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Australian Institute of Policy and Science is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve
and extend access to The Australian Quarterly
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"The Passing of Pan"
By T. INGLIS MOORE*
Other poets hailed his coming. But no one has yet recorded his
passing, even though he took an epoch away with him. For the
phenomenon of Pan in our poetry is a story of social significance
indicating stages in Australia's cultural growth, reflecting changes in
our economy and in the national spirit which it partly conditions.
Above all, the rise and fall of Pan in our poetry shadows the relation
of Australians to Australia itself.
Thus I discern three stages in the attitude of the people, as
represented by our poets, to our country. Our earlier poets, even
when native-born, still looked on the bush with slightly alien eyes, or
through the lenses of European tradition. Furthermore, they had to
struggle against the harsh conditions of a pioneering age where the
writer was neglected and starved. Hence a strong vein of melan
choly runs through the verses of Essex Evans and Brunton Stephens,
Gordon and Kendall, Daley and Lawson. Even the bush balladists,
with the notable exception of "Banjo" Paterson, often twanged a
nostalgic lyre. The poets as a whole took their ease a bit uncom
fortably, even sadly, in this rough colonial Zion.
Paterson, however, galloped cheerily along the Castlereagh and
up the Snowy River. This was his homeland and he was at home in
it. His rhyme did not soar high, but it was sturdy and home-bred.
And from the exuberant 'nineties down to contemporary times our
best poets have treated the land as their own. True, their language
was still derivative, often infected with the artifice of the "literary"
* Author of Adagio in Blue (Poems), Emu Parade (Poems), and Six Aus
tralian Poets (literary criticism), etc.
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THE PASSING OF PAN March, 194B
diction handed down by the English Romantics. Comparatively few,
like Furnley Maurice, R. D. FitzGerald, and the later Slessor, were
genuinely modern in idiom. But they painted Australia joyously as
a revelation, just as Streeton and Roberts, Gruner and Heysen dis
covered it on canvas in colours an age and a mentality removed from
Buvelot and Martens. No sombre clouds of a colonial or exiled
o?tlook darkened the azure of their indigenous skies. Pan has ar
rived, and his pipes are heard exultant from bush gullies.
The third stage of our poetry, which began, I feel, with the
depression, years and comes down to contemporary writing, has lost
this exaltation. It is the time of the passing of Pan. The poets,
like the people, have grown more thoughtful and critical of their
world. They look less at Australia and more at Australians?and
as a natural result they frequently get depressed or irritable. Our
land overflows with beauties, and it can reveal wonders of colour
and line, of space and atmosphere, which are all its own. But the
critical realist will find little that is lovely in Australian society with
its greed, dishonesty, and selfishness, its shallow materialism and
cultural poverty, its feckless want of unity or vision. In this
transition period writers are questioning, uncertain, or satirical,
and, if. affirmative in their nationalism, rather self-consciously
clamant.
In the second stage of our literature, it is the natural affirmation
of life that is characteristic. The poets on the whole accept life
joyously and positively; they believe in it in a healthy, even a simple
and hearty, fashion. In Whitman's self-descriptive phrase, they,
too, are "sane and sensual to the core." To grasp this truth fully,
we have only to place the work of O'Dowd, McCrae, Shaw Neilson,
Baylebridge, Mary Gilmore, Furnley Maurice, and FitzGerald?to
mention some outstanding names?beside that of such modern
English poets as Pound, Eliot, Auden, Spender, McNeice, Bottrall,
Day Lewis, and Madge. The latter all find the times disjoint. They
immerse themselves, as Mr. Spender has acutely shown, in what
Joseph Conrad called "the destructive element." So T. S. Eliot,
truly representative of his English age, wanders around cryptically
in his Waste Land and vents "thoughts of a dry brain in a dry
season," stating (not singing)
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And, in short, I was afraid.
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March, 1945 THE AUSTRALIAN QUARTERLY
So Louis MacNeice mourns:
I think things draw to an end, the soil is stale . . .
The jaded calendar revolves,
Its nuts need oil, carbon chokes the valves.
But out in the antipodes, far from these ditherers, Hugh McCrae
strides lustily as a follower of Pan, chortling
I blow my pipes, the glad birds sing,
The fat young nymphs about me spring,
I am the lord,
I am the lord,
I am the lord of everything!
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THE PASSING OF PAN March, 1945
Bernard O'Dowd sees Australia as a new Hellas, and pictures Alma
Venus, as universal goddess of Love, active in Australia. FitzGerald
the intellectualist naturally writes his ode to "the Greater Apollo,"
lord of light and reason. But these are exceptions. Dorothy Mackel
lar revealed a sound intuition when she declared that it is the lesser
spirits of Hellas that haunt our ways, and
Of the great gods only Pan walks hourly here?Pan only!
In the warm, dark gullies, in the thin clear upland air,
On the windy sea-cliffs and the plains apart and lonely,
By the tingling silence you may know that he is there.
Ken Slessor discovers him at Lane Cove and announces:
Baylebridge also pays the god homage on his return to earth in his
"Palingenesis of Pan":
Pan shall now returned be,
Past his former majesty?
Healthy, holy, honest Pan,
Broadening out the breath in man.
Who hath said that Pan is dead,
And his lieges lapped in lead?
From this breathing foliage round me,
From the vital hills that bound me,
From the earth, the sky, the sea,
A spirit doth commune with me!
It has found the wide and deep
Where the holies dwelling keep!
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March, 1945 THE AUSTRALIAN QUARTERLY
West Australian country, as a spirit perceptible and dynamic stamp
eding the cattle?Pan making pamic. In his poem "Austral Pan" he
celebrates the original Pan as an elemental force living regenerated
in Australia:
He seeks again his ancient haunts,
A squatter born, a squatter bred, with horns, Himself, upon his head,
His steps outback with glee are bent. He snuffs the saltbush with content
The deeper for his knowledge sure, His ancient ways and works endure.
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THE PASSING OF PAN March, 1945
theory to Hugh McCrae, he explains his "falling back on the Greek
past" and other pasts as merely forms of escape from Australia?
"refuges from a poetically insufficient reality." Now I would put
it quite differently and proclaim rather that with the poets mentioned
the Hellenic gods?and notably Pan?are not mechanisms of escape
but something far deeper, far truer. They are universals. They
are realities. So, too, we as Australians are something far deeper
than British or transplanted Europeans. We are human beings,
legatees of the past of the human race, heirs to the myths and symbols
of all ages and all lands. There is no need for' the Australian poet
to use his landscape as a key; rather the gods are the keys to the
world of nature, symbols expressing realities, ubiquitous and time
less. They are embodiments of forces as vital in Sydney and
Melbourne as in Athens or London, as dynamic in the Australian
bush as in the forests of Hellas. When creatively realised here they
are indigenous because universal. They are as much ours as Shake
speare's. As O'Dowd demanded:
Who fenced the nymphs in European vales?
Or Pan tabooed from all but Oxford dreams?
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March, 1945 THE AUSTRALIAN QUARTERLY
Pan came to us. He is the earth-god, fleshly, primitive, a trinity
of the animal, human, and divine. He is robust, affirming life,
sense-delighting yet conscious of pain and suffering. He is in
fact, typically Australian. Such a pagan god is the right symbol
for Australia?especially for the Australia between the 'nineties of
last century and the depression of this. Its people had little liking
for the intellectual, the artistic, or the spiritual; they could not sing
of Apollo or Hermes or Christ. No; they were?as they still are for
the most part?affirmers of physical delight and primitive strength.
Their heroes and prototypes are the strong, sun-bronzed Anzacs
whom Masefield saw on Gallipoli striding as pagan gods or the lusty
life-savers marching on the beaches. And so a poem like Peter
Hopegood's "Austral Pan" advanced our poetry to a more developed
national stage because it expressed consciously the Australian type
and divined the force of our land shaping our people. So, too, Bayle
bridge in his National Notes declared that "Our goal shall be .
the overrunning of Earth with Australians, strong, hot-necked,
natural men."
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THE PASSING OF PAN March, 1945
MacNeice puts it that
There is no pinpoint in any of the ordnance maps
To save you when your towns and town-bred thoughts collapse.
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March, 1945 THE AUSTRALIAN QUARTERLY
demands of a mechanised war. The "drift to the cities" has in
creased. Australia has become urbanised more and more. The
people tend to become further divorced from nature, alien to our
earth itself. And all the ferment of this transitional period has
reflected itself in our poetry. Examine the volumes of verse pub
lished in the last decade. Scrutinise the pages of recent anthologies
of Australian verse, of Meanjin Papers, Angry Penguins, and the
publications of the Jindyworobak Club. There is still affirmation,
and the Australian poet has not yet lost his healthy positivism.
There is a renaissance of national fervour, a strong preoccupation
with our national problems and ideals. Both social and class con
sciousness have become quickened and intensified.
Most striking, however, is the change from the temper of the
poets in the preceding half-century. It has lost the earth-given
delight in the mere living and is troubled instead to answer the
queries raised by our social defects and ills. The land is no longer
a thing of beauty which is a joy for ever. It is rather a problem
of present and future soil erosion and primary production. The
immediate has replaced the immortal. The eternal symbol of the
timeless mythos has been discarded. The gods are gone. Pan is
dead. The depression struck him a mortal blow. Industrialisation
and the class war gave him the coup-de-gr?ce. A war-busy and
class-torn Australia has not even noticed his passing.
The trouble with Pan, however, is that he dies only to be born
again. Even soil erosion and coal strikes cannot kill the deathless
gods. And somehow I fancy that Austral Pan will reappear again,
because there is still so much of his spirit in the true Australian.
When a new order comes, in some healthier, happier age than our
own, there may be also a second coming of the earth-god.
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