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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 that the writer retained some of the impetuosity and prejudices which were marked features of his youth.

[p 32]

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 [p 33] 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 [p 34] 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 [p 35] 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 [p 36] 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 [p 37] 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: [p 38] 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 [p 39] 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 [p 40] 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 [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.

[p 44]

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 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 [p 50] 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 [p 51] 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.

[p 52]

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 [p 53] 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 [p 54] 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.

[p 55]

‘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 [p 56] 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 [p 57] 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 [p 58] 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 [p 59] 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 [p 60] 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 [p 61] 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 [p 62] 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 [p 63] 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 [p 64] 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.

[p 65]

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 [p 66] 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.’