stories showed that Australian fiction was struggling into being. With the fiction of Marcus Clarke a further stage is reached. His novel Heavy Odds is now negligible; but his chief work, His Natural Life, is not only a vivid and carefully substantiated tale of a penal settlement, but a powerful work of fiction. Between its serial publication in The Australian Journal and its issue as a book in 1874, Clarke revised his story, with the assistance, it is said, of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy; and in its final form, though a gloomy and horrible tale, it is one of the best works of fiction that have been produced in Australia. Clarke's shorter stories of Australian life in the bush and the town, idyllic, humorous or tragic, are also good and sincere pieces of fiction. The next eminent name on the list of Australian novelists is Thomas Alexander Browne, who, under the pseudonym 'Rolf Boldrewood,' won wide popularity both in his own country and in Great Britain. Boldrewood was a squatter, a police magistrate and a warder of goldfields; and he knew thoroughly the life that he described. Those who are in a position to speak on the subject say that A Squatter's Dream and A Colonial Reformer are the best pictures extant of the squatter's life. To English readers, Boldrewood is best known by Robbery Under Arms, the story of the bushranger, Captain Starlight, which was published as a book in 1888, some years after its serial issue in The Sydney Mail, and The Miner's Right, published in 1890. In these four novels lies the best of Rolf Boldrewood's work. The two last mentioned contain plenty of exciting incident; but these tales of bushranging, of gold-digging and of squatting have little in common with the merely sensational fiction of which, it must be admitted, Australia has produced a plentiful crop. They are the work of a keen observer and a man of sound commonsense. If the character-drawing is simple, it is true to nature and to the life described; and, though a finer artist in fiction would have drawn the threads of the stories closer, Boldrewood's vigour in narrative and breezy fancy give life and interest to these faithful pictures of times that are gone. Compared with Rolf Boldrewood, the many novels of Guy Boothby, though exciting in incident, are poor in conception and slipshod in execution, and the novels of Benjamin Leopold Farjeon will count for little in the development of Australian fiction.

Travel and exploration in Australasia have been the subject of many books, most of which were written by Englishmen; the subject has been admirably summarised by Julian Edmund Tenison

Woods, the friend of Adam Lindsay Gordon, in his History of the Discovery and Exploration of Australia, published in 1865. The historians and political writers of Australia have appealed almost entirely in the past to a special audience; but the foundations of future work in these fields have been firmly laid. In 1819, W. C. Wentworth published a Description of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, which fiercely attacked the existing form of government. Among the many writings of John Dunmore Lang, there is a discursive and confusing Historical and Statistical Account of New South Wales, first published in 1834 and reissued, with new matter, in 1852 and 1875. Samuel Bennett's accurate and lucid History of Australian Discovery and Colonization, published in 1867, brings the story down to 1831. William Westgarth began his important series of reports and books on Australian history and politics with a report on the aborigines issued in 1846. They include Australia Felix; an Account of the Settlement of Port Philip (1843); Victoria, late Australia Felix (1853); and Victoria and the Australian Goldmines in 1857 (1857); while his Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne and Victoria (1888) and Half-a-Century of Australian Progress ; a personal Retrospect (1889) are full of interest and knowledge. The decade 1850-60 saw the publication of some of William Howitt's accounts of Australian life and affairs, and of R. H. Horne's very lively and amusing Australian Facts and Prospects, which was prefaced by the author's Australian Autobiography, a vivid account of his adventures as gold-escort in the early days of the diggings. James Bonwick's chief interest in life was the compiling of his invaluable collections of facts bearing upon early colonial history, and his Last of the Tasmanians and Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians, both published in 1870, are important contributions to anthropology. Alexander Sutherland's sumptuous work on Victoria and its Metropolis, published in 1888, is the leading work of its kind in a later period.

Finally, mention should be made of Australian journalism, which has from the first been vigorous and prolific, and has contrived to be independent and vivacious without stooping, in any marked degree, to scurrility or vulgarity. The Australian newspapers have not only recorded and commented upon the interesting and exciting development of the country; they have provided opportunities to poets, occasional essayists and writers of fiction who might otherwise have found no field for their selfexpression.

CHAPTER XIII

SOUTH AFRICAN POETRY

To give in brief, and yet in true perspective, a summary of the poetical literature of South Africa is no easy task, not because the material is large, but for the very opposite reason. It is very limited, but its parts are disproportioned and incommensurable. It is like a geological system which is full of faults,' the earlier strata being cut off by cataclysms from the later. The greatest of these cataclysms is the war of 1899-1902, which produced a crop of poetry of its own, and was followed by later developments which, as the work of living authors, do not fall within the scope of this chapter.

But there had been lesser wars and lesser convulsions before that great struggle. The chief advantage of the war just named, so far as literature was concerned, was to make the scene and the main features of the country familiar and intelligible to the general reader. The kopje and the kloof, the veldt and the vlei, the Karroo and the Drakenberg, the Modder, the Vaal and the Orange, became household words. But the earlier poetry had dealt with the same country in quite a different way. To show this in detail and connectedly, to give any continuous and representative account of that poetry, is difficult; for the material is both scanty and scattered. Some day, it may be done by a critic on the spot, who has access to the remains, such as they are, contained, as everyone acquainted with South African literature says, in files of forgotten newspapers, in the dry-asdust pages of old Cape magazines and journals, and who can trace by family tradition or documents the history and circumstances of the writers. Meanwhile, the present section must be regarded as 'autoschediastic,' a first essay, an attempt rather to indicate the lie of the land than to cover the whole ground.

Rudyard Kipling, himself, in a sense, the foremost English

poet of South Africa, when asked what South African poetry there was beside his own, replied:

As to South African verse, it's a case of there's Pringle, and there's Pringle, and after that one must hunt the local papers. There is also, of course, F. W. Reitz's Africaanse Gedigte, songs and parodies in the Taal, which are very characteristic.

Roughly speaking, this is a pretty fair summary of the earlier South African poetry; but it includes 'Cape-Dutch' verse, which does not come within our purview. Kipling's judgment was confirmed independently by a living South African writer, R. C. Russell, himself a poet, who wrote: "There do not appear to have been any poets of note between Pringle's time and the generation which has just passed away.'

The first thing to do, then, is to give some account of Pringle. Thomas Pringle is called by the South Africans themselves 'the father of their poetry.' He was a remarkable man, and in every sense of the word, a pioneer. A somewhat younger contemporary of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Scott, a nearer contemporary of Byron, Shelley and Keats, he fell under the influences of the former group. Born in 1789, near Kelso, the son of a border-farmer, he achieved a literary position in Edinburgh, gaining the friendship of Sir Walter Scott and the acquaintance of the Edinburgh literati, and became editor of The Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, now Blackwood's Magazine. His first volume of poems was published in 1819; but literature proved unremunerative, and he decided to emigrate to South Africa, and went out to Cape Town in that year. He settled his family in the bush, and then, with a friend, attempted to achieve a literary career in Cape Town, being appointed, through the influence of Sir Walter Scott and others, librarian of the government library. He made a promising start in this office, but was ruined by quarrelling with the governor, lord Charles Somerset, and in particular by making, as Scott said, 'the mistake of trying to bring out a whig paper in Cape Town.' After a farewell visit to his friends in the bush, he returned to London to seek redress, but without avail. He associated himself with the men who were working for the abolition of slavery, notably with Wilberforce, Coleridge and Clarkson, but fell ill just when his labours for abolition were reaching success, in the summer of 1834, and died in London in the same year at the early age of forty-six. In that year, besides a new edition of his poems, he published a prose work, Narrative of a Residence in South Africa, which he was revising

just before his death. It was a striking work, and made much impression. Its influence may be read in the wellknown lines of Locksley Hall:

Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion creeping nigher,

Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly dying fire;

which, Tennyson records, were suggested to him by a passage in Pringle's book.

Coleridge expressed a very high opinion of Pringle's poems. Little known in Scotland or England, they have had a great and a good influence in South Africa. As a recent South African poet, Vine Hall, sings:

Pringle, we love thy scorn of wrong,

Thy simple, heartfelt song,

A knightly soul unbought and unafraid,

This country oweth much to thy two-edged blade.

The characteristics of his spirit, as shown in his poetry, were love of freedom, personal and public, love of the native, love of nature, and an old-fashioned refinement and classic taste. An Edinburgh student, he quotes his Lucretius and his Vergil, and uses his Latin phrases with practised skill. These characteristics were no small inheritance to South Africa. It is not easy to select from his poems, for, though faithful and sincere, and written with an eye on the objects, they are somewhat faint in hue and at times diffuse. The Songs of the Emigrants are an echo of the then new and fashionable poem, Byron's Childe Harold, including an imitation of his 'Adieu, adieu, my native land.'

More original and of more permanent interest as a graphic and vivid picture of the Cape Colony of those days, still the unsubdued home of the wild beast, long since driven far toward the equator, is Afar in the Desert. This was pronounced by Coleridge to be one of the two or three most perfect lyric poems in the language. Its opening lines carry the reader at once into the midst of its scene:

Afar in the Desert I love to ride

With the silent Bushboy alone by my side,
Away, away, from the dwellings of men,

By the wild deer's haunt, by the buffalo's glen,

By valleys remote where the oribi plays,

Where the gnu, the gazelle and the hartebeest graze,
And the koodoo and eland untamed recline

By the skirts of grey forests o'er-hung with wild vine,