'I think we must have seemed very ridiculous the day you landed.... I know you are astonished at some of our public men.... You will write home and say how rude and rough and vulgar some of them are.'
'If one wants to see the ridiculous, one can see it everywhere. We have some public men at home who are rude and rough, and vulgar and ridiculous.... One has to make allowances, of course, for training and habits, and all that.... When our fellows are rough, there is less excuse for them. The more one goes about the world, the less one sees to laugh at, I think....'
English self-complacency is, of course, a growth of centuries, but perhaps a deliberate and intelligent effort to acquire some of it in Australia would be the best specific for that consciousness which, colonists should not forget, is the mark of insignificance. It has been said that Australians already have too much to say for themselves and their country. The assertion is only applicable to a small boisterous class who have never seen anything beyond their own shores.
A much commoner element of Antipodean life, one which some of Mrs. Praed's characters notably illustrate, is the desire for wider experience and culture produced among educated people by their constant use of British and European literature. James Ferguson, the young squatter in _The Head Station_, represents those Australians who, though stout believers in their own country, feel its intellectual deficiencies--perhaps too much; who are more English than the English themselves in their veneration for the historic associations of the mother land; who, when they go to London, are curiously at home in streets and among sights that have been more or less definitely outlined in their imagination from early childhood.
While three of his English-bred companions are exchanging reminiscences of London life, Ferguson listens with an eager interest, 'putting in a remark every now and then which had the savour, so readily detected, of acquaintance with the thing in question by means of books rather than personal experience.' In Mrs. Praed's stories, as in real life, a personal acquaintance with other countries gives the Australian a truer appreciation of the good in his own. The man who has taken part in the artificialities of a London season, or has been a spectator of its petty rivalries, returns joyfully to a simpler life; the woman who is prone to deify the smooth-spoken Englishman, learns through him to value the more homely virtues of colonial manhood.