Chapter 12

'This is only a state of half-existence,' said Honoria in reference to her country life in Australia. 'Books are so unsatisfying! I read them greedily at first, then throw them aside in disgust. They never take one below the surface.... I want to grow and live.... What is the use of living unless one can gauge one's capacity for sensation?' Gretta Reay, in whom the same discontent is reproduced, exclaims: 'Ah, we Australians are like birds shut up in a large cage--our lives are little and narrow, for all that our home is so big.'

By these and other characters of the same type, the cultivated Englishman, who offers them the prospect of change and emancipation from monotony, is distinctly preferred in marriage to the man of colonial birth and experience. 'Don't you know,' says Gretta to one of the latter, 'that an Australian girl's first aim is to captivate an Englishman of rank and be translated to a higher sphere--failing that, to make the best of a rich squatter?'

The heroine of _Outlaw and Lawmaker_ differs from Gretta only in being more emphatic in her preference for the doubtful stranger, and irrational in her objections to her tried Australian lover, Frank Hallett. Once, in a riding-party, 'she had moodily watched his (Hallett's) square, determined bushman's back as he jogged along in front of her, and compared it with Blake's easy, graceful, rather rakish, bearing. Why was Frank so stolid, so good, so commonplace?'

A trifling superficial defect of the same sort turns the tables against the gallant young explorer, Dyson Maddox, in his first suit for the hand of Miss Longleat. The half-dozen analytical studies of female character in the principal novels of Mrs. Praed are far from flattering to her countrywomen, and might be somewhat misleading if we permitted ourselves to forget that in every case it is only one phase of a colonial girl's life that is being given.

The whims, the countless flirtations, the greed for new sensations, the inconsistencies and the apparent mercenary attitude towards marriage, are not more permanently characteristic of the women of Australia than of Englishwomen with equal opportunities. The impulses of the former are under few conventional restraints; they have a greater control of their lives: that is the only material difference. The matrimonial creed of Gretta Reay expresses rather the exaggerated cynicism of a coquette than a fact generally true of the class to which she belongs. The experiences of herself and of other leading characters in these stories correctly show that, although Australian women have an undoubted preference for the gentlemanly product of an older civilisation, it is a preference of sentiment in which self-interest and prudence are scarcely considered.

Even Weeta Wilson, the professional beauty so strikingly portrayed in _The Romance of a Station_, has a soul above her own avowed commercial view of marriage. It had been systematically planned that she should contract an aristocratic alliance; for years she had co-operated with her parents in elaborate preparations, half pathetic, half ludicrous; she had been guarded and nurtured like a hothouse-plant. At last, when her opportunity came, she relinquished her lover on finding that there was another who had a prior right to him.

The subtle skill with which some of the nobler qualities of her women are brought out, especially their capacity for self-sacrifice and devotion, marks Mrs. Praed's highest point of achievement in the portrayal of character. Her knowledge of the mental complexities of her own sex is both deeper and better expressed than her observation of men. In the most inconsistent, the most cynical, or the shallowest of her women, there is a latent tenderness, a soft womanliness, which conquers dislike. Thus, it is impossible to lack sympathy for Christina Chard, or accept her own estimate of her selfishness, after reading the finely-written scene in which she is found kneeling by the bedside of her dying child, from whom she has been so cruelly separated, while her recreant husband stands apart in awe and humiliation; or, again, in the interview with Frederica Barnadine, when the claims of both women to the love of Rolf Luard are discussed.

The absence of similar redeeming qualities in several of the principal male characters leaves them almost wholly without definite claim on our regard, and also lessens the effect of the author's frequent endeavours to impartially contrast the unconsciously low moral standard of the average worldly man--the standard which society accepts--with the high, impracticable ideals of inexperienced womanhood.

The heroines in nearly all of Mrs. Praed's stories have the life of sentiment and passion revealed to them by men older in years, and skilled in those small arts and graces of refined society which are ever attractive to women. But, in fulfilling this design, the men themselves are often placed in a strained and artificial pose. The presentation of the purely emotional side of their nature inevitably tends to produce an appearance of weakness and effeminacy.

There is hardly a single admirable quality in Barrington, the base lover of Honoria Longleat; or in George Brand, who deserts Esther Hagart in her poverty and loneliness, and years afterwards, on finding her recognised as the niece of an English baronet, persuades her into an unhappy marriage; or in Brian Gilmore, the profligate in _Moloch_, who seeks to rejuvenate his jaded passions with the love of an innocent girl, after abandoning another woman whose life he has spoiled. Sir Bruce Carr-Gambier forsakes Christina Chard and her child for cowardly reasons similar to those pleaded by Brand. When they meet, long-after, he offers his devotion again, but only because her developed beauty, position, and reputed wealth attract him.

It is true that these characters fairly fulfil the author's intention, so far as they bring into vivid juxtaposition the polished life of the old world with the simplicity of the new, and help to give the necessary dramatic point to the several stories; but there is so much of the cad in their nature and conduct, that it is difficult to accept them as representatives of any conceivable type of the Englishman of birth and refinement. This result, however, does not imply any actual inability on the part of the author to realise the standard of true manhood in all its varying strength and foibles, its tenderness and honour. Where there has not seemed any necessity to bend the character to the requirements of the story, admirably life-like sketches of men have been produced--such as Rolf Luard in _Christina Chard_ and Bernard Comyn in _An Australian Heroine_ among Englishmen; and Dyson Maddox, Frank Hallett, and James Ferguson among Australians.

Though it is plain that Mrs. Praed has generally found colonial men wanting in interest in proportion as they themselves lack the polish that travel and extended experience of social life impart, she has not overlooked the rugged dignity, the truth and virility, which are their highest characteristics. Alluding to Ferguson as one type of his country, she observes that, 'underlying the rough-and-ready manners and the prosaic routine of bush-life, there is an old-world chivalry, a reverence for women, a purity of thought, a delicacy of sentiment.... This is partly due to the breezy moral atmosphere, and partly to the influence of books, which become living realities in the solitude and monotony of existence among the gum-trees. The typical Australian is an odd combination of the practical and the ideal. He is a student who learns to read to himself a foreign language, but does not attain to its pronunciation. He has no knowledge of the current jargon or society slang. He has unconsciously rejected vulgarisms and shallow conceits; but all the deeper thoughts, the poetry of life, which appeal to the soul, he has made his own.'

Ferguson himself echoes the same estimate in pleading his suit with Miss Reay. 'It seems to me,' he says, 'that there's a kind of chivalry which can be practised in the bush here better than in great cities--the chivalry Tennyson writes about--the knighthood that isn't earned by sauntering through life in a graceful, smiling sort of way, with your heart in your hand, but in simplicity and faith; by love of one woman, and reverence of all women for her sake.'

Compared with the fascinating aristocrats and adventurers, the Australian man seems crudely provincial. Yet he is never shown in an incorrect or merely satirical light. There are, to be sure, occasions when he appears too tame and Dobbin-like in acceptance of his lady's caprices; but this is partly an evidence of that mixture of stiff native pride and independence which forbids servile appeal even to one he loves.

The deficiency of which the reader is most often conscious in endeavouring to make a general estimate of Mrs. Praed's work is a want of breadth in her scope--a presentation too constant and too tense of certain phases of the passionate life of men and women, to the comparative exclusion of those softer and higher attributes which even Charlotte Brontë (whose touch that of Mrs. Praed occasionally resembles) did not neglect. In other words, we are not given enough to admire. There are few pictures--and none that can be called memorable--of happy married life to contrast with the vivid tragedies of mistaken unions. An inclination towards humorous disdain characterizes the references in the stories to conjugal relations of the ordinarily satisfactory kind. And when those of a filial nature are brought into prominence, they, too, often have only a pathetic or painful aspect--love on the one side repelled by indifference; an uncouth parent offering rough sympathy that irritates instead of soothes; a sensitive girl writhing under the brutalities or _gaucheries_ of a drunken father.

A survey of the author's female characters will recall over a score of names of discontented girls experimenting in life--flirts, minxes, unhappy wives, and shallow society women; while after passing over half a dozen of the _ingénue_, the amusing and the neutral types, there remain only about four to represent the highest and most lovable qualities of womanhood. A similar division might be made between the male characters, though here the preponderance of the bad would not be so great as in the first case.

The descriptions of English society which are amongst Mrs. Praed's best work are marked by the same clear vision of the darker side of human nature that is displayed in the treatment of English character in her Australian novels. Her view of the 'smart' section of English society is somewhat severe. After reading several of her novels, one could almost imagine her defending her literary preference in the words of Esmé Colquhoun, in _Affinities_: 'What is our mission--we writers--but to distil the essence of the age? The critics tell us that we are complex, that we are corrupt, that we are anatomists of diseased minds. We reply: The age is complex; the age is corrupt, and the society we depict is the outcome of influences which have been gathering through centuries of advancing civilization ... the reign of healthy melodrama is over; the reign of analysis has commenced. We make dramas of our sensations, not of our actions.' The same view is expressed in an article contributed by Mrs. Praed to the _North American Review_ in 1890. 'Analysis, not action,' she notes as the prevailing characteristic of the fiction produced by female writers, 'as it is also of our modern social life.' But, 'to dissect human nature under its society swathings needs,' she adds, 'the skill of a Balzac or a Thackeray, while the feminine counterpart of a Balzac or a Thackeray is difficult to find.'

That indefinable power which includes sympathetic insight and does not overlook whatever is good even in the most repulsive character is, perhaps, what the describers in fiction of modern society need even more than skill in dissection. To observe and dissect what is corrupt is easier than to make the record of corruption presentable. Mrs. Praed's own tale _The Bond of Wedlock_, with all its undoubted cleverness, its realism and dramatic strength, fails in its due impression as a picture of latter-day English morals because it is too sordid, too completely devoid of any of the better qualities of humanity.

To see Mrs. Praed in her most agreeable and natural moods one must revert to the novels in which the scenery and people of her own country are described. In _Miss Jacobsen's Chance_ we have her liveliest example of humour and caricature, in _The Head Station_ her most cheerful pictures of country life, and in _Christina Chard_ some account of the society with which colonists of wealth surround themselves in London. The latter story has several finely dramatic scenes and is a sample of the author's mature work. Hers is the most comprehensive view that we have of the social and political life of the Antipodes, and for this and for her minutely recorded knowledge of her own sex she will long continue to hold and deserve a foremost place in Australian literature.

TASMA.

Between the writers who profess not to see anything individual in the life of Australia and those others who confine themselves to describing a few of its principal scenes and types of character, Tasma holds a middle and independent place. She is absolutely without predilections and hobbies. Her materials are chosen for some quality of picturesqueness rather than for the purpose of illustrating any phase of life at the Antipodes or elsewhere. So little are some of her novels concerned with the external appearances of the country that the scene of their action might easily be transferred to almost any part of Great Britain or America.

Incidentally she has given a few strongly-sketched views of places--of Melbourne in midsummer, with its buildings of sombre bluestone and stucco, and streets swept by dust-laden hot winds; of Riverina, arid and drought-stricken; and of the peaceful beauty of rural Tasmania, the home of her own youth--but these and other descriptions from the same pen are slight compared with similar work in the stories of Kingsley, Boldrewood, and Mrs. Campbell Praed.

Tasma, as one of the younger writers, has rightly seen that, for the present at all events, more than sufficient use has been made in fiction of the natural peculiarities of Australia. Her novels are, moreover, all character studies, and little dependent upon local colour for their interest. Her quiet, satirical humour and power of rapidly and mordantly sketching a portrait, do much to justify a comparison which her friends sometimes make of her writings with those of George Eliot and Jane Austen. Rolf Boldrewood, after the publication of her first three books, hailed her as the 'Australian George Eliot,' and the title is certainly more fitting than the praise implied by the other comparison. She has much of George Eliot's conscientious literary expression, direct masculine way of looking at life, and unsparing criticism of her own sex. While reminding one, as she often does, of Jane Austen's humour, Tasma does not approach any nearer to that writer's supreme gift of describing character in dialogue than scores of others who have followed the same model during the last seventy years.

Like most of the chief contributors to Australian literature, Tasma is a colonist in experience only. She was born at Highgate, near London, and taken during childhood by her father, Mr. Alfred James Huybers, a Dutch merchant, to Hobart, in Tasmania, about forty years ago. She displayed literary talent at an early age, read extensively, and published criticisms in the _Melbourne Review_, and short stories and sketches in the lighter colonial periodicals.

In 1879 Tasma went to live in Europe, and has since known Australia only as an occasional visitor. Becoming interested in social questions during a residence in France, she wrote in the _Nouvelle Revue_, suggesting emigration to the colonies and engagement in the fruit-growing industry there as a means of relieving some of the poverty of the Old World. She afterwards lectured on the subject in French at the invitation of the Geographical Society of Paris. So successful were the lectures that she was induced to repeat them in various provincial centres, as well as in Holland and Belgium. This work occupied from 1880 to 1882, and Tasma was presented by the French Government with the decoration of Officier d'Académie. The King of the Belgians also honoured the lecturer by receiving her in special audience to discuss means of improving communication between Belgium and Tasmania.

In 1885, after revisiting Australia, Tasma was married to M. Auguste Couvreur, a distinguished Belgian politician and journalist (he has since died), and four years later began her career as a novelist by the publication at London of _Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill_, which proved to be one of the most notable books of its season.

This novel remains the best example of the author's humour and power of describing character that she has produced. It has none of the marks of a first effort. Written when Tasma was about thirty-two, it embodied some of the best fruits of many years' keenly critical study of life, in addition to the culture gained by travel and a wide course of reading. Of plot there is little--there is still less in some of the later novels--but sufficient variety of incident is given to afford scope for unusually rich faculties of sympathy and philosophic observation.

In her desire to present only real persons moving in a familiar world she merits, in _Uncle Piper_, praise almost equal to that accorded by Nathaniel Hawthorne to the novels of Anthony Trollope when he spoke of them as being 'as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting that they were being made a show of.' It is, however, less of Trollope than of Howells that Tasma reminds the reader in this first story. The character of the wealthy _parvenu_ uncle, sensitive, boastful, resentful, and obstinate, yet tender-hearted as a child, irresistibly recalls _Silas Lapham_, that wonderfully natural and sympathetic presentment of a commonplace man. There are numerous points of resemblance between the two, especially when they are shown contrasted with their aristocratic friends. The delightful comradeship of Lapham and his wife, with its curiously dry New England expression, has its counterpart in Piper's affection for his sister and their pride in each other.

The half-acknowledged social ambitions of both men, qualified by their secret contempt for the pretensions of the upper classes, is shown in various similar ways, as is also their love of display. They differ only as their nationalities differ. Puritanism survives in the American merchant and his wife, and unconsciously sways their lives. Uncle Piper's conception of the Deity is of the vaguest kind, but he has a religion of generosity and love which in the end nothing can repress--which survives the effects of a temper soured by systematic coldness and opposition on the part of a rebellious son and step-daughter. While in his relations with his womenkind--the tractable section of them--there is nothing of that quaint American delicacy and reserve noted by Howells, there is in its stead an absorbing tenderness which is irresistible.

The superiority of Silas Lapham as a realistic portrait is not difficult to affirm; still, it is a fact complimentary to Tasma that the characters thus far approximate. Uncle Piper is under all the disadvantage that a figure in fiction suffers in being described largely in plain statement by the author instead of being gradually revealed in piquant dialogue.

Readers of _Silas Lapham_ will remember the rapid series of witty touches with which the burly Bostonian is sketched as he sits in the office of his warehouse, surrounded by samples of the mineral paint that he is so pathetically proud of, striving to maintain a dignified indifference as he answers the rather flippant curiosity of the local press interviewer. Uncle Piper, on the other hand, is introduced, as all of Tasma's characters are, in sundry solid-looking pages of direct narrative. It is true that their humour and epigram make bright reading, but they are necessarily without the power of pithy dialogue to create a vivid impression of character.

Whether Uncle Piper is a type of Australian plutocracy need hardly be discussed. Of plebeian tradesmen grown wealthy every community has its proportion. It may, however, be said that the owners of luxurious villas in the suburbs of Melbourne have individually a good deal more grammar and less generosity than he who was described by one of his fashionable English guests as possessing 'the home of a West-End magnate and the intonation of a groom.' The author herself would probably disclaim any intention to represent a type. She is one of those writers who doubt the existence of types in the ordinary meaning of the term, and she certainly makes no conscious attempt to delineate them.

A passage in her third novel, _The Penance of Portia James_, gives her views on this subject, and incidentally upon Australian character. A description is furnished of a breakfast-party in the London home of an Australian who has made his fortune in a silver-mine, and from being a _habitué_ of colonial racecourses has lately developed into a patron of art and a purchaser of dubious 'old masters' at exorbitant prices.