SATAN ABSOLVED
A VICTORIAN MYSTERY
SATAN ABSOLVED
A VICTORIAN MYSTERY
BY
WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT
WITH A FRONTISPIECE AFTER
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS R.A.
LONDON AND NEW YORK
JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD
1899
DEDICATED BY PERMISSION
TO MR. HERBERT SPENCER
PREFACE
In publishing this poem, the Author feels that some apology is needed. Itdeals with matters of a kind not usually treated in modern verse, andwhich ask to be approached, if at all, with dignity and reverence. Hetrusts that he will not be found lacking on this essential point.Nevertheless, he cannot expect but that he may wound by his plain speakingthe feelings of those among his readers who sincerely believe thatNineteenth Century Civilisation is synonymous with Christianity, and thatthe English Race, above all those in existence, has a special mission fromHeaven to subdue and occupy the Earth. The self-complacency of theAuthor’s countrymen on this head is too deeply seated to be attackedwithout offence. He has not, however, shrunk from so attacking, and frominsisting on the truth that the hypocrisy and all-acquiring greed ofmodern England is an atrocious spectacle—one which, if there be anyjustice in Heaven, must bring a curse from God, as it has surely[Pg vi] alreadymade the angels weep. The destruction of beauty in the name of science,the destruction of happiness in the name of progress, the destruction ofreverence in the name of religion, these are the pharisaic crimes of allthe white races; but there is something in the Anglo-Saxon impietycrueller still: that it also destroys, as no other race does, for its merevain-glorious pleasure. The Anglo-Saxon alone has in our day exterminated,root and branch, whole tribes of mankind. He alone has depopulatedcontinents, species after species, of their wonderful animal life, and isstill yearly destroying; and this not merely to occupy the land, for itlies in large part empty, but for his insatiable lust of violentadventure, to make record bags and kill. That things are so is amplereason for the hardest words the Author can command.
To his fellow poets and poetic critics the Author too would say a word. Hehas chosen as the vehicle of his thought a metre to which in English theyare unaccustomed, the six-foot Alexandrine couplet. For some reason whichthe Author has never understood, this, the classic metre in France, hasstood in disrepute with us. Yet he ventures to think that, for rhetoricaland dramatic purposes, it is infinitely preferable to our own heroiccouplet, and preferable even, in any hands but the strongest,[Pg vii] to ourtraditional blank verse. He believes, moreover, that if our skilleddramatists would make trial of it, it would, by its extreme flexibilityand the natural break of its cesura, enable them to capture that shyest ofall shy things—success in a rhymed modern play. At least, he trusts thatthey will give it their consideration, and not condemn him off-handbecause, having a rhetorical subject to deal with, he has treated itrhetorically and in what he considers the best rhetoric form, though bothrhetoric and Alexandrines are