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. Probably if literature had been to him more of a
profession and less of a taste and pastime, he would long ago have felt
inclined to turn his back upon the indifference with which the colonies
usually treat their own products in authorship until English approval
has imparted new virtues to them.
Most of the other writers who have contributed to the portrayal of a
certain few aspects of Antipodean life have gone to London or elsewhere.
Many years absent from Australia, they know little of its later
developments. Boldrewood has spent a long and eventful life there. Of
the southern half of the continent he must possess a specially intimate
knowledge. Melbourne he has known in all the stages of its growth from a
canvas-built hamlet to the finest city in the Southern Hemisphere. When
he saw it first, the great golden wealth of the country lay unsuspected,
and Ballarat and Bendigo were not.
Though English by birth, he is wholly Australian in training and
experience. In 1830, being then four years old, he was taken by his
parents to Sydney, and there educated. Early in youth he became one of
the pioneer squatters of Western Victoria, sharing with a few others the
danger of dispossessing the aboriginals, and soon acquiring considerable
wealth. But some years later, going back to New South Wales, and
venturing to establish himself there on a larger scale as a sheep-owner,
he was involved in a disastrous drought and lost nearly everything.
In _The Squatters Dream_, which is understood to be partly
autobiographical, he has minutely recorded the varying fortunes of
pastoral life in the colonies. But the bitterness of failure never
caused him to forget the happiness of his young enthusiasm, or to speak
ill of a pursuit so much identified with the prosperity of the country.
He refers to it as 'that freest of all free lives, that pleasantest of
all pleasant professions--the calling of a squatter.'
Abandoning his ambition to rank with the wool-kings, he entered the
Civil Service as a police magistrate and gold-fields commissioner. In
these combined offices he spent twenty-five years, and, while continuing
a good public servant, contrived, like Anthony Trollope, to find time
for substantial work in literature. Though during a period of about
twenty years he contributed several stories and other literary matter to
the Sydney and Melbourne press, it was not until the publication of
_Robbery under Arms_, at London in 1889, that his work obtained due
recognition even in the colonies. Ten years earlier he had made an
unsuccessful bid for an English reputation by the publication of _Ups
and Downs_, the novel which, under the more attractive title of _The
Squatter's Dream_, reappeared in 1890 as a successor to the famous
bushranging story. That the spirited opening chapters of _Robbery under
Arms_ should have been thought lightly of by Australian editors when the
serial rights of the story were offered to them is somewhat astonishing.
The author has related how these chapters were successively rejected by
a number of the leading journals, including two of the best weeklies.
At length the manuscript was read by Mr. Hugh George, manager of the
_Sydney Morning Herald_ and the _Sydney Mail_, who promptly accepted it
for publication in the latter newspaper.
Boldrewood at this time (1880) was well known to the Australian press.
It must, however, be pointed out in justice to the editors, whom his
story failed to impress, that his previous work had revealed little of
the dramatic sense that contributed so materially to his success in
presenting the careers of his highwaymen. But it is less easy to see
why, when the full possibilities of the story had been realised, there
should have remained a second difficulty, that of securing a publisher
to issue it in book form. 'An Australian house,' the author has said,
'refused to undertake the risk;' and he adds, 'as a matter of fact I had
to publish it partly on my own account in England.' This proof of his
confidence in the attractions of the story has since been justified by
its complete success throughout the English-speaking world.
A writer with so much experience of Australia, and continuing to reside
in it, cannot be surprised if he is expected to take a large share of
responsibility for the fact that Australian fiction--the fiction
produced by writers known to the British public--only in a slight degree
reflects the most interesting features in the present-day life of the
country. At the same time, no such considerations can detract from the
sterling merits of Rolf Boldrewood's actual services to Australian
literature. It is hardly possible to believe that the English people
still prefer to look to Australia only for stories of adventure; but if
they do--and as the first to welcome and appreciate colonial writers
they are perhaps entitled to exercise a choice--it is well that such
stories be written from complete local knowledge, and thus at least
correctly describe the broader aspects of the country.
If Boldrewood were asked to explain his silence respecting Antipodean
life of the present day, he might reply that the novel of modern manners
did not form any part of the work which he had chosen to do. At all
events, he could claim to be as much a historian as a novelist. It has
been his ambition to describe Australia chiefly as he saw it in his
youth, about forty years ago--as it was immediately before and after the
discovery of gold. That his record _per se_ is strikingly vivid and
faithful is the first general impression which his novels make upon the
reader, whether English or colonial. There is about them much of that
air of 'rightness' which Hall Caine has noted to be one of the most
enduring qualities of good fiction, whatever its literary style may be.
They are cheerful, virile, soundly moral, and take far more account of
the good than of the bad in human nature. There is no fondness of the
sensational for its own sake. The conditions of probability are observed
with a closeness which, in books dependent for their interest so largely
upon plot and incident, amounts almost to a fault.
An English historian is said to have declared that he would willingly
exchange a library full of the poets for a single good novel of the
period in which he was interested. One can readily imagine that if a
generation or two hence there should be any Australian history left
unwritten, any unsatisfied curiosity concerning the simple annals now so
familiar to us, Rolf Boldrewood's novels might be found, within their
limits, a more satisfying source of information than all the rest of
contemporary Australian literature combined, the formal chroniclers
included, as well as the poets: that is to say, the general view they
would furnish of certain features of pioneer life would be fuller and
clearer, and, minor details apart, more reliable than could be gathered
from any other source.
Where is there in the elaborate histories of Rusden, Lang, Blair, and
Flanagan, or in any of the numerous books of sketches and reminiscences
written by persons who have visited or temporarily resided in Australia,
a view of the picturesque variety, colour, and splendid energy of the
great first race for gold to compare with that given in the second
volume of _The Miner's Right_, or with the memorable account of what
Starlight and the Marstons saw at Turon during their temporary
retirement from the highway?
Boldrewood, in these descriptions, has done what Henry Kingsley, with
his more eloquent pen, if slighter personal experience, unaccountably
neglected, and what Charles Reade, though he never saw Australia,
vividly imagined, and regretted his inability to fully employ. Reade saw
a theme for a great epic 'in the sudden return of a society far more
complex, artificial, and conventional than Pericles ever dreamed of, to
elements more primitive than Homer had to deal with; in this, with its
novelty and nature and strange contrasts; in the old barbaric force and
native colour of the passions as they burst out undisguised around the
gold; in the hundred and one personal combats and trials of cunning; in
a desert peopled and cities thinned by the magic of cupidity; in a huge
army collected in ten thousand tents, not as heretofore by one man's
constraining will, but each human unit spurred into the crowd by his own
heart; in the "siege of gold" defended stoutly by rock and disease; in
the world-wide effect of the discovery, the peopling of the earth at
last according to Heaven's long-published and resisted design.'
If Boldrewood had not himself realized the literary value of the
stirring scenes in which his youth was passed, this summary of the
English novelist, published in 1856, might well have suggested it to
him. How far has he succeeded in commemorating those scenes, and in what
directions chiefly?
In the first place, it is the pictorial, the literal, not the
philosophical, aspect of the subject which has most attracted him. There
is a personal zest in his remembrance of the general animation of the
scene, a keen sense of the pleasurable excitement, freedom and
good-fellowship of the life. His books are essentially men's books. This
is the universal report of the English libraries. Analytical subtleties
there are none. Boldrewood is not given to weighing moonbeams. His
nearest approach to psychology consists in noting the various effects of
robust, unconventional colonial life upon fortune-seekers and visitors
from the mother country. This has been a favourite theme with all
Australian writers, and one of which the female novelists have so far
made the most effective use. One could wish that Boldrewood had made
himself as far as possible an exception to the rule--that he had aimed
at a praiseworthy provinciality by matching with the elaborate
minuteness of his local colour some finished and memorable studies of
Australian character.
Maud Stangrove in _The Squatter's Dream_, and Antonia Frankston in _The
Colonial Reformer_, who seem to offer the best opportunities to typify
Australian womanhood, are gracefully described; but, save for an
occasional longing to relieve the monotony of their lives by a taste of
European travel and culture, they are indistinguishable from such purely
English types as Ruth Allerton and Estelle Challoner. Very pathetic, and
marked by some distinctively Antipodean traits, is the sister of the
bushrangers in _Robbery under Arms_. Aileen Marston has the strong
self-reliance and independence which are born of the exigencies, as well
as of the free life, of the country. She and her brothers represent
much of what is best in Boldrewood's portrayal of native character.
Maddie and Bella Barnes and Miss Falkland in the same novel, Kate
Lawless in _Nevermore_, and Possie Barker in _A Sydneyside Saxon_, are
also Antipodeans, but are only lightly sketched.
Boldrewood claims that in his writings he has always upheld the
Australian character. It is a fact that he has incidentally done this to
a considerable extent, but not by any notable portraiture. In the period
with which the novels deal the population of the colonies was largely
English; it was, therefore, perhaps only natural that the stranger and
adventurer from the Old World, so often well born and cultured, should
prove a more attractive study than the sons of the soil. Moreover, the
latter, in their monotonous and circumscribed life, lacked much of the
mystery and romance so vital to the novel of adventure. But when this
has been admitted in Boldrewood's favour, there still remains a broader
charge to which he is liable.
He has been accused, and it must be confessed with a good deal of
justice, of paying too little attention in later novels (taking the
order of their publication in London) to the development of even those
characters most concerned in his plots. The fault is purely one of
judgment. It is hardly possible to suppose any lack of ability in a
writer who has produced the bright and suggestive dialogue scattered
through the pages of _Robbery under Arms_ and The _Miner's Right_.
Giving rein to his passion for reminiscence and descriptive detail, he
has paid the inevitable penalty of a loss in human interest. So obvious
is this loss in the stories of pastoral life, that one is almost fain to
assume it to be the result of deliberate choice. How far the author, in
this section of his writing, has neglected the social and dramatic
possibilities of country life, can be judged by noting Mrs. Campbell
Praed's work in _The Head Station_, _Policy and Passion_, or _The
Romance of a Station_. But the best contrast to Boldrewood's style is
furnished by the author of _Geoffry Hamlyn_.
Henry Kingsley decided the movement of his characters with a loving
care. Their interests were paramount to him. They made their own story;
the story did not make them. Their author cared little for the externals
of Australian life except in so far as they helped to tell something,
especially something good, of his leading personages. His interest in
them was not semi-scientific, like that of Thackeray or Jane Austen,
Howells or Henry James, in their studies of human nature; it was that
mainly of a sympathiser and a partisan.
His frequently expressed anxiety about the impression they were making
upon the reader was not always an affectation. There is a real
solicitude in the confidences concerning William Ravenshoe upon his
sudden promotion from the stable to the drawing-room of Ravenshoe Manor.
'I hope you like this fellow, William,' he says in one place, and then
there is a naïve enumeration of some of the ex-groom's social
deficiencies. This, at best, is a useless interruption of the story, but
it helps, with other signs, to show Kingsley's constant interest in his
characters.
Nearly everything in his descriptions of Australian squatting pursuits
is intended to have a definite and notable bearing upon them. Thus, the
view we get of the drafting-yard at Garoopna, with Sam Buckley in torn
shirt, dust-covered, and wielding a deft pole on the noses of the
terrified cattle, is not presented as a piece of station-life so much as
a picturesque means of leading Alice Brentwood into an involuntary
display of her affection for Sam when he is struck down before her eyes.
Again, the description of the kangaroo-hunt, given in the same novel, is
remembered chiefly on account of the picture of Sam and Alice in the
frank enjoyment of their first love as they loiter in the tracks of the
sportsmen, and, relinquishing the chase with happy indifference, go home
and sit together under the verandah.
Kingsley avoided the fault, common to his successors, of exaggerating
the interest which readers are supposed to take in the general aspects
of life in a new country. He had a keen sense of the value of
picturesque environment, but wisely contrived that nothing should
withdraw attention from the progress of his drama. He was ever on the
watch for opportunities to sketch in lightly and humorously small traits
of character, and to emphasise salient ones. 'She had an imperial sort
of way of manoeuvring a frying-pan,' he says, in allusion to the
cheerful adaptability of the high-bred Agnes Buckley, that fine model of
English womanhood, during her first rough experiences in Australia. When
Hamlyn comes to Baroona from the neighbouring station to spend Christmas
with his old friends, he finds the same lady 'picking raisins in the
character of a duchess.' Considered apart from the story, these
Dickensian touches might seem merely humorous exaggeration, but to those
who have traced the development of Mrs. Buckley's character, how happy
and pregnant they are!
_Robbery under Arms_ not only contains Boldrewood's most dramatic plot,
but his most skilful and sympathetic treatment of character. It is a
distinct exception to the rest of his work. In the later stories the
characters are brightly sketched, but with so casual a touch that they
leave no permanent impression with the reader. The best excite no more
than a passing admiration, whereas Kingsley's win lasting admiration and
love. There can be no surer test of art and truth: it furnishes the one
indubitable proof of clear vision, sympathy, and correct expression.
Where the weakness of some of Boldrewood's characters is not due to
deficiency of interest in them on the part of the author, it is the
result of an attempt to copy life with an accuracy which sacrifices
picturesqueness.
The attempt to preserve absolute truth in every detail of the life-story
of John Redgrave, the hero of _The Squatter's Dream_, seems distinctly a
case in point. In no other novel is there so complete a description of
Australian squatting life--its varying success and failure, its solid
comforts and wholesome happiness in times of prosperity. Redgrave is one
of the most elaborately drawn of all the author's characters; there is
the fullest sense of probability in every incident; the entire story is
plainly a direct transcript of life; nothing at first seems wanting. But
when the book is laid aside, the reader realises that he has scarcely
been once moved by it. He has felt a transient pity for the hero's
misfortunes, and a mild satisfaction at his modified ultimate
success--nothing more.
The main defect here appears to consist in the central motive of
Redgrave's struggles being limited to purely personal ambition. His aim
is no higher than that of a speculator in a hurry to be rich, and when
he fails, he gets little more than the sympathy which is commonly given
to the man who plays for a high stake and loses. His love for Maud
Stangrove, which might have been made a controlling and ennobling
influence, ranks only as an incident. It comes after the main impression
of his character has been given. Beyond doubt he represents a real type;
no error has been made in this respect; his failure to win higher favour
with us arises from his too close approximation to the common clay.
There is absent just that small element of the ideal with which even
the sternest of the apostles of realism in letters have found it
impracticable to dispense.
An illustration of how little Boldrewood was inclined to idealise either
his characters or their surroundings is afforded by the account of
Redgrave's first visit to the home of the Stangroves, his neighbours on
the Warroo. On the journey he passed a Bush inn of the period where
drunkenness was the normal condition of everyone, from the owner to the
stable-boy. The shanty itself, an ugly slab building roofed with
corrugated iron, 'stood as if dropped on the edge of the bare sandy
plain.' It faced the dusty track which did duty as a highroad; at the
back of the slovenly yard was the river, chiefly used as a receptacle
for rubbish and broken bottles. A half-score of gaunt, savage-looking
pigs lay in the verandah or stirred the dust and bones in the immediate
vicinity of the front-entrance. 'What, in the name of wonder,' inquired
Jack of himself as he rode away, 'can a man do who lives in such a
fragment of Hades _but_ drink?'
The home of the Stangroves, though less depressing, bears painful
evidence of its isolation. The settler's wife little resembles Agnes
Buckley--she is too typically colonial for that. 'She was young, but a
certain worn look told of the early trials of matronhood. Her face bore
silent witness to the toils of housekeeping with indifferent servants or
none at all; to the want of average female society; to a little
loneliness and a great deal of monotony.'