Clara Morison and others by Catherine Helen Spence, who was better known as a political writer; and Charles Rowcroft's colonial 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 Dunsmore 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-aCentury 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 self-expression.

CHAPTER XIII

South African Poetry

O give in brief, and yet in true perspective, a summary of the poetical literature of South Africa is no easy task,

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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-as-dust 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