ADAM LINDSAY GORDON

Grey River Argus, 31 July 1940, Page 12

ADAM LINDSAY GORDON

HIS AUSTRALIAN MENTOR. (Says an Australian writer). It is seventy years since Adam Lindsay Gordon died. Greater poets have written in Australia. There has been none. however—neither Francis, Adams, Boake, Lawson nor Brennan —whose name and memory so linger in association with a sense of tne tragic. More has been .written about this poet than about any other who wrote in Australia, including more nonsense; for Gordon excites uncritical, if often, pretentious, people to excesses of praise which do no genuine service to Gordon, of whom his devoted friend, Kendall, wrote in his “Memorial Ode.” he

. . . sang the first great songs these lands can claim To be their own; the one who did not seem To know what royal palace waited him Within the Temple of the Beautiful.

Gordon was not. as many suppose, a native of England. He was born in the Azores. But England became his home and he a filial lover of that great land. The nostalgia of thio self-elected expatriate is tender in his writings, as welt it might be. It is interesting to recall, in this year of war, that Gordon was for three years at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. A class-mate and dose friend of his there was that other famous Gordon—he of Khartoum. Gordon soon knew the well-hoofed training stables of Tom Oliver, 01 Prestbury, England. This great horseman much influenced him, not only teaching Gordon the art of steeplechasing, but something of saddling-up on Pegasus, for he encouraged Gordon to write as well as to recite. A greater influence on Gordon, however, was Fr. Julian Tenison Woods. Mr Douglas Sladen—and no more fervent Gordonian lives or has lived —says: “There is no doubt, he (Fr Woods) was Gordon’s poetical god-father.” Is Mr Sladen in error when he writes: “They met in 1855. Woods used to lend him books and give him literary advice. Gordon was in the habit of reciting to him his favourite poems by the great masters, and, eventually, his own compositions. Woods listened to everything patiently, and offered him criticism and encouragement”? The “Life of Father Woods,” says: “ ... it is an extraordinary fact that though Gordon’s mind must have been constantly running on the lines of poetic composition, yet he barely gave hints of this to his friend, and could never be induced by the latter to show him any of his verses.” There is, however, ample evidence of their friendship and of the influence of Fr. Woods on the melancholy, indrawn poet. From Fr. Woods, Gordon borrowed many books, not a few of which suffered a sad sea-change by being carried about in Gordon’s pocket. “No man,” Fr. Woods has placed this on record, “ever formed Jris taste for literature as completely upon

classical models, though, certainly, one would not gather this from his

writings.” This sentence, showing, as it does that Fr. Woods must have become acquainted, somehow, with Gordon’s writings, appears in an article published in the “Melbourne Review” for September 8, 1883. This article Fr. O’Neil describes as being “so vivid, graphic and truthful that it deserves to be kept in remembrance better than it seems to have been by admirers of the unforgotten Australian poet.” Fr. Woods, better than almost anyone else, appears to have drawn Gordon’s confidence and affection. “As their acquaintance ripened”—the words are Fr. O’Neill’s—“Fr. Woods was astonished to find that this mysterious young horse-breaker could recite by heart long passages from English, French, Latin and Greek authors, and that this power was largely the result of self-teaching and of reading prolonged into the night with the help of a pannikin-lamp.” It reminds me, this, of a poem Padraic Colum wrote of an old Irish scholar.

Here is an account by Fr. Woods of an unpleasant experience they shared. It throws light on the character 01 both men: “In 1860, while making a journey with him from the sea-coast to Mt. Gambier, we were overtaken by a severe storm and lost our way. Night came on and the rain poured down in torrents. As my sight at night was nearly as defective as Gordon’s, we gave up looking for the track and sat crouched under a tree waiting for the rising of the moon. We were both miserably cold and hungry, ana it was most ludicrous to h.ear my companion reciting long passages from various authors on the subject of storms. We could not light a fire, and I only had to shiver while he gave me the tempest scene in ‘King Lear,’ which he knew by heart. . • •

We got to a station by midnight, and had to share the same room, but Gordon would not go to bed. The warm tea we had at supper had revived him, and he kept walking up and down the supper-room reciting ‘Childe Harold’ till the next morning.”

What a picture Fr. Woods’s words of this pair “with houseless heads and unfed sides” conveys- No two more remarkable men have figured upon the stage of Australian history.