[p131]ADA CAMBRIDGE.

[p131]ADA CAMBRIDGE.Towardsthe close of 1890 the Australian booksellers—a cautious, conservative class in their attitude towards new fiction, especially that produced by the adventurous female writer of these latter days—began to display so marked an interest in the work of Ada Cambridge, that one not acquainted with the circumstances of the case might have credited them with a friendly—possibly a patriotic—desire to give due place to a newly-risen native genius. And when, in the following year, another story from the same pen appeared, the popularity of the author was firmly established.The neat red volumes were on every stall; the Mudie of Melbourne gave them a place of honour in his show-window, and[p132]the leading critical review said that the second story possessed a charm which ought to induce even the person who ignored fiction on principle to make an exception in its favour. It was the kind of gratifying recognition that the public always believes itself eager to offer the deserving young writer. Yet Ada Cambridge’s literary work had extended over no less a period than fifteen years. Of course, much of this delay in securing recognition might have been avoided. Probably in England she could have won a substantial reputation in a third of the time, and with half the labour expended by her in contributing to the Australian press. But, as the wife of a country clergyman, she had other matters besides literature to occupy her attention, and was content to write when there happened to be leisure for it, and to see her work in a few of the leading colonial newspapers.About half a dozen novels were issued in this way, besides occasional articles and poems. The publication of the longer stories in theAustralasian, a high-class weekly[p133]journal, ought in itself to have made a name for the author, and possibly would have done so, were they not in most cases so obviously a local product, and therefore not to be seriously considered. It was a repetition of the experience of Rolf Boldrewood. In the end, as usual, it was the English public that first accepted her novels for what they were worth.Ada Cambridge is a native of Norfolk, the lonely fens and quaint villages of which are a picturesque background of some of her best stories. In 1870, shortly after her marriage, she went with her husband, the Rev. George Frederick Cross, a clergyman of the Church of England, to Wangaratta, in Victoria. After residing successively in several other country towns of this colony, they settled in 1893 at Williamstown, a waterside suburb of Melbourne.A novel entitledUp the Murray, dealing with life in the colonies, was published by Ada Cambridge (the author continues to issue her work under her maiden name) in the Melbourne press in 1875. Others of the[p134]same character followed at irregular intervals. Two were issued in book-form by a London firm of publishers, but did not attain to much more than a library circulation.When the author again came before the English public, it was with a novel in which the purely Australian interest was rigidly subordinated to dramatic quality and a richly sympathetic study of character.A Marked Manis the story of a younger son of an old English county family who, while sharing the pride and indomitable spirit of his ancestry, develops a hatred for conventional prejudices and religious cant, and, after making a final assertion of independence by marrying a farmer’s daughter, emigrates to New South Wales to establish a name and fortune on his own account.The first half of the action takes place in England, the remainder in the colonies. The natural beauties surrounding the home of the Delavels at Sydney are not less delicately and poetically described than the village life they have left behind in the mother country—the patriarchal rule of an old-fashioned,[p135]rather pompous house, over a people retaining the hereditary respect of vassals for their feudal lord; but the view given of Australian society is, in keeping with the relation to it of Richard Delavel and his household, of the slightest kind.Delavel and the only daughter whom he has trained to be his second self, whose comradeship makes him almost forget the long-drawn thraldom of his earlymésalliance, live in a world so much and so necessarily their own, that one is grateful for the good taste which excluded from it the bustle and commoner interests of colonial life. The novel met with general, and in several instances cordial, favour in England, and since then the author has yearly increased her reputation.Three out of five of the later novels are, likeA Marked Man, made comparatively independent of the distinctively local interest to which we have been accustomed in the works of most Australian authors. It is not possible, for example, to point out anything in the shape of an essentially local first cause[p136]for any of the principal incidents ofNot All in VainandA Marriage Ceremony. The passionate half-brute, Neil Hammond, who pursues the heroine of the former story across the world, and terrorises her with his unwelcome attentions, would have met a violent death, or himself have murdered someone, in his own country or elsewhere as inevitably as in Australia; and the man who killed him would not have found Katherine Knowles less faithful during the long years of his imprisonment had her sacrifice been under the daily observation of Hammond’s family and her own strait-laced aunts in their East Norfolk home.InA Marriage Ceremony, the only advantage secured by taking the story from London to Melbourne—instead of to New York, let us say—seems to lie in whatever added strength the sense of greater distance imparts to the temporary appearance of a final separation between Betty Ochiltree and her strangely-wedded husband. The marriage that was a condition of their inheritance having been performed, bride and[p137]bridegroom part in accordance with a previous agreement. The former reappears as a prominent figure in the society of modern Melbourne—the Melbourne of 1893, when the failure of banks and land companies was a regular subject of morning news.Here, it might be supposed, was an opportunity for one or two vivid and instructive sketches of the sensational period that witnessed the proof of so much folly and its punishment, and wrought so many more effects on all classes of Australian society than could be noted in the common records of the time. But the great crisis is almost ignored in the novel. There are merely a few passing references to its progress, and a mention of the loss on the part of Mrs. Ochiltree of some of the wealth which she is beginning to regard as having been rather spuriously acquired.Even the very successful story of theThree Miss KingsandA Mere Chancetell little of the city life of Australia, though their action is placed in it almost exclusively. The latter is a tale of match-making intrigue[p138]and money-worship in Toorak, but the main interest of the plot apart, the account of fashionable Melbourne is a singularly colourless one. As for Mrs. Duff-Scott and her Major, the amiable pair who in the character of leaders of Melbourne society undertake to find husbands for Elizabeth King and her sisters, and whose benevolent intentions are so effectually forestalled, they are as conventionally English as though they belonged to the pages of Miss Braddon or Mrs. Henry Wood.Again, though during half ofFideliswe are given occasional impressive and delightful glimpses of Nature under southern skies, the principal characters are English, and in England is centred first and last the dominant pathos of the story. A complete absence of dialect from the novels helps to emphasise the author’s slender use of extraneous aids to interest.The influence of Ada Cambridge’s twenty-five years’ Australian experience is shown in her general outlook upon life, rather than in the details of her work. The prevailing tone of[p139]her books is one of marked cheerfulness, sincerity, and simplicity; she has a hearty dislike for conventional stupidities, especially for the mock-modesty that stifles honest sentiment; and she gives emphatic endorsement to the pleasant dictum (which seems so much more feasible in sunny Australia than in colder northern lands) that the second half of life is not less fruitful and satisfying than the first.As the general effect of Ada Cambridge’s teaching, so far as it can be gathered from her plots, and the few instances in which she has permitted herself anything in the shape of didactic expression, is to make us more patient with life’s complexities and perceptive of its compensations, and more content with whatever happiness may be drawn in our way by the chain of accidents called Destiny, so do her principal characters, in their foibles and their strength—in the little acts and impulses which qualify alike their heroism and their baseness—tend to make us more discriminative and charitable.In almost every case they are strong[p140]studies from some point of view. Of deliberate analysis there is very little; but there are numerous realistic touches not commonly admitted in fiction, which, handled with skill and insight, keep the character within the pale of common experience and increase rather than alienate the reader’s sympathy. Thus, Richard Delavel’s outburst of relief upon the death of his first wife, so far from being vulgar and brutal, as it might have seemed in other circumstances, recalls and emphasises the high sense of duty and honour and the iron self-restraint which had enabled him to be in all essentials a good husband for twenty-five years to a cold-hearted creature, between whom and himself there had never been either common interest or feeling, and for whose sake he had relinquished the woman that would have been his real mate in intellect and sympathy. Delavel’s housekeeper, who is also a privileged friend, takes him to task for his unseemly hurry to go in search of this old love before his wife had been a week in her grave. He makes no secret of his relief. ‘The[p141]sense that I am free is turning my brain with joy,’ he confesses.‘I say it because I feel it. I am aware that it is in very bad taste, but that doesn’t make it the less true. Do you suppose people are never glad when their relations die? They are—very often; they can’t help it; only they pretend they are not, because it seems so shocking. I don’t pretend—at least, I need not pretend to you. The fault is not always—not all—on the side of the survivors, Hannah. I don’t think I am any worse than those who pretend a grief that they don’t feel. I was never unkind to her—never in my life, that I can remember. I did not kill her; I would have kept her alive as long as I possibly could. I think—I hope—that if I could have saved her by the sacrifice of my own life, I should have done it without a single moment’s hesitation.’‘I am sure you would,’ said Hannah.‘But,’ he continued, with that unwonted fire blazing in his eyes, ‘since dead she is, Iamglad—I am, I am! I am glad as a man who has been kept in prison is to be let out. It is not my fault; I would be sorry if I could. Some day, Hannah—some day, when we have been dust for a few hundred years—perhaps for a few score only—people will wake up to see how stupid it is to drive a man to be glad when his wife is dead. They are finding out so many things; they will find that out too in time.’Probably it will still appear to many that Delavel’s admission was at least indelicate[p142]and inconsistent with his chivalrous nature. It is not here possible to convey an adequate impression of his fiery spirit, his long heart-hunger, and the magnitude of the loss which a wholly uncongenial marriage must ever mean to such a man. When the full story of his life and that of his quietly ‘implacable’ wife is read, his conduct seems natural and excusable. It is as much a part of himself as the tremulous tenderness with which he ministers to the comfort of the frail Constance Bethune, after finding and bringing her home, or as his fierce grief when she dies.Another very human spectacle that illustrates the author’s method is the reunion of Betty and Rutherford Ochiltree—the frank selfishness of their mutual joy while the poor woman who had been an unconscious barrier between them lies dead under their roof. It is a somewhat painful episode, and precludes anything like high esteem for Rutherford, but it has the quality of intense actuality.In like manner is Adam Drewe shorn of some of the merit of his devotion to the heroine ofFidelisby being shown in[p143]successive attachments to other women during his long exile in Australia. The author recognises that, ‘the laws of literary romance being so much at variance with the laws of Nature,’ Adam is certain to suffer in the reader’s good opinion for having ‘continued to hunger for feminine sympathy as well as his daily dinner.’ No doubt his stature as a hero lessens when it appears that though the absent Fidelia was ever in his thoughts, and a daily source of inspiration to him as a writer, he twice narrowly escaped marriage—first with a servant girl at his lodgings, and afterwards with the daughter of his landlady—and that at another period of his colonial life he became involved in a disreputable kind of Bohemianism. But he is not disgraced by these lapses to the extent that the author anticipates; at all events, they make him more human than he could otherwise have been.It is this power of infusing a robust humanity into her characters that makes the distinctive feature of Ada Cambridge’s best novels. In each, whatever the quality of the[p144]plot, there are always two or three personages who talk and act as real men and women do—now rationally or in obedience to custom, now passionately or with that perversity which, as the author once describes it, ‘is like a natural law, independent of other laws, the only one that persistently defies our calculations.’ They are mostly big people with big appetites. The beauty of the women is the beauty of mind and of sound physical health.Susy Delavel was tall, well grown, straight and graceful, with an intelligent, eager face, though ‘her mouth was large, her nose not all it should have been, and her complexion showed the want of parasols and veils.’ She was ‘not handsome at all, but decidedly attractive.’Sarah French, the girl inFideliswhose comeliness so nearly drew the hero from his old allegiance, has ‘a strong and good, rather than a pretty, face,’ with a ‘large and substantial figure.’ Adam Drewe concluded on first sight of her that she was a nice woman. Later on he finds her ‘looking the very[p145]incarnation of home, with her cheerful healthy face, her strong busy hands, her neat hair, her neat dress…. She might have sat for a statue of Motherhood—of Charity with a babe at her ample breast, and others clinging to her supporting hand; Nature had so evidently intended her to play the part.’Katherine Knowles has fine physical symmetry and a strong, frank face. While lacking ‘the airs and graces, the superficial brightness, of conventional girlhood,’ she is ‘singularly vivid in her more substantial way.’Betty Ochiltree’s beauty, too, is of the kind that wears well. She has a face ‘frank and spirited, firm of mouth and chin, kind and sweet, as honest as the day,’ surmounting an ample body, and she carries herself with dignity, ‘as few Australian girls can do.’ And how impressive and consistent with her character is the noble, placid figure of Elizabeth King, ‘perfect in proportion, fine in texture, full of natural dignity and ease!’The author is fond of showing the attractiveness of such women at the age of thirty,[p146]or even more. ‘In real life,’ she once observes, ‘the supremely interesting woman is not a girl of eighteen, as she is in fiction. Every man worth calling a man knows that. A girl of that age … knows as much about love as does a young animal in the spring, and not a bit more. And the human male of these days—so highly developed, so subtly compounded—has grown out of the stage when that much would satisfy him. I mean, of course, the human male who in real life answers to the hero in fiction—a man who must have left, not only his teens, but his twenties behind him.’When one comes to the heroes, it is easy to recall half a dozen commanding figures who blunder in the most natural and amiable manner in their affairs; who think a good deal more of their immediate personal comforts than of religious or ethical abstractions; who like their own way and try to get it; who, in short, are mostly what the author wishes them to appear—‘the men out of books that we meet every day.’ Of little men, in the physical sense, there are only[p147]two of any importance, but even these are virile and masterful. A general aim of the stories would seem to be to show the sexes what each chiefly admires in the other. It is first a sort of apotheosis of themens sana in corpore sano, and after that an illustration of the independent attractions of sympathy, gentleness, culture, and high character.Though in most cases the strongest attachments are formed between men and women arrived at an age to discriminate beyond mere physical charm, nevertheless physical charm is the most powerful, though not always acknowledged, motive of their choice. ‘Because of this,’ says the pathetic Hilda Donne inA Marriage Ceremony, touching her cheek, which is terribly disfigured by a birth-mark, ‘I have never hadlove. Can you think what that means? You can’t. Once I thought I was not going to be quite shut out—once; but I was mistaken. I have found out that it is for one’s body that one is loved, and not for one’s soul.’Hilda unconsciously exaggerates, for it appears that Rutherford Hope, though at[p148]first affected with disgust by her disfigurement, and convinced that no healthy man could consort with ‘so unnatural a woman,’ had come at last to regard her as a possible wife—before he was confronted with the sudden temptation to secure a fortune by wedding Betty Ochiltree, in compliance with the conditions of her millionaire uncle’s will. Yet Hilda’s comment is substantially sound. Even Rutherford, with all the sense of his mature years, and all the culture that enabled him to appreciate her poetic gift, would have had to argue himself into a marriage with her.The ugliness of Adam Drewe, from which his mother turned in disgust at his birth, and which in youth drove him across the seas in an agony of sensitiveness from the woman he loved, was a less serious affliction than that of Hilda Donne; but we know that he continued to be keenly reminded of its disadvantages long after time had proved the sterling qualities of his manhood, lessened his deformity, and brought him fame and wealth.[p149]Compared with the previous illustration, however, his case is at fault in failing to give a sufficient description of his deformity. But that he himself long thought it an insuperable bar to his happiness is clear. When he fell in love with Fidelia Plunket, she was temporarily blind. His affection for her was returned, and he knew it, but dreading the disillusionment that would ensue when her sight was restored, he fled to Australia and determined to abandon all thought of her as a wife. Urged to return, because ‘when a womanisa woman,’ and really in love with a man, ‘there’s no camel she won’t swallow for him,’ Drewe replied that his camel was just the one camel that no woman had been known to swallow, or, at any rate, to digest. And he remained—for twenty years.The plots of Ada Cambridge’s novels are of the episodical order, and the author, despite her openly-expressed scorn for the unnaturalness of the average conventional novel, has not disdained employment of some of its time-honoured methods. Occasionally she is at pains to explain the feasibility of[p150]coincidences employed to secure dramatic interest. They are certainly never of an impossible kind, and no one would deny the truism that real life abounds in them. But has not a distinguished writer aptly pointed out that there are matters in which fiction cannot compete with life? As a rule, however, where a few such weaknesses exist, they do not count for much with the average reader when the principal scenes are as finely drawn as those inA Marked ManorFidelis, orThe Three Miss Kings. The latter story in some details puts a greater strain upon the credulity than any of the other novels, yet so well conceived and absolutely natural are the characters of the three girls, and so humorously and pictorially presented the chief incidents in their development, that the dubious points of the plot become almost insignificant. The qualities of the novel as a whole are similar to those which obscure the artistic defects ofGeoffry Hamlyn, and which for thirty-seven years have made it one of the most popular of Australian stories.[p151]In the presentation of tragic or pathetic incidents lies Ada Cambridge’s chief power, as far as her plots are concerned. InA Marked Manit is accompanied by her highest achievements in portraying a variety of well-contrasted character.Fidelis, which opens at the Norfolk village of the earlier novel, and reintroduces the Delavels, contains fewer developed characters, as may also be said ofA Marriage Ceremony. But the three novels are equal in the high standard of their emotional quality. No quotation of moderate size could do justice to any of the principal scenes ofA Marked Man: the chivalrous sacrifice of Richard Delavel’s youthful marriage; the inward repentance of it for twenty-two years; the revival of his love for Constance Bethune; his painful anxiety for her health, hungry enjoyment of her companionship, and anguish at her death; and his own death soon afterwards. In the more briefly detailed tragedy that brings into such striking relief the sprightly drama ofA Marriage Ceremony, there is a scene giving a fair example of the author’s style in[p152]touching passages. When Hilda, deeply in love with Rutherford Hope, hears of his union with another woman, she takes the readiest means of effacing herself by suddenly marrying a shallow coxcomb who seeks her for mercenary reasons, and going with him to Australia. Years afterwards she is so affected by the sudden reappearance of Rutherford, and by subsequent ill-treatment received from her jealous husband, that an exhausting illness follows, and to save herself from insanity she commits suicide. Meanwhile the long separation of Rutherford and Betty Ochiltree, which began on the day of their marriage, is coming to an end, and Hilda’s death removes the final impediment. Together they pay a last visit to the dead woman:Incapable of speech, he lifted a tress of hair—flowing free over the rigid arms, because it was really pretty, and thus had to be made the most of—and pressed it a moment to his bearded mouth. In that gesture he seemed to ask her forgiveness for having been a man like other men, as Nature made them.‘Kissher,’ Betty whispered, pushing him a little. She, too, felt that it would be something, if not much,[p153]to put to the account that was so frightfully ill-balanced—a kiss from Rutherford before all was wholly over.He stooped and laid his lips—scarcely laid them—on the waxen forehead. And he thought how he had nearly kissed her once, in the scented spring dusk, at her father’s gate, and been repelled at the last moment by the thought of something that he could not see…. He turned back the sheet and straightened it, and nobody but hired undertakers had anything more to do with Hilda Donne. He put out the lamps, leaving her in the dark, which, as a living, nervous woman, she had always been afraid of; and he took Betty in his arms to comfort her a little, before he opened the door upon the light and life of their own transfigured world.There is a characteristic vein of realism in the subsequent view of the lovers’ self-absorption and short-lived sorrow, and the callousness of Donne.No later than the same Saturday afternoon [Hilda was buried in the morning], her Edward was cheering himself with his preparations for New Zealand, whither he was easily persuaded to set off at once as a means of distracting his mind from his domestic woes, and of retiring gracefully from a Civil Service that was otherwise certain to dismiss him; and there he shortly found a number of absorbing interests, including—as Rutherford had predicted—a rosy-cheeked second wife, who, as he wrote to Mrs. Ochiltree when announcing his engagement, was all that heart could wish, and had apparently been made on purpose for him…. No later than[p154]Saturday afternoon—and early at that—Rutherford, having parted with the widower and seen him off the premises, ran upstairs to his wife’s door, with a spring in his step and a light in his eyes that plainly showed his mourning to be over. Hilda was dead and gone, but Betty was alive in her splendid strength and beauty, and he was her husband and bridegroom, and his hour had come! The grave had closed over that broken heart, which had ached as long as it could feel, and ached most for him; but the world was still glorious for him and his love, and never so glorious as now. They began to bask in their happiness, as the house in the sunshine that flooded it, now that the blinds were drawn up. The shadow of death, close and terrible as it was, could not dim it for them any more.In all the novels there are memorable scenes of tenderness, among the best of which are those between Fidelia and Adam Drewe, first in their brief meetings as girl and youth—she with her weak eyes bandaged, but reading him through his voice and bashful deprecation; he yearning to remain with her, but forcing himself away—and then in long years after, when he returns to find her in widowhood and poverty, and to all seeming hopelessly blind.The conception of the latter scene is quite the best to be found in the whole of Ada[p155]Cambridge’s work, and has not been equalled in its kind by any other Australian writer. The simplicity and verbal reticence of this chapter of intense feeling gives also a good sample of the author’s style of expression. Seldom ornate or much studied, it is ever a lucid and easy style. As a narrative specimen, the following, from the same novel, is conveniently quotable:It was not much of an accident, but it was enough. The engine buried its fore-paws in the soft earth of the embankment, where engines were not meant to go, and then paused abruptly in the attitude of a little dog hiding a bone in a flower-bed; the embankment sloped down instead of up, and the monster hung upon the edge of it, nose to the ground and hind-quarters in the air, looking as if a baby’s touch would send it over. Several carriages, violently running upon it and being checked suddenly, stood on tip-toes, so to speak, and fell into each other’s arms with a vehemence that completely overset them; one rolled right down the bank, head first, and the others tumbled upon its kicking wheels. It was all over in a moment; and the dazed passengers, realising in a second moment that the end of the world was still an event in the future, picked themselves up as best they could. No one was killed, but some were badly shaken, and most of them screamed horribly. The sound of those screams, mingled with the clanking and crashing of riven wood and metal, and the hissing of escaping steam, conveyed[p156]the idea of such an appalling catastrophe as would make history for the world.Though not a satirist—she does not hate well enough to be that—Ada Cambridge has occasionally a neat and forcible way of describing character. Richard Delavel’s first wife was ‘a gentle and complaisant being, soft and smooth, apparently yielding to the touch, but dense, square, and solid as a well-dumped wool-bale.’ When opposed in will or contradicted in her opinion, she smiled resignedly, and, if it appeared due to her dignity, sulked for a period. Yet generally she was ‘the evenest-tempered woman that ever a well-meaning husband found it difficult to get on with.’ A pattern of order and conscientiousness, ‘governed by principles that were as correct as her manners and costume, and as firmly established as the everlasting hills,’ she might have made an admirable wife for a clergyman, but was totally unsuited to Delavel, as he to her.Still, she was very proud of the look of ‘blood’ in her Richard, and when he became wealthy, and she a fashionable hostess in[p157]Sydney society, nothing delighted her more than her opportunities of making the aristocratic connection known. Her own origin as the daughter of a farmer was quite forgotten. ‘Annie might have been a Delavel from the beginning, in her own right, for all the recollection that remained to her of the real character of her bringing up…. Years and certain circumstances will often affect a woman’s memory that way—a man somehow manages to keep a better grasp of facts.’Yelverton, the lover of Elizabeth King, an English aristocrat spending some of his wealth in lessening the misery and vice of London, was ‘not the orthodox philanthropist, the half-feminine, half-neuter specialist with a hobby, the foot-rule reformer, the prig with a mission to set the world right; his benevolence was simply the natural expression of a sense of sympathy and brotherhood between him and his fellows, and the spirit which produced that was not limited in any direction.’His friend, Major Duff-Scott, ‘an[p158]ex-officer of dragoons, and a late prominent public man of his colony (he was prominent still, but for his social and not his official qualifications), was a well-dressed and well-preserved old gentleman who, having sown a large and miscellaneous crop of wild oats in the course of a long career, had been rewarded with great wealth, and all the privileges of the highest respectability.’[p159]ADAM LINDSAY GORDON.Thestrongest note of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poetry is a personal one. When he represents Australia best, he best represents his own striking character. Yet that character had clearly shown itself, as had also his lyric gift, before he saw Australia. He is the favourite poet of the country by a happy fortuity rather than by the merit of special native inspiration. Those tastes of the people which he has expressed in manner and degree so rare as to make a parallel difficult of conception were also his own dominant tastes. From early boyhood they had controlled his life, and in the end they wrecked it.That any man living an adventurous and precarious life, often in rude associations and[p160]without the stimulus of ambition or of intellectual society, should write poetry at all is a matter for some wonder. And when several of the compositions of such a writer are marked by rare vigour and melody, and some few are worthy to rank with the best of their kind produced in the century, it must be held that the gift of the author is genuine and spontaneous. It is impossible to believe that Gordon would have been less a poet had he never lived under the Southern Cross; that he would have cared less for horses and wild riding, for manliness and the exhilaration of danger. Had he become a country gentleman in England, or a soldier, like his father, should we not still have had ‘The Rhyme of Joyous Garde,’ ‘The Romance of Britomarte,’ ‘By Flood and Field,’ and ‘How we beat the Favourite.’ And do these not form the majority of his best poems? A man apt alike for the risks of the chase or the cavalry charge, with a delicate ear for the music of words, with natural promptings to write, would in any conditions have found time to celebrate the things which his daring and[p161]gallant spirit loved. Had he not ridden as well as written the rides related by his ‘Sick Stockrider,’ he might have been foremost in that more glorious one so often present to his fiery fancy, and have wielded‘The splendid bare swordFlashing blue, rising red from the blow!’Gordon was a true soldier in sentiment all his life, as he was also a true Englishman, and it is the soldier and the Englishman in him far more than the Australian that the people of his adopted country, consciously or unconsciously, admire. It is yet difficult to consider his work as a writer apart from his personality. And it is natural that this should be so in the case of a man whose career was itself a romance, who led as strange a double life as ever poet lived, and who, through all, retained the marked essentials of a gentleman.In his character as a sportsman and a rider there is an element of the ideal which largely helps to commend him to the majority of Australians. Though his liking for horses and the turf became a destroying passion,[p162]there was never anything sordid in it. He was not a gambler, for long after he had won recognition as the first steeplechase rider in a country of accomplished riders, he declined payment for his services on the race-track, accepting it only when compelled at last by poverty to do so; and the distaste with which he had always viewed the meaner associations of the sport latterly became dislike and scorn. In the period of disappointment that preceded his death he refused a remunerative post on the sporting staff of a leading Melbourne journal because he wished to dissociate himself completely and finally from everything connected with the professionalism of sport.As a Bush rider he became noted for the performance of feats which no one else would think of attempting. The Australians often speak and write of it as courage absence of fear—but it surely had a large admixture of pure recklessness. It is at least evident that danger had a certain irresistible fascination for him. ‘Name a jump, and he was on fire to ride at it,’ is the description given of this[p163]curious predilection which made his company in a riding party a somewhat exciting pleasure. The day in 1868 when he won three steeplechases at Melbourne is still remembered; and at Mount Gambier, in South Australia, a granite obelisk marks where once he leaped his horse over a fence surmounting the headland of a lake, and then across a chasm ‘more than forty feet wide.’ A single false step would have cast horse and rider into the lake two hundred feet below. Of the same wild character was his riding during boyhood in the hunting-fields of Gloucestershire. It would be natural to suspect some measure of vanity or bravado in all this, but no hint of either is given by any of his acquaintances; and the few who knew him well are emphatic in placing him, as a man and a sportsman, apart from and above the majority of those with whom the conditions of his life brought him into contact. ‘Gordon,’ says one of his intimate friends, ‘was always a quiet, modest, pure-minded gentleman…. I never knew such a noble-hearted man, especially where women were concerned.’[p164]The deep melancholy in many of Gordon’s poems has been attributed to the influence of Australian scenery, and to the loneliness of the earlier years of his life in the colonies. This explanation, if not wholly erroneous, is at least much exaggerated. It ignores the most obvious elements of the poet’s temperament. It takes no account of the history of wasted opportunities and regrets, of defeat and discontent, of self-wrought failure and remorse, that may plainly be read in ‘To my Sister,’ ‘An Exile’s Farewell,’ ‘Early Adieux,’ ‘Whispering in the Wattle Boughs,’ ‘Quare Fatigasti,’ ‘Wormwood and Nightshade,’ and other poems. The writer, as he himself says, has no reserve in the criticism of his own career.‘Let those who will their failings mask,To mine I frankly own;But for their pardon I will askOf none—save Heaven alone.’Gordon’s youth was wild and ungoverned. Before his twenty-first year his folly had lost him home, friends, love, and the one profession that might have steadied him, as well as[p165]afforded him distinction. He was the son of Captain Adam D. Gordon (an officer who had seen service in India) and the grandson of a wealthy Scotch merchant. Captain Gordon settled at Cheltenham in the later years of his life, and intended that his son should study for the army; but a mad wilfulness and passion for outdoor sport had taken possession of the youth, and nothing could be done with him. He rode to hounds with all the daring that marked his horsemanship in later life; he rode in steeplechases, he frequented the company of pugilists at country fairs and public-houses, and joined in their contests; he was removed from two schools for unruly conduct, and a more serious escapade, though innocent of any bad intention, nearly caused his arrest by the police. At last it was agreed that he should emigrate to Australia. He was glad to go, but bitter at the thought of what his going implied. The knowledge that he suffered solely through his own fault did not make less disagreeable to him the censure of others, even that of the gallant father whom, in his wildest moments[p166]of rebellion, he never ceased to love and admire. The unhappiness attending this severance from the home that he felt he would never see again is told in a poem to his sister, written (August, 1853) a few days before he sailed.‘Across the trackless seas I go,No matter when or where;And few my future lot will know,And fewer still will care.My hopes are gone, my time is spent,I little heed their loss,And if I cannot feel content,I cannot feel remorse.‘My parents bid me cross the flood,My kindred frowned at me;They say I have belied my blood,And stained my pedigree.But I must turn from those who chide,And laugh at those who frown;I cannot quench my stubborn pride,Or keep my spirits down.‘I once had talents fit to winSuccess in life’s career;And if I chose a part of sin,My choice has cost me dear.[p167]But those who brand me with disgrace,Will scarcely dare to sayThey spoke the taunt before my faceAnd went unscathed away.’The stanzas (there are ten more in the poem) have all the bitterness of a youthful sorrow and all the vigour of a youthful defiance. But at the moment of his deepest depression it is upon himself that the writer casts the real blame. This is characteristic of his judgment of himself throughout life. He has ever too much honour and spirit to shirk the responsibility of his own acts. And the same qualities keep him from doing injury to others. He is consoled by remembering this in bidding good-bye to his native land.‘If to error I incline,Truth whispers comfort strong,That never reckless act of mineE’er worked a comrade wrong.’As a colonist, Gordon might have justified his Scotch descent by making a fortune. Wealth was to be gained in other and surer ways than by groping for it in the goldfields. But he was indifferent, and allowed himself[p168]to drift. Australia was attractive to him only as a place of adventure, of freedom, of retirement, of oblivion. All but the latter he found it. He readily adapted himself to the rough conditions of the country, but could never overcome the thought that in those first false steps he had lost all worth striving for. Time softened the gloomy defiance of his farewell verses, but did not alter his determination to efface himself, to be forgotten even by his family. He held no communication with anyone in England, and heard nothing from his home until ten years later, when a lawyer’s letter notified him that both his mother and father were dead, and that under the will of the latter he was to receive a legacy of seven thousand pounds. Meanwhile, Gordon appears to have made no attempt to win any of the prizes that were the common reward of pluck and industry in the Australia of the fifties. He joined the mounted police force of South Australia, but, impatient of its discipline, soon left it, and for long afterwards was content with the rough employment of a horse-breaker.[p169]A curious, pathetic figure he makes at this time. He broke in horses during the day, and read the classic poets at night. Think of the refined Englishman in blue blouse, fustian, and half-Wellington boots, seated among the boisterous company of a ‘men’s hut’ on a Bush station, reading Horace by the aid of a rude lamp, ‘consisting of a honeysuckle cone stuck in clay in a pannikin, and surrounded with mutton fat!’ Or sitting at some Bush camp of his own, and imagining, as he so finely did, the famous Balaclava Charge, which set Europe ringing with pity and admiration a year after he arrived in Australia. How he would have liked to be among the actors in that scene!‘Oh! the minutes of yonder maddening rideLong years of pleasure outvie!’he exclaims, and wishes that his own end could be fair as that of one ‘who died in his stirrups there.’Gordon seemed not only to be reconciled to his Bush life, but to have become attached to it. He once declared it to be better in[p170]many respects than any other. He was temperate, skilful in his work, and as popular as one of reserved manner can be. Most of the squatters of the period made it a practice to receive into their social circle any companionable and educated man, whether their equal in position or not. It was a generous custom, typical of the most hospitable country in the world, and worked well on the whole. But Gordon, unlike Henry Kingsley and others of the same class, took no advantage of it. That the squatters did not themselves recognise the worth of one so unassertive was not to be wondered at. He saw this, and never blamed them. They could not, as he remarked on one occasion, be expected to know that he was as well born as any of them, and perhaps better educated. One of them saw there was ‘something above the common’ in him; but that was all. At length he was discovered by a good-natured and scholarly Roman Catholic priest (the Rev. Julian E. Tenison Woods), who, though he does not say so, evidently took a pleasure during the five[p171]years of their acquaintance in making the merits of the solitary Englishman known in the colony. Their tastes accorded excellently. They talked ‘horses or poetry’ as they rode together, or smoked by their camp-fires. Gordon’s reserve thawed for the first time. He had a well-trained memory, and occasionally would recite Latin or Greek verse, or a scene from Shakespeare, or passages from Byron and other modern poets. Greek he had taught himself in lonely hours after his arrival in Australia, having neglected it while at college.In the end his disposition left the good cleric, like many another, much puzzled. Was there anything of foolish pride or misanthropy in Gordon’s avoidance of society that would have welcomed him? Both his recorded speech and his poems are without evidence of either. Those who remember his taciturnity and little eccentricities also speak of his kindness of heart, generosity and trustfulness of others. Did he ever complain that he was oppressed and saddened by his self-chosen life in the Bush? We have[p172]seen the high estimate he once gave of it; and Mr. Woods, who has recorded many proofs of close observation of his friend, testifies that the melancholy of his poems found little or no expression in his conversation. Gordon may have been shy (as Marcus Clarke noted), but he early formed a fairly accurate judgment of his literary powers. He said ‘he was sure he would rise to the top of the tree in poetry, and that the world should talk of him before he died.’ Coming from one who was far from being vain or boastful, the remark suggests hope and ambition. But neither, it would seem from his colonial career, was ever more than a passing mood with him. Why did he remain in obscurity during several of the best years of his life, doing rough and dangerous work, when he might have obtained some remunerative post in one of the cities? Why did he marry a domestic servant—one who could never be an intellectual companion for him?It appears that he considered himself to have ‘irretrievably lost caste.’ It is a fantastic idea, and could not have any justification[p173]in a country where an Englishman of good manners and behaviour need never want congenial society. Gordon was abnormally proud, independent and sensitive: an unfortunate disposition for anyone who has his way to make in an imperfect world. Such a man constantly misunderstands himself and is misunderstood. He takes severe, unpractical views of his own character and of life generally. Not necessarily morose or ungenial, he is always apt to be thought so. Gordon’s conclusion that he had lost caste is a proof of supersensitiveness, and the deep effect produced upon his temperament by the incidents of his youth.There is a touching and significant little story of an acquaintance which he formed with a young lady at Cape Northumberland, and how he ended it. We are delicately told that, having become a warm admirer of his dashing horsemanship, the lady used to walk in early morning to a neighbouring field to see him training a favourite mare over hurdles. Something more than a mutual liking for horses and racing is plainly[p174]hinted at as existing between them. But after they had met thus a few times, Gordon asked abruptly whether her mother knew that she came there every morning to see him ride. She replied in the negative, adding that her mother disapproved of racing. ‘Well, don’t come again,’ said he; ‘I know the world, and you don’t. Good-bye. Don’t come again.’ Surprised and wounded, the lady silently gave him her hand in farewell. ‘He looked at it as if it were some natural curiosity, and said, “It’s the first time I have touched a lady’s hand for many a day—my own fault, my own fault—good-bye.”’For a brief period after the receipt of his father’s legacy Gordon looked towards his future with some interest and confidence. He spoke of a proposal to undertake regular journalistic work at Melbourne, and to make an attempt at writing novels. It was at this time also that he foresaw that he would make a name as a poet. The people of Mount Gambier, finding him presently settled as the owner of a small estate in the district, made him their representative in the Legislative[p175]Assembly of South Australia. In this new character he seems to have achieved only a reputation for drawing humorous sketches. Having delivered a few speeches highly embellished with classical allusions which failed to make any impression upon the plain business men of the House, he subsided, and was afterwards seldom heard. And when his seat became vacant in due course, he did not seek re-election. He had been unable to take his Parliamentary experience seriously. He is said to have always looked back upon it as something of a joke.And now, with a revival of his former attachment to the excitements and uncertainties of the turf, begin a series of misfortunes which pursued him until his death. His property, mismanaged and neglected, had to be sold, and he set out a poor man once more for the adjoining colony of Victoria. Here, while suffering ill-health and poverty—starving in his own proud way—after failing in a small business which he had undertaken, Gordon learned that he would probably come into possession of the barony[p176]of Esselmont in Scotland, then producing an income of about two thousand pounds a year. But on further inquiry it was found that his title to the estate ceased with the abolition of the entail under the Entail Amendment Act of 1848. The excitement of his ill-fortune and the effects of a recent wound on the head combined to unhinge his mind, and in June, 1870, at the age of thirty-seven he ended his life by shooting himself at Brighton, near Melbourne. In comparing the impressions of Gordon’s disposition given by his friends, it is curious to note that among the few things in which they agree is an absence of surprise at his suicide.It would not be difficult to imagine a more representative poet in the provincial sense than Gordon. His description of the colonies as‘Lands where bright blossoms are scentless,And songless bright birds,’would be strangely misleading were it not contradicted by other lines from the same hand, showing a delicate appreciation of the rugged features of Australian scenery. But[p177]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[p178]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 theBush Ballads, Gordon suggests some of the local sources of his inspiration. He obviously overstates his obligations to the country.[p179]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 resemblesA long draught of wine,When the skyline’s blue burnished resistanceMakes 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 withBush Balladsthe ‘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’;[p180]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 boundedBrushed lightly, our stirrups clashed loud as we lit.[p181]‘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 muzzleWas first, though the ring men were yelling “Dead Heat!”A nose I could swear by, but Clarke said “The mare byA 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[p182]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, itisAustralian 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[p183]‘If once we efface the joys of the chaseFrom 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.[p184]‘’Twas merry in the glowing morn, among the gleaming grassTo 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 rangTo 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[p185]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 inTemple Barin 1884, and in 1888 a short memoir of him, entitledThe 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[p186]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,[p187]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 transiencyof 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 labourTill yon goal be won,Helping every feeble neighbour,Seeking help from none.Life is mostly froth and bubble,Two things stand like stone—Kindnessin another’s trouble,Couragein 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[p188]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 livedThat frank, that open-hearted life which keepsThe splendid fire of English chivalryFrom dying out; the one who never wrongedA fellow-man; the faithful friend who judgedThe many anxious to be loved of himBy what he saw, and not by what he heard,As lesser spirits do; the brave great soulThat never told a lie, or turned asideTo fly from danger; he, I say, was oneOf that bright company this sin-stained worldCan ill afford to lose.’

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

The neat red volumes were on every stall; the Mudie of Melbourne gave them a place of honour in his show-window, and[p132]the leading critical review said that the second story possessed a charm which ought to induce even the person who ignored fiction on principle to make an exception in its favour. It was the kind of gratifying recognition that the public always believes itself eager to offer the deserving young writer. Yet Ada Cambridge’s literary work had extended over no less a period than fifteen years. Of course, much of this delay in securing recognition might have been avoided. Probably in England she could have won a substantial reputation in a third of the time, and with half the labour expended by her in contributing to the Australian press. But, as the wife of a country clergyman, she had other matters besides literature to occupy her attention, and was content to write when there happened to be leisure for it, and to see her work in a few of the leading colonial newspapers.

About half a dozen novels were issued in this way, besides occasional articles and poems. The publication of the longer stories in theAustralasian, a high-class weekly[p133]journal, ought in itself to have made a name for the author, and possibly would have done so, were they not in most cases so obviously a local product, and therefore not to be seriously considered. It was a repetition of the experience of Rolf Boldrewood. In the end, as usual, it was the English public that first accepted her novels for what they were worth.

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

A novel entitledUp the Murray, dealing with life in the colonies, was published by Ada Cambridge (the author continues to issue her work under her maiden name) in the Melbourne press in 1875. Others of the[p134]same character followed at irregular intervals. Two were issued in book-form by a London firm of publishers, but did not attain to much more than a library circulation.

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

The first half of the action takes place in England, the remainder in the colonies. The natural beauties surrounding the home of the Delavels at Sydney are not less delicately and poetically described than the village life they have left behind in the mother country—the patriarchal rule of an old-fashioned,[p135]rather pompous house, over a people retaining the hereditary respect of vassals for their feudal lord; but the view given of Australian society is, in keeping with the relation to it of Richard Delavel and his household, of the slightest kind.

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

Three out of five of the later novels are, likeA Marked Man, made comparatively independent of the distinctively local interest to which we have been accustomed in the works of most Australian authors. It is not possible, for example, to point out anything in the shape of an essentially local first cause[p136]for any of the principal incidents ofNot All in VainandA Marriage Ceremony. The passionate half-brute, Neil Hammond, who pursues the heroine of the former story across the world, and terrorises her with his unwelcome attentions, would have met a violent death, or himself have murdered someone, in his own country or elsewhere as inevitably as in Australia; and the man who killed him would not have found Katherine Knowles less faithful during the long years of his imprisonment had her sacrifice been under the daily observation of Hammond’s family and her own strait-laced aunts in their East Norfolk home.

InA Marriage Ceremony, the only advantage secured by taking the story from London to Melbourne—instead of to New York, let us say—seems to lie in whatever added strength the sense of greater distance imparts to the temporary appearance of a final separation between Betty Ochiltree and her strangely-wedded husband. The marriage that was a condition of their inheritance having been performed, bride and[p137]bridegroom part in accordance with a previous agreement. The former reappears as a prominent figure in the society of modern Melbourne—the Melbourne of 1893, when the failure of banks and land companies was a regular subject of morning news.

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

Even the very successful story of theThree Miss KingsandA Mere Chancetell little of the city life of Australia, though their action is placed in it almost exclusively. The latter is a tale of match-making intrigue[p138]and money-worship in Toorak, but the main interest of the plot apart, the account of fashionable Melbourne is a singularly colourless one. As for Mrs. Duff-Scott and her Major, the amiable pair who in the character of leaders of Melbourne society undertake to find husbands for Elizabeth King and her sisters, and whose benevolent intentions are so effectually forestalled, they are as conventionally English as though they belonged to the pages of Miss Braddon or Mrs. Henry Wood.

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

The influence of Ada Cambridge’s twenty-five years’ Australian experience is shown in her general outlook upon life, rather than in the details of her work. The prevailing tone of[p139]her books is one of marked cheerfulness, sincerity, and simplicity; she has a hearty dislike for conventional stupidities, especially for the mock-modesty that stifles honest sentiment; and she gives emphatic endorsement to the pleasant dictum (which seems so much more feasible in sunny Australia than in colder northern lands) that the second half of life is not less fruitful and satisfying than the first.

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

In almost every case they are strong[p140]studies from some point of view. Of deliberate analysis there is very little; but there are numerous realistic touches not commonly admitted in fiction, which, handled with skill and insight, keep the character within the pale of common experience and increase rather than alienate the reader’s sympathy. Thus, Richard Delavel’s outburst of relief upon the death of his first wife, so far from being vulgar and brutal, as it might have seemed in other circumstances, recalls and emphasises the high sense of duty and honour and the iron self-restraint which had enabled him to be in all essentials a good husband for twenty-five years to a cold-hearted creature, between whom and himself there had never been either common interest or feeling, and for whose sake he had relinquished the woman that would have been his real mate in intellect and sympathy. Delavel’s housekeeper, who is also a privileged friend, takes him to task for his unseemly hurry to go in search of this old love before his wife had been a week in her grave. He makes no secret of his relief. ‘The[p141]sense that I am free is turning my brain with joy,’ he confesses.

‘I say it because I feel it. I am aware that it is in very bad taste, but that doesn’t make it the less true. Do you suppose people are never glad when their relations die? They are—very often; they can’t help it; only they pretend they are not, because it seems so shocking. I don’t pretend—at least, I need not pretend to you. The fault is not always—not all—on the side of the survivors, Hannah. I don’t think I am any worse than those who pretend a grief that they don’t feel. I was never unkind to her—never in my life, that I can remember. I did not kill her; I would have kept her alive as long as I possibly could. I think—I hope—that if I could have saved her by the sacrifice of my own life, I should have done it without a single moment’s hesitation.’‘I am sure you would,’ said Hannah.‘But,’ he continued, with that unwonted fire blazing in his eyes, ‘since dead she is, Iamglad—I am, I am! I am glad as a man who has been kept in prison is to be let out. It is not my fault; I would be sorry if I could. Some day, Hannah—some day, when we have been dust for a few hundred years—perhaps for a few score only—people will wake up to see how stupid it is to drive a man to be glad when his wife is dead. They are finding out so many things; they will find that out too in time.’

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

‘I am sure you would,’ said Hannah.

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

Probably it will still appear to many that Delavel’s admission was at least indelicate[p142]and inconsistent with his chivalrous nature. It is not here possible to convey an adequate impression of his fiery spirit, his long heart-hunger, and the magnitude of the loss which a wholly uncongenial marriage must ever mean to such a man. When the full story of his life and that of his quietly ‘implacable’ wife is read, his conduct seems natural and excusable. It is as much a part of himself as the tremulous tenderness with which he ministers to the comfort of the frail Constance Bethune, after finding and bringing her home, or as his fierce grief when she dies.

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

In like manner is Adam Drewe shorn of some of the merit of his devotion to the heroine ofFidelisby being shown in[p143]successive attachments to other women during his long exile in Australia. The author recognises that, ‘the laws of literary romance being so much at variance with the laws of Nature,’ Adam is certain to suffer in the reader’s good opinion for having ‘continued to hunger for feminine sympathy as well as his daily dinner.’ No doubt his stature as a hero lessens when it appears that though the absent Fidelia was ever in his thoughts, and a daily source of inspiration to him as a writer, he twice narrowly escaped marriage—first with a servant girl at his lodgings, and afterwards with the daughter of his landlady—and that at another period of his colonial life he became involved in a disreputable kind of Bohemianism. But he is not disgraced by these lapses to the extent that the author anticipates; at all events, they make him more human than he could otherwise have been.

It is this power of infusing a robust humanity into her characters that makes the distinctive feature of Ada Cambridge’s best novels. In each, whatever the quality of the[p144]plot, there are always two or three personages who talk and act as real men and women do—now rationally or in obedience to custom, now passionately or with that perversity which, as the author once describes it, ‘is like a natural law, independent of other laws, the only one that persistently defies our calculations.’ They are mostly big people with big appetites. The beauty of the women is the beauty of mind and of sound physical health.

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

Sarah French, the girl inFideliswhose comeliness so nearly drew the hero from his old allegiance, has ‘a strong and good, rather than a pretty, face,’ with a ‘large and substantial figure.’ Adam Drewe concluded on first sight of her that she was a nice woman. Later on he finds her ‘looking the very[p145]incarnation of home, with her cheerful healthy face, her strong busy hands, her neat hair, her neat dress…. She might have sat for a statue of Motherhood—of Charity with a babe at her ample breast, and others clinging to her supporting hand; Nature had so evidently intended her to play the part.’

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

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

The author is fond of showing the attractiveness of such women at the age of thirty,[p146]or even more. ‘In real life,’ she once observes, ‘the supremely interesting woman is not a girl of eighteen, as she is in fiction. Every man worth calling a man knows that. A girl of that age … knows as much about love as does a young animal in the spring, and not a bit more. And the human male of these days—so highly developed, so subtly compounded—has grown out of the stage when that much would satisfy him. I mean, of course, the human male who in real life answers to the hero in fiction—a man who must have left, not only his teens, but his twenties behind him.’

When one comes to the heroes, it is easy to recall half a dozen commanding figures who blunder in the most natural and amiable manner in their affairs; who think a good deal more of their immediate personal comforts than of religious or ethical abstractions; who like their own way and try to get it; who, in short, are mostly what the author wishes them to appear—‘the men out of books that we meet every day.’ Of little men, in the physical sense, there are only[p147]two of any importance, but even these are virile and masterful. A general aim of the stories would seem to be to show the sexes what each chiefly admires in the other. It is first a sort of apotheosis of themens sana in corpore sano, and after that an illustration of the independent attractions of sympathy, gentleness, culture, and high character.

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

Hilda unconsciously exaggerates, for it appears that Rutherford Hope, though at[p148]first affected with disgust by her disfigurement, and convinced that no healthy man could consort with ‘so unnatural a woman,’ had come at last to regard her as a possible wife—before he was confronted with the sudden temptation to secure a fortune by wedding Betty Ochiltree, in compliance with the conditions of her millionaire uncle’s will. Yet Hilda’s comment is substantially sound. Even Rutherford, with all the sense of his mature years, and all the culture that enabled him to appreciate her poetic gift, would have had to argue himself into a marriage with her.

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

[p149]Compared with the previous illustration, however, his case is at fault in failing to give a sufficient description of his deformity. But that he himself long thought it an insuperable bar to his happiness is clear. When he fell in love with Fidelia Plunket, she was temporarily blind. His affection for her was returned, and he knew it, but dreading the disillusionment that would ensue when her sight was restored, he fled to Australia and determined to abandon all thought of her as a wife. Urged to return, because ‘when a womanisa woman,’ and really in love with a man, ‘there’s no camel she won’t swallow for him,’ Drewe replied that his camel was just the one camel that no woman had been known to swallow, or, at any rate, to digest. And he remained—for twenty years.

The plots of Ada Cambridge’s novels are of the episodical order, and the author, despite her openly-expressed scorn for the unnaturalness of the average conventional novel, has not disdained employment of some of its time-honoured methods. Occasionally she is at pains to explain the feasibility of[p150]coincidences employed to secure dramatic interest. They are certainly never of an impossible kind, and no one would deny the truism that real life abounds in them. But has not a distinguished writer aptly pointed out that there are matters in which fiction cannot compete with life? As a rule, however, where a few such weaknesses exist, they do not count for much with the average reader when the principal scenes are as finely drawn as those inA Marked ManorFidelis, orThe Three Miss Kings. The latter story in some details puts a greater strain upon the credulity than any of the other novels, yet so well conceived and absolutely natural are the characters of the three girls, and so humorously and pictorially presented the chief incidents in their development, that the dubious points of the plot become almost insignificant. The qualities of the novel as a whole are similar to those which obscure the artistic defects ofGeoffry Hamlyn, and which for thirty-seven years have made it one of the most popular of Australian stories.

[p151]In the presentation of tragic or pathetic incidents lies Ada Cambridge’s chief power, as far as her plots are concerned. InA Marked Manit is accompanied by her highest achievements in portraying a variety of well-contrasted character.Fidelis, which opens at the Norfolk village of the earlier novel, and reintroduces the Delavels, contains fewer developed characters, as may also be said ofA Marriage Ceremony. But the three novels are equal in the high standard of their emotional quality. No quotation of moderate size could do justice to any of the principal scenes ofA Marked Man: the chivalrous sacrifice of Richard Delavel’s youthful marriage; the inward repentance of it for twenty-two years; the revival of his love for Constance Bethune; his painful anxiety for her health, hungry enjoyment of her companionship, and anguish at her death; and his own death soon afterwards. In the more briefly detailed tragedy that brings into such striking relief the sprightly drama ofA Marriage Ceremony, there is a scene giving a fair example of the author’s style in[p152]touching passages. When Hilda, deeply in love with Rutherford Hope, hears of his union with another woman, she takes the readiest means of effacing herself by suddenly marrying a shallow coxcomb who seeks her for mercenary reasons, and going with him to Australia. Years afterwards she is so affected by the sudden reappearance of Rutherford, and by subsequent ill-treatment received from her jealous husband, that an exhausting illness follows, and to save herself from insanity she commits suicide. Meanwhile the long separation of Rutherford and Betty Ochiltree, which began on the day of their marriage, is coming to an end, and Hilda’s death removes the final impediment. Together they pay a last visit to the dead woman:

Incapable of speech, he lifted a tress of hair—flowing free over the rigid arms, because it was really pretty, and thus had to be made the most of—and pressed it a moment to his bearded mouth. In that gesture he seemed to ask her forgiveness for having been a man like other men, as Nature made them.‘Kissher,’ Betty whispered, pushing him a little. She, too, felt that it would be something, if not much,[p153]to put to the account that was so frightfully ill-balanced—a kiss from Rutherford before all was wholly over.He stooped and laid his lips—scarcely laid them—on the waxen forehead. And he thought how he had nearly kissed her once, in the scented spring dusk, at her father’s gate, and been repelled at the last moment by the thought of something that he could not see…. He turned back the sheet and straightened it, and nobody but hired undertakers had anything more to do with Hilda Donne. He put out the lamps, leaving her in the dark, which, as a living, nervous woman, she had always been afraid of; and he took Betty in his arms to comfort her a little, before he opened the door upon the light and life of their own transfigured world.

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

‘Kissher,’ Betty whispered, pushing him a little. She, too, felt that it would be something, if not much,[p153]to put to the account that was so frightfully ill-balanced—a kiss from Rutherford before all was wholly over.

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

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

No later than the same Saturday afternoon [Hilda was buried in the morning], her Edward was cheering himself with his preparations for New Zealand, whither he was easily persuaded to set off at once as a means of distracting his mind from his domestic woes, and of retiring gracefully from a Civil Service that was otherwise certain to dismiss him; and there he shortly found a number of absorbing interests, including—as Rutherford had predicted—a rosy-cheeked second wife, who, as he wrote to Mrs. Ochiltree when announcing his engagement, was all that heart could wish, and had apparently been made on purpose for him…. No later than[p154]Saturday afternoon—and early at that—Rutherford, having parted with the widower and seen him off the premises, ran upstairs to his wife’s door, with a spring in his step and a light in his eyes that plainly showed his mourning to be over. Hilda was dead and gone, but Betty was alive in her splendid strength and beauty, and he was her husband and bridegroom, and his hour had come! The grave had closed over that broken heart, which had ached as long as it could feel, and ached most for him; but the world was still glorious for him and his love, and never so glorious as now. They began to bask in their happiness, as the house in the sunshine that flooded it, now that the blinds were drawn up. The shadow of death, close and terrible as it was, could not dim it for them any more.

No later than the same Saturday afternoon [Hilda was buried in the morning], her Edward was cheering himself with his preparations for New Zealand, whither he was easily persuaded to set off at once as a means of distracting his mind from his domestic woes, and of retiring gracefully from a Civil Service that was otherwise certain to dismiss him; and there he shortly found a number of absorbing interests, including—as Rutherford had predicted—a rosy-cheeked second wife, who, as he wrote to Mrs. Ochiltree when announcing his engagement, was all that heart could wish, and had apparently been made on purpose for him…. No later than[p154]Saturday afternoon—and early at that—Rutherford, having parted with the widower and seen him off the premises, ran upstairs to his wife’s door, with a spring in his step and a light in his eyes that plainly showed his mourning to be over. Hilda was dead and gone, but Betty was alive in her splendid strength and beauty, and he was her husband and bridegroom, and his hour had come! The grave had closed over that broken heart, which had ached as long as it could feel, and ached most for him; but the world was still glorious for him and his love, and never so glorious as now. They began to bask in their happiness, as the house in the sunshine that flooded it, now that the blinds were drawn up. The shadow of death, close and terrible as it was, could not dim it for them any more.

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

The conception of the latter scene is quite the best to be found in the whole of Ada[p155]Cambridge’s work, and has not been equalled in its kind by any other Australian writer. The simplicity and verbal reticence of this chapter of intense feeling gives also a good sample of the author’s style of expression. Seldom ornate or much studied, it is ever a lucid and easy style. As a narrative specimen, the following, from the same novel, is conveniently quotable:

It was not much of an accident, but it was enough. The engine buried its fore-paws in the soft earth of the embankment, where engines were not meant to go, and then paused abruptly in the attitude of a little dog hiding a bone in a flower-bed; the embankment sloped down instead of up, and the monster hung upon the edge of it, nose to the ground and hind-quarters in the air, looking as if a baby’s touch would send it over. Several carriages, violently running upon it and being checked suddenly, stood on tip-toes, so to speak, and fell into each other’s arms with a vehemence that completely overset them; one rolled right down the bank, head first, and the others tumbled upon its kicking wheels. It was all over in a moment; and the dazed passengers, realising in a second moment that the end of the world was still an event in the future, picked themselves up as best they could. No one was killed, but some were badly shaken, and most of them screamed horribly. The sound of those screams, mingled with the clanking and crashing of riven wood and metal, and the hissing of escaping steam, conveyed[p156]the idea of such an appalling catastrophe as would make history for the world.

It was not much of an accident, but it was enough. The engine buried its fore-paws in the soft earth of the embankment, where engines were not meant to go, and then paused abruptly in the attitude of a little dog hiding a bone in a flower-bed; the embankment sloped down instead of up, and the monster hung upon the edge of it, nose to the ground and hind-quarters in the air, looking as if a baby’s touch would send it over. Several carriages, violently running upon it and being checked suddenly, stood on tip-toes, so to speak, and fell into each other’s arms with a vehemence that completely overset them; one rolled right down the bank, head first, and the others tumbled upon its kicking wheels. It was all over in a moment; and the dazed passengers, realising in a second moment that the end of the world was still an event in the future, picked themselves up as best they could. No one was killed, but some were badly shaken, and most of them screamed horribly. The sound of those screams, mingled with the clanking and crashing of riven wood and metal, and the hissing of escaping steam, conveyed[p156]the idea of such an appalling catastrophe as would make history for the world.

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

Still, she was very proud of the look of ‘blood’ in her Richard, and when he became wealthy, and she a fashionable hostess in[p157]Sydney society, nothing delighted her more than her opportunities of making the aristocratic connection known. Her own origin as the daughter of a farmer was quite forgotten. ‘Annie might have been a Delavel from the beginning, in her own right, for all the recollection that remained to her of the real character of her bringing up…. Years and certain circumstances will often affect a woman’s memory that way—a man somehow manages to keep a better grasp of facts.’

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

His friend, Major Duff-Scott, ‘an[p158]ex-officer of dragoons, and a late prominent public man of his colony (he was prominent still, but for his social and not his official qualifications), was a well-dressed and well-preserved old gentleman who, having sown a large and miscellaneous crop of wild oats in the course of a long career, had been rewarded with great wealth, and all the privileges of the highest respectability.’

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

That any man living an adventurous and precarious life, often in rude associations and[p160]without the stimulus of ambition or of intellectual society, should write poetry at all is a matter for some wonder. And when several of the compositions of such a writer are marked by rare vigour and melody, and some few are worthy to rank with the best of their kind produced in the century, it must be held that the gift of the author is genuine and spontaneous. It is impossible to believe that Gordon would have been less a poet had he never lived under the Southern Cross; that he would have cared less for horses and wild riding, for manliness and the exhilaration of danger. Had he become a country gentleman in England, or a soldier, like his father, should we not still have had ‘The Rhyme of Joyous Garde,’ ‘The Romance of Britomarte,’ ‘By Flood and Field,’ and ‘How we beat the Favourite.’ And do these not form the majority of his best poems? A man apt alike for the risks of the chase or the cavalry charge, with a delicate ear for the music of words, with natural promptings to write, would in any conditions have found time to celebrate the things which his daring and[p161]gallant spirit loved. Had he not ridden as well as written the rides related by his ‘Sick Stockrider,’ he might have been foremost in that more glorious one so often present to his fiery fancy, and have wielded

‘The splendid bare swordFlashing blue, rising red from the blow!’

‘The splendid bare swordFlashing blue, rising red from the blow!’

‘The splendid bare sword

Flashing blue, rising red from the blow!’

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

In his character as a sportsman and a rider there is an element of the ideal which largely helps to commend him to the majority of Australians. Though his liking for horses and the turf became a destroying passion,[p162]there was never anything sordid in it. He was not a gambler, for long after he had won recognition as the first steeplechase rider in a country of accomplished riders, he declined payment for his services on the race-track, accepting it only when compelled at last by poverty to do so; and the distaste with which he had always viewed the meaner associations of the sport latterly became dislike and scorn. In the period of disappointment that preceded his death he refused a remunerative post on the sporting staff of a leading Melbourne journal because he wished to dissociate himself completely and finally from everything connected with the professionalism of sport.

As a Bush rider he became noted for the performance of feats which no one else would think of attempting. The Australians often speak and write of it as courage absence of fear—but it surely had a large admixture of pure recklessness. It is at least evident that danger had a certain irresistible fascination for him. ‘Name a jump, and he was on fire to ride at it,’ is the description given of this[p163]curious predilection which made his company in a riding party a somewhat exciting pleasure. The day in 1868 when he won three steeplechases at Melbourne is still remembered; and at Mount Gambier, in South Australia, a granite obelisk marks where once he leaped his horse over a fence surmounting the headland of a lake, and then across a chasm ‘more than forty feet wide.’ A single false step would have cast horse and rider into the lake two hundred feet below. Of the same wild character was his riding during boyhood in the hunting-fields of Gloucestershire. It would be natural to suspect some measure of vanity or bravado in all this, but no hint of either is given by any of his acquaintances; and the few who knew him well are emphatic in placing him, as a man and a sportsman, apart from and above the majority of those with whom the conditions of his life brought him into contact. ‘Gordon,’ says one of his intimate friends, ‘was always a quiet, modest, pure-minded gentleman…. I never knew such a noble-hearted man, especially where women were concerned.’

[p164]The deep melancholy in many of Gordon’s poems has been attributed to the influence of Australian scenery, and to the loneliness of the earlier years of his life in the colonies. This explanation, if not wholly erroneous, is at least much exaggerated. It ignores the most obvious elements of the poet’s temperament. It takes no account of the history of wasted opportunities and regrets, of defeat and discontent, of self-wrought failure and remorse, that may plainly be read in ‘To my Sister,’ ‘An Exile’s Farewell,’ ‘Early Adieux,’ ‘Whispering in the Wattle Boughs,’ ‘Quare Fatigasti,’ ‘Wormwood and Nightshade,’ and other poems. The writer, as he himself says, has no reserve in the criticism of his own career.

‘Let those who will their failings mask,To mine I frankly own;But for their pardon I will askOf none—save Heaven alone.’

‘Let those who will their failings mask,To mine I frankly own;But for their pardon I will askOf none—save Heaven alone.’

‘Let those who will their failings mask,

To mine I frankly own;

But for their pardon I will ask

Of none—save Heaven alone.’

Gordon’s youth was wild and ungoverned. Before his twenty-first year his folly had lost him home, friends, love, and the one profession that might have steadied him, as well as[p165]afforded him distinction. He was the son of Captain Adam D. Gordon (an officer who had seen service in India) and the grandson of a wealthy Scotch merchant. Captain Gordon settled at Cheltenham in the later years of his life, and intended that his son should study for the army; but a mad wilfulness and passion for outdoor sport had taken possession of the youth, and nothing could be done with him. He rode to hounds with all the daring that marked his horsemanship in later life; he rode in steeplechases, he frequented the company of pugilists at country fairs and public-houses, and joined in their contests; he was removed from two schools for unruly conduct, and a more serious escapade, though innocent of any bad intention, nearly caused his arrest by the police. At last it was agreed that he should emigrate to Australia. He was glad to go, but bitter at the thought of what his going implied. The knowledge that he suffered solely through his own fault did not make less disagreeable to him the censure of others, even that of the gallant father whom, in his wildest moments[p166]of rebellion, he never ceased to love and admire. The unhappiness attending this severance from the home that he felt he would never see again is told in a poem to his sister, written (August, 1853) a few days before he sailed.

‘Across the trackless seas I go,No matter when or where;And few my future lot will know,And fewer still will care.My hopes are gone, my time is spent,I little heed their loss,And if I cannot feel content,I cannot feel remorse.‘My parents bid me cross the flood,My kindred frowned at me;They say I have belied my blood,And stained my pedigree.But I must turn from those who chide,And laugh at those who frown;I cannot quench my stubborn pride,Or keep my spirits down.‘I once had talents fit to winSuccess in life’s career;And if I chose a part of sin,My choice has cost me dear.[p167]But those who brand me with disgrace,Will scarcely dare to sayThey spoke the taunt before my faceAnd went unscathed away.’

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

‘Across the trackless seas I go,

No matter when or where;

And few my future lot will know,

And fewer still will care.

My hopes are gone, my time is spent,

I little heed their loss,

And if I cannot feel content,

I cannot feel remorse.

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

‘My parents bid me cross the flood,

My kindred frowned at me;

They say I have belied my blood,

And stained my pedigree.

But I must turn from those who chide,

And laugh at those who frown;

I cannot quench my stubborn pride,

Or keep my spirits down.

‘I once had talents fit to winSuccess in life’s career;And if I chose a part of sin,My choice has cost me dear.[p167]But those who brand me with disgrace,Will scarcely dare to sayThey spoke the taunt before my faceAnd went unscathed away.’

‘I once had talents fit to win

Success in life’s career;

And if I chose a part of sin,

My choice has cost me dear.

[p167]But those who brand me with disgrace,

Will scarcely dare to say

They spoke the taunt before my face

And went unscathed away.’

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

‘If to error I incline,Truth whispers comfort strong,That never reckless act of mineE’er worked a comrade wrong.’

‘If to error I incline,Truth whispers comfort strong,That never reckless act of mineE’er worked a comrade wrong.’

‘If to error I incline,

Truth whispers comfort strong,

That never reckless act of mine

E’er worked a comrade wrong.’

As a colonist, Gordon might have justified his Scotch descent by making a fortune. Wealth was to be gained in other and surer ways than by groping for it in the goldfields. But he was indifferent, and allowed himself[p168]to drift. Australia was attractive to him only as a place of adventure, of freedom, of retirement, of oblivion. All but the latter he found it. He readily adapted himself to the rough conditions of the country, but could never overcome the thought that in those first false steps he had lost all worth striving for. Time softened the gloomy defiance of his farewell verses, but did not alter his determination to efface himself, to be forgotten even by his family. He held no communication with anyone in England, and heard nothing from his home until ten years later, when a lawyer’s letter notified him that both his mother and father were dead, and that under the will of the latter he was to receive a legacy of seven thousand pounds. Meanwhile, Gordon appears to have made no attempt to win any of the prizes that were the common reward of pluck and industry in the Australia of the fifties. He joined the mounted police force of South Australia, but, impatient of its discipline, soon left it, and for long afterwards was content with the rough employment of a horse-breaker.

[p169]A curious, pathetic figure he makes at this time. He broke in horses during the day, and read the classic poets at night. Think of the refined Englishman in blue blouse, fustian, and half-Wellington boots, seated among the boisterous company of a ‘men’s hut’ on a Bush station, reading Horace by the aid of a rude lamp, ‘consisting of a honeysuckle cone stuck in clay in a pannikin, and surrounded with mutton fat!’ Or sitting at some Bush camp of his own, and imagining, as he so finely did, the famous Balaclava Charge, which set Europe ringing with pity and admiration a year after he arrived in Australia. How he would have liked to be among the actors in that scene!

‘Oh! the minutes of yonder maddening rideLong years of pleasure outvie!’

‘Oh! the minutes of yonder maddening rideLong years of pleasure outvie!’

‘Oh! the minutes of yonder maddening ride

Long years of pleasure outvie!’

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

Gordon seemed not only to be reconciled to his Bush life, but to have become attached to it. He once declared it to be better in[p170]many respects than any other. He was temperate, skilful in his work, and as popular as one of reserved manner can be. Most of the squatters of the period made it a practice to receive into their social circle any companionable and educated man, whether their equal in position or not. It was a generous custom, typical of the most hospitable country in the world, and worked well on the whole. But Gordon, unlike Henry Kingsley and others of the same class, took no advantage of it. That the squatters did not themselves recognise the worth of one so unassertive was not to be wondered at. He saw this, and never blamed them. They could not, as he remarked on one occasion, be expected to know that he was as well born as any of them, and perhaps better educated. One of them saw there was ‘something above the common’ in him; but that was all. At length he was discovered by a good-natured and scholarly Roman Catholic priest (the Rev. Julian E. Tenison Woods), who, though he does not say so, evidently took a pleasure during the five[p171]years of their acquaintance in making the merits of the solitary Englishman known in the colony. Their tastes accorded excellently. They talked ‘horses or poetry’ as they rode together, or smoked by their camp-fires. Gordon’s reserve thawed for the first time. He had a well-trained memory, and occasionally would recite Latin or Greek verse, or a scene from Shakespeare, or passages from Byron and other modern poets. Greek he had taught himself in lonely hours after his arrival in Australia, having neglected it while at college.

In the end his disposition left the good cleric, like many another, much puzzled. Was there anything of foolish pride or misanthropy in Gordon’s avoidance of society that would have welcomed him? Both his recorded speech and his poems are without evidence of either. Those who remember his taciturnity and little eccentricities also speak of his kindness of heart, generosity and trustfulness of others. Did he ever complain that he was oppressed and saddened by his self-chosen life in the Bush? We have[p172]seen the high estimate he once gave of it; and Mr. Woods, who has recorded many proofs of close observation of his friend, testifies that the melancholy of his poems found little or no expression in his conversation. Gordon may have been shy (as Marcus Clarke noted), but he early formed a fairly accurate judgment of his literary powers. He said ‘he was sure he would rise to the top of the tree in poetry, and that the world should talk of him before he died.’ Coming from one who was far from being vain or boastful, the remark suggests hope and ambition. But neither, it would seem from his colonial career, was ever more than a passing mood with him. Why did he remain in obscurity during several of the best years of his life, doing rough and dangerous work, when he might have obtained some remunerative post in one of the cities? Why did he marry a domestic servant—one who could never be an intellectual companion for him?

It appears that he considered himself to have ‘irretrievably lost caste.’ It is a fantastic idea, and could not have any justification[p173]in a country where an Englishman of good manners and behaviour need never want congenial society. Gordon was abnormally proud, independent and sensitive: an unfortunate disposition for anyone who has his way to make in an imperfect world. Such a man constantly misunderstands himself and is misunderstood. He takes severe, unpractical views of his own character and of life generally. Not necessarily morose or ungenial, he is always apt to be thought so. Gordon’s conclusion that he had lost caste is a proof of supersensitiveness, and the deep effect produced upon his temperament by the incidents of his youth.

There is a touching and significant little story of an acquaintance which he formed with a young lady at Cape Northumberland, and how he ended it. We are delicately told that, having become a warm admirer of his dashing horsemanship, the lady used to walk in early morning to a neighbouring field to see him training a favourite mare over hurdles. Something more than a mutual liking for horses and racing is plainly[p174]hinted at as existing between them. But after they had met thus a few times, Gordon asked abruptly whether her mother knew that she came there every morning to see him ride. She replied in the negative, adding that her mother disapproved of racing. ‘Well, don’t come again,’ said he; ‘I know the world, and you don’t. Good-bye. Don’t come again.’ Surprised and wounded, the lady silently gave him her hand in farewell. ‘He looked at it as if it were some natural curiosity, and said, “It’s the first time I have touched a lady’s hand for many a day—my own fault, my own fault—good-bye.”’

For a brief period after the receipt of his father’s legacy Gordon looked towards his future with some interest and confidence. He spoke of a proposal to undertake regular journalistic work at Melbourne, and to make an attempt at writing novels. It was at this time also that he foresaw that he would make a name as a poet. The people of Mount Gambier, finding him presently settled as the owner of a small estate in the district, made him their representative in the Legislative[p175]Assembly of South Australia. In this new character he seems to have achieved only a reputation for drawing humorous sketches. Having delivered a few speeches highly embellished with classical allusions which failed to make any impression upon the plain business men of the House, he subsided, and was afterwards seldom heard. And when his seat became vacant in due course, he did not seek re-election. He had been unable to take his Parliamentary experience seriously. He is said to have always looked back upon it as something of a joke.

And now, with a revival of his former attachment to the excitements and uncertainties of the turf, begin a series of misfortunes which pursued him until his death. His property, mismanaged and neglected, had to be sold, and he set out a poor man once more for the adjoining colony of Victoria. Here, while suffering ill-health and poverty—starving in his own proud way—after failing in a small business which he had undertaken, Gordon learned that he would probably come into possession of the barony[p176]of Esselmont in Scotland, then producing an income of about two thousand pounds a year. But on further inquiry it was found that his title to the estate ceased with the abolition of the entail under the Entail Amendment Act of 1848. The excitement of his ill-fortune and the effects of a recent wound on the head combined to unhinge his mind, and in June, 1870, at the age of thirty-seven he ended his life by shooting himself at Brighton, near Melbourne. In comparing the impressions of Gordon’s disposition given by his friends, it is curious to note that among the few things in which they agree is an absence of surprise at his suicide.

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

‘Lands where bright blossoms are scentless,And songless bright birds,’

‘Lands where bright blossoms are scentless,And songless bright birds,’

‘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[p177]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[p178]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 theBush Ballads, Gordon suggests some of the local sources of his inspiration. He obviously overstates his obligations to the country.[p179]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 resemblesA long draught of wine,When the skyline’s blue burnished resistanceMakes deeper the dreamiest distance,Some songs in all hearts have existence:Such songs have been mine.’

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

‘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 withBush Balladsthe ‘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’;[p180]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 boundedBrushed lightly, our stirrups clashed loud as we lit.[p181]‘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.’

‘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.

‘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.

‘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 boundedBrushed lightly, our stirrups clashed loud as we lit.

‘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.

[p181]‘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.

[p181]‘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.’

‘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 muzzleWas first, though the ring men were yelling “Dead Heat!”A nose I could swear by, but Clarke said “The mare byA short head.” And that’s how the favourite was beat.’

‘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.

‘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 muzzleWas first, though the ring men were yelling “Dead Heat!”A nose I could swear by, but Clarke said “The mare byA short head.” And that’s how the favourite was beat.’

‘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[p182]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, itisAustralian 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

[p183]‘If once we efface the joys of the chaseFrom the land, and out-root the Stud,Good-bye to the Anglo-Saxon Race,Farewell to the Norman Blood.’

[p183]‘If once we efface the joys of the chaseFrom the land, and out-root the Stud,Good-bye to the Anglo-Saxon Race,Farewell to the Norman Blood.’

[p183]‘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.’

‘As a type of our chivalry.’

‘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.

[p184]‘’Twas merry in the glowing morn, among the gleaming grassTo 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 rangTo 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!’

[p184]‘’Twas merry in the glowing morn, among the gleaming grassTo 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.

[p184]‘’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 rangTo 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!’

‘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[p185]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 inTemple Barin 1884, and in 1888 a short memoir of him, entitledThe 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[p186]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,[p187]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 transiencyof 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 labourTill yon goal be won,Helping every feeble neighbour,Seeking help from none.Life is mostly froth and bubble,Two things stand like stone—Kindnessin another’s trouble,Couragein your own.’

‘Question not, but live and labourTill yon goal be won,Helping every feeble neighbour,Seeking help from none.Life is mostly froth and bubble,Two things stand like stone—Kindnessin another’s trouble,Couragein your own.’

‘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—

Kindnessin another’s trouble,

Couragein 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[p188]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 livedThat frank, that open-hearted life which keepsThe splendid fire of English chivalryFrom dying out; the one who never wrongedA fellow-man; the faithful friend who judgedThe many anxious to be loved of himBy what he saw, and not by what he heard,As lesser spirits do; the brave great soulThat never told a lie, or turned asideTo fly from danger; he, I say, was oneOf that bright company this sin-stained worldCan ill afford to lose.’

‘The bard, the scholar, and the man who livedThat frank, that open-hearted life which keepsThe splendid fire of English chivalryFrom dying out; the one who never wrongedA fellow-man; the faithful friend who judgedThe many anxious to be loved of himBy what he saw, and not by what he heard,As lesser spirits do; the brave great soulThat never told a lie, or turned asideTo fly from danger; he, I say, was oneOf that bright company this sin-stained worldCan ill afford to lose.’

‘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.’

Back to IndexNext