. . . . . .
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;