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Affect, Psychoanalysis,
and American Poetry
 Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics

Series Editor: Daniel Katz, University of Warwick, UK

Political, social, erotic, and aesthetic—poetry has been a challenge to

many of the dominant discourses of our age across the globe.
Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics publishes books on modern
and contemporary poetry and poetics that explore the intersection of
poetry with philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, political and
economic theory, protest and liberation movements, as well as other
art forms, including prose. With a primary focus on texts written in
English but including work from other languages, the series brings
together leading and rising scholars from a diverse range of fields for
whom poetry has become a vital element of their research.

Editorial Board:
Hélène Aji, University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre, France
Vincent Broqua, University of Paris 8—Vincennes/Saint Denis, France
Olivier Brossard, University of Paris Est Marne La Vallée, France
Daniel Kane, University of Sussex, UK
Miriam Nichols, University of the Fraser Valley, Canada
Peter Middleton, University of Southampton, UK
Cristanne Miller, SUNY Buffalo, USA
Aldon Nielsen, Pennsylvania State University, USA
Stephen Ross, University of Warwick, UK; Editor, Wave Composition
Richard Sieburth, New York University, USA
Daniel Tiffany, University of Southern California, USA

Forthcoming Titles:
City Poems and American Urban Crisis, Nate Mickelson
 A Black Arts Poetry Machine, David Grundy
Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism, Samuel Solomon
Queer Troublemakers, Prudence Chamberlain
 Affect, Psychoanalysis,
and American Poetry:
This Feeling of Exaltation

John Steen
For Stephen, in lieu of Rock Drill
 Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1 Anxiety’s Holding: Wallace Stevens’s Poetry of the Nerves
2 Threshold Poetics: Wallace Stevens and D.W. Winnicott’s “Not-
Communicating”
3 Randall Jarrell’s Beards
4 Mourning the Elegy: Robert Creeley’s “Mother’s Photograph”
5 Ted Berrigan’s Reparations
6 Aaron Kunin’s Line of Shame
7 This Feeling of Time: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen

Notes
Bibliography
Index
 Acknowledgments

My friends, family, and colleagues made this book possible by

providing the kind of holding environment with which it is
concerned. Over the course of several years, I learned as much
about the affects from these people as from the texts that linked us.
The project began in the Department of Comparative Literature at
the Laney Graduate School of Emory University under the direction
of Elissa Marder, Walter Kalaidjian, and Claire Nouvet. These advisers
provided unrivalled support for my fledgling efforts at scholarship,
and the shape of the book owes everything to their early guidance.
Among the many faculty members at Emory whose patient
mentoring made this project possible, I’m especially grateful to
Deborah White, Geoffrey Bennington, Cathy Caruth, Andrew
Mitchell, and Jill Robbins. Fellow graduate students at Emory
introduced me to the very idea of intellectual community, and their
conversations, feedback, and gentle nudging helped me over
innumerable hurdles. Special thanks to Adam Rosenthal, Dave
Ritchie, Aaron Goldsman, Armando Mastrogiovanni, Matt Roberts,
Ronald Mendoza de Jesus, Ania Kowalik, Harold Braswell, Margaret
Boyle, Mark Stoholski, Taylor Schey, Patrick Blanchfield, Christina
Leon, Brent Dawson, Naomi Beeman, Andrew Ryder, John Selvidge,
Maya Kesrouany, Mishka Sinha, Scott Branson, Jacob Hovind, Joshua
Backer, and Verena Peter. Mentors and teachers at the Emory
University Psychoanalytic Institute nurtured my interest in the field
when I was a student there, and I’m especially grateful to Carol
Levy, Steven Levy, Patrick Haggard, and Bobby Paul.
 My colleagues at Oklahoma State University and East Carolina
University supported me in precarious times. Without the
encouragement of these steadfast teachers and thinkers, the project
would have stalled long ago. Thank you, Elizabeth Grubgeld, Ron
Brooks, Richard Frohock, Katherine Hallemeier, Seth Wood, Timothy
Bradford, Amanda Klein, Margaret Bauer, Tom Douglass, Jeffrey
Johnson, Alex Albright, Erin Frost, Liz Hoiem, Marianne Montgomery,
and Brian Glover.
During the year I spent with Scholars for North Carolina’s Future, I
learned from the examples of academics who saw their labor as
inseparable from political action, and I owe a debt of gratitude to
Bruce Orenstein, Nancy Maclean, Lisa Levenstein, Stephen Boyd,
Michael Pisapia, and many, many others for this vision of alternative
academia. Sarah Glick and Sam Wohns at Faculty Forward deserve a
special word of thanks for their encouragement during this time.
This book was completed during my first year of teaching at The
Galloway School, and I found support and encouragement from
school leadership and my colleagues at every step. I’d like to thank
Suzanna Jemsby, Gareth Griffith, Roberta Osorio, Peter Emmons,
Cheryl Despathy, Ann Fountain, Jeanne Martinez, Rosie Seagraves,
Jesus Martinez-Saldana, Scotti Belfi, Sam Biglari, Lauren Holt, Lisa
Lindgren, Robin Rakusin, Anne Broderick, and Chamara Kwakye.
The project was greatly improved thanks to those who read and
commented on parts of the manuscript. In addition to Stephen Ross,
Jason Maxwell, Timothy Bradford, Dave Ritchie, Adam Rosenthal,
Zakir Paul, Scott Branson, Seth Wood, Lisa Knisely, Elizabeth
Grubgeld, Nick Sturm, and Richard Flynn, I’m grateful to audiences
at the Modernist Studies Association, MLA, American Literature
Association Poetry Symposium, and Affect Theory: WTF conference
for the gift of their questions and comments on the work in
progress. To Daniel Katz, series editor of Bloomsbury Studies in
Critical Poetics, David Avital and Clara Herberg at Bloomsbury, and
the two anonymous readers of the manuscript, thank you for
believing in this project and shepherding it to publication over the
course of several years.
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 The love and support of friends made writing about negative
affects more bearable. From Winston-Salem, NC, to Atlanta, GA, and
everywhere in between, I have been more than fortunate to have
this company alongside me: Roy Blumenfeld, Lauren Links, Adam
Rosenthal, Dinah Hannaford, Stephen Ross, Jane Hudson, Lisa
Knisely, Aaron Goldsman, Dean Hunt, Amanda Morelli, Maria
Corrigan, Kamal Menghrajani, Liz Blackford, Rachel Greenspan,
Claire Hefner, Sarah Pickle, Andres Palmiter, Erica Palmiter, Jim
Vickers, Ciara Cordasco, Kellie Vinal, Phillip Meeker, Jordan
Chambers, Dale Donchey, Walt Hunter, Lindsay Turner, Gregg
Murray, Erin Murray, Kate Juergens, Fernando Escalona, Jimmy Lo,
Marissa Grossman, Krystle Brewer, Kara Moskowitz, Sarah Huener,
Jamie Martina, Lola Rodden, and Jenn Poole.
My family has watched this project and waited for its completion
with a patience and kindness that surpasses understanding. My
grandmothers, Dorothy and Lucy, asked about the book each time I
visited; I write in memory of their husbands, my grandfathers John
and Bart. Mom, Dad, Bart, Autumn, Matthew, Anna, Sarah, and
Andrés, let’s go to La Carreta to celebrate.
Stephen Ross trekked over miles of invisible terrain, performing, in
broad daylight, operations of great delicacy in support of this work.
Kathryn reminded me, in Adrienne Rich’s words, that “whatever
happens, this is.”
 Introduction

What does a poem contain? This unanswerable question has long

troubled readers of poetry, who recognize in a poem’s grid of lines a
proprietary claim to representing the likeness of a person, the
subjective truths of memory, and the varieties of affective
experience. Discussions of poetry in the last century have been
dedicated, explicitly or implicitly, to thinking about poems as either
closed or open, as objects whose self-referentiality accounts for their
unique status, or as objects whose openness to the reader precludes
any fixed account of their formal parameters. What would it mean to
consider poems as objects that are, paradoxically, both closed and
open and, simultaneously, neither closed nor open? A model of
poetic relationality would allow readers to imagine that an individual
poem’s relationship to its own closure or failure to close conditions
its interaction with—its failure to be either closed or fully open to—
the world that lies, at least supposedly, outside. Rather than fix
poems as either closed or open, this study considers how a poem
relates to the problem of what it contains or fails to contain, and
how this relationship brings the poem into contact with the world.
Even to ask what poems contain entails an account of some of the
most fundamental questions that continue to trouble readers,
writers, and theorists of poetry and poetics. Is there a content
proper to poetry? Must a certain form correspond to that content,
whatever it is? Do poems correspond to some outside world,
however conceived? If they do, how might the boundary between
such a poetic inside and a worldly outside be drawn, surveyed, and
maintained? What boundaries separate the poet from her poem, the
poem from its addressees and readers, and these recipients of the
poem from its effects? To return to the initial question, which
branches off into additional questions, what does the assumption
that a poem contains anything at all fail to acknowledge?
The notion that a poem contains something otherwise
uncontainable is a feature of some of the earliest accounts of the
genre, which is telling, since the continuity and self-sameness of the
genre has been questioned just as insistently. But rather than track
the long history of answers to the question—what do poems
contain?—I look to something poems have tried repeatedly to
represent, but which they continually acknowledge they have failed
to contain.
This study traces the status of the difficult feelings that attend
poetry in the wake of Modernism. It tells the story of poetic
structures overwhelmed and undone by intensities they cannot
contain, and suggests that the consequences of this undoing for
reading one of the most prolific periods of US verse to date are still
unfolding, and remain to be appraised. Even when its effect on the
sound of the poem is to mute it, feeling resonates distinctly among
the determinants of an ongoing “crisis of verse,” the genre-
challenging moment by which Mallarmé defined the modernity of
lyric in 1897. Bound by anxiety, mourning, shame, and rage,
negative affects with a particular ability to upset communication,
Wallace Stevens, Randall Jarrell, Robert Creeley, Ted Berrigan, Aaron
Kunin, and Claudia Rankine reassert the significance of feeling in the
poems of a century whose poetic history is most often indexed by its
formal and philosophical, rather than its affective, coordinates.
Affect, emotion, and feeling have long been associated with lyric
poetry, but in many ways their roles have been either idealized or
devalued. On the one hand, feeling has at times marked the sole
evaluative criterion for the effect of the poem on the reader as well
as the single metric for the speaker’s achievement of success within
its parameters.1 On the other, the range of possibilities for affect to
change poetry at its very core, to change it or index its changing,
has been underestimated by a reluctance to regard feeling as
anything more than an aftereffect of more important formal,
intellectual, political, or linguistic poles.2 In contrast to both of these
extremes, this study claims that the presence of intractable feeling
spurs poetic innovation in a century that redefined affect as it
interacts with lyric’s poles of addressor, addressee, and audience.
I suggest that these feelings upset models of reading and writing
in which poets first feel, then express, and finally provoke feelings in
their readers. I argue instead that, in their very confrontation of the
difficulties associated with handling feeling poetically in the wake of
Modernism’s challenges to lyric form, feeling rises to the level of a
crisis for these poets and their readers. Caught between demands of
Modernist form that changed the potential for poems to contain and
process feelings and the continuing desire for poems to bear a
relationship to this aspect of experience, feeling seems never to be
“caught” or captured in these works, but rather to persist in
uncomfortable proximity to them. In addition to claiming that poems
no longer achieve a purgative processing or releasing of emotion for
their speakers, but reflect it back as anxiety, grief, shame, and rage,
I will argue that negative affects point toward the new shape of the
poem and the changed parameters of its intimacy with feeling. I
suggest that an atypical grouping of US poets spanning the
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries integrate cacophonous
sound, contemporary technology, mathematical constraint, and new
media into the lyric in order to ensure the survival of the genre’s
affective resonance alongside its radically changing forms.
Discovering the obstacles that changing aesthetic paradigms make
for articulating feeling, these poems mark what is unbearable about
affect as well as what structures of feeling US verse may yet be able
to bear.
This book considers three major discourses known as much for
their separateness from each other as for their invaluable
contributions to twentieth-century intellectual, artistic, and social
life: affect theory, object relations psychoanalysis, and modern
American poetry. I argue, by contrast, that interweaving their
contributions enables a deeper understanding not only of the logics
by which each is constituted, but also of the potential clarity each
brings to pressing contemporary questions. It is relevant to note
that, while affect theory has enjoyed a surge of critical interest (and
scorn) in the last two decades, both psychoanalysis and poetry
figure as untimely interlocutors within academic discourse. With the
arrival of psychoanalysis to American shores already over a century
old and with the heyday of university poet-critics associated with the
New Criticism well behind us, what insights remain for such critical
and artistic dinosaurs to uncover? In an era that faces the onset of
climate change and the fragility of democratic norms, how can the
pre-Oedipal preoccupations of object relations psychoanalysts and
the condensed displacements of contemporary poets sound a
necessary note? Read alongside the last century’s theorists of affect,
poets from Wallace Stevens to Claudia Rankine turn to poems not to
contain, but to reckon with the uncontainable. Their explorations of
the affects point to the possibilities for representation and witness of
inchoate experience, and as such provide models for engaging that
which invites no understanding.

***

The term affect is as controversial as it is unavoidable for recent

literary criticism and theory. It must first be distinguished from or
defined with reference to emotion and feeling.3 In this study, I use
the term in two distinct ways. First, I follow theorists (Lyotard, in
particular) for whom affect, as against emotion, describes the
situations of feeling in which a failure to experience that feeling is
most salient. That is, if “experience” demands a subject able to
reflect consciously on the nature of his or her bodily and mental
existence, affects, which consistently overwhelm the structures of
perception and expression, cannot properly be said to be
experienced by anyone. They exist, but cannot, in the “now” of their
emergence, be named.4 In this sense, affect refers to a sort of “felt
unknown.” In this vein, I use the term “feeling” to refer to the
conceptual and experiential space that felt and consciously
accountable emotions share with the felt unnamed and unknown
affects. As its use in my title indicates, I take feeling as a fertile
ground for exploring the constitutive and formative tensions of US
poetry. I use it as an umbrella term for which affect and emotion
mark subtler distinctions.5 One of the chief arguments that link my
chapters is that poets respond to the role feelings play and begin to
turn explicitly toward them during the course of the twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries. Thus, while I tend mostly to the
unacknowledged anxiety of Wallace Stevens’s poems, Aaron Kunin
and Claudia Rankine engage directly with theorists of shame and
rage, contesting the static objecthood of lyric production by
incorporating intertextual interlocutors.

***

Given a discussion of affect that invokes such a transnational array

of thinkers, the choice of US poetry deserves some explanation.
First, US poetry in the last century has constantly turned to the
concept of personality. Modernist poets, especially T.S. Eliot,
explicitly opposed the value; confessional poets aimed to recover
individuality in an expressive poetics of personal and interpersonal
disclosure; contemporary poetic projects such as Lyn Hejinian’s My
Life find ways to use the pronoun “I” without asserting that poems
serve to represent psychological selves. As a category, affect is
capacious enough to treat each of these modes of grappling with
personality. It may be singularly appropriate because, while affect
shapes personality, the two remain distinct. For a body of poems
that continually questions the ways aesthetic objects do or do not
manifest the individuality of their makers, a concept like affect,
which maintains a middle ground between unconscious and
conscious life, remains a powerful analytic tool.
Second, I hope that my psychoanalytically informed readings of
poems by US poets continue to show, in a tradition established by
Jahan Ramazani, the many routes by which the forms of US poetry
are shaped by transatlantic and global currents.6 Several of the
poets represented in this study have already been the focus of work
showing their transnational influences and intertexts, while the
contemporary poets represented here bear witness to the
impossibility of isolating an “American” poetics from other national
traditions at a moment when poetry is nearly as globalized as
commerce. The fact that the term “American” represents an
impossible container for the varieties of recent verse speaks, on an
even larger scale, to the failures of containing with which I am
concerned. Thus, while there is, on the one hand, no reason to
separate American poetry from global poetry with respect to its
reliance on and relationship to affects—certainly a similar study
could be made of national and transnational bodies of work in
different periods—I wish to use the national parameters of this work
to claim that something peculiar about twentieth-century US poetry’s
relationship to affect deserves attention.

***

Why the focus on negative affects? Indeed, pleasurable affects

play a substantial role in this era’s poetry. Another study might have
structured its argument about significant formal and theoretical
innovations in poetics with reference to William Carlos Williams’
startled surprise in poems like “Arrival” and Frank O’Hara’s
spontaneous exuberance in poems like “The Mike Goldberg
Variations.” Focusing instead on affects of unpleasure, however—
those constituted, in the Freudian account, by a rising of tension
rather than its lessening or discharge7—attends both to the
analogous sense of crisis that accompanies the last century’s
struggle with affect as an increasingly urgent problem for poetics
and to the controversial flowering of affective approaches to
literature in our contemporary moment.8
My approach to affect, as indeed to US poetry, draws upon a
deliberately eclectic roster of theorists and critics. My key
interlocutors on the subject of affect span the century of poetry
alongside which they are read, and demonstrate stylistic concerns
that track those of their poetic counterparts. Sigmund Freud, D.W.
Winnicott, Roland Barthes, Silvan Tomkins, Eve Sedgwick, and
Lauren Berlant are all poetic thinkers in the sense that they push the
boundaries of the forms they inherit and to which, in their own
ways, they manage to remain faithful. One thinker in particular, D.W.
Winnicott, provides a sly justification for this eclectic approach.
Winnicott’s “String: A Technique of Communication” presents the
case study of a young boy whose mother was prone to depression
and whose symptomatic preoccupation with string, with which he
decorated his surroundings, indicated a “denial of separation” from
an object to whom no other means of linkage was possible.9 Despite
the significant differences between the accounts of affect offered by
the theorists represented here, this book represents a similarly
symptomatic string by which any complete separation of their work
from each other can be productively disavowed.
This study begins with Sigmund Freud, whose Copernican
revolution began with the recognition of a profound link between
language and affect. In Studies in Hysteria, Freud and Breuer argued
that hysteric symptoms were the result of affects that were provoked
by traumatic experience but then “strangulated.” When, through the
talking cure, memory returns to the traumatic experience and
describes it, the affect can be “abreacted” and symptoms relieved.
In Andre Green’s phrase, Freud discovered a means by which affects
could be “poured out verbally.”10
In Freud’s genetic account, the conscious experience of affect can
be traced back to “very early, perhaps pre-individual experiences of
vital importance.”11 As a tool for reading poetry, what’s most
remarkable about this observation is just how far affects can come.
That is, a study of the appearance of affect in poems permits not so
much a return to their genetic beginning but a glimpse of the
diversity of forms they take as a result of stylistic and formal
practices. The most notable aspect of Freud’s account of affect is
that, to use Wallace Stevens’s phrase, “it must change.” Affect is
frighteningly dynamic, and as such can be transformed, displaced, or
exchanged in the course of mental life with a variety of results. The
appearance of an affect always opens a story about the ideas to
which the affect has been linked and, crucially, to which it may
become attached in the future. Although I will also draw upon
Freud’s work on mourning, I focus particularly on Freud’s account of
anxiety, an affect that troubled him for much of his career, and
around which he developed some of the most consequential
descriptions of the conscious mind.
D.W. Winnicott remains particularly relevant to twenty-first-century
readers, as recent writers have acknowledged, because he offers a
theory of the transitional site of aesthetic experience that recognizes
the distinction between art and world without neglecting the ways in
which they are inextricably bound.12 Winnicott’s theory of the
holding environment, a simultaneously physical and psychical
interaction that briefly makes infant and caretaker
13
indistinguishable, provides a powerful articulation of the ways that
affects are uncontainable or, stated positively, relational. Discussions
of affects consistently invoke figures of leakiness, of transmission
and interaction, and of the powerful and often painful interactions of
variously figured “insides” and “outsides.”14 Winnicott’s theory,
crucially, addresses not only holding, but the failures of the holding
environment that produce the earliest affects, those that mark the
emerging and persistent space that separates individuals. In
adapting Winnicott’s theory of the holding environment to discuss
the work of affects in poetry, I aim to make a case for reading
poems as dyads that consistently emerge in order to acknowledge
and experience—or suffer—a gap that separates, though never
absolutely, the poem and the poet, reader and poem, work of art
and world.
Jean-Francois Lyotard’s work has not often been a source for work
associated with the “affective turn,” and he will not appear
prominently in any individual chapter of this study; nevertheless,
Lyotard’s explorations of affect ground my use of the term.
Stemming from his 1983 volume, The Differend, which articulated a
philosophy centered on the “universe” established by the unit of
language he called “the phrase,” Lyotard came to identify affect, too,
as a phrase, but one deserving of special attention because it cannot
be subsumed into any articulated phrase regime. I turn to Lyotard’s
account of the “affect-phrase” as a way of speaking about the
peculiar status of negative affects in relation to the twentieth-
century poems in which their prominence is often indicated precisely
by their muteness. As Claire Nouvet writes, “To testify to the
muteness of the affect, claims Lyotard, is the task of literature,
which labors to say a ‘secret affection’ that a writer worthy of the
name knows to be unsayable, irreducible to articulation.”15 Because
Lyotard also identifies this phrase’s address as a process into which
psychoanalysis provides special insight, my reading of Lyotard’s
concept of affect, and its relationship to the speechlessness of
infancy, calls on D.W. Winnicott’s presentation of the early infantile
holding environment as a model for understanding the significant
role of the negative affects in the development of poetic modernity.
D.W. Winnicott’s “psycho-analytic explorations” move more easily
into the realm of cultural analysis than many other post-Freudian
psychoanalytic approaches, and it is important to note that Winnicott
found in poetry a prime extension of his core concepts. “Transitional
space” or “intermediate experience,” in which neither subjective nor
objective phenomena dominate, becomes a characteristic of adult
creativity after having played a chief role in the development of the
child’s capacity to distinguish self from other, to manage separation,
and to relate to his or her own body.16 Instead of calling on poetic
examples merely to provide evidence for a preestablished conceptual
framework, Winnicott, like Freud, seeks to account for creative
activity as an outgrowth of psychic development. For Winnicott, not
every person becomes a poet, but poetry is a model of “creative
living,” a result of healthy development and the consistent maternal
holding environment that psychoanalytic treatment aims, when it
has not been experienced, to restore.17
In prescient fashion that calls to mind Lyotard’s mention of the
affect-phrase’s appearing alongside articulated phrases, Winnicott
recognized that words in the analytic situation do not stand alone
but are accompanied by effects that can only be called poetic:

Although psychoanalysis of suitable subjects is based on verbalization,

nevertheless every analyst knows that along with the content of
interpretations the attitude behind the verbalization has its own importance,
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 and that this attitude is reflected in the nuances and in the timing and in a
thousand ways that compare with the infinite variety of poetry.18

The significance of the writing of D.W. Winnicott to this study,

then, is threefold. First, I take Winnicott’s engagement with Freud,
which was sometimes oblique but always an implicit motivator of his
original thought, as a model for this project’s relationship to
psychoanalytic literary criticism. While the excesses and reductive
schemas of that tradition have been sufficiently criticized,
psychoanalytically oriented readers have not yet responded with
clear methodological aims that would differentiate a new project
from the blind spots and symptomatic readings of the old. Because
Winnicott identified himself as a Freudian, even though he also
noted that reading Freud could hamper his individuality,19 I suggest
that Winnicott’s modifications of Freudian theory, which were often
not stated as such, provide a helpful way of continuing to read
psychoanalytically without becoming suckled in a creed outworn.
One of Winnicott’s contemporary commentators, Adam Phillips,
writes that “now more than ever before, psychoanalysis has also
become something, in William James’ words, ‘to be going on
from.’”20 Nevertheless, it may remain, rather than something “right,”
a “good way of speaking about certain things like love and loss and
memory.”21 Winnicott’s conviction that his own observation of infants
and the material his patients “taught” him in the course of their
analytic work would be the inviolable source of his knowledge,22
while his reading of the psychoanalytic tradition would remain in the
background, suggests one pathway by which Philips’s modest
version of psychoanalysis could comment on the affective
environments of literary texts.
Second, I employ Winnicottian concepts to interrogate and
animate twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poems. The
maternal holding environment that precedes speech and is
fundamental for later development helps us to account for Stevens’s
conceptions of poetic space and of the poem as a container of
uncontainable feelings. Within this environment, and following from
its effects, the role of communication as an act just as often directed
to the self as to others—and justifiable in this regard despite its
unintelligibility to others—suggests a renewal of the terms by which
Stevens’s poetic “solipsism” has been evaluated. Perhaps it allows us
to speak of the “good enough” poem, just as Winnicott emphasized
the importance of a mother whose ability to fail her infant, and to
avoid both depriving it and spoiling it, gave her a sufficiency more
vital than perfection. Notably, Winnicott’s version of psychoanalysis
depends on an attention to and a validation of the patient that de-
emphasizes one of Freud’s cornerstone concepts, resistance.23 As a
result, Winnicott’s analytic technique speaks to what is useful and
unique about the peculiarities of Stevens’s oeuvre, rather than, as
some critics have emphasized, its deficits.24
Finally, aspects of Winnicottian style recommend a posture toward
texts that is attentive to the “transitional space” that the poetic
instantiates and is.25 While the concept has been noted by
numerous critics, to some extent its most radical gestures have been
overlooked. Every act of reading enters a space in which the
subjective and the objective are productively—if not without risk—
blurred, and in which a certain play between dependence and
independence that involves all actors on the psychic stage allows for
movement and insight at a pace that is as dynamic as the
interaction. It is precisely this “space between” that Winnicott’s
psychoanalytic writing on the development of the child allows us to
posit for the adult (if sometimes childlike) reader and writer of
poems; this study teases out the implications of a kind of reading
that takes place in this liminal zone—implications for reading and
writing, for texts and their readers that are borne out in the difficult
language that aims to account for affective experience.
An image of this sort of reading appears in Wallace Stevens’s “The
House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” a poem that seems at
first to sponsor a merger between book and reader before showing
that their difference is constitutive of a space that includes the
action of reading as well as the environment in which it takes place:

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The reader became the book; and summer night
 Was like the conscious being of the book.26

The use of the word “like,” as well as the fact that the poem
reasserts the material existence of “the book” in its antepenultimate
stanza, reminds us that the act of reading must be mediated—that it
must cross a distance and take place in a space. The poem’s last
line, which compares the night to thinking itself, gives us the
corollary: the world can be read like a book, and summer night can
be like a book in being an organized “perfection of thought,” but the
reader cannot, even in fantasy, “become” the book. Even in the
beginning of the poem, “summer night” is only “like” it. This
resemblance, while it lessens the distance between subject and
object in the same way that a Winnicottian potential space does,
nevertheless, and as a matter of necessity, preserves a minimal
distance that we may speak of as the poem’s environment.
I first engage affect theory in chapters on Randall Jarrell and
Aaron Kunin, to which the work of Silvan Tomkins, Eve Sedgwick,
and Lauren Berlant is central. Writing on the “bodily knowledges”
that affects produce, Sedgwick and Tomkins speak to the ways
negative affects in particular turn the individual’s attention to the
relationship between inside and outside. Shame, for instance, “as
precarious hyper-reflexivity of the surface of the body, can turn one
inside out—or outside in.”27 Poems that punctuate themselves—mark
themselves as distinct—with reference to shame are poems whose
distinction from their environments is, like desire itself in this
situation, incompletely reduced. It is, then, in the ongoing relation
between two objects (since “shame is characterized by its failure
ever to renounce its object cathexis”)28, rather than in the
absorption of one object in itself, that an analysis of affects in poems
would illuminate.
Lauren Berlant argues that some cultural logics reveal themselves
affectively before they become legible in any other way.29 Are poems
one of the first, perhaps semi-legible, next stops? Might poems
represent one of the first ways by which, after a defining cultural
logic, can be felt, it may come to be articulated? If poets can still be
said to be, as Pound wrote, the antennae of the race, attuned to the
workings of the present in ways that other parts of the cultural body
are not, and if something of what poems reveal when they present
the findings of their groping is feeling—as it has often been assumed
—then such a privileged place seems possible.
Of course, there is some reason to doubt that poets deserve, or
can legitimately lay claim to, this privileged title. In fact, one of the
key statements about poetry’s relationship to feeling—that a poem
represents emotion recollected in tranquility—suggests, even as it
lays claim to poetry as a privileged site for the containing of feeling,
that affect must recede into the past in order to be articulated
poetically. While the complexity of the present seems to inhibit poets
and poems just as readily as it inhibits the rest of us, the poems I
consider are strikingly attuned to affects that emerge even in the
course of the poem, interrupting its otherwise calm surface with an
inarticulate pulsion. In this way, poetry asserts its persistence as a
genre at a moment when the cruel optimism of our moment can be
witnessed by what Berlant calls “the waning of genre.”30
Affect theory provides a means for reading the ways in which
poems outline their attachments, and it offers an important
rearticulation of poetry’s relationality. In some sense, all poetry and
writing about it is writing about attachment and its optimism
inasmuch as it involves “the force that moves you out of yourself
and into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something
that you cannot generate on your own.”31 Berlant’s description of
optimism resembles Allen Grossman’s claim that poetry is, by
definition, an interpersonal practice: “Poetry is the least solitary of
enterprises. It pitches persons toward one another full of news. Its
purpose is to realize the self; and its law is that this can only be
done by bringing the other to light.”32 Although poems in the grip of
extreme affects turn more obviously to the project of “realizing the
self” than to one of “bringing the other to light,” I hope to show that
the work of the former sustains the possibility of the latter, such that
even those affects that inhibit sociality earn their status as relational.

***
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
balconies. In many of the churches into which I peeped Mass was in
progress, and the attendance was large of men as well as women.
In some of the streets the shops were handsome, though quite
small, while in the great arches between were caves, as it were,
where carriages and horses waited, apparently for hire, while in
others the cave had been fitted up as a café. The further one got
from the harbour, the finer were the shops and streets. In one I
saw a statue of Petrarch, and in another of Dante. The place is like
a rabbit warren, and just as populous. Priests and policemen were
everywhere. Here and there was a religious painting on the side of
a house, before which tapers were burning, and in one street I
observed a crucifix, to which the passers-by took off their hats. I
went into a café and watched some play at a billiard-table, much
smaller and with much bigger balls than those in use among us.
Omnibuses and tramcars abounded. Perpetual motion seemed to be
the order of the day. Some of my friends patronized the English
hotels, where the charges seemed to me dear. One thing, and one
thing only, amused me; I stumbled on a kind of eating-house; on the
outside was inscribed, Déjeuner à la fourchette, which was Englished
underneath as follows: ‘Breakfast to the fork.’ I did not enter. I
feared, as the English was so bad, that the cooking might be worse.
Altogether, my impression is that Naples looks best at a distance and
by moonlight, when a halo of soft light is thrown over bay and street
and mountain far away, and the hoarse cry of its thousand street-
sellers and cabmen and guides is unheard; when even the distant
tinkling of the bells of its many churches no longer reaches the ear;
when between you and the crowded city is a world of water calm
and still.
At Naples we took up more passengers and more mountains of
luggage. Our captain is in despair. That luggage question is the
terror of his life. He says that there would be no need of it if the
company would but establish a laundry on board; and why should
they not? It would be a great convenience to everyone, and save a
vast amount of trouble. The cabins are choked up with packages. It
would be as pleasant again for the passengers if they could have
their clothes washed on board.
I fear I did injustice to a dead royalty. I find, after all, it was simply
the fault of the company’s agent at Naples that most of us spent an
idle day in that far-famed city. The distinguished representative of
the distinguished Cook informed us that the Museum and Pompeii
were closed that day, because the agent of the company with whom
he came on board informed him such was the case. I find that they
were not, and that a small party of our fellow-travellers visited both
places; had lunch on shore, returned to the ship to dinner, and paid
a visit to the theatre in the evening for a sum under £1 per head.
As you may suppose, most of us were highly indignant at the
conduct of the company’s agent, and described him in terms that,
with the fear of the libel law in view, it may be dangerous for me to
report. I mention the fact that travellers may not be deceived by
what they hear on board, but go on shore and act for themselves.
Many of my fellow-travellers are Scotch. The Scotch, Mr. Charles
Reade tells us, are icebergs with volcanoes underneath, and we had
quite a volcano on board as we summed up the experiences of the
unfortunate day. I own it served me right, for, as a rule, I only
believe half that I hear. I ought to have started for Pompeii—by
myself, trusting to luck to get into the place. I am glad, however, to
be able to do justice to Cook and Sons, the friends of the traveller in
every part of the world. It is seldom that they make a blunder, or
their agents either.
In another respect I am not disappointed. ‘The grand object of
travelling,’ wrote Dr. Johnson, ‘is to see the shores of the
Mediterranean. On those shores were the four great empires of the
world—the Assyrian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman. All
our religion—almost all our laws—almost all our arts—almost all that
sets us above savages has come to us from the shores of the
Mediterranean.’ To sail down the Mediterranean, past Capri—a
sunburnt rock—past Stromboli, through the Straits of Messina, over
the far-famed Scylla and Charybdis of the ancients, past Etna,
though unfortunately hidden from our vulgar gaze by the clouds of
night, is undoubtedly an immense treat. But the rest of the journey
is rather monotonous, though we were favoured by fine weather, a
fortunate circumstance, as this part of the Mediterranean is
particularly liable to sudden storms; and if it were not for sea-quoits,
and the still more popular game of dumps, which consists in
throwing small flat balls with lead inside on to a white-painted
square board, on which numerals from one to ten are inscribed, it
would be rather hard work to get through the weary hours. At
Naples an agent came on board with the London morning papers
four days old, which sold readily at half a franc each, and the
perusal of them has helped to kill an idle time, and, besides,
afforded topics for general conversation. For pedestrian exercise the
Orizaba is admirably adapted, as eleven times round the promenade
deck is supposed to be a mile, and at certain hours every one is
supposed to be doing his or her ‘constitutional;’ thus, what used to
be considered one of the bad effects of life at sea, its confinement,
is entirely got rid of. Captain Conlan, our commander-in-chief, when
off duty, has a friendly word for us all; but I must say, if tobacco be
a slow poison, some of us are in a bad way, for I think without
exception all the male passengers smoke; and at Gibraltar, where
tobacco and cigars are cheap, most of them replenished their
exhausted stores.
The principal event after leaving the Straits of Messina is the
appearance of Crete, by the side of which, with her snowy-capped
mountains, we steamed for about five hours. From her rocky
foreground, resting on the blue waves, rise three mountain ridges,
the chief of which ‘is many-founted Ida,’ towering 8,000 feet above
the sea. As a caution to travellers, let me assure them how much
one of Smith’s dictionaries would be appreciated. Smith, it may be,
is correct, but he is pedantic. Lemprière would, perhaps, be better;
in the home of legendary lore it is not wise to be over-critical. The
Orient Company publishes a guide-book, but it is of little practical
use, though it contains an immense amount of information, some
excellent maps, and is a marvel of cheapness. You rarely get in such
books what you really want to know. We have a professor on board,
but professors nowadays are somewhat common. Men who shave
and cut corns—men who examine your head, who risk their necks in
parachutes, who excel in gymnastics, are called, or call themselves,
professors; and I, perhaps because I know no better—probably it is
so—may be a little sceptical as to the class. I always think of Barry
Cornwall’s lines in which he speaks of

Professors of hall and college,

With a great deal of learning and little knowledge.

And, alas! I have known many such. It amuses me more to talk to

some of the third-class passengers. ‘Ah, sir,’ said one of them to me,
as we steamed out of Naples Bay—‘ah, sir, that is a very wicked city;
it allus reminds me of Nineveh.’ I was compelled to admit that I did
not know much of the wickedness of either; but that I did happen to
know that, excluding Jack the Ripper, there were not a few wicked
people left in London. I always like to look at home before I begin
censuring other people. There is a good deal of truth in the remark
of the old Californian, when Sir Charles Dilke told him ‘Californians in
the Empire City were called the scum of the earth.’ ‘Them New
Yorkers,’ was the old man’s reply, ‘is a sight too fond of looking after
other people’s morals.’
Just as we are nearing the lowlands of Africa, and Port Said—a
wretched place, where we stop a few hours to coal—is in sight, a
death occurs on board; a tiny babe, weary of the world of which it
knows so little, refuses to live any longer. In the drawing-room few
of us know of the event, and the gaiety goes on much as usual. I
rush on to the deck, and see a dark cloud of passengers at one end,
and there is the Bishop standing at a red kind of box or reading-
desk, repeating that grand burial service which is nowhere more
impressive than when heard in the ocean’s solitude, with nothing but
the wide, wide sea below, and the clear, moonlight sky above. The
parents are, of course, there to mourn, and the bearing of the little
crowd is sympathetic. The poor little corpse, covered by the British
flag, is placed on an inclined board, which is tipped over when the
sentence ‘we commit this body to the deep’ is reached, and the sea
receives its dead. I had only asked the doctor that morning what
was the state of health on board the ship, and his reply was that it
was as well as could be. Perhaps steerage passengers don’t count,
especially when babies. At any rate, the funeral is over, and we are
taking our evening tea as if nothing of consequence had occurred—
as if no tender mother’s heart had been torn with anguish as she
saw her babe fall a victim to the Reaper whose name is Death. Not
for a moment did the ship slacken her career, and we press on to
Port Said with all our might.
 CHAPTER II.
EGYPT TO COLOMBO.

Coaling in Port Said—The Suez Canal—England the Main Support

—Donkey-drivers—The Electric Light—Ismailia—Suez—Aden—The
Red Sea.
Under a vermilion sky, as the sun sinks down into the west, we
approach the land of Egypt—a barren land, kindly to neither man nor
beast, fruitful only in sand, and hospitable only to the camel, who
seems here to be a friend in need, patiently following his turbaned
leader over the pathless desert. We have a little sand near
Southport, we have more still on the Lincolnshire coast at Skegness,
we have most of all on the Dutch coast, from Flushing to
Scheveningen, that gay resort of the Dutchmen and the Germans;
but they fail to give you an idea of the dreary and boundless waste
of sand through which that wonderful old man, M. de Lesseps, cut
his grand canal, which ought to have been done by Englishmen, and
which perhaps would have been, had not Lord Palmerston declared
in season and out of season that it could not be done, and that if it
were done it could never pay. When we stopped at Port Said,
looking as if only artificially raised out of the sea, I landed: partly to
say I had planted the sole of my foot in Egypt—the land of the
Pharaohs, of Joseph and his brothers, of Antony and Cleopatra, of
Origen and Hypatia and early Christian hermits, of grand
philosophies and theologies, which stir the pulses even of to-day—
and partly that I might have an evening stroll in a place not at one
time the safest for a white man to land, but which now is quite as
free from danger as any London neighbourhood—the happy hunting-
ground of the burglar and the thief. The fact was that at Port Said
we had to coal; and as we landed after dinner, it was a new
sensation to be rowed ashore by turbaned sailors, who were clothed
in what seemed to me in the twilight very much like petticoats. It
was rather risky, as the boat was crammed down to the water’s
edge. Nor was I much reassured as, after running up against the
ropes and being nearly capsized, the man at the prow called out in
broken English, ‘Never mind,’ to which I was obliged to reply that I
did mind, and that I ventured to hope he would take care of our
precious carcases. Apparently the advice was not thrown away, for
after a few minutes’ row, and after an attempt had been made to
collect the fare, which we all firmly resisted till on terra firma, we
landed where a couple of old women apparently, in reality sailors,
were standing with lanterns ready to receive us. As the fare was
only sixpence each way, I can’t say that the Egyptian watermen
were quite so exorbitant as some I wot of nearer home. There was
not much to see at Port Said; but it was better to be there than on
board ship while the process of coaling was going on. While at
dinner there was a sound all round as if a million of monkeys were
screaming and jabbering underneath. They were the coalheavers,
on board the big barges laden with coal that surrounded us on all
sides directly we had come to anchor. Each barge had two lights of
burning coals, by the glare of which we could see the porters in
strings of fifty at a time climbing up a ladder that led to the ship’s
inside, with coal-sacks on their shoulders, and streaming back again,
all the while screaming, as seems to be the manner of the Arab tribe
all the world over. They all scream. They screamed at us as we
stood on the deck; they screamed at us as they rowed us ashore;
they screamed at us as we walked the streets—or, rather, the one
long street which forms the town till it is lost in the sand of the
surrounding waste. On one side lies the market, and a mile or two
beyond is the old Arabian town. Men of all nationalities are well
represented in Port Said; but the Greeks have the best shops, where
a fine trade is done in cigarettes, photographs, and richly-worked
napkins, and helmets to keep off the sun in the Red Sea, and the
other products to be met with in Turkish bazaars. In the street it
was difficult to tell the men from the women, so weird and unearthly
seemed their make-up in the evening gloom. Two of the dark
bundles approaching me were, I concluded, women, as the faces
were concealed—all but the dark, round eyes, from the dangerous
glances of which, happily, my age protected me. The great
attraction of the place was a large café chantant, which, however, I
fancy, did duty as a gambling-house as well. On the bank, just as
you land, is a large building calling itself the Hotel Continental; but
as it was shut up, apparently it has not been a commercial success.
The houses, or, rather, the shops—for there were nothing but shops
to be seen—were all of wood and painted. On my return to the
ship, which was covered with coal-dust, I found we had an Egyptian
conjurer, who went through a performance such as we see any day
in England. But I must not say a word against a gentleman who
was so kind as to intimate that I was ‘a big masher.’
For a real Lotus-land, where it is always afternoon, commend me to
the Suez Canal. It is a busy spot. No spot is busier. Steamers,
especially English ones, are always passing up and down. It is an
expensive spot. You are fortunate if your steamer has not to pay a
thousand or two for the trip. The Orizaba has to pay £1,700 for
going through; but that does not concern you, if you have taken
your passage to Ismailia or Colombo, or one or other of the great
Australian ports. All that you have to do is to sit still and enjoy
yourself. There the good sailor and the bad one are equal. There
you fear no north or south simoom, no seas mountains high (I have
never yet seen them, and begin to believe in them only as I do in
stories of mermaids and mermen, or in legends of the sea-serpent
ever turning up at unexpected times and in unexpected quarters),
no rough blasts of the winter winds, no equinoctial gales. The
captain comes down from his bridge, the officers take it easy, and
you really need not to drive dull care away. On that calm water,
under that bright sky, you have no thought of time. All around you
is still life—the boundless sands, the distant hills, the camels, and
the Arabs encamped far away. All is repose, in the heavens above,
as well as in the earth beneath. It is true the beggars here and
there on the banks are a nuisance, but where are they not, either in
the Old World or the New? For eighteen or twenty hours you are at
peace—to read the last novel, to flirt with the last fancy of the hour;
to dream, if you like, in the broad daylight of other days and other
times. The big ship moves, but so slowly that you can scarce tell
that you are moving at all. The stewards bring your meals as usual;
your sleep is undisturbed. There is your morning bath, your
accustomed cigar, your game of chess, or your rubber of whist. Ah,
you are much to be envied! The pity of it is that the trip is so soon
over; that the dream is soon dispelled; that the curtain so soon falls
on the scene; that you have to get back again to the cares, and
troubles, and struggles of real life.
In the matter of the Suez Canal, Englishmen are paying rather dearly
for their faith in Lord Palmerston. It is to the credit of M. de Lesseps
that he conceived the idea, got together the money, and carried it
out, and by that means, as a patriotic Frenchman, secured for
France an influence in Egypt which, not to put too fine a point on it,
has not worked for the advantage of either Egypt or ourselves. The
officials of the Canal are French, the official language is French, the
neat little stations, with their painted wooden houses, protected here
and there by a palm tree struggling for life, are pre-eminently
French. Fortunately, Lord Beaconsfield bought some shares for the
nation, which gives us a locus standi. But the Canal, you feel, ought
to have been designed by British engineers and paid for by British
gold. It is emphatically England that keeps it going. The stream of
steamers ever sailing up and down by day or by night are chiefly
English steamers built in British shipyards, sailed by British captains
and officers, and filled with British goods. It is true France
subsidizes her steamers to struggle with England in all parts of the
world. It is equally true that Germany does the same, but they
cannot beat the British merchant and shipowner, who will not yield
without a fierce struggle the supremacy it has taken them centuries
to build up and sustain, and if the Canal manages to pay a dividend,
it is because of the constant passage of British ships. As we were
steaming along the Canal in one of the finest steamers of the Orient
line, and of any line, we met a French steamer on her homeward
trip. Mounseer looked politely at our crowded deck—his own
seemed deserted, though they do tell me that the accommodation
on board the French ships is remarkably good, and then our
steerage commenced singing with heart and soul ‘Rule, Britannia.’
They ought not to have done it, I know. It was a breach of good
manners; but if anywhere we may be pardoned for singing ‘Rule,
Britannia,’ it is in the Suez Canal.
On leaving Port Said, in a few minutes you are in the Canal, which
has been here protected from the shifting sand by a breakwater a
mile and a half long. On Lake Menzaleh, to the westward, are to be
seen wonderful flights and flocks of birds, including pelicans and
flamingoes, to detect which, however, requires an uncommonly
strong glass. Ships are piloted on the block system, under the
control of the head official at Port Said, who telegraphs the
movements of each ship as it slowly makes its way. At each of the
stations, or ‘gares,’ there are signal-posts, and a ball above a flag
says ‘Go into the siding,’ while a flag above a ball says ‘Go into the
Canal.’ You see a good deal of the country, an utter, miserable
desert at first, but soon hidden by the sand-banks. As you get
nearer to Suez, wandering Arabs and droves of camels may be seen
making their way along the burning waste, under the burning sun.
All day and all night the heavens are wonderful. Now and then you
meet a ship, and there is not much room to spare; now and then
one is run aground, and it is often weary waiting, as it is inexpedient
to go on shore and take a donkey-ride, in compliance with the
request of the donkey-drivers, who seem to scent a stoppage from
afar, and come to the bank, clamouring vociferously all the while. As
you proceed you find the boys and girls on each side keeping you
company, in hopes of the copper the kind-hearted visitor may feel
inclined to throw them. It is needless to add that they are loosely
clad, and are brown and sunburnt to look at. By night the electric
light on the sandy bank has a singularly strange effect, which is
more particularly apparent as another ship approaches, making the
sand where it catches the light seem as if there were drifts of snow
all round. As you enter the lakes the waters widen, and the speed is
greater; the scenery is also a little more attractive. Away on your
right is the land of Goshen, and Ismailia clusters prettily around the
summer palace of the Khedive. Here you drop the passengers for
Cairo, who are increasing in number every year—that part of Egypt
becoming increasingly a winter resort, essential to the comfort and
well-being of those who do not care for English cold and fog and
rain. It is a wonderful change and a great relief for the asthmatic to
spend a winter in Egypt. It is a pity that more cannot do so, but,
alas! few of us can spare the time, and many of us have not the
cash, and so a man must live where his bread is buttered, though to
do so prolongs his pains at the same time that it shortens his life.
As you look at Ismailia it seems a charming spot; however, the
condition of the place is by no means sanitary, and danger lurks
there under those green trees, beside those still waters. It has,
however, been the scene of high life, as when the Canal was opened
in 1869, when the Empress Eugenie, the Crown Prince of Prussia
and the Empress of Austria took part in the ceremony. At a later
date there was also exciting work in Ismailia when it became the
basis of ‘our only general’s’ brilliant campaign. The Canal and lakes
were filled with transports and men-of-war, and to the town an army
of 20,000 men looked for supplies. It was from thence they
marched to fight the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, and to send poor Arabia
prisoner for life to Ceylon, where, perhaps, after all, he is better off
than he would have been had he stopped at home. His life would
have been sacrificed had he remained.
Little of life is to be seen anywhere, but a few men are engaged in
cutting away the sand, while camels bear it far away. They are ugly
beasts, and never seem happy. They are, however, docile, and kneel
down while the men fill the panniers with sand, when they rise up
and walk away; or we come to a ferry where they are waiting to
cross, and display the same patient, forbearing, half-starved look.
The Egyptian donkey seems to me a far livelier animal. Now and
then a dog displays itself on the bank, but he is rarely a favourable
specimen of his race. Small steamers and barges, occupied in
connection with the improvement of the canal, are also met, but the
crew take little note of the white man, who, however, after all, has
got such a hold on the land that it is questionable, whatever
statesmen say at Westminster, whether it can ever be removed. It
seems as if Egypt could never be let alone. True, it was a great
country once, but that was long ago.
Again, we leave the Timseh, or the Crocodile Lake, behind, and
make our way to the Bitter Lakes, through many miles of Canal. The
lakes, history tells us, are the remains of a dried-up arm of the sea,
where once flourished the ancient port of Arsinoe. Here we meet
the slight tides of the Red Sea—that awful sea, whose waters at
some seasons range to a temperature of a hundred. It was hot as
we entered Port Said, it is hotter as we leave the Canal at Suez—the
new port of which, with its modernized hotel, its rows of trees, and
its modern warehouses, looks pretty from the water. Old Suez, a
mile and a half from the new town, is visible long before we reach
the fort. It is almost a pity that the steamers do not stay here a day
or two. The old town is the most characteristic of old Egypt, and the
rail will run you up there in a few minutes. It was the centre of the
highway between Asia and Africa. All around is the desert, while
mountains famed in history for ages are to be seen from afar.
Egyptians tell me that Suez is preferable to Cairo as a health resort.
One gentleman whom I met with told me that he wintered there
every year. As we picked him up on my return, I was obliged to tell
him that he did not look so well as when he went ashore a few
months previously. In excuse he owned that he had suffered from a
severe attack of rheumatic fever. It may be that Suez had nothing
to do with that. Perhaps at Cairo they would have told me Suez was
not a good place to go to. The water, however, is good, as we took
a good many tons of it on board. It was well that we did so. At
Aden, our next stopping-place, we found there had been no rain for
nearly three years.
We stop a few hours at Suez, and early in the morning commence
steaming down the Gulf of Suez, ere we float proudly over the
waters of the Red Sea. At length it seems to me that we realize all
that the poets have sung and painters have drawn of the Bay of
Naples—unclouded skies and a sea of brilliant blue. All day long we
are in sight of a romantic coast crowned with towering mountains,
with diversified peaks that in the sun seem to glow with light and
heat. As we approach they are brown or white or red, and then,
behind, they seem dark and stern as they rise out of the sleeping
waters. On our left are the Arabian mountains—Mount Sinai among
them—more or less connected with the religion dear to all men of
Anglo-Saxon race and tongue; the religion that has made modern
history what it is—the religion which they tell us in the pulpit is yet
to reign supreme. At dark—and it soon gets very dark in these
regions, in spite of the grand stars which shine lustrously on us in a
way of which no untravelled Englishman can form any adequate idea
—we are on the Red Sea, having just passed the wreck of a steamer,
as if to remind us that even in these days of science there are
accidents arising from fogs and currents and hidden rocks and
shoals which it is hard for any human ingenuity to guard against.
Just now a good deal of interest attaches to the Red Sea. On our
right are Suakim and Massowah, though too far off to be visible.
Small as the Red Sea looks on the map, it is 1,200 miles long. Coral
reefs and islands are so numerous that navigation is difficult and
dangerous. The coast on either side seems deserted, and only now
and then a lighthouse is to be seen, or the black hull of some small
Arabian trader, with the well-known enormous sail from the yard-
arm. However, there are one or two ports of importance on either
side. The chief of all is Jeddah—with a population of 40,000—which
is the port of the Mecca pilgrims, and which beside is the chief
market for pearls and the black coffee and aromatic spices from
Araby the Blest. Not far off is Mocha, a name familiar to British ears,
though the place itself has fallen into decay.
So far as we have travelled the Red Sea has behaved uncommonly
well. On the last voyage the heat was so intense that three times
the ship had to be turned in order that the passengers might have a
breath of cool air. As it is, no one finds the heat overpowering, and
to me it yields the same amount of enjoyment one feels in a Turkish
bath after the sweating process has got into full swing. We have
little walking now except in the early morning, or after dark, and no
gymnastic exercise of any kind. The little ones have already lost
their rosy cheeks. Sunday is well observed; one way or another
there is a good deal of preaching going on. The bishop takes in
hand the first-class passengers, while in the evening volunteer
preachers look after the souls of the second class. There was a
special service also in the steerage in the afternoon, when the
singing was at any rate very hearty.
Of course we gaze with no little pleasure at the island of Perim,
standing in the deep water a few miles before we reach Aden. The
French would have had it, the story goes, had not the Governor of
Aden, who had his suspicions aroused as the French commander,
who was sent to plant there the French flag, sat drinking champagne
at his hospitable board, sent two notes, one to the harbour-master
ordering him to delay the coaling, and another to the commander of
a gunboat to sail at once with some artillerymen for Perim. Such is
the story as told by Sir Charles Dilke and other clever men; but the
real fact is that it had been long before taken possession of by the
old East India Company. At any rate, it is of no use to our French
neighbours, now that they have lost Egypt, and that the control of
the Canal has passed into English hands. Now the French have no
Eastern Question. How we must all envy them!
In a little while we are out of the Red Sea, which at this time of year
is really agreeable. All day long we have had a strong head wind,
which has rendered the sultry atmosphere quite cool and genial.
Provided an invalid is a good sailor, I should say, as far as we have
gone, it would be impossible for him to have a more agreeable trip,
or one more likely to return him to his native land of fog and frost
and rain a better man. Everyone tells me that I am looking
wonderfully better for my voyage. I am glad to hear it, as what is
sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and I write in the hope
that those who can afford it will follow in my steps. I have offered
myself as an experiment for the sake of my asthmatic and elderly
friends. So far as I have gone the experiment has succeeded
beyond my most sanguine expectations.
We made rather a long stay at Aden, where most of the party went
ashore; I did not, for of two evils a wise man chooses the least, and
it seemed to me a greater evil to be rowed ashore and landed on a
sunburnt rock where no water is than to fight with the coal-dust on
board and to listen to the perpetual chattering of the natives. We
have to be thankful that we are safe out of the Red Sea, which is
certainly, with its sunken coral reefs and ragged rocks rising straight
out of the water, as difficult a piece of navigation as any of which I
ever heard. A captain had need be careful. The sights of Aden are
few—a low building or two on the rocks, a native town a few miles
off (not worth seeing), and water-tanks more useful than
picturesque. Before we had anchored the Somali boys rowed round
us in their little cockleshell boats, ready to dive for any coin thrown
into the water. Then came the barges, black with coal, with long,
dark, lightly-dressed natives, to convey the desirable mineral on
board. Their woolly heads seem impervious to the sun’s rays, and if
they have dark skins, it but enhances the effect of their glistening
teeth. The costume I like best is that of the native policeman, which
consists of what looks to me like a nightgown, a turban, and a black
necklace. A couple of gentlemen come on board: they wear blue
jackets and rich-coloured silk skirts. Their hair is done up in a knot
behind, and is kept in good order in front by a tortoise-shell comb.
A few salesmen, with ostrich-feathers or wicker baskets, come to do
a little business, but overboard the battle rages all day long, as the
boys clamour for coins and imploringly stretch their skinny arms to
the upper deck. A coin is tossed into the water: in a second they
turn heels over head and disappear, in another second they have
found it and are ready for another. The boats which take the
passengers on shore are large, and manned by four or five men
dressed in blue cotton. The charge is a shilling each way. The
landing is easy enough, but in this hot climate I question whether a
visit repays the trouble. Most of the passengers, however, seem to
be of a contrary opinion; nor is that to be wondered at when I state
that many of them are ladies—or in other words, true daughters of
Eve. They drive out to the tanks, and come back with headache and
ears aching as well. In the meanwhile the row on board is
incessant, as the wild Arabs of the sea scream for coins and perform
all sorts of wonderful tricks in the way of diving. From the deck the
scene is interesting and animated. Aden, with its brown rocks, is on
our right: and ahead and on the other side of the bay runs the
yellow sand, terminating—as everything does, apparently, on this
rugged coast—in a peak of rocks. It is only the rock that belongs to
us, and what we see are the offices of the company and the
residence of the officials. The town is a terrible place to live in. On
your way to the old town you meet endless strings of camels with
the produce of the country, as in Aden itself not a blade of grass
grows. The harbour is alive with ships, and steam-tugs towing the
barges laden with coal, and native boats. Over the water seagulls
and a bigger bird, apparently a kind of hawk, fly ceaselessly in
search of their prey, and beneath sharks abound, as a white man
would soon find to his cost were he to attempt a swim. Apparently
the shark prefers the white man to the black, and there I and the
shark agree. Away from Aden, which looks charming in the warm
light of the setting sun, we pass out to the Indian Ocean, and the
transition is a relief, as we leave behind the perpetual jabber of the
natives of that fortunate district—I write fortunate advisedly, for the
English spend a mint of money there, and the natives, to their credit
be it written, know how to charge. In one particular case which
came under my knowledge £2 was asked for an article for which
ultimately the seller was content with 2s. We were to have had an
addition to our live cargo in the shape of a smart little lad, whom an
Australian had engaged to accompany him. The father was willing,
but the brother, a fine-looking darkey, objected, and the boy was
taken off again, apparently much against his will. I am told that
many of these lads are taken away—they are apprenticed to the
white man for a term of three years, the white employer agreeing to
pay £12 a year in the shape of wages. As boys, they seem as active
as monkeys. Whilst I was watching, one of them had his boat filled
with water. In a moment he was out, and, rocking the boat till it
was free from water, he paddled away with his one oar as if an upset
in the water was an everyday occurrence; and the men seemed as
agile as the boys—tall and muscular, with long arms and legs, and
without an ounce of spare flesh. I fear by the side of them our
Thames watermen would have but a poor chance.
Our captain tells me he can take a holiday now for the next few
days. Out on the broad expanse of the Indian Ocean we are away
from sunken rocks and coral reefs. According to Mr. Froude, when
he made his way to Australia, he seems to have got through a good
deal of Greek and Latin. In this delicious climate study of any kind
seems quite out of place; but the sea air makes one hungry and
indolent. We live well, and we have a library, which yields me a
novel a day—of course I skip the descriptive parts and the
sentimental—and as we rush over the blue sea, a cooling breeze
meets us, and it is enough to live. I feel as if I were Ulysses and
Christopher Columbus and Captain Cook rolled into one. We see no
land, no ships, no birds in the heavens above, no fish in the water
beneath. Night comes with its clear stars and its dark waves, and
our pace is still the same. It is very wonderful, and none the less so
that it is a wonder of everyday occurrence. Over the ship, in all
parts, we have a perfect blaze of light—nine miles of electric wire!
and outside all is darkness and mystery—a darkness and a mystery
man has learned to master. Science has done that much for him.
Will science unveil the darkness and mystery of being in a similar
manner? I fear not. Happily there is a Judge

Who ends the strife

Where wit and reason fail.
 CHAPTER III.
COLOMBO TO ALBANY.

Prosperity of Colombo—Native Extortioners—Buddhist Temple—

Life in the Streets—On the Indian Ocean—Stormy Seas guard
Australia—English Coolness—Western Australia.
A scene of Oriental loveliness opens on my dazzled eyes this
morning. On my right is a fine breakwater, with a lighthouse at the
end, which altogether cost £650,000, and the building of which
occupied ten years. In front of me is the port of Colombo, filled with
shipping from every quarter of the world. On my left is a long row
of cocoa-palms, looking refreshing and green after the weary waste
of waters we have travelled over. As I write the catamarans of
Ceylon begin to crowd around. They are long, narrow boats—a
stout Englishman would find it hard to sit in one of them—rowed by
dusky sailors, with long oars, many of which seem to terminate in a
sort of spade. The men are naked, with the exception of a cloth
round the loins, and are apparently strong and sinewy. A few feet
off is the outrigger, so formed that the boat never upsets. They may
be useful, these boats, but have an awkward appearance to an
English eye. They bring on board the men who have come to fetch
the washing for the passengers, which will all be finished and on
board before we leave. Then come the tailors, who will measure
you for a suit of white, which will also be finished ere we depart.
Then come the barges with the coal, and I get into a tug and go on
shore. We all do it, for the Orizaba is unbearable while the coal is
being put on board.
It is strange to remember that at one time Colombo was so far off,
that the news of her Majesty’s accession to the crown, which
occurred on June 20, 1833, did not reach Colombo till some
immense time after. Ceylon was between ninety and a hundred days
from England, now it is only eighteen. Long after Lieutenant
Waghorn had opened up the overland route, her Majesty’s
Government with characteristic stupidity still continued to send the
mails by the Cape of Good Hope. It was left to the opening of the
Suez Canal to render Ceylon easy of access, and to render it possible
for English men and women to live there with comfort and luxury, in
my humble opinion, far superior to anything we have at home, and
Ceylon is redolent of prosperity, whether we regard its population, its
revenue, or its trade. Directly the traveller lands at Colombo he feels
as if in an enchanted isle.
As soon as you land in Colombo you are in India, and in, perhaps, its
most attractive part. There are some 130,000 people in the city, all
mild and gentle, and well-behaved. At once you are attracted by the
grand Oriental Hotel, which faces the port; you pass on a few steps,
and come to lofty shops, filled with all the dazzling products of the
East, with gardens in the rear, and it is hard to avoid being taken in,
for the swarthy shopkeepers are clamorous, and, in the matter of
cheating, quite the equal of the Heathen Chinee. A friend of mine
purchases a white sapphire, as it is called, for eighteenpence, for
which the owner asked four pounds, and I much fear my friend has
been victimized after all. An unfortunate gentleman shows me a
gold ring for which more than three pounds was paid, and which
turns out not to be worth a halfpenny. But it is too hot to walk and I
hire a carriage, and, with a companion, take a ride of a couple of
hours for the small charge of three shillings. We start for the
Buddhist temple, a whitewashed building about a couple of miles
off. Externally there is little to see. It stands in a green court,
surrounded by white walls, and the schoolmaster, after we have
dropped a shilling into the box, and given him a trifle for himself,
takes us round. The place consists of three courts, but the light is
bad, and the schoolmaster’s English very defective, and I came back
little wiser than when I entered. The things that principally
impressed me were a recumbent gigantic image of Buddha, a court
in which there were seventy-five painted images of Buddha, and a
smaller one in alabaster, and a long wall covered with
representations of Buddhist legends which the schoolmaster, alas!
did not condescend to explain. The Buddhist temple is small, and
the only sign of its being used are the flowers scattered before the
images, the offerings of his followers. The Christians, at any rate,
make a good show as far as buildings are concerned, the Church of
England heading the list with Christ Church Cathedral and nine other
churches. The Presbyterians have two, the Wesleyans six, the
Baptists one, the handsomest place of worship in the town, to say
nothing of the Salvation Army, which has also a station here. Some
people argue that Buddhism is such an exalted form of worship that
we ought not to interfere with the faith of the people. That,
however, is not the feeling of the whites in Ceylon, who know
Buddhism best. To myself, with all my sympathy for Buddhism, the
Buddhist temple seemed a very poor affair. I should have said there
are also many Mohammedans, and their mosques are numerous.
The streets are an endless delight, as you pass ladies riding in little
hooded chairs on wheels, drawn by men; or swells, native or
English, in broughams with latticed sides, so as to admit the breeze;
and cars, rather rickety, drawn by native ponies and driven by native
drivers, whom you may trust to take you to all the objects of interest
to be seen, such as the hotels, the gardens, the museum, etc. Then
there are native waggons, thatched with dried leaves, and drawn by
little dun-coloured bulls with humps on their backs—active animals,
which trot along with a swiftness of which a Sussex farmer, who still
ploughs with oxen as his fathers before him, can have no idea.
Under the trees you see the natives sitting over their dirty rice,
which they still eat with unwashed hands. Where the natives live
the population is almost as dense as in the East-end of London; and
as to the pickaninnies, they are everywhere, with their little curly
heads, sparkling eyes, and half-naked bodies, their mothers, in
coloured dresses, leaving them pretty much to take care of
themselves. Boys and girls run after us all the way with flowers, or
bright beetles, or packets of cinnamon and other woods. All is
strange, and all is attractive—the gorgeous butterflies that flit in the
sun, the crowded streets, the native dwellings, with a screen of lath,
which apparently does duty for a door; the tempting bungalows,
standing in the midst of gardens with Oriental flowers, or under the
shade of palm-trees, of which we in England can only dream; the
grand promenades, where the residents walk of an evening to catch
the refreshing sea-breeze; and the handsome parks, where English
bands play English airs to the delighted crowds. The town is
prosperous, undoubtedly. There are fine English barracks, and
England’s martial sons are to be met with everywhere. The whole
island prospers under English rule. Ceylon’s staple products—tea,
coffee, and cinchona—employ hundreds of men, women, and
children of different classes, and now an attempt is being made to
introduce fish-curing. I could almost envy Arabi his place of
banishment. I felt inclined to say with the poet, if there be an
Elysium on earth, it is this; but then I was there in the cool time of
year, when life is enjoyable, and when even the white man has a
little of his native colour left. Yet even enchanting Colombo (I did
not realize Heber’s Ceylon’s spicy breezes, quite the reverse, but
perhaps that was my misfortune rather than my fault) has its
drawbacks. As I am standing opposite the hotel, a native
approaches with a small basket. He puts the basket on the ground
and begins to pipe. To my horror, as he does so, a hooded cobra,
lying perdu, with its black eyes and silver hood, erects itself on its
tail as if ready to dart on its prey. Now, as above all things I hate
snakes, and cobras most of all, I fled the spot and at once made for
the tug, leaving the native juggler, I doubt not, not a little
astonished at my want of taste.
Life on the ocean wave is really to be enjoyed on the Indian Ocean—
an immense water, pleasanter to look at and sail on than the
Atlantic, of which no one is sure, and which is variable as woman
herself. It is impossible to overrate the beauty of the azure waves
and skies which greet us every day. Nevertheless, we may have too
much of a good thing, and no one regrets that we are approaching
the end of our journey. At church on Sunday it seemed to me that
we are much given to the use of misleading language. It was
announced that the bishop would hold divine service, and perhaps
he did so; at any rate, the assembly was numerous, and in
appearance devout; but I missed the firemen who kept up the
steam, the men on the outlook, the steersman on the bridge, and
the inmates of the room set apart for the due study of charts. Were
they not engaged in a service equally divine?
How, one by one, vanish the illusions of youth! Yesterday I would
have sworn mangoes were delicious eating, for I have read so a
thousand times; but to-day I have discovered the much-talked-of
mango to be an impostor, in shape like a potato, with a great stone
inside, only to be thrown away. Then what raptures we hear about
the Southern Cross! I have seen it and it charms no longer, and the
beauty of it is that the Australians who most rejoice in it seem
utterly unable to tell you in what part of the heavens it shines. Then
take the tropics. What descriptions one reads of tropical heats:
heats fraught with deadly fever—heats so intense that an old man
may well shrink from the danger of encountering them! I have been
now nearly a week in the tropics, and they are really delightful. It is
true you are warm; it is true that when the ports are closed by night
the atmosphere in the cabin is apt to be unpleasant—but then that is
of rare occurrence—and the tropics, I hold, so far from deserving to
be run down, are favourably to be compared with London fogs and
cold. We have now crossed the line, and have sailed for days along
the Indian Ocean. Not a drop of rain has fallen on the deck, not a
touch of bronchitis is to be met with in anyone aboard, not a ripple
is to be seen on the great blue plain of the sea save that made by
the Orizaba as she ploughs her majestic way at the rate of 320 miles
a day. I should say, as far as my experience goes, any elderly man
or woman, who in London suffers from its uncertain climate, would
find the atmosphere of the Indian Ocean an immense change for the
better. If any such require a real sanatorium, I would
conscientiously recommend them a trip to Australia and back, if they
can stand the sea, and if they have the good luck to secure a berth
in such a ship as the Orizaba. By all means let them have a chair; I
did not take one, as I thought it would not be worth the trouble, and
even at Naples, when an ex-M.P. who went ashore there kindly
offered me his chair as a parting gift, I had not sense enough to
avail myself of the offer; but I have regretted it ever since. People
who have chairs put them in the best places, where the breeze is
most grateful, and thus enjoy a great advantage over those who can
do nothing of the kind. By all means also let the tourist have a
white dress; it is the only kind of dress to be tolerated on the Indian
Ocean, and, of course, he must have canvas shoes, which he will
find the more useful if they are soled with indiarubber rather than
leather. You are bound to take as much exercise as you can, and it
is not pleasant to fall on a slippery deck.
Let the intending traveller choose, if he can, his time. Between
November and March the ocean is delightful. If, however, it is
entered between May and September, when the thick weather and
fierce winds of the south-west monsoon prevail, it is very much the
reverse. It is a run of more than 3,000 miles from Colombo to Cape
Leeuwin, the south-west point of Australia, and this is the most
monotonous part of the journey, as there is nothing to be seen on
the sea. We only met two ships after leaving Colombo, and people
grow sleepy and dull, and the conversation, at no time brilliant,
rather flags. One can scarcely imagine what the horror of the
passage was in not very remote times. When the bishop first went,
he tells me, it was in a sailing vessel, and they were three months
on the voyage, revelling on salt pork and beef all the while. Our
modern bishops don’t care much for that sort of diet, nor, if I may
judge by the way we live, their flocks either, and this, by the way, is
the real difficulty and danger on ship-board. As a rule, people are ill
because they eat and drink too much. I have been a teetotaler all
the while and have tried to eat as little as I could, and hence I am at
any rate as well as anyone aboard. Again, let me caution the
traveller to avoid a ship that rolls. In this respect we are wonderfully
fortunate. The Orizaba never rolls, and in the worst weather we
dine in comfort, no crockery is smashed, and no steward spills a
drop of soup. In the dark watches of the night it is the rolling that
keeps passengers wide awake, and if ships can be built like ours it is
a shame to send people on such long voyages in any others. In the
tropics the clouds that come up as the fiery sun sinks into the blue
sea are awful, darker and more threatening than any I have seen
elsewhere. Then they disappear, and then again reappear, to fly
with the early dawn. It is a long time before one can be reconciled
to their grandeur. I am not surprised that people feel timid. There
is a good deal to make people nervous at sea. A lady passenger
tells me that when she goes to bed in rough weather, every night
she expects to go to the bottom. I gave her what comfort I could;
but then, as Festus grandly tells us, we live by heart-throbs not by
years, and so the poor woman is to be pitied after all.
Not in summer calm, not when the gentleness of heaven is on the
sea, do we approach the Australian coast. The garden of the
Hesperides was guarded by dragons; and approach the Australian
continent, for such it really is, which way you will, you find her
defended by winds that are ever howling and seas that never are at
rest. They did their best to frighten us as we made for the point
where first we greet the granite rocks of the Land of the Golden
Fleece; of course, there is no danger, and everyone pretends to
enjoy it. As to myself, I frankly own—in spite of Byron and dear old
Captain Basil Hall, whose pictures of sea-life, when I was in jackets,
made everyone long to be a sailor—that I prefer calm to storm, and
that never do I love the ocean so much as when it has ceased to
roar. There are people who feel otherwise, just as there are people
who enjoy the bagpipes, but they are the exception rather than the
rule. It may be that the danger is little, but the motion of any ship
on a stormy sea is unpleasant. It is to be questioned, however,
whether there is any other sea-voyage so long, and at the same time
attended with so little inconvenience, as this Australian trip, and I
can quite understand how ready the Australians are to run ‘home,’ as
they call it. They love Old England to the very bottom of their
hearts. Some of them are quite ready to return and leave their
bones amongst us. But we drive them away. One of my
companions, for instance, has been spending a few weeks in
London. He is a lawyer, and has made a lot of money, gotten chiefly
at Ballarat in the good old times, when, instead of the ordinary six-
and-eight, he always pocketed a fiver. It was his intention to have
bought an estate and settled in England; but then it occurred to him
that if he did no one would ever come to see him—at any rate, such
was the universal testimony of those of his friends who had settled
down in the old country, one of them a gentleman who had done the
State some service and who had been presented at Court; and so
my friend returns to Australia—swearing he will never go to London
again—where he seems to have spent his money like a Nabob.
Another complaint which I hear in many quarters is that Englishmen
are ungrateful. One gentleman tells me how he had exerted himself
on behalf of a young lad who had come out to Melbourne friendless,
did all he could for him, treated him, in fact, as his own son, even
had a gushing letter of thanks and gratitude from the mother, and
yet when he called upon her in London she did not take the slightest
notice of him; and in another case, where he introduced himself to
the father of two young men to whom he had been the means of
rendering much assistance, and to whom he had extended the
utmost hospitality, all he received was a formal invitation to call
when that way, and that only after he had met the grateful parent
twice in the streets of the county town near which he lived.
Colonials who have been hospitable to English visitors naturally
expect a return of hospitality when they find themselves strangers in
a strange land; and Englishmen should remember that it is at all
times a duty to perpetuate the traditions of old English hospitality,
and to take in the stranger in the Scriptural rather than in the
modern way.
At length I have seen an albatross, and that may be taken as an
indication that we are getting near our journey’s end. It is a large
bird, as big almost as a turkey, with white body and dark wings, but
not often to be seen at this season of the year. For awhile we
skirted the Australian coast, and dropped some thirty passengers for
Western Australia at Albany, its chief port. They were sent ashore in
a tug in rather a primitive fashion, and we had plenty of time to
admire the magnificent harbour surrounded by granite rocks,
enclosing a wide expanse of water, which we enter between two
rocks, on one of which is a lighthouse. Of human habitations we
saw nothing save one or two on the brow of a hill, at the bottom of
which has been built a long railway pier, which railway, as it is not
complete, is only used once a week, when the steamers arrive, for
the purpose of conveying mails and passengers to Perth. ‘I suppose
the first port you touched at was Perth?’ said an English M.P. and
distinguished educationalist to me. Alas! it would have been hard
work to have taken the Orizaba to Perth. Perth is the capital of a
country eight times as large as the United Kingdom, which is at
present a Crown colony, but which is to be made directly the home
of a self-governing community. We dropped at Albany a young man
who has been sheep-farming there for fifteen years, and is quite
satisfied with the result. You could hardly credit how many
thousand acres he has hired of the Government at a rental of 10s. a
thousand acres. He has no white neighbours, and his labourers are
chiefly native blacks, with whom, he tells me, he gets on very well.
The country, he says, is well fitted for agricultural purposes, and
there is plenty of good land to be bought at 10s. an acre. Hitherto
the difficulty has been how to dispose of the produce, but that will
shortly cease, as the district is now being opened up by railways,
and from all that I can hear it is just the country for the British
farmer who feels inclined to clear off before he has lost his last
farthing in the vain attempt to compete with the foreign producer.
In Western Australia, with a little capital, he may certainly do well.
Everyone says Western Australia is the country of the future. As to
Albany itself, it is growing rapidly, and has a population now of about
2,000. It seems to me prettily situated, and already people who
have made a little money have fixed upon it as their residence.
There are Church of England, Wesleyan, and Presbyterian churches
there, and it boasts a paper—published weekly for threepence, and
dear at the money—which found a large sale on board, for the sake
mainly of its meagre telegraphic intelligence relating to English and
European affairs. After the dreary monotony of the sea it was
pleasant to look on the hills which hid Albany and its surrounding
district from the vulgar gaze. On one hill there was a long trail of
smoke, which indicated that somewhere there was a large bush fire;
and climbing up the sides of all was a scanty undergrowth, which if
good for neither man nor beast, had an appearance of verdure,
which, to the eye, seemed a living green, now and then varied by
stretches of yellow or white sand; and behind, though not visible to
us from the deck of the steamer, stretched a forest, full of a black
wood which makes the finest railway-sleepers in the world. On the
whole, it may be said Western Australia is bound to go ahead.
 CHAPTER IV.
IN THE COLONY OF VICTORIA.

Melbourne Gleanings—Dr. Bevan—Night at a Bungalow—Cole’s

Book-shop—A Day at Sorrento—White Cruelty to the Aborigines—
Coffee Palaces—Dr. Strong—The Presbyterian Church in Collins
Street—The Late Peter Lalor—Ballarat—Romance of Gold Mining
—Sydney and Melbourne compared—Australian Rogues—
Suburban Melbourne—Victorian M.P.’s—Victorian Politics.
The stranger who makes his first trip to Australia is not a little
astonished by the extreme cold which greets him as he nears his
destination. You hear so much of Australian heat that you are not a
little astonished to find the nearer you get to your journey’s end the
colder it becomes. In the tropics we had all given up warm clothing,
but as we reached Western Australia great-coats by day and
blankets by night came into fashion. People were wrapped up as if
we were on the coast of England rather than of Australia, and as to
sleeping with the ports open, that was quite out of the question.
This is an admirable provision of Nature. It gives us the advantage
of having the body braced up before it encounters the formidable
heat which, according to all accounts, awaits us on shore. Another
thing that strikes a stranger, as he studies the papers from all parts
of the country, is the extraordinary difference in the weather as
recorded in different localities. For instance, I find at Sydney the
weather is described as delightfully cool, while at Adelaide on the
same day it is recorded as the hottest of the season. In one district
I read how the rain has come down in a perfect deluge, whilst in
another men and vegetables are dying from the want of water. At a
town in Queensland, the heat is so intense that many are dying daily
of sunstrokes, and the insurance agents have been telegraphed to
not to effect any more insurances, whilst in another locality I read of
a heavy fall of snow. The fact is, it is impossible to realize the size
of the Australian continent, twenty-six times larger than Great Britain
and Ireland, or the various kinds of weather to be met with, till you
are on the continent itself.
A pleasant trip of a day and a half from Adelaide, most of which time
was passed in sight of land, enabled us to reach Melbourne—
marvellous Melbourne, as it has been called—in time to go on board
the Lusitania and bid good-bye to Miss von Finkelstein, who is, she
tells me, wonderfully delighted with her Australian trip, and intends
returning again. She goes now as far as Port Said, and thence she
makes her way to Jerusalem. I then get into the train, and after a
run of half an hour along a flat district, partly waste and partly built
over with little wooden villas—prettily painted, each with its tiny
garden, which seemed to me to have a wonderful knack of getting
burnt down every night—find myself landed in the noble
thoroughfare, which seems to me to run from one end of the city to
the other, known as Collins Street; and almost the first person I
meet—at any rate, the first one I recognise—is Dr. Hannay, who is
leaving by the next mail steamer, and who is looking very well,
though he tells me he has been much tried by the great heat of the
last fortnight. The dust and the sun are trying, and I get back to the
ship for dinner.
When next I go on shore it is Sunday morning, and a grateful breeze
awaits me as I make my way along picturesque and stately Collins
Street—a street which would be an ornament to London itself. The
public-houses are closed, the tramcars have ceased running, and the
busy crowds that block up the footways on the week-day are away.
Instead of them there are the church-goers—well-dressed, sedate,
orderly—just as we may see anywhere in England on the Sabbath.
And if I miss the sound of the church-going bell, I know not that
that is an unmitigated loss—indeed, as far as London is concerned in
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