Among those who have passed away may be
mentioned
John
Fairbairn, the contemporary and friend of Pringle, whom the
latter invited to join him at the Cape.
Fairbairn, the contemporary and friend of Pringle, whom the
latter invited to join him at the Cape.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v14
Partly owing to
his own recklessness and extravagance and partly to a hereditary
taint of melancholy, his life was unhappy, and he ended it by his
own hand; but, in the saddle and out of it, he was adventurous,
brave, 'a thorough sportsman. ' His poetry is the voice of men
who lead adventurous lives, who fight gallantly against long odds,
and take defeat almost as a matter of course. It is melancholy in
so far as it despairs of success or reward; but it is joyous in its
love of the fight for its own sake.
Gordon was a poet from his youth. On leaving England, in
1853, he wrote a poem of farewell to home which already showed
his characteristic pride and defiance. Some years, however, were
to pass before he published anything of importance. In 1865, he
contributed to Bell's Life in Victoria what purported to be
merely one of the riming tips for horse-races that were not
infrequent in that journal, but was, in fact, a fine poem, in which
his passion for horses, for the sea and for life alike found ex-
pression. More of these racing poems followed; contemporary
racing in Australia and memories of hunting and steeple-chasing
in his youth at home supplied him with subjects during the
remaining five years of his life. With the possible exception of
Whyte Melville, whom he greatly admired and to whom he
dedicated, in a beautiful poem, his volume Bush Ballads, Gordon
is the only poet who has used sport as the medium for the
## p. 367 (#397) ############################################
XII] Adam Lindsay Gordon 367
expression of his views on life. All his gallant, despairing
philosophy finds voice in these poems; and, where other poets
have turned to tales of ancient heroism at sea or on the battle-
field, Gordon turned to a race-meeting. On these sporting poems,
rather than on his reflective poems or his dramatic narratives,
Gordon's popularity rests, not only in Australia but among
English readers in all countries. And that popularity is deserved.
The best of them have not only an irresistible fire and pace:
Gordon, seeing sport as the best thing in life, could give dignity
to its treatment, while his knowledge of poetry and his natural
gifts made him a secure, if not an original, metrist.
Poems in Bell's Life in Victoria and in The Australasian
came frequently from his pen; and, in 1867, he collected some of
them into a volume, Sea Spray and Smoke Drift. The same year
saw the issue of a long poem, Ashtaroth, partly founded on
Goethe's Faust, which contains much that is characteristic of
Gordon with very little that was of his best. In 1868, Marcus
Clarke persuaded him to contribute poems to The Colonial
Monthly, and he began with the mournful poem Doubtful
Dreams. In 1869, full of trouble, he found refuge for a time
at a friend's house, where he wrote his best dramatic lyrics,
The Sick Stockrider, The Ride from the Wreck, Wolf and Hound
and his most famous racing poem, How we beat the Favourite.
In 1870, he published his volume Bush Ballads and Galloping
Rhymes and, a few months later, died by his own hand.
Gordon occasionally handled old themes, and some of his ballads
are stirring. Among his autobiographical poems, Whisperinge
in Wattle-Boughs, in which he looks back to his wild youth, is
full of music and pathos. Many of his reflective poems finely
express his ardent joy in activity and effort and his profound
melancholy, although in these his metrical debt to Swinburne
or another is more insistently noticeable than in his narratives
or poems of sport. If Gordon is not a poet of the first rank,
he is one in whom both the learned and the unlearned can take
pleasure. His spirit of daring, of joy in the fight for the fight's
sake, would appear to be alive yet in Australia; and there is much
of Gordon, though there is no imitation of Gordon, in the frank
feeling and defiant gladness of the recently published Book of
Anzac, over which the Australasian soldiers in Gallipoli have made
English readers laugh and weep.
To the same period as Gordon's poetry belong the comparatively
few poetical works of Marcus Clarke, journalist, dramatist and
## p. 368 (#398) ############################################
368
[CH.
Australia and New Zealand
novelist, who wrote some pretty lyrics and clever parodies, and
the earlier work of two poets of considerable merit, Thomas
Bracken and Arthur Patchett Martin. Martin's lyrical poems are
thoughtful and musical, tinged with the sadness of one who, in his
youth, had high faith in freedom, but lost it as time went on.
Bracken was a facile and rather sentimental poet, whose lyrics
have more sweetness than strength. One of them, Not Understood,
is widely known. Bracken was by birth a New Zealander, and not
a few of his poems are based on Maori legends or history. The
poet of the Maoris, however, is Alfred Domett, the friend of
Robert Browning, who went to New Zealand in 1842 and lived
there for nearly thirty years. Before leaving England, Domett
had published poems, among them a long lyric on Venice (1839).
His longest work, Ranolf and Amohia, he put forth after his
return home in 1872. In a great variety of lyrical metres it
describes the scenery of New Zealand and narrates a story of
Maori life. Had these been Domett's only objects in writing the
poem, he would probably have left a better memorial of his
undeniable poetic gift. His descriptions of the romantic scenery
of the islands and the mythology and customs of the Maoris are
often very beautiful and interesting. In the prefatory poem he
says:
Well, but what if there gleamed in an Age cold as this,
The divinest of Poets' ideals of bliss ?
Yea, an Eden could lurk in this Empire of ours,
With the loneliest love in the loveliest bowers.
The answer he gives is convincing: but he had a further object
which interfered with the success of his work. He wanted to talk
about theism and positivism; and, though his philosophising is
very interesting in itself, his disquisitions break the flow of his
poem. Domett's last volume, Flotsam and Jetsam, published in
1877, contains many beautiful descriptions of places which he had
visited in his European travels, and some glowing expressions of
his opinions and hopes.
To the period of Kendall and Gordon belongs also the earlier
work of the Queensland poet, James Brunton Stephens, a Scot
who went to Australia in 1866. The popularity of Stephens rests
chiefly on his humorous poems, such as To a Black Gin and
Universally Respected; and these vigorous and hearty sketches
make him the Bret Harte of Australia. They do not, however,
show his talent at its best. Stephens is a poet of great strength
and fine imagination. His first poem, Convict Once, is a tale of
## p. 369 (#399) ############################################
X11]
Fiction
369
remarkable power and gloom; and among his lyrics are several
which, for their music and their passion, are much to be prized.
Technically, Stephens is noteworthy for his strong handling of
dactylic metres. Another good Queensland poet, George Essex
Evans, belongs to a later date, since his first volume was not
published till 1891. Evans shared Stephens's lofty belief in the
destinies of Australia. His Australian Symphony and his
patriotic poems are full of passion for his country and of a more
manful and ambitious love of it than Kendall or any other
Australian poet had expressed. His long narrative poem, The
Repentance of Magdalene Despar, is strong and tragic, and in his
lyric poems he shows a command of original metres and cadences
and a choice fancy.
In the decade 1880—90, there began a new era in Australian
poetry, possibly due, in some measure, to the new pride and
confidence which was the natural result of the increased interest
in Australia after the International Exhibition at Melbourne in
1880—1 and the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London in
1886. At any rate, it is the poetry of a civilised country, with
leisured and cultivated inhabitants. The poems of Philip Joseph
Holdsworth, of Francis Adams, of James Lister Cuthbertson, of
Robert Richardson, of William Gay, of Grace Jennings Carmichael,
of Barcroft Henry Boake and of Victor James Daley show poetry
firmly established in Australia, well received by a public that can
judge for itself, and flowering with a peculiar vigour. It is the
poetry of refined and cultivated minds; but it is free from wilful
strangeness and from any native or imported taints of morbidity.
Meanwhile, John Farrell had set the vogue for racy, free-and-easy
poetry of common life, which his successors are practising with
greater skill and verisimilitude than himself. In origin it doubt-
less owes something to Bret Harte: but it is enriching the English
language with vigorous colloquial expressions, and providing
readers with excitement and amusement.
The best literary genius of Australia turns to poetry; but good
work has been done in fiction. Henry Kingsley's Geoffrey Hamlyn,
though a story of Australia, founded on the author's experiences
during his brief stay in the colony, can scarcely be considered
a novel of Australian origin; and William Howitt's A Boy's
Adventures in the Wilds of Australia stands in the same
category. Perhaps the earliest properly Australian novels were
Clara Morison and others by Catherine Helen Spence, who was
better known as a political writer; and Charles Rowcroft's colonial
24
E. L. XIV.
CH. XII.
## p. 370 (#400) ############################################
370 Australia and New Zealand [CH.
6
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. Com-
pared 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
## p. 371 (#401) ############################################
X11]
Historians
371
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 Dunmore 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-a-Century 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.
24--2
## p. 372 (#402) ############################################
CHAPTER XIII
SOUTH AFRICAN POETRY
To give in brief, and yet in true perspective, a summary of the
poetical literature of South Africa is no easy task, 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 repre-
sentative 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 circum-
stances 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, thu foremost English
## p. 373 (#403) ############################################
6
CH. XIII]
Thomas Pringle
373
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 characteristio.
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 govern-
ment 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 London to seek redress,
but without avail. He associated bimself with the men who were
working for the abolition of slavery, notably with Wilberforce,
Coleridge and Clarkson, but fell ill just when his labours for
abolition were reaching success, in the summer of 1834, and died in
London in the same year at the early age of forty-six. In that year,
besides a new edition of his poems, he published a prose work,
Narrative of a Residence in South Africa, which he was revising
## p. 374 (#404) ############################################
374
[CH.
South African Poetry
just before his death. It was a striking work, and made much
impression. Its influence may be read in the wellknown lines
of Locksley Hall :
Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion creeping nigher,
Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly dying fire;
which, Tennyson records, were suggested to him by a passage
in Pringle's book.
Coleridge expressed a very high opinion of Pringle's poems.
Little known in Scotland or England, they have had a great
and a good influence in South Africa. As a recent South African
poet, Vine Hall, sings :
Pringle, we love thy scorn of wrong,
Thy simple, heartfelt song,
A knightly soul unbought and unafraid,
This country oweth much to thy two-edgòd blade.
The characteristics of his spirit, as shown in his poetry, were
love of freedom, personal and public, love of the native, love of
nature, and an old-fashioned refinement and classic taste. An
Edinburgh student, he quotes his Lucretius and his Vergil, and
uses his Latin phrases with practised skill. These characteristics
were no small inheritance to South Africa. It is not easy to select
from his poems, for, though faithful and sincere, and written with
an eye on the objects, they are somewhat faint in hue and at times
diffuse. The Songs of the Emigrants are an echo of the then new
and fashionable poem, Byron's Childe Harold, including an imita-
tion of his 'Adieu, adieu, my native land. '
More original and of more permanent interest as a graphic
and vivid picture of the Cape Colony of those days, still the
unsubdued home of the wild beast, long since driven far toward
the equator, is A far in the Desert. This was pronounced by
Coleridge to be one of the two or three most perfect lyric poems
in the language. Its opening lines carry the reader at once into
the midst of its scene:
Afar in the Desert I love to ride
With the silent Bushboy alone by my side,
Away, away, from the dwellings of men,
By the wild deer's haunt, by the buffalo's glen,
By valleys remote where the oribi plays,
Where the gnu, the gazelle and the hartebeest graze,
And the koodoo and eland untamed recline
By the skirts of grey forests o’er-hung with wild vine,
## p. 375 (#405) ############################################
XI1]
The Bechuana Boy
375
Where the elephant browses at peace in his wood,
And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood,
And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will,
In the fen where the wild ass is drinking his fill.
No wonder that it has been translated into Cape Dutch, and is
loved by both races alike! .
The spirited Lion Hunt, a poetic sketch by a poet who, like
Homer, had seen real lions and real hunts, ends with an allusion
to Sir Walter Scott:
His head, with the paws, and the bones of his skull,
With the spoils of the leopard and buffalo bull,
We'll send to Sir Walter: Now boys let us dine,
And talk of our deeds o'er a flask of old wine!
.
And Pringle added a note that this intention had actually been
carried out, and that, in 1834, the trophies ‘had the honour to
form part of the ornaments of the lamented poet's antique armoury
at Abbotsford. '
The Lion and Giraffe is also an exceedingly graphic snapshot
of a scene which Pringle, if he had not witnessed it, had heard
described at first hand, and displays all his powers of imagination,
observation and description. But the piece, perbaps, which more
than any other marks this pious Scottish farmer's son for a real
literary artist, the brother at once of Burns and Scott and
Livingstone, is The Bechuana Boy. This touching and beautiful
piece, part fact, part fiction, truth arranged with art, was based
on the story of a Bechuana orphan boy, who had been carried
off from his native country by the mountain tribes, half-bred
Hottentots, and who fell under Pringle’s protection. The touch
of the pet springbok was suggested to Pringle by his seeing, a few
days afterwards, a slave child playing with a fawn at a farmer's
residence. The real little African boy brought by Pringle and
his wife to England became their devoted protégé and almost
adopted child, but died, like many at that time, of an affection
of the lungs.
I sat at noontide in my tent,
And looked across the Desert dun,
Beneath the clondless firmament
Far gleaming in the sun.
1 Ver in de Wildernis, a rendering by F. W. Reitz, a poet of mark, who was
president of the Orange Free State in the years 1889 to 1896, is a most successful
effort and indeed a significant token of the essential affinity of the two races.
Nowhere, perhaps, is this better shown than in the last line, practically identical in
both tongues:
Want ver is der mensch, MAAR GOD IS NABY.
## p. 376 (#406) ############################################
376
[ch.
South African Poetry
When from the bosom of the waste
A swarthy stripling came in haste
With foot unshod and naked limb;
And a tame springbok followed him.
With open aspect, frank yet bland,
And with a modest mien he stood,
Caressing with a gentle hand
That beast of gentle brood;
Then meekly gazing in my face,
Said in the language of his race
With smiling look yet pensive tone,
'Stranger-I'm in the world alone! '
*
来
*
*
来
"Thus lived I, a lone orphan lad,
My task the proud Boor's flocks to tend;
And this poor fawn was all I had
To love, or call my friend;
When suddenly, with haughty look
And taunting words, that tyrant took
My playmate for his pampered boy,
Who envied me my only joy.
6
'High swelled my heart! But when a star
Of midnight gleamed, I softly led
My bounding favourite forth, and far
Into the Desert fled.
And here, from human kind exiled,
Three moons on roots and berries wild
I've fared; and braved the beasts of prey,
To 'scape from spoilers worse than they.
'But yester morn a Bushman brought
The tidings that thy tents were near,
And now with hasty foot I've sought
Thy presence, void of fear:
Because they say, 0 English Chief,
Thou scornest not the Captive's grief:
Then let me serve thee, as thine own-
For I am in the world alone! '
Such was Marossi's touching tale,
Our breasts they were not made of stone;
His words, his winning looks prevail-
We took him for 'our own. '
And One, with woman's gentle art
Unlocked the fountains of his heart;
And love gushed forth-till he became
Her Child in everything but name.
Many other pieces testify sympathetically to the noble, indeed
often heroic, character of the Kaffirs, and to their capacity both
for poetry and religion, elements not to be forgotten in any
account of South African poetry. Such are The Ghona Widow's
## p. 377 (#407) ############################################
ị ]
XIII
Africander's Songs
377
Lullaby with its quotation from the famous Ntsikana's Hymn, or
The Captive of Camalu or The Koranna.
Pringle then, is historic, and anyone who wishes to know what
the colour and circumstances of South African life were at the
beginning of the last century will find it nowhere so well as in
his book. Some of the pieces in it to which reference has been
made may remind us that South Africa is the home of at least
two white and many black races, and that in various ways all
these appear in its literature. A volume published as long ago
as 1884, entitled Klaas Gezwint en Zijn Paert, contains not
only specimens of Pringle's poems, but verses by a number of
other verse writers of that and previous generations. The first
piece in the volume, The British Settler's Song, composed by
an early settler, A. G. Bain, and sung by him at the Settlers'
Commemoration Dinner at Graham's Town, bears the stamp of
its era upon it, and is very characteristic.
So, too, is the next piece, The Africander's War Song, an
adaptation of A' the Blue Bonnets are over the Border,
beginning :
March! March! Cabo and Caledon!
Mount your fleet steeds, they are sleek-in good order.
March, march, Stellenbosch, Swellendam,
Every brave Burgher must off to the Border!
Two others, written as companion poems, entitled Cutting
Capers and Caper Sauce, comparing, or contrasting the advantage
of England and Cape Colony, give a lively picture of some promi-
nent features. The second and most unique portion of the volume,
the Volk's Liederen, or poems in the Taal or Cape Dutch, to which
reference has already been made, we must here unwillingly pass
by. Many of them are parodies of wellknown English and Scottish
pieces, especially the latter. The Maid of Athens appears as
Sannie Beyers ; The Laird of Cockpen as Gert Beyers; Duncan
Gray as Daantjie Gouus; The Cotter's Saturday Night as Die
Boer zijn Zaterdag Aand, and Tam o' Shanter as the piece which
gives its title to the volume, Klaas Gezwint ?
The best collection of English South African poetry is The
Treasury of South African Poetry and Verse, collected from
various sources and arranged by Edward Heath Crouch, of
Cambridge, South Africa. The first edition, published in 1907,
almost at once sold out, and a second edition followed the next
1 A later volume containing pieces of a similar character but more original, is
Grappige Stories en Andere Versies in Kaaps-Hollands (Comic Tales and other Verses
in Cape Dutch), by Melt J. Brink, published in 1893.
## p. 378 (#408) ############################################
378
South African Poetry [CH.
a
year. It is divided into two sections, the longer secular portion,
and a smaller collection at the end of religious and metaphysical’
poems. Several of the authors, Pringle amongst them, appear in
both. Fortunately for themselves, but unfortunately for the
purpose of this brief survey, the authors of many of the best
pieces contained in this collection are still alive, and cannot there-
fore be treated here.
Among those who have passed away may be mentioned John
Fairbairn, the contemporary and friend of Pringle, whom the
latter invited to join him at the Cape. Pringle thought well
of his poetry, quoting in his autobiography more than one of
Fairbairn’s pieces and ranking them above his own; and expressed
a regret that one who had written so well had written so little.
A poet of some merit, with an eye and voice for the character-
istics of South African nature, was E. B. Watermeyer. Some lines
of his, happily prefixed to the Dutch collection mentioned above,
are well worth remembering :
‘English are you? or Dutch ?
Both; neither;' How?
The land I dwell in Dutch and English plough.
Together they have been in weal and woe;
Together they have stood to breast the foe;
A name of future days, in Time's far scope
May tell perhaps the nation of 'Good Hope'!
A sea piece by the same writer entitled After a Storm, is a
sincere and appealing study of nature.
Another poet of more variety and range is A. Haynes Bell.
His Knight of Avelon is a romantic story in the manner of
Tennyson, and a skilful and pleasing poem in that style. The
poem, To a Sea Conch, is also early, or middle, Victorian, with
perhaps some echo of Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
martial piece, The Last Stand, is interesting as being one of the
earlier South African poems of empire:
Comrades, wake! 'tis morn!
See, the foe draws near!
Britons we were born,
Britons then appear!
Death we laugh to scorn;
Shame alone we fear.
There are many,
true;
We are but a score,
But, though we are few,
Honour makes us more;
So we'll count anew
When the fight is o'er.
6
## p. 379 (#409) ############################################
X11]
The Last Stand
379
Now for all we love-
King, and Empire, friends;
Now for God above,
Who the right defends.
Strike, nor recreant prove
To our Country's ends.
Freedom, justice, peace,
These we bring to all.
'Tis our faith too; these
Are our Empire's wall.
Grow with its increase,
Perish with its fall.
"Tis a sacred cause
Summons to the fray;
Not for vain applause
Or the fame we pray.
For our Country's laws
Stand we here today.
Stern will be the strife;
Let us do or die.
Honour's more than life,
More than victory.
More than children, wife ;
Let us do or die.
Each, then, do his part;
Fight, lads, with a will.
Many a gallant heart
Will the tidings thrill;
Many a tear will start
To our memory still.
And should we prevail,
As by grace we may,
What a shout will hail
This triumphant day!
How the foe will quail!
What will England say ?
Steady, lads! lie low!
See, the foe appears.
Let us treat him now
To three British cheers;
Then the victor's brow
Or a nation's tears.
The influence of Tennyson, as was only natural, may be traced
in much of the poetry of South Africa at this period. He had
a great vogue there. A friend of the writer of this chapter, who
knew South Africa well and who lost his life in the South African
war, told of an old Boer farmer who, when his last days came,
4
## p. 380 (#410) ############################################
380
[CH. XIII
South African Poetry
wandered down to a stream on his farm, and was heard repeating
the wellknown verses of The Rivulet :
No more by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.
When Cecil Rhodes himself lay dying he quoted, as many will
remember, the words of In Memoriam :
So little done, so much to do.
But perhaps still more striking testimony was that rendered
by a divine of the Dutch church, H. S. Bosman, who shortly after
the war, preached a remarkable sermon at Johannesburg, in July
1902, advocating the keeping alive of the Dutch ideals, and who,
when called in question, justified himself by quoting a passage
from Tennyson's Cup, beginning :
Sir, if a State submit
At once, she may be blotted out at once,
And swallow'd in the conqueror's chronicle.
Whereas in wars of freedom and defence
The glory and grief of battle won and lost
Solders a race together.
To the influence of Tennyson succeeded naturally that of
another poet, who has spent much time in the country, knows it,
and is known by it, well. But of Rudyard Kipling and his
influence on many, if not most, of the living poets of this part
of the empire it is not permissible to take this occasion of speaking.
Suffice it, therefore, to say that in letters as in action, in poetry
as in politics and war, South Africa shows today the promise and
the potency of achievement worthy of its own growing greatness
and of the still vaster empire, and the noble aspirations, for which
it has given, and is giving, at this hour, its best blood, and the
travail alike of its sword and its soul.
## p. 381 (#411) ############################################
CHAPTER XIV
EDUCATION
THE latter half of the eighteenth century was marked by an
hitherto unprecedented development of science. Mathematics,
physics and astronomy made notable advances, the foundations of
modern chemistry were laid, the idea of biological evolution was
being carefully studied a century before the appearance of Darwin's
Origin of Species (1859); the speculations of the early French
economists were focused in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations
(1776). But the most striking results of scientific research and
experiment were to be found in the applied sciences and in
mechanical inventions. From the later years of George II onwards,
there was an extraordinary growth in the number of labour-saving
machines, more especially of those employed in the cotton and
woollen industries, inventions which multiplied almost incalcul-
ably the resources of the manufacturing districts of the north and
middle of England. On the heels of these inventions came the
work of great engineers, Watt, Boulton, Rennie, Stephenson. The
enormous economy of labour, the much greater mechanical pre-
cision of the output and the increased facility of transport, all com-
bined to bring about an industrial expansion, which, assisted by the
commercial, activity of the earlier part of the century, was deep
enough and broad enough to merit the name 'revolution. Amidst
such circumstances, it was inevitable that the critics of contem-
porary education should condemn its almost absolute disregard of
useful knowledge and of modern studies.
A new people and a new order of civilised society appeared.
Population increased, great urban communities arose in the mid-
lands and in northern England, there was a general movement
away from the rural districts; a hitherto unwonted aggregation
of capital altered the scale of industrial operations. While wealth
increased, so, also, did poverty; it would be difficult to parallel
in the previous history of England the wretched state of the
## p. 382 (#412) ############################################
382
Education
[CH.
labouring poor during the last years of the eighteenth and the
first decades of the nineteenth century. The educational provision
for the mass of English children in charity, parish and Sunday
schools was very insufficient, and commonly unsuitable in character.
The desperate plight of parents and the unsparing employment
of children in mills and factories would, in many cases, have
made the offer of a complete provision little more than a mockery.
Yet, these very conditions of ignorance and of moral degradation
stirred the hearts of reformers to attempt their alleviation by
means of schools. The evils and their remedy are both described
by Wordsworth in the last two books of The Excursion (1795–
1814).
The activity directed to educational affairs, which has been
a prominent feature of English life during recent years, dates
from the time of the French revolution; but, at the moment of
that outbreak, France and Germany could look back upon a
whole generation engaged in revolutionising national education.
By the publication of La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Rousseau had
protested against the prevailing rationalism, and, in the following
year, he produced Émile, a book whose destructive and constructive
proposals combined to make it the most considerable work of the
eighteenth century dealing with its subject. La Chalotais and
Basedow had enunciated the administrative principles of the lay
school and undenominational religious teaching, while the attacks
upon the Society of Jesus and its eventual suppression by papal
bull in 1773 had suspended the labours of the greatest educational
corporation of the time, and had inflicted a fatal blow upon the
type of instruction which, for some two and a half centuries, had
been general throughout Europe. Prussia, under the guidance
of K. A. von Zedlitz, Frederick the great's minister of education,
had initiated reforms, which made her, in this respect, the model
for the German people. So early as 1763, Frederick had decreed
compulsory instruction and the provision of primary schools ;
ten years later, F. E. von Rochow had shown how rural schools
of that order could be usefully conducted. In 1781, the modern
German classical school, pursuing a course of study not confined
to Latin and Greek, came into being with the curriculum which
Gedike introduced in Berlin. Within the same decade, Prussian
schools other than primary passed from ecclesiastical control to
that of a specially constituted board of education, and, by the
institution (1789) of the leaving examination,' the first advance
was made in the evolution of the modern German university.
a
## p. 383 (#413) ############################################
XIV]
The Universities
383
Austria and other regions of catholic Germany had entered upon
a path of reform with purposes similar to those of Prussia; but
these steps were rapidly retraced during the reaction which
followed the events of 1789 in France. Outside Germany, but
amidst a German-speaking population, Pestalozzi had completed
the inconclusive experiment in rural education which he had
been conducting upon his farm, Neuhof (1774–80).
The philosophy, psychology and, in a less degree, the educa-
tional doctrines which Europe had learned from John Locke lay
behind the greater part of this strenuous activity; yet the external
history of English education during the period 1760—90 exhibits
a complete contrast with that of her continental neighbours.
Oxford, Cambridge and the public schools, as a whole, were
educating a smaller number of men and boys than had resorted
to them in the days of Anne. At Oxford, in the first quarter
of the eighteenth century, the number of boys admitted often
exceeded 300; it never reached that number between 1726 and
1810, while it often fell below 200 in the mid-century? A similar
decline occurred at Cambridge, and at both universities there
was a fall in the number of those who graduated, which is not
fully accounted for by the diminished tale of freshmen.
An agitation for the relaxation of all formal professions of
religious belief had been carried on since the middle of the
century by a numerically small but active group of clergymen.
At the universities, the movement led to repeated attempts
between 1771 and 1787 to free bachelors of arts from subscrip-
tion to the Thirty-Nine Articles or from a statement of adherence
to the church of England. These attempts failed, and, as a
consequence, Oxford and Cambridge degrees remained closed to
the conscientious dissenter, whose membership of a college could
only be maintained, if at all, by subterfuge.
The statutory exercises for degrees represented a system of
education which had long been obsolete, and the toleration of
a merely formal compliance with the requirements had reduced
the exercises to farce? The proportion of fellow-commoners and
gentlemen-commoners amongst the undergraduates was large; and,
as a class, these young men of birth and wealth furnished an
element of idleness and dissipation which only intensified evils
i Brodrick, G. C. , Memorials of Merton College.
? These are described, with some natural exaggeration of phrase, in a locus classicus
of Knox, Vicesimus, Essays, Moral and Literary (1782), vol. I, pp. 331 ff. , 'On some
parts of the discipline in our English universities. '
## p. 384 (#414) ############################################
384
Education
[CH.
already too common in both universities. Vicesimus Knox, who
was at Oxford from 1771 to 1778, and fellow of St John's college
from 1775, asserted, in his Liberal Education (1781), that to send
a son to either university without the safeguard of a private tutor
would probably 'make shipwreck of his learning, his morals, his
health and his fortune. ' Yet boys of fifteen often became under-
graduates. Many of the professors never lectured, and some did not
make up for the omission by advancing knowledge in other ways.
Those of them who did offer this compensation might fairly urge
that the business of instructing the majority of those in statu pupil-
lari was efficiently performed by the college tutors. The others
were not likely to feel abashed in a predominantly clerical society
where the pluralist and the absentee holder of a benefice were
familiar figures. But the neglect of teaching by those whom the
university had especially appointed for that purpose was the con-
sequence of a process—the supersession of the university by its
colleges—which had been going on for two centuries. Concurrently,
Oxford and Cambridge, for the greater number of their residents,
were becoming places of education rather than seats of learning.
The change is reflected in A Letter to Lord North, which Knox
addressed to the Oxford chancellor in 1789. This pamphlet
suggested the intervention of parliament, and advocated a stricter
discipline, a diminution of personal expenses, the strengthening of
the collegiate system, an increase in the number of college tutors,
the cost to be met by doubling tuition fees and abolishing 'use-
less' professors, with confiscation of their endowments. College
tutors were to exercise a parental control over their pupils, and
professors not of the 'useless' order were to lecture thrice weekly
in every term, or resign. Long after this letter was written,
Cambridge undergraduates who broke rules were subject to the
schoolboy punishment of ‘learning lines' by heart.
But, even in this period of stagnation, reformers and some
reforms were not wanting within the universities themselves. At
Cambridge, the written examinations held in the Senate house
reduced the ancient exercises in the schools to mere forms of no
intrinsic importance; although the latter survived till 1839, the
Senate house examination from 1780 onwards set the standard
and determined the direction of academic study. At this time,
there was but one tripos, the examination including natural
religion, moral philosophy and ‘Locke' as well as mathematics,
the last being the dominant and characteristic part of the test;
some contemporary critics believed that the effect of the tripos
6
## p. 385 (#415) ############################################
XIV]
Nonconformist Academies
385
upon schools was to depreciate classical, in favour of mathematical
learning? Between 1773 and 1776, John Jebb, of Peterhouse,
made several unsuccessful attempts to bring about an annual
examination by the university of all its undergraduates; his
persistent agitation is evidence of impatience with the obsolete
forms which hindered progress in both universities. Knox, when
proposing a similar scheme to lord North, made the proviso that
examinations should be conducted with such delicacy as not to
hurt the feelings of the diffident and modest. ' Oxford's agitation
for the reconstitution of the exercises for a degree was closed in
1800 by the passing of the Public Examination statute.
During the third quarter of the century, prizes for Latin essays
and for Greek and Latin odes and epigrams were founded, an
evidence of decline in literary arts which had long been practised in
both universities. But a quite different purpose led to the founda-
tion at Cambridge of the Townshend's prize for an English essay on
an economic question (1755—6), the crown endowment of the chair
of chemistry (1766), the Jacksonian professorship of natural and
experimental philosophy' (1783) and the chair of the laws of
England (1788). At Oxford, the Radcliffe observatory dates from
1777 and the Rawlinson professorship of Anglo-Saxon from 1795.
It is significant of the time that the Cambridge professor of
chemistry (Farish) treated his subject in its application ‘to the
arts and manufactures of Britain,' 'a new and useful field of
instruction’; his prospectus of lectures for 1793 is a miscel-
laneous programme of applied science in general. Unofficial
teachers then resident in Cambridge offered opportunity for the
study of modern languages. William Gooch, second wrangler in
1791, who sailed in that year for the Pacific on a boundaries'
commission, proposed to take with him not only mathematical
books, but also works in Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Spanish;
he learned the last from Isola, Gray's tutor in Italian.
During the second half of the eighteenth century, nonconformist
academies? decreased in number, and the attempt to make them
places of general education, released from particular denomi-
national or professional ties, did not succeed. Some of their
teachers were men of distinguished attainments, of whom Joseph
Priestley, in early life a tutor in the Warrington academy, was the
greatest and most versatile. Their readiness to experiment with
1 Ingram, R. A. , The necessity of introducing divinity,' etc. (1792); Remarks upon
the enormous expense, etc. (1783).
* See, ante, vol. ix, pp. 392–5, and vol. x, pp. 381—3.
E. L. XIV. CH. XIV.
25
## p. 386 (#416) ############################################
386
[CH.
Education
new courses of study was even more pronounced than it had been
a century earlier. But, at a time when, in spite of ancient prestige
and material advantages, the universities failed to inspire public
confidence, the new institutions suffered from disabilities of their
own. Their teachers were too few to treat efficiently the wide
range of studies attempted, and students were seldom able enough
to digest an encyclopaedic curriculum. In consequence, there was
ą toleration of the superficial which may have contributed to
prevent the academies from becoming instruments of university re-
form; and their acceptance of the position of theological seminaries
for the training of ministers, a position which they had always
partially occupied, removed them finally from the main current
of national education. Nevertheless, they had done good service
in the cause of history, literature and modern studies, particularly
in respect of science and those forms of knowledge which are
immediately applicable to the affairs of daily life? . Thomas Barnes,
afterwards principal of the Manchester academy, with the support
of the newly established Literary and Philosophical society of that
town founded (1783) a college of Arts and Science, which anticipated,
in a humble way, the scientific and technical work of modern
universities and university colleges?
At the public schools, the studies and the method of education
remained in substance the same as they were in the earlier period
described in a former volume. The interesting point in their
history is the prominent social place now assumed for the first
time by Harrow, under a succession (1760—1805) of former Eton
masters, Sumner, Heath and Drury, and by Rugby under another
Etonian, Thomas James (1778–94). The number of boys in
residence Auctuated considerably during the second half of the
eighteenth century, and in some schools that number, at the
close of the century, was very much less than it had been at the
beginning. Westminster, Winchester and, in particular, Shrews-
bury, are cases in point. Cowper's incomplete and prejudiced
picture of the public school, which he drew in Tirocinium, was
less true in the year 1785, when the poem appeared, than in his
own school-days (1741–9); but the character of turbulence
ascribed by the poet to public school education was well deserved
at both the later and the earlier period. The stock question
addressed by George III to Etonians whom he chanced to meet-
f
1 See Priestley's Miscellaneous Observations (1778).
: Thompson, J. , The Owens College (1886), introductory chapter.
3 See, ante, vol. ix, pp. 408 ff.
9
## p. 387 (#417) ############################################
XIV]
Girls' Education
387
‘Have you had any rebellions lately, eh? eh ? '-might have been
put quite as aptly to any public school boy of the time. From
1770, when the Riot act was read to the Wykebamists, down to
1832, when Keate suppressed his last rebellion at Eton, there was
a constant recurrence of these outbreaks ; insubordination was
met by arbitrary measures that seem to show an ignorance or
wilful disregard of boy-nature, which in itself gives a partial
explanation of the boys' unruliness. But, rough as public school
life confessedly then was, it was not wanting in gentler elements.
At Eton, a small editorial committee, of which John Hookham
Frere was a member, produced, in 1786, The Microcosm, modelled
on the periodical essays and miscellanies in which the time was
prolific. The rival school, Westminster, had its Trifler in 1788,
to which Robert Southey, then in the school, made a rejected
contribution; his management of his own magazine, The Flagel-
lant, led to his expulsion. Like most of their kind, of which they
were the first, these school miscellanies were ephemeral.
Of the education of girls above the purely elementary stage,
it is unnecessary to add to the account already given of its
condition during the first half of the century! , except, perhaps,
to say that its imperfections had become more obvious to con-
temporary critics, and that some steps had been taken to amend
them, as Sir Anthony Absolute and Mrs Malaprop indirectly testify.
• We have young ladies. . .
. . . boarded and educated, says Miss Alscrip (in
Burgoyne's The Heiress, 1786), 'upon blue boards in gold letters in every
village, with a strolling player for dancing master, and a deserter from
Dunkirk to teach the French grammar. '
The mother-tongue and drawing were regarded as studies especially
appropriate to girls, and by the end of the century botany had
been placed in the same category. The opinion was fairly general
that girls and young women of all but the highest social standing,
or great wealth, ought to receive instruction of a distinctly ‘useful'
domestic kind, with small regard to its formative value; the others
were to acquire 'accomplishments' for the purpose of ornament
and to occupy time which would otherwise certainly be spent
in mischief. This ideal of the socially distinguished had great
attraction for those who lacked both time and means to realise
it in any appreciable degree, and the consequence was that,
throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the pursuit
· See, ante, vol. ix, pp. 401–4.
: Adam Smith unreservedly praises the current manner of educating girls on this
very ground.
25-2
## p. 388 (#418) ############################################
388
[ch.
Education
6
of 'accomplishments,' as such, reacted injuriously upon the in-
struction of girls and women generally. A work on education
long very popular in France and England, Adèle et Théodore
(1782), by Madame de Genlis, bluntly asserted that women 'are
born to a life both monotonous and dependent. . . . In their case,
genius is a useless and dangerous endowment, which takes them
out of their natural state. ' So long as this judgment reflected
public opinion, a superficial education for girls was more than
tolerated. Only a revolutionary like Mary Wollstonecraft could
plead that sex alone should not determine the course of study,
and that schoolboys and schoolgirls should be educated together.
The aims and methods of schools of good, but not of the first,
standing, may be inferred from Knox's Liberal Education.
his own recklessness and extravagance and partly to a hereditary
taint of melancholy, his life was unhappy, and he ended it by his
own hand; but, in the saddle and out of it, he was adventurous,
brave, 'a thorough sportsman. ' His poetry is the voice of men
who lead adventurous lives, who fight gallantly against long odds,
and take defeat almost as a matter of course. It is melancholy in
so far as it despairs of success or reward; but it is joyous in its
love of the fight for its own sake.
Gordon was a poet from his youth. On leaving England, in
1853, he wrote a poem of farewell to home which already showed
his characteristic pride and defiance. Some years, however, were
to pass before he published anything of importance. In 1865, he
contributed to Bell's Life in Victoria what purported to be
merely one of the riming tips for horse-races that were not
infrequent in that journal, but was, in fact, a fine poem, in which
his passion for horses, for the sea and for life alike found ex-
pression. More of these racing poems followed; contemporary
racing in Australia and memories of hunting and steeple-chasing
in his youth at home supplied him with subjects during the
remaining five years of his life. With the possible exception of
Whyte Melville, whom he greatly admired and to whom he
dedicated, in a beautiful poem, his volume Bush Ballads, Gordon
is the only poet who has used sport as the medium for the
## p. 367 (#397) ############################################
XII] Adam Lindsay Gordon 367
expression of his views on life. All his gallant, despairing
philosophy finds voice in these poems; and, where other poets
have turned to tales of ancient heroism at sea or on the battle-
field, Gordon turned to a race-meeting. On these sporting poems,
rather than on his reflective poems or his dramatic narratives,
Gordon's popularity rests, not only in Australia but among
English readers in all countries. And that popularity is deserved.
The best of them have not only an irresistible fire and pace:
Gordon, seeing sport as the best thing in life, could give dignity
to its treatment, while his knowledge of poetry and his natural
gifts made him a secure, if not an original, metrist.
Poems in Bell's Life in Victoria and in The Australasian
came frequently from his pen; and, in 1867, he collected some of
them into a volume, Sea Spray and Smoke Drift. The same year
saw the issue of a long poem, Ashtaroth, partly founded on
Goethe's Faust, which contains much that is characteristic of
Gordon with very little that was of his best. In 1868, Marcus
Clarke persuaded him to contribute poems to The Colonial
Monthly, and he began with the mournful poem Doubtful
Dreams. In 1869, full of trouble, he found refuge for a time
at a friend's house, where he wrote his best dramatic lyrics,
The Sick Stockrider, The Ride from the Wreck, Wolf and Hound
and his most famous racing poem, How we beat the Favourite.
In 1870, he published his volume Bush Ballads and Galloping
Rhymes and, a few months later, died by his own hand.
Gordon occasionally handled old themes, and some of his ballads
are stirring. Among his autobiographical poems, Whisperinge
in Wattle-Boughs, in which he looks back to his wild youth, is
full of music and pathos. Many of his reflective poems finely
express his ardent joy in activity and effort and his profound
melancholy, although in these his metrical debt to Swinburne
or another is more insistently noticeable than in his narratives
or poems of sport. If Gordon is not a poet of the first rank,
he is one in whom both the learned and the unlearned can take
pleasure. His spirit of daring, of joy in the fight for the fight's
sake, would appear to be alive yet in Australia; and there is much
of Gordon, though there is no imitation of Gordon, in the frank
feeling and defiant gladness of the recently published Book of
Anzac, over which the Australasian soldiers in Gallipoli have made
English readers laugh and weep.
To the same period as Gordon's poetry belong the comparatively
few poetical works of Marcus Clarke, journalist, dramatist and
## p. 368 (#398) ############################################
368
[CH.
Australia and New Zealand
novelist, who wrote some pretty lyrics and clever parodies, and
the earlier work of two poets of considerable merit, Thomas
Bracken and Arthur Patchett Martin. Martin's lyrical poems are
thoughtful and musical, tinged with the sadness of one who, in his
youth, had high faith in freedom, but lost it as time went on.
Bracken was a facile and rather sentimental poet, whose lyrics
have more sweetness than strength. One of them, Not Understood,
is widely known. Bracken was by birth a New Zealander, and not
a few of his poems are based on Maori legends or history. The
poet of the Maoris, however, is Alfred Domett, the friend of
Robert Browning, who went to New Zealand in 1842 and lived
there for nearly thirty years. Before leaving England, Domett
had published poems, among them a long lyric on Venice (1839).
His longest work, Ranolf and Amohia, he put forth after his
return home in 1872. In a great variety of lyrical metres it
describes the scenery of New Zealand and narrates a story of
Maori life. Had these been Domett's only objects in writing the
poem, he would probably have left a better memorial of his
undeniable poetic gift. His descriptions of the romantic scenery
of the islands and the mythology and customs of the Maoris are
often very beautiful and interesting. In the prefatory poem he
says:
Well, but what if there gleamed in an Age cold as this,
The divinest of Poets' ideals of bliss ?
Yea, an Eden could lurk in this Empire of ours,
With the loneliest love in the loveliest bowers.
The answer he gives is convincing: but he had a further object
which interfered with the success of his work. He wanted to talk
about theism and positivism; and, though his philosophising is
very interesting in itself, his disquisitions break the flow of his
poem. Domett's last volume, Flotsam and Jetsam, published in
1877, contains many beautiful descriptions of places which he had
visited in his European travels, and some glowing expressions of
his opinions and hopes.
To the period of Kendall and Gordon belongs also the earlier
work of the Queensland poet, James Brunton Stephens, a Scot
who went to Australia in 1866. The popularity of Stephens rests
chiefly on his humorous poems, such as To a Black Gin and
Universally Respected; and these vigorous and hearty sketches
make him the Bret Harte of Australia. They do not, however,
show his talent at its best. Stephens is a poet of great strength
and fine imagination. His first poem, Convict Once, is a tale of
## p. 369 (#399) ############################################
X11]
Fiction
369
remarkable power and gloom; and among his lyrics are several
which, for their music and their passion, are much to be prized.
Technically, Stephens is noteworthy for his strong handling of
dactylic metres. Another good Queensland poet, George Essex
Evans, belongs to a later date, since his first volume was not
published till 1891. Evans shared Stephens's lofty belief in the
destinies of Australia. His Australian Symphony and his
patriotic poems are full of passion for his country and of a more
manful and ambitious love of it than Kendall or any other
Australian poet had expressed. His long narrative poem, The
Repentance of Magdalene Despar, is strong and tragic, and in his
lyric poems he shows a command of original metres and cadences
and a choice fancy.
In the decade 1880—90, there began a new era in Australian
poetry, possibly due, in some measure, to the new pride and
confidence which was the natural result of the increased interest
in Australia after the International Exhibition at Melbourne in
1880—1 and the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London in
1886. At any rate, it is the poetry of a civilised country, with
leisured and cultivated inhabitants. The poems of Philip Joseph
Holdsworth, of Francis Adams, of James Lister Cuthbertson, of
Robert Richardson, of William Gay, of Grace Jennings Carmichael,
of Barcroft Henry Boake and of Victor James Daley show poetry
firmly established in Australia, well received by a public that can
judge for itself, and flowering with a peculiar vigour. It is the
poetry of refined and cultivated minds; but it is free from wilful
strangeness and from any native or imported taints of morbidity.
Meanwhile, John Farrell had set the vogue for racy, free-and-easy
poetry of common life, which his successors are practising with
greater skill and verisimilitude than himself. In origin it doubt-
less owes something to Bret Harte: but it is enriching the English
language with vigorous colloquial expressions, and providing
readers with excitement and amusement.
The best literary genius of Australia turns to poetry; but good
work has been done in fiction. Henry Kingsley's Geoffrey Hamlyn,
though a story of Australia, founded on the author's experiences
during his brief stay in the colony, can scarcely be considered
a novel of Australian origin; and William Howitt's A Boy's
Adventures in the Wilds of Australia stands in the same
category. Perhaps the earliest properly Australian novels were
Clara Morison and others by Catherine Helen Spence, who was
better known as a political writer; and Charles Rowcroft's colonial
24
E. L. XIV.
CH. XII.
## p. 370 (#400) ############################################
370 Australia and New Zealand [CH.
6
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. Com-
pared 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
## p. 371 (#401) ############################################
X11]
Historians
371
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 Dunmore 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-a-Century 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.
24--2
## p. 372 (#402) ############################################
CHAPTER XIII
SOUTH AFRICAN POETRY
To give in brief, and yet in true perspective, a summary of the
poetical literature of South Africa is no easy task, 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 repre-
sentative 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 circum-
stances 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, thu foremost English
## p. 373 (#403) ############################################
6
CH. XIII]
Thomas Pringle
373
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 characteristio.
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 govern-
ment 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 London to seek redress,
but without avail. He associated bimself with the men who were
working for the abolition of slavery, notably with Wilberforce,
Coleridge and Clarkson, but fell ill just when his labours for
abolition were reaching success, in the summer of 1834, and died in
London in the same year at the early age of forty-six. In that year,
besides a new edition of his poems, he published a prose work,
Narrative of a Residence in South Africa, which he was revising
## p. 374 (#404) ############################################
374
[CH.
South African Poetry
just before his death. It was a striking work, and made much
impression. Its influence may be read in the wellknown lines
of Locksley Hall :
Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion creeping nigher,
Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly dying fire;
which, Tennyson records, were suggested to him by a passage
in Pringle's book.
Coleridge expressed a very high opinion of Pringle's poems.
Little known in Scotland or England, they have had a great
and a good influence in South Africa. As a recent South African
poet, Vine Hall, sings :
Pringle, we love thy scorn of wrong,
Thy simple, heartfelt song,
A knightly soul unbought and unafraid,
This country oweth much to thy two-edgòd blade.
The characteristics of his spirit, as shown in his poetry, were
love of freedom, personal and public, love of the native, love of
nature, and an old-fashioned refinement and classic taste. An
Edinburgh student, he quotes his Lucretius and his Vergil, and
uses his Latin phrases with practised skill. These characteristics
were no small inheritance to South Africa. It is not easy to select
from his poems, for, though faithful and sincere, and written with
an eye on the objects, they are somewhat faint in hue and at times
diffuse. The Songs of the Emigrants are an echo of the then new
and fashionable poem, Byron's Childe Harold, including an imita-
tion of his 'Adieu, adieu, my native land. '
More original and of more permanent interest as a graphic
and vivid picture of the Cape Colony of those days, still the
unsubdued home of the wild beast, long since driven far toward
the equator, is A far in the Desert. This was pronounced by
Coleridge to be one of the two or three most perfect lyric poems
in the language. Its opening lines carry the reader at once into
the midst of its scene:
Afar in the Desert I love to ride
With the silent Bushboy alone by my side,
Away, away, from the dwellings of men,
By the wild deer's haunt, by the buffalo's glen,
By valleys remote where the oribi plays,
Where the gnu, the gazelle and the hartebeest graze,
And the koodoo and eland untamed recline
By the skirts of grey forests o’er-hung with wild vine,
## p. 375 (#405) ############################################
XI1]
The Bechuana Boy
375
Where the elephant browses at peace in his wood,
And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood,
And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will,
In the fen where the wild ass is drinking his fill.
No wonder that it has been translated into Cape Dutch, and is
loved by both races alike! .
The spirited Lion Hunt, a poetic sketch by a poet who, like
Homer, had seen real lions and real hunts, ends with an allusion
to Sir Walter Scott:
His head, with the paws, and the bones of his skull,
With the spoils of the leopard and buffalo bull,
We'll send to Sir Walter: Now boys let us dine,
And talk of our deeds o'er a flask of old wine!
.
And Pringle added a note that this intention had actually been
carried out, and that, in 1834, the trophies ‘had the honour to
form part of the ornaments of the lamented poet's antique armoury
at Abbotsford. '
The Lion and Giraffe is also an exceedingly graphic snapshot
of a scene which Pringle, if he had not witnessed it, had heard
described at first hand, and displays all his powers of imagination,
observation and description. But the piece, perbaps, which more
than any other marks this pious Scottish farmer's son for a real
literary artist, the brother at once of Burns and Scott and
Livingstone, is The Bechuana Boy. This touching and beautiful
piece, part fact, part fiction, truth arranged with art, was based
on the story of a Bechuana orphan boy, who had been carried
off from his native country by the mountain tribes, half-bred
Hottentots, and who fell under Pringle’s protection. The touch
of the pet springbok was suggested to Pringle by his seeing, a few
days afterwards, a slave child playing with a fawn at a farmer's
residence. The real little African boy brought by Pringle and
his wife to England became their devoted protégé and almost
adopted child, but died, like many at that time, of an affection
of the lungs.
I sat at noontide in my tent,
And looked across the Desert dun,
Beneath the clondless firmament
Far gleaming in the sun.
1 Ver in de Wildernis, a rendering by F. W. Reitz, a poet of mark, who was
president of the Orange Free State in the years 1889 to 1896, is a most successful
effort and indeed a significant token of the essential affinity of the two races.
Nowhere, perhaps, is this better shown than in the last line, practically identical in
both tongues:
Want ver is der mensch, MAAR GOD IS NABY.
## p. 376 (#406) ############################################
376
[ch.
South African Poetry
When from the bosom of the waste
A swarthy stripling came in haste
With foot unshod and naked limb;
And a tame springbok followed him.
With open aspect, frank yet bland,
And with a modest mien he stood,
Caressing with a gentle hand
That beast of gentle brood;
Then meekly gazing in my face,
Said in the language of his race
With smiling look yet pensive tone,
'Stranger-I'm in the world alone! '
*
来
*
*
来
"Thus lived I, a lone orphan lad,
My task the proud Boor's flocks to tend;
And this poor fawn was all I had
To love, or call my friend;
When suddenly, with haughty look
And taunting words, that tyrant took
My playmate for his pampered boy,
Who envied me my only joy.
6
'High swelled my heart! But when a star
Of midnight gleamed, I softly led
My bounding favourite forth, and far
Into the Desert fled.
And here, from human kind exiled,
Three moons on roots and berries wild
I've fared; and braved the beasts of prey,
To 'scape from spoilers worse than they.
'But yester morn a Bushman brought
The tidings that thy tents were near,
And now with hasty foot I've sought
Thy presence, void of fear:
Because they say, 0 English Chief,
Thou scornest not the Captive's grief:
Then let me serve thee, as thine own-
For I am in the world alone! '
Such was Marossi's touching tale,
Our breasts they were not made of stone;
His words, his winning looks prevail-
We took him for 'our own. '
And One, with woman's gentle art
Unlocked the fountains of his heart;
And love gushed forth-till he became
Her Child in everything but name.
Many other pieces testify sympathetically to the noble, indeed
often heroic, character of the Kaffirs, and to their capacity both
for poetry and religion, elements not to be forgotten in any
account of South African poetry. Such are The Ghona Widow's
## p. 377 (#407) ############################################
ị ]
XIII
Africander's Songs
377
Lullaby with its quotation from the famous Ntsikana's Hymn, or
The Captive of Camalu or The Koranna.
Pringle then, is historic, and anyone who wishes to know what
the colour and circumstances of South African life were at the
beginning of the last century will find it nowhere so well as in
his book. Some of the pieces in it to which reference has been
made may remind us that South Africa is the home of at least
two white and many black races, and that in various ways all
these appear in its literature. A volume published as long ago
as 1884, entitled Klaas Gezwint en Zijn Paert, contains not
only specimens of Pringle's poems, but verses by a number of
other verse writers of that and previous generations. The first
piece in the volume, The British Settler's Song, composed by
an early settler, A. G. Bain, and sung by him at the Settlers'
Commemoration Dinner at Graham's Town, bears the stamp of
its era upon it, and is very characteristic.
So, too, is the next piece, The Africander's War Song, an
adaptation of A' the Blue Bonnets are over the Border,
beginning :
March! March! Cabo and Caledon!
Mount your fleet steeds, they are sleek-in good order.
March, march, Stellenbosch, Swellendam,
Every brave Burgher must off to the Border!
Two others, written as companion poems, entitled Cutting
Capers and Caper Sauce, comparing, or contrasting the advantage
of England and Cape Colony, give a lively picture of some promi-
nent features. The second and most unique portion of the volume,
the Volk's Liederen, or poems in the Taal or Cape Dutch, to which
reference has already been made, we must here unwillingly pass
by. Many of them are parodies of wellknown English and Scottish
pieces, especially the latter. The Maid of Athens appears as
Sannie Beyers ; The Laird of Cockpen as Gert Beyers; Duncan
Gray as Daantjie Gouus; The Cotter's Saturday Night as Die
Boer zijn Zaterdag Aand, and Tam o' Shanter as the piece which
gives its title to the volume, Klaas Gezwint ?
The best collection of English South African poetry is The
Treasury of South African Poetry and Verse, collected from
various sources and arranged by Edward Heath Crouch, of
Cambridge, South Africa. The first edition, published in 1907,
almost at once sold out, and a second edition followed the next
1 A later volume containing pieces of a similar character but more original, is
Grappige Stories en Andere Versies in Kaaps-Hollands (Comic Tales and other Verses
in Cape Dutch), by Melt J. Brink, published in 1893.
## p. 378 (#408) ############################################
378
South African Poetry [CH.
a
year. It is divided into two sections, the longer secular portion,
and a smaller collection at the end of religious and metaphysical’
poems. Several of the authors, Pringle amongst them, appear in
both. Fortunately for themselves, but unfortunately for the
purpose of this brief survey, the authors of many of the best
pieces contained in this collection are still alive, and cannot there-
fore be treated here.
Among those who have passed away may be mentioned John
Fairbairn, the contemporary and friend of Pringle, whom the
latter invited to join him at the Cape. Pringle thought well
of his poetry, quoting in his autobiography more than one of
Fairbairn’s pieces and ranking them above his own; and expressed
a regret that one who had written so well had written so little.
A poet of some merit, with an eye and voice for the character-
istics of South African nature, was E. B. Watermeyer. Some lines
of his, happily prefixed to the Dutch collection mentioned above,
are well worth remembering :
‘English are you? or Dutch ?
Both; neither;' How?
The land I dwell in Dutch and English plough.
Together they have been in weal and woe;
Together they have stood to breast the foe;
A name of future days, in Time's far scope
May tell perhaps the nation of 'Good Hope'!
A sea piece by the same writer entitled After a Storm, is a
sincere and appealing study of nature.
Another poet of more variety and range is A. Haynes Bell.
His Knight of Avelon is a romantic story in the manner of
Tennyson, and a skilful and pleasing poem in that style. The
poem, To a Sea Conch, is also early, or middle, Victorian, with
perhaps some echo of Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
martial piece, The Last Stand, is interesting as being one of the
earlier South African poems of empire:
Comrades, wake! 'tis morn!
See, the foe draws near!
Britons we were born,
Britons then appear!
Death we laugh to scorn;
Shame alone we fear.
There are many,
true;
We are but a score,
But, though we are few,
Honour makes us more;
So we'll count anew
When the fight is o'er.
6
## p. 379 (#409) ############################################
X11]
The Last Stand
379
Now for all we love-
King, and Empire, friends;
Now for God above,
Who the right defends.
Strike, nor recreant prove
To our Country's ends.
Freedom, justice, peace,
These we bring to all.
'Tis our faith too; these
Are our Empire's wall.
Grow with its increase,
Perish with its fall.
"Tis a sacred cause
Summons to the fray;
Not for vain applause
Or the fame we pray.
For our Country's laws
Stand we here today.
Stern will be the strife;
Let us do or die.
Honour's more than life,
More than victory.
More than children, wife ;
Let us do or die.
Each, then, do his part;
Fight, lads, with a will.
Many a gallant heart
Will the tidings thrill;
Many a tear will start
To our memory still.
And should we prevail,
As by grace we may,
What a shout will hail
This triumphant day!
How the foe will quail!
What will England say ?
Steady, lads! lie low!
See, the foe appears.
Let us treat him now
To three British cheers;
Then the victor's brow
Or a nation's tears.
The influence of Tennyson, as was only natural, may be traced
in much of the poetry of South Africa at this period. He had
a great vogue there. A friend of the writer of this chapter, who
knew South Africa well and who lost his life in the South African
war, told of an old Boer farmer who, when his last days came,
4
## p. 380 (#410) ############################################
380
[CH. XIII
South African Poetry
wandered down to a stream on his farm, and was heard repeating
the wellknown verses of The Rivulet :
No more by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.
When Cecil Rhodes himself lay dying he quoted, as many will
remember, the words of In Memoriam :
So little done, so much to do.
But perhaps still more striking testimony was that rendered
by a divine of the Dutch church, H. S. Bosman, who shortly after
the war, preached a remarkable sermon at Johannesburg, in July
1902, advocating the keeping alive of the Dutch ideals, and who,
when called in question, justified himself by quoting a passage
from Tennyson's Cup, beginning :
Sir, if a State submit
At once, she may be blotted out at once,
And swallow'd in the conqueror's chronicle.
Whereas in wars of freedom and defence
The glory and grief of battle won and lost
Solders a race together.
To the influence of Tennyson succeeded naturally that of
another poet, who has spent much time in the country, knows it,
and is known by it, well. But of Rudyard Kipling and his
influence on many, if not most, of the living poets of this part
of the empire it is not permissible to take this occasion of speaking.
Suffice it, therefore, to say that in letters as in action, in poetry
as in politics and war, South Africa shows today the promise and
the potency of achievement worthy of its own growing greatness
and of the still vaster empire, and the noble aspirations, for which
it has given, and is giving, at this hour, its best blood, and the
travail alike of its sword and its soul.
## p. 381 (#411) ############################################
CHAPTER XIV
EDUCATION
THE latter half of the eighteenth century was marked by an
hitherto unprecedented development of science. Mathematics,
physics and astronomy made notable advances, the foundations of
modern chemistry were laid, the idea of biological evolution was
being carefully studied a century before the appearance of Darwin's
Origin of Species (1859); the speculations of the early French
economists were focused in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations
(1776). But the most striking results of scientific research and
experiment were to be found in the applied sciences and in
mechanical inventions. From the later years of George II onwards,
there was an extraordinary growth in the number of labour-saving
machines, more especially of those employed in the cotton and
woollen industries, inventions which multiplied almost incalcul-
ably the resources of the manufacturing districts of the north and
middle of England. On the heels of these inventions came the
work of great engineers, Watt, Boulton, Rennie, Stephenson. The
enormous economy of labour, the much greater mechanical pre-
cision of the output and the increased facility of transport, all com-
bined to bring about an industrial expansion, which, assisted by the
commercial, activity of the earlier part of the century, was deep
enough and broad enough to merit the name 'revolution. Amidst
such circumstances, it was inevitable that the critics of contem-
porary education should condemn its almost absolute disregard of
useful knowledge and of modern studies.
A new people and a new order of civilised society appeared.
Population increased, great urban communities arose in the mid-
lands and in northern England, there was a general movement
away from the rural districts; a hitherto unwonted aggregation
of capital altered the scale of industrial operations. While wealth
increased, so, also, did poverty; it would be difficult to parallel
in the previous history of England the wretched state of the
## p. 382 (#412) ############################################
382
Education
[CH.
labouring poor during the last years of the eighteenth and the
first decades of the nineteenth century. The educational provision
for the mass of English children in charity, parish and Sunday
schools was very insufficient, and commonly unsuitable in character.
The desperate plight of parents and the unsparing employment
of children in mills and factories would, in many cases, have
made the offer of a complete provision little more than a mockery.
Yet, these very conditions of ignorance and of moral degradation
stirred the hearts of reformers to attempt their alleviation by
means of schools. The evils and their remedy are both described
by Wordsworth in the last two books of The Excursion (1795–
1814).
The activity directed to educational affairs, which has been
a prominent feature of English life during recent years, dates
from the time of the French revolution; but, at the moment of
that outbreak, France and Germany could look back upon a
whole generation engaged in revolutionising national education.
By the publication of La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Rousseau had
protested against the prevailing rationalism, and, in the following
year, he produced Émile, a book whose destructive and constructive
proposals combined to make it the most considerable work of the
eighteenth century dealing with its subject. La Chalotais and
Basedow had enunciated the administrative principles of the lay
school and undenominational religious teaching, while the attacks
upon the Society of Jesus and its eventual suppression by papal
bull in 1773 had suspended the labours of the greatest educational
corporation of the time, and had inflicted a fatal blow upon the
type of instruction which, for some two and a half centuries, had
been general throughout Europe. Prussia, under the guidance
of K. A. von Zedlitz, Frederick the great's minister of education,
had initiated reforms, which made her, in this respect, the model
for the German people. So early as 1763, Frederick had decreed
compulsory instruction and the provision of primary schools ;
ten years later, F. E. von Rochow had shown how rural schools
of that order could be usefully conducted. In 1781, the modern
German classical school, pursuing a course of study not confined
to Latin and Greek, came into being with the curriculum which
Gedike introduced in Berlin. Within the same decade, Prussian
schools other than primary passed from ecclesiastical control to
that of a specially constituted board of education, and, by the
institution (1789) of the leaving examination,' the first advance
was made in the evolution of the modern German university.
a
## p. 383 (#413) ############################################
XIV]
The Universities
383
Austria and other regions of catholic Germany had entered upon
a path of reform with purposes similar to those of Prussia; but
these steps were rapidly retraced during the reaction which
followed the events of 1789 in France. Outside Germany, but
amidst a German-speaking population, Pestalozzi had completed
the inconclusive experiment in rural education which he had
been conducting upon his farm, Neuhof (1774–80).
The philosophy, psychology and, in a less degree, the educa-
tional doctrines which Europe had learned from John Locke lay
behind the greater part of this strenuous activity; yet the external
history of English education during the period 1760—90 exhibits
a complete contrast with that of her continental neighbours.
Oxford, Cambridge and the public schools, as a whole, were
educating a smaller number of men and boys than had resorted
to them in the days of Anne. At Oxford, in the first quarter
of the eighteenth century, the number of boys admitted often
exceeded 300; it never reached that number between 1726 and
1810, while it often fell below 200 in the mid-century? A similar
decline occurred at Cambridge, and at both universities there
was a fall in the number of those who graduated, which is not
fully accounted for by the diminished tale of freshmen.
An agitation for the relaxation of all formal professions of
religious belief had been carried on since the middle of the
century by a numerically small but active group of clergymen.
At the universities, the movement led to repeated attempts
between 1771 and 1787 to free bachelors of arts from subscrip-
tion to the Thirty-Nine Articles or from a statement of adherence
to the church of England. These attempts failed, and, as a
consequence, Oxford and Cambridge degrees remained closed to
the conscientious dissenter, whose membership of a college could
only be maintained, if at all, by subterfuge.
The statutory exercises for degrees represented a system of
education which had long been obsolete, and the toleration of
a merely formal compliance with the requirements had reduced
the exercises to farce? The proportion of fellow-commoners and
gentlemen-commoners amongst the undergraduates was large; and,
as a class, these young men of birth and wealth furnished an
element of idleness and dissipation which only intensified evils
i Brodrick, G. C. , Memorials of Merton College.
? These are described, with some natural exaggeration of phrase, in a locus classicus
of Knox, Vicesimus, Essays, Moral and Literary (1782), vol. I, pp. 331 ff. , 'On some
parts of the discipline in our English universities. '
## p. 384 (#414) ############################################
384
Education
[CH.
already too common in both universities. Vicesimus Knox, who
was at Oxford from 1771 to 1778, and fellow of St John's college
from 1775, asserted, in his Liberal Education (1781), that to send
a son to either university without the safeguard of a private tutor
would probably 'make shipwreck of his learning, his morals, his
health and his fortune. ' Yet boys of fifteen often became under-
graduates. Many of the professors never lectured, and some did not
make up for the omission by advancing knowledge in other ways.
Those of them who did offer this compensation might fairly urge
that the business of instructing the majority of those in statu pupil-
lari was efficiently performed by the college tutors. The others
were not likely to feel abashed in a predominantly clerical society
where the pluralist and the absentee holder of a benefice were
familiar figures. But the neglect of teaching by those whom the
university had especially appointed for that purpose was the con-
sequence of a process—the supersession of the university by its
colleges—which had been going on for two centuries. Concurrently,
Oxford and Cambridge, for the greater number of their residents,
were becoming places of education rather than seats of learning.
The change is reflected in A Letter to Lord North, which Knox
addressed to the Oxford chancellor in 1789. This pamphlet
suggested the intervention of parliament, and advocated a stricter
discipline, a diminution of personal expenses, the strengthening of
the collegiate system, an increase in the number of college tutors,
the cost to be met by doubling tuition fees and abolishing 'use-
less' professors, with confiscation of their endowments. College
tutors were to exercise a parental control over their pupils, and
professors not of the 'useless' order were to lecture thrice weekly
in every term, or resign. Long after this letter was written,
Cambridge undergraduates who broke rules were subject to the
schoolboy punishment of ‘learning lines' by heart.
But, even in this period of stagnation, reformers and some
reforms were not wanting within the universities themselves. At
Cambridge, the written examinations held in the Senate house
reduced the ancient exercises in the schools to mere forms of no
intrinsic importance; although the latter survived till 1839, the
Senate house examination from 1780 onwards set the standard
and determined the direction of academic study. At this time,
there was but one tripos, the examination including natural
religion, moral philosophy and ‘Locke' as well as mathematics,
the last being the dominant and characteristic part of the test;
some contemporary critics believed that the effect of the tripos
6
## p. 385 (#415) ############################################
XIV]
Nonconformist Academies
385
upon schools was to depreciate classical, in favour of mathematical
learning? Between 1773 and 1776, John Jebb, of Peterhouse,
made several unsuccessful attempts to bring about an annual
examination by the university of all its undergraduates; his
persistent agitation is evidence of impatience with the obsolete
forms which hindered progress in both universities. Knox, when
proposing a similar scheme to lord North, made the proviso that
examinations should be conducted with such delicacy as not to
hurt the feelings of the diffident and modest. ' Oxford's agitation
for the reconstitution of the exercises for a degree was closed in
1800 by the passing of the Public Examination statute.
During the third quarter of the century, prizes for Latin essays
and for Greek and Latin odes and epigrams were founded, an
evidence of decline in literary arts which had long been practised in
both universities. But a quite different purpose led to the founda-
tion at Cambridge of the Townshend's prize for an English essay on
an economic question (1755—6), the crown endowment of the chair
of chemistry (1766), the Jacksonian professorship of natural and
experimental philosophy' (1783) and the chair of the laws of
England (1788). At Oxford, the Radcliffe observatory dates from
1777 and the Rawlinson professorship of Anglo-Saxon from 1795.
It is significant of the time that the Cambridge professor of
chemistry (Farish) treated his subject in its application ‘to the
arts and manufactures of Britain,' 'a new and useful field of
instruction’; his prospectus of lectures for 1793 is a miscel-
laneous programme of applied science in general. Unofficial
teachers then resident in Cambridge offered opportunity for the
study of modern languages. William Gooch, second wrangler in
1791, who sailed in that year for the Pacific on a boundaries'
commission, proposed to take with him not only mathematical
books, but also works in Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Spanish;
he learned the last from Isola, Gray's tutor in Italian.
During the second half of the eighteenth century, nonconformist
academies? decreased in number, and the attempt to make them
places of general education, released from particular denomi-
national or professional ties, did not succeed. Some of their
teachers were men of distinguished attainments, of whom Joseph
Priestley, in early life a tutor in the Warrington academy, was the
greatest and most versatile. Their readiness to experiment with
1 Ingram, R. A. , The necessity of introducing divinity,' etc. (1792); Remarks upon
the enormous expense, etc. (1783).
* See, ante, vol. ix, pp. 392–5, and vol. x, pp. 381—3.
E. L. XIV. CH. XIV.
25
## p. 386 (#416) ############################################
386
[CH.
Education
new courses of study was even more pronounced than it had been
a century earlier. But, at a time when, in spite of ancient prestige
and material advantages, the universities failed to inspire public
confidence, the new institutions suffered from disabilities of their
own. Their teachers were too few to treat efficiently the wide
range of studies attempted, and students were seldom able enough
to digest an encyclopaedic curriculum. In consequence, there was
ą toleration of the superficial which may have contributed to
prevent the academies from becoming instruments of university re-
form; and their acceptance of the position of theological seminaries
for the training of ministers, a position which they had always
partially occupied, removed them finally from the main current
of national education. Nevertheless, they had done good service
in the cause of history, literature and modern studies, particularly
in respect of science and those forms of knowledge which are
immediately applicable to the affairs of daily life? . Thomas Barnes,
afterwards principal of the Manchester academy, with the support
of the newly established Literary and Philosophical society of that
town founded (1783) a college of Arts and Science, which anticipated,
in a humble way, the scientific and technical work of modern
universities and university colleges?
At the public schools, the studies and the method of education
remained in substance the same as they were in the earlier period
described in a former volume. The interesting point in their
history is the prominent social place now assumed for the first
time by Harrow, under a succession (1760—1805) of former Eton
masters, Sumner, Heath and Drury, and by Rugby under another
Etonian, Thomas James (1778–94). The number of boys in
residence Auctuated considerably during the second half of the
eighteenth century, and in some schools that number, at the
close of the century, was very much less than it had been at the
beginning. Westminster, Winchester and, in particular, Shrews-
bury, are cases in point. Cowper's incomplete and prejudiced
picture of the public school, which he drew in Tirocinium, was
less true in the year 1785, when the poem appeared, than in his
own school-days (1741–9); but the character of turbulence
ascribed by the poet to public school education was well deserved
at both the later and the earlier period. The stock question
addressed by George III to Etonians whom he chanced to meet-
f
1 See Priestley's Miscellaneous Observations (1778).
: Thompson, J. , The Owens College (1886), introductory chapter.
3 See, ante, vol. ix, pp. 408 ff.
9
## p. 387 (#417) ############################################
XIV]
Girls' Education
387
‘Have you had any rebellions lately, eh? eh ? '-might have been
put quite as aptly to any public school boy of the time. From
1770, when the Riot act was read to the Wykebamists, down to
1832, when Keate suppressed his last rebellion at Eton, there was
a constant recurrence of these outbreaks ; insubordination was
met by arbitrary measures that seem to show an ignorance or
wilful disregard of boy-nature, which in itself gives a partial
explanation of the boys' unruliness. But, rough as public school
life confessedly then was, it was not wanting in gentler elements.
At Eton, a small editorial committee, of which John Hookham
Frere was a member, produced, in 1786, The Microcosm, modelled
on the periodical essays and miscellanies in which the time was
prolific. The rival school, Westminster, had its Trifler in 1788,
to which Robert Southey, then in the school, made a rejected
contribution; his management of his own magazine, The Flagel-
lant, led to his expulsion. Like most of their kind, of which they
were the first, these school miscellanies were ephemeral.
Of the education of girls above the purely elementary stage,
it is unnecessary to add to the account already given of its
condition during the first half of the century! , except, perhaps,
to say that its imperfections had become more obvious to con-
temporary critics, and that some steps had been taken to amend
them, as Sir Anthony Absolute and Mrs Malaprop indirectly testify.
• We have young ladies. . .
. . . boarded and educated, says Miss Alscrip (in
Burgoyne's The Heiress, 1786), 'upon blue boards in gold letters in every
village, with a strolling player for dancing master, and a deserter from
Dunkirk to teach the French grammar. '
The mother-tongue and drawing were regarded as studies especially
appropriate to girls, and by the end of the century botany had
been placed in the same category. The opinion was fairly general
that girls and young women of all but the highest social standing,
or great wealth, ought to receive instruction of a distinctly ‘useful'
domestic kind, with small regard to its formative value; the others
were to acquire 'accomplishments' for the purpose of ornament
and to occupy time which would otherwise certainly be spent
in mischief. This ideal of the socially distinguished had great
attraction for those who lacked both time and means to realise
it in any appreciable degree, and the consequence was that,
throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the pursuit
· See, ante, vol. ix, pp. 401–4.
: Adam Smith unreservedly praises the current manner of educating girls on this
very ground.
25-2
## p. 388 (#418) ############################################
388
[ch.
Education
6
of 'accomplishments,' as such, reacted injuriously upon the in-
struction of girls and women generally. A work on education
long very popular in France and England, Adèle et Théodore
(1782), by Madame de Genlis, bluntly asserted that women 'are
born to a life both monotonous and dependent. . . . In their case,
genius is a useless and dangerous endowment, which takes them
out of their natural state. ' So long as this judgment reflected
public opinion, a superficial education for girls was more than
tolerated. Only a revolutionary like Mary Wollstonecraft could
plead that sex alone should not determine the course of study,
and that schoolboys and schoolgirls should be educated together.
The aims and methods of schools of good, but not of the first,
standing, may be inferred from Knox's Liberal Education.
