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.