Part 12
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.
But Lawson is, or until recently was, genuinely ambitious. He knows what is poetry and what is not. He has fine ideas. He has felt something of the sentiment of life and something of the weird romance and tragedy of life. A starry night in the wilderness, a woman standing by the water’s edge, a homestead where there was once a garden, a sunset, a tree, a flight of wild birds--all these have spoken of him, and he has answered back in kind. His handling of romantic and of patriotic themes marks clearly both his achievement and his limitations as a poet. From such pieces as _Reedy River_, _The Old Stone Chimney_, _Faces in the Street_, and others of the kind, we understand what he has felt, and what he would wish to say. Such verses show that he comes near to the goal of true poetry, and even occasionally places his hand upon it. But his final word and his strongest word is that in which he voices the longing of the man who wishes to do more than fate will let him do. The world, he says, is not wide enough. The scope is not great enough. The chances are not attractive enough. The fetters are becoming more cramping as each generation goes by. But once--once there was a time. Listen to the resonant ring of it, that other time:--
Then a man could fight if his heart were bold, and win, if his faith were true, Were it love or honour or power or gold or all that our hearts pursue, Could live to the world for the family name, or die for the family pride, Could fly from sorrow and sin and shame, in the days when the world was wide.
Henry Lawson should, for his own happiness’ sake, have lived in that other and more spacious time.
* * * * *
As the third representative of the school of contemporary verse writers we may take Miss Louise Mack. We may take her for several reasons. In the first place, she is a woman and represents the woman’s point of view--the Australian woman’s attitude towards art and life. In the second place, it has been claimed for her, by some of those who have followed her work most closely, that her achievement in verse is the most considerable that stands to the record of a woman in Australia. In the third place, it is a fact incapable of disguise that she has distinctive promise and distinctive merits of her own.