of ability that is needed for success in public life. A certain kind
of man flourishes, and another kind--the opposite kind--is seen to
fall; but in a year or two the positions are reversed, and the set of
qualities which seemingly commanded success are those which invite or
compel failure. Therefore the generalising process is for the most part
vain. But if one were asked to name the attribute that is most useful
to an Australian politician--the attribute that it is ruinous to be
without--one might be tempted to mention knowledge of human nature. The
phrase implies a great deal. It implies such characteristics as tact,
foresight, and sense of the fitness of things; power of being genial,
or of seeming to be genial; knowledge of when to strike, and when to
refrain from striking. It means the capacity to put yourself in the
place of those for whom you are legislating, to whom you are appealing.
It suggests in the possessor a degree of intellect, combined with a
degree of sensibility. It is the opposite of narrowness, of bigotry, of
fanaticism, and of folly of the more glaring kind.
A second quality to be considered eminently desirable is that of
accessibility. In the vernacular this is usually called “absence of
frill.” It is an asset well-nigh indispensable for any successful
public man in Australia, though it must not be confounded--as it
sometimes is--with lack of dignity. Most of the leaders of ministries
and heads of parties that I have met in Australia have been, and are,
extremely dignified; and, as a rule, the most dignified have been the
most accessible. It is not the kind of dignity that surrounds itself
with much outward pomp and ornament; not the kind that emulates Mr
Forcible Feeble, and proclaims its existence as loudly as possible,
for fear that it should be overlooked. It is the dignity that results
from mental processes not visible to the eye of the vulgar. It can
unbend, jest, laugh, look stern, wear the mask of folly or any other
mask, because it is sure of itself. The fortifications of reserve, and
the serried front of isolation, utilised by the typical English Prime
Minister, are not wanted in Australia. Here the obscure unit and the
political chief meet on equal social terms, to the advantage not merely
of the one, but of the other as well.
A third qualification which may be mentioned as very desirable, if not
as absolutely necessary, has been already alluded to as the gift of
speech. To accomplish much in public life in Australia, it is necessary
to talk, and to talk a great deal. Whether it is on a platform or in
the open air; whether it is within the walls of Parliament or outside
them, you must, if you desire to become well known, tell the public
something, and _keep on_ telling it to them. The Australians are quick,
impressionable, receptive-minded. Their highest awards are given, in
nine cases out of ten, to the man who can appeal to them in the most
direct, the most personal, and the most intelligible way.
The four men who have held office as Prime Minister of the Commonwealth
form, in the aggregate and as individuals, the best illustrations of
the qualities just enumerated. Each has displayed a sound knowledge
of human nature, evidencing the knowledge by his many-sidedness, his
tact, his judgement, his mingled daring and caution, his willingness
to compromise. Each has made himself readily approachable, alike to
indignant people who had grievances to ventilate, to friendly people
who had congratulations to utter, to newspaper people who had questions
to ask--in fact to all sorts and conditions of people who used the
right means of approach. And each has been endowed with the gift of
speech. Two of them--Mr Reid and Mr Deakin--have exhibited it in a
singular and superlative degree. Sir Edmund Barton is a speaker of the
very front rank. Even Mr Watson, though not a fiery, forensic orator,
is a very able debater. Only those who have heard and watched him in
Parliament know how keen and capable and resourceful he really is.
Quite apart from these individual instances, facts may be found to show
that one may apply over the whole field of Federal and State politics
the conclusions just arrived at.
To be a prominent public man in Australia it is not necessary to do
great things, but to act as though you could do them, or wished to do
them, or would be certain of doing them if you got the chance.
’Tis not what man _does_ which exalts him, but
what man _would_ do.
Achievement is dangerous, or fatal; the promise of achievement is
brilliant or inspiring. The truth of the matter is that Australians are
engaged, individually and collectively, in a game of which they cannot
see the end. Politically speaking, they don’t yet know where they are,
or where within the course of a generation they are likely to arrive.
V
PSEUDO-LITERARY
This world’s no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
It is strange that a people possessed of literary instincts, and of
the literary temper, should be without a literature of their own; but
so it is. The shadow of a remembered personality does indeed flit now
and then across the brief page of Australian history. There was a
writer of verses named Lindsay Gordon, and a novelist of repute named
Marcus Clarke. Each of these struck out a path for himself. Each left
a record that will not soon be forgotten. But neither was a product of
the Southern Hemisphere; neither could be described as native, “and to
the manner born”; and neither of the two, nor both together, could be
credited with creating a literature for the country in which their work
was done.
It is true there have been, and there are, others of note. There
was a poet who wrote some very fine lines about the yellow-haired
September, about waste places of Kerguelen, about lost Lorraines, about
a frail, flower-like, dead Araluen, and about much besides. It would
argue ignorance of the subject to be unaware that the book of rhymes
beginning with an account of the man from “Snowy River” has sold to the
extent of 30,000 copies, or more. There is the statement, made on what
seems reliable authority, that the author of _Our Selection_ was paid
for a continuation of that work the remarkable sum of £500. And Victor
Daley was, until a few months ago, alive amongst us. The torch of
inspiration is, therefore, not quite gone out. Throughout the continent
it flickers and falters, never shining with a steady and continuous
flame, rarely giving the wayfarer a light to guide him, but every now
and then dancing with a faint, fleeting, will-of-the-wisp quality
before his astonished eyes.
He sees a reflection, or he catches an echo, and then he is in the dark.
Of rhymes and storyettes there are any number in Australia. The local
printing presses shed them in great profusion. They are more numerous
than leaves in Vallambrosa, or than wattle blossoms in September. Nor
is their musical and poetic quality to be despised. Many of them--the
majority of them--are ephemeral and worthless; but taking them either
in the aggregate, or in the unit, they represent a fairly high
journalistic standard. Frequently can there be discovered among them a
new image, a clever piece of workmanship, even an original idea. Their
metrical quality is often admirable. In the Melbourne _Argus_ there
have been many good verses--verses so good that one regrets they should
have been consigned to so perishable a receptacle as a penny print. For
genuine melody, of something better than a topical sort, one would not
go further than the lines written to a light-footed, golden-haired,
pathetically-dead, dancing girl--lines that bring her back among the
living:--
When the scene is lighted brightly, and we
watch the players nightly,
The peasant, and the prince, and the page.
The patriotic note has been struck often, sometimes clumsily,
and sometimes with good effect. Mr Essex Evans gives it a local
application in the rather formal verses beginning:--
Awake! Arise! The wings of Dawn
Are beating at the gates of Day.
And another Australian writer gives it an Imperial significance when he
says of England, in lines that have been much praised and incidentally
awarded a substantial monetary prize by a London paper, that:--
She triumphs, moving slowly down the years.
Again, for pure romance we have Daley’s fantasy, with its very fine
exordium:--
The bright lights fade out one by one
And like a peony,
Drowning in wine, the crimson sun
Sinks down in that strange sea.
For a compound of sensuousness and sadness and lyric sweetness, we have
Von Kotze’s _Island Lover_ with its invocation, and its lament:--
Oh, Tuahina, that youth’s full measure
Should pass away like a summer’s eve!
That just the one gift that women treasure
Should be so helpless, so poor, and leave
A hint of sweetness, a taste of pleasure
And--grey-hued twilight to mourn and grieve!
These are only a few specimens, somewhat above the average as regards
workmanship and finish, but representative of what the continent is
producing every day.
So far as prose is concerned, the Australian topical and occasional
writer can hold his head up in any company. If you want a scene
described, if you want an incident related, if you want the pith of
a situation dexterously extracted, if you want an impression vividly
conveyed, if you want to catch from the paper the spirit and atmosphere
of a crowd, of a race-meeting, of a procession, of a play, of a joke,
of a tragedy, of a wedding, of a funeral; if you want any or all of
these things, there are a score or two of men in Australia who will
supply the requirement as well as it can be supplied anywhere in the
world.
But to say this is not to say there is a national literature. The
term, it must be remembered, means something more than a few dexterous
verses, a few patches of local colour, and a few characters that can
be held up to admiration as “racy of the soil.” That last phrase
hangs like a pall over the continent. If it were only possible to
forget that there is such a thing as a gum-tree in Australia the
average quality of the writing--particularly of the more ambitious and
sustained kind of writing--would considerably improve. If a national
literature implies anything, it implies the correct artistic and
adequate expression of the country’s thought and action; it signifies
the outward and visible form of what is real and vital and permanent in
the inner and intellectual life of a people. In other words it is alien
to what is merely topical and incidental. It is not a record of the
peculiarities of shearers and rouseabouts, or of the feats of jockeys
or stock-drovers. America would hardly be a literary country if it had
to rely exclusively on Bret Harte and Mark Twain. England would not be
literary if it had only Mr Punch and Mr Bernard Shaw. And Australia, so
long as its most characteristic and successful compositions deal with
the obvious peculiarities of a few local people, cannot really be said
to have a literature deserving of the name.
The position of things is curious. There is on the continent a
population of four million people, possessing a complete net-work of
state schools, high schools, art schools, academies, universities,
professorships, and chairs of learning innumerable. Education is
both free and compulsory. Complete illiteracy is almost unknown. The
ignorance and stolidity of the London docker, of the Irish peasant,
of the Russian serf, of the central European farm labourer, have no
equivalent in Australia. The people of this country are facile and
quick-minded. They turn naturally to pen and ink. The writer’s ambition
is rampant among them. It is more insidious and more pervading even
than stage fever or cricket frenzy. Every second dwelling of the middle
class is cumbered with unfinished or unpublished manuscripts. If the
son is not guilty, it is probably the daughter, or the governess, or
the parent. Every newspaper editor, if he felt disposed, could each
day fill his columns ten times over with contributions submitted by
outsiders. A Sydney paper offered last year a hundred pound prize for a
serial story. The result was a staggering mass of manuscript, weighing
in the aggregate more than half a ton, the work of one hundred and
thirty-four unknown and previously unsuspected authors. The same set
of circumstances repeats itself indefinitely. Most Australians have
ideas which seem to the possessors original. They want a vehicle of
expression, and they rush impetuously to the only one provided.
Yet the result is not great, or satisfying, or impressive. And the
reason is that the goal of all this endeavour--in so far as it is
a serious and sustained endeavour--is the hall-mark of the English
publisher. No one can compute the number of people in Melbourne and
Sydney, to say nothing of those in the country towns, who have either
accomplished, or are at present meditating, a descent on London with an
unpublished manuscript. The objective of the literary person is always
London. The recognised fount of honour is London. The banners in the
literary sky wave always in the vicinity of Paternoster Row and of
Leicester Square. Henry Kendall, who knew what he was talking about,
wrote feelingly of things that may happen to “the man of letters here.”
And circumstances have not materially altered since Kendall had his
furniture sold under him, and since he sat all night on doorsteps in a
suburb of Melbourne. While confident enough in most things, Australians
have shown no confidence in their own literary judgement. They still
look timidly and obediently towards the other hemisphere. If their
man of talent can get an English publisher to take him up, they smile
with fatuous approval. If he cannot, they pity and despise him. As a
consequence the Daleys and Quinns and Lawsons who have chosen to rely,
for the most part, on the country of their upbringing, and who have
carried their wares, for the most part, to a local market, have found
it hard to make a living. Had they been obliged to rely exclusively on
literature their living would have been a precarious one indeed.
These facts are so obvious that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them.
But a word has to be said for the other side. The Australian publisher,
like the Australian manufacturer, or the Australian politician, has his
interests at home. It is part of his policy, part also of his desire,
to encourage the literature of the country in which he lives. But he
has _paid_ so frequently for doing this that he is now extremely wary.
For a local author to tempt him is the hardest task in the world. The
publisher’s suspicions, founded on bitter experience, have communicated
themselves in some subtle fashion to the possible purchaser, and to the
country at large. At the present time it would puzzle a psychologist
to say which has the greater fear and distrust of the other--the
Australian author of the Australian publisher, or the Australian
publisher of the Australian author. The present writer has seen men in
the witness box, and in the criminal dock, and has noted the guilty
and self-accusing look on some of their faces. But for a spectacle of
absolute doubt and misgiving, for a written confession of wrong about
to be committed, for an unspoken avowal that the act in contemplation
is one of the blackest and meanest in the calendar, commend him to the
individual who, hailing from Australia, stands up before an Australian
publisher and admits that he has perpetrated a manuscript with a view
to it seeing the light of day.
The result is what might have been expected. The people are going
through a transition stage, a transition stage which, to use a mild
paradox, threatens to become permanent. They are quick to appreciate
cleverness, and, as readily as any other, that form of it which finds
expression in print. But they want to know where they are. They dislike
risks, and more especially intellectual risks. Before they begin the
task of assimilating a work of any length they desire the assurance
of some one in authority that the labour is not to be in vain. They
want the imprimatur of an English critic, or of an English public.
They appreciate good writing, and many of them know how to write, but
the confidence which is a mark of most of their pursuits, of their
virtues and their vices, deserts them entirely when it is a question of
estimating the worth of books written by their own countrymen in their
midst.
Hence a result that can be seen and read of all men. The gospel of
brevity is proclaimed everywhere. It has become recognised that the
longer and more ambitious efforts of imagination or of erudition have
not much chance of emerging into the daylight; and that even if they do
emerge, they have a still more remote chance of paying expenses, much
less of winning a profit for the ambitious author. The short article
may, however, prove remunerative. An editor who would be aggrieved
and insulted by the very suggestion of something three columns long
will put down his spectacles and smile almost cheerfully at the unknown
scribe who tenders him a column. The publisher who is firmly convinced
that the bearer of a full-length manuscript novel is a person to be
shunned like the plague, will listen with an open mind to proposals
having to do with skits and humorous episodes, with short stories and
novelettes.
From all this can be deduced the reason of the spasmodic quality, the
flashiness of the writing that is done in Australia. The warm climate
and the tired feeling may have something to do with the phenomenon; but
the main causes are those previously mentioned. It is now apparent why
the journalism of the country is one of its more admirable features.
The newspaper man has no time to waste, and no space to give away.
He must get his effects into narrow compass. He must, to employ the
vernacular, come at once to the points and leave out the superfluous
verbiage. He endeavours to do so, and often with much success. The
publisher of books does not want him, but if he wishes to be original
he can be so--to the extent of a column. If he wishes to be humorous
he can be so--to the same limit. If his vein is descriptive he has the
like opportunity--which runs also to the extent of one column. On the
approaches to every printing machine in the country, the word “Brevity”
is blazened in letters of dread significance. The Duke of Wellington’s
admonition to his chaplain “Be brief” rings sharply through the
pseudo-literary atmosphere of Australia.
It would savour of affectation to ignore the existence of the
Sydney _Bulletin_, or to attempt to deny that it is an important
semi-intellectual factor in the life of the continent. The circumstance
is unfortunate, and that for obvious reasons. The _Bulletin_ combines
in itself most of what is smart, and flashy, and cynical, and
superficial, and verbally witty in the people among whom it circulates.
Now, if a man happens to be very smart and very witty, and very
cynical, we may admit that he is a clever and interesting person. We
may hand him the laurel wreath of contemporary fame and journalistic
renown with no other feeling than one of pure appreciation and
good-will. But when his smartness and his flashiness and his cynicism
are set up as models for every one else to _copy_; when they are
watered down among a thousand imitators and served up every week
with slight variations, or with no variations at all; when we find
half the educated people of a country trying to be smart and flashy,
because they imagine that by so doing they will be able to fit their
ideas into the narrow columns of a certain publication--then we are
bound to wonder whether we in Australia are really an intelligent,
right-thinking nation, or a number of animated and extremely foolish
marionettes.
It is the readers of the paper, rather than the paper itself, who
are to blame. The sins of the copyists must rest on their own heads.
And while we get tired of certain characteristics that are always
repeating themselves, we are bound to admit the invaluable work that
the Sydney paper has done in more than one direction. By encouraging
certain writers--by gaining for them an audience and winning for them
a reputation--it has conferred a favour on the whole of Australia.
It is the kind of favour that can hardly be reckoned out on a
monetary basis. Nine-tenths of that which is musical and distinctive
and valuable in Australian verse of the last twenty years owes its
publicity, if not its existence, to the _Bulletin_. To say this is
to say a great deal. It stands to the lasting discredit of rich
proprietary newspapers of this country that they have invariably leaned
towards the reprint and the borrowed article. They have never made
what could be called a decisive stand on behalf of the struggling,
underpaid man of talent who has taken off his hat in their managerial
sanctum, or has left his wares on their guarded doorstep. They have
never championed this man; but the _Bulletin_ has always championed
him. A paper that has done this can be forgiven much. It can be
forgiven the army of cheap paragraphists, the tawdry tiresomeness of
repeated phrase, the forced ingenuity of distorted facts, the constant
disparagement of the kindred nation over-sea.
There is _some_ soul of goodness in things evil
Would man observingly distil it out.
And the truth of this in the case of the _Bulletin_ we would be the
last to impugn.
Although it must be repeated that there is no such thing as a national
literature, there are at least three distinct schools--perhaps it would
be more correct to say distinct _forms_ of writing--in Australia.
The first of these is what might be called the humorous, descriptive
style. This may be a poor thing, but it is our own. Some kinship may
be claimed for it with the method of Mark Twain and his disciples--the
method, that is to say, of calm and grotesque exaggeration. Nor is it
wholly unconnected with the thunder-and-lightning, vividly blasphemous
style of Rudyard Kipling in his earlier days. But it is in character
and essence neither American nor English; it is distinctively
Australian. We have evolved it, and should take the credit or discredit
of it. To be a successful writer of the descriptively humorous kind it
is merely necessary to attend to a few simple rules. It is necessary to
get together as many adjectives as you can, and always to apply them
in a context unlike that to which they have grown accustomed. Thus,
if you are describing something tragic and awful--say, a murder--it
is a good plan to make use of such adjectives as commonly do duty
for an artistic criticism or a musical performance. Conversely, if
you are dealing with a drama, or a piece of music, it is useful to
have at hand the terms most frequently employed in connection with a
murder. String together all the unlikely and dissimilar phrases you
can invent or remember; make a liberal and generous use of “and’s”
and “also’s”; be prodigal of semicolons and sparing of full-stops;
above all cultivate an appearance of abruptness and of brevity. Men
have been known to score a brilliant reputation, and, incidentally,
to get long manuscripts accepted, merely by leaving out the pronoun
at the beginning of a sentence, and thus giving an air of curtness
and epigrammatic force to their composition. Stick at nothing, spare
nothing, be afraid of nothing, and your fame as a descriptively
humorous writer is assured.