Delphi complete works of.., p.377
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 377
Naturally, then, if Dickens migrated his own family, a fortiori he was willing to migrate his literary creations. Along with the classic case of Mr. Micawber is that of Dr. Mell, the erstwhile schoolmaster present at the same banquet, but dug up from so far back in David Copperfield that the reader has forgotten who he is; but whoever he was or is, he is now endowed with a daughter, evidently destined to marry Mr. Micawber’s gifted son, Wilkins junior. Thus does Dickens use the rapid light and shadow of emigrant fortune to illumine his closing horizon. Still more characteristic of Dickens and of all the Victorians is the use of migration as a means of redemption. Young Charlie Bates, a convicted thief in Oliver Twist, lives to become the ‘merriest drover in New South Wales.’ Martin Chuzzlewit ‘sees the light’ among the mosquitoes of the Mississippi.
As with Dickens so with the general crowd of mid-Victorian writers. Thackeray in his Virginians proposes a wider field, the contrast between the branch of a family that stays at home and the branch that migrates to Virginia, a study ‘of opposing loyalisms and severing patriotisms.’ Thackeray proposed this, but got so busy talking to the reader about anything and everything that he forgot about it. Nodding over his patchwork he stitched in some good pieces of eighteenth-century London, and used Indians and redcoats to colour Virginia.
It is difficult to cite individual examples characters in fiction with any sustained interest for the reader. The lapse of time, the change of taste, the higher gear of modern life have removed the books of three generations ago from the of the present public. Who among them knows or cares how many characters migrated overseas out of the works of Miss Edgeworth or Charles Lever or Whyte-Melville or Wilkie Collins? But the statement may stand that from the pages of Victorian fiction there passed out an unending procession of unfortunates to seek redemption or oblivion in new lands,
But what is difficult of proof, without loss of interest, in dealing with half-forgotten authors becomes so simple as to be redundant when we turn to authors within easy reach of memory and still within easy hearing of their audience. One has but to name Kipling to call up a succession of gentleman-rankers, of forgotten men, of ‘men who were,’ men who ‘would be kings’; or to name Robert Louis Stevenson to think of Oxford graduates quoting Latin on South Sea Islands, or Masters of Ballantrae in the American wilderness, or Conan Doyle with his Refugees; while in the full glare of modern publicity and with the full rapidity of modern transport, such happy writers as Mr. Phillips Oppenheim fill their pages with mystery-men, disappearing in the forest or jungle to reappear, fabulously rich, in a London restaurant, ordering — think of it— ‘Martini cocktails’ For here is another note, and a happy one, happier than the mere negation of oblivion or the cold light of moral reform — that of exiles returning dripping with diamonds, covered with rubber, or heavy with gold.
There is a perennial human interest in disappearance and return. Even Enoch Arden, broken and penniless, became a village sensation. But a return accompanied by great wealth, to be shared by a grateful family, that is something else. Oddly enough it is the French — see Alphonse Daudet — and not ourselves who have recognised so clearly this type of the returning millionaire as, to give him a name, ‘L’Oncle d’Amerique.’’ But beside his sunlit figure the shadow falls upon a darkened one, especially known in fiction, that of the returned convict. As the penal settlements grew from the first establishment of Botany Bay to a system that threw its shadow over an empty island continent, the convict began to come into literature; the convict, with all the mixture of pity and terror that went with his lot; the hulks where he waited his departure, the convict ship that carried him, and the unknown fate — beyond human ken, over the edge of the world — that swallowed him up. For the Term of his Natural Life — so runs the grim title of Marcus Clarke’s great story. With it and after it were many others. The theme had all the attraction of unknown terror. The ‘convict’ idea fascinated a generation with its horror.
Strangely enough, slavery and the slave trade never got into our literature in their own day — except in one fierce burst of denunciation as a ground-swell of the coming American Civil War. Longfellow’s poem of the slave, an African king, dying ‘beside the ungathered rice’; and the book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on whose pages fell the tears of a myriad of children; these came not as literature in the pure sense but from the driving urge of anger and political passion. But the deeper disgrace is that the slave went unwept in our literature till the thing was over. The flag of which the Victorians, after 1833, used to sing that it ‘never shall float o’er a slave,’ had perhaps floated over more slaves in its time, at sea till 1807 and on land till 1833, than any flag in the world. But the slavery motive was what the psycho-analyst would call a mixed complex; the tragedy had got mixed with white superiority, with the Bible, and with West Indian fortunes. The dominant race cannot voice its victims; and the negroes could not sing that sort of song.
But the convict was different. He was white and, therefore, a tragedy and fit for literature. As the ‘ticket of leave’ system developed, the convict turned into a kind of immigrant. His restored fortune put him, as literature, alongside of the ‘American uncle’; indeed there was even a jocular touch available with him: ‘True patriots all; for be it understood, we left our country for our country’s good,’ so sang once an actual and gifted Australian ex-convict. Such a person naturally became an ingredient in the ‘historical’ fiction dealing with a country like Australia, lucky enough to have no history. It is amazing what has been done with so little. In Canada, with romance and history broadcast over our country, how little we have done with it!
There remains one enthusiastic page over which migration and settlement is written in large and half-formed letters — the boy’s books of the bygone century. This section of our literature has stamped the idea of migration on the mind, not of the nation at large, but of the rising generation, or rather of the successive generations that have risen in turn for two hundred years. These are the ‘boys’ books’ that deal with refugees on desert islands, with ‘settlers’ in the wilderness, with the ingenious building of shelters in trees and snug igloos in the snow. Here is all the charm that goes with ‘contrivance,’ with the surmounting of difficulty, with the ‘creation,’ as it were, of economic life.
The parent book is, of course, the immortal Robinson Crusoe, a book which probably Defoe himself did not understand. Such is often the way with authors. Dickens failed to appreciate Mr. Pickwick for many instalments, and Conan Doyle grew bitter against Sherlock Holmes, not realizing that he had created in Sherlock and Watson far more endearing characteristics than mere scientific deduction. So with Defoe. He meant to present Crusoe as an outcast, an unfortunate object of pity. Crusoe ‘fooled’ him, so to say, and became an object of envy to generations of English boys. Cowper tried later on to sing of Crusoe (under his own name of Alexander Selkirk) in terms of compassion:
‘Oh, Solitude, where are the charms
That sages have seen in thy face?
Better dwell in the midst of alarms
Than reign in this horrible place.’
Cowper, as a boy sees it, misses the point. Think of Crusoe, with his fertile island full of yams, breadfruit and cocoanuts, his axe to build a house with and wild goats to make umbrellas of, and presently his devoted Friday to attend and serve him! Can you better that? Note especially the ‘devoted native’ theme which has attracted uncounted thousands of English boys and helped to give the world — the ‘faithful Sambo’ the ‘Gunga Dins’ — these are the stuff that dreams, boys’ dreams, are made on, and out of the dreams of boys may grow the achievements of a nation.
Robinson Crusoe is the type. But it is followed by a long succession of ‘boys’’ books (some boys are seventy years old) dealing with the creative effort of isolated settlers, a series that has only died out when the world has become full, and is now being transferred to the moon. One recalls with affection the Victorian stories of R. M. Ballantyne of the Hudson’s Bay Company, chief interpreter to England of the unknown north. Such books are not of adventure. Leave adventure to the ‘Spanish Main,’ crowded with pirates and French privateers and sailing-ships abandoned with no one on board but a beautiful girl and an old man. That’s all right. But it belongs to a different kind of story. Even in Robinson Crusoe, to a boy’s mind, the ‘adventure’ comes in as a disturbance; the ‘fun’ is the settlement, or rather not so much ‘fun’ as a sense of ‘snugness,’ a self-satisfaction. Oddly enough, some of the favourite books of this type for English boys were written by foreigners, just as Hans Andersen and the Brothers Grimm wrote our fairy stories, so the author of the Swiss Family Robinson and Jules Verne, as the author of The Mysterious Island, wrote our best ‘settlement’ stories.
The Family stuff is a little tame, everything too easy; for the nursery rather than the boarding school. It was written by Johann Rudolf Wyss, a Swiss professor of philosophy, who knew as much about desert islands as a Swiss professor of philosophy would. In any case, to a boy’s mind, having the ‘family’ there at all spoils it. When you strike an A1 desert island you don’t want father and mother. But Jules Verne’s story hits it just right; the landing from a balloon on an empty and remote, but very fertile, island; the group of cheerful and ingenious men (how cheerful they are — but boys never notice that) who start bare-handed from nothing and contrive everything — what a wonderful setting! All machines can be operated backwards, put into ‘reverse gear,’ so to speak. So it often is with literary composition. The reverse gear of Robinson Crusoe is Enoch Arden. There he sits, poor, long-haired exile in the Pacific sunset, weeping for home. He won’t even cut his hair, not appreciating the fun of ‘contriving’ a pair of scissors out of oyster-shells. No contrivance for him. But notice, even in his very tears, how his sorrows call up a picture of England as if to make us feel that we have never loved it enough;
‘The climbing street, the mill, the leafy lanes,
The peacock yew-tree and the lonely Hall,
The horse he drove, the boat he sold, the chill
November dawns and deny-glooming downs,
The gentle shower, the smell of dying leaves,
And the low moan of leaden-coloured seas’
So, too, with all the emigrants. I think it has often been the people in this exile of settlement who have loved England best, who still, after twenty years, talk of ‘home,’ and see it as things only can be in retrospect of time and in the magic of distance. The stuff that binds the British Empire is not texts and tariffs, but such back and forward reactions,
‘J’en passe et des meilleurs,’ as the French say when they run out of examples. Let me under that pretext turn to the use of migration, not in the realm of fancy, but in the equally imaginary world of nineteenth-century economics. I am willing to call it, if not a world of the imagination, at any rate a lost world or a world that never came true. Political economy is not, or should not be, a work of the imagination, and hence lies properly outside the scope of the present discussion. But there is an odd parallel as between the use of emigration in fiction as a sort of defeatist method of getting rid of undesirables, and the classical economic use of the ‘emigrant man’ as a defeatist solution of social problems at home. Into their imagined setting the ‘emigrating economic man’ was placed as a sort of safety-valve. If there were too many at home, he was supposed to get out. The world which seemed very empty then was all his. He was supposed to care nothing about flags, loyalty and allegiance. At the very time — in the opening Victorian years — when the Canada Company was embarking emigrants to Upper Canada, another organization, the Colombian Society, was undertaking to send them to Venezuela.
It remained for one of the interpreters of the classical economics to prove this parallel between the defeatist migration of the economist and the ‘redemption’ migration of the novelist by bridging over the gap between them and turning economics into fiction. Harriet Martineau (1802-76) had an active mind. She was as optimistic as sunshine, as exact as a checker-board, and about as original as a hen. Her sunshine was refracted by the prism of class and caste that turned the world into masters and servants, gentle and simple, doing their duty in the state of life into which the rubric of the catechism called them. But she had an ingenious facility of words and a concrete presentation that could turn simple things into stories. On this basis she undertook to rewrite the immovable truths of the dismal science as a series of Tales — Illustrations of Political Economy in nine volumes. The tales are among the curiosities of literature, and as humour they deserve to rank with Sandford and Merton and Archibald Marshall’s Birdikin Family. In volume IV is found Tale No. 10, which deals with migration under the title of ‘New Homes.’ In this bright little narrative a Kentish family go out to Van Diemen’s Land (see under Tasmania), the father and mother and Frank and Ellen, the older brother and sister, as indentured servants, and two younger boys, their half-brothers Bob and jerry, lucky fellows, as convicts. It seems that Bob and Jerry had ‘beaten up’ (more Americana) two young gentlemen, for which they were to be hanged but were let off with transportation. To-day they would have got three months, or in America have ‘bumped the young gentlemen off’ and got nothing. Here is the cheerful landing of the family — home ties are nothing to them — in the Antipodes:
‘Ellen was the first of the family that arrived at Hobart Town. Next came the convict ship which was sent round to Launceston. Next the batch of parish immigrants arrived, and Frank found, on application to the proper government officer, that his sister had landed in good health, and had received a high character from the clergyman and his lady who had come over as superintendents of the expedition; and had been forwarded to a district where a service had been procured for her as dairymaid on a settler’s farm; and that care had been taken that her parents and her brother should be indentured to farmers in the same neighbourhood. So far, all was well.’
Quite so; in fact, fine. One can easily see how Frank and Ellen become prosperous settlers regarded with approval by the ‘gentry’ who come out later. The convict brothers also flourish. Bob becomes a sort of convict labour boss and then independent; Jerry, on ticket of leave, takes on a ‘black wife,’ refuses to work and lives apparently by pillaging the ‘gentry.’ We have a last vision of him leaving the island, as too small for his activities. The moral is that the colonies need more gentry, more servants and, as Miss Martineau says herself, that ‘our convict arrangements tend to the further corruption of the offender by letting him experience a great improvement in his condition as a direct consequence of his crime.’ How much better to keep him in jail for life.
Such has been the lot of the emigrant. Cast out in our history by persecution as a refugee, by economics as a superfluity, he might well have disappeared into limbo. In place of which, as the Latin poet would say, ‘tamen usque recurrit.’ Literature brings him back as an uncle from America, an empire builder, or at least as the point and moral of a tale.
THREE SCORE AND TEN - THE BUSINESS OF GROWING OLD
OLD AGE IS the ‘Front Line’ of life, moving into No Man’s Land. No Man’s Land is covered with mist. Beyond it is Eternity. As we have moved forward, the tumult that now lies behind us has died down. The sounds grow less and less. It is almost silence. There is an increasing feeling of isolation, of being alone. We seem so far apart. Here and there one falls, silently, and lies a little bundle on the ground that the rolling mist is burying. Can we not keep nearer? It’s hard to see one another. Can you hear me? Call to me. I am alone. This must be near the end.
I have been asked how old age feels, how it feels to have passed seventy, and I answer in metaphor, as above, ‘not so good.’
Now let us turn it round and try to laugh it off in prose. It can’t be so bad as that, eh what? Didn’t Cicero write a book’ on old age to make it all right? But you say he was only just past sixty when he wrote it, was he? That’s a tough one. Well, what about Rabbi ben Ezra, you remember— ‘Grow old along with me.’ Oh, he was eighty-one, eh? No, thanks. I’ll stay right here around seventy. He can have all his fun for himself at eighty-one.
I was born in Swanmoor, a suburb of Ryde in the Isle of Wight, on 30th December 1869. That was in Victorian England at its most Victorian, far away now, dated by the French Empire, still glittering, and Mr. Dickens writing his latest book on the edge of the grave while I thought out my first on the edge of my cradle and, in America, dated by people driving golden spikes on Pacific railroads.
It was a vast, illimitable world, far superior to this — whole continents unknown, Africa just an outline, oceans never sailed, ships lost over the horizon — as large and open as life itself.
Put beside such a world this present shrunken earth, its every corner known, its old-time mystery gone with the magic of the sea, to make place for this new demoniac confine, loud with voices out of emptiness and tense with the universal threat of death. This is not mystery but horror. The waves of the magic sea called out in the sunlight: ‘There must be a God.’ The demoniac radio answers in the dark; ‘There can’t be.’ Belief was so easy then: it has grown so hard now; and life, the individual life, that for an awakening child was so boundless, has it drawn into this — this alleyway between tall cypresses that must join somewhere in the mist? But stop, we are getting near No Man’s Land again. Turn back.
Moving pictures love to give us nowadays ‘cavalcades’ of events to mark the flight of time. Each of us carries his own. Mine shows, as its opening, the sea beaches of the Isle of Wight...Then turn on Portchester village and its Roman castle...Queen Victoria going past in a train, in the dark, putting her head out of the window (her eight heads out of eight windows)...Now shift to an Atlantic sailing steamer (type of 1876) with people emigrating to Canada...Then a Canadian farm in a lost-corner of Ontario up near Lake Simcoe for six years...Put in bears, though there weren’t any...Boarding school, scene at Upper Canada College — the real old rough stuff...University, cap and gown days, old style, put a long beard on the President, show fourteen boarding-houses at $4.50 a week...School teaching — ten years — (run it fast, a series of stills, any year is typical, I want to forget it)...
