Part 3

Gordon’s life and work were a failure. He himself would, I am sure, have been the first to admit it and have assigned the cause, and rightly, to bad luck in general and certain failings in himself in particular. Is it not bad luck to be born into an age that makes of its poets its martyrs? Gordon struggled and schemed. He was a livery-stable keeper, a landowner, a member of assembly, a keeper of racehorses, and a failure in all. It was only as jockey and stockrider that he was a success—that is to say, an object of admiration to others and of happiness to himself. “He sometimes,” says Mr. Woods, “compared the lot of a bushman with that of other states of mankind, saying that it was in many ways preferable to any one,” and for himself he was right. Let us not lament his failure in what he was not meant to be a success. Gordon, happy in life and love, might well have become at best a _dilettante_, at worst a materialized blockhead, he has so little patience, so little clear-sightedness! Perhaps it is, after all, better as it is. The axe cuts down the sandal tree, and the tree sheds forth its perfume.

“Our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought.”

We love a poet more for what he has suffered than what he has done, and yet ultimately, if we will only see it, what he suffers and what he does are the same. As boys we love our Byron and our Shelley; as men our Goethe and our Shakspere. Gordon, I say, as poet and failure is better than prose-man and success. But see now what he has to say about this life in which he failed so.

Firstly, there is all the doubt and bewilderment of a period of transition:

“We are children lost in the wood.”

“Lord,” prays this woman that loves Laurence Raby,

“Lord, lead us out of this tangled wild, where the wise and the prudent have been beguiled, and only the babes have stood.”

Meantime,

“Onward! onward! still we wander, nearer draws the goal; Half the riddle’s read, we ponder vainly on the whole.... Onward! onward! toiling ever, weary steps and slow; doubting oft, despairing never, to the goal we go!”

To what goal? Well,

“The chances are I go where most men go.”

Let us leave the rest with God—God whose “dealings with us” are unfathomable, God who is “fathomless.” Thus he achieves his resignation. But he never blinds himself to things; he never answers “the painful riddle of the earth” by “stopping up his mouth with a clod” (as Heine says). This world is a

“world of rapine and wrong, where the weak and the timid seem lawful prey for the resolute and the strong.”

Sometimes there rises in him the

“wail of discordant sadness for the wrongs he never can right,”

for the brothers, and ah for the sisters, he cannot help. But sometimes, also, he bursts forth into “a song of gladness, a pæan of joyous might.” Both are in him: the wail for the lost Lord and the thanksgiving to God for his “GLORIOUS OXYGEN.” (The capitals are his own.) With the first, we have done: let us look at the second and see what he has to show us of living and loving, of action and women, and then see what he has to show us of life as a whole, “the conclusion of the whole matter.”

I have said elsewhere that there is in Gordon the cheer and charge of our chivalry. There is. He was well worthy of a place in the charge of our cavalry at Waterloo, or Balaclava. There is in him that “magnificence” which now, alas, as the Frenchman truly said, “is not war.” These men “glory in daring that dies or prevails.” And when, as at Balaclava, they die, their poet exclaims (in capitals)—

“not in vain, as a type of our chivalry!”

What exclamations of rapture such a sight draws from him!

“Oh! the moments of yonder maddening ride, long years of life outvie!... God send me an ending as fair as his, who died in his stirrups there!...”

Here is a race:—

“They came with the rush of the southern surf, on the bar of the storm-girt bay; and like muffled drums on the sounding turf their hoof-strokes echo away.”

I know no poetry that describes the rush of horsemen quite as Gordon does. Take this description of the Balaclava charge from his “Lay of the Last Charger.”

“Now we were close to them, every horse striding madly;—St. Luce pass’t with never a groan;— Sadly my master look’d round—he was riding— on the boy’s right, with a line of his own.

“Thrusting his hand in his breast or breast-pocket, while from his wrist the sword swung by a chain, swiftly he drew out some trinket or locket, kiss’t it (I think) and replaced it again.

“Burst, while his fingers reclined on the haft, jarring concussion and earth-shaking din, Horse counter’d horse, and I reel’d, _but he laugh’t,_ _down went his man, cloven clean to the chin_!”

Lord Tennyson has watched his charge through Mr. Russell’s field-glass, and we follow his view of it, but Gordon has ridden it and takes us with him. Old and miserable, the friend of the man who had ridden this “Last Charger,” offers up the same prayer as the man who had “visioned it in the smoke:”

“Would to God I had died with your master, old man,”

for—

“he was never more happy in life than in death.”

What I find so admirable in Gordon, and in almost all his characters is, that they are _men_, I mean _men_ as opposed to dreamers or students. His Lancelot _is_ Lancelot, the knight who has lived and loved largely. Tennyson’s is not. I must confess that I really think that “The Rhyme of Joyous Guard” is worth all the other “Idylls of the King,” save “Lancelot and Elaine,” and “The Passing of Arthur,” put together. I mean that I really think it has more real deep true significance. Take this conclusion, the last prayer of Lancelot, old and passed from the world:

“If ever I smote as a man should smite, if I struck one stroke that seem’d good in Thy sight, by Thy loving mercy prevailing, Lord! let her stand in the light of Thy face, cloth’d with Thy love, and crown’d with Thy grace, when I gnash my teeth in the terrible place that is fill’d with weeping and wailing.”

This is splendid! His men, I say, are _men_, men such as we find in Byron. Orion (Satan) says that

“The angel Michael was once my foe; _He had a little the best of our strife,_ _yet he never could deal so stark a blow._”

The lover in “No Name,” thinking of meeting “the slayer of the soul” he loved, says:

“And I know that if, here or there, alone, I found him fairly, and face to face, _having slain his body, I would slay my own,_ _that my soul to Satan his soul might chase_:”

a remark in the strain of Heathcliff. Most of his lovers love passionately and sensuously, and only passionately and sensuously: The poet “revels in the rosy whiteness of that golden-headed girl:” if one thing is harder to forgive to a successful rival than another it is that

“he has held her long in his arms, and has kissed her over and over again:”

his chief regret over a dear dead girl is

“for the red that never was fairly kiss’d— for the white that never was fairly press’d:”

and, when he leaves his love for ever, he is in anguish at the thought that

“’twill, doubtless, be another’s lot those very lips to press:”

a remark in the more morbid strain of Keats to Fanny Brawne.

When Lancelot first kisses Guinevere, he, the mighty knight, “well nigh swoons.” Love, with Gordon’s lovers, “consumes their hearts with a fiery drought.” “Laurence,” says Estelle to her lover,

“Laurence, you kiss me too hard:”

and the man of “Britomarte” is at hand with the appropriate criticism that

“men at the bottom are merely brutes.”

But we must not think that _all_ Gordon’s lovers love in this way, any more than that all his men merely charge and cheer. The battle is over.

“And what then? The colours reversed, the drums muffled, the black nodding plumes, the dead march and the pall, the stern faces, soldier-like, silent, unruffled, the slow sacred music that floats over all.”

This is beautiful, and no less beautiful is the tenderness of his love.

“A grim grey coast, and a sea-board ghastly, and shores trod seldom by feet of men— where the batter’d hulk and the broken mast lie, they have lain embedded these long years ten. _Love! when we wandered here together,_ _hand in hand through the sparkling weather,_ _from the heights and hollows of fern and heather,_ _God surely loved us a little then._”

Nor is it rare to find passages in him

“with the song like the song of a maiden, with the scent like the scent of a flower.”

For “dark and true and tender is the north” with all its storm and stress.

Poor “sick stock-rider” and poet, with his wild eyes and wild words, and that “shyness and reserve which kept him locked up, as it were, in himself!” Our proud, passionate heart “out-wore its breast” as “the sword outwears its sheath,” and so we “took our rest,” but not before we had won our resignation and known, or almost known, the truth, even as Empedocles did, and yet died because “he was come too late”—or too soon—

“and the world hath the day, and must break thee, not thou the world.”

Gordon won his resignation, and knew, or almost knew, the truth. The “criticism of life” that we find in the first two scenes of “The Road to Avernus” is almost ripe: pessimistic, it is true, but almost ripe. Laurence has lost his love, (and Laurence, let us remember, is the lover that “kisses too hard!”) Does he despair in the strain of “Rolla,” or “bluster,” and take refuge in the breast of “the wondrous mother age,” and the “vision of the world” in the strain of the man of “Locksley Hall?” No, he has lost his love, and the loss is bitter, but

“such has been, and such shall still be, here as there, in sun or star. These things are to be and will be; those things were to be and are.”

“As it was so,” he says again,

“as it was so in the beginning, it shall be so in the end.”

There is the feeling here of a man who is striving to see things as they are. He will not blind himself to things: he will not answer “the painful riddle of the earth” by “stopping up his mouth with a clod.” He will have true faith, or no faith. Fate rules us, he sees:

“Man thinks, discarding the beaten track, that the sins of his youth are slain, when he seeks fresh sins, but he soon comes back to his old pet sins again.... Some flashes like faint sparks from heaven, come rarely with rushing of wings; We are conscious at times, we have striven, though seldom, to grasp better things; These pass, leaving hearts that have faltered, good angels with faces estranged, and the skin of the Æthiop unalter’d, and the spots of the leopard unchanged.”

And yet life, life as life, independent of living and loving, of activity and women, is not altogether hopeless:

“Doubtless all are bad, yet few are cruel, false, and dissolute.”

He never gets any farther than this. He sees, or almost sees, truth, as Moses saw Canaan, and then he fails. He has not had patience enough, not clear-sightedness enough! He cannot enter the Promised Land. “In defiance of pain and terror he has pressed resolutely across the howling deserts of Infidelity;” but he has not the strength left to do more than reach “the new, firm lands of Faith beyond.” He has loved life, living and loving, activity and women, and he has not feared to look into the reality of things, man and Nature and God, their sunshine and their shadow, their life and their death, and there is no hesitation in his message to us—“Onward! Onward!”—But that is all. He knows nothing of _how_ we are to go onward, or to _where_. He has had enough to do to get himself as far as he has got, to achieve what he has achieved. His life and work are a failure. We cannot for a moment think of calling him a great poet: his claim on our interest as a poet is that he is one of the poets, one of the martyrs, of our terrible period of transition, and that in him is to be found “something very like the beginnings of a national school of Australian poetry.” Of this second aspect of him—of how he is representative of what I have taken to be the distinctive marks of this Australian, this Melbourne civilisation, its general sense of movement, of progress, of conscious power: of this aspect of him I have spoken elsewhere, too, and there seems no need to do more here than to repeat the assertion. But, for my part, I cannot lay the stress on either this aspect of him, or the other which makes him “the poet of Australian scenery,” that I do on the first aspect of him. Gordon’s life and work are a failure, but they are a failure with enough redeeming points to raise them from local, or even colonial, into general interest. As our first and enthusiastic critic puts it: “he deserves to be ranked with the genuine poets of his generation,” and I feel sure that he ultimately will be. For he is representative not only of Australian, but of modern feeling: he tells not only of Australia from the fifties to the seventies, but of our terrible period of transition from the Old World into the New, from Mediævalism into Modernity.

Poor “sick stock-rider” and poet, with his wild eyes and wild words—Our proud, passionate heart “outwore its breast,” as “the sword outwears its sheath,” and so we “took our rest.” “Sleep!” says Mr. Swinburne, in the most beautiful and satisfactory of his poems, “Ave atque Vale,” the lament over another of the martyrs—the author of “Les Fleurs du Mal:”—

“Sleep; and, if life were bitter to thee, pardon, if sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live; and to give thanks is good, and to forgive ... Content thee, howsoe’er, whose days are done; There lies not any troublous thing before, nor sight nor sound to war against thee more, for whom all winds are quiet as the sun, all waters as the shore.”

_January, 1885._

THE SALVATION ARMY.

I.

When a man speaks of Modern Europe, he is generally taken to mean the Europe of steam and electricity. As a matter of fact, Modern Europe really dates back to about the middle of the last century, when certain ideas which we call “modern” first began to be promulgated. And these ideas were not, as in this expression “Modern Europe” it is tacitly supposed, merely scientific; they were not only concerned with steam and electricity; they were social. And thus, when we use the expression, if we are to use it, in this particular sense, we should remember that it means, not only that the whole world is netted with railways and telegraphs, but also that, speaking generally, the European races are no longer governed by kings or aristocracies, but by middle-classes or, as some prefer to put it, by peoples. And this, as I take it, is far the more important fact of the two. I will go further, and say that it is the most important fact of our civilization—nay, that it _is_ our civilization, and that, therefore, whoever would seek to understand the meaning of any movement, great or small, which is taking place in our civilization, must seek it here, and here only! Our civilization is our government by the Middle-class or, as some prefer to put it, by the People. But that these individuals who prefer to put it so are, let us say, if not mistaken, at any rate inaccurate, is precisely what I want in this little article to try to show, and in as striking a manner as I can, so that, not only may I try to do something towards making clear to us the real deep true significance of a much misunderstood movement, but also that of a much more misunderstood power—the Middle-class of the European races. I do not propose to go through my subject thoroughly: to do so would require more time and more space than any editor could afford me. I shall merely touch on one phase of the great spiritual movement which is at present permeating the European races, and then turn to consider another phase of it—a phase which is of peculiar interest to us of England, America, and Australia.

II.

In Europe there is but one country that still suffers the despotism of an aristocracy, and that country is Russia. The modern ideas, the modern social ideas, have taken all this time to pass from France, Germany, and England into Russia, and have seized on what, for lack of a better word, I might call, its nascent middle-class. The results have been, and still are, wonderful and terrible. A group of men (for they are little more) has suddenly realised that the immense mass of the People is being despotised over in the interest of a group in reality little larger than itself. All, I will not say freedom, but possibilities of freedom are resolutely withheld. Russia at present has not the guaranteed protection of its men’s and women’s liberties which the English of the fourteenth, the thirteenth, the twelfth, the eleventh, the tenth centuries had! This to-day is a state of things which cannot continue. The group of men who see and feel this, not clearly and quietly as we outsiders can, but intensely and passionately, is waging a duel to the death with the other group, with the despotism, for the bare principles of freedom. On the one hand are knowledge and light, on the other ignorance and darkness, the modern against the ancient spirit. But, thanks to the fact that there are men whose whole interest is to resist the one and support the other to the last, the light has become lightning and not only irradiates but strikes. It is considered by some a question whether this despotism, armed with all resources of wealth and military power, will be able to stamp out this group before the immense mass of the People is awakened to the meaning of it all. Others, however, merely consider whether the Russian government will be destroyed by a revolution or constitutionalized by a reform. We English, you see, consider it all clearly and quietly as mere outsiders, and so, as regards the _aspect_ of the problem, we are; but not, not as regards the problem itself! These modern ideas, these social ideas, are working not only in Russia, where the abuses which surround them make them burn so fiercely, but more or less all over Europe, and in England rather more than less. Ireland, we all see, smoulders with them. And why, pray? Because England and Ireland are always snarling at one another, “it being their nature to?” Not so. It is because that aspect of the problem which is presented to Great Britain generally is a little more pressing in Ireland than in England or Scotland. The trouble in Ireland is not national but social. The strife is not between Irish and English: it is between peasants and landlords. Unhappily many landlords are English: unhappily many peasants believe that the English as a nation support the landlords as a class. Hence whatever Irish hatred of England there may be; but the trouble is not, I repeat, national, it is social. It is the People rising against the Middle-class.

Well, this movement, whether it be in Russia, in England, in Germany, in France, in America, we are all pretty well agreed to call the Socialistic movement. It represents the effort of the People after social improvement. It took its rise not from _within_ the people, but from _without_. The French, English, and German Socialists were originally groups of men who suddenly realized that the immense mass of the People was being despotized over in the interest of the Middle-class. Each country has its peculiar aspect of this fact, but the fact is the same in each. In France the Middle-class made and supported the Empire, and, having stamped out the People’s wild attempt at power in ’71, made and supports the Republic. In Germany—dismembered Germany—the problem was pushed back before the apparently greater one of national unity, but now it arises again and demands solution. In England the landed proprietors, and still more the capitalists, are beginning to have qualms; but the real struggle does not lie between them and the Socialists: they are but overgrown individuals of a class. There will be no more Tories and no more Conservatives: the future lies in the struggle between Liberals and Socialists, the Middle-class and the People.

This Socialistic movement, then, took its rise not from _within_ the People but from _without_, and not in connection with Religion, the great ally of the powers that were, the Middle-class, but on the whole antagonistic to it. This movement took its rise in men of intellect who had little or no care for Religion, and its tendency is intellectual and careless of Religion. The Middle-class has shown nothing but dislike to this movement: the Middle-class has understood enough of the ideas of this movement to know that they are subversive of its own superiority. As for the People, they have understood little or nothing. Socialists tell them, what is indeed the truth, that they are the masters: that to-morrow, if they pleased, they could send a parliament up to Westminster that should dictate what terms they pleased to “their lords and masters, the landowners and the capitalists.” The People does not happily believe it. They are so hopeless: they have been deceived so often by those who said they would help them. (Bill here, you see, with a wife and six children, all living in a den that the Zoological people would consider unfit for a hyena—Bill cannot be made to understand how the question comes home to _him_!) Besides which, let us say it at once and insist upon it, the People is the most long-suffering of all things: it desires to despoil no man, it only desires the happiness which mere food, clothing, and a house will give it.

In this state of affairs—the powerlessness of the Socialists to bring home to the People the great idea of social improvement—lie the causes of the religious movement whose best-known and best representative is the Salvation Army.

III.

Consider it—first generally and then particularly.

In Russia the People has religion and no freedom. In England the People has freedom and no religion. (In both, let us add, the People has misery unspeakable). The one question presses for solution in the one country, the other in the other. The two most piteous spectacles in Europe are the religious People of Russia, and the free People of England. The Aristocracy which governs the one, the Middle-class which governs the other, both are equally indifferent to the People. Add to the fact of the utter want of religion of the English People (it is understood that by People I mean the masses), the fact of their utter want of, I will not say the comforts, but the necessities of life, and you have a field for revolution such as nowhere else, I believe, presents itself save in Russia herself.—I speak in the present, as if the problem presented itself to me to-day just as it did years ago, and I am delighted to notice that at last the English Middle-class is awakening to the fact of the misery of the People, and also of the danger of letting that misery continue. But it is quite a mistake to suppose that either the one or the other is mitigated, not to say ended, or that it will be so for years to come.