Australian Writers

E-text prepared by David Wilson and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
LONDON RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON
1896
Foremost in his list of the salient intellectual tendencies of the native population of the United States Mr. Bryce places ‘a desire to be abreast of the best thought and work of the world everywhere, and to have every form of literature and art adequately represented and excellent of its kind, so that America shall be felt to hold her own among the nations.’ And he further attributes to them ‘an admiration for literary or scientific eminence, an enthusiasm for anything that can be called genius, with an over-readiness to discover it.’
The wealthy people seem to select their reading-matter chiefly with a view to entertainment. Not long ago the manager of one of the most fashionable of the Melbourne circulating libraries said that about ninety per cent. of the female and seventy-five per cent. of the male frequenters of such libraries in Australia read only novels. But this average is perhaps rather over-stated, being given at a time when there was an exceptional demand for certain novels that had obtained notoriety by an audacious treatment of sex questions and English society.
Stephens is in the Queensland Civil Service; Mr. B. L. Farjeon’s colonial work was mainly done in connection with the New Zealand press; Messrs. Marriott, Watson, E. W. Hornung, J. F. Hogan, Haddon Chambers and Guy Boothby, among younger writers, have taken their talents to London; and none of the half-dozen female novelists have been dependent upon literature for a livelihood.
The lack of interest on the part of the novelists in the cities is the more noticeable because they contain one-third of the whole population of the country, a proportion said not to have a parallel in any other part of the world. This neglect is surely a mistake, founded on an erroneous conception of the tastes of the English public, and resulting partly from the absence of anything like a local literary influence upon the writers. ‘Have the stress and turmoil of a political career no charm?’ asks Mr. Edmund Gosse, in referring to the restricted scope of the English novel, and in making a plea for ‘a larger study of life.’