Critical Studies

by Ouida

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.