Songs of the Army of the Night Part 19

AUSTRALIAN PRESS NOTICES.

"This volume holds within its slim covers more restrained power, inward, incisive vision, and pa.s.sionate 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).

_That_ is a bewildering book, a veritable thousand islands of pa.s.sion, pathos, poetry, set in a restless, weary sea. . . The uncontrollable out-bursts of a n.o.ble, 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 h.e.l.l. Not the quaint conglomeration of bottomless brimstone and three-tined forks, but the now non-exploding self-adjusting patent h.e.l.l '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_."

AN AUSTRALIAN POET.

"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 light of the coming dawn; footsteps of the weary and fallen plash along in the mud and darkness; the lightning of angry steel, gleaming phosph.o.r.escent in the night; the hoa.r.s.e hum of famished millions moiling along with a dim yearning for a b.l.o.o.d.y vengeance, contribute the details of a grim picture of realistic misery. The first part deserves the t.i.tle 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, hoa.r.s.e 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 coa.r.s.e, 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 cla.s.sicism are in this volume thrown to the winds. The poet's muse is a glorified street trull, a Ca.s.sandra 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 pa.s.sionate, 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, Sydney _Bulletin_.

"DAWNWARDS?"

_To the Author of the_ "_Songs of the Army of the Night_."

We-who, encircled in sleepless sadness With ears laid close to the Austral earth, Have heard far cries of wrong-wrought madness, Of hopeless anguish and murd'rous mirth Beneath all noise of maudlin gladness Awail, environ the world's wide girth-

Almost arise with Hope's keen urging When out the vasty and night-bound North Red rays ascend, and Songs resurging Through all the darkness and chill, come forth!

The comet climbs until it scorches The sacred dais that skies the great, Until it gleams on palace porches, Where blissful aeons-to-be hold state- Fades, and we know it one of the torches Madmen a moment elevate!

And, closer clutching the earth, our sorrow Doth 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 sable To lead where, safe after all annoy, Sleep soft in earth's Augean stable The virgin "_Justice_," the infant "_Joy_!"- Grant this, O Father, being able, Or else in merciful might destroy

"This...o...b..whose past and present, awful Alike, 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-flown SONGS come sounding slowly!

As sea-birds kindle that sweep alee New hopes, old yearnings winging slowly From breast to bosom for shelter flee!

And scarce we know, as there they hover And our blood beats 'neath their beating wings, If 'tis an old dream earthed over Or new bird-ballad that stirs and sings!

But truth's Tyrtaeus is now our neighbour, And strives to waken the slumbering South With peal and throb of trump and tabour And sobbing songs of his mournful mouth To see where Life's all-giver, Labour, Lies fettered, famished and dumb with drouth.

SYDNEY JEPHCOTT, Brisbane _Boomerang_, 25th January 1888.

NOTES.

{27} In _The New Arcadia_ Miss 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 the _Nineteenth Century_, for instance.

{33} The attack on Missionary Ridge is an example of the brilliant initiative, as the holding of the b.l.o.o.d.y 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 great _revolution manquee_, which in England and 1381 went near to antic.i.p.ating 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 ma.s.sacres over the whole country.

{38} Who owns, and rack-rents, some of the vilest slums in London, and is beautifully aesthetic in private life.

{39a} The French.

{39b} "V 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 Pere-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 n.o.ble 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.