The story was written a quarter of a century too late to a.s.sist the abolition of convict transportation to Australia. Had it appeared at the right time, it might have done much where formal inquiries and the testimonies of disinterested and humane observers had repeatedly failed.

For sixty years the practice of deporting criminals had been carried on, upheld in England by official indifference and callousness, and in the colonies themselves by the greed of a small cla.s.s of private persons who grew rapidly wealthy upon the strength of a.s.signed convict labour, until the free emigrants by the authority of their numbers were able to insist upon its cessation. For so long as the colonies were willing to receive a population of criminals, so long was England only too anxious to supply them and make a virtue out of it. It mattered little to the official mind that the system was incurably bad and immoral; the main thing was to speedily and effectually transfer an awkward burden to other shoulders. The entire history of penal transportation from Great Britain throws a sinister light upon the national character. The practice originated with banishment of convicts to the American colonies under conditions which const.i.tuted a form of slavery.

The criminal on being sentenced became a marketable chattel of the State. His services were sold by public auction, the purchaser acquiring the right to transport him and sell him for the term of his sentence to a builder, planter, manufacturer, or other employer beyond the Atlantic.

The price paid to the British Government averaged five pounds per head, and some of the more useful prisoners were resold in America for twenty-five pounds each. One of these dealers in convict labour, in giving evidence before a committee of the House of Commons, made a matter-of-fact complaint that 'the trade' was not so remunerative as people supposed. Artisans sold well, but the profit realised upon them was often consumed by losses upon some of the others. One-seventh of his purchases died on his hands, and in the course of business he had been obliged to give the old, the halt and the lame in for nothing. When the War of Independence closed the United States against the traffic, Britain was given a fresh opportunity to reconsider and place its penal system upon a more humane basis; but the temptation to adopt sweeping measures was once more too strong to be resisted. The promoters of the Australian scheme were in so great a hurry to seize their chance that they despatched over seven hundred convicts before even the site for the first settlement was chosen. The hardships which this characteristic act afterwards entailed are too familiar in history to need repet.i.tion.

After such recklessness, it is no wonder that, as Sir Roger Therry has observed, 'the first-fruits of the system exhibited a state of society in New South Wales which the world might be challenged to surpa.s.s in depravity.'

A generation pa.s.sed before the British Government reluctantly admitted transportation to be a failure. Lord John Russell, as late as 1847, discovered that it had been 'too much the custom to consult the convenience of Great Britain by getting rid of persons of evil habits, and to take that view alone.' In planting provinces which might become empires, they 'should endeavour to make them, not seats of malefactors and convicts, but communities which may set examples of virtue and happiness.'

This mild, plat.i.tudinous rebuke came when all the damage was done. It remained for the free inhabitants of Australia to point to a plainer principle in declaring that 'the inundating of feeble and dependent colonies with the criminals of the parent State is opposed to that arrangement of Providence by which the virtue of each community is destined to combat its own vice.'

To ill.u.s.trate in a single story all the most prominent and pernicious features of the transportation system, Clarke had to invent a case of crime in which the criminal, unlike the majority of the worst offenders sent to the settlements, should always be worthy of the reader's sympathy. It was necessary that the felon be a victim as well as a felon; that he should not regain his liberty in any form, but continue by a series of offences against the authority of his gaolers to experience and display all the successive severities of Macquarie Harbour, Port Arthur, and Norfolk Island. A fundamental fact to be exhibited was the impa.s.sable gulf of misunderstanding that might exist between capricious or incompetent prison officials and a criminal who, for any reason, had once come to be regarded as hopelessly vicious. 'We must treat brutes like brutes,' says the prime martinet of the story: 'keep 'em down, sir; make 'em _feel_ what they are. They're here to work, sir. If they won't work, flog 'em until they will. If they work--why, a taste of the cat now and then keeps 'em in mind of what they may expect if they get lazy.'

The author chose to represent the extreme case of a man who, innocent of a murder charged against him, allowed himself to be transported under an a.s.sumed name in order to prevent the exposure of a long-concealed act of unfaithfulness on the part of a beloved mother.

Richard Devine is the b.a.s.t.a.r.d son of an aristocratic Englishwoman who in early youth was forced by her father into a loveless union with a rich plebeian. The single fault of the mother's life is confessed after twenty years, when the husband in a moment of anger strikes her high-spirited and obstinate son. The latter consents to leave his home for ever, and relinquish the name he has borne. On these terms the wife is spared. Richard Devine goes on the instant. Crossing Hampstead Heath, he comes upon a robbed and murdered man, and presently is arrested for the crime. The explanation that would save him would also cause the dreaded exposure of his mother, and so he withholds it, gives a false name, and, having put himself beyond the means of defence and the recognition of friends, is convicted and sentenced to transportation for life.

In making all the subsequent career of Rufus Dawes abnormally painful--that of a dumb sufferer who in sixteen years' confinement, ending only in a tragic death, experiences by turns every form of punishment and oppression--the author often touches, though it cannot be said he ever exceeds, the limits of possibility.

'Need one who was not a hardened criminal have suffered so much and so long?' is the question that continually recurs to the mind of the reader; but it is suggested by the prolonged and pitiful sense of unsatisfied justice rather than by any doubting that the extremes of penal discipline as practised in the name of the British Government between forty and sixty years ago could have been successively applied to a single human being. The writer adheres relentlessly to his central idea to the end. Dawes' unameliorated servitude and unavenged fate were intended to symbolise glaring anomalies of justice which never were remedied. The 'correction' he is subjected to was that which the laws of the time permitted, and which in many cases goaded its victims to draw lots to murder one another in order to escape from their misery.

Some of the least creditable features of convict transportation, of which it was said by Earl Grey in 1857 that their existence had been a disgrace to the nation, came to an end only when the system itself was abolished. But novelist and statesman alike struck at the abuses without feeling it necessary to mention any of the good results of the system.

Its inherent merits were strictly few, indeed; yet they ought to be sought in history by anyone who would get a fair idea of the prison policy of the period. It is, of course, inevitable that the criticism conveyed in a strong imaginative work should fail to give a full view of results so complex as those produced by the largely haphazard method of the Australian penal settlements.

The practice of a.s.signing prisoners to private employment, for example, produced notable effects upon society, of which Marcus Clarke's story gives but the faintest indication. If Rufus Dawes had been an ordinary first offender, he might have regained liberty soon after his arrival in Van Diemen's Land. But, as we have seen, it was the purpose of the author to make him exhibit all the rigours of convict discipline. His case must therefore be regarded as more exceptional than typical. As a rule, only men inveterate in crime were detained in constant punishment.

Transportation for life meant servitude only for eight years if the convict conducted himself well, a condition which, of course, depended largely on the sort of master who secured his services. Major de Winton, an officer who served for some years on Norfolk Island, has mentioned that a prisoner by good conduct received a ticket-of-leave after he had been twice sentenced to death, thrice to transportation for life, and to c.u.mulative periods of punishment amounting to over a hundred years!

An interesting view of Marcus Clarke as a literary workman is obtained from the story of the conception and laborious writing of _For the Term of his Natural Life_. It affords the first, and unhappily the last, evidence of how far he recognised the claims of realism in fiction; and from the account of his suffering under the self-imposed drudgery of keeping to the strict line of history, we see the man as his friends knew him contrasted with the conscientious artist known to the general reader of his famous novel.

The best of Clarke's minor writings display the results of much general culture, but give no proof of special preparation. They are short, concentrated, forcible--the natural expression of a brilliant, impetuous, and spasmodic worker. He overcame his natural repugnance to lengthened toil and minute thoroughness when he saw them to be essential conditions of his task. But the effort was a severe one.

In 1871, when about twenty-five years of age, he was ordered to recruit his health by a trip to Tasmania. He had been for over three years writing extensively for the press, and joining in the gaieties of Melbourne life at a rate which a const.i.tution much stronger than his could not have withstood. The idea of writing a story of prison life had suggested itself previously during his reading of Australian history.

Finding himself now without sufficient money for the proposed holiday, he decided to put into active progress this literary project which had hitherto been only vaguely outlined.

Printed records of the convict days there were in abundance at Melbourne, and from these alone such a writer could have made a sufficiently striking story. But he concluded that he could make his picture at once truer and more vivid when the surroundings of the old settlements had become a full reality to his mind. Messrs. Clarson, Ma.s.sina and Co. readily contracted with the young novelist for the first publication of the story in their monthly, the _Australian Journal_, and made him an advance of money. Off he went with characteristic confidence, and some weeks later returned ready primed and eager for the new work. His enthusiasm soon cooled. The story commenced to appear after the first few chapters were written, and the unbroken industry necessary to maintain a regular supply of the parts was more than Clarke could give.

Writing against time, he is said to have felt like a convict himself.

The irregular dribbling out of the story so injured the reputation of the journal that for a time its circulation was reduced to one-half the ordinary issue.

Mr. Hamilton Mackinnon, the writer of a sympathetic memoir of Clarke, has given an entertaining account of what followed: 'The author would be frequently interviewed by the publishers, and would as frequently promise the copy. When moral suasion was apparently powerless to effect the required object, payments in advance were made with somewhat better results; but as this could not go on _ad libitum_, copy would fall into arrears again. At last it was found that the only way to get the author to finish his tale was to induce him into a room in the publishing-house, where, under the benign influences of a pipe, etc., and a lock on the door, the necessary work would be done by the facile pen; and in such manner was _His Natural Life_ produced.'

In a note of apology to their readers in January, 1871, the publishers print a somewhat comical letter which they had received from the delinquent author. Forwarding a single chapter of the story, he tells them that they must make shift with it as best they can, and he will let them have a larger supply during the following month. The letter concludes nonchalantly as follows: 'This is awkward, I admit, and I suppose some good-natured friend or other will say that I have over-plum-puddinged or hot-whiskied myself in honour of the so-called festive season, but I can't help it.'

The story as first published was much longer than the form in which it appears in the English edition. At the request of the present writer, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, who was one of Clarke's literary friends, supplies the following account of how the novel came to be so extensively curtailed:

'As one of the trustees to the public library (Melbourne), I saw Clarke constantly, and had always a friendly, and sometimes a confidential, conversation with him. He visited me now and then at Sorrento, and on one of these occasions he spoke of a story he had running through a Melbourne periodical about which he was perplexed. He asked me to read it, and tell him unreservedly what I thought of it. I read the story carefully, making notes on the margin, and wrote him frankly the impression it had made on me.

'After twenty years I can recall the substance of the letter, which is probably still in existence. A powerful story, I said, but painful as it is powerful. The incidents, instead of being depressing, would be tragic if they befell anyone we loved or honoured. But there was no one in the story whom he could have intended us to love or honour. The hero underwent a lifelong torture without any credible, or even intelligible, motive, and on the whole was a _mauvais sujet_ himself. To win the reader's sympathy, all this must be altered. I strongly advised that the latter part of the story, in which the Ballarat outbreak was described under a leader whom he named Peter Brawler, should be omitted; and I objected to the publication of a song in French _argot_ with a spirited translation, as the latter would naturally be attributed to the author of the novel, whereas I had read it in an early _Blackwood_ before he was born.

'Marcus Clarke thanked me warmly, and said he would adopt all my suggestions. He wrote a new prologue, in which he made the protection of his mother's good name the motive of the hero's silence, and he omitted both the things I had objected to.'

Ending, as it began, with a tragedy, the artistic unity of the novel is thus preserved, and the dominant aim of the author emphasised. Many of those who read it in the serial parts strongly disapproved of the excisions, but there can be little doubt that the story is the stronger for their having been made.

It was as the work of a vivid historian, rather than of a social reformer, that Marcus Clarke's masterpiece won its popularity, and, for its dramatic and substantially accurate view of the worst (always the worst) aspect of convict life, it will continue to be read while anyone remains to take an interest in the unhappiest period of Australian history. From its pages may be learned how long it has taken the intelligent theorist of the British Government to acquire a practical method of treating a difficult social question; how long stupidity and inhumanity may be practised with the sanction of what Major Vickers was fond of respectfully calling 'the King's regulations'; and how far English gentlemen, remote from the influence of public opinion and invested with more power than single individuals should ever possess, may become despots, and even blackguards.

It is a grim record. Let those who are inclined to doubt it turn to the originals, especially to the report of the House of Commons Committee of 1837-38, and they will find facts which the creator of Rufus Dawes, with all his supple fancy and delicacy of language, could not bring himself even to indicate. There are episodes which the more matter-of-fact historians barely mention, but do not take advantage of their great privileges to describe. For example, there were times during the first thirty years of the century when the open and general lewdness of the officials on some of the princ.i.p.al settlements, in their relations with the female convicts, rendered them totally unfit for the positions they held.

Clarke in his researches obtained abundant knowledge of this, but made no use of it save in adding a few luminous touches to his portrait of Dawes' pa.s.sionate and licentious cousin.

In reading the novel for its historical interest, it is necessary throughout to remember the limitation that the writer has specifically put upon himself. He did not undertake to ill.u.s.trate any of the good effects of exile upon a section of the first offenders sent to the colonies, and scarcely touches the travesties of justice so often wrought by that lottery in human life known as the a.s.signment system.

His purpose is to describe 'the dismal condition of a felon during his term of transportation,' and to show the futility of a prison system loosely planned at one end of the world and roughly executed at the other by men who found it easier, and in some cases more agreeable, to their undiscerning hearts to coerce than to ameliorate.

The Parliamentary Committee defined transportation as 'a series of punishments embracing every degree of human suffering, from the lowest, consisting of a slight restraint upon freedom of action, to the highest, consisting of long and tedious torture.' It was with the latter part of the definition in mind that Clarke told his story. He chose to represent servitude in the chain-gangs of Van Diemen's Land and Norfolk Island as the condition of slavery which Sir Richard Bourke and Sir George Arthur admitted it to be, as the utter failure described by the experienced Dr. Ullathorne, and as the system recommended by the House of Commons Committee to be abolished as incapable of improvement and 'remarkably efficient, not in reforming, but still further corrupting those who undergo punishment.'

The idea which is the ganglion of Clarke's plot was always seen clearly, but never obsessed his mind as did a cognate theme that of the impetuous reformer Charles Reade. In his crusade against the form of punishment known as the 'silent system,' the English novelist obtrudes his moral with a frequency that weakens the effect of his often splendid eloquence. The direct opposite of this style is seen in the Australian novel. The author never openly preaches. His best effects are obtained by quiet satire conveyed in the gradual limning of his characters, and by occasional incidents of which each is allowed to give its own lesson to the reader. The facts have all the advantage of a studiously calm and impersonal presentation.

In the rapid progress of the plot the reader is kept keenly interested.

If he have an eye for the moral he will detect it at once; if not, there is no importunate author to force it upon him. In either case he will find the story an absorbing one. 'It has all the solemn ghastliness of truth,' said Lord Rosebery, writing to the novelist's widow in 1884. He confessed that the book had a fascination for him. Not once or twice, but many times, had he read it, and during his visit to Australia he spent some time in viewing the scene of the old settlements and examining the reports upon which the novel is so largely based.

That there are some exaggerations in the treatment of facts need hardly be stated, but they are few in number, not serious in import, and outbalanced by numerous cases in which it has been necessary to modify the description of incidents either too painful or horrible to be fully depicted. As a compensation for its occasional storical inaccuracy, _His Natural Life_ is notably free of the melodramatic excesses that most young writers would have been tempted to commit. Clarke was too good an artist to think of pleading the sanction of facts for any misuse of the privileges of good fiction. To maintain a strong impression on the reader, his touch is occasionally strong and fearless, like that of Kipling. But this object attained, he uses his materials with an almost unnecessary reticence. The episode of the cannibalism of Gabbett and his fellow-convicts is exceptional. Yet it purposely falls short of the terrible original, which is happily hidden away from general view between the covers of an old Parliamentary report.

It has been said of Clarke, by one of his friends, that in his estimate of motives he was invariably cynical. Though the a.s.sertion goes too far, it seems to suggest the best explanation of his notable preference for delineating the dark side of human nature. He appeared ever to see vice more clearly, or at any rate to find it more interesting for the purposes of fiction, than the good or the neutral in character. But his cynicism--if it really formed a settled feature of his character--was not of the kind that implies any indifference to injustice or dishonesty. In this particular, both his fiction and essays have no uncertain tone. It is indeed a fault of Clarke that his bad characters are in most cases wholly bad. He makes Frere abandon a life of debauchery under the influence of a pure woman's affection, but the effect is afterwards destroyed by evidences that the attachment on the man's side is sensual and based on vanity. Moreover, Frere the prison tyrant and base denier of Dawes' heroism remains unexcused.

Bob Calverley and Miss Ffrench, the only important representatives of the ordinary virtues in _Long Odds_, are little more than dim shadows contrasted with the clearly-marked personalities of half a dozen others in the story who are rogues, or the a.s.sociates and instruments of rogues. 'The human anguish of every page' of _His Natural Life_ which Lord Rosebery found so compelling to his attention, need not have been so continuous and unqualified.

The author seems purposely to have ignored the opportunity afforded by the story for the introduction of a character who, while a.s.serting the claims of Rufus Dawes and the broader interests of humanity, need not have defeated the main motive of the plot. It was a decided error not to gratify in this way the combative instinct of the reader. The Rev. James North--'gentleman, scholar, and Christian priest'--might have been an active opponent of cruelty like Eden, the clergyman in _It's Never Too Late to Mend_, instead of being made a pitiable example of a confirmed and self-accusing drunkard.

The strength of _His Natural Life_ lies not so much in the ingenuity and dramatic quality of its plot, as in the number of striking personalities among its leading characters. That of Rufus Dawes, curiously, is distinct only at intervals. It represents, for the most part, a hopeless sufferer pa.s.sing through a series of punishments which become almost monotonous in their unvaried severity.

But what could be more luminous than the portrait of Sarah Purfoy, the clever, self-possessed adventuress with the single redeeming quality of an invincible love for her worthless and villainous convict-husband? or that of Frere, the swaggering, red-whiskered, coa.r.s.ely good-humoured convict-driver, glorying in his knowledge of the heights and depths of criminal ingenuity and vice, and frankly ignorant of all else?

How naturally from such a person comes that savagely humorous dissertation upon the treatment of prisoners! 'There is a sort of satisfaction to me, by George! in keeping the scoundrels in order. I like to see the fellows' eyes glint at you as you walk past 'em. Gad!

they'd tear me to pieces if they dared, some of 'em.'

Frere is a triumph of consistent literary portraiture. He is generally understood to have been a study from life. But as the official whose name has sometimes been a.s.sociated with the character was a considerably more humane disciplinarian than the persecutor of Rufus Dawes, it must be a.s.sumed that Clarke aimed only at the representation of a type.

Brutes like Frere and his vindictive a.s.sociates, Burgess and Troke, there undoubtedly were on the settlements, but the average official has probably a better representative in Major Vickers, the Commandant.

Vickers is not an unkind man, but does not trust himself to do anything unprovided for in the 'regulations,' for which he has an abject respect.

'It is not for me to find fault with the system,' he says; 'but I have sometimes wondered if kindness would not succeed better than the chain-gang and the cat.' But he never gives intelligence, much less kindness, a fair trial.

Sylvia Vickers is the only complete picture of a good woman to be found in any of the author's stories. Taken in childhood by her parents to the penal settlements, and separated there for years from youthful society, familiarised with the constant aspects of crime and suffering, and habitually in the society of her elders, she early develops into a quaint, matter-of-fact little creature, such as might well disconcert a peac.o.c.k like the Reverend Meekin.

To Frere, whose knowledge of other women has been mainly immoral, her innocence and wilfulness, and her instinctive dislike of him, serve as a strong attraction. Though he becomes her husband by means of a cruel fraud, he never fully gains her trust, and the estrangement so tragically sealed in the last chapter of the novel comes almost as a relief to the sympathetic reader of her sad history. Sylvia Vickers, despite the gloomy environment of her youth, is throughout an intensely womanly woman, the delicate conception of whose character surely places her creator far above the rank of the cynics in literature.

Not the least of the elements which combine to make _His Natural Life_ one of the most remarkable novels of the century is the occasional skilful varying of its painful realism with a colouring of romance, as in the relations between Dawes and Sylvia: his absorbing devotion when she is so strangely made dependent upon him at the deserted settlement; his long-continued confidence that she will effect his vindication and deliverance; and, finally, the dominant motive of securing her safety against North with which he escapes from the gaol at Norfolk Island, and joins her in the doomed schooner on its last voyage to Van Diemen's Land.

What Oliver Wendell Holmes called 'the Robinson Crusoe touches' in the story--including the experiences of the marooned party at Macquarie Harbour, and those of Rex in his escape through the Devil's Blowhole--also help to leave with the reader of the novel an ineffaceable memory.