There are certain truisms that do not require to be insisted upon. They are self-evident. Mr Henry Crosland, who has become quite famous through his ingenious habit of turning positives into negatives, and negatives into positives, says that the moral tone of English upper-class circles is excellent, while that of English middle-class circles is deceitful and desperately wicked. But the ordinary man, with no literary reputation to weigh him down, declares confidently that the facts are neither as George Eliot nor as Mr Crosland declare them to be. The term society, as commonly used and understood, refers to the limited number of people who have come into possession either of a certain property or of a certain name. The atmosphere of this circle is not light and buoyant. It is heavy, and blasé, and tired, and dull. This good English society does not float on gossamer wings; it drags itself round two continents with very conscious endeavour. It is not ironical; to be that, requires mental effort, while it is easier and more effective to be supercilious. This same society is not moral; the whole scheme and purpose of conventional morality is narrow and circumscribed, and therefore unattractive to those unprejudiced people who perceive that arbitrary rules of conduct are made for slaves. The set in question is in no single particular what its apologists and admirers declare it to be. It is not really exclusive; a man with sufficient means can always enter it. There is only one thing to which it is actively antagonistic, and that is ability. It is not antagonistic to poverty; it is merely disdainful. Its arrogance is appalling. Its lack of creative power is more appalling still.
And yet while the characteristics of the best London society are of this nature—while the whole edifice would suggest the Jugurtha reflection that the city is for sale, and will perish quickly when it finds a purchaser—it is undeniably true that the passion to enter the comparatively limited circle is steadily growing. The desire is the natural result of that envy which the man or woman who is everywhere circumscribed feels for the individual who is in all things privileged. The important circumstance at present is that the London “four hundred” were never more run after than they are to-day. Their patronage and presence were never in greater demand. We may swear that this smart set is a very dull set; we may vow with the earnestness of conviction that its very atmosphere is fatal to initiative and inimical to brains, and more destructive to morals than to either; but there is not a woman, scarcely a man among us who does not bear witness, in the way he dresses, or dines, or parts his hair, or takes the hand of a lady in a ball-room, that he is a humble imitator of the example set him by the people who live in large houses and flourish in the pages of De Brett. There is not a man outside this narrow pale, be he English or Australian, who could walk along Piccadilly in the company of two members of the aristocracy, effete though that aristocracy may be, without a sense of elation bordering on vertigo. With all its vice and frippery and inanity and boredom, the thing called society is an influence, a power, a far-reaching entity, a commanding and controlling force. From a distance we can criticise it and discover what it really means, what it actually is. But at close quarters it makes cowards of us—that is to say, of all who are not hermits or desperadoes, of all who are not phenomenally rich or abysmally poor.
Good society, as already mentioned, is a peculiarly English institution. Nevertheless, it has flourishing offshoots in different parts of the world. In Australia, there is rapidly growing up a set of conventions and a habit of speech founded on a close study of the older community. There is such a thing as Australian society. It exists. It is ambitious. It aspires to be recognised. It wants to grow. Some of its members have been presented at Court and have brought back with them large social aspirations. Certain of its women have been taken into dinner by members of the British peerage. Quite a number of Australian tailors have been in Bond Street and have made observations. A proportion of Australian dressmakers has seen something of Paris. These dealers in cloth and millinery have magnificent ideas. They have impressed themselves and their notions on the home-staying community. So it has come about that dress, wealth, reputation, fashion, and appearance have done a great deal between them to create the nucleus of a favoured clientèle, and to scatter to the winds the obsolete idea that in a democracy all things are equal, and all people are socially on a par.
What, it may be asked at the outset, is meant by the term “Australian society”? It has been agreed that something of the kind has been evolved. But who are the individuals? Where are they? How can they be recognised? For purposes of rough-and-ready definition, they may be classified as the people who are in the habit of receiving invitations to Government House. It is the business of the aide-de-camp to discover who is who in Australia. The task is impossible to the statistician or the scientist, but it seems in some mysterious fashion to fit in with the temperament and abilities of an aide-de-camp. There are no definite rules that can be relied upon. The dividing line between desirables and non-desirables is of the most shifty, and uncertain, and elusive character. Yet, when mistakes are made, as they always will be, the social uproar is tremendous. The unfortunate official whose business it is to request the pleasure of So-and-so’s company at a Vice-regal dance, or a garden party, is for ever voyaging upon troubled waters, with scarcely a beacon or a land-mark to guide him. His eye may light upon a few judges, a few prominent politicians, one or two naval and military officers, half a dozen wealthy land-owners, and a few prosperous warehousemen. So far as they are concerned, he knows he is safe. But there remain the grocer, the land-agent, the brewer, the confectioner, the lawyer, the singer, the actor, the doctor, the grass-widow, and many more—a miscellaneous assortment which cannot be entirely ignored or collectively accepted, and which presents a problem baffling in the last degree.
It is almost unnecessary to say that the social world of Australia is controlled by women. It is they who set most store upon artificial distinctions. It is they who value most the receipt of a request to disport themselves on His Excellency’s lawn, or in His Excellency’s ball-room. It is they who understand best how far the Vice-regal card of invitation exalts them over their sisters who have not come in for a like attention. The average man, if left to his own devices, would not sparkle with animation at the prospect of either a Government House dance, or a Government House garden party. This average man—unless he happens to be very young and very volatile—is not an enthusiastic exponent of those ball-room exercises in which Ouida’s heroes excel. Neither has he any delight in the formality and stiffness, the silk hats and the long coats inseparable from a two hours’ promenade on some distinguished person’s lawn. If it were a matter of personal inclination, he would confess that he knew better ways of amusing himself. But the Australian woman is socially ambitious. Her passion for social festivities is unquenchable. When the tocsin has sounded she will march with the procession—at the head of it, if she can. And the man of her circle, whether he likes it or not, must march with her.
All the mannerisms that do duty in the society of one hemisphere come in their turn to do duty in the society of the other. The puppets advance and retire to identical sets of rules. If the high handshake is fashionable in England, it must become fashionable in Australia. If it is the custom to take your partner’s arm in the West End of London, it has to be the custom, a little later, in certain quarters of Melbourne and Sydney. If it is the correct thing for the young English lordling to talk in tired monosyllables to the daughter of the Marquis, it is equally the correct thing for the Australian young man of means to look as bored as possible when conversing with the daughter of the host. One artificiality follows another. The imitative processes extend to the manner of using a finger-bowl, and of handling an eye-glass. If white waistcoats and gaudy ties are the rule among certain people in England, they become the rule among certain people in Australia. Society in either country is raised, fortified, buttressed, and embellished with shams—with shams that have nothing to recommend them on the score of cleverness, or ingenuity, or outward grace or hidden meaning. They represent, simply and solely, the desire of a certain class to do certain things in a manner peculiar to itself.
As to the inner life of this fashionable society, as it exists in Australia, there is little new to be said. The object in view is simply that in view everywhere else, namely, that of obtaining as much amusement as possible, and of being left to one’s own devices as little as possible. All the distractions known to civilised man are drawn upon in one country as in another. The men bet on racecourses, drink, and play cards. The women do all three, and in addition smoke and talk scandal. In one respect Australian society has an advantage over that of London, or of Paris. It has more physical energy with which to pursue its vices and its follies to the bitter end. Its opportunities for extravagant display may be fewer, but its zest is greater. It has no series of inter-marriages to look back upon. It has no titled and blasé families to support. Its fathers or its grandfathers belonged to the race of hardy pioneers. The present generation is the product of a virile stock. As a consequence it has not exhausted its physical equipment. There is a certain buoyancy about its mental attitude, a certain juvenility in its pursuit of the bubbles of the moment. The nil admirari manner, borrowed from London drawing-rooms, sits awkwardly on its shoulders. If it could only get away from old-world traditions, if it were willing to stand upon its feet, if it would leave its absurd mannerisms to the people who first invented them, this Australian society, with all its health and youth and unimpaired vitality, with all its magnificent opportunities furnished by variety of scene and splendour of climate, might set an example of living which other countries would have reason to envy, if they had not the power to imitate. For Australia, if the fact were only recognised, is a country in which it is possible to enjoy oneself finely, or to deny oneself greatly, as the mood pleases, independently of the world.
One characteristic of Australian society is its vulgarity; another is its snobbery; another is its lack of ideals. The vulgarity is apparent on the surface. It is usually explained on the ground of want of familiarity with the more luxurious and the more cultivated conditions of living. To endow a man who commenced life as a small shopkeeper with a large house, a carriage, some superior furniture, and still more expensive possessions in the shape of wife and daughters, is not to make him refined. The glorified tradesman is the pivot of the social life of the continent. The distinction between the wholesale and the retail dealer, which is still more or less observed in England, does not obtain here. If a man has the money he is accepted at his own valuation. He can go anywhere. Government House throws its gates open to him, unless, indeed, it should have happened that certain incidents of an unusually lurid character have reached the ears of the painstaking aide-de-camp. The landowner, if his lands are extensive enough, is another who helps to set the standard. He also is usually a novice at the pursuits and mannerisms that find favour with the more seasoned upper classes. The trail of newness, of gaucherie, of awkward, although of lavish ostentation, is over the whole social fabric. The people have zest and energy. They dine well, drink well, gamble well. But they have not yet learned to do these things with the nonchalant air that comes of heredity or of much experience.
The snobbery of Australian society is a matter equally beyond the reach of question. It is an elementary principle in all speculations as to human conduct that the man or woman who is intrinsically best worth knowing is the one who asserts himself or herself least. The plutocrats of Australia are continually and tirelessly asserting themselves. They all advertise—possibly because of the survival of the shopkeeping instinct, which prompted them in earlier days to get ahead of the man next door by making a finer display of haberdashery or of cold meat. The advertising habit does not die out in one generation. At present it dominates the social life of the community. This is the reason why the man who does not care to advertise, or feels he has no need to advertise, prefers to stay away from gatherings at which the resplendent tradesmen are the observed of all observers. There are many men of sensibility, of imagination, of delicacy of thought and refinement of feeling, in Australia. There are women equally gifted. But these are not the people who besiege the Vice-regal Residence most determinedly, or appear in the papers most often. If they have means, or leisure, or culture—and often they have all three—they look for congenial souls, or are satisfied to remain apart.
The selfishness of Australian society is more or less implied in what has been already stated; but a special significance is often given to the word in connection with the declining birth-rate. The population of the continent is by no means stationary. The birth-rate is about 28 per thousand, and the death-rate scarcely 13 per thousand. In fifty years, even at the present rate of increase, there will be 8,000,000 people in the Commonwealth. But the preachers and politicians are not satisfied. They want the increase to be still greater, the births to be still more numerous. They have discovered that the cradle of the working man—when he can afford such an article of furniture—is seldom empty, while the cradle of the rich mother has only an occasional inmate. The cry has gone up that the women of the well-to-do class are furnishing a bad precedent. A committee of nine, appointed by the New South Wales Government, recently investigated the whole question. And the conclusion arrived at is that Australia, and more especially its middle and upper classes, are socially and morally in a bad way.