experience is shown in her general outlook upon life, rather than in the
details of her work. The prevailing tone of 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 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 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, I _am_ glad--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 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 of _Fidelis_ by being shown in 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 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 in _Fidelis_ whose 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 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, 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 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 the _mens 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 in _A Marriage Ceremony_, touching her cheek, which
is terribly disfigured by a birth-mark, 'I have never had _love_. 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 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.
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 woman _is_ a 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 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 in _A Marked Man_ or
_Fidelis_, or _The 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 of _Geoffry Hamlyn_,
and which for thirty-seven years have made it one of the most popular of
Australian stories.
In the presentation of tragic or pathetic incidents lies Ada Cambridge's
chief power, as far as her plots are concerned. In _A Marked Man_ it 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 of _A 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 of _A 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 of _A Marriage Ceremony_, there is a scene giving a fair
example of the author's style in 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.
'Kiss _her_,' Betty whispered, pushing him a little. She, too, felt
that it would be something, if not much, 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 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 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 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 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 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.'
ADAM LINDSAY GORDON.
The strongest 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 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 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 sword
Flashing blue, rising red from the blow!'