Chapter 9

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.