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AUSTRALIAN WRITERS
by
DESMOND BYRNE
London
Richard Bentley and Son
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
1896
[All rights reserved]
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
MARCUS CLARKE 29
HENRY KINGSLEY 90
ADA CAMBRIDGE 131
ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 159
ROLF BOLDREWOOD 189
MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED 229
TASMA 260
INTRODUCTION.
Any survey of the work done by Australian authors suggests a question
as to what length of time ought to be allowed for the development of
distinctive national characteristics in the literature of a young
country self-governing to the extent of being a republic in all but
name, isolated in position, highly civilised, enjoying all the modern
luxuries available to the English-speaking race in older lands, and with
a population fully two-thirds native. The common saying that a country
cannot be expected to produce literature during the earlier state of its
growth is too vague a generalisation. There are circumstances by which
its application may be modified. It certainly does not apply with equal
force to a country whose early difficulties included race conflicts,
war with an external power and political labours of great magnitude, and
to another whose commercial and social development, carried on under
more modern conditions by a people almost entirely homogeneous, has been
facile, unbroken and extraordinarily rapid.
Nor can paucity of literary product, where it exists, be satisfactorily
explained by the unrest that continues in a new land long after it has
attained material prosperity and the higher refinements of life. The
Americans are a type of an extremely restless people. They have been so
throughout the greater part of their history, and the characteristic is
now more marked than ever. It is a fixed condition of their national
being, an expression of the cumulative ambition that is the source of
their varied progress. Yet from time to time men have arisen among them
who not only have given intimate views of a new civilisation, but have
added something to the permanent stock of what Matthew Arnold used to
call 'the best that is known and thought in the world.' Even when the
independent nationhood of the United States was still but an aspiration,
Benjamin Franklin had familiarised Europe with much that has since been
recognised as inherent in the modes of thought and manners of the
Western race.
The bulk of the literature of America is, of course, still small in
proportion to the culture and intellectual energy of the country; but it
has been and is sufficient to interpret in a more or less distinctive
way all the leading phases in the evolution of the national thought and
sentiment. The subtle influence of the deeply-grounded religious feeling
which, implanted by the Puritan pioneers, has survived generations of
intense absorption in material progress and the distractions that modern
life offers to the possessors of newly-acquired wealth; the pride of the
people in their independence, and their natural tendency to overrate it
in comparison; with the conditions of other countries; the contrasts
furnished by a society fond of reproducing European habits, yet
retaining a simplicity and freshness of its own: these and other
features in the progress of the United States for over a century may be
found expressed in its literature from the native standpoint, and not
merely from that of the intelligent outside observer.
An American writer in discussing, a few years ago, the quality of the
literature produced before the War of Secession, when wealth and leisure
were abundant among the planters and in the principal New England towns,
observed that 'there would seem to be something in the relation of a
colony to the mother-country which dooms the thought and art of the
former to a hopeless provincialism.' If a comment so largely fanciful
could be made respecting Australasia and Canada, it would practically
mean--at all events from the American point of view--that as long as
they remain dependencies of Great Britain, and therefore lack the
stimulus of an active patriotism, so long will much of whatever is
individual in their social development and national aspirations be
without expression. In the case of the Australasian colonies it would
further mean (apart from any consideration of their future independence)
that a people far removed from other communities of the same race and
already giving promise of being the greatest power south of the equator,
must continue for an indefinite period to be wholly sustained and swayed
in matters of thought and art by a country over twelve thousand miles
distant that happens for the present to offer the most convenient
markets in which to buy and sell. The point need hardly be discussed,
but it suggests some facts in the intellectual life of Australia that it
will be of interest to name. These may not be found to explain why there
is yet no sign of the coming of an Antipodean Franklin or Irving, or
Hawthorne or Emerson; but they will help to show why the literature of
the country grows so unevenly, why it is chiefly of the objective order
and leaves large tracts of the life of the people untouched.
Perhaps the paradox that a people may read a great deal and yet not be
interested in literature could hardly be applied to the Australians,
but it is a fact that they make no special effort to encourage the
growth of a literature of their own. By no means unconscious of their
achievements in other directions--in political innovations, in sport and
athletics--they appear not to take any pride in or see the advantage of
promoting creative intellectual work. Will this be considered natural
and reasonable, as already they are supplied with books and plays and
pictures from England and Europe, or as a proof of thoughtlessness and
neglect? 'Why,' asked a critic in the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1819,
'should the Americans write books when a six weeks' passage brings them,
in their own tongue, our sense, science, and genius in bales and
hogsheads?' Are the Australians of these days asking themselves a
similar question? It would seem so. In 1894 they imported books,
magazines and newspapers from the United Kingdom to the value of
£363,741: this, too, at a time when most of the colonies were understood
to be rigidly economising in consequence of a financial crisis. A decade
before the amount was not far short of a hundred thousand pounds
higher.
Foremost in his list of the salient intellectual tendencies of the
native population of the United States Mr. Bryce places 'a desire to be
abreast of the best thought and work of the world everywhere, and to
have every form of literature and art adequately represented and
excellent of its kind, so that America shall be felt to hold her own
among the nations.' And he further attributes to them 'an admiration for
literary or scientific eminence, an enthusiasm for anything that can be
called genius, with an over-readiness to discover it.'
Artistic talent in America has from an early period in the history of
the country enjoyed the stimulus of local respect and attention. Mr.
Henry James has testified to the 'extreme honour' in which writers and
artists have always been held there. Literature is now a subject of
special systematic study in all the important schools; literary
organisations are numerous, including no fewer than five thousand
circles for the study of Shakespeare; authorship has become something
like a craze in fashionable society; the intelligence of the criticism
in the weekly press is on the whole equal to that in English journals;
and several of the magazines are largely devoted to the more artistic
kinds of writing. If the results of these incentives to production seem
comparatively small, as they undoubtedly do, it must not be forgotten
that the profession of letters in America long suffered, and is still
suffering, from the absence of international copyright law. Before the
year 1891 the markets were filled with cheap reprints of British and
European works (often of an inferior class), and even now authors have
to encounter competition with a vast quantity of foreign matter of which
copyright, owing to the peculiar conditions of the law and of the
publishing trade, is often obtained at prices much below its real value.
It is not, however, the native literary product of America that is
noteworthy so much as the widespread and conscious taste for literature
among the people, and the means which they adopt to promote it. The
best friend of Australia could not credit it at present with any
markedly active desire 'to have every form of literature and art
adequately represented and excellent of its kind.' In this respect the
results of the high standard of education attained in the Government
schools and the subsidised Universities are disappointing. The
Universities of Sydney and Melbourne will soon be fifty years old, but
neither is yet represented with distinction in the higher forms of
literature and art. The Governments, at least, do their duty. Having
liberally provided for school education, they spend annually large sums
in making additions to picture-galleries, in maintaining libraries (of
which there are over eleven hundred), technological schools and museums,
and in other ways adding to the comfort and enlightenment of the people.
But large private contributions are rare, and the founding or endowment
of public institutions still rarer.
Of societies or clubs devoted specially to the interests of literature
there are very few--probably not half a dozen. Here and there among the
upper classes there are little coteries whose members read the English
and French reviews, and are well posted in all movements of interest in
the world of letters, but there is no actual organisation among them,
and they do not seek to extend their influence. Their ambition is
confined to providing for their personal improvement and pleasure. The
reading of the people, though extensive, is not serious nor in any way
specialised, unless a recent notably high average of borrowing in the
historical departments of a few of the free libraries be taken into
account. The leading book exporters in London say that throughout the
Antipodes the public demand is confined, as in England, mainly to the
'general' literature of the hour. 'Whatever has succeeded in London will
usually succeed in Australia' is the invariable remark of the exporter
and the first principle that guides his tentative selection in the case
of all newly-published works. The circulation of the best British weekly
and monthly reviews by some of the principal subscription libraries
helps the reader to choose for himself, but if he should wish to buy a
new book, however valuable, that has not become popular in the business
sense, he will probably have to send to London for it.
The wealthy people seem to select their reading-matter chiefly with a
view to entertainment. Not long ago the manager of one of the most
fashionable of the Melbourne circulating libraries said that about
ninety per cent. of the female and seventy-five per cent. of the male
frequenters of such libraries in Australia read only novels. But this
average is perhaps rather over-stated, being given at a time when there
was an exceptional demand for certain novels that had obtained notoriety
by an audacious treatment of sex questions and English society.
A glance at the fare which fourteen of the London publishers provide in
their colonial editions is of interest. Excellent value, of its kind, is
usually offered in these issues, but here again we find proclaimed an
excessive preference for light prose literature. Of 264 volumes in one
'colonial library,' 238 are of fiction. Sketches, memoirs, reminiscences
and a few essays make up most of the balance. The taste of the working
classes, so far as it can be ascertained from the records of the
principal free libraries, is, curious as it may seem, decidedly sounder
than that attributed to the customers of the subscription libraries. It
must be remembered, however, that the former are seldom tempted with new
fiction, and never with fiction of the spicy or questionable kind. Some
of the larger institutions are rigidly exclusive in regard to the light
kinds of literature.
Authorship in Australia loses an important incentive in the absence of
local magazines. All of the better kind have lacked sufficient public
support. Several of them, including the _Colonial Monthly_ (established
by Marcus Clarke), the _Melbourne Review_, the _Centennial Magazine_,
and the _Australasian Critic_ (the latter conducted by the professors of
the Melbourne University) promised so well that their want of support is
not easily explainable. It has been attributed to an unreasoning
prejudice, an assumption that being locally produced they must
necessarily be inferior; but this probably does the reading public less
than justice. Apparently from their contents, most of the magazines
failed because they were made too Australian in character, too unlike
the English periodicals to which readers had been so long accustomed.
There are many fine magazines in the United States, but their conductors
do not make the mistake of trying to do without British and European
contributions. They know the value of names as well as of matter.
Foreign writers supply about one-third of the contents of the monthlies.
When great interest suddenly attaches to some national question, their
enterprise, like that of the newspapers of the country, sometimes takes
the special form of securing cabled summaries of the opinions of
influential politicians in Great Britain and elsewhere for immediate
publication.
A contributory cause of the failure of Australian magazines is the fact
that the cost of their mechanical production has always been higher
than that of any of their imported competitors. This promises to be a
difficulty for some years to come. Book-publishing, as a separate
business, is also practically impossible, for like reasons. The
Australian reader attaches no special value to the possibilities of the
local magazine, partly because its place as a literary and art record is
considered to be fairly supplied by the weekly newspapers. Moreover, it
is said he demands cheapness as well as high quality in his periodicals,
and knows that both can be got in several English, American and European
magazines. If this be so, the same predilection will no doubt account
for the spectacle of leading London firms sending to the colonies tons
of their popular modern books in paper covers, and offering them at
about half the price charged in the United Kingdom, where they are
obtainable only in cloth-bound editions.
That no one has yet lived by the production of literature in Australia
is not a matter for surprise. No one, indeed, would seriously think of
attempting to do so. Gordon was a mounted policeman, a horse-breaker, a
steeplechase-rider--anything but a professional man of letters; Marcus
Clarke was a journalist and playwright, and wrote only two novels in
fourteen years; Rolf Boldrewood's books were written in spare hours
before and after his daily duties as a country magistrate; Henry
Kingsley returned to England before publishing anything; Kendall held a
Government clerkship which he exchanged for journalism; Mr. Brunton
Stephens is in the Queensland Civil Service; Mr. B. L. Farjeon's
colonial work was mainly done in connection with the New Zealand press;
Messrs. Marriott, Watson, E. W. Hornung, J. F. Hogan, Haddon Chambers
and Guy Boothby, among younger writers, have taken their talents to
London; and none of the half-dozen female novelists have been dependent
upon literature for a livelihood.
What, it may be asked, becomes of the best talent developed by the
Australian schools and Universities? It is employed, or tries to find
employment, in the practice of law, medicine, journalism and teaching.
From law to politics is but a step in the colonies, and the chances of
attaining Cabinet rank, rendered frequent by the prevailing aggressive
form of party government, are often attractive to men of ability and
ambition. The journalists are more or less drenched with politics all
the year round, and they, too, occasionally find it an easy matter to
vary their occupation by assisting in the active business of law-making.
The tension of their daily lives, severer than that of the majority of
press writers in Great Britain, leaves them little or no leisure for
literary work of the higher kind, and generally the prospect of being
compelled to send whatever they might write to the other end of the
world for the chance of publication discourages effort. It may safely be
said that there are young men on the editorial and reporting staffs of a
dozen of the principal journals who possess ability that would secure
them distinction in the wider fields of England or America. To their
skill and spirited rivalry is due the universally high quality of the
Antipodean press. Mr. David Christie Murray, writing after considerable
experience of the colonies, and as one who had been an English
journalist, said that on the whole he was 'compelled to think it by far
and away the best in the world.' The remark is without exaggeration so
far as it applies to the large weekly journals.
The extent of the favour shown by Australian readers to the works of
their own novelists is, as a rule, exactly proportioned to that which
their merits have previously won in England. Booksellers and their
London agents, who of course treat all literature from a purely
commercial standpoint, are at all events unanimous in discrediting the
existence in recent years of any prejudice against colonial fiction of
the better class. It is now very seldom sent out in two or three volume
form, they say, but neither are the most popular English novels, except
occasionally to subscription libraries. For representative Australian
work, then, there is a fair field but no favour. It is as though the
function and existence of the authors apart from the rank and file of
English letters were not recognised. There is an exception to this rule
in the poet Gordon, as a portion of his writings, the Bush _Ballads and
Galloping Rhymes_, irresistibly commemorate the national love of
horseflesh and outdoor life. Every Australian now knows that _For the
Term of his Natural Life_ is a great novel of its class; but as a
leading Victorian journalist (Mr. James Smith) once pointed out in an
article in the _Melbourne Review_, Clarke's real merit was for years
undervalued, because he was known to be 'only a colonial writer.'
Thousands of English, European and American readers had admired the
novel before they thought of inquiring who the writer was or whence he
came. It is true that the story attracted a good deal of interest in
Australia even during its first appearance as a serial, but from
elsewhere came its recognition as one of the novels of the century.
The authors whose lives and writings are briefly sketched in this volume
are all noted in some degree for accuracy and sincerity in their
representation of life in Australia. They have all written from abundant
knowledge--from love, also, perhaps it may be added--of this great wide
land with its brilliant skies, its opportunities and its wholesome
pleasures. That they should fail to cover their field--that they tell
too much of country life and adventure and too little of the throb and
energy of the cities--is in a large measure explained by the fact that
their books are of necessity primarily written for English readers.
Somehow it is assumed that people in the mother-country continue to be
interested only in the picturesque, the curious and the unusual in
Australian life. The idea is in part a survival from earlier years when
a host of military officers, Civil Servants, journalists and tourists
described in some form the more obvious peculiarities of the colonies:
their giant, evergreen forests, strange amorphous animals, aristocratic
gold-diggers, ex-convicts in carriages, and general state of
topsy-turveydom. There is quite an amazing variety of occasional records
of this class in forgotten books, magazines and pamphlets. In at least
a score of well-known novels there are charming country scenes, true in
every particular; but there is a distinct limit to the power of fiction
of this kind to interest remote readers, while much repetition of it
might well be misleading.
A writer in the _Australasian Critic_ once rightly observed, respecting
a batch of short stories of the conventionally Australian kind, that
English readers might 'fancy from them that big cities are unknown in
Australia; that the population consists of squatters, diggers,
stock-riders, shepherds and bushrangers; that the superior residences
are weatherboard homesteads with wide verandas, while the inferior ones
are huts and tents.' No foreign reader could understand from them that
'more than half the Australian population have never seen kangaroos or
emus outside a zoological garden, and that not one in a hundred, or even
a thousand, has seen a wild black fellow.' There is a well-known type of
Australian novel to which the same remarks might apply with almost
equal fitness.
The lack of interest on the part of the novelists in the cities is the
more noticeable because they contain one-third of the whole population
of the country, a proportion said not to have a parallel in any other
part of the world. This neglect is surely a mistake, founded on an
erroneous conception of the tastes of the English public, and resulting
partly from the absence of anything like a local literary influence upon
the writers. 'Have the stress and turmoil of a political career no
charm?' asks Mr. Edmund Gosse, in referring to the restricted scope of
the English novel, and in making a plea for 'a larger study of life.'
The same question might with very good reason be raised concerning the
political life of Australia, which has been almost entirely neglected
since Mrs. Campbell Praed used up the best of her early impressions and
settled in England. The majority of the writers of fiction who continue
to live in the country are women, and possibly not interested in
politics; but the chief reason why the romance is seldom written of the
Cabinet Minister who started life as a gold-digger or draper's
assistant, or of the democratic legislator whose first election was
announced to him through a hole in a steam-boiler that he was riveting,
is to be found in a belief that it would not be appreciated in the
far-off land whither all Australian books must go for the sanction of
their existence. Here again the British reader appears to be misjudged,
for has he not accepted from another direction, and enjoyed, _Democracy_
and _Through One Administration_? Mrs. Praed, lightly skimming the
surface of Antipodean political life in two of her stories, has shown it
to be not without humour, nor lacking in the elements of more serious
interest. But she cannot be said to have exhibited any particular belief
in the political novel, and none of the more practised among her
colonial contemporaries has ever given it a trial.
On the main question of a national literature it will perhaps be
concluded that Australia has yet scarcely any need to be concerned: that
not much must be expected from a civilisation which, though it has been
rapid, began little more than a century ago; and that the existence of
wealth, and the possibilities of leisure and culture which wealth
affords, cannot produce the same effect upon art in a new country as in
an old one. The whole matter no doubt is somewhat difficult of decision.
It has been none the less useful to indicate why so little of the work
already done is the work of native writers--why the existence of much of
the best of it may almost be considered accidental. And while a refusal
to take the trouble of independently judging the worth of a local
artistic product may or may not be an invariable characteristic of a new
country, it was also right to contradict on the best available authority
the assertion of a 'prejudice' against the work of Australian authors.
A portion of the talent that cannot be absorbed in the already
overcrowded ranks of law and medicine might find employment in building
a literature which should have something of national savour in it, if
migration to England were no longer a condition of success to those who
would make writing a profession, as migration to New York or Boston is
similarly found to be a necessity to the young Canadian man or woman of
letters. It need not be wished that the colonial Governments would do
more than they have done--certainly not that they would create a sort of
civil pension list, as a section of the Legislative Assembly of Victoria
contemplated doing ten years ago in discussing a proposed grant to the
family of Marcus Clarke. But the Universities might extend their
influence, and those who have leisure might combine to introduce some of
the methods which have helped to create a living public interest in
literature and art in European countries. In other words, there is
needed an increased sense of responsibility in the cultured class: those
people, among others, who yearly help to fill the luxurious ocean
steamships on their long journeys to the Old World, and who bring back
so singularly little practical enthusiasm for their own land in the
South.
Meanwhile it is encouraging to note the high promise of the work of some
of the younger writers. Mary Gaunt (Mrs. H. Lindsay Miller), the
daughter of a well-known Victorian judge, has, in _The Moving Finger_,
raised the short story to an artistic level hardly approached by any
other Australian writer. And Mrs. Alick Macleod, author of _An
Australian Girl_ and _The Silent Sea_, has given in the former novel--a
fine story, despite some irregularities of form--the most perfect
description of the peculiar natural features of the country ever
written. For the first time the Bush is interpreted as well as
described. In the attitude displayed in this story towards the
fashionable life of the towns there is habitual impatience and
occasional scorn. The sketches of Mrs. Anstey Hobbs' efforts to found a
salon, the flirtations of Mrs. Lee-Travers--who 'chose her admirers to
suit her style of dress'--Laurette Tareling's solemn respect for
Government House, and the generally satirical view of the 'incessant
mimicking of other mimicries,' are no doubt justified; they are often
decidedly entertaining. But it would of course be a mistake to accept
all this as more than a partial view of Melbourne society. The book does
not pretend to deal with it in other than an incidental manner. Mrs.
Macleod's studies of character and often clever dialogue suggest that
she might profitably adapt to the presentation of Australian life the
quiet intensity of Tourguéneff, or the delicately observant style of the
American critical realists, Henry James, W. D. Howells and Richard
Harding Davis. And here one wonders whether the Australian novelists who
find so little material in Sydney and Melbourne have seen what the new
writer, Henry B. Fuller, has done with the life of modern unromantic
Chicago?
According to Mr. Howells, America, through the medium of its own
particular class of novel, 'is getting represented with unexampled
fulness.' The writers 'excel in small pieces with three or four
figures,' and are able conveniently to dispense with sensationalism--a
point not yet reached by Antipodean novelists. 'Every now and then,' he
says, referring to the extreme of this type, 'I read a book with perfect
comfort and much exhilaration, whose scenes the average Englishman would
gasp in. Nothing happens; that is, nobody murders or debauches anybody
else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is not a ghost, or
a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster
of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the whole story;
"no promenade, no band of music, nossing!" as Mr. Du Maurier's Frenchman
said of the meet for a fox-hunt. Yet it is all alive with the keenest
interest for those who enjoy the study of individual traits and general
conditions as they make themselves known to American experience.' As the
Transatlantic social conditions, of which the realistic novel with only
three or four figures is understood to be the outcome, are being more or
less repeated in Australia, a similar literary medium will probably be
found best adapted to the portrayal of life there. At least it may be
claimed that there is no lack of material in the shape of individual
traits which have not yet been suitably described in any form.
MARCUS CLARKE.
In the peculiarity of his fitful talents, and in the character of his
best work in fiction--a pathetically slender life's product--Marcus
Clarke is still alone in Australian literature. Others have shown the
cheerful, hopeful, romantic aspects of the new land; he, not less
honestly, but with a more concentrated and individual view, has pictured
some of the monotony of its half-grown society, the gloom of its
scenery, and the painful realities of its early penal systems. Reputed
only as a novelist, he possessed besides imagination some of the higher
qualities of the critical historian. And had his life been prolonged, he
might almost have done for Australian city life what Thackeray did for
the London of seventy years ago. He could, at least, have written a
novel of manners that would have credited the people of Australia with
some individuality: such a novel as would mark the effects which
comparative isolation must produce in a people who are educated and
intelligent beyond the average of the British race, intensely
self-contained and ambitious, and of whom two-thirds are now
native-born,--a novel that would have corrected the too languidly
accepted judgments of omniscient elderly gentlemen, who, after a few
weeks or months spent among the smallest and most imitative section of
Antipodean society, gravely conclude that 'leaves that grow on one
branch of an oak are not more like leaves that grow upon another, than
the Australian swarm is like the hive it sprang from.'
A rhetorical half-truth of this kind, as applied to the entire people,
can best be answered in the manner of the modern realists. The field is
narrow in Australia, yet not too narrow for the writer who, foregoing
the taste for sensation, will be content to transcribe and interpret
impressions of the moving humanity around him to their minutest detail;
who will forget the pioneer squatter, the Oxford scholar disguised as a
'rouseabout,' and the digger and bushranger of a past generation; who
will sacrifice something of dramatic effect in the endeavour to produce
a faithful and finished picture of colonial middle-class society. As
qualifications for such work, Clarke had exceptional courage,
straightness of eye, and a decided taste for exposing shams, superadded
to a forcible and satirical style of expression.
Whether he had the tact and temperate spirit that must form the basis of
these qualities in the production of serious fiction is less certain, if
he may be judged by the tone of such minor pieces as _Civilization
without Delusion_, _Beaconsfield's Novels_, and _Democratic Snobbery_.
There is a certain violence in these which is more offensive than their
undoubted cleverness is admirable or their satire entertaining. They
show that the writer retained some of the impetuosity and prejudices
which were marked features of his youth.
Clarke was an anti-Semite, therefore in the Beaconsfield novels he saw
little beyond an expression of the author's personal exultation as the
successful representative of a maligned race. In the theological
controversy of _Civilization without Delusion_, an even less effective
and becoming performance, the young author revealed a deficiency which,
in any writer, can only be regarded as a misfortune and a cause for
tolerant regret. The spiritual side of his nature was an undeveloped,
almost a barren field. Neglected in boyhood and sapped by early habits
of dissipation, it had no strength to resist the agnostic conclusions
which were the product in later years of a coldly critical examination
of the general grounds of Christian belief.
In dealing with religion, his characteristic independence developed into
a stiff intellectual pride, and from that into a recklessness which
disregarded alike his public reputation and the feelings of others. But
these forays into the preserves of theology were happily rare. Such
questions obtained no permanent place in his thoughts: they were only
the passing expression of an ever-besetting mental restlessness. It is
indeed surprising that a writer with artistic instinct and a sense of
humour should ever have persuaded himself to enter the fruitless field
of religious contention at all.
There are a few facts in the early life of Marcus Clarke which are
sometimes so strongly, and even painfully, reflected in his brief career
that they form a necessary preface to any consideration of his literary
work. Soon after his birth at Kensington (London) in 1846 his mother
died, and thenceforward through all his youth he seems to have received
little advice or attention from relations. His father, a barrister and
literary man of retired and eccentric habits, exercised over him a
merely nominal authority, and so he had liberty to gratify a spirit of
inquiry and curiosity notably beyond his years. At his own home he
became the pet of his father's acquaintances, a set of fashionable
cynics.
In _Human Repetends_, a sketch of his published several years later,
there is a passage which substantially records his experiences at this
time: 'I was thrown, when still a boy, into the society of men thrice my
age, and was tolerated as a clever impertinent in all those wicked and
witty circles in which virtuous women are conspicuous by their
absence.... I was suffered at sixteen to ape the vices of sixty.... So
long as I was reported to be moving only in that set to which my father
chose to ally himself, he never cared to inquire how I spent the
extravagant allowance which his indifference, rather than his
generosity, permitted me to waste. You can guess the result of such a
training.'
Left alone in the world at the age of eighteen, upon the death of his
father, he emigrated to Australia. Failing to take any interest in a
bank-clerkship provided by an uncle for him at Melbourne, he was sent to
a sheep-station near Glenorchy, one hundred miles inland. Here again he
paid little attention to the occupation chosen for him. All the day and
half the night were dreamed away in literary thought. Just as he
wandered alone over fern-hill and creek-bed, plain and mountain range,
and absorbed impressions of a scenery at once repulsive and fascinating
to him, so he dipped into all kinds of literature without method or set
purpose. But he preferred fiction, and as the consignee of an endless
succession of French novels he became a marked man in the eyes of the
village postmaster.
Two years had thus been spent, when a Dr. Lewins, who was known as a
'materialistic philosopher,' visited the station and made the young
Englishman's acquaintance. A warm mutual regard resulted, and soon
Lewins succeeded in obtaining a small post for Clarke on the Melbourne
_Argus_. This was the beginning of the most brilliant journalistic
career established on the Australian press.
A less happy result of the same friendship was Clarke's conversion to
the arid and uninspiring doctrines of materialism, though perhaps it
could hardly be called a conversion in the case of one upon whom the
deeper principles of Christian faith had never obtained any real hold.
Colonial democracy seems to have been to Clarke at once a source of
inspiration and of scorn. Coming from among the English upper classes,
with the education and temperament of an aristocrat, he was yet readily
able to sympathise with the higher principles of the new society. Its
intelligence, virility and free intercourse broadened and interested
him, as it does most young Englishmen. But for that common product of
a new country, the pretentious plutocrat, he had only contempt.
It is the bitterness with which this feeling is expressed in his
journalistic writings that helps to raise a doubt as to his capacity for
work of the best class in fiction. Still, if it be true, as some of
those who were his friends say, that this occasional work was seldom
much studied, it becomes unreliable as an indicator of the writer's
character. The same hand that in the famous _Snob Papers_ so savagely,
and in at least one case so intemperately, satirised types of English
society, afterwards produced novels in which fidelity to the essential
facts of life is the most conspicuous quality. So, too, might it have
been in the case of the 'Peripatetic Philosopher,' whose weekly
criticisms of Melbourne men and manners in 1867-68 has correctly been
judged the best writing of its kind yet done in Australia. In these
articles, remarkable as the work of one who was only in his
twenty-second year, there is a closeness of observation and incisiveness
of style which promised much more for their author than the
circumstances of his life afterwards permitted him to realise.
The usual effects of an undirected youth and an undisciplined manhood
explain Marcus Clarke's failure to render to his adopted country the
service which, as a distinctly gifted writer of the realist school, he
seemed well fitted to perform. He was a Bohemian, who, while resisting
the worst vices of his class, shared its carelessness and improvidence
to a degree that left little energy for ambitious work.
His was not an idle nature by any means: it was only erratic, fond of
variety, impatient of drudgery. Thus, in the course of fourteen years'
literary work, his thoughts make excursions from town-life to
country-life, from social satire to story-telling, from art to
ethnology, from theology to opera-bouffe! Here are the titles of a few
of his compositions: _Lower Bohemia in Melbourne_ (a sketch), _Plot_ (a
sensational drama), _Review of Comte and Positive Philosophy_ (magazine
article), _The Humbug Papers_ (humorous and satirical), _The Future
Australian Race_ (an ethnological study), _Goody Two Shoes_ (a
pantomime), _Civilization without Delusion_ (a theological discussion
with the Bishop of Melbourne), _The Power of Love_ (an extravaganza),
_Doré and Modern Art_ (a review), _Cannabis Indica_ (a psychological
experiment). Almost the whole of Clarke's life may be said to have been
devoted to the supply of some temporary demand of the periodical press
or the stage. Even the two novels which represent his only sustained
work were written for serial issue in Melbourne magazines.
It does not appear in either case that he wrote with any special view
to establish a literary reputation; indeed, it would seem that the story
of convict life might not have been completed but for the strenuous
importunity of the firm of publishers with whom he had contracted to
write it.
Journalism, the early occupation of so many eminent men of letters, has
usually been abandoned as soon as the young writer has once shown
exceptional ability as a novelist. This rule was not followed by Clarke.
As the leader in his day of the journalistic class, who, as the late Mr.
Francis Adams has said with substantial truth, still 'stand almost
entirely for the conscious literary culture of the whole Antipodean
community,' he held a position which would have unfavourably affected
the literary tone and ambition of a still more energetic and original
writer.
He had no predecessors in the special work he elected to do; he had to
establish his own standard of achievement; and he was without the
constant stimulus which intercourse with literary society, such as that
of London, affords. The demands of the newspapers were then, as now,
more for purely ephemeral criticism or narrative than for matter worthy
to rank as permanent literature.
An alert, pithy style and a distinct gift of satirical humour such as
Clarke had, and developed by a wide range of reading, were just the
qualities which are always in request on the keen, aggressive daily
press of Australia. One can easily imagine the flattering demands made
upon the young author's powers by the men who were his personal friends
as well as employers.
Whenever he was deficient in taste of expression, or in urbanity of
criticism (as in his treatment of the Jews), he showed the effects
partly of impetuous haste, and partly of his remoteness from those
centres of literary opinion which always beneficially influence a young
writer, be he ever so original or naturally artistic. It has been
doubted whether Clarke was ever fully convinced of his own powers; but
however feasibly this may have applied to the first four or five years
of his literary career, there was no ground for it after the unanimously
favourable reception accorded to _For the Term of his Natural Life_ upon
its issue in book form in 1874.
In England and America, as well as in Australia, this one novel gave him
an immediate and distinct reputation. With it he might have speedily
established himself as one of the leading writers of the day, and,
turning from the depressing realism of penal cruelties which can have no
further parallel in British countries to something more within our
sympathies--to the realism of modern Australian life,--have supplied
what is still conspicuously lacking in Australian fiction. Yet, during
the remaining seven years of his life he produced no imaginative work
worthy his name and ability. The ever-ready market of the local
newspaper press absorbed his best efforts, and such intervals as there
were he devoted to an attempt to establish himself as a writer and
adapter for the stage.
In this way the years passed without yielding much beyond a livelihood.
Meantime, Melbourne was his microcosm: he made a systematic study of its
life from the purlieus of Little Bourke and Lonsdale streets to the
palace of his 'model legislator' on Eastern Hill. Like Balzac, one of
his favourite novelists, he made observation a severe and regular
business, but he lacked the energy or the patience to take full
advantage of its results. Balzac employed his accumulated materials in
bursts of creative energy which, if terrible in their intensity and
their drain upon his health, had at least method in them, and effected
their purpose. Poverty did not swerve him, nor prosperity sate him.
That part of genius which consists in natural depth and accuracy of
vision Clarke had in abundance, but he was weak in the lesser gifts of
patience and synthetic power, perhaps also in ambition. Moreover, an
unfortunate extravagance, which led from chronic debt to bankruptcy,
compelled him to continue the class of work which gave the surest and
most regular income.
Repeated requests by the Messrs. Bentley for more fiction were neglected
from year to year, and similar indifference was shown to a flattering
invitation to join the staff of the _Daily Telegraph_ in London, an
opportunity that would have led to the establishment of Clarke in those
literary circles outside of which no purely Australian writer, with the
exception of Rolf Boldrewood, has ever yet received adequate
recognition.
Among Clarke's uncompleted writings are a few brilliant chapters of a
novel which promised to be as permanent a record of his ability as the
well-known convict story, though of a different kind. But the author had
the unlucky faculty of attending to anything rather than the work which
offered him certain fame and fortune, as well as the most natural
employment of his powers. At the time of his death he was only in his
thirty-fifth year. Probably with advancing life he would have become
more settled in his tastes and habits, realising that the work at which
he was happiest in every sense was the writing of novels, and that
alone.
The satire and cynicism so noticeable in Clarke's writings, especially
in his critical sketches and essays, are liable to give an inaccurate
conception of his temperament. They obscure, as such characteristics
nearly always do in literature, the gentler aspects of the writer's
nature. His satire is, perhaps, too uncompromising. It often seems to
reflect a personal bitterness, to take too little cognisance of the
springs of human weakness. Undoubtedly brilliant in force and keenness,
it yet too seldom produces the kind of hearty laugh with which Thackeray
and Swift, for example, relieve their fiercest scorn. His personal
experience of life had been discouraging. He had sounded its depths and
sipped its pleasures; its rude facts found him deficient in self-control
and fortitude. He had refused to learn the common logic of existence.
There is an element of tragedy in the rapid change which the unhappy
circumstances of his private life wrought in his temperament. Addressing
the disciples of Mrs. Grundy in an early essay defending the
Bohemianism of his youth, he tells them that they are ignorant how
easily good spirits, good digestion, and jolly companions enable a man
to triumph over all the ills that flesh is heir to. 'You cannot know,'
he adds, 'what a fund of humour there is in common life, and how
ridiculous one's shifts and strugglings appear when viewed through
Bohemian glass.... Life seems to you but as a "twice told tale, vexing
the dull ear of a drowsy man" seems but as a vale of tears, a place of
mourning, weeping, and wailing.... I wish ye had lived for a while in
"Austin Friars"; it would have enlarged your hearts, believe me.'
This was the cheerful philosophy of Clarke as a young bachelor, after he
had spent his slender patrimony, disappointed the successive efforts of
friends to make a business man of him, and was about to begin the
earning of a living by his pen. A dozen years later we see him with
developed talents and a valuable name, but broken in fortune and spirit,
and gloomily anticipating death months before it came. The Jew usurers,
whose race he despised, had long been his real masters, and, with a
nature sensitive in the extreme, he writhed in their bondage.
Improvidence had been not merely an unhappy incident, as it is in the
lives of so many young men of artistic tastes; it had overweighted him
more or less for years, and 'the thoughtless writer of thoughtful
literature,' as the author of his biographical memoir has called him,
sank beneath it while yet at the beginning of a career full of the
brightest promise. The sort of companionship that pleased his careless
youth had latterly proved unsatisfying, and to some extent distasteful
to him. Its effects upon his character were so unfavourable that some
who had been his companions in journalism felt it necessary, after his
death, to credit him with a greater capacity for kindly forbearance
towards humanity than is apparent in the bulk of his writings.
'My friend,' says one writer, 'was one of those many geniuses who appear
to be born to prove the vast amount of contradictory elements which can
exist in the same individual. In his case these contradictions were so
apparent--and, if I may use the term, so contradictory--that, unless one
knew him, it was impossible to believe what his nature was. On the one
hand, he was recklessly generous, impulsively partisan, morbidly
sensitive, and highly chivalrous; on the other, forgetful of
obligations, defiantly antagonistic, unnecessarily caustic, and
affectedly cynical.... His life was one of impulse, and the direction of
the impulse depended solely on surrounding circumstances.... He has
passed from us at an early age, leaving behind him some enemies made,
perhaps, by his own waywardness; but he has left many friends,
too,--friends who loved him for the good that was in him.'