THE UNCROWNED KING OF SUSSEX1

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By CAMERON ROGERS

HEN Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the uncrowned King of Sussex, died in his eighty-third year on November 9, 1922, there were but few of that vivid fellowship of his youth and manhood to observe upon it or to note the unfilled niche among the last of the great Victorians. Blunt, who had shocked these many times and had chidden them thunderously from afar off for their sinewed faith in imperialism and their heavy-footed stumbling among people who abhorred them; prophesying evil for England in the East and evil for England in Ireland; Blunt, the mad prophet of an enfranchised Islam and the aegis of Arabi, had after all outlived them as he had outhated and outsung them. They could never quite understand him. Perhaps in their halloing in the spoor marks of Cromer and Kitchener they never wished to, feeling that he was in some inexcusable way "a wrong un" though the kinsman of noblemen and himself one of the greatest gentlemen in England. In a manner incredibly magnificent he had betrayed his caste, wronged the salt of his own great Southern holdings, the coverts of Crabbet, and the Jacobean suzerainty of Newbuildings. He left England to ride abroad in the Saharan open upon a steel-thewed barb as 1 From The Saturday Review of Literature, September 19, 1925.

arrogant as himself, to ride in a burnous as white as the sunlight, the handsomest face in Europe outthrust, urgent as a hawk's, to perceive the tyrannies and the follies of his countrymen in the land of his adoption.

To leave Sussex for a vast pagan household in the Sahara, pitched in the very shadow of the tomb of a Muslim Saint! Sheikh El Obeyd and Newbuildings! Monstrous. The man was a comedian. And yet El Sheikh El Obeyd became suddenly a noise in the land, and in the pitiless gaol of Khartoum another protestant welcomed his voice, though his own. beat quite fruitlessly upon the ear-drums of a Grand Old Man whom certain of Her Majesty's Service who had fought with the emirs at Abu Klea and El Teb called in an evil levity Gordon's Old Murderer.

Blunt at Sheikh El Obeyd befriended Arabi, though he might not avert the punishment that crushed his crusade with the guns of Tel-el-Kebir. His convictions became a hail of little shafts that from the quivers of bookbindings made him a malison in the eyes of right-thinking England. And then he swept into England, and shortly therefrom into Ireland, where he opposed England with such glittering crescendoes that he passed into Kilmainham Gaol for a few months, as delighted as a child.

Ah, Blunt! Incurable case. And yet from his birth in 1840 to 1869, when the diplomacy of his country was bereaved of his services, he had been all that a landed gentleman of heritage and presence should be. Something in the eyes of his equally en

dowed contemporaries had then gone wrong. But what? Poet, diplomat, sculptor, author, sportsman, traveler, and a lover of many conquests, his were qualities sufficient, one might think, to guarantee sound British political views. But, alas, not so. Imperialism became in his mind a murrain laid upon him personally, a sickness to be delivered from and from which to deliver others. And he strove for this deliverance while his peers snorted with annoyance and fumed with a perfectly justifiable irritation.

And of course in the meantime he had married the granddaughter of Lord Byron, and there is no doubt he found reserves in the blood and bone of the Noels.

What a honeymoon and what a marriage. On foot, on horses, this vibrant couple made of the whole Orient their playground and of Africa their especial village green. Arabic was as their own language to them and in them, as in that other dark genius, Sir Richard Burton, the Bedawi strain seemed stronger than the Saxon.

Curiously enough, Blunt had but little profit or pleasure from the evening when he and Sir Richard came into each other's company. Sir Richard's fault, no doubt, since he cast those hypnotic eyes so dreadfully upon Wilfrid that the latter raised a navy revolver against him and threatened to pistol him if he did not at once desist. Yet in one way the two would not have made an ill-assorted couple. Blunt labored his whole life long with a changing

mind upon matters spiritual. He had come under the influence of Newman, who, he would say, had wrought a miracle upon him. He had been more than once upon the point of a fervent and orthodox Catholicism, and then always he waited, wrestled anew with himself, and lived on beyond the extended hand-grip of the church. Islam beckoned and to his dear friend, the Grand Mufti, he more than once nearly made the profession of faith. He did not. Still he wrestled. One year of barren combat he determined to make an end of doubt and set out upon a journey of forty days to interview the chieftain temporal and spiritual of the Senussi, whose power went forth from Jerabub, near Tripoli. His guide was of the Senussi, and his pilgrimage lay among their fellowship, yet the convert-to-be was set upon and beaten, robbed and sorely injured, more, however, in his faith than in his body. So doubts returned again fourfold, and he wrestled and still wrestled.

In moments between this spiritual rough and tumbling, preaching, riding, and making love, he wrote. He wrote poetry that will live as long as anthologists exist to anthologize, such poetry as the first of that couple of superb sonnets:

O world, in very truth thou art too young;
When wilt thou learn to wear the garb of age?
World, with thy covering of yellow flowers,
Hast thou forgot what generations sprung
Out of thy loins and loved thee and are gone?
Hast thou no place in all their heritage

Where thou dost only weep, that I may come
Nor fear the mockery of thy yellow flowers?
O world, in very truth thou art too young,
The heroic wealth of passionate emprize
Built thee fair cities for thy naked plains.
How hast thou set thy summer growth among
The broken stones which were their palaces!
Hast thou forgot the darkness where he lies
Who made thee beautiful, or have thy bees
Found out his grave to build their honeycombs?

And certainly his prose will live as long as Ireland or the British occupation of Egypt are of interest to the world. But of the two it is his verse that is the more endurable. There had come quite early the Sonnets of Proteus, of which Oscar Wilde, in a review of In Vinculis, sterner ones written a decade or so later from Kilmainham Gaol, remarked with a pleasant smugness that not a few were shameful. Oh, the usage the "nineties" gave that word! In any case, they were love sonnets, for a multitude of loves inspired Wilfrid. Esther and Manon and Juliet and a many more. There is, for instance, for those who care to look for it, that translucent acrostic subtly entitled "A Cuckoo Song," to a young noblewoman who could not well have been more beautiful than her name.

Not all were in this vein, however. There is "The Wind and the Whirlwind," which blew into England out of Egypt clamant with an indignant warning and whose ending has proved not unprophetic: