Part 11

'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!'

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, partly 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