Australian Writers. Desmond Byrne
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 [p 23] 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 [p 24] 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 [p 25] 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 [p 26] 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 [p 27] 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 [p 28] 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.
[p 29]
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, [p 30] 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 [p 31] 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