A GREAT PROTESTER

Scawen Blunt. By Edith Finch. (Cape. 15s.)

THIS exceedingly good book may be called a public, and not a private, Life. Based largely on Wilfrid Blunt's own Diaries, where he recorded the minutiae of his vast interest in public men and affairs, it does not contain any of the stirring intimacies with which men and women have revealed themselves. There was so much surface-life to Wilfrid Blunt that the reader must find the drama there ; true intimacy thrives on less eventful-

ness. Blunt's activities were astonishing ones, and in Miss Finch he has the ideal biographer. She has made herself entirely at home in the intricacies of his long political strivings, and without partisanship has done justice to one of the most interesting men of his time, a mixture of rebel and conservative, a patriot but ostracised, of supremely attractive personality but unhappy with different kinds of failure, a man no less loved after the time for gallantries was over than before.

Rich enough to travel and see things for himself in Egypt, India, and Ireland, and enough of an aristocrat to be able to

harry powerful people as one of themselves, and led on by small successes, Blunt was in the late Victorian era the thorn in the flesh of those less consumed than himself with a passion

for small and oppressed nationalities :

" His point of view was held neither lightly nor sentimentally. From a sound basis of experience it developed logically step by step :—his finding, during his journey through Asia Minor in 1873, that Eastern ways of government had something to recommend them ; his recognition in Nejd in 1879, of the happiness which a nation, however poor in material ways, might attain if left to itself without foreign interference ; his discovery, in Iraq during the same year, of the disastrous results brought about by corrupt foreign rule of a weaker, poorer nation ; his suspicion, aroused at Simla in 1879-80, that the value to India of the paternal govern- ment of England was in large measure sham ; his conviction induced by the study of Islam in 188o, of the possibility of a progressive liberal movement in Islam ; and the final death, in the disillusion- ments of 1882-83, of his faith in the disinterestedness of the English Government."

Since it is on a balanced judgement of him that his intelli- gent biographer is bent, she explores the make-up of Blunt's

violent championings

" But though Blunt's sincerity is obvious and though his scorn of the political game is understandable, it is impossible not to suspect that he enjoyed the excitement and importance both of being at the centre of the fray and also of stirring it up. In a measure at any rate, his scorn of opponents was owing to personal pique and, having thrown in his lot with the Nationalists, he was forced by pride to win their—his—success. He delighted in catching out his adversaries in unfortunate situations, in collecting stories of their social failures, their less happy attempts at literary and artistic pursuits, and their unflattering photographs. Thz pleasures of irony often led him too far. And undoubtedly he was susceptible, though not blind, to flattery. Perhaps, also, his attitude towards those whom he supported savoured too strongly of the beneficent lord and master."

Blunt was in fact too persevering and industrious, and suffered too much bitterness of disillusion (to say nothing of prison horrors) to have been influenced by any other consideration

than heroic compassion. He spent £8,000 on the defence of Arabi Pasha after Tel-el-Kebir (though when praised later by a friend he said " and have I eaten a chop the less ? "). Him unacceptable version of affairs that have since been largely rectified exiled him from all official sympathies. The complete

dissentient does not add to his own convenience or happiness.

" This Burmese War," he wrote in 1884, " is a piece with all these wars : hungry commercial speculators making contracts with a dishonest prince, European intrigues, British remons- trances, official interference, threats from Calcutta, appeal of the prince to his people, who strangely take his side in the quarrel, ultimatum issued, arrival of fleet, massacre of Euro- peans, bombardment, slaughter of natives, triumph of British arms, annexation of territory, pay, prize money, pensions, peerages all round, and so da capo." Instead of raising this despised voice, Blunt might have begun and ended with the mere love of England which added gall to his convictions— where he was squire in Sussex of exquisite civilised architecture and wild woods and fields browsed by an Arab stud. A friend of William Morris, his own aesthetic interests, combined with his sporting ones, and the enjoyment of his extraordinarily individual and attractive art of living might have been all, if he could have seen injustice and remained indifferent. Although he proclaimed himself the man of action, his rhetoric of " I would not be a poet " was contradicted by poetry-writing from early to late years. To the young man of Byronic beauty, sensitive, privileged, romantic, unhappy, poetry must have seemed the final ornament of life, something • he could add to himself on his own account. And by supple- menting youthful intensity of passion with metre and verse, he afforded himself incidentally compensation for passion's woes. That his poetry had its origin more in his fancying the part of poet than in the necessity of genius even his closest poetry-adherents might admit. To re-read after the lapse of time his two famous sonnet sequences Esther and The Love Sonnets of Proteus is to be reminded of the truth of Henley's verdict that " whatever its quality as accomplishment, it fairly triumphs as a living piece of life." The Sonnets commemorate loves flavoured with guilt (" Our dear shame "), cyclamen'd over with the sweetness-and-sadness of Protean farewells ; but many of them secure that they arc read with the same sensitiveness as that with which they were written, and an echo of the same emotion.

As for the unremitting prose of the Diaries, and letters to the papers (of which The Spectator printed the first), and fighting pamphlets, and the longer histories of Imperial government, it was reasoned and forceful, an effective instrument to use upon the wrongs and mistakes and muddles of public life.

There are probably not many survivors of Blunt's lifelong friends to check this book for consistently true recording and portraiture. It is nothing less than an extraordinary achieve- ment to have produced a book that is unassailable by such of those intimates as there arc. And to one of them, a member of my own family, to whom there was never any truth, politically, like Blunt truth, the satisfaction is intense of seeing presented to the world such a record of selfless aims and fearless struggle