Sonnets | Page 2

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."
NOTE ON THE HISTORY OF THE SONNET IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Now that Italy holds such a brilliant place among our Allies during this the greatest war in the world's history--the war of chivalry (which is to say moral and spiritual right) against the arrogant might of the Prussian Octopus,--it is well to remember that it was from Italy the Sonnet first came into England. The word _sonnet_ in fact, is from the Italian _sonetto_ (literally "a little sound"), and the _sonetto_ was originally a short poem recited or sung to the accompaniment of music, probably the lute