Part 2
Free-trade—Federalism—Higher Education, they all go together. The necessities of life are cheap here, wonderfully cheap; a man can get a dinner here for sixpence that he could not get in England for twice or thrice the amount. “There are not,” says the _Australasian Schoolmaster_, the organ of the State Schools, “there are not many under-fed children in the Australian [as there are in the English] schools.” But the luxuries of life (and let us remember that what we call the luxuries of life are, after all, necessities; they are the things which go to make up our civilization, the things which make us feel that there is a greater pleasure in life than sitting under your vine and your fig-tree, whatever Mr. George may have to say to the contrary)—the luxuries of life, I say, are dear here, very dear, owing to, what I must be permitted to call, an exorbitant tariff, and, consequently, the money that would be spent in fostering a higher ideal of life, in preparing the way for a national higher education, is spent on these luxuries, and the claims of intellect and knowledge, and of beauty and manners, have to suffer for it. Here is your Mr. Marcus Clarke, for instance, talking grimly, not to say bitterly, of “the capacity of this city to foster poetic instinct,” of his “astonishment that such work” as Gordon’s “was ever produced here.” He is astonished, you see, that the claims of intellect and knowledge, and of beauty and manners are enough satisfied in this city to produce a talent of this sort; he is astonished, because he does not see that there is an element in this city which, in its way, is making for at any rate the intellect and knowledge—an element which is a product, not of England but of Australia; a general sense of movement, of progress, of conscious power.
Free-trade—Federalism—Higher Education, they all, I say, go together; but if one is more important than the other, then it is the last. Improvement, real improvement, must always be from within outwards, not from without inwards. All abiding good comes, as it has been well said, by evolution not by revolution. “Our chief, our gravest want in this country at present,” says Arnold, “our _unum necessarium_, is a middle-class, homogeneous, intelligent, civilized, brought up in good public schools, and on the first plane.” How true is this of Australia too, of Melbourne! There are State schools for the lower-class, but what is there for the great upper educated class of the nation? The voluntary schools, the “private adventure schools.” And what sort of education do _they_ supply either in England or here? “The voluntary schools,” says a happy shallow man in some Publishers’ circular I lit on the other day, “the voluntary schools of the country” [of England] “have reached the highest degree of efficiency.” This, to those who have taken the trouble to study the question, not to say to have considerable absolute experience in the English voluntary schools—this is intelligence as surprising as it ought to be gratifying. To such men, the idea they had arrived at of the English voluntary schools was somewhat different; their idea being that these schools were, both socially and intellectually, the most inadequate that fall to the lot of any middle class among the civilized nations of Europe. “Comprehend,” says Arnold to us Englishmen, and he might as well be saying it to you Australians, “comprehend that middle-class education—the higher education, as we have put it, of the great upper educated class—is a great democratic reform, of the truest, surest, safest description.”
“But there are many difficulties to be overcome—so many, that we doubt these abstract theories to be at present within the sphere of practical application. There is such a mass of opposition to the idea of Federalism. And, as for the idea of Free-trade, we can only speculate on the existence of a national spirit here. The thinking public is quite content with its State schools for the lower class, and cares little or nothing about State schools and a higher education for the upper class. They are much more interested in the religious questions of the day—the Catholic attitude, the conflict between Mr. Strong and his Presbytery on the subject of Religious Liberalism or Latitudinarianism, as you may please to call it, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”—All this is so, let us admit it at once, but it does not discourage us. We know, or think we know (which is, after all, almost the same thing), that these three questions—Free-trade, Federalism, Higher Education—are the three great, the three vital questions for Australia, for Melbourne. We know that, sooner or later, they will have to be properly considered and decided upon, and that, if Melbourne is to keep the place which she now holds as the leading city, intellectually and commercially, of Australia, they will have to be decided upon in that way which conforms with “the intelligible law of things,” with the _Tendency of the Age_, with the _Time-Spirit_. For this is the one invaluable and, in the end, irresistible ally of Progress—of Progress onward and upward.
_December, 1884._
NOTE.—No one, speaking of Free-trade and Federalism in Australia, can omit a tribute of thanks to the _Argus_ and the _Federal Australian_ for what they have respectively done for the two causes. The cause of Higher Education, however, still waits for a champion in the Press.
THE POETRY OF ADAM LINDSAY GORDON.
“In the whole range of English literature,” says an Australian critic reviewing the complete edition of Gordon’s poems, “in the whole range of English literature there have been few poets possessed of a finer lyrical faculty than Adam Lindsay Gordon.... ‘Ashtaroth,’” continues our critic now warm at his work, “‘Ashtaroth’ is worthy to rank with any of Tennyson’s songs, and is far more musical than the best of Browning’s.” Then there is “the beauty of his ballad poetry, such as ‘Fauconshawe’ and ‘Rippling Water,’ which are perfect of their style;” and so on in the same strain, more or less, until the reader is surprised that our critic ends up with no further claim for his poet than that he “deserves to be ranked with the genuine poets of his generation.” One does not propose to criticise, verbally, criticism of this sort: it would be unkind to do so, and, above all, it would be useless. This is a native melody in the style of “Rule Britannia:” “Australia, and especially Victoria, is great and therefore her poet must be great also. Let us say that Melbourne is the equal of any English city save London, and Gordon the equal of any English poet save Shakspere and Milton!”
Now let us hear what another Australian critic, one who cares more about finding out the real deep true significance of Gordon and his poetry than of glorifying the _amour-propre_ of this class or of that: let us hear what Mr. Marcus Clarke has to say. “Written as they were” (as Gordon’s poems were) “at odd times in leisure moments of a stirring and adventurous life, it is not to be wondered at if they are unequal and unfinished. The astonishment of those who knew the man, and can gauge the capacity of this city to foster poetic instinct, is, that such work was ever produced here at all.”—What a different tone is this from that of our first and enthusiastic critic! “_Unequal and unfinished_”—“_astonishment that such work was ever produced here at all!_” But this is not all that Mr. Clarke has to say about Gordon’s poetry: he has also to notice what influence was at work in it, and (most important of all!) what is its real deep true significance. He talks of Gordon “owning nothing but a love for horsemanship and a head full of Browning and Shelley,” and follows this up by saying that “the influence of Browning and of Swinburne” (who, as we all know, has been, creatively and demonstratively, the chief prophet in his generation of the poet who, he likes to think, is ‘beloved above all other poets, being beyond all other poets—in one word, and the only proper word,—divine’)—“the influence of Browning and of Swinburne upon the writer’s taste is plain. There is plainly visible also, however, a keen sense of natural beauty and a manly admiration for healthy living.” Well, and the conclusion of the whole matter? “The student of these unpretending volumes will be repaid for his labour. _He will find in them something very like the beginnings of a national school of Australian poetry._”
Let us hasten to offer up our small tribute of praise and thanks to Mr. Clarke for his critical sagacity here, and let us venture to hope that the “Poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon” may go down to posterity accompanied always by this small “Preface” of Mr. Clarke, who both “knew the man” and was yet the first to appreciate this aspect of his work.
What, however, Mr. Clarke has to say about the facts of Gordon’s life is, at best, inaccurate. It is Mr. Sutherland to whom our gratitude is due here, gratitude for having discovered for us all the details of the poet’s life which it is necessary for us to know.[2]
What, then, remains for any other critic to do? There remains to him, as it seems to me, the task of doing what Mr. Clarke tells us he did not propose to do, “of criticising these volumes,” and also of trying, as befits one who comes later, and to whom, therefore, the events of the past have fallen into that symmetry and proper proportion that the events of the present can scarcely ever fall into: of trying, I say, to bring out more clearly (one aspect of which he has done little more than indicate), the real, deep, true significance of the poet’s work; in a word, of trying to understand, instead of being “astonished” at it.
The first thing to notice about Gordon’s poetry is, that it is almost all in regular and rymed rhythms. There is not a line of blank verse in it. Now, a “fine faculty” for regular and rymed rhythms is by no means a synonym for a “fine lyrical faculty.” Shelley, our greatest master in poetry of pure melody, has a “fine faculty” for regular and rymed rhythms, but has also a fine faculty for irregular rhythms: lines in which the regular rhythm is broken, in order that a more subtle melody may be expressed, are frequent in him. In Mr. Swinburne such lines are rare—he has a fine faculty for regular and rymed rhythms, but his faculty for irregular rhythms is (let us say) less fine. Gordon, who is the disciple of this first side of Mr. Swinburne’s technical talent, who, in his turn, is a disciple of the first side of Shelley’s—Gordon, I say, is in this respect to Mr. Swinburne what Mr. Swinburne is to Shelley.
Mr. Hammersley, one of the few survivors of that peculiar phase of colonial and Victorian feeling which produced the poetry of Gordon, and who “may say he knew him intimately” —tells us[3] how he “was often amused to hear him quote from the poets, and his recitations used to make me laugh outright. One day I said, ‘Hang it, Gordon, you can write good poetry, but you can’t read.’” What was the matter with his “reading,” then? He used to “read” in “a sing-song fashion.” Mr. Woods, too, tells us[4] that “Gordon had an odd way of reciting poetry, and his delivery was monotonous; but,” he adds, “his way of emphasising the beautiful portions of what he recited was charming from its earnestness.” Gordon’s criticism on his own verses was: “They don’t _ring_ so badly after all, old fellow, do they?” He had no faculty for irregular rhythms. He cannot, then, be said to possess a “fine lyrical faculty;” he possessed a fine faculty for regular and rymed rhythms. (As for his rymes, as rymes, they are as a rule excellent, although there is often too little of the “poet or prophet,” as he says, in them, and too much of the “jingler of rymes,” the dealer in “verse-jingle chimes.”) Since, however, this faculty of his is a fine faculty, it must not be described as (in the usual and bad sense of the word) imitative. There are, I think, passages in him that Byron might have written (“To my Sister”), that Lord Tennyson might have written (“The Road to Avernus,” scene x.), that Mr. Swinburne might have written (“A Dedication”), and the latter are frequent. In no other poets, save Wordsworth and the earlier works of Mr. Arnold, do I find precisely this same sort of (shall I say) parallelism of feeling and expression on certain subjects that I do in Mr. Swinburne and Gordon. But it is, I think, very open to question whether Gordon would have grown, as Mr. Arnold has, into a purely distinctive style of his own. Gordon is terribly lacking in variety: to live with a close study of him for several days is one of the most trying of critical tasks. “My rymes,” he asks—
“My rymes, are they stale? If my metre is varied, one chime rings through all; one chime—though I sing more or sing less, I have but one string to my lute.”
I doubt, I say, whether under any circumstances Gordon would have produced, as Mr. Hammersley thought, “poems worthy to be ranked with some of the masterpieces of the English language.” He had not patience enough, he had not clear-sightedness enough! “A more dare-devil rider,” says Mr. Hammersley, “never crossed a horse.... As a steeplechase rider he was, of course, in the very first rank, and his name is indelibly associated with many of the most famous chases run in Victoria, although in my opinion, and I think in that of many good judges too, he was deficient in what is termed ‘good hands,’ and when it came to a finish was far behind a Mount or a Watson.” (And, considering his shortsightedness, which Mr. Woods designates as “painful,” this is not to be wondered at). It is the same with his poetry. All in his poetry that is good has been done at a rush; the rest is inferior, poor, and sometimes quite worthless. He has little, if any, sense of real artistic workmanship either in whole or in parts: “he is deficient in what is termed ‘good hands.’” Take, for instance, his dramatic lyric, “Ashtaroth.” It is worth reading. There are two beautiful songs in it, “On the Current,” and “Oh! days and years departed.” There are a few fine passages, a few fine dramatic touches, in it, and one splendid outburst of Orion’s (“I hate thee not, thy grievous plight”), but the poem, taken as a whole is, I say, worth reading. Many of the speeches are weak, and some are not poetry at all, but rymed prose, and bad at that. A sustained effort, such as a piece like this requires, was impossible to him. I say nothing of the ludicrous attempt at an adaptation of Faust, Mephistopheles and Margarete, which is the basis of the poem: I merely remark that, judged by its own poor standard of judgment, it is quite a failure. Perhaps some day we shall have a selection from the poet’s work, from which what is worthless will be eliminated, in order that all our attention may be fixed on what is good, and perhaps the selector will have the courage to dismiss all this poem, save some dozen or so of extracts, into the gulf of oblivion or an appendix. Encumbered as Gordon at present is with such an amount of worthless work, there is a danger that much of what is good may perish also.
All his poetry that is good, I say, has been done at a rush. The dramatic touches in it are as frequent as they are fine. Take, for instance, this from the “Rhyme of Joyous Guard.”—Lancelot, old, worn-out, feeling that “there is nothing good for him under the sun but to perish as” (his bright past) “has perished,” is thinking of the close of his career and Arthur’s: of the discovery of his amour with Guinevere, his siege in Joyous Guard, his encounters with “brave Gawain,” whom he virtually slew, and then “the crime of Modred,” and “the king by the knave’s hand stricken”—
“And the once-loved knight, was he there to save that knightly king who that knighthood gave? _Ah, Christ! will he greet me as knight or knave_ _in the day when the dust shall quicken?_”
This is splendid! And, as I have said, it by no means stands alone. As a set-off against this excellence of his, is the defect of prolixity. Byron had it, but Byron was an unsurpassed improviser, not an artist. Like, too, his technical master of the “Poems and Ballads” when he gets hold of a regular or rymed rhythm that pleases him, Gordon will go on making it “ring,” listening as the “verse-jingle chimes,” till we are all quite weary of it. He is regardless of what Goethe calls “the æsthetic whole.” Indeed, it may justly be said that few, very few, of his poems are “æsthetic wholes” at all, but only passages.
So much, then, for the outward form of his poetry. We have now to consider what is the significance to us of his life and work, of his personality, and of his “criticism of life.”
In the first place, let us begin by stating that Gordon _has_ a personality. Mr. Hammersley tells us how “at times Gordon was the strangest, most weird, mysterious man I ever saw, and I could not help feeling almost afraid of him, and yet there was a fascination about him that made me like to see him.” There was the fascination of his converse. “He was one of the few men I have known in the colonies,” asseverates Mr. Hammersley, “that never made me tire of listening to him.” And there was the fascination of his individuality: “His wild haunting eye,” “a look something like what is termed the evil eye.” (This reminds one of what Mr. Clarke has to say about “the dominant note of Australian scenery: Weird Melancholy.”) Mr. Woods’ whole article bears witness to this personal fascination of Gordon’s. Well, it is the same in his poetry: I mean, that it is the same as Mr. Hammersley _means_. There is attraction in Gordon. We want to go to see anything that he has had to do with. We seek out his grave and brood over it.[5] He is the Australian fellow to Baudelaire and James Thomson, the last martyrs, let us hope, to our terrible period of transition from the Old World into the New, from Mediævalism into Modernity. There is attraction in Gordon. We should like to have seen and known the original of Laurence Raby, of Maurice, of the man of the “Sea-spray and Smoke-Drift,” and “Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes.” He is an individuality, and a modern and a colonial individuality. He looks at life as it is, not as it is represented.
“In thy grandeur, oh sea! we acknowledge, in thy fairness, oh earth! we confess, hidden truths that are taught in no college, hidden songs that no parchment express.”
And, as for the pedants of the Old World, why! (as we know)
“They are slow, very slow, in discerning that book-lore and wisdom are twain.”
Here, then, is the first charm in Gordon, and his work; they are modern, they represent the main-current of the age, not some side-water or back-water, that are perhaps nice enough in their way, but still—side-waters or back-waters, and _only_ side-waters or back-waters.
Gordon and his work are modern, but not wholly modern; he belongs, as I have said, to a period of transition. Like Mary Magdalene, he feels that “they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him.” He has lost the Old, and he has not won the New Faith. He is a poet of the twilight and the dawn. “On this earth so rough,” he says,
“on this earth so rough, we know quite enough, _and, I sometimes fancy, a little too much_,”
and so, we have to suffer! Burns, Byron, Leopardi, Heine, Musset, Baudelaire, Clough, Thomson—greater and lesser, this is true of them all! Their early life is embittered by it, their later life made desperate. “Years back,” says Gordon,
“Years back I believed a little, and as I believed I spoke.”
Years back he could utter prayer, years back when he was a child. He cannot utter it now: “For prayer must die since hope is dead.” _Now_ he can only wonder
“Is there nothing real but confusion? is nothing certain but death? is nothing fair, save illusion? is nothing good that has breath?...”
“I can hardly vouch,” he says, again,
“I can hardly vouch for the truth of what little I see.... On earth there’s little worth a sigh, and nothing worth a tear.”
But ah,
“the restless throbbings and burnings that hope unsatisfied brings, the weary longings and yearnings for the mystical better things.... There are others toiling and straining ’neath burdens graver than mine— They are weary, yet uncomplaining— I know it, yet I repine. I know it, how time will ravage, how time will level, and yet I long with a longing savage, I regret with a fierce regret....”
We are sorely tired, “we, with our bodies thus weakly, with hearts hard and dangerous.”
“We have suffered and striven till we have grown reckless of pain, though feeble of heart, and of brain.”
Who has expressed the malady of our time better? “Our burdens are heavy, our natures weak,” he says again. We cannot escape from them:
“Round about one fiery centre wayward thoughts like moths revolve;”
We cannot write a description of a horse-race without letting them come in, without calling our description by a name expressive of them—“_Ex fumo dare lucem:_”
“_Till the good is brought forth from evil,_ _as day is brought forth from night._— Vain dreams! for our fathers cherished high hopes in the days that were; and these men wondered and perished, nor better than these we fare; And our due at least is their due, they fought against odds and fell; “_En avant les enfants perdus!_” We fight against odds as well.”
_Enfant perdu_: so the dying Heine calls himself. _Enfants perdus_, that is what they were! The storms of our terrible period of transition raged about them: “they could not wait their passing,” as Arnold says—
“they could not wait their passing, they are dead.”
“I am slow,” says Gordon,
“I am slow in learning, and swift in forgetting, and I have grown so weary with long sand-sifting! T’wards the mist, where the breakers moan the rudderless bark is drifting, through the shoals of the quick-sands shifting— In the end shall the night-rack lifting, discover the shores unknown?”
The idea of killing himself seems to have been with him from almost the first. It was not “bitter” to him: “man in his blindness” taught so; but, to him that
“mystic hour when the wings of the shadowy angel lower,”
was not without its charm. “When I first heard the sad news,” Mr. Hammersley tells us, “I was not the least surprised. I really expected that what did happen would happen.” We all know Gordon’s poem, “De Te.” The last two verses of it are the best criticism that we have to offer “of him,” “found dead in the heather, near his home, with a bullet from his own rifle in his brain:”
“No man may shirk the allotted work, the deed to do, the death to die; at least I think so—neither Turk, nor Jew, nor infidel am I— And yet I wonder when I try to solve one question, may or must, and shall I solve it by-and-bye, beyond the dark, beneath the dust? _I trust so, and I only trust._
“Aye what they will, such trifles kill. Comrade, for one good deed of yours, your history shall not help to fill the mouths of many brainless boors. It may be death absolves or cures the sin of life. ’Twere hazardous to assert so. If the sin endures, say only, ‘_God, who has judged him thus,_ _be merciful to him, and us:_’”
And his work, his “criticism of life?” Is there nothing in it but this “_trust and only trust_?” There is more, much more! “There is plainly visible,” says Mr. Clarke, “a keen sense of natural beauty, and a manly admiration for healthy living ... a very clear perception of the loveliness of duty and of labour.” Let us see if this, too, is so, or if any qualification of this remark is needed; and, if so, what qualification.