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As the third representative of the school of contemporary verse writers we may take Miss Louise Mack. We may take her for several reasons. In the first place, she is a woman and represents the woman’s point of view—the Australian woman’s attitude towards art and life. In the second place, it has been claimed for her, by some of those who have followed her work most closely, that her achievement in verse is the most considerable that stands to the record of a woman in Australia. In the third place, it is a fact incapable of disguise that she has distinctive promise and distinctive merits of her own.
Setting apart for a moment the attainments of Miss Mack as a writer of poems, it is impossible not to appreciate and “affect” the nature and temperament of the woman. She has both strength and delicacy. She has a genuine, inborn habit of tenderness, combined with a certain power of artistic restraint. She is by no means colourless. She is not a mere imitator. She understands a great deal even if she does not in her literary work always realise a great deal. It is this combination of strength and tenderness, added to an artistic, womanly sensibility, that makes her already a distinctive figure in the world of letters, and gives promise of yet greater achievement and wider appreciation in the future.
What this Australian authoress needed at the outset was a measure of candid, though kindly, criticism, and a certain amount of disappointment. Instead of these she was given an intoxicating draught of praise. To a Daley or a Lawson this recognition, this flattery, might not have proved in any sense harmful. The man’s faculties are harder, more firmly knit. His temperament is less emotional. His judgement is less easily swayed. If he possesses an original vein he will, in nine cases out of ten, let it take its course. But Miss Mack, when scarcely out of her teens, had held to her lips a cup of intoxicating quality—a cup for which hundreds of men and women, of perhaps equal ability wait all their lives and which they never obtain. The people who championed her not only printed her poetry, as they well might do, but printed her prose. This prose, though it did not rise above mediocrity, found its way into book form, and was despatched with much enthusiasm to different parts of this, and of the other hemisphere. The ambitious girl was taken on the staff of one of the Sydney papers. She was grateful and anxious to please. She knew that her predecessors in office had been smart and flippant; she knew that she was expected to be the same. She did her best to fulfil expectations. And though she never quite got down to the level of the tiresomely smart and painfully clever society writer, she at least succeeded in suggesting, through her prose writings, the atmosphere of the circle amid which she wrote. She could not be vulgar, therefore she was only moderately smart. She avoided being serious, and she realised—what? The pity of it is that when she emerged from this groove, and began to write books of travel and of personal experience she wrote as if still under the impression that it would never do to be herself; that it was necessary to be smart, or to perish in the attempt.
However, it is possible to forgive her for conveying that impression. It is possible to forgive a great deal to a mind like hers, to a talent like hers. Her verses, collected into book form and published under the title of Dreams in Flower, form a compendium which is of genuine value, and which possibly justifies its claim to be considered “the most distinguished body of verses” written by a woman in Australia.
It is the peculiar merit of Miss Louise Mack that she almost invariably suggests more than she actually conveys. The intangible thing called inspiration is hers. The ether waves that play upon the surface of her imagination are of the subtlest and rarest kind. Neither her ideas nor her method are commonplace. Continually she seems to be opening the door to an enchanted region of fancy, to vistas of the loftiest conception, to palaces of purest gold. But the glimpse is a fleeting one. The door is no sooner half opened than it is shut again. Or, if the enquirer is allowed to enter, if he makes any progress beyond the rich and splendid portals, he usually meets with disillusion. He finds that the initial grandeur will not go with him to the end of the journey. He realises that the authoress has given him a promising start, but that if he follows her too expectantly he is likely to get left in the wilderness.
Considering that poetry is mainly impressionism, and that it is not like logic, where a weak link in the chain of reasoning makes the whole fabric worthless, it is necessary to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to this writer for her fine individual passages, for her rich idealism, for her many musical lines. She can play on more than one string. Her lines on Sydney, which stand at the commencement of Dreams in Flower have a trick of haunting the memory. The sentiment is warmly human, but is so far from being commonplace that it deserves to be called pantheistic. The opening invocation would disarm criticism:—
Oh! to mix in my soul this city,
That lies with feet in the fairest waters,
This young, unformed Australian city!