ig6 



inserted into the original manuscript is or is not the composition, and perhaps even in 

 the handwriting, of Shakespeare. Some useful reprints, together with illustrative mat- 

 ter bearing on the English drama, have also appeared in the Materialien zur Kunde des 

 alteren Englischen Dramas, edited by Prof. W. Bang of Louvain. ^y 



(E. K. CHAMBERS.) 

 BRITISH COLONIAL LITERATURE 



Australian. Australia's beginning was from a literary standpoint unfortunate. 

 The primitive aborigines had no history and no legendary lore which, finding expression 

 through some of the first colonists, might have added to the world's stock of romance. 

 The exploring of the continent the siege of the Blue Mountains with their baffling 

 natural fortifications, the conquest of the great fastnesses of the sun on the dry inland 

 plains might have inspired an epic, but no one of the explorers nor of their contempo- 

 raries attempted more than a bare record. The sordid convict era inspired one book, 

 For the Term of His Natural Life, by Marcus Clarke, which is made notable by its 

 subject rather than its treatment. The bushranging era inspired another, Robbery 

 Under Arms, by " Rolf Boldrewood " (T. A. Browne, b. London, 1826), of which the 

 same may be said. Those are the two master works of early Australian letters. Yet 

 neither is distinctively Australian in the sense of showing a different outlook on life, or a 

 different sense of literary values, to that of the average contemporary English writer. 

 The same may be said of the poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon, who wrote in Australia of 

 Australian subjects from the standpoint of an English squire. 



To-day, with less notable books to cite, the observer may see the beginnings of a 

 characteristic Australian literature. The people bred from the wilder and more enter- 

 prising of English, Scottish and Irish stock, responding to the influence of the bountiful, 

 sometimes fierce, sunshine, and conditions of life which are singularly free from any 

 bonds of convention and are singularly levelling of social conditions begin to depart 

 from the home type. They are gay and debonair, whilst a little inclined to be cynkal, 

 irreverent and vainglorious; enduring and brave, even to the point of being somewhat 

 ruthless. The qualities of these new people, the Australians, begin to show in their 

 literature, which is as yet more impressive in quantity than in quality. There are at 

 least one hundred minor poets of some skill and originality of thought in Australia (with 

 less than five million inhabitants), and nearly that number of prose writers of some 

 distinction all showing to the close observer some signs to distinguish them from 

 writers of the same class in Great Britain and in America. A hedonistic joy in life, a 

 disrespect for authority, a wit tinged with cruelty, a freakish humour founded on wild 

 exaggeration those are the qualities which outcrop most often in exploring the fields of 

 contemporary Australian literature. There is to be found, too, a tinge of mystic 

 melancholy, a sense of bitterness a loving bitterness inspired by the harsh realities 

 of life in the " Bush " where Nature makes great demands on human endurance before 

 permitting her conquest, but enslaves her wooers by her very cruelty. 



This modern Australian literature owes very much to one man, Mr. J. F. Archibald 

 (b. Vic., 1858). He was of partly Scottish, partly Irish, partly French forbears, with a 

 touch of Semitic blood. Editor for a quarter of a century of a notable Australian paper, 

 he made it his mission to encourage young Australians to write of the life that was pe- 

 culiar to Australia. He was a wit with a fine flair for a phrase; a sentimental cynic; and 

 passionately Australian. Mainly under his aegis there came forward a young school of 

 writers which included Mr. Henry Lawson (b. N.S.W., 1867), who has given in short 

 stories and verse faithful, sometimes terrible, glimpses of the " Bush;" Mr. A. B. 

 (" Banjo ") Paterson (b. N.S.W., 1864), a singer of the racketty horsey life of Australian 

 sheep stations; Mr. Louis Bccke (b. N.S.W., 1857), who pictures South Sea Island life; 

 Mr. A. H. Davis (" Steele Rudd ") (b. Queensland, 1868), who writes broadly comic ami 

 yet sympathetic studies of life on the small farms of Australia; Mr. Roderic Quinri (b. 

 N.S.W., 1869), and the late Victor Daley (both of Irish extraction and giving in their 

 verse two different and yet both characteristically Australian modifications of Celtic 

 melancholy); Mr. Edwin J. Brady (b. N.S.W., 1869), writer of sea-songs; Miss Ethel 



