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.
[p 90]
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 [p 91] their brief enumeration, Kingsley has been freely credited with a certain ever-pleasing vivacity and gallantry of style far too rare in literature to be overlooked. The warmest of his admirers in his own country have even attempted to raise him to a position above that of his more celebrated brother.
The task of comparing Kingsley the poet, preacher, and reformer, with Kingsley the laughing, genial teller of stories who never cherished a hobby in his life, would seem to be as superfluous on general grounds as it is premature in respect of the only possible question as to which of them is likely to be best remembered a generation or two hence. Only in one particular does it seem quite safe to predict—namely, that whatever may be the future standing of one who is said to have never penned a story without a didactic purpose of some kind, Henry Kingsley is certain of a permanent place in the literature of the young country where he encountered both the best and the worst experiences of his life.
The English estimate of his novels—mainly [p 92] a technical one—having been recorded, it seems to the present writer that something of interest might be said of them from, as far as possible, the Australian point of view, the standpoint of the reader who knows the country of Sam Buckley and Alice Brentwood, and has lived some of their life. Two out of the three best novels are largely Australian in matter, and the reasons for their enduring popularity in the colonies are among the best grounds of the favour in which the author is held by the average English reader, to leave out of reckoning for the moment the literary expert. Geoffry Hamlyn and The Hillyars and the Burtons have obvious faults, but in most respects they are the highest, because the least artificial, expression of Kingsley’s powers. A consideration of some of their more noticeable qualities will perhaps afford the clearest answer to the question which opens this essay.
Henry Kingsley was one of the many impecunious young Englishmen of education and adventurous spirit who sought fortune [p 93] on the gold-fields of Australia between 1851 and 1860, and were rewarded in some cases with ready wealth, but in far more with bitter disappointment. Leaving Oxford without a degree in the company of two fellow-students, he hurried off to the Victorian gold-fields, which were then in the early sensational period of their development, and attracting people from all parts of the world. It was the time when the ordinary business of the colonies could scarcely be carried on at any sacrifice—when some of the more perplexed employers in the adjoining territory of New South Wales had urged Governor Fitzroy to proclaim martial law and peremptorily prohibit mining, ‘in order that the inducement which seemed so irresistible to persons to quit their ordinary occupations might be removed.’ In the country districts crops were left unreaped and sheep unshorn; in the towns masters did their own work or paid excessively to have it half done; while the harbours were filled with vessels whose crews had deserted to join in the general scramble for gold. No one was content to stand [p 94] behind a counter all day and hear of nuggets being found up-country which sold for over four thousand pounds. ‘As well attempt to stop the influx of the tide as stop the rush to the diggings,’ was the reply given by Fitzroy to his petitioners.
Ex-military and naval officers, professional men, convicts from Van Diemen’s Land, picturesque cut-throats from the Californian and Mexican mines, Chinese, and many other varieties of the human species, rubbed shoulders and lived generally in remarkable order and amity in the crowded canvas cities of Turon, Mount Alexander, Ballarat, and Bendigo. In 1852, the year before Kingsley’s arrival, seventy thousand of them were toiling in Victoria alone.
Such were the times and the people which gave the future novelist his first practical experience of colonial life. The varied knowledge that he accumulated, first of the gold-fields and later of pastoral life and the towns, was the only reward of his five years’ voluntary exile from England. During his absence he never wrote to his parents, and [p 95] they thought him dead. His reticence as to his unsuccessful struggles was continued when he returned home, and not relaxed in later life even to his wife.
An interesting memoir by Mr. Clement Shorter, prefixed to a new edition of Kingsley’s novels, briefly describes his school-days and literary career, but is almost wholly silent concerning the eventful years spent in the colonies. There is a single reference to the period which succeeded his gold-digging days, when want forced him to seek a less precarious occupation. For a time, it seems, he was a mounted policeman in New South Wales, until, ‘compelled by duty to attend an execution, he was so much affected that he threw up the appointment in disgust.’ Then, like many another unlucky digger, he was obliged to travel the country in search of work on the sheep and cattle stations.