To Mrs. Campbell Praed belongs the credit of being the first to attempt to give an extended and impartial view of the social and political life of the upper classes in Australia. While she has not ignored whatever seemed picturesque in the external aspects of the country, her chief concern has been with the people themselves. Some of the best of her works—Policy and Passion and Miss Jacobsen’s Chance, for example—might fairly be named as an answer to the somewhat common complaint of a deficiency of dramatic suggestion in colonial life.

In a preface to the first-named novel, Mrs. Praed explains it to have been her wish to depict ‘certain phases of Australian life, in which the main interests and dominant [p 230] passions of the personages concerned are identical with those which might readily present themselves upon a European stage, but which directly and indirectly are influenced by striking natural surroundings and conditions of being inseparable from the youth of a vigorous and impulsive nation.’

The point of view here taken by the author at almost the beginning of her literary career has been maintained in most cases throughout her later work. The same preface might almost, in fact, serve for all her Australian stories. They describe broadly, in an attitude of good-natured criticism, the leading facts in the intellectual life of the people; their proud self-reliance, tempered by an acute sense of isolation and its disadvantages; their susceptibility to foreign criticism and example; their frank, natural manners in social customs of native origin, contrasted with their quaintly-rigid observance of conventionalities which have long since been relaxed in the mother country whence they were copied.

Mrs. Praed has turned to account more [p 231] fully than any other writer the 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 [p 232] 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 [p 233] 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 [p 234] 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.[p 235]
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, [p 236] 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 [p 237] 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.[p 238]
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 [p 239] 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 [p 240] 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 [p 241] 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 [p 242] 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.[p 243]
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 [p 244] 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 [p 245] 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 [p 246] 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 [p 247] 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?’[p 248]
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 [p 249] 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 [p 250] 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 [p 251] 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 [p 252] 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 [p 253] 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 [p 254] 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.’