true Englishman, and it is the soldier and the Englishman in him far
more than the Australian that the people of his adopted country,
consciously or unconsciously, admire. It is yet difficult to consider
his work as a writer apart from his personality. And it is natural that
this should be so in the case of a man whose career was itself a
romance, who led as strange a double life as ever poet lived, and who,
through all, retained the marked essentials of a gentleman.
In his character as a sportsman and a rider there is an element of the
ideal which largely helps to commend him to the majority of Australians.
Though his liking for horses and the turf became a destroying passion,
there was never anything sordid in it. He was not a gambler, for long
after he had won recognition as the first steeplechase rider in a
country of accomplished riders, he declined payment for his services on
the race-track, accepting it only when compelled at last by poverty to
do so; and the distaste with which he had always viewed the meaner
associations of the sport latterly became dislike and scorn. In the
period of disappointment that preceded his death he refused a
remunerative post on the sporting staff of a leading Melbourne journal
because he wished to dissociate himself completely and finally from
everything connected with the professionalism of sport.
As a Bush rider he became noted for the performance of feats which no
one else would think of attempting. The Australians often speak and
write of it as courage absence of fear--but it surely had a large
admixture of pure recklessness. It is at least evident that danger had a
certain irresistible fascination for him. 'Name a jump, and he was on
fire to ride at it,' is the description given of this curious
predilection which made his company in a riding party a somewhat
exciting pleasure. The day in 1868 when he won three steeplechases at
Melbourne is still remembered; and at Mount Gambier, in South Australia,
a granite obelisk marks where once he leaped his horse over a fence
surmounting the headland of a lake, and then across a chasm 'more than
forty feet wide.' A single false step would have cast horse and rider
into the lake two hundred feet below. Of the same wild character was his
riding during boyhood in the hunting-fields of Gloucestershire. It would
be natural to suspect some measure of vanity or bravado in all this, but
no hint of either is given by any of his acquaintances; and the few who
knew him well are emphatic in placing him, as a man and a sportsman,
apart from and above the majority of those with whom the conditions of
his life brought him into contact. 'Gordon,' says one of his intimate
friends, 'was always a quiet, modest, pure-minded gentleman.... I never
knew such a noble-hearted man, especially where women were concerned.'
The deep melancholy in many of Gordon's poems has been attributed to the
influence of Australian scenery, and to the loneliness of the earlier
years of his life in the colonies. This explanation, if not wholly
erroneous, is at least much exaggerated. It ignores the most obvious
elements of the poet's temperament. It takes no account of the history
of wasted opportunities and regrets, of defeat and discontent, of
self-wrought failure and remorse, that may plainly be read in 'To my
Sister,' 'An Exile's Farewell,' 'Early Adieux,' 'Whispering in the
Wattle Boughs,' 'Quare Fatigasti,' 'Wormwood and Nightshade,' and other
poems. The writer, as he himself says, has no reserve in the criticism
of his own career.
'Let those who will their failings mask,
To mine I frankly own;
But for their pardon I will ask
Of none--save Heaven alone.'
Gordon's youth was wild and ungoverned. Before his twenty-first year his
folly had lost him home, friends, love, and the one profession that
might have steadied him, as well as afforded him distinction. He was
the son of Captain Adam D. Gordon (an officer who had seen service in
India) and the grandson of a wealthy Scotch merchant. Captain Gordon
settled at Cheltenham in the later years of his life, and intended that
his son should study for the army; but a mad wilfulness and passion for
outdoor sport had taken possession of the youth, and nothing could be
done with him. He rode to hounds with all the daring that marked his
horsemanship in later life; he rode in steeplechases, he frequented the
company of pugilists at country fairs and public-houses, and joined in
their contests; he was removed from two schools for unruly conduct, and
a more serious escapade, though innocent of any bad intention, nearly
caused his arrest by the police. At last it was agreed that he should
emigrate to Australia. He was glad to go, but bitter at the thought of
what his going implied. The knowledge that he suffered solely through
his own fault did not make less disagreeable to him the censure of
others, even that of the gallant father whom, in his wildest moments of
rebellion, he never ceased to love and admire. The unhappiness attending
this severance from the home that he felt he would never see again is
told in a poem to his sister, written (August, 1853) a few days before
he sailed.
'Across the trackless seas I go,
No matter when or where;
And few my future lot will know,
And fewer still will care.
My hopes are gone, my time is spent,
I little heed their loss,
And if I cannot feel content,
I cannot feel remorse.
'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 shirk 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 classic 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 class, took no advantage of it. That the
squatters did not themselves recognise the worth of one so unassertive
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 passages 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 passing 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 dashing horsemanship, 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 Assembly
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 classical 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 title 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 passing, 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 spacious 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
Shipwreck'; '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 association 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 shine,
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 space 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 scraps 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 pronounced 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 nobility 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 grass
To wander as we've wandered many a mile,
And blow the cool tobacco cloud, and watch the white wreaths pass,
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!'