Australian Writers
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Title: Australian Writers
Author: Desmond Byrne
Release date: April 24, 2009 [eBook #28599]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AUSTRALIAN WRITERS ***
E-text prepared by David Wilson and the Project Gutenberg Online
Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
AUSTRALIAN WRITERS
by
DESMOND BYRNE
London
Richard Bentley and Son
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
1896
[All rights reserved]
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
MARCUS CLARKE 29
HENRY KINGSLEY 90
ADA CAMBRIDGE 131
ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 159
ROLF BOLDREWOOD 189
MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED 229
TASMA 260
INTRODUCTION.
Any survey of the work done by Australian authors suggests a question
as to what length of time ought to be allowed for the development of
distinctive national characteristics in the literature of a young
country self-governing to the extent of being a republic in all but
name, isolated in position, highly civilised, enjoying all the modern
luxuries available to the English-speaking race in older lands, and with
a population fully two-thirds native. The common saying that a country
cannot be expected to produce literature during the earlier state of its
growth is too vague a generalisation. There are circumstances by which
its application may be modified. It certainly does not apply with equal
force to a country whose early difficulties included race conflicts,
war with an external power and political labours of great magnitude, and
to another whose commercial and social development, carried on under
more modern conditions by a people almost entirely homogeneous, has been
facile, unbroken and extraordinarily rapid.
Nor can paucity of literary product, where it exists, be satisfactorily
explained by the unrest that continues in a new land long after it has
attained material prosperity and the higher refinements of life. The
Americans are a type of an extremely restless people. They have been so
throughout the greater part of their history, and the characteristic is
now more marked than ever. It is a fixed condition of their national
being, an expression of the cumulative ambition that is the source of
their varied progress. Yet from time to time men have arisen among them
who not only have given intimate views of a new civilisation, but have
added something to the permanent stock of what Matthew Arnold used to
call 'the best that is known and thought in the world.' Even when the
independent nationhood of the United States was still but an aspiration,
Benjamin Franklin had familiarised Europe with much that has since been
recognised as inherent in the modes of thought and manners of the
Western race.
The bulk of the literature of America is, of course, still small in
proportion to the culture and intellectual energy of the country; but it
has been and is sufficient to interpret in a more or less distinctive
way all the leading phases in the evolution of the national thought and
sentiment. The subtle influence of the deeply-grounded religious feeling
which, implanted by the Puritan pioneers, has survived generations of
intense absorption in material progress and the distractions that modern
life offers to the possessors of newly-acquired wealth; the pride of the
people in their independence, and their natural tendency to overrate it
in comparison; with the conditions of other countries; the contrasts
furnished by a society fond of reproducing European habits, yet
retaining a simplicity and freshness of its own: these and other
features in the progress of the United States for over a century may be
found expressed in its literature from the native standpoint, and not
merely from that of the intelligent outside observer.
An American writer in discussing, a few years ago, the quality of the
literature produced before the War of Secession, when wealth and leisure
were abundant among the planters and in the principal New England towns,
observed that 'there would seem to be something in the relation of a
colony to the mother-country which dooms the thought and art of the
former to a hopeless provincialism.' If a comment so largely fanciful
could be made respecting Australasia and Canada, it would practically
mean--at all events from the American point of view--that as long as
they remain dependencies of Great Britain, and therefore lack the
stimulus of an active patriotism, so long will much of whatever is
individual in their social development and national aspirations be
without expression. In the case of the Australasian colonies it would
further mean (apart from any consideration of their future independence)
that a people far removed from other communities of the same race and
already giving promise of being the greatest power south of the equator,
must continue for an indefinite period to be wholly sustained and swayed
in matters of thought and art by a country over twelve thousand miles
distant that happens for the present to offer the most convenient
markets in which to buy and sell. The point need hardly be discussed,
but it suggests some facts in the intellectual life of Australia that it
will be of interest to name. These may not be found to explain why there
is yet no sign of the coming of an Antipodean Franklin or Irving, or
Hawthorne or Emerson; but they will help to show why the literature of
the country grows so unevenly, why it is chiefly of the objective order
and leaves large tracts of the life of the people untouched.
Perhaps the paradox that a people may read a great deal and yet not be
interested in literature could hardly be applied to the Australians,
but it is a fact that they make no special effort to encourage the
growth of a literature of their own. By no means unconscious of their
achievements in other directions--in political innovations, in sport and
athletics--they appear not to take any pride in or see the advantage of
promoting creative intellectual work. Will this be considered natural
and reasonable, as already they are supplied with books and plays and
pictures from England and Europe, or as a proof of thoughtlessness and
neglect? 'Why,' asked a critic in the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1819,
'should the Americans write books when a six weeks' passage brings them,
in their own tongue, our sense, science, and genius in bales and
hogsheads?' Are the Australians of these days asking themselves a
similar question? It would seem so. In 1894 they imported books,
magazines and newspapers from the United Kingdom to the value of
£363,741: this, too, at a time when most of the colonies were understood
to be rigidly economising in consequence of a financial crisis. A decade
before the amount was not far short of a hundred thousand pounds
higher.
Foremost in his list of the salient intellectual tendencies of the
native population of the United States Mr. Bryce places 'a desire to be
abreast of the best thought and work of the world everywhere, and to
have every form of literature and art adequately represented and
excellent of its kind, so that America shall be felt to hold her own
among the nations.' And he further attributes to them 'an admiration for
literary or scientific eminence, an enthusiasm for anything that can be
called genius, with an over-readiness to discover it.'
Artistic talent in America has from an early period in the history of
the country enjoyed the stimulus of local respect and attention. Mr.
Henry James has testified to the 'extreme honour' in which writers and
artists have always been held there. Literature is now a subject of
special systematic study in all the important schools; literary
organisations are numerous, including no fewer than five thousand
circles for the study of Shakespeare; authorship has become something
like a craze in fashionable society; the intelligence of the criticism
in the weekly press is on the whole equal to that in English journals;
and several of the magazines are largely devoted to the more artistic
kinds of writing. If the results of these incentives to production seem
comparatively small, as they undoubtedly do, it must not be forgotten
that the profession of letters in America long suffered, and is still
suffering, from the absence of international copyright law. Before the
year 1891 the markets were filled with cheap reprints of British and
European works (often of an inferior class), and even now authors have
to encounter competition with a vast quantity of foreign matter of which
copyright, owing to the peculiar conditions of the law and of the
publishing trade, is often obtained at prices much below its real value.
It is not, however, the native literary product of America that is
noteworthy so much as the widespread and conscious taste for literature
among the people, and the means which they adopt to promote it. The
best friend of Australia could not credit it at present with any
markedly active desire 'to have every form of literature and art
adequately represented and excellent of its kind.' In this respect the
results of the high standard of education attained in the Government
schools and the subsidised Universities are disappointing. The
Universities of Sydney and Melbourne will soon be fifty years old, but
neither is yet represented with distinction in the higher forms of
literature and art. The Governments, at least, do their duty. Having
liberally provided for school education, they spend annually large sums
in making additions to picture-galleries, in maintaining libraries (of
which there are over eleven hundred), technological schools and museums,
and in other ways adding to the comfort and enlightenment of the people.
But large private contributions are rare, and the founding or endowment
of public institutions still rarer.
Of societies or clubs devoted specially to the interests of literature
there are very few--probably not half a dozen. Here and there among the
upper classes there are little coteries whose members read the English
and French reviews, and are well posted in all movements of interest in
the world of letters, but there is no actual organisation among them,
and they do not seek to extend their influence. Their ambition is
confined to providing for their personal improvement and pleasure. The
reading of the people, though extensive, is not serious nor in any way
specialised, unless a recent notably high average of borrowing in the
historical departments of a few of the free libraries be taken into
account. The leading book exporters in London say that throughout the
Antipodes the public demand is confined, as in England, mainly to the
'general' literature of the hour. 'Whatever has succeeded in London will
usually succeed in Australia' is the invariable remark of the exporter
and the first principle that guides his tentative selection in the case
of all newly-published works. The circulation of the best British weekly
and monthly reviews by some of the principal subscription libraries
helps the reader to choose for himself, but if he should wish to buy a
new book, however valuable, that has not become popular in the business
sense, he will probably have to send to London for it.
The wealthy people seem to select their reading-matter chiefly with a
view to entertainment. Not long ago the manager of one of the most
fashionable of the Melbourne circulating libraries said that about
ninety per cent. of the female and seventy-five per cent. of the male
frequenters of such libraries in Australia read only novels. But this
average is perhaps rather over-stated, being given at a time when there
was an exceptional demand for certain novels that had obtained notoriety
by an audacious treatment of sex questions and English society.
A glance at the fare which fourteen of the London publishers provide in
their colonial editions is of interest. Excellent value, of its kind, is
usually offered in these issues, but here again we find proclaimed an
excessive preference for light prose literature. Of 264 volumes in one
'colonial library,' 238 are of fiction. Sketches, memoirs, reminiscences
and a few essays make up most of the balance. The taste of the working
classes, so far as it can be ascertained from the records of the
principal free libraries, is, curious as it may seem, decidedly sounder
than that attributed to the customers of the subscription libraries. It
must be remembered, however, that the former are seldom tempted with new
fiction, and never with fiction of the spicy or questionable kind. Some
of the larger institutions are rigidly exclusive in regard to the light
kinds of literature.
Authorship in Australia loses an important incentive in the absence of
local magazines. All of the better kind have lacked sufficient public
support. Several of them, including the _Colonial Monthly_ (established
by Marcus Clarke), the _Melbourne Review_, the _Centennial Magazine_,
and the _Australasian Critic_ (the latter conducted by the professors of
the Melbourne University) promised so well that their want of support is
not easily explainable. It has been attributed to an unreasoning
prejudice, an assumption that being locally produced they must
necessarily be inferior; but this probably does the reading public less
than justice. Apparently from their contents, most of the magazines
failed because they were made too Australian in character, too unlike
the English periodicals to which readers had been so long accustomed.
There are many fine magazines in the United States, but their conductors
do not make the mistake of trying to do without British and European
contributions. They know the value of names as well as of matter.
Foreign writers supply about one-third of the contents of the monthlies.
When great interest suddenly attaches to some national question, their
enterprise, like that of the newspapers of the country, sometimes takes
the special form of securing cabled summaries of the opinions of
influential politicians in Great Britain and elsewhere for immediate
publication.
A contributory cause of the failure of Australian magazines is the fact
that the cost of their mechanical production has always been higher
than that of any of their imported competitors. This promises to be a
difficulty for some years to come. Book-publishing, as a separate
business, is also practically impossible, for like reasons. The
Australian reader attaches no special value to the possibilities of the
local magazine, partly because its place as a literary and art record is
considered to be fairly supplied by the weekly newspapers. Moreover, it
is said he demands cheapness as well as high quality in his periodicals,
and knows that both can be got in several English, American and European
magazines. If this be so, the same predilection will no doubt account
for the spectacle of leading London firms sending to the colonies tons
of their popular modern books in paper covers, and offering them at
about half the price charged in the United Kingdom, where they are
obtainable only in cloth-bound editions.
That no one has yet lived by the production of literature in Australia
is not a matter for surprise. No one, indeed, would seriously think of
attempting to do so. Gordon was a mounted policeman, a horse-breaker, a
steeplechase-rider--anything but a professional man of letters; Marcus
Clarke was a journalist and playwright, and wrote only two novels in
fourteen years; Rolf Boldrewood's books were written in spare hours
before and after his daily duties as a country magistrate; Henry
Kingsley returned to England before publishing anything; Kendall held a
Government clerkship which he exchanged for journalism; Mr. Brunton
Stephens is in the Queensland Civil Service; Mr. B. L. Farjeon's
colonial work was mainly done in connection with the New Zealand press;
Messrs. Marriott, Watson, E. W. Hornung, J. F. Hogan, Haddon Chambers
and Guy Boothby, among younger writers, have taken their talents to
London; and none of the half-dozen female novelists have been dependent
upon literature for a livelihood.
What, it may be asked, becomes of the best talent developed by the
Australian schools and Universities? It is employed, or tries to find
employment, in the practice of law, medicine, journalism and teaching.
From law to politics is but a step in the colonies, and the chances of
attaining Cabinet rank, rendered frequent by the prevailing aggressive
form of party government, are often attractive to men of ability and
ambition. The journalists are more or less drenched with politics all
the year round, and they, too, occasionally find it an easy matter to
vary their occupation by assisting in the active business of law-making.
The tension of their daily lives, severer than that of the majority of
press writers in Great Britain, leaves them little or no leisure for
literary work of the higher kind, and generally the prospect of being
compelled to send whatever they might write to the other end of the
world for the chance of publication discourages effort. It may safely be
said that there are young men on the editorial and reporting staffs of a
dozen of the principal journals who possess ability that would secure
them distinction in the wider fields of England or America. To their
skill and spirited rivalry is due the universally high quality of the
Antipodean press. Mr. David Christie Murray, writing after considerable
experience of the colonies, and as one who had been an English
journalist, said that on the whole he was 'compelled to think it by far
and away the best in the world.' The remark is without exaggeration so
far as it applies to the large weekly journals.
The extent of the favour shown by Australian readers to the works of
their own novelists is, as a rule, exactly proportioned to that which
their merits have previously won in England. Booksellers and their
London agents, who of course treat all literature from a purely
commercial standpoint, are at all events unanimous in discrediting the
existence in recent years of any prejudice against colonial fiction of
the better class. It is now very seldom sent out in two or three volume
form, they say, but neither are the most popular English novels, except
occasionally to subscription libraries. For representative Australian
work, then, there is a fair field but no favour. It is as though the
function and existence of the authors apart from the rank and file of
English letters were not recognised. There is an exception to this rule
in the poet Gordon, as a portion of his writings, the Bush _Ballads and
Galloping Rhymes_, irresistibly commemorate the national love of
horseflesh and outdoor life. Every Australian now knows that _For the
Term of his Natural Life_ is a great novel of its class; but as a
leading Victorian journalist (Mr. James Smith) once pointed out in an
article in the _Melbourne Review_, Clarke's real merit was for years
undervalued, because he was known to be 'only a colonial writer.'
Thousands of English, European and American readers had admired the
novel before they thought of inquiring who the writer was or whence he
came. It is true that the story attracted a good deal of interest in
Australia even during its first appearance as a serial, but from
elsewhere came its recognition as one of the novels of the century.
The authors whose lives and writings are briefly sketched in this volume
are all noted in some degree for accuracy and sincerity in their
representation of life in Australia. They have all written from abundant
knowledge--from love, also, perhaps it may be added--of this great wide
land with its brilliant skies, its opportunities and its wholesome
pleasures. That they should fail to cover their field--that they tell
too much of country life and adventure and too little of the throb and
energy of the cities--is in a large measure explained by the fact that
their books are of necessity primarily written for English readers.
Somehow it is assumed that people in the mother-country continue to be
interested only in the picturesque, the curious and the unusual in
Australian life. The idea is in part a survival from earlier years when
a host of military officers, Civil Servants, journalists and tourists
described in some form the more obvious peculiarities of the colonies:
their giant, evergreen forests, strange amorphous animals, aristocratic
gold-diggers, ex-convicts in carriages, and general state of
topsy-turveydom. There is quite an amazing variety of occasional records
of this class in forgotten books, magazines and pamphlets. In at least
a score of well-known novels there are charming country scenes, true in
every particular; but there is a distinct limit to the power of fiction
of this kind to interest remote readers, while much repetition of it
might well be misleading.
A writer in the _Australasian Critic_ once rightly observed, respecting
a batch of short stories of the conventionally Australian kind, that
English readers might 'fancy from them that big cities are unknown in
Australia; that the population consists of squatters, diggers,
stock-riders, shepherds and bushrangers; that the superior residences
are weatherboard homesteads with wide verandas, while the inferior ones
are huts and tents.' No foreign reader could understand from them that
'more than half the Australian population have never seen kangaroos or
emus outside a zoological garden, and that not one in a hundred, or even
a thousand, has seen a wild black fellow.' There is a well-known type of
Australian novel to which the same remarks might apply with almost
equal fitness.
The lack of interest on the part of the novelists in the cities is the
more noticeable because they contain one-third of the whole population
of the country, a proportion said not to have a parallel in any other
part of the world. This neglect is surely a mistake, founded on an
erroneous conception of the tastes of the English public, and resulting
partly from the absence of anything like a local literary influence upon
the writers. 'Have the stress and turmoil of a political career no
charm?' asks Mr. Edmund Gosse, in referring to the restricted scope of
the English novel, and in making a plea for 'a larger study of life.'
The same question might with very good reason be raised concerning the
political life of Australia, which has been almost entirely neglected
since Mrs. Campbell Praed used up the best of her early impressions and
settled in England. The majority of the writers of fiction who continue
to live in the country are women, and possibly not interested in
politics; but the chief reason why the romance is seldom written of the
Cabinet Minister who started life as a gold-digger or draper's
assistant, or of the democratic legislator whose first election was
announced to him through a hole in a steam-boiler that he was riveting,
is to be found in a belief that it would not be appreciated in the
far-off land whither all Australian books must go for the sanction of
their existence. Here again the British reader appears to be misjudged,
for has he not accepted from another direction, and enjoyed, _Democracy_
and _Through One Administration_? Mrs. Praed, lightly skimming the
surface of Antipodean political life in two of her stories, has shown it
to be not without humour, nor lacking in the elements of more serious
interest. But she cannot be said to have exhibited any particular belief
in the political novel, and none of the more practised among her
colonial contemporaries has ever given it a trial.
On the main question of a national literature it will perhaps be
concluded that Australia has yet scarcely any need to be concerned: that
not much must be expected from a civilisation which, though it has been
rapid, began little more than a century ago; and that the existence of
wealth, and the possibilities of leisure and culture which wealth
affords, cannot produce the same effect upon art in a new country as in
an old one. The whole matter no doubt is somewhat difficult of decision.
It has been none the less useful to indicate why so little of the work
already done is the work of native writers--why the existence of much of
the best of it may almost be considered accidental. And while a refusal
to take the trouble of independently judging the worth of a local
artistic product may or may not be an invariable characteristic of a new
country, it was also right to contradict on the best available authority
the assertion of a 'prejudice' against the work of Australian authors.
A portion of the talent that cannot be absorbed in the already
overcrowded ranks of law and medicine might find employment in building
a literature which should have something of national savour in it, if
migration to England were no longer a condition of success to those who
would make writing a profession, as migration to New York or Boston is
similarly found to be a necessity to the young Canadian man or woman of
letters. It need not be wished that the colonial Governments would do
more than they have done--certainly not that they would create a sort of
civil pension list, as a section of the Legislative Assembly of Victoria
contemplated doing ten years ago in discussing a proposed grant to the
family of Marcus Clarke. But the Universities might extend their
influence, and those who have leisure might combine to introduce some of
the methods which have helped to create a living public interest in
literature and art in European countries. In other words, there is
needed an increased sense of responsibility in the cultured class: those
people, among others, who yearly help to fill the luxurious ocean
steamships on their long journeys to the Old World, and who bring back
so singularly little practical enthusiasm for their own land in the
South.
Meanwhile it is encouraging to note the high promise of the work of some
of the younger writers. Mary Gaunt (Mrs. H. Lindsay Miller), the
daughter of a well-known Victorian judge, has, in _The Moving Finger_,
raised the short story to an artistic level hardly approached by any
other Australian writer. And Mrs. Alick Macleod, author of _An
Australian Girl_ and _The Silent Sea_, has given in the former novel--a
fine story, despite some irregularities of form--the most perfect
description of the peculiar natural features of the country ever
written. For the first time the Bush is interpreted as well as
described. In the attitude displayed in this story towards the
fashionable life of the towns there is habitual impatience and
occasional scorn. The sketches of Mrs. Anstey Hobbs' efforts to found a
salon, the flirtations of Mrs. Lee-Travers--who 'chose her admirers to
suit her style of dress'--Laurette Tareling's solemn respect for
Government House, and the generally satirical view of the 'incessant
mimicking of other mimicries,' are no doubt justified; they are often
decidedly entertaining. But it would of course be a mistake to accept
all this as more than a partial view of Melbourne society. The book does
not pretend to deal with it in other than an incidental manner. Mrs.
Macleod's studies of character and often clever dialogue suggest that
she might profitably adapt to the presentation of Australian life the
quiet intensity of Tourguéneff, or the delicately observant style of the
American critical realists, Henry James, W. D. Howells and Richard
Harding Davis. And here one wonders whether the Australian novelists who
find so little material in Sydney and Melbourne have seen what the new
writer, Henry B. Fuller, has done with the life of modern unromantic
Chicago?
According to Mr. Howells, America, through the medium of its own
particular class of novel, 'is getting represented with unexampled
fulness.' The writers 'excel in small pieces with three or four
figures,' and are able conveniently to dispense with sensationalism--a
point not yet reached by Antipodean novelists. 'Every now and then,' he
says, referring to the extreme of this type, 'I read a book with perfect
comfort and much exhilaration, whose scenes the average Englishman would
gasp in. Nothing happens; that is, nobody murders or debauches anybody
else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is not a ghost, or
a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster
of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the whole story;
"no promenade, no band of music, nossing!" as Mr. Du Maurier's Frenchman
said of the meet for a fox-hunt. Yet it is all alive with the keenest
interest for those who enjoy the study of individual traits and general
conditions as they make themselves known to American experience.' As the
Transatlantic social conditions, of which the realistic novel with only
three or four figures is understood to be the outcome, are being more or
less repeated in Australia, a similar literary medium will probably be
found best adapted to the portrayal of life there. At least it may be
claimed that there is no lack of material in the shape of individual
traits which have not yet been suitably described in any form.
MARCUS CLARKE.
In the peculiarity of his fitful talents, and in the character of his
best work in fiction--a pathetically slender life's product--Marcus
Clarke is still alone in Australian literature. Others have shown the
cheerful, hopeful, romantic aspects of the new land; he, not less
honestly, but with a more concentrated and individual view, has pictured
some of the monotony of its half-grown society, the gloom of its
scenery, and the painful realities of its early penal systems. Reputed
only as a novelist, he possessed besides imagination some of the higher
qualities of the critical historian. And had his life been prolonged, he
might almost have done for Australian city life what Thackeray did for
the London of seventy years ago. He could, at least, have written a
novel of manners that would have credited the people of Australia with
some individuality: such a novel as would mark the effects which
comparative isolation must produce in a people who are educated and
intelligent beyond the average of the British race, intensely
self-contained and ambitious, and of whom two-thirds are now
native-born,--a novel that would have corrected the too languidly
accepted judgments of omniscient elderly gentlemen, who, after a few
weeks or months spent among the smallest and most imitative section of
Antipodean society, gravely conclude that 'leaves that grow on one
branch of an oak are not more like leaves that grow upon another, than
the Australian swarm is like the hive it sprang from.'
A rhetorical half-truth of this kind, as applied to the entire people,
can best be answered in the manner of the modern realists. The field is
narrow in Australia, yet not too narrow for the writer who, foregoing
the taste for sensation, will be content to transcribe and interpret
impressions of the moving humanity around him to their minutest detail;
who will forget the pioneer squatter, the Oxford scholar disguised as a
'rouseabout,' and the digger and bushranger of a past generation; who
will sacrifice something of dramatic effect in the endeavour to produce
a faithful and finished picture of colonial middle-class society. As
qualifications for such work, Clarke had exceptional courage,
straightness of eye, and a decided taste for exposing shams, superadded
to a forcible and satirical style of expression.
Whether he had the tact and temperate spirit that must form the basis of
these qualities in the production of serious fiction is less certain, if
he may be judged by the tone of such minor pieces as _Civilization
without Delusion_, _Beaconsfield's Novels_, and _Democratic Snobbery_.
There is a certain violence in these which is more offensive than their
undoubted cleverness is admirable or their satire entertaining. They
show that the writer retained some of the impetuosity and prejudices
which were marked features of his youth.
Clarke was an anti-Semite, therefore in the Beaconsfield novels he saw
little beyond an expression of the author's personal exultation as the
successful representative of a maligned race. In the theological
controversy of _Civilization without Delusion_, an even less effective
and becoming performance, the young author revealed a deficiency which,
in any writer, can only be regarded as a misfortune and a cause for
tolerant regret. The spiritual side of his nature was an undeveloped,
almost a barren field. Neglected in boyhood and sapped by early habits
of dissipation, it had no strength to resist the agnostic conclusions
which were the product in later years of a coldly critical examination
of the general grounds of Christian belief.
In dealing with religion, his characteristic independence developed into
a stiff intellectual pride, and from that into a recklessness which
disregarded alike his public reputation and the feelings of others. But
these forays into the preserves of theology were happily rare. Such
questions obtained no permanent place in his thoughts: they were only
the passing expression of an ever-besetting mental restlessness. It is
indeed surprising that a writer with artistic instinct and a sense of
humour should ever have persuaded himself to enter the fruitless field
of religious contention at all.
There are a few facts in the early life of Marcus Clarke which are
sometimes so strongly, and even painfully, reflected in his brief career
that they form a necessary preface to any consideration of his literary
work. Soon after his birth at Kensington (London) in 1846 his mother
died, and thenceforward through all his youth he seems to have received
little advice or attention from relations. His father, a barrister and
literary man of retired and eccentric habits, exercised over him a
merely nominal authority, and so he had liberty to gratify a spirit of
inquiry and curiosity notably beyond his years. At his own home he
became the pet of his father's acquaintances, a set of fashionable
cynics.
In _Human Repetends_, a sketch of his published several years later,
there is a passage which substantially records his experiences at this
time: 'I was thrown, when still a boy, into the society of men thrice my
age, and was tolerated as a clever impertinent in all those wicked and
witty circles in which virtuous women are conspicuous by their
absence.... I was suffered at sixteen to ape the vices of sixty.... So
long as I was reported to be moving only in that set to which my father
chose to ally himself, he never cared to inquire how I spent the
extravagant allowance which his indifference, rather than his
generosity, permitted me to waste. You can guess the result of such a
training.'
Left alone in the world at the age of eighteen, upon the death of his
father, he emigrated to Australia. Failing to take any interest in a
bank-clerkship provided by an uncle for him at Melbourne, he was sent to
a sheep-station near Glenorchy, one hundred miles inland. Here again he
paid little attention to the occupation chosen for him. All the day and
half the night were dreamed away in literary thought. Just as he
wandered alone over fern-hill and creek-bed, plain and mountain range,
and absorbed impressions of a scenery at once repulsive and fascinating
to him, so he dipped into all kinds of literature without method or set
purpose. But he preferred fiction, and as the consignee of an endless
succession of French novels he became a marked man in the eyes of the
village postmaster.
Two years had thus been spent, when a Dr. Lewins, who was known as a
'materialistic philosopher,' visited the station and made the young
Englishman's acquaintance. A warm mutual regard resulted, and soon
Lewins succeeded in obtaining a small post for Clarke on the Melbourne
_Argus_. This was the beginning of the most brilliant journalistic
career established on the Australian press.
A less happy result of the same friendship was Clarke's conversion to
the arid and uninspiring doctrines of materialism, though perhaps it
could hardly be called a conversion in the case of one upon whom the
deeper principles of Christian faith had never obtained any real hold.
Colonial democracy seems to have been to Clarke at once a source of
inspiration and of scorn. Coming from among the English upper classes,
with the education and temperament of an aristocrat, he was yet readily
able to sympathise with the higher principles of the new society. Its
intelligence, virility and free intercourse broadened and interested
him, as it does most young Englishmen. But for that common product of
a new country, the pretentious plutocrat, he had only contempt.
It is the bitterness with which this feeling is expressed in his
journalistic writings that helps to raise a doubt as to his capacity for
work of the best class in fiction. Still, if it be true, as some of
those who were his friends say, that this occasional work was seldom
much studied, it becomes unreliable as an indicator of the writer's
character. The same hand that in the famous _Snob Papers_ so savagely,
and in at least one case so intemperately, satirised types of English
society, afterwards produced novels in which fidelity to the essential
facts of life is the most conspicuous quality. So, too, might it have
been in the case of the 'Peripatetic Philosopher,' whose weekly
criticisms of Melbourne men and manners in 1867-68 has correctly been
judged the best writing of its kind yet done in Australia. In these
articles, remarkable as the work of one who was only in his
twenty-second year, there is a closeness of observation and incisiveness
of style which promised much more for their author than the
circumstances of his life afterwards permitted him to realise.
The usual effects of an undirected youth and an undisciplined manhood
explain Marcus Clarke's failure to render to his adopted country the
service which, as a distinctly gifted writer of the realist school, he
seemed well fitted to perform. He was a Bohemian, who, while resisting
the worst vices of his class, shared its carelessness and improvidence
to a degree that left little energy for ambitious work.
His was not an idle nature by any means: it was only erratic, fond of
variety, impatient of drudgery. Thus, in the course of fourteen years'
literary work, his thoughts make excursions from town-life to
country-life, from social satire to story-telling, from art to
ethnology, from theology to opera-bouffe! Here are the titles of a few
of his compositions: _Lower Bohemia in Melbourne_ (a sketch), _Plot_ (a
sensational drama), _Review of Comte and Positive Philosophy_ (magazine
article), _The Humbug Papers_ (humorous and satirical), _The Future
Australian Race_ (an ethnological study), _Goody Two Shoes_ (a
pantomime), _Civilization without Delusion_ (a theological discussion
with the Bishop of Melbourne), _The Power of Love_ (an extravaganza),
_Doré and Modern Art_ (a review), _Cannabis Indica_ (a psychological
experiment). Almost the whole of Clarke's life may be said to have been
devoted to the supply of some temporary demand of the periodical press
or the stage. Even the two novels which represent his only sustained
work were written for serial issue in Melbourne magazines.
It does not appear in either case that he wrote with any special view
to establish a literary reputation; indeed, it would seem that the story
of convict life might not have been completed but for the strenuous
importunity of the firm of publishers with whom he had contracted to
write it.
Journalism, the early occupation of so many eminent men of letters, has
usually been abandoned as soon as the young writer has once shown
exceptional ability as a novelist. This rule was not followed by Clarke.
As the leader in his day of the journalistic class, who, as the late Mr.
Francis Adams has said with substantial truth, still 'stand almost
entirely for the conscious literary culture of the whole Antipodean
community,' he held a position which would have unfavourably affected
the literary tone and ambition of a still more energetic and original
writer.
He had no predecessors in the special work he elected to do; he had to
establish his own standard of achievement; and he was without the
constant stimulus which intercourse with literary society, such as that
of London, affords. The demands of the newspapers were then, as now,
more for purely ephemeral criticism or narrative than for matter worthy
to rank as permanent literature.
An alert, pithy style and a distinct gift of satirical humour such as
Clarke had, and developed by a wide range of reading, were just the
qualities which are always in request on the keen, aggressive daily
press of Australia. One can easily imagine the flattering demands made
upon the young author's powers by the men who were his personal friends
as well as employers.
Whenever he was deficient in taste of expression, or in urbanity of
criticism (as in his treatment of the Jews), he showed the effects
partly of impetuous haste, and partly of his remoteness from those
centres of literary opinion which always beneficially influence a young
writer, be he ever so original or naturally artistic. It has been
doubted whether Clarke was ever fully convinced of his own powers; but
however feasibly this may have applied to the first four or five years
of his literary career, there was no ground for it after the unanimously
favourable reception accorded to _For the Term of his Natural Life_ upon
its issue in book form in 1874.
In England and America, as well as in Australia, this one novel gave him
an immediate and distinct reputation. With it he might have speedily
established himself as one of the leading writers of the day, and,
turning from the depressing realism of penal cruelties which can have no
further parallel in British countries to something more within our
sympathies--to the realism of modern Australian life,--have supplied
what is still conspicuously lacking in Australian fiction. Yet, during
the remaining seven years of his life he produced no imaginative work
worthy his name and ability. The ever-ready market of the local
newspaper press absorbed his best efforts, and such intervals as there
were he devoted to an attempt to establish himself as a writer and
adapter for the stage.
In this way the years passed without yielding much beyond a livelihood.
Meantime, Melbourne was his microcosm: he made a systematic study of its
life from the purlieus of Little Bourke and Lonsdale streets to the
palace of his 'model legislator' on Eastern Hill. Like Balzac, one of
his favourite novelists, he made observation a severe and regular
business, but he lacked the energy or the patience to take full
advantage of its results. Balzac employed his accumulated materials in
bursts of creative energy which, if terrible in their intensity and
their drain upon his health, had at least method in them, and effected
their purpose. Poverty did not swerve him, nor prosperity sate him.
That part of genius which consists in natural depth and accuracy of
vision Clarke had in abundance, but he was weak in the lesser gifts of
patience and synthetic power, perhaps also in ambition. Moreover, an
unfortunate extravagance, which led from chronic debt to bankruptcy,
compelled him to continue the class of work which gave the surest and
most regular income.
Repeated requests by the Messrs. Bentley for more fiction were neglected
from year to year, and similar indifference was shown to a flattering
invitation to join the staff of the _Daily Telegraph_ in London, an
opportunity that would have led to the establishment of Clarke in those
literary circles outside of which no purely Australian writer, with the
exception of Rolf Boldrewood, has ever yet received adequate
recognition.
Among Clarke's uncompleted writings are a few brilliant chapters of a
novel which promised to be as permanent a record of his ability as the
well-known convict story, though of a different kind. But the author had
the unlucky faculty of attending to anything rather than the work which
offered him certain fame and fortune, as well as the most natural
employment of his powers. At the time of his death he was only in his
thirty-fifth year. Probably with advancing life he would have become
more settled in his tastes and habits, realising that the work at which
he was happiest in every sense was the writing of novels, and that
alone.
The satire and cynicism so noticeable in Clarke's writings, especially
in his critical sketches and essays, are liable to give an inaccurate
conception of his temperament. They obscure, as such characteristics
nearly always do in literature, the gentler aspects of the writer's
nature. His satire is, perhaps, too uncompromising. It often seems to
reflect a personal bitterness, to take too little cognisance of the
springs of human weakness. Undoubtedly brilliant in force and keenness,
it yet too seldom produces the kind of hearty laugh with which Thackeray
and Swift, for example, relieve their fiercest scorn. His personal
experience of life had been discouraging. He had sounded its depths and
sipped its pleasures; its rude facts found him deficient in self-control
and fortitude. He had refused to learn the common logic of existence.
There is an element of tragedy in the rapid change which the unhappy
circumstances of his private life wrought in his temperament. Addressing
the disciples of Mrs. Grundy in an early essay defending the
Bohemianism of his youth, he tells them that they are ignorant how
easily good spirits, good digestion, and jolly companions enable a man
to triumph over all the ills that flesh is heir to. 'You cannot know,'
he adds, 'what a fund of humour there is in common life, and how
ridiculous one's shifts and strugglings appear when viewed through
Bohemian glass.... Life seems to you but as a "twice told tale, vexing
the dull ear of a drowsy man" seems but as a vale of tears, a place of
mourning, weeping, and wailing.... I wish ye had lived for a while in
"Austin Friars"; it would have enlarged your hearts, believe me.'
This was the cheerful philosophy of Clarke as a young bachelor, after he
had spent his slender patrimony, disappointed the successive efforts of
friends to make a business man of him, and was about to begin the
earning of a living by his pen. A dozen years later we see him with
developed talents and a valuable name, but broken in fortune and spirit,
and gloomily anticipating death months before it came. The Jew usurers,
whose race he despised, had long been his real masters, and, with a
nature sensitive in the extreme, he writhed in their bondage.
Improvidence had been not merely an unhappy incident, as it is in the
lives of so many young men of artistic tastes; it had overweighted him
more or less for years, and 'the thoughtless writer of thoughtful
literature,' as the author of his biographical memoir has called him,
sank beneath it while yet at the beginning of a career full of the
brightest promise. The sort of companionship that pleased his careless
youth had latterly proved unsatisfying, and to some extent distasteful
to him. Its effects upon his character were so unfavourable that some
who had been his companions in journalism felt it necessary, after his
death, to credit him with a greater capacity for kindly forbearance
towards humanity than is apparent in the bulk of his writings.
'My friend,' says one writer, 'was one of those many geniuses who appear
to be born to prove the vast amount of contradictory elements which can
exist in the same individual. In his case these contradictions were so
apparent--and, if I may use the term, so contradictory--that, unless one
knew him, it was impossible to believe what his nature was. On the one
hand, he was recklessly generous, impulsively partisan, morbidly
sensitive, and highly chivalrous; on the other, forgetful of
obligations, defiantly antagonistic, unnecessarily caustic, and
affectedly cynical.... His life was one of impulse, and the direction of
the impulse depended solely on surrounding circumstances.... He has
passed from us at an early age, leaving behind him some enemies made,
perhaps, by his own waywardness; but he has left many friends,
too,--friends who loved him for the good that was in him.'
In another sketch of the author, his character is thus summed up:
'Caustic he was sometimes, and cynical always; but beneath there beat a
heart of gold--a heart tender and pitiful as a woman's.' This estimate
is amply justified by the power of pathos and the often tender analysis
of human feeling in _For the Term of his Natural Life_, however absent
the same qualities may seem in many of the shorter stories.
An interesting picture of Clarke's personality is given by a writer in
the Sydney _Bulletin_: 'His wit was keen and polished, his humour
delicate and refined, and his powers of description masterly.... His
face was a remarkable one--remarkable for its singular beauty. Like
Coleridge, the poet, he was "a noticeable man with large grey eyes," and
one had but to look into them to perceive at once the light of
genius.... He was one of the best talkers I have ever met. Like Charles
Lamb, he had a stutter which seemed to emphasise and add point to his
witticisms. As in his writings, he had the knack of saying brilliant
things, and scattering _bons mots_ with apparent ease, so that in
listening to him one felt the pleasure that is derived from such books
as Horace Walpole's correspondence and those of the French
memoir-writers.... He knew not how to care for money, yet he had none
of those vices which ordinarily reduce men of genius to destitution, and
are cloaked beneath the hackneyed phrase, "He had no enemy but
himself."'
In all his journalistic criticism, Marcus Clarke scarcely more than
pointed to the material which the life of such cities as Melbourne and
Sydney offer a novelist capable of work like that of Mr. W. D. Howells,
or the series of tales of urban society in America by Mr. Marion
Crawford. There is now an opportunity, and, one might almost say, a
need, for fiction which shall also, in effect, be salutary criticism.
The Antipodes have lately illustrated the fact that a single decade will
sometimes witness a notable change in the conditions of an entire people
in a new and rapidly-developing country.
Thus, with the struggle for subsistence now keen to a degree which could
not have been foretold by the gloomiest pessimist a few years ago; with
Parliaments, hitherto safely democratic, threatened with Socialism by
the increasing practice of electing artisans and labourers to do the
legislative work of their respective classes; the crash of fortunes
which never had substantial existence; the pauperising to-day of the
paper millionaire of yesterday; the spectacle of worn, old men, after
overreaching and ruining themselves, starting pitifully the race of life
afresh, a sinister experience their sole advantage over the faltering
novice; and that other common spectacle of democratic life, the secure
and cultured rich cynically eschewing the active business of
government,--with these and some social aspects still less agree able to
contemplate there is ample subject-matter for any novelist who may have
the disposition and ability to carry on the work which Clarke had
indicated, but scarcely begun, before he died.
_Long Odds_, Clarke's first story, deals with English life, and bears no
resemblance in quality or kind to the later novel with which his name is
chiefly associated. It is primarily the tragedy of a _mésalliance_, and
horseracing and politics assist the plot, with the usual complications
of gambling and intrigue. The story has, however, a good deal less to
do with sport than the title suggests. The plot is mainly concerned with
the selfish, cruel, and infamous in human nature--a singularly dark
theme for a young beginner in fiction to choose. Except at rare
intervals when the business of characterisation is momentarily set
aside, as in the vivid descriptions of the Kirkminster Steeplechase and
the Matcham Hunt, there is little suggestion of youthful spirit or
freshness.
The outlines of plot and incident are attractively arranged, the
expression of life for the most part second-hand and artificial. There
are traces of Dickens' burlesque without his sympathy, and the high
colouring of Lytton with less than Lytton's wit. Disraeli's satire, too,
is echoed in the political scenes. The young Australian squatter, whose
experiences in England were to have formed the main purpose of the book,
is allowed no opportunity to show the better, and rarely even the
ordinary, capabilities of the new race of which he is ostensibly a type.
It is said to be a well-understood maxim of the novelist's art that many
a liberty taken with hero or heroine, or both, is forgiven if the writer
keeps a constant eye upon his villain, and deals honestly by him. In
_Long Odds_ there are two villains, and at least two others villainously
inclined. Between the four of them the easy-going hero has no chance.
It is natural that, in the construction of a novel which aims at
dramatic point before anything else, the 'simple Australian,' as his
author is at last constrained to regard him, should seem less useful
than the polished and unprincipled man of the world. But in this
instance the balance of interest is too unequal. Dramatic quality has
been secured at the expense of tone and proportion. Of the two male
characters whose exploits in rascality it becomes the real business of
the story to tell, Rupert Dacre is the more natural and entertaining.
There is an attention to detail in his portrait which suggests that the
lineaments of the conventional society villain may have been filled in
with the help of a little personal knowledge, perhaps of some of those
morally doubtful individuals already mentioned as having been among the
acquaintances of Clarke's early youth. Dacre is the chief cynic of the
story, and to him are assigned the best of the dialogue and all of the
small stock of humour to be found in the novel. But the man who is both
his associate and enemy, Cyril Chatteris, is a common sort of dastard,
and altogether disagreeable.
The author is not entirely forgetful of the interests of his nominal
hero. If throughout three-fourths of the story Calverley is made the
plaything of circumstances that favour only rogues, he is at last
allowed a triumph in love and sport which, though unsatisfying from an
artistic point of view, is calculated to soothe a not too fastidious
taste for poetic justice.
Conscious of the conventional character of his principal theme, the
author apparently sought to improve it by deepening its intensity. The
result of this was to add more of weakness than of strength. Incidents
that might have been effectively dramatic become melodramatic; the
conceivably probable is sometimes strained into the obviously
improbable. The agreeable finish to the minor love-story of Calverley
and Miss Ffrench does not remove the general savour of sordidness which
the reader carries away from the study of so much of the bad side of
human nature.
In connection with criticism of this kind, it ought, however, to be
noted that other hands besides the author's are known to have
contributed to the novel. Shortly after it began to appear serially in
the _Colonial Monthly_, Marcus Clarke fell from a horse while hunting,
and sustained a fracture of the skull which interrupted his literary
work for many weeks. How much of the writing had previously been done
seems to be a subject of dispute. It is, however, quite clear that, in
order to preserve continuity in the publication of the parts, Clarke's
friends did write some portion of the story, but whether in accordance
with the author's _scenario_, supposing one to have existed, has not
been stated.
'Only a few of the first chapters' were the work of Clarke, says the
editor of the _Marcus Clarke Memorial Volume_, writing in 1884; but in
an article published in the _Imperial Review_ (Melbourne) for 1886, the
contributed matter is limited to a couple of chapters written by Mr.
G. A. Walstab, and skilfully inserted in the middle of the novel.
Walstab was one of Clarke's best friends, and he is no doubt the
'G. A. W.' to whom the story is dedicated 'in grateful remembrance of
the months of July and August, 1868.'
From the absence of a prefatory explanation when _Long Odds_ was
published in book form in 1869, it may be assumed that Clarke was
satisfied with the quality of the contributed work. At least, he was
willing to take the full responsibility of its authorship. But even with
this in view, it were well, perhaps, not to hold him too strictly
accountable for the faults of the story. Not much must be expected from
a first novel produced in the circumstances mentioned, and issued when
the author was only twenty-three. In his haste to give it final shape
immediately after the serial publication, he was probably ill advised.
One can only regret that it was not set aside for a year or so, and
written afresh, or, at least, largely revised. Perhaps this would have
been expecting too much from so unmethodical a worker as Clarke. The far
finer dramatic taste and literary form of his masterpiece, issued five
years later, showed how little indicative of his talent was the earlier
work.
In view of the large extent to which the life of the Australian landed
classes has been described in fiction during the last twenty years, it
is curious to read the plea Clarke offered to his Antipodean critics for
passing over the literary material close at hand and preferring the
well-worn paths of the English novelist.
During the serial publication of _Long Odds_ the colonial press raised
some objection to the laying of the scene in England instead of in
Australia. The author replied simply that Henry Kingsley's _Geoffry
Hamlyn_ being the best Australian novel that had been, or probably
would be, written, 'any attempt to paint the ordinary squatting life of
the colonies could not fail to challenge unfavourable comparison with
that admirable story.'
The excuse is just a little too adventitious to have convinced even
those to whom it was originally addressed. None the less, it may at the
moment have accurately represented the opinion of a beginner who at that
time could scarcely have known the extent of his own powers.
Probably he had given the subject little thought. His colonial
experience was certainly less varied than Kingsley's had been. Above
all, his tastes, and in some degree his temperament, differed
markedly from those of his predecessor in the field. The judgment or
instinct that kept him from coming into direct competition with
Kingsley--assuming his own questionable belief that any effort of his
would have been competition--at least erred on the side of safety. That
the immediate alternative should have been an imitative example of a
hackneyed class of English novel, ineffective of purpose,
book-inspired, and tainted with the deadness of cynicism, is something
which admits of a more definite opinion.
'I have often thought,' says the writer, referring to the hero of
_Geoffry Hamlyn_ 'and I dare say other Australian readers have thought
also, How would Sam Buckley get on in England? My excuse, therefore, in
offering to the Australian public a novel in which the plot, the
sympathies, the interest, and the moral, are all English, must be that
I have endeavoured to depict with such skill as is permitted to me the
fortunes of a young Australian in that country which young Australians
still call "Home."'
Without this prefatory sign-post, the reader could never have suspected
such a purpose. Clarke may have had it definitely in his mind when he
first sat down to the work; but if so, it was put aside, consciously or
unconsciously, after the completion of the first few chapters, in favour
of more complex characterisation. Bob Calverley, the young squatter,
really holds a third or fourth place in relation to the main motive of
the story, and is used rather as a foil than as an exemplar of anything
typically Australian. He does not bear any active part in the drama of
passion and intrigue; he is not even permitted to be a passive spectator
of it.
To say that he was good-natured, jovial, popular, 'the sort of man that
one involuntarily addresses by his Christian name'; that although he was
shy and awkward in the society of ladies, at ease with his own sex only
when cattle and horses were the subject of conversation, ignorant of
music, and unable to tell Millais from Tenniel, he 'could pick you out
any bullock in a herd ... shear a hundred sheep a day ... and drive four
horses down a sidling in a Gippsland range with any man in
Australia,'--to say all this by way of preliminary, to add that
Calverley was no fool, and yet to show him in scarcely any other guise
than that of a trusting victim of rogues, is to go a very short distance
in the portrayal of a typical Australian.
In the slack-baked condition in which we find him, he merely repeats the
ordinary spectacle of green youth in the process of seeing life and
buying experience at the usual high figure. Compared with the real
squatter (who, ordinarily, is college-trained, and does not shear sheep
nor risk his neck unnecessarily), Bob, the son of rich 'Old Calverley,'
and nephew of an English baronet, is as an exaggerated stock-figure of
the stage to the commonplace blood and brain of everyday life. A
childlike trust in one's fellows, a reputation for good-nature, an
untamable taste for horseflesh and the pursuits of the Bush, belong to
every young squatter in a certain class of Australian fiction; they are
qualities which may be applied indiscriminately, with always some
effect.
The real squatter is a more civilised and reliable, if less picturesque,
person. He likes both work and pleasure, provided they be suitably
proportioned. His work is in the personal management of his properties;
his pleasure is taken in the large cities. He entertains no fantastic
prejudices against urban life, in proof of which he often spends his
later years in some city hundreds of miles from the scene of his early
toil and pastoral successes.
As a young man in London, he can be found with rooms at the Langham, the
Métropole, or some other of the half-dozen fashionable hotels known to
colonial visitors. There he will entertain his friends, joining with
them, in turn, the continuous movements of the society season. He
frankly lacks much of the ease and polish of the young Englishman, but
his natural amiability and good spirits largely compensate for these
deficiencies, while they preclude any feeling of discomfort on his own
part.
During his three or six months' stay in London (the combination usually
of a little business with a very full programme of pleasure) he spends
freely, and in his tour of the clubs plays here and there a little at
cards--perchance loses. Worldly beyond his reputation, and somewhat
Chesterfieldian in his principles, he consents to be a Roman while at
Rome. He has inherited the British hatred of fuss and personal
peculiarity, and none shall call him mean. But, unlike many of his
English friends at club and course, he has watched and taken some part
in the hard process of making money, and knows the difference between a
little gentlemanly extravagance and the reckless hazarding of a fortune.
At least, it may be affirmed of him that in nine cases out of ten he is
decidedly no fool.
These are only a few of the prominent outlines of the type of young man
who, his holiday over, returns unspoiled to work on his own or his
father's estates. Those whose passion for a horse destroys all
self-control, who spend thousands in gambling and betting, who
innocently take every smooth gentleman at his own valuation, are merely
individuals--persons who may as unfailingly be found in England or
elsewhere as in Australia.
Sam Buckley is a typical descendant of the British pioneer colonists, as
every Australian knows. In attempting to give an answer to his own
speculation of 'How would Sam Buckley get on in England?' Clarke
presumably undertook to continue the portrayal of this type. The result,
considered apart from the function Calverley fulfils in _Long Odds_,
must be held as emphatically a failure.
Never was a novel written with a franker or more deliberate purpose than
that shown in _For the Term of his Natural Life_. The author had the
twofold object of picturing the dreadful crudities and brutalities of
the early system of convict 'reformation' in Australia, and of
preventing their possible repetition elsewhere. The first of these aims
was attained with a fuller employment, and perhaps more moderate
statement of historical facts, than can be found in any other fiction of
the same class; the second was ineffective, because, when it found
expression, the abuses which had suggested it no longer continued at the
Antipodes, and could not conceivably be repeated on the existing
settlements at Port Blair and Noumea.
The story was written a quarter of a century too late to assist the
abolition of convict transportation to Australia. Had it appeared at the
right time, it might have done much where formal inquiries and the
testimonies of disinterested and humane observers had repeatedly failed.
For sixty years the practice of deporting criminals had been carried on,
upheld in England by official indifference and callousness, and in the
colonies themselves by the greed of a small class of private persons who
grew rapidly wealthy upon the strength of assigned convict labour, until
the free emigrants by the authority of their numbers were able to insist
upon its cessation. For so long as the colonies were willing to receive
a population of criminals, so long was England only too anxious to
supply them and make a virtue out of it. It mattered little to the
official mind that the system was incurably bad and immoral; the main
thing was to speedily and effectually transfer an awkward burden to
other shoulders. The entire history of penal transportation from Great
Britain throws a sinister light upon the national character. The
practice originated with banishment of convicts to the American colonies
under conditions which constituted a form of slavery.
The criminal on being sentenced became a marketable chattel of the
State. His services were sold by public auction, the purchaser acquiring
the right to transport him and sell him for the term of his sentence to
a builder, planter, manufacturer, or other employer beyond the Atlantic.
The price paid to the British Government averaged five pounds per head,
and some of the more useful prisoners were resold in America for
twenty-five pounds each. One of these dealers in convict labour, in
giving evidence before a committee of the House of Commons, made a
matter-of-fact complaint that 'the trade' was not so remunerative as
people supposed. Artisans sold well, but the profit realised upon them
was often consumed by losses upon some of the others. One-seventh of his
purchases died on his hands, and in the course of business he had been
obliged to give the old, the halt and the lame in for nothing. When the
War of Independence closed the United States against the traffic,
Britain was given a fresh opportunity to reconsider and place its penal
system upon a more humane basis; but the temptation to adopt sweeping
measures was once more too strong to be resisted. The promoters of the
Australian scheme were in so great a hurry to seize their chance that
they despatched over seven hundred convicts before even the site for the
first settlement was chosen. The hardships which this characteristic act
afterwards entailed are too familiar in history to need repetition.
After such recklessness, it is no wonder that, as Sir Roger Therry has
observed, 'the first-fruits of the system exhibited a state of society
in New South Wales which the world might be challenged to surpass in
depravity.'
A generation passed before the British Government reluctantly admitted
transportation to be a failure. Lord John Russell, as late as 1847,
discovered that it had been 'too much the custom to consult the
convenience of Great Britain by getting rid of persons of evil habits,
and to take that view alone.' In planting provinces which might become
empires, they 'should endeavour to make them, not seats of malefactors
and convicts, but communities which may set examples of virtue and
happiness.'
This mild, platitudinous rebuke came when all the damage was done. It
remained for the free inhabitants of Australia to point to a plainer
principle in declaring that 'the inundating of feeble and dependent
colonies with the criminals of the parent State is opposed to that
arrangement of Providence by which the virtue of each community is
destined to combat its own vice.'
To illustrate in a single story all the most prominent and pernicious
features of the transportation system, Clarke had to invent a case of
crime in which the criminal, unlike the majority of the worst offenders
sent to the settlements, should always be worthy of the reader's
sympathy. It was necessary that the felon be a victim as well as a
felon; that he should not regain his liberty in any form, but continue
by a series of offences against the authority of his gaolers to
experience and display all the successive severities of Macquarie
Harbour, Port Arthur, and Norfolk Island. A fundamental fact to be
exhibited was the impassable gulf of misunderstanding that might exist
between capricious or incompetent prison officials and a criminal who,
for any reason, had once come to be regarded as hopelessly vicious. 'We
must treat brutes like brutes,' says the prime martinet of the story:
'keep 'em down, sir; make 'em _feel_ what they are. They're here to
work, sir. If they won't work, flog 'em until they will. If they
work--why, a taste of the cat now and then keeps 'em in mind of what
they may expect if they get lazy.'
The author chose to represent the extreme case of a man who, innocent of
a murder charged against him, allowed himself to be transported under an
assumed name in order to prevent the exposure of a long-concealed act of
unfaithfulness on the part of a beloved mother.
Richard Devine is the bastard son of an aristocratic Englishwoman who in
early youth was forced by her father into a loveless union with a rich
plebeian. The single fault of the mother's life is confessed after
twenty years, when the husband in a moment of anger strikes her
high-spirited and obstinate son. The latter consents to leave his home
for ever, and relinquish the name he has borne. On these terms the wife
is spared. Richard Devine goes on the instant. Crossing Hampstead Heath,
he comes upon a robbed and murdered man, and presently is arrested for
the crime. The explanation that would save him would also cause the
dreaded exposure of his mother, and so he withholds it, gives a false
name, and, having put himself beyond the means of defence and the
recognition of friends, is convicted and sentenced to transportation for
life.
In making all the subsequent career of Rufus Dawes abnormally
painful--that of a dumb sufferer who in sixteen years' confinement,
ending only in a tragic death, experiences by turns every form of
punishment and oppression--the author often touches, though it cannot be
said he ever exceeds, the limits of possibility.
'Need one who was not a hardened criminal have suffered so much and so
long?' is the question that continually recurs to the mind of the
reader; but it is suggested by the prolonged and pitiful sense of
unsatisfied justice rather than by any doubting that the extremes of
penal discipline as practised in the name of the British Government
between forty and sixty years ago could have been successively applied
to a single human being. The writer adheres relentlessly to his central
idea to the end. Dawes' unameliorated servitude and unavenged fate were
intended to symbolise glaring anomalies of justice which never were
remedied. The 'correction' he is subjected to was that which the laws of
the time permitted, and which in many cases goaded its victims to draw
lots to murder one another in order to escape from their misery.
Some of the least creditable features of convict transportation, of
which it was said by Earl Grey in 1857 that their existence had been a
disgrace to the nation, came to an end only when the system itself was
abolished. But novelist and statesman alike struck at the abuses without
feeling it necessary to mention any of the good results of the system.
Its inherent merits were strictly few, indeed; yet they ought to be
sought in history by anyone who would get a fair idea of the prison
policy of the period. It is, of course, inevitable that the criticism
conveyed in a strong imaginative work should fail to give a full view of
results so complex as those produced by the largely haphazard method of
the Australian penal settlements.
The practice of assigning prisoners to private employment, for example,
produced notable effects upon society, of which Marcus Clarke's story
gives but the faintest indication. If Rufus Dawes had been an ordinary
first offender, he might have regained liberty soon after his arrival in
Van Diemen's Land. But, as we have seen, it was the purpose of the
author to make him exhibit all the rigours of convict discipline. His
case must therefore be regarded as more exceptional than typical. As a
rule, only men inveterate in crime were detained in constant punishment.
Transportation for life meant servitude only for eight years if the
convict conducted himself well, a condition which, of course, depended
largely on the sort of master who secured his services. Major de Winton,
an officer who served for some years on Norfolk Island, has mentioned
that a prisoner by good conduct received a ticket-of-leave after he had
been twice sentenced to death, thrice to transportation for life, and to
cumulative periods of punishment amounting to over a hundred years!
An interesting view of Marcus Clarke as a literary workman is obtained
from the story of the conception and laborious writing of _For the Term
of his Natural Life_. It affords the first, and unhappily the last,
evidence of how far he recognised the claims of realism in fiction; and
from the account of his suffering under the self-imposed drudgery of
keeping to the strict line of history, we see the man as his friends
knew him contrasted with the conscientious artist known to the general
reader of his famous novel.
The best of Clarke's minor writings display the results of much general
culture, but give no proof of special preparation. They are short,
concentrated, forcible--the natural expression of a brilliant,
impetuous, and spasmodic worker. He overcame his natural repugnance to
lengthened toil and minute thoroughness when he saw them to be essential
conditions of his task. But the effort was a severe one.
In 1871, when about twenty-five years of age, he was ordered to recruit
his health by a trip to Tasmania. He had been for over three years
writing extensively for the press, and joining in the gaieties of
Melbourne life at a rate which a constitution much stronger than his
could not have withstood. The idea of writing a story of prison life had
suggested itself previously during his reading of Australian history.
Finding himself now without sufficient money for the proposed holiday,
he decided to put into active progress this literary project which had
hitherto been only vaguely outlined.
Printed records of the convict days there were in abundance at
Melbourne, and from these alone such a writer could have made a
sufficiently striking story. But he concluded that he could make his
picture at once truer and more vivid when the surroundings of the old
settlements had become a full reality to his mind. Messrs. Clarson,
Massina and Co. readily contracted with the young novelist for the first
publication of the story in their monthly, the _Australian Journal_, and
made him an advance of money. Off he went with characteristic
confidence, and some weeks later returned ready primed and eager for the
new work. His enthusiasm soon cooled. The story commenced to appear
after the first few chapters were written, and the unbroken industry
necessary to maintain a regular supply of the parts was more than Clarke
could give.
Writing against time, he is said to have felt like a convict himself.
The irregular dribbling out of the story so injured the reputation of
the journal that for a time its circulation was reduced to one-half the
ordinary issue.
Mr. Hamilton Mackinnon, the writer of a sympathetic memoir of Clarke,
has given an entertaining account of what followed: 'The author would
be frequently interviewed by the publishers, and would as frequently
promise the copy. When moral suasion was apparently powerless to effect
the required object, payments in advance were made with somewhat better
results; but as this could not go on _ad libitum_, copy would fall into
arrears again. At last it was found that the only way to get the author
to finish his tale was to induce him into a room in the
publishing-house, where, under the benign influences of a pipe, etc.,
and a lock on the door, the necessary work would be done by the facile
pen; and in such manner was _His Natural Life_ produced.'
In a note of apology to their readers in January, 1871, the publishers
print a somewhat comical letter which they had received from the
delinquent author. Forwarding a single chapter of the story, he tells
them that they must make shift with it as best they can, and he will let
them have a larger supply during the following month. The letter
concludes nonchalantly as follows: 'This is awkward, I admit, and I
suppose some good-natured friend or other will say that I have
over-plum-puddinged or hot-whiskied myself in honour of the so-called
festive season, but I can't help it.'
The story as first published was much longer than the form in which it
appears in the English edition. At the request of the present writer,
Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, who was one of Clarke's literary friends,
supplies the following account of how the novel came to be so
extensively curtailed:
'As one of the trustees to the public library (Melbourne), I saw Clarke
constantly, and had always a friendly, and sometimes a confidential,
conversation with him. He visited me now and then at Sorrento, and on
one of these occasions he spoke of a story he had running through a
Melbourne periodical about which he was perplexed. He asked me to read
it, and tell him unreservedly what I thought of it. I read the story
carefully, making notes on the margin, and wrote him frankly the
impression it had made on me.
'After twenty years I can recall the substance of the letter, which is
probably still in existence. A powerful story, I said, but painful as it
is powerful. The incidents, instead of being depressing, would be tragic
if they befell anyone we loved or honoured. But there was no one in the
story whom he could have intended us to love or honour. The hero
underwent a lifelong torture without any credible, or even intelligible,
motive, and on the whole was a _mauvais sujet_ himself. To win the
reader's sympathy, all this must be altered. I strongly advised that the
latter part of the story, in which the Ballarat outbreak was described
under a leader whom he named Peter Brawler, should be omitted; and I
objected to the publication of a song in French _argot_ with a spirited
translation, as the latter would naturally be attributed to the author
of the novel, whereas I had read it in an early _Blackwood_ before he
was born.
'Marcus Clarke thanked me warmly, and said he would adopt all my
suggestions. He wrote a new prologue, in which he made the protection of
his mother's good name the motive of the hero's silence, and he omitted
both the things I had objected to.'
Ending, as it began, with a tragedy, the artistic unity of the novel is
thus preserved, and the dominant aim of the author emphasised. Many of
those who read it in the serial parts strongly disapproved of the
excisions, but there can be little doubt that the story is the stronger
for their having been made.
It was as the work of a vivid historian, rather than of a social
reformer, that Marcus Clarke's masterpiece won its popularity, and, for
its dramatic and substantially accurate view of the worst (always the
worst) aspect of convict life, it will continue to be read while anyone
remains to take an interest in the unhappiest period of Australian
history. From its pages may be learned how long it has taken the
intelligent theorist of the British Government to acquire a practical
method of treating a difficult social question; how long stupidity and
inhumanity may be practised with the sanction of what Major Vickers was
fond of respectfully calling 'the King's regulations'; and how far
English gentlemen, remote from the influence of public opinion and
invested with more power than single individuals should ever possess,
may become despots, and even blackguards.
It is a grim record. Let those who are inclined to doubt it turn to the
originals, especially to the report of the House of Commons Committee of
1837-38, and they will find facts which the creator of Rufus Dawes, with
all his supple fancy and delicacy of language, could not bring himself
even to indicate. There are episodes which the more matter-of-fact
historians barely mention, but do not take advantage of their great
privileges to describe. For example, there were times during the first
thirty years of the century when the open and general lewdness of the
officials on some of the principal settlements, in their relations with
the female convicts, rendered them totally unfit for the positions they
held.
Clarke in his researches obtained abundant knowledge of this, but made
no use of it save in adding a few luminous touches to his portrait of
Dawes' passionate and licentious cousin.
In reading the novel for its historical interest, it is necessary
throughout to remember the limitation that the writer has specifically
put upon himself. He did not undertake to illustrate any of the good
effects of exile upon a section of the first offenders sent to the
colonies, and scarcely touches the travesties of justice so often
wrought by that lottery in human life known as the assignment system.
His purpose is to describe 'the dismal condition of a felon during his
term of transportation,' and to show the futility of a prison system
loosely planned at one end of the world and roughly executed at the
other by men who found it easier, and in some cases more agreeable, to
their undiscerning hearts to coerce than to ameliorate.
The Parliamentary Committee defined transportation as 'a series of
punishments embracing every degree of human suffering, from the lowest,
consisting of a slight restraint upon freedom of action, to the
highest, consisting of long and tedious torture.' It was with the latter
part of the definition in mind that Clarke told his story. He chose to
represent servitude in the chain-gangs of Van Diemen's Land and Norfolk
Island as the condition of slavery which Sir Richard Bourke and Sir
George Arthur admitted it to be, as the utter failure described by the
experienced Dr. Ullathorne, and as the system recommended by the House
of Commons Committee to be abolished as incapable of improvement and
'remarkably efficient, not in reforming, but still further corrupting
those who undergo punishment.'
The idea which is the ganglion of Clarke's plot was always seen clearly,
but never obsessed his mind as did a cognate theme that of the impetuous
reformer Charles Reade. In his crusade against the form of punishment
known as the 'silent system,' the English novelist obtrudes his moral
with a frequency that weakens the effect of his often splendid
eloquence. The direct opposite of this style is seen in the Australian
novel. The author never openly preaches. His best effects are obtained
by quiet satire conveyed in the gradual limning of his characters, and
by occasional incidents of which each is allowed to give its own lesson
to the reader. The facts have all the advantage of a studiously calm and
impersonal presentation.
In the rapid progress of the plot the reader is kept keenly interested.
If he have an eye for the moral he will detect it at once; if not, there
is no importunate author to force it upon him. In either case he will
find the story an absorbing one. 'It has all the solemn ghastliness of
truth,' said Lord Rosebery, writing to the novelist's widow in 1884. He
confessed that the book had a fascination for him. Not once or twice,
but many times, had he read it, and during his visit to Australia he
spent some time in viewing the scene of the old settlements and
examining the reports upon which the novel is so largely based.
That there are some exaggerations in the treatment of facts need hardly
be stated, but they are few in number, not serious in import, and
outbalanced by numerous cases in which it has been necessary to modify
the description of incidents either too painful or horrible to be fully
depicted. As a compensation for its occasional storical inaccuracy, _His
Natural Life_ is notably free of the melodramatic excesses that most
young writers would have been tempted to commit. Clarke was too good an
artist to think of pleading the sanction of facts for any misuse of the
privileges of good fiction. To maintain a strong impression on the
reader, his touch is occasionally strong and fearless, like that of
Kipling. But this object attained, he uses his materials with an almost
unnecessary reticence. The episode of the cannibalism of Gabbett and his
fellow-convicts is exceptional. Yet it purposely falls short of the
terrible original, which is happily hidden away from general view
between the covers of an old Parliamentary report.
It has been said of Clarke, by one of his friends, that in his estimate
of motives he was invariably cynical. Though the assertion goes too far,
it seems to suggest the best explanation of his notable preference for
delineating the dark side of human nature. He appeared ever to see vice
more clearly, or at any rate to find it more interesting for the
purposes of fiction, than the good or the neutral in character. But his
cynicism--if it really formed a settled feature of his character--was
not of the kind that implies any indifference to injustice or
dishonesty. In this particular, both his fiction and essays have no
uncertain tone. It is indeed a fault of Clarke that his bad characters
are in most cases wholly bad. He makes Frere abandon a life of
debauchery under the influence of a pure woman's affection, but the
effect is afterwards destroyed by evidences that the attachment on the
man's side is sensual and based on vanity. Moreover, Frere the prison
tyrant and base denier of Dawes' heroism remains unexcused.
Bob Calverley and Miss Ffrench, the only important representatives of
the ordinary virtues in _Long Odds_, are little more than dim shadows
contrasted with the clearly-marked personalities of half a dozen others
in the story who are rogues, or the associates and instruments of
rogues. 'The human anguish of every page' of _His Natural Life_ which
Lord Rosebery found so compelling to his attention, need not have been
so continuous and unqualified.
The author seems purposely to have ignored the opportunity afforded by
the story for the introduction of a character who, while asserting the
claims of Rufus Dawes and the broader interests of humanity, need not
have defeated the main motive of the plot. It was a decided error not to
gratify in this way the combative instinct of the reader. The Rev. James
North--'gentleman, scholar, and Christian priest'--might have been an
active opponent of cruelty like Eden, the clergyman in _It's Never Too
Late to Mend_, instead of being made a pitiable example of a confirmed
and self-accusing drunkard.
The strength of _His Natural Life_ lies not so much in the ingenuity and
dramatic quality of its plot, as in the number of striking personalities
among its leading characters. That of Rufus Dawes, curiously, is
distinct only at intervals. It represents, for the most part, a
hopeless sufferer passing through a series of punishments which become
almost monotonous in their unvaried severity.
But what could be more luminous than the portrait of Sarah Purfoy, the
clever, self-possessed adventuress with the single redeeming quality of
an invincible love for her worthless and villainous convict-husband? or
that of Frere, the swaggering, red-whiskered, coarsely good-humoured
convict-driver, glorying in his knowledge of the heights and depths of
criminal ingenuity and vice, and frankly ignorant of all else?
How naturally from such a person comes that savagely humorous
dissertation upon the treatment of prisoners! 'There is a sort of
satisfaction to me, by George! in keeping the scoundrels in order. I
like to see the fellows' eyes glint at you as you walk past 'em. Gad!
they'd tear me to pieces if they dared, some of 'em.'
Frere is a triumph of consistent literary portraiture. He is generally
understood to have been a study from life. But as the official whose
name has sometimes been associated with the character was a considerably
more humane disciplinarian than the persecutor of Rufus Dawes, it must
be assumed that Clarke aimed only at the representation of a type.
Brutes like Frere and his vindictive associates, Burgess and Troke,
there undoubtedly were on the settlements, but the average official has
probably a better representative in Major Vickers, the Commandant.
Vickers is not an unkind man, but does not trust himself to do anything
unprovided for in the 'regulations,' for which he has an abject respect.
'It is not for me to find fault with the system,' he says; 'but I have
sometimes wondered if kindness would not succeed better than the
chain-gang and the cat.' But he never gives intelligence, much less
kindness, a fair trial.
Sylvia Vickers is the only complete picture of a good woman to be found
in any of the author's stories. Taken in childhood by her parents to the
penal settlements, and separated there for years from youthful society,
familiarised with the constant aspects of crime and suffering, and
habitually in the society of her elders, she early develops into a
quaint, matter-of-fact little creature, such as might well disconcert a
peacock like the Reverend Meekin.
To Frere, whose knowledge of other women has been mainly immoral, her
innocence and wilfulness, and her instinctive dislike of him, serve as a
strong attraction. Though he becomes her husband by means of a cruel
fraud, he never fully gains her trust, and the estrangement so
tragically sealed in the last chapter of the novel comes almost as a
relief to the sympathetic reader of her sad history. Sylvia Vickers,
despite the gloomy environment of her youth, is throughout an intensely
womanly woman, the delicate conception of whose character surely places
her creator far above the rank of the cynics in literature.
Not the least of the elements which combine to make _His Natural Life_
one of the most remarkable novels of the century is the occasional
skilful varying of its painful realism with a colouring of romance, as
in the relations between Dawes and Sylvia: his absorbing devotion when
she is so strangely made dependent upon him at the deserted settlement;
his long-continued confidence that she will effect his vindication and
deliverance; and, finally, the dominant motive of securing her safety
against North with which he escapes from the gaol at Norfolk Island, and
joins her in the doomed schooner on its last voyage to Van Diemen's
Land.
What Oliver Wendell Holmes called 'the Robinson Crusoe touches' in the
story--including the experiences of the marooned party at Macquarie
Harbour, and those of Rex in his escape through the Devil's
Blowhole--also help to leave with the reader of the novel an
ineffaceable memory.
HENRY KINGSLEY.
What are the special qualities that constitute the permanent charm of
Henry Kingsley's early novels? Some English critics, judging him by
principles of literary art, have said that his best work is in many
places of slovenly construction, deficient in dramatic power, and
imitative in expression. A series of episodes, they observe, supply the
place of a plot in _The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn_; the central
motive of _The Hillyars and the Burtons_ is an impossible story of a
young woman's self-sacrifice; and the Thackerayan mannerisms in
_Ravenshoe_ are an offensive blemish upon an otherwise fine novel.
As a set-off to these defects, which are of less real consequence than
may appear from their brief enumeration, Kingsley has been freely
credited with a certain ever-pleasing vivacity and gallantry of style
far too rare in literature to be overlooked. The warmest of his admirers
in his own country have even attempted to raise him to a position above
that of his more celebrated brother.
The task of comparing Kingsley the poet, preacher, and reformer, with
Kingsley the laughing, genial teller of stories who never cherished a
hobby in his life, would seem to be as superfluous on general grounds as
it is premature in respect of the only possible question as to which of
them is likely to be best remembered a generation or two hence. Only in
one particular does it seem quite safe to predict--namely, that whatever
may be the future standing of one who is said to have never penned a
story without a didactic purpose of some kind, Henry Kingsley is certain
of a permanent place in the literature of the young country where he
encountered both the best and the worst experiences of his life.
The English estimate of his novels--mainly a technical one--having been
recorded, it seems to the present writer that something of interest
might be said of them from, as far as possible, the Australian point of
view, the standpoint of the reader who knows the country of Sam Buckley
and Alice Brentwood, and has lived some of their life. Two out of the
three best novels are largely Australian in matter, and the reasons for
their enduring popularity in the colonies are among the best grounds of
the favour in which the author is held by the average English reader, to
leave out of reckoning for the moment the literary expert. _Geoffry
Hamlyn_ and _The Hillyars and the Burtons_ have obvious faults, but in
most respects they are the highest, because the least artificial,
expression of Kingsley's powers. A consideration of some of their more
noticeable qualities will perhaps afford the clearest answer to the
question which opens this essay.
Henry Kingsley was one of the many impecunious young Englishmen of
education and adventurous spirit who sought fortune on the gold-fields
of Australia between 1851 and 1860, and were rewarded in some cases with
ready wealth, but in far more with bitter disappointment. Leaving Oxford
without a degree in the company of two fellow-students, he hurried off
to the Victorian gold-fields, which were then in the early sensational
period of their development, and attracting people from all parts of the
world. It was the time when the ordinary business of the colonies could
scarcely be carried on at any sacrifice--when some of the more perplexed
employers in the adjoining territory of New South Wales had urged
Governor Fitzroy to proclaim martial law and peremptorily prohibit
mining, 'in order that the inducement which seemed so irresistible to
persons to quit their ordinary occupations might be removed.' In the
country districts crops were left unreaped and sheep unshorn; in the
towns masters did their own work or paid excessively to have it half
done; while the harbours were filled with vessels whose crews had
deserted to join in the general scramble for gold. No one was content to
stand behind a counter all day and hear of nuggets being found
up-country which sold for over four thousand pounds. 'As well attempt to
stop the influx of the tide as stop the rush to the diggings,' was the
reply given by Fitzroy to his petitioners.
Ex-military and naval officers, professional men, convicts from Van
Diemen's Land, picturesque cut-throats from the Californian and Mexican
mines, Chinese, and many other varieties of the human species, rubbed
shoulders and lived generally in remarkable order and amity in the
crowded canvas cities of Turon, Mount Alexander, Ballarat, and Bendigo.
In 1852, the year before Kingsley's arrival, seventy thousand of them
were toiling in Victoria alone.
Such were the times and the people which gave the future novelist his
first practical experience of colonial life. The varied knowledge that
he accumulated, first of the gold-fields and later of pastoral life and
the towns, was the only reward of his five years' voluntary exile from
England. During his absence he never wrote to his parents, and they
thought him dead. His reticence as to his unsuccessful struggles was
continued when he returned home, and not relaxed in later life even to
his wife.
An interesting memoir by Mr. Clement Shorter, prefixed to a new edition
of Kingsley's novels, briefly describes his school-days and literary
career, but is almost wholly silent concerning the eventful years spent
in the colonies. There is a single reference to the period which
succeeded his gold-digging days, when want forced him to seek a less
precarious occupation. For a time, it seems, he was a mounted policeman
in New South Wales, until, 'compelled by duty to attend an execution, he
was so much affected that he threw up the appointment in disgust.' Then,
like many another unlucky digger, he was obliged to travel the country
in search of work on the sheep and cattle stations.
A well-known pastoralist of the western district of Victoria, the late
Hon. Philip Russell, was accustomed to describe to his friends the
arrival at his station many years ago of a party of 'sundowners'
(_i.e._, tramps), among whom was Kingsley, looking 'very much down on
his luck.' Soon found to be no ordinary swagman, he was made a guest at
the station, where he remained for several months. The most agreeable
glimpse obtainable of his colonial life is given in _Old Melbourne
Memories_, a little collection of sketches published by Rolf Boldrewood
twelve years ago.
At the period which they recall, Boldrewood was a young man, and making
the experiment in squatting which, though disastrous in its ultimate
commercial results, was afterwards turned to a rich literary account by
him. A friend of his named Mitchell occupied a station in western
Victoria named Langa-willi, and there on one occasion Boldrewood met
Kingsley. The passage in which he gracefully records the event is worth
quoting in full.
'Why Langa-willi,' he says, 'will always be a point of interest in my
memory, apart from other reasons, for I spent many a pleasant day there,
was that Henry Kingsley lived there the chief part of a year as a guest
of Mitchell's.
'It was at Langa-willi that _Geoffry Hamlyn_, that immortal work, the
best Australian novel, and for long the only one, was written. In the
well-appointed sitting-room of that most comfortable cottage one can
imagine the gifted but somewhat ill-fated author sitting down
comfortably after breakfast to his "copy," when his host had ridden
forth with his overseer to make-believe to inspect the flocks, but in
reality to get an appetite for lunch.
'I like to think of them both spending the evening sociably in their own
way, both rather silent men--Kingsley writing away till he had covered
the regulation number of sheets or finished the chapter, perhaps when
the bushrangers came to Garoopna; Mitchell reading steadily, or writing
up his home correspondence; the old housekeeper coming in with the
glasses at ten o'clock; then a tumbler of toddy, a smoke on the
verandah, or over the fire if in winter, and so to bed. Peaceful, happy,
unexciting days and nights, good for Mitchell, who was not strong, and
for his talented guest, who was not always so profitably employed. I
suspect that in England, where both abode in later years, they often
looked back with regret to the peerless climate, the calm days, the
restful evenings spent so far beyond the southern main at Langa-willi.'
At least one of them must often have recalled those days as being among
the happiest of a none too happy life. The main features of Kingsley's
career after he returned to England may be summarised here in a few
words. The distinct success as a novelist which he won during the first
four or five years was not maintained. His work lessened in interest as
he lost the _verve_ of youth, increased his leaning towards romance, and
became more conventional in his methods.
He essayed journalism for a time, first as editor of the Edinburgh
_Daily Review_, and later as a correspondent of the same journal at the
Franco-German War. As an editor he was a failure, through being without
the necessary technical training, and it does not appear that he had
much opportunity to distinguish himself as a war correspondent. The
writing of fiction was his proper work, and his success at it seemed
always to be in proportion to the amount of personal experience which he
employed to support the superstructure of his somewhat reckless fancy.
Those of Kingsley's friends who contribute to the brief memoir of his
life bear unanimous testimony to the personal brightness and kindness of
which he has left so worthy a memorial in his first novels.
It is characteristic of Kingsley that he never wrote an ungenerous word
of the country which sent him away empty-handed from the store of its
riches. Not even a suggestion of the fruitless toil and the
disillusionment which he shared with scores of other amateur diggers
during the first two years of his colonial life finds expression in any
of his novels. His choice of incident and adventure in _Geoffry Hamlyn_
seems to imply a deliberate ignoring of what was by far the most
striking development of Antipodean life in the decade of 1850-60.
The gold-fields were then in a sense an epitome of the world, the centre
at which all men's thoughts converged, an ever-changing spectacle, a
daily source of novelty and suggestion. The life of the squatters was
primitive, inferior in variety, and marked only by a rapid accumulation
of wealth, which was in itself but a part of the general prosperity
created by the discovery of gold. If Kingsley wished to repress memories
which it would have been against his cheerful nature to perpetuate, he
succeeded with singular completeness.
Save the technical knowledge of geology shown by Trevittick in _The
Hillyars and the Burtons_, and by the encyclopædic Dr. Mulhaus in his
lecture at the picnic in the grass-covered crater of Mirngish, there is
nothing to suggest that the author had any personal acquaintance with
mining in the colonies. The experience that was so fresh and abundant in
his mind is put aside in favour of a set of facts and pictures not even
incidentally connected with life on the gold-fields.
As if to emphasise the motive of his choice, if motive there was, he
selected the pre-auriferous period for the Australian parts of his
stories. His squatters become wealthy by a comparatively slow process,
extending over some sixteen years. The squatters of the gold period
would certainly seem better adapted to the purposes of fiction. There
is, indeed, more than a suggestion of romance in the sudden burst of
fortune which within the first few years after 1851 raised so many of
them from positions of struggling uncertainty to affluence, with incomes
varying from ten to twenty thousand pounds, and in some few cases as
high as thirty thousand pounds, a year.
The first and last use Kingsley made of his gold-fields experience is
seen in the sketch of mining of the successful sort in the third volume
of _The Hillyars and the Burtons_, but this is so slight that it might
have been imagined by a writer who had never handled a shovel or a
washing-cradle in his life.
The Australian people have so often been the subject of flippant and
ill-natured criticisms, that they can readily appreciate any liberal
estimate of themselves in whatever form it may be placed before their
kindred in Great Britain. It is a fact, as natural as it is undeniable,
that they are very sensitive to praise or blame. What wounds them more
than adverse comment itself, is the circumstance of its often proceeding
from persons who have accepted without warning their too prompt and
trustful hospitality.
To anyone but the incorrigibly confident and good-natured Antipodean,
the lesson would be obvious, namely, that the distinguished visitor
should be petted less, and left more dependent upon his own devices in
the collection of materials for the inevitable book or magazine article.
Though the result might be the same, there would be no ingratitude, and
the critic would be less able to pose as an impartial inside observer of
Australian society.
Perhaps, indeed, though this implies a somewhat wild flight of
imagination, he might altogether escape the fatal sense of compulsion
towards printers'-ink, under which the traveller of a few weeks' or
months' experience commonly labours when once he has extricated himself
from the blandishments of Toorak or Darling Point.
It is true that Australia has received many a compliment from casual
writers, but to Australians themselves it is always a question whether
these kindnesses are not outbalanced by the inaccuracies which surround
them. For it may as well be said at once that the younger colonists do
not relish being denied all native individuality, and depicted with a
complaisant condescension as mere imitators of English life. It is well
to be a Briton, they say, but better to be an Australian. And who shall
say that their self-satisfaction is not healthy and pardonable?
By contrast with the judgments of persons to whom candour concerning the
colonies seems to be a stern duty, Henry Kingsley's pictures of the
pioneer life of Australia fifty years ago, and his liberal estimate
(since largely realised) of the future of the country, find more
enduring appreciation than would, perhaps, be accorded such writing in
ordinary circumstances.
The good feeling that shines on every page of _Geoffry Hamlyn_ would
earn gratitude from Australian readers were the story not in itself
spirited and absorbing. If from the personal experiences with which this
first novel is crowded Kingsley excluded everything that might be
unfavourable to the reputation of Australia and its people, he at least
told nothing that was untrue. His record of the country is a generous
one, but there is no flattery--at least, none of the grosser sort.
It is one of his supreme qualities, too, that while delighting to
preserve unmodified the British spirit and traditions in his emigrant
colonists, he surrounds their offspring with a subtle distinction. Some
of the manly strength and courtly serenity, the truth, honour, and
delicacy of the ideal Englishman and Englishwoman they reproduce; and
then there is added a something caught from the warm air and the broader
expanses of the South--a new impulse, a deeper tinge in the blood, a
greater trust in human nature.
As befitting the early period of which the novelist wrote, this
difference is not strongly marked, and is more readily recognisable in
the light of colonial experience than without it; but it clearly exists.
Its continuation at the present day is far more apparent. Kingsley's
young Australians are home-taught, and necessarily display most of the
characteristics of their British parents. But, still, they show
themselves types of a new race, which has now its hundreds of
representatives in the homes of the Australian gentry.
Of such was the young squatter who so attracted the attention of Mr.
Froude at the first station he visited in Victoria. 'He had till within
a month or two been herding cattle in Queensland, doing the work for
four years of the roughest emigrant field hand, yet had retained the
manners of the finest of fine gentlemen--tall, spare-loined, agile as a
deer, and with a face that might have belonged to Sir Lancelot.' Of
course, the genial author of _Oceana_ made no pretence of minute
observation in the account of his travels. Had he not been content to
fly through the country, viewing it mainly, as he admits, from 'softest
sofas' of 'a superlative carriage lined with blue satin,' he might have
seen not one, but many fine specimens of what Sir George Bowen has aptly
called the working aristocracy of Australia.
The little Arcadian kingdom--cheerful, self-contained, and
picturesque--of the Buckleys, the Brentwoods, and their historian,
Geoffry Hamlyn, of the Mayfords, Tom Troubridge, Mary Hawker, and the
rest, far from illustrates all the intermittent successes and hardships
which have commonly attended squatting in Australia. The toil,
loneliness, and monotony of the occupation are scarcely mentioned. The
aspect represented is almost entirely the agreeable one.
There is, it must be admitted, some ground for the charge that he has
made squatting life 'too much like a prolonged picnic.' Had Kingsley
been himself a pastoralist, a hundred minute experiences might have
obtained expression which he has avoided. In this respect the
historical value of his work is less than it might have been. But the
compensating gain in human interest more than justifies the author's
choice of treatment. He never allowed himself to forget that he was
telling a story, that he was writing the adventures of a small group of
emigrant English families, not a history of colonial settlement and its
difficulties. Nor does he ever take advantage of the fact that, with the
exception of two or three others whose works are collections of sketches
rather than novels, and whose names are now almost forgotten, he was the
first to describe in fiction the rural life of the country, to recognise
the beginning of an aristocracy of landholders, and to commemorate the
pervading spirit of cheerful confidence to which so much of the rapid
early development of Australia was due.
It may well be regretted that one who had so keen an eye for all that
was best in the social life of the country, at one of its most
interesting periods, should not have written a volume or two of
reminiscences, but no colonial reader would wish _Geoffry Hamlyn_ or
_The Hillyars and the Burtons_ to have been made the vehicle of more
descriptive matter than they contain. Kingsley was more sparing in the
use of local colour and incident than Boldrewood and some of the younger
writers are, though in his first novel a few passages occur which may be
considered unnecessary, including the story told by the hut-keeper to
Hamlyn in the presence of the disguised bushrangers, the whisking of
Captain Blockstrop and his friends on and off the stage, and the story
of the lost child. The latter, however, like Dr. Mulhaus' geological
lecture, has the merit of being one of the best pieces of prose the
author ever wrote, and gives Sam Buckley and Cecil Mayford an
opportunity for a dramatic settlement of the order of their suit for the
hand of Alice Brentwood. In the main narrative the periods of 'dull
prosperity' are expressly avoided. After that first beautiful picture of
the pioneer settlement, 'the scene so venerable, so ancient, so seldom
seen in the old world--the patriarchs moving into the desert with all
their wealth to find a new pasture land'--the action of the story is
rapidly advanced to the later days of their success. The estate which
has been the home of Major Buckley's forefathers for generations no
longer providing a competence, he has resolutely left it for the land
where he is to find 'a new heaven and a new earth.' Unlike so many of
the pioneers, he has bade a final good-bye to England, but that it is
_not_ 'for ever' one can safely predict from the outset. He sees the old
country in long years after, when, with some of the wealth garnered on
the rolling prairies of Northern Australia, his son has proudly bought
back the family domain of Clere in all the completeness of its original
acres. Within a few brief chapters the colonists are discovered in the
security of assured wealth. Sitting under their station verandahs, they
can contemplate almost with calmness the death of their cattle by
hundreds, and the devastation of their runs by Bush fires. They have
arrived at the period when 'there was money in the bank, claret in the
cellar, and race-horses in the paddock.' Meanwhile, the old Devonshire
life is becoming a dim memory. They have kept their promise to create a
new Drumston in the wilderness, and are well content with their homes
among the southern fern-clad hills. The history of their intercourse
approaches the character of an epic. Over his structure of realism--of
life as he saw it and lived it himself--the writer has cast a softening
glow of romance, through which are seen the beauties of ideal
friendship, of youthful love, family affection, pride of nationality,
and charity towards all mankind.
Kingsley was a lover of his fellows, and wont to declare that the
proportion of good to bad in human nature was as ten to one the world
over. This tenet of his religion he infused in some measure into all his
novels. It is this they teach if they teach anything. From it spring
their most vital qualities. The best of the stories possess that
'certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere,' which Matthew Arnold
assigned as the gift of literary genius. Their virility and right
feeling are unmistakable, and insensibly teach the practice of a silent
and kindly forbearance towards the foibles of our fellow-creatures. The
names alone of the principal characters in _Geoffry Hamlyn_ recall scene
after scene in their idyllic life to which it refreshes the mind to
return. There is Major Buckley, a hero of Waterloo, gigantic in stature,
refined, calmly courageous--a fitting leader of the settlement; Mrs.
Buckley, high-bred, stately, self-reliant, a model English matron; Tom
Troubridge, the big, merry Devonian, grown with prosperity weighty and
didactic in his speech, and thinking of turning his attention to
politics; Miss Thornton, the dignified, sweet old maid, born to spend
her life in uncomplaining service of others; Mary Hawker, tragic,
passionate, paying the slow penalty of youthful wilfulness; Captain
Brentwood, of Wellington's artillery, and his gallant son Jim, who is
sighing for a red coat and a commission; Sam and Alice, the young lovers
so nearly lost to each other 'in the year when the bushrangers came
down'; and Dr. Mulhaus, the mysterious German, with his good-humoured
roar, first heard at old Drumston, and with us to the end, who is
everybody's friend and counsellor, and beloved by all--except George
Hawker, of whose 'tom-cat' skull he has made that amusingly audacious
examination at the beginning of their acquaintance. It is delightful to
find all the faces familiar in the old land reappearing in the new, even
though the coincidences which attend their coming seem too good to be
true.
But the reader forgets the occasional loose-jointedness of the story in
contemplation of the swift succession of happy scenes created for him.
In these there is nothing dubious or artificial. They are sketches
straight from the life of the country, and it is their beauty that makes
_Geoffry Hamlyn_ a classic in Australian literature.
Among the characters, there are so many who inspire us with love rather
than mere interest, that a multiplicity of similar scenes, of
conversations, rides, pleasure-excursions, and other intercourse, which
in another book might prove wearisome, becomes here the best enjoyment
of the reader. With what vivacity and gusto the author describes the
visits exchanged between the home stations, and the comforts and
happiness which they reveal! Half the book is made up of them, and yet
the majority remain sufficiently clear in the memory to be recalled
separately. Brentwood, who is at first fifty miles away, buys a station
near at hand, he and Buckley having become inseparable, and now Baroona,
Garoopna, and Toonarbin are only a few miles apart. 'There was always a
hostage from one staying as a guest at the other.' The visits were
generally unannounced, and the visitors stayed as long as they felt
inclined to. The effects of this custom are once amusingly illustrated
at the home of Captain Brentwood. It is when the members of the little
colony hear of the arrival of his beautiful daughter from Sydney, where
she has been at school. 'That week one of those runs upon the Captain's
hospitality took place which are common enough in the Bush, and,
although causing a temporary inconvenience, are generally as much
enjoyed by the entertainers as the entertained. Everybody during this
next week came to see them, and nobody went back again. So by the end of
the week there were a dozen or fourteen guests assembled, all uninvited,
and apparently bent on making a long stay of it.' They help one another
when there is work to be done, dine sumptuously, picnic luxuriously.
Kingsley has properly made eating and drinking a noticeable part of the
hearty full-bodied existence of his squatters and their friends.
There is no class of people who have a better capacity for enjoying the
material comforts of life than the country gentlemen of Australia. Major
Buckley is just the sort of person one might have expected to hold
decided views on the subject of dining as an art. To dine in the middle
of the day was, in his opinion, a gross abuse of the gifts of
Providence. 'I eat my dinner not so much for the sake of the dinner
itself as for the after-dinnerish feeling which follows--a feeling that
you have nothing to do, and that, if you had, you'd be shot if you'd do
it.'
On another occasion the author himself preaches a similarly agreeable
doctrine, concluding with the advice: 'My brother, let us breakfast in
Scotland, lunch in Australia, and dine in France, till our lives end.'
Nor is the kindred subject of lounging in midsummer forgotten. Anyone in
an armchair under a broad Australian verandah, who fetched anything for
himself, would, in the author's opinion, 'show himself a man of weak
mind.' Niggers were all that a Southern gentleman wanted to complete his
comfort when the sun was at baking-point. Mrs. Beecher Stowe's teachings
undergo a playful deprecation. Did she know the exertion required for
cutting up a pipe of tobacco in a hot north wind; or the amount of
perspiration and anger superinduced by knocking the head off a bottle of
Bass in January; or the physical prostration caused by breaking two
lumps of hard white sugar in a pawnee before a thunderstorm? The
Southern gentleman undertakes to affirm that she didn't.
In the conversation of Kingsley's colonists, the business of the
squatter, his hopes, fears and struggles, find no place, and the idea of
hard work is never obtruded for its own sake. The talk is the talk of a
cultured class who live wholesome lives and have no cares. The twelve
thousand miles that separate them from the centre of their intellectual
life are obliterated. The men preserve their individual tastes, together
with that comradeship and mutual considerateness which have their origin
in the best traditions of college life. The same loyalty and chivalry
are prominently reproduced in the characters of _Ravenshoe_ and _Silcote
of Silcotes_. But in _Geoffry Hamlyn_ these qualities are perhaps more
noticeable (at all events to a colonial reader) than in the later
novels, because of the contrast they furnish to the essentially
competitive life of modern Australia. Brentwood is 'excessively attached
to mathematics, and has leisure to gratify his hobby'; Harding, 'an
Oxford man,' is 'an inveterate writer of songs,' a pastime which only
the annual business of shearing is permitted to interrupt; Buckley is
intent on the education of his son, in which he is careful to provide
for a knowledge of the Latin Grammar; while Doctor Mulhaus finds the new
country an even better field than the old one for his researches as a
naturalist and geologist. In telling his story, Kingsley seems, in
short, to have treated pioneer squatting in Australia as the brighter
aspects of English country life have been treated in fiction for
generations past. He expends his best efforts in showing the picturesque
surroundings and interior comfort of Australian homes. Neither their
tables nor their bookshelves lack any of the best luxuries of the hour.
The greyness and rawness of their environment are not touched upon.
Marcus Clarke could never have shown the Australian people so much of
the beauty of their strange fauna and flora as can be found in _Geoffry
Hamlyn_. He would have allowed the budding civilisation of the country
to be swallowed up in sombre desolate forests, or appear as lonely
specks on bleached and thirsty plains. Though he might intend the
contrary, that, substantially, would be the final impression left on
the mind of the reader. Australian scenery awed and depressed him. With
all his powers of graphic expression, he could seldom write of it
without exaggeration. It was the fascination of the grotesque rather
than the picturesque that he felt. Kingsley, though scarcely so graceful
and vivid a describer, had a keener and more constant sense of natural
beauty. His vision was unclouded by the peculiar susceptibility of
temperament which narrowed the view of his brilliant contemporary. He
could not have indulged in rhetorical flourishes at the expense of
accuracy, as in the familiar passage professing to give the Australian
view of 'our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds
who cannot fly, our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all
fours.' A comparison of Marcus Clarke's too often quoted description
with the sketches of landscape given in, say, the twentieth,
twenty-eighth and thirty-sixth chapters of _Geoffry Hamlyn_ and at the
beginning of the third volume of _The Hillyars and the Burtons_
curiously illustrates how far the appreciation of Australian scenery
depends upon the point of view of the observer.
Kingsley's descriptions, like all else that he wrote of the country,
breathe an unmistakable personal enjoyment. They are the natural
expression of a happy disposition, just as is the boyish fun with which
he surrounds the love-making of his characters. 'Halbert kicked Jim's
shins under the table, and whispered: "You've lost your money, old
fellow!"' when Sam Buckley, flushed and happy, rejoined his friends in
the sitting-room at Garoopna, after proposing to Alice in the garden.
Jim Brentwood had peevishly bet his friend that the lovers would go on
shilly-shallying half their lives; but Halbert, with keener vision, had
foreseen the very hour of their betrothal, and made a bet of five pounds
on the event. More comical still is the spectacle of Hamlyn ducking
under the bedclothes to escape the boot that is about to be flung at
him, for laughingly discrediting the story of which his bosom-friend
Stockbridge has tragically unburdened himself concerning the
evaporation of his love for Mary Hawker.
Whether in recording the actions and dialogue of his characters, or in
describing scenery and the habits of the birds and animals which figure
so often in his first novel, Kingsley always reflected some of his own
happiness. It is not wit nor subtle humour, but a combination of pure
mirth with the enthusiasm of warm friendship, that maintains one's
interest in the simple life of the new Drumston. There is an abundance
of farcical fun and playfulness which force laughter, and never approach
an unkindness. The men avoid being smart at each other's expense; and if
they cannot claim to be clever or heroic, they are at least good
fellows, any one of whom might serve as a model of manliness.
Kingsley's knowledge of household pets was of the kind exhibited by
persons who have spent some period of their lives in loneliness, with
only the companionship of dumb creatures. He was an acute observer of
their peculiarities, with the noting of which he combined a whimsical
exaggeration. The account of the menagerie which Sam Buckley found at
Garoopna on the occasion of his memorable first meeting with Alice
Brentwood is almost unique in Australian literature.
Buckley's ride to rescue his sweetheart from the bushrangers is one of
the most moving and dramatic incidents in the book, and a good specimen
of Kingsley's graphic narrative style. A band of the outlaws who were
the terror of pioneer colonists fifty years ago have risen in the
district, and, after committing outrages at one station, are reported to
be riding on to another twenty miles distant. At the latter, Captain
Brentwood's home, Alice happens to be alone. When the terrible news
comes to her young lover, he is at Baroona, which by the shortest road
is ten miles from Brentwood's. What start have the bushrangers had, and
will they arrive before him?
Sam's noble horse, Widderin, a horse with a pedigree a hundred years
old, stood in the stable. The buying of that horse had been Sam's
only extravagance, for which he had often reproached himself, and
now this day he would see whether he would get his money's-worth out
of that horse or no.
I followed him up to the stable, and found him putting the bridle on
Widderin's beautiful little head. Neither of us spoke; only when I
handed him the saddle, and helped him with the girths, he said, 'God
bless you!'
I ran out and got down the slip-rails for him. As he rode by, he
said, 'Good-bye, Uncle Jeff; perhaps you won't see me again'; and I
cried out, 'Remember your God and your mother, Sam, and don't do
anything foolish.' Then he was gone....
Looking across the plains the way he should go, I saw another
horseman toiling far away, and recognised Doctor Mulhaus. Good
Doctor! he had seen the danger in a moment, and by his ready wit had
got a start of everyone else by ten minutes. The Doctor, on his
handsome, long-bodied Arabian mare, was making good work of it
across the plains, when he heard the rush of a horse's feet behind
him, and turning, he saw tall Widderin bestridden by Sam, springing
over the turf, gaining on him stride after stride. In a few minutes
they were alongside of one another.
'Good lad!' cried the Doctor. 'On, forwards; catch her, and away to
the woods with her! Bloodhound Desborough will be on their trail in
half an hour. Save her, and we will have noble vengeance!'
Sam only waved his hand in good-bye, and sped on across the plain
like a solitary ship at sea. The good horse, with elastic and easy
motion, fled on his course like a bird, lifting his feet clearly and
rapidly through the grass. The brisk south wind filled his wide
nostrils as he turned his graceful neck from side to side, till,
finding that work was meant, and not play, he began to hold his head
straight before him, and rush steadily forward....
One stumble now, and it were better to lie down on the plain and
die. He was in the hands of God, and he felt it. He said one short
prayer, but that towards the end was interrupted by the wild current
of his thoughts. Was there any hope? They, the devils, would have
been drinking at the Mayfords', and perhaps would go slow; or would
they ride fast and wild? After thinking a short time, he feared the
latter. They had tasted blood, and knew that the country would be
roused on them shortly....
Here are a brace of good pistols, and they with care shall give
account, if need be, of two men. After that, nothing. It were
better--so much better--not to live if one were only ten minutes too
late.... Now he was in the forest again, and now as he rode quickly
down the steep sandy road among the bracken, he heard the hoarse
rush of the river in his ears, and knew the end was well-nigh
come.... Now the house was in sight, and now he cried aloud some
wild inarticulate sound of thankfulness and joy. All was as peaceful
as ever, and Alice, unconscious, stood white-robed in the verandah,
feeding her birds.
As he rode up he shouted to her and beckoned. She came running
through the house, and met him breathless at the doorway.
'The bushrangers, Alice, my love!' he said. 'We must fly this
instant; they are close to us now.'
She had been prepared for this. She knew her duty well, for her
father had often told her what to do. No tears! no hysterics! She
took Sam's hand without a word, and, placing her fairy foot upon his
boot, vaulted up into the saddle before him.... They crossed the
river, and dismounting, they led the tired horse up the steep slope
of turf that surrounded a little castellated tor of bluestone....
'I do not see them anywhere, Alice,' said Sam presently. 'I see no
one coming across the plains. They must be either very near us in
the hollow of the river-valley, or else a long way off.'
'There they are!' said Alice. 'Surely there is a large party of
horsemen on the plain, but they are seven or eight miles off.'
'Ay, ten,' said Sam. 'I am not sure that they are horsemen.' Then he
said suddenly in a whisper, 'Lie down, my love, in God's name! Here
they are, close to us!'
There burst on his ear a confused round of talking and laughing, and
out of one of the rocky gullies leading towards the river came the
men they had been flying from, in number about fourteen. They had
crossed the river, for some unknown reason, and to the fear-struck
hiders it seemed as though they were making straight towards their
lair.
He had got Widderin's head in his breast, blindfolding him with his
coat, for should he neigh now they were undone indeed! As the
bushrangers approached, the horse began to get uneasy and paw the
ground, putting Sam in such an agony of terror that the sweat rolled
down his face. In the midst of this he felt a hand on his arm, and
Alice's voice, which he scarcely recognised, said in a fierce
whisper: 'Give me one of your pistols, sir!'
'Leave that to me!' he replied, in the same tone.
'As you please,' she said; 'but I must not fall alive into their
hands. Never look your mother in the face again if I do.'
He gave one more glance around, and saw that the enemy would come
within a hundred yards of their hiding-place. Then he held the horse
faster than ever and shut his eyes.
Was it a minute only, or an hour, until they heard the sound of the
voices dying away in the roar of the river, and, opening their eyes
once more, looked into one another's faces? Faces they thought that
they had never seen before--so each told the other afterwards--so
wild, so haggard, and so strange.
If, as Professor Masson says, 'it is by his characters that a novelist
is chiefly judged,' Henry Kingsley's future reputation will be found to
depend almost solely on what he accomplished in _Geoffry Hamlyn_, _The
Hillyars and the Burtons_ and _Ravenshoe_. In the first two of these
there is an abundance of original observation and little conscious study
of character. The vivid Australian scenes of the one, and the Chelsea
life of the other, are transcripts of the author's own memories. His
knowledge of the squatters he got by working for them and living with
them; what he knew of police and convicts and bushrangers he learned in
doing police duty; the life of the Burtons, as told in 'Jim Burton's
Story,' was that which the author saw during his boyhood round his
father's old rectory on Chelsea Embankment.
'He seemed to me,' says Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie, 'to have lived his own
books, battled them out and forced them into their living shapes, to
have felt them and been them all.' Hardly all--one feels bound to say.
The remark is entirely true of nearly everything in _Geoffry Hamlyn_ and
of three-fourths of _The Hillyars and the Burtons_, but to _Ravenshoe_
it applies in a more limited degree, and to some of the later novels
scarcely ever. Either through carelessness (of which one often suspects
him) or deficiency of judgment, Kingsley more than once allowed the
exigencies of his plots to destroy all consistency in his characters.
Thus, Squire Silcote, the clever old ex-lawyer, is made to retire from
the world and brood for many years, and on quite insufficient grounds,
in the belief that his first wife had been unfaithful, and had tried to
poison him. Nothing short of a condition of semi-insanity could explain
his conduct. In other respects the character is finely conceived. Emma
Burton, too, is a perfectly natural and charming person until she is
employed to revive the old problem of how far a sense of duty can
triumph over the power of love. Her devotion to her deformed brother is
wrong, because it is unnecessary. But even if this were not the case, it
would be irrational in a woman so eminently sensible and unromantic as
she is shown to be in the first half of the story. Almost at the
beginning of her voluntary service she is represented as realising 'the
hideous fate to which she has condemned herself in her fanaticism.' It
is quite impossible to make the reader believe that, loving Erne Hillyar
as she did, she could for years persist in rejecting him, and that her
brother would permit so much sacrifice on his account.
The beautiful, crazy Gerty Neville is another instance of perversion.
Her silliness is exaggerated in order that she shall weary and disgust
the _blasé_ aristocrat who has married her. Some of her chatter is more
inconceivable than the 'coo-ee-ing' which Mr. Hornung's 'Bride from the
Bush' employed to attract the attention of a colonial acquaintance of
hers in Rotten Row.
But the distortion which the character of Emma Burton undergoes, and the
caricature of Gerty Neville, are, after all, easily pardonable faults in
a story rich in noble thought and sympathy, bright with pretty,
audacious nonsense, and containing such real personages as Jim Burton
and his father and mother, Erne Hillyar, and the Honourable Jack Dawson.
Even in _Silcote of Silcotes_ there are intermittent glimpses of
finely-conceived character which almost outbalance the eccentricities of
the Dark Squire and his sister, the fantastic meddler in foreign
intrigue. Kingsley's skill lay chiefly in his portrayal of men,
especially of young men, such as the dashing Charles Ravenshoe and his
philosophic friend Marston (a study of the George Warrington type);
Lord Welter, Lieutenant Hillyar, and Colonel Tom Silcote, reckless
profligates, but likeable fellows all; Frank Maberly, the athletic
curate; and Sam Buckley, the type of an Australian country gentleman.
With old men he was less successful. Lord Saltire, the placid
good-natured cynic of _Ravenshoe_, is, however, a clever exception. 'All
old women are beautiful,' says Kingsley in one of his stories, and he
never portrayed one that was not. His best are Miss Thornton and Lady
Ascot. The younger women, excepting Mary Hawker and Adelaide Summers,
are rather slightly drawn. Even Alice Brentwood is a somewhat indistinct
personage compared with the Australian girls of Mrs. Campbell Praed and
Ada Cambridge.
The superior position usually accorded to _Ravenshoe_ among Kingsley's
novels is merited more by the soundness of its plot than by the
naturalness of its characters. It was the author's first essay in pure
romance, and, with Henry Kingsley, to build character from imagination
was always largely, sometimes extravagantly, to idealise. He loved to
people old country houses with walking mysteries, to unravel tangled
genealogies, and discover secrets of youthful folly, to apportion
property to rightful heirs, and endow his characters with a superhuman
generosity. When Charles Ravenshoe is recovering from the long illness
which terminates the full series of his misfortunes, he sends for
Welter, the man who might be considered his arch-enemy, who not so long
before that had seduced Charles's sister and stole his _fiancée_.
Ravenshoe is represented as forgetting all his newly-suffered wrongs,
and thinking only of Welter as his favourite schoolfellow and youthful
companion. Anticipating doubts as to the feasibility of this, the author
proceeds to discuss the point with the reader, as he does in many
similar instances throughout the story. He appears to have a constant
anxiety about the impression he is making, and his comments and
confidences certainly become distasteful. But this foible goes only a
small way to discount the sterling merits of the novel.
ADA CAMBRIDGE.
Towards the close of 1890 the Australian booksellers--a cautious,
conservative class in their attitude towards new fiction, especially
that produced by the adventurous female writer of these latter
days--began to display so marked an interest in the work of Ada
Cambridge, that one not acquainted with the circumstances of the case
might have credited them with a friendly--possibly a patriotic--desire
to give due place to a newly-risen native genius. And when, in the
following year, another story from the same pen appeared, the popularity
of the author was firmly established.
The neat red volumes were on every stall; the Mudie of Melbourne gave
them a place of honour in his show-window, and the leading critical
review said that the second story possessed a charm which ought to
induce even the person who ignored fiction on principle to make an
exception in its favour. It was the kind of gratifying recognition that
the public always believes itself eager to offer the deserving young
writer. Yet Ada Cambridge's literary work had extended over no less a
period than fifteen years. Of course, much of this delay in securing
recognition might have been avoided. Probably in England she could have
won a substantial reputation in a third of the time, and with half the
labour expended by her in contributing to the Australian press. But, as
the wife of a country clergyman, she had other matters besides
literature to occupy her attention, and was content to write when there
happened to be leisure for it, and to see her work in a few of the
leading colonial newspapers.
About half a dozen novels were issued in this way, besides occasional
articles and poems. The publication of the longer stories in the
_Australasian_, a high-class weekly journal, ought in itself to have
made a name for the author, and possibly would have done so, were they
not in most cases so obviously a local product, and therefore not to be
seriously considered. It was a repetition of the experience of Rolf
Boldrewood. In the end, as usual, it was the English public that first
accepted her novels for what they were worth.
Ada Cambridge is a native of Norfolk, the lonely fens and quaint
villages of which are a picturesque background of some of her best
stories. In 1870, shortly after her marriage, she went with her husband,
the Rev. George Frederick Cross, a clergyman of the Church of England,
to Wangaratta, in Victoria. After residing successively in several other
country towns of this colony, they settled in 1893 at Williamstown, a
waterside suburb of Melbourne.
A novel entitled _Up the Murray_, dealing with life in the colonies, was
published by Ada Cambridge (the author continues to issue her work under
her maiden name) in the Melbourne press in 1875. Others of the same
character followed at irregular intervals. Two were issued in book-form
by a London firm of publishers, but did not attain to much more than a
library circulation.
When the author again came before the English public, it was with a
novel in which the purely Australian interest was rigidly subordinated
to dramatic quality and a richly sympathetic study of character. _A
Marked Man_ is the story of a younger son of an old English county
family who, while sharing the pride and indomitable spirit of his
ancestry, develops a hatred for conventional prejudices and religious
cant, and, after making a final assertion of independence by marrying a
farmer's daughter, emigrates to New South Wales to establish a name and
fortune on his own account.
The first half of the action takes place in England, the remainder in
the colonies. The natural beauties surrounding the home of the Delavels
at Sydney are not less delicately and poetically described than the
village life they have left behind in the mother country--the
patriarchal rule of an old-fashioned, rather pompous house, over a
people retaining the hereditary respect of vassals for their feudal
lord; but the view given of Australian society is, in keeping with the
relation to it of Richard Delavel and his household, of the slightest
kind.
Delavel and the only daughter whom he has trained to be his second self,
whose comradeship makes him almost forget the long-drawn thraldom of his
early _mésalliance_, live in a world so much and so necessarily their
own, that one is grateful for the good taste which excluded from it the
bustle and commoner interests of colonial life. The novel met with
general, and in several instances cordial, favour in England, and since
then the author has yearly increased her reputation.
Three out of five of the later novels are, like _A Marked Man_, made
comparatively independent of the distinctively local interest to which
we have been accustomed in the works of most Australian authors. It is
not possible, for example, to point out anything in the shape of an
essentially local first cause for any of the principal incidents of
_Not All in Vain_ and _A Marriage Ceremony_. The passionate half-brute,
Neil Hammond, who pursues the heroine of the former story across the
world, and terrorises her with his unwelcome attentions, would have met
a violent death, or himself have murdered someone, in his own country or
elsewhere as inevitably as in Australia; and the man who killed him
would not have found Katherine Knowles less faithful during the long
years of his imprisonment had her sacrifice been under the daily
observation of Hammond's family and her own strait-laced aunts in their
East Norfolk home.
In _A Marriage Ceremony_, the only advantage secured by taking the story
from London to Melbourne--instead of to New York, let us say--seems to
lie in whatever added strength the sense of greater distance imparts to
the temporary appearance of a final separation between Betty Ochiltree
and her strangely-wedded husband. The marriage that was a condition of
their inheritance having been performed, bride and bridegroom part in
accordance with a previous agreement. The former reappears as a
prominent figure in the society of modern Melbourne--the Melbourne of
1893, when the failure of banks and land companies was a regular subject
of morning news.
Here, it might be supposed, was an opportunity for one or two vivid and
instructive sketches of the sensational period that witnessed the proof
of so much folly and its punishment, and wrought so many more effects on
all classes of Australian society than could be noted in the common
records of the time. But the great crisis is almost ignored in the
novel. There are merely a few passing references to its progress, and a
mention of the loss on the part of Mrs. Ochiltree of some of the wealth
which she is beginning to regard as having been rather spuriously
acquired.
Even the very successful story of the _Three Miss Kings_ and _A Mere
Chance_ tell little of the city life of Australia, though their action
is placed in it almost exclusively. The latter is a tale of match-making
intrigue and money-worship in Toorak, but the main interest of the plot
apart, the account of fashionable Melbourne is a singularly colourless
one. As for Mrs. Duff-Scott and her Major, the amiable pair who in the
character of leaders of Melbourne society undertake to find husbands for
Elizabeth King and her sisters, and whose benevolent intentions are so
effectually forestalled, they are as conventionally English as though
they belonged to the pages of Miss Braddon or Mrs. Henry Wood.
Again, though during half of _Fidelis_ we are given occasional
impressive and delightful glimpses of Nature under southern skies, the
principal characters are English, and in England is centred first and
last the dominant pathos of the story. A complete absence of dialect
from the novels helps to emphasise the author's slender use of
extraneous aids to interest.
The influence of Ada Cambridge's twenty-five years' Australian
experience is shown in her general outlook upon life, rather than in the
details of her work. The prevailing tone of her books is one of marked
cheerfulness, sincerity, and simplicity; she has a hearty dislike for
conventional stupidities, especially for the mock-modesty that stifles
honest sentiment; and she gives emphatic endorsement to the pleasant
dictum (which seems so much more feasible in sunny Australia than in
colder northern lands) that the second half of life is not less fruitful
and satisfying than the first.
As the general effect of Ada Cambridge's teaching, so far as it can be
gathered from her plots, and the few instances in which she has
permitted herself anything in the shape of didactic expression, is to
make us more patient with life's complexities and perceptive of its
compensations, and more content with whatever happiness may be drawn in
our way by the chain of accidents called Destiny, so do her principal
characters, in their foibles and their strength--in the little acts and
impulses which qualify alike their heroism and their baseness--tend to
make us more discriminative and charitable.
In almost every case they are strong studies from some point of view.
Of deliberate analysis there is very little; but there are numerous
realistic touches not commonly admitted in fiction, which, handled with
skill and insight, keep the character within the pale of common
experience and increase rather than alienate the reader's sympathy.
Thus, Richard Delavel's outburst of relief upon the death of his first
wife, so far from being vulgar and brutal, as it might have seemed in
other circumstances, recalls and emphasises the high sense of duty and
honour and the iron self-restraint which had enabled him to be in all
essentials a good husband for twenty-five years to a cold-hearted
creature, between whom and himself there had never been either common
interest or feeling, and for whose sake he had relinquished the woman
that would have been his real mate in intellect and sympathy. Delavel's
housekeeper, who is also a privileged friend, takes him to task for his
unseemly hurry to go in search of this old love before his wife had been
a week in her grave. He makes no secret of his relief. 'The sense that
I am free is turning my brain with joy,' he confesses.
'I say it because I feel it. I am aware that it is in very bad
taste, but that doesn't make it the less true. Do you suppose people
are never glad when their relations die? They are--very often; they
can't help it; only they pretend they are not, because it seems so
shocking. I don't pretend--at least, I need not pretend to you. The
fault is not always--not all--on the side of the survivors, Hannah.
I don't think I am any worse than those who pretend a grief that
they don't feel. I was never unkind to her--never in my life, that I
can remember. I did not kill her; I would have kept her alive as
long as I possibly could. I think--I hope--that if I could have
saved her by the sacrifice of my own life, I should have done it
without a single moment's hesitation.'
'I am sure you would,' said Hannah.
'But,' he continued, with that unwonted fire blazing in his eyes,
'since dead she is, I _am_ glad--I am, I am! I am glad as a man who
has been kept in prison is to be let out. It is not my fault; I
would be sorry if I could. Some day, Hannah--some day, when we have
been dust for a few hundred years--perhaps for a few score
only--people will wake up to see how stupid it is to drive a man to
be glad when his wife is dead. They are finding out so many things;
they will find that out too in time.'
Probably it will still appear to many that Delavel's admission was at
least indelicate and inconsistent with his chivalrous nature. It is not
here possible to convey an adequate impression of his fiery spirit, his
long heart-hunger, and the magnitude of the loss which a wholly
uncongenial marriage must ever mean to such a man. When the full story
of his life and that of his quietly 'implacable' wife is read, his
conduct seems natural and excusable. It is as much a part of himself as
the tremulous tenderness with which he ministers to the comfort of the
frail Constance Bethune, after finding and bringing her home, or as his
fierce grief when she dies.
Another very human spectacle that illustrates the author's method is the
reunion of Betty and Rutherford Ochiltree--the frank selfishness of
their mutual joy while the poor woman who had been an unconscious
barrier between them lies dead under their roof. It is a somewhat
painful episode, and precludes anything like high esteem for Rutherford,
but it has the quality of intense actuality.
In like manner is Adam Drewe shorn of some of the merit of his devotion
to the heroine of _Fidelis_ by being shown in successive attachments to
other women during his long exile in Australia. The author recognises
that, 'the laws of literary romance being so much at variance with the
laws of Nature,' Adam is certain to suffer in the reader's good opinion
for having 'continued to hunger for feminine sympathy as well as his
daily dinner.' No doubt his stature as a hero lessens when it appears
that though the absent Fidelia was ever in his thoughts, and a daily
source of inspiration to him as a writer, he twice narrowly escaped
marriage--first with a servant girl at his lodgings, and afterwards with
the daughter of his landlady--and that at another period of his colonial
life he became involved in a disreputable kind of Bohemianism. But he is
not disgraced by these lapses to the extent that the author anticipates;
at all events, they make him more human than he could otherwise have
been.
It is this power of infusing a robust humanity into her characters that
makes the distinctive feature of Ada Cambridge's best novels. In each,
whatever the quality of the plot, there are always two or three
personages who talk and act as real men and women do--now rationally or
in obedience to custom, now passionately or with that perversity which,
as the author once describes it, 'is like a natural law, independent of
other laws, the only one that persistently defies our calculations.'
They are mostly big people with big appetites. The beauty of the women
is the beauty of mind and of sound physical health.
Susy Delavel was tall, well grown, straight and graceful, with an
intelligent, eager face, though 'her mouth was large, her nose not all
it should have been, and her complexion showed the want of parasols and
veils.' She was 'not handsome at all, but decidedly attractive.'
Sarah French, the girl in _Fidelis_ whose comeliness so nearly drew the
hero from his old allegiance, has 'a strong and good, rather than a
pretty, face,' with a 'large and substantial figure.' Adam Drewe
concluded on first sight of her that she was a nice woman. Later on he
finds her 'looking the very incarnation of home, with her cheerful
healthy face, her strong busy hands, her neat hair, her neat dress....
She might have sat for a statue of Motherhood--of Charity with a babe at
her ample breast, and others clinging to her supporting hand; Nature had
so evidently intended her to play the part.'
Katherine Knowles has fine physical symmetry and a strong, frank face.
While lacking 'the airs and graces, the superficial brightness, of
conventional girlhood,' she is 'singularly vivid in her more substantial
way.'
Betty Ochiltree's beauty, too, is of the kind that wears well. She has a
face 'frank and spirited, firm of mouth and chin, kind and sweet, as
honest as the day,' surmounting an ample body, and she carries herself
with dignity, 'as few Australian girls can do.' And how impressive and
consistent with her character is the noble, placid figure of Elizabeth
King, 'perfect in proportion, fine in texture, full of natural dignity
and ease!'
The author is fond of showing the attractiveness of such women at the
age of thirty, or even more. 'In real life,' she once observes, 'the
supremely interesting woman is not a girl of eighteen, as she is in
fiction. Every man worth calling a man knows that. A girl of that age
... knows as much about love as does a young animal in the spring, and
not a bit more. And the human male of these days--so highly developed,
so subtly compounded--has grown out of the stage when that much would
satisfy him. I mean, of course, the human male who in real life answers
to the hero in fiction--a man who must have left, not only his teens,
but his twenties behind him.'
When one comes to the heroes, it is easy to recall half a dozen
commanding figures who blunder in the most natural and amiable manner in
their affairs; who think a good deal more of their immediate personal
comforts than of religious or ethical abstractions; who like their own
way and try to get it; who, in short, are mostly what the author wishes
them to appear--'the men out of books that we meet every day.' Of little
men, in the physical sense, there are only two of any importance, but
even these are virile and masterful. A general aim of the stories would
seem to be to show the sexes what each chiefly admires in the other. It
is first a sort of apotheosis of the _mens sana in corpore sano_, and
after that an illustration of the independent attractions of sympathy,
gentleness, culture, and high character.
Though in most cases the strongest attachments are formed between men
and women arrived at an age to discriminate beyond mere physical charm,
nevertheless physical charm is the most powerful, though not always
acknowledged, motive of their choice. 'Because of this,' says the
pathetic Hilda Donne in _A Marriage Ceremony_, touching her cheek, which
is terribly disfigured by a birth-mark, 'I have never had _love_. Can
you think what that means? You can't. Once I thought I was not going to
be quite shut out--once; but I was mistaken. I have found out that it is
for one's body that one is loved, and not for one's soul.'
Hilda unconsciously exaggerates, for it appears that Rutherford Hope,
though at first affected with disgust by her disfigurement, and
convinced that no healthy man could consort with 'so unnatural a woman,'
had come at last to regard her as a possible wife--before he was
confronted with the sudden temptation to secure a fortune by wedding
Betty Ochiltree, in compliance with the conditions of her millionaire
uncle's will. Yet Hilda's comment is substantially sound. Even
Rutherford, with all the sense of his mature years, and all the culture
that enabled him to appreciate her poetic gift, would have had to argue
himself into a marriage with her.
The ugliness of Adam Drewe, from which his mother turned in disgust at
his birth, and which in youth drove him across the seas in an agony of
sensitiveness from the woman he loved, was a less serious affliction
than that of Hilda Donne; but we know that he continued to be keenly
reminded of its disadvantages long after time had proved the sterling
qualities of his manhood, lessened his deformity, and brought him fame
and wealth.
Compared with the previous illustration, however, his case is at fault
in failing to give a sufficient description of his deformity. But that
he himself long thought it an insuperable bar to his happiness is clear.
When he fell in love with Fidelia Plunket, she was temporarily blind.
His affection for her was returned, and he knew it, but dreading the
disillusionment that would ensue when her sight was restored, he fled to
Australia and determined to abandon all thought of her as a wife. Urged
to return, because 'when a woman _is_ a woman,' and really in love with
a man, 'there's no camel she won't swallow for him,' Drewe replied that
his camel was just the one camel that no woman had been known to
swallow, or, at any rate, to digest. And he remained--for twenty years.
The plots of Ada Cambridge's novels are of the episodical order, and the
author, despite her openly-expressed scorn for the unnaturalness of the
average conventional novel, has not disdained employment of some of its
time-honoured methods. Occasionally she is at pains to explain the
feasibility of coincidences employed to secure dramatic interest. They
are certainly never of an impossible kind, and no one would deny the
truism that real life abounds in them. But has not a distinguished
writer aptly pointed out that there are matters in which fiction cannot
compete with life? As a rule, however, where a few such weaknesses
exist, they do not count for much with the average reader when the
principal scenes are as finely drawn as those in _A Marked Man_ or
_Fidelis_, or _The Three Miss Kings_. The latter story in some details
puts a greater strain upon the credulity than any of the other novels,
yet so well conceived and absolutely natural are the characters of the
three girls, and so humorously and pictorially presented the chief
incidents in their development, that the dubious points of the plot
become almost insignificant. The qualities of the novel as a whole are
similar to those which obscure the artistic defects of _Geoffry Hamlyn_,
and which for thirty-seven years have made it one of the most popular of
Australian stories.
In the presentation of tragic or pathetic incidents lies Ada Cambridge's
chief power, as far as her plots are concerned. In _A Marked Man_ it is
accompanied by her highest achievements in portraying a variety of
well-contrasted character. _Fidelis_, which opens at the Norfolk village
of the earlier novel, and reintroduces the Delavels, contains fewer
developed characters, as may also be said of _A Marriage Ceremony_. But
the three novels are equal in the high standard of their emotional
quality. No quotation of moderate size could do justice to any of the
principal scenes of _A Marked Man_: the chivalrous sacrifice of Richard
Delavel's youthful marriage; the inward repentance of it for twenty-two
years; the revival of his love for Constance Bethune; his painful
anxiety for her health, hungry enjoyment of her companionship, and
anguish at her death; and his own death soon afterwards. In the more
briefly detailed tragedy that brings into such striking relief the
sprightly drama of _A Marriage Ceremony_, there is a scene giving a fair
example of the author's style in touching passages. When Hilda, deeply
in love with Rutherford Hope, hears of his union with another woman, she
takes the readiest means of effacing herself by suddenly marrying a
shallow coxcomb who seeks her for mercenary reasons, and going with him
to Australia. Years afterwards she is so affected by the sudden
reappearance of Rutherford, and by subsequent ill-treatment received
from her jealous husband, that an exhausting illness follows, and to
save herself from insanity she commits suicide. Meanwhile the long
separation of Rutherford and Betty Ochiltree, which began on the day of
their marriage, is coming to an end, and Hilda's death removes the final
impediment. Together they pay a last visit to the dead woman:
Incapable of speech, he lifted a tress of hair--flowing free over
the rigid arms, because it was really pretty, and thus had to be
made the most of--and pressed it a moment to his bearded mouth. In
that gesture he seemed to ask her forgiveness for having been a man
like other men, as Nature made them.
'Kiss _her_,' Betty whispered, pushing him a little. She, too, felt
that it would be something, if not much, to put to the account that
was so frightfully ill-balanced--a kiss from Rutherford before all
was wholly over.
He stooped and laid his lips--scarcely laid them--on the waxen
forehead. And he thought how he had nearly kissed her once, in the
scented spring dusk, at her father's gate, and been repelled at the
last moment by the thought of something that he could not see.... He
turned back the sheet and straightened it, and nobody but hired
undertakers had anything more to do with Hilda Donne. He put out the
lamps, leaving her in the dark, which, as a living, nervous woman,
she had always been afraid of; and he took Betty in his arms to
comfort her a little, before he opened the door upon the light and
life of their own transfigured world.
There is a characteristic vein of realism in the subsequent view of the
lovers' self-absorption and short-lived sorrow, and the callousness of
Donne.
No later than the same Saturday afternoon [Hilda was buried in the
morning], her Edward was cheering himself with his preparations for
New Zealand, whither he was easily persuaded to set off at once as a
means of distracting his mind from his domestic woes, and of
retiring gracefully from a Civil Service that was otherwise certain
to dismiss him; and there he shortly found a number of absorbing
interests, including--as Rutherford had predicted--a rosy-cheeked
second wife, who, as he wrote to Mrs. Ochiltree when announcing his
engagement, was all that heart could wish, and had apparently been
made on purpose for him.... No later than Saturday afternoon--and
early at that--Rutherford, having parted with the widower and seen
him off the premises, ran upstairs to his wife's door, with a spring
in his step and a light in his eyes that plainly showed his mourning
to be over. Hilda was dead and gone, but Betty was alive in her
splendid strength and beauty, and he was her husband and bridegroom,
and his hour had come! The grave had closed over that broken heart,
which had ached as long as it could feel, and ached most for him;
but the world was still glorious for him and his love, and never so
glorious as now. They began to bask in their happiness, as the house
in the sunshine that flooded it, now that the blinds were drawn up.
The shadow of death, close and terrible as it was, could not dim it
for them any more.
In all the novels there are memorable scenes of tenderness, among the
best of which are those between Fidelia and Adam Drewe, first in their
brief meetings as girl and youth--she with her weak eyes bandaged, but
reading him through his voice and bashful deprecation; he yearning to
remain with her, but forcing himself away--and then in long years after,
when he returns to find her in widowhood and poverty, and to all seeming
hopelessly blind.
The conception of the latter scene is quite the best to be found in the
whole of Ada Cambridge's work, and has not been equalled in its kind by
any other Australian writer. The simplicity and verbal reticence of this
chapter of intense feeling gives also a good sample of the author's
style of expression. Seldom ornate or much studied, it is ever a lucid
and easy style. As a narrative specimen, the following, from the same
novel, is conveniently quotable:
It was not much of an accident, but it was enough. The engine buried
its fore-paws in the soft earth of the embankment, where engines
were not meant to go, and then paused abruptly in the attitude of a
little dog hiding a bone in a flower-bed; the embankment sloped down
instead of up, and the monster hung upon the edge of it, nose to the
ground and hind-quarters in the air, looking as if a baby's touch
would send it over. Several carriages, violently running upon it and
being checked suddenly, stood on tip-toes, so to speak, and fell
into each other's arms with a vehemence that completely overset
them; one rolled right down the bank, head first, and the others
tumbled upon its kicking wheels. It was all over in a moment; and
the dazed passengers, realising in a second moment that the end of
the world was still an event in the future, picked themselves up as
best they could. No one was killed, but some were badly shaken, and
most of them screamed horribly. The sound of those screams, mingled
with the clanking and crashing of riven wood and metal, and the
hissing of escaping steam, conveyed the idea of such an appalling
catastrophe as would make history for the world.
Though not a satirist--she does not hate well enough to be that--Ada
Cambridge has occasionally a neat and forcible way of describing
character. Richard Delavel's first wife was 'a gentle and complaisant
being, soft and smooth, apparently yielding to the touch, but dense,
square, and solid as a well-dumped wool-bale.' When opposed in will or
contradicted in her opinion, she smiled resignedly, and, if it appeared
due to her dignity, sulked for a period. Yet generally she was 'the
evenest-tempered woman that ever a well-meaning husband found it
difficult to get on with.' A pattern of order and conscientiousness,
'governed by principles that were as correct as her manners and costume,
and as firmly established as the everlasting hills,' she might have made
an admirable wife for a clergyman, but was totally unsuited to Delavel,
as he to her.
Still, she was very proud of the look of 'blood' in her Richard, and
when he became wealthy, and she a fashionable hostess in Sydney
society, nothing delighted her more than her opportunities of making the
aristocratic connection known. Her own origin as the daughter of a
farmer was quite forgotten. 'Annie might have been a Delavel from the
beginning, in her own right, for all the recollection that remained to
her of the real character of her bringing up.... Years and certain
circumstances will often affect a woman's memory that way--a man somehow
manages to keep a better grasp of facts.'
Yelverton, the lover of Elizabeth King, an English aristocrat spending
some of his wealth in lessening the misery and vice of London, was 'not
the orthodox philanthropist, the half-feminine, half-neuter specialist
with a hobby, the foot-rule reformer, the prig with a mission to set the
world right; his benevolence was simply the natural expression of a
sense of sympathy and brotherhood between him and his fellows, and the
spirit which produced that was not limited in any direction.'
His friend, Major Duff-Scott, 'an ex-officer of dragoons, and a late
prominent public man of his colony (he was prominent still, but for his
social and not his official qualifications), was a well-dressed and
well-preserved old gentleman who, having sown a large and miscellaneous
crop of wild oats in the course of a long career, had been rewarded with
great wealth, and all the privileges of the highest respectability.'
ADAM LINDSAY GORDON.
The strongest note of Adam Lindsay Gordon's poetry is a personal one.
When he represents Australia best, he best represents his own striking
character. Yet that character had clearly shown itself, as had also his
lyric gift, before he saw Australia. He is the favourite poet of the
country by a happy fortuity rather than by the merit of special native
inspiration. Those tastes of the people which he has expressed in manner
and degree so rare as to make a parallel difficult of conception were
also his own dominant tastes. From early boyhood they had controlled his
life, and in the end they wrecked it.
That any man living an adventurous and precarious life, often in rude
associations and without the stimulus of ambition or of intellectual
society, should write poetry at all is a matter for some wonder. And
when several of the compositions of such a writer are marked by rare
vigour and melody, and some few are worthy to rank with the best of
their kind produced in the century, it must be held that the gift of the
author is genuine and spontaneous. It is impossible to believe that
Gordon would have been less a poet had he never lived under the Southern
Cross; that he would have cared less for horses and wild riding, for
manliness and the exhilaration of danger. Had he become a country
gentleman in England, or a soldier, like his father, should we not still
have had 'The Rhyme of Joyous Garde,' 'The Romance of Britomarte,' 'By
Flood and Field,' and 'How we beat the Favourite.' And do these not form
the majority of his best poems? A man apt alike for the risks of the
chase or the cavalry charge, with a delicate ear for the music of words,
with natural promptings to write, would in any conditions have found
time to celebrate the things which his daring and gallant spirit loved.
Had he not ridden as well as written the rides related by his 'Sick
Stockrider,' he might have been foremost in that more glorious one so
often present to his fiery fancy, and have wielded
'The splendid bare sword
Flashing blue, rising red from the blow!'
Gordon was a true soldier in sentiment all his life, as he was also a
true Englishman, and it is the soldier and the Englishman in him far
more than the Australian that the people of his adopted country,
consciously or unconsciously, admire. It is yet difficult to consider
his work as a writer apart from his personality. And it is natural that
this should be so in the case of a man whose career was itself a
romance, who led as strange a double life as ever poet lived, and who,
through all, retained the marked essentials of a gentleman.
In his character as a sportsman and a rider there is an element of the
ideal which largely helps to commend him to the majority of Australians.
Though his liking for horses and the turf became a destroying passion,
there was never anything sordid in it. He was not a gambler, for long
after he had won recognition as the first steeplechase rider in a
country of accomplished riders, he declined payment for his services on
the race-track, accepting it only when compelled at last by poverty to
do so; and the distaste with which he had always viewed the meaner
associations of the sport latterly became dislike and scorn. In the
period of disappointment that preceded his death he refused a
remunerative post on the sporting staff of a leading Melbourne journal
because he wished to dissociate himself completely and finally from
everything connected with the professionalism of sport.
As a Bush rider he became noted for the performance of feats which no
one else would think of attempting. The Australians often speak and
write of it as courage absence of fear--but it surely had a large
admixture of pure recklessness. It is at least evident that danger had a
certain irresistible fascination for him. 'Name a jump, and he was on
fire to ride at it,' is the description given of this curious
predilection which made his company in a riding party a somewhat
exciting pleasure. The day in 1868 when he won three steeplechases at
Melbourne is still remembered; and at Mount Gambier, in South Australia,
a granite obelisk marks where once he leaped his horse over a fence
surmounting the headland of a lake, and then across a chasm 'more than
forty feet wide.' A single false step would have cast horse and rider
into the lake two hundred feet below. Of the same wild character was his
riding during boyhood in the hunting-fields of Gloucestershire. It would
be natural to suspect some measure of vanity or bravado in all this, but
no hint of either is given by any of his acquaintances; and the few who
knew him well are emphatic in placing him, as a man and a sportsman,
apart from and above the majority of those with whom the conditions of
his life brought him into contact. 'Gordon,' says one of his intimate
friends, 'was always a quiet, modest, pure-minded gentleman.... I never
knew such a noble-hearted man, especially where women were concerned.'
The deep melancholy in many of Gordon's poems has been attributed to the
influence of Australian scenery, and to the loneliness of the earlier
years of his life in the colonies. This explanation, if not wholly
erroneous, is at least much exaggerated. It ignores the most obvious
elements of the poet's temperament. It takes no account of the history
of wasted opportunities and regrets, of defeat and discontent, of
self-wrought failure and remorse, that may plainly be read in 'To my
Sister,' 'An Exile's Farewell,' 'Early Adieux,' 'Whispering in the
Wattle Boughs,' 'Quare Fatigasti,' 'Wormwood and Nightshade,' and other
poems. The writer, as he himself says, has no reserve in the criticism
of his own career.
'Let those who will their failings mask,
To mine I frankly own;
But for their pardon I will ask
Of none--save Heaven alone.'
Gordon's youth was wild and ungoverned. Before his twenty-first year his
folly had lost him home, friends, love, and the one profession that
might have steadied him, as well as afforded him distinction. He was
the son of Captain Adam D. Gordon (an officer who had seen service in
India) and the grandson of a wealthy Scotch merchant. Captain Gordon
settled at Cheltenham in the later years of his life, and intended that
his son should study for the army; but a mad wilfulness and passion for
outdoor sport had taken possession of the youth, and nothing could be
done with him. He rode to hounds with all the daring that marked his
horsemanship in later life; he rode in steeplechases, he frequented the
company of pugilists at country fairs and public-houses, and joined in
their contests; he was removed from two schools for unruly conduct, and
a more serious escapade, though innocent of any bad intention, nearly
caused his arrest by the police. At last it was agreed that he should
emigrate to Australia. He was glad to go, but bitter at the thought of
what his going implied. The knowledge that he suffered solely through
his own fault did not make less disagreeable to him the censure of
others, even that of the gallant father whom, in his wildest moments of
rebellion, he never ceased to love and admire. The unhappiness attending
this severance from the home that he felt he would never see again is
told in a poem to his sister, written (August, 1853) a few days before
he sailed.
'Across the trackless seas I go,
No matter when or where;
And few my future lot will know,
And fewer still will care.
My hopes are gone, my time is spent,
I little heed their loss,
And if I cannot feel content,
I cannot feel remorse.
'My parents bid me cross the flood,
My kindred frowned at me;
They say I have belied my blood,
And stained my pedigree.
But I must turn from those who chide,
And laugh at those who frown;
I cannot quench my stubborn pride,
Or keep my spirits down.
'I once had talents fit to win
Success in life's career;
And if I chose a part of sin,
My choice has cost me dear.
But those who brand me with disgrace,
Will scarcely dare to say
They spoke the taunt before my face
And went unscathed away.'
The stanzas (there are ten more in the poem) have all the bitterness of
a youthful sorrow and all the vigour of a youthful defiance. But at the
moment of his deepest depression it is upon himself that the writer
casts the real blame. This is characteristic of his judgment of himself
throughout life. He has ever too much honour and spirit to shirk the
responsibility of his own acts. And the same qualities keep him from
doing injury to others. He is consoled by remembering this in bidding
good-bye to his native land.
'If to error I incline,
Truth whispers comfort strong,
That never reckless act of mine
E'er worked a comrade wrong.'
As a colonist, Gordon might have justified his Scotch descent by making
a fortune. Wealth was to be gained in other and surer ways than by
groping for it in the goldfields. But he was indifferent, and allowed
himself to drift. Australia was attractive to him only as a place of
adventure, of freedom, of retirement, of oblivion. All but the latter he
found it. He readily adapted himself to the rough conditions of the
country, but could never overcome the thought that in those first false
steps he had lost all worth striving for. Time softened the gloomy
defiance of his farewell verses, but did not alter his determination to
efface himself, to be forgotten even by his family. He held no
communication with anyone in England, and heard nothing from his home
until ten years later, when a lawyer's letter notified him that both his
mother and father were dead, and that under the will of the latter he
was to receive a legacy of seven thousand pounds. Meanwhile, Gordon
appears to have made no attempt to win any of the prizes that were the
common reward of pluck and industry in the Australia of the fifties. He
joined the mounted police force of South Australia, but, impatient of
its discipline, soon left it, and for long afterwards was content with
the rough employment of a horse-breaker.
A curious, pathetic figure he makes at this time. He broke in horses
during the day, and read the classic poets at night. Think of the
refined Englishman in blue blouse, fustian, and half-Wellington boots,
seated among the boisterous company of a 'men's hut' on a Bush station,
reading Horace by the aid of a rude lamp, 'consisting of a honeysuckle
cone stuck in clay in a pannikin, and surrounded with mutton fat!' Or
sitting at some Bush camp of his own, and imagining, as he so finely
did, the famous Balaclava Charge, which set Europe ringing with pity and
admiration a year after he arrived in Australia. How he would have liked
to be among the actors in that scene!
'Oh! the minutes of yonder maddening ride
Long years of pleasure outvie!'
he exclaims, and wishes that his own end could be fair as that of one
'who died in his stirrups there.'
Gordon seemed not only to be reconciled to his Bush life, but to have
become attached to it. He once declared it to be better in many
respects than any other. He was temperate, skilful in his work, and as
popular as one of reserved manner can be. Most of the squatters of the
period made it a practice to receive into their social circle any
companionable and educated man, whether their equal in position or not.
It was a generous custom, typical of the most hospitable country in the
world, and worked well on the whole. But Gordon, unlike Henry Kingsley
and others of the same class, took no advantage of it. That the
squatters did not themselves recognise the worth of one so unassertive
was not to be wondered at. He saw this, and never blamed them. They
could not, as he remarked on one occasion, be expected to know that he
was as well born as any of them, and perhaps better educated. One of
them saw there was 'something above the common' in him; but that was
all. At length he was discovered by a good-natured and scholarly Roman
Catholic priest (the Rev. Julian E. Tenison Woods), who, though he does
not say so, evidently took a pleasure during the five years of their
acquaintance in making the merits of the solitary Englishman known in
the colony. Their tastes accorded excellently. They talked 'horses or
poetry' as they rode together, or smoked by their camp-fires. Gordon's
reserve thawed for the first time. He had a well-trained memory, and
occasionally would recite Latin or Greek verse, or a scene from
Shakespeare, or passages from Byron and other modern poets. Greek he had
taught himself in lonely hours after his arrival in Australia, having
neglected it while at college.
In the end his disposition left the good cleric, like many another, much
puzzled. Was there anything of foolish pride or misanthropy in Gordon's
avoidance of society that would have welcomed him? Both his recorded
speech and his poems are without evidence of either. Those who remember
his taciturnity and little eccentricities also speak of his kindness of
heart, generosity and trustfulness of others. Did he ever complain that
he was oppressed and saddened by his self-chosen life in the Bush? We
have seen the high estimate he once gave of it; and Mr. Woods, who has
recorded many proofs of close observation of his friend, testifies that
the melancholy of his poems found little or no expression in his
conversation. Gordon may have been shy (as Marcus Clarke noted), but he
early formed a fairly accurate judgment of his literary powers. He said
'he was sure he would rise to the top of the tree in poetry, and that
the world should talk of him before he died.' Coming from one who was
far from being vain or boastful, the remark suggests hope and ambition.
But neither, it would seem from his colonial career, was ever more than
a passing mood with him. Why did he remain in obscurity during several
of the best years of his life, doing rough and dangerous work, when he
might have obtained some remunerative post in one of the cities? Why did
he marry a domestic servant--one who could never be an intellectual
companion for him?
It appears that he considered himself to have 'irretrievably lost
caste.' It is a fantastic idea, and could not have any justification in
a country where an Englishman of good manners and behaviour need never
want congenial society. Gordon was abnormally proud, independent and
sensitive: an unfortunate disposition for anyone who has his way to make
in an imperfect world. Such a man constantly misunderstands himself and
is misunderstood. He takes severe, unpractical views of his own
character and of life generally. Not necessarily morose or ungenial, he
is always apt to be thought so. Gordon's conclusion that he had lost
caste is a proof of supersensitiveness, and the deep effect produced
upon his temperament by the incidents of his youth.
There is a touching and significant little story of an acquaintance
which he formed with a young lady at Cape Northumberland, and how he
ended it. We are delicately told that, having become a warm admirer of
his dashing horsemanship, the lady used to walk in early morning to a
neighbouring field to see him training a favourite mare over hurdles.
Something more than a mutual liking for horses and racing is plainly
hinted at as existing between them. But after they had met thus a few
times, Gordon asked abruptly whether her mother knew that she came there
every morning to see him ride. She replied in the negative, adding that
her mother disapproved of racing. 'Well, don't come again,' said he; 'I
know the world, and you don't. Good-bye. Don't come again.' Surprised
and wounded, the lady silently gave him her hand in farewell. 'He looked
at it as if it were some natural curiosity, and said, "It's the first
time I have touched a lady's hand for many a day--my own fault, my own
fault--good-bye."'
For a brief period after the receipt of his father's legacy Gordon
looked towards his future with some interest and confidence. He spoke of
a proposal to undertake regular journalistic work at Melbourne, and to
make an attempt at writing novels. It was at this time also that he
foresaw that he would make a name as a poet. The people of Mount
Gambier, finding him presently settled as the owner of a small estate in
the district, made him their representative in the Legislative Assembly
of South Australia. In this new character he seems to have achieved only
a reputation for drawing humorous sketches. Having delivered a few
speeches highly embellished with classical allusions which failed to
make any impression upon the plain business men of the House, he
subsided, and was afterwards seldom heard. And when his seat became
vacant in due course, he did not seek re-election. He had been unable to
take his Parliamentary experience seriously. He is said to have always
looked back upon it as something of a joke.
And now, with a revival of his former attachment to the excitements and
uncertainties of the turf, begin a series of misfortunes which pursued
him until his death. His property, mismanaged and neglected, had to be
sold, and he set out a poor man once more for the adjoining colony of
Victoria. Here, while suffering ill-health and poverty--starving in his
own proud way--after failing in a small business which he had
undertaken, Gordon learned that he would probably come into possession
of the barony of Esselmont in Scotland, then producing an income of
about two thousand pounds a year. But on further inquiry it was found
that his title to the estate ceased with the abolition of the entail
under the Entail Amendment Act of 1848. The excitement of his
ill-fortune and the effects of a recent wound on the head combined to
unhinge his mind, and in June, 1870, at the age of thirty-seven he ended
his life by shooting himself at Brighton, near Melbourne. In comparing
the impressions of Gordon's disposition given by his friends, it is
curious to note that among the few things in which they agree is an
absence of surprise at his suicide.
It would not be difficult to imagine a more representative poet in the
provincial sense than Gordon. His description of the colonies as
'Lands where bright blossoms are scentless,
And songless bright birds,'
would be strangely misleading were it not contradicted by other lines
from the same hand, showing a delicate appreciation of the rugged
features of Australian scenery. But he sees them only in passing, or as
a symbol of something he is pondering, or as a contrast to what he has
left behind 'on far English ground.' No sight or sound of Australian
Nature is a sole subject of any of his poems. His 'Whispering in the
Wattle Boughs' does not express the voices of the forest, but the echoes
of a sad youth, the yearnings of an exile; his 'Song of Autumn' is not a
song of autumn, but a forecast of his own death--a forecast that was
fulfilled. If he ever felt any enthusiasm for the future nationhood of
Australia, he did not express it. And such few native legends as there
were, he left to other pens.
In all of his best poems, there is some central human interest,
something that tells for courage, honour, manly resignation. When a
story does not come readily to his hand in the new world, he seeks one
in the old. He fondly turns to the spacious days of the old knighthood,
when men drank and loved deeply, when they were ready to put happiness
or life itself upon a single hazard. The subjects that Gordon best liked
were short dramatic romances, which he found it easier to evolve from
literature than from the life and history of his adopted country. Beyond
the compositions upon the national sport of horse-racing, the only
noteworthy Australian subjects in his three slender volumes are 'The
Sick Stockrider's Review of the Excitements and Pleasures of a Careless
Bush Life, and his Pathetic Self-satisfaction'; 'The Story of a
Shipwreck'; 'Wolf and Hound,' which describes a duel between the
hunted-down bushranger and a trooper; and some verses on the death of
the explorer Burke. 'Ashtaroth,' an elaborate attempt at a sustained
dramatic lyric in the manner of Goethe's 'Faust' and 'Manfred,' fills
one of the three volumes, and among shorter pieces in the other two are
more than a dozen suggested by the poet's reading, by his recollections
of English life, and, in a notable instance, by one of the most
memorable of modern European wars.
In a dedication prefixed to the _Bush Ballads_, Gordon suggests some of
the local sources of his inspiration. He obviously overstates his
obligations to the country. Some of the best of the poems in this, the
most characteristic collection of his work, have no association with it
whatever. 'The Sick Stockrider,' 'From the Wreck,' and 'Wolf and Hound'
are colonial experiences, finely described. But most of the remaining
poems, while they owe something to Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne,
are not in any sense Australian.
'In the Spring, when the wattle gold trembles
'Twixt shadow and shine,
When each dew-laden air resembles
A long draught of wine,
When the skyline's blue burnished resistance
Makes deeper the dreamiest distance,
Some songs in all hearts have existence:
Such songs have been mine.'
But where, save in the retrospect of 'The Sick Stockrider' and a verse
or two of 'From the Wreck,' shall we find any of the air of the lovely,
transient Australian spring? It is rather absurd to place with _Bush
Ballads_ the 'Rhyme of Joyous Garde,' a recital of the old tragedy of
Arthur and Launcelot; the story of seventeenth-century siege and
gallantry in the 'Romance of Britomarte'; the dramatic scenes from the
'Road to Avernus;' 'The Friends' (a translation from the French); and
the psychological musings of 'De Te' and 'Doubtful Dreams.'
And the galloping rhymes? Yes, there is indeed one galloping rhyme--'How
we beat the Favourite'--with a ring and a rush, a spirit and swiftness
of colour, not approached by the best verse of Egerton Warburton or
Whyte-Melville. Especially vivid and terse is the description of the
latter part of the race, where the favourite (The Clown) overtakes
Iseult, the mare leading in the run home.
'She rose when I hit her. I saw the stream glitter,
A wide scarlet nostril flashed close to my knee;
Between sky and water The Clown came and caught her;
The space that he cleared was a caution to see.
'And forcing the running, discarding all cunning,
A length to the front went the rider in green;
A long strip of stubble, and then the big double,
Two stiff flights of rails with a quickset between.
'She raced at the rasper, I felt my knees grasp her,
I found my hands give to the strain on the bit;
She rose when The Clown did--our silks as we bounded
Brushed lightly, our stirrups clashed loud as we lit.
'A rise steeply sloping, a fence with stone coping,
The last--we diverged round the base of the hill;
His path was the nearer, his leap was the clearer,
I flogged up the straight, and he led sitting still.
'She came to his quarter, and on still I brought her,
And up to his girth, to his breast-plate she drew;
A short prayer from Neville just reached me, "The Devil!"
He muttered--lock'd level the hurdles we flew.'
After a glance at the crowd where, as seen by the rider, all 'figures
are blended and features are blurred'--
'On still past the gateway she strains in the straight way,
Still struggles, "The Clown by a short neck at most!"
He swerves, the green scourges, the stand rocks and surges,
And flashes, and verges, and flits the white post.
'Aye! so ends the tussle--I knew the tan muzzle
Was first, though the ring men were yelling "Dead Heat!"
A nose I could swear by, but Clarke said "The mare by
A short head." And that's how the favourite was beat.'
It was by this piece, according to Marcus Clarke, that the poet's early
reputation was made. 'Intensely nervous, and feeling much of that shame
at the exercise of the higher intelligence which besets those who are
known to be renowned in field sports, Gordon produced his poems shyly,
scribbled them on scraps of paper, and sent them anonymously to
magazines. It was not until he discovered one morning that everybody
knew a couplet or two of "How we beat the Favourite" that he consented
to forego his anonymity and appear in the unsuspected character of a
verse-maker.' Even in this picture of the excitements of the turf, there
is nothing that would not be as true of Epsom or Ascot as of Randwick or
Flemington. Yet, it _is_ Australian in the sense that it expresses the
one taste which, of all those inherited by the people from their British
ancestors, seems never likely to be lost (as it was by the American
colonists)--which, on the contrary, has gained in ardour in the new
land. Gordon was a pronounced believer in the efficacy of field sports
as a means of maintaining the nerve and hardihood of the race. In one of
his minor pieces he vigorously affirms that
'If once we efface the joys of the chase
From the land, and out-root the Stud,
Good-bye to the Anglo-Saxon Race,
Farewell to the Norman Blood.'
With him the fearless huntsman makes the fearless soldier. Both are to
be cultivated and admired, and when the latter dies needlessly, as at
Balaclava, we are to be none the less proud of him,
'As a type of our chivalry.'
Of the longer poems, the two best in artistic quality are 'The Rhyme of
Joyous Garde' and 'The Sick Stockrider.' They afford a complete contrast
in subject, tone and treatment. The old Arthurian story is the finer and
more finished. There is a nobility in its expression not elsewhere
equalled by the author. But the other poem is more direct and simple in
its pathos, more easily understood. It tells something of familiar
experience in language irresistibly touching and musical. It would be
interesting and a favourite if only through the obvious fact that it
describes in part some of Gordon's own early life.
''Twas merry in the glowing morn, among the gleaming grass
To wander as we've wandered many a mile,
And blow the cool tobacco cloud, and watch the white wreaths pass,
Sitting loosely in the saddle all the while.
'Twas merry 'mid the backwoods, when we spied the station roofs,
To wheel the wild-scrub cattle at the yard,
With a running fire of stockwhips and a fiery run of hoofs;
Oh! the hardest day was never then too hard.
'Aye! we had a glorious gallop after Starlight and his gang,
When they bolted from Sylvester's on the flat;
How the sun-dried reed-beds crackled, how the flint-strewn ranges rang
To the strokes of Mountaineer and Acrobat!
Hard behind them in the timber, harder still across the heath,
Close beside them through the ti-tree scrub we dashed;
And the golden-tinted fern-leaves, how they rustled underneath!
And the honeysuckle osiers, how they crashed!'
'The Rhyme of Joyous Garde' loses in appreciation by assuming
familiarity on the part of the reader with all the details of the story.
It is too allusive. It is a description more of Launcelot's remorse
than of the crime which occasions it. As to the other classic themes,
they probably avail as little to the reputation of the author as did the
elegant quotations which he inflicted upon the South Australian
legislators. 'He talked of the Danai, whilst they were vastly more
interested in the land valuators.'
Gordon's work was introduced to the English public by an article in
_Temple Bar_ in 1884, and in 1888 a short memoir of him, entitled _The
Laureate of the Centaurs_ (now out of print), was published. Since then
his poems have become known throughout the English-speaking world. Is
this because he is called an Australian poet--because people wish to
learn something of Australian life from his pages? Do English readers
ever ask for the poems of Harpur, or Henry Kendall, or Brunton Stephens?
No; Gordon's poems are admired for the human interest in them; for what
they tell of tastes and personal qualities dear to the pleasure-loving
and fighting Briton in whatever land he may be. It is the sort of
admiration that finds fit expression when an English officer and artist
makes a present to the publishers of a spirited and valuable set of
drawings to illustrate the poem of the Balaclava Charge. No other
Australian poet has yet found entrance to the great popular libraries of
England. Kendall, who almost deserves to be called the Australian
Shelley, tells more of Nature in one of his graceful pages than can be
found in a volume of his contemporary. But his thoughts are too remote
from the common interests of life; and of his own character he has
recorded only what is sad and painful. For the rest, his brief history
seems to prove that scarce any service may be less noticed or thanked in
Australia than the describing of its natural beauties or the writing of
its national odes.
Gordon has more than once been misrepresented with respect to his
religious views. He has been called an agnostic, an atheist, even a
pagan. Passages in nearly a score of his poems must be read and compared
before an opinion can properly be given on the point. That he was a
doubter, and to some extent a fatalist, appears certain; but there is
nothing to support the charge of atheism. He shows a very clear
conception of the Christian ideas respecting right and wrong, and of the
Divine mercy, but hesitates to accept any theories of punishment in a
future state. His general attitude is one of hope, and of desire to
believe. He often thinks--too often--of the transiency of life, and of
the question to be solved 'beyond the dark beneath the dust.' But there
is no despair. And meanwhile his practical creed is
'Question not, but live and labour
Till yon goal be won,
Helping every feeble neighbour,
Seeking help from none.
Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone--
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own.'
It conveys at once the highest and truest of the many views he has given
of his own character. Generous to others, he was too seldom just to
himself. It was well there remained among the friends he left behind a
few who knew him for what he was, and who were unwilling that qualities
often clouded during his life by an unhappy temperament should be
undervalued or forgotten. Kendall's 'In Memoriam' is a worthy tribute,
and finely summarizes the general impression of Gordon which one obtains
from his verse:
'The bard, the scholar, and the man who lived
That frank, that open-hearted life which keeps
The splendid fire of English chivalry
From dying out; the one who never wronged
A fellow-man; the faithful friend who judged
The many anxious to be loved of him
By what he saw, and not by what he heard,
As lesser spirits do; the brave great soul
That never told a lie, or turned aside
To fly from danger; he, I say, was one
Of that bright company this sin-stained world
Can ill afford to lose.'
ROLF BOLDREWOOD.
English readers of Rolf Boldrewood's novels have often wondered why he
has ignored in his writings the modern social life of Australia. He has
a unique knowledge of the country extending over sixty years, but his
literary materials have been drawn only from the first half of this
period. No other purely Australian novelist has succeeded in making a
considerable reputation without feeling the necessity of fleeing to the
more congenial atmosphere of literary London.
It is true that even he had to find acceptance at home through the
circuitous route of the press and the libraries of Great Britain, but he
was able to wait for his long-delayed popularity, and when it came and
found him in advanced age, he had no inclination to leave the land of
his adoption
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