Then, in the third place, we have the erotic school. This also has certain Australian characteristics. These manifest themselves not in the prose, but in the verse of the country. The local rhymester has been more than once exhorted to give the rein to his fancies—to let himself go. The advice is not uncongenial, even apart from the fact that he has probably been reading Swinburne, and is more or less under the influence of the master mind. A certain biblical institution was told that it was condemned, because it was luke-warm. The reproach can hardly be levied against the youthful poets who fill unvalued spaces of the print that is their medium for the time being. Amid all this intensity—bogus intensity, be it understood—there is very seldom the note of contentment, still less of genuine mirth. Australia is a bright, sunlit, open, and breezy country; but the minor poets that it produces in abundance have, for the most part, gloom dwelling in their inmost souls. The Australian child of the Muses is willing enough to clasp his Amaryllis to his palpitating breast, and to tell every one who likes to listen about the subtle and permeating sweetness of her eyes and lips and hair; but at the next moment, or in the very same breath, he is inviting us to contemplate a desolated life, a dead body, a tombstone, or a grave. In the verse of this people intense eroticism and profound melancholy are continually blended. The Northerner may, on the average, be less fluent and less imaginative, but he seems, when at his best, to develop a finer idealism, a better thought. He writes in the Pall Mall Gazette:—
Lean, love, a little nearer; shine, moon, a little clearer;
You cannot make her dearer, or a thousandth part more fair,
But only you can show me the kisses she would throw me,
The guardian angels that shall go before me everywhere.
While his fellow rhymester in Australia alternates between telling us in a burst of fervour that
Hilda’s kisses seem in German
Just as sweet as any way—
And most tragically exclaiming:—
God! the irony of bringing her with garments wet and clinging