NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 94, 22 April 1911, Page 13

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

VICTOR DALEY, BOHEMIAN AND MYSTIC. "Wine and Roses." By Victor J. Daley, author of "At Dawn and Dusk." Edited, with a memoir, by Bertram Stevens. Sydney .- Angus and Robertson. Limited. It is thirteen years einco Victor J. Daley's " Dawn and Dusk " scored an unquestioned literary success, and what was perhaps in some respects more important to the somewhat irresponsible author, yielded a certain amount of financial profit. Literary genius is cosmopolitan, and certain determined attempts to manufacture- a factitious demand for work that shall be "racy of the soil " has wrought no little mischief to Australian literature, producing mucii manifestly spurious sentiment, both in prose and verse. Some of the best verse by two distinguished Queenelandere — Brunton Stephens and Essex Evans — were concerned with thoughts deeper and interests wider than the mere accident of locality, and there have been 3ome who girded at them on this ground. Victor Daley, whose literary life chiefly lay in Adelaide and Sydney, came into the same category . Anyone, for instance, who should look for " local colour " in " The Woode of Dandenong " would fare no better than if, being literal-minded, he consulted Ruskin on " The Enclosure of Sheepfolds." But already the winnowing winds have begun then- useful work. The xlustralian element in Kendall was inter woven with his whole nature, giving a characteristic tone and colour to his genius, while it tended to narrow its scope within certain, ranges of vision. Daley had very evident limits also, but in tne first place he was not a native, and in the second he so far resembled Kendall that he wove his ' own singingrobe and no second-hand or patched imitation. Messrs Angus and Robertsou havts done well to, collect and republish the scattered verses 01 Daley subsequent to those in the earlier book. It is over five yeai'fi since his death, ami his admirers, who are many, will be glad to see the earlier volume supplemented by this second collection, which includes some of his best work. It is not such an anacreontic wreath as the title might imply, nor could its quality be fairly Buggeated by any general classification with the work of other men. Daley had an original touch, and is often quite unexpected. Lacking in some of the higher and stronger qualities, he had a sweetness of tone and delicacy of ear that rarely erred, a compelling charm and grace almost independent of the theme or message — a burden which, notwithstanding the irresponsible gaiety of his disposition, gave more often than not a hint of sadness and unsatisfied questionings almost morbid. He seems to have thought that he had some philosophy of life, and to have meditated, as his editor expresses it, "a big work in verse, which would express all he> had thought about Things-in-General. He began one when staying on the Hawkesbury River in 1,884, and the result was printed aa 'Fragments of a frustrate poem.' I yefc shall sing my splendid song, The world is young, the word is strong' he cried, and tried again, but found he was incapable of sustained effort." It is a, common token of genius that its ideal, even when clearly realised in imagination, baffles attainment. Kendall's wellknown "After Many Years" axpresse? this thought with a note of poignant lament. There is 'a refined intellectual pleasure to be derived from Daley, there is delight in his felicities of language, and he is at homo in many remote regions of. literature, tradition, superstition, and delightful folk-lore, but one finds little tending to strength, illumination, or helpfulness. As Mr. Oscar Alpers'onoe summed up Ibsen, "he always ends with a note of interrogation." Probably the world has lost little or nothing in the unwritten masterpiece. While no order of imagination is much remoter from that of Daley than William Blake's, there is at times an almost uncanny resemblance in the quaint simplicity and effective directness of, phrase, and from tho opposite poles of habitual doubt and unquestioning faith the two join hands on the common ground of mysticism. The true mystic has this advantage — as we can not possibly read the thought of his mind v/e have a splendid liberty of interpretation and therefore find him an intellectual stimulus, sometimes wonderfully suggestive. He arouses little hostility, for knowing that he is entirely misunderstood when taken literally we make wide alloArance on the plea that he is never as heterodox as he seems. And with some -remarkably suggestive flashes of epigrammatic wisdom from Victor Daley we close. "Saint Francis II." is a simple quatrain : — I learnt lue language of the birds, A new Saint Francis I would be; But, when 1 understood their words— The birds were preaching unto me. In "1.H.5." the poet is as heretical as anywhere, judged by the creeds. (The compositor, not understanding one of the lines, has interpolated an apostrophe, and spoiled a -beautiful phrase in the sixth stanza). But we find a very fine thought in the two stanzas we quote :—: — He was not by the nations hailed As Saviour of the world; not He, But on his symbol He was nailed— An everlasting guarantee. And though they were so hard and wiße I see, the gulf of years across, With wringing hands and weeping eyes, The old gods following the Cross. "Dolores." By Ivy Compton Burnett. London : William Blackwood and Sons. The author of "Dolores" has the gift of pictuiing with good-humoured satire the little oddities, vanities, and self-de-ceptions of worthy people. There is no malice, no caricature ; but there does seem a little exaggeration here and there. Interests centre in a village where a somewhat lively sectarian rivalry has not interfered with friendly personal relations among the leaders ; and in studente in a girls' college, which gives considerable scope for characterdrawing. The story opens with greater vigour than its developments . display j with remarkable descriptive skill and much excellent work in some of the episodes there is a certain lack in the construction, and the novel is fragmentary, and on the whole disappointing. With all the care devoted to the elaboration of the character of the heroine, who so deliberately and consistently chooses the path of self-abnegation and sacrifice) for others, her blameless life seems for the most part to be devoted to ungrateful folk, who are quite ready to accept voluntary service as a right. As for the figure almost worshipped by Dolores in secret — Sigismund Claverhonse, the wiiter of plays too profouisd and subtle for the vulgar world to appreciate — he strikes us as intolerably selfish, and we have an uneasy feeling throughout that the heroine's swan really belongs to a different genus, and that marriage would have brought speedy disillusionment — as it did to the luckless Perdka. The reader will find whole-hearted enjoj'inent in the intercourse between the um-versity-irained vicar, the retired business man who combines lay-preaching with temperance advocacy, with no reasonable equipment for either, and the really clever "self-educated 1 ' nodical practitioner (American degree), who ia also a Plymouth Brother, "l)'rom this body, for some scruple pf epiieripncc -upon which he was v&aw|, fee hM Ipte* eccfid.ed, though hf> M^i'H tfWM& *t

tenderness for it, referring to its members collectively as 'the brethren' ; and at the time when this story opens, he had reached, at the age of thirty-nine, the emancipated stage of holding worship with his wife in his dining-room." There is also a Wesleyan minister, whoso ignorance, not only of matters of pietty common knowledge, but of the most familiar facts in the history of his own denomination, rather taxes the reader's faith. Some of ,these folk are associated by marriage, and in many of the ordinary matters of life ; they are more or less convinced of their own infallibility, lacking iv charity, and tactless in their dealings with others, yet — and this says much for the general clearness of the author's visiqn — these are all worthy and right-living men and women, with influence for good among their neighbours, whose welfare they sincerely seek. We meet them in the common difficulties and grieia of life, and their little vanities and eccentricities" are forgotten in the underlying human sympathies, of which the writer never loses hold. It is not altogether with goodwill that we bid farewell to the selfish father of Dolores, but the widow he has married may be trusted to deal more than adequately with him. And we have a feeling that in a story where so many clever folk overrate themselves, chief of these is the hero — if a hero there be — who so completely dazzled the usually clear-eyed Dolores. " Collar and Cuffs : The Adventures of a Jackeroo,' 1 by St. Clare Grondona (Melbourne : George Robertson and Co.), is the reprint of a number of very readable sketches of station lif-e in Central Queensland, oiiginally published in The Leader. Lively pictures are given of life and adventures "out-back" — of droving, j mustering, shearing, and boundaryriding; of bush fires, tropical rains and floods ; of the fauna, and flora. ; of horsebreaking, hair-breadth, escape, and bush adventure, and of Christmas jollifications. The book is in the form of a series of letters from a station hand, who has gone out for experience, and the "Jackeroo," one Bertram Hardy Smith, who goes into the wilds equipped with a dress-suit and dancing-pumps, to the unspeakable delight of the hands, is a connecting figure for the various episodes. Smith, however, turned out not to be quite the "new-chum" he chose to personate. — One of those little books of Australian life that are "worth while." * . " Australia, ' and other Poems," by William H. Elsum • (George Robertson and Company, Melbourne), is flattered by the description on its cover. Some of the pieces in this collection must have been accepted by a publisher, as permission has been asked for their inclusion, but in these hundred-and-forty pages of " songs of nation-making " and " poems of Australian life " we can find nothing to warrant the making of a book. There is loud-voiced vaunting which may pass with the unthinking for patriotism, there is much bombast and bathos, but no spark of lyric ring or poetic inspiration. In one national ditty thirteen metaphors struggle with each other in the first quatrain, and tile imaginary party adjured to "sing me a s 4 ong of the wai to come" is told that "ye will need the best of your grand white blood." "Peace" tells us of " Stepping-stones to heights of glory where, in rarer atmosphere, we may read the truth of living, cease to cavil ; be not mere faction-servers, trifle-hunters, fools who mouth of rights and wrongs, while a frighted world waits wondering at our foemen's battle songs." Similarly unintelligible and incoherent—sometimes coarse in addition — are Mr. Blsum's other published effusions. In The Lone Hand for 4pril, 0. H. M. Abbott writes on the magnificent irrigation works in progress in New South Wales, showing how the great artificial inland sea at Burrinjuck will water Riverina, two hundred and fifty milee away, and photographs by the Public Works Department show many ingenious j and successful devices invented by the I engineers. 'The Syrian Sweater" reveals in New South Wales what seem ts be almost the lowest depths of sordid grinding of the poor that imagination can conceive. Some of the terrific denunciations of Isaiah iii. are taken a& a text, and the joint writers (one of them not long ago a Wellington journalist) say that "the Syrian is a sweate!- by instinct in 1911, A.D., even as he was in 760, 8.C., and, having destroyed hie own country ty his abominable practices, he is now helping to destroy outs." But investigation shows the problem to be more complex than at first sight appears. For instance, it is not, as many suppose, an evil solely >or chiefly of race or colour — on© that a "pogrom" would wipe out. The sweated women dread the Syrian and Chinese less than some of the white employers who would style themselves Christians. "These white Australian slaves' declaa-e that . . . the Syrian tyrant and sweater is kinder than, the tyrant of their own race. Consider the shame of White Australian women trembling lest Chinese and Syrian sweaters should get down to the awful depth of the White Australian sweater. But, shameful as it may be, that is the terror that haunts hundreds of White Australian women and girls in Sydney to-day." Closely bound up with the sweating evil is the casual manner in which a numerous class of Australian married men abandon wife and children — wives, too, of a type that will work themselves to death rather than that the children shall suffer. They could take advantage of State institutions, but, according to the Lone Hand, they prefer the sweat shop evil they know to the sweatshop evil of the boarded-out "home" of the dairy farms to which the hapless children may be consigned. The "pogrom" apparently should begin in official quarters. It ie to be hoped that Mr. Barr's crusade will bring some relief to the victims, who are represented by those who have investigated the evil os of the highest heroic and self-sacrificing type.