Australian Writers Part 7

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 t.i.tle 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 ma.n.u.script 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 ent.i.tled 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 pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sed, 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. a.n.a.lytical 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 circ.u.mscribed 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sume 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 Pa.s.sion_, 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 nave 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 d.u.c.h.ess.' Considered apart from the story, these d.i.c.kensian 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 pa.s.sing 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 enn.o.bling 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 pa.s.sed 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.'

The visitor meets another member of the household, Stangrove's unmarried 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 pa.s.ses 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 circ.u.mstance. 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 a.s.sociated 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 partic.i.p.ation 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sengers 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 d.u.c.h.esses,' 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 pa.s.sages 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 cla.s.s 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 ident.i.ty.

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 G.o.d!' says Sir Ferdinand, bending down, and looking into his face. 'It can't be! Yes; by Jove! it is----'