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AUSTRALIAN WRITERS

by

DESMOND BYRNE







London
Richard Bentley and Son
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
1896

[All rights reserved]




CONTENTS.

                                PAGE
  INTRODUCTION                     1

  MARCUS CLARKE                   29

  HENRY KINGSLEY                  90

  ADA CAMBRIDGE                  131

  ADAM LINDSAY GORDON            159

  ROLF BOLDREWOOD                189

  MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED            229

  TASMA                          260




INTRODUCTION.


Any survey of the work done by Australian authors suggests a question
as to what length of time ought to be allowed for the development of
distinctive national characteristics in the literature of a young
country self-governing to the extent of being a republic in all but
name, isolated in position, highly civilised, enjoying all the modern
luxuries available to the English-speaking race in older lands, and with
a population fully two-thirds native. The common saying that a country
cannot be expected to produce literature during the earlier state of its
growth is too vague a generalisation. There are circumstances by which
its application may be modified. It certainly does not apply with equal
force to a country whose early difficulties included race conflicts,
war with an external power and political labours of great magnitude, and
to another whose commercial and social development, carried on under
more modern conditions by a people almost entirely homogeneous, has been
facile, unbroken and extraordinarily rapid.

Nor can paucity of literary product, where it exists, be satisfactorily
explained by the unrest that continues in a new land long after it has
attained material prosperity and the higher refinements of life. The
Americans are a type of an extremely restless people. They have been so
throughout the greater part of their history, and the characteristic is
now more marked than ever. It is a fixed condition of their national
being, an expression of the cumulative ambition that is the source of
their varied progress. Yet from time to time men have arisen among them
who not only have given intimate views of a new civilisation, but have
added something to the permanent stock of what Matthew Arnold used to
call 'the best that is known and thought in the world.' Even when the
independent nationhood of the United States was still but an aspiration,
Benjamin Franklin had familiarised Europe with much that has since been
recognised as inherent in the modes of thought and manners of the
Western race.

The bulk of the literature of America is, of course, still small in
proportion to the culture and intellectual energy of the country; but it
has been and is sufficient to interpret in a more or less distinctive
way all the leading phases in the evolution of the national thought and
sentiment. The subtle influence of the deeply-grounded religious feeling
which, implanted by the Puritan pioneers, has survived generations of
intense absorption in material progress and the distractions that modern
life offers to the possessors of newly-acquired wealth; the pride of the
people in their independence, and their natural tendency to overrate it
in comparison; with the conditions of other countries; the contrasts
furnished by a society fond of reproducing European habits, yet
retaining a simplicity and freshness of its own: these and other
features in the progress of the United States for over a century may be
found expressed in its literature from the native standpoint, and not
merely from that of the intelligent outside observer.

An American writer in discussing, a few years ago, the quality of the
literature produced before the War of Secession, when wealth and leisure
were abundant among the planters and in the principal New England towns,
observed that 'there would seem to be something in the relation of a
colony to the mother-country which dooms the thought and art of the
former to a hopeless provincialism.' If a comment so largely fanciful
could be made respecting Australasia and Canada, it would practically
mean--at all events from the American point of view--that as long as
they remain dependencies of Great Britain, and therefore lack the
stimulus of an active patriotism, so long will much of whatever is
individual in their social development and national aspirations be
without expression. In the case of the Australasian colonies it would
further mean (apart from any consideration of their future independence)
that a people far removed from other communities of the same race and
already giving promise of being the greatest power south of the equator,
must continue for an indefinite period to be wholly sustained and swayed
in matters of thought and art by a country over twelve thousand miles
distant that happens for the present to offer the most convenient
markets in which to buy and sell. The point need hardly be discussed,
but it suggests some facts in the intellectual life of Australia that it
will be of interest to name. These may not be found to explain why there
is yet no sign of the coming of an Antipodean Franklin or Irving, or
Hawthorne or Emerson; but they will help to show why the literature of
the country grows so unevenly, why it is chiefly of the objective order
and leaves large tracts of the life of the people untouched.

Perhaps the paradox that a people may read a great deal and yet not be
interested in literature could hardly be applied to the Australians,
but it is a fact that they make no special effort to encourage the
growth of a literature of their own. By no means unconscious of their
achievements in other directions--in political innovations, in sport and
athletics--they appear not to take any pride in or see the advantage of
promoting creative intellectual work. Will this be considered natural
and reasonable, as already they are supplied with books and plays and
pictures from England and Europe, or as a proof of thoughtlessness and
neglect? 'Why,' asked a critic in the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1819,
'should the Americans write books when a six weeks' passage brings them,
in their own tongue, our sense, science, and genius in bales and
hogsheads?' Are the Australians of these days asking themselves a
similar question? It would seem so. In 1894 they imported books,
magazines and newspapers from the United Kingdom to the value of
L363,741: this, too, at a time when most of the colonies were understood
to be rigidly economising in consequence of a financial crisis. A decade
before the amount was not far short of a hundred thousand pounds
higher.

Foremost in his list of the salient intellectual tendencies of the
native population of the United States Mr. Bryce places 'a desire to be
abreast of the best thought and work of the world everywhere, and to
have every form of literature and art adequately represented and
excellent of its kind, so that America shall be felt to hold her own
among the nations.' And he further attributes to them 'an admiration for
literary or scientific eminence, an enthusiasm for anything that can be
called genius, with an over-readiness to discover it.'

Artistic talent in America has from an early period in the history of
the country enjoyed the stimulus of local respect and attention. Mr.
Henry James has testified to the 'extreme honour' in which writers and
artists have always been held there. Literature is now a subject of
special systematic study in all the important schools; literary
organisations are numerous, including no fewer than five thousand
circles for the study of Shakespeare; authorship has become something
like a craze in fashionable society; the intelligence of the criticism
in the weekly press is on the whole equal to that in English journals;
and several of the magazines are largely devoted to the more artistic
kinds of writing. If the results of these incentives to production seem
comparatively small, as they undoubtedly do, it must not be forgotten
that the profession of letters in America long suffered, and is still
suffering, from the absence of international copyright law. Before the
year 1891 the markets were filled with cheap reprints of British and
European works (often of an inferior class), and even now authors have
to encounter competition with a vast quantity of foreign matter of which
copyright, owing to the peculiar conditions of the law and of the
publishing trade, is often obtained at prices much below its real value.

It is not, however, the native literary product of America that is
noteworthy so much as the widespread and conscious taste for literature
among the people, and the means which they adopt to promote it. The
best friend of Australia could not credit it at present with any
markedly active desire 'to have every form of literature and art
adequately represented and excellent of its kind.' In this respect the
results of the high standard of education attained in the Government
schools and the subsidised Universities are disappointing. The
Universities of Sydney and Melbourne will soon be fifty years old, but
neither is yet represented with distinction in the higher forms of
literature and art. The Governments, at least, do their duty. Having
liberally provided for school education, they spend annually large sums
in making additions to picture-galleries, in maintaining libraries (of
which there are over eleven hundred), technological schools and museums,
and in other ways adding to the comfort and enlightenment of the people.
But large private contributions are rare, and the founding or endowment
of public institutions still rarer.

Of societies or clubs devoted specially to the interests of literature
there are very few--probably not half a dozen. Here and there among the
upper classes there are little coteries whose members read the English
and French reviews, and are well posted in all movements of interest in
the world of letters, but there is no actual organisation among them,
and they do not seek to extend their influence. Their ambition is
confined to providing for their personal improvement and pleasure. The
reading of the people, though extensive, is not serious nor in any way
specialised, unless a recent notably high average of borrowing in the
historical departments of a few of the free libraries be taken into
account. The leading book exporters in London say that throughout the
Antipodes the public demand is confined, as in England, mainly to the
'general' literature of the hour. 'Whatever has succeeded in London will
usually succeed in Australia' is the invariable remark of the exporter
and the first principle that guides his tentative selection in the case
of all newly-published works. The circulation of the best British weekly
and monthly reviews by some of the principal subscription libraries
helps the reader to choose for himself, but if he should wish to buy a
new book, however valuable, that has not become popular in the business
sense, he will probably have to send to London for it.

The wealthy people seem to select their reading-matter chiefly with a
view to entertainment. Not long ago the manager of one of the most
fashionable of the Melbourne circulating libraries said that about
ninety per cent. of the female and seventy-five per cent. of the male
frequenters of such libraries in Australia read only novels. But this
average is perhaps rather over-stated, being given at a time when there
was an exceptional demand for certain novels that had obtained notoriety
by an audacious treatment of sex questions and English society.

A glance at the fare which fourteen of the London publishers provide in
their colonial editions is of interest. Excellent value, of its kind, is
usually offered in these issues, but here again we find proclaimed an
excessive preference for light prose literature. Of 264 volumes in one
'colonial library,' 238 are of fiction. Sketches, memoirs, reminiscences
and a few essays make up most of the balance. The taste of the working
classes, so far as it can be ascertained from the records of the
principal free libraries, is, curious as it may seem, decidedly sounder
than that attributed to the customers of the subscription libraries. It
must be remembered, however, that the former are seldom tempted with new
fiction, and never with fiction of the spicy or questionable kind. Some
of the larger institutions are rigidly exclusive in regard to the light
kinds of literature.

Authorship in Australia loses an important incentive in the absence of
local magazines. All of the better kind have lacked sufficient public
support. Several of them, including the _Colonial Monthly_ (established
by Marcus Clarke), the _Melbourne Review_, the _Centennial Magazine_,
and the _Australasian Critic_ (the latter conducted by the professors of
the Melbourne University) promised so well that their want of support is
not easily explainable. It has been attributed to an unreasoning
prejudice, an assumption that being locally produced they must
necessarily be inferior; but this probably does the reading public less
than justice. Apparently from their contents, most of the magazines
failed because they were made too Australian in character, too unlike
the English periodicals to which readers had been so long accustomed.
There are many fine magazines in the United States, but their conductors
do not make the mistake of trying to do without British and European
contributions. They know the value of names as well as of matter.
Foreign writers supply about one-third of the contents of the monthlies.
When great interest suddenly attaches to some national question, their
enterprise, like that of the newspapers of the country, sometimes takes
the special form of securing cabled summaries of the opinions of
influential politicians in Great Britain and elsewhere for immediate
publication.

A contributory cause of the failure of Australian magazines is the fact
that the cost of their mechanical production has always been higher
than that of any of their imported competitors. This promises to be a
difficulty for some years to come. Book-publishing, as a separate
business, is also practically impossible, for like reasons. The
Australian reader attaches no special value to the possibilities of the
local magazine, partly because its place as a literary and art record is
considered to be fairly supplied by the weekly newspapers. Moreover, it
is said he demands cheapness as well as high quality in his periodicals,
and knows that both can be got in several English, American and European
magazines. If this be so, the same predilection will no doubt account
for the spectacle of leading London firms sending to the colonies tons
of their popular modern books in paper covers, and offering them at
about half the price charged in the United Kingdom, where they are
obtainable only in cloth-bound editions.

That no one has yet lived by the production of literature in Australia
is not a matter for surprise. No one, indeed, would seriously think of
attempting to do so. Gordon was a mounted policeman, a horse-breaker, a
steeplechase-rider--anything but a professional man of letters; Marcus
Clarke was a journalist and playwright, and wrote only two novels in
fourteen years; Rolf Boldrewood's books were written in spare hours
before and after his daily duties as a country magistrate; Henry
Kingsley returned to England before publishing anything; Kendall held a
Government clerkship which he exchanged for journalism; Mr. Brunton
Stephens is in the Queensland Civil Service; Mr. B. L. Farjeon's
colonial work was mainly done in connection with the New Zealand press;
Messrs. Marriott, Watson, E. W. Hornung, J. F. Hogan, Haddon Chambers
and Guy Boothby, among younger writers, have taken their talents to
London; and none of the half-dozen female novelists have been dependent
upon literature for a livelihood.

What, it may be asked, becomes of the best talent developed by the
Australian schools and Universities? It is employed, or tries to find
employment, in the practice of law, medicine, journalism and teaching.
From law to politics is but a step in the colonies, and the chances of
attaining Cabinet rank, rendered frequent by the prevailing aggressive
form of party government, are often attractive to men of ability and
ambition. The journalists are more or less drenched with politics all
the year round, and they, too, occasionally find it an easy matter to
vary their occupation by assisting in the active business of law-making.
The tension of their daily lives, severer than that of the majority of
press writers in Great Britain, leaves them little or no leisure for
literary work of the higher kind, and generally the prospect of being
compelled to send whatever they might write to the other end of the
world for the chance of publication discourages effort. It may safely be
said that there are young men on the editorial and reporting staffs of a
dozen of the principal journals who possess ability that would secure
them distinction in the wider fields of England or America. To their
skill and spirited rivalry is due the universally high quality of the
Antipodean press. Mr. David Christie Murray, writing after considerable
experience of the colonies, and as one who had been an English
journalist, said that on the whole he was 'compelled to think it by far
and away the best in the world.' The remark is without exaggeration so
far as it applies to the large weekly journals.

The extent of the favour shown by Australian readers to the works of
their own novelists is, as a rule, exactly proportioned to that which
their merits have previously won in England. Booksellers and their
London agents, who of course treat all literature from a purely
commercial standpoint, are at all events unanimous in discrediting the
existence in recent years of any prejudice against colonial fiction of
the better class. It is now very seldom sent out in two or three volume
form, they say, but neither are the most popular English novels, except
occasionally to subscription libraries. For representative Australian
work, then, there is a fair field but no favour. It is as though the
function and existence of the authors apart from the rank and file of
English letters were not recognised. There is an exception to this rule
in the poet Gordon, as a portion of his writings, the Bush _Ballads and
Galloping Rhymes_, irresistibly commemorate the national love of
horseflesh and outdoor life. Every Australian now knows that _For the
Term of his Natural Life_ is a great novel of its class; but as a
leading Victorian journalist (Mr. James Smith) once pointed out in an
article in the _Melbourne Review_, Clarke's real merit was for years
undervalued, because he was known to be 'only a colonial writer.'
Thousands of English, European and American readers had admired the
novel before they thought of inquiring who the writer was or whence he
came. It is true that the story attracted a good deal of interest in
Australia even during its first appearance as a serial, but from
elsewhere came its recognition as one of the novels of the century.

The authors whose lives and writings are briefly sketched in this volume
are all noted in some degree for accuracy and sincerity in their
representation of life in Australia. They have all written from abundant
knowledge--from love, also, perhaps it may be added--of this great wide
land with its brilliant skies, its opportunities and its wholesome
pleasures. That they should fail to cover their field--that they tell
too much of country life and adventure and too little of the throb and
energy of the cities--is in a large measure explained by the fact that
their books are of necessity primarily written for English readers.

Somehow it is assumed that people in the mother-country continue to be
interested only in the picturesque, the curious and the unusual in
Australian life. The idea is in part a survival from earlier years when
a host of military officers, Civil Servants, journalists and tourists
described in some form the more obvious peculiarities of the colonies:
their giant, evergreen forests, strange amorphous animals, aristocratic
gold-diggers, ex-convicts in carriages, and general state of
topsy-turveydom. There is quite an amazing variety of occasional records
of this class in forgotten books, magazines and pamphlets. In at least
a score of well-known novels there are charming country scenes, true in
every particular; but there is a distinct limit to the power of fiction
of this kind to interest remote readers, while much repetition of it
might well be misleading.

A writer in the _Australasian Critic_ once rightly observed, respecting
a batch of short stories of the conventionally Australian kind, that
English readers might 'fancy from them that big cities are unknown in
Australia; that the population consists of squatters, diggers,
stock-riders, shepherds and bushrangers; that the superior residences
are weatherboard homesteads with wide verandas, while the inferior ones
are huts and tents.' No foreign reader could understand from them that
'more than half the Australian population have never seen kangaroos or
emus outside a zoological garden, and that not one in a hundred, or even
a thousand, has seen a wild black fellow.' There is a well-known type of
Australian novel to which the same remarks might apply with almost
equal fitness.

The lack of interest on the part of the novelists in the cities is the
more noticeable because they contain one-third of the whole population
of the country, a proportion said not to have a parallel in any other
part of the world. This neglect is surely a mistake, founded on an
erroneous conception of the tastes of the English public, and resulting
partly from the absence of anything like a local literary influence upon
the writers. 'Have the stress and turmoil of a political career no
charm?' asks Mr. Edmund Gosse, in referring to the restricted scope of
the English novel, and in making a plea for 'a larger study of life.'

The same question might with very good reason be raised concerning the
political life of Australia, which has been almost entirely neglected
since Mrs. Campbell Praed used up the best of her early impressions and
settled in England. The majority of the writers of fiction who continue
to live in the country are women, and possibly not interested in
politics; but the chief reason why the romance is seldom written of the
Cabinet Minister who started life as a gold-digger or draper's
assistant, or of the democratic legislator whose first election was
announced to him through a hole in a steam-boiler that he was riveting,
is to be found in a belief that it would not be appreciated in the
far-off land whither all Australian books must go for the sanction of
their existence. Here again the British reader appears to be misjudged,
for has he not accepted from another direction, and enjoyed, _Democracy_
and _Through One Administration_? Mrs. Praed, lightly skimming the
surface of Antipodean political life in two of her stories, has shown it
to be not without humour, nor lacking in the elements of more serious
interest. But she cannot be said to have exhibited any particular belief
in the political novel, and none of the more practised among her
colonial contemporaries has ever given it a trial.

On the main question of a national literature it will perhaps be
concluded that Australia has yet scarcely any need to be concerned: that
not much must be expected from a civilisation which, though it has been
rapid, began little more than a century ago; and that the existence of
wealth, and the possibilities of leisure and culture which wealth
affords, cannot produce the same effect upon art in a new country as in
an old one. The whole matter no doubt is somewhat difficult of decision.
It has been none the less useful to indicate why so little of the work
already done is the work of native writers--why the existence of much of
the best of it may almost be considered accidental. And while a refusal
to take the trouble of independently judging the worth of a local
artistic product may or may not be an invariable characteristic of a new
country, it was also right to contradict on the best available authority
the assertion of a 'prejudice' against the work of Australian authors.

A portion of the talent that cannot be absorbed in the already
overcrowded ranks of law and medicine might find employment in building
a literature which should have something of national savour in it, if
migration to England were no longer a condition of success to those who
would make writing a profession, as migration to New York or Boston is
similarly found to be a necessity to the young Canadian man or woman of
letters. It need not be wished that the colonial Governments would do
more than they have done--certainly not that they would create a sort of
civil pension list, as a section of the Legislative Assembly of Victoria
contemplated doing ten years ago in discussing a proposed grant to the
family of Marcus Clarke. But the Universities might extend their
influence, and those who have leisure might combine to introduce some of
the methods which have helped to create a living public interest in
literature and art in European countries. In other words, there is
needed an increased sense of responsibility in the cultured class: those
people, among others, who yearly help to fill the luxurious ocean
steamships on their long journeys to the Old World, and who bring back
so singularly little practical enthusiasm for their own land in the
South.

Meanwhile it is encouraging to note the high promise of the work of some
of the younger writers. Mary Gaunt (Mrs. H. Lindsay Miller), the
daughter of a well-known Victorian judge, has, in _The Moving Finger_,
raised the short story to an artistic level hardly approached by any
other Australian writer. And Mrs. Alick Macleod, author of _An
Australian Girl_ and _The Silent Sea_, has given in the former novel--a
fine story, despite some irregularities of form--the most perfect
description of the peculiar natural features of the country ever
written. For the first time the Bush is interpreted as well as
described. In the attitude displayed in this story towards the
fashionable life of the towns there is habitual impatience and
occasional scorn. The sketches of Mrs. Anstey Hobbs' efforts to found a
salon, the flirtations of Mrs. Lee-Travers--who 'chose her admirers to
suit her style of dress'--Laurette Tareling's solemn respect for
Government House, and the generally satirical view of the 'incessant
mimicking of other mimicries,' are no doubt justified; they are often
decidedly entertaining. But it would of course be a mistake to accept
all this as more than a partial view of Melbourne society. The book does
not pretend to deal with it in other than an incidental manner. Mrs.
Macleod's studies of character and often clever dialogue suggest that
she might profitably adapt to the presentation of Australian life the
quiet intensity of Tourgueneff, or the delicately observant style of the
American critical realists, Henry James, W. D. Howells and Richard
Harding Davis. And here one wonders whether the Australian novelists who
find so little material in Sydney and Melbourne have seen what the new
writer, Henry B. Fuller, has done with the life of modern unromantic
Chicago?

According to Mr. Howells, America, through the medium of its own
particular class of novel, 'is getting represented with unexampled
fulness.' The writers 'excel in small pieces with three or four
figures,' and are able conveniently to dispense with sensationalism--a
point not yet reached by Antipodean novelists. 'Every now and then,' he
says, referring to the extreme of this type, 'I read a book with perfect
comfort and much exhilaration, whose scenes the average Englishman would
gasp in. Nothing happens; that is, nobody murders or debauches anybody
else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is not a ghost, or
a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster
of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the whole story;
"no promenade, no band of music, nossing!" as Mr. Du Maurier's Frenchman
said of the meet for a fox-hunt. Yet it is all alive with the keenest
interest for those who enjoy the study of individual traits and general
conditions as they make themselves known to American experience.' As the
Transatlantic social conditions, of which the realistic novel with only
three or four figures is understood to be the outcome, are being more or
less repeated in Australia, a similar literary medium will probably be
found best adapted to the portrayal of life there. At least it may be
claimed that there is no lack of material in the shape of individual
traits which have not yet been suitably described in any form.




MARCUS CLARKE.


In the peculiarity of his fitful talents, and in the character of his
best work in fiction--a pathetically slender life's product--Marcus
Clarke is still alone in Australian literature. Others have shown the
cheerful, hopeful, romantic aspects of the new land; he, not less
honestly, but with a more concentrated and individual view, has pictured
some of the monotony of its half-grown society, the gloom of its
scenery, and the painful realities of its early penal systems. Reputed
only as a novelist, he possessed besides imagination some of the higher
qualities of the critical historian. And had his life been prolonged, he
might almost have done for Australian city life what Thackeray did for
the London of seventy years ago. He could, at least, have written a
novel of manners that would have credited the people of Australia with
some individuality: such a novel as would mark the effects which
comparative isolation must produce in a people who are educated and
intelligent beyond the average of the British race, intensely
self-contained and ambitious, and of whom two-thirds are now
native-born,--a novel that would have corrected the too languidly
accepted judgments of omniscient elderly gentlemen, who, after a few
weeks or months spent among the smallest and most imitative section of
Antipodean society, gravely conclude that 'leaves that grow on one
branch of an oak are not more like leaves that grow upon another, than
the Australian swarm is like the hive it sprang from.'

A rhetorical half-truth of this kind, as applied to the entire people,
can best be answered in the manner of the modern realists. The field is
narrow in Australia, yet not too narrow for the writer who, foregoing
the taste for sensation, will be content to transcribe and interpret
impressions of the moving humanity around him to their minutest detail;
who will forget the pioneer squatter, the Oxford scholar disguised as a
'rouseabout,' and the digger and bushranger of a past generation; who
will sacrifice something of dramatic effect in the endeavour to produce
a faithful and finished picture of colonial middle-class society. As
qualifications for such work, Clarke had exceptional courage,
straightness of eye, and a decided taste for exposing shams, superadded
to a forcible and satirical style of expression.

Whether he had the tact and temperate spirit that must form the basis of
these qualities in the production of serious fiction is less certain, if
he may be judged by the tone of such minor pieces as _Civilization
without Delusion_, _Beaconsfield's Novels_, and _Democratic Snobbery_.
There is a certain violence in these which is more offensive than their
undoubted cleverness is admirable or their satire entertaining. They
show that the writer retained some of the impetuosity and prejudices
which were marked features of his youth.

Clarke was an anti-Semite, therefore in the Beaconsfield novels he saw
little beyond an expression of the author's personal exultation as the
successful representative of a maligned race. In the theological
controversy of _Civilization without Delusion_, an even less effective
and becoming performance, the young author revealed a deficiency which,
in any writer, can only be regarded as a misfortune and a cause for
tolerant regret. The spiritual side of his nature was an undeveloped,
almost a barren field. Neglected in boyhood and sapped by early habits
of dissipation, it had no strength to resist the agnostic conclusions
which were the product in later years of a coldly critical examination
of the general grounds of Christian belief.

In dealing with religion, his characteristic independence developed into
a stiff intellectual pride, and from that into a recklessness which
disregarded alike his public reputation and the feelings of others. But
these forays into the preserves of theology were happily rare. Such
questions obtained no permanent place in his thoughts: they were only
the passing expression of an ever-besetting mental restlessness. It is
indeed surprising that a writer with artistic instinct and a sense of
humour should ever have persuaded himself to enter the fruitless field
of religious contention at all.

There are a few facts in the early life of Marcus Clarke which are
sometimes so strongly, and even painfully, reflected in his brief career
that they form a necessary preface to any consideration of his literary
work. Soon after his birth at Kensington (London) in 1846 his mother
died, and thenceforward through all his youth he seems to have received
little advice or attention from relations. His father, a barrister and
literary man of retired and eccentric habits, exercised over him a
merely nominal authority, and so he had liberty to gratify a spirit of
inquiry and curiosity notably beyond his years. At his own home he
became the pet of his father's acquaintances, a set of fashionable
cynics.

In _Human Repetends_, a sketch of his published several years later,
there is a passage which substantially records his experiences at this
time: 'I was thrown, when still a boy, into the society of men thrice my
age, and was tolerated as a clever impertinent in all those wicked and
witty circles in which virtuous women are conspicuous by their
absence.... I was suffered at sixteen to ape the vices of sixty.... So
long as I was reported to be moving only in that set to which my father
chose to ally himself, he never cared to inquire how I spent the
extravagant allowance which his indifference, rather than his
generosity, permitted me to waste. You can guess the result of such a
training.'

Left alone in the world at the age of eighteen, upon the death of his
father, he emigrated to Australia. Failing to take any interest in a
bank-clerkship provided by an uncle for him at Melbourne, he was sent to
a sheep-station near Glenorchy, one hundred miles inland. Here again he
paid little attention to the occupation chosen for him. All the day and
half the night were dreamed away in literary thought. Just as he
wandered alone over fern-hill and creek-bed, plain and mountain range,
and absorbed impressions of a scenery at once repulsive and fascinating
to him, so he dipped into all kinds of literature without method or set
purpose. But he preferred fiction, and as the consignee of an endless
succession of French novels he became a marked man in the eyes of the
village postmaster.

Two years had thus been spent, when a Dr. Lewins, who was known as a
'materialistic philosopher,' visited the station and made the young
Englishman's acquaintance. A warm mutual regard resulted, and soon
Lewins succeeded in obtaining a small post for Clarke on the Melbourne
_Argus_. This was the beginning of the most brilliant journalistic
career established on the Australian press.

A less happy result of the same friendship was Clarke's conversion to
the arid and uninspiring doctrines of materialism, though perhaps it
could hardly be called a conversion in the case of one upon whom the
deeper principles of Christian faith had never obtained any real hold.

Colonial democracy seems to have been to Clarke at once a source of
inspiration and of scorn. Coming from among the English upper classes,
with the education and temperament of an aristocrat, he was yet readily
able to sympathise with the higher principles of the new society. Its
intelligence, virility and free intercourse broadened and interested
him, as it does most young Englishmen. But for that common product of
a new country, the pretentious plutocrat, he had only contempt.

It is the bitterness with which this feeling is expressed in his
journalistic writings that helps to raise a doubt as to his capacity for
work of the best class in fiction. Still, if it be true, as some of
those who were his friends say, that this occasional work was seldom
much studied, it becomes unreliable as an indicator of the writer's
character. The same hand that in the famous _Snob Papers_ so savagely,
and in at least one case so intemperately, satirised types of English
society, afterwards produced novels in which fidelity to the essential
facts of life is the most conspicuous quality. So, too, might it have
been in the case of the 'Peripatetic Philosopher,' whose weekly
criticisms of Melbourne men and manners in 1867-68 has correctly been
judged the best writing of its kind yet done in Australia. In these
articles, remarkable as the work of one who was only in his
twenty-second year, there is a closeness of observation and incisiveness
of style which promised much more for their author than the
circumstances of his life afterwards permitted him to realise.

The usual effects of an undirected youth and an undisciplined manhood
explain Marcus Clarke's failure to render to his adopted country the
service which, as a distinctly gifted writer of the realist school, he
seemed well fitted to perform. He was a Bohemian, who, while resisting
the worst vices of his class, shared its carelessness and improvidence
to a degree that left little energy for ambitious work.

His was not an idle nature by any means: it was only erratic, fond of
variety, impatient of drudgery. Thus, in the course of fourteen years'
literary work, his thoughts make excursions from town-life to
country-life, from social satire to story-telling, from art to
ethnology, from theology to opera-bouffe! Here are the titles of a few
of his compositions: _Lower Bohemia in Melbourne_ (a sketch), _Plot_ (a
sensational drama), _Review of Comte and Positive Philosophy_ (magazine
article), _The Humbug Papers_ (humorous and satirical), _The Future
Australian Race_ (an ethnological study), _Goody Two Shoes_ (a
pantomime), _Civilization without Delusion_ (a theological discussion
with the Bishop of Melbourne), _The Power of Love_ (an extravaganza),
_Dore and Modern Art_ (a review), _Cannabis Indica_ (a psychological
experiment). Almost the whole of Clarke's life may be said to have been
devoted to the supply of some temporary demand of the periodical press
or the stage. Even the two novels which represent his only sustained
work were written for serial issue in Melbourne magazines.

It does not appear in either case that he wrote with any special view
to establish a literary reputation; indeed, it would seem that the story
of convict life might not have been completed but for the strenuous
importunity of the firm of publishers with whom he had contracted to
write it.

Journalism, the early occupation of so many eminent men of letters, has
usually been abandoned as soon as the young writer has once shown
exceptional ability as a novelist. This rule was not followed by Clarke.
As the leader in his day of the journalistic class, who, as the late Mr.
Francis Adams has said with substantial truth, still 'stand almost
entirely for the conscious literary culture of the whole Antipodean
community,' he held a position which would have unfavourably affected
the literary tone and ambition of a still more energetic and original
writer.

He had no predecessors in the special work he elected to do; he had to
establish his own standard of achievement; and he was without the
constant stimulus which intercourse with literary society, such as that
of London, affords. The demands of the newspapers were then, as now,
more for purely ephemeral criticism or narrative than for matter worthy
to rank as permanent literature.

An alert, pithy style and a distinct gift of satirical humour such as
Clarke had, and developed by a wide range of reading, were just the
qualities which are always in request on the keen, aggressive daily
press of Australia. One can easily imagine the flattering demands made
upon the young author's powers by the men who were his personal friends
as well as employers.

Whenever he was deficient in taste of expression, or in urbanity of
criticism (as in his treatment of the Jews), he showed the effects
partly of impetuous haste, and partly of his remoteness from those
centres of literary opinion which always beneficially influence a young
writer, be he ever so original or naturally artistic. It has been
doubted whether Clarke was ever fully convinced of his own powers; but
however feasibly this may have applied to the first four or five years
of his literary career, there was no ground for it after the unanimously
favourable reception accorded to _For the Term of his Natural Life_ upon
its issue in book form in 1874.

In England and America, as well as in Australia, this one novel gave him
an immediate and distinct reputation. With it he might have speedily
established himself as one of the leading writers of the day, and,
turning from the depressing realism of penal cruelties which can have no
further parallel in British countries to something more within our
sympathies--to the realism of modern Australian life,--have supplied
what is still conspicuously lacking in Australian fiction. Yet, during
the remaining seven years of his life he produced no imaginative work
worthy his name and ability. The ever-ready market of the local
newspaper press absorbed his best efforts, and such intervals as there
were he devoted to an attempt to establish himself as a writer and
adapter for the stage.

In this way the years passed without yielding much beyond a livelihood.
Meantime, Melbourne was his microcosm: he made a systematic study of its
life from the purlieus of Little Bourke and Lonsdale streets to the
palace of his 'model legislator' on Eastern Hill. Like Balzac, one of
his favourite novelists, he made observation a severe and regular
business, but he lacked the energy or the patience to take full
advantage of its results. Balzac employed his accumulated materials in
bursts of creative energy which, if terrible in their intensity and
their drain upon his health, had at least method in them, and effected
their purpose. Poverty did not swerve him, nor prosperity sate him.

That part of genius which consists in natural depth and accuracy of
vision Clarke had in abundance, but he was weak in the lesser gifts of
patience and synthetic power, perhaps also in ambition. Moreover, an
unfortunate extravagance, which led from chronic debt to bankruptcy,
compelled him to continue the class of work which gave the surest and
most regular income.

Repeated requests by the Messrs. Bentley for more fiction were neglected
from year to year, and similar indifference was shown to a flattering
invitation to join the staff of the _Daily Telegraph_ in London, an
opportunity that would have led to the establishment of Clarke in those
literary circles outside of which no purely Australian writer, with the
exception of Rolf Boldrewood, has ever yet received adequate
recognition.

Among Clarke's uncompleted writings are a few brilliant chapters of a
novel which promised to be as permanent a record of his ability as the
well-known convict story, though of a different kind. But the author had
the unlucky faculty of attending to anything rather than the work which
offered him certain fame and fortune, as well as the most natural
employment of his powers. At the time of his death he was only in his
thirty-fifth year. Probably with advancing life he would have become
more settled in his tastes and habits, realising that the work at which
he was happiest in every sense was the writing of novels, and that
alone.

The satire and cynicism so noticeable in Clarke's writings, especially
in his critical sketches and essays, are liable to give an inaccurate
conception of his temperament. They obscure, as such characteristics
nearly always do in literature, the gentler aspects of the writer's
nature. His satire is, perhaps, too uncompromising. It often seems to
reflect a personal bitterness, to take too little cognisance of the
springs of human weakness. Undoubtedly brilliant in force and keenness,
it yet too seldom produces the kind of hearty laugh with which Thackeray
and Swift, for example, relieve their fiercest scorn. His personal
experience of life had been discouraging. He had sounded its depths and
sipped its pleasures; its rude facts found him deficient in self-control
and fortitude. He had refused to learn the common logic of existence.

There is an element of tragedy in the rapid change which the unhappy
circumstances of his private life wrought in his temperament. Addressing
the disciples of Mrs. Grundy in an early essay defending the
Bohemianism of his youth, he tells them that they are ignorant how
easily good spirits, good digestion, and jolly companions enable a man
to triumph over all the ills that flesh is heir to. 'You cannot know,'
he adds, 'what a fund of humour there is in common life, and how
ridiculous one's shifts and strugglings appear when viewed through
Bohemian glass.... Life seems to you but as a "twice told tale, vexing
the dull ear of a drowsy man" seems but as a vale of tears, a place of
mourning, weeping, and wailing.... I wish ye had lived for a while in
"Austin Friars"; it would have enlarged your hearts, believe me.'

This was the cheerful philosophy of Clarke as a young bachelor, after he
had spent his slender patrimony, disappointed the successive efforts of
friends to make a business man of him, and was about to begin the
earning of a living by his pen. A dozen years later we see him with
developed talents and a valuable name, but broken in fortune and spirit,
and gloomily anticipating death months before it came. The Jew usurers,
whose race he despised, had long been his real masters, and, with a
nature sensitive in the extreme, he writhed in their bondage.

Improvidence had been not merely an unhappy incident, as it is in the
lives of so many young men of artistic tastes; it had overweighted him
more or less for years, and 'the thoughtless writer of thoughtful
literature,' as the author of his biographical memoir has called him,
sank beneath it while yet at the beginning of a career full of the
brightest promise. The sort of companionship that pleased his careless
youth had latterly proved unsatisfying, and to some extent distasteful
to him. Its effects upon his character were so unfavourable that some
who had been his companions in journalism felt it necessary, after his
death, to credit him with a greater capacity for kindly forbearance
towards humanity than is apparent in the bulk of his writings.

'My friend,' says one writer, 'was one of those many geniuses who appear
to be born to prove the vast amount of contradictory elements which can
exist in the same individual. In his case these contradictions were so
apparent--and, if I may use the term, so contradictory--that, unless one
knew him, it was impossible to believe what his nature was. On the one
hand, he was recklessly generous, impulsively partisan, morbidly
sensitive, and highly chivalrous; on the other, forgetful of
obligations, defiantly antagonistic, unnecessarily caustic, and
affectedly cynical.... His life was one of impulse, and the direction of
the impulse depended solely on surrounding circumstances.... He has
passed from us at an early age, leaving behind him some enemies made,
perhaps, by his own waywardness; but he has left many friends,
too,--friends who loved him for the good that was in him.'

In another sketch of the author, his character is thus summed up:
'Caustic he was sometimes, and cynical always; but beneath there beat a
heart of gold--a heart tender and pitiful as a woman's.' This estimate
is amply justified by the power of pathos and the often tender analysis
of human feeling in _For the Term of his Natural Life_, however absent
the same qualities may seem in many of the shorter stories.

An interesting picture of Clarke's personality is given by a writer in
the Sydney _Bulletin_: 'His wit was keen and polished, his humour
delicate and refined, and his powers of description masterly.... His
face was a remarkable one--remarkable for its singular beauty. Like
Coleridge, the poet, he was "a noticeable man with large grey eyes," and
one had but to look into them to perceive at once the light of
genius.... He was one of the best talkers I have ever met. Like Charles
Lamb, he had a stutter which seemed to emphasise and add point to his
witticisms. As in his writings, he had the knack of saying brilliant
things, and scattering _bons mots_ with apparent ease, so that in
listening to him one felt the pleasure that is derived from such books
as Horace Walpole's correspondence and those of the French
memoir-writers.... He knew not how to care for money, yet he had none
of those vices which ordinarily reduce men of genius to destitution, and
are cloaked beneath the hackneyed phrase, "He had no enemy but
himself."'

In all his journalistic criticism, Marcus Clarke scarcely more than
pointed to the material which the life of such cities as Melbourne and
Sydney offer a novelist capable of work like that of Mr. W. D. Howells,
or the series of tales of urban society in America by Mr. Marion
Crawford. There is now an opportunity, and, one might almost say, a
need, for fiction which shall also, in effect, be salutary criticism.
The Antipodes have lately illustrated the fact that a single decade will
sometimes witness a notable change in the conditions of an entire people
in a new and rapidly-developing country.

Thus, with the struggle for subsistence now keen to a degree which could
not have been foretold by the gloomiest pessimist a few years ago; with
Parliaments, hitherto safely democratic, threatened with Socialism by
the increasing practice of electing artisans and labourers to do the
legislative work of their respective classes; the crash of fortunes
which never had substantial existence; the pauperising to-day of the
paper millionaire of yesterday; the spectacle of worn, old men, after
overreaching and ruining themselves, starting pitifully the race of life
afresh, a sinister experience their sole advantage over the faltering
novice; and that other common spectacle of democratic life, the secure
and cultured rich cynically eschewing the active business of
government,--with these and some social aspects still less agree able to
contemplate there is ample subject-matter for any novelist who may have
the disposition and ability to carry on the work which Clarke had
indicated, but scarcely begun, before he died.

_Long Odds_, Clarke's first story, deals with English life, and bears no
resemblance in quality or kind to the later novel with which his name is
chiefly associated. It is primarily the tragedy of a _mesalliance_, and
horseracing and politics assist the plot, with the usual complications
of gambling and intrigue. The story has, however, a good deal less to
do with sport than the title suggests. The plot is mainly concerned with
the selfish, cruel, and infamous in human nature--a singularly dark
theme for a young beginner in fiction to choose. Except at rare
intervals when the business of characterisation is momentarily set
aside, as in the vivid descriptions of the Kirkminster Steeplechase and
the Matcham Hunt, there is little suggestion of youthful spirit or
freshness.

The outlines of plot and incident are attractively arranged, the
expression of life for the most part second-hand and artificial. There
are traces of Dickens' burlesque without his sympathy, and the high
colouring of Lytton with less than Lytton's wit. Disraeli's satire, too,
is echoed in the political scenes. The young Australian squatter, whose
experiences in England were to have formed the main purpose of the book,
is allowed no opportunity to show the better, and rarely even the
ordinary, capabilities of the new race of which he is ostensibly a type.

It is said to be a well-understood maxim of the novelist's art that many
a liberty taken with hero or heroine, or both, is forgiven if the writer
keeps a constant eye upon his villain, and deals honestly by him. In
_Long Odds_ there are two villains, and at least two others villainously
inclined. Between the four of them the easy-going hero has no chance.

It is natural that, in the construction of a novel which aims at
dramatic point before anything else, the 'simple Australian,' as his
author is at last constrained to regard him, should seem less useful
than the polished and unprincipled man of the world. But in this
instance the balance of interest is too unequal. Dramatic quality has
been secured at the expense of tone and proportion. Of the two male
characters whose exploits in rascality it becomes the real business of
the story to tell, Rupert Dacre is the more natural and entertaining.

There is an attention to detail in his portrait which suggests that the
lineaments of the conventional society villain may have been filled in
with the help of a little personal knowledge, perhaps of some of those
morally doubtful individuals already mentioned as having been among the
acquaintances of Clarke's early youth. Dacre is the chief cynic of the
story, and to him are assigned the best of the dialogue and all of the
small stock of humour to be found in the novel. But the man who is both
his associate and enemy, Cyril Chatteris, is a common sort of dastard,
and altogether disagreeable.

The author is not entirely forgetful of the interests of his nominal
hero. If throughout three-fourths of the story Calverley is made the
plaything of circumstances that favour only rogues, he is at last
allowed a triumph in love and sport which, though unsatisfying from an
artistic point of view, is calculated to soothe a not too fastidious
taste for poetic justice.

Conscious of the conventional character of his principal theme, the
author apparently sought to improve it by deepening its intensity. The
result of this was to add more of weakness than of strength. Incidents
that might have been effectively dramatic become melodramatic; the
conceivably probable is sometimes strained into the obviously
improbable. The agreeable finish to the minor love-story of Calverley
and Miss Ffrench does not remove the general savour of sordidness which
the reader carries away from the study of so much of the bad side of
human nature.

In connection with criticism of this kind, it ought, however, to be
noted that other hands besides the author's are known to have
contributed to the novel. Shortly after it began to appear serially in
the _Colonial Monthly_, Marcus Clarke fell from a horse while hunting,
and sustained a fracture of the skull which interrupted his literary
work for many weeks. How much of the writing had previously been done
seems to be a subject of dispute. It is, however, quite clear that, in
order to preserve continuity in the publication of the parts, Clarke's
friends did write some portion of the story, but whether in accordance
with the author's _scenario_, supposing one to have existed, has not
been stated.

'Only a few of the first chapters' were the work of Clarke, says the
editor of the _Marcus Clarke Memorial Volume_, writing in 1884; but in
an article published in the _Imperial Review_ (Melbourne) for 1886, the
contributed matter is limited to a couple of chapters written by Mr.
G. A. Walstab, and skilfully inserted in the middle of the novel.
Walstab was one of Clarke's best friends, and he is no doubt the
'G. A. W.' to whom the story is dedicated 'in grateful remembrance of
the months of July and August, 1868.'

From the absence of a prefatory explanation when _Long Odds_ was
published in book form in 1869, it may be assumed that Clarke was
satisfied with the quality of the contributed work. At least, he was
willing to take the full responsibility of its authorship. But even with
this in view, it were well, perhaps, not to hold him too strictly
accountable for the faults of the story. Not much must be expected from
a first novel produced in the circumstances mentioned, and issued when
the author was only twenty-three. In his haste to give it final shape
immediately after the serial publication, he was probably ill advised.
One can only regret that it was not set aside for a year or so, and
written afresh, or, at least, largely revised. Perhaps this would have
been expecting too much from so unmethodical a worker as Clarke. The far
finer dramatic taste and literary form of his masterpiece, issued five
years later, showed how little indicative of his talent was the earlier
work.

In view of the large extent to which the life of the Australian landed
classes has been described in fiction during the last twenty years, it
is curious to read the plea Clarke offered to his Antipodean critics for
passing over the literary material close at hand and preferring the
well-worn paths of the English novelist.

During the serial publication of _Long Odds_ the colonial press raised
some objection to the laying of the scene in England instead of in
Australia. The author replied simply that Henry Kingsley's _Geoffry
Hamlyn_ being the best Australian novel that had been, or probably
would be, written, 'any attempt to paint the ordinary squatting life of
the colonies could not fail to challenge unfavourable comparison with
that admirable story.'

The excuse is just a little too adventitious to have convinced even
those to whom it was originally addressed. None the less, it may at the
moment have accurately represented the opinion of a beginner who at that
time could scarcely have known the extent of his own powers.

Probably he had given the subject little thought. His colonial
experience was certainly less varied than Kingsley's had been. Above
all, his tastes, and in some degree his temperament, differed
markedly from those of his predecessor in the field. The judgment or
instinct that kept him from coming into direct competition with
Kingsley--assuming his own questionable belief that any effort of his
would have been competition--at least erred on the side of safety. That
the immediate alternative should have been an imitative example of a
hackneyed class of English novel, ineffective of purpose,
book-inspired, and tainted with the deadness of cynicism, is something
which admits of a more definite opinion.

'I have often thought,' says the writer, referring to the hero of
_Geoffry Hamlyn_ 'and I dare say other Australian readers have thought
also, How would Sam Buckley get on in England? My excuse, therefore, in
offering to the Australian public a novel in which the plot, the
sympathies, the interest, and the moral, are all English, must be that
I have endeavoured to depict with such skill as is permitted to me the
fortunes of a young Australian in that country which young Australians
still call "Home."'

Without this prefatory sign-post, the reader could never have suspected
such a purpose. Clarke may have had it definitely in his mind when he
first sat down to the work; but if so, it was put aside, consciously or
unconsciously, after the completion of the first few chapters, in favour
of more complex characterisation. Bob Calverley, the young squatter,
really holds a third or fourth place in relation to the main motive of
the story, and is used rather as a foil than as an exemplar of anything
typically Australian. He does not bear any active part in the drama of
passion and intrigue; he is not even permitted to be a passive spectator
of it.

To say that he was good-natured, jovial, popular, 'the sort of man that
one involuntarily addresses by his Christian name'; that although he was
shy and awkward in the society of ladies, at ease with his own sex only
when cattle and horses were the subject of conversation, ignorant of
music, and unable to tell Millais from Tenniel, he 'could pick you out
any bullock in a herd ... shear a hundred sheep a day ... and drive four
horses down a sidling in a Gippsland range with any man in
Australia,'--to say all this by way of preliminary, to add that
Calverley was no fool, and yet to show him in scarcely any other guise
than that of a trusting victim of rogues, is to go a very short distance
in the portrayal of a typical Australian.

In the slack-baked condition in which we find him, he merely repeats the
ordinary spectacle of green youth in the process of seeing life and
buying experience at the usual high figure. Compared with the real
squatter (who, ordinarily, is college-trained, and does not shear sheep
nor risk his neck unnecessarily), Bob, the son of rich 'Old Calverley,'
and nephew of an English baronet, is as an exaggerated stock-figure of
the stage to the commonplace blood and brain of everyday life. A
childlike trust in one's fellows, a reputation for good-nature, an
untamable taste for horseflesh and the pursuits of the Bush, belong to
every young squatter in a certain class of Australian fiction; they are
qualities which may be applied indiscriminately, with always some
effect.

The real squatter is a more civilised and reliable, if less picturesque,
person. He likes both work and pleasure, provided they be suitably
proportioned. His work is in the personal management of his properties;
his pleasure is taken in the large cities. He entertains no fantastic
prejudices against urban life, in proof of which he often spends his
later years in some city hundreds of miles from the scene of his early
toil and pastoral successes.

As a young man in London, he can be found with rooms at the Langham, the
Metropole, or some other of the half-dozen fashionable hotels known to
colonial visitors. There he will entertain his friends, joining with
them, in turn, the continuous movements of the society season. He
frankly lacks much of the ease and polish of the young Englishman, but
his natural amiability and good spirits largely compensate for these
deficiencies, while they preclude any feeling of discomfort on his own
part.

During his three or six months' stay in London (the combination usually
of a little business with a very full programme of pleasure) he spends
freely, and in his tour of the clubs plays here and there a little at
cards--perchance loses. Worldly beyond his reputation, and somewhat
Chesterfieldian in his principles, he consents to be a Roman while at
Rome. He has inherited the British hatred of fuss and personal
peculiarity, and none shall call him mean. But, unlike many of his
English friends at club and course, he has watched and taken some part
in the hard process of making money, and knows the difference between a
little gentlemanly extravagance and the reckless hazarding of a fortune.
At least, it may be affirmed of him that in nine cases out of ten he is
decidedly no fool.

These are only a few of the prominent outlines of the type of young man
who, his holiday over, returns unspoiled to work on his own or his
father's estates. Those whose passion for a horse destroys all
self-control, who spend thousands in gambling and betting, who
innocently take every smooth gentleman at his own valuation, are merely
individuals--persons who may as unfailingly be found in England or
elsewhere as in Australia.

Sam Buckley is a typical descendant of the British pioneer colonists, as
every Australian knows. In attempting to give an answer to his own
speculation of 'How would Sam Buckley get on in England?' Clarke
presumably undertook to continue the portrayal of this type. The result,
considered apart from the function Calverley fulfils in _Long Odds_,
must be held as emphatically a failure.

Never was a novel written with a franker or more deliberate purpose than
that shown in _For the Term of his Natural Life_. The author had the
twofold object of picturing the dreadful crudities and brutalities of
the early system of convict 'reformation' in Australia, and of
preventing their possible repetition elsewhere. The first of these aims
was attained with a fuller employment, and perhaps more moderate
statement of historical facts, than can be found in any other fiction of
the same class; the second was ineffective, because, when it found
expression, the abuses which had suggested it no longer continued at the
Antipodes, and could not conceivably be repeated on the existing
settlements at Port Blair and Noumea.

The story was written a quarter of a century too late to assist the
abolition of convict transportation to Australia. Had it appeared at the
right time, it might have done much where formal inquiries and the
testimonies of disinterested and humane observers had repeatedly failed.
For sixty years the practice of deporting criminals had been carried on,
upheld in England by official indifference and callousness, and in the
colonies themselves by the greed of a small class of private persons who
grew rapidly wealthy upon the strength of assigned convict labour, until
the free emigrants by the authority of their numbers were able to insist
upon its cessation. For so long as the colonies were willing to receive
a population of criminals, so long was England only too anxious to
supply them and make a virtue out of it. It mattered little to the
official mind that the system was incurably bad and immoral; the main
thing was to speedily and effectually transfer an awkward burden to
other shoulders. The entire history of penal transportation from Great
Britain throws a sinister light upon the national character. The
practice originated with banishment of convicts to the American colonies
under conditions which constituted a form of slavery.

The criminal on being sentenced became a marketable chattel of the
State. His services were sold by public auction, the purchaser acquiring
the right to transport him and sell him for the term of his sentence to
a builder, planter, manufacturer, or other employer beyond the Atlantic.
The price paid to the British Government averaged five pounds per head,
and some of the more useful prisoners were resold in America for
twenty-five pounds each. One of these dealers in convict labour, in
giving evidence before a committee of the House of Commons, made a
matter-of-fact complaint that 'the trade' was not so remunerative as
people supposed. Artisans sold well, but the profit realised upon them
was often consumed by losses upon some of the others. One-seventh of his
purchases died on his hands, and in the course of business he had been
obliged to give the old, the halt and the lame in for nothing. When the
War of Independence closed the United States against the traffic,
Britain was given a fresh opportunity to reconsider and place its penal
system upon a more humane basis; but the temptation to adopt sweeping
measures was once more too strong to be resisted. The promoters of the
Australian scheme were in so great a hurry to seize their chance that
they despatched over seven hundred convicts before even the site for the
first settlement was chosen. The hardships which this characteristic act
afterwards entailed are too familiar in history to need repetition.
After such recklessness, it is no wonder that, as Sir Roger Therry has
observed, 'the first-fruits of the system exhibited a state of society
in New South Wales which the world might be challenged to surpass in
depravity.'

A generation passed before the British Government reluctantly admitted
transportation to be a failure. Lord John Russell, as late as 1847,
discovered that it had been 'too much the custom to consult the
convenience of Great Britain by getting rid of persons of evil habits,
and to take that view alone.' In planting provinces which might become
empires, they 'should endeavour to make them, not seats of malefactors
and convicts, but communities which may set examples of virtue and
happiness.'

This mild, platitudinous rebuke came when all the damage was done. It
remained for the free inhabitants of Australia to point to a plainer
principle in declaring that 'the inundating of feeble and dependent
colonies with the criminals of the parent State is opposed to that
arrangement of Providence by which the virtue of each community is
destined to combat its own vice.'

To illustrate in a single story all the most prominent and pernicious
features of the transportation system, Clarke had to invent a case of
crime in which the criminal, unlike the majority of the worst offenders
sent to the settlements, should always be worthy of the reader's
sympathy. It was necessary that the felon be a victim as well as a
felon; that he should not regain his liberty in any form, but continue
by a series of offences against the authority of his gaolers to
experience and display all the successive severities of Macquarie
Harbour, Port Arthur, and Norfolk Island. A fundamental fact to be
exhibited was the impassable gulf of misunderstanding that might exist
between capricious or incompetent prison officials and a criminal who,
for any reason, had once come to be regarded as hopelessly vicious. 'We
must treat brutes like brutes,' says the prime martinet of the story:
'keep 'em down, sir; make 'em _feel_ what they are. They're here to
work, sir. If they won't work, flog 'em until they will. If they
work--why, a taste of the cat now and then keeps 'em in mind of what
they may expect if they get lazy.'

The author chose to represent the extreme case of a man who, innocent of
a murder charged against him, allowed himself to be transported under an
assumed name in order to prevent the exposure of a long-concealed act of
unfaithfulness on the part of a beloved mother.

Richard Devine is the bastard son of an aristocratic Englishwoman who in
early youth was forced by her father into a loveless union with a rich
plebeian. The single fault of the mother's life is confessed after
twenty years, when the husband in a moment of anger strikes her
high-spirited and obstinate son. The latter consents to leave his home
for ever, and relinquish the name he has borne. On these terms the wife
is spared. Richard Devine goes on the instant. Crossing Hampstead Heath,
he comes upon a robbed and murdered man, and presently is arrested for
the crime. The explanation that would save him would also cause the
dreaded exposure of his mother, and so he withholds it, gives a false
name, and, having put himself beyond the means of defence and the
recognition of friends, is convicted and sentenced to transportation for
life.

In making all the subsequent career of Rufus Dawes abnormally
painful--that of a dumb sufferer who in sixteen years' confinement,
ending only in a tragic death, experiences by turns every form of
punishment and oppression--the author often touches, though it cannot be
said he ever exceeds, the limits of possibility.

'Need one who was not a hardened criminal have suffered so much and so
long?' is the question that continually recurs to the mind of the
reader; but it is suggested by the prolonged and pitiful sense of
unsatisfied justice rather than by any doubting that the extremes of
penal discipline as practised in the name of the British Government
between forty and sixty years ago could have been successively applied
to a single human being. The writer adheres relentlessly to his central
idea to the end. Dawes' unameliorated servitude and unavenged fate were
intended to symbolise glaring anomalies of justice which never were
remedied. The 'correction' he is subjected to was that which the laws of
the time permitted, and which in many cases goaded its victims to draw
lots to murder one another in order to escape from their misery.

Some of the least creditable features of convict transportation, of
which it was said by Earl Grey in 1857 that their existence had been a
disgrace to the nation, came to an end only when the system itself was
abolished. But novelist and statesman alike struck at the abuses without
feeling it necessary to mention any of the good results of the system.
Its inherent merits were strictly few, indeed; yet they ought to be
sought in history by anyone who would get a fair idea of the prison
policy of the period. It is, of course, inevitable that the criticism
conveyed in a strong imaginative work should fail to give a full view of
results so complex as those produced by the largely haphazard method of
the Australian penal settlements.

The practice of assigning prisoners to private employment, for example,
produced notable effects upon society, of which Marcus Clarke's story
gives but the faintest indication. If Rufus Dawes had been an ordinary
first offender, he might have regained liberty soon after his arrival in
Van Diemen's Land. But, as we have seen, it was the purpose of the
author to make him exhibit all the rigours of convict discipline. His
case must therefore be regarded as more exceptional than typical. As a
rule, only men inveterate in crime were detained in constant punishment.
Transportation for life meant servitude only for eight years if the
convict conducted himself well, a condition which, of course, depended
largely on the sort of master who secured his services. Major de Winton,
an officer who served for some years on Norfolk Island, has mentioned
that a prisoner by good conduct received a ticket-of-leave after he had
been twice sentenced to death, thrice to transportation for life, and to
cumulative periods of punishment amounting to over a hundred years!

An interesting view of Marcus Clarke as a literary workman is obtained
from the story of the conception and laborious writing of _For the Term
of his Natural Life_. It affords the first, and unhappily the last,
evidence of how far he recognised the claims of realism in fiction; and
from the account of his suffering under the self-imposed drudgery of
keeping to the strict line of history, we see the man as his friends
knew him contrasted with the conscientious artist known to the general
reader of his famous novel.

The best of Clarke's minor writings display the results of much general
culture, but give no proof of special preparation. They are short,
concentrated, forcible--the natural expression of a brilliant,
impetuous, and spasmodic worker. He overcame his natural repugnance to
lengthened toil and minute thoroughness when he saw them to be essential
conditions of his task. But the effort was a severe one.

In 1871, when about twenty-five years of age, he was ordered to recruit
his health by a trip to Tasmania. He had been for over three years
writing extensively for the press, and joining in the gaieties of
Melbourne life at a rate which a constitution much stronger than his
could not have withstood. The idea of writing a story of prison life had
suggested itself previously during his reading of Australian history.
Finding himself now without sufficient money for the proposed holiday,
he decided to put into active progress this literary project which had
hitherto been only vaguely outlined.

Printed records of the convict days there were in abundance at
Melbourne, and from these alone such a writer could have made a
sufficiently striking story. But he concluded that he could make his
picture at once truer and more vivid when the surroundings of the old
settlements had become a full reality to his mind. Messrs. Clarson,
Massina and Co. readily contracted with the young novelist for the first
publication of the story in their monthly, the _Australian Journal_, and
made him an advance of money. Off he went with characteristic
confidence, and some weeks later returned ready primed and eager for the
new work. His enthusiasm soon cooled. The story commenced to appear
after the first few chapters were written, and the unbroken industry
necessary to maintain a regular supply of the parts was more than Clarke
could give.

Writing against time, he is said to have felt like a convict himself.
The irregular dribbling out of the story so injured the reputation of
the journal that for a time its circulation was reduced to one-half the
ordinary issue.

Mr. Hamilton Mackinnon, the writer of a sympathetic memoir of Clarke,
has given an entertaining account of what followed: 'The author would
be frequently interviewed by the publishers, and would as frequently
promise the copy. When moral suasion was apparently powerless to effect
the required object, payments in advance were made with somewhat better
results; but as this could not go on _ad libitum_, copy would fall into
arrears again. At last it was found that the only way to get the author
to finish his tale was to induce him into a room in the
publishing-house, where, under the benign influences of a pipe, etc.,
and a lock on the door, the necessary work would be done by the facile
pen; and in such manner was _His Natural Life_ produced.'

In a note of apology to their readers in January, 1871, the publishers
print a somewhat comical letter which they had received from the
delinquent author. Forwarding a single chapter of the story, he tells
them that they must make shift with it as best they can, and he will let
them have a larger supply during the following month. The letter
concludes nonchalantly as follows: 'This is awkward, I admit, and I
suppose some good-natured friend or other will say that I have
over-plum-puddinged or hot-whiskied myself in honour of the so-called
festive season, but I can't help it.'

The story as first published was much longer than the form in which it
appears in the English edition. At the request of the present writer,
Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, who was one of Clarke's literary friends,
supplies the following account of how the novel came to be so
extensively curtailed:

'As one of the trustees to the public library (Melbourne), I saw Clarke
constantly, and had always a friendly, and sometimes a confidential,
conversation with him. He visited me now and then at Sorrento, and on
one of these occasions he spoke of a story he had running through a
Melbourne periodical about which he was perplexed. He asked me to read
it, and tell him unreservedly what I thought of it. I read the story
carefully, making notes on the margin, and wrote him frankly the
impression it had made on me.

'After twenty years I can recall the substance of the letter, which is
probably still in existence. A powerful story, I said, but painful as it
is powerful. The incidents, instead of being depressing, would be tragic
if they befell anyone we loved or honoured. But there was no one in the
story whom he could have intended us to love or honour. The hero
underwent a lifelong torture without any credible, or even intelligible,
motive, and on the whole was a _mauvais sujet_ himself. To win the
reader's sympathy, all this must be altered. I strongly advised that the
latter part of the story, in which the Ballarat outbreak was described
under a leader whom he named Peter Brawler, should be omitted; and I
objected to the publication of a song in French _argot_ with a spirited
translation, as the latter would naturally be attributed to the author
of the novel, whereas I had read it in an early _Blackwood_ before he
was born.

'Marcus Clarke thanked me warmly, and said he would adopt all my
suggestions. He wrote a new prologue, in which he made the protection of
his mother's good name the motive of the hero's silence, and he omitted
both the things I had objected to.'

Ending, as it began, with a tragedy, the artistic unity of the novel is
thus preserved, and the dominant aim of the author emphasised. Many of
those who read it in the serial parts strongly disapproved of the
excisions, but there can be little doubt that the story is the stronger
for their having been made.

It was as the work of a vivid historian, rather than of a social
reformer, that Marcus Clarke's masterpiece won its popularity, and, for
its dramatic and substantially accurate view of the worst (always the
worst) aspect of convict life, it will continue to be read while anyone
remains to take an interest in the unhappiest period of Australian
history. From its pages may be learned how long it has taken the
intelligent theorist of the British Government to acquire a practical
method of treating a difficult social question; how long stupidity and
inhumanity may be practised with the sanction of what Major Vickers was
fond of respectfully calling 'the King's regulations'; and how far
English gentlemen, remote from the influence of public opinion and
invested with more power than single individuals should ever possess,
may become despots, and even blackguards.

It is a grim record. Let those who are inclined to doubt it turn to the
originals, especially to the report of the House of Commons Committee of
1837-38, and they will find facts which the creator of Rufus Dawes, with
all his supple fancy and delicacy of language, could not bring himself
even to indicate. There are episodes which the more matter-of-fact
historians barely mention, but do not take advantage of their great
privileges to describe. For example, there were times during the first
thirty years of the century when the open and general lewdness of the
officials on some of the principal settlements, in their relations with
the female convicts, rendered them totally unfit for the positions they
held.

Clarke in his researches obtained abundant knowledge of this, but made
no use of it save in adding a few luminous touches to his portrait of
Dawes' passionate and licentious cousin.

In reading the novel for its historical interest, it is necessary
throughout to remember the limitation that the writer has specifically
put upon himself. He did not undertake to illustrate any of the good
effects of exile upon a section of the first offenders sent to the
colonies, and scarcely touches the travesties of justice so often
wrought by that lottery in human life known as the assignment system.
His purpose is to describe 'the dismal condition of a felon during his
term of transportation,' and to show the futility of a prison system
loosely planned at one end of the world and roughly executed at the
other by men who found it easier, and in some cases more agreeable, to
their undiscerning hearts to coerce than to ameliorate.

The Parliamentary Committee defined transportation as 'a series of
punishments embracing every degree of human suffering, from the lowest,
consisting of a slight restraint upon freedom of action, to the
highest, consisting of long and tedious torture.' It was with the latter
part of the definition in mind that Clarke told his story. He chose to
represent servitude in the chain-gangs of Van Diemen's Land and Norfolk
Island as the condition of slavery which Sir Richard Bourke and Sir
George Arthur admitted it to be, as the utter failure described by the
experienced Dr. Ullathorne, and as the system recommended by the House
of Commons Committee to be abolished as incapable of improvement and
'remarkably efficient, not in reforming, but still further corrupting
those who undergo punishment.'

The idea which is the ganglion of Clarke's plot was always seen clearly,
but never obsessed his mind as did a cognate theme that of the impetuous
reformer Charles Reade. In his crusade against the form of punishment
known as the 'silent system,' the English novelist obtrudes his moral
with a frequency that weakens the effect of his often splendid
eloquence. The direct opposite of this style is seen in the Australian
novel. The author never openly preaches. His best effects are obtained
by quiet satire conveyed in the gradual limning of his characters, and
by occasional incidents of which each is allowed to give its own lesson
to the reader. The facts have all the advantage of a studiously calm and
impersonal presentation.

In the rapid progress of the plot the reader is kept keenly interested.
If he have an eye for the moral he will detect it at once; if not, there
is no importunate author to force it upon him. In either case he will
find the story an absorbing one. 'It has all the solemn ghastliness of
truth,' said Lord Rosebery, writing to the novelist's widow in 1884. He
confessed that the book had a fascination for him. Not once or twice,
but many times, had he read it, and during his visit to Australia he
spent some time in viewing the scene of the old settlements and
examining the reports upon which the novel is so largely based.

That there are some exaggerations in the treatment of facts need hardly
be stated, but they are few in number, not serious in import, and
outbalanced by numerous cases in which it has been necessary to modify
the description of incidents either too painful or horrible to be fully
depicted. As a compensation for its occasional storical inaccuracy, _His
Natural Life_ is notably free of the melodramatic excesses that most
young writers would have been tempted to commit. Clarke was too good an
artist to think of pleading the sanction of facts for any misuse of the
privileges of good fiction. To maintain a strong impression on the
reader, his touch is occasionally strong and fearless, like that of
Kipling. But this object attained, he uses his materials with an almost
unnecessary reticence. The episode of the cannibalism of Gabbett and his
fellow-convicts is exceptional. Yet it purposely falls short of the
terrible original, which is happily hidden away from general view
between the covers of an old Parliamentary report.

It has been said of Clarke, by one of his friends, that in his estimate
of motives he was invariably cynical. Though the assertion goes too far,
it seems to suggest the best explanation of his notable preference for
delineating the dark side of human nature. He appeared ever to see vice
more clearly, or at any rate to find it more interesting for the
purposes of fiction, than the good or the neutral in character. But his
cynicism--if it really formed a settled feature of his character--was
not of the kind that implies any indifference to injustice or
dishonesty. In this particular, both his fiction and essays have no
uncertain tone. It is indeed a fault of Clarke that his bad characters
are in most cases wholly bad. He makes Frere abandon a life of
debauchery under the influence of a pure woman's affection, but the
effect is afterwards destroyed by evidences that the attachment on the
man's side is sensual and based on vanity. Moreover, Frere the prison
tyrant and base denier of Dawes' heroism remains unexcused.

Bob Calverley and Miss Ffrench, the only important representatives of
the ordinary virtues in _Long Odds_, are little more than dim shadows
contrasted with the clearly-marked personalities of half a dozen others
in the story who are rogues, or the associates and instruments of
rogues. 'The human anguish of every page' of _His Natural Life_ which
Lord Rosebery found so compelling to his attention, need not have been
so continuous and unqualified.

The author seems purposely to have ignored the opportunity afforded by
the story for the introduction of a character who, while asserting the
claims of Rufus Dawes and the broader interests of humanity, need not
have defeated the main motive of the plot. It was a decided error not to
gratify in this way the combative instinct of the reader. The Rev. James
North--'gentleman, scholar, and Christian priest'--might have been an
active opponent of cruelty like Eden, the clergyman in _It's Never Too
Late to Mend_, instead of being made a pitiable example of a confirmed
and self-accusing drunkard.

The strength of _His Natural Life_ lies not so much in the ingenuity and
dramatic quality of its plot, as in the number of striking personalities
among its leading characters. That of Rufus Dawes, curiously, is
distinct only at intervals. It represents, for the most part, a
hopeless sufferer passing through a series of punishments which become
almost monotonous in their unvaried severity.

But what could be more luminous than the portrait of Sarah Purfoy, the
clever, self-possessed adventuress with the single redeeming quality of
an invincible love for her worthless and villainous convict-husband? or
that of Frere, the swaggering, red-whiskered, coarsely good-humoured
convict-driver, glorying in his knowledge of the heights and depths of
criminal ingenuity and vice, and frankly ignorant of all else?

How naturally from such a person comes that savagely humorous
dissertation upon the treatment of prisoners! 'There is a sort of
satisfaction to me, by George! in keeping the scoundrels in order. I
like to see the fellows' eyes glint at you as you walk past 'em. Gad!
they'd tear me to pieces if they dared, some of 'em.'

Frere is a triumph of consistent literary portraiture. He is generally
understood to have been a study from life. But as the official whose
name has sometimes been associated with the character was a considerably
more humane disciplinarian than the persecutor of Rufus Dawes, it must
be assumed that Clarke aimed only at the representation of a type.

Brutes like Frere and his vindictive associates, Burgess and Troke,
there undoubtedly were on the settlements, but the average official has
probably a better representative in Major Vickers, the Commandant.
Vickers is not an unkind man, but does not trust himself to do anything
unprovided for in the 'regulations,' for which he has an abject respect.
'It is not for me to find fault with the system,' he says; 'but I have
sometimes wondered if kindness would not succeed better than the
chain-gang and the cat.' But he never gives intelligence, much less
kindness, a fair trial.

Sylvia Vickers is the only complete picture of a good woman to be found
in any of the author's stories. Taken in childhood by her parents to the
penal settlements, and separated there for years from youthful society,
familiarised with the constant aspects of crime and suffering, and
habitually in the society of her elders, she early develops into a
quaint, matter-of-fact little creature, such as might well disconcert a
peacock like the Reverend Meekin.

To Frere, whose knowledge of other women has been mainly immoral, her
innocence and wilfulness, and her instinctive dislike of him, serve as a
strong attraction. Though he becomes her husband by means of a cruel
fraud, he never fully gains her trust, and the estrangement so
tragically sealed in the last chapter of the novel comes almost as a
relief to the sympathetic reader of her sad history. Sylvia Vickers,
despite the gloomy environment of her youth, is throughout an intensely
womanly woman, the delicate conception of whose character surely places
her creator far above the rank of the cynics in literature.

Not the least of the elements which combine to make _His Natural Life_
one of the most remarkable novels of the century is the occasional
skilful varying of its painful realism with a colouring of romance, as
in the relations between Dawes and Sylvia: his absorbing devotion when
she is so strangely made dependent upon him at the deserted settlement;
his long-continued confidence that she will effect his vindication and
deliverance; and, finally, the dominant motive of securing her safety
against North with which he escapes from the gaol at Norfolk Island, and
joins her in the doomed schooner on its last voyage to Van Diemen's
Land.

What Oliver Wendell Holmes called 'the Robinson Crusoe touches' in the
story--including the experiences of the marooned party at Macquarie
Harbour, and those of Rex in his escape through the Devil's
Blowhole--also help to leave with the reader of the novel an
ineffaceable memory.




HENRY KINGSLEY.


What are the special qualities that constitute the permanent charm of
Henry Kingsley's early novels? Some English critics, judging him by
principles of literary art, have said that his best work is in many
places of slovenly construction, deficient in dramatic power, and
imitative in expression. A series of episodes, they observe, supply the
place of a plot in _The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn_; the central
motive of _The Hillyars and the Burtons_ is an impossible story of a
young woman's self-sacrifice; and the Thackerayan mannerisms in
_Ravenshoe_ are an offensive blemish upon an otherwise fine novel.

As a set-off to these defects, which are of less real consequence than
may appear from their brief enumeration, Kingsley has been freely
credited with a certain ever-pleasing vivacity and gallantry of style
far too rare in literature to be overlooked. The warmest of his admirers
in his own country have even attempted to raise him to a position above
that of his more celebrated brother.

The task of comparing Kingsley the poet, preacher, and reformer, with
Kingsley the laughing, genial teller of stories who never cherished a
hobby in his life, would seem to be as superfluous on general grounds as
it is premature in respect of the only possible question as to which of
them is likely to be best remembered a generation or two hence. Only in
one particular does it seem quite safe to predict--namely, that whatever
may be the future standing of one who is said to have never penned a
story without a didactic purpose of some kind, Henry Kingsley is certain
of a permanent place in the literature of the young country where he
encountered both the best and the worst experiences of his life.

The English estimate of his novels--mainly a technical one--having been
recorded, it seems to the present writer that something of interest
might be said of them from, as far as possible, the Australian point of
view, the standpoint of the reader who knows the country of Sam Buckley
and Alice Brentwood, and has lived some of their life. Two out of the
three best novels are largely Australian in matter, and the reasons for
their enduring popularity in the colonies are among the best grounds of
the favour in which the author is held by the average English reader, to
leave out of reckoning for the moment the literary expert. _Geoffry
Hamlyn_ and _The Hillyars and the Burtons_ have obvious faults, but in
most respects they are the highest, because the least artificial,
expression of Kingsley's powers. A consideration of some of their more
noticeable qualities will perhaps afford the clearest answer to the
question which opens this essay.

Henry Kingsley was one of the many impecunious young Englishmen of
education and adventurous spirit who sought fortune on the gold-fields
of Australia between 1851 and 1860, and were rewarded in some cases with
ready wealth, but in far more with bitter disappointment. Leaving Oxford
without a degree in the company of two fellow-students, he hurried off
to the Victorian gold-fields, which were then in the early sensational
period of their development, and attracting people from all parts of the
world. It was the time when the ordinary business of the colonies could
scarcely be carried on at any sacrifice--when some of the more perplexed
employers in the adjoining territory of New South Wales had urged
Governor Fitzroy to proclaim martial law and peremptorily prohibit
mining, 'in order that the inducement which seemed so irresistible to
persons to quit their ordinary occupations might be removed.' In the
country districts crops were left unreaped and sheep unshorn; in the
towns masters did their own work or paid excessively to have it half
done; while the harbours were filled with vessels whose crews had
deserted to join in the general scramble for gold. No one was content to
stand behind a counter all day and hear of nuggets being found
up-country which sold for over four thousand pounds. 'As well attempt to
stop the influx of the tide as stop the rush to the diggings,' was the
reply given by Fitzroy to his petitioners.

Ex-military and naval officers, professional men, convicts from Van
Diemen's Land, picturesque cut-throats from the Californian and Mexican
mines, Chinese, and many other varieties of the human species, rubbed
shoulders and lived generally in remarkable order and amity in the
crowded canvas cities of Turon, Mount Alexander, Ballarat, and Bendigo.
In 1852, the year before Kingsley's arrival, seventy thousand of them
were toiling in Victoria alone.

Such were the times and the people which gave the future novelist his
first practical experience of colonial life. The varied knowledge that
he accumulated, first of the gold-fields and later of pastoral life and
the towns, was the only reward of his five years' voluntary exile from
England. During his absence he never wrote to his parents, and they
thought him dead. His reticence as to his unsuccessful struggles was
continued when he returned home, and not relaxed in later life even to
his wife.

An interesting memoir by Mr. Clement Shorter, prefixed to a new edition
of Kingsley's novels, briefly describes his school-days and literary
career, but is almost wholly silent concerning the eventful years spent
in the colonies. There is a single reference to the period which
succeeded his gold-digging days, when want forced him to seek a less
precarious occupation. For a time, it seems, he was a mounted policeman
in New South Wales, until, 'compelled by duty to attend an execution, he
was so much affected that he threw up the appointment in disgust.' Then,
like many another unlucky digger, he was obliged to travel the country
in search of work on the sheep and cattle stations.

A well-known pastoralist of the western district of Victoria, the late
Hon. Philip Russell, was accustomed to describe to his friends the
arrival at his station many years ago of a party of 'sundowners'
(_i.e._, tramps), among whom was Kingsley, looking 'very much down on
his luck.' Soon found to be no ordinary swagman, he was made a guest at
the station, where he remained for several months. The most agreeable
glimpse obtainable of his colonial life is given in _Old Melbourne
Memories_, a little collection of sketches published by Rolf Boldrewood
twelve years ago.

At the period which they recall, Boldrewood was a young man, and making
the experiment in squatting which, though disastrous in its ultimate
commercial results, was afterwards turned to a rich literary account by
him. A friend of his named Mitchell occupied a station in western
Victoria named Langa-willi, and there on one occasion Boldrewood met
Kingsley. The passage in which he gracefully records the event is worth
quoting in full.

'Why Langa-willi,' he says, 'will always be a point of interest in my
memory, apart from other reasons, for I spent many a pleasant day there,
was that Henry Kingsley lived there the chief part of a year as a guest
of Mitchell's.

'It was at Langa-willi that _Geoffry Hamlyn_, that immortal work, the
best Australian novel, and for long the only one, was written. In the
well-appointed sitting-room of that most comfortable cottage one can
imagine the gifted but somewhat ill-fated author sitting down
comfortably after breakfast to his "copy," when his host had ridden
forth with his overseer to make-believe to inspect the flocks, but in
reality to get an appetite for lunch.

'I like to think of them both spending the evening sociably in their own
way, both rather silent men--Kingsley writing away till he had covered
the regulation number of sheets or finished the chapter, perhaps when
the bushrangers came to Garoopna; Mitchell reading steadily, or writing
up his home correspondence; the old housekeeper coming in with the
glasses at ten o'clock; then a tumbler of toddy, a smoke on the
verandah, or over the fire if in winter, and so to bed. Peaceful, happy,
unexciting days and nights, good for Mitchell, who was not strong, and
for his talented guest, who was not always so profitably employed. I
suspect that in England, where both abode in later years, they often
looked back with regret to the peerless climate, the calm days, the
restful evenings spent so far beyond the southern main at Langa-willi.'

At least one of them must often have recalled those days as being among
the happiest of a none too happy life. The main features of Kingsley's
career after he returned to England may be summarised here in a few
words. The distinct success as a novelist which he won during the first
four or five years was not maintained. His work lessened in interest as
he lost the _verve_ of youth, increased his leaning towards romance, and
became more conventional in his methods.

He essayed journalism for a time, first as editor of the Edinburgh
_Daily Review_, and later as a correspondent of the same journal at the
Franco-German War. As an editor he was a failure, through being without
the necessary technical training, and it does not appear that he had
much opportunity to distinguish himself as a war correspondent. The
writing of fiction was his proper work, and his success at it seemed
always to be in proportion to the amount of personal experience which he
employed to support the superstructure of his somewhat reckless fancy.
Those of Kingsley's friends who contribute to the brief memoir of his
life bear unanimous testimony to the personal brightness and kindness of
which he has left so worthy a memorial in his first novels.

It is characteristic of Kingsley that he never wrote an ungenerous word
of the country which sent him away empty-handed from the store of its
riches. Not even a suggestion of the fruitless toil and the
disillusionment which he shared with scores of other amateur diggers
during the first two years of his colonial life finds expression in any
of his novels. His choice of incident and adventure in _Geoffry Hamlyn_
seems to imply a deliberate ignoring of what was by far the most
striking development of Antipodean life in the decade of 1850-60.

The gold-fields were then in a sense an epitome of the world, the centre
at which all men's thoughts converged, an ever-changing spectacle, a
daily source of novelty and suggestion. The life of the squatters was
primitive, inferior in variety, and marked only by a rapid accumulation
of wealth, which was in itself but a part of the general prosperity
created by the discovery of gold. If Kingsley wished to repress memories
which it would have been against his cheerful nature to perpetuate, he
succeeded with singular completeness.

Save the technical knowledge of geology shown by Trevittick in _The
Hillyars and the Burtons_, and by the encyclopaedic Dr. Mulhaus in his
lecture at the picnic in the grass-covered crater of Mirngish, there is
nothing to suggest that the author had any personal acquaintance with
mining in the colonies. The experience that was so fresh and abundant in
his mind is put aside in favour of a set of facts and pictures not even
incidentally connected with life on the gold-fields.

As if to emphasise the motive of his choice, if motive there was, he
selected the pre-auriferous period for the Australian parts of his
stories. His squatters become wealthy by a comparatively slow process,
extending over some sixteen years. The squatters of the gold period
would certainly seem better adapted to the purposes of fiction. There
is, indeed, more than a suggestion of romance in the sudden burst of
fortune which within the first few years after 1851 raised so many of
them from positions of struggling uncertainty to affluence, with incomes
varying from ten to twenty thousand pounds, and in some few cases as
high as thirty thousand pounds, a year.

The first and last use Kingsley made of his gold-fields experience is
seen in the sketch of mining of the successful sort in the third volume
of _The Hillyars and the Burtons_, but this is so slight that it might
have been imagined by a writer who had never handled a shovel or a
washing-cradle in his life.

The Australian people have so often been the subject of flippant and
ill-natured criticisms, that they can readily appreciate any liberal
estimate of themselves in whatever form it may be placed before their
kindred in Great Britain. It is a fact, as natural as it is undeniable,
that they are very sensitive to praise or blame. What wounds them more
than adverse comment itself, is the circumstance of its often proceeding
from persons who have accepted without warning their too prompt and
trustful hospitality.

To anyone but the incorrigibly confident and good-natured Antipodean,
the lesson would be obvious, namely, that the distinguished visitor
should be petted less, and left more dependent upon his own devices in
the collection of materials for the inevitable book or magazine article.
Though the result might be the same, there would be no ingratitude, and
the critic would be less able to pose as an impartial inside observer of
Australian society.

Perhaps, indeed, though this implies a somewhat wild flight of
imagination, he might altogether escape the fatal sense of compulsion
towards printers'-ink, under which the traveller of a few weeks' or
months' experience commonly labours when once he has extricated himself
from the blandishments of Toorak or Darling Point.

It is true that Australia has received many a compliment from casual
writers, but to Australians themselves it is always a question whether
these kindnesses are not outbalanced by the inaccuracies which surround
them. For it may as well be said at once that the younger colonists do
not relish being denied all native individuality, and depicted with a
complaisant condescension as mere imitators of English life. It is well
to be a Briton, they say, but better to be an Australian. And who shall
say that their self-satisfaction is not healthy and pardonable?

By contrast with the judgments of persons to whom candour concerning the
colonies seems to be a stern duty, Henry Kingsley's pictures of the
pioneer life of Australia fifty years ago, and his liberal estimate
(since largely realised) of the future of the country, find more
enduring appreciation than would, perhaps, be accorded such writing in
ordinary circumstances.

The good feeling that shines on every page of _Geoffry Hamlyn_ would
earn gratitude from Australian readers were the story not in itself
spirited and absorbing. If from the personal experiences with which this
first novel is crowded Kingsley excluded everything that might be
unfavourable to the reputation of Australia and its people, he at least
told nothing that was untrue. His record of the country is a generous
one, but there is no flattery--at least, none of the grosser sort.

It is one of his supreme qualities, too, that while delighting to
preserve unmodified the British spirit and traditions in his emigrant
colonists, he surrounds their offspring with a subtle distinction. Some
of the manly strength and courtly serenity, the truth, honour, and
delicacy of the ideal Englishman and Englishwoman they reproduce; and
then there is added a something caught from the warm air and the broader
expanses of the South--a new impulse, a deeper tinge in the blood, a
greater trust in human nature.

As befitting the early period of which the novelist wrote, this
difference is not strongly marked, and is more readily recognisable in
the light of colonial experience than without it; but it clearly exists.
Its continuation at the present day is far more apparent. Kingsley's
young Australians are home-taught, and necessarily display most of the
characteristics of their British parents. But, still, they show
themselves types of a new race, which has now its hundreds of
representatives in the homes of the Australian gentry.

Of such was the young squatter who so attracted the attention of Mr.
Froude at the first station he visited in Victoria. 'He had till within
a month or two been herding cattle in Queensland, doing the work for
four years of the roughest emigrant field hand, yet had retained the
manners of the finest of fine gentlemen--tall, spare-loined, agile as a
deer, and with a face that might have belonged to Sir Lancelot.' Of
course, the genial author of _Oceana_ made no pretence of minute
observation in the account of his travels. Had he not been content to
fly through the country, viewing it mainly, as he admits, from 'softest
sofas' of 'a superlative carriage lined with blue satin,' he might have
seen not one, but many fine specimens of what Sir George Bowen has aptly
called the working aristocracy of Australia.

The little Arcadian kingdom--cheerful, self-contained, and
picturesque--of the Buckleys, the Brentwoods, and their historian,
Geoffry Hamlyn, of the Mayfords, Tom Troubridge, Mary Hawker, and the
rest, far from illustrates all the intermittent successes and hardships
which have commonly attended squatting in Australia. The toil,
loneliness, and monotony of the occupation are scarcely mentioned. The
aspect represented is almost entirely the agreeable one.

There is, it must be admitted, some ground for the charge that he has
made squatting life 'too much like a prolonged picnic.' Had Kingsley
been himself a pastoralist, a hundred minute experiences might have
obtained expression which he has avoided. In this respect the
historical value of his work is less than it might have been. But the
compensating gain in human interest more than justifies the author's
choice of treatment. He never allowed himself to forget that he was
telling a story, that he was writing the adventures of a small group of
emigrant English families, not a history of colonial settlement and its
difficulties. Nor does he ever take advantage of the fact that, with the
exception of two or three others whose works are collections of sketches
rather than novels, and whose names are now almost forgotten, he was the
first to describe in fiction the rural life of the country, to recognise
the beginning of an aristocracy of landholders, and to commemorate the
pervading spirit of cheerful confidence to which so much of the rapid
early development of Australia was due.

It may well be regretted that one who had so keen an eye for all that
was best in the social life of the country, at one of its most
interesting periods, should not have written a volume or two of
reminiscences, but no colonial reader would wish _Geoffry Hamlyn_ or
_The Hillyars and the Burtons_ to have been made the vehicle of more
descriptive matter than they contain. Kingsley was more sparing in the
use of local colour and incident than Boldrewood and some of the younger
writers are, though in his first novel a few passages occur which may be
considered unnecessary, including the story told by the hut-keeper to
Hamlyn in the presence of the disguised bushrangers, the whisking of
Captain Blockstrop and his friends on and off the stage, and the story
of the lost child. The latter, however, like Dr. Mulhaus' geological
lecture, has the merit of being one of the best pieces of prose the
author ever wrote, and gives Sam Buckley and Cecil Mayford an
opportunity for a dramatic settlement of the order of their suit for the
hand of Alice Brentwood. In the main narrative the periods of 'dull
prosperity' are expressly avoided. After that first beautiful picture of
the pioneer settlement, 'the scene so venerable, so ancient, so seldom
seen in the old world--the patriarchs moving into the desert with all
their wealth to find a new pasture land'--the action of the story is
rapidly advanced to the later days of their success. The estate which
has been the home of Major Buckley's forefathers for generations no
longer providing a competence, he has resolutely left it for the land
where he is to find 'a new heaven and a new earth.' Unlike so many of
the pioneers, he has bade a final good-bye to England, but that it is
_not_ 'for ever' one can safely predict from the outset. He sees the old
country in long years after, when, with some of the wealth garnered on
the rolling prairies of Northern Australia, his son has proudly bought
back the family domain of Clere in all the completeness of its original
acres. Within a few brief chapters the colonists are discovered in the
security of assured wealth. Sitting under their station verandahs, they
can contemplate almost with calmness the death of their cattle by
hundreds, and the devastation of their runs by Bush fires. They have
arrived at the period when 'there was money in the bank, claret in the
cellar, and race-horses in the paddock.' Meanwhile, the old Devonshire
life is becoming a dim memory. They have kept their promise to create a
new Drumston in the wilderness, and are well content with their homes
among the southern fern-clad hills. The history of their intercourse
approaches the character of an epic. Over his structure of realism--of
life as he saw it and lived it himself--the writer has cast a softening
glow of romance, through which are seen the beauties of ideal
friendship, of youthful love, family affection, pride of nationality,
and charity towards all mankind.

Kingsley was a lover of his fellows, and wont to declare that the
proportion of good to bad in human nature was as ten to one the world
over. This tenet of his religion he infused in some measure into all his
novels. It is this they teach if they teach anything. From it spring
their most vital qualities. The best of the stories possess that
'certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere,' which Matthew Arnold
assigned as the gift of literary genius. Their virility and right
feeling are unmistakable, and insensibly teach the practice of a silent
and kindly forbearance towards the foibles of our fellow-creatures. The
names alone of the principal characters in _Geoffry Hamlyn_ recall scene
after scene in their idyllic life to which it refreshes the mind to
return. There is Major Buckley, a hero of Waterloo, gigantic in stature,
refined, calmly courageous--a fitting leader of the settlement; Mrs.
Buckley, high-bred, stately, self-reliant, a model English matron; Tom
Troubridge, the big, merry Devonian, grown with prosperity weighty and
didactic in his speech, and thinking of turning his attention to
politics; Miss Thornton, the dignified, sweet old maid, born to spend
her life in uncomplaining service of others; Mary Hawker, tragic,
passionate, paying the slow penalty of youthful wilfulness; Captain
Brentwood, of Wellington's artillery, and his gallant son Jim, who is
sighing for a red coat and a commission; Sam and Alice, the young lovers
so nearly lost to each other 'in the year when the bushrangers came
down'; and Dr. Mulhaus, the mysterious German, with his good-humoured
roar, first heard at old Drumston, and with us to the end, who is
everybody's friend and counsellor, and beloved by all--except George
Hawker, of whose 'tom-cat' skull he has made that amusingly audacious
examination at the beginning of their acquaintance. It is delightful to
find all the faces familiar in the old land reappearing in the new, even
though the coincidences which attend their coming seem too good to be
true.

But the reader forgets the occasional loose-jointedness of the story in
contemplation of the swift succession of happy scenes created for him.
In these there is nothing dubious or artificial. They are sketches
straight from the life of the country, and it is their beauty that makes
_Geoffry Hamlyn_ a classic in Australian literature.

Among the characters, there are so many who inspire us with love rather
than mere interest, that a multiplicity of similar scenes, of
conversations, rides, pleasure-excursions, and other intercourse, which
in another book might prove wearisome, becomes here the best enjoyment
of the reader. With what vivacity and gusto the author describes the
visits exchanged between the home stations, and the comforts and
happiness which they reveal! Half the book is made up of them, and yet
the majority remain sufficiently clear in the memory to be recalled
separately. Brentwood, who is at first fifty miles away, buys a station
near at hand, he and Buckley having become inseparable, and now Baroona,
Garoopna, and Toonarbin are only a few miles apart. 'There was always a
hostage from one staying as a guest at the other.' The visits were
generally unannounced, and the visitors stayed as long as they felt
inclined to. The effects of this custom are once amusingly illustrated
at the home of Captain Brentwood. It is when the members of the little
colony hear of the arrival of his beautiful daughter from Sydney, where
she has been at school. 'That week one of those runs upon the Captain's
hospitality took place which are common enough in the Bush, and,
although causing a temporary inconvenience, are generally as much
enjoyed by the entertainers as the entertained. Everybody during this
next week came to see them, and nobody went back again. So by the end of
the week there were a dozen or fourteen guests assembled, all uninvited,
and apparently bent on making a long stay of it.' They help one another
when there is work to be done, dine sumptuously, picnic luxuriously.
Kingsley has properly made eating and drinking a noticeable part of the
hearty full-bodied existence of his squatters and their friends.

There is no class of people who have a better capacity for enjoying the
material comforts of life than the country gentlemen of Australia. Major
Buckley is just the sort of person one might have expected to hold
decided views on the subject of dining as an art. To dine in the middle
of the day was, in his opinion, a gross abuse of the gifts of
Providence. 'I eat my dinner not so much for the sake of the dinner
itself as for the after-dinnerish feeling which follows--a feeling that
you have nothing to do, and that, if you had, you'd be shot if you'd do
it.'

On another occasion the author himself preaches a similarly agreeable
doctrine, concluding with the advice: 'My brother, let us breakfast in
Scotland, lunch in Australia, and dine in France, till our lives end.'

Nor is the kindred subject of lounging in midsummer forgotten. Anyone in
an armchair under a broad Australian verandah, who fetched anything for
himself, would, in the author's opinion, 'show himself a man of weak
mind.' <DW65>s were all that a Southern gentleman wanted to complete his
comfort when the sun was at baking-point. Mrs. Beecher Stowe's teachings
undergo a playful deprecation. Did she know the exertion required for
cutting up a pipe of tobacco in a hot north wind; or the amount of
perspiration and anger superinduced by knocking the head off a bottle of
Bass in January; or the physical prostration caused by breaking two
lumps of hard white sugar in a pawnee before a thunderstorm? The
Southern gentleman undertakes to affirm that she didn't.

In the conversation of Kingsley's colonists, the business of the
squatter, his hopes, fears and struggles, find no place, and the idea of
hard work is never obtruded for its own sake. The talk is the talk of a
cultured class who live wholesome lives and have no cares. The twelve
thousand miles that separate them from the centre of their intellectual
life are obliterated. The men preserve their individual tastes, together
with that comradeship and mutual considerateness which have their origin
in the best traditions of college life. The same loyalty and chivalry
are prominently reproduced in the characters of _Ravenshoe_ and _Silcote
of Silcotes_. But in _Geoffry Hamlyn_ these qualities are perhaps more
noticeable (at all events to a colonial reader) than in the later
novels, because of the contrast they furnish to the essentially
competitive life of modern Australia. Brentwood is 'excessively attached
to mathematics, and has leisure to gratify his hobby'; Harding, 'an
Oxford man,' is 'an inveterate writer of songs,' a pastime which only
the annual business of shearing is permitted to interrupt; Buckley is
intent on the education of his son, in which he is careful to provide
for a knowledge of the Latin Grammar; while Doctor Mulhaus finds the new
country an even better field than the old one for his researches as a
naturalist and geologist. In telling his story, Kingsley seems, in
short, to have treated pioneer squatting in Australia as the brighter
aspects of English country life have been treated in fiction for
generations past. He expends his best efforts in showing the picturesque
surroundings and interior comfort of Australian homes. Neither their
tables nor their bookshelves lack any of the best luxuries of the hour.
The greyness and rawness of their environment are not touched upon.
Marcus Clarke could never have shown the Australian people so much of
the beauty of their strange fauna and flora as can be found in _Geoffry
Hamlyn_. He would have allowed the budding civilisation of the country
to be swallowed up in sombre desolate forests, or appear as lonely
specks on bleached and thirsty plains. Though he might intend the
contrary, that, substantially, would be the final impression left on
the mind of the reader. Australian scenery awed and depressed him. With
all his powers of graphic expression, he could seldom write of it
without exaggeration. It was the fascination of the grotesque rather
than the picturesque that he felt. Kingsley, though scarcely so graceful
and vivid a describer, had a keener and more constant sense of natural
beauty. His vision was unclouded by the peculiar susceptibility of
temperament which narrowed the view of his brilliant contemporary. He
could not have indulged in rhetorical flourishes at the expense of
accuracy, as in the familiar passage professing to give the Australian
view of 'our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds
who cannot fly, our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all
fours.' A comparison of Marcus Clarke's too often quoted description
with the sketches of landscape given in, say, the twentieth,
twenty-eighth and thirty-sixth chapters of _Geoffry Hamlyn_ and at the
beginning of the third volume of _The Hillyars and the Burtons_
curiously illustrates how far the appreciation of Australian scenery
depends upon the point of view of the observer.

Kingsley's descriptions, like all else that he wrote of the country,
breathe an unmistakable personal enjoyment. They are the natural
expression of a happy disposition, just as is the boyish fun with which
he surrounds the love-making of his characters. 'Halbert kicked Jim's
shins under the table, and whispered: "You've lost your money, old
fellow!"' when Sam Buckley, flushed and happy, rejoined his friends in
the sitting-room at Garoopna, after proposing to Alice in the garden.
Jim Brentwood had peevishly bet his friend that the lovers would go on
shilly-shallying half their lives; but Halbert, with keener vision, had
foreseen the very hour of their betrothal, and made a bet of five pounds
on the event. More comical still is the spectacle of Hamlyn ducking
under the bedclothes to escape the boot that is about to be flung at
him, for laughingly discrediting the story of which his bosom-friend
Stockbridge has tragically unburdened himself concerning the
evaporation of his love for Mary Hawker.

Whether in recording the actions and dialogue of his characters, or in
describing scenery and the habits of the birds and animals which figure
so often in his first novel, Kingsley always reflected some of his own
happiness. It is not wit nor subtle humour, but a combination of pure
mirth with the enthusiasm of warm friendship, that maintains one's
interest in the simple life of the new Drumston. There is an abundance
of farcical fun and playfulness which force laughter, and never approach
an unkindness. The men avoid being smart at each other's expense; and if
they cannot claim to be clever or heroic, they are at least good
fellows, any one of whom might serve as a model of manliness.

Kingsley's knowledge of household pets was of the kind exhibited by
persons who have spent some period of their lives in loneliness, with
only the companionship of dumb creatures. He was an acute observer of
their peculiarities, with the noting of which he combined a whimsical
exaggeration. The account of the menagerie which Sam Buckley found at
Garoopna on the occasion of his memorable first meeting with Alice
Brentwood is almost unique in Australian literature.

Buckley's ride to rescue his sweetheart from the bushrangers is one of
the most moving and dramatic incidents in the book, and a good specimen
of Kingsley's graphic narrative style. A band of the outlaws who were
the terror of pioneer colonists fifty years ago have risen in the
district, and, after committing outrages at one station, are reported to
be riding on to another twenty miles distant. At the latter, Captain
Brentwood's home, Alice happens to be alone. When the terrible news
comes to her young lover, he is at Baroona, which by the shortest road
is ten miles from Brentwood's. What start have the bushrangers had, and
will they arrive before him?

    Sam's noble horse, Widderin, a horse with a pedigree a hundred years
    old, stood in the stable. The buying of that horse had been Sam's
    only extravagance, for which he had often reproached himself, and
    now this day he would see whether he would get his money's-worth out
    of that horse or no.

    I followed him up to the stable, and found him putting the bridle on
    Widderin's beautiful little head. Neither of us spoke; only when I
    handed him the saddle, and helped him with the girths, he said, 'God
    bless you!'

    I ran out and got down the slip-rails for him. As he rode by, he
    said, 'Good-bye, Uncle Jeff; perhaps you won't see me again'; and I
    cried out, 'Remember your God and your mother, Sam, and don't do
    anything foolish.' Then he was gone....

    Looking across the plains the way he should go, I saw another
    horseman toiling far away, and recognised Doctor Mulhaus. Good
    Doctor! he had seen the danger in a moment, and by his ready wit had
    got a start of everyone else by ten minutes. The Doctor, on his
    handsome, long-bodied Arabian mare, was making good work of it
    across the plains, when he heard the rush of a horse's feet behind
    him, and turning, he saw tall Widderin bestridden by Sam, springing
    over the turf, gaining on him stride after stride. In a few minutes
    they were alongside of one another.

    'Good lad!' cried the Doctor. 'On, forwards; catch her, and away to
    the woods with her! Bloodhound Desborough will be on their trail in
    half an hour. Save her, and we will have noble vengeance!'

    Sam only waved his hand in good-bye, and sped on across the plain
    like a solitary ship at sea. The good horse, with elastic and easy
    motion, fled on his course like a bird, lifting his feet clearly and
    rapidly through the grass. The brisk south wind filled his wide
    nostrils as he turned his graceful neck from side to side, till,
    finding that work was meant, and not play, he began to hold his head
    straight before him, and rush steadily forward....

    One stumble now, and it were better to lie down on the plain and
    die. He was in the hands of God, and he felt it. He said one short
    prayer, but that towards the end was interrupted by the wild current
    of his thoughts. Was there any hope? They, the devils, would have
    been drinking at the Mayfords', and perhaps would go slow; or would
    they ride fast and wild? After thinking a short time, he feared the
    latter. They had tasted blood, and knew that the country would be
    roused on them shortly....

    Here are a brace of good pistols, and they with care shall give
    account, if need be, of two men. After that, nothing. It were
    better--so much better--not to live if one were only ten minutes too
    late.... Now he was in the forest again, and now as he rode quickly
    down the steep sandy road among the bracken, he heard the hoarse
    rush of the river in his ears, and knew the end was well-nigh
    come.... Now the house was in sight, and now he cried aloud some
    wild inarticulate sound of thankfulness and joy. All was as peaceful
    as ever, and Alice, unconscious, stood white-robed in the verandah,
    feeding her birds.

    As he rode up he shouted to her and beckoned. She came running
    through the house, and met him breathless at the doorway.

    'The bushrangers, Alice, my love!' he said. 'We must fly this
    instant; they are close to us now.'

    She had been prepared for this. She knew her duty well, for her
    father had often told her what to do. No tears! no hysterics! She
    took Sam's hand without a word, and, placing her fairy foot upon his
    boot, vaulted up into the saddle before him.... They crossed the
    river, and dismounting, they led the tired horse up the steep <DW72>
    of turf that surrounded a little castellated tor of bluestone....

    'I do not see them anywhere, Alice,' said Sam presently. 'I see no
    one coming across the plains. They must be either very near us in
    the hollow of the river-valley, or else a long way off.'

    'There they are!' said Alice. 'Surely there is a large party of
    horsemen on the plain, but they are seven or eight miles off.'

    'Ay, ten,' said Sam. 'I am not sure that they are horsemen.' Then he
    said suddenly in a whisper, 'Lie down, my love, in God's name! Here
    they are, close to us!'

    There burst on his ear a confused round of talking and laughing, and
    out of one of the rocky gullies leading towards the river came the
    men they had been flying from, in number about fourteen. They had
    crossed the river, for some unknown reason, and to the fear-struck
    hiders it seemed as though they were making straight towards their
    lair.

    He had got Widderin's head in his breast, blindfolding him with his
    coat, for should he neigh now they were undone indeed! As the
    bushrangers approached, the horse began to get uneasy and paw the
    ground, putting Sam in such an agony of terror that the sweat rolled
    down his face. In the midst of this he felt a hand on his arm, and
    Alice's voice, which he scarcely recognised, said in a fierce
    whisper: 'Give me one of your pistols, sir!'

    'Leave that to me!' he replied, in the same tone.

    'As you please,' she said; 'but I must not fall alive into their
    hands. Never look your mother in the face again if I do.'

    He gave one more glance around, and saw that the enemy would come
    within a hundred yards of their hiding-place. Then he held the horse
    faster than ever and shut his eyes.

    Was it a minute only, or an hour, until they heard the sound of the
    voices dying away in the roar of the river, and, opening their eyes
    once more, looked into one another's faces? Faces they thought that
    they had never seen before--so each told the other afterwards--so
    wild, so haggard, and so strange.

If, as Professor Masson says, 'it is by his characters that a novelist
is chiefly judged,' Henry Kingsley's future reputation will be found to
depend almost solely on what he accomplished in _Geoffry Hamlyn_, _The
Hillyars and the Burtons_ and _Ravenshoe_. In the first two of these
there is an abundance of original observation and little conscious study
of character. The vivid Australian scenes of the one, and the Chelsea
life of the other, are transcripts of the author's own memories. His
knowledge of the squatters he got by working for them and living with
them; what he knew of police and convicts and bushrangers he learned in
doing police duty; the life of the Burtons, as told in 'Jim Burton's
Story,' was that which the author saw during his boyhood round his
father's old rectory on Chelsea Embankment.

'He seemed to me,' says Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie, 'to have lived his own
books, battled them out and forced them into their living shapes, to
have felt them and been them all.' Hardly all--one feels bound to say.
The remark is entirely true of nearly everything in _Geoffry Hamlyn_ and
of three-fourths of _The Hillyars and the Burtons_, but to _Ravenshoe_
it applies in a more limited degree, and to some of the later novels
scarcely ever. Either through carelessness (of which one often suspects
him) or deficiency of judgment, Kingsley more than once allowed the
exigencies of his plots to destroy all consistency in his characters.

Thus, Squire Silcote, the clever old ex-lawyer, is made to retire from
the world and brood for many years, and on quite insufficient grounds,
in the belief that his first wife had been unfaithful, and had tried to
poison him. Nothing short of a condition of semi-insanity could explain
his conduct. In other respects the character is finely conceived. Emma
Burton, too, is a perfectly natural and charming person until she is
employed to revive the old problem of how far a sense of duty can
triumph over the power of love. Her devotion to her deformed brother is
wrong, because it is unnecessary. But even if this were not the case, it
would be irrational in a woman so eminently sensible and unromantic as
she is shown to be in the first half of the story. Almost at the
beginning of her voluntary service she is represented as realising 'the
hideous fate to which she has condemned herself in her fanaticism.' It
is quite impossible to make the reader believe that, loving Erne Hillyar
as she did, she could for years persist in rejecting him, and that her
brother would permit so much sacrifice on his account.

The beautiful, crazy Gerty Neville is another instance of perversion.
Her silliness is exaggerated in order that she shall weary and disgust
the _blase_ aristocrat who has married her. Some of her chatter is more
inconceivable than the 'coo-ee-ing' which Mr. Hornung's 'Bride from the
Bush' employed to attract the attention of a colonial acquaintance of
hers in Rotten Row.

But the distortion which the character of Emma Burton undergoes, and the
caricature of Gerty Neville, are, after all, easily pardonable faults in
a story rich in noble thought and sympathy, bright with pretty,
audacious nonsense, and containing such real personages as Jim Burton
and his father and mother, Erne Hillyar, and the Honourable Jack Dawson.

Even in _Silcote of Silcotes_ there are intermittent glimpses of
finely-conceived character which almost outbalance the eccentricities of
the Dark Squire and his sister, the fantastic meddler in foreign
intrigue. Kingsley's skill lay chiefly in his portrayal of men,
especially of young men, such as the dashing Charles Ravenshoe and his
philosophic friend Marston (a study of the George Warrington type);
Lord Welter, Lieutenant Hillyar, and Colonel Tom Silcote, reckless
profligates, but likeable fellows all; Frank Maberly, the athletic
curate; and Sam Buckley, the type of an Australian country gentleman.
With old men he was less successful. Lord Saltire, the placid
good-natured cynic of _Ravenshoe_, is, however, a clever exception. 'All
old women are beautiful,' says Kingsley in one of his stories, and he
never portrayed one that was not. His best are Miss Thornton and Lady
Ascot. The younger women, excepting Mary Hawker and Adelaide Summers,
are rather slightly drawn. Even Alice Brentwood is a somewhat indistinct
personage compared with the Australian girls of Mrs. Campbell Praed and
Ada Cambridge.

The superior position usually accorded to _Ravenshoe_ among Kingsley's
novels is merited more by the soundness of its plot than by the
naturalness of its characters. It was the author's first essay in pure
romance, and, with Henry Kingsley, to build character from imagination
was always largely, sometimes extravagantly, to idealise. He loved to
people old country houses with walking mysteries, to unravel tangled
genealogies, and discover secrets of youthful folly, to apportion
property to rightful heirs, and endow his characters with a superhuman
generosity. When Charles Ravenshoe is recovering from the long illness
which terminates the full series of his misfortunes, he sends for
Welter, the man who might be considered his arch-enemy, who not so long
before that had seduced Charles's sister and stole his _fiancee_.
Ravenshoe is represented as forgetting all his newly-suffered wrongs,
and thinking only of Welter as his favourite schoolfellow and youthful
companion. Anticipating doubts as to the feasibility of this, the author
proceeds to discuss the point with the reader, as he does in many
similar instances throughout the story. He appears to have a constant
anxiety about the impression he is making, and his comments and
confidences certainly become distasteful. But this foible goes only a
small way to discount the sterling merits of the novel.




ADA CAMBRIDGE.


Towards the close of 1890 the Australian booksellers--a cautious,
conservative class in their attitude towards new fiction, especially
that produced by the adventurous female writer of these latter
days--began to display so marked an interest in the work of Ada
Cambridge, that one not acquainted with the circumstances of the case
might have credited them with a friendly--possibly a patriotic--desire
to give due place to a newly-risen native genius. And when, in the
following year, another story from the same pen appeared, the popularity
of the author was firmly established.

The neat red volumes were on every stall; the Mudie of Melbourne gave
them a place of honour in his show-window, and the leading critical
review said that the second story possessed a charm which ought to
induce even the person who ignored fiction on principle to make an
exception in its favour. It was the kind of gratifying recognition that
the public always believes itself eager to offer the deserving young
writer. Yet Ada Cambridge's literary work had extended over no less a
period than fifteen years. Of course, much of this delay in securing
recognition might have been avoided. Probably in England she could have
won a substantial reputation in a third of the time, and with half the
labour expended by her in contributing to the Australian press. But, as
the wife of a country clergyman, she had other matters besides
literature to occupy her attention, and was content to write when there
happened to be leisure for it, and to see her work in a few of the
leading colonial newspapers.

About half a dozen novels were issued in this way, besides occasional
articles and poems. The publication of the longer stories in the
_Australasian_, a high-class weekly journal, ought in itself to have
made a name for the author, and possibly would have done so, were they
not in most cases so obviously a local product, and therefore not to be
seriously considered. It was a repetition of the experience of Rolf
Boldrewood. In the end, as usual, it was the English public that first
accepted her novels for what they were worth.

Ada Cambridge is a native of Norfolk, the lonely fens and quaint
villages of which are a picturesque background of some of her best
stories. In 1870, shortly after her marriage, she went with her husband,
the Rev. George Frederick Cross, a clergyman of the Church of England,
to Wangaratta, in Victoria. After residing successively in several other
country towns of this colony, they settled in 1893 at Williamstown, a
waterside suburb of Melbourne.

A novel entitled _Up the Murray_, dealing with life in the colonies, was
published by Ada Cambridge (the author continues to issue her work under
her maiden name) in the Melbourne press in 1875. Others of the same
character followed at irregular intervals. Two were issued in book-form
by a London firm of publishers, but did not attain to much more than a
library circulation.

When the author again came before the English public, it was with a
novel in which the purely Australian interest was rigidly subordinated
to dramatic quality and a richly sympathetic study of character. _A
Marked Man_ is the story of a younger son of an old English county
family who, while sharing the pride and indomitable spirit of his
ancestry, develops a hatred for conventional prejudices and religious
cant, and, after making a final assertion of independence by marrying a
farmer's daughter, emigrates to New South Wales to establish a name and
fortune on his own account.

The first half of the action takes place in England, the remainder in
the colonies. The natural beauties surrounding the home of the Delavels
at Sydney are not less delicately and poetically described than the
village life they have left behind in the mother country--the
patriarchal rule of an old-fashioned, rather pompous house, over a
people retaining the hereditary respect of vassals for their feudal
lord; but the view given of Australian society is, in keeping with the
relation to it of Richard Delavel and his household, of the slightest
kind.

Delavel and the only daughter whom he has trained to be his second self,
whose comradeship makes him almost forget the long-drawn thraldom of his
early _mesalliance_, live in a world so much and so necessarily their
own, that one is grateful for the good taste which excluded from it the
bustle and commoner interests of colonial life. The novel met with
general, and in several instances cordial, favour in England, and since
then the author has yearly increased her reputation.

Three out of five of the later novels are, like _A Marked Man_, made
comparatively independent of the distinctively local interest to which
we have been accustomed in the works of most Australian authors. It is
not possible, for example, to point out anything in the shape of an
essentially local first cause for any of the principal incidents of
_Not All in Vain_ and _A Marriage Ceremony_. The passionate half-brute,
Neil Hammond, who pursues the heroine of the former story across the
world, and terrorises her with his unwelcome attentions, would have met
a violent death, or himself have murdered someone, in his own country or
elsewhere as inevitably as in Australia; and the man who killed him
would not have found Katherine Knowles less faithful during the long
years of his imprisonment had her sacrifice been under the daily
observation of Hammond's family and her own strait-laced aunts in their
East Norfolk home.

In _A Marriage Ceremony_, the only advantage secured by taking the story
from London to Melbourne--instead of to New York, let us say--seems to
lie in whatever added strength the sense of greater distance imparts to
the temporary appearance of a final separation between Betty Ochiltree
and her strangely-wedded husband. The marriage that was a condition of
their inheritance having been performed, bride and bridegroom part in
accordance with a previous agreement. The former reappears as a
prominent figure in the society of modern Melbourne--the Melbourne of
1893, when the failure of banks and land companies was a regular subject
of morning news.

Here, it might be supposed, was an opportunity for one or two vivid and
instructive sketches of the sensational period that witnessed the proof
of so much folly and its punishment, and wrought so many more effects on
all classes of Australian society than could be noted in the common
records of the time. But the great crisis is almost ignored in the
novel. There are merely a few passing references to its progress, and a
mention of the loss on the part of Mrs. Ochiltree of some of the wealth
which she is beginning to regard as having been rather spuriously
acquired.

Even the very successful story of the _Three Miss Kings_ and _A Mere
Chance_ tell little of the city life of Australia, though their action
is placed in it almost exclusively. The latter is a tale of match-making
intrigue and money-worship in Toorak, but the main interest of the plot
apart, the account of fashionable Melbourne is a singularly colourless
one. As for Mrs. Duff-Scott and her Major, the amiable pair who in the
character of leaders of Melbourne society undertake to find husbands for
Elizabeth King and her sisters, and whose benevolent intentions are so
effectually forestalled, they are as conventionally English as though
they belonged to the pages of Miss Braddon or Mrs. Henry Wood.

Again, though during half of _Fidelis_ we are given occasional
impressive and delightful glimpses of Nature under southern skies, the
principal characters are English, and in England is centred first and
last the dominant pathos of the story. A complete absence of dialect
from the novels helps to emphasise the author's slender use of
extraneous aids to interest.

The influence of Ada Cambridge's twenty-five years' Australian
experience is shown in her general outlook upon life, rather than in the
details of her work. The prevailing tone of her books is one of marked
cheerfulness, sincerity, and simplicity; she has a hearty dislike for
conventional stupidities, especially for the mock-modesty that stifles
honest sentiment; and she gives emphatic endorsement to the pleasant
dictum (which seems so much more feasible in sunny Australia than in
colder northern lands) that the second half of life is not less fruitful
and satisfying than the first.

As the general effect of Ada Cambridge's teaching, so far as it can be
gathered from her plots, and the few instances in which she has
permitted herself anything in the shape of didactic expression, is to
make us more patient with life's complexities and perceptive of its
compensations, and more content with whatever happiness may be drawn in
our way by the chain of accidents called Destiny, so do her principal
characters, in their foibles and their strength--in the little acts and
impulses which qualify alike their heroism and their baseness--tend to
make us more discriminative and charitable.

In almost every case they are strong studies from some point of view.
Of deliberate analysis there is very little; but there are numerous
realistic touches not commonly admitted in fiction, which, handled with
skill and insight, keep the character within the pale of common
experience and increase rather than alienate the reader's sympathy.
Thus, Richard Delavel's outburst of relief upon the death of his first
wife, so far from being vulgar and brutal, as it might have seemed in
other circumstances, recalls and emphasises the high sense of duty and
honour and the iron self-restraint which had enabled him to be in all
essentials a good husband for twenty-five years to a cold-hearted
creature, between whom and himself there had never been either common
interest or feeling, and for whose sake he had relinquished the woman
that would have been his real mate in intellect and sympathy. Delavel's
housekeeper, who is also a privileged friend, takes him to task for his
unseemly hurry to go in search of this old love before his wife had been
a week in her grave. He makes no secret of his relief. 'The sense that
I am free is turning my brain with joy,' he confesses.

    'I say it because I feel it. I am aware that it is in very bad
    taste, but that doesn't make it the less true. Do you suppose people
    are never glad when their relations die? They are--very often; they
    can't help it; only they pretend they are not, because it seems so
    shocking. I don't pretend--at least, I need not pretend to you. The
    fault is not always--not all--on the side of the survivors, Hannah.
    I don't think I am any worse than those who pretend a grief that
    they don't feel. I was never unkind to her--never in my life, that I
    can remember. I did not kill her; I would have kept her alive as
    long as I possibly could. I think--I hope--that if I could have
    saved her by the sacrifice of my own life, I should have done it
    without a single moment's hesitation.'

    'I am sure you would,' said Hannah.

    'But,' he continued, with that unwonted fire blazing in his eyes,
    'since dead she is, I _am_ glad--I am, I am! I am glad as a man who
    has been kept in prison is to be let out. It is not my fault; I
    would be sorry if I could. Some day, Hannah--some day, when we have
    been dust for a few hundred years--perhaps for a few score
    only--people will wake up to see how stupid it is to drive a man to
    be glad when his wife is dead. They are finding out so many things;
    they will find that out too in time.'

Probably it will still appear to many that Delavel's admission was at
least indelicate and inconsistent with his chivalrous nature. It is not
here possible to convey an adequate impression of his fiery spirit, his
long heart-hunger, and the magnitude of the loss which a wholly
uncongenial marriage must ever mean to such a man. When the full story
of his life and that of his quietly 'implacable' wife is read, his
conduct seems natural and excusable. It is as much a part of himself as
the tremulous tenderness with which he ministers to the comfort of the
frail Constance Bethune, after finding and bringing her home, or as his
fierce grief when she dies.

Another very human spectacle that illustrates the author's method is the
reunion of Betty and Rutherford Ochiltree--the frank selfishness of
their mutual joy while the poor woman who had been an unconscious
barrier between them lies dead under their roof. It is a somewhat
painful episode, and precludes anything like high esteem for Rutherford,
but it has the quality of intense actuality.

In like manner is Adam Drewe shorn of some of the merit of his devotion
to the heroine of _Fidelis_ by being shown in successive attachments to
other women during his long exile in Australia. The author recognises
that, 'the laws of literary romance being so much at variance with the
laws of Nature,' Adam is certain to suffer in the reader's good opinion
for having 'continued to hunger for feminine sympathy as well as his
daily dinner.' No doubt his stature as a hero lessens when it appears
that though the absent Fidelia was ever in his thoughts, and a daily
source of inspiration to him as a writer, he twice narrowly escaped
marriage--first with a servant girl at his lodgings, and afterwards with
the daughter of his landlady--and that at another period of his colonial
life he became involved in a disreputable kind of Bohemianism. But he is
not disgraced by these lapses to the extent that the author anticipates;
at all events, they make him more human than he could otherwise have
been.

It is this power of infusing a robust humanity into her characters that
makes the distinctive feature of Ada Cambridge's best novels. In each,
whatever the quality of the plot, there are always two or three
personages who talk and act as real men and women do--now rationally or
in obedience to custom, now passionately or with that perversity which,
as the author once describes it, 'is like a natural law, independent of
other laws, the only one that persistently defies our calculations.'
They are mostly big people with big appetites. The beauty of the women
is the beauty of mind and of sound physical health.

Susy Delavel was tall, well grown, straight and graceful, with an
intelligent, eager face, though 'her mouth was large, her nose not all
it should have been, and her complexion showed the want of parasols and
veils.' She was 'not handsome at all, but decidedly attractive.'

Sarah French, the girl in _Fidelis_ whose comeliness so nearly drew the
hero from his old allegiance, has 'a strong and good, rather than a
pretty, face,' with a 'large and substantial figure.' Adam Drewe
concluded on first sight of her that she was a nice woman. Later on he
finds her 'looking the very incarnation of home, with her cheerful
healthy face, her strong busy hands, her neat hair, her neat dress....
She might have sat for a statue of Motherhood--of Charity with a babe at
her ample breast, and others clinging to her supporting hand; Nature had
so evidently intended her to play the part.'

Katherine Knowles has fine physical symmetry and a strong, frank face.
While lacking 'the airs and graces, the superficial brightness, of
conventional girlhood,' she is 'singularly vivid in her more substantial
way.'

Betty Ochiltree's beauty, too, is of the kind that wears well. She has a
face 'frank and spirited, firm of mouth and chin, kind and sweet, as
honest as the day,' surmounting an ample body, and she carries herself
with dignity, 'as few Australian girls can do.' And how impressive and
consistent with her character is the noble, placid figure of Elizabeth
King, 'perfect in proportion, fine in texture, full of natural dignity
and ease!'

The author is fond of showing the attractiveness of such women at the
age of thirty, or even more. 'In real life,' she once observes, 'the
supremely interesting woman is not a girl of eighteen, as she is in
fiction. Every man worth calling a man knows that. A girl of that age
... knows as much about love as does a young animal in the spring, and
not a bit more. And the human male of these days--so highly developed,
so subtly compounded--has grown out of the stage when that much would
satisfy him. I mean, of course, the human male who in real life answers
to the hero in fiction--a man who must have left, not only his teens,
but his twenties behind him.'

When one comes to the heroes, it is easy to recall half a dozen
commanding figures who blunder in the most natural and amiable manner in
their affairs; who think a good deal more of their immediate personal
comforts than of religious or ethical abstractions; who like their own
way and try to get it; who, in short, are mostly what the author wishes
them to appear--'the men out of books that we meet every day.' Of little
men, in the physical sense, there are only two of any importance, but
even these are virile and masterful. A general aim of the stories would
seem to be to show the sexes what each chiefly admires in the other. It
is first a sort of apotheosis of the _mens sana in corpore sano_, and
after that an illustration of the independent attractions of sympathy,
gentleness, culture, and high character.

Though in most cases the strongest attachments are formed between men
and women arrived at an age to discriminate beyond mere physical charm,
nevertheless physical charm is the most powerful, though not always
acknowledged, motive of their choice. 'Because of this,' says the
pathetic Hilda Donne in _A Marriage Ceremony_, touching her cheek, which
is terribly disfigured by a birth-mark, 'I have never had _love_. Can
you think what that means? You can't. Once I thought I was not going to
be quite shut out--once; but I was mistaken. I have found out that it is
for one's body that one is loved, and not for one's soul.'

Hilda unconsciously exaggerates, for it appears that Rutherford Hope,
though at first affected with disgust by her disfigurement, and
convinced that no healthy man could consort with 'so unnatural a woman,'
had come at last to regard her as a possible wife--before he was
confronted with the sudden temptation to secure a fortune by wedding
Betty Ochiltree, in compliance with the conditions of her millionaire
uncle's will. Yet Hilda's comment is substantially sound. Even
Rutherford, with all the sense of his mature years, and all the culture
that enabled him to appreciate her poetic gift, would have had to argue
himself into a marriage with her.

The ugliness of Adam Drewe, from which his mother turned in disgust at
his birth, and which in youth drove him across the seas in an agony of
sensitiveness from the woman he loved, was a less serious affliction
than that of Hilda Donne; but we know that he continued to be keenly
reminded of its disadvantages long after time had proved the sterling
qualities of his manhood, lessened his deformity, and brought him fame
and wealth.

Compared with the previous illustration, however, his case is at fault
in failing to give a sufficient description of his deformity. But that
he himself long thought it an insuperable bar to his happiness is clear.
When he fell in love with Fidelia Plunket, she was temporarily blind.
His affection for her was returned, and he knew it, but dreading the
disillusionment that would ensue when her sight was restored, he fled to
Australia and determined to abandon all thought of her as a wife. Urged
to return, because 'when a woman _is_ a woman,' and really in love with
a man, 'there's no camel she won't swallow for him,' Drewe replied that
his camel was just the one camel that no woman had been known to
swallow, or, at any rate, to digest. And he remained--for twenty years.

The plots of Ada Cambridge's novels are of the episodical order, and the
author, despite her openly-expressed scorn for the unnaturalness of the
average conventional novel, has not disdained employment of some of its
time-honoured methods. Occasionally she is at pains to explain the
feasibility of coincidences employed to secure dramatic interest. They
are certainly never of an impossible kind, and no one would deny the
truism that real life abounds in them. But has not a distinguished
writer aptly pointed out that there are matters in which fiction cannot
compete with life? As a rule, however, where a few such weaknesses
exist, they do not count for much with the average reader when the
principal scenes are as finely drawn as those in _A Marked Man_ or
_Fidelis_, or _The Three Miss Kings_. The latter story in some details
puts a greater strain upon the credulity than any of the other novels,
yet so well conceived and absolutely natural are the characters of the
three girls, and so humorously and pictorially presented the chief
incidents in their development, that the dubious points of the plot
become almost insignificant. The qualities of the novel as a whole are
similar to those which obscure the artistic defects of _Geoffry Hamlyn_,
and which for thirty-seven years have made it one of the most popular of
Australian stories.

In the presentation of tragic or pathetic incidents lies Ada Cambridge's
chief power, as far as her plots are concerned. In _A Marked Man_ it is
accompanied by her highest achievements in portraying a variety of
well-contrasted character. _Fidelis_, which opens at the Norfolk village
of the earlier novel, and reintroduces the Delavels, contains fewer
developed characters, as may also be said of _A Marriage Ceremony_. But
the three novels are equal in the high standard of their emotional
quality. No quotation of moderate size could do justice to any of the
principal scenes of _A Marked Man_: the chivalrous sacrifice of Richard
Delavel's youthful marriage; the inward repentance of it for twenty-two
years; the revival of his love for Constance Bethune; his painful
anxiety for her health, hungry enjoyment of her companionship, and
anguish at her death; and his own death soon afterwards. In the more
briefly detailed tragedy that brings into such striking relief the
sprightly drama of _A Marriage Ceremony_, there is a scene giving a fair
example of the author's style in touching passages. When Hilda, deeply
in love with Rutherford Hope, hears of his union with another woman, she
takes the readiest means of effacing herself by suddenly marrying a
shallow coxcomb who seeks her for mercenary reasons, and going with him
to Australia. Years afterwards she is so affected by the sudden
reappearance of Rutherford, and by subsequent ill-treatment received
from her jealous husband, that an exhausting illness follows, and to
save herself from insanity she commits suicide. Meanwhile the long
separation of Rutherford and Betty Ochiltree, which began on the day of
their marriage, is coming to an end, and Hilda's death removes the final
impediment. Together they pay a last visit to the dead woman:

    Incapable of speech, he lifted a tress of hair--flowing free over
    the rigid arms, because it was really pretty, and thus had to be
    made the most of--and pressed it a moment to his bearded mouth. In
    that gesture he seemed to ask her forgiveness for having been a man
    like other men, as Nature made them.

    'Kiss _her_,' Betty whispered, pushing him a little. She, too, felt
    that it would be something, if not much, to put to the account that
    was so frightfully ill-balanced--a kiss from Rutherford before all
    was wholly over.

    He stooped and laid his lips--scarcely laid them--on the waxen
    forehead. And he thought how he had nearly kissed her once, in the
    scented spring dusk, at her father's gate, and been repelled at the
    last moment by the thought of something that he could not see.... He
    turned back the sheet and straightened it, and nobody but hired
    undertakers had anything more to do with Hilda Donne. He put out the
    lamps, leaving her in the dark, which, as a living, nervous woman,
    she had always been afraid of; and he took Betty in his arms to
    comfort her a little, before he opened the door upon the light and
    life of their own transfigured world.

There is a characteristic vein of realism in the subsequent view of the
lovers' self-absorption and short-lived sorrow, and the callousness of
Donne.

    No later than the same Saturday afternoon [Hilda was buried in the
    morning], her Edward was cheering himself with his preparations for
    New Zealand, whither he was easily persuaded to set off at once as a
    means of distracting his mind from his domestic woes, and of
    retiring gracefully from a Civil Service that was otherwise certain
    to dismiss him; and there he shortly found a number of absorbing
    interests, including--as Rutherford had predicted--a rosy-cheeked
    second wife, who, as he wrote to Mrs. Ochiltree when announcing his
    engagement, was all that heart could wish, and had apparently been
    made on purpose for him.... No later than Saturday afternoon--and
    early at that--Rutherford, having parted with the widower and seen
    him off the premises, ran upstairs to his wife's door, with a spring
    in his step and a light in his eyes that plainly showed his mourning
    to be over. Hilda was dead and gone, but Betty was alive in her
    splendid strength and beauty, and he was her husband and bridegroom,
    and his hour had come! The grave had closed over that broken heart,
    which had ached as long as it could feel, and ached most for him;
    but the world was still glorious for him and his love, and never so
    glorious as now. They began to bask in their happiness, as the house
    in the sunshine that flooded it, now that the blinds were drawn up.
    The shadow of death, close and terrible as it was, could not dim it
    for them any more.

In all the novels there are memorable scenes of tenderness, among the
best of which are those between Fidelia and Adam Drewe, first in their
brief meetings as girl and youth--she with her weak eyes bandaged, but
reading him through his voice and bashful deprecation; he yearning to
remain with her, but forcing himself away--and then in long years after,
when he returns to find her in widowhood and poverty, and to all seeming
hopelessly blind.

The conception of the latter scene is quite the best to be found in the
whole of Ada Cambridge's work, and has not been equalled in its kind by
any other Australian writer. The simplicity and verbal reticence of this
chapter of intense feeling gives also a good sample of the author's
style of expression. Seldom ornate or much studied, it is ever a lucid
and easy style. As a narrative specimen, the following, from the same
novel, is conveniently quotable:

    It was not much of an accident, but it was enough. The engine buried
    its fore-paws in the soft earth of the embankment, where engines
    were not meant to go, and then paused abruptly in the attitude of a
    little dog hiding a bone in a flower-bed; the embankment sloped down
    instead of up, and the monster hung upon the edge of it, nose to the
    ground and hind-quarters in the air, looking as if a baby's touch
    would send it over. Several carriages, violently running upon it and
    being checked suddenly, stood on tip-toes, so to speak, and fell
    into each other's arms with a vehemence that completely overset
    them; one rolled right down the bank, head first, and the others
    tumbled upon its kicking wheels. It was all over in a moment; and
    the dazed passengers, realising in a second moment that the end of
    the world was still an event in the future, picked themselves up as
    best they could. No one was killed, but some were badly shaken, and
    most of them screamed horribly. The sound of those screams, mingled
    with the clanking and crashing of riven wood and metal, and the
    hissing of escaping steam, conveyed the idea of such an appalling
    catastrophe as would make history for the world.

Though not a satirist--she does not hate well enough to be that--Ada
Cambridge has occasionally a neat and forcible way of describing
character. Richard Delavel's first wife was 'a gentle and complaisant
being, soft and smooth, apparently yielding to the touch, but dense,
square, and solid as a well-dumped wool-bale.' When opposed in will or
contradicted in her opinion, she smiled resignedly, and, if it appeared
due to her dignity, sulked for a period. Yet generally she was 'the
evenest-tempered woman that ever a well-meaning husband found it
difficult to get on with.' A pattern of order and conscientiousness,
'governed by principles that were as correct as her manners and costume,
and as firmly established as the everlasting hills,' she might have made
an admirable wife for a clergyman, but was totally unsuited to Delavel,
as he to her.

Still, she was very proud of the look of 'blood' in her Richard, and
when he became wealthy, and she a fashionable hostess in Sydney
society, nothing delighted her more than her opportunities of making the
aristocratic connection known. Her own origin as the daughter of a
farmer was quite forgotten. 'Annie might have been a Delavel from the
beginning, in her own right, for all the recollection that remained to
her of the real character of her bringing up.... Years and certain
circumstances will often affect a woman's memory that way--a man somehow
manages to keep a better grasp of facts.'

Yelverton, the lover of Elizabeth King, an English aristocrat spending
some of his wealth in lessening the misery and vice of London, was 'not
the orthodox philanthropist, the half-feminine, half-neuter specialist
with a hobby, the foot-rule reformer, the prig with a mission to set the
world right; his benevolence was simply the natural expression of a
sense of sympathy and brotherhood between him and his fellows, and the
spirit which produced that was not limited in any direction.'

His friend, Major Duff-Scott, 'an ex-officer of dragoons, and a late
prominent public man of his colony (he was prominent still, but for his
social and not his official qualifications), was a well-dressed and
well-preserved old gentleman who, having sown a large and miscellaneous
crop of wild oats in the course of a long career, had been rewarded with
great wealth, and all the privileges of the highest respectability.'




ADAM LINDSAY GORDON.


The strongest note of Adam Lindsay Gordon's poetry is a personal one.
When he represents Australia best, he best represents his own striking
character. Yet that character had clearly shown itself, as had also his
lyric gift, before he saw Australia. He is the favourite poet of the
country by a happy fortuity rather than by the merit of special native
inspiration. Those tastes of the people which he has expressed in manner
and degree so rare as to make a parallel difficult of conception were
also his own dominant tastes. From early boyhood they had controlled his
life, and in the end they wrecked it.

That any man living an adventurous and precarious life, often in rude
associations and without the stimulus of ambition or of intellectual
society, should write poetry at all is a matter for some wonder. And
when several of the compositions of such a writer are marked by rare
vigour and melody, and some few are worthy to rank with the best of
their kind produced in the century, it must be held that the gift of the
author is genuine and spontaneous. It is impossible to believe that
Gordon would have been less a poet had he never lived under the Southern
Cross; that he would have cared less for horses and wild riding, for
manliness and the exhilaration of danger. Had he become a country
gentleman in England, or a soldier, like his father, should we not still
have had 'The Rhyme of Joyous Garde,' 'The Romance of Britomarte,' 'By
Flood and Field,' and 'How we beat the Favourite.' And do these not form
the majority of his best poems? A man apt alike for the risks of the
chase or the cavalry charge, with a delicate ear for the music of words,
with natural promptings to write, would in any conditions have found
time to celebrate the things which his daring and gallant spirit loved.
Had he not ridden as well as written the rides related by his 'Sick
Stockrider,' he might have been foremost in that more glorious one so
often present to his fiery fancy, and have wielded

            'The splendid bare sword
  Flashing blue, rising red from the blow!'

Gordon was a true soldier in sentiment all his life, as he was also a
true Englishman, and it is the soldier and the Englishman in him far
more than the Australian that the people of his adopted country,
consciously or unconsciously, admire. It is yet difficult to consider
his work as a writer apart from his personality. And it is natural that
this should be so in the case of a man whose career was itself a
romance, who led as strange a double life as ever poet lived, and who,
through all, retained the marked essentials of a gentleman.

In his character as a sportsman and a rider there is an element of the
ideal which largely helps to commend him to the majority of Australians.
Though his liking for horses and the turf became a destroying passion,
there was never anything sordid in it. He was not a gambler, for long
after he had won recognition as the first steeplechase rider in a
country of accomplished riders, he declined payment for his services on
the race-track, accepting it only when compelled at last by poverty to
do so; and the distaste with which he had always viewed the meaner
associations of the sport latterly became dislike and scorn. In the
period of disappointment that preceded his death he refused a
remunerative post on the sporting staff of a leading Melbourne journal
because he wished to dissociate himself completely and finally from
everything connected with the professionalism of sport.

As a Bush rider he became noted for the performance of feats which no
one else would think of attempting. The Australians often speak and
write of it as courage absence of fear--but it surely had a large
admixture of pure recklessness. It is at least evident that danger had a
certain irresistible fascination for him. 'Name a jump, and he was on
fire to ride at it,' is the description given of this curious
predilection which made his company in a riding party a somewhat
exciting pleasure. The day in 1868 when he won three steeplechases at
Melbourne is still remembered; and at Mount Gambier, in South Australia,
a granite obelisk marks where once he leaped his horse over a fence
surmounting the headland of a lake, and then across a chasm 'more than
forty feet wide.' A single false step would have cast horse and rider
into the lake two hundred feet below. Of the same wild character was his
riding during boyhood in the hunting-fields of Gloucestershire. It would
be natural to suspect some measure of vanity or bravado in all this, but
no hint of either is given by any of his acquaintances; and the few who
knew him well are emphatic in placing him, as a man and a sportsman,
apart from and above the majority of those with whom the conditions of
his life brought him into contact. 'Gordon,' says one of his intimate
friends, 'was always a quiet, modest, pure-minded gentleman.... I never
knew such a noble-hearted man, especially where women were concerned.'

The deep melancholy in many of Gordon's poems has been attributed to the
influence of Australian scenery, and to the loneliness of the earlier
years of his life in the colonies. This explanation, if not wholly
erroneous, is at least much exaggerated. It ignores the most obvious
elements of the poet's temperament. It takes no account of the history
of wasted opportunities and regrets, of defeat and discontent, of
self-wrought failure and remorse, that may plainly be read in 'To my
Sister,' 'An Exile's Farewell,' 'Early Adieux,' 'Whispering in the
Wattle Boughs,' 'Quare Fatigasti,' 'Wormwood and Nightshade,' and other
poems. The writer, as he himself says, has no reserve in the criticism
of his own career.

  'Let those who will their failings mask,
    To mine I frankly own;
  But for their pardon I will ask
    Of none--save Heaven alone.'

Gordon's youth was wild and ungoverned. Before his twenty-first year his
folly had lost him home, friends, love, and the one profession that
might have steadied him, as well as afforded him distinction. He was
the son of Captain Adam D. Gordon (an officer who had seen service in
India) and the grandson of a wealthy Scotch merchant. Captain Gordon
settled at Cheltenham in the later years of his life, and intended that
his son should study for the army; but a mad wilfulness and passion for
outdoor sport had taken possession of the youth, and nothing could be
done with him. He rode to hounds with all the daring that marked his
horsemanship in later life; he rode in steeplechases, he frequented the
company of pugilists at country fairs and public-houses, and joined in
their contests; he was removed from two schools for unruly conduct, and
a more serious escapade, though innocent of any bad intention, nearly
caused his arrest by the police. At last it was agreed that he should
emigrate to Australia. He was glad to go, but bitter at the thought of
what his going implied. The knowledge that he suffered solely through
his own fault did not make less disagreeable to him the censure of
others, even that of the gallant father whom, in his wildest moments of
rebellion, he never ceased to love and admire. The unhappiness attending
this severance from the home that he felt he would never see again is
told in a poem to his sister, written (August, 1853) a few days before
he sailed.

  'Across the trackless seas I go,
    No matter when or where;
  And few my future lot will know,
    And fewer still will care.
  My hopes are gone, my time is spent,
    I little heed their loss,
  And if I cannot feel content,
    I cannot feel remorse.

  'My parents bid me cross the flood,
    My kindred frowned at me;
  They say I have belied my blood,
    And stained my pedigree.
  But I must turn from those who chide,
    And laugh at those who frown;
  I cannot quench my stubborn pride,
    Or keep my spirits down.

  'I once had talents fit to win
    Success in life's career;
  And if I chose a part of sin,
    My choice has cost me dear.
  But those who brand me with disgrace,
    Will scarcely dare to say
  They spoke the taunt before my face
    And went unscathed away.'

The stanzas (there are ten more in the poem) have all the bitterness of
a youthful sorrow and all the vigour of a youthful defiance. But at the
moment of his deepest depression it is upon himself that the writer
casts the real blame. This is characteristic of his judgment of himself
throughout life. He has ever too much honour and spirit to shirk the
responsibility of his own acts. And the same qualities keep him from
doing injury to others. He is consoled by remembering this in bidding
good-bye to his native land.

          'If to error I incline,
  Truth whispers comfort strong,
  That never reckless act of mine
  E'er worked a comrade wrong.'

As a colonist, Gordon might have justified his Scotch descent by making
a fortune. Wealth was to be gained in other and surer ways than by
groping for it in the goldfields. But he was indifferent, and allowed
himself to drift. Australia was attractive to him only as a place of
adventure, of freedom, of retirement, of oblivion. All but the latter he
found it. He readily adapted himself to the rough conditions of the
country, but could never overcome the thought that in those first false
steps he had lost all worth striving for. Time softened the gloomy
defiance of his farewell verses, but did not alter his determination to
efface himself, to be forgotten even by his family. He held no
communication with anyone in England, and heard nothing from his home
until ten years later, when a lawyer's letter notified him that both his
mother and father were dead, and that under the will of the latter he
was to receive a legacy of seven thousand pounds. Meanwhile, Gordon
appears to have made no attempt to win any of the prizes that were the
common reward of pluck and industry in the Australia of the fifties. He
joined the mounted police force of South Australia, but, impatient of
its discipline, soon left it, and for long afterwards was content with
the rough employment of a horse-breaker.

A curious, pathetic figure he makes at this time. He broke in horses
during the day, and read the classic poets at night. Think of the
refined Englishman in blue blouse, fustian, and half-Wellington boots,
seated among the boisterous company of a 'men's hut' on a Bush station,
reading Horace by the aid of a rude lamp, 'consisting of a honeysuckle
cone stuck in clay in a pannikin, and surrounded with mutton fat!' Or
sitting at some Bush camp of his own, and imagining, as he so finely
did, the famous Balaclava Charge, which set Europe ringing with pity and
admiration a year after he arrived in Australia. How he would have liked
to be among the actors in that scene!

  'Oh! the minutes of yonder maddening ride
    Long years of pleasure outvie!'

he exclaims, and wishes that his own end could be fair as that of one
'who died in his stirrups there.'

Gordon seemed not only to be reconciled to his Bush life, but to have
become attached to it. He once declared it to be better in many
respects than any other. He was temperate, skilful in his work, and as
popular as one of reserved manner can be. Most of the squatters of the
period made it a practice to receive into their social circle any
companionable and educated man, whether their equal in position or not.
It was a generous custom, typical of the most hospitable country in the
world, and worked well on the whole. But Gordon, unlike Henry Kingsley
and others of the same class, took no advantage of it. That the
squatters did not themselves recognise the worth of one so unassertive
was not to be wondered at. He saw this, and never blamed them. They
could not, as he remarked on one occasion, be expected to know that he
was as well born as any of them, and perhaps better educated. One of
them saw there was 'something above the common' in him; but that was
all. At length he was discovered by a good-natured and scholarly Roman
Catholic priest (the Rev. Julian E. Tenison Woods), who, though he does
not say so, evidently took a pleasure during the five years of their
acquaintance in making the merits of the solitary Englishman known in
the colony. Their tastes accorded excellently. They talked 'horses or
poetry' as they rode together, or smoked by their camp-fires. Gordon's
reserve thawed for the first time. He had a well-trained memory, and
occasionally would recite Latin or Greek verse, or a scene from
Shakespeare, or passages from Byron and other modern poets. Greek he had
taught himself in lonely hours after his arrival in Australia, having
neglected it while at college.

In the end his disposition left the good cleric, like many another, much
puzzled. Was there anything of foolish pride or misanthropy in Gordon's
avoidance of society that would have welcomed him? Both his recorded
speech and his poems are without evidence of either. Those who remember
his taciturnity and little eccentricities also speak of his kindness of
heart, generosity and trustfulness of others. Did he ever complain that
he was oppressed and saddened by his self-chosen life in the Bush? We
have seen the high estimate he once gave of it; and Mr. Woods, who has
recorded many proofs of close observation of his friend, testifies that
the melancholy of his poems found little or no expression in his
conversation. Gordon may have been shy (as Marcus Clarke noted), but he
early formed a fairly accurate judgment of his literary powers. He said
'he was sure he would rise to the top of the tree in poetry, and that
the world should talk of him before he died.' Coming from one who was
far from being vain or boastful, the remark suggests hope and ambition.
But neither, it would seem from his colonial career, was ever more than
a passing mood with him. Why did he remain in obscurity during several
of the best years of his life, doing rough and dangerous work, when he
might have obtained some remunerative post in one of the cities? Why did
he marry a domestic servant--one who could never be an intellectual
companion for him?

It appears that he considered himself to have 'irretrievably lost
caste.' It is a fantastic idea, and could not have any justification in
a country where an Englishman of good manners and behaviour need never
want congenial society. Gordon was abnormally proud, independent and
sensitive: an unfortunate disposition for anyone who has his way to make
in an imperfect world. Such a man constantly misunderstands himself and
is misunderstood. He takes severe, unpractical views of his own
character and of life generally. Not necessarily morose or ungenial, he
is always apt to be thought so. Gordon's conclusion that he had lost
caste is a proof of supersensitiveness, and the deep effect produced
upon his temperament by the incidents of his youth.

There is a touching and significant little story of an acquaintance
which he formed with a young lady at Cape Northumberland, and how he
ended it. We are delicately told that, having become a warm admirer of
his dashing horsemanship, the lady used to walk in early morning to a
neighbouring field to see him training a favourite mare over hurdles.
Something more than a mutual liking for horses and racing is plainly
hinted at as existing between them. But after they had met thus a few
times, Gordon asked abruptly whether her mother knew that she came there
every morning to see him ride. She replied in the negative, adding that
her mother disapproved of racing. 'Well, don't come again,' said he; 'I
know the world, and you don't. Good-bye. Don't come again.' Surprised
and wounded, the lady silently gave him her hand in farewell. 'He looked
at it as if it were some natural curiosity, and said, "It's the first
time I have touched a lady's hand for many a day--my own fault, my own
fault--good-bye."'

For a brief period after the receipt of his father's legacy Gordon
looked towards his future with some interest and confidence. He spoke of
a proposal to undertake regular journalistic work at Melbourne, and to
make an attempt at writing novels. It was at this time also that he
foresaw that he would make a name as a poet. The people of Mount
Gambier, finding him presently settled as the owner of a small estate in
the district, made him their representative in the Legislative Assembly
of South Australia. In this new character he seems to have achieved only
a reputation for drawing humorous sketches. Having delivered a few
speeches highly embellished with classical allusions which failed to
make any impression upon the plain business men of the House, he
subsided, and was afterwards seldom heard. And when his seat became
vacant in due course, he did not seek re-election. He had been unable to
take his Parliamentary experience seriously. He is said to have always
looked back upon it as something of a joke.

And now, with a revival of his former attachment to the excitements and
uncertainties of the turf, begin a series of misfortunes which pursued
him until his death. His property, mismanaged and neglected, had to be
sold, and he set out a poor man once more for the adjoining colony of
Victoria. Here, while suffering ill-health and poverty--starving in his
own proud way--after failing in a small business which he had
undertaken, Gordon learned that he would probably come into possession
of the barony of Esselmont in Scotland, then producing an income of
about two thousand pounds a year. But on further inquiry it was found
that his title to the estate ceased with the abolition of the entail
under the Entail Amendment Act of 1848. The excitement of his
ill-fortune and the effects of a recent wound on the head combined to
unhinge his mind, and in June, 1870, at the age of thirty-seven he ended
his life by shooting himself at Brighton, near Melbourne. In comparing
the impressions of Gordon's disposition given by his friends, it is
curious to note that among the few things in which they agree is an
absence of surprise at his suicide.

It would not be difficult to imagine a more representative poet in the
provincial sense than Gordon. His description of the colonies as

  'Lands where bright blossoms are scentless,
    And songless bright birds,'

would be strangely misleading were it not contradicted by other lines
from the same hand, showing a delicate appreciation of the rugged
features of Australian scenery. But he sees them only in passing, or as
a symbol of something he is pondering, or as a contrast to what he has
left behind 'on far English ground.' No sight or sound of Australian
Nature is a sole subject of any of his poems. His 'Whispering in the
Wattle Boughs' does not express the voices of the forest, but the echoes
of a sad youth, the yearnings of an exile; his 'Song of Autumn' is not a
song of autumn, but a forecast of his own death--a forecast that was
fulfilled. If he ever felt any enthusiasm for the future nationhood of
Australia, he did not express it. And such few native legends as there
were, he left to other pens.

In all of his best poems, there is some central human interest,
something that tells for courage, honour, manly resignation. When a
story does not come readily to his hand in the new world, he seeks one
in the old. He fondly turns to the spacious days of the old knighthood,
when men drank and loved deeply, when they were ready to put happiness
or life itself upon a single hazard. The subjects that Gordon best liked
were short dramatic romances, which he found it easier to evolve from
literature than from the life and history of his adopted country. Beyond
the compositions upon the national sport of horse-racing, the only
noteworthy Australian subjects in his three slender volumes are 'The
Sick Stockrider's Review of the Excitements and Pleasures of a Careless
Bush Life, and his Pathetic Self-satisfaction'; 'The Story of a
Shipwreck'; 'Wolf and Hound,' which describes a duel between the
hunted-down bushranger and a trooper; and some verses on the death of
the explorer Burke. 'Ashtaroth,' an elaborate attempt at a sustained
dramatic lyric in the manner of Goethe's 'Faust' and 'Manfred,' fills
one of the three volumes, and among shorter pieces in the other two are
more than a dozen suggested by the poet's reading, by his recollections
of English life, and, in a notable instance, by one of the most
memorable of modern European wars.

In a dedication prefixed to the _Bush Ballads_, Gordon suggests some of
the local sources of his inspiration. He obviously overstates his
obligations to the country. Some of the best of the poems in this, the
most characteristic collection of his work, have no association with it
whatever. 'The Sick Stockrider,' 'From the Wreck,' and 'Wolf and Hound'
are colonial experiences, finely described. But most of the remaining
poems, while they owe something to Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne,
are not in any sense Australian.

  'In the Spring, when the wattle gold trembles
    'Twixt shadow and shine,
  When each dew-laden air resembles
    A long draught of wine,
  When the skyline's blue burnished resistance
  Makes deeper the dreamiest distance,
  Some songs in all hearts have existence:
    Such songs have been mine.'

But where, save in the retrospect of 'The Sick Stockrider' and a verse
or two of 'From the Wreck,' shall we find any of the air of the lovely,
transient Australian spring? It is rather absurd to place with _Bush
Ballads_ the 'Rhyme of Joyous Garde,' a recital of the old tragedy of
Arthur and Launcelot; the story of seventeenth-century siege and
gallantry in the 'Romance of Britomarte'; the dramatic scenes from the
'Road to Avernus;' 'The Friends' (a translation from the French); and
the psychological musings of 'De Te' and 'Doubtful Dreams.'

And the galloping rhymes? Yes, there is indeed one galloping rhyme--'How
we beat the Favourite'--with a ring and a rush, a spirit and swiftness
of colour, not approached by the best verse of Egerton Warburton or
Whyte-Melville. Especially vivid and terse is the description of the
latter part of the race, where the favourite (The Clown) overtakes
Iseult, the mare leading in the run home.

  'She rose when I hit her. I saw the stream glitter,
    A wide scarlet nostril flashed close to my knee;
  Between sky and water The Clown came and caught her;
    The space that he cleared was a caution to see.

  'And forcing the running, discarding all cunning,
    A length to the front went the rider in green;
  A long strip of stubble, and then the big double,
    Two stiff flights of rails with a quickset between.

  'She raced at the rasper, I felt my knees grasp her,
    I found my hands give to the strain on the bit;
  She rose when The Clown did--our silks as we bounded
    Brushed lightly, our stirrups clashed loud as we lit.

  'A rise steeply sloping, a fence with stone coping,
    The last--we diverged round the base of the hill;
  His path was the nearer, his leap was the clearer,
    I flogged up the straight, and he led sitting still.

  'She came to his quarter, and on still I brought her,
    And up to his girth, to his breast-plate she drew;
  A short prayer from Neville just reached me, "The Devil!"
    He muttered--lock'd level the hurdles we flew.'

After a glance at the crowd where, as seen by the rider, all 'figures
are blended and features are blurred'--

  'On still past the gateway she strains in the straight way,
    Still struggles, "The Clown by a short neck at most!"
  He swerves, the green scourges, the stand rocks and surges,
    And flashes, and verges, and flits the white post.

  'Aye! so ends the tussle--I knew the tan muzzle
    Was first, though the ring men were yelling "Dead Heat!"
  A nose I could swear by, but Clarke said "The mare by
    A short head." And that's how the favourite was beat.'

It was by this piece, according to Marcus Clarke, that the poet's early
reputation was made. 'Intensely nervous, and feeling much of that shame
at the exercise of the higher intelligence which besets those who are
known to be renowned in field sports, Gordon produced his poems shyly,
scribbled them on scraps of paper, and sent them anonymously to
magazines. It was not until he discovered one morning that everybody
knew a couplet or two of "How we beat the Favourite" that he consented
to forego his anonymity and appear in the unsuspected character of a
verse-maker.' Even in this picture of the excitements of the turf, there
is nothing that would not be as true of Epsom or Ascot as of Randwick or
Flemington. Yet, it _is_ Australian in the sense that it expresses the
one taste which, of all those inherited by the people from their British
ancestors, seems never likely to be lost (as it was by the American
colonists)--which, on the contrary, has gained in ardour in the new
land. Gordon was a pronounced believer in the efficacy of field sports
as a means of maintaining the nerve and hardihood of the race. In one of
his minor pieces he vigorously affirms that

  'If once we efface the joys of the chase
    From the land, and out-root the Stud,
  Good-bye to the Anglo-Saxon Race,
    Farewell to the Norman Blood.'

With him the fearless huntsman makes the fearless soldier. Both are to
be cultivated and admired, and when the latter dies needlessly, as at
Balaclava, we are to be none the less proud of him,

  'As a type of our chivalry.'

Of the longer poems, the two best in artistic quality are 'The Rhyme of
Joyous Garde' and 'The Sick Stockrider.' They afford a complete contrast
in subject, tone and treatment. The old Arthurian story is the finer and
more finished. There is a nobility in its expression not elsewhere
equalled by the author. But the other poem is more direct and simple in
its pathos, more easily understood. It tells something of familiar
experience in language irresistibly touching and musical. It would be
interesting and a favourite if only through the obvious fact that it
describes in part some of Gordon's own early life.

  ''Twas merry in the glowing morn, among the gleaming grass
    To wander as we've wandered many a mile,
  And blow the cool tobacco cloud, and watch the white wreaths pass,
    Sitting loosely in the saddle all the while.
  'Twas merry 'mid the backwoods, when we spied the station roofs,
    To wheel the wild-scrub cattle at the yard,
  With a running fire of stockwhips and a fiery run of hoofs;
    Oh! the hardest day was never then too hard.

  'Aye! we had a glorious gallop after Starlight and his gang,
    When they bolted from Sylvester's on the flat;
  How the sun-dried reed-beds crackled, how the flint-strewn ranges rang
    To the strokes of Mountaineer and Acrobat!
  Hard behind them in the timber, harder still across the heath,
    Close beside them through the ti-tree scrub we dashed;
  And the golden-tinted fern-leaves, how they rustled underneath!
    And the honeysuckle osiers, how they crashed!'

'The Rhyme of Joyous Garde' loses in appreciation by assuming
familiarity on the part of the reader with all the details of the story.
It is too allusive. It is a description more of Launcelot's remorse
than of the crime which occasions it. As to the other classic themes,
they probably avail as little to the reputation of the author as did the
elegant quotations which he inflicted upon the South Australian
legislators. 'He talked of the Danai, whilst they were vastly more
interested in the land valuators.'

Gordon's work was introduced to the English public by an article in
_Temple Bar_ in 1884, and in 1888 a short memoir of him, entitled _The
Laureate of the Centaurs_ (now out of print), was published. Since then
his poems have become known throughout the English-speaking world. Is
this because he is called an Australian poet--because people wish to
learn something of Australian life from his pages? Do English readers
ever ask for the poems of Harpur, or Henry Kendall, or Brunton Stephens?
No; Gordon's poems are admired for the human interest in them; for what
they tell of tastes and personal qualities dear to the pleasure-loving
and fighting Briton in whatever land he may be. It is the sort of
admiration that finds fit expression when an English officer and artist
makes a present to the publishers of a spirited and valuable set of
drawings to illustrate the poem of the Balaclava Charge. No other
Australian poet has yet found entrance to the great popular libraries of
England. Kendall, who almost deserves to be called the Australian
Shelley, tells more of Nature in one of his graceful pages than can be
found in a volume of his contemporary. But his thoughts are too remote
from the common interests of life; and of his own character he has
recorded only what is sad and painful. For the rest, his brief history
seems to prove that scarce any service may be less noticed or thanked in
Australia than the describing of its natural beauties or the writing of
its national odes.

Gordon has more than once been misrepresented with respect to his
religious views. He has been called an agnostic, an atheist, even a
pagan. Passages in nearly a score of his poems must be read and compared
before an opinion can properly be given on the point. That he was a
doubter, and to some extent a fatalist, appears certain; but there is
nothing to support the charge of atheism. He shows a very clear
conception of the Christian ideas respecting right and wrong, and of the
Divine mercy, but hesitates to accept any theories of punishment in a
future state. His general attitude is one of hope, and of desire to
believe. He often thinks--too often--of the transiency of life, and of
the question to be solved 'beyond the dark beneath the dust.' But there
is no despair. And meanwhile his practical creed is

   'Question not, but live and labour
      Till yon goal be won,
    Helping every feeble neighbour,
      Seeking help from none.
    Life is mostly froth and bubble,
      Two things stand like stone--
    Kindness in another's trouble,
      Courage in your own.'

It conveys at once the highest and truest of the many views he has given
of his own character. Generous to others, he was too seldom just to
himself. It was well there remained among the friends he left behind a
few who knew him for what he was, and who were unwilling that qualities
often clouded during his life by an unhappy temperament should be
undervalued or forgotten. Kendall's 'In Memoriam' is a worthy tribute,
and finely summarizes the general impression of Gordon which one obtains
from his verse:

  'The bard, the scholar, and the man who lived
  That frank, that open-hearted life which keeps
  The splendid fire of English chivalry
  From dying out; the one who never wronged
  A fellow-man; the faithful friend who judged
  The many anxious to be loved of him
  By what he saw, and not by what he heard,
  As lesser spirits do; the brave great soul
  That never told a lie, or turned aside
  To fly from danger; he, I say, was one
  Of that bright company this sin-stained world
  Can ill afford to lose.'




ROLF BOLDREWOOD.


English readers of Rolf Boldrewood's novels have often wondered why he
has ignored in his writings the modern social life of Australia. He has
a unique knowledge of the country extending over sixty years, but his
literary materials have been drawn only from the first half of this
period. No other purely Australian novelist has succeeded in making a
considerable reputation without feeling the necessity of fleeing to the
more congenial atmosphere of literary London.

It is true that even he had to find acceptance at home through the
circuitous route of the press and the libraries of Great Britain, but he
was able to wait for his long-delayed popularity, and when it came and
found him in advanced age, he had no inclination to leave the land of
his adoption. Probably if literature had been to him more of a
profession and less of a taste and pastime, he would long ago have felt
inclined to turn his back upon the indifference with which the colonies
usually treat their own products in authorship until English approval
has imparted new virtues to them.

Most of the other writers who have contributed to the portrayal of a
certain few aspects of Antipodean life have gone to London or elsewhere.
Many years absent from Australia, they know little of its later
developments. Boldrewood has spent a long and eventful life there. Of
the southern half of the continent he must possess a specially intimate
knowledge. Melbourne he has known in all the stages of its growth from a
canvas-built hamlet to the finest city in the Southern Hemisphere. When
he saw it first, the great golden wealth of the country lay unsuspected,
and Ballarat and Bendigo were not.

Though English by birth, he is wholly Australian in training and
experience. In 1830, being then four years old, he was taken by his
parents to Sydney, and there educated. Early in youth he became one of
the pioneer squatters of Western Victoria, sharing with a few others the
danger of dispossessing the aboriginals, and soon acquiring considerable
wealth. But some years later, going back to New South Wales, and
venturing to establish himself there on a larger scale as a sheep-owner,
he was involved in a disastrous drought and lost nearly everything.

In _The Squatters Dream_, which is understood to be partly
autobiographical, he has minutely recorded the varying fortunes of
pastoral life in the colonies. But the bitterness of failure never
caused him to forget the happiness of his young enthusiasm, or to speak
ill of a pursuit so much identified with the prosperity of the country.
He refers to it as 'that freest of all free lives, that pleasantest of
all pleasant professions--the calling of a squatter.'

Abandoning his ambition to rank with the wool-kings, he entered the
Civil Service as a police magistrate and gold-fields commissioner. In
these combined offices he spent twenty-five years, and, while continuing
a good public servant, contrived, like Anthony Trollope, to find time
for substantial work in literature. Though during a period of about
twenty years he contributed several stories and other literary matter to
the Sydney and Melbourne press, it was not until the publication of
_Robbery under Arms_, at London in 1889, that his work obtained due
recognition even in the colonies. Ten years earlier he had made an
unsuccessful bid for an English reputation by the publication of _Ups
and Downs_, the novel which, under the more attractive title of _The
Squatter's Dream_, reappeared in 1890 as a successor to the famous
bushranging story. That the spirited opening chapters of _Robbery under
Arms_ should have been thought lightly of by Australian editors when the
serial rights of the story were offered to them is somewhat astonishing.
The author has related how these chapters were successively rejected by
a number of the leading journals, including two of the best weeklies.

At length the manuscript was read by Mr. Hugh George, manager of the
_Sydney Morning Herald_ and the _Sydney Mail_, who promptly accepted it
for publication in the latter newspaper.

Boldrewood at this time (1880) was well known to the Australian press.
It must, however, be pointed out in justice to the editors, whom his
story failed to impress, that his previous work had revealed little of
the dramatic sense that contributed so materially to his success in
presenting the careers of his highwaymen. But it is less easy to see
why, when the full possibilities of the story had been realised, there
should have remained a second difficulty, that of securing a publisher
to issue it in book form. 'An Australian house,' the author has said,
'refused to undertake the risk;' and he adds, 'as a matter of fact I had
to publish it partly on my own account in England.' This proof of his
confidence in the attractions of the story has since been justified by
its complete success throughout the English-speaking world.

A writer with so much experience of Australia, and continuing to reside
in it, cannot be surprised if he is expected to take a large share of
responsibility for the fact that Australian fiction--the fiction
produced by writers known to the British public--only in a slight degree
reflects the most interesting features in the present-day life of the
country. At the same time, no such considerations can detract from the
sterling merits of Rolf Boldrewood's actual services to Australian
literature. It is hardly possible to believe that the English people
still prefer to look to Australia only for stories of adventure; but if
they do--and as the first to welcome and appreciate colonial writers
they are perhaps entitled to exercise a choice--it is well that such
stories be written from complete local knowledge, and thus at least
correctly describe the broader aspects of the country.

If Boldrewood were asked to explain his silence respecting Antipodean
life of the present day, he might reply that the novel of modern manners
did not form any part of the work which he had chosen to do. At all
events, he could claim to be as much a historian as a novelist. It has
been his ambition to describe Australia chiefly as he saw it in his
youth, about forty years ago--as it was immediately before and after the
discovery of gold. That his record _per se_ is strikingly vivid and
faithful is the first general impression which his novels make upon the
reader, whether English or colonial. There is about them much of that
air of 'rightness' which Hall Caine has noted to be one of the most
enduring qualities of good fiction, whatever its literary style may be.
They are cheerful, virile, soundly moral, and take far more account of
the good than of the bad in human nature. There is no fondness of the
sensational for its own sake. The conditions of probability are observed
with a closeness which, in books dependent for their interest so largely
upon plot and incident, amounts almost to a fault.

An English historian is said to have declared that he would willingly
exchange a library full of the poets for a single good novel of the
period in which he was interested. One can readily imagine that if a
generation or two hence there should be any Australian history left
unwritten, any unsatisfied curiosity concerning the simple annals now so
familiar to us, Rolf Boldrewood's novels might be found, within their
limits, a more satisfying source of information than all the rest of
contemporary Australian literature combined, the formal chroniclers
included, as well as the poets: that is to say, the general view they
would furnish of certain features of pioneer life would be fuller and
clearer, and, minor details apart, more reliable than could be gathered
from any other source.

Where is there in the elaborate histories of Rusden, Lang, Blair, and
Flanagan, or in any of the numerous books of sketches and reminiscences
written by persons who have visited or temporarily resided in Australia,
a view of the picturesque variety, colour, and splendid energy of the
great first race for gold to compare with that given in the second
volume of _The Miner's Right_, or with the memorable account of what
Starlight and the Marstons saw at Turon during their temporary
retirement from the highway?

Boldrewood, in these descriptions, has done what Henry Kingsley, with
his more eloquent pen, if slighter personal experience, unaccountably
neglected, and what Charles Reade, though he never saw Australia,
vividly imagined, and regretted his inability to fully employ. Reade saw
a theme for a great epic 'in the sudden return of a society far more
complex, artificial, and conventional than Pericles ever dreamed of, to
elements more primitive than Homer had to deal with; in this, with its
novelty and nature and strange contrasts; in the old barbaric force and
native colour of the passions as they burst out undisguised around the
gold; in the hundred and one personal combats and trials of cunning; in
a desert peopled and cities thinned by the magic of cupidity; in a huge
army collected in ten thousand tents, not as heretofore by one man's
constraining will, but each human unit spurred into the crowd by his own
heart; in the "siege of gold" defended stoutly by rock and disease; in
the world-wide effect of the discovery, the peopling of the earth at
last according to Heaven's long-published and resisted design.'

If Boldrewood had not himself realized the literary value of the
stirring scenes in which his youth was passed, this summary of the
English novelist, published in 1856, might well have suggested it to
him. How far has he succeeded in commemorating those scenes, and in what
directions chiefly?

In the first place, it is the pictorial, the literal, not the
philosophical, aspect of the subject which has most attracted him. There
is a personal zest in his remembrance of the general animation of the
scene, a keen sense of the pleasurable excitement, freedom and
good-fellowship of the life. His books are essentially men's books. This
is the universal report of the English libraries. Analytical subtleties
there are none. Boldrewood is not given to weighing moonbeams. His
nearest approach to psychology consists in noting the various effects of
robust, unconventional colonial life upon fortune-seekers and visitors
from the mother country. This has been a favourite theme with all
Australian writers, and one of which the female novelists have so far
made the most effective use. One could wish that Boldrewood had made
himself as far as possible an exception to the rule--that he had aimed
at a praiseworthy provinciality by matching with the elaborate
minuteness of his local colour some finished and memorable studies of
Australian character.

Maud Stangrove in _The Squatter's Dream_, and Antonia Frankston in _The
Colonial Reformer_, who seem to offer the best opportunities to typify
Australian womanhood, are gracefully described; but, save for an
occasional longing to relieve the monotony of their lives by a taste of
European travel and culture, they are indistinguishable from such purely
English types as Ruth Allerton and Estelle Challoner. Very pathetic, and
marked by some distinctively Antipodean traits, is the sister of the
bushrangers in _Robbery under Arms_. Aileen Marston has the strong
self-reliance and independence which are born of the exigencies, as well
as of the free life, of the country. She and her brothers represent
much of what is best in Boldrewood's portrayal of native character.
Maddie and Bella Barnes and Miss Falkland in the same novel, Kate
Lawless in _Nevermore_, and Possie Barker in _A Sydneyside Saxon_, are
also Antipodeans, but are only lightly sketched.

Boldrewood claims that in his writings he has always upheld the
Australian character. It is a fact that he has incidentally done this to
a considerable extent, but not by any notable portraiture. In the period
with which the novels deal the population of the colonies was largely
English; it was, therefore, perhaps only natural that the stranger and
adventurer from the Old World, so often well born and cultured, should
prove a more attractive study than the sons of the soil. Moreover, the
latter, in their monotonous and circumscribed life, lacked much of the
mystery and romance so vital to the novel of adventure. But when this
has been admitted in Boldrewood's favour, there still remains a broader
charge to which he is liable.

He has been accused, and it must be confessed with a good deal of
justice, of paying too little attention in later novels (taking the
order of their publication in London) to the development of even those
characters most concerned in his plots. The fault is purely one of
judgment. It is hardly possible to suppose any lack of ability in a
writer who has produced the bright and suggestive dialogue scattered
through the pages of _Robbery under Arms_ and The _Miner's Right_.
Giving rein to his passion for reminiscence and descriptive detail, he
has paid the inevitable penalty of a loss in human interest. So obvious
is this loss in the stories of pastoral life, that one is almost fain to
assume it to be the result of deliberate choice. How far the author, in
this section of his writing, has neglected the social and dramatic
possibilities of country life, can be judged by noting Mrs. Campbell
Praed's work in _The Head Station_, _Policy and Passion_, or _The
Romance of a Station_. But the best contrast to Boldrewood's style is
furnished by the author of _Geoffry Hamlyn_.

Henry Kingsley decided the movement of his characters with a loving
care. Their interests were paramount to him. They made their own story;
the story did not make them. Their author cared little for the externals
of Australian life except in so far as they helped to tell something,
especially something good, of his leading personages. His interest in
them was not semi-scientific, like that of Thackeray or Jane Austen,
Howells or Henry James, in their studies of human nature; it was that
mainly of a sympathiser and a partisan.

His frequently expressed anxiety about the impression they were making
upon the reader was not always an affectation. There is a real
solicitude in the confidences concerning William Ravenshoe upon his
sudden promotion from the stable to the drawing-room of Ravenshoe Manor.
'I hope you like this fellow, William,' he says in one place, and then
there is a naive enumeration of some of the ex-groom's social
deficiencies. This, at best, is a useless interruption of the story, but
it helps, with other signs, to show Kingsley's constant interest in his
characters.

Nearly everything in his descriptions of Australian squatting pursuits
is intended to have a definite and notable bearing upon them. Thus, the
view we get of the drafting-yard at Garoopna, with Sam Buckley in torn
shirt, dust-covered, and wielding a deft pole on the noses of the
terrified cattle, is not presented as a piece of station-life so much as
a picturesque means of leading Alice Brentwood into an involuntary
display of her affection for Sam when he is struck down before her eyes.

Again, the description of the kangaroo-hunt, given in the same novel, is
remembered chiefly on account of the picture of Sam and Alice in the
frank enjoyment of their first love as they loiter in the tracks of the
sportsmen, and, relinquishing the chase with happy indifference, go home
and sit together under the verandah.

Kingsley avoided the fault, common to his successors, of exaggerating
the interest which readers are supposed to take in the general aspects
of life in a new country. He had a keen sense of the value of
picturesque environment, but wisely contrived that nothing should
withdraw attention from the progress of his drama. He was ever on the
watch for opportunities to sketch in lightly and humorously small traits
of character, and to emphasise salient ones. 'She had an imperial sort
of way of manoeuvring a frying-pan,' he says, in allusion to the
cheerful adaptability of the high-bred Agnes Buckley, that fine model of
English womanhood, during her first rough experiences in Australia. When
Hamlyn comes to Baroona from the neighbouring station to spend Christmas
with his old friends, he finds the same lady 'picking raisins in the
character of a duchess.' Considered apart from the story, these
Dickensian touches might seem merely humorous exaggeration, but to those
who have traced the development of Mrs. Buckley's character, how happy
and pregnant they are!

_Robbery under Arms_ not only contains Boldrewood's most dramatic plot,
but his most skilful and sympathetic treatment of character. It is a
distinct exception to the rest of his work. In the later stories the
characters are brightly sketched, but with so casual a touch that they
leave no permanent impression with the reader. The best excite no more
than a passing admiration, whereas Kingsley's win lasting admiration and
love. There can be no surer test of art and truth: it furnishes the one
indubitable proof of clear vision, sympathy, and correct expression.
Where the weakness of some of Boldrewood's characters is not due to
deficiency of interest in them on the part of the author, it is the
result of an attempt to copy life with an accuracy which sacrifices
picturesqueness.

The attempt to preserve absolute truth in every detail of the life-story
of John Redgrave, the hero of _The Squatter's Dream_, seems distinctly a
case in point. In no other novel is there so complete a description of
Australian squatting life--its varying success and failure, its solid
comforts and wholesome happiness in times of prosperity. Redgrave is one
of the most elaborately drawn of all the author's characters; there is
the fullest sense of probability in every incident; the entire story is
plainly a direct transcript of life; nothing at first seems wanting. But
when the book is laid aside, the reader realises that he has scarcely
been once moved by it. He has felt a transient pity for the hero's
misfortunes, and a mild satisfaction at his modified ultimate
success--nothing more.

The main defect here appears to consist in the central motive of
Redgrave's struggles being limited to purely personal ambition. His aim
is no higher than that of a speculator in a hurry to be rich, and when
he fails, he gets little more than the sympathy which is commonly given
to the man who plays for a high stake and loses. His love for Maud
Stangrove, which might have been made a controlling and ennobling
influence, ranks only as an incident. It comes after the main impression
of his character has been given. Beyond doubt he represents a real type;
no error has been made in this respect; his failure to win higher favour
with us arises from his too close approximation to the common clay.
There is absent just that small element of the ideal with which even
the sternest of the apostles of realism in letters have found it
impracticable to dispense.

An illustration of how little Boldrewood was inclined to idealise either
his characters or their surroundings is afforded by the account of
Redgrave's first visit to the home of the Stangroves, his neighbours on
the Warroo. On the journey he passed a Bush inn of the period where
drunkenness was the normal condition of everyone, from the owner to the
stable-boy. The shanty itself, an ugly slab building roofed with
corrugated iron, 'stood as if dropped on the edge of the bare sandy
plain.' It faced the dusty track which did duty as a highroad; at the
back of the slovenly yard was the river, chiefly used as a receptacle
for rubbish and broken bottles. A half-score of gaunt, savage-looking
pigs lay in the verandah or stirred the dust and bones in the immediate
vicinity of the front-entrance. 'What, in the name of wonder,' inquired
Jack of himself as he rode away, 'can a man do who lives in such a
fragment of Hades _but_ drink?'

The home of the Stangroves, though less depressing, bears painful
evidence of its isolation. The settler's wife little resembles Agnes
Buckley--she is too typically colonial for that. 'She was young, but a
certain worn look told of the early trials of matronhood. Her face bore
silent witness to the toils of housekeeping with indifferent servants or
none at all; to the want of average female society; to a little
loneliness and a great deal of monotony.'

The visitor meets another member of the household, Stangrove's unmarried
sister, a beautiful and spirited young woman whose impatience with her
colourless life is outwardly subdued to ironical resignation. 'Another
eventful day for Mr. Redgrave,' she remarks on his return after a day's
riding over the station with her brother; 'yesterday the sheep were
lost--to-day the sheep are found; so passes our life on the Warroo.'

The best argument against Boldrewood's usual treatment of character is
furnished by the great bushranger chief who is the central figure in
_Robbery under Arms_. The author here submits for the first and only
time to that fundamental law of fiction which demands a certain
judicious exaggeration in the characters of a story depending for its
interest mainly on the charm of circumstance. Starlight is at once the
most real and least possible personage to be found in any of
Boldrewood's novels. He becomes real because his character and actions
are conceived in harmony with the romance and pathos of the story.
Though it is obvious enough that there never could have existed a
bushranger with quite so much of the _bel air_, or with a private code
of honour so admirable, the exaggeration is far from obtrusive. He is of
a stature suited to the deeds he performs, and, both he and his exploits
being often closely associated with historical facts, a strong sense of
reality is maintained.

Starlight seems to be a compound of several characters. He has Turpin's
ubiquity, Claude Duval's _sang-froid_, the personal attractiveness of
Gardiner (leader of a gang which made a business of robbing
gold-escorts in New South Wales about forty years ago), and the
humorous daredevilry of the 'Captain Thunderbolt' who obtained notoriety
in the same colony a few years later.

Boldrewood seems to have shrewdly agreed with the dictum of Turpin, that
it is necessary for a highwayman, at all events a captain of highwaymen,
to be a gentleman. But Starlight, unlike Turpin, does not become vain
with success, and is far from being enamoured with his profession.
Indeed, he is quite with the orthodox view of it. He is a bushranger,
apparently, because he no longer hopes or desires to resume his rank in
certain aristocratic circles from which, by occasional hints, we are
informed that he has fallen. He indulges in no lugubrious
moralisings--he is far too agreeable a person for that--but exhibits
just the required touch of romance by letting you know that in his past
there is a sadness which a career of excitement and danger is necessary
to enable him to forget. Having been won over as a sympathiser and
admirer, the reader is ready to believe that at worst the dashing
outlaw could never have been a very bad fellow. Certainly the author has
carefully kept him from participation in the grosser acts of lawlessness
of which his revengeful old partner Ben Marston, the more typical
bushranger, is guilty. Cattle-stealing and highway robbery as supervised
by Starlight are allowable, and even meritorious, in so far as they
afford him opportunities to practise some facetious deception on the
police. Such raids are not crimes, but comedies.

There is excellent fun in his posing as 'Charles Carisforth, Esq., of
Sturton, Yorkshire, and Banda, Waroona and Ebor Downs, N.S.W.,' while
awaiting the arrival at Adelaide of the 1,100 head of stolen cattle, or
as the 'Hon. Frank Haughton,' one of 'the three honourables' on the
Turon gold-field. The rash daring and cleverness of these disguises
furnish a combination of amusement and dramatic interest not approached
in anything else that Boldrewood has written. Starlight's presence at
dinner with the gold-fields commissioner and police magistrate at
Turon, when 'in walked Inspector Goring,' the officer who had been so
long and patiently seeking him elsewhere, and his appearance at Bella
Barnes' wedding, after a reward of a thousand pounds has been offered
for his capture, are scenes which remain vivid in the memory long after
the more commonplace adventures of the lords of Terrible Hollow have
lost their distinctness or been forgotten.

Next to his humour and courage, the qualities which most endear this
picturesque marauder to the reader are the happy fierceness with which
he commands the respect of his retainers, and his politeness and
gallantry to women. When a robbery is to be effected, the plans are laid
with sound generalship, but there is no unnecessary violence or loss of
good manners. His conduct at the plundering of the gold-escort is fully
equal to the traditional suavity of Claude Duval. 'Now, then, all
aboard!' he calls out to the passengers when the contents of the coach
have been removed. 'Get in, gentlemen; our business matters are
concluded for the night. Better luck next time! William, you had better
drive on. Send back from the next stage, and you will find the mail-bags
under that tree. They shall not be injured more than can be helped.'

The bushranger of real life, as known to the pioneer colonist, would
have bagged his booty with much fewer words. That Starlight should have
'treated all women as if they were duchesses,' and have made it a point
of honour to keep his pledged word with them, in however slight a
matter, seems only natural. Not even the women-folk of his enemy are
allowed to want a protector. When Moran and his gang of ruffians take
possession of Darjallook station during the absence of the male members
of the household, Starlight and the Marstons ride twenty miles across
country and rescue the ladies before the worst has been done. Starlight
bows to them 'as if he was just coming into a ball-room,' and, retiring,
raises Miss Falkland's hand to his lips like a knight of old.

These passages are only a few of the many which might be cited to show
how far the author, fired with the spirit and romance of the story,
gave freedom to his imagination in shaping the proportions of his
leading character. Starlight, though he is not, and cannot be, a
portrait of any single colonial outlaw of real life, is sufficiently
natural to consistently represent in both his conduct and adventures
much that was typical of Australian bushranging forty years ago and
later.

Some of his characteristics, and at least one of the concluding episodes
of the story, were suggested by the career of a New South Wales
horse-stealer who became known as 'Captain Moonlight.' So much is
certain. Boldrewood has himself narrated to a contributor of the
Australian _Review of Reviews_ his recollections of Moonlight and his
end: 'Among other horses he stole was a mare called Locket, with a white
patch on her neck. We had all seen her. This was the horse that brought
about his downfall, and he was actually killed on the Queensland border
in the way I have described in _Robbery under Arms_. Before that,
Moonlight had had some encounters with Sergeant Wallings (Goring); and
this day, when Wallings rode straight at him, he said: "Keep back, if
you're wise, Wallings. I don't want your blood on my head; but if you
must----" But Wallings rode at him at a gallop. Two of the troopers
fired point-blank at Moonlight, and both shots told. He never moved, but
just lifted his rifle. Wallings threw up his arms, and fell off his
horse a dying man. As Moonlight was sinking, the leader of the troopers
said: "Now you may as well tell us what your name is." But he shook his
head, and died with the secret.' He was 'a gentlemanly fellow,' probably
one of that unhappy class of young Englishmen of good birth and no
character who are exiled to the colonies for their sins, and there often
acquire new vices or sink into obscurity.

When Archibald Forbes was in New Zealand a few years ago, he met a
peer's son who was earning his 'tucker' as a station-cook. A Chinaman,
aspiring to better things, had vacated the billet in his favour! It is
interesting to note the use Boldrewood makes in his novel of the
suggestion afforded by the bushranger's concealment of his identity.
When Starlight is overcome in his last attempt at escape, the curiosity
long felt concerning his past life seems for the third time in the story
about to be gratified. But the reader is once more and finally
disappointed. The bushranger has given his last messages, and is dying
with some of the indifference to existence which has characterised him
throughout the story.

    'I say, Morringer, do you remember the last pigeon-match you and I
    shot in, at Hurlingham?'

    'Why, good God!' says Sir Ferdinand, bending down, and looking into
    his face. 'It can't be! Yes; by Jove! it is----'

    He spoke some name I couldn't catch, but Starlight put a finger on
    his lips, and whispered:

    'You won't tell, will you? Say you won't.'

    The other nodded.

    He smiled just like his old self.

    'Poor Aileen!' he said, quite faint. His head fell back. Starlight
    was dead!

Boldrewood's characters, as he has said himself, are constructed from
many models. And the Marstons are, it seems, the only personages he has
drawn solely from life. Gardiner, with whom some readers have
identified Starlight, was, it is recorded, 'a man of prepossessing
appearance and plausible address, who had many friends even among the
settlers never suspected of sympathy with criminals, while many of the
fair sex regarded him as a veritable hero.'

That the romantic life of this noted criminal furnished Boldrewood with
some material there cannot be any doubt, but the fictitious bushranger
is far from being in any respect a mere copy of the real one. In
Starlight's relations with women, for instance, there is nothing but
what is manly and honourable, whereas one of Gardiner's exploits was the
seduction of a settler's wife, a beautiful woman whom he induced to
elope with him to a remote district in Queensland. And, further, none of
the sensational incidents connected with his capture--his escape under a
legal technicality from the death-penalty suffered by some of his
associates, his imprisonment for twelve years and subsequent exile--are
made use of in the novel.

The narrative method adopted in _Robbery under Arms_ has so much
contributed to the success of the story as to be worthy of some
comparison with the ordinary style of the author. The limitations
imposed by the choice of a narrator with no pretensions to education or
sentiment, and writing in the first person, proved in this case salutary
rather than disadvantageous. They repressed Boldrewood's usual tendency
to excessive detail, and kept his attention closely fixed on the drama
of the story.

The occasional deficiency of local colour and loss of effect in the
grouping of the characters is more than compensated for by the racy
piquancy of Dick Marston's vernacular, and the aspect, unrivalled in
Australian literature, which his account affords of bushranging life
from the bushranger's own point of view. In the truth with which this
view is presented lies the strength and lasting merit of what might
otherwise have been little better than a commonplace series of
sensational episodes.

Starlight and the Marstons, as we see them, are reckless and dangerous
criminals, but they are not exactly the 'bloodthirsty cowards' and
'murderers' known to the press and police of the period. The little they
can plead in excuse for their lives is plainly stated, while no
complaint is urged against their fate, or attempt made to obscure its
obvious lesson. Grim old Ben Marston's career illustrates one of the
results of the stupidly cruel system of transporting persons from
England to the colonies for petty offences which in these days are
punished by a slight fine, and his sons are types of a class who were
far from being as irreclaimable as their offences made them appear. 'Men
like us,' Dick Marston is once made to say, 'are only half-and-half bad,
like a good many more in this world. They are partly tempted into doing
wrong by opportunity, and kept back by circumstances from getting into
the straight track afterwards.'

The examples given in the story of the aptness of this remark are often
very touching. The poor Marston boys are indeed only half bad. Their
better natures, seconded by the influence of a good mother and sister,
are continually urging them to reformation, but for this there is no
opportunity. The decision of their fate by the turn of a coin when the
first great temptation comes is symbolical of the trifling causes to
which the ruin of so many young Bushmen in the early days of squatting
was traceable.

The personal observation strongly marked in all Boldrewood's novels has
in _Robbery under Arms_ its fullest, as well as most skilful,
expression. As a squatter, the author had seen the practices of the
cattle-thief, and learned his language. He had observed the extent to
which idleness and a love of horseflesh combined to fill the gaols of
the country, and in later years this knowledge was confirmed in the
course of his long experience as a magistrate. The judgment with which
he presents the case of the young Marstons as types of a class is
excelled only by the literary skill employed upon the character of their
chief.

But there was no need to make Dick Marston so often emphasise the
comfort of living 'on the square,' and the folly of ever doing
otherwise. The story bears a self-evident moral. Humour there is in
plenty, but the pathos of tragedy is the dominant, as it is the
appropriate, tone of the book. In no respect has greater accuracy been
attained than in the reproduction of the Australian vernacular, that odd
compound of English, Irish, Scotch, and American phrases and inflexions,
with its slender admixture of original terms. Visitors to Australia have
praised the purity of the English spoken there by the middle classes.
Mr. Froude, as late as 1885, found that 'no provincialism had yet
developed itself,' but he wrote chiefly of what he had heard in the
towns. It is in the country that the colonial dialect--if speech so
largely imitative can yet be called a dialect--is most heard.

Among other interesting features in Dick Marston's narrative is the
curious half-impersonal view which the outlaws take of the efforts made
by the Government to capture them, and their strong dislike, on the
other hand, to the private persons who competed with the police for the
large rewards offered. This detail is as true to life as the example of
the sympathy and assistance accorded the bushrangers by settlers in the
neighbourhood of their mountain retreat.

It was sympathy of this kind, combined with bribery, which so protected
the Kelly gang as to involve the Government of Victoria in an outlay of
about one hundred and fifteen thousand pounds before their destruction
could be accomplished. Effective literary use will be made at some time
in the future of the exploits of this last and most daring of all the
bushranging gangs, but many years must elapse before the sordid aspects
of their career shall have been forgotten, and only its romance be left.
And nothing short of genius will be required to refine the rude
proportions of Ned Kelly into something like the gentlemanly exterior of
the dashing captain, the smooth gallant, the humorist, philosopher, and
quick-change artist of _Robbery under Arms_.

In _The Miner's Right_, which ranks second in popularity among
Boldrewood's novels, the personal narrative style is again adopted, but
with little effect of the kind produced by Dick Marston's vivid
directness in the earlier novel. Hereward Pole, the hero, is a cultured
Englishman, sensitive and sentimental, who keeps an eye upon humanity at
large, as well as upon the business of making a fortune which has
brought him to the colonies. Half of his record, though a striking
picture of the gold-fields, is not an inherent part of the story of his
own career. Confined to their strictly just limits, the events which
combine to prolong his separation from the sweetheart whom he has left
in England could have been told in fifty pages. But this would not have
been all the author wished. He was satisfied with a slender plot and a
_denouement_ which can be guessed almost from the outset as soon as he
saw that they would carry the glowing scenes and episodes of diggings
life with which his memory was so richly stocked. One cannot believe but
that, in this case, his slender attention to the long-drawn thread of
the story was the outcome of choice. Else where was the need for
elaborateness in such details as the dispute over the Liberator claim
at Yatala, the trial of Pole and the inquest on Challerson, with their
rendering of witnesses' depositions in the manner of a newspaper report,
the riot at Green Valley and Oxley, and the scene at the funeral of the
agitator Radetsky? Yet, though these episodes are given at great length,
and do not form any essential part of the story of Hereward Pole and
Ruth Allerton--the vindication of a man's honour and the triumph of a
woman's invincible devotion--they are told with so much intimate
knowledge and strength of colouring as almost to supply the absence of a
plot, and to make the story, apart from artistic considerations, a
really fine piece of work.

It has a popularity in the English libraries which is itself a proof of
the service done by the author to those who would know something of the
careers of varying success and bitter failure, of hardship and romantic
adventure, upon which so many of their kinsmen set out forty years ago.
_Nevermore_ and _The Sphinx of Eaglehawk_ give other views of the
gold-digging days, chiefly of their seamy side, but these stories offer
nothing that equals in interest the splendid panorama of pioneer life
revealed in _The Miner's Right_.

Boldrewood has more than once insisted with evident pleasure upon the
general good behaviour and manliness of the miners, and, having been one
of those all-seeing autocrats, the gold-fields commissioners, he is an
authority to be believed on the subject. In _Robbery under Arms_ the
names are given of thirty races represented on the Turon field, and
Hereward Pole, recounting his early impressions of Yatala, says: 'I was
never done wondering of what struck me as the chief characteristic of
this great army of adventurers suddenly gathered together from all seas
and lands, namely, its outward propriety and submission to the law.'
Elsewhere he likens the sensible reticence which they observed
respecting their own affairs and those of their neighbours to the
demeanour and mode of thought which prevails in club life.

A passage from Dick Marston's account of what he saw at Turon is worth
reproducing here as characteristic of the author's representation of a
gold-fields community and as a sample of his humour. The 'three
honourables,' of whom the disguised bushranger captain is one, are
together in a hotel.

    'The last time I drank wine as good as this,' says Starlight, 'was
    at the Caffy Troy, something or other, in Paris. I wouldn't mind
    being there again, with the Variety Opera to follow--would you,
    Clifford?'

    'Well, I don't know,' says the other swell. 'I find this amazing
    good fun for a bit. I never was in such grand condition since I left
    Oxford. This eight hours' shift business is just the right thing for
    training. I feel fit to go for a man's life. Just feel this,
    Despard,' and he holds out his arm to the camp swell. 'There's
    muscle for you!'

    'Plenty of muscle,' says Mr. Despard, looking round. He was a swell
    that didn't work, and wouldn't work, and thought it fine to treat
    the diggers like dogs.... 'Plenty of muscle,' says he, 'but devilish
    little society.'

    'I don't agree with you,' says the other honourable. 'It's the most
    amusing, and, in a way, instructive place for a man who wants to
    know his fellow-creatures I was ever in. I never pass a day without
    meeting some fresh variety of the human race, man or woman; and
    their experiences are well worth knowing, I can tell you. Not that
    they're in a hurry to impart them; for that there's more natural
    unaffected good manners on a digging than in any society I ever
    mingled in I shall never doubt. But when they see you don't want to
    patronise, and are content to be as simple man among men, there's
    nothing they won't do for you or tell you.'

    'Oh, d----n one's fellow-creatures! present company excepted,' says
    Mr. Despard, filling his glass, 'and the man that grew this
    "tipple." They're useful to me now and then, and one has to put up
    with this crowd; but I never could take much interest in them.'

    'All the worse for you, Despard,' says Clifford: 'you're wasting
    your chances--golden opportunities in every sense of the word.
    You'll never see such a spectacle as this, perhaps, again as long as
    you live. It's a fancy-dress ball with real characters.'

    'Dashed bad characters, if we only knew,' says Despard, yawning.
    'What do you say, Haughton?' looking at Starlight, who was playing
    with his glass, and not listening much, by the look of him.

In his latest novels Boldrewood reverts to his familiar themes. _The
Sphinx of Eaglehawk_, the shortest of all his works, might have been an
excerpt from The _Miner's Right_; and the scene of _The Crooked Stick_
is an inland station in New South Wales in the days of bushranging and
disastrous droughts.

The materials employed in the latter story reproduce the principal
features of almost a score of other Australian novels published within
the last few years. The love-affairs of a beautiful, impulsive girl,
sighing for knowledge of the great world beyond the limits of her narrow
experience; the influence upon her of a fascinating and gentlemanly
Englishman, with aristocratic connections and a dubious past; the manly
young Australian, whose loyalty, undervalued for a time, is rewarded in
the end--these are some of the items which go to the making of a class
of story already somewhat too common. The fact that Boldrewood continues
to make such subjects interesting is due largely to the pervading sense
of scrupulous truth, the evident element of personal experience, and the
general cheerfulness of tone, which are never absent from any product of
his pen, and which constitute his highest claims to rank in Australian
literature.




MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED.


To Mrs. Campbell Praed belongs the credit of being the first to attempt
to give an extended and impartial view of the social and political life
of the upper classes in Australia. While she has not ignored whatever
seemed picturesque in the external aspects of the country, her chief
concern has been with the people themselves. Some of the best of her
works--_Policy and Passion_ and _Miss Jacobsen's Chance_, for
example--might fairly be named as an answer to the somewhat common
complaint of a deficiency of dramatic suggestion in colonial life.

In a preface to the first-named novel, Mrs. Praed explains it to have
been her wish to depict 'certain phases of Australian life, in which the
main interests and dominant passions of the personages concerned are
identical with those which might readily present themselves upon a
European stage, but which directly and indirectly are influenced by
striking natural surroundings and conditions of being inseparable from
the youth of a vigorous and impulsive nation.'

The point of view here taken by the author at almost the beginning of
her literary career has been maintained in most cases throughout her
later work. The same preface might almost, in fact, serve for all her
Australian stories. They describe broadly, in an attitude of
good-natured criticism, the leading facts in the intellectual life of
the people; their proud self-reliance, tempered by an acute sense of
isolation and its disadvantages; their susceptibility to foreign
criticism and example; their frank, natural manners in social customs of
native origin, contrasted with their quaintly-rigid observance of
conventionalities which have long since been relaxed in the mother
country whence they were copied.

Mrs. Praed has turned to account more fully than any other writer the
little affectations of that small upper crust of Antipodean society
which is sufficiently cultured to have developed a taste for
aristocratic European habits, along with an uncomfortable suspicion of
'bad form' in anything of purely local growth. This is the class which
maintains an air of portentous solemnity in public ceremonials, and is
liable at any moment to be convulsed by a question of precedence at a
Government House dinner.

From a lively appreciation of comedy to caricature is an easy descent
which the author has not always resisted, but her exaggeration is so
obviously resorted to in the interests of fun that it is unlikely to
mislead. There is certainly no need to repudiate as untypical of
Australian political society the Pickwickian spectacle of a drunken
Postmaster-General fearfully trying to walk a plank after a Vice-regal
dinner, in order to win three dozen of champagne wagered by the leader
of the Opposition, while the Premier looks on and holds his sides with
merriment; or the case of the Premier's wife, who, on being told by a
newly-arrived Governor--a musical enthusiast--that he hoped to be able
to 'introduce Wagner' at the local philharmonic concerts, said: 'I'm
sure we shall be very pleased to see the gentleman.'

Considering, however, the opportunities which colonial life, and
especially colonial politics, afford for ridicule, the author has been
commendably careful to avoid, as far as possible, giving real offence.
Yet her criticism is sufficiently free to be piquant, and, on the whole,
as salutary as it is entertaining. 'Why need Australians always be on
the defensive?' asks more than once an Englishman in one of her novels.
The author seems to have put the same question to herself as an
Australian, and to have decided that ultra-sensitiveness is a worse vice
than affectation, and that her compatriots, by giving way to it, do both
themselves and their country an injustice. For it implies a too low
estimate of what is fresh and strong and of real merit in the
independent life of the nation.

Colonists need a little more of the philosophic and common-sense spirit
which can look upon deficiencies and crudities merely as phases in the
natural evolution of society in a new land. This is what Mrs. Praed has
endeavoured to teach in some of her stories. The lesson is often
surrounded with a good deal of bantering discussion; it may not always
be apparent to an English reader, but it can hardly be overlooked by an
Australian. There is rarely anything so pointed as the conversation
between Miss Jacobsen and her lover, Chepstowe. The former has been
wondering what the cultivated Englishman thought of a recent noisy and
rather vulgar reception tendered to a new Governor for whom he is acting
as private secretary. Chepstowe is suspected of being secretly amused at
his surroundings. But his view of them is purely rational and
matter-of-fact.

    'You know, I fancy you colonists think rather too little of
    yourselves, and we in England rather too much. Or I'll put it in
    another way. I fancy you colonists think too much about yourselves,
    and we in England think too little.'

    'You said just now that you think too much.'

    'Yes; it's the same thing put in a different way. We think too much
    of ourselves, and for that reason too little about ourselves. You
    are always thinking somebody is laughing at you; we have made up our
    minds that we are the admiration of everybody. We are often very
    ridiculous, and don't know it. You often think you are ridiculous
    when you really are not.'

    'I think we must have seemed very ridiculous the day you landed....
    I know you are astonished at some of our public men.... You will
    write home and say how rude and rough and vulgar some of them are.'

    'If one wants to see the ridiculous, one can see it everywhere. We
    have some public men at home who are rude and rough, and vulgar and
    ridiculous.... One has to make allowances, of course, for training
    and habits, and all that.... When our fellows are rough, there is
    less excuse for them. The more one goes about the world, the less
    one sees to laugh at, I think....'

English self-complacency is, of course, a growth of centuries, but
perhaps a deliberate and intelligent effort to acquire some of it in
Australia would be the best specific for that consciousness which,
colonists should not forget, is the mark of insignificance. It has been
said that Australians already have too much to say for themselves and
their country. The assertion is only applicable to a small boisterous
class who have never seen anything beyond their own shores.

A much commoner element of Antipodean life, one which some of Mrs.
Praed's characters notably illustrate, is the desire for wider
experience and culture produced among educated people by their constant
use of British and European literature. James Ferguson, the young
squatter in _The Head Station_, represents those Australians who, though
stout believers in their own country, feel its intellectual
deficiencies--perhaps too much; who are more English than the English
themselves in their veneration for the historic associations of the
mother land; who, when they go to London, are curiously at home in
streets and among sights that have been more or less definitely outlined
in their imagination from early childhood.

While three of his English-bred companions are exchanging reminiscences
of London life, Ferguson listens with an eager interest, 'putting in a
remark every now and then which had the savour, so readily detected, of
acquaintance with the thing in question by means of books rather than
personal experience.' In Mrs. Praed's stories, as in real life, a
personal acquaintance with other countries gives the Australian a truer
appreciation of the good in his own. The man who has taken part in the
artificialities of a London season, or has been a spectator of its petty
rivalries, returns joyfully to a simpler life; the woman who is prone to
deify the smooth-spoken Englishman, learns through him to value the more
homely virtues of colonial manhood.

In the difficult task of rendering attractive the restricted life of the
squatting class, who form the country aristocracy of Australia, Mrs.
Praed has combined humour and a terse cultivated style of expression
with a dramatic sense, which has guided her past details that are merely
commonplace. The natural surroundings of a head station furnish
materials for bright little sketches immediately associated with some
romantic episode in the story; there is no vague straining to create
'atmosphere,' or anything that a judicious reader would skip.

The beautiful Honoria Longleat reclining in a hammock under the
vine-trellised verandah at Kooralbyn, stray shafts of sunlight
imparting a warm chestnut tint to her hair, a trailing withe of orange
begonia touching her shoulder, a book in her lap and a bundle of guavas
on the ground beside her; Elsie Valliant waiting for her lover on the
rocky crossing of Luya Dell, framed between two giant cedars and
outlined cameo-like against the blue sky; Gretta Reay, the proud, sturdy
little belle of Doondi, with upturned sleeves at her churn, pretending
unconcern when she is surprised by her English visitors--these are some
of the pictures in which the author commemorates much that is noteworthy
in the warmth and colour of tropical Australia and in the daily life of
its inhabitants. This fondness for posing her heroines is one of the
minor features of her work. Its results in some of her later novels are
not, however, always agreeable: a few of the scenes in the history of
the unhappy Judith Fountain in _Affinities_ are painful, and the
portrait, in _The Brother of the Shadow_, of Mrs. Vascher as she lies in
the mesmerist's blue-silk-lined room is an unnecessary ghastly
elaboration.

The hardships suggested by the beginnings of pastoral life amid the
giant forests and intense loneliness of Australia are never allowed by
Mrs. Praed to give a gloomy colour to her stories. It is one of their
distinct merits that they present the humorous incongruities rather than
the trials of pioneering, though the latter are by no means ignored. In
the first three chapters of _The Romance of a Station_ some excellent
humour is provided by the young bride's account of her home-coming to
the rude mansion on her husbands mosquito-infested island station, and
the ludicrous privations she encountered there. There is nothing of the
kind more amusing in the whole of Australian fiction. The description of
the household pets, and the vermin--including a lizard with an uncanny
habit of 'unfastening its tail and making off on its stump when
pursued'--rivals the famous verandah scene in _Geoffry Hamlyn_. An
intimation in the preface that these experiences are a faithful record
from the early life of the author herself sufficiently explains their
graphic quality. Amusing also are the sketches of the aristocratic
settlers in _Policy and Passion_ and _Outlaw and Lawmaker_ who try to
apply the principles of aestheticism to the crude surroundings of their
new-made homes in the backwoods--Dolph Bassett with his ornamental
bridges and rockeries and his grand piano; Lord Horace Gage explaining
with his maxim, 'If we can't be comfortable, let us at least be
artistic,' a neglect to fill up the chinks in his slab hut.

Queensland, the scene of Mrs. Praed's colonial experience and the
'Leichardt's Land' of her stories, differs notably from the rest of
Australia only in climate; its social and political conditions are
essentially the same in character as those in the rest of the country.
The Englishman acquiring colonial experience, the squatter living in
various stages of comfort or discomfort, the gentleman spendthrift from
whom his family has parted with the affectionate injunction, 'God bless
you, dear boy; let us never see your face again!' and the political
parties which go in and out of office 'like buckets in a well' (to use
the author's own expression), are, or have been, common features of
every colony. Like several of her heroines, Mrs. Praed alternated life
in the country with the gaieties of the capital.

The position of her father, the Hon. T. L. Murray-Prior, as a member of
the Legislative Council, brought her into contact with those political
and vice-regal circles of which she has given entertaining and
occasionally derisive accounts in _Policy and Passion_, _Miss Jacobsen's
Chance_, and elsewhere. Her description in the former story of the
wealthy landowners, who adopt a passive and somewhat disdainful attitude
towards party strife, applies to a class already large in the colonies.
Whether such an attitude is consistent with 'the truest conservatism to
be found in Australia,' which they are said to represent, may be
questioned. It seems rather to indicate selfishness, petulance, and lack
of patriotism.

It is not, however, upon the business of politics or the humours and
makeshifts of colonial life that Mrs. Praed has expended her best
efforts as a writer. Some study of the human emotions is the primary
interest in all her novels. There is nearly always love of the
passionate and romantic kind, prompted on the one side by impulse,
ignorance or glamour, and on the other by passing fancy or
self-interest: the love of an innocent, unsophisticated woman for a man
experienced in the pleasures and some of the darker vices of life; and,
in contrast, the blunt respect and devotion of the typical Australian
man for the same woman, and her light estimate of his worth. The
tragedies of marriage--the union of the refined and imaginative with the
coarse and commonplace, the high-souled with the worldly and cynical,
the pure with the impure--are correlative themes of some of the
strongest of the novels. In these, pathos is the prevailing tone. We
have the spectacle of the woman's blind, illogical trust abused, her
helplessness in self-inflicted misery, or the tenacity with which, in
temptation, she clings to the safeguards of conventional morality. In
most cases this tenacity, which the author accounts an instinct rather
than a virtue, is either allowed to triumph, or is placed by death
beyond the possibility of a supreme test. In the loves of Hester
Murgatroyd and Durnford in _The Head Station_, of Mrs. Lomax and Leopold
D'Acosta in _The Bond of Wedlock_, and of Mrs. Borlase and Esme
Colquhoun in _Affinities_, it is the woman who directly, or by
implication, insists upon respect of the marriage tie so long as it
remains a legal obligation.

But it should be made clear that Mrs. Praed is not in any sense a
propagandist on the subject of marriage. She illustrates, often
impressively, its difficulties and anomalies, but leaves the rest to the
judgment of the reader. The romantic, ignorant girl who marries on
trust, or is ready to do so, has numerous representatives in these
novels. Though it is a woman's view of her trials and unhappiness that
is given, there is nothing in the shape of a crusade against male vices.
It is not the faults of men that are dwelt upon so much as the
inevitably lenient, the pitifully inadequate estimate which women make
of men themselves.

The most striking illustration of this feature is probably contained in
the last scenes of _The Bond of Wedlock_, where the heroine learns at
once the hypocrisy of her father and the dishonour of her lover. The
father, in a fit of resentment, has revealed the mean plot by which she
has been enabled to divorce her husband and marry Sir Leopold D'Acosta.
The latter, seeing that Mrs. Lomax would never consent to an elopement,
has paid another woman--a former mistress of his--to incriminate Harvey
Lomax, while the audacious old humbug, his father-in-law, does the
business of a detective. Ariana's dream of happiness is dissipated. She
hardens into indifference. The revelation completes the disillusionment
which had already begun. 'I had set you up as my hero, and my ideal, and
I have found you--a man.' This is the summary of her life's experience,
which in effect is also that of Esther Hagart, Ginevra Rolt, Christina
Chard, Ina Gage, and others in the list of Mrs. Praed's unhappy
heroines. Married life, as they illustrate it, is usually a compromise.
Even that of Mrs. Lomax is not quite a failure. Her husband does not
attempt to conceal the fact that she no longer interests him, but with
that commonly-accepted philosophy which recognises a wife as at least an
adjunct to conventional respectability, he reminds her that, after all,
their union has some advantages:

    'I would much rather have you for a wife than any other woman I ever
    knew; and if I sometimes think a man is better who hasn't a wife, it
    is only when you are in one of those reproachful moods, and seem as
    if you were anxious to make me out a heartless sort of miscreant. In
    Heaven's name, why not make the best of things? Why need we be
    melodramatic? We are man and woman of the world. We must take the
    world as we find it, and ourselves for what it has made us.'

Ariana's answer was given later on when she realized the full extent to
which she had been self-deluded: 'I am not going to be melodramatic. We
can be very good friends on the outside. We need never be anything
more.'

A strong bias towards analysis is the chief characteristic of Mrs.
Praed's studies in character. As in her illustrations of the perplexing
uncertainties of married life it is the woman's point of view that is
most impressively presented, so in each story there is at least one
woman whose personality stands out in pathetic relief and claims
paramount attention. She is usually a cultivated woman of romantic
tendency, living in a restricted social environment, and displaying the
craving of that class of her sex for change, pleasurable excitement, and
sympathy. In the satisfaction of her yearnings or ambitions are seen,
perhaps more often than is typical, the gloomy aspects of marriage, and
the incompetence of women to manage their own lives.

The average Australian girl of real life is neither very romantic nor
fastidious. She is cheerful, adaptable, too fond of pleasure to be
thoughtful, and has a decided inclination towards married life. Its
material advantages and status attract her--and, for the rest, she has a
vague confidence that everything will come right. Nowhere is the horror
of elderly spinsterhood more potent. The influence of independent
professional life fostered by the large public schools is still
infinitesimal.

The type upon which Mrs. Praed has bestowed her most elaborate work
belongs to a class both higher and far fewer in numbers. It is the class
that Mr. Froude had chiefly in view when he noted the absence of 'severe
intellectual interests' as a deficiency of society at Sydney.

Honoria Longleat, the principal study of Mrs. Praed's second novel, may,
with a few obvious deductions, be taken as a fair example of the
colonial woman educated beyond sympathy with her native surroundings,
and unprovided with any employment for her mental energies. With the
distractions and interests of her narrow circle exhausted, and the
knowledge that her future--her only possible future--must soon be
decided by marriage, she is consumed with an intense and reckless desire
for new emotional experience. Her unrest is like that of the large class
of American women who are educated above the purely commercial standard
of their fathers and brothers, and are impelled to satisfy their
intellectual cravings by frequent European travel.

'This is only a state of half-existence,' said Honoria in reference to
her country life in Australia. 'Books are so unsatisfying! I read them
greedily at first, then throw them aside in disgust. They never take one
below the surface.... I want to grow and live.... What is the use of
living unless one can gauge one's capacity for sensation?' Gretta Reay,
in whom the same discontent is reproduced, exclaims: 'Ah, we Australians
are like birds shut up in a large cage--our lives are little and narrow,
for all that our home is so big.'

By these and other characters of the same type, the cultivated
Englishman, who offers them the prospect of change and emancipation from
monotony, is distinctly preferred in marriage to the man of colonial
birth and experience. 'Don't you know,' says Gretta to one of the
latter, 'that an Australian girl's first aim is to captivate an
Englishman of rank and be translated to a higher sphere--failing that,
to make the best of a rich squatter?'

The heroine of _Outlaw and Lawmaker_ differs from Gretta only in being
more emphatic in her preference for the doubtful stranger, and
irrational in her objections to her tried Australian lover, Frank
Hallett. Once, in a riding-party, 'she had moodily watched his
(Hallett's) square, determined bushman's back as he jogged along in
front of her, and compared it with Blake's easy, graceful, rather
rakish, bearing. Why was Frank so stolid, so good, so commonplace?'

A trifling superficial defect of the same sort turns the tables against
the gallant young explorer, Dyson Maddox, in his first suit for the hand
of Miss Longleat. The half-dozen analytical studies of female character
in the principal novels of Mrs. Praed are far from flattering to her
countrywomen, and might be somewhat misleading if we permitted ourselves
to forget that in every case it is only one phase of a colonial girl's
life that is being given.

The whims, the countless flirtations, the greed for new sensations, the
inconsistencies and the apparent mercenary attitude towards marriage,
are not more permanently characteristic of the women of Australia than
of Englishwomen with equal opportunities. The impulses of the former are
under few conventional restraints; they have a greater control of their
lives: that is the only material difference. The matrimonial creed of
Gretta Reay expresses rather the exaggerated cynicism of a coquette than
a fact generally true of the class to which she belongs. The experiences
of herself and of other leading characters in these stories correctly
show that, although Australian women have an undoubted preference for
the gentlemanly product of an older civilisation, it is a preference of
sentiment in which self-interest and prudence are scarcely considered.

Even Weeta Wilson, the professional beauty so strikingly portrayed in
_The Romance of a Station_, has a soul above her own avowed commercial
view of marriage. It had been systematically planned that she should
contract an aristocratic alliance; for years she had co-operated with
her parents in elaborate preparations, half pathetic, half ludicrous;
she had been guarded and nurtured like a hothouse-plant. At last, when
her opportunity came, she relinquished her lover on finding that there
was another who had a prior right to him.

The subtle skill with which some of the nobler qualities of her women
are brought out, especially their capacity for self-sacrifice and
devotion, marks Mrs. Praed's highest point of achievement in the
portrayal of character. Her knowledge of the mental complexities of her
own sex is both deeper and better expressed than her observation of men.
In the most inconsistent, the most cynical, or the shallowest of her
women, there is a latent tenderness, a soft womanliness, which conquers
dislike. Thus, it is impossible to lack sympathy for Christina Chard, or
accept her own estimate of her selfishness, after reading the
finely-written scene in which she is found kneeling by the bedside of
her dying child, from whom she has been so cruelly separated, while her
recreant husband stands apart in awe and humiliation; or, again, in the
interview with Frederica Barnadine, when the claims of both women to
the love of Rolf Luard are discussed.

The absence of similar redeeming qualities in several of the principal
male characters leaves them almost wholly without definite claim on our
regard, and also lessens the effect of the author's frequent endeavours
to impartially contrast the unconsciously low moral standard of the
average worldly man--the standard which society accepts--with the high,
impracticable ideals of inexperienced womanhood.

The heroines in nearly all of Mrs. Praed's stories have the life of
sentiment and passion revealed to them by men older in years, and
skilled in those small arts and graces of refined society which are ever
attractive to women. But, in fulfilling this design, the men themselves
are often placed in a strained and artificial pose. The presentation of
the purely emotional side of their nature inevitably tends to produce an
appearance of weakness and effeminacy.

There is hardly a single admirable quality in Barrington, the base lover
of Honoria Longleat; or in George Brand, who deserts Esther Hagart in
her poverty and loneliness, and years afterwards, on finding her
recognised as the niece of an English baronet, persuades her into an
unhappy marriage; or in Brian Gilmore, the profligate in _Moloch_, who
seeks to rejuvenate his jaded passions with the love of an innocent
girl, after abandoning another woman whose life he has spoiled. Sir
Bruce Carr-Gambier forsakes Christina Chard and her child for cowardly
reasons similar to those pleaded by Brand. When they meet, long-after,
he offers his devotion again, but only because her developed beauty,
position, and reputed wealth attract him.

It is true that these characters fairly fulfil the author's intention,
so far as they bring into vivid juxtaposition the polished life of the
old world with the simplicity of the new, and help to give the necessary
dramatic point to the several stories; but there is so much of the cad
in their nature and conduct, that it is difficult to accept them as
representatives of any conceivable type of the Englishman of birth and
refinement. This result, however, does not imply any actual inability on
the part of the author to realise the standard of true manhood in all
its varying strength and foibles, its tenderness and honour. Where there
has not seemed any necessity to bend the character to the requirements
of the story, admirably life-like sketches of men have been
produced--such as Rolf Luard in _Christina Chard_ and Bernard Comyn in
_An Australian Heroine_ among Englishmen; and Dyson Maddox, Frank
Hallett, and James Ferguson among Australians.

Though it is plain that Mrs. Praed has generally found colonial men
wanting in interest in proportion as they themselves lack the polish
that travel and extended experience of social life impart, she has not
overlooked the rugged dignity, the truth and virility, which are their
highest characteristics. Alluding to Ferguson as one type of his
country, she observes that, 'underlying the rough-and-ready manners and
the prosaic routine of bush-life, there is an old-world chivalry, a
reverence for women, a purity of thought, a delicacy of sentiment....
This is partly due to the breezy moral atmosphere, and partly to the
influence of books, which become living realities in the solitude and
monotony of existence among the gum-trees. The typical Australian is an
odd combination of the practical and the ideal. He is a student who
learns to read to himself a foreign language, but does not attain to its
pronunciation. He has no knowledge of the current jargon or society
slang. He has unconsciously rejected vulgarisms and shallow conceits;
but all the deeper thoughts, the poetry of life, which appeal to the
soul, he has made his own.'

Ferguson himself echoes the same estimate in pleading his suit with Miss
Reay. 'It seems to me,' he says, 'that there's a kind of chivalry which
can be practised in the bush here better than in great cities--the
chivalry Tennyson writes about--the knighthood that isn't earned by
sauntering through life in a graceful, smiling sort of way, with your
heart in your hand, but in simplicity and faith; by love of one woman,
and reverence of all women for her sake.'

Compared with the fascinating aristocrats and adventurers, the
Australian man seems crudely provincial. Yet he is never shown in an
incorrect or merely satirical light. There are, to be sure, occasions
when he appears too tame and Dobbin-like in acceptance of his lady's
caprices; but this is partly an evidence of that mixture of stiff native
pride and independence which forbids servile appeal even to one he
loves.

The deficiency of which the reader is most often conscious in
endeavouring to make a general estimate of Mrs. Praed's work is a want
of breadth in her scope--a presentation too constant and too tense of
certain phases of the passionate life of men and women, to the
comparative exclusion of those softer and higher attributes which even
Charlotte Bronte (whose touch that of Mrs. Praed occasionally resembles)
did not neglect. In other words, we are not given enough to admire.
There are few pictures--and none that can be called memorable--of happy
married life to contrast with the vivid tragedies of mistaken unions.
An inclination towards humorous disdain characterizes the references in
the stories to conjugal relations of the ordinarily satisfactory kind.
And when those of a filial nature are brought into prominence, they,
too, often have only a pathetic or painful aspect--love on the one side
repelled by indifference; an uncouth parent offering rough sympathy that
irritates instead of soothes; a sensitive girl writhing under the
brutalities or _gaucheries_ of a drunken father.

A survey of the author's female characters will recall over a score of
names of discontented girls experimenting in life--flirts, minxes,
unhappy wives, and shallow society women; while after passing over half
a dozen of the _ingenue_, the amusing and the neutral types, there
remain only about four to represent the highest and most lovable
qualities of womanhood. A similar division might be made between the
male characters, though here the preponderance of the bad would not be
so great as in the first case.

The descriptions of English society which are amongst Mrs. Praed's best
work are marked by the same clear vision of the darker side of human
nature that is displayed in the treatment of English character in her
Australian novels. Her view of the 'smart' section of English society is
somewhat severe. After reading several of her novels, one could almost
imagine her defending her literary preference in the words of Esme
Colquhoun, in _Affinities_: 'What is our mission--we writers--but to
distil the essence of the age? The critics tell us that we are complex,
that we are corrupt, that we are anatomists of diseased minds. We reply:
The age is complex; the age is corrupt, and the society we depict is the
outcome of influences which have been gathering through centuries of
advancing civilization ... the reign of healthy melodrama is over; the
reign of analysis has commenced. We make dramas of our sensations, not
of our actions.' The same view is expressed in an article contributed by
Mrs. Praed to the _North American Review_ in 1890. 'Analysis, not
action,' she notes as the prevailing characteristic of the fiction
produced by female writers, 'as it is also of our modern social life.'
But, 'to dissect human nature under its society swathings needs,' she
adds, 'the skill of a Balzac or a Thackeray, while the feminine
counterpart of a Balzac or a Thackeray is difficult to find.'

That indefinable power which includes sympathetic insight and does not
overlook whatever is good even in the most repulsive character is,
perhaps, what the describers in fiction of modern society need even more
than skill in dissection. To observe and dissect what is corrupt is
easier than to make the record of corruption presentable. Mrs. Praed's
own tale _The Bond of Wedlock_, with all its undoubted cleverness, its
realism and dramatic strength, fails in its due impression as a picture
of latter-day English morals because it is too sordid, too completely
devoid of any of the better qualities of humanity.

To see Mrs. Praed in her most agreeable and natural moods one must
revert to the novels in which the scenery and people of her own country
are described. In _Miss Jacobsen's Chance_ we have her liveliest
example of humour and caricature, in _The Head Station_ her most
cheerful pictures of country life, and in _Christina Chard_ some account
of the society with which colonists of wealth surround themselves in
London. The latter story has several finely dramatic scenes and is a
sample of the author's mature work. Hers is the most comprehensive view
that we have of the social and political life of the Antipodes, and for
this and for her minutely recorded knowledge of her own sex she will
long continue to hold and deserve a foremost place in Australian
literature.




TASMA.


Between the writers who profess not to see anything individual in the
life of Australia and those others who confine themselves to describing
a few of its principal scenes and types of character, Tasma holds a
middle and independent place. She is absolutely without predilections
and hobbies. Her materials are chosen for some quality of
picturesqueness rather than for the purpose of illustrating any phase of
life at the Antipodes or elsewhere. So little are some of her novels
concerned with the external appearances of the country that the scene of
their action might easily be transferred to almost any part of Great
Britain or America.

Incidentally she has given a few strongly-sketched views of places--of
Melbourne in midsummer, with its buildings of sombre bluestone and
stucco, and streets swept by dust-laden hot winds; of Riverina, arid and
drought-stricken; and of the peaceful beauty of rural Tasmania, the home
of her own youth--but these and other descriptions from the same pen are
slight compared with similar work in the stories of Kingsley,
Boldrewood, and Mrs. Campbell Praed.

Tasma, as one of the younger writers, has rightly seen that, for the
present at all events, more than sufficient use has been made in fiction
of the natural peculiarities of Australia. Her novels are, moreover, all
character studies, and little dependent upon local colour for their
interest. Her quiet, satirical humour and power of rapidly and mordantly
sketching a portrait, do much to justify a comparison which her friends
sometimes make of her writings with those of George Eliot and Jane
Austen. Rolf Boldrewood, after the publication of her first three books,
hailed her as the 'Australian George Eliot,' and the title is certainly
more fitting than the praise implied by the other comparison. She has
much of George Eliot's conscientious literary expression, direct
masculine way of looking at life, and unsparing criticism of her own
sex. While reminding one, as she often does, of Jane Austen's humour,
Tasma does not approach any nearer to that writer's supreme gift of
describing character in dialogue than scores of others who have followed
the same model during the last seventy years.

Like most of the chief contributors to Australian literature, Tasma is a
colonist in experience only. She was born at Highgate, near London, and
taken during childhood by her father, Mr. Alfred James Huybers, a Dutch
merchant, to Hobart, in Tasmania, about forty years ago. She displayed
literary talent at an early age, read extensively, and published
criticisms in the _Melbourne Review_, and short stories and sketches in
the lighter colonial periodicals.

In 1879 Tasma went to live in Europe, and has since known Australia only
as an occasional visitor. Becoming interested in social questions during
a residence in France, she wrote in the _Nouvelle Revue_, suggesting
emigration to the colonies and engagement in the fruit-growing industry
there as a means of relieving some of the poverty of the Old World. She
afterwards lectured on the subject in French at the invitation of the
Geographical Society of Paris. So successful were the lectures that she
was induced to repeat them in various provincial centres, as well as in
Holland and Belgium. This work occupied from 1880 to 1882, and Tasma was
presented by the French Government with the decoration of Officier
d'Academie. The King of the Belgians also honoured the lecturer by
receiving her in special audience to discuss means of improving
communication between Belgium and Tasmania.

In 1885, after revisiting Australia, Tasma was married to M. Auguste
Couvreur, a distinguished Belgian politician and journalist (he has
since died), and four years later began her career as a novelist by the
publication at London of _Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill_, which proved to
be one of the most notable books of its season.

This novel remains the best example of the author's humour and power of
describing character that she has produced. It has none of the marks of
a first effort. Written when Tasma was about thirty-two, it embodied
some of the best fruits of many years' keenly critical study of life, in
addition to the culture gained by travel and a wide course of reading.
Of plot there is little--there is still less in some of the later
novels--but sufficient variety of incident is given to afford scope for
unusually rich faculties of sympathy and philosophic observation.

In her desire to present only real persons moving in a familiar world
she merits, in _Uncle Piper_, praise almost equal to that accorded by
Nathaniel Hawthorne to the novels of Anthony Trollope when he spoke of
them as being 'as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the
earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going
about their daily business and not suspecting that they were being made
a show of.' It is, however, less of Trollope than of Howells that Tasma
reminds the reader in this first story. The character of the wealthy
_parvenu_ uncle, sensitive, boastful, resentful, and obstinate, yet
tender-hearted as a child, irresistibly recalls _Silas Lapham_, that
wonderfully natural and sympathetic presentment of a commonplace man.
There are numerous points of resemblance between the two, especially
when they are shown contrasted with their aristocratic friends. The
delightful comradeship of Lapham and his wife, with its curiously dry
New England expression, has its counterpart in Piper's affection for his
sister and their pride in each other.

The half-acknowledged social ambitions of both men, qualified by their
secret contempt for the pretensions of the upper classes, is shown in
various similar ways, as is also their love of display. They differ only
as their nationalities differ. Puritanism survives in the American
merchant and his wife, and unconsciously sways their lives. Uncle
Piper's conception of the Deity is of the vaguest kind, but he has a
religion of generosity and love which in the end nothing can
repress--which survives the effects of a temper soured by systematic
coldness and opposition on the part of a rebellious son and
step-daughter. While in his relations with his womenkind--the tractable
section of them--there is nothing of that quaint American delicacy and
reserve noted by Howells, there is in its stead an absorbing tenderness
which is irresistible.

The superiority of Silas Lapham as a realistic portrait is not difficult
to affirm; still, it is a fact complimentary to Tasma that the
characters thus far approximate. Uncle Piper is under all the
disadvantage that a figure in fiction suffers in being described largely
in plain statement by the author instead of being gradually revealed in
piquant dialogue.

Readers of _Silas Lapham_ will remember the rapid series of witty
touches with which the burly Bostonian is sketched as he sits in the
office of his warehouse, surrounded by samples of the mineral paint that
he is so pathetically proud of, striving to maintain a dignified
indifference as he answers the rather flippant curiosity of the local
press interviewer. Uncle Piper, on the other hand, is introduced, as
all of Tasma's characters are, in sundry solid-looking pages of direct
narrative. It is true that their humour and epigram make bright reading,
but they are necessarily without the power of pithy dialogue to create a
vivid impression of character.

Whether Uncle Piper is a type of Australian plutocracy need hardly be
discussed. Of plebeian tradesmen grown wealthy every community has its
proportion. It may, however, be said that the owners of luxurious villas
in the suburbs of Melbourne have individually a good deal more grammar
and less generosity than he who was described by one of his fashionable
English guests as possessing 'the home of a West-End magnate and the
intonation of a groom.' The author herself would probably disclaim any
intention to represent a type. She is one of those writers who doubt the
existence of types in the ordinary meaning of the term, and she
certainly makes no conscious attempt to delineate them.

A passage in her third novel, _The Penance of Portia James_, gives her
views on this subject, and incidentally upon Australian character. A
description is furnished of a breakfast-party in the London home of an
Australian who has made his fortune in a silver-mine, and from being a
_habitue_ of colonial racecourses has lately developed into a patron of
art and a purchaser of dubious 'old masters' at exorbitant prices.

    To hold up the assembled party to the eyes of English readers as
    thoroughly typical Australians would be as unjust a proceeding as
    was that of Dumas _pere_ when he declared that all the inhabitants
    of Antwerp were _roux_ because he had encountered two red-headed
    girls on his way to the hotel. No one is thoroughly typical unless
    he be a savage or a peasant. Portia and her relatives retained their
    own underlying individualities none the less that they had been
    influenced in their outward bearing and modes of expressing
    themselves by a long sojourn in the backwoods of Victoria, in daily
    contact with all sorts and conditions of men--broken-down gentlemen,
    English yokels, bush-hands, and the like. After all, the moulding of
    character by outward influences alone is not a work to be achieved
    in one generation, or what would become of the theory of heredity,
    upon which everything is supposed to depend, more or less, in our
    present scientific age? If these people strike the English reader,
    therefore, as differing in certain respects from those he is
    accustomed to meet in his daily walk through life, let him remember
    that the differences which will strike him most are the merely
    superficial ones resulting from an occasional departure from the
    conventional rules of speech and behaviour that guide his own
    outward conduct, and that in all the main essentials they are, _au
    fond_, neither more like him or more unlike him than though chance
    had willed that they should be born and brought up on the selfsame
    patch of earth as himself. A difference in the vocabulary of the
    native-born Australian, or long resident in Australia, of the not
    too highly educated order, as well as a difference in his tone of
    voice and enunciation, from that of a person belonging to a
    corresponding class in England, is one of those facts, however,
    which 'nobody can deny.' I am not going to enter in this connection
    upon a disquisition respecting the relative merits of what Mrs.
    James would have called 'hoefisch' English, and the English that has
    been coined out of entirely new conditions by pioneers and
    backwoodsmen. Suffice it to say there _is_ a difference, and Portia
    was never more sensible of it than when she returned, as on the
    present occasion, from moving among a London society crowd into the
    Anglo-Australian social atmosphere of the Kensington house.

Tasma's efforts to give variety to her work, and keep as far as possible
out of the beaten paths of the Australian writer, have not, however,
quite excluded from her novels characters which will be recognised as
typical. There is, for instance, the young pleasure-loving colonial man
who keeps racehorses, gets deeply into debt and love, and has sometimes
to encounter awkward parental alternatives.

At least three excellent portraits of such men are given. The best is
that of George Drafton, in _In Her Earliest Youth_. In no other novel
are the rough good-nature and loose, slangy talk of the young Australian
sportsman of the upper-middle class more naturally expressed. The
author's knowledge of the cant terms and short cuts in the vocabulary of
the not necessarily ill-educated but supremely careless colonial young
man is almost equal to that of Rolf Boldrewood, who has been listening
to the talk of such men all his life.

Uncle Piper's exasperating 'gentleman' son George is also a noticeably
clever creation in a book full of good portraits; and it is a tribute to
the author's skill that as the story progresses our sympathy for him
increases rather than diminishes, notwithstanding the needless agonies
of rage he occasions his father.

The most vivid chapter to be found in any of Tasma's novels is that in
which Uncle Piper, after witnessing a love-scene between Laura Lydiat
and George, sends for the latter and threatens to cast him off if a
marriage of the pair should take place. Laura is an agnostic and a sort
of 'new woman' who maintains a constant attitude of disdain towards her
stepfather. She and George have spent much of their youth together,
discussed pessimistic theories in Piper's hearing, and generally ignored
him, and made him feel his ignorance in ways very trying to the temper
of a man who, 'now that his money-making days were over, had a passion
for dictating absolutely to everyone about him.' 'He'd talk' and 'she'd
talk,' as Mr. Piper would complain; 'and they'd spout their scraps of
poetry that hadn't an ounce of the sense any good, honest old rhyme
could show; and you'd think, to hear them, they were doing their Maker a
favour by condescending to go on living at all!'

An alliance of this kind between the two people for whom he had done
most with his wealth was bad enough, but Uncle Piper was determined
that it should not become a closer one. Was this not one reason for his
importation of an entire family of impoverished relatives, that they and
his little pet daughter, the angelic Louey, should readjust the balance
of household power in his favour?

It was on the eve of the arrival of his aristocratic connections, the
Cavendishes, that he determined to put a stop to his son's courtship.
George, at the outset of the momentous interview with his father,
speculated inwardly on his chances of being able to soften the old man
to a favourable view of 'the only wish that he had ever framed with a
feeling that savoured of intensity.'

Before entering the ornamental tower where his father awaited him,
George had composed his face to its usual expression of laziest
indifference. His imperturbability always 'had the effect of a goad upon
his father's temper. His face never changed colour when the old man's
was purple. His voice never lost its measured drawl.'

    As Mr. Piper turned and faced him you would never have traced the
    sonship in George. There was nothing in common between the sallow,
    indolent face of the younger man, and the spreading, heated face of
    the elder. George looked like any club-lounger--not unwilling to let
    it be seen that he is slightly bored, yet ready, with perfect
    acquiescence, to go through with an hour or a forenoon of the
    infliction of boredom, as conveyed by a father's presence.... Mr.
    Piper watched him as he continued tranquilly to pare his nails, the
    baffled sense of helplessness that exasperated him at the outset of
    an interview with his son creeping over him as he watched. If George
    could only once have lost his head and sworn, or only once implored
    or threatened! But he never did. The apathy and unconcern of his
    attitude--the veiled disrespect it implied--spoke of an indifference
    that was worse than the most open revolt. But surely he would be
    made to feel now! Mr. Piper had never tried to reach 'my gentleman'
    through his 'young woman' yet.... A slight elevation of an unruffled
    brow just gave evidence that though his eyes were looking critically
    at his almond-shaped finger-nails, his ear took in the sense of his
    fathers words. Otherwise he might have served as a perfect model of
    intentness upon his hands, as the statue of the boy who to all
    eternity will be absorbed in the task of extracting a thorn from his
    foot.

Meanwhile Mr. Piper is in a state of acute excitement.

    'I'll see and put a stop to it!' he threatened. 'I'll take and pack
    her off, and you at the back of her, "my gentleman"!' George knew
    that the use of this expression signified especial bitterness on
    his father's part. 'I'll have an end of this nonsense--a painted
    jade like her!'

    'Wait a minute, please,' said George, shutting the knife with a
    little snap, and settling himself back upon the window-sill; 'you
    are a little hard to follow, or I am slow at catching your meaning,
    perhaps. I understand that you had some object in sending for me.
    Are you explaining it to me now? I am quite prepared to listen, as
    you see.'

    'You're very condescending, I'm sure,' said Mr. Piper, with such
    withering sarcasm that George stroked his moustache and smiled. 'You
    put yourself about for your father a deal too much, "my gentleman,"
    there's no doubt of it.' Then, with a sudden break in his voice:
    'No, George; it's not much of a son you've been to me, and no one
    can say I've stood in your light. I'd like you to show me another
    young man who could carry on top ropes like you. There's not many
    fathers 'ud have stood it. Most fathers 'ud made you turn to long
    ago.'

    'Do you want anything done for you?' interrupted George, with the
    air of a man who is laying himself out to oblige--'another tour of
    inspection in the north?'

    Whenever Mr. Piper made allusion to George's want of occupation, it
    was the young man's policy to refer to this tour of inspection--a
    memorable tour, seeing that it had given him employment for at least
    three months....

    If there was anything humiliating in being rated as an 'able-bodied
    young man who wasn't worth his salt,' as a loafer who was hardly fit
    to 'jackaroo' on a station, as a 'lazy lubber' who would 'go to the
    dogs if it weren't for his father,' George never betrayed that he
    felt humiliated by so much as the twitching of an eyelid.
    Persistently stroking the ends of his moustache with an air of
    profound abstraction, he made it apparent, as soon as Mr. Piper
    stopped to take breath, that he was suppressing an inclination to
    yawn.

    'I dare say it's all very true, governor,' was all he said in reply.
    'It's very nice and complimentary, I'm sure, and I ought to be very
    much obliged to you. But, _a propos_ of your compliments, may I ask
    if it was only to treat me to them in full that you brought me up
    those confounded tower steps this morning? Because, in that case, I
    wouldn't have minded waiting, you know. It's hardly fair upon a man,
    is it, to put him to the treadmill before he's well awake in the
    morning?'

    'If you were like other young men,' retorted Mr. Piper, 'you'd be up
    and down them steps twenty times a day' (George shuddered); 'but oh
    no! my gentleman can crawl on to the lawn and carry on with a----'

    'Stop there!' cried George, in a tone that made his father silent
    through sheer astonishment (George had never been known to raise his
    voice before). 'Do you know the relation in which Laura stands to
    me?'

    He looked Mr. Piper full in the face as he said it, and seeing the
    ghastly change that came over the face as he looked, he felt that he
    had been over-hasty. For the glass through which Mr. Piper had made
    a feint of looking dropped from his quivering fingers and his lips
    worked in a distorted fashion over his discoloured teeth; the blood
    rushing away from his florid cheeks left them streaked with thready,
    sanguineous veins, mottling the ash- patches; and rushed
    back again with a force that seemed to swell the veins round his
    temples to bursting....

    'What's the matter, father?' said George at last, not with any of
    Louey's vehement alarm, but eyeing him rather gravely and curiously.
    'Do you object to my looking upon Laura in the light of
    a--_sister_?'

    'Eh?' said Mr. Piper. His power of articulation was slowly
    returning, but his breath as yet was only equal to the monosyllable.

    'Of a sister,' repeated George slowly, 'and a friend.'

    'Your _sister_!' said Mr. Piper, as soon as he could speak
    distinctly. 'That's as you choose to take it. She's none o' mine,
    thank God! But you take and make her more than your sister, and see
    how soon you'll come to repent it. It's down in my will. I've sworn
    it. Dead or alive, I won't have the jade in my family! If you've got
    a fancy for her, you may take her, but never come anigh Piper's Hill
    again!'

    'You mistake the position of affairs,' said George calmly. 'Laura
    wouldn't have me if I wanted!'

    'Ho, ho!' Mr. Piper's laugh was more insulting than mirthful.
    'That's why she comes and hugs you on the lawn of a morning, is it?'

The interview ended with an intimation that Mr. Piper will not have
Laura as a daughter-in-law 'at any price,' and that if George choose to
marry her it must be as a pauper, and unrelieved of his heavy burden of
turf debts. Piper's stormy, almost speechless anger, like his craving
for sympathy and approval, are alike often exceedingly pathetic. His
personality, though less delicately drawn than that of his niece, Sara
Cavendish, is a striking figure throughout the book. A good delineation
of an old man is sufficiently rare in fiction to make that of Uncle
Piper notable. Tasma has not equalled this performance in any of her
other works. Josiah Carp, the Melbourne merchant in _In Her Earliest
Youth_, and Sir Matthew Bogg, another of the same class, in the short
story _Monsieur Caloche_, are shown only in a satirical and repulsive
light, which necessarily makes them appear somewhat unreal.

As a vivid study, combined with excellent comedy, the portrait of Sara
Cavendish would not have been unworthy of Thackeray. The selfishness
concealed by her demure exterior and great beauty, and the absurdly
excessive estimate of her virtues made by the Reverend Francis Lydiat,
are a warning to all susceptible young men. Lydiat was a passenger by
the ship which carried Sara and her parents to Australia. When he gave
his weekly sermons during the voyage, Miss Cavendish was always present,
and looked at him with her large eyes to such purpose that they 'seemed
to be absorbing his meaning into the soul of their possessor.'

But there was nothing ethereal in Sara's thoughts. 'She had a fancy for
imagining becoming dresses. She would build up a delightful wardrobe in
the air, entering into as many details of her airy outfit as though it
could be instantly materialised. And she liked to imagine a becoming
background for her own beautiful person, in which a husband with the
essentials of good birth and unlimited money, and the desirable
qualifications of an air of distinction and great devotion to her,
filled a reasonable space.' Lydiat had often seen her lost in daydreams
such as it would have seemed to him almost a sacrilege to disturb,
'though it is probable that the only notion he would have been guilty of
upsetting had reference to the shape of an imaginary velvet train.'

The insight and completeness with which Sara's character is depicted in
the course of the story make it impossible that the reader should
entirely dislike her as a mere sample of the calculating coquette. She
is one of that large class of women, with a limited capacity for
affection, whose natures expand only in an atmosphere of luxury. 'Don't
be shocked,' she says to her sister in reference to the unsuccessful
suit of her clerical lover; 'I never intended to be a poor man's wife.'
As a contrast to the cold personality of the beautiful Sara, the author
gives a charming picture of the elder sister's affection and
thoughtfulness for others.

Margaret Cavendish and Eila Frost, in _Not Counting the Cost_, are good
women of a perfectly possible and natural kind, and it is surprising to
think that the same hand which drew them also found patience to draw the
unhappy, metaphysical heroines of _In Her Earliest Youth_ and _The
Knight of the White Feather_. Tasma is seldom so pleasing as when
describing the characters of children, of whom several figure
prominently in her novels. There is a delightful picture of romping
childhood at the opening of _Not Counting the Cost_. The scene is a farm
in the shadow of Mount Wellington, near Hobart, the city where the
author spent many of her own early years. 'Chubby,' the eight-year-old
uncle of the heroine of _In Her Earliest Youth_, and Louey Piper are
lovable creations, though, it must be said, more quaint than natural.
One remembers the expansive dignity of the former on his first meeting
with Pauline's lover, George Drafton. 'How do you do, little man?' says
the latter condescendingly. 'How do you do, sir?' replies the little man
stiffly, raising his garden hat. 'You are an acquaintance of Paul--of
Miss Vyner's, I believe. I have the honour to be her maternal uncle.' No
wonder George bursts into a loud guffaw, notwithstanding the tragic
intensity of his love protestations of five minutes before!

Louey Piper's relations with her father are idyllic. She is more
necessary to him than Eppie to Silas Marner; she is a continual
negotiator of peace in his divided house, and 'in this she could not
have displayed more courtier-like sagacity had she been an old-world
changeling with centuries of experience respecting rich fathers of
uncertain testamentary inclinations.' In her limited knowledge of things
outside Piper's Hill, 'street-crossings and railway-platforms presented
themselves to her in the light of shocking and mysterious man-traps....
The wistful, yearning look that gave her eyes so touching an expression
in the setting of her small freckled face never gave place to such a
fulness of satisfaction as when her father, her brother, and her sister
were all, as it were, under her eye, and safe to remain indoors for the
night.'

The general praise won by _Uncle Piper_ for its author as a delineator
of character appears to have decided her to give increased attention to
her ability in this direction. The immediate result was scarcely a happy
one. The analytical bias disclosed in the first story was largely
extended in the second, with the usual accompaniment of a decrease in
action and humour. Pauline Vyner, the central figure of _In Her
Earliest Youth_, a sensitive and speculative girl, marries without love
a man who has saved the life of a child to whom she is much attached. In
tastes and intellectual bent the pair are almost without anything in
common. The story--an unusually long three-volume one--is mainly a
minute study of Pauline's disillusionment during the early period of her
wifehood: how she escaped the temptations placed in her way by a man who
had formerly attracted her; and how, with the birth of her first child,
she experienced the dawn of affection for its father.

The story is excessively expanded for the small amount of dramatic
movement it contains. Only three characters are prominently described,
and these too seldom through the medium of dialogue. The central motive,
moreover, is lacking in strength. It is difficult to appreciate the
tragic pathos of so common a matrimonial error as Pauline's, especially
as George, though uncongenial in his tastes, and not exempt from the
ordinary weaknesses of men, is entirely devoted to her, and would
readily have improved under her influence, had she chosen to exert any.
Tasma's more recent work is better both in spirit and literary
construction. Very sympathetic and entertaining is the narrative, in
_Not Counting the Cost_, of the adventures of the Clare family in their
quixotic travels in search of the cousin who is to restore them a
long-lost heritage. In this story and _The Penance of Portia James_ the
author gives some interesting scenes of Paris life. But to get the best
samples of her humour, one must return to her first novel. The burlesque
of Piper's pompous, genteel brother-in-law is delicious. Mr. Cavendish
affects to be revolted by the necessity of being indebted to the
_ci-devant_ butcher, while secretly luxuriating in his munificence.
Finally, as a means of discharging some of his obligations, he conceives
the project of hunting up a pedigree for his plebeian relative, after
the manner of the enterprising person who opened a 'heraldry office' in
Sydney about fifty years ago, and announced his readiness to provide
clients with reliable information of their ancestors, together with
suitable coats of arms.

    True, Piper is not a name of much promise, but there _had_ been a
    Count Piper somewhere or other some centuries ago, and the very
    rarity of the name proved that every Piper must come from one common
    stock. Fired by this generous idea, Mr. Cavendish gave himself up to
    its pursuit with enthusiasm. He would spend whole hours in the
    Melbourne Library poring over books of heraldry. Every chronological
    or biographical document bearing upon the age in which Count Piper
    was supposed to have lived was made the subject of long and minute
    examination. When the monthly mail day came round there would sure
    to be a budget of letters in Mr. Cavendish's handwriting, addressed
    to the different colleges and societies at home and abroad, who were
    to help in extracting all Pipers of any importance from the oblivion
    in which they had hitherto been suffered to remain.

Mr. Piper is at length informed of the progress of the inquiries, but
shows a provoking obtuseness and indifference concerning them.

    'I am--hem!--I am pursuing a task of the utmost consequence to your
    family interests,' Mr. Cavendish had told him one day. 'In fact, my
    dear sir, I am engaged in a work of no less moment than that of
    reconstructing your family tree.'

    'My what-do-you-call-it tree?' exclaimed Mr. Piper, with a hazy
    idea that Mr. Cavendish had been trying some unwarrantable
    experiments upon his lemon and orange bushes. 'Don't you take and
    put any rubbish in the garden. I've got a new lot of guano, and I
    don't want it meddled with.'

    'Guano!' echoed Mr. Cavendish, with a tone of the most withering
    compassion. 'I'm afraid you don't quite apprehend my meaning. I am
    not alluding to coarse material facts at all. I am speaking of a
    genealogical tree--a ge-ne-a-lo-gi-cal tree, you understand? I am
    trying to rescue your ancestors from the dust of oblivion. I am....'

    'You'd better leave 'em alone,' interrupted Mr. Piper, with the
    sulky accent of one whose suspicions have not been altogether
    allayed. '_They_ won't do you any good--no more than they've done
    for me. You've got some of your own, I expect; that's enough for any
    man, I should think.'

    Mr. Cavendish shrugged his shoulders and held his peace. If the
    matter had not become a hobby by this time, he would have abandoned
    it then and there. As it was, he contented himself by deploring the
    sad effects of low association upon the undoubted descendant of a
    count, and pondering upon the possibility of introducing a hog in
    armour instead of a stag at gaze into the coat-of-arms that he
    foresaw would be the result of his researches.

Equally comical is the spectacle of Mrs. Cavendish, on the eve of the
first meeting of the two men, humbly wondering how she could soften the
heart of her discontented lord towards the low-born brother--'how lead
him to pardon, as it were, his benefactor for having dared to benefit
him,' and the subsequent reflection of Cavendish that not only was
wealth an acknowledged power, 'even though pork-sausages should have
been its alleged first cause,' but that, after all, 'politic members of
the great ruling houses in the old world had been known to make
concessions to trade,' and he 'was prepared to make concessions too!'
Accordingly, he resolved that the meeting with his relative should bear
the semblance of cordiality.

    'This is a real pleasure, my dear sir,' he said, with ten white
    fingers--the fingers of thoroughbred hands--closing round Mr.
    Piper's plebeian knuckles. No onlooker could have supposed for an
    instant that he had come, with the whole of his family, in an
    entirely destitute condition, to live upon his wife's brother.
    Besides, we know that among well-bred people, to receive a favour is
    virtually to oblige a man. You only accept cordialities from people
    you esteem....

    'You're welcome, sir,' said Mr. Piper.

    Then there was a pause, during which Mrs. Cavendish wiped her eyes,
    and Mr. Piper said very heartily, 'You're welcome, the lot of you.'

Cavendish is the only character that the author has treated in a
consistently farcical vein. Eila Frost's canting old father-in-law in
_Not Counting the Cost_ is made ridiculous in his harangue on the duties
of the young wife to her insane husband; but, with this exception,
little is said of him in the story. It would seem that Tasma regards
broadly humorous exaggeration to be scarcely compatible with her
somewhat grave style, for in all the later stories her satire, if not
less pungent, is of a quieter kind.

Next to their humour and skilful presentation of character, the most
noteworthy feature of these novels is their lucid and polished language.
The style is, perhaps, scarcely easy enough for fiction. Its qualities
and culture are those that equip the essayist or critic rather than the
novelist. Indeed, judged by some of her early work in the reviews, and
by the little philosophic exordiums with which she opens so many of her
chapters, Tasma would have made a brilliant essayist. To a large class
of thoughtful readers it will always seem that what her novels lack in
dramatic interest is fully compensated for by their more than usually
faithful sketches of both men and women, and by their intimate and
sympathetic view of our common life.




THE END.




BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.

_G., C. & CO._




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