Chapter IV: Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ADAM LINDSAY GORDON.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'As a type of our chivalry.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROLF BOLDREWOOD.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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