the everlasting sense of living amongst forms

When Ada Cambridge in the fin de siecle writes, “Geoffrey Hamlyn was my sheet anchor, but did not seem to be supported by the scraps of prosaic history obtainable,” she is remembering how it was before she migrated to Australia in 1870 with her husband, who was being sent to a position in a southeast country town. His friend had written them a letter “reporting the place not wild at all, but quite like home,” though this friend had seen nothing outside Melbourne (two hundred and thirty kms from the place where they would be living) and knew “no more than we of the mysterious Bush, which I thought of as a vast shrubbery, with occasional spears hurtling through it.” Her retrospective conclusion is analogous to that of Weitemeyer, the poor Hamburg carpenter. “When we had assimilated all the information available, our theory of the life before us was still shapeless. However, we were young and trusting, and prepared to take things as they came.” De Quincey in his Autobiography Continued From 1803 – 1808, 1835, describes his own migration to “the woods of Lower Canada” where he saw himself in his late teens living in a spot he had already picked out, “a cottage and a considerable library, about seventeen miles from Quebec.”

My object [in planning the migration] was simply profound solitude, such as cannot now be had in any part of Great Britain--with two accessary advantages, also peculiar to countries situated in the circumstances and under the climate of Canada: viz. the exalting presence in an under-consciousness of forests endless and silent, the everlasting sense of living amongst forms so ennobling and impressive, together with the pleasure attached to natural agencies, such as frost, more powerfully manifested than in English latitudes, and for a much longer period. I hope there is nothing fanciful in all this. It is certain that in England, and in all moderate climates, we are too slightly reminded of nature or the forces of nature. Great heats, or great colds (and in Canada there are both), or great hurricanes, as in the West Indian latitudes, recall us continually to the sense of a powerful presence, investing our paths on every side …

“[T]he silence and grandeur of solitude impressed a sacred awe upon her heart.” Radcliffe, Udolpho, 1794. Dorothy Richardson’s Miriam had the same sensation at a ski resort. Reacting against Great Britain, de Quincey imagines the rewards of the migration logically existing; the opposition engenders the picture, not knowledge, because he does not know Canada, never migrated, knows neither “great colds” nor “great heats,” and is in the same state of ignorance as a tourist who thinks they can walk from the Mandalay Bay to the Wynn in the middle of June without a hat. “These things we did believe in, because all our authorities mentioned them,” says Cambridge, remembering the books she once read about “the physical characteristics of the country, there were but the scentless flowers, the songless birds, the cherries with their stones outside (none of which, actually, is the rule, and I have found nothing to resemble the description of the latter), and the kangaroo that carries its family in a breast-pocket” – she believed in it, as de Quincey can still believe, as he writes his memoir, that the migration might have been as he imagines it, and somewhere a Cambridge who has never migrated is imagining her own migration to the land where the “strange contrasts to the rest of the world which it affords [are] enumerated and commented upon--its cherries with their stones growing outside--its trees, which shed their bark instead of their leaves--its strange animals--its still stranger population--its mushroom cities--and, finally, the fact that the approach to human habitations is not announced by the barking of dogs, but by the barking of trees” – quoted from John Lort Stokes’, Discoveries in Australia, With An Account Of The Coasts And Rivers Explored And Surveyed During the Voyage Of H.M.S. Beagle, In The Years 1837-38-39-40-41-42-43 by Command Of The Lords Commissioners Of The Admiralty, 1846 – Stokes the original source of the cherries rumour -- though he tell us that he already knew “from the best authorities” before he landed on the continent that “within the heart of Australia, nature seems to delight in contradiction” – and so expected the things that he saw, not the precise forms, but the nature of them: the contradictions.

The birds we observed were common to other parts of the continent, being a few screaming cockatoos, parrots, and quails, and near the water a small white egret. There was nothing of interest to recall our memories to this first visit to a new part of Australia, save a very large ant's nest, measuring twenty feet in height. This object is always the first that presents itself whenever my thoughts wander to that locality.

disembodied eyeballs

When I decided to write about Kingsley's Geoffrey Hamlyn I was remembering people online who had mentioned the book and yet they hadn't read it – they were wondering what it was like -- and I thought that I would write something, and then they would be less apprehensive, which would disperse, magically, some benefit over the earth, and who knew what but there it would be, god help us all; and the Tibetan Buddhists who paint disembodied eyeballs must be relieved to know that other people will be reminded of the impermanence of life by the sight of these eyeballs, but other people have not written about Geoffrey Hamlyn as often as Tibetans in the past have painted disembodied eyeballs, and so I was not so sure, but you have to start somewhere – I said to myself – which is a lie …

Nobody is going to read Kingsley, though, after seeing that description of the call and response patterns I think I see in him, absolutely nobody. I am an unreliable executor, which is worse than being an unreliable narrator; at least the unreliable narrator still gets you where you need to go, being, in fact, secretly, a completely reliable narrator. Unreliable narrators are the kindest people. They sacrifice everything.

allow me to write of other people's experiences

Henry Kingsley had never written a book but then he went to Australia and afterwards he did it. The same for Mary Theresa Vidal and Caroline Leakey. Australia convinced them to commit violence on their own unblemished previous records of not publishing books. It was a great silent continent, thinking of the quiet of the deserts. Longus of Daphnis and Chloe hopes at the end of his preface that fiction will not derange his mind with alien ideas. "I hope that god will allow me to write of other people's experiences while retaining my own sanity" (tr. Paul Turner). But the others are not afraid of that possibility at all: they have been stimulated or shocked and they drive ahead without a fear of their own characters; they don't worry about their sanity: they are reassured that they are quite strong or else they are insensitive to this form of brutality, and Longus was as well, if you read those words as a rhetorical gesture rather than a serious statement of feeling.

The readers are the ones who obsess and go deranged over characters, writing fanfic as they do, not being able to absorb or possess the characters themselves because their beloveds are already tied up with another, and will always be so, no matter how diligently they press towards them, and the author is not interested in that character by now, and would let it free if they could, for the fanfic writers to take (if they want it so much), but they can't, the characters can't be released, any more than you could pull out a word somehow and give it to somebody (André Maurois, in his autobiography, suggests that when you are a child words are not so much meanings as fields of emotion and that some children, in this respect, never grow up).

already done, captain

But Kingsley is teasing you with the impossible book because he is about to overcome it. This is not brokenness he is showing you, it is triumph –

I replied not, but went into my bedroom, and returning with a thick roll of papers threw it on the floor—as on the stage the honest notary throws down the long-lost will,—and there I stood for a moment with my arms folded, eyeing Brentwood triumphantly.

"It is already done, captain," I said. "There it lies."

It is the book we are about to read. Kingsley uses the same pattern again later when he wants to introduce a parson named Frank Maberley. One character has suggested that an action is impossible; another character has performed it already.

The dinner time was past some ten minutes, when they saw a man in black put his hand on the garden-gate, vault over, and run breathless up to the hall-door. Tom had recognised him and dashed out to receive him, but ere he had time to say "good day" even, the new comer pulled out his watch, and, having looked at it, said in a tone of vexation: --

"Twenty-one minutes, as near as possible; nay, a little over. By Jove! how pursy a fellow gets mewed up in town! How far do you call it, now, from the Buller Arms?"

"It is close upon four miles," said Tom, highly amused.

"So they told me," replied Frank Maberly. "I left my portmanteau there, and the landlord-fellow had the audacity to say in conversation that I couldn't run the four miles in twenty minutes. It's lucky a parson can't bet, or I should have lost my money. But the last mile is very much up-hill, as you must allow."

Power, power; and the author of Kingsley's entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography believes that the man was in awe of his brother Charles, the Muscular Christian. "Sensitive about his puny and ugly appearance, he was inclined to adulate more personable contemporaries, especially his brother." That might be wishful gossip but it prompts me to notice that the narrator's writing-deed has been brought into the same framework as the Muscular Christian parson's running-deed, not only power, but power legitimised by the framing, made not-random, not enigmatic or questionable, or, put it this way: the deeds are not personal, not held and nourished in private, instead they are social, since other people are evidently rolling them around in their minds and calling out for their accomplishment.

Kingsley likes to present the actions of his characters in this call-and-response way (I mean he lets you know that these actions are wanted), and some of those actions should have been personal, perhaps, and I am wishing, when I think about it, that a person could put flowers in her hair without being hijacked.

Her complexion was very full, as though she were blushing at something one of them had said to her, and while I watched I saw James rise and go to a jug of flowers, and bring back a wreath of scarlet Kennedia, saying: –

"Do us a favour on Christmas night, Mary; twine this in your hair."

She blushed deeper than before, but she did it, and Tom helped her.

that old horse is alive still

When I mention magic I remember Frank Kermode in his essay Between Time and Eternity, writing, "All plots have something in common with prophecy, for they must appear to educe from the prime matter of the situation the forms of a future," and I wonder vaguely about the predictive or coercive power of systems (a system in itself is a prediction; to note a system is to note a prediction) -- and also I consider the mechanisms that trigger or indicate or introduce you to those systems, and then naturally I think of the aged horse in the opening pages of The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (1859), that book by Henry Kingsley, the brother of Charles (The Water Babies (1862-63, serialised)).

"Bless me!" I said; "You don't mean to say that that old horse is alive still?"

"He looks like it," said the major. "He'd carry you a mile or two, yet."

"I thought he had died while I was in England," I said. "Ah, major, that horse's history would be worth writing."

"If you began," answered the major, "to write the history of the horse, you must write also the history of every body who was concerned in those circumstances which caused Sam to take a certain famous ride upon him. And you would find that the history of the horse would be reduced into very small compass, and that the rest of your book would assume proportions too vast for the human intellect to grasp."

"How so?" I said.

He entered into certain details, which I will not give. "You would have," he said, "to begin at the end of the last century, and bring one gradually on to the present time. Good heavens! just consider."

"I think you exaggerate," I said.

"Not at all," he answered. "You must begin the histories of the Buckley and Thornton families in the last generation. The Brentwoods also, must not be omitted,-- why there's work for several years."

So if you tell the story of those families then you will also have to tell the stories of the people connected to them and so on and so on until by Major Buckley's logic the entire world is swallowed (recalling that Ruskin in one book contemplates the holy profusion of leaves), which is the problem Gertrude Stein enunciated in The Making of Americans, when she talks about the neighbours and then the neighbours of the neighbours, until she reaches the same conclusion as Major Buckley, this playful and useless idea that any grossly representational book would be "too vast for the human intellect to grasp" and what does that say about the human intellect and also Kingsley's playfulness, and then Gertrude Stein's playfulness, which is an oblique or self-defending reflex, and also self-conquering as it indicates that it is biting off more than it can chew, in fact creating that too-much obstacle and showing it to you so that it can throw up its hands and say, "Non" – here is the book desiring to have that Non-action inside itself and going to these abnormal lengths to get it, and asking you to observe its crippledness, its broken-wingedness, ha, ha, ha?