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.