Australian Writers Part 6

'My parents bid me cross the flood, My kindred frowned at me; They say I have belied my blood, And stained my pedigree.

But I must turn from those who chide, And laugh at those who frown; I cannot quench my stubborn pride, Or keep my spirits down.

'I once had talents fit to win Success in life's career; And if I chose a part of sin, My choice has cost me dear.

But those who brand me with disgrace, Will scarcely dare to say They spoke the taunt before my face And went unscathed away.'

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 s.h.i.+rk 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 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.

A curious, pathetic figure he makes at this time. He broke in horses during the day, and read the cla.s.sic 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 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 cla.s.s, took no advantage of it. That the squatters did not themselves recognise the worth of one so una.s.sertive 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 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 pa.s.sages 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 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 pa.s.sing 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 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 das.h.i.+ng horsemans.h.i.+p, 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 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."'

For a brief period after the receipt of his father's legacy Gordon looked towards his future with some interest and confidence. He spoke of a proposal to undertake regular journalistic work at Melbourne, and to make an attempt at writing novels. It was at this time also that he foresaw that he would make a name as a poet. The people of Mount Gambier, finding him presently settled as the owner of a small estate in the district, made him their representative in the Legislative a.s.sembly of South Australia. In this new character he seems to have achieved only a reputation for drawing humorous sketches. Having delivered a few speeches highly embellished with cla.s.sical allusions which failed to make any impression upon the plain business men of the House, he subsided, and was afterwards seldom heard. And when his seat became vacant in due course, he did not seek re-election. He had been unable to take his Parliamentary experience seriously. He is said to have always looked back upon it as something of a joke.

And now, with a revival of his former attachment to the excitements and uncertainties of the turf, begin a series of misfortunes which pursued him until his death. His property, mismanaged and neglected, had to be sold, and he set out a poor man once more for the adjoining colony of Victoria. Here, while suffering ill-health and poverty--starving in his own proud way--after failing in a small business which he had undertaken, Gordon learned that he would probably come into possession of the barony of Esselmont in Scotland, then producing an income of about two thousand pounds a year. But on further inquiry it was found that his t.i.tle to the estate ceased with the abolition of the entail under the Entail Amendment Act of 1848. The excitement of his ill-fortune and the effects of a recent wound on the head combined to unhinge his mind, and in June, 1870, at the age of thirty-seven he ended his life by shooting himself at Brighton, near Melbourne. In comparing the impressions of Gordon's disposition given by his friends, it is curious to note that among the few things in which they agree is an absence of surprise at his suicide.

It would not be difficult to imagine a more representative poet in the provincial sense than Gordon. His description of the colonies as

'Lands where bright blossoms are scentless, And songless bright birds,'

would be strangely misleading were it not contradicted by other lines from the same hand, showing a delicate appreciation of the rugged features of Australian scenery. But he sees them only in pa.s.sing, or as a symbol of something he is pondering, or as a contrast to what he has left behind 'on far English ground.' No sight or sound of Australian Nature is a sole subject of any of his poems. His 'Whispering in the Wattle Boughs' does not express the voices of the forest, but the echoes of a sad youth, the yearnings of an exile; his 'Song of Autumn' is not a song of autumn, but a forecast of his own death--a forecast that was fulfilled. If he ever felt any enthusiasm for the future nationhood of Australia, he did not express it. And such few native legends as there were, he left to other pens.

In all of his best poems, there is some central human interest, something that tells for courage, honour, manly resignation. When a story does not come readily to his hand in the new world, he seeks one in the old. He fondly turns to the s.p.a.cious days of the old knighthood, when men drank and loved deeply, when they were ready to put happiness or life itself upon a single hazard. The subjects that Gordon best liked were short dramatic romances, which he found it easier to evolve from literature than from the life and history of his adopted country. Beyond the compositions upon the national sport of horse-racing, the only noteworthy Australian subjects in his three slender volumes are 'The Sick Stockrider's Review of the Excitements and Pleasures of a Careless Bush Life, and his Pathetic Self-satisfaction'; 'The Story of a s.h.i.+pwreck'; 'Wolf and Hound,' which describes a duel between the hunted-down bushranger and a trooper; and some verses on the death of the explorer Burke. 'Ashtaroth,' an elaborate attempt at a sustained dramatic lyric in the manner of Goethe's 'Faust' and 'Manfred,' fills one of the three volumes, and among shorter pieces in the other two are more than a dozen suggested by the poet's reading, by his recollections of English life, and, in a notable instance, by one of the most memorable of modern European wars.

In a dedication prefixed to the _Bush Ballads_, Gordon suggests some of the local sources of his inspiration. He obviously overstates his obligations to the country. Some of the best of the poems in this, the most characteristic collection of his work, have no a.s.sociation with it whatever. 'The Sick Stockrider,' 'From the Wreck,' and 'Wolf and Hound'

are colonial experiences, finely described. But most of the remaining poems, while they owe something to Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne, are not in any sense Australian.

'In the Spring, when the wattle gold trembles 'Twixt shadow and s.h.i.+ne, When each dew-laden air resembles A long draught of wine, When the skyline's blue burnished resistance Makes deeper the dreamiest distance, Some songs in all hearts have existence: Such songs have been mine.'

But where, save in the retrospect of 'The Sick Stockrider' and a verse or two of 'From the Wreck,' shall we find any of the air of the lovely, transient Australian spring? It is rather absurd to place with _Bush Ballads_ the 'Rhyme of Joyous Garde,' a recital of the old tragedy of Arthur and Launcelot; the story of seventeenth-century siege and gallantry in the 'Romance of Britomarte'; the dramatic scenes from the 'Road to Avernus;' 'The Friends' (a translation from the French); and the psychological musings of 'De Te' and 'Doubtful Dreams.'

And the galloping rhymes? Yes, there is indeed one galloping rhyme--'How we beat the Favourite'--with a ring and a rush, a spirit and swiftness of colour, not approached by the best verse of Egerton Warburton or Whyte-Melville. Especially vivid and terse is the description of the latter part of the race, where the favourite (The Clown) overtakes Iseult, the mare leading in the run home.

'She rose when I hit her. I saw the stream glitter, A wide scarlet nostril flashed close to my knee; Between sky and water The Clown came and caught her; The s.p.a.ce that he cleared was a caution to see.

'And forcing the running, discarding all cunning, A length to the front went the rider in green; A long strip of stubble, and then the big double, Two stiff flights of rails with a quickset between.

'She raced at the rasper, I felt my knees grasp her, I found my hands give to the strain on the bit; She rose when The Clown did--our silks as we bounded Brushed lightly, our stirrups clashed loud as we lit.

'A rise steeply sloping, a fence with stone coping, The last--we diverged round the base of the hill; His path was the nearer, his leap was the clearer, I flogged up the straight, and he led sitting still.

'She came to his quarter, and on still I brought her, And up to his girth, to his breast-plate she drew; A short prayer from Neville just reached me, "The Devil!"

He muttered--lock'd level the hurdles we flew.'

After a glance at the crowd where, as seen by the rider, all 'figures are blended and features are blurred'--

'On still past the gateway she strains in the straight way, Still struggles, "The Clown by a short neck at most!"

He swerves, the green scourges, the stand rocks and surges, And flashes, and verges, and flits the white post.

'Aye! so ends the tussle--I knew the tan muzzle Was first, though the ring men were yelling "Dead Heat!"

A nose I could swear by, but Clarke said "The mare by A short head." And that's how the favourite was beat.'

It was by this piece, according to Marcus Clarke, that the poet's early reputation was made. 'Intensely nervous, and feeling much of that shame at the exercise of the higher intelligence which besets those who are known to be renowned in field sports, Gordon produced his poems shyly, scribbled them on sc.r.a.ps of paper, and sent them anonymously to magazines. It was not until he discovered one morning that everybody knew a couplet or two of "How we beat the Favourite" that he consented to forego his anonymity and appear in the unsuspected character of a verse-maker.' Even in this picture of the excitements of the turf, there is nothing that would not be as true of Epsom or Ascot as of Randwick or Flemington. Yet, it _is_ Australian in the sense that it expresses the one taste which, of all those inherited by the people from their British ancestors, seems never likely to be lost (as it was by the American colonists)--which, on the contrary, has gained in ardour in the new land. Gordon was a p.r.o.nounced believer in the efficacy of field sports as a means of maintaining the nerve and hardihood of the race. In one of his minor pieces he vigorously affirms that

'If once we efface the joys of the chase From the land, and out-root the Stud, Good-bye to the Anglo-Saxon Race, Farewell to the Norman Blood.'

With him the fearless huntsman makes the fearless soldier. Both are to be cultivated and admired, and when the latter dies needlessly, as at Balaclava, we are to be none the less proud of him,

'As a type of our chivalry.'

Of the longer poems, the two best in artistic quality are 'The Rhyme of Joyous Garde' and 'The Sick Stockrider.' They afford a complete contrast in subject, tone and treatment. The old Arthurian story is the finer and more finished. There is a n.o.bility in its expression not elsewhere equalled by the author. But the other poem is more direct and simple in its pathos, more easily understood. It tells something of familiar experience in language irresistibly touching and musical. It would be interesting and a favourite if only through the obvious fact that it describes in part some of Gordon's own early life.

''Twas merry in the glowing morn, among the gleaming gra.s.s To wander as we've wandered many a mile, And blow the cool tobacco cloud, and watch the white wreaths pa.s.s, Sitting loosely in the saddle all the while.

'Twas merry 'mid the backwoods, when we spied the station roofs, To wheel the wild-scrub cattle at the yard, With a running fire of stockwhips and a fiery run of hoofs; Oh! the hardest day was never then too hard.

'Aye! we had a glorious gallop after Starlight and his gang, When they bolted from Sylvester's on the flat; How the sun-dried reed-beds crackled, how the flint-strewn ranges rang To the strokes of Mountaineer and Acrobat!

Hard behind them in the timber, harder still across the heath, Close beside them through the ti-tree scrub we dashed; And the golden-tinted fern-leaves, how they rustled underneath!

And the honeysuckle osiers, how they crashed!'

'The Rhyme of Joyous Garde' loses in appreciation by a.s.suming familiarity on the part of the reader with all the details of the story.

It is too allusive. It is a description more of Launcelot's remorse than of the crime which occasions it. As to the other cla.s.sic themes, they probably avail as little to the reputation of the author as did the elegant quotations which he inflicted upon the South Australian legislators. 'He talked of the Danai, whilst they were vastly more interested in the land valuators.'

Gordon's work was introduced to the English public by an article in _Temple Bar_ in 1884, and in 1888 a short memoir of him, ent.i.tled _The Laureate of the Centaurs_ (now out of print), was published. Since then his poems have become known throughout the English-speaking world. Is this because he is called an Australian poet--because people wish to learn something of Australian life from his pages? Do English readers ever ask for the poems of Harpur, or Henry Kendall, or Brunton Stephens?

No; Gordon's poems are admired for the human interest in them; for what they tell of tastes and personal qualities dear to the pleasure-loving and fighting Briton in whatever land he may be. It is the sort of admiration that finds fit expression when an English officer and artist makes a present to the publishers of a spirited and valuable set of drawings to ill.u.s.trate the poem of the Balaclava Charge. No other Australian poet has yet found entrance to the great popular libraries of England. Kendall, who almost deserves to be called the Australian Sh.e.l.ley, tells more of Nature in one of his graceful pages than can be found in a volume of his contemporary. But his thoughts are too remote from the common interests of life; and of his own character he has recorded only what is sad and painful. For the rest, his brief history seems to prove that scarce any service may be less noticed or thanked in Australia than the describing of its natural beauties or the writing of its national odes.

Gordon has more than once been misrepresented with respect to his religious views. He has been called an agnostic, an atheist, even a pagan. Pa.s.sages in nearly a score of his poems must be read and compared before an opinion can properly be given on the point. That he was a doubter, and to some extent a fatalist, appears certain; but there is nothing to support the charge of atheism. He shows a very clear conception of the Christian ideas respecting right and wrong, and of the Divine mercy, but hesitates to accept any theories of punishment in a future state. His general att.i.tude is one of hope, and of desire to believe. He often thinks--too often--of the transiency of life, and of the question to be solved 'beyond the dark beneath the dust.' But there is no despair. And meanwhile his practical creed is

'Question not, but live and labour Till yon goal be won, Helping every feeble neighbour, Seeking help from none.

Life is mostly froth and bubble, Two things stand like stone-- Kindness in another's trouble, Courage in your own.'

It conveys at once the highest and truest of the many views he has given of his own character. Generous to others, he was too seldom just to himself. It was well there remained among the friends he left behind a few who knew him for what he was, and who were unwilling that qualities often clouded during his life by an unhappy temperament should be undervalued or forgotten. Kendall's 'In Memoriam' is a worthy tribute, and finely summarizes the general impression of Gordon which one obtains from his verse:

'The bard, the scholar, and the man who lived That frank, that open-hearted life which keeps The splendid fire of English chivalry From dying out; the one who never wronged A fellow-man; the faithful friend who judged The many anxious to be loved of him By what he saw, and not by what he heard, As lesser spirits do; the brave great soul That never told a lie, or turned aside To fly from danger; he, I say, was one Of that bright company this sin-stained world Can ill afford to lose.'