The real Australia

by Alfred Buchanan

VI

ADAM LINDSAY GORDON

Life is mostly froth and bubble,

Two things stand like stone;

Kindness in another’s trouble,

Courage in your own.

Since the finding of his body on the Brighton beach one morning, thirty-five years ago, the fame of Gordon has been steadily growing. He is the acknowledged Australian poet; but what do his countrymen really know about him? Considering all things, the literature that has to do with him is meagre and inadequate. There is the appreciation of Francis Adams—good, on the whole, but fragmentary, and too exclusively insistent on the merits of one poem. There is the life of Gordon, told briefly, with a few strictly orthodox comments, in the book of Messrs Turner and Sutherland. There is also the work of Mr Desmond Byrne—correct, but formal, and consequently little read. Of late years the daily or weekly journalist has taken a fancy to revive interest in the poet, and to bring under notice some fresh phase or incident in his life. But there is yet a great deal that could be said. For the present the average Englishman knows nothing of Gordon, and even the well-read Englishman knows only the name attached to some galloping rhymes. The Australian is familiar with the name of Lindsay Gordon, and is not lacking in appreciation, but as often as not he reserves his praises for what is least admirable and least characteristic.

To think of Gordon is to think of a succession of pictures on an always darkening screen. The opening vistas are rose-coloured; but each successive glance at the moving canvas leaves on the mental retina an image more gloomy than the one before it. The result of the life itself was a great tragedy; the result of the work was a signal triumph. The contrast between these two—between this splendid artistic success and this dire personal failure—have helped to create for Gordon a sympathy and affection out of proportion to the amount, though scarcely out of keeping with the quality of his writing. He resembles somewhat the fleeting figure in Shelley’s Adonais:—

A pard-like spirit beautiful and wild,

A joy in desolation masked.

The spirit was beautiful, but the joy—what visitations there were of it—was always hedged round with desolation. And the tendency was always away from the light, instead of towards it; the clouds were always gathering as the day went on.

Yet the series of views thrown upon the moving screen begins brightly. On an island of the Azores, amid surroundings which rest the eye and charm the sense, a child is growing up to manhood. Listen to what his father, a retired army officer, says of Lindsay Gordon:—“A sweet little fellow he is! indeed, I think him almost too pretty. Very slight and upright, carrying his little curly head well back, and almost swaggering along. He talks with a sweet, full, laughing voice, and a face dimpled and bright as the morning. He is seen here, perhaps, to too great an advantage, in very light clothing, scampering amid the large and airy playrooms.” This is the opening picture of the series, and there is no suggestion of shadow about it. The promise is of a life healthful and happy, proof against all morbid fancies, singularly unfettered, mentally and physically free.

But the operator is busily at work; and he quickly changes the landscape from the Azores to England. The next glimpse of Gordon is that of a youth on the deck of a ship outward bound for Australia. The rose and gold tints are less noticeable now, but there is still no occasion for excess of sympathy. There is every reason why the young man of twenty should find a prosperous career in the new and rapidly developing continent. He stands on the deck of a ship with the salt spray of the channel blowing a keen reviving breath upon his forehead. The light of imagination is in his eyes. The flush of expectation is on his face. It is not a situation to merit sympathy, even though home and England are soon to vanish on the sky-line. Only—and the shadow will assert itself a little here—there is a morbid tendency, possibly associated in some fashion with the state of mind of his mother, who has developed a form of religious melancholia. And Gordon’s mother and father are first cousins. It is a circumstance of sinister omen.

Once the life in Australia has begun, the unseen hand that is manipulating the screen makes feverish haste to get forward. Two years of experience as a member of the South Australian mounted police are passed rapidly in review. There is a following period of seven years; but this also need not delay the onlookers. It shows the young man of destiny carrying on business as a professional horse-breaker, and incidentally writing verses. His means are limited; his social advantages non-existent; his opportunities of intellectual intercourse and improvement practically nil. During these first nine years in Australia the spectre of inherited melancholia, though never quite in the ascendant, is never entirely laid. Yet the life must have had its compensations. The recollection of many a lonely ride, of many a starry midnight, of many a breaking sunrise, of many a drifting fancy, wild and subtle as the music of the Spectre Bride, are conveyed in the spirit rather than in the words of verses that Gordon wrote at this period of his life.

Then, for a brief space, there are indications of a turn of the tide. Fortune ceases to frown. It seems desirous all at once of petting Gordon, of consoling him, of giving him fresh chances, of making up to him what nature and heredity had taken away. It flings into his lap a legacy of £7,000; it makes him a member of the Legislature of his colony; it wins him success and fame as a cross-country rider, as a master of that daring game which can always be relied upon to draw the wildest plaudits from the crowd. But even this mood, this smiling, flattering, relenting mood, does not avail. And as a matter of fact, it does not last. The legacy is lost in speculation; the Parliamentary career is abandoned; the steeplechase successes are punctuated with accident and failure. The sands begin to run downward faster than before.

There is just one picture, in the dissolving series, on which it is sometimes tempting to linger. Gordon is by this time thirty-seven years old. He is without robust health, without money, and without regular employment. It is quite true that he can write verses; he is not altogether confident about them, but he believes they are good verses. One or two people who ought to know have praised them. But these Melbourne publishers will pay nothing for them; no doubt, the author admits, because they would lose money if they did. What is a man to do whose health is shaky, and who has nothing but unpaid bills and unpublished verses in his pocket? He dare not dwell on the prospect; it must at all cost be forgotten, pressed back, kept out of sight.

There is one man who will help him to forget, and that man is Henry Clarence Kendall. The two meet in Collins Street, Melbourne, on the last morning but one of Gordon’s life. It is a meeting pleasant to think about, pleasant to dwell upon. For Kendall at least appreciates, and Kendall understands. That appreciation is warmly, generously, enthusiastically expressed, and it must convey a great deal to Lindsay Gordon, though he is to die by his own hand next day. For to the true poet the clamorous praise of the crowd means very little. If there is any elysium for him on earth, it is found in the recognition of the few whose knowledge and perceptions are not of the earth, earthy. Perhaps for an hour or two while he talked with Kendall in the Melbourne hotel, and drank with him the drink, both of the successful and the despairing, perhaps for a moment he had an inkling of the truth that he had not lived altogether in vain.

It is never easy to estimate a man’s place in the domain of poetry. It is practically impossible in his lifetime, and it is difficult after he is dead. There is not merely the metrical, formal quality, not merely the imaginative power, not merely the originality of treatment that have to be considered. The whole question of individual taste and temperament, whether of the writer or the reader, is at work upon the scales. It may be impossible to prove on mathematical lines that Gordon was a great poet. Yet it can be asserted confidently that his verse is marked by three qualities which between them go a long way to make up greatness. These are its spontaneity, its musical quality, and its refinement. Everything else is included under one or other of these three heads.

To take the first of the three—spontaneity, Gordon was above all things a natural singer. This naturalness, this unforced quality, is undoubtedly his first and his finest merit. He hoped for nothing—at least for nothing tangible—from his verses. In one sense, he did not wish to write. He much preferred action. If some one had given him a troop of cavalry and shown him a battery of opposing artillery, he would, in the rush and forgetfulness of one wild, sweeping movement, have experienced more real life, more real pleasure, than he was ever destined to know. Such an experience might have laid once and for ever the ghosts that always haunted him; might have made him feel that he was born to act, as his soldier-fathers had acted, instead of being obliged to sit down in a strange land and listen to memories of action that sang fitfully through his brain. It is for this reason—for the reason that temperament, and heredity, and poetic impulse forced him to find relief in verse whether he wished to or not, whether he was proud of the performance or ashamed of it—that he occupies his unique place. The pen and ink processes are invisible in his best work; it is as though

A wistful, wandering zephyr presses

The strings of some Æolian lyre.

To illustrate the spontaneous manner of Gordon would be to run through a complete list of his published poems. There is no need to go much further than the opening lines of The Rhyme of Joyous Garde. It is instructive to notice how in this, as in others of his poems, the picture seems to create itself:—

Through the lattice rushes the south wind, dense

With fumes of the flowery frankincense

And hawthorn blossoming thickly.

No preparations, no apologies, no preliminary turning and scraping; only the rush of a few lines which sweep the reader, whether he likes it or not, into the enchanted world of dreams. Equally natural, and quite as resistless, is the sentiment of Podas Okus. Here again we feel, so to speak, the pulse-beat of the inevitable; we get again the impression that Gordon could not help the writing; that he himself, and not the Greek, is lying at a tent’s entrance; that for him the hues of sunset are blending with the brief glories of an almost vanished life; that it is he, and not Achilles, who murmurs to the golden-haired Briseis:—

Place your hand in mine, and listen,

While the strong soul cleaves its way

Through the death mist hovering o’er me,

As the strong ship cleaves the wave,

To my fathers gone before me,

To the gods who love the brave.

The musical quality of Gordon is a kindred though a distinct merit. A poet may be natural and spontaneous without being particularly musical, just as he may achieve a musical result by what are manifestly artificial means. A lyric poet must, however, aim at musical effect. If he fails to attain this, he is not what he professes to be. Does the reader receive an impression of melody? Does it please him? Does he carry it away with him? These are some of the questions by which the writer of verses must always be judged. The novelty, or even the abstract merit of the idea does not matter so much. Occasionally, as in Swinburne’s Triumph of Time, there are to be found some striking ideas wedded to lines that are musically splendid. Occasionally, as in the same author’s Ballad of Dreamland, there is delicate and subtle harmony, associated only with the faint flicker of an idea. The school of self-styled poets founded by Euphues made the cardinal mistake of supposing that the form of expression mattered little; that their chief business was to get hold of fresh fancies, and previously unheard-of conceits. We know better than that nowadays. We can put up with the old idea if the treatment is artistic enough and musical enough. In lyric poetry the new or the startling idea creates a kind of metaphysical check, and is not really wanted. In Gordon there is enough of the familiar, enough of the sentimental idea to satisfy every-day requirements, while there is musical quality enough to proclaim the genuine lyric poet. The man had a sensitive ear. It is rarely that he strikes discordant notes. His versification is not flawless; it is not always of the quality of The Swimmer or of the Autumn Song, but in reading him one feels that Australia has produced a poet in whom there dwelt the rare faculty of music, the genuine gift of melodic form.

The third distinguishing attribute of Gordon is his refinement. This is a word that has come to require explanation. It has some rather unfortunate associations. A young ladies’ academy is nothing if not refined. Bunthorne, in Patience is extremely refined. The heroes of Richardson and of Miss Burney are refinement itself. When the term is applied to a man or an author in these days, it is necessary to be explicit in order to avoid misunderstanding. One of the merits of Gordon, and one that must tend to make the memory of the man loved, even more than his poetry is admired, is the habit of thought which reflects a fine and clear and elevated temperament; a temperament, that does not lend itself to vice; a temperament, in other words, that is refined. To say that Gordon was so constituted is not to say that he lacked emotional strength or force. He had abundance of either. He had also passion, though it was a passion that ran to self-restraint, to fatalism, and to sombre thought. It never brought him to realism, or even to the verge of it. When he follows a certain impulse and writes:—

From a long way off to look at your charms

Made my blood run redder in every vein,

While he—he has held you long in his arms,

And kissed you over and over again—

he is going as far as his finer nature will let him go in the painting of pictures dear to the fleshly school. It is almost incredible that a lyric poet who had come under the influence of Shelley and Swinburne should go no further than this. But Gordon’s verses are not like most other love verses—they show no indulgence in that more blatant form of sensualism which will insist on its red lips and its soft arms, on its tropic midnights and its reiterated embraces. It is only “from a long way off” that he looks upon the vision splendid; he never vulgarises it by coming too near it; in the better and more enduring sense of the word, he is refined.

To understand Gordon it is necessary to remember that his was a dual personality. First of all he was a man of action. He wrote as a man who loved action, for other men who loved action. There was enough of the soldier about him, enough of ingrained modesty, or of patrician reserve, to make him rather ashamed of a parade of his own feelings. It was very much finer, to his way of thinking, to do something than merely to write about something. He lived much on horseback and rode in many races, because the speed of a steeplechase could persuade him for a moment that he was acting; could make him forget the piping times in which he lived. But while all his sympathy and all his desires were towards action, his temperament was largely that of the dreamer. It is a rare combination, and one that explains a great deal. When he put his dreams into words—when he set his fancy free in such compositions as Doubtful Dreams, Cui Bono, A Song of Autumn, and others of the kind, it did not occur to him that he was doing anything remarkable. It did not seem to him that fame was to be won in that way. It did not appeal to him that this class of work might call forth rarer qualities, might establish a better claim to gratitude and remembrance, than could the actions of the man who went with a tomahawk into the wilderness, or of the man who led a forlorn hope right up to the cannon’s mouth. He wrote not so much to please others as to please himself, and because he was unable to be always silent. He wrote because voices that sang through him would not remain dumb.

There are three classes into which his poetry can be divided. The first and the largest class is that in which the man of action preponderates. These are the verses that tell of deeds of daring, most of them accomplished on horseback. The lines have about them the genuine ring of saddle and sabre. The air seems to be rushing past as one reads them. Almost the whole of what praise or credit came to Gordon in his lifetime was due to what he wrote about men on horseback. Even now he is known to the great majority of his countrymen by such verses as How we beat the Favourite, The Roll of the Kettledrum, From the Wreck, and others of the kind. Poetry of this description may not be the highest possible, but Gordon did it very well. He did it so well that he may be said to have beaten all competitors in this particular line—and that despite his uneven quality, and his occasional lapses into the inartistic and the commonplace. His friend Kendall raised an incredulous smile by writing in the Australasian that the shy and reserved man who said so little and rode so well was superior to Whyte Melville in the latter’s special domain. It was thought then that a compliment had been paid to Gordon; it would be considered now that the compliment was wholly to Whyte Melville. The Australian has out—distanced most of his rivals; but he did not know of the fact in his lifetime, and on the banks of the Styx he may not much care.

Of all these poems of action there is none better, perhaps none quite so fine as regards conception and execution, as the Romance of Britomarte. It is a remarkable piece of work. The artistic finish of it does not strike the reader while he is reading. To watch a really fine actor is to forget he is acting; to listen to a tale that is properly told is to forget the teller. It is rarely, indeed, that the mechanical processes do not obtrude themselves. Of genius there has never yet been a satisfactory definition; but the word may surely be reserved for the man or woman who can write a book, or act a piece, or compose a poem, of such quality that the reader or onlooker will forget for the moment everything but that which is placed before him. It is almost impossible to begin reading Britomarte and to put it down unfinished, or to be conscious of anything but the dramatic interest of the story. The verve and swing of the opening lines

I’ll tell you a story—but pass the jack,

And let us make merry to-night, my men—

carry the reader on a rushing wave from beginning to close. It is a tale of great and successful daring, purporting to be told by the chief actor himself; but no crudeness, or bad taste, or braggadocio mars the effect. Thinking of such a piece one forgets to be sorry for the author. Irrespective of fame, or the lack of fame, he must have known that the work was good; he must have known that criticism could neither help it, nor harm it; he must have experienced the joy of creation, which comes only to certain natures, and not often to them.

On the second class of his poetry, which may be described as fatalism set to music, opinions are likely to differ widely. The majority of people prefer How we Beat the Favourite to Doubtful Dreams, but then the majority of people have from time immemorial been the worst judges of poetry. These verses that belong to the second class—the class not of action, but of brooding fancy—are well represented by the piece entitled The Swimmer. All the philosophy in them is contained in the four lines:—

A little season of light and laughter,

Of love and leisure, and pleasure and pain,

And a horror of outer darkness after,

And dust returneth to dust again.

All the music of them is exemplified in the same piece, for example in the lines commencing:—

I would that with sleepy, soft embraces

The sea would fold me, would find me rest

In luminous depths of her secret places

In gulfs where her marvels are manifest.

They are melancholy and mystic, and not hopefully inspiring, these verses in which the writer seeks to link the unsatisfactory present with the unknown beyond. Yet they have a sweetness of their own. The strings that throbbed in Gordon to the touch of his mother, the Night, have, indeed, a siren quality, akin to the lute of Orpheus when heard on the eve of everlasting sleep in the garden of Prosperinë. Preferable sometimes to the utterance of a noisy and blatant optimism—finer than the blare of brass instruments or the shouting of crowds—is the voice of the reed shaken by the wind.

As a final word something may be said of Gordon’s third and highest class of achievement, namely his blending in verse of the active with the melancholic temper. He could do two things: he could write of action, and he could write of sadness. Now and again he combines in one poem all that is best and most distinctive in these two sides of his nature. There are times when he devotes his verse to enterprises of some kind, to feats on horseback, or to feats in war. There are other times when he discards action, and lets the sombre mood of the moment envelop him. The hour of his greatest and rarest inspiration is when he mixes the action with the sentiment; when he unites the warrior with the poet; when he fuses in the same fire the contrasted (but not necessarily antagonistic) temperaments of a Bayard and a Byron, of a Lancelot and a Lamartine.

It is undeniable that The Rhyme of Joyous Garde represents the summit of Gordon’s poetic achievement. And the reason is that it brings together in complete harmony the two spirits which alternately strove for mastery in the life of the man. The movements in The Rhyme of Joyous Garde are varied, but they fit into each other, and grow out of each other, as do the movements in a Beethoven symphony. First of all there is the atmosphere of pure idealism, of pure romance. There is the breath of the south wind, rich with the glory of the hawthorn and the frankincense. It is the man of action, who is also a poet, that is speaking. The setting is that of Arthurian England. Every line of the opening verse is flooded with the sentiment of a romantic country—a country in which brave men lived, and in which great deeds were done.

Against this rich, warm-tinted background is outlined a battle picture. Here begins the second movement. First the country itself, with its sunny fields and blossoming hedges; then the memory springing to life of great daring and heroic achievement:—-

Pardie! I nearly had won that crown

Which endureth more than a knight’s renown,

When the pagan giant had got me down,

Sore spent in the deadly grapple.

In a couple of resonant verses he explains why. The third movement begins when the woman enters. It is romance again, but romance of a more intense, more personal, more richly emotional kind. It forms the dominant note of this varied theme:—

The brown thrush sang through the briar and bower,

All flushed or frosted with forest flower,

In the warm sun’s wanton glances;

And I grew deaf to the song-bird—blind

To blossom that sweetened the sweet spring wind,

I saw her only—a girl reclined

In her girlhood’s indolent trances.

The realism of the picture is carried no further. With fine artistic sensibility Gordon recognises that he has said enough. The woman has entered; the man has grown blind to the blossom and deaf to the song-bird; the eternal tragedy, which is not altogether a tragedy, has begun.

For the rest, the poem plays upon two strings. Alternately there are echoes from the fields of undying renown, and again voices of sad and hopeless and unending regret. The well-known lines beginning:—

Then a steel-shod rush, and a glittering ring,

And a crash of the spear staves splintering

are a memorable piece of versification. They arrest and perpetuate the fighting Arthurian spirit, they convey in words the actual clash of arms, and they bring back the forgotten mood of the man of personal valour as possibly no other verses have yet done. Such a word picture might be expected to leave weak and tame anything that followed; but with equal conviction, and with equal command of tone and touch, Gordon strikes again the chord of intense spiritual shame and sorrow, gradually merging it into one of religious appeal and exhortation. On this latter note the poem closes.

The man who had done this great thing surely deserved something in this existence, or in some other existence, in return for what he had given to the people among whom he lived. Surely, one likes to think, there must be, somewhere, at some time or another, a compensation, a recompense, for the tragedy of a life that merited so much success and vanished, or seemed to vanish, in such utter dark.