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.
To hold up the assembled party to the eyes of English readers as
thoroughly typical Australians would be as unjust a proceeding as
was that of Dumas _père_ when he declared that all the inhabitants
of Antwerp were _roux_ because he had encountered two red-headed
girls on his way to the hotel. No one is thoroughly typical unless
he be a savage or a peasant. Portia and her relatives retained their
own underlying individualities none the less that they had been
influenced in their outward bearing and modes of expressing
themselves by a long sojourn in the backwoods of Victoria, in daily
contact with all sorts and conditions of men--broken-down gentlemen,
English yokels, bush-hands, and the like. After all, the moulding of
character by outward influences alone is not a work to be achieved
in one generation, or what would become of the theory of heredity,
upon which everything is supposed to depend, more or less, in our
present scientific age? If these people strike the English reader,
therefore, as differing in certain respects from those he is
accustomed to meet in his daily walk through life, let him remember
that the differences which will strike him most are the merely
superficial ones resulting from an occasional departure from the
conventional rules of speech and behaviour that guide his own
outward conduct, and that in all the main essentials they are, _au
fond_, neither more like him or more unlike him than though chance
had willed that they should be born and brought up on the selfsame
patch of earth as himself. A difference in the vocabulary of the
native-born Australian, or long resident in Australia, of the not
too highly educated order, as well as a difference in his tone of
voice and enunciation, from that of a person belonging to a
corresponding class in England, is one of those facts, however,
which 'nobody can deny.' I am not going to enter in this connection
upon a disquisition respecting the relative merits of what Mrs.
James would have called 'höfisch' English, and the English that has
been coined out of entirely new conditions by pioneers and
backwoodsmen. Suffice it to say there _is_ a difference, and Portia
was never more sensible of it than when she returned, as on the
present occasion, from moving among a London society crowd into the
Anglo-Australian social atmosphere of the Kensington house.
Tasma's efforts to give variety to her work, and keep as far as possible
out of the beaten paths of the Australian writer, have not, however,
quite excluded from her novels characters which will be recognised as
typical. There is, for instance, the young pleasure-loving colonial man
who keeps racehorses, gets deeply into debt and love, and has sometimes
to encounter awkward parental alternatives.
At least three excellent portraits of such men are given. The best is
that of George Drafton, in _In Her Earliest Youth_. In no other novel
are the rough good-nature and loose, slangy talk of the young Australian
sportsman of the upper-middle class more naturally expressed. The
author's knowledge of the cant terms and short cuts in the vocabulary of
the not necessarily ill-educated but supremely careless colonial young
man is almost equal to that of Rolf Boldrewood, who has been listening
to the talk of such men all his life.
Uncle Piper's exasperating 'gentleman' son George is also a noticeably
clever creation in a book full of good portraits; and it is a tribute to
the author's skill that as the story progresses our sympathy for him
increases rather than diminishes, notwithstanding the needless agonies
of rage he occasions his father.
The most vivid chapter to be found in any of Tasma's novels is that in
which Uncle Piper, after witnessing a love-scene between Laura Lydiat
and George, sends for the latter and threatens to cast him off if a
marriage of the pair should take place. Laura is an agnostic and a sort
of 'new woman' who maintains a constant attitude of disdain towards her
stepfather. She and George have spent much of their youth together,
discussed pessimistic theories in Piper's hearing, and generally ignored
him, and made him feel his ignorance in ways very trying to the temper
of a man who, 'now that his money-making days were over, had a passion
for dictating absolutely to everyone about him.' 'He'd talk' and 'she'd
talk,' as Mr. Piper would complain; 'and they'd spout their scraps of
poetry that hadn't an ounce of the sense any good, honest old rhyme
could show; and you'd think, to hear them, they were doing their Maker a
favour by condescending to go on living at all!'
An alliance of this kind between the two people for whom he had done
most with his wealth was bad enough, but Uncle Piper was determined
that it should not become a closer one. Was this not one reason for his
importation of an entire family of impoverished relatives, that they and
his little pet daughter, the angelic Louey, should readjust the balance
of household power in his favour?
It was on the eve of the arrival of his aristocratic connections, the
Cavendishes, that he determined to put a stop to his son's courtship.
George, at the outset of the momentous interview with his father,
speculated inwardly on his chances of being able to soften the old man
to a favourable view of 'the only wish that he had ever framed with a
feeling that savoured of intensity.'
Before entering the ornamental tower where his father awaited him,
George had composed his face to its usual expression of laziest
indifference. His imperturbability always 'had the effect of a goad upon
his father's temper. His face never changed colour when the old man's
was purple. His voice never lost its measured drawl.'
As Mr. Piper turned and faced him you would never have traced the
sonship in George. There was nothing in common between the sallow,
indolent face of the younger man, and the spreading, heated face of
the elder. George looked like any club-lounger--not unwilling to let
it be seen that he is slightly bored, yet ready, with perfect
acquiescence, to go through with an hour or a forenoon of the
infliction of boredom, as conveyed by a father's presence.... Mr.
Piper watched him as he continued tranquilly to pare his nails, the
baffled sense of helplessness that exasperated him at the outset of
an interview with his son creeping over him as he watched. If George
could only once have lost his head and sworn, or only once implored
or threatened! But he never did. The apathy and unconcern of his
attitude--the veiled disrespect it implied--spoke of an indifference
that was worse than the most open revolt. But surely he would be
made to feel now! Mr. Piper had never tried to reach 'my gentleman'
through his 'young woman' yet.... A slight elevation of an unruffled
brow just gave evidence that though his eyes were looking critically
at his almond-shaped finger-nails, his ear took in the sense of his
fathers words. Otherwise he might have served as a perfect model of
intentness upon his hands, as the statue of the boy who to all
eternity will be absorbed in the task of extracting a thorn from his
foot.
Meanwhile Mr. Piper is in a state of acute excitement.
'I'll see and put a stop to it!' he threatened. 'I'll take and pack
her off, and you at the back of her, "my gentleman"!' George knew
that the use of this expression signified especial bitterness on
his father's part. 'I'll have an end of this nonsense--a painted
jade like her!'
'Wait a minute, please,' said George, shutting the knife with a
little snap, and settling himself back upon the window-sill; 'you
are a little hard to follow, or I am slow at catching your meaning,
perhaps. I understand that you had some object in sending for me.
Are you explaining it to me now? I am quite prepared to listen, as
you see.'
'You're very condescending, I'm sure,' said Mr. Piper, with such
withering sarcasm that George stroked his moustache and smiled. 'You
put yourself about for your father a deal too much, "my gentleman,"
there's no doubt of it.' Then, with a sudden break in his voice:
'No, George; it's not much of a son you've been to me, and no one
can say I've stood in your light. I'd like you to show me another
young man who could carry on top ropes like you. There's not many
fathers 'ud have stood it. Most fathers 'ud made you turn to long
ago.'
'Do you want anything done for you?' interrupted George, with the
air of a man who is laying himself out to oblige--'another tour of
inspection in the north?'
Whenever Mr. Piper made allusion to George's want of occupation, it
was the young man's policy to refer to this tour of inspection--a
memorable tour, seeing that it had given him employment for at least
three months....