For if the place fails in this or in that respect, it never fails to keep its expectations high. It has been doing this for the past dozen years or more. It has long outgrown its happy-go-lucky, red-shirted, soft-collared, mining, pioneering days. It has no wish to recall these outward symbols of an earlier and a vanished generation. With the memory of many losses and many disappointments, there is still the determination to put the best face on everything. Though the crowds no longer hum and vibrate round its chief thoroughfares, it retains its streets and its houses, its spacious theatres and commodious public buildings; its magnificent Houses of Parliament, its squares and gardens, its network of railways and tram lines, its villa residences at St Kilda and its mansions at Toorak. The outward shell of things is still there. Every now and then there is a sign of movement, an agitation as of returning life. The people are convinced that something is going to happen. The period of depression, they say, cannot last for ever. In imagination they can see the Golden Days ever returning.
Meantime, the business of keeping up appearances goes on. Melbourne has become accustomed, through sheer force of insistence on its individual merits, to regard itself as everything that a modern city ought to be, and as most things that other cities are not. It prides itself on a great deal—on its music, its art, its culture, its architecture, its good looks, and its intelligence. In the matter of dress it aspires to set the fashion for Australia. Men and women join in this amiable rivalry. The girl of the Victorian capital is more severe in demeanour, more classic in pose, and more punctilious in attire than her Sydney sister. She takes herself more seriously. She has few negligé airs and graces; she does not cultivate the irresponsible freedom of the gown of Nora Creina; she arrays herself for the Block with a firm resolve to compel critical admiration. And in this she generally succeeds. The men of Melbourne live in starched shirts and expensive broadcloth. They cling tenaciously to that fading relic of an earlier civilisation—the bell-topper hat. Social life in the city would be impossible without one. The Universities keep up their quota of students, whether the parents can afford to pay or not. The theatres can attract audiences even for a performance of Wagner, or a revival of Shakespeare. The city fathers set an example of dignity to the rest of Australia. The politicians rarely call each other bad names, and never indulge in free fights on the floor of Parliament.
Behind all this outward seeming there is, it need hardly be said, a great amount of make-believe. Melbourne is only the temporary capital of the Commonwealth, but it is the permanent centre of—to use an ecclesiastically sounding word—attitudinarianism. Its mental life is more the expression of a desire to be thought superior to others than the outcome of any set of inborn predilections. Its intellectuality has the motto videri quam esse. There is not one of its learned pundits or its litterateurs or its native born poets who has won much outside reputation. Its scrupulous regard for dress is the screen for much actual poverty. Its vaunted cosmopolitanism has no real existence. Its social circle is, only too often, the playground of snobs. Its professed public virtue deceives no one. In Sydney the spectacle of vice undraped, and of Lais plying her profession in the public streets, is more insistent and more familiar. But in Melbourne there is as much for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to grieve over, though there may be less that meets the casual eye.
When the last word has been said on the subject—when it has been admitted that Melbourne pretends a great deal and poses a great deal, and hides a great deal—it is yet a fact that the city retains among its people much of sterling worth, and many of the elements of greatness. From the army of those who are not what they claim to be, or not what they would have you think them to be, may be picked out a leaven of those who are entitled to respect, and perhaps to something more. Alert, quick-witted, well-read, well-mannered, tolerant, and scrupulously fair—that is the type which may be encountered if the search is keen enough. Hereafter, this type may set the standard. At present, all that can be said of it is that it is there.
The fact must always stand to the credit of Melbourne that it is capable of generous enthusiasms. When it lets itself go, it does so without reserve. Carlyle has remarked that a man who can laugh unrestrainedly, even if he only laughs once, is not wholly bad. A city that can cheer unitedly and unreservedly, whether for a singer, an orator, an actor, or a returned contingent, has at least some prospect of emerging from the wilderness of shams in which it happens to be located. Melbourne rises to greatness the moment it forgets itself.
X
THE NOVELIST
AND HIS SELECTION
Some are born great, some achieve
greatness, and some have greatness
thrust upon them.—Malvolio in Twelfth Night.