“with the song like the song of a maiden,
with the scent like the scent of a flower.”
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—
“and the world hath the day, and must break thee,
not thou the world.”
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
“such has been, and such shall still be, here as there, in sun or star.
These things are to be and will be; those things were to be and are.”
“As it was so,” he says again,
“as it was so in the beginning,
it shall be so in the end.”
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:
“Man thinks, discarding the beaten track,
that the sins of his youth are slain,
when he seeks fresh sins, but he soon comes back
to his old pet sins again....
Some flashes like faint sparks from heaven,
come rarely with rushing of wings;
We are conscious at times, we have striven,
though seldom, to grasp better things;
These pass, leaving hearts that have faltered,
good angels with faces estranged,
and the skin of the Æthiop unalter’d,
and the spots of the leopard unchanged.”
And yet life, life as life, independent of living and loving, of activity
and women, is not altogether hopeless:
“Doubtless all are bad, yet few are
cruel, false, and dissolute.”
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:”—
“Sleep; and, if life were bitter to thee, pardon,
if sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live;
and to give thanks is good, and to forgive ...
Content thee, howsoe’er, whose days are done;
There lies not any troublous thing before,
nor sight nor sound to war against thee more,
for whom all winds are quiet as the sun,
all waters as the shore.”
_January, 1885._
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