Chapter II: Part 2

Conscious of the conventional character of his principal theme, the author apparently sought to improve it by deepening its intensity. The result of this was to add more of weakness than of strength. Incidents that might have been effectively dramatic become melodramatic; the conceivably probable is sometimes strained into the obviously improbable. The agreeable finish to the minor love-story of Calverley and Miss Ffrench does not remove the general savour of sordidness which the reader carries away from the study of so much of the bad side of human nature.

In connection with criticism of this kind, it ought, however, to be noted that other hands besides the author's are known to have contributed to the novel. Shortly after it began to appear serially in the _Colonial Monthly_, Marcus Clarke fell from a horse while hunting, and sustained a fracture of the skull which interrupted his literary work for many weeks. How much of the writing had previously been done seems to be a subject of dispute. It is, however, quite clear that, in order to preserve continuity in the publication of the parts, Clarke's friends did write some portion of the story, but whether in accordance with the author's _scenario_, supposing one to have existed, has not been stated.

'Only a few of the first chapters' were the work of Clarke, says the editor of the _Marcus Clarke Memorial Volume_, writing in 1884; but in an article published in the _Imperial Review_ (Melbourne) for 1886, the contributed matter is limited to a couple of chapters written by Mr. G. A. Walstab, and skilfully inserted in the middle of the novel. Walstab was one of Clarke's best friends, and he is no doubt the 'G. A. W.' to whom the story is dedicated 'in grateful remembrance of the months of July and August, 1868.'

From the absence of a prefatory explanation when _Long Odds_ was published in book form in 1869, it may be assumed that Clarke was satisfied with the quality of the contributed work. At least, he was willing to take the full responsibility of its authorship. But even with this in view, it were well, perhaps, not to hold him too strictly accountable for the faults of the story. Not much must be expected from a first novel produced in the circumstances mentioned, and issued when the author was only twenty-three. In his haste to give it final shape immediately after the serial publication, he was probably ill advised. One can only regret that it was not set aside for a year or so, and written afresh, or, at least, largely revised. Perhaps this would have been expecting too much from so unmethodical a worker as Clarke. The far finer dramatic taste and literary form of his masterpiece, issued five years later, showed how little indicative of his talent was the earlier work.

In view of the large extent to which the life of the Australian landed classes has been described in fiction during the last twenty years, it is curious to read the plea Clarke offered to his Antipodean critics for passing over the literary material close at hand and preferring the well-worn paths of the English novelist.

During the serial publication of _Long Odds_ the colonial press raised some objection to the laying of the scene in England instead of in Australia. The author replied simply that Henry Kingsley's _Geoffry Hamlyn_ being the best Australian novel that had been, or probably would be, written, 'any attempt to paint the ordinary squatting life of the colonies could not fail to challenge unfavourable comparison with that admirable story.'

The excuse is just a little too adventitious to have convinced even those to whom it was originally addressed. None the less, it may at the moment have accurately represented the opinion of a beginner who at that time could scarcely have known the extent of his own powers.

Probably he had given the subject little thought. His colonial experience was certainly less varied than Kingsley's had been. Above all, his tastes, and in some degree his temperament, differed markedly from those of his predecessor in the field. The judgment or instinct that kept him from coming into direct competition with Kingsley--assuming his own questionable belief that any effort of his would have been competition--at least erred on the side of safety. That the immediate alternative should have been an imitative example of a hackneyed class of English novel, ineffective of purpose, book-inspired, and tainted with the deadness of cynicism, is something which admits of a more definite opinion.

'I have often thought,' says the writer, referring to the hero of _Geoffry Hamlyn_ 'and I dare say other Australian readers have thought also, How would Sam Buckley get on in England? My excuse, therefore, in offering to the Australian public a novel in which the plot, the sympathies, the interest, and the moral, are all English, must be that I have endeavoured to depict with such skill as is permitted to me the fortunes of a young Australian in that country which young Australians still call "Home."'

Without this prefatory sign-post, the reader could never have suspected such a purpose. Clarke may have had it definitely in his mind when he first sat down to the work; but if so, it was put aside, consciously or unconsciously, after the completion of the first few chapters, in favour of more complex characterisation. Bob Calverley, the young squatter, really holds a third or fourth place in relation to the main motive of the story, and is used rather as a foil than as an exemplar of anything typically Australian. He does not bear any active part in the drama of passion and intrigue; he is not even permitted to be a passive spectator of it.

To say that he was good-natured, jovial, popular, 'the sort of man that one involuntarily addresses by his Christian name'; that although he was shy and awkward in the society of ladies, at ease with his own sex only when cattle and horses were the subject of conversation, ignorant of music, and unable to tell Millais from Tenniel, he 'could pick you out any bullock in a herd ... shear a hundred sheep a day ... and drive four horses down a sidling in a Gippsland range with any man in Australia,'--to say all this by way of preliminary, to add that Calverley was no fool, and yet to show him in scarcely any other guise than that of a trusting victim of rogues, is to go a very short distance in the portrayal of a typical Australian.

In the slack-baked condition in which we find him, he merely repeats the ordinary spectacle of green youth in the process of seeing life and buying experience at the usual high figure. Compared with the real squatter (who, ordinarily, is college-trained, and does not shear sheep nor risk his neck unnecessarily), Bob, the son of rich 'Old Calverley,' and nephew of an English baronet, is as an exaggerated stock-figure of the stage to the commonplace blood and brain of everyday life. A childlike trust in one's fellows, a reputation for good-nature, an untamable taste for horseflesh and the pursuits of the Bush, belong to every young squatter in a certain class of Australian fiction; they are qualities which may be applied indiscriminately, with always some effect.

The real squatter is a more civilised and reliable, if less picturesque, person. He likes both work and pleasure, provided they be suitably proportioned. His work is in the personal management of his properties; his pleasure is taken in the large cities. He entertains no fantastic prejudices against urban life, in proof of which he often spends his later years in some city hundreds of miles from the scene of his early toil and pastoral successes.

As a young man in London, he can be found with rooms at the Langham, the Métropole, or some other of the half-dozen fashionable hotels known to colonial visitors. There he will entertain his friends, joining with them, in turn, the continuous movements of the society season. He frankly lacks much of the ease and polish of the young Englishman, but his natural amiability and good spirits largely compensate for these deficiencies, while they preclude any feeling of discomfort on his own part.

During his three or six months' stay in London (the combination usually of a little business with a very full programme of pleasure) he spends freely, and in his tour of the clubs plays here and there a little at cards--perchance loses. Worldly beyond his reputation, and somewhat Chesterfieldian in his principles, he consents to be a Roman while at Rome. He has inherited the British hatred of fuss and personal peculiarity, and none shall call him mean. But, unlike many of his English friends at club and course, he has watched and taken some part in the hard process of making money, and knows the difference between a little gentlemanly extravagance and the reckless hazarding of a fortune. At least, it may be affirmed of him that in nine cases out of ten he is decidedly no fool.

These are only a few of the prominent outlines of the type of young man who, his holiday over, returns unspoiled to work on his own or his father's estates. Those whose passion for a horse destroys all self-control, who spend thousands in gambling and betting, who innocently take every smooth gentleman at his own valuation, are merely individuals--persons who may as unfailingly be found in England or elsewhere as in Australia.

Sam Buckley is a typical descendant of the British pioneer colonists, as every Australian knows. In attempting to give an answer to his own speculation of 'How would Sam Buckley get on in England?' Clarke presumably undertook to continue the portrayal of this type. The result, considered apart from the function Calverley fulfils in _Long Odds_, must be held as emphatically a failure.

Never was a novel written with a franker or more deliberate purpose than that shown in _For the Term of his Natural Life_. The author had the twofold object of picturing the dreadful crudities and brutalities of the early system of convict 'reformation' in Australia, and of preventing their possible repetition elsewhere. The first of these aims was attained with a fuller employment, and perhaps more moderate statement of historical facts, than can be found in any other fiction of the same class; the second was ineffective, because, when it found expression, the abuses which had suggested it no longer continued at the Antipodes, and could not conceivably be repeated on the existing settlements at Port Blair and Noumea.

The story was written a quarter of a century too late to assist the abolition of convict transportation to Australia. Had it appeared at the right time, it might have done much where formal inquiries and the testimonies of disinterested and humane observers had repeatedly failed. For sixty years the practice of deporting criminals had been carried on, upheld in England by official indifference and callousness, and in the colonies themselves by the greed of a small class of private persons who grew rapidly wealthy upon the strength of assigned convict labour, until the free emigrants by the authority of their numbers were able to insist upon its cessation. For so long as the colonies were willing to receive a population of criminals, so long was England only too anxious to supply them and make a virtue out of it. It mattered little to the official mind that the system was incurably bad and immoral; the main thing was to speedily and effectually transfer an awkward burden to other shoulders. The entire history of penal transportation from Great Britain throws a sinister light upon the national character. The practice originated with banishment of convicts to the American colonies under conditions which constituted a form of slavery.

The criminal on being sentenced became a marketable chattel of the State. His services were sold by public auction, the purchaser acquiring the right to transport him and sell him for the term of his sentence to a builder, planter, manufacturer, or other employer beyond the Atlantic. The price paid to the British Government averaged five pounds per head, and some of the more useful prisoners were resold in America for twenty-five pounds each. One of these dealers in convict labour, in giving evidence before a committee of the House of Commons, made a matter-of-fact complaint that 'the trade' was not so remunerative as people supposed. Artisans sold well, but the profit realised upon them was often consumed by losses upon some of the others. One-seventh of his purchases died on his hands, and in the course of business he had been obliged to give the old, the halt and the lame in for nothing. When the War of Independence closed the United States against the traffic, Britain was given a fresh opportunity to reconsider and place its penal system upon a more humane basis; but the temptation to adopt sweeping measures was once more too strong to be resisted. The promoters of the Australian scheme were in so great a hurry to seize their chance that they despatched over seven hundred convicts before even the site for the first settlement was chosen. The hardships which this characteristic act afterwards entailed are too familiar in history to need repetition. After such recklessness, it is no wonder that, as Sir Roger Therry has observed, 'the first-fruits of the system exhibited a state of society in New South Wales which the world might be challenged to surpass in depravity.'

A generation passed before the British Government reluctantly admitted transportation to be a failure. Lord John Russell, as late as 1847, discovered that it had been 'too much the custom to consult the convenience of Great Britain by getting rid of persons of evil habits, and to take that view alone.' In planting provinces which might become empires, they 'should endeavour to make them, not seats of malefactors and convicts, but communities which may set examples of virtue and happiness.'

This mild, platitudinous rebuke came when all the damage was done. It remained for the free inhabitants of Australia to point to a plainer principle in declaring that 'the inundating of feeble and dependent colonies with the criminals of the parent State is opposed to that arrangement of Providence by which the virtue of each community is destined to combat its own vice.'

To illustrate in a single story all the most prominent and pernicious features of the transportation system, Clarke had to invent a case of crime in which the criminal, unlike the majority of the worst offenders sent to the settlements, should always be worthy of the reader's sympathy. It was necessary that the felon be a victim as well as a felon; that he should not regain his liberty in any form, but continue by a series of offences against the authority of his gaolers to experience and display all the successive severities of Macquarie Harbour, Port Arthur, and Norfolk Island. A fundamental fact to be exhibited was the impassable gulf of misunderstanding that might exist between capricious or incompetent prison officials and a criminal who, for any reason, had once come to be regarded as hopelessly vicious. 'We must treat brutes like brutes,' says the prime martinet of the story: 'keep 'em down, sir; make 'em _feel_ what they are. They're here to work, sir. If they won't work, flog 'em until they will. If they work--why, a taste of the cat now and then keeps 'em in mind of what they may expect if they get lazy.'

The author chose to represent the extreme case of a man who, innocent of a murder charged against him, allowed himself to be transported under an assumed name in order to prevent the exposure of a long-concealed act of unfaithfulness on the part of a beloved mother.

Richard Devine is the bastard son of an aristocratic Englishwoman who in early youth was forced by her father into a loveless union with a rich plebeian. The single fault of the mother's life is confessed after twenty years, when the husband in a moment of anger strikes her high-spirited and obstinate son. The latter consents to leave his home for ever, and relinquish the name he has borne. On these terms the wife is spared. Richard Devine goes on the instant. Crossing Hampstead Heath, he comes upon a robbed and murdered man, and presently is arrested for the crime. The explanation that would save him would also cause the dreaded exposure of his mother, and so he withholds it, gives a false name, and, having put himself beyond the means of defence and the recognition of friends, is convicted and sentenced to transportation for life.

In making all the subsequent career of Rufus Dawes abnormally painful--that of a dumb sufferer who in sixteen years' confinement, ending only in a tragic death, experiences by turns every form of punishment and oppression--the author often touches, though it cannot be said he ever exceeds, the limits of possibility.

'Need one who was not a hardened criminal have suffered so much and so long?' is the question that continually recurs to the mind of the reader; but it is suggested by the prolonged and pitiful sense of unsatisfied justice rather than by any doubting that the extremes of penal discipline as practised in the name of the British Government between forty and sixty years ago could have been successively applied to a single human being. The writer adheres relentlessly to his central idea to the end. Dawes' unameliorated servitude and unavenged fate were intended to symbolise glaring anomalies of justice which never were remedied. The 'correction' he is subjected to was that which the laws of the time permitted, and which in many cases goaded its victims to draw lots to murder one another in order to escape from their misery.

Some of the least creditable features of convict transportation, of which it was said by Earl Grey in 1857 that their existence had been a disgrace to the nation, came to an end only when the system itself was abolished. But novelist and statesman alike struck at the abuses without feeling it necessary to mention any of the good results of the system. Its inherent merits were strictly few, indeed; yet they ought to be sought in history by anyone who would get a fair idea of the prison policy of the period. It is, of course, inevitable that the criticism conveyed in a strong imaginative work should fail to give a full view of results so complex as those produced by the largely haphazard method of the Australian penal settlements.

The practice of assigning prisoners to private employment, for example, produced notable effects upon society, of which Marcus Clarke's story gives but the faintest indication. If Rufus Dawes had been an ordinary first offender, he might have regained liberty soon after his arrival in Van Diemen's Land. But, as we have seen, it was the purpose of the author to make him exhibit all the rigours of convict discipline. His case must therefore be regarded as more exceptional than typical. As a rule, only men inveterate in crime were detained in constant punishment. Transportation for life meant servitude only for eight years if the convict conducted himself well, a condition which, of course, depended largely on the sort of master who secured his services. Major de Winton, an officer who served for some years on Norfolk Island, has mentioned that a prisoner by good conduct received a ticket-of-leave after he had been twice sentenced to death, thrice to transportation for life, and to cumulative periods of punishment amounting to over a hundred years!

An interesting view of Marcus Clarke as a literary workman is obtained from the story of the conception and laborious writing of _For the Term of his Natural Life_. It affords the first, and unhappily the last, evidence of how far he recognised the claims of realism in fiction; and from the account of his suffering under the self-imposed drudgery of keeping to the strict line of history, we see the man as his friends knew him contrasted with the conscientious artist known to the general reader of his famous novel.

The best of Clarke's minor writings display the results of much general culture, but give no proof of special preparation. They are short, concentrated, forcible--the natural expression of a brilliant, impetuous, and spasmodic worker. He overcame his natural repugnance to lengthened toil and minute thoroughness when he saw them to be essential conditions of his task. But the effort was a severe one.

In 1871, when about twenty-five years of age, he was ordered to recruit his health by a trip to Tasmania. He had been for over three years writing extensively for the press, and joining in the gaieties of Melbourne life at a rate which a constitution much stronger than his could not have withstood. The idea of writing a story of prison life had suggested itself previously during his reading of Australian history. Finding himself now without sufficient money for the proposed holiday, he decided to put into active progress this literary project which had hitherto been only vaguely outlined.

Printed records of the convict days there were in abundance at Melbourne, and from these alone such a writer could have made a sufficiently striking story. But he concluded that he could make his picture at once truer and more vivid when the surroundings of the old settlements had become a full reality to his mind. Messrs. Clarson, Massina and Co. readily contracted with the young novelist for the first publication of the story in their monthly, the _Australian Journal_, and made him an advance of money. Off he went with characteristic confidence, and some weeks later returned ready primed and eager for the new work. His enthusiasm soon cooled. The story commenced to appear after the first few chapters were written, and the unbroken industry necessary to maintain a regular supply of the parts was more than Clarke could give.

Writing against time, he is said to have felt like a convict himself. The irregular dribbling out of the story so injured the reputation of the journal that for a time its circulation was reduced to one-half the ordinary issue.

Mr. Hamilton Mackinnon, the writer of a sympathetic memoir of Clarke, has given an entertaining account of what followed: 'The author would be frequently interviewed by the publishers, and would as frequently promise the copy. When moral suasion was apparently powerless to effect the required object, payments in advance were made with somewhat better results; but as this could not go on _ad libitum_, copy would fall into arrears again. At last it was found that the only way to get the author to finish his tale was to induce him into a room in the publishing-house, where, under the benign influences of a pipe, etc., and a lock on the door, the necessary work would be done by the facile pen; and in such manner was _His Natural Life_ produced.'

In a note of apology to their readers in January, 1871, the publishers print a somewhat comical letter which they had received from the delinquent author. Forwarding a single chapter of the story, he tells them that they must make shift with it as best they can, and he will let them have a larger supply during the following month. The letter concludes nonchalantly as follows: 'This is awkward, I admit, and I suppose some good-natured friend or other will say that I have over-plum-puddinged or hot-whiskied myself in honour of the so-called festive season, but I can't help it.'

The story as first published was much longer than the form in which it appears in the English edition. At the request of the present writer, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, who was one of Clarke's literary friends, supplies the following account of how the novel came to be so extensively curtailed:

'As one of the trustees to the public library (Melbourne), I saw Clarke constantly, and had always a friendly, and sometimes a confidential, conversation with him. He visited me now and then at Sorrento, and on one of these occasions he spoke of a story he had running through a Melbourne periodical about which he was perplexed. He asked me to read it, and tell him unreservedly what I thought of it. I read the story carefully, making notes on the margin, and wrote him frankly the impression it had made on me.

'After twenty years I can recall the substance of the letter, which is probably still in existence. A powerful story, I said, but painful as it is powerful. The incidents, instead of being depressing, would be tragic if they befell anyone we loved or honoured. But there was no one in the story whom he could have intended us to love or honour. The hero underwent a lifelong torture without any credible, or even intelligible, motive, and on the whole was a _mauvais sujet_ himself. To win the reader's sympathy, all this must be altered. I strongly advised that the latter part of the story, in which the Ballarat outbreak was described under a leader whom he named Peter Brawler, should be omitted; and I objected to the publication of a song in French _argot_ with a spirited translation, as the latter would naturally be attributed to the author of the novel, whereas I had read it in an early _Blackwood_ before he was born.

'Marcus Clarke thanked me warmly, and said he would adopt all my suggestions. He wrote a new prologue, in which he made the protection of his mother's good name the motive of the hero's silence, and he omitted both the things I had objected to.'

Ending, as it began, with a tragedy, the artistic unity of the novel is thus preserved, and the dominant aim of the author emphasised. Many of those who read it in the serial parts strongly disapproved of the excisions, but there can be little doubt that the story is the stronger for their having been made.

It was as the work of a vivid historian, rather than of a social reformer, that Marcus Clarke's masterpiece won its popularity, and, for its dramatic and substantially accurate view of the worst (always the worst) aspect of convict life, it will continue to be read while anyone remains to take an interest in the unhappiest period of Australian history. From its pages may be learned how long it has taken the intelligent theorist of the British Government to acquire a practical method of treating a difficult social question; how long stupidity and inhumanity may be practised with the sanction of what Major Vickers was fond of respectfully calling 'the King's regulations'; and how far English gentlemen, remote from the influence of public opinion and invested with more power than single individuals should ever possess, may become despots, and even blackguards.

It is a grim record. Let those who are inclined to doubt it turn to the originals, especially to the report of the House of Commons Committee of 1837-38, and they will find facts which the creator of Rufus Dawes, with all his supple fancy and delicacy of language, could not bring himself even to indicate. There are episodes which the more matter-of-fact historians barely mention, but do not take advantage of their great privileges to describe. For example, there were times during the first thirty years of the century when the open and general lewdness of the officials on some of the principal settlements, in their relations with the female convicts, rendered them totally unfit for the positions they held.

Clarke in his researches obtained abundant knowledge of this, but made no use of it save in adding a few luminous touches to his portrait of Dawes' passionate and licentious cousin.

In reading the novel for its historical interest, it is necessary throughout to remember the limitation that the writer has specifically put upon himself. He did not undertake to illustrate any of the good effects of exile upon a section of the first offenders sent to the colonies, and scarcely touches the travesties of justice so often wrought by that lottery in human life known as the assignment system. His purpose is to describe 'the dismal condition of a felon during his term of transportation,' and to show the futility of a prison system loosely planned at one end of the world and roughly executed at the other by men who found it easier, and in some cases more agreeable, to their undiscerning hearts to coerce than to ameliorate.

The Parliamentary Committee defined transportation as 'a series of punishments embracing every degree of human suffering, from the lowest, consisting of a slight restraint upon freedom of action, to the highest, consisting of long and tedious torture.' It was with the latter part of the definition in mind that Clarke told his story. He chose to represent servitude in the chain-gangs of Van Diemen's Land and Norfolk Island as the condition of slavery which Sir Richard Bourke and Sir George Arthur admitted it to be, as the utter failure described by the experienced Dr. Ullathorne, and as the system recommended by the House of Commons Committee to be abolished as incapable of improvement and 'remarkably efficient, not in reforming, but still further corrupting those who undergo punishment.'

The idea which is the ganglion of Clarke's plot was always seen clearly, but never obsessed his mind as did a cognate theme that of the impetuous reformer Charles Reade. In his crusade against the form of punishment known as the 'silent system,' the English novelist obtrudes his moral with a frequency that weakens the effect of his often splendid eloquence. The direct opposite of this style is seen in the Australian novel. The author never openly preaches. His best effects are obtained by quiet satire conveyed in the gradual limning of his characters, and by occasional incidents of which each is allowed to give its own lesson to the reader. The facts have all the advantage of a studiously calm and impersonal presentation.

In the rapid progress of the plot the reader is kept keenly interested. If he have an eye for the moral he will detect it at once; if not, there is no importunate author to force it upon him. In either case he will find the story an absorbing one. 'It has all the solemn ghastliness of truth,' said Lord Rosebery, writing to the novelist's widow in 1884. He confessed that the book had a fascination for him. Not once or twice, but many times, had he read it, and during his visit to Australia he spent some time in viewing the scene of the old settlements and examining the reports upon which the novel is so largely based.

That there are some exaggerations in the treatment of facts need hardly be stated, but they are few in number, not serious in import, and outbalanced by numerous cases in which it has been necessary to modify the description of incidents either too painful or horrible to be fully depicted. As a compensation for its occasional storical inaccuracy, _His Natural Life_ is notably free of the melodramatic excesses that most young writers would have been tempted to commit. Clarke was too good an artist to think of pleading the sanction of facts for any misuse of the privileges of good fiction. To maintain a strong impression on the reader, his touch is occasionally strong and fearless, like that of Kipling. But this object attained, he uses his materials with an almost unnecessary reticence. The episode of the cannibalism of Gabbett and his fellow-convicts is exceptional. Yet it purposely falls short of the terrible original, which is happily hidden away from general view between the covers of an old Parliamentary report.

It has been said of Clarke, by one of his friends, that in his estimate of motives he was invariably cynical. Though the assertion goes too far, it seems to suggest the best explanation of his notable preference for delineating the dark side of human nature. He appeared ever to see vice more clearly, or at any rate to find it more interesting for the purposes of fiction, than the good or the neutral in character. But his cynicism--if it really formed a settled feature of his character--was not of the kind that implies any indifference to injustice or dishonesty. In this particular, both his fiction and essays have no uncertain tone. It is indeed a fault of Clarke that his bad characters are in most cases wholly bad. He makes Frere abandon a life of debauchery under the influence of a pure woman's affection, but the effect is afterwards destroyed by evidences that the attachment on the man's side is sensual and based on vanity. Moreover, Frere the prison tyrant and base denier of Dawes' heroism remains unexcused.

Bob Calverley and Miss Ffrench, the only important representatives of the ordinary virtues in _Long Odds_, are little more than dim shadows contrasted with the clearly-marked personalities of half a dozen others in the story who are rogues, or the associates and instruments of rogues. 'The human anguish of every page' of _His Natural Life_ which Lord Rosebery found so compelling to his attention, need not have been so continuous and unqualified.

The author seems purposely to have ignored the opportunity afforded by the story for the introduction of a character who, while asserting the claims of Rufus Dawes and the broader interests of humanity, need not have defeated the main motive of the plot. It was a decided error not to gratify in this way the combative instinct of the reader. The Rev. James North--'gentleman, scholar, and Christian priest'--might have been an active opponent of cruelty like Eden, the clergyman in _It's Never Too Late to Mend_, instead of being made a pitiable example of a confirmed and self-accusing drunkard.

The strength of _His Natural Life_ lies not so much in the ingenuity and dramatic quality of its plot, as in the number of striking personalities among its leading characters. That of Rufus Dawes, curiously, is distinct only at intervals. It represents, for the most part, a hopeless sufferer passing through a series of punishments which become almost monotonous in their unvaried severity.

But what could be more luminous than the portrait of Sarah Purfoy, the clever, self-possessed adventuress with the single redeeming quality of an invincible love for her worthless and villainous convict-husband? or that of Frere, the swaggering, red-whiskered, coarsely good-humoured convict-driver, glorying in his knowledge of the heights and depths of criminal ingenuity and vice, and frankly ignorant of all else?

How naturally from such a person comes that savagely humorous dissertation upon the treatment of prisoners! 'There is a sort of satisfaction to me, by George! in keeping the scoundrels in order. I like to see the fellows' eyes glint at you as you walk past 'em. Gad! they'd tear me to pieces if they dared, some of 'em.'

Frere is a triumph of consistent literary portraiture. He is generally understood to have been a study from life. But as the official whose name has sometimes been associated with the character was a considerably more humane disciplinarian than the persecutor of Rufus Dawes, it must be assumed that Clarke aimed only at the representation of a type.

Brutes like Frere and his vindictive associates, Burgess and Troke, there undoubtedly were on the settlements, but the average official has probably a better representative in Major Vickers, the Commandant. Vickers is not an unkind man, but does not trust himself to do anything unprovided for in the 'regulations,' for which he has an abject respect. 'It is not for me to find fault with the system,' he says; 'but I have sometimes wondered if kindness would not succeed better than the chain-gang and the cat.' But he never gives intelligence, much less kindness, a fair trial.

Sylvia Vickers is the only complete picture of a good woman to be found in any of the author's stories. Taken in childhood by her parents to the penal settlements, and separated there for years from youthful society, familiarised with the constant aspects of crime and suffering, and habitually in the society of her elders, she early develops into a quaint, matter-of-fact little creature, such as might well disconcert a peacock like the Reverend Meekin.

To Frere, whose knowledge of other women has been mainly immoral, her innocence and wilfulness, and her instinctive dislike of him, serve as a strong attraction. Though he becomes her husband by means of a cruel fraud, he never fully gains her trust, and the estrangement so tragically sealed in the last chapter of the novel comes almost as a relief to the sympathetic reader of her sad history. Sylvia Vickers, despite the gloomy environment of her youth, is throughout an intensely womanly woman, the delicate conception of whose character surely places her creator far above the rank of the cynics in literature.

Not the least of the elements which combine to make _His Natural Life_ one of the most remarkable novels of the century is the occasional skilful varying of its painful realism with a colouring of romance, as in the relations between Dawes and Sylvia: his absorbing devotion when she is so strangely made dependent upon him at the deserted settlement; his long-continued confidence that she will effect his vindication and deliverance; and, finally, the dominant motive of securing her safety against North with which he escapes from the gaol at Norfolk Island, and joins her in the doomed schooner on its last voyage to Van Diemen's Land.

What Oliver Wendell Holmes called 'the Robinson Crusoe touches' in the story--including the experiences of the marooned party at Macquarie Harbour, and those of Rex in his escape through the Devil's Blowhole--also help to leave with the reader of the novel an ineffaceable memory.

HENRY KINGSLEY.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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.