The World’s Tragedy

XXXVI PREFACE. formal or informal pledged to the guardianship of mankind. With this postulate the way is clear. In the prologue we find innocence : Pagan love, Pagan music, Pagan mysticism, and we find the Sabbatarians pretty sick about it, like the fox that lost his tail. We next find Alexander, one of the guardians, anxious about humanity. He is not squeamish about a little blood, his own or another’s, and he discovers the plot. Next we find the dove achieving his foul purpose, not on a pure laughing Pagan girl, but on a furtive lecherous girl, already half a Christian. Enough of this painful subject ! Now comes the Nativity, with the guardians, under Alexander’s presidency, on the watch. They are perfectly indifferent to all but the secret purpose — more magical ethics, my disciples ! They are moved neither to pity nor to disgust, for the Great Pity and the Great Disgust have moved them to this Immobility. Next we see love under Christianity, as guilt, disease, weariness ; and the half-man rotten by its revolting filth, consenting to the ruin of mankind and his own death as relief from it. Lastly we see the man magically awakened to a sense of his disaster, too weak to retrieve the past or avert the future, though alive to all its horror. In the meanwhile the corruption of Roman virtue begins ; and we should end the play in despair were it not that Alexander comes for- ward and obligingly prophesies the arrival of Aleister