Francis William Lauderdale Adams

“ It is necessary to make this limitation, because it would be an injustice to Francis Adams to let it be assumed, by those who may not be acquainted with his other writings, that his fiery zeal for social emancipation represents more than one side—albeit a most important one—of his many-sided labours. "I am but a poor devil who tries to touch life at several artistic points," He writes in one of his letters of 1892, "and if I give this one pleasure as a lyrist, and that as a dramatist, and that as a story-teller, and that as a critic, I am content." ”

“ Our heart is against your heart; you can feel it beat. Soul speaks to soul through lips whose utterance is a need. In your room alone, in your lonely walks, in the still hours of day and night we will be with you. ”

“ A friend once reported to me a saying of Matthew Arnold's, that he did not believe in any man of intelligence taking a desperate view of the social problem in England. I am afraid that saying relegates me to the ranks of the fools, but I am content to remain there. I believe that never since 1881, which is the date of the Peasant's Revolt, has England presented such a spectacle of the happiness of the tens, of the misery of the millions. It is not by any means the artisan, or the general or the agricultural labourer, who is the only sufferer. ”

“ So to these Songs, for my love's sake,
As Priestess of Love must you stand,
And, for the great Truth above's sake,
God's seraph with his sword in your hand!
(Heart, soul and all, dear, never to sever,
Love me for ever!) ”

“ Landlordism shares with Capitalism the plunder of Labour. Why are rents high in Australia? Because here Labour is scarcer, its wages correspondingly higher and therefore Landlordism steps in to filch from Labour its hard-won comforts, and once more reduce it to the necessities of existence. The American slavers had to spend more in housing and keeping any fixed number of their slaves in serviceable condition than Capitalism spends in wages. Capitalism and Landlordism, like good Christian Institutions, leave the living to keep alive their living, and the dead to bury their dead. ”

“ We are the spirit of those piteous ones, the wronged, the oppressed, the robbed, the murdered, and we bid you open your warm heart, your light-lit soul to us! We will thrill you with the clarion of hate and defiance and despair in the tempest of land and sea. ”

“ No memory of him will dwell more abidingly in the minds of those who knew him than the occasions when, with magnetic eloquence, he would dilate on the people's wrongs—his beautiful expressive features and large flashing eyes lit up with the glow of a single-hearted life-long enthusiasm. ”

“ The new wine of revolutionary thought cannot be put in the old bottles of academical versification, and those readers who wish to form a fair judgment of the literary value of the poems must have the courage to regard them not from the standpoint of the conventional critic (who invariably fails to appreciate the true significance of any new and genuine poetry) , but from that of the author himself, who knew exactly what he had to say, and how he could say it with most effect. ”

“ Look, we have suffered, we have agonised, we have longed to hasten the hour of rest. But beyond the darkness there is light, beyond the turbulence peace. "Courage and be true to one another." "We bid you hope." ”

“ Yet, all such disabilities being allowed for, it is difficult to believe that any candid reader, who has a true love of poetry in his heart, can fail to appreciate the great literary merits which distinguish the best, if the best only, of these remarkable lyrics, remarkable in all cases for their vigour and audacity, in a considerable number of cases for the highest qualities of song. ”

“ All society groans under the slavery of stupendous toil and a pittance wage. The negro slavery of the Southern States of America was better than the white slavery of to-day all over the earth, but more particularly in Europe and in America. ”

“ In the case of writings of this sort, the measure of the critic's antipathy is often the measure of the poet's success. It is not suprising that these revolutionary songs have aroused, and will continue to arouse, misunderstanding and reprobation, for they have an incisivə and trenchant quality which seldom fails to make itself felt; whatever else they do, or fail to do, they strike home. ”

“ The vast edifice of our Civilization is built on the essential wrong of recompensing Labour, not according to the worth of its work, but according to the worth of its members in the market of unlimited competition, and that soon comes to mean the payment of what will hold body and soul together when in the enjoyment of health and strength. ”

“ We have already far too many balanced literary gentlemen sitting comfortably on the stile, with an equipoise which might move the envy of a Blondin; it is their æsthetic indifferentism, far more than any emotional excess, which is the bane of our present literature. ”

“ Man or woman, girl or boy, labourer, mechanic, clerk, house-servant, whoever you may be, whose wages are not the worth of your work,—no, nor a fraction of it—whose wages are the minimum which you and those like you, pressed by the desire for life in the dreadful struggle of "Competition," will consent to take from your Employers who, thanks to it, are able thus to rob you ”

“ The Songs, as their author once told me, are an attempt to do what has never been done before—to express what might be the feelings of a member of the working classes, as he finds out the hollowness (to him, at any rate) of our "culture" and "respectability."
Still less valid, I think, is the technical criticism which would set aside the "Songs of the Army of the Night" as bad poetry and doggerel, because the book contains numerous violations of the customary "laws" of metre and rhyme-sound. ”

“ That Francis Adams' "Songs of the Army of the Night," a book which is a deliberate challenge and menace to all established opinions on the matters with which it deals, should be now entering on a third and enlarged edition, is an event not devoid of welcome and gladdening significance for those who, in the gloom of the present social turmoil, are looking for the dawn of a brighter and purer day. Originally published in Australia in 1888, the Songs (with a few slight omissions) were reproduced in England in 1890 ”

“ But the poems are so "unbalanced," says the literary critic, who, with the caution of his kind, is always on his guard against militant writers who "mean business," who have got something to say, and are determined to say it at whatever hazard to delicate academical proprieties. The poems undoubtedly are unbalanced ”

“ It is as a critic that he has received from his fellow-critics the largest share of praise, doubtless because there is of necessity a more cautious tone in that class of his writings, which gives satisfaction to the "balanced" literary mind. I venture, however, to think that the reviewers are wrong in this estimate of Francis Adams' powers ”

“ He was educated at Shrewsbury school (the "Colchester" described in "Leicester, an Autobiography") , and after spending two or three years in Paris and London, became an assistant-master at Ventnor College in 1882. In 1884 he was married and went to Australia, where he busied himself in literary, educational, and political work, and was on the staff of the Sydney Bulletin. ”