Chapter I: Preface: Written for This Edition by Lady Gregory

A few Sundays ago I was staying with Mr. Blunt at Newbuildings Place, that ancient and beautiful manor house which has been a best loved part of his inheritance, as I have been used to do perhaps once in a year when chance or business draws me from Ireland to London. We were out of doors all the morning, he in his pony chair, in the beautiful oak woods that cover some five hundred of his Sussex acres. Our midday meal was set out nearer the house yet still under blossoming trees. Peacocks came to be fed and among them a Spanish lamb, black-spotted, using its sprouting horns to butt at the watch dog in whose companionship it had been reared. And as we talked “the Squire,” (for so he is known to his people) told me, and with pleasure in the telling, that these volumes of his “Diaries,” being sold out in England were now being printed in America, an honour new to him, for his work is not yet so widely known there as at home. But he said, and he was a little troubled with regard to this, that a new preface had been asked of him that would give something more of a biography, even of a confession, than is to be found in the text of the “Diaries” and “I am not at present” he said “in a mood for writing this.” I did not see him again, but after my return to Ireland not many days later, a home-coming hastened by news of troublesome events near by, a letter came from him reminding me of our talk and asking me to “do him a great kindness” and myself write the few needed words. I felt such a request from my friend of forty years an honour and not to be refused if I could but accomplish it, but there is much to say in a short space and it is sometimes harder to say less than more.

“I have lived my life in full” he said the other day and he had written, as I remembered, in the preface to the complete edition of his verse, “No life is perfect that has not been lived, youth in feeling, manhood in battle, old age in meditation,” and that very same day someone said to me in London when I spoke of him “His life has been lived for freedom.” That full life of his has, more happily than many, found its record not only in public action but in the intensity of lyrical expression—as an earlier poet has said “outward to man—inward to the Gods.” He tells in these diaries in vigorous prose of the circumstances that have in the last 30 years surrounded him, of talks with friends, and the gossip of Parliaments, of gatherings for shooting or for tennis or for the sales of his famous Arab Stud. They were written in early mornings not only where Eastern travel accustomed him to rise with the rising of the sun but through London seasons, and visits to great country houses in fine society, for he was many sided; a man of fashion, rider to hounds at home; rider also on the camels of the desert; attaché at the court of a King of Greece, a Queen of Spain, an Emperor of the French at the time of that Emperor’s supreme vain glory, translator from the Arabic; painter, architect and sculptor (as is shown in his greatest effort, the beautiful monument at Crawley, the recumbent figure of his brother); politician outside Parliament; revolutionist and helper of revolutions.

A brief summary of his earlier history, before I knew him, has been given me by a friend of his and mine:

“The English books of reference tell us that Mr. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was born at Crabbet Park in Sussex in the year 1840. His father was a squire possessed of some four thousand acres mostly of forest land; a justice of the peace, a Deputy Lieutenant of that county, and master of the local foxhounds, who had served in the Peninsular campaign and had carried the colours of the Grenadier Guards under Sir John Moore at the battle of Corunna where he was wounded, and remained through life a follower of the Duke of Wellington, the object of his political devotion.

“Mr. Blunt’s sole hereditary connection with letters, it is interesting to learn, was that the family estates in Sussex lay closely adjoining those of the Shelleys and that his great grandfather was fellow justice of the peace to Percy Shelley’s father and that they sat as Magistrates on the same Bench at the County town of Horsham, also that his father was a contemporary at Harrow School of that other great poet Byron, and acted as “fag” to him there according to English public school fashion for a year, memories that are cherished in the family traditions.

“Left an orphan while yet a child, he had been brought up a Catholic and had received his education under the Jesuits at Stonyhurst and later at Oscott, but pursued his education no further. He was never at an university, but at the early age of eighteen was given, by one of his guardians connected with the Ministry of the day, a post in the Diplomatic Service and was sent abroad the same year as attaché to the British Legation at Athens and afterwards by way of Constantinople to Germany, where he went through a mental crisis connected with the Darwinian discussions of the day, allusions to which will be found in the diaries.

“From Frankfort he was transferred in 1863 to Madrid and in the following year to the Paris Embassy, just then at the full height of the short lived glory of the Second Napoleonic Empire. Here the romantic follies of his youth began and with them the first outpourings of his poetic faculty followed by a diplomatic exile to the remoter posts in the service—to the Legations of Portugal and the River Plate. On his return to Europe he married Lady Annabella Noel, the only daughter of William Earl of Lovelace and of Ada Byron, that child of romance to whom the poet Byron addressed those pathetic lines: “Ada, sole daughter of my house and heart”; and the year after on the death of his elder brother he left the diplomatic service and settled down to a country life on his ancestral acres. There he and his highly gifted wife busied themselves for some half dozen years, she with painting, he with sculpture, and in secret with those verses which afterwards were to become so celebrated as “The Sonnets of Proteus,” and both in the rebuilding of their family home, Crabbet Park, a work for which they were their own sole architects.

“In 1875 tiring of too inadventurous a life at home, a sudden impulse started them on a series of romantic horseback journeys in Spain, Algeria and Asia Minor, and eventually in that still wilder wandering in Mesopotamia, Persia and the as yet quite unvisited regions of Central Arabia.”

It was in 1881 that my first meeting with him and Lady Anne took place, at Cairo, when they were living in the garden they had bought on the desert edge of Heliopolis; and at that meeting my husband had told us how some years before at a bull fight at Madrid he had been struck by the extraordinary good looks of the young matador awaiting the rush of the bull in the arena and asking who he was heard he was an attaché from the English Embassy, Wilfrid Blunt. That fine poem of his on the dying bull fighter Sancho Sanchez shows perhaps the hidden root of that adventure:

“Meaning was there in our courage and the calm of our demeanour,

For there stood a foe before us which had need of all our skill,

And our lives were as the programme, and the world was our arena,

And the wicked beast was death and the horns of death were Hell.

“And the boast of our profession was a bulwark against danger

With its fearless expectation of what good or ill may come,

For the very prince of darkness shall burst forth on us no stranger

When the doors of death fly open to the rolling of the drum.”

I will quote again from the summary: “At the time of his arrival at Cairo Mr. Blunt was still in the good books of the Foreign Office and in personal correspondence with Mr. Gladstone as an authority on Oriental matters and had just published his first prose work “The Future of Islam.” But overborne by his strong natural sympathy for liberty he espoused the cause of Egyptian Nationalism, and when the quarrel between England and the Egyptians came to hostilities at the bombardment of Alexandria he refused to abandon the cause that he had taken up, with the result that when after the defeat of Tel el Kebir the Egyptian leader Arabi found himself a prisoner of war threatened with death at the hands of a court martial, he succeeded in rousing popular feeling in England to shame at their betrayal of an honourable cause, the first of freedom in the East, and secured his release and honourable exile.

“The public action taken by Mr. Blunt in opposition to the Foreign Office, his first appearance in English political life, brought him into close connection with the leading politicians of the day and amongst others Parnell and the other members of the Irish Party and he joined the new group of Tory Democrats founded by Lord Randolph Churchill at that time in opposition which eventually succeeded in overthrowing the Government at the election of 1885. His fearless action with regard to Egypt ended his friendly relations with the Foreign Office and resulted in his exile from Egypt and he was forbidden to enter that country for some three years; and came to be regarded as the ‘_enfant terrible_’ in politics just as Samuel Butler was in art and literature.”

I wrote to him a little while ago asking if he had any letters of mine written from or to Egypt at the time of Arabi’s rebellion for, I said, it seemed to me I had made my education in politics there. And he answered “You talk of having made your political education in Egypt, and so too did I with you, for before that eventful year 1882 I had never played a public part of any kind or written so much as a letter to _The Times_ with my name to it and we made our education together over it.” All that story is told in his “Secret History of the Occupation of Egypt”; and he records that among his most important supporters there were Lord Houghton “who in early life had been an enthusiastic advocate of freedom in the East, and Sir William Gregory, an old follower of Gladstone and well known Liberal and who sent more than one powerful letter to what was then the leading journal of Europe (_The Times_) giving the Nationalist side. . . It is hardly too much to say that Gregory’s letters and mine, especially his, were largely the means of obtaining a respite for Egypt from the dangers that threatened her.” But after the war had been formally declared and at London evening parties “everyone was rejoicing over the bombardment of Alexandria” Wilfrid Blunt was almost alone in openly taking the part of the Egyptians; though Lord Houghton, while declaring himself for victory, characteristically told him that if he did go to Egypt he must bring back Arabi with him “and you must both come and dine with me.” When after Tel el Kebir the short war was over, and Cairo had fallen and Arabi had surrendered, a rumor went round that he and his officers, prisoners of war in English hands, were to be put to death, and a private letter of Mr. Gladstone’s confirmed this possibility, some men of honour and good feeling held up their hands in horror yet saw no way to compel the Ministry to abide by justice and custom and avoid this disgrace. But Mr. Blunt found a way and within two or three days he had engaged Counsel to act for the Egyptian rebels’ defence. He wrote to me at the time, “I have taken the precaution of sending out a couple of lawyers to see what can be done. We are the rear guard of a beaten army where there are plenty of blows and no glory to be won. Egypt may get a certain share of financial ease but she will not get liberty, at least not in our time, and the bloodless revolution so nearly brought about has been drowned in blood.”

When the expenses of the defence of the prisoner began to be very heavy some subscriptions were sent towards it by, amongst others, Lord Wentworth, Lord Wemyss, Frederic Harrison, Admiral Lord Mark Kerr, Lord Randolph Churchill, A. W. Kinglake, George Meredith, and General Gordon (who wrote with his, “I suppose Government will not pay it. Arabi himself will repay it within a year’s time”). But with a splendid generosity Mr. Blunt took the whole burden upon himself, paying if I remember aright a sum of £3,000. It was not his last service to Egypt, and that passionate denunciation of the Imperial Government in “The Wind and the Whirlwind,” though it went past the ears closed to any but an official voice still stands as an indictment and a prophecy. Here are some of his lines:

Oh insolence of strength! Oh boast of wisdom!

Oh poverty in all things truly wise!

Thinkest thou, England, God can be outwitted

For ever thus by him who sells and buys?

Thou sellest the sad nations to their ruin.

What hast thou bought? The child within the womb,

The son of him thou slayest to thy hurting,

Shall answer thee “An Empire for thy tomb.”

Thou hast joined house to house for thy perdition.

Thou hast done evil in the name of right.

Thou hast made bitter sweet and the sweet bitter,

And called light darkness and the darkness light.

Thou art become a by-word for dissembling,

A beacon to thy neighbors for all fraud.

Thy deeds of violence men count and reckon.

Who takes the sword shall perish by the sword.

The Empire thou didst build shall be divided.

Thou shalt be weighed in thine own balances

Of usury to peoples and to princes,

And be found wanting by the world and these.

Thy Empire shall be parted and thy Kingdom.

At thy own doors a Kingdom shall arise,

Where freedom shall be preached and the wrong righted

Which thy unwisdom wrought in days unwise.

Truth yet shall triumph in a world of justice.

This is of faith. I swear it. East and West

The law of Man’s progression shall accomplish

Even this last great marvel with the rest.

Thou wouldst not further it, Thou canst not hinder.

If thou shalt learn in time thou yet shalt live.

But God shall ease thy hand of its dominion,

And give to these the rights thou wouldst not give.

The nations of the East have left their childhood.

Thou art grown old. Their manhood is to come;

And they shall carry on Earth’s high tradition

Through the long ages when thy lips are dumb.

The wisdom of the West is but a madness,

The fret of shallow waters in their beds.

Yours is the flow, the fulness of Man’s patience,

The ocean of God’s rest inherited.

I think when London fashion turned against him for his support of the Egyptians who fought for freedom, his good looks were a positive annoyance to his enemies. All had not the good humour of Lord Houghton who said to me in his whimsical way “The fellow knows he has a handsome head and he wants it to be seen on Temple Bar.” Those good looks on the other hand and perhaps his love of horses softened the sternness of magistrates who visited him according to their duty when he was picking oakum as a prisoner in a cell of Galway gaol. For in the Land League days, turning from the East he had taken up the cause of “the Westernmost of all European nations and the most Christian,” and had held it an honour to be “the first Englishman put in prison for Ireland’s sake.” He was condemned to two months of that prison life for holding a meeting of protest “against the denial of the right universally claimed by our countrymen to speak where grievances exist.” Lady Anne, devoted and heroic, Byron’s granddaughter, Ada’s daughter, lingered near the gaol until work on his behalf called her to England. He took his punishment with a gallant spirit. Bereft of books he found pleasure in watching the seagulls as they hovered overhead, and the jackdaws and sparrows on the look out for scraps of prison food; talking of horse flesh with the visiting justices, even finding a solace in the oakum-picking “the unravelling of an old tarred rope with a good healthy smell”—(I still possess a strand of this smuggled from the cell, and acting as a marker to my copy of his prison poems “In Vinculis”); even hiding a bit of rope on Saturday to begile the tedium of the unoccupied Sabbath; but finding his chief hardship in those January nights, being given but scanty covering as he lay on the plank bed that he found harder than the naked ground of any of his Eastern encampments. But with a hidden scrap of pencil he wrote sonnets on the blank leaves of his prayer book, and some of these are a cry from one who feels real suffering:

“God knows, ’twas not with a fore-reasoned plan

I left the easeful dwellings of my peace

And sought this conflict with ungodly Man

And ceaseless still through years that do not cease

Have warred with Powers and Principalities.

My natural soul, ere yet these strifes began,

Was as a sister, diligent to please

And loving all, and most the human clan.

God knows it. And He knows how the world’s tears

Touched me. And He is witness of my wrath,

How it was kindled against murderers

Who slew for gold, and how upon their path

I met them. Since which day the World in arms

Strikes at my life with angers and alarms.”

An “_enfant terrible_” of politics indeed, he has kept to the resolve recorded in the first page of these Diaries of “pleading the cause of the backward nations of the world” in and out of season. He has never given up his right of protest against injustice in Egypt and elsewhere, denouncing the floggings and hangings of the villagers of Denshawai in 1905; calling out against the hanging of Dingra, the Hindoo political assassin, in 1909; against the Italian massacres of Arabs in Tripoli in 1911; against the hanging of Roger Casement in 1914; and against the “lawyers arguments” used in the British Cabinet to urge and justify the late war. An unusual and gallant record for a Sussex gentleman of many acres, of inherited wealth and ease.

The story told in these Diaries from year to year, sometimes from day to day, the “humour, the charming good temper that flickers into all corners of life” through its pages makes a richly woven background, a tapestry of rich colour, for the adventure of that personal life, the “life of love, the romance of travel, the delight in woods and fields and skies, the pride of ancestry and race” ascribed to him by one who knew him; the many gifts, the mastery of living, that seem to belong to the heroic ages of the world, that show him out as one of Plutarch’s men.

A. GREGORY.

JUNE 12, 1921.