Service, Gordon and Wilcox.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)

SIR: Rod Moran (Letters, September 2007) decides to leave to "our splendid cultural studies intellects to sort out" the question of whether the verse of "the great twentieth-century balladeer" Robert W. Service is of comparatively little literary merit, as is suggested in The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English.

To thus leave the question is probably wise, although support for the R.W. Service cause can be found in an amusing editorial to the June 1934 issue of the London Mercury, which favourably contrasts the poetic merits of Service with none other than those of our own Adam Lindsay Gordon (in fact "our own" by adoption, for he was sent to South Australia from England for his health).

In lamenting the admission to Poets' Comer in Westminster Abbey of a bust of Gordon, following the refusal a few years earlier by a Dean of Westminster to admit a Byron memorial to the abbey, the Editor said:

 
   There is a strange similarity in 
   the ring of that name [Adam 
   Lindsay Gordon] and the ring 
   of the name of Ella Wheeler 
   Wilcox: and there is a dreadful 
   similarity between their works. 
   I do not know whether Mrs 
   Wilcox showed equal prowess 
   with Gordon in riding and 
   rounding up cattle; and I do 
   not, never having seen a picture 
   of the lady, know she was as 
   handsome as he was. But this at 
   least is certain: that they had an 
   equal gift of platitude, an equal 
   false heartiness, and an equal 
   power of writing decayed 
   Swinburne. Shall not thou and 
   I, says Henry V to Katherine of 
   France in the eponymous play, 
   between St Denis and St 
   George, compound a boy, half 
   French and half English, that 
   shall go to Constantinople and 
   take the Turk by the beard? 
   What beards might not have 
   been taken by a compound of 
   Adam Lindsay Gordon and Ella 
   Wheeler Wilcox! She wrote: 
   Laugh and the worm laughs 
   with you, 
   Weep and you weep alone. 
   He wrote: 
   Life is mostly froth and bubble. 
   Two things stand like stone: 
   Kindness in another's troubles, 
   Courage in your own. 

With reference ...