Part 13
Setting apart for a moment the attainments of Miss Mack as a writer of poems, it is impossible not to appreciate and “affect” the nature and temperament of the woman. She has both strength and delicacy. She has a genuine, inborn habit of tenderness, combined with a certain power of artistic restraint. She is by no means colourless. She is not a mere imitator. She _understands_ a great deal even if she does not in her literary work always _realise_ a great deal. It is this combination of strength and tenderness, added to an artistic, womanly sensibility, that makes her already a distinctive figure in the world of letters, and gives promise of yet greater achievement and wider appreciation in the future.
What this Australian authoress needed at the outset was a measure of candid, though kindly, criticism, and a certain amount of disappointment. Instead of these she was given an intoxicating draught of praise. To a Daley or a Lawson this recognition, this flattery, might not have proved in any sense harmful. The man’s faculties are harder, more firmly knit. His temperament is less emotional. His judgement is less easily swayed. If he possesses an original vein he will, in nine cases out of ten, let it take its course. But Miss Mack, when scarcely out of her teens, had held to her lips a cup of intoxicating quality--a cup for which hundreds of men and women, of perhaps equal ability wait all their lives and which they never obtain. The people who championed her not only printed her poetry, as they well might do, but printed her prose. This prose, though it did not rise above mediocrity, found its way into book form, and was despatched with much enthusiasm to different parts of this, and of the other hemisphere. The ambitious girl was taken on the staff of one of the Sydney papers. She was grateful and anxious to please. She knew that her predecessors in office had been smart and flippant; she knew that she was expected to be the same. She did her best to fulfil expectations. And though she never quite got down to the level of the tiresomely smart and painfully clever society writer, she at least succeeded in suggesting, through her prose writings, the atmosphere of the circle amid which she wrote. She could not be vulgar, therefore she was only moderately smart. She avoided being serious, and she realised--what? The pity of it is that when she emerged from this groove, and began to write books of travel and of personal experience she wrote as if still under the impression that it would never do to be herself; that it was necessary to be smart, or to perish in the attempt.
However, it is possible to forgive her for conveying that impression. It is possible to forgive a great deal to a mind like hers, to a talent like hers. Her verses, collected into book form and published under the title of _Dreams in Flower_, form a compendium which is of genuine value, and which possibly justifies its claim to be considered “the most distinguished body of verses” written by a woman in Australia.
It is the peculiar merit of Miss Louise Mack that she almost invariably suggests more than she actually conveys. The intangible thing called inspiration is hers. The ether waves that play upon the surface of her imagination are of the subtlest and rarest kind. Neither her ideas nor her method are commonplace. Continually she seems to be opening the door to an enchanted region of fancy, to vistas of the loftiest conception, to palaces of purest gold. But the glimpse is a fleeting one. The door is no sooner half opened than it is shut again. Or, if the enquirer is allowed to enter, if he makes any progress beyond the rich and splendid portals, he usually meets with disillusion. He finds that the initial grandeur will not go with him to the end of the journey. He realises that the authoress has given him a promising start, but that if he follows her too expectantly he is likely to get left in the wilderness.
Considering that poetry is mainly impressionism, and that it is not like logic, where a weak link in the chain of reasoning makes the whole fabric worthless, it is necessary to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to this writer for her fine individual passages, for her rich idealism, for her many musical lines. She can play on more than one string. Her lines on Sydney, which stand at the commencement of _Dreams in Flower_ have a trick of haunting the memory. The sentiment is warmly human, but is so far from being commonplace that it deserves to be called pantheistic. The opening invocation would disarm criticism:--
Oh! to mix in my soul this city, That lies with feet in the fairest waters, This young, unformed Australian city! In the harbour’s arms the isles, her daughters, Dream all day in a perfect sleep. Oh! to hold in my heart those waters, Flowing east with the sun behind them, Through great gates to the outer deep!
There are two following verses almost equally good, and it is only in the fourth and last that the inspiration is seen to flag:--
Oh! to sing of this little city A true strong song that no years can weaken: A song that tells how the sea-girt city Cast her light o’er the seas, a beacon Seen and sought by the farmost sail; Made a name that no years could weaken, Fought a way to the fore of nations, All lands owning her vast avail!
The repetition of “weaken,” as applied first to the song and then to the name, is not effective; there seems to be confusion of ideas between a place that is merely a glimmering beacon and one that has attained to “the fore of nations,” while the meaning of the last line is not clear. The inspiration which carried the writer brilliantly through three verses failed her in the last.
Yet there are individual poems in this collection which betray no serious defects of workmanship. They are short and strong and self-contained. They are the exception to the general rule which makes Miss Mack a poet of exceptional promise but of uneven performance. The lines _On Wairee Hill_ are imaginative, and always musical. _Illusion_ strikes more than one resonant note. In the verses entitled _Vows_ we get the woman’s emotional and intellectual strength in revolt against the trammels of conventionalism; and in _As long as any May_ there is as much intensity as the brainy Australian woman usually allows herself to feel--or, at any rate, to express.
There is a certain intellectual force, as well as a genuine poetic vein, in the verses of Miss Louise Mack. One imagines her to be always mistress of herself. The lyric mood may interpret her, but it does not master her. We find here no hint of the school which delights in “sense swooning into sound.” To quote from her poems is hardly to do her justice. She is stronger mentally, and finer artistically, than her published work.
There is one short piece entitled--it might be _Silences_--which seems to interpret, as nearly as possible, her independent, woman’s view of life. It begins:--
I take my life with my hands, You shall not touch, you shall not see; I hold it there away from you, The fitful shining soul in me.
Ah, but you do not know ’tis hid, Because you did not know ’twas there; You look along the curving lip, Search the deep eyes, and touch the hair,
And cry, “Oh love me, woman, love Your eyes are stars, your mouth a flower”; And all the while a low voice says, “This is a fool without the power
To look beneath and find a free Unfettered spirit serving none, A heart that loves, and does not love, A space untrod by any one.”
So let us keep our silences! I’ll honour yours, or mine will break; And you, guard well the sacredness Of mine for your own soul’s shrine’s sake.
These are only flashes of ideas, but they will suffice. The Australian woman of the advanced, intellectual type requires careful treatment. You may admire her, but you must not pretend to a complete understanding of her. You may marry her, but you must not expect to absorb her. She will give you confidences, but only when in the mood; she _may_ give you kisses, but behind them there is a splendid shining soul that laughs and draws away--
A heart that loves, and does not love, A space untrod by any one.
XII
FOUR PRIME MINISTERS
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god!--HAMLET.
In every important transaction, in every impersonation of life, it is of advantage to be able to look the part. History, when it comes to deal with the first Prime Minister of Australia, will say that he possessed this advantage in a superlative degree. We are all more or less susceptible to appearances. In very many cases we can judge only by appearances. In very rare instances are we given the opportunity of getting behind the outer shell of things and judging personality.
That fortune was generous to the pioneer of the Union movement in Australia, is universally admitted. He not only spoke well, but he looked well. He won votes in country districts before he had uttered a syllable. Some of his critics said that he travelled the country on his hair. The statement was at best a half truth, and at worst a trifle libellous. For the Goddess, in emptying her horn into the lap of the future Prime Minister, gave him something more than an idealistic head of hair, useful asset though that has been. It gave him a large skull-index, a massive forehead, an impressive set of features that look their best when on a platform surmounting a vast concourse of people. It gave him a certain faculty for looking like a great man. To hear Edmund Barton concluding one of his elaborate and lawyer-like periods, to watch him closing his lips firmly and looking out with that Roscius-like gaze over the heads of the audience, is to experience an unreasonable desire to rise up in the middle of the hall and cheer. The crowd is always amenable to proper discipline, and it has been disciplined by its eyesight into believing that it could do no better than exalt Barton to the highest offices within its gift.
To endeavour to get at the personal and intellectual quality behind this imposing framework is to receive a somewhat vague, a somewhat indeterminate impression. Only the Creator and Edmund Barton himself know what is at the back of those fine eyes when the audience is intensely listening, and certain well-sounding phrases are telling their tale. Only they know, and one is no more likely to tell than is the other. The word histrionic suggests itself in this connection. It is not by any means a bad word; it is by no means intended to be used in a disparaging sense. The first Prime Minister of Australia has a knowledge of effect; he appreciates and loves effect. In that fact lies his strength and his weakness, his greatness and his less than greatness, his virtues and his demerits. There is no part he could not play if it looked well enough, there is no _rôle_ of which he could not seem worthy, and there is no height to which he could not histrionically attain. You could fit him with no robes, place him in no position of dignity, load him with no honours to which he would not appear entitled. Whether representing the Commonwealth in London, whether taking precedence of Dukes and Earls at a banquet at Guildhall, whether voicing the aspirations of the new Commonwealth in the councils of the Empire, whether facing the flashlights of the Mansion House, or looking lofty rebuke on the disorderly ruffians of Wooloomooloo, there would never be any doubt as to his capacity for looking the character. You would say instinctively that the best man had been chosen. Personally he knows in what his strength consists. He has the confidence which comes from the consciousness of great powers; but he knows also that certain effects are obtained in a certain way.
Putting his rare dramatic faculty on one side, it is impossible to deny the ex-Prime Minister the credit of being unusually gifted, unusually able, unusually subtle-minded. This is the type of intellect from which very little could remain hid, provided that investigation seemed worth while. Edmund Barton, in the course of his half century or more on earth, has investigated quite a number of things. He has read and studied a great deal. His public career has been marked by an erudition rare in any country. But he has owed less to his reading than to the quality of his mind. It combines in a singular degree two contrasted gifts--that of close analysis with that of fervent enthusiasm, or (what is the same thing for a public man) the appearance of fervent enthusiasm. In the thousands of speeches which Edmund Barton has delivered in this and other continents, you will look in vain for any crudeness of thought, for any narrowness of vision, for any lack of illuminating powers. The daily newspaper men of Australia know well enough how the ex-Prime Minister’s utterances used to be inlaid thought on thought, word upon word, qualifying phrase on qualifying phrase. There was an absence of directness, often, but there was never an absence of mentality or of idea. When a man of such impressive gifts and of such histrionic faculty undertakes to play Peter the Hermit; when he says that such and such a thing ought to take place; when he declares, as he did in the Sydney Town Hall on a memorable occasion, that, “God means to give us this Federation”--for all the world as though he had received a direct communication from the Almighty on the subject--the result on the average individual is usually convincing, not to say overwhelming.
The less than complete political success of Edmund Barton must be attributed, not to his intellectual qualities, but to his character. It was his character that, from the day of his great appointment, fought against him. The fact is that he possessed too good a character. A worse man would have held office longer, if not with better results; his conspicuous lack of badness, of hardness, of callousness, was his chief enemy. It is not to be assumed, because this fact was so, that the great advocate of Australian Union set himself to live a life of austerity to which the vaunted virtues of Edward the Confessor or of a modern college of Cardinals would be as riotous excess. He had his redeeming faults, and, unless the Supreme Court Bench has scourged them out of him, has them now. But they were not the faults that tell most in the strenuous business of Party warfare; they were not the faults that help a man to vanquish his deadliest enemies. Sir Edmund Barton was not quite cunning enough, or, rather, he would not stoop low enough; he was not hard enough, he was not unscrupulous enough; there was much of the Macbeth temper in him; what he wanted highly, he wanted holily, or, if not holily, at any rate respectably. Whether from inherent principle or because he was averse of certain lines of conduct, or because the _cui bono_ precept had struck too deep a root in his philosophy, he would not try ways that were open to him. He compromised, conceded, refined, and yielded more than once. In his place in the House he was always a splendid, an impressive figure; but the bull-dog tenacious quality that is the possession of many lesser men was never his. When he took a seat on the Supreme Court Bench, it was recognised that Parliament had lost the man best worth looking at within its walls, but it was recognised also that the probabilities of complete success were brighter for him in the new sphere than in the old.
To speak of Alfred Deakin, the second man to hold office as Prime Minister of Australia, is to speak of a unique personality. There is no doubt that Nature, when it conceived the idea of giving an Alfred Deakin to the world, intended him to be much disliked. It specially designed him for that purpose. To begin with, it gave him all those agreeable and outwardly attractive qualities which make a man suspected by his fellows. As in the case of Byron, all the fairies were bidden to his cradle. They came in smiling enough fashion, but they had a malignant purpose. So it was that the future Prime Minister was loaded with gifts and graces intended to drag him down. He grew up tall and straight and comely to look upon. A quick-minded, receptive, intelligent man of ideas, he was voted a most agreeable person to talk to. No one could quote the romantic poets more aptly, or talk the language of culture with better accent and discretion. When he went upon a platform, words flowed from him in a silver stream; when he stood for Parliament, audiences felt that they were being honoured above their deserts. He was member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly at twenty-three, Minister of the Crown at twenty-seven, Senior Representative of the Imperial Conference in London before he was thirty-one, member of the National Australian Convention four years later, and Prime Minister of the Commonwealth when he was forty-seven. His flatterers have combined with Nature to do their worst: there is nothing on which he has not been complimented, from his management of the affairs of a nation to his smile, or from his oratory to the way in which he holds the hand of a lady at a dance. When he made his first official visit to London the late Queen Victoria enquired, in a sentence that became famous, whether there were many men like Alfred Deakin in the Australian continent. He has been belauded impartially and comprehensively as an Adonis and a Demosthenes, as a Caius Gracchus and a Marcus Aurelius, as a Beau Brummell and a William Pitt. It is no wonder that newspaper men, knowing him only by repute, and seeing him for the first time rise in his place in Parliament, have shuddered inwardly to think what manner of insufferable and awful person such a petted individual must be.
Yet Alfred Deakin, to do him justice, has struggled manfully against his disadvantages. Nature intended him to be disliked, undoubtedly, but it is well-nigh impossible to dislike him. He has fought a great and, on the whole, a successful battle against the load of adulation that has been pressed upon him. This circumstance must always stand to his credit, while it explains a great deal that would otherwise be incomprehensible. With every inducement to develop into a snob, he has made conscientious efforts not to become one. Any unknown and undistinguished person, aware of the blighting effects of success on the average temperament, would hesitate to approach Alfred Deakin. He would say that such a man could not retain his sense of proportion, could not judge except by appearances. As a matter of fact, the Prime Minister is at his best when talking to little-known people. If you happen to be a newspaper reporter, travelling in the same train with Mr Deakin--and the present writer has often been in that position--you need not bother either to entertain him or to keep out of his way. It is more than likely, unless circumstances keep him otherwise occupied, that he will make it his business to entertain you. There are certain qualities he recognises. He has always time to spare for a man who is intelligent and earnest and anxious to get on. He does not worship success; because he has had too much of it, he knows how to value it. My own opinion is that Alfred Deakin is intensely tired of all this talk of himself as a “silver-tongued orator.” If some one could convince him that he was not really an orator at all, and had only a blundering acquaintance with the fine points of the English language, he would be intensely grateful. I remember an incident, slight but significant, which took place when he was moving, in presence of a full and adoring House, the second reading of his High Court Bill. There was only one individual--a rash and sacrilegious individual--who ventured to interject. The House was astonished; one or two members looked as if they expected the roof to fall. The Speaker’s wrath blazed out against the offender, but Mr Deakin took the latter’s part. “It was a friendly interjection, sir,” was his comment, as he replied to the rash person’s remark. The episode may have been trifling, but at least it went to show that Mr Deakin is weary of his very remarkable reputation; that he dislikes being looked upon as either a tin god or a hot-house flower, and that he would welcome anything that brought him to the ordinary level of political war.
It is necessary to get away from the glamour of Alfred Deakin’s oratory, and the shining white light of his character, in order to arrive at some reasonable estimate of his value as a politician. On the latter subject a great deal has been written, and a great deal could be written, not _all_ of it in the language of extravagant eulogy. It is said that the “tempers” of the man of words and of the man of action are necessarily distinct. That may or may not be the case. What is certain, is that there is no instance on record of a politician combining such a gift of speech as Deakin’s with an equal faculty for wise, clear, vigorous, and resolutely determined action. As a State Minister, this darling of the gods was chiefly remarkable for what he wished to do, but failed to do, in connection with Victorian immigration. He had a great poetic conception of what might be achieved in the arid regions of Northern Victoria by letting in healing streams of water, and causing wildernesses to rejoice and blossom as the rose. He constructed channels, built reservoirs, and expended public money; but the channels ran dry, the reservoirs became barren, and the local bodies repudiated the debt. It was a splendid failure on the Minister’s part, but none the less a failure. As an advocate of Federation, Mr Deakin was a complete success. Eloquence was required, and it was forthcoming. As Prime Minister of the Commonwealth, Mr Deakin did little during his first term--as a matter of fact he had time to do very little--but he spoke finely, and went down heroically on a question of abstract principle. If he had vanquished a continent he could not have been more vociferously applauded on the manner of his downfall. He has now another magnificent opportunity, and it remains to be seen how he will use it. If he has done nothing else he has lifted the dull business of politics out of the rut of the commonplace. And that of itself is no mean achievement.