sister, a beautiful and spirited young woman whose impatience with her
colourless life is outwardly subdued to ironical resignation. 'Another
eventful day for Mr. Redgrave,' she remarks on his return after a day's
riding over the station with her brother; 'yesterday the sheep were
lost--to-day the sheep are found; so passes our life on the Warroo.'
The best argument against Boldrewood's usual treatment of character is
furnished by the great bushranger chief who is the central figure in
_Robbery under Arms_. The author here submits for the first and only
time to that fundamental law of fiction which demands a certain
judicious exaggeration in the characters of a story depending for its
interest mainly on the charm of circumstance. Starlight is at once the
most real and least possible personage to be found in any of
Boldrewood's novels. He becomes real because his character and actions
are conceived in harmony with the romance and pathos of the story.
Though it is obvious enough that there never could have existed a
bushranger with quite so much of the _bel air_, or with a private code
of honour so admirable, the exaggeration is far from obtrusive. He is of
a stature suited to the deeds he performs, and, both he and his exploits
being often closely associated with historical facts, a strong sense of
reality is maintained.
Starlight seems to be a compound of several characters. He has Turpin's
ubiquity, Claude Duval's _sang-froid_, the personal attractiveness of
Gardiner (leader of a gang which made a business of robbing
gold-escorts in New South Wales about forty years ago), and the
humorous daredevilry of the 'Captain Thunderbolt' who obtained notoriety
in the same colony a few years later.
Boldrewood seems to have shrewdly agreed with the dictum of Turpin, that
it is necessary for a highwayman, at all events a captain of highwaymen,
to be a gentleman. But Starlight, unlike Turpin, does not become vain
with success, and is far from being enamoured with his profession.
Indeed, he is quite with the orthodox view of it. He is a bushranger,
apparently, because he no longer hopes or desires to resume his rank in
certain aristocratic circles from which, by occasional hints, we are
informed that he has fallen. He indulges in no lugubrious
moralisings--he is far too agreeable a person for that--but exhibits
just the required touch of romance by letting you know that in his past
there is a sadness which a career of excitement and danger is necessary
to enable him to forget. Having been won over as a sympathiser and
admirer, the reader is ready to believe that at worst the dashing
outlaw could never have been a very bad fellow. Certainly the author has
carefully kept him from participation in the grosser acts of lawlessness
of which his revengeful old partner Ben Marston, the more typical
bushranger, is guilty. Cattle-stealing and highway robbery as supervised
by Starlight are allowable, and even meritorious, in so far as they
afford him opportunities to practise some facetious deception on the
police. Such raids are not crimes, but comedies.
There is excellent fun in his posing as 'Charles Carisforth, Esq., of
Sturton, Yorkshire, and Banda, Waroona and Ebor Downs, N.S.W.,' while
awaiting the arrival at Adelaide of the 1,100 head of stolen cattle, or
as the 'Hon. Frank Haughton,' one of 'the three honourables' on the
Turon gold-field. The rash daring and cleverness of these disguises
furnish a combination of amusement and dramatic interest not approached
in anything else that Boldrewood has written. Starlight's presence at
dinner with the gold-fields commissioner and police magistrate at
Turon, when 'in walked Inspector Goring,' the officer who had been so
long and patiently seeking him elsewhere, and his appearance at Bella
Barnes' wedding, after a reward of a thousand pounds has been offered
for his capture, are scenes which remain vivid in the memory long after
the more commonplace adventures of the lords of Terrible Hollow have
lost their distinctness or been forgotten.
Next to his humour and courage, the qualities which most endear this
picturesque marauder to the reader are the happy fierceness with which
he commands the respect of his retainers, and his politeness and
gallantry to women. When a robbery is to be effected, the plans are laid
with sound generalship, but there is no unnecessary violence or loss of
good manners. His conduct at the plundering of the gold-escort is fully
equal to the traditional suavity of Claude Duval. 'Now, then, all
aboard!' he calls out to the passengers when the contents of the coach
have been removed. 'Get in, gentlemen; our business matters are
concluded for the night. Better luck next time! William, you had better
drive on. Send back from the next stage, and you will find the mail-bags
under that tree. They shall not be injured more than can be helped.'
The bushranger of real life, as known to the pioneer colonist, would
have bagged his booty with much fewer words. That Starlight should have
'treated all women as if they were duchesses,' and have made it a point
of honour to keep his pledged word with them, in however slight a
matter, seems only natural. Not even the women-folk of his enemy are
allowed to want a protector. When Moran and his gang of ruffians take
possession of Darjallook station during the absence of the male members
of the household, Starlight and the Marstons ride twenty miles across
country and rescue the ladies before the worst has been done. Starlight
bows to them 'as if he was just coming into a ball-room,' and, retiring,
raises Miss Falkland's hand to his lips like a knight of old.
These passages are only a few of the many which might be cited to show
how far the author, fired with the spirit and romance of the story,
gave freedom to his imagination in shaping the proportions of his
leading character. Starlight, though he is not, and cannot be, a
portrait of any single colonial outlaw of real life, is sufficiently
natural to consistently represent in both his conduct and adventures
much that was typical of Australian bushranging forty years ago and
later.
Some of his characteristics, and at least one of the concluding episodes
of the story, were suggested by the career of a New South Wales
horse-stealer who became known as 'Captain Moonlight.' So much is
certain. Boldrewood has himself narrated to a contributor of the
Australian _Review of Reviews_ his recollections of Moonlight and his
end: 'Among other horses he stole was a mare called Locket, with a white
patch on her neck. We had all seen her. This was the horse that brought
about his downfall, and he was actually killed on the Queensland border
in the way I have described in _Robbery under Arms_. Before that,
Moonlight had had some encounters with Sergeant Wallings (Goring); and
this day, when Wallings rode straight at him, he said: "Keep back, if
you're wise, Wallings. I don't want your blood on my head; but if you
must----" But Wallings rode at him at a gallop. Two of the troopers
fired point-blank at Moonlight, and both shots told. He never moved, but
just lifted his rifle. Wallings threw up his arms, and fell off his
horse a dying man. As Moonlight was sinking, the leader of the troopers
said: "Now you may as well tell us what your name is." But he shook his
head, and died with the secret.' He was 'a gentlemanly fellow,' probably
one of that unhappy class of young Englishmen of good birth and no
character who are exiled to the colonies for their sins, and there often
acquire new vices or sink into obscurity.
When Archibald Forbes was in New Zealand a few years ago, he met a
peer's son who was earning his 'tucker' as a station-cook. A Chinaman,
aspiring to better things, had vacated the billet in his favour! It is
interesting to note the use Boldrewood makes in his novel of the
suggestion afforded by the bushranger's concealment of his identity.
When Starlight is overcome in his last attempt at escape, the curiosity
long felt concerning his past life seems for the third time in the story
about to be gratified. But the reader is once more and finally
disappointed. The bushranger has given his last messages, and is dying
with some of the indifference to existence which has characterised him
throughout the story.
'I say, Morringer, do you remember the last pigeon-match you and I
shot in, at Hurlingham?'
'Why, good God!' says Sir Ferdinand, bending down, and looking into
his face. 'It can't be! Yes; by Jove! it is----'
He spoke some name I couldn't catch, but Starlight put a finger on
his lips, and whispered:
'You won't tell, will you? Say you won't.'
The other nodded.
He smiled just like his old self.
'Poor Aileen!' he said, quite faint. His head fell back. Starlight
was dead!
Boldrewood's characters, as he has said himself, are constructed from
many models. And the Marstons are, it seems, the only personages he has
drawn solely from life. Gardiner, with whom some readers have
identified Starlight, was, it is recorded, 'a man of prepossessing
appearance and plausible address, who had many friends even among the
settlers never suspected of sympathy with criminals, while many of the
fair sex regarded him as a veritable hero.'
That the romantic life of this noted criminal furnished Boldrewood with
some material there cannot be any doubt, but the fictitious bushranger
is far from being in any respect a mere copy of the real one. In
Starlight's relations with women, for instance, there is nothing but
what is manly and honourable, whereas one of Gardiner's exploits was the
seduction of a settler's wife, a beautiful woman whom he induced to
elope with him to a remote district in Queensland. And, further, none of
the sensational incidents connected with his capture--his escape under a
legal technicality from the death-penalty suffered by some of his
associates, his imprisonment for twelve years and subsequent exile--are
made use of in the novel.
The narrative method adopted in _Robbery under Arms_ has so much
contributed to the success of the story as to be worthy of some
comparison with the ordinary style of the author. The limitations
imposed by the choice of a narrator with no pretensions to education or
sentiment, and writing in the first person, proved in this case salutary
rather than disadvantageous. They repressed Boldrewood's usual tendency
to excessive detail, and kept his attention closely fixed on the drama
of the story.
The occasional deficiency of local colour and loss of effect in the
grouping of the characters is more than compensated for by the racy
piquancy of Dick Marston's vernacular, and the aspect, unrivalled in
Australian literature, which his account affords of bushranging life
from the bushranger's own point of view. In the truth with which this
view is presented lies the strength and lasting merit of what might
otherwise have been little better than a commonplace series of
sensational episodes.
Starlight and the Marstons, as we see them, are reckless and dangerous
criminals, but they are not exactly the 'bloodthirsty cowards' and
'murderers' known to the press and police of the period. The little they
can plead in excuse for their lives is plainly stated, while no
complaint is urged against their fate, or attempt made to obscure its
obvious lesson. Grim old Ben Marston's career illustrates one of the
results of the stupidly cruel system of transporting persons from
England to the colonies for petty offences which in these days are
punished by a slight fine, and his sons are types of a class who were
far from being as irreclaimable as their offences made them appear. 'Men
like us,' Dick Marston is once made to say, 'are only half-and-half bad,
like a good many more in this world. They are partly tempted into doing
wrong by opportunity, and kept back by circumstances from getting into
the straight track afterwards.'
The examples given in the story of the aptness of this remark are often
very touching. The poor Marston boys are indeed only half bad. Their
better natures, seconded by the influence of a good mother and sister,
are continually urging them to reformation, but for this there is no
opportunity. The decision of their fate by the turn of a coin when the
first great temptation comes is symbolical of the trifling causes to
which the ruin of so many young Bushmen in the early days of squatting
was traceable.
The personal observation strongly marked in all Boldrewood's novels has
in _Robbery under Arms_ its fullest, as well as most skilful,
expression. As a squatter, the author had seen the practices of the
cattle-thief, and learned his language. He had observed the extent to
which idleness and a love of horseflesh combined to fill the gaols of
the country, and in later years this knowledge was confirmed in the
course of his long experience as a magistrate. The judgment with which
he presents the case of the young Marstons as types of a class is
excelled only by the literary skill employed upon the character of their
chief.
But there was no need to make Dick Marston so often emphasise the
comfort of living 'on the square,' and the folly of ever doing
otherwise. The story bears a self-evident moral. Humour there is in
plenty, but the pathos of tragedy is the dominant, as it is the
appropriate, tone of the book. In no respect has greater accuracy been
attained than in the reproduction of the Australian vernacular, that odd
compound of English, Irish, Scotch, and American phrases and inflexions,
with its slender admixture of original terms. Visitors to Australia have
praised the purity of the English spoken there by the middle classes.
Mr. Froude, as late as 1885, found that 'no provincialism had yet
developed itself,' but he wrote chiefly of what he had heard in the
towns. It is in the country that the colonial dialect--if speech so
largely imitative can yet be called a dialect--is most heard.
Among other interesting features in Dick Marston's narrative is the
curious half-impersonal view which the outlaws take of the efforts made
by the Government to capture them, and their strong dislike, on the
other hand, to the private persons who competed with the police for the
large rewards offered. This detail is as true to life as the example of
the sympathy and assistance accorded the bushrangers by settlers in the
neighbourhood of their mountain retreat.
It was sympathy of this kind, combined with bribery, which so protected
the Kelly gang as to involve the Government of Victoria in an outlay of
about one hundred and fifteen thousand pounds before their destruction
could be accomplished. Effective literary use will be made at some time
in the future of the exploits of this last and most daring of all the
bushranging gangs, but many years must elapse before the sordid aspects
of their career shall have been forgotten, and only its romance be left.
And nothing short of genius will be required to refine the rude
proportions of Ned Kelly into something like the gentlemanly exterior of
the dashing captain, the smooth gallant, the humorist, philosopher, and
quick-change artist of _Robbery under Arms_.
In _The Miner's Right_, which ranks second in popularity among
Boldrewood's novels, the personal narrative style is again adopted, but
with little effect of the kind produced by Dick Marston's vivid
directness in the earlier novel. Hereward Pole, the hero, is a cultured
Englishman, sensitive and sentimental, who keeps an eye upon humanity at
large, as well as upon the business of making a fortune which has
brought him to the colonies. Half of his record, though a striking
picture of the gold-fields, is not an inherent part of the story of his
own career. Confined to their strictly just limits, the events which
combine to prolong his separation from the sweetheart whom he has left
in England could have been told in fifty pages. But this would not have
been all the author wished. He was satisfied with a slender plot and a
_dénouement_ which can be guessed almost from the outset as soon as he
saw that they would carry the glowing scenes and episodes of diggings
life with which his memory was so richly stocked. One cannot believe but
that, in this case, his slender attention to the long-drawn thread of
the story was the outcome of choice. Else where was the need for
elaborateness in such details as the dispute over the Liberator claim
at Yatala, the trial of Pole and the inquest on Challerson, with their
rendering of witnesses' depositions in the manner of a newspaper report,
the riot at Green Valley and Oxley, and the scene at the funeral of the
agitator Radetsky? Yet, though these episodes are given at great length,
and do not form any essential part of the story of Hereward Pole and
Ruth Allerton--the vindication of a man's honour and the triumph of a
woman's invincible devotion--they are told with so much intimate
knowledge and strength of colouring as almost to supply the absence of a
plot, and to make the story, apart from artistic considerations, a
really fine piece of work.
It has a popularity in the English libraries which is itself a proof of
the service done by the author to those who would know something of the
careers of varying success and bitter failure, of hardship and romantic
adventure, upon which so many of their kinsmen set out forty years ago.
_Nevermore_ and _The Sphinx of Eaglehawk_ give other views of the
gold-digging days, chiefly of their seamy side, but these stories offer
nothing that equals in interest the splendid panorama of pioneer life
revealed in _The Miner's Right_.
Boldrewood has more than once insisted with evident pleasure upon the
general good behaviour and manliness of the miners, and, having been one
of those all-seeing autocrats, the gold-fields commissioners, he is an
authority to be believed on the subject. In _Robbery under Arms_ the
names are given of thirty races represented on the Turon field, and
Hereward Pole, recounting his early impressions of Yatala, says: 'I was
never done wondering of what struck me as the chief characteristic of
this great army of adventurers suddenly gathered together from all seas
and lands, namely, its outward propriety and submission to the law.'
Elsewhere he likens the sensible reticence which they observed
respecting their own affairs and those of their neighbours to the
demeanour and mode of thought which prevails in club life.
A passage from Dick Marston's account of what he saw at Turon is worth
reproducing here as characteristic of the author's representation of a
gold-fields community and as a sample of his humour. The 'three
honourables,' of whom the disguised bushranger captain is one, are
together in a hotel.
'The last time I drank wine as good as this,' says Starlight, 'was
at the Caffy Troy, something or other, in Paris. I wouldn't mind
being there again, with the Variety Opera to follow--would you,
Clifford?'
'Well, I don't know,' says the other swell. 'I find this amazing
good fun for a bit. I never was in such grand condition since I left
Oxford. This eight hours' shift business is just the right thing for
training. I feel fit to go for a man's life. Just feel this,
Despard,' and he holds out his arm to the camp swell. 'There's
muscle for you!'
'Plenty of muscle,' says Mr. Despard, looking round. He was a swell
that didn't work, and wouldn't work, and thought it fine to treat
the diggers like dogs.... 'Plenty of muscle,' says he, 'but devilish
little society.'
'I don't agree with you,' says the other honourable. 'It's the most
amusing, and, in a way, instructive place for a man who wants to
know his fellow-creatures I was ever in. I never pass a day without
meeting some fresh variety of the human race, man or woman; and
their experiences are well worth knowing, I can tell you. Not that
they're in a hurry to impart them; for that there's more natural
unaffected good manners on a digging than in any society I ever
mingled in I shall never doubt. But when they see you don't want to
patronise, and are content to be as simple man among men, there's
nothing they won't do for you or tell you.'
'Oh, d----n one's fellow-creatures! present company excepted,' says
Mr. Despard, filling his glass, 'and the man that grew this
"tipple." They're useful to me now and then, and one has to put up
with this crowd; but I never could take much interest in them.'
'All the worse for you, Despard,' says Clifford: 'you're wasting
your chances--golden opportunities in every sense of the word.
You'll never see such a spectacle as this, perhaps, again as long as
you live. It's a fancy-dress ball with real characters.'
'Dashed bad characters, if we only knew,' says Despard, yawning.
'What do you say, Haughton?' looking at Starlight, who was playing
with his glass, and not listening much, by the look of him.
In his latest novels Boldrewood reverts to his familiar themes. _The
Sphinx of Eaglehawk_, the shortest of all his works, might have been an
excerpt from The _Miner's Right_; and the scene of _The Crooked Stick_
is an inland station in New South Wales in the days of bushranging and
disastrous droughts.
The materials employed in the latter story reproduce the principal
features of almost a score of other Australian novels published within
the last few years. The love-affairs of a beautiful, impulsive girl,
sighing for knowledge of the great world beyond the limits of her narrow
experience; the influence upon her of a fascinating and gentlemanly
Englishman, with aristocratic connections and a dubious past; the manly
young Australian, whose loyalty, undervalued for a time, is rewarded in
the end--these are some of the items which go to the making of a class
of story already somewhat too common. The fact that Boldrewood continues
to make such subjects interesting is due largely to the pervading sense
of scrupulous truth, the evident element of personal experience, and the
general cheerfulness of tone, which are never absent from any product of
his pen, and which constitute his highest claims to rank in Australian
literature.
MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED.
To Mrs. Campbell Praed belongs the credit of being the first to attempt
to give an extended and impartial view of the social and political life
of the upper classes in Australia. While she has not ignored whatever
seemed picturesque in the external aspects of the country, her chief
concern has been with the people themselves. Some of the best of her
works--_Policy and Passion_ and _Miss Jacobsen's Chance_, for
example--might fairly be named as an answer to the somewhat common
complaint of a deficiency of dramatic suggestion in colonial life.
In a preface to the first-named novel, Mrs. Praed explains it to have
been her wish to depict 'certain phases of Australian life, in which the
main interests and dominant passions of the personages concerned are
identical with those which might readily present themselves upon a
European stage, but which directly and indirectly are influenced by
striking natural surroundings and conditions of being inseparable from
the youth of a vigorous and impulsive nation.'
The point of view here taken by the author at almost the beginning of
her literary career has been maintained in most cases throughout her
later work. The same preface might almost, in fact, serve for all her
Australian stories. They describe broadly, in an attitude of
good-natured criticism, the leading facts in the intellectual life of
the people; their proud self-reliance, tempered by an acute sense of
isolation and its disadvantages; their susceptibility to foreign
criticism and example; their frank, natural manners in social customs of
native origin, contrasted with their quaintly-rigid observance of
conventionalities which have long since been relaxed in the mother
country whence they were copied.