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.’
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 [p 255] 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 [p 256] 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 [p 257] 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 [p 258] 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 [p 259] 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.