Australian Writers Part 8

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 s.e.x 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 fict.i.tious 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 a.s.sociates, 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 d.i.c.k 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 ill.u.s.trates 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 cla.s.s who were far from being as irreclaimable as their offences made them appear. 'Men like us,' d.i.c.k 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 circ.u.mstances 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 cla.s.s is excelled only by the literary skill employed upon the character of their chief.

But there was no need to make d.i.c.k 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 cla.s.ses.

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 d.i.c.k 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 a.s.sistance 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 d.i.c.k 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 _denouement_ 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 pa.s.sage from d.i.c.k 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 pa.s.s 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 gla.s.s, '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 gla.s.s, 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 princ.i.p.al 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 cla.s.s 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 const.i.tute 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 cla.s.ses 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 Pa.s.sion_ 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 pa.s.sions 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 att.i.tude 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.

Mrs. Praed has turned to account more fully than any other writer the little affectations of that small upper crust of Antipodean society which is sufficiently cultured to have developed a taste for aristocratic European habits, along with an uncomfortable suspicion of 'bad form' in anything of purely local growth. This is the cla.s.s which maintains an air of portentous solemnity in public ceremonials, and is liable at any moment to be convulsed by a question of precedence at a Government House dinner.

From a lively appreciation of comedy to caricature is an easy descent which the author has not always resisted, but her exaggeration is so obviously resorted to in the interests of fun that it is unlikely to mislead. There is certainly no need to repudiate as untypical of Australian political society the Pickwickian spectacle of a drunken Postmaster-General fearfully trying to walk a plank after a Vice-regal dinner, in order to win three dozen of champagne wagered by the leader of the Opposition, while the Premier looks on and holds his sides with merriment; or the case of the Premier's wife, who, on being told by a newly-arrived Governor--a musical enthusiast--that he hoped to be able to 'introduce Wagner' at the local philharmonic concerts, said: 'I'm sure we shall be very pleased to see the gentleman.'

Considering, however, the opportunities which colonial life, and especially colonial politics, afford for ridicule, the author has been commendably careful to avoid, as far as possible, giving real offence.

Yet her criticism is sufficiently free to be piquant, and, on the whole, as salutary as it is entertaining. 'Why need Australians always be on the defensive?' asks more than once an Englishman in one of her novels.

The author seems to have put the same question to herself as an Australian, and to have decided that ultra-sensitiveness is a worse vice than affectation, and that her compatriots, by giving way to it, do both themselves and their country an injustice. For it implies a too low estimate of what is fresh and strong and of real merit in the independent life of the nation.

Colonists need a little more of the philosophic and common-sense spirit which can look upon deficiencies and crudities merely as phases in the natural evolution of society in a new land. This is what Mrs. Praed has endeavoured to teach in some of her stories. The lesson is often surrounded with a good deal of bantering discussion; it may not always be apparent to an English reader, but it can hardly be overlooked by an Australian. There is rarely anything so pointed as the conversation between Miss Jacobsen and her lover, Chepstowe. The former has been wondering what the cultivated Englishman thought of a recent noisy and rather vulgar reception tendered to a new Governor for whom he is acting as private secretary. Chepstowe is suspected of being secretly amused at his surroundings. But his view of them is purely rational and matter-of-fact.

'You know, I fancy you colonists think rather too little of yourselves, and we in England rather too much. Or I'll put it in another way. I fancy you colonists think too much about yourselves, and we in England think too little.'

'You said just now that you think too much.'

'Yes; it's the same thing put in a different way. We think too much of ourselves, and for that reason too little about ourselves. You are always thinking somebody is laughing at you; we have made up our minds that we are the admiration of everybody. We are often very ridiculous, and don't know it. You often think you are ridiculous when you really are not.'

'I think we must have seemed very ridiculous the day you landed....

I know you are astonished at some of our public men.... You will write home and say how rude and rough and vulgar some of them are.'

'If one wants to see the ridiculous, one can see it everywhere. We have some public men at home who are rude and rough, and vulgar and ridiculous.... One has to make allowances, of course, for training and habits, and all that.... When our fellows are rough, there is less excuse for them. The more one goes about the world, the less one sees to laugh at, I think....'

English self-complacency is, of course, a growth of centuries, but perhaps a deliberate and intelligent effort to acquire some of it in Australia would be the best specific for that consciousness which, colonists should not forget, is the mark of insignificance. It has been said that Australians already have too much to say for themselves and their country. The a.s.sertion is only applicable to a small boisterous cla.s.s who have never seen anything beyond their own sh.o.r.es.

A much commoner element of Antipodean life, one which some of Mrs.

Praed's characters notably ill.u.s.trate, is the desire for wider experience and culture produced among educated people by their constant use of British and European literature. James Ferguson, the young squatter in _The Head Station_, represents those Australians who, though stout believers in their own country, feel its intellectual deficiencies--perhaps too much; who are more English than the English themselves in their veneration for the historic a.s.sociations of the mother land; who, when they go to London, are curiously at home in streets and among sights that have been more or less definitely outlined in their imagination from early childhood.