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.