Australian Writers Part 9

While three of his English-bred companions are exchanging reminiscences of London life, Ferguson listens with an eager interest, 'putting in a remark every now and then which had the savour, so readily detected, of acquaintance with the thing in question by means of books rather than personal experience.' In Mrs. Praed's stories, as in real life, a personal acquaintance with other countries gives the Australian a truer appreciation of the good in his own. The man who has taken part in the artificialities of a London season, or has been a spectator of its petty rivalries, returns joyfully to a simpler life; the woman who is p.r.o.ne to deify the smooth-spoken Englishman, learns through him to value the more homely virtues of colonial manhood.

In the difficult task of rendering attractive the restricted life of the squatting cla.s.s, who form the country aristocracy of Australia, Mrs.

Praed has combined humour and a terse cultivated style of expression with a dramatic sense, which has guided her past details that are merely commonplace. The natural surroundings of a head station furnish materials for bright little sketches immediately a.s.sociated with some romantic episode in the story; there is no vague straining to create 'atmosphere,' or anything that a judicious reader would skip.

The beautiful Honoria Longleat reclining in a hammock under the vine-trellised verandah at Kooralbyn, stray shafts of sunlight imparting a warm chestnut tint to her hair, a trailing withe of orange begonia touching her shoulder, a book in her lap and a bundle of guavas on the ground beside her; Elsie Valliant waiting for her lover on the rocky crossing of Luya Dell, framed between two giant cedars and outlined cameo-like against the blue sky; Gretta Reay, the proud, st.u.r.dy little belle of Doondi, with upturned sleeves at her churn, pretending unconcern when she is surprised by her English visitors--these are some of the pictures in which the author commemorates much that is noteworthy in the warmth and colour of tropical Australia and in the daily life of its inhabitants. This fondness for posing her heroines is one of the minor features of her work. Its results in some of her later novels are not, however, always agreeable: a few of the scenes in the history of the unhappy Judith Fountain in _Affinities_ are painful, and the portrait, in _The Brother of the Shadow_, of Mrs. Vascher as she lies in the mesmerist's blue-silk-lined room is an unnecessary ghastly elaboration.

The hards.h.i.+ps suggested by the beginnings of pastoral life amid the giant forests and intense loneliness of Australia are never allowed by Mrs. Praed to give a gloomy colour to her stories. It is one of their distinct merits that they present the humorous incongruities rather than the trials of pioneering, though the latter are by no means ignored. In the first three chapters of _The Romance of a Station_ some excellent humour is provided by the young bride's account of her home-coming to the rude mansion on her husbands mosquito-infested island station, and the ludicrous privations she encountered there. There is nothing of the kind more amusing in the whole of Australian fiction. The description of the household pets, and the vermin--including a lizard with an uncanny habit of 'unfastening its tail and making off on its stump when pursued'--rivals the famous verandah scene in _Geoffry Hamlyn_. An intimation in the preface that these experiences are a faithful record from the early life of the author herself sufficiently explains their graphic quality. Amusing also are the sketches of the aristocratic settlers in _Policy and Pa.s.sion_ and _Outlaw and Lawmaker_ who try to apply the principles of aestheticism to the crude surroundings of their new-made homes in the backwoods--Dolph Ba.s.sett with his ornamental bridges and rockeries and his grand piano; Lord Horace Gage explaining with his maxim, 'If we can't be comfortable, let us at least be artistic,' a neglect to fill up the c.h.i.n.ks in his slab hut.

Queensland, the scene of Mrs. Praed's colonial experience and the 'Leichardt's Land' of her stories, differs notably from the rest of Australia only in climate; its social and political conditions are essentially the same in character as those in the rest of the country.

The Englishman acquiring colonial experience, the squatter living in various stages of comfort or discomfort, the gentleman spendthrift from whom his family has parted with the affectionate injunction, 'G.o.d bless you, dear boy; let us never see your face again!' and the political parties which go in and out of office 'like buckets in a well' (to use the author's own expression), are, or have been, common features of every colony. Like several of her heroines, Mrs. Praed alternated life in the country with the gaieties of the capital.

The position of her father, the Hon. T. L. Murray-Prior, as a member of the Legislative Council, brought her into contact with those political and vice-regal circles of which she has given entertaining and occasionally derisive accounts in _Policy and Pa.s.sion_, _Miss Jacobsen's Chance_, and elsewhere. Her description in the former story of the wealthy landowners, who adopt a pa.s.sive and somewhat disdainful att.i.tude towards party strife, applies to a cla.s.s already large in the colonies.

Whether such an att.i.tude is consistent with 'the truest conservatism to be found in Australia,' which they are said to represent, may be questioned. It seems rather to indicate selfishness, petulance, and lack of patriotism.

It is not, however, upon the business of politics or the humours and makes.h.i.+fts of colonial life that Mrs. Praed has expended her best efforts as a writer. Some study of the human emotions is the primary interest in all her novels. There is nearly always love of the pa.s.sionate and romantic kind, prompted on the one side by impulse, ignorance or glamour, and on the other by pa.s.sing fancy or self-interest: the love of an innocent, unsophisticated woman for a man experienced in the pleasures and some of the darker vices of life; and, in contrast, the blunt respect and devotion of the typical Australian man for the same woman, and her light estimate of his worth. The tragedies of marriage--the union of the refined and imaginative with the coa.r.s.e and commonplace, the high-souled with the worldly and cynical, the pure with the impure--are correlative themes of some of the strongest of the novels. In these, pathos is the prevailing tone. We have the spectacle of the woman's blind, illogical trust abused, her helplessness in self-inflicted misery, or the tenacity with which, in temptation, she clings to the safeguards of conventional morality. In most cases this tenacity, which the author accounts an instinct rather than a virtue, is either allowed to triumph, or is placed by death beyond the possibility of a supreme test. In the loves of Hester Murgatroyd and Durnford in _The Head Station_, of Mrs. Lomax and Leopold D'Acosta in _The Bond of Wedlock_, and of Mrs. Borlase and Esme Colquhoun in _Affinities_, it is the woman who directly, or by implication, insists upon respect of the marriage tie so long as it remains a legal obligation.

But it should be made clear that Mrs. Praed is not in any sense a propagandist on the subject of marriage. She ill.u.s.trates, often impressively, its difficulties and anomalies, but leaves the rest to the judgment of the reader. The romantic, ignorant girl who marries on trust, or is ready to do so, has numerous representatives in these novels. Though it is a woman's view of her trials and unhappiness that is given, there is nothing in the shape of a crusade against male vices.

It is not the faults of men that are dwelt upon so much as the inevitably lenient, the pitifully inadequate estimate which women make of men themselves.

The most striking ill.u.s.tration of this feature is probably contained in the last scenes of _The Bond of Wedlock_, where the heroine learns at once the hypocrisy of her father and the dishonour of her lover. The father, in a fit of resentment, has revealed the mean plot by which she has been enabled to divorce her husband and marry Sir Leopold D'Acosta.

The latter, seeing that Mrs. Lomax would never consent to an elopement, has paid another woman--a former mistress of his--to incriminate Harvey Lomax, while the audacious old humbug, his father-in-law, does the business of a detective. Ariana's dream of happiness is dissipated. She hardens into indifference. The revelation completes the disillusionment which had already begun. 'I had set you up as my hero, and my ideal, and I have found you--a man.' This is the summary of her life's experience, which in effect is also that of Esther Hagart, Ginevra Rolt, Christina Chard, Ina Gage, and others in the list of Mrs. Praed's unhappy heroines. Married life, as they ill.u.s.trate it, is usually a compromise.

Even that of Mrs. Lomax is not quite a failure. Her husband does not attempt to conceal the fact that she no longer interests him, but with that commonly-accepted philosophy which recognises a wife as at least an adjunct to conventional respectability, he reminds her that, after all, their union has some advantages:

'I would much rather have you for a wife than any other woman I ever knew; and if I sometimes think a man is better who hasn't a wife, it is only when you are in one of those reproachful moods, and seem as if you were anxious to make me out a heartless sort of miscreant. In Heaven's name, why not make the best of things? Why need we be melodramatic? We are man and woman of the world. We must take the world as we find it, and ourselves for what it has made us.'

Ariana's answer was given later on when she realized the full extent to which she had been self-deluded: 'I am not going to be melodramatic. We can be very good friends on the outside. We need never be anything more.'

A strong bias towards a.n.a.lysis is the chief characteristic of Mrs.

Praed's studies in character. As in her ill.u.s.trations of the perplexing uncertainties of married life it is the woman's point of view that is most impressively presented, so in each story there is at least one woman whose personality stands out in pathetic relief and claims paramount attention. She is usually a cultivated woman of romantic tendency, living in a restricted social environment, and displaying the craving of that cla.s.s of her s.e.x for change, pleasurable excitement, and sympathy. In the satisfaction of her yearnings or ambitions are seen, perhaps more often than is typical, the gloomy aspects of marriage, and the incompetence of women to manage their own lives.

The average Australian girl of real life is neither very romantic nor fastidious. She is cheerful, adaptable, too fond of pleasure to be thoughtful, and has a decided inclination towards married life. Its material advantages and status attract her--and, for the rest, she has a vague confidence that everything will come right. Nowhere is the horror of elderly spinsterhood more potent. The influence of independent professional life fostered by the large public schools is still infinitesimal.

The type upon which Mrs. Praed has bestowed her most elaborate work belongs to a cla.s.s both higher and far fewer in numbers. It is the cla.s.s that Mr. Froude had chiefly in view when he noted the absence of 'severe intellectual interests' as a deficiency of society at Sydney.

Honoria Longleat, the princ.i.p.al study of Mrs. Praed's second novel, may, with a few obvious deductions, be taken as a fair example of the colonial woman educated beyond sympathy with her native surroundings, and unprovided with any employment for her mental energies. With the distractions and interests of her narrow circle exhausted, and the knowledge that her future--her only possible future--must soon be decided by marriage, she is consumed with an intense and reckless desire for new emotional experience. Her unrest is like that of the large cla.s.s of American women who are educated above the purely commercial standard of their fathers and brothers, and are impelled to satisfy their intellectual cravings by frequent European travel.

'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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 a.n.a.lytical studies of female character in the princ.i.p.al 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 att.i.tude 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 cla.s.s 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 n.o.bler 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 s.e.x 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 princ.i.p.al 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sions 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 p.r.o.nunciation. 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 pa.s.sionate life of men and women, to the comparative exclusion of those softer and higher attributes which even Charlotte Bronte (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 pa.s.sing over half a dozen of the _ingenue_, 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 Esme 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 a.n.a.lysis 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. 'a.n.a.lysis, 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 s.e.x 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 princ.i.p.al 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 ill.u.s.trating 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 t.i.tle 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 s.e.x. 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'Academie. 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.