When I was young, the muse I worshipped took me,Fearless, a lonely heart, to look on men.“’Tis yours,” said she, “to paint this show of themEven as they are!” Then smiling she forsook me.
Wherefore with passionate patience I withdrew,With eyes from which all loves, hates, hopes, and fears,Joys aureole, and the blinding sheen of tears,Were purged away. And what I saw I drew.
Then, as I worked remote, serene, alone,A child-girl came to me and touched my cheek,And lo her lips were pale, her limbs were weak,Her eyes had thirst’s desire and hunger’s moan.
She said: “I am the soul of this sad dayWhere thousands toil and suffer hideous Crime,Where units rob and mock the empty timeWith revel and rank prayer and deaths display!”
I said: “O child, how shall I leave my songs,My songs and tales, the warp and subtle woofOf this great work and web, in your behoofTo strive and passionately sing of wrongs?
“Child, is it nothing that I here fulfilMy heart and soul? that I may look and seeWhere Homer bends and Shakspere smiles on me,And Goethe praises the unswerving will?”
She hung her head, and straight, without a word,Passed from me. And I raised my conscious faceTo where, in beauteous power in her place,She stood, the muse, my muse, and watched and heard.
Her proud and marble brow was faintly flushed;Upon her flawless lips, and in her eyesA mild light flickered as the young sunrise,Glad, sacred, terrible, serene and hushed.
Then I cried out, and rose with pure wrath wild,Desperate with hatred of Fate’s slaveryAnd this cold cruel demon. With that cry,I left her, and sought out the piteous child.
“Darling,’tis nothing that I shed and weepThese tears of fire that wither all the heart,These bloody sweats that drain and sear and smart,I love you,and you’ll kiss me when I sleep!”
The End.
“This volume holds within its slim covers more restrained power, inward, incisive vision, and passionate pity than any volume of verse that has seen the light in the Southern Hemisphere (always, of course, excepting the complete ‘Poetical Works’ of the same author).Thatis a bewildering book, a veritable thousand islands of passion, pathos, poetry, set in a restless, weary sea. . . The uncontrollable out-bursts of a noble, tender soul maddened by the misery and hypocrisy of our cannibal civilisation,
“This volume holds within its slim covers more restrained power, inward, incisive vision, and passionate pity than any volume of verse that has seen the light in the Southern Hemisphere (always, of course, excepting the complete ‘Poetical Works’ of the same author).Thatis a bewildering book, a veritable thousand islands of passion, pathos, poetry, set in a restless, weary sea. . . The uncontrollable out-bursts of a noble, tender soul maddened by the misery and hypocrisy of our cannibal civilisation,
This putrid death,This flesh-feast of the few,This social structure of red mud,This edifice of slime,Whose bricks are bones, whose mortar blood,Whose pinnacle is crime!
Hemorrhages from the very vitals of one tortured in Hell. Not the quaint conglomeration of bottomless brimstone and three-tined forks, but the now non-exploding self-adjusting patent Hell ‘of our own manufacture,’ whose seventh hopeless circle centres in the old village by the Thames—(trade mark, ‘Commerce and Christ.’)”—Sydney Jephcott, “Australian Standard.”
Hemorrhages from the very vitals of one tortured in Hell. Not the quaint conglomeration of bottomless brimstone and three-tined forks, but the now non-exploding self-adjusting patent Hell ‘of our own manufacture,’ whose seventh hopeless circle centres in the old village by the Thames—(trade mark, ‘Commerce and Christ.’)”—Sydney Jephcott, “Australian Standard.”
“Francis Adams is about the least Australian of the Australian poets. There is in his work lack of wattle-bloom and waratah, rollicking rhyme and galloping jingle. There is much of old-world problems and old-world troubles, which are old-world simply because we here have not had time enough to breed the fever germ to a ravaging pestilence. We have, however, the fever germ, and Francis Adams does our young country yeoman service in awakening a fear for the future in his latest book of poems, ‘Songs of the Army of the Night.’ The book is not all night though. It is a cantata without music. The first part is all gloom; angry threatening clouds bar out the lightof the coming dawn; footsteps of the weary and fallen plash along in the mud and darkness; the lightning of angry steel, gleaming phosphorescent in the night; the hoarse hum of famished millions moiling along with a dim yearning for a bloody vengeance, contribute the details of a grim picture of realistic misery. The first part deserves the title given to the whole book, ‘Songs of the Army of the Night.’ The third part is perturbed and stormy, the sea heaving and surging after a tempest; but already the day is breaking, and young hope is felt in the warmth of the sun’s first rays. The third part might be justly termed ‘Songs of the Dawn.’ The second part is hot and heavy with the languorous heat of the tropics. . . . The whole book is a hymn in praise of fodder. The people march hungry, hoarse with lack of sustenance, gripping their firelocks with feverish, skeleton hands, glaring fiercely with famished eyes towards the granaries of the wealthy. . . . This is the sermon of Nature: ‘If you would be good, eat.’ It is in the first part that we hear the trumpet-blast of the social message. Here the verses throb with a realistic agony, a lyric Zolaism, that chains the eyes to the page with a virile fascination. It is so simple, too—the coarse, strong meat of the poetry of first principles. The lines are hot and fervid; the poet’s pulses keep time with the great heart of human woe. This is socialism in verse, anarchism in the guise of a Grecian statue. ‘Outside London’ breathes thick and heavy with the vapours of gutterdom. It is despair, hunger, prophecy, hate, revenge. Francis Adams, a ripe and true scholar, in this shows his devotion to truth and to art. The traditions of classicism are in this volume thrown to the winds. The poet’s muse is a glorified street trull, a Cassandra of the slums, a draggle-tailed Menad from Whitechapel, and her voice is thick and frenzied with shouting at the barricades. ‘The Evening Hymn in the Hovels,’ ‘Hagar,’ ‘To the Girls of the Unions,’ ‘In the Edgware Road,’ ‘In Trafalgar Square,’ ‘Aux Ternes,’ ‘One among so many,’ ‘The New Locksley Hall,’ ‘To the Christians,’ voice in passionate, simple people’s lyrics the socialism which is always felt in strong under-currents by a nation before it appears in literary form, but which is only on the eve of bursting forth and overwhelming everything with its fury, when it does appear in literary form. Rosseau, Voltaire, and Diderot ushered in the French Revolution; in similar fashion the English Revolution is heralded by William Morris and Francis Adams.”—F. J. Broomfield, SydneyBulletin.
To the Author of the“Songs of the Army of the Night.”
We—who, encircled in sleepless sadnessWith ears laid close to the Austral earth,Have heard far cries of wrong-wrought madness,Of hopeless anguish and murd’rous mirthBeneath all noise of maudlin gladnessAwail, environ the world’s wide girth—
Almost arise with Hope’s keen urgingWhen out the vasty and night-bound NorthRed rays ascend, and Songs resurgingThrough all the darkness and chill, come forth!
The comet climbs until it scorchesThe sacred dais that skies the great,Until it gleams on palace porches,Where blissful æons-to-be hold state—Fades, and we know it one of the torchesMadmen a moment elevate!
And, closer clutching the earth, our sorrowDoth then with desperate murmur cry,“We ne’er shall see or morn or morrow!For never star doth scale the sky,
“All men made wise through midnight sableTo lead where, safe after all annoy,Sleep soft in earth’s Augean stableThe virgin “Justice,” the infant “Joy!”—Grant this, O Father, being able,Or else in merciful might destroy
“This orb whose past and present, awfulAlike, attest it a torture wheel,Where, bound by holy men and lawful,Man’s body’s broken with bars of steel!”
But when we pause, despairing wholly,As a storm that strengthens out on the sea,The far-flownsongscome sounding slowly!As sea-birds kindle that sweep aleeNew hopes, old yearnings winging slowlyFrom breast to bosom for shelter flee!
And scarce we know, as there they hoverAnd our blood beats ’neath their beating wings,If ’tis an old dream earthed overOr new bird-ballad that stirs and sings!
But truth’s Tyrtæus is now our neighbour,And strives to waken the slumbering SouthWith peal and throb of trump and tabourAnd sobbing songs of his mournful mouthTo see where Life’s all-giver, Labour,Lies fettered, famished and dumb with drouth.
Sydney Jephcott,BrisbaneBoomerang, 25th January 1888.
[27]InThe New ArcadiaMiss Robinson devoted to the Cause of Labour a dilettante little book that had not even one note of the true, the sweet and lovely poetry of her deeper impulses. There is the amateur, and the female amateur, no less in perception and emotion than in the technical aspects of our art, and we want no more flimsy “sympathetic” rigmaroles, like “The Cry of the Children,” or “A Song for the Ragged Schools of London,” from those who, in the portraiture of the divine simple woman’s soul within them, can give us poetry complete, genuine, everlasting.
[32]His attack on George Eliot in “Fiction, Fair and Foul,” in theNineteenth Century, for instance.
[33]The attack on Missionary Ridge is an example of the brilliant initiative, as the holding of the Bloody Angle in the Wilderness is of the dauntless resolution, of the army of the Democracy of the United States, while the last attacks on Richmond were the final exploit of the conqueror of two combatants, of whom it is enough to say that they were worthy of one another.
[35]Something like an adequate account of this greatrévolution manquée, which in England and 1381 went near to anticipating France and 1793, has at last found its place in the historian’s pages, and Longland the poet, Ball the preacher, and Tyler the man of action, who first raised for us the democratic demand, can be seen somewhat as they were. This, and more, we owe to John Richard Green. An account of the Revolt will be found in section 4 of chapter 5 of his “Short History of the English People.” The phrases in verses 3 and 5 were catchwords among the revolters.
[36]After dismissing the peasants with the formally written acknowledgment of their freedom and rights, Richard II. with an army of 40,000 followers avenged himself and his lords by ruthless and prolonged massacres over the whole country.
[38]Who owns, and rack-rents, some of the vilest slums in London, and is beautifully æsthetic in private life.
[39a]The French.
[39b]“Vœ victis!” woe to the conquered—the motto of the Gauls in Rome as of the modern Civilization of Land and Capital.
[44]France.
[45]In Père-la-Chaise, the famous Parisian cemetery, the Communists made a desperate stand, but were overcome and the captured ones shot. And Morny’s vaulted tomb was close at hand, and Balzac smiled his animal cynicism from his bust. Victims, murderer, and commenting Chorus, all were there.
[46]A part of Paris.
[49]The New Model is the name by which is known that reorganization of the Roundhead Army, without which Cromwell saw that the Cavaliers could not be conquered. No one was permitted in its ranks who did not thoroughly believe in the Cause for which it fought.
[66]This graveyard, one side of a gully, which suddenly expands and leaves its base large enough for the local race-course, is in summer one of the loveliest spots on earth. Hindoos, Protestants, Catholics, and Mahommadan have their separate portions. Here in regimental or individual tombs are the record of noble lives thrown away in the iniquity of the English relations with China.
[69a]The Russian tea-urn.
[69b]In China the system of Trades Unions is admirable.—Coolie is the generic term in the East for labourer.
[70]This is one of the three well-known colossi of Gautama, the Buddha. The same type of proud patience marks this embodiment of the suffering East, wherever we meet it.
[76]Dr Moorhouse came out to Melbourne as bishop in the Church of England there in 1876. He almost immediately took the position of the leading religious personality in Australia. To a rare geniality he added the gifts of a “scholar” and a “gentleman,” both real and both as modern as yet seems permitted to the old caste and religion. He achieved an influence over men of all denominations, and of none, that was quite phenomenal, and might have been used for a national object as great as good. The work of his diocese, however, proving too much for his strength, he announced the fact, and declared that, unless his bishopric were divided, he would be compelled to resign it. Shortly afterwards he accepted the bishopric of Manchester, on the ground that “a larger sphere of labour had been offered to him unsolicited.” His departure was a sort of national event.
[79a]Orang-utan.
[79b]The Buddhistic temple in Java, known as the temple of Borobodo.
[80]This explanation of these curious arborial growths is Mr Alfred Wallace’s (Malay Archipelago, chapter v.), and in this matter also we may perhaps be content to rely on that “innate genius for solving difficulties” which Darwin has assigned to the illustrious naturalist whom Socialism is proud to number among her sons.
[84]The Australian Seamen’s Union, after defeating our most powerful shipping company over the question of Coloured Labour, after compelling the companies that used Coloured Labour to abandon all coastal trade, in alliance with the Miners, faces the craft that was once the brutality of the sea-capitalists with the same dauntless determination, the same noble self-restraint, that made it long ago the protagonist of Australian Labour.
[87a]His attack on Carlyle, for instance, of which the prose part is the fouler, the verse part the more virulent.
[87b]Poems and Ballads. (1st Series.)
[87c]Songs before Sunrise.
[87d]The picturesque Italian gentlemen who struggled so heroically for Italian Nationalism represent to-day a tyranny deeper and more dark than that of the Austrian foreigners, the tyranny ofcaste. The certainty of popularity was the bait held out by the greasy respectability of theLondon Times, and poetical vanity swallowed it, making Mr Swinburne also among the panders in his denunciation of Irish Nationalism.
[89]To Mr Zox is chiefly due the formation of the Union of Female Workers, Servants, and Shop-girls in Melbourne. There is no class called upon to endure more petty tyranny and injustice, more hard work and insult, and there is no class which finds less real sympathy and help. Cannot stupid Sydney follow suit?
[95]This was one of the most horrible crimes of our time. A band of young ruffians assaulted, violated, and frightfully maltreated a young girl of rather dubious character. Nine were arraigned, seven condemned to death, and four hanged. The trial was most indecently hurried by a Judge who seemed determined to make the affair, from the aspect of law and justice, as evilly noteworthy as from other aspects of it.
[110]Charles I. and Stafford,e.g.