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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'As a type of our chivalry.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



ROLF BOLDREWOOD.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other nodded.

He smiled just like his old self.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



TASMA.

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

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

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

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

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