Chapter III: Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had been prepared for this. She knew her duty well, for her
father had often told her what to do. No tears! no hysterics! She
took Sam's hand without a word, and, placing her fairy foot upon his
boot, vaulted up into the saddle before him.... They crossed the
river, and dismounting, they led the tired horse up the steep 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 Widderin's head in his breast, blindfolding him with his
coat, for should he neigh now they were undone indeed! As the
bushrangers approached, the horse began to get uneasy and paw the
ground, putting Sam in such an agony of terror that the sweat rolled
down his face. In the midst of this he felt a hand on his arm, and
Alice's voice, which he scarcely recognised, said in a fierce
whisper: 'Give me one of your pistols, sir!'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ADA CAMBRIDGE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I am sure you would,' said Hannah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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