The Irish in Australia/Chapter 14

by James Francis Hogan

CHAPTER XIV.

LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND ART.

MARCUS CLARKE, AUSTRALIA'S PREMIER NOVELIST—EDWARD WHITTY—DANIEL HENRY DENIEHY—DR. HEARN—PROFESSOR McCOY—EDMUND HAYES—HIS COLLECTION OF IRISH BALLAD POETRY—"THE DREAM OF DAMPIER"—WILLIAM CARLETON, Jun.—JOHN FINN AMORE—RODERICK FLANAGAN—WILLIAM VINCENT WALLACE—COMPOSITION OF "MARITANA"—CHEQUERED CAREER OF A MUSICAL GENIUS.

Colonel Sir Andrew Clarke, the son of the first Irish governor of Western Australia, was a man who rendered very efficient service to the young colony of Victoria as its first Surveyor-General and Chief Commissioner of Crown Lands. To him was delegated the herculean task of organising municipal government throughout the country amongst a promiscuous population drawn by the golden magnet from all points of the compass. How well he succeeded is shown by the host of cities, towns, boroughs and shires, that are spread over the face of the land, each locally self-governed, each raising its own revenue, and controlling the expenditure of its own funds. Science also owes him a debt of gratitude, for he was the founder of the Philosophical Society of Victoria—the earliest organisation for the collection of scientific data on all matters connected with the colonies. Under the title of the Royal Society of Victoria, the institution continues to flourish and to publish a yearly volume of its "Transactions." Sir Andrew's near relative, Marcus Clarke, is the only novelist of the first rank that Australia has yet produced, and it will be many years before the colonies cease to mourn the early death of that gifted son of genius. Though born in a London suburb, Marcus Clarke was always proud of his Irish lineage, and, at the outset of his literary career, he had the good fortune to secure the friendship and patronage of Sir Redmond Barry and Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, who were instrumental in procuring for him a congenial appointment in the Melbourne Public Library.

It was to Sir Charles Gavan Duffy that he dedicated his most powerful and thrilling work of fiction—"His Natural Life"—a book familiar as a household word throughout Australia, and almost as widely known in America, where it was republished by the Harpers. Three editions were issued in London, and the story was also translated into several European languages. It is a tale told with a purpose, and that purpose was to unveil before the eyes of the world the horrors of the English transportation system. Seeing that Marcus Clarke had not been born into the world when these horrors were in full blast, and that he had to search through a multiplicity of old newspapers, prison records, and blue-books, for the facts that formed the groundwork of his story, the realism of the narrative and the enthralling interest it excites in the mind of every reader, are calculated to excite a feeling of wonder at such a brilliant performance on the part of a young man of five-and-twenty, coupled with a feeling of deep sorrow that a life so rich in promise and possibilities, should have been extinguished so soon after the threshold of fame was passed. But, if it was impossible for him to witness the fiendish cruelties, by which the hapless convicts were in bygone days systematically goaded to madness or murder by inhuman military tyrants, he could at least visit the scenes of those dismal tragedies of a terrible past, and this he did by spending some time on the sites—physically beautiful but morally detestable—once occupied by two of the most infamous of the "convict hells" of Van Diemen's Land, viz., Port Arthur and Macquarie Harbour. He thus acquired valuable local knowledge, and assimilated all the local traditions, besides ensuring that topographical accuracy of description which characterises the premier novel of Australia. All who have read "His Natural Life" will have no difficulty in agreeing with the dictum of Lord Rosebery that: "There can indeed be no two opinions as to the horrible fascination of the book. The reader who takes it up and gets beyond the prologue, though he cannot but be harrowed by the long agony of the story and the human anguish of every page, is unable to lay it down: almost in spite of himself, he has to read and to suffer to the bitter end. To me, I confess, it is the most terrible of all novels, more terrible than 'Oliver Twist' or Victor Hugo's most startling effects, for the simple reason that it is more real. It has all the solemn ghastliness of truth." And Mrs. Cashel Hoey, than whom there is no more competent judge, published this high estimate of the deceased young author in her "Lady's Letter from London," which has for years formed one of the most attractive features of a leading weekly journal of Melbourne:^[1] "His tales of the early days of the colonies, and his very striking novel, 'His Natural Life,' made a deep impression here. We were always expecting another powerful fiction from his pen. I fear he has not left any finished work, and I regret the fact all the more deeply that I have been allowed the privilege of reading a few chapters of a novel begun by Mr. Marcus Clarke, under the title of 'Felix and Felicitas.' The promise of those chapters is quite exceptional; they equal in brilliancy and vivacity the best writing of Edward Whitty, and they surpass that vivid writer in construction. It is difficult to believe, while reading the opening chapters of this, I fear, unfinished work, that the author lived at the other side of the world from the scenes and the society which he depicts with such accuracy, lightness, grace and humour." Though it is on "His Natural Life" that the literary reputation of Marcus Clarke will permanently rest, he is perhaps seen at his best in those thirty shorter tales and sketches which he wrote during his brief but industrious lifetime. In these minor efforts, the versatility of his genius is strikingly displayed. Some of them are tenderly pathetic, whilst others are grotesquely humorous, and several may be described as wildly imaginative, but all are essentially Australian in their character, and each of them happily illustrates some particular type or phase of colonial life. They afford abundant evidence that if the life of their talented author had been prolonged, he would, with matured powers of study and observation, have diligently explored the virgin fields of fiction at the antipodes, and enriched Australian literature with more than one book racy of the soil.

Edward Whitty, the "vivid writer" with whom Mrs. Cashel Hoey compares Marcus Clarke in the foregoing extract, also lies in a Melbourne cemetery, where his last resting-place is pointed out by a column of white marble that was placed over his grave by the well-known, warm-hearted, sympathetic Irish actor, Barry Sullivan. Like Marcus Clarke, Edward Whitty was born of Irish parents in London, and, by a strange coincidence, both died in Melbourne at precisely the same premature age of thirty-four. Whitty's father was a journalist who did good service in the cause of Catholic emancipation, and Whitty the younger adopted the paternal profession at an early age. When he was nineteen, he joined the staff of the Times, "the youngest man that the Thunderer ever entrusted with literary functions of any kind." He was successively editor of that most outspoken of journals, the Leader, and the radical Irish organ known as the Northern Whig, A sad domestic calamity, the death of his wife and two children within a short period of each other, made the old scenes unbearable to his sight, and he wandered away to the antipodes, only to find an early grave awaiting him. The book by which Whitty is best known is his "Friends of Bohemia," a series of powerful and graphic sketches of adventurers in politics and literature. "The Governing Classes" is another work of his that attracted some notice. Montalembert speaks of it in the highest terms in his "Constitutional Government in England," and describes its author as "the most original and accomplished journalist of the day." Just as in the case of Marcus Clarke, poor Whitty's fruitful mind was full of ambitious literary undertakings in the new land of his adoption, when he was suddenly struck down in the flower of early manhood. A brilliant Irish-Australian friend and contemporary has placed on record this by no means exaggerated estimate of his abilities: "There is no story in the whole melancholy chronicle of misfortunes of men of genius so sad as this of Edward Whitty. That he was something more and something higher than a man of genius, that his nature was moulded of the profoundest sensibilities, and that he altogether lived upon deep and passionate affections, is evinced by the utter shattering and subversion of health, hopes, and interests in the world, which followed the loss of his dear ones. Others, and men of fine mind and fine fettling too, would perhaps have come out of the typhoon dismasted and with broken timbers, but eventually to regain and to ride quietly for years on the world's waters. So young, too—so gifted—so abounding and ebullient with the life-blood of intellectual power, not the mere faculty of writing graceful verses or beautiful trifles of any kind, but with that power, disciplined by learned experiences of the ways of life, to deal with men and things, hard and cold and clear, and bright, warm and joyous, just as they are. His creation of Nea in 'Friends of Bohemia'—the poor girl-wife that her father, a selfish peer, deeply in debt to an old commercial speculator, had given to the latter's Bohemian son—though but a sketch, is a creation of the very highest beauty and a positive contribution to imaginative English literature."

The hand that penned this fraternal criticism belonged to Daniel Henry Deniehy, and the mention of that honoured name, in conjunction with those of Marcus Clarke and Edward Whitty, completes an ill-fated trinity of Irish-Australian genius. Born in the capital of the parent Australian colony, he mastered several European languages at an early age, and, in his twenty-fifth year, gave his countrymen the first glimpse of his oratorical powers in a striking course of lectures on "Modern Literature." His fresh and vigorous eloquence made him, at the outset of his career, the idol of the people, and, unfortunately for himself, he was triumphantly elected to a seat in the first representative assembly of New South Wales. Mr. Frank Fowler, in his "Southern Lights and Shadows," passes in review the leading politicians of New South Wales, and describes Deniehy as the "most accomplished man in the popular chamber." Brought up under the care of the best of guides, philosophers and friends, his sweet home, overlooking the waters of Port Jackson, is the happy refuge of all poor workers in the field of art or letters. Mr. Deniehy has attained the subtle critical faculty of a De Quincey, with conversational powers as brilliant as they are profound. His grasp of subjects is wonderfully extensive, while his rare and highly cultured intellectual faculties dart into every nook and cranny of a topic, convexing its hidden recesses into sharp and vivid relief." His future would perhaps have been far brighter and happier, had he eschewed politics and devoted his splendid abilities to his practice at the bar. Retiring after a few years from public life, he took up his versatile pen, established the Southern Cross, and in its pages, and those of other Sydney journals, poured forth that graceful, scholarly series of critical, historical, descriptive, and satirical papers, the perusal of which induced an English author-statesman^[2] to exclaim: "Had Deniehy lived, he would have become the Macaulay of Australia, the first of critics and essayists." But fate had willed it otherwise; the once bright and powerful intellect went out in deepest gloom, and the once favourite pet of the populace was found one morning in the streets of an inland city, and carried, like another Edgar Allan Poe, to a public hospital to die, in his thirty-fifth year. Truly a sad ending to a career that opened with such exceptional sunshine and promise.

Deniehy, then a young man of twenty, spent the opening months of 1848 in the land of his forefathers, and became acquainted with the leaders of the Young Ireland party, with whose views he was in enthusiastic sympathy. In one of his most interesting sketches, he describes John Mitchel as le beau sabreur—the Murat of the movement; Charles Gavan Duffy as showing a literary character, broad, abundant, luminous as a river, and yet chequered with soft, sad autumnal hues; and Thomas Davis as the archetype of Young Ireland culture, and of the masculine purity of genius hallowed to lofty purposes—the scholar and the poet of his party. He thus admirably hits off the leading characteristics of John Mitchel's energetic journalism in 1848: "Splendid sarcasm, vitriolic in its specific quality as a destructive; argument close and conclusive, couched in eloquent execration, taunt and curse and defiance, jest and jeer, as grim in their way as attainders or excommunications; but above all, history—Irish history—pointed out week after week in such a light as, from the flames of a burning church, one might see the inscriptions on mural tablets a minute ere the slabs crack, and drop into the blazing chaos. Compared to them, the thunderers of the Times were weak rum-and-water to Russian quass or the Tartar distillation from equine milk. The denunciations of Junius, whose flimsy pretensions to power as political literature De Quincey has, among a host of similar services, shown the world, were as lemonade, and inferior lemonade, too, beside the arrack of the Mitchellian diatribes."

And in his elaborate review of the journal kept by John Mitchel during his detention as a prisoner of state, he soliloquises:

"Even to me, an Australian, who spent but a swallow's season in Ireland, there are passages in Mitchel's 'Jail Journal' that set my memory retouching Irish landscapes. They conjure up the places I know best in Erin—the brimming Lee with a midnight flash of the mill-wheels at Dripsey; Gougane Barra, with its 'pomp of waters unwithstood,' sung by Callanan in strains where, as often in martial music, the victorious mingles with the plaintive; the black waters shimmering by the home of Raleigh, and those sacred shades, the wizard woods of Kilcolman, that, with useful and shadowed beauty, closed in about the visions of the dying Spenser."

Contemplating in another essay the extent of the unexplored regions of Irish literature, he exclaims:

"What a tract of imaginative grandeur, lying away dim, sublime and gloomy, like the isle 0' Brazil of popular legend, Irish writers of poetry have left untouched in portions of the early religious history of Ireland! Lough Dearg, with so much of what is mightiest and most lasting in relation to the heart and soul floating dimly about it, is an instance. Calderon, the Catholic, soars into this region for the poetic; but the Purgatorio del San Patricio, though Shelley dug the finest image in the 'Cenci' from it, is only a scratch on the surface of an auriferous soil."

In the ranks of Australian scholarship no name stands higher than that of Dr. W. E. Hearn, a county Cavan man, and a distinguished alumnus of Trinity College, Dublin. Selected at the age of twenty-eight, by a committee presided over by Sir John Herschel, to fill the chair of history and political economy in the newly-founded University of Melbourne, Dr. Hearn has for more than thirty years been one of the chief bulwarks of that institution, and one of the great intellectual forces of the southern continent. "The Government of England," "Plutology," and "The Aryan Household," are three works from his pen, displaying an erudition which has won for them a recognised position as text-books on the subjects of which they treat, in European seats of learning. His colleague. Professor McCoy, is a Dublin man, and was chosen at the same time by Sir John Herschel to occupy the chair of natural science. The scientific attainments of Professor McCoy are widely known, and the splendid Australasian museum which has been established in Melbourne under his fostering care, whilst being a source of delight and instruction to thousands, is a standing monument to his painstaking industry and his scientific enthusiasm. It is to a Victorian citizen that the Irish race is indebted for the best and most complete collection of national poetry in existence, viz., "The Ballad Poetry of Ireland," in two volumes, compiled by Edmund Hayes, a long-time resident of Melbourne. Conversely, the native-born Australian race is under an obligation to an Irishman resident in their midst—Gerald Henry Supple—for the only national poem of the first order of merit they possess. "The Dream of Dampier" is styled by its author "An Australasian Foreshadowing," and, in its full and flowing verse, there seems to throb the ardent lifeblood of the youngest of the nations; the vision of the future rises before the dreamy gaze of the hardy buccaneer as he skirts the shores of Australia, and he sees in wondrous anticipation the golden glories that were destined to remain hidden for two centuries before being revealed to mortal eyes.

William Carleton, jun., and John Finnamore are two Irish-Australians who have also attained distinction in the field of colonial poetry. The former is the son of the great Irish novelist of the same name. His chief work is entitled "The Warden of Galway." It is a metrical romance founded on a remarkable incident in Irish history—the execution of his own son by an inexorable father, who sacrifices all the feelings of nature in order to vindicate the law. Mr. Finnamore's two well-constructed tragedies, "Francesca Vasari" and "Carpio," have a circle of admirers that increases in circumference with the progress of the colonies, and the extension of the higher education. In the realm of Australian history, "there is no more reliable chronicler," to quote the words of a literary critic in the Argus newspaper, "than Roderick Flanagan, whose two well packed volumes," he adds, "will always be treated with respect by reason of their honesty, their modesty, and their simple dignity." Flanagan's "Hitsory" is, in fact, a mine of information on colonial subjects, from which many valuable pieces of rough gold have been extracted, and briskly polished, and brightened up by a later generation of literary artists, and made to appear as much as possible like original discoveries.

It is something to be proud of that the two most popular English operas of the century—"The Bohemian Girl," by Michael William Balfe, and "Maritana," by William Vincent Wallace—are the products of Irish musical genius; and it is a fact not generally known that it was in an Australian city, Sydney, that the delightful music of "Maritana" was mainly composed. Wallace seems to have caught a happy inspiration from the serene and sunny skies of Australia, and the lovely surroundings of Sydney, which are reflected in the airiness, the brightness, and the vivacity that distinguish his magnum opus. Though he achieved distinction as a young violinist in Dublin, Wallace seems to have emigrated to Australia in 1835, with the fixed determination of abandoning a musical career, and turning himself into a hard-working pioneer colonist. Anyhow, it is certain that he buried himself for some time in the bush country to the west of Sydney, and it was whilst paying a brief visit to this metropolis that a lucky accident revealed his secret, and opened the eyes of his fellow-colonists to the fact that they had a musical genius of the first order in their midst. The discovery was the turning-point of his life. Under the patronage of Sir Richard Bourke, the reigning governor and an admiring compatriot, he gave a concert in Sydney that was so successful from every point of view, as to convince the young Irish emigrant that he had been allowing a God-given talent to lie unproductive. As if to make up for lost time, Wallace now applied himself with much industry to the work of composition in private and violin-playing in public. He travelled professionally through the Australian colonies, and he more than once placed his life in jeopardy by a reckless disregard of necessary precautions, when passing through districts where the natives happened to be in a belligerent humour at the time. On one of those occasions, he was on the point of being sacrificed by a party of Maories who had made him prisoner, and it was only the opportune intercession of the chief's daughter that saved him from a horrible death. After this, his Bohemian temperament prompted him into the eccentricity of embarking on a whaling voyage, and this also was very nearly ending fatally for him. The native crew mutinied in mid-ocean and seized the vessel, and Wallace was one of the four white men who barely escaped with their lives. We next have a glimpse of the wandering minstrel crossing the Andes on the back of a mule, and traversing the whole distance from Valparaiso to Buenos Ayres in this primitive fashion. Other romantic episodes in the chequered career of this erratic genius might be narrated, but, to turn from the man to the music, it is a safe prophecy to assert that many a year will elapse before the works that he has given to the modern lyric stage will cease to charm the popular ear. Such widely-known and such favourite airs as "Let me like a soldier fall," "There is a flower that bloometh," "In happy moments, day by day," "Alas, those chimes," "No, my courage," and "Sainted mother, guide his footsteps," throb with the life-blood of humanity, and will long perpetuate the name and fame of William Vincent Wallace.

1. The Australasian.
2. The late Lord Lytton.