'Caustic he was sometimes, and cynical always; but beneath there beat a
heart of gold--a heart tender and pitiful as a woman's.' This estimate
is amply justified by the power of pathos and the often tender analysis
of human feeling in _For the Term of his Natural Life_, however absent
the same qualities may seem in many of the shorter stories.
An interesting picture of Clarke's personality is given by a writer in
the Sydney _Bulletin_: 'His wit was keen and polished, his humour
delicate and refined, and his powers of description masterly.... His
face was a remarkable one--remarkable for its singular beauty. Like
Coleridge, the poet, he was "a noticeable man with large grey eyes," and
one had but to look into them to perceive at once the light of
genius.... He was one of the best talkers I have ever met. Like Charles
Lamb, he had a stutter which seemed to emphasise and add point to his
witticisms. As in his writings, he had the knack of saying brilliant
things, and scattering _bons mots_ with apparent ease, so that in
listening to him one felt the pleasure that is derived from such books
as Horace Walpole's correspondence and those of the French
memoir-writers.... He knew not how to care for money, yet he had none
of those vices which ordinarily reduce men of genius to destitution, and
are cloaked beneath the hackneyed phrase, "He had no enemy but
himself."'
In all his journalistic criticism, Marcus Clarke scarcely more than
pointed to the material which the life of such cities as Melbourne and
Sydney offer a novelist capable of work like that of Mr. W. D. Howells,
or the series of tales of urban society in America by Mr. Marion
Crawford. There is now an opportunity, and, one might almost say, a
need, for fiction which shall also, in effect, be salutary criticism.
The Antipodes have lately illustrated the fact that a single decade will
sometimes witness a notable change in the conditions of an entire people
in a new and rapidly-developing country.
Thus, with the struggle for subsistence now keen to a degree which could
not have been foretold by the gloomiest pessimist a few years ago; with
Parliaments, hitherto safely democratic, threatened with Socialism by
the increasing practice of electing artisans and labourers to do the
legislative work of their respective classes; the crash of fortunes
which never had substantial existence; the pauperising to-day of the
paper millionaire of yesterday; the spectacle of worn, old men, after
overreaching and ruining themselves, starting pitifully the race of life
afresh, a sinister experience their sole advantage over the faltering
novice; and that other common spectacle of democratic life, the secure
and cultured rich cynically eschewing the active business of
government,--with these and some social aspects still less agree able to
contemplate there is ample subject-matter for any novelist who may have
the disposition and ability to carry on the work which Clarke had
indicated, but scarcely begun, before he died.
_Long Odds_, Clarke's first story, deals with English life, and bears no
resemblance in quality or kind to the later novel with which his name is
chiefly associated. It is primarily the tragedy of a _mésalliance_, and
horseracing and politics assist the plot, with the usual complications
of gambling and intrigue. The story has, however, a good deal less to
do with sport than the title suggests. The plot is mainly concerned with
the selfish, cruel, and infamous in human nature--a singularly dark
theme for a young beginner in fiction to choose. Except at rare
intervals when the business of characterisation is momentarily set
aside, as in the vivid descriptions of the Kirkminster Steeplechase and
the Matcham Hunt, there is little suggestion of youthful spirit or
freshness.
The outlines of plot and incident are attractively arranged, the
expression of life for the most part second-hand and artificial. There
are traces of Dickens' burlesque without his sympathy, and the high
colouring of Lytton with less than Lytton's wit. Disraeli's satire, too,
is echoed in the political scenes. The young Australian squatter, whose
experiences in England were to have formed the main purpose of the book,
is allowed no opportunity to show the better, and rarely even the
ordinary, capabilities of the new race of which he is ostensibly a type.
It is said to be a well-understood maxim of the novelist's art that many
a liberty taken with hero or heroine, or both, is forgiven if the writer
keeps a constant eye upon his villain, and deals honestly by him. In
_Long Odds_ there are two villains, and at least two others villainously
inclined. Between the four of them the easy-going hero has no chance.
It is natural that, in the construction of a novel which aims at
dramatic point before anything else, the 'simple Australian,' as his
author is at last constrained to regard him, should seem less useful
than the polished and unprincipled man of the world. But in this
instance the balance of interest is too unequal. Dramatic quality has
been secured at the expense of tone and proportion. Of the two male
characters whose exploits in rascality it becomes the real business of
the story to tell, Rupert Dacre is the more natural and entertaining.
There is an attention to detail in his portrait which suggests that the
lineaments of the conventional society villain may have been filled in
with the help of a little personal knowledge, perhaps of some of those
morally doubtful individuals already mentioned as having been among the
acquaintances of Clarke's early youth. Dacre is the chief cynic of the
story, and to him are assigned the best of the dialogue and all of the
small stock of humour to be found in the novel. But the man who is both
his associate and enemy, Cyril Chatteris, is a common sort of dastard,
and altogether disagreeable.
The author is not entirely forgetful of the interests of his nominal
hero. If throughout three-fourths of the story Calverley is made the
plaything of circumstances that favour only rogues, he is at last
allowed a triumph in love and sport which, though unsatisfying from an
artistic point of view, is calculated to soothe a not too fastidious
taste for poetic justice.
Conscious of the conventional character of his principal theme, the
author apparently sought to improve it by deepening its intensity. The
result of this was to add more of weakness than of strength. Incidents
that might have been effectively dramatic become melodramatic; the
conceivably probable is sometimes strained into the obviously
improbable. The agreeable finish to the minor love-story of Calverley
and Miss Ffrench does not remove the general savour of sordidness which
the reader carries away from the study of so much of the bad side of
human nature.
In connection with criticism of this kind, it ought, however, to be
noted that other hands besides the author's are known to have
contributed to the novel. Shortly after it began to appear serially in
the _Colonial Monthly_, Marcus Clarke fell from a horse while hunting,
and sustained a fracture of the skull which interrupted his literary
work for many weeks. How much of the writing had previously been done
seems to be a subject of dispute. It is, however, quite clear that, in
order to preserve continuity in the publication of the parts, Clarke's
friends did write some portion of the story, but whether in accordance
with the author's _scenario_, supposing one to have existed, has not
been stated.
'Only a few of the first chapters' were the work of Clarke, says the
editor of the _Marcus Clarke Memorial Volume_, writing in 1884; but in
an article published in the _Imperial Review_ (Melbourne) for 1886, the
contributed matter is limited to a couple of chapters written by Mr.
G. A. Walstab, and skilfully inserted in the middle of the novel.
Walstab was one of Clarke's best friends, and he is no doubt the
'G. A. W.' to whom the story is dedicated 'in grateful remembrance of
the months of July and August, 1868.'
From the absence of a prefatory explanation when _Long Odds_ was
published in book form in 1869, it may be assumed that Clarke was
satisfied with the quality of the contributed work. At least, he was
willing to take the full responsibility of its authorship. But even with
this in view, it were well, perhaps, not to hold him too strictly
accountable for the faults of the story. Not much must be expected from
a first novel produced in the circumstances mentioned, and issued when
the author was only twenty-three. In his haste to give it final shape
immediately after the serial publication, he was probably ill advised.
One can only regret that it was not set aside for a year or so, and
written afresh, or, at least, largely revised. Perhaps this would have
been expecting too much from so unmethodical a worker as Clarke. The far
finer dramatic taste and literary form of his masterpiece, issued five
years later, showed how little indicative of his talent was the earlier
work.
In view of the large extent to which the life of the Australian landed
classes has been described in fiction during the last twenty years, it
is curious to read the plea Clarke offered to his Antipodean critics for
passing over the literary material close at hand and preferring the
well-worn paths of the English novelist.
During the serial publication of _Long Odds_ the colonial press raised
some objection to the laying of the scene in England instead of in
Australia. The author replied simply that Henry Kingsley's _Geoffry
Hamlyn_ being the best Australian novel that had been, or probably
would be, written, 'any attempt to paint the ordinary squatting life of
the colonies could not fail to challenge unfavourable comparison with
that admirable story.'
The excuse is just a little too adventitious to have convinced even
those to whom it was originally addressed. None the less, it may at the
moment have accurately represented the opinion of a beginner who at that
time could scarcely have known the extent of his own powers.
Probably he had given the subject little thought. His colonial
experience was certainly less varied than Kingsley's had been. Above
all, his tastes, and in some degree his temperament, differed
markedly from those of his predecessor in the field. The judgment or
instinct that kept him from coming into direct competition with
Kingsley--assuming his own questionable belief that any effort of his
would have been competition--at least erred on the side of safety. That
the immediate alternative should have been an imitative example of a
hackneyed class of English novel, ineffective of purpose,
book-inspired, and tainted with the deadness of cynicism, is something
which admits of a more definite opinion.
'I have often thought,' says the writer, referring to the hero of
_Geoffry Hamlyn_ 'and I dare say other Australian readers have thought
also, How would Sam Buckley get on in England? My excuse, therefore, in
offering to the Australian public a novel in which the plot, the
sympathies, the interest, and the moral, are all English, must be that
I have endeavoured to depict with such skill as is permitted to me the
fortunes of a young Australian in that country which young Australians
still call "Home."'
Without this prefatory sign-post, the reader could never have suspected
such a purpose. Clarke may have had it definitely in his mind when he
first sat down to the work; but if so, it was put aside, consciously or
unconsciously, after the completion of the first few chapters, in favour
of more complex characterisation. Bob Calverley, the young squatter,
really holds a third or fourth place in relation to the main motive of
the story, and is used rather as a foil than as an exemplar of anything
typically Australian. He does not bear any active part in the drama of
passion and intrigue; he is not even permitted to be a passive spectator
of it.
To say that he was good-natured, jovial, popular, 'the sort of man that
one involuntarily addresses by his Christian name'; that although he was
shy and awkward in the society of ladies, at ease with his own sex only
when cattle and horses were the subject of conversation, ignorant of
music, and unable to tell Millais from Tenniel, he 'could pick you out
any bullock in a herd ... shear a hundred sheep a day ... and drive four
horses down a sidling in a Gippsland range with any man in
Australia,'--to say all this by way of preliminary, to add that
Calverley was no fool, and yet to show him in scarcely any other guise
than that of a trusting victim of rogues, is to go a very short distance
in the portrayal of a typical Australian.
In the slack-baked condition in which we find him, he merely repeats the
ordinary spectacle of green youth in the process of seeing life and
buying experience at the usual high figure. Compared with the real
squatter (who, ordinarily, is college-trained, and does not shear sheep
nor risk his neck unnecessarily), Bob, the son of rich 'Old Calverley,'
and nephew of an English baronet, is as an exaggerated stock-figure of
the stage to the commonplace blood and brain of everyday life. A
childlike trust in one's fellows, a reputation for good-nature, an
untamable taste for horseflesh and the pursuits of the Bush, belong to
every young squatter in a certain class of Australian fiction; they are
qualities which may be applied indiscriminately, with always some
effect.
The real squatter is a more civilised and reliable, if less picturesque,
person. He likes both work and pleasure, provided they be suitably
proportioned. His work is in the personal management of his properties;
his pleasure is taken in the large cities. He entertains no fantastic
prejudices against urban life, in proof of which he often spends his
later years in some city hundreds of miles from the scene of his early
toil and pastoral successes.
As a young man in London, he can be found with rooms at the Langham, the
Métropole, or some other of the half-dozen fashionable hotels known to
colonial visitors. There he will entertain his friends, joining with
them, in turn, the continuous movements of the society season. He
frankly lacks much of the ease and polish of the young Englishman, but
his natural amiability and good spirits largely compensate for these
deficiencies, while they preclude any feeling of discomfort on his own
part.
During his three or six months' stay in London (the combination usually
of a little business with a very full programme of pleasure) he spends
freely, and in his tour of the clubs plays here and there a little at
cards--perchance loses. Worldly beyond his reputation, and somewhat
Chesterfieldian in his principles, he consents to be a Roman while at
Rome. He has inherited the British hatred of fuss and personal
peculiarity, and none shall call him mean. But, unlike many of his
English friends at club and course, he has watched and taken some part
in the hard process of making money, and knows the difference between a
little gentlemanly extravagance and the reckless hazarding of a fortune.
At least, it may be affirmed of him that in nine cases out of ten he is
decidedly no fool.
These are only a few of the prominent outlines of the type of young man
who, his holiday over, returns unspoiled to work on his own or his
father's estates. Those whose passion for a horse destroys all
self-control, who spend thousands in gambling and betting, who
innocently take every smooth gentleman at his own valuation, are merely
individuals--persons who may as unfailingly be found in England or
elsewhere as in Australia.
Sam Buckley is a typical descendant of the British pioneer colonists, as
every Australian knows. In attempting to give an answer to his own
speculation of 'How would Sam Buckley get on in England?' Clarke
presumably undertook to continue the portrayal of this type. The result,
considered apart from the function Calverley fulfils in _Long Odds_,
must be held as emphatically a failure.
Never was a novel written with a franker or more deliberate purpose than
that shown in _For the Term of his Natural Life_. The author had the
twofold object of picturing the dreadful crudities and brutalities of
the early system of convict 'reformation' in Australia, and of
preventing their possible repetition elsewhere. The first of these aims
was attained with a fuller employment, and perhaps more moderate
statement of historical facts, than can be found in any other fiction of
the same class; the second was ineffective, because, when it found
expression, the abuses which had suggested it no longer continued at the
Antipodes, and could not conceivably be repeated on the existing
settlements at Port Blair and Noumea.
The story was written a quarter of a century too late to assist the
abolition of convict transportation to Australia. Had it appeared at the
right time, it might have done much where formal inquiries and the
testimonies of disinterested and humane observers had repeatedly failed.
For sixty years the practice of deporting criminals had been carried on,
upheld in England by official indifference and callousness, and in the
colonies themselves by the greed of a small class of private persons who
grew rapidly wealthy upon the strength of assigned convict labour, until
the free emigrants by the authority of their numbers were able to insist
upon its cessation. For so long as the colonies were willing to receive
a population of criminals, so long was England only too anxious to
supply them and make a virtue out of it. It mattered little to the
official mind that the system was incurably bad and immoral; the main
thing was to speedily and effectually transfer an awkward burden to
other shoulders. The entire history of penal transportation from Great
Britain throws a sinister light upon the national character. The
practice originated with banishment of convicts to the American colonies
under conditions which constituted a form of slavery.
The criminal on being sentenced became a marketable chattel of the
State. His services were sold by public auction, the purchaser acquiring
the right to transport him and sell him for the term of his sentence to
a builder, planter, manufacturer, or other employer beyond the Atlantic.
The price paid to the British Government averaged five pounds per head,
and some of the more useful prisoners were resold in America for
twenty-five pounds each. One of these dealers in convict labour, in
giving evidence before a committee of the House of Commons, made a
matter-of-fact complaint that 'the trade' was not so remunerative as
people supposed. Artisans sold well, but the profit realised upon them
was often consumed by losses upon some of the others. One-seventh of his
purchases died on his hands, and in the course of business he had been
obliged to give the old, the halt and the lame in for nothing. When the
War of Independence closed the United States against the traffic,
Britain was given a fresh opportunity to reconsider and place its penal
system upon a more humane basis; but the temptation to adopt sweeping
measures was once more too strong to be resisted. The promoters of the
Australian scheme were in so great a hurry to seize their chance that
they despatched over seven hundred convicts before even the site for the
first settlement was chosen. The hardships which this characteristic act
afterwards entailed are too familiar in history to need repetition.
After such recklessness, it is no wonder that, as Sir Roger Therry has
observed, 'the first-fruits of the system exhibited a state of society
in New South Wales which the world might be challenged to surpass in
depravity.'
A generation passed before the British Government reluctantly admitted
transportation to be a failure. Lord John Russell, as late as 1847,
discovered that it had been 'too much the custom to consult the
convenience of Great Britain by getting rid of persons of evil habits,
and to take that view alone.' In planting provinces which might become
empires, they 'should endeavour to make them, not seats of malefactors
and convicts, but communities which may set examples of virtue and
happiness.'
This mild, platitudinous rebuke came when all the damage was done. It
remained for the free inhabitants of Australia to point to a plainer
principle in declaring that 'the inundating of feeble and dependent
colonies with the criminals of the parent State is opposed to that
arrangement of Providence by which the virtue of each community is
destined to combat its own vice.'
To illustrate in a single story all the most prominent and pernicious
features of the transportation system, Clarke had to invent a case of
crime in which the criminal, unlike the majority of the worst offenders
sent to the settlements, should always be worthy of the reader's
sympathy. It was necessary that the felon be a victim as well as a
felon; that he should not regain his liberty in any form, but continue
by a series of offences against the authority of his gaolers to
experience and display all the successive severities of Macquarie
Harbour, Port Arthur, and Norfolk Island. A fundamental fact to be
exhibited was the impassable gulf of misunderstanding that might exist
between capricious or incompetent prison officials and a criminal who,
for any reason, had once come to be regarded as hopelessly vicious. 'We
must treat brutes like brutes,' says the prime martinet of the story:
'keep 'em down, sir; make 'em _feel_ what they are. They're here to
work, sir. If they won't work, flog 'em until they will. If they
work--why, a taste of the cat now and then keeps 'em in mind of what
they may expect if they get lazy.'
The author chose to represent the extreme case of a man who, innocent of
a murder charged against him, allowed himself to be transported under an
assumed name in order to prevent the exposure of a long-concealed act of
unfaithfulness on the part of a beloved mother.
Richard Devine is the bastard son of an aristocratic Englishwoman who in
early youth was forced by her father into a loveless union with a rich
plebeian. The single fault of the mother's life is confessed after
twenty years, when the husband in a moment of anger strikes her
high-spirited and obstinate son. The latter consents to leave his home
for ever, and relinquish the name he has borne. On these terms the wife
is spared. Richard Devine goes on the instant. Crossing Hampstead Heath,
he comes upon a robbed and murdered man, and presently is arrested for
the crime. The explanation that would save him would also cause the
dreaded exposure of his mother, and so he withholds it, gives a false
name, and, having put himself beyond the means of defence and the
recognition of friends, is convicted and sentenced to transportation for
life.
In making all the subsequent career of Rufus Dawes abnormally
painful--that of a dumb sufferer who in sixteen years' confinement,
ending only in a tragic death, experiences by turns every form of
punishment and oppression--the author often touches, though it cannot be
said he ever exceeds, the limits of possibility.
'Need one who was not a hardened criminal have suffered so much and so
long?' is the question that continually recurs to the mind of the
reader; but it is suggested by the prolonged and pitiful sense of
unsatisfied justice rather than by any doubting that the extremes of
penal discipline as practised in the name of the British Government
between forty and sixty years ago could have been successively applied
to a single human being. The writer adheres relentlessly to his central
idea to the end. Dawes' unameliorated servitude and unavenged fate were
intended to symbolise glaring anomalies of justice which never were
remedied. The 'correction' he is subjected to was that which the laws of
the time permitted, and which in many cases goaded its victims to draw
lots to murder one another in order to escape from their misery.