“In the whole range of English literature,” says an Australian critic reviewing the complete edition of Gordon’s poems, “in the whole range of English literature there have been few poets possessed of a finer lyrical faculty than Adam Lindsay Gordon.... ‘Ashtaroth,’” continues our critic now warm at his work, “‘Ashtaroth’ is worthy to rank with any of Tennyson’s songs, and is far more musical than the best of Browning’s.” Then there is “the beauty of his ballad poetry, such as ‘Fauconshawe’ and ‘Rippling Water,’ which are perfect of their style;” and so on in the same strain, more or less, until the reader is surprised that our critic ends up with no further claim for his poet than that he “deserves to be ranked with the genuine poets of his generation.” One does not propose to criticise, verbally, criticism of this sort: it would be unkind to do so, and, above all, it would be useless. This is a native melody in the style of “Rule Britannia:” “Australia, and especially Victoria, is great and therefore her poet must be great also. Let us say that Melbourne is the equal of any English city save London, and Gordon the equal of any English poet save Shakspere and Milton!”

Now let us hear what another Australian critic, one who cares more about finding out the real deep true significance of Gordon and his poetry than of glorifying the amour-propre of this class or of that: let us hear what Mr. Marcus Clarke has to say. “Written as they were” (as Gordon’s poems were) “at odd times in leisure moments of a stirring and adventurous life, it is not to be wondered at if they are unequal and unfinished. The astonishment of those who knew the man, and can gauge the capacity of this city to foster poetic instinct, is, that such work was ever produced here at all.”—What a different tone is this from that of our first and enthusiastic critic! “Unequal and unfinished”—“astonishment that such work was ever produced here at all!” But this is not all that Mr. Clarke has to say about Gordon’s poetry: he has also to notice what influence was at work in it, and (most important of all!) what is its real deep true significance. He talks of Gordon “owning nothing but a love for horsemanship and a head full of Browning and Shelley,” and follows this up by saying that “the influence of Browning and of Swinburne” (who, as we all know, has been, creatively and demonstratively, the chief prophet in his generation of the poet who, he likes to think, is ‘beloved above all other poets, being beyond all other poets—in one word, and the only proper word,—divine’)—“the influence of Browning and of Swinburne upon the writer’s taste is plain. There is plainly visible also, however, a keen sense of natural beauty and a manly admiration for healthy living.” Well, and the conclusion of the whole matter? “The student of these unpretending volumes will be repaid for his labour. He will find in them something very like the beginnings of a national school of Australian poetry.”

Let us hasten to offer up our small tribute of praise and thanks to Mr. Clarke for his critical sagacity here, and let us venture to hope that the “Poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon” may go down to posterity accompanied always by this small “Preface” of Mr. Clarke, who both “knew the man” and was yet the first to appreciate this aspect of his work.

What, however, Mr. Clarke has to say about the facts of Gordon’s life is, at best, inaccurate. It is Mr. Sutherland to whom our gratitude is due here, gratitude for having discovered for us all the details of the poet’s life which it is necessary for us to know.[2]

What, then, remains for any other critic to do? There remains to him, as it seems to me, the task of doing what Mr. Clarke tells us he did not propose to do, “of criticising these volumes,” and also of trying, as befits one who comes later, and to whom, therefore, the events of the past have fallen into that symmetry and proper proportion that the events of the present can scarcely ever fall into: of trying, I say, to bring out more clearly (one aspect of which he has done little more than indicate), the real, deep, true significance of the poet’s work; in a word, of trying to understand, instead of being “astonished” at it.

The first thing to notice about Gordon’s poetry is, that it is almost all in regular and rymed rhythms. There is not a line of blank verse in it. Now, a “fine faculty” for regular and rymed rhythms is by no means a synonym for a “fine lyrical faculty.” Shelley, our greatest master in poetry of pure melody, has a “fine faculty” for regular and rymed rhythms, but has also a fine faculty for irregular rhythms: lines in which the regular rhythm is broken, in order that a more subtle melody may be expressed, are frequent in him. In Mr. Swinburne such lines are rare—he has a fine faculty for regular and rymed rhythms, but his faculty for irregular rhythms is (let us say) less fine. Gordon, who is the disciple of this first side of Mr. Swinburne’s technical talent, who, in his turn, is a disciple of the first side of Shelley’s—Gordon, I say, is in this respect to Mr. Swinburne what Mr. Swinburne is to Shelley.

Mr. Hammersley, one of the few survivors of that peculiar phase of colonial and Victorian feeling which produced the poetry of Gordon, and who “may say he knew him intimately” —tells us[3] how he “was often amused to hear him quote from the poets, and his recitations used to make me laugh outright. One day I said, ‘Hang it, Gordon, you can write good poetry, but you can’t read.’” What was the matter with his “reading,” then? He used to “read” in “a sing-song fashion.” Mr. Woods, too, tells us[4] that “Gordon had an odd way of reciting poetry, and his delivery was monotonous; but,” he adds, “his way of emphasising the beautiful portions of what he recited was charming from its earnestness.” Gordon’s criticism on his own verses was: “They don’t ring so badly after all, old fellow, do they?” He had no faculty for irregular rhythms. He cannot, then, be said to possess a “fine lyrical faculty;” he possessed a fine faculty for regular and rymed rhythms. (As for his rymes, as rymes, they are as a rule excellent, although there is often too little of the “poet or prophet,” as he says, in them, and too much of the “jingler of rymes,” the dealer in “verse-jingle chimes.”) Since, however, this faculty of his is a fine faculty, it must not be described as (in the usual and bad sense of the word) imitative. There are, I think, passages in him that Byron might have written (“To my Sister”), that Lord Tennyson might have written (“The Road to Avernus,” scene x.), that Mr. Swinburne might have written (“A Dedication”), and the latter are frequent. In no other poets, save Wordsworth and the earlier works of Mr. Arnold, do I find precisely this same sort of (shall I say) parallelism of feeling and expression on certain subjects that I do in Mr. Swinburne and Gordon. But it is, I think, very open to question whether Gordon would have grown, as Mr. Arnold has, into a purely distinctive style of his own. Gordon is terribly lacking in variety: to live with a close study of him for several days is one of the most trying of critical tasks. “My rymes,” he asks—

I doubt, I say, whether under any circumstances Gordon would have produced, as Mr. Hammersley thought, “poems worthy to be ranked with some of the masterpieces of the English language.” He had not patience enough, he had not clear-sightedness enough! “A more dare-devil rider,” says Mr. Hammersley, “never crossed a horse.... As a steeplechase rider he was, of course, in the very first rank, and his name is indelibly associated with many of the most famous chases run in Victoria, although in my opinion, and I think in that of many good judges too, he was deficient in what is termed ‘good hands,’ and when it came to a finish was far behind a Mount or a Watson.” (And, considering his shortsightedness, which Mr. Woods designates as “painful,” this is not to be wondered at). It is the same with his poetry. All in his poetry that is good has been done at a rush; the rest is inferior, poor, and sometimes quite worthless. He has little, if any, sense of real artistic workmanship either in whole or in parts: “he is deficient in what is termed ‘good hands.’” Take, for instance, his dramatic lyric, “Ashtaroth.” It is worth reading. There are two beautiful songs in it, “On the Current,” and “Oh! days and years departed.” There are a few fine passages, a few fine dramatic touches, in it, and one splendid outburst of Orion’s (“I hate thee not, thy grievous plight”), but the poem, taken as a whole is, I say, worth reading. Many of the speeches are weak, and some are not poetry at all, but rymed prose, and bad at that. A sustained effort, such as a piece like this requires, was impossible to him. I say nothing of the ludicrous attempt at an adaptation of Faust, Mephistopheles and Margarete, which is the basis of the poem: I merely remark that, judged by its own poor standard of judgment, it is quite a failure. Perhaps some day we shall have a selection from the poet’s work, from which what is worthless will be eliminated, in order that all our attention may be fixed on what is good, and perhaps the selector will have the courage to dismiss all this poem, save some dozen or so of extracts, into the gulf of oblivion or an appendix. Encumbered as Gordon at present is with such an amount of worthless work, there is a danger that much of what is good may perish also.

All his poetry that is good, I say, has been done at a rush. The dramatic touches in it are as frequent as they are fine. Take, for instance, this from the “Rhyme of Joyous Guard.”—Lancelot, old, worn-out, feeling that “there is nothing good for him under the sun but to perish as” (his bright past) “has perished,” is thinking of the close of his career and Arthur’s: of the discovery of his amour with Guinevere, his siege in Joyous Guard, his encounters with “brave Gawain,” whom he virtually slew, and then “the crime of Modred,” and “the king by the knave’s hand stricken”—

This is splendid! And, as I have said, it by no means stands alone. As a set-off against this excellence of his, is the defect of prolixity. Byron had it, but Byron was an unsurpassed improviser, not an artist. Like, too, his technical master of the “Poems and Ballads” when he gets hold of a regular or rymed rhythm that pleases him, Gordon will go on making it “ring,” listening as the “verse-jingle chimes,” till we are all quite weary of it. He is regardless of what Goethe calls “the æsthetic whole.” Indeed, it may justly be said that few, very few, of his poems are “æsthetic wholes” at all, but only passages.

So much, then, for the outward form of his poetry. We have now to consider what is the significance to us of his life and work, of his personality, and of his “criticism of life.”

In the first place, let us begin by stating that Gordon has a personality. Mr. Hammersley tells us how “at times Gordon was the strangest, most weird, mysterious man I ever saw, and I could not help feeling almost afraid of him, and yet there was a fascination about him that made me like to see him.” There was the fascination of his converse. “He was one of the few men I have known in the colonies,” asseverates Mr. Hammersley, “that never made me tire of listening to him.” And there was the fascination of his individuality: “His wild haunting eye,” “a look something like what is termed the evil eye.” (This reminds one of what Mr. Clarke has to say about “the dominant note of Australian scenery: Weird Melancholy.”) Mr. Woods’ whole article bears witness to this personal fascination of Gordon’s. Well, it is the same in his poetry: I mean, that it is the same as Mr. Hammersley means. There is attraction in Gordon. We want to go to see anything that he has had to do with. We seek out his grave and brood over it.[5] He is the Australian fellow to Baudelaire and James Thomson, the last martyrs, let us hope, to our terrible period of transition from the Old World into the New, from Mediævalism into Modernity. There is attraction in Gordon. We should like to have seen and known the original of Laurence Raby, of Maurice, of the man of the “Sea-spray and Smoke-Drift,” and “Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes.” He is an individuality, and a modern and a colonial individuality. He looks at life as it is, not as it is represented.

And, as for the pedants of the Old World, why! (as we know)

Here, then, is the first charm in Gordon, and his work; they are modern, they represent the main-current of the age, not some side-water or back-water, that are perhaps nice enough in their way, but still—side-waters or back-waters, and only side-waters or back-waters.

Gordon and his work are modern, but not wholly modern; he belongs, as I have said, to a period of transition. Like Mary Magdalene, he feels that “they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him.” He has lost the Old, and he has not won the New Faith. He is a poet of the twilight and the dawn. “On this earth so rough,” he says,

and so, we have to suffer! Burns, Byron, Leopardi, Heine, Musset, Baudelaire, Clough, Thomson—greater and lesser, this is true of them all! Their early life is embittered by it, their later life made desperate. “Years back,” says Gordon,

Years back he could utter prayer, years back when he was a child. He cannot utter it now: “For prayer must die since hope is dead.” Now he can only wonder

“I can hardly vouch,” he says, again,

But ah,

We are sorely tired, “we, with our bodies thus weakly, with hearts hard and dangerous.”

Who has expressed the malady of our time better? “Our burdens are heavy, our natures weak,” he says again. We cannot escape from them:

We cannot write a description of a horse-race without letting them come in, without calling our description by a name expressive of them—“Ex fumo dare lucem:”

Enfant perdu: so the dying Heine calls himself. Enfants perdus, that is what they were! The storms of our terrible period of transition raged about them: “they could not wait their passing,” as Arnold says—

“I am slow,” says Gordon,

The idea of killing himself seems to have been with him from almost the first. It was not “bitter” to him: “man in his blindness” taught so; but, to him that

was not without its charm. “When I first heard the sad news,” Mr. Hammersley tells us, “I was not the least surprised. I really expected that what did happen would happen.” We all know Gordon’s poem, “De Te.” The last two verses of it are the best criticism that we have to offer “of him,” “found dead in the heather, near his home, with a bullet from his own rifle in his brain:”

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.

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.

Firstly, there is all the doubt and bewilderment of a period of transition:

“Lord,” prays this woman that loves Laurence Raby,

Meantime,

To what goal? Well,

Let us leave the rest with God—God whose “dealings with us” are unfathomable, God who is “fathomless.” Thus he achieves his resignation. But he never blinds himself to things; he never answers “the painful riddle of the earth” by “stopping up his mouth with a clod” (as Heine says). This world is a

Sometimes there rises in him the

for the brothers, and ah for the sisters, he cannot help. But sometimes, also, he bursts forth into “a song of gladness, a pæan of joyous might.” Both are in him: the wail for the lost Lord and the thanksgiving to God for his “glorious oxygen.” (The capitals are his own.) With the first, we have done: let us look at the second and see what he has to show us of living and loving, of action and women, and then see what he has to show us of life as a whole, “the conclusion of the whole matter.”

I have said elsewhere that there is in Gordon the cheer and charge of our chivalry. There is. He was well worthy of a place in the charge of our cavalry at Waterloo, or Balaclava. There is in him that “magnificence” which now, alas, as the Frenchman truly said, “is not war.” These men “glory in daring that dies or prevails.” And when, as at Balaclava, they die, their poet exclaims (in capitals)—

What exclamations of rapture such a sight draws from him!

Here is a race:—

I know no poetry that describes the rush of horsemen quite as Gordon does. Take this description of the Balaclava charge from his “Lay of the Last Charger.”

Lord Tennyson has watched his charge through Mr. Russell’s field-glass, and we follow his view of it, but Gordon has ridden it and takes us with him. Old and miserable, the friend of the man who had ridden this “Last Charger,” offers up the same prayer as the man who had “visioned it in the smoke:”

for—

What I find so admirable in Gordon, and in almost all his characters is, that they are men, I mean men as opposed to dreamers or students. His Lancelot is Lancelot, the knight who has lived and loved largely. Tennyson’s is not. I must confess that I really think that “The Rhyme of Joyous Guard” is worth all the other “Idylls of the King,” save “Lancelot and Elaine,” and “The Passing of Arthur,” put together. I mean that I really think it has more real deep true significance. Take this conclusion, the last prayer of Lancelot, old and passed from the world:

This is splendid! His men, I say, are men, men such as we find in Byron. Orion (Satan) says that

The lover in “No Name,” thinking of meeting “the slayer of the soul” he loved, says:

a remark in the strain of Heathcliff. Most of his lovers love passionately and sensuously, and only passionately and sensuously: The poet “revels in the rosy whiteness of that golden-headed girl:” if one thing is harder to forgive to a successful rival than another it is that

his chief regret over a dear dead girl is

and, when he leaves his love for ever, he is in anguish at the thought that

a remark in the more morbid strain of Keats to Fanny Brawne.

When Lancelot first kisses Guinevere, he, the mighty knight, “well nigh swoons.” Love, with Gordon’s lovers, “consumes their hearts with a fiery drought.” “Laurence,” says Estelle to her lover,

and the man of “Britomarte” is at hand with the appropriate criticism that

But we must not think that all Gordon’s lovers love in this way, any more than that all his men merely charge and cheer. The battle is over.

This is beautiful, and no less beautiful is the tenderness of his love.

Nor is it rare to find passages in him

For “dark and true and tender is the north” with all its storm and stress.

Poor “sick stock-rider” and poet, with his wild eyes and wild words, and that “shyness and reserve which kept him locked up, as it were, in himself!” Our proud, passionate heart “out-wore its breast” as “the sword outwears its sheath,” and so we “took our rest,” but not before we had won our resignation and known, or almost known, the truth, even as Empedocles did, and yet died because “he was come too late”—or too soon—

Gordon won his resignation, and knew, or almost knew, the truth. The “criticism of life” that we find in the first two scenes of “The Road to Avernus” is almost ripe: pessimistic, it is true, but almost ripe. Laurence has lost his love, (and Laurence, let us remember, is the lover that “kisses too hard!”) Does he despair in the strain of “Rolla,” or “bluster,” and take refuge in the breast of “the wondrous mother age,” and the “vision of the world” in the strain of the man of “Locksley Hall?” No, he has lost his love, and the loss is bitter, but

“As it was so,” he says again,

There is the feeling here of a man who is striving to see things as they are. He will not blind himself to things: he will not answer “the painful riddle of the earth” by “stopping up his mouth with a clod.” He will have true faith, or no faith. Fate rules us, he sees:

And yet life, life as life, independent of living and loving, of activity and women, is not altogether hopeless:

He never gets any farther than this. He sees, or almost sees, truth, as Moses saw Canaan, and then he fails. He has not had patience enough, not clear-sightedness enough! He cannot enter the Promised Land. “In defiance of pain and terror he has pressed resolutely across the howling deserts of Infidelity;” but he has not the strength left to do more than reach “the new, firm lands of Faith beyond.” He has loved life, living and loving, activity and women, and he has not feared to look into the reality of things, man and Nature and God, their sunshine and their shadow, their life and their death, and there is no hesitation in his message to us—“Onward! Onward!”—But that is all. He knows nothing of how we are to go onward, or to where. He has had enough to do to get himself as far as he has got, to achieve what he has achieved. His life and work are a failure. We cannot for a moment think of calling him a great poet: his claim on our interest as a poet is that he is one of the poets, one of the martyrs, of our terrible period of transition, and that in him is to be found “something very like the beginnings of a national school of Australian poetry.” Of this second aspect of him—of how he is representative of what I have taken to be the distinctive marks of this Australian, this Melbourne civilisation, its general sense of movement, of progress, of conscious power: of this aspect of him I have spoken elsewhere, too, and there seems no need to do more here than to repeat the assertion. But, for my part, I cannot lay the stress on either this aspect of him, or the other which makes him “the poet of Australian scenery,” that I do on the first aspect of him. Gordon’s life and work are a failure, but they are a failure with enough redeeming points to raise them from local, or even colonial, into general interest. As our first and enthusiastic critic puts it: “he deserves to be ranked with the genuine poets of his generation,” and I feel sure that he ultimately will be. For he is representative not only of Australian, but of modern feeling: he tells not only of Australia from the fifties to the seventies, but of our terrible period of transition from the Old World into the New, from Mediævalism into Modernity.

Poor “sick stock-rider” and poet, with his wild eyes and wild words—Our proud, passionate heart “outwore its breast,” as “the sword outwears its sheath,” and so we “took our rest.” “Sleep!” says Mr. Swinburne, in the most beautiful and satisfactory of his poems, “Ave atque Vale,” the lament over another of the martyrs—the author of “Les Fleurs du Mal:”—

January, 1885.