by Ouida
‘He gazes at her. He remembers, in his earliest childhood, a time when there had been two servants in their house; when his mother had been a gentlewoman, going out for a walk with his father, while the bonne pushed the little carriage of the baby François. And here she was, his own mother, with a mattress for sale on her shoulder, on foot in the mud at this time of night. “Mamma! mamma! dear little mamma!” he cried, sobbing, without a single selfish thought, caring only for her, so profoundly, so intensely!’
Again, there is the same intense sympathy in the author with the suffering of the spirit when the two Sèvres vases are taken to their new home, sold for twenty francs, the poor, pretty, familiar things which look so elegant, so slender, so aristocratic amongst the coarse, vulgar ornaments of their new owners, that Georges is proud of their superiority amidst the anguish with which he thinks of them, lost for ever:
‘Frail penates, saturated with the soul of home. Ah! how many birthday mornings, how many twilights of study, how many long rainy days and gentle suns of springtime, how many dreams of future voyages in far lands, how many nights fearful with storm or mute with falling snow, had these objects seen! They had been always there, fixing themselves inalienably on the retina in their unalterable attitude of delicacy and art: and now they were lost for ever, given over to an alien hand for a coin of gold which would last two days!’
Nothing can be more touching, more sincere, more eloquent than this episode.
Take again the magnificent opening chapter of the fire at which Lamarque contracts the illness which ultimately kills him. It is too long to quote here, but its description is of a force incomparable, and of a truth as great. No one of his contemporaries could have written this chapter; its sobriety and veracity, united to its splendour of diction and its terror of suggestion, make it a magnum opus.
It has only one defect; it gives the reader the impression that it cost great effort to the author. It does not convey that sense of the author’s spontaneous fertility and joy in creation which Pierre Loti, François Coppée, Anatole France, feel and give. L’Impérieuse Bonté is a great work, but its greatness must have cost painful thought and unremitting labour.
One feels that there is nothing of improvisation, of careless and happy inspiration, about it. It is the matured fruit of profound observation, and of complicated doubt, of an unselfish sorrow, and of a noble altruism. It is a work which must impress and elevate all readers who are capable of comprehending its teaching. But there is no laughter in it, nor is there even a smile, save that sad divine smile which accompanies the tears of pity.
VI. WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT
There are few men of our time more interesting than the man who bears this name. Fresh with English air, and dark with desert suns, passionately liberal in thought and nobly independent in opinion, spending his winters on the shores of the Nile, on the edge of the desert, and his summers between the vale of Shoreham, and the alder-shaded water of the humble Mole, he touches, and has always touched, life at its most different facets. Not without knowledge has he written of the green Sussex weald, and of the woodcocks and the thrushes, the oak trees and the yew trees, of ‘Evelyn’s land’; not without love as though he were also a son of the soil has he written of that other far-off country where —
‘We may make terms with Nature, and awhile Put as it were our souls to grass, and run Barefooted and bareheaded in the smile Of that long summer which still girds the Nile.’
His private life, likewise, is equally of interest to the most indifferent, since he is the husband of Byron’s granddaughter, the father-in-law of Neville Lytton, the companion in youth of Owen Meredith, the friend of the Arab, the champion of the dumb, and the standard-bearer of all lost causes. In few personalities is there united so much which is uncommon, and idiosyncrasies which are so varied. He has been so fortunate, often-times, in his friends and his fortunes, that it is perhaps only to be human that he should, in his editor who is his friend, fail to be so fortunate as one could wish. Mr Henley, who selected his poems, has excluded many; one is disposed to resent and to rebel; Mr Henley is apt at all times to arouse that sensation in the reader of his somewhat too condescending criticisms.
Many of the verses excluded were political; now it is precisely in politics that Mr Blunt is most delightful to those amongst us who abhor actual governments.
I wish that these poems had come before the public without this species of apology with which Mr Henley heads them. They do not need so uncertain a prefatory note. They are certainly not likely to be popular. They will not be recited over a little tambourine, and used to collect monies for woollen socks and chocolate. They will be little appreciated by the lovers of ballads of blood and fury, and odes of war which scream like a steam-hooter. They are made to be read in quiet places where daffodils blossom, and the black-cap sings; where lake waters lie calm in mountain shadows, or where, through the stillness of a studio or study, a summer breeze blows dropped rose-leaves across the threshold.
Mr Henley raises one standard of great verse: Milton’s: and below that nothing to him is great. I know not where he places Shelley, but does Milton ever touch the heart except perhaps in the Lycidas? Who can care for the exiles of Eden?
I do not think that it was necessary for Mr Henley to say that Mr Blunt is not John Milton. It would not occur to anyone that he was. But then, neither to my thinking is he Byron or Burns, whom Mr Henley thinks that he is, nor is he either Owen Meredith, to whom Mr Henley likewise compares him. He is, to my thinking, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt; alone in his verse as he is also alone (or almost alone) in his opinions and his politics. I dislike comparisons in criticisms. It is a meagre way to define what is, this habit of declaring what it is not; and I love not either the diminution of the living for the exaltation of the dead, or the praise of the living for the depreciation of the dead. Nor is it to me either wit or wisdom to say that Byron ‘followed.’ Who did he follow? Who was his precursor? Who showed him his matchless double rhymes? Who before him struck the splendid chords of his Juan? Who crowded into a few years of life such accomplishment, such eloquence such romance of existence? Who resembled Byron before Byron lived?
Poets who are not great, and do not aspire to be so, may touch the chords of memory, may unseal the fountains of tears, may make dead loves arise and smile, and the springs of dead years return, and do this with a line, a verse, a suggestion. This is what Owen Meredith did in his song; so does his friend and comrade in his. There is a strongly virile quality in his verse: it is not epicene, nor ever effeminate; the thoughts are always the thoughts of a man who has felt the hoof of the desert horse cast up the sand of the desert, and seen the circle of the waiting vultures poised in the blue air; and heard ‘God’s thunder upon Horeb’; who has read his Augustine and Chrysostom on the shores of the Dead Sea, and his Horace and his Herrick lying on the short sheep-cropped grass of Sussex; who knows many a bank whereon the wild thyme grows in lowly Kentish lanes, and has walked with the shades of Dante and of Byron in the marble streets of Ravenna, and under the dying pines of its forest; who has loved and laughed in the artificial passions and mocking mirth of Paris, and has dwelt in the solitudes where the hair tents of the sons of Shem are dark against the east.
Mr Henley, in his somewhat autocratic manner, says that a man lives for posterity in proportion as he figures the gestures and sets forth the emotions of his own time. We can none of us judge what posterity may do or say. I fear it will be too engrossed with itself to take much heed of anything which went before it. Or, possibly, there will be no posterity at all, but only a shattered earth; scattered into space by some exploit of that boastful Icarus called Science. But taking Mr Henley’s dictum as it stands, is it true, seeing (as its context shows) that he means an Englishman must be judged by what he writes of England? If this were true, where would go the Juan and the Parisina, the Anactoria and the Atalanta in Calydon, the Cenci and the Adonaïs, the Lucille and the Clytemnestra? Scott would be greater than Shelley, and Cowp
er than Coleridge. The theory will not hold water. Which is the greater play of Shakespeare— ‘King John’ or ‘The Tempest’? ‘Henry the Fifth’ or ‘Romeo and Juliet’? ‘Richard the Third’ or ‘Hamlet’? What are esteemed the greatest epics of the human race — Milton’s and Dante’s — are located in no known province of our narrow sphere, but, in worlds, heavenly and infernal, whither no traveller has gone, save in the spirit. ‘Country’ is but a restricted boundary for whoever has the vision which sees beyond the ordinary range of men. To the true poet his native land lies wherever what is beautiful can be beloved, or that which is sorrowful needs solace.
The only thing that personally I regret in these verses is their author’s tendency to be too careless in his rhymes. Many of them grate upon one’s ear, and such as sun and stone vex one’s sense of melody, indeed, are not rhymes: whilst some words used, such as for instance Revenue, accord ill with verse at all. He deems himself quit of obligation to observe these delicacies of metrical beauty, because he says peevishly that he is no poet. But he is a poet; and is so strongly one in feeling that there is no excuse for him not to be more observant of style.
For style is the reed-pipe through which the singer’s breath blows music, and he should take heed that his syrinx be well chosen, and well cut, so that each air played on it be clear as the throstle’s note.
But rough though many of his compositions are — rough and unstudied — yet, when read in fitting atmosphere, they will be beloved, and in the mind of the reader they will linger like the lilt of a moorland song heard on an autumn eve. There is the vox humana in their melody. They come from the heart of a man who has suffered. They are unequal, extremely unequal; the poet has gone through the woods and gathered together grass and orchis, and gorse, and the sceptered meadow sweet and the bearded barley, all together, just as they happened to come in his path; common things sometimes, or such as seem so to those who do not see the sun shine through and the dew tremble on them.
They are not put together with great care. I should not think that they were turned, and returned, and pondered over, and doubted about. They are too spontaneous, or seem so, to be the subject of great meditation. They are the natural children of a forest-lover. As you read them you receive the irresistible impression that they were written involuntarily as a full heart sighs, as a glad heart sings, but the sigh is more frequent than the song.
He has a great love of rural things. He says: —
‘You cannot know, In your bald cities where no cowslips blow, How dear life is to us. The tramp of feet Brushes all other footsteps from the street And you see nothing of the graves you tread. With us they are still present, the poor dead. Being so near the places where they sleep Who sowed these fields, we in their absence reap.’
Again: —
‘This ridge Is only thirty miles from London Bridge, And when the wind blows north, the London smoke Comes down upon us, and the grey crows croak, For the great city seems to reach about With its dark arms, and grip them by the throat. Time may yet prove them right. The wilderness May be disforested, and Nature’s face Stamped out of beauty by the heel of man Who has no room for beauty in his plan.’
Again: —
‘The dove did lend me wings. I fled away From the loud world which long had troubled me. Oh, lightly did I flee when hoyden May Threw her wild mantle on the hawthorn tree. I left the dusty highroad, and my way Was through deep meadows, shut with copses fair, A choir of thrushes poured its roundelay From every hedge and every thicket there; Mild, moon-faced kine looked on, where in the grass All heaped I lay, from noon till eve. And hares unwitting close to me did pass And still the birds sang....’
A certain similarity there is in his verse to Owen Meredith’s, but this is due to the fact that they were friends and companions always, in youth and manhood, and that Wilfrid Blunt had an intense and adoring sentiment for his friend which made him regard the other with a feeling which was almost religious in its strength and sincerity.
The following sonnet might have come out of ‘The Wanderer,’ and I imagine the house called here Palazzo Pagani is the villa in Bellosguardo which in ‘The Wanderer’ shelters the lovers of the ‘Eve and May.’
‘This is the house where twenty years ago They spent a spring and summer. This shut gate Would lead you to the terrace, and below To a rose-garden long since desolate. Here they once lived. How often I have sat Till it was dusk among the olive trees, Waiting to hear their coming horse hoofs graze Upon the gravel, till the freshening breeze Bore down a sound of voices. Even yet A broken echo of their laughter rings Through the deserted terraces. And see, While I am speaking, from the parapet There is a hand put forth, and someone flings Her very window open overhead. How sweet it is, the scent of rosemary, These are the last tears I shall ever shed.’
Here the influence of Owen Meredith is very strong, but it is the influence due to sympathy, not to imitation.
But where he is entirely unlike Owen Meredith is in his passion of pity, which is his dominant instinct, and which in the other is rarely perceptible. Owen Meredith was entirely personal; Wilfrid Blunt is strongly impersonal. The sorrows of man, and of one man in especial, constituted the be all, and end all, of the former; the woes of all creation lie heavy on the soul of the latter. The bird with a broken wing is to Wilfrid Blunt as pitiful a tragedy as the human lover with his ruined joys was to the author of ‘The Wanderer’; the chained eagle dying in an iron cage is to him as cruel a captive as his own soul pining to be free from the limits of sense and the blindness of mortality. He reaches a high level in altruism, which is in him of a very pure kind.
Such pity thrills through these lines on the stricken hart: —
‘The stricken hart had fled the brake, His courage spent for life’s dear sake, He came to die beside the lake.
‘The golden trout leaped up to view, The moorfowl clapped his wings and crew, The swallow brushed him as she flew.
‘He looked upon the glorious sun, His blood dropped slowly on the stone, He loved the life so nearly won,
‘And then he died. The ravens found A carcase couched upon the ground, They said their god had dealt the wound.
‘The Eternal Father calmly shook One page untitled from life’s book — Few words. None ever cared to look.
‘Yet woe for life thus idly riven, He blindly loved what God had given, And love, some say, has conquered Heaven.’
What Wilfrid Blunt perceives and feels more keenly than greater English poets, more keenly indeed than any English poet except Shelley and Matthew Arnold, are the pathos, the value, the infinite sadness, of these free forest, or desert, lives struck down in the fulness of their strength and beauty by the brutal pursuit of that ravenous and insatiable brute which is Man. It is this emotion which has inspired in him the strange poem named ‘Satan Absolved.’
‘Satan Absolved’ was not written when Mr Henley edited the books of earlier poems, and I imagine that it has scared Mr Henley and displeased him. I do not know this, I have not asked, but I imagine that ‘Satan Absolved’ must make Mr Henley extremely uncomfortable.
Briefly, the motive of ‘Satan Absolved’ is the accusation brought by Satan against Man; and against God, as the Creator and Authoriser of Man. This will sound in many ears a profanity; but it is not so, and Satan has sad reason in his arguments. It was a fine and lofty courage which made the author produce it at a moment when the English people are drunk and delirious with the lust of carnage and of conquest, and the great thinker Herbert Spencer has accepted its dedication, whilst the great painter Watts has given it its frontispiece.
It is a poem which will alienate many, affright many, and to many no doubt will appear blasphemous; but it is absolutely true in its hardy and original conception of the sins of mankind against the other races of the earth, and of the hypocrisy, brutality, and avarice of man, clothed and cultured, against man primitive and helpless. It is a cri de coeur, breaking almost involuntarily from a heart swollen with indignation, and scorn, and
pain, before the emptiness of creeds, the impudence of prayer and praise, the vileness of aggression and of war-lust.
‘Hast Thou not heard their chanting? Nay, Thou dost not hear, Or Thou hadst loosed Thy hand, like lightning in the clear, To smite their ribald lips with palsy!’
Like all poems in which Satan is the hero, the Fallen Angel dwarfs Deity. The rebel, not the lord, is in the right. This is inevitable.
Especially it is inevitable here, where Satan is the holder of the scales of justice; the advocate of all those countless races upon earth, who in their birth, and in their death, in their up-rising, and their down-lying, in every day which dawns, and night which falls, curse Man, their merciless master.
‘The Earth is a lost force, Man’s lazar house of woe Undone by his lewd will. We may no longer strive, The evil hath prevailed. There is no soul alive That shall escape his greed. We spend our days in tears Mourning the world’s lost beauty in the night of years. All pity is departed. Each once happy thing That on Thy fair Earth moves how fleet of foot or wing, How glorious in its strength, how wondrous in design, How royal in its raiment tinctured opaline, How rich in joyous life, the inheritor of forms, All noble, all of worth which had survived the storms, The chances of decay in the World’s living plan, From the remote fair past when still ignoble Man On his four foot soles went, and howled thro’ the lone hills In moody bestial wrath, unclassed amongst Earth’s ills. Each one of them is doomed. From the deep Central Seas To the white Poles, Man ruleth, pitiless Lord of these, And daily he destroyeth. The great whales he driveth Beneath the northern ice, and quarter none he giveth, Who perish there of wounds in their huge agony. He presseth the white bear on the white frozen sea And slaughtereth for his pastime. The wise amorous seal He flayeth big with young, the walrus cubs that kneel But cannot turn his rage, alive he mangleth them, Leaveth in breathing heaps, outrooted branch and stem. In every land he slayeth. He hath new engines made Which no life may withstand, nor in the forest shade, Nor in the sunlit plain, which wound all from afar, The timorous with the valiant, waging his false war, Coward, himself unseen. In pity, Lord, look down On the blank widowed plains which he hath made his own By right of solitude. Where, Lord God, are they now, Thy glorious bison herds, Thy ariels white as snow. Thy antelopes in troops, the zebras of Thy plain? Behold their whitened bones on the dull track of men. Thy elephants, Lord, where? For ages Thou did’st build Their frames’ capacity, the hide which was their shield No thorn might pierce, no sting, no violent tooth assail, The tusks which were their levers, the lithe trunk their flail. Thou strengthenedst their deep brain. Thou madest them wise to know, And wiser to ignore, advised, deliberate, slow, Conscious of power supreme in right. The manifest token Of Thy high will on earth, Thy natural peace unbroken, Unbreakable by fear. For ages did they move Thus, kings of Thy deep forest swayed by only love. Where are they now, Lord God? A fugitive spent few Used as Man’s living targets by the ignoble crew Who boast their coward skill to plant the balls that fly, Thy work of all time spoiled, their only use to die That these sad clowns may laugh. Nay, Lord, we weep for Thee, And spend ourselves in tears for Thy marred majesty. Behold, Lord, what we bring, — this last proof in our hands, Their latest fiendliest spoil from Thy fair tropic-lands, The birds of all the Earth, unwinged to deck the heads Of their unseemly women: plumage of such reds As not the sunset teach, such purples as no throne, Not even in heaven showeth, hardly, Lord, Thine own; Such azures as the sea’s, such greens as are in spring The oak trees’ tenderest buds of watched-for blossoming, Such opalescent pearls as only in Thy skies The lunar bow revealeth to night’s sleep-tired eyes. Behold them, Lord of Beauty, Lord of Reverence, Lord of Compassion, Thou who metest means to ends, Nor madest Thy world fair for less than Thine own fame, Behold Thy birds of joy, lost, tortured, put to shame, For these vile strumpets’ whim. Arise, or cease to be Judge of the quick and dead! These dead wings cry to Thee, Arise, Lord, and avenge!’