Unlike her is the other type of political woman—the intensely serious, aggressive type. This type is not numerous, but what there is of it is formidable. It is the very latest thing in Australian public life. It is determined to regenerate the world by the deus ex machina of the ballot box. It has a mania for contesting seats in Parliament. Its opinion of the opposite sex is quite unfit for publication—nevertheless it is often published. The type of this description is unusual and rather abnormal, yet there are not wanting indications that it is growing in numbers.
Another kind of woman often met with has made a special cult of æstheticism. With the sex in Australia, æstheticism and theosophy usually go together. The writer has been unable to discover what difference, if any, exists between the two, or where the one begins and the other leaves off. It is surprising to think what a number of girls, particularly during recent years, have taken to professing themselves theosophists. The Anglican curate and the young non-Conformist preacher have but a modified social success in Australia. They are not the toys and darlings of any but a very limited sisterhood. On the other hand, the man who can talk mysticism, and quote Plato or Edwin Arnold, can be sure of a wide and growing feminine clientèle. If, in addition, he can play the violin, he leaps at once into a blaze of popularity. It is an interesting phrase of the feminine temperament, this leaning towards a spiritualistic-cum-theosophic-cum-Buddhist-cum-æsthetic School. The underlying principle, the subtle essence pervading the whole, is a yearning for the higher life. This yearning is not actually expressed in common words “understanded” by the vulgar, but is implied in certain lines borrowed from The Light of Asia, in certain names taken from the Sacred Books of the Vedas, in a certain transcendentalism of appearance, a certain intensity of manner, a certain trick of the voice, now and then in a certain severe simplicity in arranging the hair.
At the opposite pole from the æsthetic, is the athletic woman. This latter type is very often to be met with. Considering the languorous and enervating climate that she has, for the most part, to contend against, her performances are more than creditable. She sweeps a wide gamut of athletic achievement. Golf is one of her specialties, but it does not operate to the exclusion of other things. She plays tennis with a tremendous amount of energy, more particularly when it is a question of a ladies’ four, and the masculine onlooker or player is absent. In the curious and indefinite pastime known as “mixed doubles,” she is a perpetual source of astonishment, alternating between sudden fits of energy and a graceful quiescence in the middle of the court. Her partner is never quite sure whether she is secretly wild with rage at him for taking her shots, or whether she is disgusted with his laziness in leaving so much to her. The athletic woman will also row vigorously, walk untiringly, play hockey till she is red in the face, and dance the strongest male partner off his feet. In the ordinary course of things she is independent of companionship, and has no use whatever for a chaperone. The least attractive feature about her is her language. In this respect she can out-Herod Herod, and out-slang the slangiest barracker at the most exciting football match that was ever played on the Australian field. Even Professor Morris has no clue to certain of the terms which she evolves either from the recesses of her memory, or from the depths of her inner consciousness. It is stated that she can, on occasion, skip lightly across the border of colloquialism into the stormy regions of profanity. That may be so. In any case, there is not a great deal to choose between the lady who sometimes borrows an Australia curse word, and her whose ready-money is the aforesaid awful vernacular.
Yet another type is the scholastic woman. The lingering mediævalism of Oxford and Cambridge would be surprised if it knew to what an extent in Australia masculine prerogative in the matter of higher education has broken down. We teach our girls everything from classics to metaphysics, from the theory of music to the practice of medicine, from botany to jurisprudence, from dressmaking to trigonometry, from cookery to architecture, from domestic economy to Egyptology, from plain sewing to conic sections. There is nothing in which they are not being perpetually instructed; and for the result you have only to look around. The erudite woman is everywhere. Sometimes she teaches in a High School or College; sometimes she is to be encountered at home, just returned from a finishing tour to Europe, half shuddering at the prospect of contact with numerous illiterate and unfinished persons, half inclined to envy her sister the loaves and fishes of common domestic life. This scholarly woman—not the one who possesses merely a smattering of scholarship, but the one who has used her cleverness in a sustained attempt to acquire knowledge—the one who has taken degrees and passed examinations by the dozen—is usually unattractive to the eye. She is inclined to be pale, inclined to be angular, inclined to wear spectacles. She has learned too much to have any illusions. She has worked too hard to have much feminine fancy remaining. It is impossible for her to make a hero of a man, because through a long course of scientific and experimental observations she has become perfectly well acquainted with his thousand weaknesses, vices, physical failings, and mental limitations. The man knows that he stands before her like an open book. Knowing this, he trembles, as he has every reason to do.
As a matter of fact no one of these four types, nor all four together, nor any others that might be given a place in the category, represents, in any general sense, the Australian woman. There is reason for believing that most, if not all the phases of activity just mentioned, together with others that might be mentioned, are sublimely insincere, are magnificently built up on shams. The political woman does not really care for politics. The æsthetic woman is only interested in the picturesque side of æsthetics. The athletic girl considers fame at golf or lawn tennis as at best a means to an end. The lady graduate is not in love with her degree. The woman has not yet been identified who can lay her hand on her heart, and swear that the study of higher mathematics, or even a profound analysis of the Latin poets, is an altogether satisfying pursuit. The age is one of experimentalism, so far as the Australian woman is concerned. She is attempting many things; she is looking for new interests in many directions; she has taken to playing several fresh parts; she has learned quite a number of new tricks. Yet there is a suspicion that they are only tricks after all.
The Australian girl—with the accent on the definite article—remains yet to be defined. Some of her attributes, or accomplishments, or phases are readily enough made out, but many of these are merely incidental modes of the moment; others are to be regarded as streaks of colour on an always variegated landscape; they are not the landscape itself. We know well enough that certain things will invariably take her fancy. A love of dress, a fondness for jewellery, a passion for display, a taste for theatres, a tendency to gush, a dislike for solitude, a mania for admiration—all these are manifestations that are continually meeting the eye of the casual observer. But they are not peculiar to the Australian woman, or to the sex in any one country. And, on the other hand, there are discernment, subtlety, artistic sensibility, grace of movement, warmth of temperament, quickness of sympathy, and much else that could be mentioned. These latter qualities, for all that is known to the contrary, may be in the majority of cases more outward than inward. That is to say, they may be dexterously woven into the garment for purposes of effect. In any case, it does not matter. If the resulting product can please the eye and satisfy the sense it is foolish to begin raising doubts about its precise texture or its wearing capabilities.
Womanhood, per se, apart from incidental gifts and graces, apart from what it can do, and cannot do, seems to be a curious mixture of practicality and sentiment; in other words, of water and fire. The elements are so blended that nature cannot stand up and say with confidence, This is a woman. There is nothing a woman dislikes so much as being called sentimental; but there is nothing she takes to so kindly as sentiment. It is her essence, her metier, a part of the air she breathes; she repudiates it in words, but acknowledges it in practice every day. And yet, with all this extraordinary sentiment, with all this drift towards emotionalism, the Australian girl combines in some mysterious and inexplicable fashion a singular faculty for holding her own, and a marvellously clear eye for the main chance. In the vagaries of her wildest mood there is a concealed art and a sound method. In the whirlwind of her emotionalism there is a certain immovable common-sense. The storm may blow hither and thither, but it blows on sufferance. The cold Angel of reason, with the ruling rod of prudence, is never out of sight and hearing. To understand the position it is only necessary to recollect that the Australian girl, albeit disinclined by temperament to hard routine and cold formality, has been instructed from infancy in many things that were quite unknown to her English sister, at any rate until recent years. She has been taught to rely much upon herself; she is not chaperoned and she is not shut in. Thus it is that, while she is artistically susceptible to every mode of emotion, she will not, except when she is under the age of seventeen, throw herself recklessly away on the first individual who is to be encountered strolling in the garden of Romance; not even though he be a pleasant person and goodly to look upon.
For the reasons just stated or implied, a love affair with an Australian woman is usually an interesting, and often an instructive, experience. In suggesting for his bored and blasé King of Ruritania (or some such place) a love affair with a red-haired woman, Mr Henry Harland was following slavishly in the tracts of physiology. But that kind of science is always unsatisfactory, and, more often than not, misleading. The woman of this continent—Mr Harland had never been in Australia—does not require red hair to prove an antidote for dulness. Her inborn strain of sentiment makes her the finest of natural players in the game of hearts. Her marked individuality and abundance of common-sense render her anything but an easy bird to capture. As a matter of fact, she is more often the pursuer than the pursued. If she sustains a reverse in one direction she recovers it in another. She does not stand to be shot at; she has a thousand subterfuges, a thousand weapons both of defence and attack. It is only experienced players who can encounter her with safety. The crude beginner is almost certain to sustain damage, if, indeed, he is not battered out of recognisable shape.
It is the histrionic faculty again. The more one observes it, the more admirable and the more dangerous it appears. A clever woman talking to an eligible man in a drawing-room—or anywhere else for that matter—is undoubtedly the noblest work of art. Observe how her own individuality and her own ideas are kept in the background, while she seems to be waiting with prettily veiled impatience for the words of wisdom that she knows are about to fall from the man she is talking to. Observe how the electric light has a habit of falling on her profile every now and then. Observe how on occasion it lights up her eyes. Observe also with what artless art she will bend forward her rapt soul in her eyes, and again lean musingly or languorously back. She gives the man every opportunity. If he has anything to say she flatters him by wanting to listen, by drinking it thirstily in. If it becomes evident that he can’t talk, or wont talk, she will talk for him, rally him, entertain him, be brilliant for him, make him imagine that he is brilliant in listening to her. Glancing across the room, we wonder why she does it. We don’t know her motive, but we recognise that the man isn’t worthy. We see that she is wasting her time, throwing herself away. She should be talking to us. We should be talking to her.
“Nature,” said a well-known painter to me only the other week, “is hateful, horrible; it is only art that can make her endurable.” He was speaking in the Melbourne Gallery, and he pointed to a picture of his—a “Symphony,” it was called—which he had given away for a couple of hundred pounds. The finished work was a symphony no doubt; but the copied thing was to any but the artistic eye a dull conglomeration of twig and leaf and timber. We have to thank this painter for creating out of common and unattractive material a feast of colour that must appeal to every beholder. We are not always as grateful as is necessary to the individual who makes himself look other—and incidentally better—than he really is. The world is full of intensely natural and intensely uninteresting people. The unrefined product of nature when presented in its native shape is alarming and calculated to make the beholder flee into the wilderness. To be natural is to be condemned. Let us thank the Australian girl for the fine example, for the clear lead she has given. Let us endeavour to be as artificial, as histrionic as we can.