Readers of Silas Lapham will remember the rapid series of witty touches with which the burly Bostonian is sketched as he sits in the office of his warehouse, surrounded by samples of the mineral paint that he is so pathetically proud of, striving to maintain a dignified indifference as he answers the rather flippant curiosity of the local press [p 267] interviewer. Uncle Piper, on the other hand, is introduced, as all of Tasma’s characters are, in sundry solid-looking pages of direct narrative. It is true that their humour and epigram make bright reading, but they are necessarily without the power of pithy dialogue to create a vivid impression of character.
Whether Uncle Piper is a type of Australian plutocracy need hardly be discussed. Of plebeian tradesmen grown wealthy every community has its proportion. It may, however, be said that the owners of luxurious villas in the suburbs of Melbourne have individually a good deal more grammar and less generosity than he who was described by one of his fashionable English guests as possessing ‘the home of a West-End magnate and the intonation of a groom.’ The author herself would probably disclaim any intention to represent a type. She is one of those writers who doubt the existence of types in the ordinary meaning of the term, and she certainly makes no conscious attempt to delineate them.
A passage in her third novel, The Penance [p 268] of Portia James, gives her views on this subject, and incidentally upon Australian character. A description is furnished of a breakfast-party in the London home of an Australian who has made his fortune in a silver-mine, and from being a habitué of colonial racecourses has lately developed into a patron of art and a purchaser of dubious ‘old masters’ at exorbitant prices.
To hold up the assembled party to the eyes of English readers as thoroughly typical Australians would be as unjust a proceeding as was that of Dumas père when he declared that all the inhabitants of Antwerp were roux because he had encountered two red-headed girls on his way to the hotel. No one is thoroughly typical unless he be a savage or a peasant. Portia and her relatives retained their own underlying individualities none the less that they had been influenced in their outward bearing and modes of expressing themselves by a long sojourn in the backwoods of Victoria, in daily contact with all sorts and conditions of men—broken-down gentlemen, English yokels, bush-hands, and the like. After all, the moulding of character by outward influences alone is not a work to be achieved in one generation, or what would become of the theory of heredity, upon which everything is supposed to depend, more or less, in our present scientific age? If these people strike the English reader, therefore, as differing in certain respects from those he is accustomed to meet in his daily walk through life, let him remember that the [p 269] differences which will strike him most are the merely superficial ones resulting from an occasional departure from the conventional rules of speech and behaviour that guide his own outward conduct, and that in all the main essentials they are, au fond, neither more like him or more unlike him than though chance had willed that they should be born and brought up on the selfsame patch of earth as himself. A difference in the vocabulary of the native-born Australian, or long resident in Australia, of the not too highly educated order, as well as a difference in his tone of voice and enunciation, from that of a person belonging to a corresponding class in England, is one of those facts, however, which ‘nobody can deny.’ I am not going to enter in this connection upon a disquisition respecting the relative merits of what Mrs. James would have called ‘höfisch’ English, and the English that has been coined out of entirely new conditions by pioneers and backwoodsmen. Suffice it to say there is a difference, and Portia was never more sensible of it than when she returned, as on the present occasion, from moving among a London society crowd into the Anglo-Australian social atmosphere of the Kensington house.
Tasma’s efforts to give variety to her work, and keep as far as possible out of the beaten paths of the Australian writer, have not, however, quite excluded from her novels characters which will be recognised as typical. There is, for instance, the young pleasure-loving [p 270] colonial man who keeps racehorses, gets deeply into debt and love, and has sometimes to encounter awkward parental alternatives.
At least three excellent portraits of such men are given. The best is that of George Drafton, in In Her Earliest Youth. In no other novel are the rough good-nature and loose, slangy talk of the young Australian sportsman of the upper-middle class more naturally expressed. The author’s knowledge of the cant terms and short cuts in the vocabulary of the not necessarily ill-educated but supremely careless colonial young man is almost equal to that of Rolf Boldrewood, who has been listening to the talk of such men all his life.
Uncle Piper’s exasperating ‘gentleman’ son George is also a noticeably clever creation in a book full of good portraits; and it is a tribute to the author’s skill that as the story progresses our sympathy for him increases rather than diminishes, notwithstanding the needless agonies of rage he occasions his father.
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The most vivid chapter to be found in any of Tasma’s novels is that in which Uncle Piper, after witnessing a love-scene between Laura Lydiat and George, sends for the latter and threatens to cast him off if a marriage of the pair should take place. Laura is an agnostic and a sort of ‘new woman’ who maintains a constant attitude of disdain towards her stepfather. She and George have spent much of their youth together, discussed pessimistic theories in Piper’s hearing, and generally ignored him, and made him feel his ignorance in ways very trying to the temper of a man who, ‘now that his money-making days were over, had a passion for dictating absolutely to everyone about him.’ ‘He’d talk’ and ‘she’d talk,’ as Mr. Piper would complain; ‘and they’d spout their scraps of poetry that hadn’t an ounce of the sense any good, honest old rhyme could show; and you’d think, to hear them, they were doing their Maker a favour by condescending to go on living at all!’
An alliance of this kind between the two people for whom he had done most with his [p 272] wealth was bad enough, but Uncle Piper was determined that it should not become a closer one. Was this not one reason for his importation of an entire family of impoverished relatives, that they and his little pet daughter, the angelic Louey, should readjust the balance of household power in his favour?
It was on the eve of the arrival of his aristocratic connections, the Cavendishes, that he determined to put a stop to his son’s courtship. George, at the outset of the momentous interview with his father, speculated inwardly on his chances of being able to soften the old man to a favourable view of ‘the only wish that he had ever framed with a feeling that savoured of intensity.’