us today with empty hands. We shall actually have to crown Arjillax here because no other sculptor is exhibiting.
ACIS [returning from the temple steps to behind the curved seat on the right of the three] Whats the row, Ecrasia? Why have you fallen out with Arjillax?
ECRASIA. He has insulted us! outraged us! profaned his art! You know how much we hoped from the twelve busts he placed in the temple to be unveiled today. Well, go in and look at them. That is all I have to say. [She sweeps to the curved seat, and sits down just where Acis is leaning over it].
ACIS. I am no great judge of sculpture. Art is not my line. What is wrong with the busts?
ECRASIA. Wrong with them! Instead of being ideally beautiful nymphs and youths, they are horribly realistic studies of–but I really cannot bring my lips to utter it.
The Newly Born, full of curiosity, runs to the temple, and peeps in.
ACIS. Oh, stow it, Ecrasia. Your lips are not so squeamish as all that. Studies of what?
THE NEWLY BORN [from the temple steps] Ancients.
ACIS [surprised but not scandalized] Ancients!
ECRASIA. Yes, ancients. The one subject that is by the universal consent of all connoisseurs absolutely excluded from the fine arts. [To Arjillax] How can you defend such a proceeding?
ARJILLAX. If you come to that, what interest can you find in the statues of smirking nymphs and posturing youths you stick up all over the place?
ECRASIA. You did not ask that when your hand was still skilful enough to model them.
ARJILLAX. Skilful! You high-nosed idiot, I could turn such things out by the score with my eyes bandaged and one hand tied behind me. But what use would they be? They would bore me; and they would bore you if you had any sense. Go in and look at my busts. Look at them again and yet again until you receive the full impression of the intensity of mind that is stamped on them; and then go back to the pretty-pretty confectionery you call sculpture, and see whether you can endure its vapid emptiness. [He mounts the altar impetuously] Listen to me, all of you; and do you, Ecrasia, be silent if you are capable of silence.
ECRASIA. Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn. Scorn! That is what I feel for your revolting busts.
ARJILLAX. Fool: the busts are only the beginning of a mighty design. Listen.
ACIS. Go ahead, old sport. We are listening.
Martellus stretches himself on the sward beside the altar. The Newly Born sits on the temple steps with her chin on her hands, ready to devour the first oration she has ever heard. The rest sit or stand at ease.
ARJILLAX. In the records which generations of children have rescued from the stupid neglect of the ancients, there has come down to us a fable which, like many fables, is not a thing that was done in the past, but a thing that is to be done in the future. It is a legend of a supernatural being called the Archangel Michael.
THE NEWLY BORN. Is this a story? I want to hear a story. [She runs down the steps and sits on the altar at Arjillax’s feet].
ARJILLAX. The Archangel Michael was a mighty sculptor and painter. He found in the centre of the world a temple erected to the goddess of the centre, called Mediterranea. This temple was full of silly pictures of pretty children, such as Ecrasia approves.
ACIS. Fair play, Arjillax! If she is to keep silent, let her alone.
ECRASIA. I shall not interrupt, Acis. Why should I not prefer youth and beauty to age and ugliness?
ARJILLAX. Just so. Well, the Archangel Michael was of my opinion, not yours. He began by painting on the ceiling the newly born in all their childish beauty. But when he had done this he was not satisfied; for the temple was no more impressive than it had been before, except that there was a strength and promise of greater things about his newly born ones than any other artist had attained to. So he painted all round these newly born a company of ancients, who were in those days called prophets and sybils, whose majesty was that of the mind alone at its intensest. And this painting was acknowledged through ages and ages to be the summit and masterpiece of art. Of course we cannot believe such a tale literally. It is only a legend. We do not believe in archangels; and the notion that thirty thousand years ago sculpture and painting existed, and had even reached the glorious perfection they have reached with us, is absurd. But what men cannot realize they can at least aspire to. They please themselves by pretending that it was realized in a golden age of the past. This splendid legend endured because it lived as a desire in the hearts of the greatest artists. The temple of Mediterranea never was built in the past, nor did Michael the Archangel exist. But today the temple is here [he points to the porch]; and the man is here [he slaps himself on the chest]. I, Arjillax, am the man. I will place in your theatre such images of the newly born as must satisfy even Ecrasia’s appetite for beauty; and I will surround them with ancients more august than any who walk through our woods.
MARTELLUS [as before] Ha!
ARJILLAX [stung] Why do you laugh, you who have come empty-handed, and, it seems, empty-headed?
ECRASIA [rising indignantly] Oh, shame! You dare disparage Martellus, twenty times your master.
ACIS. Be quiet, will you [he seizes her shoulders and thrusts her back into her seat].
MARTELLUS. Let him disparage his fill, Ecrasia. [Sitting up] My poor Arjillax, I too had this dream. I too found one day that my images of loveliness had become vapid, uninteresting, tedious, a waste of time and material. I too lost my desire to model limbs, and retained only my interest in heads and faces. I, too, made busts of ancients; but I had not your courage: I made them in secret, and hid them from you all.
ARJILLAX [jumping down from the altar behind Martellus in his surprise and excitement] You made busts of ancients! Where are they, man? Will you be talked out of your inspiration by Ecrasia and the fools who imagine she speaks with authority? Let us have them all set up beside mine in the theatre. I have opened the way for you; and you see I am none the worse.
MARTELLUS. Impossible. They are all smashed. [He rises, laughing].
ALL. Smashed!
ARJILLAX. Who smashed them?
MARTELLUS. I did. That is why I laughed at you just now. You will smash yours before you have completed a dozen of them. [He goes to the end of the altar and sits down beside the Newly Born].
ARJILLAX. But why?
MARTELLUS. Because you cannot give them life. A live ancient is better than a dead statue. [He takes the Newly Born on his knee: she is flattered and voluptuously responsive]. Anything alive is better than anything that is only pretending to be alive. [To Arjillax] Your disillusion with your works of beauty is only the beginning of your disillusion with images of all sorts. As your hand became more skilful and your chisel cut deeper, you strove to get nearer and nearer to truth and reality, discarding the fleeting fleshly lure, and making images of the mind that fascinates to the end. But how can so noble an inspiration be satisfied with any image, even an image of the truth? In the end the intellectual conscience that tore you away from the fleeting in art to the eternal must tear you away from art altogether, because art is false and life alone is true.
THE NEWLY BORN [flings her arms round his neck and kisses him enthusiastically].
MARTELLUS [rises; carries her to the curved bench on his left; deposits her beside Strephon as if she were his overcoat; and continues without the least change of tone] Shape it as you will, marble remains marble, and the graven image an idol. As I have broken my idols, and cast away my chisel and modelling tools, so will you too break these busts of yours.
ARJILLAX. Never.
MARTELLUS. Wait, my friend. I do not come empty-handed today, as you imagined. On the contrary, I bring with me such a work of art as you have never seen, and an artist who has surpassed both you and me further than we have surpassed all our competitors.
ECRASIA. Impossible. The greatest things in art can never be surpassed.
ARJILLAX. Who is this paragon whom you declare greater than I?
MARTELLUS. I declare him greater than myself, Arjillax.
ARJILLAX [frowning] I understand. Sooner than not drown me, you are willing to clasp me round the waist and jump overboard with me.
ACIS. Oh, stop squabbling. That is the worst of you artists. You are always in little squabbling cliques; and the worst cliques are those which consist of one man. Who is this new fellow you are throwing in one another’s teeth?
ARJILLAX. Ask Martellus: do not ask me. I know nothing of him. [He leaves Martellus, and sits down beside Ecrasia, on her left].
MARTELLUS. You know him quite well. Pygmalion.
ECRASIA [indignantly] Pygmalion! That soulless creature! A scientist! A laboratory person!
ARJILLAX. Pygmalion produce a work of art! You have lost your artistic senses. The man is utterly incapable of modelling a thumb nail, let alone a human figure.
MARTELLUS. That does not matter: I have done the modelling for him.
ARJILLAX. What on earth do you mean?
MARTELLUS [calling] Pygmalion: come forth.
Pygmalion, a square-fingered youth with his face laid out in horizontal blocks, and a perpetual smile of eager benevolent interest in everything, and expectation of equal interest from everybody else, comes from the temple to the centre of the group, who regard him for the most part with dismay, as dreading that he will bore them. Ecrasia is openly contemptuous.
MARTELLUS. Friends: it is unfortunate that Pygmalion is constitutionally incapable of exhibiting anything without first giving a lecture about it to explain it; but I promise you that if you will be patient he will shew you the two most wonderful works of art in the world, and that they will contain some of my own very best workmanship. Let me add that they will inspire a loathing that will cure you of the lunacy of art for ever. [He sits down next the Newly Born, who pouts and turns a very cold right shoulder to him, a demonstration utterly lost on him].
Pygmalion, with the smile of a simpleton, and the eager confidence of a fanatical scientist, climbs awkwardly on to the altar. They prepare for the worst.
PYGMALION. My friends: I will omit the algebra–
ACIS. Thank God!
PYGMALION [continuing]–because Martellus has made me promise to do so. To come to the point, I have succeeded in making artificial human beings. Real live ones, I mean.
INCREDULOUS VOICES. Oh, come! Tell us another. Really, Pyg! Get out. You havnt. What a lie!
PYGMALION. I tell you I have. I will shew them to you. It has been done before. One of the very oldest documents we possess mentions a tradition of a biologist who extracted certain unspecified minerals from the earth and, as it quaintly expresses it, ‘breathed into their nostrils the breath of life.’ This is the only tradition from the primitive ages which we can regard as really scientific. There are later documents which specify the minerals with great precision, even to their atomic weights; but they are utterly unscientific, because they overlook the element of life which makes all the difference between a mere mixture of salts and gases and a living organism. These mixtures were made over and over again in the crude laboratories of the Silly-Clever Ages; but nothing came of them until the ingredient which the old chronicler called the breath of life was added by this very remarkable early experimenter. In my view he was the founder of biological science.
ARJILLAX. Is that all we know about him? It doesnt amount to very much, does it?
PYGMALION. There are some fragments of pictures and documents which represent him as walking in a garden and advising people to cultivate their gardens. His name has come down to us in several forms. One of them is Jove. Another is Voltaire.
ECRASIA. You are boring us to distraction with your Voltaire. What about your human beings?
ARJILLAX. Aye: come to them.
PYGMALION. I assure you that these details are intensely interesting. [Cries of No! They are not! Come to the human beings! Conspuez Voltaire! Cut it short, Pyg! interrupt him from all sides]. You will see their bearing presently. I promise you I will not detain you long. We know, we children of science, that the universe is full of forces and powers and energies of one kind and another. The sap rising in a tree, the stone holding together in a definite crystalline structure, the thought of a philosopher holding his brain in form and operation with an inconceivably powerful grip, the urge of evolution: all these forces can be used by us. For instance, I use the force of gravitation when I put a stone on my tunic to prevent it being blown away when I am bathing. By substituting appropriate machines for the stone we have made not only gravitation our slave, but also electricity and magnetism, atomic attraction, repulsion, polarization, and so forth. But hitherto the vital force has eluded us; so it has had to create machinery for itself. It has created and developed bony structures of the requisite strength, and clothed them with cellular tissue of such amazing sensitiveness that the organs it forms will adapt their action to all the normal variations in the air they breathe, the food they digest, and the circumstances about which they have to think. Yet, as these live bodies, as we call them, are only machines after all, it must be possible to construct them mechanically.
ARJILLAX. Everything is possible. Have you done it? that is the question.
PYGMALION. Yes. But that is a mere fact. What is interesting is the explanation of the fact. Forgive my saying so; but it is such a pity that you artists have no intellect.
ECRASIA [sententiously] I do not admit that. The artist divines by inspiration all the truths that the so-called scientist grubs up in his laboratory slowly and stupidly long afterwards.
ARJILLAX [to Ecrasia, quarrelsomely] What do you know about it? You are not an artist.
ACIS. Shut your heads, both of you. Let us have the artificial men. Trot them out, Pygmalion.
PYGMALION. It is a man and a woman. But I really must explain first.
ALL [groaning]!!!
PYGMALION. Yes: I–
ACIS. We want results, not explanations.
PYGMALION [hurt] I see I am boring you. Not one of you takes the least interest in science. Goodbye. [He descends from the altar and makes for the temple].
SEVERAL YOUTHS AND MAIDENS [rising and rushing to him] No, no. Dont go. Dont be offended. We want to see the artificial pair. We will listen. We are tremendously interested. Tell us all about it.
PYGMALION [relenting] I shall not detain you two minutes.
ALL. Half an hour if you like. Please go on, Pygmalion. [They rush him back to the altar, and hoist him on to it]. Up you go.
They return to their former places.
PYGMALION. As I told you, lots of attempts were made to produce protoplasm in the laboratory. Why were these synthetic plasms, as they called them, no use?
ECRASIA. We are waiting for you to tell us.
THE NEWLY BORN [modelling herself on Ecrasia, and trying to outdo her intellectually] Clearly because they were dead.
PYGMALION. Not bad for a baby, my pet. But dead and alive are very loose terms. You are not half as much alive as you will be in another month or so. What was wrong with the synthetic protoplasm was that it could not fix and conduct the Life Force. It was like a wooden magnet or a lightning conductor made of silk: it would not take the current.
ACIS. Nobody but a fool would make a wooden magnet, and expect it to attract anything.
PYGMALION. He might if he were so ignorant as not to be able to distinguish between wood and soft iron. In those days they were very ignorant of the differences between things, because their methods of analysis were crude. They mixed up messes that were so like protoplasm that they could not tell the difference. But the difference was there, though their analysis was too superficial and incomplete to detect it. You must remember that these poor devils were very little better than our idiots: we should never dream of letting one of them survive the day of its birth. Why, the Newly Born there already knows by instinct many things that their greatest physicists could hardly arrive at by forty years of strenuous study. Her simple direct sense of space-time and quantity unconsciously solves problems which cost their most famous mathematicians years of prolonged and laborious calculations requiring such intense mental application that they frequently forgot to breathe when engaged in them, and almost suffocated themselves in consequence.
ECRASIA. Leave these obscure prehistoric abortions; and come back to your synthetic man and woman.
PYGMALION. When I undertook the task of making synthetic men, I did not waste my time on protoplasm. It was evident to me that if it were possible to make protoplasm in the laboratory, it must be equally possible to begin higher up and make fully evolved muscular and nervous tissues, bone, and so forth. Why make the seed when the making of the flower would be no greater miracle? I tried thousands of combinations before I succeeded in producing anything that would fix high-potential Life Force.
ARJILLAX. High what?
PYGMALION. High-po-tential. The Life Force is not so simple as you think. A high-potential current of it will turn a bit of dead tissue into a philosopher’s brain. A low-potential current will reduce the same bit of tissue to a mass of corruption. Will you believe me when I tell you that, even in man himself, the Life Force used to slip suddenly down from its human level to that of a fungus, so that men found their flesh no longer growing as flesh, but proliferating horribly in a lower form which was called cancer, until the lower form of life killed the higher, and both perished together miserably?
MARTELLUS. Keep off the primitive tribes, Pygmalion. They interest you; but they bore these young things.
PYGMALION. I am only trying to make you understand. There was the Life Force raging all round me: there was I, trying to make organs that would capture it as a battery captures electricity, and tissues that would conduct it and operate it. It was easy enough to make eyes more perfect than our own, and ears with a larger range of sound; but they could neither see nor hear, because they were not susceptible to the Life Force. But it was far worse when I discovered how to make them susceptible; for the first thing that happened was that they ceased to be eyes and ears and turned into heaps of maggots.
ECRASIA. Disgusting! Please stop.
ACIS. If you don’t want to hear, go away. You go ahead, Pyg.
PYGMALION. I went ahead. You see, the lower potentials of the Life Force could make maggots, but not human eyes or ears. I improved the tissue until it was susceptible to a higher potential.
ARJILLAX [intensely interested] Yes; and then?
PYGMALION. Then the eyes and ears turned into cancers.
ECRASIA. Oh, hideous!
PYGMALION. Not at all. That was a great advance. It encouraged me so much that I put aside the eyes and ears, and made a brain. It wouldn’t take the Life Force at all until I had altered its constitution a dozen times; but when it did, it took a much higher potential, and did not dissolve; and neither did the eyes and ears when I connected them up with the brain. I was able to make a sort of monster: a thing without arms or legs; and it really and truly lived for half-an-hour.
THE NEWLY BORN. Half-an-hour! What good was that? Why did it die?
PYGMALION. Its blood went wrong. But I got that right; and then I went ahead with a complete human body: arms and legs and all. He was my first man.
ARJILLAX. Who modelled him?
PYGMALION. I did.
MARTELLUS. Do you mean to say you tried your own hand before you sent for me?
PYGMALION. Bless you, yes, several times. My first man was the ghastliest creature: a more dreadful mixture of horror and absurdity than you who have not seen him can conceive.
ARJILLAX. If you modelled him, he must indeed have been a spectacle.
PYGMALION. Oh, it was not his shape. You see I did not invent that. I took actual measurements and moulds from my own body. Sculptors do that sometimes, you know; though they pretend they don’t.
MARTELLUS. Hm!
ARJILLAX. Hah!
PYGMALION. He was all right to look at, at first, or nearly so. But he behaved in the most appalling manner; and the subsequent developments were so disgusting that I really cannot describe them to you. He seized all sorts of things and swallowed them. He drank every fluid in the laboratory. I tried to explain to him that he must take nothing that he could not digest and assimilate completely; but of course he could not understand me. He assimilated a little of what he swallowed; but the process left horrible residues which he had no means of getting rid of. His blood turned to poison; and he perished in torments, howling. I then perceived that I had produced a prehistoric man; for there are certain traces in our own bodies of arrangements which enabled the earlier forms of mankind to renew their bodies by swallowing flesh and grains and vegetables and all sorts of unnatural and hideous foods, and getting rid of what they could not digest.
ECRASIA. But what a pity he died! What a glimpse of the past we have lost! He could have told us stories of the Golden Age.
PYGMALION. Not he. He was a most dangerous beast. He was afraid of me, and actually tried to kill me by snatching up things and striking at me with them. I had to give him two or three pretty severe shocks before I convinced him that he was at my mercy.
THE NEWLY BORN. Why did you not make a woman instead of a man? She would have known how to behave herself.
MARTELLUS. Why did you not make a man and a woman? Their children would have been interesting.
PYGMALION. I intended to make a woman; but after my experience with the man it was out of the question.
ECRASIA. Pray why?
PYGMALION. Well, it is difficult to explain if you have not studied prehistoric methods of reproduction. You see the only sort of men and women I could make were men and women just like us as far as their bodies were concerned. That was how I killed the poor beast of a man. I hadnt provided for his horrible prehistoric methods of feeding himself. Suppose the woman had reproduced in some prehistoric way instead of being oviparous as we are? She couldn’t have done it with a modern female body. Besides, the experiment might have been painful.
ECRASIA. Then you have nothing to shew us at all?
PYGMALION. Oh yes I have. I am not so easily beaten as that. I set to work again for months to find out how to make a digestive system that would deal with waste products and a reproductive system capable of internal nourishment and incubation.
ECRASIA. Why did you not find out how to make them like us?
STREPHON [crying out in his grief for the first time] Why did you not make a woman whom you could love? That was the secret you needed.
THE NEWLY BORN. Oh yes. How true! How great of you, darling Strephon! [She kisses him impulsively].
STREPHON [passionately] Let me alone.
MARTELLUS. Control your reflexes, child.
THE NEWLY BORN. My what!
MARTELLUS. Your reflexes. The things you do without thinking. Pygmalion is going to shew you a pair of human creatures who are all reflexes and nothing else. Take warning by them.
THE NEWLY BORN. But wont they be alive, like us?
PYGMALION. That is a very difficult question to answer, my dear. I confess I thought at first I had created living creatures; but Martellus declares they are only automata. But then Martellus is a mystic: I am a man of science. He draws a line between an automaton and a living organism. I cannot draw that line to my own satisfaction.
MARTELLUS. Your artificial men have no self-control. They only respond to stimuli from without.
PYGMALION. But they are conscious. I have taught them to talk and read; and now they tell lies. That is so very lifelike.
MARTELLUS. Not at all. If they were alive they would tell the truth. You can provoke them to tell any silly lie; and you can foresee exactly the sort of lie they will tell. Give them a clip below the knee, and they will jerk their foot forward. Give them a clip in their appetites or vanities or any of their lusts and greeds, and they will boast and lie, and affirm and deny, and hate and love without the slightest regard to the facts that are staring them in the face, or to their own obvious limitations. That proves that they are automata.
PYGMALION [unconvinced] I know, dear old chap; but there really is some evidence that we are descended from creatures quite as limited and absurd as these. After all, the baby there is three-quarters an automaton. Look at the way she has been going on!
THE NEWLY BORN [indignantly] What do you mean? How have I been going on?
ECRASIA. If they have no regard for truth, they can have no real vitality.
PYGMALION. Truth is sometimes so artificial: so relative, as we say in the scientific world, that it is very hard to feel quite sure that what is false and even ridiculous to us may not be true to them.
ECRASIA. I ask you again, why did you not make them like us? Would any true artist be content with less than the best?
PYGMALION. I couldnt. I tried. I failed. I am convinced that what I am about to shew you is the very highest living organism that can be produced in the laboratory. The best tissues we can manufacture will not take as high potentials as the natural product: that is where Nature beats us. You dont seem to understand, any of you, what an enormous triumph it was to produce consciousness at all.
ACIS. Cut the cackle; and come to the synthetic couple.
SEVERAL YOUTHS AND MAIDENS. Yes, yes. No more talking. Let us have them. Dry up, Pyg; and fetch them along. Come on: out with them! The synthetic couple.
PYGMALION [waving his hands to appease them] Very well, very well. Will you please whistle for them? They respond to the stimulus of a whistle.
All who can, whistle like streetboys.
ECRASIA [makes a wry face and puts her fingers in her ears]!
PYGMALION. Sh-sh-sh! Thats enough: thats enough: thats enough. [Silence]. Now let us have some music. A dance tune. Not too fast.
The flutists play a quiet dance.
MARTELLUS. Prepare yourselves for something ghastly.
Two figures, a man and woman of noble appearance, beautifully modelled and splendidly attired, emerge hand in hand from the temple. Seeing that all eyes are fixed on them, they halt on the steps, smiling with gratified vanity. The woman is on the man’s left.
PYGMALION [rubbing his hands with the purring satisfaction of a creator] This way, please.
The Figures advance condescendingly and pose themselves centrally between the curved seats.
PYGMALION. Now if you will be so good as to oblige us with a little something. You dance so beautifully, you know. [He sits down next Martellus, and whispers to him] It is extraordinary how sensitive they are to the stimulus of flattery.
The Figures, with a gracious air, dance pompously, but very passably. At the close they bow to one another.
ON ALL HANDS [clapping] Bravo! Thank you. Wonderful! Splendid. Perfect.
The Figures acknowledge the applause in an obvious condition of swelled head.
THE NEWLY BORN. Can they make love?
PYGMALION. Yes: they can respond to every stimulus. They have all the reflexes. Put your arm round the man’s neck, and he will put his arm round your body. He cannot help it.
THE FEMALE FIGURE [frowning] Round mine, you mean.
PYGMALION. Yours, too, of course, if the stimulus comes from you.
ECRASIA. Cannot he do anything original?
PYGMALION. No. But then, you know, I do not admit that any of us can do anything really original, though Martellus thinks we can.
ACIS. Can he answer a question?
PYGMALION. Oh yes. A question is a stimulus, you know. Ask him one.
ACIS [to the Male Figure] What do you think of what you see around you? Of us, for instance, and our ways and doings?
THE MALE FIGURE. I have not seen the newspaper today.
THE FEMALE FIGURE. How can you expect my husband to know what to think of you if you give him his breakfast without his paper?
MARTELLUS. You see. He is a mere automaton.
THE NEWLY BORN. I don’t think I should like him to put his arm round my neck. I don’t like them. [The Male Figure looks offended, and the Female jealous]. Oh, I thought they couldn’t understand. Have they feelings?
PYGMALION. Of course they have. I tell you they have all the reflexes.
THE NEWLY BORN. But feelings are not reflexes.
PYGMALION. They are sensations. When the rays of light enter their eyes and make a picture on their retinas, their brains become conscious of the picture and they act accordingly. When the waves of sound started by your speaking enter their ears and record a disparaging remark on their keyboards, their brains become conscious of the disparagement and resent it accordingly. If you did not disparage them they would not resent it. They are merely responding to a stimulus.
THE MALE FIGURE. We are part of a cosmic system. Free will is an illusion. We are the children of Cause and Effect. We are the Unalterable, the Irresistible, the Irresponsible, the Inevitable.
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
There is a general stir of curiosity at this.
ACIS. What the dickens does he mean?
THE MALE FIGURE. Silence, base accident of Nature. This [taking the hand of the Female Figure and introducing her] is Cleopatra-Semiramis, consort of the king of kings, and therefore queen of queens. Ye are things hatched from eggs by the brainless sun and the blind fire; but the king of kings and queen of queens are not accidents of the egg: they are thought-out and hand-made to receive the sacred Life Force. There is one person of the king and one of the queen; but the Life Force of the king and queen is all one: the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal. Such as the king is so is the queen, the king thought-out and hand-made, the queen thought-out and hand-made. The actions of the king are caused, and therefore determined, from the beginning of the world to the end; and the actions of the queen are likewise. The king logical and predetermined and inevitable, and the queen logical and predetermined and inevitable. And yet they are not two logical and predetermined and inevitable, but one logical and predetermined and inevitable. Therefore confound not the persons, nor divide the substance: but worship us twain as one throne, two in one and one in two, lest by error ye fall into irretrievable damnation.
THE FEMALE FIGURE. And if any say unto you ‘Which one?’ remember that though there is one person of the king and one of the queen, yet these two persons are not alike, but are woman and man, and that as woman was created after man, the skill and practice gained in making him were added to her, wherefore she is to be exalted above him in all personal respects, and–
THE MALE FIGURE. Peace, woman; for this is a damnable heresy. Both Man and Woman are what they are and must do what they must according to the eternal laws of Cause and Effect. Look to your words; for if they enter my ear and jar too repugnantly on my sensorium, who knows that the inevitable response to that stimulus may not be a message to my muscles to snatch up some heavy object and break you in pieces.
The Female Figure picks up a stone and is about to throw it at her consort.
ARJILLAX [springing up and shouting to Pygmalion, who is fondly watching the Male Figure] Look out, Pygmalion! Look at the woman!
Pygmalion, seeing what is happening, hurls himself on the Female Figure and wrenches the stone out of her hand. All spring up in consternation.
ARJILLAX. She meant to kill him.
STREPHON. This is horrible.
THE FEMALE FIGURE [wrestling with Pygmalion] Let me go. Let me go, will you [she bites his hand].
PYGMALION [releasing her and staggering] Oh!
A general shriek of horror echoes his exclamation. He turns deadly pale, and supports himself against the end of the curved seat.
THE FEMALE FIGURE [to her consort] You would stand there and let me be treated like this, you unmanly coward.
Pygmalion falls dead.
THE NEWLY BORN. Oh! Whats the matter? Why did he fall! What has happened to him?
They look on anxiously as Martellus kneels down and examines the body of Pygmalion.
MARTELLUS. She has bitten a piece out of his hand nearly as large as a finger nail: enough to kill ten men. There is no pulse, no breath.
ECRASIA. But his thumb is clinched.
MARTELLUS. No: it has just straightened out. See! He has gone. Poor Pygmalion!
THE NEWLY BORN. Oh! [She weeps].
STREPHON. Hush, dear: thats childish.
THE NEWLY BORN [subsiding with a sniff]!!
MARTELLUS [rising] Dead in his third year. What a loss to Science!
ARJILLAX. Who cares about Science? Serve him right for making that pair of horrors!
THE MALE FIGURE [glaring] Ha!
THE FEMALE FIGURE. Keep a civil tongue in your head, you.
THE NEWLY BORN. Oh, do not be so unkind, Arjillax. You will make water come out of my eyes again.
MARTELLUS [contemplating the Figures] Just look at these two devils. I modelled them out of the stuff Pygmalion made for them. They are masterpieces of art. And see what they have done! Does that convince you of the value of art, Arjillax!
STREPHON. They look dangerous. Keep away from them.
ECRASIA. No need to tell us that, Strephon. Pf! They poison the air.
THE MALE FIGURE. Beware, woman. The wrath of Ozymandias strikes like the lightning.
THE FEMALE FIGURE. You just say that again if you dare, you filthy creature.
ACIS. What are you going to do with them, Martellus? You are responsible for them, now that Pygmalion has gone.
MARTELLUS. If they were marble it would be simple enough: I could smash them. As it is, how am I to kill them without making a horrible mess?
THE MALE FIGURE [posing heroically] Ha! [He declaims]
Come one: come all: this rock shall fly From its firm base as soon as I.
THE FEMALE FIGURE [fondly] My man! My hero husband! I am proud of you. I love you.
MARTELLUS. We must send out a message for an ancient.
ACIS. Need we bother an ancient about such a trifle? It will take less than half a second to reduce our poor Pygmalion to a pinch of dust. Why not calcine the two along with him?
MARTELLUS. No: the two automata are trifles; but the use of our powers of destruction is never a trifle. I had rather have the case judged.
The He-Ancient emerges from the grove. The Figures are panic-stricken.
THE HE-ANCIENT [mildly] Am I wanted? I feel called. [Seeing the body of Pygmalion, and immediately taking a sterner tone] What! A child lost! A life wasted! How has this happened?
THE FEMALE FIGURE [frantically] I didn’t do it. It was not me. May I be struck dead if I touched him! It was he [pointing to the Male Figure].
ALL [amazed at the lie] Oh!
THE MALE FIGURE. Liar. You bit him. Everyone here saw you do it.
THE HE-ANCIENT. Silence. [Going between the Figures] Who made these two loathsome dolls?
THE MALE FIGURE [trying to assert himself with his knees knocking] My name is Ozymandias, king of–
THE HE-ANCIENT [with a contemptuous gesture] Pooh!
THE MALE FIGURE [falling on his knees] Oh dont, sir. Dont. She did it, sir: indeed she did.
THE FEMALE FIGURE [howling lamentably] Boohoo! oo! ooh!
THE HE-ANCIENT. Silence, I say.
He knocks the Male Automaton upright by a very light flip under the chin. The Female Automaton hardly dares to sob. The immortals contemplate them with shame and loathing. The She-Ancient comes from the trees opposite the temple.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Somebody wants me. What is the matter? [She comes to the left hand of the Female Figure, not seeing the body of Pygmalion]. Pf! [Severely] You have been making dolls. You must not: they are not only disgusting: they are dangerous.
THE FEMALE FIGURE [snivelling piteously] I’m not a doll, mam. I’m only poor Cleopatra-Semiramis, queen of queens. [Covering her face with her hands] Oh, don’t look at me like that, mam. I meant no harm. He hurt me: indeed he did.
THE HE-ANCIENT. The creature has killed that poor youth.
THE SHE-ANCIENT [seeing the body of Pygmalion] What! This clever child, who promised so well!
THE FEMALE FIGURE. He made me. I had as much right to kill him as he had to make me. And how was I to know that a little thing like that would kill him? I shouldn’t die if he cut off my arm or leg.
ECRASIA. What nonsense!
MARTELLUS. It may not be nonsense. I daresay if you cut off her leg she would grow another, like the lobsters and the little lizards.
THE HE-ANCIENT. Did this dead boy make these two things?
MARTELLUS. He made them in his laboratory. I moulded their limbs. I am sorry. I was thoughtless: I did not foresee that they would kill and pretend to be persons they were not, and declare things that were false, and wish evil. I thought they would be merely mechanical fools.
THE MALE FIGURE. Do you blame us for our human nature?
THE FEMALE FIGURE. We are flesh and blood and not angels.
THE MALE FIGURE. Have you no hearts?
ARJILLAX. They are mad as well as mischievous. May we not destroy them?
STREPHON. We abhor them.
THE NEWLY BORN. We loathe them.
ECRASIA. They are noisome.
ACIS. I don’t want to be hard on the poor devils; but they are making me feel uneasy in my inside. I never had such a sensation before.
MARTELLUS. I took a lot of trouble with them. But as far as I am concerned, destroy them by all means. I loathed them from the beginning.
ALL. Yes, yes: we all loathe them. Let us calcine them.
THE FEMALE FIGURE. Oh, don’t be so cruel. I’m not fit to die. I will never bite anyone again. I will tell the truth. I will do good. Is it my fault if I was not made properly? Kill him; but spare me.
THE MALE FIGURE. No! I have done no harm: she has. Kill her if you like: you have no right to kill me.
THE NEWLY BORN. Do you hear that? They want to have one another killed.
ARJILLAX. Monstrous! Kill them both.
THE HE-ANCIENT. Silence. These things are mere automata: they cannot help shrinking from death at any cost. You see that they have no self-control, and are merely shuddering through a series of reflexes. Let us see whether we cannot put a little more life into them. [He takes the Male Figure by the hand, and places his disengaged hand on its head]. Now listen. One of you two is to be destroyed. Which of you shall it be?
THE MALE FIGURE [after a slight convulsion during which his eyes are fixed on the He-Ancient] Spare her; and kill me.
STREPHON. Thats better.
THE NEWLY BORN. Much better.
THE SHE-ANCIENT [handling the Female Automaton in the same manner] Which of you shall we kill?
THE FEMALE FIGURE. Kill us both. How could either of us live without the other?
ECRASIA. The woman is more sensible than the man.
The Ancients release the Automata.
THE MALE FIGURE [sinking to the ground] I am discouraged. Life is too heavy a burden.
THE FEMALE FIGURE [collapsing] I am dying. I am glad. I am afraid to live.
THE NEWLY BORN. I think it would be nice to give the poor things a little music.
ARJILLAX. Why?
THE NEWLY BORN. I don’t know. But it would.
The Musicians play.
THE FEMALE FIGURE. Ozymandias: do you hear that? [She rises on her knees and looks raptly into space] Queen of queens! [She dies].
THE MALE FIGURE [crawling feebly towards her until he reaches her hand] I knew I was really a king of kings. [To the others] Illusions, farewell: we are going to our thrones. [He dies].
The music stops. There is dead silence for a moment.
THE NEWLY BORN. That was funny.
STREPHON. It was. Even the Ancients are smiling.
THE NEWLY BORN. Just a little.
THE SHE-ANCIENT [quickly recovering her grave and peremptory manner] Take these two abominations away to Pygmalion’s laboratory, and destroy them with the rest of the laboratory refuse. [Some of them move to obey]. Take care: do not touch their flesh: it is noxious: lift them by their robes. Carry Pygmalion into the temple; and dispose of his remains in the usual way.
The three bodies are carried out as directed, Pygmalion into the temple by his bare arms and legs, and the two Figures through the grove by their clothes. Martellus superintends the removal of the Figures, Acis that of Pygmalion. Ecrasia, Arjillax, Strephon, and the Newly Born sit down as before, but on contrary benches; so that Strephon and the Newly Born now face the grove, and Ecrasia and Arjillax the temple. The Ancients remain standing at the altar.
ECRASIA [as she sits down] Oh for a breeze from the hills!
STREPHON. Or the wind from the sea at the turn of the tide!
THE NEWLY BORN. I want some clean air.
THE HE-ANCIENT. The air will be clean in a moment. This doll flesh that children make decomposes quickly at best; but when it is shaken by such passions as the creatures are capable of, it breaks up at once and becomes horribly tainted.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Let it be a lesson to you all to be content with lifeless toys, and not attempt to make living ones. What would you think of us ancients if we made toys of you children?
THE NEWLY BORN [coaxingly] Why do you not make toys of us? Then you would play with us; and that would be very nice.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. It would not amuse us. When you play with one another you play with your bodies, and that makes you supple and strong; but if we played with you we should play with your minds, and perhaps deform them.
STREPHON. You are a ghastly lot, you ancients. I shall kill myself when I am four years old. What do you live for?
THE HE-ANCIENT. You will find out when you grow up. You will not kill yourself.
STREPHON. If you make me believe that, I shall kill myself now.
THE NEWLY BORN. Oh no. I want you. I love you.
STREPHON. I love someone else. And she has gone old, old. Lost to me for ever.
THE HE-ANCIENT. How old?
STREPHON. You saw her when you barged into us as we were dancing. She is four.
THE NEWLY BORN. How I should have hated her twenty minutes ago! But I have grown out of that now.
THE HE-ANCIENT. Good. That hatred is called jealousy, the worst of our childish complaints.
Martellus, dusting his hands and puffing, returns from the grove.
MARTELLUS. Ouf! [He sits down next the Newly Born] That job’s finished.
ARJILLAX. Ancients: I should like to make a few studies of you. Not portraits, of course: I shall idealize you a little. I have come to the conclusion that you ancients are the most interesting subjects after all.
MARTELLUS. What! Have those two horrors, whose ashes I have just deposited with peculiar pleasure in poor Pygmalion’s dustbin, not cured you of this silly image-making!
ARJILLAX. Why did you model them as young things, you fool? If Pygmalion had come to me, I should have made ancients of them for him. Not that I should have modelled them any better. I have always said that no one can beat you at your best as far as handwork is concerned. But this job required brains. That is where I should have come in.
MARTELLUS. Well, my brainy boy, you are welcome to try your hand. There are two of Pygmalion’s pupils at the laboratory who helped him to manufacture the bones and tissues and all the rest of it. They can turn out a couple of new automatons; and you can model them as ancients if this venerable pair will sit for you.
ECRASIA [decisively] No. No more automata. They are too disgusting.
ACIS [returning from the temple] Well, thats done. Poor old Pyg!
ECRASIA. Only fancy, Acis! Arjillax wants to make more of those abominable things, and to destroy even their artistic character by making ancients of them.
THE NEWLY BORN. You wont sit for them, will you? Please dont.
THE HE-ANCIENT. Children, listen.
ACIS [striding down the steps to the bench and seating himself next Ecrasia] What! Even the Ancient wants to make a speech! Give it mouth, O Sage.
STREPHON. For heaven’s sake don’t tell us that the earth was once inhabited by Ozymandiases and Cleopatras. Life is hard enough for us as it is.
THE HE-ANCIENT. Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful. What I wanted to tell you is that ever since men existed, children have played with dolls.
ECRASIA. You keep using that word. What are dolls, pray?
THE SHE-ANCIENT. What you call works of art. Images. We call them dolls.
ARJILLAX. Just so. You have no sense of art; and you instinctively insult it.
THE HE-ANCIENT. Children have been known to make dolls out of rags, and to caress them with the deepest fondness.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Eight centuries ago, when I was a child, I made a rag doll. The rag doll is the dearest of all.
THE NEWLY BORN [eagerly interested] Oh! Have you got it still?
THE SHE-ANCIENT. I kept it a full week.
ECRASIA. Even in your childhood, then, you did not understand high art, and adored your own amateur crudities.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. How old are you?
ECRASIA. Eight months.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. When you have lived as long as I have–
ECRASIA [interrupting rudely] I shall worship rag dolls, perhaps. Thank heaven I am still in my prime.
THE HE-ANCIENT. You are still capable of thanking, though you do not know what you thank. You are a thanking little animal, a blaming little animal, a–
ACIS. A gushing little animal.
ARJILLAX. And, as she thinks, an artistic little animal.
ECRASIA [nettled] I am an animated being with a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. If your Automata had been properly animated, Martellus, they would have been more successful.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. That is where you are wrong, my child. If those two loathsome things had been rag dolls, they would have been amusing and lovable. The Newly Born here would have played with them; and you would all have laughed and played with them too until you had torn them to pieces; and then you would have laughed more than ever.
THE NEWLY BORN. Of course we should. Isnt that funny?
THE HE-ANCIENT. When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth.
STREPHON. Yes; and take all the fun out of it.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Do not be so embittered because your sweetheart has outgrown her love for you. The Newly Born will make amends.
THE NEWLY BORN. Oh yes: I will be more than she could ever have been.
STREPHON. Psha! Jealous!
THE NEWLY BORN. Oh no. I have grown out of that. I love her now because she loved you, and because you love her.
THE HE-ANCIENT. That is the next stage. You are getting on very nicely, my child.
MARTELLUS. Come! what is the truth that was hidden in the rag doll?
THE HE-ANCIENT. Well, consider why you are not content with the rag doll, and must have something more closely resembling a real living creature. As you grow up you make images and paint pictures. Those of you who cannot do that make stories about imaginary dolls. Or you dress yourselves up as dolls and act plays about them.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. And, to deceive yourself the more completely, you take them so very very seriously that Ecrasia here declares that the making of dolls is the holiest work of creation, and the words you put into the mouths of dolls the sacredest of scriptures and the noblest of utterances.
ECRASIA. Tush!
ARJILLAX. Tosh!
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Yet the more beautiful they become the further they retreat from you. You cannot caress them as you caress the rag doll. You cannot cry for them when they are broken or lost, or when you pretend they have been unkind to you, as you could when you played with rag dolls.
THE HE-ANCIENT. At last, like Pygmalion, you demand from your dolls the final perfection of resemblance to life. They must move and speak.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. They must love and hate.
THE HE-ANCIENT. They must think that they think.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. They must have soft flesh and warm, blood.
THE HE-ANCIENT. And then, when you have achieved this as Pygmalion did; when the marble masterpiece is dethroned by the automaton and the homo by the homunculus; when the body and the brain, the reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting, as Ecrasia says, stand before you unmasked as mere machinery, and your impulses are shewn to be nothing but reflexes, you are filled with horror and loathing, and would give worlds to be young enough to play with your rag doll again, since every step away from it has been a step away from love and happiness. Is it not true?
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Speak, Martellus: you who have travelled the whole path.
MARTELLUS. It is true. With fierce joy I turned a temperature of a million degrees on those two things I had modelled, and saw them vanish in an instant into inoffensive dust.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Speak, Arjillax: you who have advanced from imitating the lightly living child to the intensely living ancient. Is it true, so far?
ARJILLAX. It is partly true: I cannot pretend to be satisfied now with modelling pretty children.
THE HE-ANCIENT. And you, Ecrasia: you cling to your highly artistic dolls as the noblest projections of the Life Force, do you not?
ECRASIA. Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
THE NEWLY BORN [anticipating the She-Ancient, who is evidently going to challenge her] Now you are coming to me, because I am the latest arrival. But I don’t understand your art and your dolls at all. I want to caress my darling Strephon, not to play with dolls.
ACIS. I am in my fourth year; and I have got on very well without your dolls. I had rather walk up a mountain and down again than look at all the statues Martellus and Arjillax ever made. You prefer a statue to an automaton, and a rag doll to a statue. So do I; but I prefer a man to a rag doll. Give me friends, not dolls.
THE HE-ANCIENT. Yet I have seen you walking over the mountains alone. Have you not found your best friend in yourself?
ACIS. What are you driving at, old one? What does all this lead to?
THE HE-ANCIENT. It leads, young man, to the truth that you can create nothing but yourself.
ACIS [musing] I can create nothing but myself. Ecrasia: you are clever. Do you understand it? I don’t.
ECRASIA. It is as easy to understand as any other ignorant error. What artist is as great as his own works? He can create masterpieces; but he cannot improve the shape of his own nose.
ACIS. There! What have you to say to that, old one?
THE HE-ANCIENT. He can alter the shape of his own soul. He could alter the shape of his nose if the difference between a turned-up nose and a turned-down one were worth the effort. One does not face the throes of creation for trifles.
ACIS. What have you to say to that, Ecrasia?
ECRASIA. I say that if the ancients had thoroughly grasped the theory of fine art they would understand that the difference between a beautiful nose and an ugly one is of supreme importance: that it is indeed the only thing that matters.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. That is, they would understand something they could not believe, and that you do not believe.
ACIS. Just so, mam. Art is not honest: that is why I never could stand much of it. It is all make-believe. Ecrasia never really says things: she only rattles her teeth in her mouth.
ECRASIA. Acis: you are rude.
ACIS. You mean that I wont play the game of make-believe. Well, I don’t ask you to play it with me; so why should you expect me to play it with you?
ECRASIA. You have no right to say that I am not sincere. I have found a happiness in art that real life has never given me. I am intensely in earnest about art. There is a magic and mystery in art that you know nothing of.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Yes, child: art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul. But we who are older use neither glass mirrors nor works of art. We have a direct sense of life. When you gain that you will put aside your mirrors and statues, your toys and your dolls.
THE HE-ANCIENT. Yet we too have our toys and our dolls. That is the trouble of the ancients.
ARJILLAX. What! The ancients have their troubles! It is the first time I ever heard one of them confess it.
THE HE-ANCIENT. Look at us. Look at me. This is my body, my blood, my brain; but it is not me. I am the eternal life, the perpetual resurrection; but [striking his body] this structure, this organism, this makeshift, can be made by a boy in a laboratory, and is held back from dissolution only by my use of it. Worse still, it can be broken by a slip of the foot, drowned by a cramp in the stomach, destroyed by a flash from the clouds. Sooner or later, its destruction is certain.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Yes: this body is the last doll to be discarded. When I was a child, Ecrasia, I, too, was an artist, like your sculptor friends there, striving to create perfection in things outside myself. I made statues: I painted pictures: I tried to worship them.
THE HE-ANCIENT. I had no such skill; but I, like Acis, sought perfection in friends, in lovers, in nature, in things outside myself. Alas! I could not create if. I could only imagine it.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. I, like Arjillax, found out that my statues of bodily beauty were no longer even beautiful to me; and I pressed on and made statues and pictures of men and women of genius, like those in the old fable of Michael Angelo. Like Martellus, I smashed them when I saw that there was no life in them: that they were so dead that they would not even dissolve as a dead body does.
THE HE-ANCIENT. And I, like Acis, ceased to walk over the mountains with my friends, and walked alone; for I found that I had creative power over myself but none over my friends. And then I ceased to walk on the mountains; for I saw that the mountains were dead.
ACIS [protesting vehemently] No. I grant you about the friends perhaps; but the mountains are still the mountains, each with its name, its individuality, its upstanding strength and majesty, its beauty–
ECRASIA. What! Acis among the rhapsodists!
THE HE-ANCIENT. Mere metaphor, my poor boy: the mountains are corpses.
ALL THE YOUNG [repelled] Oh!
THE HE-ANCIENT. Yes. In the hardpressed heart of the earth, where the inconceivable heat of the sun still glows, the stone lives in fierce atomic convulsion, as we live in our slower way. When it is cast out to the surface it dies like deep-sea fish: what you see is only its cold dead body. We have tapped that central heat as prehistoric man tapped water springs; but nothing has come up alive from those flaming depths: your landscapes, your mountains, are only the world’s cast skins and decaying teeth on which we live like microbes.
ECRASIA. Ancient: you blaspheme against Nature and against Man.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Child, child, how much enthusiasm will you have for man when you have endured eight centuries of him, as I have, and seen him perish by an empty mischance that is yet a certainty? When I discarded my dolls as he discarded his friends and his mountains, it was to myself I turned as to the final reality. Here, and here alone, I could shape and create. When my arm was weak and I willed it to be strong, I could create a roll of muscle on it; and when I understood that, I understood that I could without any greater miracle give myself ten arms and three heads.
THE HE-ANCIENT. I also came to understand such miracles. For fifty years I sat contemplating this power in myself and concentrating my will.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. So did I; and for five more years I made myself into all sorts of fantastic monsters. I walked upon a dozen legs: I worked with twenty hands and a hundred fingers: I looked to the four quarters of the compass with eight eyes out of four heads. Children fled in amazement from me until I had to hide myself from them; and the ancients, who had forgotten how to laugh, smiled grimly when they passed.
THE HE-ANCIENT. We have all committed these follies. You will all commit them.
THE NEWLY BORN. Oh, do grow a lot of arms and legs and heads for us. It would be so funny.
THE HE-ANCIENT. My child: I am just as well as I am. I would not lift my finger now to have a thousand heads.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. But what would I not give to have no head at all?
ALL THE YOUNG. Whats that? No head at all? Why? How?
THE HE-ANCIENT. Can you not understand?
ALL THE YOUNG [shaking their heads] No.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. One day, when I was tired of learning to walk forward with some of my feet and backwards with others and sideways with the rest all at once, I sat on a rock with my four chins resting on four of my palms, and four or my elbows resting on four of my knees. And suddenly it came into my mind that this monstrous machinery of heads and limbs was no more me than my statues had been me, and that it was only an automaton that I had enslaved.
MARTELLUS. Enslaved? What does that mean?
THE SHE-ANCIENT. A thing that must do what you command it is a slave; and its commander is its master. These are words you will learn when your turn comes.
THE HE-ANCIENT. You will also learn that when the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. And so I perceived that I had made myself the slave of a slave.
THE HE-ANCIENT. When we discovered that, we shed our superfluous heads and legs and arms until we had our old shapes again, and no longer startled the children.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. But still I am the slave of this slave, my body. How am I to be delivered from it?
THE HE-ANCIENT. That, children, is the trouble of the ancients. For whilst we are tied to this tyrannous body we are subject to its death, and our destiny is not achieved.
THE NEWLY BORN. What is your destiny?
THE HE-ANCIENT. To be immortal.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. The day will come when there will be no people, only thought.
THE HE-ANCIENT. And that will be life eternal.
ECRASIA. I trust I shall meet my fatal accident before that day dawns.
ARJILLAX. For once, Ecrasia, I agree with you. A world in which there were nothing plastic would be an utterly miserable one.
ECRASIA. No limbs, no contours, no exquisite lines and elegant shapes, no worship of beautiful bodies, no poetic embraces in which cultivated lovers pretend that their caressing hands are wandering over celestial hills and enchanted valleys, no–
ACIS [interrupting her disgustedly] What an inhuman mind you have, Ecrasia!
ECRASIA. Inhuman!
ACIS. Yes: inhuman. Why don’t you fall in love with someone?
ECRASIA. I! I have been in love all my life. I burned with it even in the egg.
ACIS. Not a bit of it. You and Arjillax are just as hard as two stones.
ECRASIA. You did not always think so, Acis.
ACIS. Oh, I know. I offered you my love once, and asked for yours.
ECRASIA. And did I deny it to you, Acis?
ACIS. You didn’t even know what love was.
ECRASIA. Oh! I adored you, you stupid oaf, until I found that you were a mere animal.
ACIS. And I made no end of a fool of myself about you until I discovered that you were a mere artist. You appreciated my contours! I was plastic, as Arjillax says. I wasn’t a man to you: I was a masterpiece appealing to your tastes and your senses. Your tastes and senses had overlaid the direct impulse of life in you. And because I cared only for our life, and went straight to it, and was bored by your calling my limbs fancy names and mapping me into mountains and valleys and all the rest of it, you called me an animal. Well, I am an animal, if you call a live man an animal.
ECRASIA. You need not explain. You refused to be refined. I did my best to lift your prehistoric impulses on to the plane of beauty, of imagination, of romance, of poetry, of art, of–
ACIS. These things are all very well in their way and in their proper places. But they are not love. They are an unnatural adulteration of love. Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.
ARJILLAX. That is false. The statue comes to life always. The statues of today are the men and women of the next incubation. I hold up the marble figure before the mother and say, ‘This is the model you must copy.’ We produce what we see. Let no man dare to create in art a thing that he would not have exist in life.
MARTELLUS. Yes: I have been through all that. But you yourself are making statues of ancients instead of beautiful nymphs and swains. And Ecrasia is right about the ancients being inartistic. They are damnably inartistic.
ECRASIA [triumphant] Ah! Our greatest artist vindicates me. Thanks, Martellus.
MARTELLUS. The body always ends by being a bore. Nothing remains beautiful and interesting except thought, because the thought is the life. Which is just what this old gentleman and this old lady seem to think too.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Quite so.
THE HE-ANCIENT. Precisely.
THE NEWLY BORN [to the He-Ancient] But you cant be nothing. What do you want to be?
THE HE-ANCIENT. A vortex.
THE NEWLY BORN. A what?
THE SHE-ANCIENT. A vortex. I began as a vortex: why should I not end as one?
ECRASIA. Oh! That is what you old people are, Vorticists.
ACIS. But if life is thought, can you live without a head?
THE HE-ANCIENT. Not now perhaps. But prehistoric men thought they could not live without tails. I can live without a tail. Why should I not live without a head?
THE NEWLY BORN. What is a tail?
THE HE-ANCIENT A habit of which your ancestors managed to pure themselves.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. None of us now believe that all this machinery of flesh and blood is necessary. It dies.
THE HE-ANCIENT. It imprisons us on this petty planet and forbids us to range through the stars.
ACIS. But even a vortex is a vortex in something. You cant have a whirlpool without water; and you cant have a vortex without gas, or molecules or atoms or ions or electrons or something, not nothing.
THE HE-ANCIENT. No: the vortex is not the water nor the gas nor the atoms: it is a power over these things.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. The body was the slave of the vortex; but the slave has become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. It is this stuff [indicating her body], this flesh and blood and bone and all the rest of it, that is intolerable. Even prehistoric man dreamed of what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the body of this death.
ACIS [evidently out of his depth] I shouldn’t think too much about it if I were you. You have to keep sane, you know.
The two Ancients look at one another; shrug their shoulders; and address themselves to their departure.
THE HE-ANCIENT. We are staying too long with you, children. We must go.
All the young people rise rather eagerly.
ARJILLAX. Dont mention it.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. It is tiresome for us, too. You see, children, we have to put things very crudely to you to make ourselves intelligible.
THE HE-ANCIENT. And I am afraid we do not quite succeed.
STREPHON. Very kind of you to come at all and talk to us, I’m sure.
ECRASIA. Why do the other ancients never come and give us a turn?
THE SHE-ANCIENT. It is difficult for them. They have forgotten how to speak; how to read; even how to think in your fashion. We do not communicate with one another in that way or apprehend the world as you do.
THE HE-ANCIENT. I find it more and more difficult to keep up your language. Another century or two and it will be impossible. I shall have to be relieved by a younger shepherd.
ACIS. Of course we are always delighted to see you; but still, if it tries you very severely, we could manage pretty well by ourselves, you know.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Tell me, Acis: do you ever think of yourself as having to live perhaps for thousands of years?
ACIS. Oh, don’t talk about it. Why, I know very well that I have only four years of what any reasonable person would call living; and three and a half of them are already gone.
ECRASIA. You must not mind our saying so; but really you cannot call being an ancient living.
THE NEWLY BORN [almost in tears] Oh, this dreadful shortness of our lives! I cannot bear it.
STREPHON. I made up my mind on that subject long ago. When I am three years and fifty weeks old, I shall have my fatal accident. And it will not be an accident.
THE HE-ANCIENT. We are very tired of this subject. I must leave you.
THE NEWLY BORN. What is being tired?
THE SHE-ANCIENT. The penalty of attending to children. Farewell.
The two Ancients go away severally, she into the grove, he up to the hills behind the temple.
ALL. Ouf! [A great sigh of relief].
ECRASIA. Dreadful people!
STREPHON. Bores!
MARTELLUS. Yet one would like to follow them; to enter into their life; to grasp their thought; to comprehend the universe as they must.
ARJILLAX. Getting old, Martellus?
MARTELLUS. Well, I have finished with the dolls; and I am no longer jealous of you. That looks like the end. Two hours sleep is enough for me. I am afraid I am beginning to find you all rather silly.
STREPHON. I know. My girl went off this morning. She hadnt slept for weeks. And she found mathematics more interesting than me.
MARTELLUS. There is a prehistoric saying that has come down to us from a famous woman teacher. She said: ‘Leave women; and study mathematics.’ It is the only remaining fragment of a lost scripture called The Confessions of St Augustin, the English Opium Eater. That primitive savage must have been a great woman, to say a thing that still lives after three hundred centuries. I too will leave women and study mathematics, which I have neglected too long. Farewell, children, my old playmates. I almost wish I could feel sentimental about parting from you; but the cold truth is that you bore me. Do not be angry with me: your turn will come. [He passes away gravely into the grove].
ARJILLAX. There goes a great spirit. What a sculptor he was! And now, nothing! It is as if he had cut off his hands.
THE NEWLY BORN. Oh, will you all leave me as he has left you?
ECRASIA. Never. We have sworn it.
STREPHON. What is the use of swearing? She swore. He swore. You have sworn. They have sworn.
ECRASIA. You speak like a grammar.
STREPHON. That is how one ought to speak, isnt it? We shall all be forsworn.
THE NEWLY BORN. Do not talk like that. You are saddening us; and you are chasing the light away. It is growing dark.
ACIS. Night is falling. The light will come back tomorrow.
THE NEWLY BORN. What is tomorrow?
ACIS. The day that never comes. [He turns towards the temple].
All begin trooping into the temple.
THE NEWLY BORN [holding Acis back] That is no answer. What–
ARJILLAX. Silence. Little children should be seen and not heard.
THE NEWLY BORN [putting out her tongue at him]!
ECRASIA. Ungraceful. You must not do that.
THE NEWLY BORN. I will do what I like. But there is something the matter with me. I want to lie down. I cannot keep my eyes open.
ECRASIA. You are falling asleep. You will wake up again.
THE NEWLY BORN [drowsily] What is sleep?
ACIS. Ask no questions; and you will be told no lies. [He takes her by the ear, and leads her firmly towards the temple].
THE NEWLY BORN. Ai! oi! ai! Dont. I want to be carried. [She reels into the arms of Acts, who carries her into the temple].
ECRASIA. Come, Arjillax: you at least are still an artist. I adore you.
ARJILLAX. Do you? Unfortunately for you, I am not still a child. I have grown out of cuddling. I can only appreciate your figure. Does that satisfy you?
ECRASIA. At what distance?
ARJILLAX. Arm’s length or more.
ECRASIA. Thank you: not for me. [She turns away from him].
ARJILLAX. Ha! ha! [He strides off into the temple].
ECRASIA [calling to Strephon, who is on the threshold of the temple, going in] Strephon.
STREPHON. No. My heart is broken. [He goes into the temple].
ECRASIA. Must I pass the night alone? [She looks round, seeking another partner; but they have all gone]. After all, I can imagine a lover nobler than any of you. [She goes into the temple].
It is now quite dark. A vague radiance appears near the temple and shapes itself into the ghost of Adam.
A WOMAN’S VOICE [in the grove] Who is that?
ADAM. The ghost of Adam, the first father of mankind. Who are you?
THE VOICE. The ghost of Eve, the first mother of mankind.
ADAM. Come forth, wife; and shew yourself to me.
EVE [appearing near the grove] Here I am, husband. You are very old.
A VOICE [in the hills] Ha! ha! ha!
ADAM. Who laughs? Who dares laugh at Adam?
EVE. Who has the heart to laugh at Eve?
THE VOICE. The ghost of Cain, the first child, and the first murderer. [He appears between them; and as he does so there is a prolonged hiss]. Who dares hiss at Cain, the lord of death?
A VOICE. The ghost of the serpent, that lived before Adam and before Eve, and taught them how to bring forth Cain. [She becomes visible, coiled in the trees].
A VOICE. There is one that came before the serpent.
THE SERPENT. That is the voice of Lilith, in whom the father and mother were one. Hail, Lilith!
Lilith becomes visible between Cain and Adam.
LILITH. I suffered unspeakably; I tore myself asunder; I lost my life, to make of my one flesh these twain, man and woman. And this is what has come of it. What do you make of it, Adam, my son?
ADAM. I made the earth bring forth by my labor, and the woman bring forth by my love. And this is what has come of it. What do you make of it, Eve, my wife?
EVE. I nourished the egg in my body and fed it with my blood. And now they let it fall as the birds did, and suffer not at all. What do you make of it, Cain, my first-born?
CAIN. I invented killing and conquest and mastery and the winnowing out of the weak by the strong. And now the strong have slain one another; and the weak live for ever; and their deeds do nothing for the doer more than for another. What do you make of it, snake?
THE SERPENT. I am justified. For I chose wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil; and now there is no evil; and wisdom and good are one. It is enough. [She vanishes].
CAIN. There is no place for me on earth any longer. You cannot deny that mine was a splendid game while it lasted. But now! Out, out, brief candle! [He vanishes].
EVE. The clever ones were always my favorites. The diggers and the fighters have dug themselves in with the worms. My clever ones have inherited the earth. All’s well. [She fades away].
ADAM. I can make nothing of it, neither head nor tail. What is it all for? Why? Whither? Whence? We were well enough in the garden. And now the fools have killed all the animals; and they are dissatisfied because they cannot be bothered with their bodies! Foolishness, I call it. [He disappears].
LILITH. They have accepted the burden of eternal life. They have taken the agony from birth; and their life does not fail them even in the hour of their destruction. Their breasts are without milk: their bowels are gone: the very shapes of them are only ornaments for their children to admire and caress without understanding. Is this enough; or shall I labor again? Shall I bring forth something that will sweep them away and make an end of them as they have swept away the beasts of the garden, and made an end of the crawling things and the flying things and of all them that refuse to live for ever? I had patience with them for many ages: they tried me very sorely. They did terrible things: they embraced death, and said that eternal life was a fable. I stood amazed at the malice and destructiveness of the things I had made: Mars blushed as he looked down on the shame of his sister planet: cruelty and hypocrisy became so hideous that the face of the earth was pitted with the graves of little children among which living skeletons crawled in search of horrible food. The pangs of another birth were already upon me when one man repented and lived three hundred years; and I waited to see what would come of that. And so much came of it that the horrors of that time seem now but an evil dream. They have redeemed themselves from their vileness, and turned away from their sins. Best of all, they are still not satisfied: the impulse I gave them in that day when I sundered myself in twain and launched Man and Woman on the earth still urges them: after passing a million goals they press on to the goal of redemption from the flesh, to the vortex freed from matter, to the whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a whirlpool in pure force. And though all that they have done seems but the first hour of the infinite work of creation, yet I will not supersede them until they have forded this last stream that lies between flesh and spirit, and disentangled their life from the matter that has always mocked it. I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have waited always to see what they will do tomorrow. Let them feed that appetite well for me. I say, let them dread, of all things, stagnation; for from the moment I, Lilith, lose hope and faith in them, they are doomed. In that hope and faith I have let them live for a moment; and in that moment I have spared them many times. But mightier creatures than they have killed hope and faith, and perished from the earth; and I may not spare them for ever. I am Lilith: I brought life into the whirlpool of force, and compelled my enemy, Matter, to obey a living soul. But in enslaving Life’s enemy I made him Life’s master; for that is the end of all slavery; and now I shall see the slave set free and the enemy reconciled, the whirlpool become all life and no matter. And because these infants that call themselves ancients are reaching out towards that, I will have patience with them still; though I know well that when they attain it they shall become one with me and supersede me, and Lilith will be only a legend and a lay that has lost its meaning. Of Life only is there no end; and though of its million starry mansions many are empty and many still unbuilt, and though its vast domain is as yet unbearably desert, my seed shall one day fill it and master its matter to its uttermost confines. And for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond. [She vanishes].