If only this Upper-class of Victoria and of Australia generally could be brought to see it! If only it would confess its sins, many and heinous, against true civilization and be “converted” and lead a new life! Nothing, I think, strikes an Englishman more, coming out here, than the brightness and intelligence of the Victorian girls! (“Our daughters,” you know.) And how heart-rending to discover that all this brightness and intelligence is wasted on the mere accidents and incidents of every-day existence! Two-shilling novels are her idea of literature: “Some day” and “Ehren on the Rhine” her idea of music: the coloured illustrations of the illustrated papers, her idea of art. And her brother is in a worse state! The tortoise English girl is, after all, better than the Australian hare, and the young male bull-dog than the kangaroo.
Everything cries out for the education, for the civilization, of the Upper-class, the ruling class. Educate it, civilize it, let it know what Truth is and what Beauty is, and abolish the bells and the brass-bands for ever! If the Upper-class is beautiful, its beauty will react on the Lower-class. Give us public schools for the Upper-class, as there are public schools for the Lower-class. Fight tooth and nail against any attempts after an “Upper Ten Thousand,” whether it be of land or of wealth. Keep clearly before us the ideal of an Upper-class that is homogeneous. Let us have the man of business as cultured as the professional man, and the professional man as cultured as the man of means. Let us be a true Republic, offering every opportunity to the intelligence of the Lower-class to attain to the culture of the Upper. Let us not have ten thousand aristocrats, but ten hundred thousand, ever more and more, and never less and less! On the other hand, let us learn from the People the great lesson which they have to teach us—the lesson of the language of the heart. Let us learn from them the softness of pity, yea and the richness of love. Let us give them our Social Socialism and let us take their Religious; for, in the perfect marriage of light and heat, is the perfect day, the true civilization, the beauty of the truth of Nature and of God.
February, 1885.
SYDNEY AND HER CIVILIZATION, AS THEY STRIKE AN ENGLISHMAN.
It was in 1770 that Cook entered the bay to which he gave the name of Botany: in ’88 that Philip landed in Port Jackson with his convict settlement: in 1849 that the settlers refused to receive any more convicts: and in ’56 that the settlement was acknowledged as a colony and dowered with a constitution. These few facts have a very different significance to those which correspond to them in the history of Melbourne. The epithet phenomenal cannot be applied to the former in the same sense as to the latter; nor yet, let us hasten to add, the epithet premature. English people, who carry to a quite quaint degree their modern representative poet’s dislike of
“Raw Haste, half-sister to Delay,”
find Melbourne “too American,” as they say, and reserve all their praise for “picturesque Sydney” and the harbour about whose description Mr. Trollope went (as we are all never likely to be able, at any rate in Sydney, to forget) into diffuse despair. “The business thoroughfares,” says a simple English traveller, “as well as the shops themselves, have a far more English appearance than those of the capital of Victoria,” and shuns all comment as superfluous. Let us not think of contradicting him. That elemental characteristic of the British architect, “the impotence to express anything,” is in no danger of disappearing in Sydney, nor yet, let us again hasten to add, in Melbourne; but, if it be possible to distinguish the matter thus, I should say that in Sydney he had found his happy hunting-grounds, whereas in Melbourne he was just beginning to feel that there was a rival about.
No, it is just where Sydney is un-English that she has charm. I do not now refer to her natural position, nor to her age—age which will tone down, and perhaps some day almost mellow, the masterpieces of even the British architect. I refer to those buildings in the town, few and far between enough, it is true, in which the Sydney perception of its individual life has striven to express itself. The Sydney perception of its individual life is not strong. As a local guide-book puts it more particularly, “in the nomenclature of the streets Sydney shows intense loyalty, and the lover of history will be delighted by the associations which some of the names will summon to his memory. For instance, his historical predilections will be gratified in noticing that the principal street is named after George the Third, during whose reign the colony was founded.” Of course, when the local guide-book tells us that a thing is so, it is so; and when it says that our predilections, historical or otherwise, will be gratified and delighted, they are gratified and delighted. But these Sydney men and women, with their intense loyalty, or rather what the writer in the local guide-books means thereby, have not, what we called, the metropolitan look—have not the metropolitan feeling. Mr. Marcus Clarke, in the cleverest and also the most fantastic of his clever but often fantastic criticisms, “The Future Australian Race,” says boldly: “It is more than likely that what should be the Australian Empire will be cut in half by a line drawn through the centre of the continent.... All beneath this line will be a Republic, having the mean climate, and, in consequence, the development of Greece. The intellectual capital of the Republic will be in Victoria; the fashionable and luxurious capital on the shore of Sydney Harbour.” Then he adds that “the Australians will be a fretful, clever, perverse, irritable race,” showing us what, under all their superficial differences, the people of Victoria and of New South Wales have, he thinks, in common. I do not believe that the whole secret of the matter is here laid open before us. Mr. Marcus Clarke had an admirable acuteness of perception, but he was apt, having swiftly perceived one aspect of a thing, to write it down at once as the aspect without staying for a second or third look at the thing itself. The consequence is that he rarely reaches the whole secret of a thing: witness, for instance, his view of Christianity, (but Mr. Arnold notices how even a critic of Sainte-Beuve’s calibre was capable of illusion here), or of the significance of Gordon’s poetry, which I have spoken of elsewhere; and it is lamentable to think how much of this false tendency in him was due to the circumstance that he was a man of letters, and an Australian man of letters. I do not believe, I say, that, when he tells us that the really distinctive characteristic of Sydney is (for “will be” is only “is” unmaterialized) fashion and luxury, and Melbourne intellect, he has laid open before us the whole secret of the present tendencies of these cities, or yet when he sees them united with the common characteristics of fretfulness, cleverness, perverseness, irritability. But here, undoubtedly, is one aspect of the matter expressed admirably. The men and women of Sydney do not live so fast mentally as the men and women of Melbourne: they give more free play to their emotional passions. As we say, they “take things easier.” They cling to the past which Melbourne throws away: they consider the present, which Melbourne has very little time for. Their attachment to “the old country” is deeper; they have intense loyalty, as the writer in the local guide-book says. They are much more possessed by the affairs of Melbourne than Melbourne is about theirs. The Sydney Morning Herald and the Sydney Mail do not hold the same position in Melbourne as the Argus and the Australasian do in Sydney. The Sydney people are captious in their criticism on the younger capital, just as Boston is on New York: they talk about being “dragged at the chariot wheels of Victoria,” and asseverate that they will not endure it. Melbourne people criticise Sydney good-humouredly, and justly so, since in that aspect of them both, which people seem to think is alone worth criticising, Melbourne is undoubtedly far superior. Intellect in the modern world is the master: emotion is the handmaid. Or, to put it in another way, our best average work at present is being done in clear, nervous prose, while poetry is praised and left to starve. Science is a better paymaster than Art, and nearly all the best average intelligence of the world has turned to the rising, and from the setting, sun. And Melbourne, I say, Melbourne with her perception of movement, progress, conscious power, has out-stripped this Sydney, whose perception of her individual life is so weak that all she has to point to are her natural advantages, her age, and the meagre fact that her “business thoroughfares, as well as the shops themselves, have a far more English appearance than those of the capital of Victoria.” And yet, undoubtedly, Sydney has—or so it seems to me—a rich and rare possession of her own, and one which is worth as much as that of Melbourne, even as emotion is worth as much as intellect, as poetry is worth as much as prose. And there are, as we know, good judges who would change the “as much” into “more.” I, however, who have no pretentions to be a good judge, and am, as an acute English critic of mine so aptly put it once, only “Whitman and water:” I must still cling to the belief that perfection is to be found, and only to be found, in the union of these two qualities—of emotion and intellect, of poetry and prose. Or, as I said the other day,[7] true science (which is essentially intellectual) and true faith (which is essentially emotional) are to be, as they must be, harmonies, eternal harmonies, the “perfect music” and “noble words” of truth.
Well now, let us try and find out a little more definitely wherein these men and women of Sydney, these who have not the metropolitan look, the metropolitan feeling, show themselves, at any rate to the disinterested seeker after a really fine civilization, as the equals of our intellectual men and women of Melbourne. (“Intellectual,” we are agreed, is here used as meaning that spiritual quality which is opposed to emotional). First of all, however, let us examine this phrase of ours, metropolitan look, metropolitan feeling, for fear it should be nothing but a phrase, a mere catchword, and, as such, worthy only the places where sawdust is stored.