little affectations of that small upper crust of Antipodean society
which is sufficiently cultured to have developed a taste for
aristocratic European habits, along with an uncomfortable suspicion of
'bad form' in anything of purely local growth. This is the class which
maintains an air of portentous solemnity in public ceremonials, and is
liable at any moment to be convulsed by a question of precedence at a
Government House dinner.
From a lively appreciation of comedy to caricature is an easy descent
which the author has not always resisted, but her exaggeration is so
obviously resorted to in the interests of fun that it is unlikely to
mislead. There is certainly no need to repudiate as untypical of
Australian political society the Pickwickian spectacle of a drunken
Postmaster-General fearfully trying to walk a plank after a Vice-regal
dinner, in order to win three dozen of champagne wagered by the leader
of the Opposition, while the Premier looks on and holds his sides with
merriment; or the case of the Premier's wife, who, on being told by a
newly-arrived Governor--a musical enthusiast--that he hoped to be able
to 'introduce Wagner' at the local philharmonic concerts, said: 'I'm
sure we shall be very pleased to see the gentleman.'
Considering, however, the opportunities which colonial life, and
especially colonial politics, afford for ridicule, the author has been
commendably careful to avoid, as far as possible, giving real offence.
Yet her criticism is sufficiently free to be piquant, and, on the whole,
as salutary as it is entertaining. 'Why need Australians always be on
the defensive?' asks more than once an Englishman in one of her novels.
The author seems to have put the same question to herself as an
Australian, and to have decided that ultra-sensitiveness is a worse vice
than affectation, and that her compatriots, by giving way to it, do both
themselves and their country an injustice. For it implies a too low
estimate of what is fresh and strong and of real merit in the
independent life of the nation.
Colonists need a little more of the philosophic and common-sense spirit
which can look upon deficiencies and crudities merely as phases in the
natural evolution of society in a new land. This is what Mrs. Praed has
endeavoured to teach in some of her stories. The lesson is often
surrounded with a good deal of bantering discussion; it may not always
be apparent to an English reader, but it can hardly be overlooked by an
Australian. There is rarely anything so pointed as the conversation
between Miss Jacobsen and her lover, Chepstowe. The former has been
wondering what the cultivated Englishman thought of a recent noisy and
rather vulgar reception tendered to a new Governor for whom he is acting
as private secretary. Chepstowe is suspected of being secretly amused at
his surroundings. But his view of them is purely rational and
matter-of-fact.
'You know, I fancy you colonists think rather too little of
yourselves, and we in England rather too much. Or I'll put it in
another way. I fancy you colonists think too much about yourselves,
and we in England think too little.'
'You said just now that you think too much.'
'Yes; it's the same thing put in a different way. We think too much
of ourselves, and for that reason too little about ourselves. You
are always thinking somebody is laughing at you; we have made up our
minds that we are the admiration of everybody. We are often very
ridiculous, and don't know it. You often think you are ridiculous
when you really are not.'
'I think we must have seemed very ridiculous the day you landed....
I know you are astonished at some of our public men.... You will
write home and say how rude and rough and vulgar some of them are.'
'If one wants to see the ridiculous, one can see it everywhere. We
have some public men at home who are rude and rough, and vulgar and
ridiculous.... One has to make allowances, of course, for training
and habits, and all that.... When our fellows are rough, there is
less excuse for them. The more one goes about the world, the less
one sees to laugh at, I think....'
English self-complacency is, of course, a growth of centuries, but
perhaps a deliberate and intelligent effort to acquire some of it in
Australia would be the best specific for that consciousness which,
colonists should not forget, is the mark of insignificance. It has been
said that Australians already have too much to say for themselves and
their country. The assertion is only applicable to a small boisterous
class who have never seen anything beyond their own shores.
A much commoner element of Antipodean life, one which some of Mrs.
Praed's characters notably illustrate, is the desire for wider
experience and culture produced among educated people by their constant
use of British and European literature. James Ferguson, the young
squatter in _The Head Station_, represents those Australians who, though
stout believers in their own country, feel its intellectual
deficiencies--perhaps too much; who are more English than the English
themselves in their veneration for the historic associations of the
mother land; who, when they go to London, are curiously at home in
streets and among sights that have been more or less definitely outlined
in their imagination from early childhood.
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 prone 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 class, 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 associated 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, sturdy
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 hardships 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 Passion_ and _Outlaw and Lawmaker_ who try to
apply the principles of æstheticism to the crude surroundings of their
new-made homes in the backwoods--Dolph Bassett 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 chinks 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, 'God 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 Passion_, _Miss Jacobsen's
Chance_, and elsewhere. Her description in the former story of the
wealthy landowners, who adopt a passive and somewhat disdainful attitude
towards party strife, applies to a class already large in the colonies.
Whether such an attitude 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
makeshifts 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
passionate and romantic kind, prompted on the one side by impulse,
ignorance or glamour, and on the other by passing 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
coarse 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 Esmé
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 illustrates, 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 illustration 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 illustrate 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 analysis is the chief characteristic of Mrs.
Praed's studies in character. As in her illustrations 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 class of her sex 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 class both higher and far fewer in numbers. It is the class
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 principal 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 class
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 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.