IX
TWO CITIES
Where, O Earth! is a fairer city
Than this by night, when the Quay’s half circle ...
Lights the dusk of the city’s face?
Miss Mack’s verses to Sydney are the kind of tribute one would wish to pay to a lover of happier days. For that reason they may awake some kind of echo in the breasts of many hundreds of persons who will confess to a fondness for Sydney, but who are indifferent to the ways and methods of the lofty rhyme. For the place has a strong personality. One never thinks of it as merely so many houses and so many people. An entity, a living thing, a friend, a mistress, a consoler, a woman with soft breath and warm-tinted hair, a queen of men and yet their servant—it is any or all of these, and much besides.
The new-comer should arrange to enter Sydney by night. If he does this he will experience the strong and always remembered sensation of emerging from Cimmerian darkness into the blaze of a lighted arena. The waters of the Tasman sea are usually cold and stormy. If you have been ploughing across them for the best part of a week, if you have been beset with bad weather, or sea-sickness, or boredom, or with the three combined, you will hail as one of the pleasant sounds of a lifetime the news that there is visible a glimmer from South Head. Thereafter the transformation is rapid. Sydney by night does not grow upon you; it bursts upon you, and the impression is not soon forgotten. Whatever you have read and whatever you have dreamed of Eastern cities by the Tigris; whatever you have seen of lime-light effects on a brilliant, gaily coloured, thronged and animated stage; whatever you have pictured to yourself of islands and gardens and palaces by the water’s edge—all these and more are around you and in front of you as the ship winds past promontory after promontory, island after island, on its passage towards a mooring place in Darling Harbour. The panorama has an unreal and fairy-like splendour. For a minute or two, perhaps for half an hour, you expect that everything will presently dissolve, and the conditions of blackness and vacancy reassert themselves. But the boat passes on, and the picture remains. You realise after a while that it is the city itself welcoming you, beckoning to you, smiling at you with all its arcs and crescents and its glittering phantasmagoria of lights.
In the daytime all this is changed. Sydney by day is the real Sydney, the working Sydney, and like every other place in which men work and congregate, it has its dull and drab and depressing features. But the strangely marked personal characteristics are there still. They have taken on new phases, and they make a different kind of appeal. Your mistress has no longer the sparkle in her eyes and the diamonds on her brow; she no longer scintillates to dazzle you, and no longer challenges you to admiration by her life and movement. She has grown languorous as the land of the lotos-flower, enervating as the Island of Circë. True, she has her marts and her merchandise, her busy streets, her ships, and her people who toil and spin. But they are a people on whom she has set her imprint, and who have drunk the wine of love and of laughter at her hands. The fact is that neither by day nor by night, neither in summer nor winter, can Sydney look consistently hard or repellant. Now and then a bracing wind blows up from the waste places of the Pacific and talks menacingly of storm and stress and shipwreck. But it loses itself or dies to nothing when in the heart of the city, or when endeavouring to make its way along such good-tempered, well-protected thoroughfares as George and Pitt Streets. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it blusters a little, but only with an amusing semblance of anger. In an hour or two the sun is shining again.
A city that has grown has always an advantage, in point of attractiveness, over one that has been merely made. It is easy to understand the reason. No one cares for the display of qualities that seem to be the result of artificial training. Every one admires spontaneity, or rather the appearance of spontaneity. The thing itself may be a product of the finest art. But that matters nothing. As it is with individuals, so it is with a city. The straight, uncompromising lines which appeal to the draughtsman are of interest to no one else. It is a mistake to cultivate a prim demeanour or to attempt to keep a straight face if Nature has in view something else. The friend who keeps calling “Duty, duty, duty” in your ear is not really wise, and is always certain to be disliked. Equally tedious is the architect, or the surveyor, or the mathematician, who says dogmatically that certain streets should always meet at such and such an angle; that there should be certain spaces for parks and certain widths reserved for traffic; that there should be buildings modelled on particular lines, and conglomerations of houses arranged after a particular fashion; that there should be a scientific method observed in building the thing to be called a city, just as there are particular rules for turning out a baker’s oven or for making a carpenter’s box.
Sydney, as it does not take long to discover, has grown up after a careless and wilful fashion of its own. It is neither consciously straight, nor consciously irregular. Of modern improvements it takes what it pleases, and leaves what it does not want. Buildings cluster round the harbour and bedeck themselves with red-tiled roofs and flaunt their pleasant inertia in the sun. Some of the more recent structures—hotels, warehouses, public markets and the like—are showy and even magnificent. But the main streets make no pretence to symmetry or modernity, and are strongly reminiscent in their narrowness and grime of second and third-rate towns in France and England. The resemblance would be more striking did not Australia lack the pointed, old-world architecture that gives historic quaintness and interest even to the dirtier and more tumbledown villages of Europe. Sydney is suspicious of new inventions, and would prefer that the disturbing, scientific spirit of the age left it alone. Until lately it knew of no better means of locomotion than its steam trams. It is only within the last year or two that it has had its electric cars. The energy with which these gigantic structures rush to and fro and disturb traffic is quite out of keeping with the atmosphere of the place. There are numerous accidents, because so many of the Sydneyites have not the energy to get out of the way.