Robbery under Arms not only contains Boldrewood’s most dramatic plot, but his most skilful and sympathetic treatment of character. It is a distinct exception to the rest of his [p 205] work. In the later stories the characters are brightly sketched, but with so casual a touch that they leave no permanent impression with the reader. The best excite no more than a passing admiration, whereas Kingsley’s win lasting admiration and love. There can be no surer test of art and truth: it furnishes the one indubitable proof of clear vision, sympathy, and correct expression. Where the weakness of some of Boldrewood’s characters is not due to deficiency of interest in them on the part of the author, it is the result of an attempt to copy life with an accuracy which sacrifices picturesqueness.
The attempt to preserve absolute truth in every detail of the life-story of John Redgrave, the hero of The Squatter’s Dream, seems distinctly a case in point. In no other novel is there so complete a description of Australian squatting life—its varying success and failure, its solid comforts and wholesome happiness in times of prosperity. Redgrave is one of the most elaborately drawn of all the author’s characters; there is the fullest sense of probability in every incident; the [p 206] entire story is plainly a direct transcript of life; nothing at first seems wanting. But when the book is laid aside, the reader realises that he has scarcely been once moved by it. He has felt a transient pity for the hero’s misfortunes, and a mild satisfaction at his modified ultimate success—nothing more.
The main defect here appears to consist in the central motive of Redgrave’s struggles being limited to purely personal ambition. His aim is no higher than that of a speculator in a hurry to be rich, and when he fails, he gets little more than the sympathy which is commonly given to the man who plays for a high stake and loses. His love for Maud Stangrove, which might have been made a controlling and ennobling influence, ranks only as an incident. It comes after the main impression of his character has been given. Beyond doubt he represents a real type; no error has been made in this respect; his failure to win higher favour with us arises from his too close approximation to the common clay. There is absent just that small element of the ideal with which even [p 207] the sternest of the apostles of realism in letters have found it impracticable to dispense.
An illustration of how little Boldrewood was inclined to idealise either his characters or their surroundings is afforded by the account of Redgrave’s first visit to the home of the Stangroves, his neighbours on the Warroo. On the journey he passed a Bush inn of the period where drunkenness was the normal condition of everyone, from the owner to the stable-boy. The shanty itself, an ugly slab building roofed with corrugated iron, ‘stood as if dropped on the edge of the bare sandy plain.’ It faced the dusty track which did duty as a highroad; at the back of the slovenly yard was the river, chiefly used as a receptacle for rubbish and broken bottles. A half-score of gaunt, savage-looking pigs lay in the verandah or stirred the dust and bones in the immediate vicinity of the front-entrance. ‘What, in the name of wonder,’ inquired Jack of himself as he rode away, ‘can a man do who lives in such a fragment of Hades but drink?’
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The home of the Stangroves, though less depressing, bears painful evidence of its isolation. The settler’s wife little resembles Agnes Buckley—she is too typically colonial for that. ‘She was young, but a certain worn look told of the early trials of matronhood. Her face bore silent witness to the toils of housekeeping with indifferent servants or none at all; to the want of average female society; to a little loneliness and a great deal of monotony.’
The visitor meets another member of the household, Stangrove’s unmarried sister, a beautiful and spirited young woman whose impatience with her colourless life is outwardly subdued to ironical resignation. ‘Another eventful day for Mr. Redgrave,’ she remarks on his return after a day’s riding over the station with her brother; ‘yesterday the sheep were lost—to-day the sheep are found; so passes our life on the Warroo.’
The best argument against Boldrewood’s usual treatment of character is furnished by the great bushranger chief who is the central [p 209] figure in Robbery under Arms. The author here submits for the first and only time to that fundamental law of fiction which demands a certain judicious exaggeration in the characters of a story depending for its interest mainly on the charm of circumstance. Starlight is at once the most real and least possible personage to be found in any of Boldrewood’s novels. He becomes real because his character and actions are conceived in harmony with the romance and pathos of the story. Though it is obvious enough that there never could have existed a bushranger with quite so much of the bel air, or with a private code of honour so admirable, the exaggeration is far from obtrusive. He is of a stature suited to the deeds he performs, and, both he and his exploits being often closely associated with historical facts, a strong sense of reality is maintained.
Starlight seems to be a compound of several characters. He has Turpin’s ubiquity, Claude Duval’s sang-froid, the personal attractiveness of Gardiner (leader of a gang which made a business of robbing gold-escorts [p 210] in New South Wales about forty years ago), and the humorous daredevilry of the ‘Captain Thunderbolt’ who obtained notoriety in the same colony a few years later.
Boldrewood seems to have shrewdly agreed with the dictum of Turpin, that it is necessary for a highwayman, at all events a captain of highwaymen, to be a gentleman. But Starlight, unlike Turpin, does not become vain with success, and is far from being enamoured with his profession. Indeed, he is quite with the orthodox view of it. He is a bushranger, apparently, because he no longer hopes or desires to resume his rank in certain aristocratic circles from which, by occasional hints, we are informed that he has fallen. He indulges in no lugubrious moralisings—he is far too agreeable a person for that—but exhibits just the required touch of romance by letting you know that in his past there is a sadness which a career of excitement and danger is necessary to enable him to forget. Having been won over as a sympathiser and admirer, the reader is ready to believe that [p 211] at worst the dashing outlaw could never have been a very bad fellow. Certainly the author has carefully kept him from participation in the grosser acts of lawlessness of which his revengeful old partner Ben Marston, the more typical bushranger, is guilty. Cattle-stealing and highway robbery as supervised by Starlight are allowable, and even meritorious, in so far as they afford him opportunities to practise some facetious deception on the police. Such raids are not crimes, but comedies.
There is excellent fun in his posing as ‘Charles Carisforth, Esq., of Sturton, Yorkshire, and Banda, Waroona and Ebor Downs, N.S.W.,’ while awaiting the arrival at Adelaide of the 1,100 head of stolen cattle, or as the ‘Hon. Frank Haughton,’ one of ‘the three honourables’ on the Turon gold-field. The rash daring and cleverness of these disguises furnish a combination of amusement and dramatic interest not approached in anything else that Boldrewood has written. Starlight’s presence at dinner with the gold-fields commissioner and police magistrate at [p 212] Turon, when ‘in walked Inspector Goring,’ the officer who had been so long and patiently seeking him elsewhere, and his appearance at Bella Barnes’