BOOKS.
ADAM LINDSAY GORDON.* IT is curious that, although Gordon died in 1870, there should until this month have been no complete edition of his poems and no comprehensive memoir of his life published in this country ; still more curious that these three volumes, which have for the first time given England the opportunity of acquiring a real knowledge of the poet who is at once the prophet and the romance of Australia, should at last have appeared within a few days of one another. But it is not only because of the unique position which their subject occupies in the minds of a great and kindred people that these two volumes will interest English readers, for they disclose a personality and an art worthy of independent study for their own sake.
Mr. Robb's prefatory sketch is as much concerned with criticism as with narrative. Miss Humphris' and Mr. Sladen's memoir, on the other hand, is probably as complete as industry and enthusiasm could make it, and it is the more regrettable that they should not have made a more economical use of their material. A great deal is included that is of very little interest or relevance, and the considerable mass of really interesting matter is confused by haphazard arrangement and unnecessary repetition. None the less, the two books enable one to see clearly enough the various influences which went to mould Gordon's life and the main events of its romance and tragedy.
Gordon's life and character seem indeed to have been expressly designed to make him the hero of Australia. His father and mother were first cousins, both members of the junior branch of an ancient Scottish family His father, who had been a captain in the service of the East India Company and had retired from the Army, was living in the Azores when Lindsay was born, and it was not till the boy was seven years old that the family settled in Cheltenham, where Captain Gordon became teacher of Oriental languages at the college.
Captain Gordon had been a daring rider and sportsman in India, and he was besides a scholar and a man of attractive appearance and personality. From Lindsay's early letters in Mr. Sladen's volume it would seem that he was something of a disciplinarian, but his character is overshadowed by the vivid and eccentric personality of his wife, a woman of great taste and charm, but ungovernable temper, extravagant, capricious, and at times (according to Mr. Robb) afflicted with what almost amounted to religious mania. It is evident that Lindsay inherited many of her characteristics, and the circumstances of his boyhood were unfortunately of a kind too little likely to bring peace to so inflam- mable a family. Between the ages of seven and twenty be received only about five scattered years of schooling. For the rest he ran wild, and in 1853, after continued storms, he left England never to return. The reasons for this step are not certainly known. Tradition connects it with an escapade that resulted in the boy stealing from its owner's stable a horse which he had agreed to buy and been unable to pay for, and riding it to victory in a steeplechase. It was more probably due to the general inability of young Gordon to fit in with the conventions and discipline of his home. Ever since his fifteenth year the love of horses bad played an increasingly important part in his life. He had become a friend of trainers and afrequenter of racing stables. He hunted in the Cotswolds when- ever he could borrow a mount. There is a story too that he once went into school with racing colours under his great-coat and rode off from the schoolroom door to compete in a local steeplechase. This passion of his doubtless distressed his parents, for it led him into danger, loose company, and extra- vagances far beyond his means, and his passion for boxing can have pleased them little better. He became the favourite
• (1) Adam Lindsay Gordon and his Friends in England and Australia. By Edith Humphris and Douglas Gladen. London: Constable and Co. [12s. ad. net.]—(2) The Poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon. Arranged by Douglas Sladen. fdamepublinher— [2s. ad. net.]—(3) The Poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon. Edited by Frank Valdoit Robb. London: Henry Frowde. ad. net.]
pupil of Jem Edwards, the middle-weight champion, and was fond of challenging all comers at country fairs. Even at this raw age, however, those who knew him at all intimately w. re able to discern something uncommon in his powers. He had a wonderful memory and could recite any poem or speech which he had once read. He was fond of spouting poetry too, and to his nearest friend would sometimes write letters partly in verse. Hie taste in dress was fantastic, and like many young men of the time he affected a Byronic pose, which no doubt led him to exaggerate his youthful misdoings and his natural tendency to reserve and depression. None the less he seems to have been a boy of high spirits, thoughtless, cheerful, and fond of cheerful, thoughtless company. When, however, his father secured for him the offer of a commission in the Australian Mounted Police he realized that he was making nothing of his life, and that he must embrace the opportunity, but he felt the parting deeply, the more so because it involved separation from a lady for whom he had already formed a deep attach- ment. Exactly how strong a hold this attachment had on him it is difficult to say. Mr. Robb thinks that the impression it made was a deep and lasting one, and it is certain that if she had asked him to stay in England he would have done so, but the references to her in his early letters from Australia are hardly suggestive of a great passion.
But however this may he, the parting from old ties and old associations made a great change in Gordon's character. He did not apply for his commission on arrival in Australia, but instead enlisted as an ordinary mounted constable, in which capacity he served two years. Ho then took up the profession of a travelling horsebreaker, and spent seven years travelling the bush, living the roughest life and riding the wildest animals, with practically no educated society of any kind. It was during this time that he made the acquaintance of Tenison Woods, the naturalist priest, who was surprised to find a travelling horsebreaker quoting Racine, Corneille, Shakespeare, and Byron by the page. Woods lent him a Horace and a Browning and Maca.ulsy'a Lays, and these became the subject of his constant study during the ensuing years as he lay at night in his solitary tent by the faint light of a smoky pannikin lamp. It was at this time, too, that he took seriously to composing poetry. His companions often noticed that he rode for hours together in deep abstrac- tion mumbling verses to himself and sometimes throwing hie knee across the saddle to scribble on a piece of paper. He never spoke of his verse to any one, and formed few friendships, but he made a mark wherever he went, and all who were brought in contact with him were struck with his straightforward and honourable character. Drink and gambling — the bushman's ordinary relaxations — had no hold on him. Indeed his life at this time seems to have been singularly temperate, solitary, and austere. In 1862 he married a girl much beneath him in social status and education, but one who made him a brave and faithful wife in the short and troubled time that was left to him. Two years later the first great misfortune of his life befell him—he inherited a sum of £7,000, and in 1865 he was asked to stand for, and was elected to, the Parliament of Victoria, in which State he had settled since his marriage. He was a failure in Parliament. and resigned his eeat in eighteen months, but the next few years saw at once the zenith and decline of his fortunes. He took to steeplechasing as an amateur, and for three years was the most successful rider on the Australian turf. He wrote freely, too, and published both in the press and in book form, but his verse brought him in little money, and, as he seldom betted, he made little by his racing. Mean- while he lost heavily in one or two speculations, and suffered a still heavier blow by the death of his only child. His fits of depression grew stronger and more frequent ; his intervals of gaiety scantier and less restrained. Two bad accidents impaired his health, and for the first time he began to have recourse to drink and opiates. The vanity which bad marked the Byronic phase of his boyhood, but which, during the solitary years of bush-life, ho had consciously subdued, regained its hold on him. His riding became more and more reckless, and his recklessness was indeed one of the secrets of his success. He was an ungainly rider, being handicapped by his singularly long, loose figure, for though he was six feet tall he rode only ten stone, and he was, moreover, so shortsighted that he could never see beyond his horse's ears, but he had a marvellous influence over horses, and his
opponents found it useless to compete with a man who raced with a secret hope of being killed. Before long he began to dislike racing, feeling, in spite of his passion for horses and his clean joy in the contests of the turf, that it brought him into contact with unworthy company and base ideals ; but he could not afford to give it up. In 1868 came the second great catastrophe. He received an intimation from home that he had a good claim to the family estate of Esslemont in Scotland. The hope of establishing this claim became the dominant idea in his mind, and when at last an adverse decision of the courts shattered the hope, he waited only to see his last volume of poems through the press, and then one grey morning walked out into the bush and shot himself through the gullet with a Service rifle.
Such was Gordon's brief and tragic life, a life of action and solitude, of few intimacies and little subject to the external influence of literary criticism or literary friendship. Such education as he had he gave himself during those nights of study in the bush, for it is difficult to believe that he can have gained much from the short and scattered years of his school- ing. It is plain that he could read Latin, the Greek of Homer, French, and probably Spanish—which be may have remembered from his early years at Fayal—and it is plain, too, that the few books which he read stirred his imagination deeply. But study was never able to give his mind any seriously philosophic bent. Solitude made him brood much on life, but he had not the impulse or the cast of thought that could lead him to any solution of its enigma. He saw the enigma and he chafed at it, but the sight did not draw his thoughts outward, rather it drove them into a tragic and bitter introspection. Ideals he had, but they were the ideals of a schoolboy. Honesty, courage, generosity, and independence, on these he pinned his faith, but they proved an insufficient armoury for a man with all the vanity, sensibility, and capacity for suffering which are too often the poet's heritage, and when they failed him in the fight he could only put his back againstthe wall and die fighting. These limitations of his mind are clearly reflected in his poems. Gordon was too much a man of action to work out for himself any very exactly personal style. His need for expression came from feeling rather than from thought, and when the feeling stirred him he was apt to let his words run to some extent in the mould of one of the poets whose lines were ever singing in his head. There is no imitation in any sense of the word. A tune besieged his mind and he fitted his words to it, but his words moulded the tune. Mr. Robb devotes several pages to a detailed analysis of the debt to Browning which he discovers in Gordon's verse, but although Browning, no doubt, set him writing "Dramatic Lyrics," his productions in this manner are infinitely less like Browning (and also, it must be confessed, considerably less successful) than the work of half a dozen poets of our own day. The first series of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads must have taken a strong hold of his mind when it came out in 1867, though there is no record of the time at which the volume actually came to his hands. It found bim sinking into depression, harassed with debt and in the thick of racing. The fluency of the new poet's rhetoric and the swing of his easy ringing rhythms seized Gordon's imagination immediately, and he poured into the mould a flood of personal feeling—satire, cynicism, aphorism, regret— the chief defect of which is the excessive fluency into which the fire and ease of his new model lured him.
There is something boyish in this kind of imitation, and indeed Gordon's verse always retained the faults as well as something of the charm of boyhood. He had no subtleties to express, for he neither felt nor saw things subtly; there is not even any minute observation of external nature in his bush poems. What he bad to say he said rapidly, carelessly, but always naturally. His boyish energies, his boyish remorse, his boyish pessimism, crowded to the pen-point as quickly as did the songs of action to which he owes the main part of his popularity. Yet, while the scope of his feelings was boyish, in force they were those of a man and of a poet. And this was his tragedy. The shell was too weak for the metal. It yielded and fell asunder. Poetry of this type does not show at its best in short quotation. It is his turf ballads and his turf philosophy that have won the love of Australia, and it is they which are chiefly quoted and known to us in England. But terse, vigorous, and admirable as much of this work is, the turf does not represent the best of his work any more than
it did the best of his life. The real value of his work, and that which gives it its real fascination, is the fidelity with which it tells the progress of his romantic, brooding, reckless, and unhappy life. There are a score of poems in these two volumes which, within their limited range, could hardly be bettered. We do not quote from them, for the short quotation, for which alone there is space in a review of this kind, would hardly do justice to their merit. It is enough to say that no one who studies them can fail to be sincerely thankful for the sympathetic labours which have made Gordon's work for the first time easily accessible to English readers. Each of the two collections contains some poems not included in the other, and some which have not hitherto been published in book form. Mr. Sladen in particular is to be congratulated on having discovered some lines which, though hitherto unpublished, are perhaps the best that Gordon ever wrote. In other respects Mr. Sladen's work is less admirable (his punctuation of the poems is often lamentable), but it is a great thing that a task so long neglected should at last have been so conscientiously and enthusiastically undertaken.
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