In the conversation of Kingsley’s colonists, [p 116] the business of the squatter, his hopes, fears and struggles, find no place, and the idea of hard work is never obtruded for its own sake. The talk is the talk of a cultured class who live wholesome lives and have no cares. The twelve thousand miles that separate them from the centre of their intellectual life are obliterated. The men preserve their individual tastes, together with that comradeship and mutual considerateness which have their origin in the best traditions of college life. The same loyalty and chivalry are prominently reproduced in the characters of Ravenshoe and Silcote of Silcotes. But in Geoffry Hamlyn these qualities are perhaps more noticeable (at all events to a colonial reader) than in the later novels, because of the contrast they furnish to the essentially competitive life of modern Australia. Brentwood is ‘excessively attached to mathematics, and has leisure to gratify his hobby’; Harding, ‘an Oxford man,’ is ‘an inveterate writer of songs,’ a pastime which only the annual business of shearing is permitted to interrupt; Buckley is intent on the education of his son, [p 117] in which he is careful to provide for a knowledge of the Latin Grammar; while Doctor Mulhaus finds the new country an even better field than the old one for his researches as a naturalist and geologist. In telling his story, Kingsley seems, in short, to have treated pioneer squatting in Australia as the brighter aspects of English country life have been treated in fiction for generations past. He expends his best efforts in showing the picturesque surroundings and interior comfort of Australian homes. Neither their tables nor their bookshelves lack any of the best luxuries of the hour. The greyness and rawness of their environment are not touched upon. Marcus Clarke could never have shown the Australian people so much of the beauty of their strange fauna and flora as can be found in Geoffry Hamlyn. He would have allowed the budding civilisation of the country to be swallowed up in sombre desolate forests, or appear as lonely specks on bleached and thirsty plains. Though he might intend the contrary, that, substantially, would be the final impression left on the [p 118] mind of the reader. Australian scenery awed and depressed him. With all his powers of graphic expression, he could seldom write of it without exaggeration. It was the fascination of the grotesque rather than the picturesque that he felt. Kingsley, though scarcely so graceful and vivid a describer, had a keener and more constant sense of natural beauty. His vision was unclouded by the peculiar susceptibility of temperament which narrowed the view of his brilliant contemporary. He could not have indulged in rhetorical flourishes at the expense of accuracy, as in the familiar passage professing to give the Australian view of ‘our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all fours.’ A comparison of Marcus Clarke’s too often quoted description with the sketches of landscape given in, say, the twentieth, twenty-eighth and thirty-sixth chapters of Geoffry Hamlyn and at the beginning of the third volume of The Hillyars and the Burtons curiously illustrates how [p 119] far the appreciation of Australian scenery depends upon the point of view of the observer.
Kingsley’s descriptions, like all else that he wrote of the country, breathe an unmistakable personal enjoyment. They are the natural expression of a happy disposition, just as is the boyish fun with which he surrounds the love-making of his characters. ‘Halbert kicked Jim’s shins under the table, and whispered: “You’ve lost your money, old fellow!”’ when Sam Buckley, flushed and happy, rejoined his friends in the sitting-room at Garoopna, after proposing to Alice in the garden. Jim Brentwood had peevishly bet his friend that the lovers would go on shilly-shallying half their lives; but Halbert, with keener vision, had foreseen the very hour of their betrothal, and made a bet of five pounds on the event. More comical still is the spectacle of Hamlyn ducking under the bedclothes to escape the boot that is about to be flung at him, for laughingly discrediting the story of which his bosom-friend Stockbridge has tragically unburdened [p 120] himself concerning the evaporation of his love for Mary Hawker.
Whether in recording the actions and dialogue of his characters, or in describing scenery and the habits of the birds and animals which figure so often in his first novel, Kingsley always reflected some of his own happiness. It is not wit nor subtle humour, but a combination of pure mirth with the enthusiasm of warm friendship, that maintains one’s interest in the simple life of the new Drumston. There is an abundance of farcical fun and playfulness which force laughter, and never approach an unkindness. The men avoid being smart at each other’s expense; and if they cannot claim to be clever or heroic, they are at least good fellows, any one of whom might serve as a model of manliness.
Kingsley’s knowledge of household pets was of the kind exhibited by persons who have spent some period of their lives in loneliness, with only the companionship of dumb creatures. He was an acute observer of their peculiarities, with the noting of [p 121] which he combined a whimsical exaggeration. The account of the menagerie which Sam Buckley found at Garoopna on the occasion of his memorable first meeting with Alice Brentwood is almost unique in Australian literature.
Buckley’s ride to rescue his sweetheart from the bushrangers is one of the most moving and dramatic incidents in the book, and a good specimen of Kingsley’s graphic narrative style. A band of the outlaws who were the terror of pioneer colonists fifty years ago have risen in the district, and, after committing outrages at one station, are reported to be riding on to another twenty miles distant. At the latter, Captain Brentwood’s home, Alice happens to be alone. When the terrible news comes to her young lover, he is at Baroona, which by the shortest road is ten miles from Brentwood’s. What start have the bushrangers had, and will they arrive before him?
Sam’s noble horse, Widderin, a horse with a pedigree a hundred years old, stood in the stable. The buying of that horse had been Sam’s only extravagance, for [p 122] which he had often reproached himself, and now this day he would see whether he would get his money’s-worth out of that horse or no.
I followed him up to the stable, and found him putting the bridle on Widderin’s beautiful little head. Neither of us spoke; only when I handed him the saddle, and helped him with the girths, he said, ‘God bless you!’
I ran out and got down the slip-rails for him. As he rode by, he said, ‘Good-bye, Uncle Jeff; perhaps you won’t see me again’; and I cried out, ‘Remember your God and your mother, Sam, and don’t do anything foolish.’ Then he was gone….
Looking across the plains the way he should go, I saw another horseman toiling far away, and recognised Doctor Mulhaus. Good Doctor! he had seen the danger in a moment, and by his ready wit had got a start of everyone else by ten minutes. The Doctor, on his handsome, long-bodied Arabian mare, was making good work of it across the plains, when he heard the rush of a horse’s feet behind him, and turning, he saw tall Widderin bestridden by Sam, springing over the turf, gaining on him stride after stride. In a few minutes they were alongside of one another.
‘Good lad!’ cried the Doctor. ‘On, forwards; catch her, and away to the woods with her! Bloodhound Desborough will be on their trail in half an hour. Save her, and we will have noble vengeance!’
Sam only waved his hand in good-bye, and sped on across the plain like a solitary ship at sea. The good horse, with elastic and easy motion, fled on his course like a bird, lifting his feet clearly and rapidly through the grass. The brisk south wind filled his wide nostrils [p 123] as he turned his graceful neck from side to side, till, finding that work was meant, and not play, he began to hold his head straight before him, and rush steadily forward….
One stumble now, and it were better to lie down on the plain and die. He was in the hands of God, and he felt it. He said one short prayer, but that towards the end was interrupted by the wild current of his thoughts. Was there any hope? They, the devils, would have been drinking at the Mayfords’, and perhaps would go slow; or would they ride fast and wild? After thinking a short time, he feared the latter. They had tasted blood, and knew that the country would be roused on them shortly….
Here are a brace of good pistols, and they with care shall give account, if need be, of two men. After that, nothing. It were better—so much better—not to live if one were only ten minutes too late…. Now he was in the forest again, and now as he rode quickly down the steep sandy road among the bracken, he heard the hoarse rush of the river in his ears, and knew the end was well-nigh come…. Now the house was in sight, and now he cried aloud some wild inarticulate sound of thankfulness and joy. All was as peaceful as ever, and Alice, unconscious, stood white-robed in the verandah, feeding her birds.
As he rode up he shouted to her and beckoned. She came running through the house, and met him breathless at the doorway.
‘The bushrangers, Alice, my love!’ he said. ‘We must fly this instant; they are close to us now.’
She had been prepared for this. She knew her duty [p 124] well, for her father had often told her what to do. No tears! no hysterics! She took Sam’s hand without a word, and, placing her fairy foot upon his boot, vaulted up into the saddle before him…. They crossed the river, and dismounting, they led the tired horse up the steep slope of turf that surrounded a little castellated tor of bluestone….
‘I do not see them anywhere, Alice,’ said Sam presently. ‘I see no one coming across the plains. They must be either very near us in the hollow of the river-valley, or else a long way off.’
‘There they are!’ said Alice. ‘Surely there is a large party of horsemen on the plain, but they are seven or eight miles off.’
‘Ay, ten,’ said Sam. ‘I am not sure that they are horsemen.’ Then he said suddenly in a whisper, ‘Lie down, my love, in God’s name! Here they are, close to us!’
There burst on his ear a confused round of talking and laughing, and out of one of the rocky gullies leading towards the river came the men they had been flying from, in number about fourteen. They had crossed the river, for some unknown reason, and to the fear-struck hiders it seemed as though they were making straight towards their lair.
He had got Widderin’s head in his breast, blindfolding him with his coat, for should he neigh now they were undone indeed! As the bushrangers approached, the horse began to get uneasy and paw the ground, putting Sam in such an agony of terror that the sweat rolled down his face. In the midst of this he felt a hand on his arm, and Alice’s voice, which he scarcely recognised, [p 125] said in a fierce whisper: ‘Give me one of your pistols, sir!’
‘Leave that to me!’ he replied, in the same tone.
‘As you please,’ she said; ‘but I must not fall alive into their hands. Never look your mother in the face again if I do.’
He gave one more glance around, and saw that the enemy would come within a hundred yards of their hiding-place. Then he held the horse faster than ever and shut his eyes.
Was it a minute only, or an hour, until they heard the sound of the voices dying away in the roar of the river, and, opening their eyes once more, looked into one another’s faces? Faces they thought that they had never seen before—so each told the other afterwards—so wild, so haggard, and so strange.
If, as Professor Masson says, ‘it is by his characters that a novelist is chiefly judged,’ Henry Kingsley’s future reputation will be found to depend almost solely on what he accomplished in Geoffry Hamlyn, The Hillyars and the Burtons and Ravenshoe. In the first two of these there is an abundance of original observation and little conscious study of character. The vivid Australian scenes of the one, and the Chelsea life of the other, are transcripts of the author’s own memories. His knowledge of [p 126] the squatters he got by working for them and living with them; what he knew of police and convicts and bushrangers he learned in doing police duty; the life of the Burtons, as told in ‘Jim Burton’s Story,’ was that which the author saw during his boyhood round his father’s old rectory on Chelsea Embankment.
‘He seemed to me,’ says Mrs.
Thackeray Ritchie, ‘to have lived his own books, battled them out and forced them into their living shapes, to have felt them and been them all.’ Hardly all—one feels bound to say. The remark is entirely true of nearly everything in Geoffry Hamlyn and of three-fourths of The Hillyars and the Burtons, but to Ravenshoe it applies in a more limited degree, and to some of the later novels scarcely ever. Either through carelessness (of which one often suspects him) or deficiency of judgment, Kingsley more than once allowed the exigencies of his plots to destroy all consistency in his characters.
Thus, Squire Silcote, the clever old ex-lawyer, is made to retire from the world and brood for many years, and on quite [p 127] insufficient grounds, in the belief that his first wife had been unfaithful, and had tried to poison him. Nothing short of a condition of semi-insanity could explain his conduct. In other respects the character is finely conceived. Emma Burton, too, is a perfectly natural and charming person until she is employed to revive the old problem of how far a sense of duty can triumph over the power of love. Her devotion to her deformed brother is wrong, because it is unnecessary. But even if this were not the case, it would be irrational in a woman so eminently sensible and unromantic as she is shown to be in the first half of the story. Almost at the beginning of her voluntary service she is represented as realising ‘the hideous fate to which she has condemned herself in her fanaticism.’ It is quite impossible to make the reader believe that, loving Erne Hillyar as she did, she could for years persist in rejecting him, and that her brother would permit so much sacrifice on his account.