The second restored excerpt from ‘The Veiled Queen’ comes in at the end of the chapter called ‘The Magic of Snowdon,’ and runs thus:—
“I think, indeed, that I had passed into that sufistic ecstasy expressed by a writer often quoted by my father, an Oriental writer, Ferridoddin:—
With love I burn: the centre is within me;
While in a circle everywhere around me
Its Wonder lies—that exalted mood, I mean, described in the great chapter on the Renascence of Wonder which forms the very core and heart-thought of the strange book so strangely destined to govern the entire drama of my life, ‘The Veiled Queen.’
The very words of the opening of that chapter came to me:
‘The omnipotence of love—its power of knitting together the entire universe—is, of course, best understood by the Oriental mind. Just after the loss of my dear wife I wrote the following poem called “The Bedouin Child,” dealing with the strange feeling among the Bedouins about girl children, and I translated it into Arabic. Among these Bedouins a father in enumerating his children never counts his daughters, because a daughter is considered a disgrace.
Ilyàs the prophet, lingering ’neath the moon,
Heard from a tent a child’s heart-withering wail,
Mixt with the message of the nightingale,
And, entering, found, sunk in mysterious swoon,
A little maiden dreaming there alone.
She babbled of her father sitting pale
’Neath wings of Death—’mid sights of sorrow and bale,
And pleaded for his life in piteous tone.“Poor child, plead on,” the succouring prophet saith,
While she, with eager lips, like one who tries
To kiss a dream, stretches her arms and cries
To Heaven for help—“Plead on; such pure love-breath,
Reaching the throne, might stay the wings of Death
That, in the Desert, fan thy father’s eyes.”The drouth-slain camels lie on every hand;
Seven sons await the morning vultures’ claws;
’Mid empty water-skins and camel maws
The father sits, the last of all the band.
He mutters, drowsing o’er the moonlit sand,
“Sleep fans my brow; sleep makes us all pashas;
Or, if the wings are Death’s, why Azraeel draws
A childless father from an empty land.”“Nay,” saith a Voice, “the wind of Azraeel’s wings
A child’s sweet breath has stilled: so God decrees:”
A camel’s bell comes tinkling on the breeze,
Filling the Bedouin’s brain with bubble of springs
And scent of flowers and shadow of wavering trees,
Where, from a tent, a little maiden sings.‘Between this reading of Nature, which makes her but “the superficial film” of the immensity of God, and that which finds a mystic heart of love and beauty beating within the bosom of Nature herself, I know no real difference. Sufism, in some form or another, could not possibly be confined to Asia. The Greeks, though strangers to the mystic element of that Beauty-worship which in Asia became afterwards Sufism, could not have exhibited a passion for concrete beauty such as theirs without feeling that, deeper than Tartarus, stronger than Destiny and Death, the great heart of Nature is beating to the tune of universal love and beauty.’”
With regard to the two sonnets quoted above, a great poet has said that the method of depicting the power of love in them is sublime. ‘The Slave girl’s Progress to Paradise,’ however, is equally powerful and equally original. The feeling in the ‘Bedouin Child’ and in ‘The Slave Girl’s Progress to Paradise’ is exactly like that which inspires ‘The Coming of Love.’ When Percy sees Rhona’s message in the sunrise he exclaims:—
But now—not all the starry Virtues seven
Seem strong as she, nor Time, nor Death, nor Night.
And morning says, ‘Love hath such godlike might
That if the sun, the moon, and all the stars,
Nay, all the spheral spirits who guide their cars,
Were quelled by doom, Love’s high-creative leaven
Could light new worlds.’ If, then, this Lord of Fate,
When death calls in the stars, can re-create,
Is it a madman’s dream that Love can show
Rhona, my Rhona, in yon ruby glow,
And build again my heaven?
The same mystical faith in the power of love is passionately affirmed in the words of ‘The Spirit of the Sunrise,’ addressed to the bereaved poet:—
Though Love be mocked by Death’s obscene derision,
Love still is Nature’s truth and Death her lie;
Yet hard it is to see the dear flesh die,
To taste the fell destroyer’s crowning spite
That blasts the soul with life’s most cruel sight,
Corruption’s hand at work in Life’s transition:
This sight was spared thee: thou shalt still retain
Her body’s image pictured in thy brain;
The flowers above her weave the only shroud
Thine eye shall see: no stain of Death shall cloud
Rhona! Behold the vision!
Some may call this too mystical—some may dislike it on other accounts—but few will dream of questioning its absolute originality.
Let me now turn to those words of Mr. Balfour’s to which the passages quoted from ‘The Veiled Queen’ have been compared. In his presidential address to the British Association, entitled, ‘Reflections suggested by the New Theory of Matter,’ he said:—
“We claim to found all our scientific opinions on experience: and the experience on which we found our theories of the physical universe is our sense of perception of that universe. That is experience; and in this region of belief there is no other. Yet the conclusions which thus profess to be entirely founded upon experience are to all appearance fundamentally opposed to it; our knowledge of reality is based upon illusion, and the very conceptions we use in describing it to others, or in thinking of it ourselves, are abstracted from anthropomorphic fancies, which science forbids us to believe and nature compels us to employ.
Observe, then, that in order of logic sense perceptions supply the premisses from which we draw all our knowledge of the physical world. It is they which tell us there is a physical world; it is on their authority that we learn its character. But in order of causation they are effects due (in part) to the constitution of our orders of sense. What we see depends, not merely on what there is to be seen, but on our eyes. What we hear depends, not merely on what there is to hear, but on our ears.”
I may mention here a curious instance of the way in which any idea that is new is ridiculed, and of the way in which it is afterwards accepted as a simple truth. One of the reviewers of ‘Aylwin’ was much amused by the description of the hero’s emotions when he stood in the lower room of Mrs. Gudgeon’s cottage waiting to be confronted upstairs by Winifred’s corpse, stretched upon a squalid mattress:—