SOURCE: Stilz, Gerhard. “Nationalism before Nationhood: Overseas Horizons in the Debates of the 1880s.” Australian Literary Studies 14, no. 4 (October 1990): 476-88.

[In the following essay, Stilz studies international inspiration and domestic contention in the development of an Australian national literature in the 1880s.]

In 1888, the year of the Australian Centennial, the Sydney Bulletin, otherwise no mean advocate of nationalising Australian culture, observed with some sarcasm:

During the present period of high-falutin, Centennial ‘blow’, Australia has pulled herself together and carefully and categorically gone over the entirety of her attractions. She has compared her progress with that of the nations of the earth, much to her own satisfaction. Her trade, her industries, her resources (mineral and agricultural), her advancement in the various branches of science, her sport, even her literature and her art, have each and all been measured and gauged with an infinitude of self-gratulation. Members of Parliament, advocates of Imperialism, Premiers, ex-Ministers, newspaper-writers, and presidents of art societies have seized their trumpets of tin and their cymbals of brass and assisted in the laudation of everything Australian.

(‘Art in Australia.’ 11 February 1888: 4)

Australian nationalism had entered on its constitutive phase, promising finally a way out of a century of cultural inferiority. A dual paradox, however, characterises the colonial self-assertion of the 1880s, at least as far as literature is concerned. It is a nationalism not based on a nation but only anticipating one, and it is perhaps therefore a national awakening that needed an overseas horizon on which its models might be found. France and the United States came into view, those two egalitarian countries that had preceded Australia in her effort to abolish institutionalised class privileges.

I will explore in this paper how these apparently conflicting notions of nationalism and internationalism, of mono-cultural self-searching and multicultural orientation, shaped the Australian literary debate during the decade of the Centennial not only in the Bulletin¹ but elsewhere as well. In order to arrive at this general view I will exploit sources that have not been used much so far, including such major Melbourne periodicals as the Victorian Review, the Melbourne Review, the Centennial Magazine, the Argus, the Australasian, and the Melbourne Daily Telegraph.²

My analysis will first concentrate on the explicit directions for a new national art and literature given in programmatic statements, whereas the latter part of my paper will deal with a few implicit guidelines that become apparent in the critical receptions in Australia of a few authors of European renown.

The Australian literary debate in the 1880s focusses mainly on a handful of key issues, some of which had already been raised earlier in the seventies, such as the defence of Australian literature and its evolutionary status in the colonial process or the question of its progressive character in the debate of religion and science; others are obviously new, like the issue of the social quality and function of Australian literature, the debate over its proper subject matter and the true mode of presenting it, or the question of the moral limits of Australian realism that reflects and even partly anticipates the international debate on naturalism and obscenity.

For the argument to vindicate colonial literature in the light of evolution, the essay ‘Australian Poetry’, by S.S.T. in the Melbourne Review 1 (1876): 202-30, can be taken as a starting point. Its author defends colonial poetry as ‘neither inconsiderable in bulk nor despicable as regards its quality’, and he gladly accepts ‘the very high praise [bestowed] by such eminent English journals as the Westminster Review, the Athenaeum and the Spectator [on] some of our poets' (202). Since to him recognition from Europe is not lacking, he sees the bane of Australian poetry in the disregard for home-made literature in the colony itself—‘that tendency in human nature to overlook the treasures which lie at our feet, and welcome with open arms anything which is far off’ (202). Having thus characterised the Australian ‘cultural cringe’ as a kind of inverted exoticism, he does not withhold his critical observations. Although Australian poets deserve his praise on account of their technical competence (‘our poets, as a rule, are masters of metre and rhythm. Their powers of description are also more than ordinary and their command of language is exhaustive’, 227), he notes their defects in their treatment of Australian life (‘everyday character in everyday circumstances will excite but little interest’, 227), in their lack of intellectual depth (‘they do not deal in any degree with the ordinary philosophical questions of the day’, 228), in their lack of strenuousness (‘their incapacity for a sustained effort’, 228), in their lack of originality (‘tendency to imitate prior and contemporary English poets’, 227). But he nevertheless encourages Australian writers to carry on dealing with distinctly Australian topics:

When we speak of ‘Australian poetry’, we do not mean merely poetry written by men who happen to have been born in Australia, or have lived part of their life there. We mean by ‘Australian poetry’ poetry which smacks of the soil, which deals with Australian scenery, Australian modes of life, and Australian methods of thought.

(22f.)

And he supports this guideline by an evolutionary prophecy that envisages cultural if not national independence from England:

There may be no great difference at present between an Englishman and an Australian, but there is some difference, and that difference will increase from generation to generation. If this be so, our poets will have to deal with the phases of human nature which they themselves come in contact with. Convict life, the diggings, bush life, all afford fresh and striking materials for a poet's pen.

(227f.)

His Australian paragons, so far, are Henry Kendall and Adam Lindsay Gordon, and his overseas models Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller, the literary pioneers who discovered the local colour of the American West.

Colonial inferiority and national confidence are also the keynotes of James Smith's article ‘Colonial Literature and the Colonial Press: A Note’ in the Melbourne Review 3 (1878): 337-43. The author correlates his initial complaint that ‘Colonial literature has not yet emerged from the Grub Street condition’ with the observation ‘that there is a tendency, even among ourselves, to underrate colonial production’ (337). But he foresees a future that will be less ignominious for a cultured Australian nationalist:

So surely as we are developing a national life and national types of character, resembling, no doubt, but yet distinct from, that of the mother country, so surely shall we develop, whatever may be the difficulties and obstacles in the way, a genuine literature of our own. For all literature is merely the artistic expression of national life and character.

(343)

Nationalism in a broad sense even dominated programmes and prophecies that did not explicitly use the keyword itself but rather relied on its paraphernalia and implications. Thus the Victorian Review, edited by H. Mortimer Franklyn, opened its first volume in November 1879 with a ‘Prefatory Note’ that combines Matthew Arnold's high valuation of literature and criticism,³ with mercantilistic arguments that speak in favour of Australia's future:

It is felt by many of the leading men in Melbourne that there is wanted in Victoria a first-class magazine which shall reflect its highest culture and express the opinions of the best thinkers of the day and all the great problems now agitating the public mind in the colonies. It is also believed that the increasing importance of Australia as one of the future granaries, vineyards and meat and wool producing countries of the world, has created an interest in her welfare, and a desire to be more intimately acquainted with her resources …

(1)

The editorial policy, therefore, in this monthly review that lived for seven years, was ‘that it shall be distinctly Australian in tone, while eclectic in character, patriotic in aim, progressive in policy’ (1). And though its editor chooses a predominantly colonial viewpoint, the models for the new venture were taken from abroad: ‘following the example of the Nineteenth Century, the Revue des Deux Mondes, the Contemporary, the North American Review, and the International’ (1). The Sydney Bulletin, widely rated as the eponym of Australian literary nationalism, entered this field in 1880, with a new voice, no doubt, but facing a horizon of expectations that had been prepared earlier by others. It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that in spite of the innovative impulse proclaimed in its first number, the Bulletin⁴ echoes arguments for an Australian national literature heard before. One of these is reminiscent of Wordsworth's romantic idea that ‘the individual mind … is fitted … to the external world’,⁵ in particular to the nature of the surrounding country. In its ‘Marginal Notes’ of 19 February 1881 the Bulletin subscribed to this axiom which, with evolutionary necessity, promised to produce a distinctly Australian literature. Starting from the assumption that ‘the genius of the people of any country is deeply tinged with characteristics correspondent to its peculiarities of physical conformation’ (1), and referring for evidence to Norse, Italian, German and Ottoman literature, the Bulletin holds that ‘in the same way, we contend, that our colonies here, with their “images of a virgin found in sky and landscape, and in the flora and fauna of Australia”, must eventually bring forth a class of people with mental and intellectual characteristics of their own’ (1). An Australian national literature, the manifestation of national character, is thus confidently anticipated. But although its evolutionary development seems inevitable, individual encouragement is felt to be necessary in the Bulletin's preliminary conclusion:

Everyone has therefore a part in the working out of the civilisation of the future, for it must be obvious that in proportion as the aesthetic sense is cultivated and enlarged, the refining and humanizing effects of a higher civilization will be apparent.

(2)

Even at this early stage, the progressive character of Australian literature is repeatedly stressed. What this actually implies had not been clearly stated in the ‘Prefatory Note’ of the Victorian Review of 1879. But we came closer to an explanation in Marcus Clarke's essay ‘Civilisation without Delusion’ published in the same volume (65-75). Here, Australia's most widely read novelist and author of His Natural Life (first published 1870-1872) took sides in the dispute between science and religion by identifying the notion of progress with science. Clarke declared that

The measure of the people's knowledge is the measure of the people's religion. Educate your children to understand the discoveries of Tyndall, Huxley, and Darwin, and you will find them pleasantly laughing at the old fables of Jonah, Balaam and Lazarus … The progress of the world will be the sole care of its inhabitants; and the innovation of the race the only religion of mankind.

(74-75)

Although the Bishop of Melbourne, in a prompt reply of December 1879, castigated Clarke's position as ‘so extreme that, except by a very small school of atheists and materialists, they are not likely to be defended’ (Victorian Review 1 [1879]: 242), a considerable number, if not the majority, of Australian authors and critics in the 1880s went along with the new credo of the natural sciences, in short: with naturalism⁶ which they take as conducive to and appreciative of a distinctly national brand of literature. Thus John Wisker, in a critical article on ‘The Modern Novel’ proclaims a necessary departure from the romantic novel, very much in the vein of Zola:

… to describe men and women as falling from good to evil, or ascending from evil to good, without the slightest inducement, motive, or preparatory process, is alike irritating to the reader, debasing to the author, and demoralizing to all concerned. The development of character according to natural laws is the highest function of all imaginative literature.

(Victorian Review 8 [1883]: 155)

Progress in Australia, including the development of an Australian literature, was believed to follow the lines of scientific evolution and natural history. Australian writers and intellectuals participated, perhaps more unreservedly and more unrestrictedly than their English colleagues, in the European scientific movement of the late nineteenth century.

That Australian men of letters were also more inclined towards democratic radicalism than their fellow-writers at ‘Home’, seems equally obvious. Douglas Jarvis, in his unpublished dissertation (cf. footnote 1), finds that ‘realism’ in Australia was taken ‘as a theory of literature with a social and political orientation appropriate to a democratic society’ (44). Its foremost representatives and subscribers can be seen in J. F. Archibald, Francis Adams, William Lane, Henry Lawson, and William Astley (Price Warung). There can be no doubt that the correlation felt in Australia between the literary movement called realism and the political commitment to egalitarianism and social reform correspond to the international awakening of naturalism that had started in France and Central Europe and was soon hotly debated in England. The central issues of this movement fell on much more fertile ground in Australia than in the mother country. Whereas in England many critics believed that they had to defend their insular conventions against the unpleasant urge for revelations and reforms, Australian authors and critics, as a rule, had a much more uncomplicated approach to this European movement which, in various ways, seemed to be compatible with their very own nationalist aims. Reservations were made, for instance, in ‘Some Thoughts on the Duties of the Upper Classes’, Victorian Review (1880), where F.J.C. realised that ‘democracy means the management and control of social arrangements by the least educated classes’ (618). But even then, the ‘duty of the upper classes’ in Australia was seen in ‘instructing the masses in the elements of political economy’ (618) and in ‘bringing [good literature] before the people in an attainable form’ (619) rather than in withholding power and information from the masses:

Free reading rooms, lending libraries and lectures (social, sanitary and political) would do much towards diffusing knowledge required for our every-day lives; careful and discriminating personal charity, the proper administration of public charities, and in our homes and places of business a closer and better relationship between the employer and the employed, would bring classes together in a common bond of kindliness, and private influence and example might bring about a gradual moral and religious change.

(622)

This plea, though paternalistic in tone and opportunist in its political strategy, makes social reform a national duty. Likewise, J.F. Hogan, in his essay ‘The Coming Australian’, in Victorian Review (1880): 102-109, although dismissing the activity of the Australian Democratic Associations with a sceptical aristocratic sneer, still recommends that non-political Young Men's Mental Improvement Societies should be formed as

the means of inciting the Australian mind to an active sympathy with intellectual pursuits; and by participating in debates, literary exercises and elocutionary practice, Australian natives [i.e. Australian-born Europeans] would be undergoing the best possible training for the important work that will devolve upon them when the destinies of the southern continent are placed entirely in their hands.

(107)

Obviously, the literary education of the masses was regarded as a desirable and useful step towards building an Australian nation, even among some colonial conservatives.

But let us return to the quality of literature that was regarded as so essential to the formation of an independent nation. The Bulletin, in its praise of Henry Kendall's poetry (19 February 1881: 1-2) seems to make idealism and realism, the great antagonist catchwords of the day, join hands:

In the latest work of the foremost living Australian bard … may be found the advanced notes of a national love of beauty characteristic in every way of the peculiarities of our ‘natural gifts’.

(2)

Yet the same Bulletin reviewer remains sceptical of Kendall's social prophecies and prospects:

We would fain believe that his verse reflects the more attractive side of the popular spirit of the future in its better manifestations as truthfully as it mirrors the varied tints of the Australian forest and the azure brightness of the fair Australian sky.

(2)

This reservation quite evidently places the value of truth over beauty and attributes more importance to realism than to idealism. However, this line is not followed in all its implications by some other periodicals.

The Australian Magazine of Contemporary Colonial Opinion, in an article on ‘Realism and Permanence in Literature’ (August 1886: 191-98) tries to save the concept of ‘Realism’ while disparaging contemporary realists. Very much in the vein of W.S. Lilly's denouncement of Zola's ‘New Naturalism’ in the Fortnightly Review (1885),⁷ the author of this defence excludes from his notion of realism ‘all books that address a narrower audience, that are intended only for certain classes of mankind, whether these be sects, or professions, or trades or such like’ (193), and he strives to establish a universal concept of realistic books that ‘can be produced only by writers who can truly realize the unchangeable human nature that underlies and is independent of all external conditions of time and place’ (194). Charles Kingsley, to him, is much closer to such a concept than George Eliot, and when he comes to Zola, he is quite exasperated:

Realistic! It excites our indignation to see a word worthy to be graven on the portals of the glorious temple of literature, wherein are enshrined the images of all the truly great writers the world has ever seen, scrawled on the door of some low den where Zola and his parasites carouse, and where the toast goes round to wantonness and obscenity.

(197)

Certainly this article does not immediately yield any prescriptions for Australian writing, but it could easily be adapted to colonial purposes. Thus, in the first number of the Centennial Magazine (August 1888), Julian R. Ashton formulated ‘An Aim for Australian Art’. He is incensed and ironical when commenting on the demand for ‘subjects peculiarly Australian in character’:

Australian in character! That is the keynote of Australian criticism. We are expected to have an Art which no one can mistake for that of any other country than Australia, totally forgetting the fact that Art belongs to no country, but to all time … Because the artists of other countries are endeavouring to paint the beautiful, we as Australians should take as subjects those which are repellent and ugly.

(31)

Ashton takes pains to forestall such tendencies in Australian art by offering poetic realism as an answer. He permits the reproduction of contemporary life and scenes on condition that they reveal a redeeming beauty:

If men could but see it, there is as much beauty and poetry now, not only in the human figure but in the commonest forms of life around us as ever there was,—and there is no doubt that beauty of some sort should be insisted upon.

(31)

This noble credo was not shared by Francis Adams, poet, novelist and essayist, who in the same number of the Centennial Magazine published his essay ‘Realism’ (56-60). With Henry James he pleads for audacity in fiction, and without defending Zola's ‘tiresomeness’, he praises ‘realism’ in Zola's own terms:

To write no longer for half-views of things—to draw men and women as they are, assigning to them the motives which move men and women as they are, and with the proportional force of these motives—to apply the same passionately impartial method to the great ‘streams of tendency’, the laws of which men and women are the phenomena, this is the bare outline of the gospel of Realism.

(59)

To Francis Adams, educated in England and in Paris, suffering from tuberculosis, who had come to live and work in Australia in 1884, this ‘gospel’ was no abstract theory, no fashionable rag of a remote European coterie, but a very practical and promising programme for Australian literature. Therefore, after a passionate plea for the unpleasant truth of reality in literature, he concludes his essay:

This is Realism, and if Australia is ever to have an Art of her own, it is only when she turns her eyes to this theory and incarnates it in practice, that that Art will take its place with the Art of Homer, of Dante, of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Goethe.

(60)

There were certainly many obstacles to an immediate implementation of such a programme. One of them is touched on by the Bulletin on 4 August 1888 (‘So English, You Know’). Imitativeness and plagiarism, deeply rooted cultural habits in the civilisations of Northern Europe, are said to have been inherited in the colonies, in America as well as in Australia. From eating and drinking to literature and religion the Bulletin observes a ‘customary anxiety to copy “dear old England”’ and it fears that ‘for years yet, perhaps for decades, we shall neglect the cultivation of everything that is real and genuine and national …’ (4). But certainly in Australia one could not simply ignore the cultural traditions that had been imported by British immigrants. The point was rather to expose the fatuous imitation of English models, in painting and literature, and to catch, understand and appreciate instead ‘the dominant note of Australian scenery’ (4). The painter, and no less the poet, had to be made aware of his task, as Fred. J. Broomfield observed in ‘Art and Artists in Victoria’, in the Centennial Magazine 1 (1888): 883-89:

He is the via media between external nature and the soul of man, he is a story-teller, a magician who conjures in form and color [sic], a man who stops to note and tells the hurrying public—who have no time to stop and no ability to note—the things he sees, and he interprets to them the meaning thereof.

(887)

Although the question hotly debated in Britain of whether the true purpose of literature was primarily to describe and to present everyday reality (possibly with an eye to reform it) or whether it should elevate and ennoble man's feelings (and thus facilitate his escape from the fetters of reality) did not meet with a uniform and unequivocal decision in Australia, a majority of critics favoured the quality of description. Thus Marcus Clarke's place in Australian literature, according to an article reprinted in the supplement of the Australasian on 8 January 1887 from the Argus, a Melbourne daily paper, is secured on the grounds of ‘a never failing freshness of description; a graphic power that places the scene bodily before the eye of the reader; and a plot [For the Term of His Natural Life] improbable in many ways, but constructed and worked out with consummate art’ (2). Similarly Francis Adams' Songs of the Army of the Night, a collection of poems concentrating on the misery of the working classes, met with the Bulletin's praise (26 November 1887) for ‘showing things as they are, and not as most poets do, as he would them wish to be’ (4).

Even the ‘limits of realism’ (i.e. the question of obscenity) were not as vehemently defended in Australia as they were in Britain. On 3 October 1884, the Melbourne Daily Telegraph reported ‘the seizure of pernicious literature’ in a Sydney bookshop. The dangerous load included G. R. Drysdale's Experiments of Social Science (1854), a Malthusian Social Theory; Charles Knowlton's The Fruits of Philosophy (1832) which contains deliberations on birth control; and Zola's Nana, ‘a sensual novel by a French author’ (in fact Henry Vizetelli's translation of 1884). Yet, at the same time, the paper did not suppress news of a resolution moved before the Freethought Conference in which ‘this meeting indignantly protests against the seizure of such books’ (5). Moreover, the Bulletin in its leading article ‘Indecent Literature’ published on Saturday, 11 October 1884, opposed the confiscation and defended Zola's Nana on the grounds of its provocative merits:

This work, the precursor of a school of fiction—the realistic—is a work of absolute genius. It presents no spurious concoction of impossible morality, but pictures aspects of life which it is probably useful should be recognised and fairly faced. ‘Nana’ has been read all over the civilised world, and is freely sold in every part of the globe, except the Russian Empire, Sydney, New South Wales.

(4)

However, when Vizetelli, Zola's translator and publisher in England, was fined in 1888 by the Central Criminal Court in London after issuing La Terre under the title The Soil: A Realistic Novel, the Melbourne Argus, 3 November 1888, approved of the verdict. Still, a line was drawn between Zola and ‘any of the English writers to whom exception might be taken’ (15). In spite of the condemnation of Zola, even this conservative paper favoured strong writing in Australia: ‘A prudish literature, written in the style of the sensitive people who talk of the “limbs” of a table, would be effete and contemptible. But the opposite extreme is just as far removed from the function of a genuine literature’ (15). Aestheticism, under these premises, remained in Australia a rare and short-lived craze that deserved ridicule and contempt.⁸

It will be obvious that during the decade preceding the Centennial, overseas literary horizons inspired and guided the quest for a future Australian national literature. There were touchstones and lodestars: authors that could be emulated but had to be surpassed and improved upon like Bret Harte and Mark Twain, who were regarded as the paragons of a literature ‘racy of the soil’, showing Australian writers the way to national and possibly international success that seemed inoffensive and legitimate; and there were authors like Ibsen, Zola or George Moore, that one might follow but better not approach too closely for the risk of singeing one's wings on the burning questions of naturalism and obscenity.

The American authors, with their humour and local colour, had a successful way of turning pitiful provincialism into a profitable virtue, by taking the outsider perspective for granted in a new world and relying on the reader's interest in and enjoyment of unconventional if harsh realities.

Bret Harte, who had been praised by the Melbourne Review as early as 1876 for having ‘almost invented a new kind of poetry, by the fresh and original manner in which [he has] dealt with American life and character’, continued to serve as a godfather to a ‘true Australian poetry’⁹ in the eighties. The Bulletin (3 September 1881), takes Bret Harte's description of the ‘goldfields' civilisation’ as ‘true enough to nature to be fairly descriptive of the same class among ourselves’. Yet, in the same breath, it questions ‘whether any of his sketches, racy of the soil as they be, are of themselves more intrinsically interesting than many of the incidents chronicled for us, in so commonplace a way, from time to time, by our very commonplace newspapers’; and it concludes, encouraging everybody, with the invitation: ‘Who will tell the tale?’ (2).

E.F., in ‘American Humour and Its Imitators’, Sydney Mail (1881), strengthens this point of regional authenticity by observing that, in Australia, the imitation of American humour may appear trite and the transfer of American local colour grotesquely out of place. Here, Bret Harte and Mark Twain are still accorded considerable respect in their own right, but their imitators are blamed for their ‘false humour’, their ‘incongruous images’, their ‘jokes filched from American papers’, their ‘use of bad spelling’ (893). A mere repetitive transfer of the idiosyncrasies of the American Western Story to Australia won't do, although some of the social features may seem related:

The Californian miner is essentially different from the Australian, and yet most of our writers write in imitations of Bret Harte and transfer the scene to Australia … That we don't talk about ‘gulches’, and ‘canons’ [sic], that we have public-houses instead of whisky saloons, and blackfellows instead of Indians, matters little to the follower of Mark Twain and company.

(894)

It is therefore hoped ‘that some new model will shortly arise, so that our humourists may take a fresh departure’ (893). And a few qualities of the new Australian humourist are outlined:

A true humourist must have a keen appreciation of the ridiculous, a ready wit, a delicate fancy, and an active imagination … That our own slang is any better than the imported article, one hesitates to say; but, at any rate, it smacks of the soil, and drops in more naturally into Australian English than the imported American article.

(894)

It is easy to see that Steele Rudd, in the nineties, worked in this vein, when, with his stories that later made up On Our Selection (1899), he laid the foundations for his enormous and lasting success.

Ibsen and Zola, the fathers of continental naturalism, were more difficult literary models in Australia. In a review of Nora (‘A Norwegian Drama’) published in the Melbourne Leader (7 April 1883), the Norwegian (two of whose plays had been translated into English by Henrietta Francis Lord in 1882) is seen as a powerful and original dramatist free from French influence. For Nora, the claim of dramatic truth is implicitly made (‘a play which “holds the mirror up to nature”’) and Miss Lord's translation of it is praised as ‘effective drama’ of ‘great merit’ (35). We find no explicit reference to Australian literature in this text, much less an encouragement to colonial playwrights to follow the Norwegian model. Australian drama was not yet regarded as something worth pursuing. The colonial theatre in Melbourne and Sydney was still largely monopolised by European touring companies. Moreover, not much seems to have been known about Ibsen before he exploded onto the London stage in 1889 with his scandalous success A Doll's House (on 7 June at the Novelty Theatre) and of Pillars of Society (on 17 July at the Opéra Comique). These events, backed up by William Archer's translations of Ibsen's plays in 1890-91, triggered off a lively reception in Australia in which the uncomfortable lessons that Ibsen put on the stage were applauded. The reviewers were eager to extol his personal integrity and his aristocratic manners.¹⁰

For Zola, critical opinions were divided. The Australian Magazine (15 October 1881: 488) praised Vizetelli's translations as a vigorous alternative to the ‘twaddle’ offered in circulating libraries. The Bulletin, in a review of Au Bonheur des Dames (24 February 1883), acknowledged Zola's novel as ‘very realistic’, but could not help making a few reservations regarding Zola's tone and style: ‘[He] has not the faintest sense of humour and his French is far from elegant’ (9). The same novel receives similar praise from the Australasian on 7 July 1882, for its ‘strictly realistic’ method by which the author ‘makes us feel how universally the law of strife and rapine which prevails throughout nature prevails also throughout human society’ (8). The only objection is directed against ‘those squalid, sordid, degraded conditions in the representation of which he has revelled in some of his earlier works. Hence comes the repulsive element from which even his best work is never free’. But the reviewer accepts this novel as a ‘photographic transcript of the actual conditions of the life depicted’ (8). Even after the seizure of Zola's novel Nana as ‘pernicious literature’ in Sydney on 2 October 1884, the Bulletin is not intimidated. In a short note attached to a portrait of Zola on 31 October 1885, it praises his mind as ‘minutely realistic’, and perceptively emphasises his powers of imagination:

Many people who affect his style believe that when they have raked together a pile of ghastly materials, they have shown a Zolaesque capacity for great work. There is no greater mistake. It is the imagination with which Zola robes his corpses that keeps his books from being charnel houses from which all would turn away.

(13)

And the Bulletin does not flinch from potentially objectionable designations: ‘As a philosopher and sociologist, Zola's reputation is high. He is radical, rationalistic, communistic’ (13). Such praise did not remain without contradiction within the colony. We find examples in the Australian Magazine of Contemporary Colonial Opinion (1886) and on the occasion of the Vizetelli case in London, in the Argus (3 November 1888).

Finally, George Moore, the ‘English Zola’, did not fare better with Australian critics during the eighties. The Australasian introduced his first novel, A Modern Lover, on 8 December 1883, with a response that could have been addressed to Zola himself:

We know nothing of Mr. George Moore, but he has in this story written a novel of considerable power, and if we could overlook all its objectionable elements, one of considerable promise. But it is very difficult to overlook them. Mr. Moore has made one of the most conspicuous attempts we have seen to transplant the spirit and the method of M. Zola into English fiction. We do not like them in their original exemplar, and we like them quite as little in their English adaption.

(2)

The reviewer is divided between his praise of the principle of realism, ‘which compels its disciples to look facts in the face’, and his disapproval of the realities selected for analysis and description: ‘Why must the realist so often grovel in the gutters and dive in the noisome sewers, instead of walking his cleanly way like a respectable person … ?’ In matters of style, Moore's faults are taken to be ‘many and great’ and ‘of a kind for which there is no forgiveness’ (2). Moore's example was not wholly denounced, but at first it did not offer a very enticing path to young Australian writers. When Mudie's circulating libraries, the most powerful literary distributor in London, had decided to boycott Moore's second novel, The Mummer's Wife, in 1885, the earlier book was republished and now received a slightly more favourable treatment by the Sydney Mail (2 January 1886). Here the reviewer concedes that ‘the novel, if it be anything, is contemporary history, an exact and complete reproduction of the age we live in’, and he finds that Moore's ‘characters are well conceived, and [that] his pictures of the latest forms of artistic aestheticism and Bohemian positivism are excellent, and strictly faithful to nature’. Apart from some flaws in characterisation and the ‘feebleness in execution’, including ‘the vulgarity of his determination to be entirely and unnecessary realistic’, The Modern Lover is praised as ‘a powerful novel [which] fully entitles Mr. George Moore to claim a synonym of the English Zola’ (7).

Thus, on the eve of the Centennial, literary naturalism appeared in Australia as a precarious and offensive starting point, but, with due consideration and a modicum of humour or irony, it could serve as a signpost to a practicable and promising way towards a future national literature. Major Australian authors of the turn of the century, like Henry Lawson, Barbara Baynton, Price Warung and Joseph Furphy, followed this line in their search for an Australian national voice.

Notes

1. I am obliged to the following predecessors in this field, whose findings will be supplemented and modified by the new material in my article: Ailsa G. Thomson. ‘The Early History of the Bulletin’. Historical Studies 6 (1954): 121-34; Bruce Nesbitt. ‘Literary Nationalism and the 1890's.’ ALS [Australian Literary Studies] 5 (1971): 3-17; Grace Keel. ‘The Early Bulletin and Lyric Verse.’ Overland 81 (1980): 45-50; John Docker. ‘Australian Literature of the 1890s.’ The Literary Criterion 15. 3-4 (1980): 7-22; Douglas Robert Jarvis. ‘Narrative Technique in Lawson.’ ALS 9 (1980): 367-73; D.R. Jarvis. ‘The Development of an Egalitarian Poetics in the Bulletin, 1880-1890.’ ALS 10 (1981): 22-34; D.R. Jarvis, ‘Francis Adams: Australia's Champion of Realism.’ New Literature Review 12 (1982): 25-35; D.R. Jarvis. ‘Realism and Australian Critical Thought 1880-1900.’ Unpubl. Ph D thesis, U of New South Wales, 1982; D.R. Jarvis. ‘Lawson, the Bulletin and the Short Story.’ ALS 12 (1983): 58-66.

2. This has been facilitated by the ‘Hergenhan Index’ to Melbourne newspapers and periodicals, 1880-1900, in the Fryer Library, University of Queensland.

3. Cf. Arnold's famous formula of literature as ‘the best that is thought and known in the world’, created in ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864), and later modulated in ‘Literature and Science’ (1881).

4. ‘The aim of the proprietors is to establish a journal which cannot be beaten—excellent in the illustrations which embellish its pages and unsurpassed in the vigour, freshness, and geniality of its literary contributions. To this end the services of the best men of pen and pencil in the colony have been secured and, fair support conceded, The Bulletin will assuredly become the very best and most interesting newspaper published in Australia’. ‘A Matter of Public Concern.’ Bulletin 1 (31 January 1880): 1.

5. Cf. Wordsworth's ‘Preface’ to the 1814 edition of The Excursion 11. 62-71.

6. For a clarification of the term and its relevance in English literature cf. Walter Greiner and Gerhard Stilz. Naturalismus in England 1880-1920: Texte zur Forschung. Darmstadt, 1983.

7. The Fortnightly Review 44, N.S. 38 (August 1885): 240-56; rpt. Greiner/Stilz, Naturalismus: 69-79.

8. The Bulletin (9 July 1881: 8) had launched a satirical parody on occasion of a vice-regal charity reception at Sydney. This was followed up by a second article on 23 July 1881: 7, under the title ‘Anti-Aesthetics’, in which a certain concern with aestheticism's robbing the culture of ‘realism’, of ‘deep emotion’, of ‘real and zealous life’ is anticipated and tuned down: ‘As a people, we are not in the habit of wasting much precious time above sunflowers nodding by old grey walls, or tall white lilies, “mystic, wonderful”, or daffodil borders, or primrose banks. We have not gone to a dangerous depth in the love of Rossettie [sic], and Swinburne, and Botticelli and Tadema. “High blue dados” do not affect us more deeply than staples of wool.’

9. S.S.T., ‘Australian Poetry.’ Melbourne Review 1 (1876): 202-30.

10. Cf. Leader 21 September 1889: 27 and 28 September 1889: 27; Argus 21 September 1889: 13; Age 12 October 1889: 4 and 30 April 1890: 6; Argus 1 May 1890: 13; Leader 3 May 1890: 35; Argus 11 July 1891: 13 and 22 July 1893: 8-9.