I merely mention these things to show how they treat a poet in Australia.
For the rest, the Australian poets are pessimists, alleged funny writers, and parodists of Swinburne and Kipling. Paterson's writings smell of horse sweat and stable sweepings. Lawson sings of Colonial beer—which, dear English reader, God spare you from ever tasting—Daley retails the philosophy of that blasphemous old reprobate, Omar, with this difference—a pewter of Colonial beer, not a jug of wine. And then there are Gordon, and Sladen, John Cash Neild, Mr. Furtell and Farrell. The last mentioned wrote a poem "How he Died." I've never read it, and don't want to, so can't say how he died. But if it was an Australian poet who was dying I know how he ought to have been killed. In the pleasant metaphor of his own country, he should have got it where the chicken got the axe.
Chapter XVI.
THE C.Y.A.
This title, which attaches to all Australians during a period of superficial precocity, has great local significance. It means clever young Australian, and it originated in the newspapers, where the phrases are the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. For instance, no Australian editor would let the name of Chatterton pass without adding "Wonderful boy."
C.Y.A. is, therefore, a newspaper degree. It is conferred most heartily—and with rather less discrimination than Ally Sloper's award of merit—by junior reporters. Mothers just yearn for it, and the local newspaper is obliging.
An Australian mother tells her daughters to be clever—and let who will be good. The result is much cultivated mediocrity—mechanical pianists, and thin voices taught to sing Tosti's "Goodbye" for the inevitable subscription concert to raise funds for further futile study. There is in every town in the Commonwealth, a coming Australian, but none of them ever seem to do any arriving. Someone is, all the same, for ever getting a benefit (of the doubt) in the shape of the aforesaid subscription concert. It is given out that she is going to the old world to study under Marchesi or someone sufficiently afar to make the passage money a consideration. It's a regular confidence trick, for no sooner does the shock of the beneficiary's awful singing blow over, than she is back about town again. Perhaps she has realised enough by the fraud to buy a piano and a brass plate and she sets up teaching others to follow in her devious ways.
Strict justice to the Australian songster compels me to say that a few of them do achieve to the position of chorus girls. I heard some chorus girls of the old school complain in a café one night that "what with these Conservatorium girls cutting the screws the profession is going to the dogs."
There have been some Australian women who have reached London and hit that city hard. Melba—Nellie Armstrong that was—managed it. She was not a C.Y.A., however. She has outlived one of the adjectives before she went "Home." When she was singing at shilling concerts her fellow Australians hadn't the gumption to hear anything wonderful in her notes. Melba recently swept through Australia in a semi-regal way, and was queen of a champion grovelling match.
Ada Crossley also found London. She came back and found Australia, which wouldn't look at her at a 1/- some years before when her notes were fuller and richer, ready to pay half a guinea a time of its creditors' money to see what her gowns were like.