HENRY LAWSON.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXV, Issue 17, 27 August 1897, Page 27

HENRY LAWS O N.

HIS PLACE AS A POET. An interesting sketch of Mr. Henry Lawson. the Australian poet, who is at present, we understand, teaching a Maori school in New Zealand appears in a recent issue of the Catholic iVcw. We make the following extracts :—: — Mr. Henry Lawson is a true poet, and one who, given the opportunity, that is leisure, will surely produce work worthy of the language. He wants leisure to study the measures and rhymes of the great poets of the world, for Lawscm's one deficiency is the small knowledge he has of metre. He has but one metre, and that a sing-song one, sunn as '• In the days when the world was wide." This metre was first used by the " bard of Thorn ond," and its modifications are the staple ones of Lawson. But to redeem this lack of metre, Lawson throws into his poems the Promethein fire of genius of expression, and his mode of expression, however blunt as it sometimes is, never produces the impression of prose, as do passages ot Browning. Invariably beautiful his work is not, but it invariably arrests and haunts. There is about it at once a simplicity and a strangeness, an air of reality and of mystery, a combination of the poignantly human with the unaccountably fantastic, a force, a penetration and intensity, which together appeal to the reader with a power comparable in degree, if not in kind, to the power of the appeal made by any of the greatest masters of other schools. The spectacle of human misery and human fall is ever with him. " The still sad music of humanity " haunts him with its pathetic and sorrowful refrain. I am inclined to think that it is in this deep moral sympathy, this feeling of brotherhood, this tender outlook on the suffering that Lawson's truest claim to most enduring greatness rests. In his "Faces in the street'" can readily be seen the " feminine " side of Lawson's genius, to which attention was drawn by one of our ablest critics. In this poem, Lawson's love of humanity finds full vent, and we understand how the bitter sea of human sorrow and human failure laves his feet and chilis him with its spray. They lie, the men who tell us in a loud decisive tone That want is hei'e a stranger, and that misery's unknown ; For where the nearest suburb and the city proper meet My window-sill is level with the faces in the street —

Drifting past, drifting past, To the beat of weary feet — While I sorrow for the owners of those faces in the street. And cause I have to sorrow, in a land so young and fair, To see upon those faces stamped the marks of want and care ; I look in vain for traces of the fresh and fair and sweet, In sallow, sunken faces that are drifting through the streetDrifting on, drifting on, To the scrape of restless feet ; I can sorrow for the owners of the faces in the street. In hours before the dawning dims the starlight in the sky, The wan and weary faces first begin to trickle by, Increasing as the moments hurry on with morning feet, Till like a pallid river flow the faces in the streetFlowing in, flowing in, To the beat of hurried feet — Ah ! I sorrow for the owners of those faces in the street. Of a similar character but inferior in merit are such poems as " Sez You," " When your Pants begin to Go," and " When the Children come Home." Lawson does not excel in descriptions of nature, people are to him ever more than songs and the haunting sadness of man more than the breeze stroking the tree tops. Bu some aspects of nature he has painted as few have painted before What is more characteristic than the following marked with Lawson's own genius. The old year went, and the new returned, ia the withering weeks of drought, The cheque was spent that the shearer earned, and the sheds were all cut out ; The publican's words were short and few, and the publican's looks were black. And the time had come the shearer knew, to carry his swag Out Back. For time means tucker, and tramp you must, where the scrubs and plains are wide, With seldom a track that a man can trust, or a mountain peak zo guide. All day long in the dust and heat — when summer is on the track — With stinted stomachs and blistered feet, they carry their swaga Out Back. He tramped away from the shanty there, when the days were long and hot, With never a soul to know or care if he died on the track or not. The poor of the city have friends in woe, no matter how much they lack, But only God and the swagmen know how a poor man fares Out Back. He begged his way on the parched Paroo and the Warrego tracks once more, And lived like a dog as the swagmen do, till the western stations shore ; But men were many, and sheds were full, for work in the town was slack, The traveller never got hands in wool, though he tramped for a year Out Back. In stifling noons when his back was wrung by its load and the air seemed dead, And the water warmed in the bag that hung to his aching arm like lead ; Or in times of flood, when plains were seas, and the scrubs were cold and black, He ploughed in mud to his trembling knees, and paid for his sins Out Back. " Out Back." to my mind, can enter into competition with the plastic arts. Certainly it vividly recalls that great picture by Gerome, entitled " Thirst." A vast barren desert stretches away from the foreground as far as the eye can reach until it blends with the distant horizon. There is no tree, no shrub, nor any green thing. Above is the white heat of the quivering air and the brazen sky. In the front, ju^t up against the spectator, is a huge, gaunt lion, lying on the sands by the side of what was a pool of water, but ia now dried away into a foetid puddle of slime. That lion has once ravaged the desert and the forest ; at his roar all beasts hid themsehes. Now he lies there — old, toothless, starving, dying of thirst by that putrid slough ; his tongue lolling forth and licking the loul mud in a vain effort to find one cooling drop. iEsop's ass might come and kick at him. Already the desert eagles gather in the air overhead to await his death. Gerome's picture is to tell a tale and adorn a moral. Lawson's words are more powerful than any painting, and he has told his tale without a moral. "Up the Country " again illustrates bis powerful conceptions of pitiful life. Mr. Lawson is a really genuine writer of humorous verse. His wit possesses the true flavour. He does not appeal altogether to the lowest of the low, as do many Australian rhymesters who write alleged humorous verse about the vagaries of drunken shearers and similar topics, but Lawson's lines please those also who have claims to culture. l> Peter Anderson and Co " and a " Cii/p Bushman," are works of power, and in these as in others of Lawson's poems we see how thin is the partition that divides laughter from tears. As a lyric writer Lawson is most successful. His "Glass on the Bar " is a typical Australian lyric. And many of Lawson's poems have a sad lyrical flow of fancy that is inexpressibly touching and tender. Lawson will sing among the immortals if he produces nothing more than his latest volume, for such a poem as " Faces in the Street ' is eternal. Mr. Lawson is the laureate of the peopl and democracy's staunchest champion. " Let me but make th

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songs of the nation and I care not who makes the laws." He is the voice of those dumb ones who, as Oliver Wendall Holmes has Baid have known the cross without the crown. The exceeding appreciation of many living and to be will be Lawson's reward. The world waits with anxiety Mr. Henry Lawson's next book.