'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.'