A NEW ZEALANDER’S NOVEL

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1680, 11 May 1904, Page 23

A NEW ZEALANDER’S NOVEL

MR ARTHUR H. ADAMS’S FIRST ROMANCE. ‘‘Tussock Land." By Arthur H. Adams. T. Fisher Unwin, London. Whitcombe and Tombs, Wellington. -Mr Adams, after mean&erlngs in ‘‘Maoriland and Other has ■written a novel. He fe as yet more of a limner of character, more of . a painter or scenery than a story teller. There are not many incidents in his narrative, and. nothing more sensational than lovemaking. Still, the opening chapters form a pretty idyll. The scene is land in Otago, and by an easy transition Sydney is reached, and so the story becomes “a romance of New Zealand and the Commonwealth.” Bat it is not tumtil hero and heroine meet again in DuuecLn ♦that Mr Adams's romance attains its refined, delicate and delightful end. The story is not involved. Aro.lia ,Gre(y is the heroine, and she has the blood of two races in her veins. King Soiuthem Is the hero, but he has the dreams and the follies of youth and the subsequent sense of riper years. Aroha has foir a grandfather on the maternal side the greatest of Maori chiefs in the South Island, and her father was one of the Greys of Essex, who. with broken fortunes at Home, came to revive them in New Zealand, failed commercially, and died a broken man.. lying met Aroha by accident, and loved her at first sight on the breezy Otago-run in the Mataura Valley. He had fallen from his horse and sprained his ankle. Aroha helped him to the homestead, where her mother .was kindness itself. But King was a student of art. and had ambitions as an artist. He could not revisit Westella. the name of Grey's i*m, because an English artist was en tour and staying in Dunedin fo/r the elummer, and so Grey, infatuated with himself and his art, decided to take lessons. Then he went to Sydney, 'intending to migrate to London; Paris, Rome and Florence. He was clever, but the newspaper critics in Sydney “slated” his work; and he despaired. He gave himself up.to idleness arid to folly for a time. - His love-making with two or three of Sydney’s belles is not creditable to him as the hero of a romance; but King had evidently a charm of manner and an ease of address that was captivating, as far as women were concerned. However, he ultimately abandons art, studies law, makes progress, and is offered a partnership by a former New Zealand friend named Chas. Craven, who had in his younger days notions of being' a poet. ' After six years’ absence King returns to New Zealand and settles in the town called, for the cirsumstances of the story. Waiatua some distance out of Wellington. Successful practice Tor five years gives steadiness to an otherwise changeful character, but withal a lovable one. The death of his mother brings him again to Dunedin, to renew friendship with his father, and ultimately his affection for Aroha, who. some yea is before, believing she would never again see King, bestows her love upon an Australian squatter’s son. whose enraged father spurns the beauty of Maoriland- as a daughter-in-law. ' '* •

Tlieve are many splendid passages in this romance. -Mr. Adams wie'lds a facile pen. His pictures are finely drawn, and! the colonring is delightfully realistic. The opening sentences will give some idea of the. author’s style as a descriptive Writer: “Nineteen, aglow with health',-with a heart untroubled, from sheer gladness of living Aroha Grey sang. Overhead was the fathomless blue of the New Zealand sky.. Across this arch, of .turquoise scurried thin wisps of white clouds, as if the keen, persistent wind that swept down the valley had blown the waves of the foam. It was a crisp, splendid' autumn day in the south of New Zealand. Already there was a taste of winter in the air, and the breeze that fo/rever roamed these solitudes of tussock land brought with it this afternoon some memory of the Antarctic that had given it birth ? Then we have a picture. of the pastoral scenery of Otago, with all the wealth,of “silky tussocks'’’ “clothing spuir and valley with a faint tinge of gold.” Here - and there there is a. looseness of expression; as well as a display of elahorar tioh, and soahetimes an pinknit sentence will mar a paragraph like that ending wherein the rain is depicted as . having “washed the atmosphere to a crystalline lucidity the • sharp marked outline of that range of mountains, rising majestically, fifty miles away, from an adoring multituae of hills,etc. We hardly

like the prepositional endings to sentences in strong passages, and they occur just sufficiently frequently to be noticeable. And to be even, a littLe more critical we have many repetitions of “affloresoemcei” and "wisps” in widely different connections. We have “wisps of clouds” in one place, and “wisps of brown hair” in another, and only a few pages dividing them, while “affl or-escent-re’ blossoms everywhere. Despite these apparent blemishes, which mom careful leading would have remedied* them are innumerably fine phrases; and some of those passages wherem Mr Adams, delivers himself of short essays on various phases of life and character reach a height rarely attained by novelist© of acknowledged reputations. When King finds himself far from famous as a painter of pictures he laughs grimly at the humour of life that had dragged him so far and so carelessly 'fiung him. aside. Then, adds the author, “That is the humiliating discovery life at thirty has for all of ms. Perhaps when we make that discoverv we have a Sleepless night; but we sbrug our shoulders —at thirty shoulders are easily shrugged—and our appetite does not fail us. Youthful ambitions are fine and delicately bea/i----tiful things, but there am more solid andi enduring things than ideals —an income, for instance. So we go on earning our living and providing for our wives and ch;.n hen; and if sometimes, in a sentimental mood, wo take out our youthful ambitions and turn them idly over in our memories, we do not weep over them. We light another cigar and contemplate its ash without bitterness.. There is ash in every cigar; and one grows older. And so> we relinquish the great and glowing hope that so long had lighted our lives, and have only noticed that somouhing has faded, that the wo. id -has grown greyer. But with a clamorous family and a growing business with a more insistent world to consider, we come gratefully to the conclusion that ideals are inconvenient things to carry through middle age, we shrug the raciie shoulders of- thircy and—light another cigar.

We cannot agree, however, with Mr Adams’s contrast between Australia a.nd xNew Zealand as to their fertility of genius. “The Australian will,” he says, •be an artistic people/’ Under the brilliance of that sky, lander the germinating influence of that heat, he will •reach heights of artistic expression impossible to his more sturdy oousin in Maoriland. The New Zealander dwells in a mountainous country; and it is not the Himalayas nor’ the Alps that produce the great poets, the masters of painting and of music. It fe easy to p -phecy on a matter of this kind, and one who questions Mr Adamsi’s deductions and prognostications -may be met with the retort, “Wait till yctiu see.” But to say that it requires “wide and monotonous plains/’ c(r “the sordid dreariness of the city” to rear genius, and then to observe that It required “the quiet homeliness and! pleasant content of Stratford’s thatched cottages to produce a Shakespeare’' is but to make Mr Adams’s philosophising on the subject of genius redicoleus. Besides the greatest poets, artists and musicians have come out of countries where sleepy , level, fat lands were scarce, and mountain peaks innumerable. It .is unpecesSsary to particularise, to every commonplace student of literature, name after name will arise to refute Mr Adams’s conclusions. Neither can we agree that “Hie New Zealand race, at ease in. a paradise of majestic scenery, will rest content with that. . . Like the dwellers in a tropical island, they will not feel the meed of initiative;, happily and luxuriously down the centuries they may contentedly drift.” But then he belies tbe prediction by saying that the future may have for the people of this country the clarion that .will awake them from their dangerous content. “But that lie- is the great unknown, below the horizon of the years/’ We have lingered too long over this romance. We have done so because it is by a writer we personally know, and because it shows both literary merit and artistic power. The incongruities of this book will be remedied in a second effort, and too- close a stiudy of the characters of Sydney women is not desirable. ' We would have liked to have seen more of John, the ploughman of Westella, and more of King’s mother in the story, aiid a little less of Effie, of Barbara and of Gertrud© Wonder. Over ail Mr Adams’s first novel is full of human interest, and alt,hopgh it is devoid of sensation, as sensations are understood —the nearest being the falling overboa,rd of Gertrude and her rescue by one Roy Underwood —it is certain to absorb the attention of its readers.