standing army of a great European power. Of
course, the colonials are as brave and athletic as any other average
white men. Of course, they acquitted themselves with reasonable credit.
All I have here to indicate is that, for the purposes of this theory of
the new nation, it is necessary to maintain that the colonial forces
were more useful or more heroic than the gunners at Colenso or the
Fighting Fifth. And of this contention there is not, and never has
been, one stick or straw of evidence.

A similar attempt is made, and with even less success, to represent the
literature of the colonies as something fresh and vigorous and
important. The imperialist magazines are constantly springing upon us
some genius from Queensland or Canada, through whom we are expected to
smell the odours of the bush or the prairie. As a matter of fact, any
one who is even slightly interested in literature as such (and I, for
one, confess that I am only slightly interested in literature as such),
will freely admit that the stories of these geniuses smell of nothing
but printer's ink, and that not of first-rate quality. By a great
effort of Imperial imagination the generous English people reads into
these works a force and a novelty. But the force and the novelty are
not in the new writers; the force and the novelty are in the ancient
heart of the English. Anybody who studies them impartially will know
that the first-rate writers of the colonies are not even particularly
novel in their note and atmosphere, are not only not producing a new
kind of good literature, but are not even in any particular sense
producing a new kind of bad literature. The first-rate writers of the
new countries are really almost exactly like the second-rate writers of
the old countries. Of course they do feel the mystery of the
wilderness, the mystery of the bush, for all simple and honest men feel
this in Melbourne, or Margate, or South St. Pancras. But when they
write most sincerely and most successfully, it is not with a background
of the mystery of the bush, but with a background, expressed or
assumed, of our own romantic cockney civilization. What really moves
their souls with a kindly terror is not the mystery of the wilderness,
but the Mystery of a Hansom Cab.

Of course there are some exceptions to this generalization. The one
really arresting exception is Olive Schreiner, and she is quite as
certainly an exception that proves the rule. Olive Schreiner is