The real Australia

by Alfred Buchanan

XI

THREE WRITERS OF VERSE

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music, too.

Yes, we have our own music: and it is not all thin in quality, nor is it all played upon a single string. A rare value, a special distinction attach to the achievements in verse of Victor Daley, who is one of the latest to join the great company of poets in the shades. He did his work for a people who were somewhat indifferent and who, when they appreciated, showed their appreciation in no very practical way. And now, when he is

Far too far for words or wings to follow,

Far too far off for thought or any prayer,

these fitfully poetical, but wholly good-hearted people of the continent in which he lived are inclined to regret him. It is a regret that does them credit, though it can be tempered with some reflections of a more satisfying kind. For Daley was honoured probably as much as—perhaps more than—most poets are by their contemporaries. It is possible to believe that in the long twilight which preceded his earthly eclipse, he believed that he had given lasting shape and form to some of the more beautiful, more intangible things of life, and found sufficient consolation in the belief. There is not a great deal to be said about the life history of Victor Daley. Some one of those who rhymed with him, drank with him, joked with him, or sat up all night quoting verses with him may yet write his biography. But it will not be a startling or an eventful document. He was of Irish parentage and came to Australia—unless a statement made by one of his most intimate friends is erroneous—when nearly out of his teens. He drifted into journalism, as many men of restless temperament and uncommercial principles do. He wrote a great deal both in prose and verse for Melbourne papers, for Sydney papers, and for up-country papers in New South Wales. He married early, and children grew up round him. When he died in Sydney towards the end of December 1905, he was but forty-seven years of age. The lingering illness that preceded his death left him in straightened circumstances; so straightened, in fact, that his friends thought less, at the finish, of his chances of immortality than of the prospects of keeping a roof over his and his children’s heads.

His most important publication was the volume At Dawn and Dusk, which appeared about eight years before his death. It consisted for the most part of occasional pieces, reprinted from various papers. It brought the author a certain amount of intelligent and appreciative criticism, and a slight—but only a slight—monetary reward. Thereafter he went on his way; the fitful and uncertain way of one whom circumstances had forced into journalism, but whom temperament had made a poet. The book mentioned is his permanent record.

There are certain moods that are not easily expressed in the forms of common speech; that are not easily expressed at all. There are occasions when the average man wishes—it may be only for an instant or two, but he wishes—that he had some better medium of thought transference than the ordinary prose of ordinary use. For those few moments he could desire that the gods had made him poetical, even if for the remainder of his life he would prefer that they made him anything else. Then, it may be, there comes beating across his brain the recollection of a similar mood interpreted adequately and finely by another. He is grateful for the chance of appropriating and taking to himself that which he did not individually create.

One of these less prosaic, less frequent moods is that of sentimental regret. Every one knows it, every one has been through it. When looked back upon, it is an experience to be valued. It is always a relief from the harder outlines of the present. It need have no bitterness and scarcely a tinge of remorse. This mood, or the indulgence in it, is the tribute the man of sensitive mind pays to his better nature, to the woman he might have loved, to the ideal he might have attained. It is a mood that the million recognise, but that only the one in a million—that is to say, the genuine poet—should be allowed to express. Another mood, and a more impersonal one, is that which implies discontent with the present surroundings, and longing for more distant fields, for ampler opportunities, for less prosaic realities. The discontent may be merely petulant or it may have in it something of the nature of the Divine. All depends on the temperament of the individual. Yet another mood, and a still more pronounced and easily recognised one, is that of erotic or of semi-sensual desire. In its cruder and more direct form it is the mood that finds voice in the Shakespearian poem of Venus and Adonis; in its etherealised essence it is the mood of Shelley in the poem addressed to Emilia Viviani.

The first of these moods—the half-regretful, half-sentimental and wholly idealistic one—is finely interpreted by Daley in the verses entitled Years Ago. He voices a passion that is no longer a passion, but rather a figure of remembrance, from which the poetic temperament can draw Memnon music. The woman of these verses is not described, but suggested. There is no need to describe her. The reader must build her up out of his own experiences. She must always be looked at from a distance, and must always live in the mind of the man for whom the intenser passion of desire has become the soft glow of remembrance. Daley shows her silhouetted against the sky-line at the moment when his ship, the inevitable ship of Destiny, goes sailing:

Across the seas in the years agone;

And seaward set were the eyes unquailing,

And landward looking the faces wan.

The poem is a very fine one. It is musical, rhythmical, dreamily sensuous, and never crudely realistic. The workmanship is even, and the high level reached in the first verse is maintained to the end. The words and the treatment create their own sentiment, and always suggest more than they say.

There is another mood in which Daley has been equally successful—the mood of picturesque romance. This is the frame of mind in which he sails “into the sunset’s glow.” Here, also, he strikes a note that awakens a universal echo. Every man has wanted, at some time or another, to sail into the sunset, understanding by that word the whole untrodden, unattainable, indefinable, but brilliantly lighted and always glowing region that lies beyond the boundaries of the place in which he follows out the round of his allotted tasks. It is only on the wings of imagination that one ever arrives within sight of this region. And the wings themselves must be of a certain texture, or they will melt more quickly than did those of Icarus. There are only one or two people who can supply materials calculated to take the voyager there. Victor Daley is one of these. He has himself explained the necessary equipment:—

Our ship shall be of sandal built,

Like ships in old-world tales,

Carven with cunning art, and gilt,

And winged with scented sails

Of silver silk, whereon the red

Great gladioli burn;

A rainbow flag at her masthead,

A rose flag at her stern....

And perching on the point above,

Wherefrom the pennon blows,

The figure of a flying dove,

And in her beak a rose.

It is an auspicious, even a brilliant commencement. Dull and ungrateful must be the mind or temperament that refuses to acknowledge either the skill of the builder, or the perfection of the craft.

A third phase of Daley’s is one common to all poets, whether good, bad, or indifferent. Its impression is conveyed in what, for want of a more exact term, is called love poetry. It is not composed either of sentimental regrets or of sunset fantasies. It deals with the present and associates itself with one object—a living one. A certain class of writer conveys in this form of poetry a direct appeal to the senses. Daley rarely does so. He is always imaginative rather than realistic. He can play on more than one emotional string; but it is never so much the woman herself as the memory and the thought of her that he appears to caress. In the verses entitled At the Opera, which recall Browning’s A Pretty Woman, he puts his poetic creed into a sentence. Others may pluck the rose and watch it fall and die; “but I—

Love it so well, I leave it free.”

And even in Blanchelys, warmly tinted as it is, he suggests in the opening four lines an atmosphere that is far more idealistic than it is intense or burning:—

With little hands all filled with bloom,

The rose tree wakes from her long trance,

And from my heart, as from a tomb,

Steals forth the ghost of dead romance.

It stands to the author’s credit that his touch never vulgarises. He never drags his objective to a lower level; when his theme is woman he raises her to his own level, or to the one that he has created for her.

Victor Daley has written on a variety of subjects, and some of his work is in a lightly humorous and descriptive vein. His signal merit as an Australian writer is that he is not wedded to the soil. He is not dependent on the gum tree or the wattle, or the dusty plain. His best work is cosmopolitan in character and tone. It is difficult to see how the foremost place among local writers of imaginative literature can be denied to the man whose name is appended to the collection of verses At Dawn and Dusk. A strictly conscientious critic might find it incumbent upon him to add that while Daley has done some things well, he has done other things not so well. He might begin with a major premise to the effect that the poet was conspicuous for some gifts, and add as a minor premise, that he was not so conspicuous for others; and the syllogism might be completed by a pronouncement to the effect that when the indifferent work had been weighed against the good work, the latter much preponderated. Sometimes it seems as though there were a clog on Victor Daley in his flight towards the empyrean. He wants something of the lyric quality, not merely of a Shelley or a Swinburne, but of such a musical rhymester as Will Ogilvie. The man who wrote Blanchelys is in the same family as Cassius; he thinks too much. The idea is sometimes better than its setting. Imagination, atmosphere, creative power, selection, beauty of thought, beauty of phrase—-he has all these. But that resistless melody which flows like water, and chimes like a bell, is only attained by him now and then. It is only occasionally that harmony of thought and expression are complete. There is no doubt that Daley lacks much of the rousing, resonant quality that always appeals so strangely to unpoetical people; that is to say, to the majority of people in most countries under the sun. Thus a few still pass him in the race for recognition; there was scarce one in his lifetime that did not pass him in the pursuit of tangible reward.

Yet it should not matter a great deal to Victor Daley, living or dead. He was never a great popular success. He never aspired to be a great social success. His personal gifts and graces were reserved for the comparatively few. The average individual, who deals in groceries, or who has laid hands on mining shares, could have bought and sold him many times, even in his most prosperous days. There are a large number of prosperous tradesmen in the country who could, metaphorically, have driven over him—who would certainly have done so literally, unless he had scrambled out of the way. He dealt in brains, in sentiment, in imagination, in the beauty of life and the romance of life. He was not outwardly successful, because that kind of success belongs principally to the coarse-grained men, to the rough-fibred men, to the unimaginative and the uncreative or the essentially lucky man of the world. But it does not greatly matter. He has his audience, and it is a growing one. It is the only kind of audience whose good opinion is really desirable. It will remember him and cherish him in that region of fancy to which all good poets make their way hereafter—a region in which tradesmen cease from troubling and self-made merchants never intrude.

. . . . . .

It may be putting a stress on the word to call Henry Lawson a poet; but a writer of many verses, some of them very good ones, he certainly is. He is a prominent figure in Australian literature, or what passes for Australian literature. He covers a great deal of ground; he is always suggestive of one country, and that country Australia; he has a great deal of talent; he is—or was—very restless and ambitious; he is extremely versatile; and after ten or twelve years’ work he finds himself still pursuing editors to their sanctum, and still wondering where the latest manuscript is likely to find a resting-place. Tantæ molis erat—to win fame by writing prose or verse in Australia.

And yet Lawson, if he has won nothing else, has won a very considerable measure of local fame. Of the five million people in Australasia, it is only the very uneducated and very unintelligent who are not acquainted at least with his name. He is better known than Victor Daley, only less known than Gordon and Kendall. This, at any rate, is something. The pity of it is that those who know what he has done are aware also of what he has failed to do, or of what the people he wrote for would not let him do; of the manner in which he has drifted or been driven from pillar to post; of his peregrinations throughout this continent, through New Zealand, throughout England, and back again; of his inability to lay up for himself treasure upon earth; of his frequent discouragements following upon his fitful successes; of his shaken firmness of purpose and of mind. The liking and admiration felt for him are tinged with the sympathy that one feels for a man who has been cheated by destiny of the stakes he fairly played for, and should have fairly won.

Daley’s genius is essentially cosmopolitan; Lawson’s temper and colouring are always Australian. Therein lies the main difference between them. Lawson attempted at the outset an almost impossible task. He aspired to make both a living and a name for himself as a literary man. It was a noble aspiration, but in the circumstances quixotic. What he needed, what he should have been given, was some professional, or even some mechanical training that would have brought him in an income, while his audience and his reputation were growing. Some one ought to have taught him shorthand, or got him into the Civil Service, or made him a lawyer’s clerk, or instructed him in the art of making bricks, or driving cabs—anything to save him from drifting round the continent with unpublished manuscripts in his pocket. Some one should have done this for him; but who? His father he never really knew. His mother, a large-hearted, large-minded woman, happened to be proud of her son. He grew up without a professional training, but with a rich inheritance of ideas.

He has offered himself to the reading public of Australia; has, in fact, thrown himself upon it. He has not been rejected; but he has learned that the path of the literary free-lance is one of the rockiest and most discouraging that ever presented itself to a man cursed with a hatred of routine, and an ability to write. The recognition that he has won has never had an adequate cash value. He acknowledges the fact with much candour and some bitterness. But he has taken the good with the evil. He has never lost heart. He is not unmindful of his author’s prestige, and is not lost to its compensations. Yet he writes to his son:—

You are a child of field and flood,

But with the gipsy strains,

A strong Norwegian sailor’s blood

Is running through your veins.

Be true, and slander never stings;

Be straight, and all may frown—

You’ll have the strength to grapple things

That dragged your father down.

Be generous, and still do good,

And banish while you live

The spectre of ingratitude

That haunts the ones who give.

But if the crisis comes at length

That your fate might be marred,

Strike hard, my son, with all your strength,

For your own self’s sake, strike hard!

Lawson himself has struck often and dexterously, but with a somewhat uncertain aim, a wavering objective. He realises now that success is won only by a striking hard and relentlessly at the one thing in front of you; by striking also at the heads of all who happen to get in the way.

In estimating the published work of this bard of the bush and the open plain, it is desirable to allow something for the special circumstances that have both made and hampered him. He has had to write for his living; and he has written too much. His typical and humorous verses were never out of place in the columns of a newspaper, but their careful collection and subsequent reproduction in book form were not necessarily a service to the memory of the author. Lawson would admit quite candidly that they were written, many of them, to fill up space and to earn a guinea. They were not intended as pure literature; and if regarded in that light may be the cause of an injustice to the author. To get to what is worth preserving it is necessary to rummage about among a mass of what belongs only to the moment.

There is scarcely a type, or a class, or a feature in the life of his continent about which he has not rhymed and written. The station-hand, the rouse-about, the shearer, the bullock-driver, the jackaroo, the up-country selector, the swagman, the drover, the dead-beat—he has made verses and extracted humour out of all of these, and out of many more of the same kind. He has shown great ingenuity, great powers of observation, wide-reaching sympathy, and a great deal of very clever phrasing in this class of work. The result may not be poetry, but it forms in the aggregate a rare and valuable picture of a mode of life and of a people who are still a people apart from the rest of the world. No one has described them quite so faithfully as Lawson has done. Some of these verses, for example those entitled When the Ladies come to the Shearing Shed, will stand reprinting and, for the purposes of the comic reciter, committing to memory.

But Lawson is, or until recently was, genuinely ambitious. He knows what is poetry and what is not. He has fine ideas. He has felt something of the sentiment of life and something of the weird romance and tragedy of life. A starry night in the wilderness, a woman standing by the water’s edge, a homestead where there was once a garden, a sunset, a tree, a flight of wild birds—all these have spoken of him, and he has answered back in kind. His handling of romantic and of patriotic themes marks clearly both his achievement and his limitations as a poet. From such pieces as Reedy River, The Old Stone Chimney, Faces in the Street, and others of the kind, we understand what he has felt, and what he would wish to say. Such verses show that he comes near to the goal of true poetry, and even occasionally places his hand upon it. But his final word and his strongest word is that in which he voices the longing of the man who wishes to do more than fate will let him do. The world, he says, is not wide enough. The scope is not great enough. The chances are not attractive enough. The fetters are becoming more cramping as each generation goes by. But once—once there was a time. Listen to the resonant ring of it, that other time:—

Then a man could fight if his heart were bold, and win, if his faith were true,

Were it love or honour or power or gold or all that our hearts pursue,

Could live to the world for the family name, or die for the family pride,

Could fly from sorrow and sin and shame, in the days when the world was wide.

Henry Lawson should, for his own happiness’ sake, have lived in that other and more spacious time.

. . . . . .

As the third representative of the school of contemporary verse writers we may take Miss Louise Mack. We may take her for several reasons. In the first place, she is a woman and represents the woman’s point of view—the Australian woman’s attitude towards art and life. In the second place, it has been claimed for her, by some of those who have followed her work most closely, that her achievement in verse is the most considerable that stands to the record of a woman in Australia. In the third place, it is a fact incapable of disguise that she has distinctive promise and distinctive merits of her own.

Setting apart for a moment the attainments of Miss Mack as a writer of poems, it is impossible not to appreciate and “affect” the nature and temperament of the woman. She has both strength and delicacy. She has a genuine, inborn habit of tenderness, combined with a certain power of artistic restraint. She is by no means colourless. She is not a mere imitator. She understands a great deal even if she does not in her literary work always realise a great deal. It is this combination of strength and tenderness, added to an artistic, womanly sensibility, that makes her already a distinctive figure in the world of letters, and gives promise of yet greater achievement and wider appreciation in the future.

What this Australian authoress needed at the outset was a measure of candid, though kindly, criticism, and a certain amount of disappointment. Instead of these she was given an intoxicating draught of praise. To a Daley or a Lawson this recognition, this flattery, might not have proved in any sense harmful. The man’s faculties are harder, more firmly knit. His temperament is less emotional. His judgement is less easily swayed. If he possesses an original vein he will, in nine cases out of ten, let it take its course. But Miss Mack, when scarcely out of her teens, had held to her lips a cup of intoxicating quality—a cup for which hundreds of men and women, of perhaps equal ability wait all their lives and which they never obtain. The people who championed her not only printed her poetry, as they well might do, but printed her prose. This prose, though it did not rise above mediocrity, found its way into book form, and was despatched with much enthusiasm to different parts of this, and of the other hemisphere. The ambitious girl was taken on the staff of one of the Sydney papers. She was grateful and anxious to please. She knew that her predecessors in office had been smart and flippant; she knew that she was expected to be the same. She did her best to fulfil expectations. And though she never quite got down to the level of the tiresomely smart and painfully clever society writer, she at least succeeded in suggesting, through her prose writings, the atmosphere of the circle amid which she wrote. She could not be vulgar, therefore she was only moderately smart. She avoided being serious, and she realised—what? The pity of it is that when she emerged from this groove, and began to write books of travel and of personal experience she wrote as if still under the impression that it would never do to be herself; that it was necessary to be smart, or to perish in the attempt.

However, it is possible to forgive her for conveying that impression. It is possible to forgive a great deal to a mind like hers, to a talent like hers. Her verses, collected into book form and published under the title of Dreams in Flower, form a compendium which is of genuine value, and which possibly justifies its claim to be considered “the most distinguished body of verses” written by a woman in Australia.

It is the peculiar merit of Miss Louise Mack that she almost invariably suggests more than she actually conveys. The intangible thing called inspiration is hers. The ether waves that play upon the surface of her imagination are of the subtlest and rarest kind. Neither her ideas nor her method are commonplace. Continually she seems to be opening the door to an enchanted region of fancy, to vistas of the loftiest conception, to palaces of purest gold. But the glimpse is a fleeting one. The door is no sooner half opened than it is shut again. Or, if the enquirer is allowed to enter, if he makes any progress beyond the rich and splendid portals, he usually meets with disillusion. He finds that the initial grandeur will not go with him to the end of the journey. He realises that the authoress has given him a promising start, but that if he follows her too expectantly he is likely to get left in the wilderness.

Considering that poetry is mainly impressionism, and that it is not like logic, where a weak link in the chain of reasoning makes the whole fabric worthless, it is necessary to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to this writer for her fine individual passages, for her rich idealism, for her many musical lines. She can play on more than one string. Her lines on Sydney, which stand at the commencement of Dreams in Flower have a trick of haunting the memory. The sentiment is warmly human, but is so far from being commonplace that it deserves to be called pantheistic. The opening invocation would disarm criticism:—

Oh! to mix in my soul this city,

That lies with feet in the fairest waters,

This young, unformed Australian city!

In the harbour’s arms the isles, her daughters,

Dream all day in a perfect sleep.

Oh! to hold in my heart those waters,

Flowing east with the sun behind them,

Through great gates to the outer deep!

There are two following verses almost equally good, and it is only in the fourth and last that the inspiration is seen to flag:—

Oh! to sing of this little city

A true strong song that no years can weaken:

A song that tells how the sea-girt city

Cast her light o’er the seas, a beacon

Seen and sought by the farmost sail;

Made a name that no years could weaken,

Fought a way to the fore of nations,

All lands owning her vast avail!

The repetition of “weaken,” as applied first to the song and then to the name, is not effective; there seems to be confusion of ideas between a place that is merely a glimmering beacon and one that has attained to “the fore of nations,” while the meaning of the last line is not clear. The inspiration which carried the writer brilliantly through three verses failed her in the last.

Yet there are individual poems in this collection which betray no serious defects of workmanship. They are short and strong and self-contained. They are the exception to the general rule which makes Miss Mack a poet of exceptional promise but of uneven performance. The lines On Wairee Hill are imaginative, and always musical. Illusion strikes more than one resonant note. In the verses entitled Vows we get the woman’s emotional and intellectual strength in revolt against the trammels of conventionalism; and in As long as any May there is as much intensity as the brainy Australian woman usually allows herself to feel—or, at any rate, to express.

There is a certain intellectual force, as well as a genuine poetic vein, in the verses of Miss Louise Mack. One imagines her to be always mistress of herself. The lyric mood may interpret her, but it does not master her. We find here no hint of the school which delights in “sense swooning into sound.” To quote from her poems is hardly to do her justice. She is stronger mentally, and finer artistically, than her published work.

There is one short piece entitled—it might be Silences—which seems to interpret, as nearly as possible, her independent, woman’s view of life. It begins:—

I take my life with my hands,

You shall not touch, you shall not see;

I hold it there away from you,

The fitful shining soul in me.

Ah, but you do not know ’tis hid,

Because you did not know ’twas there;

You look along the curving lip,

Search the deep eyes, and touch the hair,

And cry, “Oh love me, woman, love

Your eyes are stars, your mouth a flower”;

And all the while a low voice says,

“This is a fool without the power

To look beneath and find a free

Unfettered spirit serving none,

A heart that loves, and does not love,

A space untrod by any one.”

So let us keep our silences!

I’ll honour yours, or mine will break;

And you, guard well the sacredness

Of mine for your own soul’s shrine’s sake.

These are only flashes of ideas, but they will suffice. The Australian woman of the advanced, intellectual type requires careful treatment. You may admire her, but you must not pretend to a complete understanding of her. You may marry her, but you must not expect to absorb her. She will give you confidences, but only when in the mood; she may give you kisses, but behind them there is a splendid shining soul that laughs and draws away—

A heart that loves, and does not love,

A space untrod by any one.