original effort, and individual style among the writers of Australia.
The continent should be well able to maintain two or three magazines
of its own. One has only to think of the talent that is running to
waste. In a majority of the Sydney and Melbourne daily papers, brains
are allowed to show themselves, and are occasionally encouraged. If any
one takes the trouble to read, critically and carefully, six successive
issues of one of these big “dailies,” he will find much that is
calculated to surprise him. If he is not surprised, it is only because
he has been long accustomed to the menu. A great deal of skill in the
use of sentences, some vivid delineations of men and places, much
artistic discernment, undoubted eye for effect, literary or dramatic
criticism of a bright and illuminative character--all these, and more,
can be found now and then in the columns of the metropolitan press.
Talent is going to waste for the reason that the authors are usually
unrecognised, the work is underpaid, the public take all for granted,
and the writers, when their brilliancy begins to wane, are expected to
remove themselves and their fading fortunes to another arena. There
_should be_ Australian magazines strong enough and popular enough to
win for the man--the really able man--who grinds out his soul on a
morning or evening paper at least an Australian recognition. There
should be, but there are not. The reason, if sought for, is to be
found in the deep-rooted, the seemingly ineradicable habit of obtaining
magazines, along with the latest book, the latest melodrama, the most
up-to-date hat, and the newest thing in waistcoats, from London or
Paris, and from nowhere else.
“Steele Rudd’s” magazine can claim the great merit, the unusual
distinction, of standing on its own feet. Whatever else it does, or
does not do, it gets its materials from within the continent. When
it deals in new ideas--a somewhat rare occurrence for a monthly
magazine--the ideas can be set down as its own. It finds no trouble in
filling up space. The old friends are there, but they dance to slightly
different tunes. Here and there a costume has been altered, here and
there is a fresh streak of colour, here and there is a new dab of
paint. There is nothing _décolleté_ about any of the literary figures,
or about those supplied by writers in this magazine. All are decent
and proper on the moral side. The one stipulation is that they must
be Australian. How they grin and twist and tumble, these subsidiary
performers whom the “Selection” novel has called into existence!
Here is the contributor who is to speak a piece about art and the
Bohemian quarter--save the mark!--of Sydney and Melbourne. Here is our
amusing friend of the red page. Here is our local story writer, with
his rather tragical humour, and his rather humorous tragedy. Here is
our minor poet, tuning his lyre and tearing his hair. And here is the
editor himself, smiling genially, conscious of his triumph, but modest,
inflexibly modest, the while. They are all writers for “Steele Rudd’s”
magazine. The trail of “Steele Rudd” is over them all.
What is to be thought of this latest development? Is there scope for it
in Australia? Will it be permanent? Or is the author giving us a little
more than we originally bargained for? Does he recollect the parallel
case of Tithonus:--
I asked thee: Give me immortality;
And thou didst grant mine asking with a smile,
Like a rich man who cares not how he gives.
The analogy is obvious. We, the suppliant public, are Tithonus; Mr
“Rudd,” the person supplicated, is Aurora. We asked him to give us more
of his “Selection” literature, and he, the rich man mentally, granted
our request--granted it with a smile. But, again like Tithonus, we
scarcely realised what we were asking for, or how much we were likely
to get. For Mr “Rudd” _himself_ we have always a welcome, and always
some pieces of silver. But for a whole school of “Rudds”--a recurring
atmosphere of “Rudds”--a monthly and ever present edition of Joe and
Sandy and the rest--we were not entirely prepared. The significant
circumstance is that writers in Mr “Rudd’s” magazine are beginning to
imitate Mr “Rudd.” When a young lady contributor is found beginning a
sketch of a place out back with monosyllabic question and monosyllabic
answer--when “Mick” and “Sam” and “the girls” are once more brought
forward--it is to be apprehended that the influence of the master is
at work, and that others are attempting a task which can be _safely_
entrusted only to one.
The story of the “Selection novel” as popularised in this country
teaches a useful, if rather obvious, moral. In any world, literate or
illiterate, there is nothing succeeds like success. There is no fixed
law or principle about these matters. There is no critic whose opinion
is worth anything when weighed against the opinion of any other critic.
“What am I, the dreamer, but a dream?” writes Victor Daley, _à propos_
of the riddle of existence. How can we, the lookers on at the game,
know what the verdict of the public will be, or whether thumbs will be
turned up or down? One man has a fondness for the poetry of Shelley,
and another prefers the prose of Mr Lorimer; one man has a passion for
_Lohengrin_, another would rather have three hours of _The Country
Girl_. And if the majority prefer it, if it gives them more genuine
pleasure, _The Country Girl_ is the better work of the two, whatever
some opinionated critic may say to the contrary. It is useless to argue
about opinions. There is only one recognised criterion, and that is
success. There is only one way of measuring success, and that is by the
monetary standard. When cast into the scales, the third, and in some
respects the weakest of “Steele Rudd’s” books, weighs out at £500. And
this for an Australian literary man is the most conspicuous success yet
achieved.
XI
THREE WRITERS OF VERSE
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music, too.
Yes, we have our own music: and it is not all thin in quality, nor is
it all played upon a single string. A rare value, a special distinction
attach to the achievements in verse of Victor Daley, who is one of the
latest to join the great company of poets in the shades. He did his
work for a people who were somewhat indifferent and who, when they
appreciated, showed their appreciation in no very practical way. And
now, when he is
Far too far for words or wings to follow,
Far too far off for thought or any prayer,
these fitfully poetical, but wholly good-hearted people of the
continent in which he lived are inclined to regret him. It is a regret
that does them credit, though it can be tempered with some reflections
of a more satisfying kind. For Daley was honoured probably as much
as--perhaps more than--most poets are by their contemporaries. It
is possible to believe that in the long twilight which preceded his
earthly eclipse, he believed that he had given lasting shape and form
to some of the more beautiful, more intangible things of life, and
found sufficient consolation in the belief. There is not a great deal
to be said about the life history of Victor Daley. Some one of those
who rhymed with him, drank with him, joked with him, or sat up all
night quoting verses with him may yet write his biography. But it will
not be a startling or an eventful document. He was of Irish parentage
and came to Australia--unless a statement made by one of his most
intimate friends is erroneous--when nearly out of his teens. He drifted
into journalism, as many men of restless temperament and uncommercial
principles do. He wrote a great deal both in prose and verse for
Melbourne papers, for Sydney papers, and for up-country papers in New
South Wales. He married early, and children grew up round him. When he
died in Sydney towards the end of December 1905, he was but forty-seven
years of age. The lingering illness that preceded his death left him in
straightened circumstances; so straightened, in fact, that his friends
thought less, at the finish, of his chances of immortality than of the
prospects of keeping a roof over his and his children’s heads.
His most important publication was the volume _At Dawn and Dusk_, which
appeared about eight years before his death. It consisted for the most
part of occasional pieces, reprinted from various papers. It brought
the author a certain amount of intelligent and appreciative criticism,
and a slight--but only a slight--monetary reward. Thereafter he went
on his way; the fitful and uncertain way of one whom circumstances had
forced into journalism, but whom temperament had made a poet. The book
mentioned is his permanent record.
There are certain moods that are not easily expressed in the forms
of common speech; that are not easily expressed at all. There are
occasions when the average man wishes--it may be only for an instant
or two, but he wishes--that he had some better medium of thought
transference than the ordinary prose of ordinary use. For those few
moments he could desire that the gods had made him poetical, even
if for the remainder of his life he would prefer that they made him
anything else. Then, it may be, there comes beating across his brain
the recollection of a similar mood interpreted adequately and finely by
another. He is grateful for the chance of appropriating and taking to
himself that which he did not individually create.
One of these less prosaic, less frequent moods is that of sentimental
regret. Every one knows it, every one has been through it. When looked
back upon, it is an experience to be valued. It is always a relief
from the harder outlines of the present. It need have no bitterness
and scarcely a tinge of remorse. This mood, or the indulgence in it,
is the tribute the man of sensitive mind pays to his better nature, to
the woman he might have loved, to the ideal he might have attained.
It is a mood that the million recognise, but that only the one in
a million--that is to say, the genuine poet--should be allowed to
express. Another mood, and a more impersonal one, is that which implies
discontent with the present surroundings, and longing for more distant
fields, for ampler opportunities, for less prosaic realities. The
discontent may be merely petulant or it may have in it something of the
nature of the Divine. All depends on the temperament of the individual.
Yet another mood, and a still more pronounced and easily recognised
one, is that of erotic or of semi-sensual desire. In its cruder and
more direct form it is the mood that finds voice in the Shakespearian
poem of _Venus and Adonis_; in its etherealised essence it is the mood
of Shelley in the poem addressed to Emilia Viviani.
The first of these moods--the half-regretful, half-sentimental and
wholly idealistic one--is finely interpreted by Daley in the verses
entitled _Years Ago_. He voices a passion that is no longer a passion,
but rather a figure of remembrance, from which the poetic temperament
can draw Memnon music. The woman of these verses is not described, but
suggested. There is no need to describe her. The reader must build
her up out of his own experiences. She must always be looked at from
a distance, and must always live in the mind of the man for whom the
intenser passion of desire has become the soft glow of remembrance.
Daley shows her silhouetted against the sky-line at the moment when his
ship, the inevitable ship of Destiny, goes sailing:
Across the seas in the years agone;
And seaward set were the eyes unquailing,
And landward looking the faces wan.
The poem is a very fine one. It is musical, rhythmical, dreamily
sensuous, and never crudely realistic. The workmanship is even, and the
high level reached in the first verse is maintained to the end. The
words and the treatment create their own sentiment, and always suggest
more than they say.
There is another mood in which Daley has been equally successful--the
mood of picturesque romance. This is the frame of mind in which he
sails “into the sunset’s glow.” Here, also, he strikes a note that
awakens a universal echo. Every man has wanted, at some time or
another, to sail into the sunset, understanding by that word the whole
untrodden, unattainable, indefinable, but brilliantly lighted and
always glowing region that lies beyond the boundaries of the place in
which he follows out the round of his allotted tasks. It is only on the
wings of imagination that one ever arrives within sight of this region.
And the wings themselves must be of a certain texture, or they will
melt more quickly than did those of Icarus. There are only one or two
people who can supply materials calculated to take the voyager there.
Victor Daley is one of these. He has himself explained the necessary
equipment:--
Our ship shall be of sandal built,
Like ships in old-world tales,
Carven with cunning art, and gilt,
And winged with scented sails
Of silver silk, whereon the red
Great gladioli burn;
A rainbow flag at her masthead,
A rose flag at her stern....
And perching on the point above,
Wherefrom the pennon blows,
The figure of a flying dove,
And in her beak a rose.
It is an auspicious, even a brilliant commencement. Dull and ungrateful
must be the mind or temperament that refuses to acknowledge either the
skill of the builder, or the perfection of the craft.
A third phase of Daley’s is one common to all poets, whether good,
bad, or indifferent. Its impression is conveyed in what, for want of a
more exact term, is called love poetry. It is not composed either of
sentimental regrets or of sunset fantasies. It deals with the present
and associates itself with one object--a living one. A certain class of
writer conveys in this form of poetry a direct appeal to the senses.
Daley rarely does so. He is always imaginative rather than realistic.
He can play on more than one emotional string; but it is never so
much the woman herself as the memory and the thought of her that he
appears to caress. In the verses entitled _At the Opera_, which recall
Browning’s _A Pretty Woman_, he puts his poetic creed into a sentence.
Others may pluck the rose and watch it fall and die; “but I--
Love it so well, I leave it free.”
And even in _Blanchelys_, warmly tinted as it is, he suggests in the
opening four lines an atmosphere that is far more idealistic than it is
intense or burning:--
With little hands all filled with bloom,
The rose tree wakes from her long trance,
And from my heart, as from a tomb,
Steals forth the ghost of dead romance.
It stands to the author’s credit that his touch never vulgarises. He
never drags his objective to a lower level; when his theme is woman he
raises her to his own level, or to the one that he has created for her.
Victor Daley has written on a variety of subjects, and some of his
work is in a lightly humorous and descriptive vein. His signal merit
as an Australian writer is that he is not wedded to the soil. He is
not dependent on the gum tree or the wattle, or the dusty plain. His
best work is cosmopolitan in character and tone. It is difficult to see
how the foremost place among local writers of imaginative literature
can be denied to the man whose name is appended to the collection of
verses _At Dawn and Dusk_. A strictly conscientious critic might find
it incumbent upon him to add that while Daley has done some things
well, he has done other things not so well. He might begin with a major
premise to the effect that the poet was conspicuous for some gifts,
and add as a minor premise, that he was not so conspicuous for others;
and the syllogism might be completed by a pronouncement to the effect
that when the indifferent work had been weighed against the good work,
the latter much preponderated. Sometimes it seems as though there were
a clog on Victor Daley in his flight towards the empyrean. He wants
something of the lyric quality, not merely of a Shelley or a Swinburne,
but of such a musical rhymester as Will Ogilvie. The man who wrote
_Blanchelys_ is in the same family as Cassius; he thinks too much. The
idea is sometimes better than its setting. Imagination, atmosphere,
creative power, selection, beauty of thought, beauty of phrase---he
has all these. But that resistless melody which flows like water, and
chimes like a bell, is only attained by him now and then. It is only
occasionally that harmony of thought and expression are complete. There
is no doubt that Daley lacks much of the rousing, resonant quality
that always appeals so strangely to unpoetical people; that is to say,
to the majority of people in most countries under the sun. Thus a few
still pass him in the race for recognition; there was scarce one in his
lifetime that did not pass him in the pursuit of tangible reward.
Yet it should not matter a great deal to Victor Daley, living or dead.
He was never a great popular success. He never aspired to be a great
social success. His personal gifts and graces were reserved for the
comparatively few. The average individual, who deals in groceries, or
who has laid hands on mining shares, could have bought and sold him
many times, even in his most prosperous days. There are a large number
of prosperous tradesmen in the country who could, metaphorically, have
driven over him--who would certainly have done so literally, unless
he had scrambled out of the way. He dealt in brains, in sentiment,
in imagination, in the beauty of life and the romance of life. He
was not outwardly successful, because that kind of success belongs
principally to the coarse-grained men, to the rough-fibred men, to the
unimaginative and the uncreative or the essentially lucky man of the
world. But it does not greatly matter. He has his audience, and it is
a growing one. It is the only kind of audience whose good opinion is
really desirable. It will remember him and cherish him in that region
of fancy to which all good poets make their way hereafter--a region
in which tradesmen cease from troubling and self-made merchants never
intrude.
* * * * *
It may be putting a stress on the word to call Henry Lawson a poet;
but a writer of many verses, some of them very good ones, he certainly
is. He is a prominent figure in Australian literature, or what passes
for Australian literature. He covers a great deal of ground; he is
always suggestive of one country, and that country Australia; he has a
great deal of talent; he is--or was--very restless and ambitious; he
is extremely versatile; and after ten or twelve years’ work he finds
himself still pursuing editors to their sanctum, and still wondering
where the latest manuscript is likely to find a resting-place. _Tantæ
molis erat_--to win fame by writing prose or verse in Australia.
And yet Lawson, if he has won nothing else, has won a very considerable
measure of local fame. Of the five million people in Australasia, it is
only the very uneducated and very unintelligent who are not acquainted
at least with his name. He is better known than Victor Daley, only
less known than Gordon and Kendall. This, at any rate, is something.
The pity of it is that those who know what he has done are aware also
of what he has failed to do, or of what the people he wrote for would
not let him do; of the manner in which he has drifted or been driven
from pillar to post; of his peregrinations throughout this continent,
through New Zealand, throughout England, and back again; of his
inability to lay up for himself treasure upon earth; of his frequent
discouragements following upon his fitful successes; of his shaken
firmness of purpose and of mind. The liking and admiration felt for
him are tinged with the sympathy that one feels for a man who has been
cheated by destiny of the stakes he fairly played for, and should have
fairly won.
Daley’s genius is essentially cosmopolitan; Lawson’s temper and
colouring are always Australian. Therein lies the main difference
between them. Lawson attempted at the outset an almost impossible task.
He aspired to make both a living and a name for himself as a literary
man. It was a noble aspiration, but in the circumstances quixotic. What
he needed, what he should have been given, was some professional, or
even some mechanical training that would have brought him in an income,
while his audience and his reputation were growing. Some one ought to
have taught him shorthand, or got him into the Civil Service, or made
him a lawyer’s clerk, or instructed him in the art of making bricks, or
driving cabs--anything to save him from drifting round the continent
with unpublished manuscripts in his pocket. Some one should have done
this for him; but who? His father he never really knew. His mother, a
large-hearted, large-minded woman, happened to be proud of her son. He
grew up without a professional training, but with a rich inheritance of
ideas.
He has offered himself to the reading public of Australia; has, in
fact, thrown himself upon it. He has not been rejected; but he has
learned that the path of the literary free-lance is one of the rockiest
and most discouraging that ever presented itself to a man cursed with
a hatred of routine, and an ability to write. The recognition that he
has won has never had an adequate cash value. He acknowledges the fact
with much candour and some bitterness. But he has taken the good with
the evil. He has never lost heart. He is not unmindful of his author’s
prestige, and is not lost to its compensations. Yet he writes to his
son:--
You are a child of field and flood,
But with the gipsy strains,
A strong Norwegian sailor’s blood
Is running through your veins.
Be true, and slander never stings;
Be straight, and all may frown--
You’ll have the strength to grapple things
That dragged your father down.
Be generous, and still do good,
And banish while you live
The spectre of ingratitude
That haunts the ones who give.
But if the crisis comes at length
That your fate might be marred,
Strike hard, my son, with all your strength,
For your own self’s sake, strike hard!
Lawson himself has struck often and dexterously, but with a somewhat
uncertain aim, a wavering objective. He realises now that success is
won only by a striking hard and relentlessly at the one thing in front
of you; by striking also at the heads of all who happen to get in the
way.
In estimating the published work of this bard of the bush and the open
plain, it is desirable to allow something for the special circumstances
that have both made and hampered him. He has had to write for his
living; and he has written too much. His typical and humorous verses
were never out of place in the columns of a newspaper, but their
careful collection and subsequent reproduction in book form were not
necessarily a service to the memory of the author. Lawson would admit
quite candidly that they were written, many of them, to fill up space
and to earn a guinea. They were not intended as pure literature; and if
regarded in that light may be the cause of an injustice to the author.
To get to what is worth preserving it is necessary to rummage about
among a mass of what belongs only to the moment.
There is scarcely a type, or a class, or a feature in the life of his
continent about which he has not rhymed and written. The station-hand,
the rouse-about, the shearer, the bullock-driver, the jackaroo, the
up-country selector, the swagman, the drover, the dead-beat--he has
made verses and extracted humour out of all of these, and out of many
more of the same kind. He has shown great ingenuity, great powers of
observation, wide-reaching sympathy, and a great deal of very clever
phrasing in this class of work. The result may not be poetry, but
it forms in the aggregate a rare and valuable picture of a mode of
life and of a people who are still a people apart from the rest of
the world. No one has described them quite so faithfully as Lawson
has done. Some of these verses, for example those entitled _When the
Ladies come to the Shearing Shed_, will stand reprinting and, for the
purposes of the comic reciter, committing to memory.