“They are slow, very slow, in discerning
that book-lore and wisdom are twain.”
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,
“on this earth so rough, we know quite enough,
_and, I sometimes fancy, a little too much_,”
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 I believed a little,
and as I believed I spoke.”
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
“Is there nothing real but confusion?
is nothing certain but death?
is nothing fair, save illusion?
is nothing good that has breath?...”
“I can hardly vouch,” he says, again,
“I can hardly vouch
for the truth of what little I see....
On earth there’s little worth a sigh,
and nothing worth a tear.”
But ah,
“the restless throbbings and burnings
that hope unsatisfied brings,
the weary longings and yearnings
for the mystical better things....
There are others toiling and straining
’neath burdens graver than mine—
They are weary, yet uncomplaining—
I know it, yet I repine.
I know it, how time will ravage,
how time will level, and yet
I long with a longing savage,
I regret with a fierce regret....”
We are sorely tired, “we, with our bodies thus weakly, with hearts hard
and dangerous.”
“We have suffered and striven
till we have grown reckless of pain,
though feeble of heart, and of brain.”
Who has expressed the malady of our time better? “Our burdens are heavy,
our natures weak,” he says again. We cannot escape from them:
“Round about one fiery centre
wayward thoughts like moths revolve;”
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:_”
“_Till the good is brought forth from evil,_
_as day is brought forth from night._—
Vain dreams! for our fathers cherished
high hopes in the days that were;
and these men wondered and perished,
nor better than these we fare;
And our due at least is their due,
they fought against odds and fell;
“_En avant les enfants perdus!_”
We fight against odds as well.”
_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—
“they could not wait their passing, they are dead.”
“I am slow,” says Gordon,
“I am slow in learning, and swift in
forgetting, and I have grown
so weary with long sand-sifting!
T’wards the mist, where the breakers moan
the rudderless bark is drifting,
through the shoals of the quick-sands shifting—
In the end shall the night-rack lifting,
discover the shores unknown?”
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
“mystic hour
when the wings of the shadowy angel lower,”
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:”
“No man may shirk the allotted work,
the deed to do, the death to die;
at least I think so—neither Turk,
nor Jew, nor infidel am I—
And yet I wonder when I try
to solve one question, may or must,
and shall I solve it by-and-bye,
beyond the dark, beneath the dust?
_I trust so, and I only trust._
“Aye what they will, such trifles kill.
Comrade, for one good deed of yours,
your history shall not help to fill
the mouths of many brainless boors.
It may be death absolves or cures
the sin of life. ’Twere hazardous
to assert so. If the sin endures,
say only, ‘_God, who has judged him thus,_
_be merciful to him, and us:_’”
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.
“Our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought.”
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:
“We are children lost in the wood.”
“Lord,” prays this woman that loves Laurence Raby,
“Lord, lead us out of this tangled wild,
where the wise and the prudent have been beguiled,
and only the babes have stood.”
Meantime,
“Onward! onward! still we wander,
nearer draws the goal;
Half the riddle’s read, we ponder
vainly on the whole....
Onward! onward! toiling ever,
weary steps and slow;
doubting oft, despairing never,
to the goal we go!”
To what goal? Well,
“The chances are I go where most men go.”
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
“world of rapine and wrong,
where the weak and the timid seem lawful prey
for the resolute and the strong.”