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 AUSTRALIAN WRITERS
 
 AUSTRALIAN WRITERS 
 
 DESMOND BYRNE 
 
 LONDON 
 RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON 
 
 }3ubli8lxcid in ©rbinttru to ^)cv ^^ttajcstij the (Qucrix 
 1896 
 
 / [A// rights reser^'eef]

 
 
 CONTENTS, 
 
 PAGE 
 
 >j INTRODUCTION ----- i 
 
 <C 
 
 ^ MARCUS CLARKE - - - - ' ^9 
 
 M 
 
 -' HENRY KINGSLEY - - - - - 90 
 
 r^ADA CAMBRIDGE 
 
 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON - - - "159 
 
 ^ ROLF BOLDREWOOD - - - - 1 89 
 
 Uj 
 
 ^MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED - - - . 229 
 
 ^TASMA ------ 260 
 
 9i 
 
 264402
 
 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 develop- 
 ment of distinctive national characteristics in 
 the literature of a young country self-govern- 
 ing 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 i 
 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 
 genefalisation. There are circumstances by 
 which its application may be modified. It 
 certainly does not apply with equal force to 
 
 1
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 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 de- 
 velopment, carried on under more modern 
 conditions by a people almost entirely homo- 
 geneous, has been facile, unbroken and extra- 
 ordinarily 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 expres- 
 sion of the cumulative ambition that is the 
 source of their varied progress. Yet from 
 time to time men have arisen amono- them 
 
 o 
 
 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
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 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 recosfnised 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 absorp- 
 tion 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 re- 
 producing European habits, yet retaining a
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 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 Hterature 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 pro- 
 duced 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 pro- 
 vincialism.' 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 develop- 
 ment and national aspirations be without 
 expression. In the case of the Australasian
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 colonies it would further mean (apart from 
 any consideration of their future indepen- 
 dence) 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 dis- 
 cussed, 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
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 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 un- 
 conscious 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 con- 
 sidered natural and reasonable, as already 
 they are supplied with books and plays and 
 pictures from England and Europe, or as a 
 proof of thou_2;"htlessness and neglect ? ' Why, ' 
 asked a critic in the Edinburgh Review in 
 1 8 19, '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 ^363,741 : 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
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 amount was not far short of a hundred 
 thousand pounds higher. 
 
 Foremost in his Hst of the saHent intel- 
 lectual tendencies of the native population of 
 the United States Mr. Bryce places ' a desire 
 to be abreast of the best thougrht and work 
 of the world everywhere, and to have every 
 form of literature and art adequately repre- 
 sented 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. Litera- 
 ture 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
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 of Shakespeare; authorship has become some- 
 thing 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 ab- 
 sence 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 pro- 
 duct of America that is noteworthy so much 
 as the widespread and conscious taste for 
 literature among the people, and the means
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 which they adopt to promote it. The best 
 friend of AustraHa 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 educa- 
 ti(Mi, 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. 
 Hut large private contributions are rare, and 
 the founding or endowment of public insti- 
 tutions still rarer. 
 
 Of societies or clubs devoted specially 
 to the interests of literature there are very
 
 lO 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 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 pro- 
 viding 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 de- 
 partments of a few of the free libraries be 
 taken into account. The leading book ex- 
 porters 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
 
 INTRODUCTION ii 
 
 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 enter- 
 tainment. 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 ex- 
 ceptional 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
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 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 remem- 
 bered, 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 ex- 
 clusive 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 Revieiv, the Centen- 
 nial 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
 
 INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 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 con- 
 tents, 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 preat 
 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 sum- 
 maries of the opinions of influential politicians 
 in Great Britain and elsewhere for immediate 
 publication. 
 
 A contributory cause of the failure of Aus- 
 tralian magazines is the fact that the cost of 
 their mechanical production has always been
 
 14 INTRODUCTION 
 
 higher than that of any of their imported 
 competitors. This promises to be a difficulty 
 for some years to come. Book-pubHshing, as 
 a separate business, is also practically impos- 
 sible, 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 con- 
 sidered to be fairly supplied by the weekly 
 newspapers. Moreover, it is said he de- 
 mands cheapness as well as high quality in 
 his periodicals, and knows that both can be 
 got in several English, American and Euro- 
 pean 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 pro- 
 duction of literature in Australia is not a 
 matter for surprise. No one, indeed, would 
 seriously think of attempting to do so.
 
 INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 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 re- 
 turned to England before publishing any- 
 thing ; Kendall held a Government clerkship 
 which he exchanged for journalism ; Mr. 
 Bruton 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
 
 i6 INTRODUCTION 
 
 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 aggres- 
 sive 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 what- 
 ever 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 dis- 
 tinction in the wider fields of Engfland or 
 America. To their skill and spirited rivalry 
 is due the universally high quality of the
 
 INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 Antipodean press. Mr. David Christie 
 Murray, writing after considerable experi- 
 ence 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 re- 
 mark is without exaggeration so far as it 
 applies to the large weekly journals. 
 
 The extent of the favour shown by Aus- 
 tralian 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 litera- 
 ture 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 occa- 
 sionally to subscription libraries. For repre- 
 sentative Australian work, then, there is a 
 fair field but no favour. It is as though the 
 function and existence of the authors apart 
 
 2
 
 1 8 INTRODUCTION 
 
 from the rank and file of Eno-Hsh 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 Gallop- 
 ing Rhy77zes, irresistibly commemorate the 
 national love of horseflesh and outdoor life. 
 Every Australian now knows that For the 
 Terfn 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
 
 INTRODUCTION 19 
 
 in their representation of life in Australia. 
 They have all written from abundant know- 
 ledge—from love, also, perhaps it may be 
 added — of this great wide land with its 
 brilliant skies, its opportunities and its whole- 
 some 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 Ser- 
 vants, journalists and tourists described in 
 some forni the more obvious peculiarities of 
 the colonies : their giant, evergreen forests, 
 strange amorphous animals, aristocratic gold- 
 dioxrers, ex-convicts in carriao^es, and general 
 state of topsy-turveydom. There is quite an 
 amazing variety of occasional records of this
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 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 mis- 
 leading. 
 
 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 bio- cities are unknown in Aus- 
 tralia ; that the population consists of 
 squatters, diggers, stock-riders, shepherds 
 and bushrangers ; that the superior resi- 
 dences are weatherboard homesteads with 
 wide verandas, while the inferior ones are huts 
 and tents.' No foreign reader could under- 
 stand from them that ' more than half the 
 Australian population have never seen kan- 
 garoos 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 typ(i of Australian
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 novel to which the same remarks might 
 apply with almost equal fitness. 
 
 The lack of interest on the part ol 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 ot 
 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
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 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 appre- 
 ciated in the far-off land whither all Aus- 
 tralian 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 Ad- 
 ministi'ation ? 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 ele- 
 ments of more serious interest. But she 
 cannot be said to have exhibited any par- 
 ticular 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 litera-
 
 INTRODUCTION 23 
 
 ture 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 ' pre- 
 judice ' against the work of Australian 
 authors. 
 
 A portion of the talent that cannot be 
 absorbed in the already overcrowded ranks
 
 24 INTRODUCTION 
 
 of law and medicine might find employment 
 in building a literature which should have 
 something of national savour in it, if migra- 
 tion 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 contem- 
 plated 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 Euro- 
 pean 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
 
 INTRODUCTION 25 
 
 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 T/ie Moviug 
 Finger, raised the short story to an artistic 
 level hardly approached by any other Aus- 
 tralian writer. And Mrs. Alick Macleod, 
 author of An Australian Girl and TJie 
 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 — w4io ' chose 
 her admirers to suit her style of dress ' — 
 Laurette Tareling's solemn respect for
 
 26 INTRODUCTION 
 
 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 Mel- 
 bourne 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 Tour- 
 gueneff, 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 Aus- 
 tralian 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
 
 INTRODUCTION 27 
 
 are able conveniently to dispense with sensa- 
 tionalism — 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 com- 
 fort and much exhilaration, whose scenes the 
 average Englishman would gasp in. Nothing 
 happens ; that is, nobody murders or de- 
 bauches 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
 
 28 INTRODUCTION 
 
 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.
 
 [ 29 ] 
 
 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 
 o'loom 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,
 
 30 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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 cor- 
 rected 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 Anti- 
 podean society, gravely conclude that ' leaves 
 that ofrow 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, fore- 
 going the taste for sensation, will be content 
 to transcribe and interpret impressions of
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 31 
 
 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 qualifica- 
 tions 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, BeaconsfielcCs 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.
 
 3 2 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 Clarke was an anti-Semite, therefore in 
 the Beaconsfield novels he saw little beyond 
 an expression of the author's personal ex- 
 ultation as the successful representative 
 of a maligned race. In the theological 
 controversy of Civilization without Delusion, 
 an even less effective and becoming per- 
 formance, the young author revealed a de- 
 ficiency 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 aofnostic conclusions which were 
 the product in later years of a coldly critical 
 examination of the oeneral "rounds of Chris- 
 tian belief. 
 
 In dealing with religion, his characteristic 
 independence developed into a stiff intel- 
 lectual pride, and from that into a reckless- 
 ness 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
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 33 
 
 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 per- 
 suaded 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 pre- 
 face 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 re- 
 ceived little advice or attention from rela- 
 tions. 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 inquirv 
 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 Hitman Rcpetends, a sketch of his
 
 34 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 published several years later, there is a 
 passage which substantially records his ex- 
 periences 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 ex- 
 travagant 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
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 35 
 
 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 acquaint- 
 ance. A warm mutual recrard resulted, and 
 soon Lewins succeeded in obtainino- a small 
 post for Clarke on the Melbourne Argus. 
 This was the beginning of the most brilliant 
 journalistic career established on the Aus- 
 tralian 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
 
 36 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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 ot 
 scorn. Coming from among the English 
 upper classes, with the education and tempera- 
 ment 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 voune Enoflishmen. But 
 for that common product of a new country, 
 the pretentious plutocrat, he had only con- 
 tempt. 
 
 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
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 37 
 
 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 ot 
 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 per- 
 mitted 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 resistino- 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 ; 
 
 264402
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 it was only erratic, fond of variety, impatient 
 of drudgery. Thus, in the course of fourteen 
 years' Hterary work, his thoughts make ex- 
 cursions 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 compo- 
 sitions : Loiver Bohnnia in Melbourne (a 
 sketch), Plot (a sensational drama), Revieiv 
 of Conite and Positive Philosophy (magazine 
 article). The Hitinbug Papers (humorous and 
 satirical), The Future Atistralian Race (an 
 ethnological study), Goody Tivo Shoes (a 
 pant(3mime). Civilization ivithout Delusion 
 (a theological discussion with the Bishop of 
 Melbourne), The Power of Love (an extrava- 
 ganza), Dor^ and Mode7'n Art (a review). 
 Cannabis Indica (a psychological experiment). 
 Almost the whole of Clarke's life may be said 
 to have been devoted to the su[)ply of some 
 temporary demand of the periodical press or 
 the stage. Even the two novels which repre- 
 sent his only sustained work were written 
 for serial issue in Melbourne magazines. 
 
 It does not appear in either case that he
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 39 
 
 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 impor- 
 tunity 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 
 i)een 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 
 enero^etic and orioinal 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
 
 40 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 of London, affords. The demands of the 
 newspapers were then, as now, more for 
 purely ephemeral criticism or narrative than 
 tor 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 
 llattering 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 o{ 
 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
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 41 
 
 four or five years of his literary career, there 
 was no ground for it after the unanimously 
 favourable reception accorded to J'or the 
 Terin of /lis 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 hini- 
 self as one of the leading writers of the da)-, 
 <md, 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 Austra- 
 lian 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
 
 42 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 yielding much beyond a livelihood. Mean- 
 time, 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 legis- 
 lator ' on Eastern Hill. Like Balzac, one 
 of his favourite novelists, he made observa- 
 tion a severe and regular business, but he 
 lacked the energy or the patience to take 
 full advantaofe of its results. Balzac em- 
 ployed 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.
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 43 
 
 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 any- 
 thing rather than the work which offered him 
 certain fame and fortune, as well as the most 
 natural employment of his powers. At the f 
 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 
 writincr of novels, and that alone.
 
 44 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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 ot 
 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 producer the 
 kind of hearty laugh with which Thackeray 
 and Swift, for example, relieve their fiercest 
 scorn. His personal experience of life had 
 been discourag^inof. 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 circum- 
 stances of his private life wrought in his 
 temperament. Addressing the disciples of 
 Mrs. Grundy in an early essay defending
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 45 
 
 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 succes- 
 sive efforts of friends to make a business 
 man of him, and was about to beofin the 
 
 o 
 
 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
 
 46 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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 thouo-htless 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 companion- 
 ship 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 Ijorn 
 to prove the vast amount of contradictory
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 47 
 
 elements which can exist in the same indi- 
 vidual. 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, de- 
 fiantly antagonistic, unnecessarily caustic, and 
 affectedly cynical. ... His life was one of 
 impulse, and the direction of the impulse 
 depended solely on surrounding circum- 
 stances. ... 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 char- 
 acter 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
 
 48 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 the often tender analysis of human feeling 
 in F^oi^ the Term of his Nattiral Life, how- 
 ever absent the same qualities may seem in 
 many of the shorter stories. 
 
 An interesting picture of Clarke's per- 
 sonality 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 dons 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
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 49 
 
 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 chancre in the conditions of an 
 entire people in a new and rapidly-developing 
 country. 
 
 Thus, with the struofo-le for subsistence 
 now keen to a degree which could not have 
 been loretokl by the gloom.iest pessimist a 
 few years ago ; with Parliaments, hitherto 
 safely democratic, threatened with Socialism 
 by the increasing practice of electing artisans 
 
 4
 
 50 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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 them- 
 selves, 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 grovernment, — 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 ??i^sailiaiice, and 
 horseracing and politics assist the plot, with 
 the usual complications of gambling and
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 51 
 
 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 Kirk- 
 minster 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 with- 
 out 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.
 
 52 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 53 
 
 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 in- 
 tensity. The result of this was to add more 
 of weakness than of strength. Incidents
 
 54 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 that might have been effectively dramatic 
 become melodramatic ; the conceivably pro- 
 bable 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 accord- 
 ance with the author's sccitario, supposing 
 one to have existed, has not been stated.
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 55 
 
 ' Only a few of the first chapters ' were 
 the work of Clarke, says the editor of the 
 Marcus Clarke Memorial V^olunie, 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 ex- 
 planation 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. x-\t least, he was willing 
 to take the full responsibility of its author- 
 ship. 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
 
 56 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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 ex- 
 pecting 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 objec- 
 tion to the laying of the scene in England 
 instead of in Australia. The author re- 
 plied simply that Henry Kingsley's Geoff ry 
 Hamlyn being the best Australian novel
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 57 
 
 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 cer- 
 tainly 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 judg- 
 ment 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 competi- 
 tion — at least erred on the side of safety, 
 rhat the immediate alternative should have 
 been an imitative example of a hackneyed
 
 5S MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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 Ha77ilyn 
 '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 in- 
 terest, 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 uncon- 
 sciously, after the completion of the first few 
 chapters, in favour of more complex char- 
 acterisation. Bob Calverley, the young 
 squatter, really holds a third or fourth place
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 59 
 
 in relation to the main motive of the story, 
 and is used rather as a foil than as an ex- 
 emplar of anything typically Australian. He 
 does not bear any active part in the drama 
 of passion and intrigue ; he is not even per- 
 mitted to be a passive spectator of it. 
 
 To say that he was good-natured, jovial, 
 popular, ' the sort of man that one involun- 
 tarily 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, ionorant of music, and un- 
 able to tell Millais froni 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
 
 6o MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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 every- 
 day 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 indiscrimi- 
 nately, 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
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 6i 
 
 from the scene of his early toil and pastoral 
 
 successes. 
 
 As a young man in London, he can be 
 found with rooms at the Lanoham, 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 move- 
 ments 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
 
 62 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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 ex- 
 travagance 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 Aus- 
 tralian 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 por- 
 trayal of this type. The result, considered
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 63 
 
 apart from the function Calverley fulfils in 
 Lo^ij^ Odds, must be held as emphatically a 
 failure. 
 
 Never was a novel written with a franker 
 or more deliberate purpose than that shown 
 m 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
 
 64 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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. 
 'I'he [)ractice originated with banishment of 
 convicts to the American colonies under 
 conditions which constituted a form of 
 slavery.
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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 sfivino; 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 nothintj. 
 When the War of Independence closed the 
 United States asfciinst the traffic. Britain 
 was given a fresh opportunity to reconsider 
 and place its penal system upon a more 
 
 5
 
 66 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 humane basis ; but the temptation to adopt 
 sweeping measures was once more too strong 
 to be resisted. The promoters of the 
 Austrahan 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 after- 
 wards 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 transporta- 
 tion to be a failure. Lord John Russell, as 
 late as 1847, discovered that it had been 
 ' too much the custom to consult the con- 
 venience 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 ' sh(juld endeavour to 
 make them, not seats of malefactors and
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 67 
 
 convicts, but communities which may set 
 examples of virtue and happiness.' 
 
 This mild, platitudinous rebuke came 
 when all the damacje 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 ex- 
 perience and display all the successive 
 severities of Macquarie Harbour, Port 
 Arthur, and Norfolk Island. A fundamental
 
 68 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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 /ee/ 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.
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 69 
 
 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 him- 
 self 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' confine- 
 ment, ending only in a tragic death, ex- 
 periences 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 lono; ?* 
 
 o
 
 70 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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 ' correc- 
 tion ' 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 neces-
 
 MARCUS CLARKE yr 
 
 sary 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 stronor imaofinative work should fail to 
 give a full view of results so complex as 
 those produced by the largely haphazard 
 method of the x\ustralian 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 there- 
 fore 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 him-
 
 72 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 self well, a condition which, of course, de- 
 pended 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 interestino- view of Marcus Clarke as a 
 literary workman is obtained from the story 
 of the conception and laborious writing of 
 /^?r //le Tervi 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 con- 
 trasted 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
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 73 
 
 short, concentrated, forcible — the natural 
 expression of a brilliant, impetuous, and 
 spasmodic worker. He overcame his natural 
 repugnance to lengthened toil and minute 
 thorouohness when he saw them to be 
 essential conditions of his task. But the 
 effort was a severe one. 
 
 In 1S71, 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 pro- 
 gress 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
 
 74 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 that he could make his picture at once truer 
 and more vivid when the surroundini^s 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 un- 
 broken industry necessary to maintain a 
 regular supply of the parts was more than 
 Clarke could oive. 
 
 Writing against time, he is said to have 
 felt like a convict himself. The irreofular 
 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
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 75 
 
 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 libitwn, 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 
 Nahiral Life produced.' 
 
 In a note of apology to their readers in 
 January, 1871, the publishers print a some- 
 what 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 con- 
 cludes nonchalantly as follows : ' This is 
 awkward, I admit, and I suppose some good-
 
 76 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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 un- 
 reservedly 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 sub-
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 77 
 
 stance 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 nianvais 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 out- 
 break 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
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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 pre- 
 served, 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
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 79 
 
 Kind's reofulations ' ; and how far Ensflish 
 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 lanoruao['e, could not brino- himself even to 
 indicate. There are episodes which the more 
 matter-of-fact historians barely mention, but 
 do not take advantage of their great privi- 
 leges 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
 
 8o MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 portrait of Dawes' passionate and licentious 
 cousin. 
 
 In reading the novel for its historical 
 interest, it is necessary throughout to re- 
 member 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 assign- 
 ment 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
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 8i 
 
 highest, consisting^ of lono- 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 Georo^e 
 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 oano-Iion of Clarke's 
 plot was always seen clearly, but never 
 obsessed his mind as did a coQfnate theme 
 that of the im[)ctuous 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 s[)lendid eloquence. The direct opposite 
 of this style is seen in the Australian novel. 
 
 6
 
 82 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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,
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 83 
 
 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 ex- 
 ceptional. 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
 
 84 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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 in- 
 difference 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 Lo7ig Odds, are little more than 
 dim shadows contrasted with the clearly- 
 marked personalities of half a dozen others
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 85 
 
 in the story who are rogues, or the associates 
 cUid instruments of rogues. ' The human 
 anguish of every page ' of //is Natural 
 Life which Lord Rosebery found so com- 
 pelling 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 /t\ Never Too Late to /l/end, 
 instead of being made a pitiable example of 
 a confirmed and self-accusing drunkard. 
 
 The strength of //is 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
 
 86 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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 re- 
 deeming 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, glory- 
 ing 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
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 87 
 
 official whose name has sometimes been asso- 
 ciated with the character was a considerably 
 more humane disciplinarian than the perse- 
 cutor of Rufus Dawes, it must be assumed 
 that Clarke aimed only at the representation 
 of a type. 
 
 Brutes like Frere and his vindictive asso- 
 ciates, Burgess and Troke, there undoubtedly 
 were on the settlements, but the average 
 official has probably a better representative 
 in Major Yickers, 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 sepa- 
 rated there for years from youthful society,
 
 88 MARCUS CLARKE 
 
 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 inno- 
 cence 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 full) 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 com- 
 bine to make //is A^atui^al Life one of the 
 most remarkable novels of the century is the 
 occasional skilful varying of its painful realism
 
 MARCUS CLARKE 89 
 
 with a colouring of romance, as in the rela- 
 tions between Dawes and Sylvia : his absorb- 
 ing devotion when she is so strangely made 
 dependent upon him at the deserted settle- 
 ment ; 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 Blow- 
 hole —also help to leave with the reader of 
 the novel an ineffaceable memory.
 
 [ 90 ] 
 
 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 Geoff7y 
 Hamlyn ; the central motive of The Hill- 
 yars aiid 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
 
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 91 
 
 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 veneration 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
 
 92 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 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 Brent- 
 wood, 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 
 Hainlyn and The Hillyars and the Biu^tons 
 have obvious faults, but in most respects 
 they are the highest, because the least arti- 
 ficial, expression of Kingslex 's powers. A 
 consideration of some of their more notice- 
 able 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
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 93 
 
 on the gold-fields of Australia between 1851 
 and i860, 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 pro- 
 hibit mining, ' in order that the inducement 
 which seemed so irresistible to persons to 
 quit their ordinary occupations might be re- 
 moved.' 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
 
 94 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 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 injfiux 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 toil- 
 ine 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
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 95 
 
 they thought him dead. His reticence as to 
 his unsuccessful strugforles 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, briefl\' 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 un- 
 lucky 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
 
 96 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 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 ob- 
 tainable 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, Boldre- 
 wood was a young man, and making the 
 experiment in squatting which, though dis- 
 astrous in its ultimate commercial results, 
 w^as 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
 
 HENRY KINGS LEY 97 
 
 lived there the chief part of a year as a guest 
 of Mitchell's. 
 
 ' It was at Langa - willi that Geofiry 
 Hamlyu, 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, 
 
 7
 
 98 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 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 vej've 
 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 Eranco-German War. As an editor 
 he was a failure, through being without the
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 99 
 
 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 reck- 
 less fancy. Those of Kingsley's friends 
 who contribute to the brief memoir of his 
 life bear unanimous testimony to the per- 
 sonal 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 
 suirafestion of the fruitless toil and the dis- 
 illusionment which he shared with scores of 
 other amateur diggers during the first two 
 years of his colonial life finds e.xpression 
 in any of his novels. His choice of incident 
 and adventure in Gcoffry Hamlyn seems to 
 imply a deliberate ignoring of what was
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 by far the most striking development of 
 Antipodean life in the decade of 1850-60. 
 
 The orold-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 pros- 
 perity 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 T/ie 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
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 incidentally connected with life on the o-old- 
 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 ot the 
 gold period would certainly seem better 
 adapted to the purposes of fiction. There 
 is, indeed, more than a sugijestion 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 uncer- 
 tainty 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 7 lie 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 washinof-cradle in his life.
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 The Australian people have so often been 
 the subject of flippant and ill-natured criti- 
 cisms, 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 circum- 
 stance 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 dis- 
 tinguished 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 in- 
 gratitude, 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
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 103 
 
 might altogether escape the fatal sense of 
 compulsion towards printers '-ink, under which 
 the traveller of a few weeks' or months' ex- 
 perience 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,
 
 I04 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 find more enduring appreciation than would, 
 perhaps, be accorded such writing in ordinary 
 circumstances. 
 
 The good feehng that shines on every 
 page of Geoffry Hamlyn would earn grati- 
 tude 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 nothino- 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
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 105 
 
 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. Kings- 
 ley'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 mioht have belonged to 
 Sir Lancelot.' Of course, the genial author 
 ot Oceana made no pretence of minute
 
 io6 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 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 work- 
 ing aristocracy of Australia. 
 
 The little Arcadian kingdom — cheerful, 
 self-contained, and picturesque— of the Buck- 
 leys, 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 ex- 
 pression which he has avoided. In this
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 107 
 
 respect the historical value of his work is 
 less than it might have been. But the com- 
 pensating 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 ad- 
 ventures 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 col- 
 lections 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 com- 
 memorate 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 Geojfi'y Hamlyn
 
 io8 HENRY KINGS LEY 
 
 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 con- 
 sidered 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 Brent- 
 wood. 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 ' —
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 109 
 
 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 pro- 
 viding a competence, he has resolutely left it 
 for the land where he is to find 'a new heaven 
 and a new earth." L'nlike so many of the 
 pioneers, he has bade a final good-bye to 
 l:^ngland, but that it is no/ ' for ever' one can 
 safely predict from the out.set. 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 contemj)late almost with 
 calmness the death of their cattle by hundred.s, 
 and the devastation of their runs by Bush 
 fires. They have arrived at the period when 
 ' there was mone)' in the bank, claret in the 
 cellar, and race-horses in the paddock.' 
 Meanwhile, the old I )(.'V()nshire life is
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 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 relioion 
 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 atmo- 
 sphere,' 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
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 kindly forbearance towards the foibles of 
 our fellow-creatures. The names alone of 
 the principal characters in Geoff?'}' Hatnlyii 
 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 pros- 
 perity 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 uncom- 
 plaining 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
 
 HENRY KINGS LEY 
 
 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 de- 
 lightful 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 Hanilyn a classic in Aus- 
 tralian 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
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 113 
 
 vivacity and gusto the author describes the 
 visits exchanored 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 beauti- 
 ful 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 enter- 
 tainers as the entertained. Everybody during 
 
 8
 
 114 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 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 com- 
 forts 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.'
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 115 
 
 Oi\ another occasion the author himself 
 preaches a similarly agreeable doctrine, con- 
 cluding 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 arm- 
 chair under a broad Australian verandah, 
 who fetched anything for himself, would, in 
 the author's opinion, ' show himself a man 
 of weak mind.' Niggers were all that a 
 Southern gentleman wanted to complete his 
 comfort when the sun was at baking-point. 
 Mrs. Beecher Stowe's teachings undergfo 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.
 
 ii6 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 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 indi- 
 vidual 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 promi- 
 nently reproduced in the characters o{ Ravens - 
 Jioe and Silcote of Silcotcs. But in Geoff ry 
 Hainlyii 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 com- 
 petitive 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; 
 l^)uckley is intent on the education of his son,
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 117 
 
 in which he is careful to provide for a know- 
 ledcre 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 ha\ e 
 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 (jcoffry Hainlyn. 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
 
 ii8 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 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 indulofed 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 Haiulyn and at the be- 
 ginning of the third volume of The Hillyars 
 and the Burtons curiously illustrates how
 
 HENRY KINGS LEY 119 
 
 far the appreciation of Australian scenery- 
 depends upon the point of view of the 
 observer. 
 
 Kingsley's descriptions, Hke all else that 
 he wrote of the country, breathe an unmis- 
 takable 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
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 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
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 121 
 
 which he combined a whimsical exaggera- 
 tion. 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 Aus- 
 tralian 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 re- 
 ported to be riding on to another twenty 
 miles distant. At the latter, Captain Brent- 
 wood'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
 
 HENRY KINGS LEY 
 
 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.' I'hen 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 1' 
 
 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
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 123 
 
 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 com.e. . . . 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 breath- 
 less 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
 
 124 HENRY KINGS LEY 
 
 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 slope 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 W'idderin'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,
 
 HENRY KINGS LEY 125 
 
 said in a fierce whisper : ' Give nie one of your pistols, 
 
 sir!' 
 
 ' Leave that to me !' he repHed, 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 aw^ay 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 Gcoffiy Hanilyn, The 
 Hillyars and the Burtons and Ravenshoe. 
 In the first two of these there is an abund- 
 ance of original observation and little con- 
 scious 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
 
 126 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 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 Haiulyn and of three-fourths of 
 The Hillyars and the Burtons, but to Ravens- 
 hoe 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 judg- 
 ment, Kingsley more than once allowed the 
 exigencies of his plots to destroy all con- 
 sistency 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 in-
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 127 
 
 sufficient grounds, in the belief that his first 
 wife had been unfaithful, and had tried 
 to poison him. Nothing short of a con- 
 dition 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 de- 
 formed brother is wrong, because it is un- 
 necessary. 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 im- 
 possible 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
 
 128 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 another instance of perversion. Her silli- 
 ness is exaggerated in order that she shall 
 weary and disgust the b/asc aristocrat who 
 has married her. Some of her chatter is 
 more inconceivable than the ' coo-ee-ino- ' 
 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 pardon- 
 able 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 Silcotc of Silcotes there are 
 intermittent glimpses of finely - conceived 
 character which almost outbalance the eccen- 
 tricities 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 philo- 
 sophic friend Marston (a study of the George
 
 HENRY KINGSLEY 129 
 
 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 
 ofentleman. With old men he was less sue- 
 cessful. 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 some- 
 what indistinct personage compared with the 
 Australian girls of Mrs. Campbell Praed and 
 Ada Cambridge. 
 
 The superior position usually accorded 
 to Ravcnshoe 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, some- 
 
 9
 
 I30 HENRY KINGSLEY 
 
 times 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 ter- 
 minates 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 fiancde. Ravenshoe is represented 
 as forgetting all his newly-suffered wrongs, 
 and thinking only of Welter as his favourite 
 schoolfellow and youthful companion. An- 
 ticipating doubts as to the feasibility of this, 
 the author proceeds to discuss the point with 
 the reader, as he does in many similar in- 
 stances throughout the story. He appears 
 to have a constant anxiety about the impres- 
 sion 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.
 
 [ ^31 ] 
 
 ADA CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 Towards the close of 1890 the AustraHan 
 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
 
 132 ADA CAMBRIDGE 
 
 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 ex- 
 pended by her in contributing to the Aus- 
 tralian press. But, as the wife of a country 
 clergyman, she had other matters besides 
 Hterature 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
 
 ADA CAMBRIDGE 133 
 
 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 
 countr)^ towns of this colony, they settled in 
 1893 ^t Williamstown, a waterside suburb of 
 Melbourne. 
 
 A novel entitled C/^ 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
 
 134 ADA CAMBRIDGE 
 
 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,
 
 ADA CAMBRIDGE 135 
 
 rather pompous house, over a people re- 
 taining 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 7ndsalliance, 
 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 in- 
 stances 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
 
 136 ADA CAMBRIDGE 
 
 for any of the principal incidents of A/^o^ All 
 in Vain and A Mar7'iage 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 sacri- 
 fice 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 ad- 
 vantage 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 mar- 
 riage that was a condition of their inherit- 
 ance having been performed, bride and
 
 ADA CAMBRIDGE 137 
 
 bridegroom part in accordance with a pre- 
 vious 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 oppor- 
 tunity for one or two vivid and instructive 
 sketches of the sensational period that wit- 
 nessed 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-makino- intrigue
 
 138 ADA CAMBRIDGE 
 
 and money-worship in Toorak, but the main 
 interest of the plot apart, the account of 
 fashionable Melbourne is a singularly colour- 
 less 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 con- 
 ventionally 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 domi- 
 nant 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- 
 flve years' Australian experience is shown in 
 her general outlook upon life, rather than in the 
 details of her work. The prevailing tone of
 
 ADA CAMBRIDGE 139 
 
 her books is one of marked cheerfulness, 
 sincerity, and simpHcity ; she has a hearty 
 dislike for conventional stupidities, especially 
 for the mock-modesty that stifles honest 
 sentiment ; and she gives emphatic endorse- 
 ment 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
 
 I40 ADA CAMBRIDGE 
 
 studies from some point of view. Of de- 
 liberate 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 out- 
 burst of relief upon the death of his first 
 wife, so far from being vulgar and brutal, 
 as it might have seemed in other circum- 
 stances, 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 privi- 
 leofed friend, takes him to task for his un- 
 seemly 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
 
 ADA CAMBRIDGE 141 
 
 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 rela- 
 tions 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
 
 142 ADA CAMBRIDGE 
 
 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 illus- 
 trates 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 sue-
 
 ADA CAMBRIDGE 143 
 
 cessive attachments to other women during 
 his long" exile in AustraHa. The author re- 
 cognises that, ' the laws of literary romance 
 beincr 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 evgr 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 dis- 
 graced 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
 
 144 ADA CAMBRIDGE 
 
 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 cal- 
 culations.' 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 sub- 
 stantial figure.' Adam Drewe concluded on 
 first sight of her that she was a nice woman. 
 Later on he finds her ' looking the very in-
 
 ADA CAMBRIDGE 145 
 
 carnation 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 evi- 
 dently 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 showinof the attrac- 
 tlveness of such women at the age of thirty, 
 
 10
 
 146 ADA CAMBRIDGE 
 
 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 com- 
 forts 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
 
 ADA CAMBRIDGE 147 
 
 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 7;^ens sana 
 in corpore sano, and after that an illustration 
 of the independent attractions of sympathy, 
 gentleness, culture, and high character. 
 
 Thouorh in most cases the strong-est attach- 
 ments 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
 
 148 ADA CAMBRIDGE 
 
 first affected with disgust by her disfigure- 
 ment, 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 uorliness of Adam Drewe, from which 
 his mother turned in disg-ust 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.
 
 ADA CAMBRIDGE 149 
 
 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 thouofht 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 unnatural- 
 ness 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 co-
 
 150 ADA CAMBRIDGE 
 
 incidences 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, how- 
 ever, where a few such weaknesses exist, they 
 do not count for much with the averao-e 
 reader when the principal scenes are as 
 finely drawn as those in A Marked Man 
 or Fidelis, or TJie Th^ee 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 develop- 
 ment, 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 
 Hanilyn, and which for thirty-seven years 
 have made it one of the most popular of 
 Australian stories.
 
 ADA CAMBRIDGE 151 
 
 In the presentation of tragic or pathetic 
 incidents lies Ada Cambridge's chief power, 
 as far as her plots are concerned, \n 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 Delaveis, contains 
 fewer developed characters, as may also be 
 said of A Marriage Cereino7iy. 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
 
 152 ADA CAMBRIDGE 
 
 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. To- 
 gether 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 /ler,' Betty whispered, pushing him a little. 
 She, too, felt that it would be something, if not much.
 
 ADA CAMBRIDGE 153 
 
 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 reaHsm 
 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 him- 
 self 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 other- 
 wise certain to dismiss him ; and there he shortly found 
 a number of absorbing interests, including — as Ruther- 
 ford had predicted— a rosy-cheeked second wife, who, as 
 he wrote to Mrs. Ochiltree when announcing his engage- 
 ment, was all that heart could wish, and had apparently 
 been made on purpose for him. . . . No later than
 
 154 ADA CAMBRIDGE 
 
 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 Ught in his eyes that plainly showed Ais 
 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 meetincrs as o-irl 
 and youth — she with her weak eyes bandaged, 
 but readino him through his voice and bash- 
 ful 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
 
 ADA CAMBRIDGE 155 
 
 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 speci- 
 men, 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 
 embanicment, where engines were not meant to go, and 
 then paused abruptly in the attitude of a httle 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
 
 156 ADA CAMBRIDGE 
 
 the idea of such an appalling catastrophe as would make 
 history for the world. 
 
 Thouofh not a satirist — she does not hate 
 well enough to be that — Ada Cambridge has 
 occasionally a neat and forcible way of de- 
 scribing 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 wath.' 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 miMit 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
 
 ADA CAMBRIDGE 157 
 
 Sydney society, nothing delighted her more 
 than her opportunities of making the aristo- 
 cratic connection known. Her own oriofin 
 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 benevo- 
 lence 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 direc- 
 tion.' 
 
 His friend, Major Duff-Scott, 'an ex-
 
 158 ADA CAMBRIDGE 
 
 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.'
 
 [ 159 ] 
 
 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON. 
 
 The strongest note of Adam Lindsay Gordon's 
 poetry Is a personal one. When he represents 
 AustraHa best, he best represents his own 
 strikingf 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 con- 
 trolled his life, and in the end they wrecked 
 it. 
 
 That any man living an adventurous and 
 precarious life, often in rude associations and
 
 i6o ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 
 
 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 mh of the author is grenuine 
 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 gentle- 
 man 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 thino^s which his darinor and 
 
 o o
 
 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON i6i 
 
 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 stranoe 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. Thouirh his liking for horses 
 and the turf became a destroying passion, 
 
 1 1
 
 r62 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 
 
 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 dis- 
 appointment 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
 
 ADAM LINDSAY CORDON 163 
 
 curious predilection which made his company 
 in a riding party a somewhat exciting pleasure. 
 The day in 1868 when he won three steeple- 
 chases at Melbourne is still remembered ; 
 and at Mount Gambler, in South Australia, 
 a granite obelisk marks where once he leaped 
 his horse over a fence surmountino- the head- 
 land 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.'
 
 i64 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 
 
 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 tempera- 
 ment. 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
 
 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 165 
 
 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 wilful- 
 ness 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 inten- 
 tion, 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
 
 i66 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 
 
 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.
 
 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 167 
 
 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
 
 i68 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 
 
 to drift. Australia was attractive to him only 
 as a place of adventure, of freedom, of retire- 
 ment, 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 thouQ-ht 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 for- 
 gotten 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.
 
 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 169 
 
 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 EngHshman 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
 
 lyo ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 
 
 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 hos- 
 pitable 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
 
 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 171 
 
 years of their acquaintance in making the 
 merits of the soHtary 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 occa- 
 sionally 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
 
 172 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 
 
 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 conversa- 
 tion. 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 justifi-
 
 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 173 
 
 cation in a country where an Englishman of 
 good manners and behaviour need never 
 want congenial society. Gordon was ab- 
 normally proud, independent and sensitive : 
 an unfortunate disposition for anyone who 
 has his way to make in an imperfect world. 
 Such a man constantly misunderstands him- 
 self 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
 
 174 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 
 
 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 JNIelbourne, 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 
 Gambler, finding him presently settled as the 
 owner of a small estate in the district, made 
 him their representative in the Legislative
 
 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 175 
 
 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 uncer- 
 tainties of the turf, begin a series of mis- 
 fortunes 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
 
 176 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 
 
 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
 
 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON i77 
 
 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 
 
 12
 
 178 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 
 
 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 recol- 
 lections of English life, and, in a notable 
 instance, by one of the most memorable of 
 modern European wars. 
 
 In a dedication prefixed to the J^tis/i 
 Ballads, Gordon suggests some of the local 
 sources of his inspiration. He obviously 
 overstates his obligations to the country.
 
 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 179 
 
 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 Tenny- 
 son, Browning, and Swinburne, are not in 
 any sense Australian. 
 
 ' In the Spring, when the wattle gold trembles 
 
 'Twixt shadow and shine, 
 ^\'hen 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 B2is/i 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';
 
 i8o ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 
 
 the dramatic scenes from the ' Road to Aver- 
 nus ;' ' 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 ap- 
 proached by the best verse of Egerton War- 
 burton 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.
 
 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON i8i 
 
 * 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
 
 i82 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 
 
 of that shame at the exercise of the his/her 
 intelHg-ence 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 every- 
 body knew a couplet or two of " How we 
 beat the Favourite " that he consented to 
 forego his anonymity and appear in the un- 
 suspected 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 Fleming- 
 ton. Yet, it is Australian in the sense that it 
 expresses the one taste which, of all those in- 
 herited 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 hardi- 
 hood of the race. In one of his minor pieces 
 he vigorously affirms that
 
 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 183 
 
 ' If once we efface the joys of the chase 
 From the land, and out-root the Stud, 
 Goodbye 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 need- 
 lessly, 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 inter- 
 esting and a favourite if only through the 
 obvious fact that it describes in part some of 
 Gordon's own early life.
 
 i84 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 
 
 ' '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, j 
 
 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 famiHarity on the 
 part of the reader with all the details of the 
 story. It is too allusive. It is a description
 
 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 185 
 
 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 1S88 a short memoir of him, 
 entitled The Lmircatc of the Ccntaiirs (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
 
 i86 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 
 
 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 mis- 
 represented 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 com- 
 pared before an opinion can properly be 
 given on the point. That he was a doubter,
 
 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 187 
 
 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 transciency 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
 
 i88 ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 
 
 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 Uved 
 That frank, that open-hearted Hfe 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.'
 
 [ i89 J 
 
 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 ac- 
 ceptance at home through the circuitous 
 route of the press and the libraries of Great 
 Britain, but he was able to wait for his lono;- 
 delayed popularity, and when it came and 
 found him in advanced age, he had no
 
 I90 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 inclinacion 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 con- 
 tributed 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
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 191 
 
 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 Squatter s Dream, which is under- 
 stood to be partly autobiographical, he has 
 minutely recorded the varying fortunes of 
 pastoral life in the colonies. But the bitter- 
 ness 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.' 
 
 AbandoninQ- his ambition to rank with the 
 wool-kings, he entered the Civil Service 
 as a police magistrate and gold-fields com-
 
 192 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 missioner. 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 publica- 
 tion 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 
 Dozvns, the novel which, under the more 
 attractive title of T/ie Squatter s Drea)n, 
 reappeared in 1890 as a successor to the 
 famous bushranging story. That the spirited 
 opening chapters of Robbery itnder Arms 
 should have been thought lightly of by 
 Australian editors when the serial rights of 
 the story were offered to them is somewhat 
 astonishino;. The author has related how 
 these chapters were successively rejected by 
 a number of the leading journals, including 
 two of the best weeklies.
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 193 
 
 At length the manuscript was read by Mr. 
 Hugh George, manager of the Sydney 
 Morjiing 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.
 
 194 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 A writer with so much experience of 
 AustraHa, and continuing to reside in it, 
 cannot be surprised if he is expected to rake 
 a large share of responsibihty for the fact 
 that Austrahan fiction — the fiction produced 
 by writers known to the British pubhc — 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 Boldre- 
 wood's actual services to Australian literature. 
 It is hardly possible to believe that the 
 English people still prefer to look to Aus- 
 tralia only for stories of adventure ; but if 
 they do — and as the first to welcome and ap- 
 preciate colonial writers they are perhaps en- 
 titled to exercise a choice — it is well that such 
 stories be written from complete local know- 
 ledge, 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
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 195 
 
 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 Action, what- 
 ever 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 de- 
 clared that he would willingly exchange a 
 library full of the poets for a single good 
 novel of the period in which he was in-
 
 196 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 terested. One can readily imagine that if a 
 generation or two hence there should be any 
 Australian history left unwritten, any un- 
 satisfied curiosity concerning the simple 
 annals now so familiar to us, Rolf Boldre- 
 wood's novels might be found, within their 
 limits, a more satisfying source of infor- 
 mation 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 7/ie Miners Right, or with the 
 memorable account of what Starlight and
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 197 
 
 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 sHghter 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 un- 
 diso'uised around the oold ; in the hundred 
 and one personal combats and trials of cun- 
 ning ; in a desert peopled and cities thinned 
 by the magic of cupidity ; in a huge army 
 collected in ten thousand tents, not as hereto- 
 fore 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-
 
 198 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 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 su^ro-ested 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, uncon- 
 ventional colonial life upon fortune-seekers 
 and visitors from the mother country. This
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 199 
 
 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 him- 
 self 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 char- 
 acter. 
 
 Maud Stangrove in The Sqtiatters Dream, 
 and Antonia Frankston in The Colonial Re- 
 former, who seem to offer the best oppor- 
 tunities to typify Australian womanhood, are 
 gracefully described ; but, save for an occa- 
 sional 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 Robbejy 7inder 
 Arms. Aileen Marston has the strong self- 
 reliance and independence which are born of 
 the exigencies, as well as of the free life, of
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 the country. She and her brothers repre- 
 sent 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, per- 
 haps 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 con-
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 fessed 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 Anns and The Miners 
 Right. Giving rein to his passion for remin- 
 iscence 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 TJie 
 Romance of a Station. But the best contrast 
 to Boldrewood's style is furnished by the 
 author of Geoffry Hainlyn. 
 
 Henry KIngsley decided the movement of
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 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 Httle for 
 the externals of Australian life except in so 
 far as they helped to tell something, espe- 
 cially something good, of his leading per- 
 sonages. 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 promo- 
 tion 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.
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 203 
 
 Nearly ever}^thing 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 pre- 
 sented as a piece of station-life so much as a 
 picturesque means of leading Alice Brent- 
 wood into an involuntary display of her affec- 
 tion 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 sports- 
 men, 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
 
 204 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 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 manatuvring a frying- 
 pan,' he says, in allusion to the cheerful 
 adaptability of the high-bred Agnes Buckley, 
 that fine model of EnoHsh womanhood, 
 during her first rough experiences in Aus- 
 tralia. 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
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 205 
 
 work. In the later stones 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 char- 
 acters 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 Red- 
 grave, the hero of The S(juattei'''s Dreatu, 
 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
 
 2o6 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 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 
 hicjh stake and loses. His love for Maud 
 Stanpfrove, which mioht 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 clement of the ideal with which even
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 207 
 
 the sternest of the apostles of realism in 
 letters have found it impracticable to dis- 
 pense. 
 
 An illustration of how little Boldrevvood 
 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, chieily 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 du^ drink ?'
 
 2o8 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 The home of the Stangroves, thouo-h 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 matron- 
 hood. 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 out- 
 wardly 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 ar2:ument against Boldrewood's 
 usual treatment of character is furnished by 
 the great bushranger chief who is the central
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 209 
 
 figure in Robbery under Anns. The author 
 here submits for the first and only time to 
 that fiindamental law of fiction which 
 demands a certain judicious exaggeration in 
 the characters of a story depending for its 
 interest mainly on the charm of circum- 
 stance. 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 
 enougrh 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 at- 
 tractiveness of Gardiner (leader of a gang 
 which made a business of robbing gold- 
 
 14
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 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 Star- 
 light, 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 aristo- 
 cratic 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
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 211 
 
 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-steal- 
 ing 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, York- 
 shire, and Banda, Waroona and Ebor Downs, 
 N.S.W.,' while awaiting the arrival at Ade- 
 laide of the 1,100 head of stolen cattle, or 
 as the ' Hon. Frank Haughton,' one of 'the 
 three honourables * on the Turon orold-field. 
 The rash daring and cleverness of these dis- 
 guises furnish a combination of amusement 
 and dramatic interest not approached in any- 
 thing else that Boldrewood has written. 
 Starlight's presence at dinner with the gold- 
 fields commissioner and police magistrate at
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 Turon, when 'in walked Inspector Goring,' 
 the officer who had been so long and patiently 
 seeking him elsewhere, and his appearance 
 at Bella Barns' 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 fierce- 
 ness 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 plunder- 
 ing of the gold-escort is fully equal to the 
 traditional suavity of Claude Duval. ' Now, 
 then, all aboard !' he calls out to the pas- 
 sengers 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
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 213 
 
 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 Star- 
 light 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 house- 
 hold, 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 Falk- 
 land'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
 
 214 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 of the story, gave freedom to his imagination 
 in shaping the proportions of his leading 
 character. Starhght, 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 con- 
 tributor 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
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 215 
 
 (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 Moon- 
 light, 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 suogrestion afforded bv
 
 2i6 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 the bushranger's concealment of his identity. 
 When Starhght 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 disap- 
 pointed. The bushranger has given his last 
 messages, and is dying with some of the 
 indifference to existence which has char- 
 acterised him throughout the story. 
 
 ' I say, Morringer, do you remember the last pigeon- 
 match you and I shot in, at HurHngham?' 
 
 ' 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
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD zi' 
 
 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 ex- 
 ploits 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 inci- 
 dents 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 sub- 
 sequent exile — are made use of in the novel. 
 
 The narrative method adopted in Robbery
 
 2i8 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 iiJider 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 Hmitations imposed by the 
 choice of a narrator with no pretensions 
 to education or sentiment, and writino- 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 ver- 
 nacular, and the aspect, unrivalled in Aus- 
 tralian 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,
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 219 
 
 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 irre- 
 claimable 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 oppor- 
 tunity, 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 touch- 
 ing. The poor Marston boys are indeed only 
 half bad. Their better natures, seconded by 
 the influence of a oood mother and sister.
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 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 Robbeiy 
 under Anns 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 horse- 
 flesh combined to fill the gaols of the country, 
 and in later years this knowledge was con- 
 firmed 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
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 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 
 Manston'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 com- 
 peted with the police for the large rewards
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 oftered. 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 for- 
 gotten, 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 wider Arms. 
 
 I n The Miner s Ris'ht, which ranks second 
 in popularity among Boldrewood's novels, the 
 personal narrative style is again adopted, but
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 223 
 
 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 senti- 
 mental, 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 separa- 
 tion 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 dhioziement 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, m 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
 
 224 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 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 Here ward Pole 
 and Ruth Allerton — the vindication of a 
 mans honour and the triumph of a woman's 
 invincible devotion — they are told with so 
 much intimate knowledofe and strenorth 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 some- 
 thing 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
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 225 
 
 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 T/ie 
 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 autho- 
 rity to be believed on the subject. In Robbery 
 u?ider Arms the names are given of thirty 
 races represented on the Turon field, and 
 Hereward Pole, recounting his early impres- 
 sions of Yatala, says : ' I was never done 
 wondering of what struck me as the chief 
 characteristic of this great army of adven- 
 turers 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 ob- 
 served 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 
 
 15
 
 226 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 of what he saw at Turon is worth reproducing 
 here as characteristic of the author's repre- 
 sentation of a gold-fields community and as 
 a sample of his humour. The ' three 
 honourables,' of whom the disguised bush- 
 ranger 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
 
 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 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.' 
 
 'AH 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 Des- 
 pard, 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 Eaglc- 
 kaivk, the shortest of all his works, might 
 have been an excerpt from T/ic Miner s 
 Rigid ; and the scene of The Crooked Stick 
 is an inland station in New South Wales in 
 the days of bushranging- and disastrous 
 droutrhts. 
 
 The materials employed in the latter story 
 reproduce the principal features of almost a
 
 228 ROLF BOLDREWOOD 
 
 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 influ- 
 ence upon her of a fascinating and gentle- 
 manly Englishman, with aristocratic connec- 
 tions 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 evi- 
 dent 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.
 
 [ 229 ] 
 
 MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED. 
 
 To Mrs. Campbell Praed belongs the credit 
 of being the first to attempt to give an ex- 
 tended 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 Jacob- 
 sens Chance, for example — might fairly be 
 named as an answer to the somewhat common 
 complaint of a deficiency of dramatic sug- 
 gestion 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
 
 230 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 
 
 passions of the personages concerned are 
 identical with those which might readily 
 present themselves upon a European stage, 
 but which directly and indirectly are influ- 
 enced 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 criti- 
 cism, 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
 
 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 231 
 
 fully than any other writer the little affecta- 
 tions 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
 
 232 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 
 
 a newly-arrived Governor — a musical enthu- 
 siast — 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 criti- 
 cism 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 English- 
 man 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 strono- and of real merit 
 in the independent life of the nation. 
 
 Colonists need a little more of the philo- 
 sophic and common-sense spirit which can
 
 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 233 
 
 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 Aus- 
 tralian. There is rarely anything so pointed 
 as the conversation between Miss Jacobsen 
 and her lover, Chepstowe. The former has 
 been wondering what the cultivated English- 
 man 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
 
 234 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 
 
 think too much of ourselves, and for that reason too 
 little about ourselves. You are always thinking some- 
 body 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. VVe have some public men at home who 
 are rude and rough, and vulgar and ridiculous. . . . 
 One has to make allowances, of course, for traming 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 
 fopj-et, is the mark of insio^nificance. 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 any- 
 thing beyond their own shores.
 
 MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED 235 
 
 A much commoner element of Antipodean 
 life, one which some of Mrs. Praed's char- 
 acters notably illustrate, is the desire for 
 wider experience and culture produced among 
 educated people by their constant use of 
 British and European literature. James Fer- 
 guson, 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 com- 
 panions 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 de- 
 tected, of acquaintance with the thing in 
 question by means of books rather than per- 
 sonal experience.' In Mrs. Praed's stories,
 
 236 MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED 
 
 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 sur- 
 roundings of a head station furnish materials 
 for bright little sketches immediately asso- 
 ciated 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
 
 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 237 
 
 at Kooralbyn, stray shafts of sunlight impart- 
 ing a warm chestnut tint to her hair, a trail- 
 ing 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.
 
 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 
 
 The hardships suggested by the beginnings 
 of pastoral hfe amid the giant forests and 
 intense loneHness of Austraha are never 
 allowed by Mrs. Praed to give a gloomy 
 colour to her stories. It is one of their dis- 
 tinct merits that they present the humorous 
 incongruities rather than the trials of pioneer- 
 ing, though the latter are by no means 
 ignored. In the first three chapters of T/ie 
 Romance of cc Station some excellent humour 
 is provided by the young bride's account of 
 her home-coming to the rude mansion on her 
 husband's 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 — includino- a lizard with an un- 
 canny habit of ' unfastening its tail and making 
 off on its stump when pursued ' — rivals the 
 famous verandah scene in Geoff ry IJamlyit. 
 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
 
 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 239 
 
 are the sketches of the aristocratic settlers in 
 Policy and Passion and Otitlaw and Laiv- 
 makcr who try to apply the principles of 
 Destheticism 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 gentle- 
 man 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
 
 240 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 
 
 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 Jacobseiis Chance, and elsewhere. Her 
 description in the former story of the wealthy 
 landowners, who adopt a passive and some- 
 what 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 Aus- 
 tralia,' 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 ot 
 colonial life that Mrs. Praed has expended 
 her best efforts as a writer. Some study of
 
 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 241 
 
 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 common- 
 place, 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 pre- 
 vailing 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 
 
 16
 
 242 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 
 
 either allowed to triumph, or is placed by 
 death beyond the possibility of a supreme 
 test. In the loves of Hester Muroatroyd 
 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 anoma- 
 lies, 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.
 
 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 243 
 
 The most striking illustration of this 
 feature is probably contained in the last 
 scenes of T/ie 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 com-
 
 244 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 
 
 promise. 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 re- 
 spectability, 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 mis- 
 creant. 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 o^iven later on when 
 she realized the full extent to which she had 
 been self-deluded : ' I am not eoino- 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 char-
 
 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 245 
 
 acter. As in her illustrations of the per- 
 plexing uncertainties of married life it is the 
 woman's point of view that is most impres- 
 sively 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, plea- 
 surable 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 in- 
 competence 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
 
 246 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 
 
 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 hio^her 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 sym- 
 pathy with her native surroundings, and un- 
 provided with any employment for her mental 
 energies. With the distractions and interests 
 of her narrow circle exhausted, and the know- 
 ledge 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
 
 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 247 
 
 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 livin"; unless one can 
 gauge one's capacity for sensation ?' Gretta 
 Reay, in whom the same discontent is repro- 
 duced, 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 emancipa- 
 tion 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 ?'
 
 248 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 
 
 The heroine of Outlaw and Lawrnakei' 
 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 Lonsfleat. 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 our- 
 selves 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
 
 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 249 
 
 marriage, are not more permanently charac- 
 teristic of the women of AustraHa than of 
 EngHshwomen with equal opportunities. The 
 impulses of the former are under few conven- 
 tional restraints ; they have a greater control 
 of their lives : that is the only material dif- 
 ference, 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 pre- 
 ference of sentiment in which self-interest 
 and prudence are scarcely considered. 
 
 Even Weeta Wilson, the professional 
 beauty so strikingly portrayed in T/ie 
 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
 
 250 MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED 
 
 ludicrous ; she had been guarded and nur- 
 tured 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 ot 
 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, 
 aorain, in the interview with Frederica Bar-
 
 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 251 
 
 nadine, 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 reg^ard, 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 o-races 
 
 O 
 
 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 inevit- 
 ably tends to produce an appearance of weak- 
 ness and effeminacy. 
 
 There is hardly a single admirable quality 
 in Harrington, the base lover of Honoria
 
 252 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 
 
 Longleat ; or in George Brand, who deserts 
 Esther Hagart in her poverty and loneHness, 
 and years afterwards, on finding her recog- 
 nised as the niece of an EngHsh 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 aban- 
 doning 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 de- 
 veloped 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 repre- 
 sentatives of any conceivable type of the
 
 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 253 
 
 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 vary- 
 ing strength and foibles, its tenderness and 
 honour. Where there has not seemed any 
 necessity to bend the character to the re- 
 quirements of the story, admirably life-like 
 sketches of men have been produced — such 
 as Rolf Luard in CJiristina Chard and 
 Bernard Comyn in An Attstralian 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 in- 
 terest in proportion as they themselves lack 
 the polish that travel and extended experi- 
 ence of social life impart, she has not over- 
 looked the rugged dignity, the truth and 
 virility, which are their highest character- 
 istics. Alluding to Ferguson as one type 
 of his country, she observes that, ' under- 
 lying the rough-and-ready manners and the 
 prosaic routine of bush-life, there is an old-
 
 254 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 
 
 world chivalry, a reverence for women, a 
 purity of thought, a delicacy of sentiment. 
 . . . This is partly due to the breezy moral 
 atmosphere, and pardy 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 vulgar- 
 isms and shallow conceits ; but all the deeper 
 thoughts, the poetry of life, which appeal to 
 the soul, he has made his own.' 
 
 Ferofuson 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 knight- 
 hood that isn't earned by sauntering through 
 life in a graceful, smiling sort of way, with 
 your heart in your hand, but in simplicity
 
 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 255 
 
 and faith ; by love of one woman, and rever- 
 ence 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 accept- 
 ance 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
 
 256 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 
 
 with the vivid tragedies of mistaken unions. 
 An inclination towards humorous disdain 
 characterizes the references in the stories 
 to conjugal relations of the ordinarily satis- 
 factory 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 indiffer- 
 ence ; an uncouth parent offering rough sym- 
 pathy that irritates instead of soothes ; a 
 sensitive girl writhing under the brutalities 
 or gauckeries of a drunken father. 
 
 A survey of the author's female characters 
 will recall over a score of names of discon- 
 tented girls experimenting in life — flirts, 
 minxes, unhappy wives, and shallow society 
 women ; while after passing over half a dozen 
 of the ingdnue, the amusing and the neutral 
 types, there remain only about four to repre- 
 sent 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
 
 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 2 si 
 
 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 Eno-lish 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 sensa- 
 tions, not of our actions.' The same view 
 is expressed in an article contributed by Mrs. 
 Praed to the JVorih American Review in 
 1890. 'Analysis, not action,' she notes as 
 the prevailing characteristic of the fiction 
 
 17
 
 258 MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED 
 
 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 
 Jacobsens Chance we have her liveliest
 
 MRS. CAMPBELL PR A ED 259 
 
 example of humour and caricature, in T/ie 
 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.
 
 [ 26o ] 
 
 TASMA. 
 
 Between the writers who profess not to 
 see anything individual in the Hfe of Aus- 
 traha and those others who confine them- 
 selves to describing a few of its principal 
 scenes and types of character, Tasma holds a 
 middle and independent place. She is abso- 
 lutely 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 An- 
 tipodes or elsewhere. So little are some of 
 her novels concerned with the external ap- 
 pearances 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
 
 TASMA 261 
 
 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 Aus- 
 tralia. Her novels are, moreover, all char- 
 acter 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
 
 262 TASMA 
 
 has much of George EHot'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 dia- 
 logue than scores of others who have followed 
 the same model during the last seventy years. 
 
 Like most of the chief contributors to Aus- 
 tralian literature, Tasma is a colonist in ex- 
 perience 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 Melbotirne 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 aii 
 occasional visitor. Becoming interested in 
 social questions during a residence in France, 
 she wrote in the Nouvelle Revue, suggesting
 
 TASMA 263 
 
 emigration to the colonies and engagement 
 in the fruit-growing industry there as a means 
 of reheving 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 success- 
 ful 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 dis- 
 tinguished Belgian politician and journalist 
 (he has since died), and four years later 
 began her career as a novelist by the pub- 
 lication 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
 
 264 TASMA 
 
 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 em- 
 bodied 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 oiant 
 had hewn a great lump out of the earth and 
 put it under a glass case, with all its in- 
 habitants 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 re- 
 minds the reader in this first story. The
 
 TASMA 265 
 
 character of the w t-sHthy />arve/m uncle, sensi- 
 tive, boastful, resentful, and obstinate, yet 
 tender-hearted as a child, irresistibly recalls 
 St/as Laphain, that wonderfully natural and 
 sympathetic presentment of a commonplace 
 man. There are numerous points of resem- 
 blance between the two, especially when they 
 are shown contrasted with their aristocratic 
 friends. The delightful comradeship of Lap- 
 ham 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 con- 
 tempt 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 sur- 
 vives 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
 
 266 TASMA 
 
 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 
 dialooue. 
 
 Readers of S77as LapJiam 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 inter-
 
 TASMA 267 
 
 viewer. Uncle Piper, on the other hand, is 
 introduced, as all of Tasma's characters are, 
 in sundry solid-looking pages of direct narra- 
 tive. It is true that their humour and epi- 
 gram make bright reading, but they are neces- 
 sarily without the power of pithy dialogue 
 to create a vivid impression of character. 
 
 Whether Uncle Piper is a type of Aus- 
 tralian plutocracy need hardly be discussed. 
 Of plebeian tradesmen grown wealthy every 
 community has its proportion. It may, how- 
 ever, 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 mag- 
 nate 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, T/ie Penance
 
 268 TASMA 
 
 of Po7'tia 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 habitu^ 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 in- 
 fluences 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
 
 TASMA 269 
 
 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 /ofid, 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 vocabu- 
 lary 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 ' hofisch ' English, and 
 the English that has been coined out of entirely new 
 conditions by pioneers and backwoodsmen. Suffice it 
 to say there t's 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 Ken- 
 sington house. 
 
 Tasma's efforts to give variety to her work, 
 and keep as far as possible out of the beaten 
 paths of the Austrahan writer, have not, how- 
 ever, quite excluded from her novels char- 
 acters which will be recognised as typical. 
 There is, for instance, the young pleasure-
 
 270 TASMA 
 
 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 /n Her Earliest YoutJi. 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, not- 
 withstanding the needless agonies of rage he 
 occasions his father.
 
 TASMA 271 
 
 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
 
 272 TASMA 
 
 wealth was bad enough, but Uncle Piper was 
 determined that it should not become a closer 
 one. Was this not one reason for his impor- 
 tation of an entire family of impoverished 
 relatives, that they and his little pet daughter, 
 the angelic Louey, should readjust the balance 
 ot 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, specu- 
 lated 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 com- 
 posed 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
 
 TASMA 273 
 
 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. (ieorge looked like any club-lounger — not un- 
 willing 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 con- 
 veyed 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 un- 
 ruffled 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 father s 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 expres- 
 
 18
 
 274 
 
 TASMA 
 
 sion 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 an) thing 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
 
 TASMA ?.-]s 
 
 for his father,' George never betrayed that he felt humi- 
 liated by so much as the twitching of an eyelid. Persis- 
 tently 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 suppress- 
 ing 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-coloured patches ; and rushed back again with a
 
 2 76 TASMA 
 
 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 — si'sfer ?' 
 
 ' 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 sis/er /' 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 !' 
 
 ' V^ou 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
 
 TASMA 277 
 
 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 /;z //ej^ Earliest 
 Yo7ith, 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
 
 278 TASMA 
 
 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 pos- 
 sessor.' 
 
 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 un- 
 limited money, and the desirable qualifica- 
 tions 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
 
 TASMA 279 
 
 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 
 JVot 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
 
 28o TASMA 
 
 romping childhood at the opening of A/'o^ 
 Counting the Cost. The scene is a farm in 
 the shadow of Mount Welhngton, 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 Yozitk, 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, 
 raisinof his grarden hat. ' You are an ac- 
 quaintance 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 
 P>ppie to Silas Marner ; she is a continual 
 negotiator of peace in his divided house, and
 
 TASMA 281 
 
 ' 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 testa- 
 mentary inclinations.' In her limited know- 
 ledge 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
 
 282 TASMA 
 
 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 un- 
 usually 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 con- 
 tains. 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 diffi- 
 cult 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
 
 TASMA 283 
 
 her, iind 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. V^ery 
 sympathetic and entertaining is the narrative, 
 in JVo^ CoiLiiting 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 Fenaiice 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 luxu- 
 riating 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
 
 284 TASMA 
 
 their ancestors, together with suitable coats 
 of arms. 
 
 True, Piper is not a name of much promise, but there 
 /lad 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 docu- 
 ment 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 pro- 
 voking obtuseness and indifference concern- 
 ing 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,
 
 TASMA 285 
 
 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. ' T//ey 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 intro- 
 ducing 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
 
 286 TASMA 
 
 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 on- 
 looker could have supposed for an instant that he had 
 come, with the whole of his family, in an entirely desti- 
 tute 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 cordiali- 
 ties from people you esteem. . . . 
 
 * You're welcome, sir,' said Mr. Piper. 
 
 Then there was a pause, during which Mrs. Cavendish 
 wiped her eyes, and ]\Ir. Piper said very heartily, 'You're 
 welcome, the lot of you.'
 
 TASMA 287 
 
 Cavendish is the only character that the 
 author has treated in a consistently farcical 
 vein. Eila Frost's canting old father-in-law 
 in 7W/ 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 com- 
 patible 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 presenta- 
 tion 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
 
 288 TASMA 
 
 dramatic interest is fully compensated for 
 by their more than usually faithful sketches 
 of both men and women, and by their inti- 
 mate and sympathetic view of our common 
 life. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD. 
 
 G., C. if Co.
 
 
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