Читать книгу Australian Essays онлайн

18 страница из 38

The first thing to notice about Gordon’s poetry is, that it is almost all in regular and rymed rhythms. There is not a line of blank verse in it. Now, a “fine faculty” for regular and rymed rhythms is by no means a synonym for a “fine lyrical faculty.” Shelley, our greatest master in poetry of pure melody, has a “fine faculty” for regular and rymed rhythms, but has also a fine faculty for irregular rhythms: lines in which the regular rhythm is broken, in order that a more subtle melody may be expressed, are frequent in him. In Mr. Swinburne such lines are rare—he has a fine faculty for regular and rymed rhythms, but his faculty for irregular rhythms is (let us say) less fine. Gordon, who is the disciple of this first side of Mr. Swinburne’s technical talent, who, in his turn, is a disciple of the first side of Shelley’s—Gordon, I say, is in this respect to Mr. Swinburne what Mr. Swinburne is to Shelley.

Mr. Hammersley, one of the few survivors of that peculiar phase of colonial and Victorian feeling which produced the poetry of Gordon, and who “may say he knew him intimately” —tells us[3] how he “was often amused to hear him quote from the poets, and his recitations used to make me laugh outright. One day I said, ‘Hang it, Gordon, you can write good poetry, but you can’t read.’” What was the matter with his “reading,” then? He used to “read” in “a sing-song fashion.” Mr. Woods, too, tells us[4] that “Gordon had an odd way of reciting poetry, and his delivery was monotonous; but,” he adds, “his way of emphasising the beautiful portions of what he recited was charming from its earnestness.” Gordon’s criticism on his own verses was: “They don’t ring so badly after all, old fellow, do they?” He had no faculty for irregular rhythms. He cannot, then, be said to possess a “fine lyrical faculty;” he possessed a fine faculty for regular and rymed rhythms. (As for his rymes, as rymes, they are as a rule excellent, although there is often too little of the “poet or prophet,” as he says, in them, and too much of the “jingler of rymes,” the dealer in “verse-jingle chimes.”) Since, however, this faculty of his is a fine faculty, it must not be described as (in the usual and bad sense of the word) imitative. There are, I think, passages in him that Byron might have written (“To my Sister”), that Lord Tennyson might have written (“The Road to Avernus,” scene x.), that Mr. Swinburne might have written (“A Dedication”), and the latter are frequent. In no other poets, save Wordsworth and the earlier works of Mr. Arnold, do I find precisely this same sort of (shall I say) parallelism of feeling and expression on certain subjects that I do in Mr. Swinburne and Gordon. But it is, I think, very open to question whether Gordon would have grown, as Mr. Arnold has, into a purely distinctive style of his own. Gordon is terribly lacking in variety: to live with a close study of him for several days is one of the most trying of critical tasks. “My rymes,” he asks—