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 [p 261] 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 [p 262] 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 [p 263] 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 [p 264] 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 [p 265] 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 [p 266] 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.