Chapter 2
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.