Part 4

But they didn’t. They shut Nigger up instead.

II.

The sun shone on the pale sodden summer grass, and the raindrops on the trees glistened. The clouds were rolling back over the plain and the sea. Nigger wanted a walk. He danced down the drive, and looked back to see if anyone were following. No one. Nigger wagged his tail and tried again. The invitation was ignored. Nigger drooped his tail (what there was of it) and came back.

Simonette got her coat; Nigger wagged; an umbrella; Nigger sprang into the air and spun round and round and barked. Simonette would indicate the general direction of the walk, and he, Nigger, could introduce all the variety. Simonette went over the hill; so did Nigger—and right and left, too; he knew all the _best_ rabbit-holes.

But Simonette heard him tell little kennel-bound Kiwi, “Oh, just a middling walk. Better than nothing, of course. But if only a man had been here...!”

And since master came back Nigger hasn’t even spoken to Simonette.

Miscellaneous

The Queen City of the South

Writers about the Old World can take so much for granted. Even the Colonial knows what to expect when the scene is laid in Tooting, Maida Vale, or the _Boul’ Mich’_. He is intimate with some of the geographical details, and with the social atmosphere of very different parts of London and Paris. Regent Street, Clapham Junction, and the Edgeware Road are as atmospheric for him as the Domain and Toorak. The writer of the New World has no such advantage. He cannot be certain that even the names of his capital cities will be recognized, and he knows that few readers abroad (abroad, for him, is the Northern Hemisphere) will care to learn even the general outlines of God-knows-what insignificant citylet. Yet Australian States and cities, nay, the very suburbs, are almost as broadly distinct and as superficially varied as anything in the Old World, even though they are not as mellow or as complex; and our citizens are as much moulded by their surroundings.

Some years ago Foster Fraser tried to help us out as he whizzed through each capital. Thus he labelled Sydney “for pleasure,” Melbourne “for business,” and Adelaide “for culture.” But Adelaide is the only city that is satisfied with his judgment. All six capitals bridle with pleasure when “the Queen City of the South” is mentioned, which, as any South Australian will tell you, is absurd; every unbiassed person knows that the phrase is only a descriptive variant for Adelaide.

The only superiority freely accorded to Adelaide by her sister cities is that of piety. The reason is partly the number of her churches, but far more, I think, a malicious disinclination to let drop the legend of our mayor who veiled with decent calico our Venus and our Hercules. Some of our many later statues more rightly bring a blush to the aesthetic cheek of the young person, but not, alas, because they are unclad.

South Australia is a long, narrow State running down the middle of the continent from the centre to the sea, from which, and her port, Adelaide is not seven miles distant. The cattle tracks of the dry, hot (and cold) Far North, and all the railways through the wheat and sheep and copper areas, and all good roads everywhere, lead towards Adelaide. That Queen City herself lies like a jewel on the broad and beautiful plain, in the bend of the arm of hills which sweep inland from the shore. The heart of it is a square mile of broad streets intersecting at right angles, bound by gardened terraces, and secured from the rough jostling and elbowing of the suburbs by broad belts of park land sacred to browsing cows and horses, cricket, tennis, football, and bowls. East Terrace has specialized in markets, for it lies nearest the hills and the vegetable gardens; West Terrace faces the monuments and the sad little mounds of a cemetery. Within these confines are five tree-shaded lawns where children may play, and seats for those who choose to watch the gay flower-beds. To the south are crowded streets and populous lanes, lined mainly with dwellings; to the middle and north business has developed.

Three or four shopping streets for womenkind, ten or twelve streets of offices for men, and some of warehouses and factories, are so far enough for this hub of the State. King William Street bisects it from north to south, lined with banks and shops and huge hotels (huge for us, you know), and cutting it at right angles is Rundle Street, a kind of Drapers’ Row. Next to Rundle Street, and parallel with it, is North Terrace, where the chambers of doctors and dentists intermingle with warehouses. The Terrace is broad and treed and gardened like a boulevard, and even along its garden and pedestrian side buildings have been allowed. Here are the Railway Station and Parliament House, and, east of King William Street, Government House behind its palm trees and lawns, the Public Reading Rooms and Library, the Art Gallery, the University, and the big Exhibition Building, which forms one entrance to an Oval and Showground. Still further east is the long red-bricked General Hospital, with its wide, shady lawn, and the ironwork entrance to the lovely Botanic Gardens.

At the back of all these, between sloping banks of grass and flowers, flows the Torrens. There is a little embarrassment about showing our river to visitors, lest they should wish to row too far west or east, and we South Australians do not care to expose our limitations to dwellers on Thameside. The fact is that our river has to be carefully saved up and dammed back for the purpose, and once a year we empty it for excavation and repairs. Some precisians call it a lake—an artificial lake. One midwinter, when the mud-banks gleamed grey and slimy, and only a narrow trickle forced a way along the middle of the bed, we were subjected to civic humiliation. The Governor-General announced a hasty and unpremeditated visit. Every effort was made to fill the Torrens against his Excellency’s arrival, but despite all that man could do we had to hurry the representative of majesty past a very meagre stream.

This north end of the city is undoubtedly the loveliest. Here the line of lower roofs is broken by towers and spires and miniature sky-scrapers rising above the quaint architecture of a cruder time and art. And it is over this north end of the city, with its corrugated sky-line, its river and its lawns, that the slender Cathedral looks, standing on a hill above churches and houses whose bases are lost in greenery. East and south are pretty suburbs where each house stands in its own garden, but only in North Adelaide are the homes so spacious, so serene, so certain of their beauty and their fitness. Oddly enough, this retreat of wealth and leisure has for western neighbour the region where the gas and soap and bricks are made, where hides are tanned and laundry work is done. But then North Adelaide holds up her skirts with jewelled hands and stands clear of the squalor of Bowden and Hindmarsh by a whole park width.

When electric cars were brought to Adelaide the Municipal Tramways Trust had the humorous notion, or perhaps it was only the business instinct, fortified by democratic principle, of whizzing the North Adelaide cars down the hill and round to Bowden. And so pretty misses with books or racquets or clubs rub shoulders with stout old parties laden with string bags and parcels, and dingy women are bitterly amused when their grubby offspring wipe their boots on the dresses of remote and silken ladies. The fastidious gaze reluctantly on the lashless, pink-lidded outdoor patients, on the monstrous and deformed. Oh, the classes meet the masses in the Hill Street car!

A Literature in the Making

Criticism often seems presumptuous, yet until we have examined and weighed, how can we set a price—appreciate? For us who are but amateurs, and who have taken our growth in a province, the attempt to fix the price (as against assessing the value for us, which is always legitimate, for it reveals our own position rather than the subject’s) of the great writers of the world is true presumption; our legitimate training in criticism we get by exercising our discrimination on our unfortunate contemporaries and compeers, the not-yet, the perhaps not-to-be, acclaimed.

In 1916, G. Hassell & Son published a small brown pocket volume, “Poems, Real and Imaginative,” by M. R. Walker. Like so many other little books between 1914 and 1919, it was intended to aid the funds of the Red Cross; unlike, on the other hand, so many of its companions, it really deserved for its own sake the sympathetic attention of all literary Australians. _The Bulletin_ was rather off-handed with the little stranger, for _The Bulletin_, hardy parent that it is, often favours the lusty, the clamorous, even the violent and rude, more than the child with the low, sweet voice; but there must have been many who pondered the twenty-four sets of verses in the wee book, for it ran into a second edition.

It has been out long enough now for us to estimate it impartially.

Not a mine of pure gold, it is good enough to be mistaken for such by the uncritical, bad enough to have its qualities entirely overlooked by the supercilious. All is very fair verse, bits are true poetry; but perhaps no piece, however short, is pure poetry throughout.

The topics are the simple, natural, age-old topics of the poet—the sea and the moon and the mountains, love, friendship, and country. Of these Miss Walker is most adequate to the first group, to “Sea Pictures,” “A June Evening,” “To the Ouse.” Read this fragment of blank verse from “Half-moon Bay”:—

High overhead The forest stretching to the seven peaks Is beautiful in slopes of wilding gum, Wattle, and box. The sad shea-oaks, Huddled together down a windy ridge, Whisper their troublous sighing to the waves A thousand feet below. The coves and inlets of the circling bay Are floored with giant pebbles, and the wash Goes sweeping up the deep rock-riven cracks To break in shallows on the level ledge, And drop again in sparkling waterfall.

The felicities of picture and of sound in this are typical of her art, but it misses the sunshine and open-air buoyancy of “At Maria Island.”

Oh the yellow broom is growing On the sand-banks by the sea, And the breezes blowing, blowing, Mingle with the waters’ flowing In a haunting melody.

There the gulls are rising, falling, To the heaving of the tide, Listen to them calling, calling, To the fishermen a-hauling Nets, out where the schooners ride.

Perhaps “At Maria Island” comes nearest to maintaining throughout the same technical level, and the same trend of theme. A short and convenient instance of the vague but disconcerting shifting of the direction of the thought, and a certain incompleteness or fragmentariness, that characterize most of the pieces, is “Sea Pictures.”

Know you the swinging of wild water after storm, The racing breeze that sings along the sand, And rocks, deep-flung, where sea-birds love to swarm, Wave-weary for the land?

There are fair nights in summer on the sea, And moonlight falling gentlier on the waves Than echo’s sighs, borne back again to me From dim, sea-haunted caves.

Here the thought does not march from one verse to the next; rather there is a turning away from the question that links poet and reader in eager sympathy, to a mood of brooding, personal reminiscence. In “Blue” the jerkiness is conscious, and is covered by a conceit impossible to the serious poetic mood. In “There is a Land” it manifests itself as obscurity. Poetry is in the air, but the poet cannot freely draw breath. In the eighteen lines of this poem are examples of nearly all Miss Walker’s qualities; there is inspiration, but inadequately expressed, a passionate clutching at a meaning that eludes the words, and comes out rather baldly, as in the line,

Ah Death; and some pass on, that know not and are blind.

There is technical failure—and technical felicity.

... the soul Cries to the silence with a living cry— A whisper that goes by upon the wind, A breaking wave upon some lonely shore, The list’ning hush of mountains in the dawn, And lo! the Voice! An echo in the soul! And then—the level stillness of the days.

The irregularity in the pulse of the thought is found also in some constructions which, though grammatical, are unexpected and not at first obvious, where, for instance, we were expecting one object to be described, and find that the epithet applies to another, the thought having moved on; it is also reflected in a technique so frequent as to become a mannerism:—

... a Voice Calling unto its own, that, oft, the soul ... As sullen seas that, sweeping o’er some reef ... Where, low, the boobyallas keep....

These halts and returns would not be noticed in longer poems, or in the poems read separately; but the ear of the student begins to wait for them, as it does for some inevitable voice-pauses at line-endings where the meaning should trip on.

... tree-guarded from the light Flinging its wide farewell across the sky.

(This also is an instance of the unexpected construction referred to above; we are expecting a further description of “deep wells of shade,” what we get is an adjectival clause about “light”; perhaps it is the voice-pause that gives this feeling and sends us back again upon our construing.)

... the fishermen a-hauling Nets,

in the quotation above also pulls us up with a jerk.

There are other tricks of manner that grow monotonous. “O Moon,” “O Son of Essex,” “Ah, Love,” “Ah, Death,” “Oh have you ever stood alone to watch ...” Apostrophe and exclamation so reiterated point to poverty of expression, to a labouring to say what cannot get itself said. And there are commonplace lines, prose in metre—

O moon, that risest now, how beautiful thou art. Poor little girl, you did not wish to die.

Perhaps there is bathos—

A little, wandering, broken-hearted child.

But not all this can do away with the many triumphs, the recurrent charms for eye and ear—

Thy waters washing into shallow pools ...

... a moorèd boat Asway upon the idle-swinging tide ...

The islands to the north were bathed in sleep, Their cliffs stood out in sunshine to the sea, Only the murmur, murmur, of the waves, Broke the long silence unto you and me.

The songs and the scenes and the thought are not joyous. Beauty of nature, and loves of friends, or man and maid, induce wistful thoughts. The sadness may be explicit—

But in the days, ay me! the empty days, The long, long days that lead to no fireside, Philosophy’s a thing to call a friend, To hold to, and to cherish, lest one fail, Afraid before the vista of the years.

Or it may sigh itself out in falling cadence, as in the song on page 24, where what should be a sigh of ecstacy falls on the ear like a foreboding. But the melancholy is never morbid. It may be hopeless, but it is resigned and controlled and quietly courageous.

Australia is too young to produce great poetry, for that never blossoms from unacclimatized minds. But the necessary conditions are gradually emerging. Australians are increasingly in sympathy with their country and its qualities: its sunlight, its seas and mountains and plains and deserts, its sheep and its wheat and forests and minerals, are all giving out their emanations into the mental medium where poetry forms; there, too, our traditions are being made or absorbed. We have not yet the plethora of elements from which the great poetic souls take shape, but crystals more or less characteristic are being precipitated from such material as there is. Those of to-day may be small and cloudy and faultily-shapen, but they presage a beauty and a perfection in the poetry of the future.

G. HASSELL & SON. PRINTERS & PUBLISHERS, CURRIE ST., ADELAIDE.