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 [p 91] 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 [p 92] 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 [p 93] 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 [p 94] 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 [p 95] 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 [p 96] 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 [p 97] 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, [p 98] 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 [p 99] 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 [p 100] 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 [p 101] 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.[p 102]
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 [p 103] 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, [p 104] 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 [p 105] 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 [p 106] 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 [p 107] 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 [p 108] 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 [p 109] 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 [p 110] 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 [p 111] 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 [p 112] 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 [p 113] 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 [p 114] 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.’[p 115]
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, [p 116] 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, [p 117] 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 [p 118] 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 [p 119] 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 [p 120] 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 [p 121] 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 [p 122] 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 [p 123] 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 [p 124] 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, [p 125] 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 [p 126] 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 [p 127] 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 [p 128] 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 [p 129] 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, [p 130] 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.
