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.