Page:Adams - Australian Essays.djvu/21

Rh books were to hand, somewhat cast into the shade, it is true, by a profusion of cheap English novels and journals, but still they were to hand. And who were the people that were buying them ? The people of the dominant class, the middle- class. I began to enquire at what rate the popular, scientific, and even literary books were selling. Fairly, was the answer. "And how do Gordon's poems sell?" "Oh they sell well" was the answer, "he's the only poet we've turned out."

This pleased me, it made me think that the "go-ahead" element in Victorian and Melbourne life had gone ahead in this direction also. If, in a similar book-mart in Falmouth (say), I had asked how the poems of Charles Kingsley were selling, it is a question whether much more than the name would have been recognized. And yet the middle-class here is as, and perhaps more, badly — more appallingly badly — off for a higher education than the English provincial middle class is. Whence comes it, then, that a poet like Gordon with the cheer and charge of our chivalry in him, with his sad " trust and only trust," and his

Whence comes it that he is a popular poet here? Let him answer us English for himself and Melbourne: Yes, indeed, to Melbourne, such as life presents itself to her, she knows it, and, what is more, she knows that she knows it, and her self-knowledge gives her a contempt for the pedantry of the old world. Walk about in her streets, look at her private build- ings, these banks of hers, for instance, and you will see this. They mean something, they express something: they do not (as Mr. Arnold said of our British Belgravian architecture) "only express the impotence of the artist to express anything." They express a certain sense of movement, of progress, of conscious power. They say: "Some thirty years ago the first gold nuggets made their entry into William Street. Well, many more nuggets have followed, and wealth of other sorts has followed the nuggets, and we express that wealth — we express movement, progress, conscious power. — Is that, tiow, what your English banks express V And we can only say that it is not, that our English banks express something quite different; something, if deeper, slower ; if stronger, more clumsy.