Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  The use of the six-foot Alexandrine couplet may seem to many readers as a thing unknown and unwelcome in English verse. Others may say that here and there the language has not been sufficiently carefully weighed, that there is repetition of thought in some places, and of words in others, as for instance the word ‘plain’ recurs three times in seven lines. But when hypercriticism has said and done its worst, the work remains a just and generous indictment; heroic in its courage and vigorous in its eloquence, pleading the cause of those who cannot plead their own. The human race will be ill-pleased by the denunciation; for their vanity must be wounded by one who incessantly reminds it of its kinship to ‘the lewd, bare-buttocked ape,’ and who calls it full rightly, ‘sad creature without shame,’ and calls it also: —

  ‘A presence saturnine, In stealth among the rest, equipped as none of these With Thy mind’s attributes, low crouched beneath the trees, Betraying all and each.

  ‘The red Japhetic stock of the bare plains, which rolled A base-born horde on Rome erewhile in lust of gold, Tide following tide, the Goth, Gaul, Vandal, Lombard, Hun, Spewed forth from the white North, to new dominion In the fair Southern lands, with famine at their heel And rapine in their van, armed to the lips with steel.

  ‘The master-wolf of all men call the Sassenach, The Anglo-Norman dog who goeth by land and sea, As his forefathers went in chartered piracy, Death, fire, in his right hand.’

  Again, who, in the vain-glorious Britain of our time, will pardon this? —

  ‘The head knaves of the horde, Those who inspire the rest and give the master word, The leaders of their thought, their lords political, Sages, kings, poets, priests, in their hearts one and all, For all their faith avowed and their lip service done In face of Thy high fires each day beneath the sun, Ay, and their prelates too, their men of godliest worth, Believe no word of Thee as master of their Earth, Controllers of their acts, no word of Thy high right To bend men to obedience, and at need to smite, No word of Thy true law, the enforcement of Thy peace, Thy all-deciding arm in the world’s policies, They ignore Thee on the earth. They grant Thee, as their “God,” The kingdom of the heavens, seeing it a realm untrod, Untreadable, by man, a space, a res nullius, Or No Man’s Land which they, as loyal men and pious, Leave and assign to Thee to deal with as Thou wilt, To hold as Thy strong throne or loose as water spilt, For sun and wind to gather in the wastes of air. Whether of a Truth thou art, they know not, Lord, nor care; Only they name Thee “God,” and pay Thee their prayers vain, As dormant over-lord and pensioned suzerain, The mediatised blind monarch of a world, outgrown Of its faith’s swaddling clothes, which wills to walk alone.’

  These lines must be bitter in the teeth of the men of his generation, of the men who say openly that religion is for the seventh day, not for the week of work and war; who, churchgoers and chapelgoers alike, uphold the campaign of blood and plunder; who prate of Helots, and treat the Kaffir worse than any Helot that ever lived; who seek warrant in their Scriptures for endless slaughter, and for endless slavery, of all in any manner weaker than themselves; and who, with their jargon of civilisation, and their doggerel of cant, bear fire and pestilence over all the globe.

  Doubtless to man, convinced in deformity of his own beauty, in disease of his own health, in crime of his own virtue, in blood-lust of his own religious aims, the portrait of Man as given here in Satan’s scathing words will be very offensive. All honour be to the man who has dared to draw it!

  It might be perhaps easy to show the fallacy of this upbraiding, and prove the facts of the maintenance of life by the destruction of life which has always prevailed on earth; the facts that the python and the cobra, if not the tiger, and the eagle, slays, as man slays, for sport in addition to food; that in the depths of the unfathomed seas, and in the azure space of highest air, and in the green twilight of virgin forests, the god of cruelty reigns and prevails; that the elephant and the rhinoceros wrestled and the keen cheetah sprang on the meek cameleopard, and the jaws of the crocodile opened for the playful gazelle before ever the steel and the lead of the human brute touched and slew them. But when this has been said and admitted, it does not invalidate the truth of Satan’s charge; that man has laid waste the earth and slaughtered for greed, for savage pleasure, for mere wantonness, as never any other creature before him or beside him on this planet, has done or has ever wished to do.

  To blast the harmless, gentle, colossal whale with the coward’s tool of dynamite; to strip the fur coat off the living seal and drive her tender body over sharp rocks it was never made to cross; to castrate the lion and tear his flesh with red-hot irons that he may make the sport of fools; to rear the timid pheasant by millions, hand fed and unsuspecting, only that they may fall under the breechloaders of princes and lords and gentlemen; to penetrate into virgin forests and plunge in untroubled streams to seize the heron on her nest, and poison the lyre-bird in his haunts, and snatch his golden plumes from the bird of paradise, and his rosy wings from the flamingo, that commerce may flourish and women be adorned — all these things, and more like them, crimes of every clime and every hour, are human sins, and human sins alone; and justify in its strongest accusations the charge of Satan against Man as the most brutal murderer on earth; the same creature of destruction still, in the comedy which he calls civilisation, as when in his cave and his lake dwellings he first sharpened a stone, and then stole out to kill.

  And it is herein there lie alike the courage and the value of the ‘Satan Absolved.’ It is by no means a perfect poem; it would have been well if it had received much more meditation and amplification, if passages which approach the grotesque like the ‘old world furniture,’ the ‘linen long in press’ of Heaven in the first page had been altered; and the destiny and mission of Satan at the close are enwrapped in a mystery which is to me at least incomprehensible; but when the utmost has been said against it which can be urged, the poem remains a noble effort to proclaim a supreme truth, which, as all great truths have done, dawns slowly on the human mind — the solidarity of life.

  The preface alone to the book should make everyone obtain and cherish it. This time the writer has penned his own presentation, and is not ushered in by Mr Henley. It is enough to say that the introduction, like the work, is worthy of the Englishman who, amidst a deafening roar of national vanity and triumph, dared to denounce the injustice and the inhumanity of Omdurman.

  It must not be forgotten that this poet is also a writer of prose; prose clear, terse and strong. His letters to the leading journal of London, and his works on the present state of India and the future state of Islam are virile in thought and fearless in expression. A Sussex landowner, and the possessor of a fortune sufficient to give him entire independence, he has been the nominee of no party and the slave of no prejudice. His temper is essentially frondeur; he has, what so few possess, absolute independence of judgment; he refuses to see through other men’s spectacles, whether of smoked or of rose-coloured glass. Again and again has he had the courage to oppose the policy of ministers who were his personal friends. He opposed Mr Gladstone’s and Lord Granville’s policy in Egypt, considering it alike unjust and unwise; and he appealed alike to Parliament and to the nation against it, uselessly but not the less manfully. The eloquence which he used so nobly at that time must remain in the memories of many. He equally opposed the recent campaign in the Soudan of Lord Salisbury’s Cabinet, and the brutal carnage commanded and excused by Kitchener. In India he was, at an interval of a few years, the guest of two Viceroys, yet he never for a moment consented to accept the views of either, although for both he had strong personal friendship and regard. He thought (and thinks) the whole system of English administration in India a cruel, costly and most perilous mistake.

  ‘I believe,’ he says, ‘the natives capable of governing themselves much better than we can do, and at about a tenth part of the expense.

  ‘I have found a vast economic disturbance, caused partly by the selfish commercial policy of the English Government, p
artly by the no less selfish expenditure of the English official class. I have found the Indian peasantry poor, in some districts, to starvation; deeply in debt, and without the means of improving their position; the wealth accumulated in a few great cities and in a few rich hands, the public revenues spent to a large extent abroad, and by an absentee Government. I have been unable to convince myself that India is not a poorer country, now, than it was a hundred years ago, when we first began to manage its finances. I believe, in common with all native economists, that its modern system of finance is unsound, that far too large a revenue is raised from the land, and that this is only maintained at its present high figure by drawing on what may be called the capital of the country, namely, the material welfare of the agricultural class; probably, too, the productive power of the soil. I find a large public debt and foresee further financial difficulties.

  ‘Again, I find the ancient organisation of society broken up, the interdependence of class upon class disturbed, the simple customary law of the East replaced by a complicated jurisprudence imported from the West, increased powers given to the recovery of debt, and consequently increased facilities of litigation and usury. Also, great centralisation of power in the hands of officers daily more and more automatons and less and less interested in the special districts they administer. In a word, new machinery replacing, on many points disadvantageously, the old. I do not say that all these things are unprofitable, but they are not natural to the country and are costly and out of all proportion to the good. India has appeared to me in the light of a large estate which has been experimented on by a series of Scotch bailiffs who have all gone away rich.’

  In another place he says with equal frankness: —

  ‘India seems to me just as ill-governed as the rest of Asia. There is just the same heavy taxation, government by foreign officials, and waste of money that one sees in Turkey. The result is the same; and I don’t see much difference between making the starving Hindoo pay for a cathedral at Calcutta and taxing Bulgarians for a palace on the Bosphorus. Want cuts up all these great empires in their centralised governments.’

  ‘The “natives” as they call them,’ he writes farther on, ‘are a race of slaves, frightened, unhappy, and terribly thin. I own to being shocked at the Egyptian bondage in which they are held, and my faith in British institutions has received a severe blow.... I never could see the moral obligations Governments acknowledge of taxing people for debts which the Governments, and not the people, have incurred. All public debts, even in a self-governing country, are more or less dishonest, but in a despotism like India they are a swindle.’ ‘It is my distinct impression,’ he states in another portion of his too brief work, ‘from all that I have seen and heard, that the ill-feeling now existing in India between the English there and the indigenous races is one which, if it be not allayed by a more generous treatment, will in a few years make the continued connection between England and India altogether impossible, and that a final rupture of friendly relations will ensue between the two countries, which will be an incalculable misfortune for both, and may possibly be marked by scenes of violence such as nothing in the past history of either will have equalled. The people are beginning to awake and to resent the stupidity of those who, representing England in India, wantonly affront them, and unless the English public at home, with whom as yet the Indian races have no quarrel, becomes awake, too, to the danger of its own indifference, the irreparable result of a general race hatred will follow. Only it should be remembered that India is a vast continent peopled by races ten times more numerous than ourselves, and then the convulsion, when it comes, will be on a scale altogether out of proportion to our experience, and so the more alarming. Let India once be united in a common sentiment of hatred for all that is English and our rule there will ipso facto cease. Let it once finally despair of English justice, and English force will be powerless to hold it in subjection. The huge mammal, India’s symbol, is a docile beast and may be ridden by a child. He is sensible, docile and easily attached. But ill-treatment he will not bear forever, and when he is angered in earnest his vast bulk alone makes him dangerous, and puts it beyond the strength of the strongest to guide him.’

  All who are interested in the future of England and India should read this volume, which, although written as far back as Lord Ripon’s viceroyalty, applies in all its lessons and all its warnings with ten times greater force to the India of to-day, which, with the three-fold curse upon it of famine, of drought, and of plague, finds the British Government too engrossed in its aggressive and criminal war in South Africa to come to the relief of its Indian Empire, where tens of thousands of human lives, and millions of animals, are wasting in death and in despair.

  VII. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN

  Several years ago, at the moment when Mr Chamberlain, having abandoned the Liberal Party, was adored by the party which calls itself Conservative, I looked at him one evening after a dinner in a well-known house in Belgrave Square. He was standing, surrounded by the loveliest and most fashionable women of society, who were offering him a homage which must have been delightful to him. It was an interesting, if rather comical, spectacle, and I imagine that Chamberlain, though he gave no sign of doing so, enjoyed it extremely, and laughed at it in his sleeve. His physiognomy indicates his character; it has no distinction, but it is full of energy, intelligence, and resolution; it is the physiognomy of a tradesman, not of a statesman, of a person extremely keen and acute, obstinate and cruel, but not by any means intellectual. The eternal eyeglass serves to hide such expression as his features might have, and the nose, short and rétroussé, makes plebeian lineaments which might without this defect be sufficiently regular. In these later times he has aged more than his years perhaps justify, and it is said that he suffers from neuralgia and gout. He is always well dressed; ‘too well’ an ex-Viceroy murmured to me that evening; and he is never seen, as everyone knows, without an orchid in his button-hole; a flower always culled in one of those famous orchid-houses at Highbury, which, before his conversion, the Tory ladies longed so passionately to burn down, in days when he was considered odious, accursed, almost an Antichrist! — days not so very distant as the life of a nation counts.

  It was always said, at the time of his apostasy, that he left the Radicals out of jealousy of Gladstone’s greater powers, and of the magnetism which Gladstone exercised over all his colleagues; and also because amongst the Liberals there was Lord Rosebery, then in the fulness of promise; there was Vernon Harcourt, then extremely eloquent and much followed; and there was also in the Home Rule Party that great genius, known amongst men as Charles Stewart Parnell, in whom Chamberlain felt an irresistible superiority. If this were the reason, he must now be content, since in his present party he has no rival in the Cabinet, no one ventures to contradict him, and he is de facto, though not yet de jure, the head of the present Government. There have been many men of distinction before him in the somewhat subordinate post of Secretary of the Colonies, notably the late Lord Carnarvon, and the first Lord Lytton; but no one has ever made of this Department the throne of the Suprema Lex as Mr Chamberlain has contrived to do. The fault of whom, or the fault of what, lies at the root of this successful usurpation? Let us endeavour to discover, for the problem is interesting; and one of its most strange phenomena is to see Robert Cecil, Marquis of Salisbury, fallen under the dominion of the Birmingham screw-maker.

  In the whole of the Tory Party, Chamberlain has no one who opposes him, no one who approaches him for strength of character and for acuteness of perception, one may also add for unscrupulousness in principle and in action. The sole person of the party who could have imposed authority upon him by superiority of intellect would have been Lord Salisbury; but either through force of energy on his own part, or by lack of energy on his chief’s, he has been able completely to rule and influence the master of Hatfield, as he has succeeded in ruling and influencing all others who sit round the ministerial table in Downing Street. A friend of mine speaking on
ce to me of Lord Salisbury, whom he knew intimately, said, ‘He is a fine big cannon, but he won’t go off; I doubt if he will ever go off.’ It is probable that Chamberlain had the same opinion, and therefore resolved himself to manœuvre and fire the cannon. Anyhow, he has acted well for himself in leaving the Radicals to ally himself with their adversaries. If posterity blame him, and call him a turncoat, I imagine that he is a man to whom the verdict of posterity is absolutely indifferent. He is as ‘hard as nails,’ to use an appropriate if common phrase; he is cynical and selfish; and to a politician of this stamp, reputation in history is a matter of extreme indifference; fame must seem to him only a carnival-masquer, noisily blowing a tin trumpet.