The real Australia

by Alfred Buchanan

V

PSEUDO-LITERARY

This world’s no blot for us,

Nor blank; it means intensely and means good:

To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

It is strange that a people possessed of literary instincts, and of the literary temper, should be without a literature of their own; but so it is. The shadow of a remembered personality does indeed flit now and then across the brief page of Australian history. There was a writer of verses named Lindsay Gordon, and a novelist of repute named Marcus Clarke. Each of these struck out a path for himself. Each left a record that will not soon be forgotten. But neither was a product of the Southern Hemisphere; neither could be described as native, “and to the manner born”; and neither of the two, nor both together, could be credited with creating a literature for the country in which their work was done.

It is true there have been, and there are, others of note. There was a poet who wrote some very fine lines about the yellow-haired September, about waste places of Kerguelen, about lost Lorraines, about a frail, flower-like, dead Araluen, and about much besides. It would argue ignorance of the subject to be unaware that the book of rhymes beginning with an account of the man from “Snowy River” has sold to the extent of 30,000 copies, or more. There is the statement, made on what seems reliable authority, that the author of Our Selection was paid for a continuation of that work the remarkable sum of £500. And Victor Daley was, until a few months ago, alive amongst us. The torch of inspiration is, therefore, not quite gone out. Throughout the continent it flickers and falters, never shining with a steady and continuous flame, rarely giving the wayfarer a light to guide him, but every now and then dancing with a faint, fleeting, will-of-the-wisp quality before his astonished eyes.

He sees a reflection, or he catches an echo, and then he is in the dark.

Of rhymes and storyettes there are any number in Australia. The local printing presses shed them in great profusion. They are more numerous than leaves in Vallambrosa, or than wattle blossoms in September. Nor is their musical and poetic quality to be despised. Many of them—the majority of them—are ephemeral and worthless; but taking them either in the aggregate, or in the unit, they represent a fairly high journalistic standard. Frequently can there be discovered among them a new image, a clever piece of workmanship, even an original idea. Their metrical quality is often admirable. In the Melbourne Argus there have been many good verses—verses so good that one regrets they should have been consigned to so perishable a receptacle as a penny print. For genuine melody, of something better than a topical sort, one would not go further than the lines written to a light-footed, golden-haired, pathetically-dead, dancing girl—lines that bring her back among the living:—

When the scene is lighted brightly, and we

watch the players nightly,

The peasant, and the prince, and the page.

The patriotic note has been struck often, sometimes clumsily, and sometimes with good effect. Mr Essex Evans gives it a local application in the rather formal verses beginning:—

Awake! Arise! The wings of Dawn

Are beating at the gates of Day.

And another Australian writer gives it an Imperial significance when he says of England, in lines that have been much praised and incidentally awarded a substantial monetary prize by a London paper, that:—

She triumphs, moving slowly down the years.

Again, for pure romance we have Daley’s fantasy, with its very fine exordium:—

The bright lights fade out one by one

And like a peony,

Drowning in wine, the crimson sun

Sinks down in that strange sea.

For a compound of sensuousness and sadness and lyric sweetness, we have Von Kotze’s Island Lover with its invocation, and its lament:—

Oh, Tuahina, that youth’s full measure

Should pass away like a summer’s eve!

That just the one gift that women treasure

Should be so helpless, so poor, and leave

A hint of sweetness, a taste of pleasure

And—grey-hued twilight to mourn and grieve!

These are only a few specimens, somewhat above the average as regards workmanship and finish, but representative of what the continent is producing every day.

So far as prose is concerned, the Australian topical and occasional writer can hold his head up in any company. If you want a scene described, if you want an incident related, if you want the pith of a situation dexterously extracted, if you want an impression vividly conveyed, if you want to catch from the paper the spirit and atmosphere of a crowd, of a race-meeting, of a procession, of a play, of a joke, of a tragedy, of a wedding, of a funeral; if you want any or all of these things, there are a score or two of men in Australia who will supply the requirement as well as it can be supplied anywhere in the world.

But to say this is not to say there is a national literature. The term, it must be remembered, means something more than a few dexterous verses, a few patches of local colour, and a few characters that can be held up to admiration as “racy of the soil.” That last phrase hangs like a pall over the continent. If it were only possible to forget that there is such a thing as a gum-tree in Australia the average quality of the writing—particularly of the more ambitious and sustained kind of writing—would considerably improve. If a national literature implies anything, it implies the correct artistic and adequate expression of the country’s thought and action; it signifies the outward and visible form of what is real and vital and permanent in the inner and intellectual life of a people. In other words it is alien to what is merely topical and incidental. It is not a record of the peculiarities of shearers and rouseabouts, or of the feats of jockeys or stock-drovers. America would hardly be a literary country if it had to rely exclusively on Bret Harte and Mark Twain. England would not be literary if it had only Mr Punch and Mr Bernard Shaw. And Australia, so long as its most characteristic and successful compositions deal with the obvious peculiarities of a few local people, cannot really be said to have a literature deserving of the name.

The position of things is curious. There is on the continent a population of four million people, possessing a complete net-work of state schools, high schools, art schools, academies, universities, professorships, and chairs of learning innumerable. Education is both free and compulsory. Complete illiteracy is almost unknown. The ignorance and stolidity of the London docker, of the Irish peasant, of the Russian serf, of the central European farm labourer, have no equivalent in Australia. The people of this country are facile and quick-minded. They turn naturally to pen and ink. The writer’s ambition is rampant among them. It is more insidious and more pervading even than stage fever or cricket frenzy. Every second dwelling of the middle class is cumbered with unfinished or unpublished manuscripts. If the son is not guilty, it is probably the daughter, or the governess, or the parent. Every newspaper editor, if he felt disposed, could each day fill his columns ten times over with contributions submitted by outsiders. A Sydney paper offered last year a hundred pound prize for a serial story. The result was a staggering mass of manuscript, weighing in the aggregate more than half a ton, the work of one hundred and thirty-four unknown and previously unsuspected authors. The same set of circumstances repeats itself indefinitely. Most Australians have ideas which seem to the possessors original. They want a vehicle of expression, and they rush impetuously to the only one provided.

Yet the result is not great, or satisfying, or impressive. And the reason is that the goal of all this endeavour—in so far as it is a serious and sustained endeavour—is the hall-mark of the English publisher. No one can compute the number of people in Melbourne and Sydney, to say nothing of those in the country towns, who have either accomplished, or are at present meditating, a descent on London with an unpublished manuscript. The objective of the literary person is always London. The recognised fount of honour is London. The banners in the literary sky wave always in the vicinity of Paternoster Row and of Leicester Square. Henry Kendall, who knew what he was talking about, wrote feelingly of things that may happen to “the man of letters here.” And circumstances have not materially altered since Kendall had his furniture sold under him, and since he sat all night on doorsteps in a suburb of Melbourne. While confident enough in most things, Australians have shown no confidence in their own literary judgement. They still look timidly and obediently towards the other hemisphere. If their man of talent can get an English publisher to take him up, they smile with fatuous approval. If he cannot, they pity and despise him. As a consequence the Daleys and Quinns and Lawsons who have chosen to rely, for the most part, on the country of their upbringing, and who have carried their wares, for the most part, to a local market, have found it hard to make a living. Had they been obliged to rely exclusively on literature their living would have been a precarious one indeed.

These facts are so obvious that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them. But a word has to be said for the other side. The Australian publisher, like the Australian manufacturer, or the Australian politician, has his interests at home. It is part of his policy, part also of his desire, to encourage the literature of the country in which he lives. But he has paid so frequently for doing this that he is now extremely wary. For a local author to tempt him is the hardest task in the world. The publisher’s suspicions, founded on bitter experience, have communicated themselves in some subtle fashion to the possible purchaser, and to the country at large. At the present time it would puzzle a psychologist to say which has the greater fear and distrust of the other—the Australian author of the Australian publisher, or the Australian publisher of the Australian author. The present writer has seen men in the witness box, and in the criminal dock, and has noted the guilty and self-accusing look on some of their faces. But for a spectacle of absolute doubt and misgiving, for a written confession of wrong about to be committed, for an unspoken avowal that the act in contemplation is one of the blackest and meanest in the calendar, commend him to the individual who, hailing from Australia, stands up before an Australian publisher and admits that he has perpetrated a manuscript with a view to it seeing the light of day.

The result is what might have been expected. The people are going through a transition stage, a transition stage which, to use a mild paradox, threatens to become permanent. They are quick to appreciate cleverness, and, as readily as any other, that form of it which finds expression in print. But they want to know where they are. They dislike risks, and more especially intellectual risks. Before they begin the task of assimilating a work of any length they desire the assurance of some one in authority that the labour is not to be in vain. They want the imprimatur of an English critic, or of an English public. They appreciate good writing, and many of them know how to write, but the confidence which is a mark of most of their pursuits, of their virtues and their vices, deserts them entirely when it is a question of estimating the worth of books written by their own countrymen in their midst.

Hence a result that can be seen and read of all men. The gospel of brevity is proclaimed everywhere. It has become recognised that the longer and more ambitious efforts of imagination or of erudition have not much chance of emerging into the daylight; and that even if they do emerge, they have a still more remote chance of paying expenses, much less of winning a profit for the ambitious author. The short article may, however, prove remunerative. An editor who would be aggrieved and insulted by the very suggestion of something three columns long will put down his spectacles and smile almost cheerfully at the unknown scribe who tenders him a column. The publisher who is firmly convinced that the bearer of a full-length manuscript novel is a person to be shunned like the plague, will listen with an open mind to proposals having to do with skits and humorous episodes, with short stories and novelettes.

From all this can be deduced the reason of the spasmodic quality, the flashiness of the writing that is done in Australia. The warm climate and the tired feeling may have something to do with the phenomenon; but the main causes are those previously mentioned. It is now apparent why the journalism of the country is one of its more admirable features. The newspaper man has no time to waste, and no space to give away. He must get his effects into narrow compass. He must, to employ the vernacular, come at once to the points and leave out the superfluous verbiage. He endeavours to do so, and often with much success. The publisher of books does not want him, but if he wishes to be original he can be so—to the extent of a column. If he wishes to be humorous he can be so—to the same limit. If his vein is descriptive he has the like opportunity—which runs also to the extent of one column. On the approaches to every printing machine in the country, the word “Brevity” is blazened in letters of dread significance. The Duke of Wellington’s admonition to his chaplain “Be brief” rings sharply through the pseudo-literary atmosphere of Australia.

It would savour of affectation to ignore the existence of the Sydney Bulletin, or to attempt to deny that it is an important semi-intellectual factor in the life of the continent. The circumstance is unfortunate, and that for obvious reasons. The Bulletin combines in itself most of what is smart, and flashy, and cynical, and superficial, and verbally witty in the people among whom it circulates. Now, if a man happens to be very smart and very witty, and very cynical, we may admit that he is a clever and interesting person. We may hand him the laurel wreath of contemporary fame and journalistic renown with no other feeling than one of pure appreciation and good-will. But when his smartness and his flashiness and his cynicism are set up as models for every one else to copy; when they are watered down among a thousand imitators and served up every week with slight variations, or with no variations at all; when we find half the educated people of a country trying to be smart and flashy, because they imagine that by so doing they will be able to fit their ideas into the narrow columns of a certain publication—then we are bound to wonder whether we in Australia are really an intelligent, right-thinking nation, or a number of animated and extremely foolish marionettes.

It is the readers of the paper, rather than the paper itself, who are to blame. The sins of the copyists must rest on their own heads. And while we get tired of certain characteristics that are always repeating themselves, we are bound to admit the invaluable work that the Sydney paper has done in more than one direction. By encouraging certain writers—by gaining for them an audience and winning for them a reputation—it has conferred a favour on the whole of Australia. It is the kind of favour that can hardly be reckoned out on a monetary basis. Nine-tenths of that which is musical and distinctive and valuable in Australian verse of the last twenty years owes its publicity, if not its existence, to the Bulletin. To say this is to say a great deal. It stands to the lasting discredit of rich proprietary newspapers of this country that they have invariably leaned towards the reprint and the borrowed article. They have never made what could be called a decisive stand on behalf of the struggling, underpaid man of talent who has taken off his hat in their managerial sanctum, or has left his wares on their guarded doorstep. They have never championed this man; but the Bulletin has always championed him. A paper that has done this can be forgiven much. It can be forgiven the army of cheap paragraphists, the tawdry tiresomeness of repeated phrase, the forced ingenuity of distorted facts, the constant disparagement of the kindred nation over-sea.

There is some soul of goodness in things evil

Would man observingly distil it out.

And the truth of this in the case of the Bulletin we would be the last to impugn.

Although it must be repeated that there is no such thing as a national literature, there are at least three distinct schools—perhaps it would be more correct to say distinct forms of writing—in Australia. The first of these is what might be called the humorous, descriptive style. This may be a poor thing, but it is our own. Some kinship may be claimed for it with the method of Mark Twain and his disciples—the method, that is to say, of calm and grotesque exaggeration. Nor is it wholly unconnected with the thunder-and-lightning, vividly blasphemous style of Rudyard Kipling in his earlier days. But it is in character and essence neither American nor English; it is distinctively Australian. We have evolved it, and should take the credit or discredit of it. To be a successful writer of the descriptively humorous kind it is merely necessary to attend to a few simple rules. It is necessary to get together as many adjectives as you can, and always to apply them in a context unlike that to which they have grown accustomed. Thus, if you are describing something tragic and awful—say, a murder—it is a good plan to make use of such adjectives as commonly do duty for an artistic criticism or a musical performance. Conversely, if you are dealing with a drama, or a piece of music, it is useful to have at hand the terms most frequently employed in connection with a murder. String together all the unlikely and dissimilar phrases you can invent or remember; make a liberal and generous use of “and’s” and “also’s”; be prodigal of semicolons and sparing of full-stops; above all cultivate an appearance of abruptness and of brevity. Men have been known to score a brilliant reputation, and, incidentally, to get long manuscripts accepted, merely by leaving out the pronoun at the beginning of a sentence, and thus giving an air of curtness and epigrammatic force to their composition. Stick at nothing, spare nothing, be afraid of nothing, and your fame as a descriptively humorous writer is assured.

There is another school, which may be called the flippant school. It must not be confused with the one just mentioned. The flippant school is mainly the preserve and playground of women. The lady journalists of Australia are as fond of a varnish of cynicism on their social writings as certain of their sisters are of a suggestion of rouge on their faces. The amusing part of it is that in neither case does the deception deceive any one. A few years ago there lived a woman named Ina Wildman, who wrote under the pseudonym of Sappho Smith. A gifted woman she was, with a wonderful eye for bizarre effects and a mind like a scintillating surface of light. She was a conspicuous journalistic success, and deserved to be. The Sydney Bulletin discovered her, and deserves the credit of the discovery. But one penalty of success is persistent imitation. The truism has in her case been proved up to the hilt. It matters nothing to Sappho Smith—she is beyond the reach of that kind of vexation—but it is distressing to the patriotic Australian to find so many of his countrywomen rushing pell-mell into a literary groove that can only be safely trodden by those possessed of quite singular ability and quite exceptional discernment. Over all of the larger Melbourne and Sydney journals there is now the trail of the flippant woman writer. Not a line of the product rings true. Every word of it is imitation. Whether it is a wedding, or an engagement, or an infant baptism, or a crush at Government House, or a Lady Mayoress’s reception, or an afternoon tea-party, or a display of new millinery, or a theatre, or a football match, the Sappho Smiths of these times bring to bear the same set of phrases, the same slap-dash methods, the same cynical suggestion of a roué of seventy in a garden of growing girls. This style of composition is specially remarkable when the topic is a wedding. If the Australian woman expressed her real thoughts about a wedding she would speak of it as the most tragic and fateful, the most joyous and the most serious event on earth. But when she gets a pen in her hand she finds it necessary to revel in the slang of two continents. For this the example of the Bulletin and of its greatest woman contributor is mainly to blame.

Then, in the third place, we have the erotic school. This also has certain Australian characteristics. These manifest themselves not in the prose, but in the verse of the country. The local rhymester has been more than once exhorted to give the rein to his fancies—to let himself go. The advice is not uncongenial, even apart from the fact that he has probably been reading Swinburne, and is more or less under the influence of the master mind. A certain biblical institution was told that it was condemned, because it was luke-warm. The reproach can hardly be levied against the youthful poets who fill unvalued spaces of the print that is their medium for the time being. Amid all this intensity—bogus intensity, be it understood—there is very seldom the note of contentment, still less of genuine mirth. Australia is a bright, sunlit, open, and breezy country; but the minor poets that it produces in abundance have, for the most part, gloom dwelling in their inmost souls. The Australian child of the Muses is willing enough to clasp his Amaryllis to his palpitating breast, and to tell every one who likes to listen about the subtle and permeating sweetness of her eyes and lips and hair; but at the next moment, or in the very same breath, he is inviting us to contemplate a desolated life, a dead body, a tombstone, or a grave. In the verse of this people intense eroticism and profound melancholy are continually blended. The Northerner may, on the average, be less fluent and less imaginative, but he seems, when at his best, to develop a finer idealism, a better thought. He writes in the Pall Mall Gazette:—

Lean, love, a little nearer; shine, moon, a little clearer;

You cannot make her dearer, or a thousandth part more fair,

But only you can show me the kisses she would throw me,

The guardian angels that shall go before me everywhere.

While his fellow rhymester in Australia alternates between telling us in a burst of fervour that

Hilda’s kisses seem in German

Just as sweet as any way—

And most tragically exclaiming:—

God! the irony of bringing her with garments wet and clinging

Close to my feet that lagged for her upon the sands alone—

The better English journal can teach the better Australian journal nothing in respect of technique; but there is sometimes an artistic restraint about the one which the other might copy without suffering any loss. It is well, however, to recognise the day of small things, looking to the day when greater things will come to pass. From Dan to Beersheba everything is not barren; in fact there are springs and oases in cheerful profusion. And it must be remembered that if Australia, with all its effervescence of youth and ambition, has not yet found its intellectual footing, it is merely exemplifying a familiar stage in the life of man, which has a counterpart and analogy in the larger life of a nation.