FOREWORD, BY R.C. FRASER NOTE ON THE HISTORY OF THE SONNET IN ENGLISH LITERATURE PROLOGUE I. REBIRTH II. THE CROWN OF LIFE III. BEFORE THE THRONE IV. WORSHIP V. UNITY VI. LOVE'S SILENCE VII. THE SUBLIME HOPE VIII. THE HEART OF LOVE IX. "'TWIXT STAR AND STAR" X. THE HIGHER KNIGHTHOOD XI. IN BEAUTY'S BLOOM XII. ETERNAL JOY XIII. CONSTANCY XIV. CALM AFTER STORM XV. THE STAR OF LOVE XVI. IMPRISONED MUSIC XVII. LOVE'S MESSAGE XVIII. ECSTASY XIX. THE DREAM XX. ETHEREAL BEAUTY XXI. A CROWN OF THORNS XXII. TWO HEARTS IN ONE XXIII. YEARNING XXIV. LOVE'S GIFT EPILOGUE
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.