The first thing, I think, that strikes a man who knows the three great modern cities of the world—London, Paris, New York—and is walking observingly about Melbourne is, that Melbourne is made up of curious elements. There is something of London in her, something of Paris, something of New York, and something of her own. Here is an attraction to start with. Melbourne has, what might be called, the metropolitan tone. The look on the faces of her inhabitants is the metropolitan look. These people live quickly: such as life presents itself to them, they know it: as far as they can see, they have no prejudices. “I was born in Melbourne,” said the wife of a small bootmaker to me once, “I was born in Melbourne, and I went to Tasmania for a bit, but I soon came back again. I like to be in a place where they go ahead.” The wife of a small bootmaker, you see, has the metropolitan tone, the metropolitan look about her; she sees that there is a greater pleasure in life than sitting under your vine and your fig-tree; she likes to be in a place where they go ahead. And she is a type of her city. Melbourne likes to “go ahead.” Look at her public buildings, her New Law Courts not finished yet, her Town Hall, her Hospital, her Library, her Houses of Parliament, and above all her Banks! Nay, and she has become desirous of a fleet and has established a “Naval Torpedo Corps” with seven electricians. All this is well, very well. Melbourne, I say, lives quickly: such as life presents itself to her, she knows it: as far as she can see, she has no prejudices.
As far as she can see.—The limitation is important. The real question is, how far can she see? how far does her civilization answer the requirements of a really fine civilization? what scope in it is there (as Mr. Arnold would say) for the satisfaction of the claims of conduct, of intellect and knowledge, of beauty and manners? Now in order the better to answer this question, let us think for a moment what are the chief elements that have operated and are still operating in this Melbourne and her civilization.
This is an English colony: it springs, as its poet Gordon (of whom there will presently be something to be remarked) says, in large capitals, it springs from “the Anglo-Saxon race ... the Norman blood.” Well, if there is one quality which distinguishes this race, this blood, it is its determined strength. Wherever we have gone, whatever we have done, we have gone and we have done with all our heart and soul. We have made small, if any, attempt to conciliate others. Either they have had to give way before, or adapt themselves to us. India, America, Australia, they all bear witness to our determined, our pitiless strength. What is the state of the weaker nations that opposed us there? In America and Australia they are perishing off the face of the earth; even in New Zealand, where the aborigines are a really fine and noble race, we are, it seems, swiftly destroying them. In India, whose climate is too extreme for us ever to make it a colony in the sense that America and Australia are colonies; in India, since we could neither make the aborigines give way, nor make them adapt themselves to us, we have simply let them alone. They do not understand us, nor we them. Of late, it is true, an interest in them, in their religion and literature, has been springing up, but what a strange aspect do we, the lords of India for some hundred and thirty years, present! “In my own experience among Englishmen,” says an Indian scholar writing to the Times in 1874, “I have found no general indifference to India, but I have found a Cimmerian darkness about the manners and habits of my countrymen, an almost poetical description of our customs, and a conception no less wild and startling than the vagaries of Mandeville and Marco Polo concerning our religion.” Do we want any further testimony than this to the determined, the pitiless strength of “the Anglo-Saxon race ... the Norman blood?”
Well, and how does all this concern Australia in general and Melbourne in particular? It concerns them in this way, that the civilization of Australia, of Melbourne, is an Anglo-Saxon civilization, a civilization of the Norman blood, and that, with all the good attendant on such a civilization, there is also all the evil. All? Well, I will not say all, for that would be to contradict one of the first and chief statements I made about her, namely that “as far as she can see Melbourne has no prejudices,” a statement which I could not make of England. “This our native or adopted land,” says an intelligent Australian critic, the late Mr. Marcus Clarke, “has no past, no story. No poet speaks to us.” “No,” we might add, “and (thus far happily for you) neither, as far as you can see, does any direct preacher of prejudice.” And here, as I take it, we have put our finger upon what is at once the strength and the weakness of this civilization.
Let us consider it for a moment. The Australians have no prejudice about an endowed Church, as we English have, and hence they have, what we have not, religious liberty. As far as I can make out, there is no reason why the wife of a clergyman of the Church of England should in this colony look down upon the wife of a dissenting minister as her social inferior, and this is, on the whole, I think, well, for it tends to break up the notion of caste that exists between the two sects; it tends, I mean, to their mutual benefit, to the interchange of the church’s sense of “the beauty of holiness” with the chapel’s sense of the passion of holiness. Here, then, you are better off than we. On the other hand, you have no prejudice, as we at last have, against Protection, and consequently you go on benefiting a class at the expense of the community in a manner that can only, I think, be defined as short-sighted and foolish. Here we are better off than you. Again, however, you have not the prejudice that we have against the intervention of the State. You have nationalized your railways, and are attempting, as much as possible, to nationalize your land.[1] You are beginning to see that a land tax, at any given rate of annual value, would be (as Mr. Fawcett puts it) “a valuable national resource, which might be utilized in rendering unnecessary the imposition of many taxes which will otherwise have to be imposed.” Here you are better off than we, better off both in fortune and general speculation. Again, you have not yet arrived at Federalism, and what a waste of time and all time’s products is implied in the want of central unity! Now the first and third of these instances show the strength that is in this civilization, and the second shows a portion of the weakness, at present only a small portion, but, unless vigorous measures are resorted to and soon, this Protection will become the great evil that it is in America. There is just the same cry there as here: “Protect the native industries until they are strong enough to stand alone”—as if an industry that has once been protected will ever care to stand alone again until it is compelled to! as if a class benefited at the expense of the community will ever give up its benefit until the community takes it away again!
On one of the first afternoons I spent in Melbourne, I remember strolling into a well-known book-mart, the book-mart “at the sign of the rainbow.” I was interested both in the books and the people who were looking at or buying them. Here I found, almost at the London prices (for we get our twopence or threepence in the shilling on books now in London), all, or almost all, of the average London books of the day. The popular scientific, theological, and even literary books were to hand, somewhat cast into the shade, it is true, by a profusion of cheap English novels and journals, but still they were to hand. And who were the people that were buying them? The people of the dominant class, the middle-class. I began to enquire at what rate the popular, scientific, and even literary books were selling. Fairly, was the answer. “And how do Gordon’s poems sell?” “Oh they sell well,” was the answer, “he’s the only poet we’ve turned out.”
This pleased me, it made me think that the “go-ahead” element in Victorian and Melbourne life had gone ahead in this direction also. If, in a similar book-mart in Falmouth (say), I had asked how the poems of Charles Kingsley were selling, it is a question whether much more than the name would have been recognized. And yet the middle-class here is as, and perhaps more, badly—more appallingly badly—off for a higher education than the English provincial middle class is. Whence comes it, then, that a poet like Gordon with the cheer and charge of our chivalry in him, with his sad “trust and only trust,” and his
“weary longings and yearnings
for the mystical better things:”
Whence comes it that he is a popular poet here? Let him answer us English for himself and Melbourne: