Page:Facts and Fancies about Our "Son of the Woods", Henry Clarence Kendall and his Poetry (IA factsfanciesabou00hami).pdf/17

Rh Mountains." I do this for the simple reason that I think that first volume should not have been suppressed, as it is a key to much that Kendall wrote in more mature years—a key to his later poetry, and still more, a key to his character as a man. The child is father of the man. It seems to me that many mistakes made by some of his critics and reviewers might have been avoided—at least, in the effects upon the reading public—had Kendall's early disposition as a poet (to view despondently his own efforts, always questioning their merit) been fairly recognised as merely one of his idiosyncrasies, not to be taken too seriously.

We very often are taken at our own valuation. And if we under estimate, there are few generous enough to think better of us than we think of ourselves: and fewer still sufficiently discriminating to penetrate beyond the surface, passing over mere defects of matter, and (like the diver searching for the hidden pearls beneath), leaving the merely floating straws for the interest and amusement of the idiot or the idle. Among his detractors we do not include the late P.J. Holdsworth, who, as far as we know, was always the poet's most sincere and practical friend, and who took exception to some of the critics and reviewers of that time, claiming that the "wall of failure" which ran through many of his poems meant anything beyond the fact that Kendall's own ideals of what might be sung had not yet been realised. One reviewer particularly, in a Sydney quarterly magazine, seemed to aim at impressing his readers with the idea that this yearning of the poet for the attainment of his own ideals really meant the comparative failure of anything he had yet accomplished. Whereas the sympathetic reader of Kendalll's verses (unbiassed by such one-sided views) would only have been all the more keenly interested in the aspirations of the poet, and would have regretted that the silence of the tomb precluded our hope of ever hearing again on earth our sweetest singer's "perfect song" in new and varied symphonies. For this reviewer's opinion on the defects (as he saw them) of Henry Kendall and his poetry was published some years after the death of the poet, when his few actively sympathetic friends were