Australian Writers. Desmond Byrne
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 [p 41] 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 [p 42] 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.
[p 43]
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.
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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 [p 45] 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 [p 46] 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 [p 47] 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.’
In another sketch of the author, his character is thus summed up: ‘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 [p 48] 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 [p 49] 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