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.