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“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.