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 Adonais, the Lucille and the
Clytemnestra? Scott would be greater than Shelley, and Cowper 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.