Reviews

(Pall Mall Gazette, March 25, 1889.)

A critic recently remarked of Adam Lindsay Gordon that through him Australia had found her first fine utterance in song. ((See Australian Poets, page 370.))  This, however, is an amiable error.  There is very little of Australia in Gordon’s poetry.  His heart and mind and fancy were always preoccupied with memories and dreams of England and such culture as England gave him.  He owed nothing to the land of his adoption.  Had he stayed at home he would have done much better work.  In a few poems such as The Sick Stockrider, From the Wreck, and Wolf and Hound there are notes of Australian influences, and these Swinburnian stanzas from the dedication to the Bush Ballads deserve to be quoted, though the promise they hold out was never fulfilled:

They are rhymes rudely strung with intent less
   Of sound than of words,
In lands where bright blossoms are scentless,
   And songless bright birds;
Where, with fire and fierce drought on her tresses,
Insatiable summer oppresses
Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses,
   And faint flocks and herds.

Whence gather’d?—The locust’s grand chirrup
   May furnish a stave;
The ring of a rowel and stirrup,
   The wash of a wave.
The chaunt of the marsh frog in rushes,
That chimes through the pauses and hushes
   Of nightfall, the torrent that gushes,
The tempests that rave.

  In the gathering of night gloom o’erhead, in
The still silent change,
   All fire-flushed when forest trees redden
On slopes of the range.
When the gnarl’d, knotted trunks Eucalyptian
Seem carved, like weird columns Egyptian,
With curious device—quaint inscription,
   And hieroglyph strange;

In the Spring, when the wattle gold trembles
   ’Twixt shadow and shine,
When each dew-laden air draught resembles
   A long draught of wine;
When the sky-line’s blue burnish’d resistance
   Makes deeper the dreamiest distance,
Some song in all hearts hath existence,—
   Such songs have been mine.

As a rule, however, Gordon is distinctly English, and the landscapes he describes are always the landscapes of our own country.  He writes about mediæval lords and ladies in his Rhyme of Joyous Garde, about Cavaliers and Roundheads in The Romance of Britomarte, and Ashtaroth, his longest and most ambitious poem, deals with the adventures of the Norman barons and Danish knights of ancient days.  Steeped in Swinburne and bewildered with Browning, he set himself to reproduce the marvellous melody of the one and the dramatic vigour and harsh strength of the other.  From the Wreck is a sort of Australian edition of the Ride to Ghent.  These are the first three stanzas of one of the so-called Bush Ballads:

On skies still and starlit
   White lustres take hold,
And grey flashes scarlet,
   And red flashes gold.
And sun-glories cover
The rose, shed above her,
Like lover and lover
   They flame and unfold.

. . . . .

Still bloom in the garden
   Green grass-plot, fresh lawn,
Though pasture lands harden
   And drought fissures yawn.
While leaves, not a few fall,
Let rose-leaves for you fall,
Leaves pearl-strung with dewfall,
   And gold shot with dawn.

Does the grass-plot remember
   The fall of your feet
In Autumn’s red ember
   When drought leagues with heat,
When the last of the roses
Despairingly closes
In the lull that reposes
   Ere storm winds wax fleet?

And the following verses show that the Norman Baron of Ashtaroth had read Dolores just once too often:

Dead priests of Osiris, and Isis,
   And Apis! that mystical lore,
Like a nightmare, conceived in a crisis
   Of fever, is studied no more;
Dead Magian! yon star-troop that spangles
   The arch of yon firmament vast
Looks calm, like a host of white angels
   On dry dust of votaries past

On seas unexplored can the ship shun
   Sunk rocks?  Can man fathom life’s links,
Past or future, unsolved by Egyptian
   Or Theban, unspoken by Sphynx?
The riddle remains yet, unravell’d
   By students consuming night oil.
O earth! we have toil’d, we have travailed:
   How long shall we travail and toil?.

By the classics Gordon was always very much fascinated.  He loved what he calls ‘the scroll that is godlike and Greek,’ though he is rather uncertain about his quantities, rhyming ‘Polyxena’ to ‘Athena’ and ‘Aphrodite’ to ‘light,’ and occasionally makes very rash statements, as when he represents Leonidas exclaiming to the three hundred at Thermopylae:

‘Ho! comrades let us gaily dine—
   This night with Plato we shall sup,’

if this be not, as we hope it is, a printer’s error.  What the Australians liked best were his spirited, if somewhat rough, horse-racing and hunting poems.  Indeed, it was not till he found that How We Beat the Favourite was on everybody’s lips that he consented to forego his anonymity and appear in the unsuspected character of a verse-writer, having up to that time produced his poems shyly, scribbled them on scraps of paper, and sent them unsigned to the local magazines.  The fact is that the social atmosphere of Melbourne was not favourable to poets, and the worthy colonials seem to have shared Audrey’s doubts as to whether poetry was a true and honest thing.  It was not till Gordon won the Cup Steeplechase for Major Baker in 1868 that he became really popular, and probably there were many who felt that to steer Babbler to the winning-post was a finer achievement than ‘to babble o’er green fields.’

On the whole, it is impossible not to regret that Gordon ever emigrated.  His literary power cannot be denied, but it was stunted in uncongenial surroundings and marred by the rude life he was forced to lead.  Australia has converted many of our failures into prosperous and admirable mediocrities, but she certainly spoiled one of our poets for us.  Ovid at Tomi is not more tragic than Gordon driving cattle or farming an unprofitable sheep-ranch.

That Australia, however, will some day make amends by producing a poet of her own we cannot doubt, and for him there will be new notes to sound and new wonders to tell of.  The description, given by Mr. Marcus Clarke in the preface to this volume, of the aspect and spirit of Nature in Australia is most curious and suggestive.  The Australian forests, he tells us, are funereal and stern, and ‘seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair.’  No leaves fall from the trees, but ‘from the melancholy gum strips of white bark hang and rustle.  Great grey kangaroos hop noiselessly over the coarse grass.  Flights of cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls.  The sun suddenly sinks and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter.’  The aborigines aver that, when night comes, from the bottomless depth of some lagoon a misshapen monster rises, dragging his loathsome length along the ooze.  From a corner of the silent forest rises a dismal chant, and around a fire dance natives painted like skeletons.  All is fear-inspiring and gloomy.  No bright fancies are linked with the memories of the mountains.  Hopeless explorers have named them out of their sufferings—Mount Misery, Mount Dreadful, Mount Despair.

In Australia alone (says Mr. Clarke) is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write.  But the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charm of the fantastic land of monstrosities.  He becomes familiar with the beauty of loneliness.  Whispered to by the myriad tongues of the wilderness, he learns the language of the barren and the uncouth, and can read the hieroglyphs of haggard gum-trees, blown into odd shapes, distorted with fierce hot winds, or cramped with cold nights, when the Southern Cross freezes in a cloudless sky of icy blue.  The phantasmagoria of that wild dream-land termed the Bush interprets itself, and the Poet of our desolation begins to comprehend why free Esau loved his heritage of desert sand better than all the bountiful richness of Egypt.

Here, certainly, is new material for the poet, here is a land that is waiting for its singer.  Such a singer Gordon was not.  He remained thoroughly English, and the best that we can say of him is that he wrote imperfectly in Australia those poems that in England he might have made perfect.

Poems.  By Adam Lindsay Gordon.  (Samuel Mullen.)

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