The real active, interesting, hopeful period of Australian literature began with Adam Lindsey Gordon (1833-72), who, though born in the Azores, came to South Australia, a young Oxford graduate in 1853. His father, an army officer, was of a literary turn of mind, and the boy, who was early well versed in the classics, was widely read in English literature before he left the university. He was an ardent ad mirer of Byron, whom he had already success fully imitated. In Australia Gordon was two years on the mounted police; and the seven fol lowing years he was a horse dealer and breaker and became champion steeplechase rider of the island. He was by temperament a man of ac tion, and the more popular of his poems abound in movement, in the action of the life he led, which he liked for its activity and hated on ac count of its lack of social advantages and in tellectual surroundings and opportunities. A legacy of f7,000 suddenly changed Gordon's life and surroundings and he became a member of the state legislature, where success came to him as a poet and cross-country rider. But the legacy was lost in speculation and with it went Gordon's business interests and his social posi tion. In ill health and out of work he took his own life when apparently on the verge of ma terial success. Gordon is the greatest of the Australianpoets. His verse is spontaneous, musical, refined and natural. He has such a sensitive ear he rarely strikes a discordant note and he has the genuine gift of melodic form. His temperament is always superior to his sur roundings and his literary touch is certain and self-possessed yet accompanied with emotional strength and restrained passion. But he is strongly touched with classical fatalism and sombre clouds ever hang over him constantly. His work naturally divides itself into three classes : Poems of action; strange, music haunted poems of fatalism and brooding fancy; and poems blending action with his mood of brooding melancholy, in which he attains his highest note. Three volumes of poems, 'Sea Spray and Smoke-Drift' and 'Ashtaroth' (1867), and 'Bush Ballads' (1870) constitute his published works. Henry Clarence Kendall (1842-82), the mad Australian poet who died in an asylum for the insane, is, after Gordon, the best of the native poets. He sings in a pure, spontaneous manner, in clear, lyrical tones, the glories of Australian forests, hills and plains. He loves her rivers and lakes and his verse is near to nature's heart. His pub lished works include 'Songs and Poems,' 'Songs from the Mountains' and (Leaves from an Australian Forest.' Like that of Gordon his verse is strikingly spontaneous and natural. Alfred Domett (1811-87), Premier of New Zealand, who, in 'Ranolf and Amohia' (1872) goes to the Maori for his subject and the in spiration for a forceful narrative poem, was highly praised by Longfellow, Tennyson and Browning. Charles Harpur (1812-68) has pub lished several volumes of poems in which he sings, in a melancholic minor note touched with weird fancy upon which the bushland has placed its hand, the life of the back country in which his early manhood was passed. He is known as the bush poet. James Brunton Stephens who published 'Convict Once' in London in 1871, was better known, until recently, than Gordon or Kendall, though he is inferior to them. He was quite a prolific writer. George Gordon McCrae (1833) who wrote original, though rather unfinished, poems, on native Australian legends and stories; Alex ander-Sutherland (1852), D. B. W. Sladen (1856 ), W. P. Reeves (1857) Victor Daley (1858-1905), A. B. Patterson (1864), Bernard O'Dowd (1866) Will Ogilvie (1869), Roderick Quinn (1869), Edwin J. Brady (1869) are among the best known of Australian poets after those already men tioned. Daley was a somewhat restless jour nalist who wrote much in both prose and verse for Melbourne, Sydney and other papers. He is idealistic, dreamily sensuous, suggesting often more than he says. He has been successful in picturesque, romantic poetry, love verse and humorous fancies. His work is cosmopolitan in tone and subject and occupies a high place among writers of imaginative literature in Australia; for he is imaginative rather than realistic and has many and varied strings to his lute. 'At Dawn and Dusk' (1897) contains much of his best work, the greater part of which is still scattered through the files of many papers. Brady wrote songs of the sea with a swing to them that is distinctively Australian. Patterson shares with Henry Lawson the first place as popular poet to-day in Australia. Both are successful novelists as well as poets. Law son especially is very versatile and always sug gestive of Australia. There is scarcely a type or feature or class in the life of the Common wealth of which he has not written. He looks upon the humorous side of life and he has given us a view of Australia distinct from that presented by other writers. His work is un even; but it contains much that is excellent, while most of it is passable. His most charac teristic book is 'While the Billy Boils.' Charles Allen Sherard CA Daughter of the South,' 1889), J. B. O'Hara of the South,' 1891), E. B. Loughran ('Neath Austral Skies,' 1894), Edward Dyson ('Rhymes from the Mines,' 1896), William Gay ( 'Sonnets,' 1896) and other poems, Melville Whyte, Kenneth MacKenzie, Patrick Maloney and Robert Rich ardson have also contributed to the making of the literary activity which began with the open ing of the present century and still continues unabated in Australia.
One of the noticeable features of the pres ent day literary movement in Australia is the prominent part being played in it by women writers. Louise Mack, a journalist, magazine writer and critic of note, is the leading spirit in this movement of the Australian woman toward literature. She has created a school of her own, distinctly feminine, and she has found scores of imitators, all of them inferior to herself in talent, imagination and vivacity. But Miss Mack seems to be growing out of her own school, which is not of the best, into bet ter things and leaving the field to her followers and imitators, who appear unable to follow her. She gives signs of ridding herself of her news paper mannerisms and giving rein to her in nate delicacy, tenderness, artistic restraint and real strength of subtle imagination. 'Dreams
in Flower,' her volume of published verse, though uneven in execution, is, at times, touched with an inspiration that promises well for the future. Among the two score or more of women in active literary life in Australia, Ethel Castilla, Jessie MacKay, Ethel Turner, Inez K. Hyland, Dora Wilcox Henly, Florence Gay and Dorothea MacKellar are most worthy of mention. All of them have done good work in some one field or another. Miss Turner .has also written good juvenile stories.
At the head of the younger school of novel ists in Australia is Arthur Hoey Davis ('Steele Rudd') who has, for several years, been one of the most discussed men in literary life in any country. He has broken away from the literary traditions of Australia so effectively that he has raised up an army of imitators. He writes vividly of the interior sections of the country where man fights an uneven fight against nature. He is a humorist and he lays the local color on with a strong brush. He treats, in a somewhat fantastic manner, but with notice able individuality of style, a crowded gallery of native characters and types. He publishes a magazine of his own which has helped largely to increase his influence over the younger lit erary generation of the Commonwealth. The great charge laid at his door is that his pre tended realism is the creation of his own vivid imagination and that he gives an untrue picture of Australian life and characters. Be this as it may, he has wakened literature and pulled it out of the rut in which it had gone since the days of Gordon, and he has turned the attention of native literary men to the great wealth of literary material at home, more full of interest, life and originality than any field heretofore entered in Australia during the pres ent century. Prose, like verse, in Australia, has gone through a long apprenticeship of imita tion and worshipping at foreign literary shrines. From 1840 to 1860 Australia went through a literary phase somewhat like the American dime novel, Indian and Wild West literature. Its literary aspirants for prose honors were, for the most part, but little superior to the writers of this American dime novel output In Australia, however, they dignified the period with the name of school. This school helped to quicken the imagination and to create an interest in Australia, if not in things Australian. It dealt, in its first phase, with escaped convicts, immigrants with a shady past, bushrangers, gold diggers, highwaymen and the other picturesque and lawless characters who then made up a fair part of the life of the island. Henry Kingsley, an Englishman and brother of Charles IGngsley, after several years' residence in Austraha, published, in 1859, 'The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn,' which is credited with having had a strong salutary influence upon Australian fiction. L. B. Farjeon ('Grif,> 1869), Marcus Clarke (1846-81, 'For the Term of His Natural Life,' 1874) are among the few names of this early literary movement worthy of remembrance. Farjeon depicted vividly and truthfully the night life of Melbourne, while Clarke handled the convict system in a manner that compelled attention, not only at home in Australia but in the coun tries of Europe, into the languages of most of which his novel has been translated. Charles Alexander Brown is the best of the Australian novelists. Under his pen name of 'Rolf Bold rewood,> he has written a series of novels which show the life of Australia of the latter half of the 19th century in a vivid and interest ing manner. 'Robbery under Arms' (1:::) won for him a reputation as a novelist through out the English-speaking world. He has more than a dozen works of a like nature to his credit. A. B. Patterson has also ventured into this field, the crudeness of the life of which he i delights in depicting. Louis Becke, too, finds the unpleasant and immoral phases of Aus tralian life to his taste. Guy Boothby ((The Beautiful White Devil' and 'Dr. Nikola,> 1896), Walter Jeffrey ((By Reef and Palm,' 1896, 'Pacific Tales,' 'Child Life in the South ern Seas,' 1897, and 'The Mutineer,' 1899) are the legitimate forerunners of the modern Aus tralian school of fiction headed by Davis, who has put on the appearance, at least, of making true and realistic pictures of representative life in the interior of Queensland. He has done Australian literature the great service of rid ding it of the crudities and questionable plc tures which the previous native novelists were but too prone to present.
Mrs. G. F. Cross (Ada Cambridge 1854), though not a native of Australia, has so identi fied herself with its literary life that she may justly lay claim to being its greatest woman story teller. She has close upon a score of novels to her.credit. They are cosmopolitan in subject and vigorous in treatment. In the (Three Miss Kings' she depicts vividly life in the bush country. Mrs. Campbell Praed (1851) has been even more prolific than Mrs. Cross, her published novels being well over a score. Though she has been, in a sense, popular, here stories, owing to their extreme pessimism, are not pleasant; but they show power of character delineation and character painting; and her facility of invention seldom limps. Mrs. Aeneas Gunn has lately achieved an international reputation as a novelist and her works have become popular in the United States, England and Canada. One of her most characteristic novels is 'We of the Never Never.' Bibliography.