The claim is occasionally made, that one part of the continent is more favourable to high dramatic art than another. Melbourne, which is always endeavouring to be superior to every other city in Australia, is accustomed to delude itself with the idea that it is fond of intellectual plays. It makes a decent pretence, now and again, of attending a revival of Shakespeare. If the brief season proves a failure, as it usually does, the critics unkindly tell the performers that it is they, and not the Bard of Avon, or the taste of the Melbourne public, that are at fault. Sydney, to do it justice, is given over to no such unnecessary make-believe. Shakespeare has been expurgated so much that there is no risk, and consequently no excitement, in going to see him, and Sydney stays away.
Outside the drama there are amusements which, between them, take up most of the thought and most of the spare time of the people. But little requires to be said of them, because, while they resemble the drama in that they are borrowed from abroad, they give much less scope for the play of individual taste and temper and sensibility. Racing is the national recreation, just as gambling is the national vice. The two insensibly melt into each other. It is a great sporting continent. When the word “sport” is used—when a certain individual is called a sportsman, and another individual is referred to as a follower of “the game”—the reference is invariably to the game in which the horse and the bookmaker play the leading parts. No writer, however admirable his intentions, and however lurid his language, has been able to exaggerate the hold which racing has over the whole population from Port Darwin to Cape Otway, and from Brisbane round to Perth. The office boy reads his racing intelligence in the papers with as much zest, and usually with as much critical discernment, as does the man of wealth and leisure. The man who never goes to horse races and never talks horse, is to be met with, but he is distinctly uncommon. He stands apart from the rest of the community. He is a modern Isaac Newton, given to voyaging through strange social seas alone.
The assertion that racing is a noble and improving pastime—improving to the breed of horses and incidentally to the people who look on—is continually being made by writers who should know something of the subject. A few delusions of the respectable sort are considered necessary in the life of a people, and the decent efforts of sporting authorities to keep these delusions alive are not treated with disrespect. But any one who wishes to discover the real facts can easily do so. The public who support racing care as much for improving the breed of horses, as they do for civilising the Solomon Islanders, or for christianising the Chinese—as much and no more. The horse is emphatically not the thing; he is not the end; he can hardly be called the means to the end; he is merely a useful pawn in the great and insidious gambling game. In this game there are certain rules which have to be observed. That is to say, they must not be broken in too open, or too defiant, or too glaring a manner. But under cover of these rules, and under pretext of observing them, every one does his best to swindle every one else. The owner begins by deceiving the public; the trainer, if it is sufficiently worth his while, misleads the owner; the jockey scores repeatedly off the trainer; the bookmaker does his best to make a profit out of the other three. The people who pay in the last resort are the public. It is all very interesting, and very expensive. The atmosphere of speculation is buoyant and breezy, and, for the time being, exhilarating. Yet for all except those who have learned how to move about in it—for all except the owners, and, trainers, and jockeys, and bookmakers, and a few others—it is decidedly unhealthy. While it is possibly advisable to have national amusements, it is an advantage to understand what we are doing. The man in Mrs Thurston’s novel, who keeps talking about “nerves,” when he means opium, becomes, after a time, an infliction. And the individual who is always referring to “sport,” when he means horse-racing, is in danger of growing tedious.
The continent has its athletic games, although none of these can be called national in the sense that racing is national. Not even cricket. The Englishman sees more of Australian cricketers than he does of Australian horses, and may be inclined to think that a country which has beaten him at Lords, while it has been unable to raise a decent gallop at Epsom, must perforce pay more attention to cricket than it does to horse-racing. The idea, if it exists, is amusingly erroneous. How do the attendances at Club cricket compare with the attendances at local race meetings? How does the sprinkling of enthusiasts at the one fixture look beside the tens of thousands, who, week in and week out, follow the racing game in every centre of population in the Commonwealth? An international cricket match will always draw a crowd; but international cricket matches are few and far between. The truth is that the speculation fever, the gambling fever, the fever to which the horse acts as the main irritant, runs in the blood of the people. The other excitements are transitory, and merely endemic.
In the realm of sport, to use the generic word, there is nothing that the people will not attempt, nothing on which they have not turned a roving eye. They play football, golf, tennis, croquet, hockey, lacrosse, bridge, ping-pong, and a great deal else. They indulge in skating on artificial ice, and, in the middle of a tropic summer, struggle with dumplings and roast beef. They seek amusement everywhere. In the mass, they are far more impressed by skill at some kind of game than by any intellectual achievements. The hero-worship goes out, in the first place, to the successful cricketer, and in the next place, to the leading jockey, with the politician an indifferent third, and the local poet or litterateur entirely out of the running. It is an undeniable fact that his countrymen were more proud of that amiable and pleasant youth, Mr Victor Trumper, after his English season of 1902, than they have ever been of any Prime Minister, actor, author, singer, poet, or professor of metaphysics in the land.
In the world of sport and of recreation, just as in the world of the stage, there is the tendency to borrow, and to borrow again. The games that are played in England are played here, just as the kind of drama that is acted in England is acted here. It matters little whether the climate and temperament and other conditions are suitable, or the reverse. The initiative faculty is stronger than its surroundings. To watch a game of Rugby football in progress at Charters Towers, or at Brisbane, is to wonder whether a new race of Salamanders, gifted with tireless energy and some marvellous kind of asbestos physique, has struck the earth. There is only one thing that may in the end kill the initiative faculty, and that is the national dislike for too much exertion. There are not wanting faint indications that Australia is beginning to find the strain of these more strenuous pastimes too severe, that it is slowly but surely coming to the conclusion that training for football and for sculling matches necessitates more sustained effort than the result is worth. It may be all very well for the Englishman to keep himself warm by vigorous exercise. His climate requires heroic treatment. The Australian, though still ready to abase himself before the successful athlete, is slowly working round to the conviction that certain pursuits are better adapted for the Northern Hemisphere than for his own. The day is coming, and may not be far distant, when the Australian people will revolt from their Christmas dumplings, and abandon their Rugby football; when they will be content, from North to South, with backing unreliable steeds on a race-course, with playing poker in a shady room, and with watching from the stalls of a theatre, the swaying forms of lightly clad heroines, and the graceful movements of dancing feet.
VIII
THE ETERNAL FEMININE
“But still I see the tenor of man’s woe
Holds on the same, from woman to begin.”