Desmond Byrne

“ The tragedies of marriage—the union of the refined and imaginative with the coarse and commonplace, the high-souled with the worldly and cynical, the pure with the impure—are correlative themes of some of the strongest of the novels. In these, pathos is the prevailing tone. We have the spectacle of the woman’s blind, illogical trust abused, her helplessness in self-inflicted misery, or the tenacity with which, in temptation, she clings to the safeguards of conventional morality. ”

“ His choice of incident and adventure in Geoffry Hamlyn seems to imply a deliberate ignoring of what was [p 100] by far the most striking development of Antipodean life in the decade of 1850-60.
The gold-fields were then in a sense an epitome of the world, the centre at which all men’s thoughts converged, an ever-changing spectacle, a daily source of novelty and suggestion. The life of the squatters was primitive, inferior in variety, and marked only by a rapid accumulation of wealth, which was in itself but a part of the general prosperity created by the discovery of gold. ”

“ That any man living an adventurous and precarious life, often in rude associations and [p 160] without the stimulus of ambition or of intellectual society, should write poetry at all is a matter for some wonder. And when several of the compositions of such a writer are marked by rare vigour and melody, and some few are worthy to rank with the best of their kind produced in the century, it must be held that the gift of the author is genuine and spontaneous. ”

“ A writer with so much experience of Australia, and continuing to reside in it, cannot be surprised if he is expected to take a large share of responsibility for the fact that Australian fiction—the fiction produced by writers known to the British public—only in a slight degree reflects the most interesting features in the present-day life of the country. At the same time, no such considerations can detract from the sterling merits of Rolf Boldrewood’s actual services to Australian literature. ”

“ His affection for her was returned, and he knew it, but dreading the disillusionment that would ensue when her sight was restored, he fled to Australia and determined to abandon all thought of her as a wife. Urged to return, because ‘when a woman is a woman,’ and really in love with a man, ‘there’s no camel she won’t swallow for him,’ Drewe replied that his camel was just the one camel that no woman had been known to swallow, or, at any rate, to digest. ”

“ Nor does he ever take advantage of the fact that, with the exception of two or three others whose works are collections of sketches rather than novels, and whose names are now almost forgotten, he was the first to describe in fiction the rural life of the country, to recognise the beginning of an aristocracy of landholders, and to commemorate the pervading spirit of cheerful confidence to which so much of the rapid early development of Australia was due. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every man worth calling a man knows that. A girl of that age ... knows as much about love as does a young animal in the spring, and not a bit more. And the human male of these days—so highly developed, so subtly compounded—has grown out of the stage when that much would satisfy him. I mean, of course, the human male who in real life answers to the hero in fiction—a man who must have left, not only his teens, but his twenties behind him.’
When one comes to the heroes, it is easy to recall half a dozen commanding figures who blunder in the most natural and amiable manner in their affairs ”

“ 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. ”

“ For sixty years the practice of deporting criminals had been carried on, upheld in England by official indifference and callousness, and in the colonies themselves by the greed of a small class of private persons who grew rapidly wealthy upon the strength of assigned convict labour, until the free emigrants by the authority of their numbers were able to insist upon its cessation. For so long as the colonies were willing to receive a population of criminals, so long was England only too anxious to supply them and make a virtue out of it. ”

“ The field is narrow in Australia, yet not too narrow for the writer who, foregoing the taste for sensation, will be content to transcribe and interpret impressions of [p 31] the moving humanity around him to their minutest detail; who will forget the pioneer squatter, the Oxford scholar disguised as a ‘rouseabout,’ and the digger and bushranger of a past generation; who will sacrifice something of dramatic effect in the endeavour to produce a faithful and finished picture of colonial middle-class society. ”

“ The satire and cynicism so noticeable in Clarke’s writings, especially in his critical sketches and essays, are liable to give an inaccurate conception of his temperament. They obscure, as such characteristics nearly always do in literature, the gentler aspects of the writer’s nature. His satire is, perhaps, too uncompromising. It often seems to reflect a personal bitterness, to take too little cognisance of the springs of human weakness. ”

“ Whether in recording the actions and dialogue of his characters, or in describing scenery and the habits of the birds and animals which figure so often in his first novel, Kingsley always reflected some of his own happiness. It is not wit nor subtle humour, but a combination of pure mirth with the enthusiasm of warm friendship, that maintains one’s interest in the simple life of the new Drumston. There is an abundance of farcical fun and playfulness which force laughter, and never approach an unkindness. The men avoid being smart at each other’s expense ”

“ Even Rutherford, with all the sense of his mature years, and all the culture that enabled him to appreciate her poetic gift, would have had to argue himself into a marriage with her.
The ugliness of Adam Drewe, from which his mother turned in disgust at his birth, and which in youth drove him across the seas in an agony of sensitiveness from the woman he loved, was a less serious affliction than that of Hilda Donne ”

“ It is true that Australia has received many a compliment from casual writers, but to Australians themselves it is always a question whether these kindnesses are not outbalanced by the inaccuracies which surround them. For it may as well be said at once that the younger colonists do not relish being denied all native individuality, and depicted with a complaisant condescension as mere imitators of English life. ”

“ In all the novels there are memorable scenes of tenderness, among the best of which are those between Fidelia and Adam Drewe, first in their brief meetings as girl and youth—she with her weak eyes bandaged, but reading him through his voice and bashful deprecation; he yearning to remain with her, but forcing himself away—and then in long years after, when he returns to find her in widowhood and poverty, and to all seeming hopelessly blind. ”

“ Any survey of the work done by Australian authors suggests a question as to what length of time ought to be allowed for the development of distinctive national characteristics in the literature of a young country self-governing to the extent of being a republic in all but name, isolated in position, highly civilised, enjoying all the modern luxuries available to the English-speaking race in older lands, and with a population fully two-thirds native. The common saying that a country cannot be expected to produce literature during the earlier state of its growth is too vague a generalisation. ”

“ As the general effect of Ada Cambridge’s teaching, so far as it can be gathered from her plots, and the few instances in which she has permitted herself anything in the shape of didactic expression, is to make us more patient with life’s complexities and perceptive of its compensations, and more content with whatever happiness may be drawn in our way by the chain of accidents called Destiny, so do her principal characters, in their foibles and their strength—in the little acts and impulses which qualify alike their heroism and their baseness—tend to make us more discriminative and charitable. ”

“ The estate which has been the home of Major Buckley’s forefathers for generations no longer providing a competence, he has resolutely left it for the land where he is to find ‘a new heaven and a new earth.’ Unlike so many of the pioneers, he has bade a final good-bye to England, but that it is not ‘for ever’ one can safely predict from the outset. He sees the old country in long years after, when, with some of the wealth garnered on the rolling prairies of Northern Australia, his son has proudly bought back the family domain of Clere in all the completeness of its original acres. ”

“ The attempt to preserve absolute truth in every detail of the life-story of John Redgrave, the hero of The Squatter’s Dream, seems distinctly a case in point. In no other novel is there so complete a description of Australian squatting life—its varying success and failure, its solid comforts and wholesome happiness in times of prosperity. Redgrave is one of the most elaborately drawn of all the author’s characters; there is the fullest sense of probability in every incident ”

“ In the conversation of Kingsley’s colonists, [p 116] the business of the squatter, his hopes, fears and struggles, find no place, and the idea of hard work is never obtruded for its own sake. The talk is the talk of a cultured class who live wholesome lives and have no cares. The twelve thousand miles that separate them from the centre of their intellectual life are obliterated. ”

“ Praed is not in any sense a propagandist on the subject of marriage. She illustrates, often impressively, its difficulties and anomalies, but leaves the rest to the judgment of the reader. The romantic, ignorant girl who marries on trust, or is ready to do so, has numerous representatives in these novels. Though it is a woman’s view of her trials and unhappiness that is given, there is nothing in the shape of a crusade against male vices. It is not the faults of men that are dwelt upon so much as the inevitably lenient, the pitifully inadequate estimate which women make of men themselves. ”

“ In all of his best poems, there is some central human interest, something that tells for courage, honour, manly resignation. When a story does not come readily to his hand in the new world, he seeks one in the old. He fondly turns to the spacious days of the old knighthood, when men drank and loved deeply, when they were ready to put happiness or life itself upon a single hazard. The subjects that Gordon best liked were [p 178] short dramatic romances, which he found it easier to evolve from literature than from the life and history of his adopted country. ”

“ The plot is mainly concerned with the selfish, cruel, and infamous in human nature—a singularly dark theme for a young beginner in fiction to choose. Except at rare intervals when the business of characterisation is momentarily set aside, as in the vivid descriptions of the Kirkminster Steeplechase and the Matcham Hunt, there is little suggestion of youthful spirit or freshness.
The outlines of plot and incident are attractively arranged, the expression of life for the most part second-hand and artificial. ”

“ A childlike trust in one’s fellows, a reputation for good-nature, an untamable taste for horseflesh and the pursuits of the Bush, belong to every young squatter in a certain class of Australian fiction ”

“ Praed has expended her best efforts as a writer. Some study of [p 241] the human emotions is the primary interest in all her novels. There is nearly always love of the passionate and romantic kind, prompted on the one side by impulse, ignorance or glamour, and on the other by passing fancy or self-interest: the love of an innocent, unsophisticated woman for a man experienced in the pleasures and some of the darker vices of life; and, in contrast, the blunt respect and devotion of the typical Australian man for the same woman, and her light estimate of his worth. ”

“ Bryce places ‘a desire to be abreast of the best thought and work of the world everywhere, and to have every form of literature and art adequately represented and excellent of its kind, so that America shall be felt to hold her own among the nations.’ And he further attributes to them ‘an admiration for literary or scientific eminence, an enthusiasm for anything that can be called genius, with an over-readiness to discover it.’
Artistic talent in America has from an early period in the history of the country enjoyed the stimulus of local respect and attention. ”

“ In all his journalistic criticism, Marcus Clarke scarcely more than pointed to the material which the life of such cities as Melbourne and Sydney offer a novelist capable of work like that of Mr. W. D. Howells, or the series of tales of urban society in America by Mr. Marion Crawford. There is now an opportunity, and, one might almost say, a need, for fiction which shall also, in effect, be salutary criticism. The Antipodes have lately illustrated the fact that a single decade will sometimes witness a notable change in the conditions of an entire people in a new and rapidly-developing country. ”