the mouths of many brainless boors.
It may be death absolves or cures
the sin of life. ’Twere hazardous
to assert so. If the sin endures,
say only, ‘God, who has judged him thus,
be merciful to him, and us:’”
And his work, his “criticism of life?” Is there nothing in it but this “trust and only trust?” There is more, much more! “There is plainly visible,” says Mr. Clarke, “a keen sense of natural beauty, and a manly admiration for healthy living ... a very clear perception of the loveliness of duty and of labour.” Let us see if this, too, is so, or if any qualification of this remark is needed; and, if so, what qualification.
Gordon’s life and work were a failure. He himself would, I am sure, have been the first to admit it and have assigned the cause, and rightly, to bad luck in general and certain failings in himself in particular. Is it not bad luck to be born into an age that makes of its poets its martyrs? Gordon struggled and schemed. He was a livery-stable keeper, a landowner, a member of assembly, a keeper of racehorses, and a failure in all. It was only as jockey and stockrider that he was a success—that is to say, an object of admiration to others and of happiness to himself. “He sometimes,” says Mr. Woods, “compared the lot of a bushman with that of other states of mankind, saying that it was in many ways preferable to any one,” and for himself he was right. Let us not lament his failure in what he was not meant to be a success. Gordon, happy in life and love, might well have become at best a dilettante, at worst a materialized blockhead, he has so little patience, so little clear-sightedness! Perhaps it is, after all, better as it is. The axe cuts down the sandal tree, and the tree sheds forth its perfume.
“Our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought.”
We love a poet more for what he has suffered than what he has done, and yet ultimately, if we will only see it, what he suffers and what he does are the same. As boys we love our Byron and our Shelley; as men our Goethe and our Shakspere. Gordon, I say, as poet and failure is better than prose-man and success. But see now what he has to say about this life in which he failed so.