Somebody asked me, on hearing that Angus and Robertson's new edition of The Sentimental Bloke had reproduced Hal Gye's original illustrations, what I really thought of the propriety of decorating all those little larrikins with wings so that they look like Cupids.

The inquirer was an artist, and it might have been better for me to ask him what he thought about them; but my own opinion is, and always has been, that they have such a delightful impropriety that it would be a crime to leave them out.

But were they not, in the original edition, just a trifle more improper than they are now? It cannot surely, at this date, be prudish censorship that has deprived them of what no Cupid would willingly lose. I suspect (without looking-up the first-edition, lest all illusions be lost) that the original drawings have been mislaid and these have been reproduced by some photographic process in which detail has been blurred. They seem - not to be too particular in this delicate matter - rather to have been nipped in the bud.

But it is good to have them, even so. They seem to belong inextricably and inevitably to the poem itself, almost a part of the writing, like Dore's illustrations to Rabelais, Norman Lindsay's to "The Magic Pudding" and Tenniel's to "Alice." They are sacrosanct and should never be dropped. It is possible, and I think likely, that they contribute a great deal to the total effect of the poem.

Not that I am suggesting that Hal Gye is a Dore, any more than I could suggest that Dennis (whose values were very conventional) was a Rabelais. But the drawings have great charm and humor; they add a note of lightness, of fantasy, of naughtiness indeed to the poem; and without them it would be a lesser thing. Wherefore by all means let Hal Gye be honored along with Dennis when this new edition isappraised - as, for his "Father" short-stories under his other name of James Hackston and almost as rich an overflow from the Lawson tradition as Brian James's, he will also be honored in due course: when he can be bothered to put them together in a book.

I very much doubt - if the fantastic drawings need to be defended - whether Hal Gye could have got much fun, or much charm, either, out of illustrating "The Bloke" realistically. Surely the burly larrikin and his cliner, and even the Stror-'at Coot, could never have looked so amusing in literal drawings as they do as Cupids. And a fantastic approach to the story was, in fact, pretty well forced on the artist: for Dennis's larrikin is himself wholly a fantasy.

That was one of the things that struck me most forcibly on rereading the poem: how totally unreal and unconvincing as any kind of portrait of a larrikin Dennis's hero is.

What kind of person would he have been in real life? I am afraid that he would have been just a nasty, hulking brute.

We are told, for instance, that his favorite amusement before he met Doreen was "stoushin' coppers." He has even done a stretch for it. Surely, on reflection, even if policemen are only doubtfully human, this is not a nice thing to do. We are told that, when he catches the Stror-'at Coot with Doreen, he jabs his elbow in his ribs and then, so he says, "spanks" him: the world must be full of nice, stror-'atted coots - many of them, no doubt, most ardent readers of Dennis - who would regard it as positively outrageous to be jabbed and spanked by hoodlums in the public streets . . .

Of course we are also told that the Bloke, after he meets Doreen, reforms; he develops a heart of gold and in the last section of the poem - without any proof that he has ever done a single kindly action to a neighbor - sings the praises of doing good to others. But here he seems to me to depart altogether into fantasy. I don't believe that larrikins who bash policemen have hearts of gold at all (you ask the policemen!): I think they have hearts of pig-iron. I think the real larrikin Dennis set out to portray - the cop-stousher - would have finished up married to a harridan in the slums, with frequent holidays in jail; or possibly, in New South Wales, an honorable career in politics.

What are we to believe, then? That the Bloke didn't mean it when he bashed the cops? That it was only his fun? That larrikins do reform? And that, despite the entire lack of evidence, he did spend the rest of his life doing good deeds to his neighbors? I think we can only believe that he, was not a larrikin at all, but a fantasy; having his only validity as a symbol of the normal male, as we all like to think of ourselves and as Burns most convincingly portrayed him, who sometimes gets tight on a Friday night and annoys the little woman, but is a pretty good fellow underneath: one of the best, in fact, and a very proper recipient for beef-tea after he has had a night-out with the boys.

I must admit that at this date, after he has so long been hallowed in the role, it seems heretical to suggest that Bill was never a larrikin. There is no doubt he was accepted as such in his period. We have Henry Lawson's word on that, in the pleasant, sentimental little foreword reprinted in this edition, going on about how Dennis had created a better larrikin than any Henry did himself.

There might be some truth in that; for Lawson, borrowing his outlook from Dickens, didn't do his city types nearly so well as his bush people; but surely the Bloke could not remotely be compared, as a portrait of a larrikin, with the achievements of Dyson and Louis Stone.

And, in fact, when you reread Dennis's poem, it is amazing to discover how very few pictures of larrikin-life there are in it. We have the two references to stoushing coppers; we are told that Bill was addicted to "gettin' shick" and "'eadin' browns" and that he had a "barrer"; we are told that Ginger Mick was a rabbit-oh. There is the Bloke"s outburst of "Put in the boot!" at "Romeo and Juliet" (and a nice sentiment that is, for a reformed character!). We are told that he spends his night-out playing two-up. And that, really, is about all. No copper-bashing is ever described; no rabbit-ohing; not even the game of two-up. The whole thing depends, for its impression of being a picture of larrikin-life, on these few touches, on a few local references to "Little Lon." and the like (which would be better understood in the period than they are now), on Hal Gye's illustrations of the larrikin neckerchiefs on his Cupids, and, of course, on the slang - itself obviously, though with many authentic touches, an invented language. What larrikin ever spoke like this? -

   Sure of 'is title then, the champeen Day
   Begins to put on dawg among 'is push,
   An' as he mooches on 'is gaudy way,
   Drors tribute from each tree an' flow'r an' bush.
   An,' w'ile 'e swigs the dew in sylvan bars,
   The sun shouts insults at the sneakin' stars.

Basically. as a larrikin-poem, I think it rests almost entirely on the knowledge and sentiment of the period. It was enough, when it was first published, for Dennis to label his character "Larrikin" and put in a few tiny brush-strokes to indicate the background; and the public, eager to romanticise the larrikin as a kind of city version of the ever-popular outlaw, took the Bloke to its heart and believed in him. But it was with more than a few quick dabs like this that Paterson painted "The Man from Snowy River" and his background.

We have, then, this, curious paradox of a poem that never was a picture of a larrikin being accepted and cherished as such for 40 years, selling 165,000 copies (no less!) and likely enough to sell the 10,000 more which Angus and Robertson have printed for this edition. And 175,000 readers, can't be wrong. Ten-thousand can be, when a book is first printed; but not 175,000 over the years. Some kind of basic sanity in public taste makes decisions of this magnitude.

What are the reasons for its long-continued popularity?

Well, to begin with, it is very well written. The stanza-form is pleasantly varied from section to section; the narrative moves in clear, steady progress; the rhymes (allowing for a few lazy "logs" and "fogs" and "dogs") is at once correct and quite fresh enough for Dennis's purposes; the verse as a whole is tight, compact, with very little padding, flowing with an easy vigor. Dennis ketp an eye on the ball throughout. Moreover, through the charming spring-noises of the opening become repetitive when prolonged as far as the seventh section - surely, even in Melbourne, the weather sometimes changes - there is a nice, soft music running through the whole thing: no mean achievement when, as in the following stanza, it is conveyed through the uncouth medium of reasonably authentic larrikin-speech:-

   "I wish't yeh meant it," I can 'ear 'er yet,
   My, bit o' fluff!  The moon was shinin' bright,
   Turnin' the waves all yeller where it set -
            A bonzer night!
   The sparklin' sea all sorter gold an' green;
   An' on the pier the band - O 'Ell!. . . Doreen!

The verse is, too, often vividly, even lyrically, pictorial. If pictures of the larrikin background are, as I have said, astonishingly rare, and we would have to go to Furnley Maurice's "Melbourne Odes" to really to find out what the Victoria Markets looked like, we do get Bill on the beach; and we do get the Fitzroy Gardens:-

    The little birds is chirpin' in the nest,
    The parks and gardings is a bosker sight,
    Where smilin' tarts walks up and down, all dressed
            In clobber white.
    An', as their snowy forms goes steppin' by,
    It seems I'm seekin' somethin' on the sly.

And again - quite a significant achievement this, in the foundation of a national literature - there are the times when Dennis makes an elective and authentic use of Australian idiom comparable (at the proper distance in both cases) with the idiomatic speech of Burns and "Banjo" Paterson. If I find such distortions as "forchinit" merely painful and, for that matter, can see no real justification for "orl" and "becors" - these are merely the ordinary pronunciations distorted to look like larrikinese - there is no doubt about the distinctively Australian flavor of such a stanza as:-

   'Twus orl becors uv Ginger Mick - the cow!
   (I wish't I 'ad 'im 'ere to deal wiv now!
   I'd pass 'im one, I would!  'E ain't no man!)
   I meets 'im Choosdee ev'nin' up the town.
   "Wot 0," 'e chips me.  "Kin yeh keep one down?""
            I sez I can.
   We 'as a couple then meets three er four
   Flash coves.  I useter know, an' 'as some more.

How well, incidentally, here and throughout the poem, Dennis uses that truncated line in the midst or at the end of the stanza for humorous emphasis! - "I sez I can." Somehow there's a wealth of wicked, Australianism packed into those four simple words. Again at a distance, it reminds me of the way Burns used the short lines in his "epistles."

Dennis is, of course, often credited with being a creator of Australian idiom. I am a bit doubtful of that. How many slang terms or phrases did he invent? How many idioms of the period have survived only because he picked them up and put them in the poem? How many were not, when he took them over, already firmly established in popular usage? This for the experts to determine: but I suppose at least a few of the idioms still in popular use must be credited to Dennis's authorship or sponsorship; I dips me lid at any rate to "I dips me lid"; and I dare say it was he who first made popular, and amusing, the appalling outcry of "Put in the boot."

I think I have seen him credited, too, like Shakspeare and like Burns (once more at the proper distance, I trust) with being one of those mind-forming, nation-forming writers who can put into compact and memorable speech the resounding commonplaces upon which mortal existence is based: sayings like "Ripeness is all" or "A man's a man for a' that." At any rate, some politician claimed for the first edition that Dennis was "the Burns of Australia,", and I myself, from former readings of the poem, always had a notion that that was the sort of thing you could find in it. I don't find now, on re-examinaton, that there are many such phrases. "The commin end of most of us is - Tart" is too commonplace a commplace, and vulgar. "Livin' and lovin' - so life mooches on" is cloying. I prefer, in its context, the Bloke's heartfelt ejaculation, "Gorstrooth! Wot is the use o' me, I arst?"; but I doubt if it could be said to live upon the tongue of mankind along with "To be or not to be" or "The best laid schemes o' mice and men."

One of the poem's strongest claims both to popularity and enduring interest remain, nevertheless, its touches of basic humanity: if not so much in specific phrases, in the entire texture of the story, its pattern of love, jealousy, marriage and the birth of the child; also in the theme of incorrigible masculinity. If it turns didactic and sentimental at the end, in Bill's wholly undocumented conversion to the Golden Rule, it is still essentially the fundamental human story. Bill, if hardly a larrikin, is a kind of Everyman; and it is not surprising that Everyman should be interested in his doings.

And if this human story, as Dennis has handled it, tastes sometimes too sugary, there remains at all times the escape and reinforcement of his humor: for even if you find the Bloke very slight as a picture of a larrikin, and if you find him a little unrealistic in his courtship of Doreen and more than a little embarrassing when he is goo-gooing over his son, nobody can deny that Dennis is funny.

There is that most ingenious piece of light-verse in "The Stoush o' Day," a prolonged Homeric metaphor where a single joking image is expanded to 88 lines. There is the skit on "Romeo and Juliet" - where the famous "'Peanuts or lollies!' sez a boy upstairs" strikes me as a little obvious, and where Dennis has scored a faintly reprehensible success for the anti-cultural tendency of his poem ... but it remains amusing. There is the squashing of the Stror-'at Coot; the cruel but irresistible caricature of "Mar"; and there is the wholly diverting "Pilot Cove." And, though these are supreme moments, humor infuses, strengthens and redeems the whole body of the poem.

Because of its failure to depict the larrikin background and to make the Bloke a convincing and consistent piece of characterisation, "The Sentimental Bloke" has not the solidity of Paterson's ballads, the type of Australian writing with which it may most suitably be compared. As a popular narrative it does not seem as amusing as John Farrell's neglected "My Sundowner." It would be absurd to compare it, as a picture of manners or a deep evocation of humanity, with such a piece as Burns's "The Cotter's Saturday Night," let alone the Rabelaisian "Jolly Beggars."

Its total effect is of slightness. But also of charm, ingenuity and humor. And, simply because it tells a clear story in capable verse, dealing with the basic human emotions, it remains a challenge to "serious" Australian poetry; which, despite a few notable exceptions in recent years, has not yet sufficiently recognised that from this aspect at least, at however infinite a distance, Dennis practised the art of Chaucer and of Byron. Only the writer who deals in narrative poetry can ever hope to attract that lamentable, that wicked, that wonderful total of 175,000 readers.

Douglas Stewart
The Bulletin, 10 July 1957, red page