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.