As Far as Thought Can Reach: A.D. 31,920/§ v
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 it. 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; andaddress 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?