‘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.