[OOQ]| To those people who are
[OOQ]| deeply interested in the development of Australian
[OOQ]| letters this book (
Unfortunately, the [OOQ]| people who care passionately for literature are, [OOQ]| in every country, small in number, yet any [OOQ]| achievement of value is in their keeping. Books [OOQ]| get published every year in great profusion, and [OOQ]| the patrons of the circulating libraries receive [OOQ]| such nourishment as they demand, but from this [OOQ]| confused outpour of the printing presses it is the [OOQ]| business of the critic, professional and [OOQ]| unprofessional, to select such works as are of [OOQ]| permanent worth and help to keep them alive. [OOQ]| Books, when all is said, are inorganic matter, and [OOQ]| have no life of their own apart from the people [OOQ]| who read and treasure them. The belief that if a [OOQ]| book has merit it will ultimately come into its [OOQ]| own, has no basis except a blind faith in the [OOQ]| vigilance of critics, or in some purely mechanical [OOQ]| theory of survival of the fittest. It is true that [OOQ]| important books have been recovered after a lapse [OOQ]| of many years, but many of equal worth have, in [OOQ]| all probability, perished utterly. In Australia [OOQ]| our literary achievement is so small that we must [OOQ]| guard every part of it jealously.
[OOQ]|
Luckily in
[OOQ]| Joseph Furphy the period found a chronicler who
[OOQ]| was particularly fitted to record its character.
[OOQ]| Born at Yering, on the Upper Yarra, in 1843, he
[OOQ]| followed successively the occupations of farmer,
[OOQ]| gold hunter, bullock driver, and mechanic,
[OOQ]| realising, as he said near the close of his days,
[OOQ]|
[OOQ]|
Indeed, from the beginning he was too
[OOQ]| engrossed in impersonal interests either to value
[OOQ]| or actually achieve material success. Money-making
[OOQ]| he regarded as irrelevant to the main purposes of
[OOQ]| his life, and as an artificer he worked
[OOQ]| contentedly for wages in the family foundry,
[OOQ]| placing himself by choice in the class with which
[OOQ]| he had most sympathy. To his proper work of
[OOQ]| chronicler he brought a habit of accurate
[OOQ]| observation, a masculine humor, and an interest in
[OOQ]| general ideas as well as in human character. The
[OOQ]| first interest was fortified by a wide if
[OOQ]| disorderly culture, and the second by continued
[OOQ]| association with the varied types of men that
[OOQ]| might be found in the Riverina in those days, when
[OOQ]| personal idiosyncrasies were as diverse as the
[OOQ]| dialects brought from overseas. Joseph Furphy's
[OOQ]| style was catholic enough to suit his
[OOQ]| subject-matter. Slang, scientific terminology, and
[OOQ]| racy simile were all at his hand, and his native vigor
[OOQ]| fused them easily into a pliant instrument of
[OOQ]| expression. He could turn from a description of a
[OOQ]| bucking horse to a metaphysical argument without
[OOQ]| changing step or getting out of his stride. And
[OOQ]| when he chooses to be aggressive his dialectic has
[OOQ]| the ring of Swift or Shaw, though he could hardly
[OOQ]| have read the latter writer, and had little in
[OOQ]| common with either, except his Irish blood.
[OOQ]|says a [OOQ]| recent critic, Professor Gregory,
[OOQ]|This distinction [OOQ]| is enlightening, for recently in Europe it has [OOQ]| become the habit to refer to the new countries as [OOQ]| if they contained no important differences in [OOQ]| character or institutions, and in comparing [OOQ]| Australia with North America these differences can [OOQ]| be made evident to all but the most superficial [OOQ]| minds. Our innate idealism is combined with an [OOQ]| attitude of irony to the realities of contemporary [OOQ]| life which sometimes degenerates into mere [OOQ]| cynicism and a disregard of beauty. These [OOQ]| qualities, complementary in essence, can be found [OOQ]| in nearly every page of Australian writing that [OOQ]| has literary quality, whether in the stories of [OOQ]| Henry Lawson, the plays of Louis Esson, or the [OOQ]| poems of Bernard O'Dowd. They are emphasised in [OOQ]| the work of Joseph Furphy.
American [OOQ]| romanticism, on the other hand, at its finest in [OOQ]| Poe and Hawthorne, easily lapses into mere [OOQ]| banality. The glow which should rightfully belong [OOQ]| to high adventures is used to glorify the [OOQ]| operations of a Beef Trust or the machinations of [OOQ]| an oil king, and when Nature is brought in she is [OOQ]| made personal and sentimental. The feeling of [OOQ]| kinship with wild earth, genuine enough in [OOQ]| Thoreau, provides lesser writers with an excuse [OOQ]| for becoming dithyrambic about the Great White [OOQ]| Silence, or some lone pine to which the heroine [OOQ]| pours out her soul at twilight. The romantic [OOQ]| Westerner, alive and interesting in the best pages [OOQ]| of Bret Harte, degenerates quickly into a stage [OOQ]| hero, whose impeccable sentiments are only [OOQ]| relieved by his vivid clothes. Differences in [OOQ]| national character show most clearly in [OOQ]| literature, and it is necessary to recognise them [OOQ]| in order to arrive at standards of criticism and [OOQ]| guard against the perils of influence and [OOQ]| imitation. Between our idealism and North American [OOQ]| romanticism there is a gulf fixed which can only [OOQ]| be crossed at the risk of spreading the defects of [OOQ]| each quality, for literary vices are more [OOQ]| contagious than their accompanying virtues. There [OOQ]| will be no picturesque cowboys on our Western [OOQ]| stations, if our literary instinct holds true, and [OOQ]| the realities of life on a selection may only be [OOQ]| redeemed by crude farce, but at least the air will [OOQ]| remain clear and the vision unperverted. As an [OOQ]| example of the alien and exotic, the essentially [OOQ]| false note in our literature one has only to read [OOQ]| Marcus Clarke's story,
[OOQ]|
says Joseph Furphy,
[OOQ]|
The latter part of the claim cannot
[OOQ]| wholly be allowed, for artistic truth is not
[OOQ]| simply a matter of good intentions, and
[OOQ]|
As to the form [OOQ]| of the book, a word or two must be said. The [OOQ]| picturesque novel shows signs of coming into [OOQ]| fashion again, even in France, where the [OOQ]| vicissitudes of war have broken up the neat, [OOQ]| logical form of construction that was the ideal of [OOQ]| at least two generations of writers. [OOQ]|
Although Joseph Furphy did not write for [OOQ]| publication until he was past 40, his literary [OOQ]| gift was far from infertile. Besides [OOQ]|