FOREWORD
BY RICHARD CHARLES FRASER
The following Sonnet Sequence,—written during rare intervals of leisure in a busy and strenuous life,—was privately printed in Madras early in 1914, without any intention of publication on the part of the author. He has, however, now consented to allow it to be given to a wider audience; and we anticipate in many directions a welcome for this small but significant volume by the writer of India to England, one of the most popular and often-quoted lyrics evoked by the Great War.
The Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur, was born in the State of Hyderabad, but educated in England; and there are some—at Cambridge and elsewhere—who will remember his keenly discriminating interest in British history and literature, and the comprehensive way he, in a few words, would indicate his impressions of poets and heroes, long dead, but to him ever-living.
His appreciation was both ardent and just; he could swiftly recognise the nobler elements in characters which at first glance might seem startlingly dissimilar; and he could pass without apparent effort from study of the lives of men of action to the inward contemplations of abstruse philosophers.
To those who have not met him, it may appear paradoxical to say that his tastes were at the same moment acutely fastidious and widely sympathetic; but anyone who has talked with him will recall the blend of high impersonal ideas with a remarkable personality which seldom failed to stimulate other minds—even if those others shared few if any of his intellectual tastes.
A famous British General (still living) was once asked, "What is the most essential quality for a great leader of men?" And he replied in one word "SYMPATHY." The General was speaking of leadership in relation to warfare; and by "Sympathy" he meant swift insight into the minds of others; and, with this insight, the power to arouse and fan into a flame the spark of chivalry and true nobility in each. The career of the Nawab Nizamat Jung has not been set in the world of action,—he is at present a Judge of the High Court in Hyderabad,—but nevertheless this definition of sympathy is not irrelevant, for the Nawab's personal influence has been more subtle and far-reaching than he himself is yet aware. His love of poetry and history, if on the one hand it has intensified his realisation of the sorrows and tragedies of earthly life, on the other hand has equipped him with a power to awake in others a vivid consciousness of the moral value of literature,—through which (for the mere asking) we any of us can find our way into a kingdom of great ideas. This kingdom is also the kingdom of eternal realities—or so at least it should be; and those who in the early nineties in England talked with Nizamoudhin (as he then was) could scarcely fail to notice that he valued the genius of an author, or the exploits of a character in history, chiefly in proportion to the permanent and vital nature of the truths this character had laboured to express—whether in words or action.
But Truth, has many faces; and scarcely any poet (except perhaps Shakespeare) has come within measurable distance of expressing every aspect of the human character. The Nawab could take pleasure in reading poets as temperamentally dissimilar as Shelley and Scott, Spenser and Byron,—to name only a few. Shelley, who was a spirit utterly unable to understand this world or ordinary homespun human nature; and Scott, who not only comprehended both without an effort, but who combined the practical and the romantic elements successfully in his own life, A devotion to Spenser, "the poet's poet," the poet of a dreamy yet very real and living chivalry,—Spenser who used to forget himself in his creations,—did not prevent the Nawab from understanding Byron, who never could forget himself at all; and who, with all his vivid impulses of generous sympathy for the oppressed, is nevertheless generally classed to-day as a colossal egoist. (Unjustly so, for no mere egoist would have toiled as he toiled for Greek emancipation, in the nerve-racking campaign which cost him his life.)
In India to England—most characteristic of the war poems of Nizamat Jung—we see traces of the influence of more than one of the English poets he has read so lovingly. But the poem is none the less poignantly personal. The same may be said of the Sonnets here prefaced; for although they are related to the sonnets of earlier poets whose work must be familiar to the writer, yet they are in no sense imitations, nor are they echoes.
"Poetry is the natural language of strong emotion," the Nawab said many years ago;—and if it may be asked why, holding this view, he has chosen such an elaborate (and, some people might add, artificial) form as the Sonnet, we can only answer that when an emotion or conviction is deep-seated and permanent, it becomes clarified, concentrated, and intensified under the stern discipline of compression within the arbitrary yet expressive limitations of a sonnet.[A]
One of the main reasons why the Nawab's friends have urged the publication of his Sonnets, is that despite occasional imperfections (of which he himself is conscious), they form a consistent whole, and in their spirit and sentiment they are akin to some of the most noble utterances of the great minds and hearts whose words have been like torches to show what heights a strong aspiring soul can climb.
"The Will is the master. Imagination the tool, and the body the plastic material," said a famous physician, who was also a practical man of the world;—and the poet who identifies his will and imagination with the eternal truths, who looks up to the stars instead of down into the mud, may always, even in his weariest hours, cheer himself by mental companionship with the other resolute souls whose pens have been used as swords in the service of Divine Beauty.
Of all the most famous writers of Sonnets, it is Michelangelo whose words come back most vividly to memory as we read the Nawab's expressions of faith.
"Love wakes the soul and gives it wings to fly."
"All beauty that to human sight is given Is but the shadow, if we rightly see, Of Him from Whom man's spirit issueth."
"As heat from fire, my love from the ideal Is parted never."
"Oh noble spirit, noble semblance taking, We mirrored in Thy mortal beauty see What Heaven and earth achieve in harmony."
Thus wrote Michelangelo of Vittoria Colonna (Marchioness of Pescara), "being enamoured of her divine spirit";[B] and though in the Sonnets of the Nawab, who uses what is for him a foreign tongue, the ideal is sometimes greater than the expression of it, yet the spirit shines out with a light which none can mistake. And whether the average man accepts or rejects the standards therein embodied, lovers of poetry will recognise that the Nawab, in his championship of a high and noble ideal, fights in the same army as Dante and Michelangelo,—neither of them cloistered dreamers, neither of them arm-chair theorists, but men who lived and loved and suffered amidst the turmoil of a world they viewed with wide-open eyes and unflinching minds.
The chivalrous ideal of an exalted and inspiring love can be rejected if we please;—but let none claim to be manly because this ideal seems too ethereal. For it is by the most vigorous, most strenuous, and most commanding souls and minds that this faith in the Eternal Beauty has been cherished and upheld most ardently and resolutely.
September 29, 1917.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] See "Note on the History of the Sonnet in English Literature," below.
[B] Ascanio Condivi's "Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti."