[In the following excerpt, Kiernan examines Australian literary criticism of the 1890s, focusing on A. G. Stephens as “the critical patron of Australian literature” and his twentieth-century successor, Vance Palmer.]

Generally [Australian] critics were in basic agreement on their assumptions about the relationship between literature and society. They differed mainly in their opinions on the way in which the future ‘national literature’ could be best encouraged—by a disinterested appeal to the highest standards or by an encouraging response to the gallant efforts of those who were destined by History to be the pioneers preparing the soil for a later harvest (it was perhaps no coincidence that so many books of poetry were offered as ‘first fruits’ or other horticultural tributes). A. G. Stephens, who is often seen as the literary-critical prophet of a new epoch creating the terms of the subsequent debate on such issues as the nature of Australian literature and the relevant criteria for its evaluation, was in fact participating in a well-established and continuing debate (if that is the right word when each side preferred to ignore what the other actually said). Stephens began editing the Bulletin's Red Page during the high point of ‘colonial’ criticism. Although the use of the pink cover for literary material began a couple of years earlier, and ‘A.G.S.’ contributed, the famous Red Page began in name under his editorship in 1896, the year Desmond Byrne's Australian Writers was published in London; Turner and Sutherland's The Development of Australian Literature was published in Melbourne in 1898, and A. Patchett Martin's The Beginnings of an Australian Literature in London in the same year. Marcus Clarke, Henry Kingsley and Adam Lindsay Gordon were three writers later to be regarded as ‘colonial’ who were considered in these three books. Turner and Sutherland in their book commented on the ‘surprising success’ of such Bulletin poets as Henry Lawson and ‘Banjo’ Paterson. In his own book A. Patchett Martin, a Gordon enthusiast, defended the Bulletin poets against Turner and Sutherland's strictures and claimed that the Bulletin itself had ‘done its utmost to foster a national school of writers in verse and prose’.

A. G. Stephens was the man most responsible for the Bulletin's encouragement of a ‘national school’ of Australian writers. His strength as a critic lay not in his theoretical position but in his awareness of what was being written in Australia and overseas. Stephens adopted a ‘double standard’ consciously and explicitly. His use of the Red Page for discussions of classic and contemporary English, American, French and German literature and art established the ‘absolute’ standards to which his often enthusiastic welcoming of local writing was relative. A novel such as Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career was welcomed as having value for Australian society at that time, rather than for the world at large. But even while he was encouraging the local writer, he could be severe in what he thought were the writer's own best interests—as Lawson discovered. Today Stephens's reputation, considerably inflated by the literary nationalism of a later age, rests on a number of memorable placings of writers whose talents he recognized on their first appearance. His authoritative tone and crisp phrasing record memorably the most intelligent reception writers like Lawson and Furphy were accorded when first published, and his judgements provide convenient starting points for later appraisals of the same writers. But they do not amount to a consistent body of criticism. His writings are too fugitive, too much written under the stress of having to meet deadlines and, perhaps as a consequence, too inclined to succumb to the temptation of presenting ‘personalized’, entertaining writing instead of considered arguments. His critical abilities were never sufficiently concentrated and extended for him to achieve his potential as a critic. It is as an editor, a confidant, an encourager of talents more creative than his own that he is remembered, as much as for his criticism. He never fully appreciated what Furphy was up to in Such is Life, he tampered with Shaw Neilson's poetry, he antagonized rather than helped Lawson; but he cared, he was in an influential position to assist writers, and at his best he was a journalist of genius.

What was characteristically new about Stephens's approach can be seen by comparing a couple of articles in the Melbourne Review of Reviews for 1899. In the July issue T. G. Tucker wrote ‘A Criticism of Australian Poetry’ calling for an end to the note of provinciality and ‘naive wonder at its own literary ventures’ that he found in local criticism. Recalling with distaste the notion that Australian poetry must ‘smack of the soil’, Tucker treads fastidiously over already well-trodden ground in pointing out that ‘the essence of poetry in no way depends on local colour, but, on the contrary, local colour comes of the genuineness of the poetry’, and that the ‘classic’ Australian poetry of the future will be unselfconsciously Australian. This article contains the essential points of Tucker's lecture issued in pamphlet form, The Cultivation of Literature in Australia (1902), which begins with the observation already referred to that life is too short for the reading of Australian books. For Tucker it was obvious that ‘a country does not make progress in literature because it makes progress in numbers, in trade, in material bulk’. True standards of criticism must be cultivated first if literature of classic rank is to emerge in Australia, for literature emerges in response to the intellectual energy of the age, and a writer like Shakespeare does not stand alone but, like Mont Blanc, is buttressed by the surrounding peaks he o'ercaps. Cultivation of true standards of criticism in Australia will presumably, in the rich medley of analogies Tucker employed (some of which are still in currency), lay the foundations of our progress towards the peaks of a national literary harvest. As an editor of the Australasian Critic, who in his Review of Reviews article pointed out that with the emergence of poets like Brunton Stephens and ‘Banjo’ Paterson Australia had no excuse for adopting a kinder standard for local writing, Tucker was not unkindly disposed towards Australian literature. He was, in fact, its most active academic critic, but he was not much interested in it beyond the theoretical issues of how it could be defined and the standards by which it ought to be judged.

In the October issue of the same journal is an article by A. G. Stephens, by then well established as editor of the Red Page, on ‘Newer Australian Verse Writers’. He starts his ‘medley’ of biographical and critical notes on Daley, Quinn, Brennan and others by pointing out that the struggle of the small population with the natural environment had hindered cultivation of the arts in this country. Tucker had objected to this by now hoary apology for Australian writing in his article of a few months before when he pointed out that the question ‘Is this poetry?’ is logically quite different from the question ‘Is this highly creditable for a young country with a small population?’ In this way, and in addressing himself to the by now venerable conundrum of how we can define Australian poetry when some of the best examples have been written by men not born in Australia, Stephens seems to be rushing unsuspectingly into combat with veterans. But he has already delivered a judgement which reveals the essential difference of his approach from Tucker's: Australian poets are minor, but some of them deserve to have their work ranked with the best of the minor verse being written at the time. The assurance with which this judgement is offered on actual poems (which he quotes to support it) contrasts with Tucker's confidence in talking about Poetry. Stephens is more concerned with concrete examples of writing in a certain context rather than with critical ‘issues’, and this more ‘practical’ approach shows in his style, which is more individual and provocative, more metaphoric, more convincingly attuned to the creative use of language that is its subject than are the elegant periods of Tucker. From this article Stephens appears as a critic who may be innocently unaware of the time-honoured theoretical discussions but who is well acquainted with what is being written at the moment, is keenly interested by it, and is prepared to venture judgements.

Most of Stephens's writing was intended to entertain the common reader as well as to interest him in contemporary writing. Stephens could write for a range of audiences, and in a formal and considered piece he could develop an argument—though not necessarily in a straight line. But the characteristic style of his critical writing is terse, sharp, staccato. He offers insights and judgements rather than arguments. Today no one reads Tucker (whose last book appeared in 1925) but Stephens at his best, for example in his essays on Lawson, is still challenging reading: ‘… Lawson's pre-eminent Australian appeal lessens the force of his universal appeal. He is splendidly parochial. That increases his claim upon his country, but decreases his claim upon literature’.¹ Here, the ‘universal’ and the ‘local’ criteria of the ‘double standard’, so often opposed to each other, are being held confidently in balance.

Stephens was a patriot, of that there is no doubt, but he was not a literary nationalist. An article in Commonwealth in 1901 (a good opportunity for nationalistic enthusiasm) reveals both his characteristic playfulness and the broader perspectives which his hopes for Australian literature rarely led him to lose sight of—‘Here then is a list of writers who are essentially Australian yet cosmopolitan in letters … [three lines of blanks follow]’. His own collection of his criticism from the Bulletin, with the appalling title of The Red Pagan (1904), contains an overwhelming proportion of essays on non-Australian subjects, including Ruskin, the Brontë family, George Eliot and Kipling. His studies of particular writers, although themselves uneven in quality, are far superior to his general essays, confirming the impression given by his Review of Reviews article that he is, in contrast to Tucker, a practical rather than a theoretical critic. Although his ‘absolute’ standards could be idiosyncratic or wilfully provocative (‘Much of Shakespeare is rubbish which a modern writer would be hooted for producing; but Shakespeare has been canonized by critical centuries, and the average reader swallows good or bad with equal rapture’²), and his criticisms of local writers could seem carping, he did attempt to honour them as well as do them justice by comparing them to the overseas writers, past and present, whom he admired. In this way he defined their limited ‘universal’ significance yet, at the same time, their special ‘local’ value.

It is tempting to see Stephens as the founder of a tradition of ‘popular’ criticism, as opposed to the ‘academic’ exercises of those who were more concerned with the classic literatures of other countries and did not have deadlines to meet and indignant authors to placate. In an attack on Professor Morris for his review of Lawson's poems in the Melbourne Review of Reviews, Stephens castigated the universities for their failure to produce more than ‘half-a-dozen volumes of echo-verse, culture verse’.³ But Stephens himself never missed an opportunity to let a flash of erudition reveal his wide reading. He gave university extension lectures and must have seemed, to most readers of ‘the bushies' Bible’, quite academic, if not completely mandarin, in his zealous attempts to educate them into the mysteries of French Symbolist poetry. His books on Daley, Kendall and Brennan represent a claim for a more substantial reputation than he perhaps felt his journalism would provide. Although the game of ‘popular’ versus ‘academic’ critics has been indulged in as gleefully in Australia as elsewhere, the restricted outlets in Australia for critics of either variety have meant that the professor who refers dismissively to ‘journalistic’ criticism is likely to appear in public shortly afterwards wearing his journalistic hat. At the time Stephens was writing, all critics of Australian writing, academics or not, were acting in a ‘popular’ or ‘journalistic’ way by broaching the subject.

Rather than representing any clear division between ‘academic’ and ‘popular’ criticism at this time, the differences in the approaches of Tucker and Stephens can perhaps be seen more revealingly as indications of the differences that were becoming apparent between the well-established literary culture of ‘metropolitan’ Melbourne and the new, more creative literary culture that had its centre in Sydney and the Bulletin. Stephens's editorship of the Red Page brought him into contact with university teachers of literature who were themselves poets and who provided contrasts with Morris and Tucker. John Le Gay Brereton, the Professor of English at the University of Sydney, was as a critic chiefly interested in Elizabethan tragedy; but he wrote a number of pieces on Lawson, contributed poetry to the Bulletin regularly, joined in literary feuds and was the first president of the Fellowship of Australian Writers.⁴ Christopher Brennan, the Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the same university, and the most eminent Australian poet of his time, ranged widely as a critic in the Bulletin and Stephens's Bookfellow. Although his writings on Australian works are few, the literary journalism Brennan carried on from the late nineties to the mid-twenties was extraordinary for the range of its topics, and extraordinary also for what would seem to be the unlikely context of the Bulletin. Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Maeterlinck, Heine, Hoffman, Ariosto, Sappho, Horace and Homer are a few names that point to a broader interest in literature (partly Stephens's, one suspects) than later generations were to associate with the Bulletin. Brennan was perhaps the only Australian with the potential, and the opportunity, to become a great critic. His legendary scholarship in both ancient and modern languages, his close acquaintance with many near contemporary French and German writers, and his ability to express complex insights with simplicity equipped him for the historic opportunity of explaining authoritatively the contemporary artistic developments on the Continent which still remained obscure to the majority of English critics. His account of the Romantic image in ‘Symbolism and Nineteenth Century Literature’ still has the advantage of more recent studies in its breadth of vision and depth of understanding. His ‘German Romanticism: A Progressive Definition Of’ reveals him to have been perhaps the only critic writing in English at that time to understand the aesthetic of the German Romantics, and especially their concept of irony, which has remained elusive to the more pragmatic and naturalistic English critical tradition. It was not perhaps until Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle (1931) that as broadly informed and lucidly expounded an account of late Romantic and Symbolist developments became available in English. Yet Brennan's accounts are lectures. An incomplete version of ‘German Romanticism’ was published in the New South Wales Modern Language Review in 1920, and the unfinished notes on ‘Symbolism’ remained unpublished until his prose was collected in 1962.

In a number of senses, Stephens's mantle as the critical patron of Australian literature passed to Vance Palmer, who was twenty years Stephens's junior, published his first article, ‘An Australian National Art’ in 1905 when he was nineteen, and continued to foster such an art through his many writings and other activities until he died in 1959, a quarter of a century after Stephens. Both Stephens and Palmer were concerned with the expression or realization in literature of a national sense of identity—Palmer's editing of a selection of Stephens's criticism (1941) being most responsible for Stephens's reputation as a literary nationalist. Both were patriots who made their patriotism apparent in their criticism. The differences between them, however, are important in suggesting a shift in culturally representative attitudes, but they are subtle differences disguised by the initial impression of a broad agreement about the relationship between the cultivation of literature in Australia and Australian culture. Palmer continued the concerns and presuppositions of the ‘nationalist’ period around the end of last century into the decade after the Second World War and, by looking back (when Stephens and others had looked forward) he was one of the chief contributors towards the creation of the image which that earlier period came to hold in the minds and memories of later generations.

As a critic, Stephens had begun by echoing the most frequently heard clichés of the ‘colonial’ period; Palmer's first article—although we must make allowances for his precocity and his admission that he provides ‘only a superficial explanation’—was an eloquent pastiche of the ‘nationalist’ period's attitudes towards culture:

We, who have in our power the makings of a glorious nation with no sordid past, such as is the legacy of most countries, are content to imitate the customs of old degenerate nations, and to let our individuality be obscured by the detestable word ‘colonial’. Under such conditions our art must suffer.⁵

Palmer calls for an art as ‘original as our own flora and fauna’. As the bush provides the most pronounced national types, so the bush must, for the present, ‘be the mainspring of our national literature’. In this brief essay there is the blending of the nationalistic excitement that a new age was beginning (‘In each of our cities is arising a little band of writers …’) with the assumptions about the relationship between art and the environment which preceded the nationalistic decades. These are the assumptions about the evolution of a national culture and the corresponding evolution of a national art which Stephens had echoed in his Review of Reviews article, but although the later Stephens was always ready with an eccentric account of the relationship of the individual artist to his art (in terms of mental instability or Celtic ancestry, or both), he did not continue to expound such a simple causal connection between social and artistic development. He attended more to the individual writer, whereas Palmer was more concerned with the broader cultural implications of literature. His last and most important work of cultural criticism, The Legend of the Nineties (1954), appeared after the Second World War at a time when a new society seemed to be emerging, a society not fully in accord with the values of optimistic democratic idealism that had prevailed during the war. Like other literary and historical works of that time, it attempted to take stock of a past that had receded so far as to have become mythic, a past that was more influential because of its power to stir a collective memory (or sentiment) than because of its formative effects on the present. Like Russel Ward's The Australian Legend (1958), Palmer's study sets out to deal dispassionately with a ‘legend’ but succumbs somewhat to the fascination and appeal the subject holds for its author. That is, despite Palmer's disclaimer that we have been inclined to set too much store by the past, there is little doubt in the reader's mind that this period of his own boyhood which the book embraces is seen as a Golden Age. In retrospect, the nineties came to have an aureate glow of which the writers of that period seem to have been themselves largely unaware. The creation of the ‘legend’ of this period, of an egalitarian, collectivist Australian tradition, was chiefly a product of the Second World War period and later. The generation of critics who helped create this legend—and sometimes they helped to create it in questioning its validity—were concerned not only to win appreciation for Australian literature and to define its canon but also to discover in that literature the distinctive social values which they approved and felt were threatened.

In a period of some reaction against ‘nationalism’, it is perhaps worth emphasizing that the connotations of this word, so central to the issues of ‘Australian’ literary criticism, changed considerably from the turn of the century, when Palmer began to write, to the middle of the century, when The Legend of the Nineties appeared. The ‘national art’ Palmer wrote about in his first article was a general concern of many critics elsewhere in the nineteenth century, and Palmer when he returned to Australia in the 1920s had the encouragement of Yeats's and Synge's comments to Louis Esson to support the founding of an Australian national theatre. Yeats thought Australia should do well in literature, ‘for young countries are generally enthusiastic’, and Synge thought that there ought to be plenty of material for drama with ‘all those outback stations with peasants going mad in lonely huts’.⁶ The pursuit of a ‘national literature’ entailed a search for popular and convincingly ‘ethnic’ material that could be drawn upon for literature, preferably expressed in the vernacular. In these terms, Vance and Nettie Palmer and others can be seen as participating in a movement that was not by any means peculiarly Australian. It had its counterpart in most other countries. The later literary nationalism of Palmer's The Legend of the Nineties, A. A. Phillips's The Australian Tradition (1958), H. M. Green's History of Australian Literature (1961) and T. Inglis Moore's Social Patterns in Australian Literature (1971) was essentially different in that it found in the literature of the nineties the national characteristics and ethos which the critics of that time believed would emerge in the future. This later generation of critics, who experienced the transformation of Australian cultural life during the Second World War and after, were very much ‘social’ critics concerned with the role of literature in helping to define distinctive social values and traditions. In their accounts of Australian literary history, the ‘universalist’ and ‘localist’ tensions experienced by a critic like Stephens were projected into opposed critical camps that never existed in such pure forms, at least amongst serious critics.

Notes

1. A. G. Stephens, ‘Lawson and Literature’, Bookfellow, 18 February 1899, reprinted in Barnes, p. 86.

2. A. G. Stephens, The Red Pagan (Sydney, 1904), p. 95.

3. Red Page, Bulletin, 23 May 1896. Morris's review of Lawson appeared in the Review of Reviews (Melbourne), April 1896.

4. See H. P. Heseltine, John Le Gay Brereton (Melbourne, 1965).

5. Vance Palmer, ‘An Australian National Art’, Steele Rudd's Magazine (January 1905), reprinted in Barnes, p. 168.

6. Vance Palmer, Louis Esson and the Australian Theatre (Melbourne, 1948), pp. 3-4.