"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.