Critical Studies Part 10

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[8] 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 gra.s.s All heaped I lay, from noon till eve.

And hares unwitting close to me did pa.s.s And still the birds sang....'

[Footnote 8: Surely _wild_ is a misprint for _white_? A mantle cannot be wild, nor is it an epithet to apply to a hawthorn tree.]

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 pa.s.sion 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, const.i.tuted 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 G.o.d had dealt the wound.

'The Eternal Father calmly shook One page unt.i.tled from life's book-- Few words. None ever cared to look.

'Yet woe for life thus idly riven, He blindly loved what G.o.d 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 G.o.d, 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 l.u.s.t 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-l.u.s.t.

'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 n.o.ble, 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 ign.o.ble Man On his four foot soles went, and howled thro' the lone hills In moody b.e.s.t.i.a.l wrath, uncla.s.sed 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.sail, 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 G.o.d? A fugitive spent few Used as Man's living targets by the ign.o.ble crew Who boast their coward skill to plant the b.a.l.l.s 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 Compa.s.sion, 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 repet.i.tion 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-b.u.t.tocked 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 j.a.phetic stock of the bare plains, which rolled A base-born horde on Rome erewhile in l.u.s.t 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 Sa.s.senach, 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 G.o.dliest 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 "G.o.d,"

The kingdom of the heavens, seeing it a realm untrod, Untreadable, by man, a s.p.a.ce, a _res nullius_, Or No Man's Land which they, as loyal men and pious, Leave and a.s.sign 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 "G.o.d," 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-l.u.s.t 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 s.p.a.ce of highest air, and in the green twilight of virgin forests, the G.o.d 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.