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.