The stanzas (there are ten more in the poem) have all the bitterness of a youthful sorrow and all the vigour of a youthful defiance. But at the moment of his deepest depression it is upon himself that the writer casts the real blame. This is characteristic of his judgment of himself throughout life. He has ever too much honour and spirit to shirk the responsibility of his own acts. And the same qualities keep him from doing injury to others. He is consoled by remembering this in bidding good-bye to his native land.
‘If to error I incline,
Truth whispers comfort strong,
That never reckless act of mine
E’er worked a comrade wrong.’
As a colonist, Gordon might have justified his Scotch descent by making a fortune. Wealth was to be gained in other and surer ways than by groping for it in the goldfields. But he was indifferent, and allowed himself [p 168] to drift. Australia was attractive to him only as a place of adventure, of freedom, of retirement, of oblivion. All but the latter he found it. He readily adapted himself to the rough conditions of the country, but could never overcome the thought that in those first false steps he had lost all worth striving for. Time softened the gloomy defiance of his farewell verses, but did not alter his determination to efface himself, to be forgotten even by his family. He held no communication with anyone in England, and heard nothing from his home until ten years later, when a lawyer’s letter notified him that both his mother and father were dead, and that under the will of the latter he was to receive a legacy of seven thousand pounds. Meanwhile, Gordon appears to have made no attempt to win any of the prizes that were the common reward of pluck and industry in the Australia of the fifties. He joined the mounted police force of South Australia, but, impatient of its discipline, soon left it, and for long afterwards was content with the rough employment of a horse-breaker.
[p 169]
A curious, pathetic figure he makes at this time. He broke in horses during the day, and read the classic poets at night. Think of the refined Englishman in blue blouse, fustian, and half-Wellington boots, seated among the boisterous company of a ‘men’s hut’ on a Bush station, reading Horace by the aid of a rude lamp, ‘consisting of a honeysuckle cone stuck in clay in a pannikin, and surrounded with mutton fat!’ Or sitting at some Bush camp of his own, and imagining, as he so finely did, the famous Balaclava Charge, which set Europe ringing with pity and admiration a year after he arrived in Australia. How he would have liked to be among the actors in that scene!
‘Oh! the minutes of yonder maddening ride
Long years of pleasure outvie!’
he exclaims, and wishes that his own end could be fair as that of one ‘who died in his stirrups there.’
Gordon seemed not only to be reconciled to his Bush life, but to have become attached to it. He once declared it to be better in [p 170] many respects than any other. He was temperate, skilful in his work, and as popular as one of reserved manner can be. Most of the squatters of the period made it a practice to receive into their social circle any companionable and educated man, whether their equal in position or not. It was a generous custom, typical of the most hospitable country in the world, and worked well on the whole. But Gordon, unlike Henry Kingsley and others of the same class, took no advantage of it. That the squatters did not themselves recognise the worth of one so unassertive was not to be wondered at. He saw this, and never blamed them. They could not, as he remarked on one occasion, be expected to know that he was as well born as any of them, and perhaps better educated. One of them saw there was ‘something above the common’ in him; but that was all. At length he was discovered by a good-natured and scholarly Roman Catholic priest (the Rev. Julian E. Tenison Woods), who, though he does not say so, evidently took a pleasure during the five [p 171] years of their acquaintance in making the merits of the solitary Englishman known in the colony. Their tastes accorded excellently. They talked ‘horses or poetry’ as they rode together, or smoked by their camp-fires. Gordon’s reserve thawed for the first time. He had a well-trained memory, and occasionally would recite Latin or Greek verse, or a scene from Shakespeare, or passages from Byron and other modern poets. Greek he had taught himself in lonely hours after his arrival in Australia, having neglected it while at college.
In the end his disposition left the good cleric, like many another, much puzzled. Was there anything of foolish pride or misanthropy in Gordon’s avoidance of society that would have welcomed him? Both his recorded speech and his poems are without evidence of either. Those who remember his taciturnity and little eccentricities also speak of his kindness of heart, generosity and trustfulness of others. Did he ever complain that he was oppressed and saddened by his self-chosen life in the Bush? We have [p 172] seen the high estimate he once gave of it; and Mr. Woods, who has recorded many proofs of close observation of his friend, testifies that the melancholy of his poems found little or no expression in his conversation. Gordon may have been shy (as Marcus Clarke noted), but he early formed a fairly accurate judgment of his literary powers. He said ‘he was sure he would rise to the top of the tree in poetry, and that the world should talk of him before he died.’ Coming from one who was far from being vain or boastful, the remark suggests hope and ambition. But neither, it would seem from his colonial career, was ever more than a passing mood with him. Why did he remain in obscurity during several of the best years of his life, doing rough and dangerous work, when he might have obtained some remunerative post in one of the cities? Why did he marry a domestic servant—one who could never be an intellectual companion for him?
It appears that he considered himself to have ‘irretrievably lost caste.’ It is a fantastic idea, and could not have any justification [p 173] in a country where an Englishman of good manners and behaviour need never want congenial society. Gordon was abnormally proud, independent and sensitive: an unfortunate disposition for anyone who has his way to make in an imperfect world. Such a man constantly misunderstands himself and is misunderstood. He takes severe, unpractical views of his own character and of life generally. Not necessarily morose or ungenial, he is always apt to be thought so. Gordon’s conclusion that he had lost caste is a proof of supersensitiveness, and the deep effect produced upon his temperament by the incidents of his youth.
There is a touching and significant little story of an acquaintance which he formed with a young lady at Cape Northumberland, and how he ended it. We are delicately told that, having become a warm admirer of his dashing horsemanship, the lady used to walk in early morning to a neighbouring field to see him training a favourite mare over hurdles. Something more than a mutual liking for horses and racing is plainly [p 174] hinted at as existing between them. But after they had met thus a few times, Gordon asked abruptly whether her mother knew that she came there every morning to see him ride. She replied in the negative, adding that her mother disapproved of racing. ‘Well, don’t come again,’ said he; ‘I know the world, and you don’t. Good-bye. Don’t come again.’ Surprised and wounded, the lady silently gave him her hand in farewell. ‘He looked at it as if it were some natural curiosity, and said, “It’s the first time I have touched a lady’s hand for many a day—my own fault, my own fault—good-bye.”’