“You are slow, very slow, in discerning
that book-lore and wisdom are twain:”
Yes, indeed, to Melbourne, such as life presents itself to her, she knows it, and, what is more, she knows that she knows it, and her self-knowledge gives her a contempt for the pedantry of the old world. Walk about in her streets, look at her private buildings, these banks of hers, for instance, and you will see this. They mean something, they express something: they do not (as Mr. Arnold said of our British Belgravian architecture) “only express the impotence of the artist to express anything.” They express a certain sense of movement, of progress, of conscious power. They say: “Some thirty years ago the first gold nuggets made their entry into William Street. Well, many more nuggets have followed, and wealth of other sorts has followed the nuggets, and we express that wealth—we express movement, progress, conscious power.—Is that, now, what your English banks express?” And we can only say that it is not, that our English banks express something quite different; something, if deeper, slower; if stronger, more clumsy.
But the matter does not end here. When we took the instance of the books and the people “at the sign of the rainbow,” we took also the abode itself of the rainbow; when we took the best of the private buildings, we took also the others. Many of them are hideous enough, we know; this is what Americans, English, and Australians have in common, this inevitable brand of their civilization, of their determined, their pitiless strength. The same horrible “pot hat,” “frock coat,” and the rest, are to be found in London, in Calcutta, in New York, in Melbourne.
Let us sum up. “The Anglo-Saxon race, the Norman blood:” a colony made of this: a city into whose hands wealth and its power is suddenly phenomenally cast: a general sense of movement, of progress, of conscious power. This, I say, is Melbourne—Melbourne with its fine public buildings and tendency towards banality, with its hideous houses and tendency towards anarchy. And Melbourne is, after all, the Melbournians. Alas, then, how will this city and its civilization stand the test of a really fine city and fine civilization? how far will they answer the requirements of such a civilization? what scope is there in them for the satisfaction of the claims of conduct, of intellect and knowledge, of beauty, and manners?
Of the first I have only to say that, so far as I can see, its claims are satisfied, satisfied as well as in a large city, and in a city of the above-mentioned composition, they can be. But of the second, of the claims of intellect and knowledge, what enormous room for improvement there is! What a splendid field for culture lies in this middle-class that makes a popular poet of Adam Lindsay Gordon! It tempts one to prophesy that, given a higher education for this middle-class, and fifty—forty—thirty years to work it through a generation, and it will leave the English middle-class as far behind in intellect and knowledge as, at the present moment, it is left behind by the middle-class, or rather the one great educated upper-class, of France.
There is still the other claim, that of beauty and manners. And it is here that your Australian, your Melbourne civilization is, I think, most wanting, is most weak; it is here that one feels the terrible need of “a past, a story, a poet to speak to you.” With the Library are a sculpture gallery and a picture gallery. What an arrangement in them both! In the sculpture gallery “are to be seen,” we are told, “admirably executed casts of ancient and modern sculpture, from the best European sources, copies of the Elgin marbles from the British Museum, and other productions from the European Continent.” Yes, and Summers stands side by side with Michaelangelo! And poor busts of Moore and Goethe come between Antinous and the Louvre Apollo the Lizard slayer! But this, it may be said, is after all only an affair of an individual, the arranger. Not altogether so. If an audience thinks that a thing is done badly, they express their opinion, and the failure has to vanish. And how large a portion of the audience of Melbourne city, pray, is of opinion that quite half of its architecture is a failure, is hideous, is worthy only, as architecture, of abhorrence? how many are shocked by the atrocity of the Medical College building at the University? how many feel that Bourke Street, taken as a whole, is simply an insult to good taste?
“Yes, all this,” it is said, “may be true, as abstract theory, but it is at present quite out of the sphere of practical application. You would talk of Federalism, and here is our good ex-Premier of New South Wales, Sir Henry Parkes, making it the subject of a farewell denunciation. ‘I venture to say now,’ says Sir Henry Parkes, ‘here amongst you what I said when I had an opportunity in London, what I ventured to say to Lord Derby himself, that this federation scheme must prove a failure.’ You talk of Free-trade and here is what an intelligent writer in the Argus says apropos of ‘the promised tariff negotiations with Tasmania.’ ‘In America,’ he says, ‘there is no difficulty in inducing the States to see that, whatever may be their policy as regards the outside world, they should interchange as between each other in order that they may stand on as broad a base as possible, but we can only speculate on the existence of such a national spirit here.’—These facts, my good sir,” it is said, “as indicative of the amount of opposition that the nation feels to the ideas of Free-trade and Federalism, are not encouraging.”—They are not, let us admit it at once, but there are others which are; others, some of which we have been considering, and, above and beyond everything, there is one invaluable and in the end irresistible ally of these ideas: there is the Tendency of the Age—the Time-Spirit, as Goethe calls it. Things move more quickly now than they used to do: ideas, the modern ideas, are permeating the masses swiftly and thoroughly and universally. We cannot tell, we can only speculate as to what another fifty—forty—thirty years will actually bring forth.
Free-trade—Federalism—Higher Education, they all go together. The necessities of life are cheap here, wonderfully cheap; a man can get a dinner here for sixpence that he could not get in England for twice or thrice the amount. “There are not,” says the Australasian Schoolmaster, the organ of the State Schools, “there are not many under-fed children in the Australian [as there are in the English] schools.” But the luxuries of life (and let us remember that what we call the luxuries of life are, after all, necessities; they are the things which go to make up our civilization, the things which make us feel that there is a greater pleasure in life than sitting under your vine and your fig-tree, whatever Mr. George may have to say to the contrary)—the luxuries of life, I say, are dear here, very dear, owing to, what I must be permitted to call, an exorbitant tariff, and, consequently, the money that would be spent in fostering a higher ideal of life, in preparing the way for a national higher education, is spent on these luxuries, and the claims of intellect and knowledge, and of beauty and manners, have to suffer for it. Here is your Mr. Marcus Clarke, for instance, talking grimly, not to say bitterly, of “the capacity of this city to foster poetic instinct,” of his “astonishment that such work” as Gordon’s “was ever produced here.” He is astonished, you see, that the claims of intellect and knowledge, and of beauty and manners are enough satisfied in this city to produce a talent of this sort; he is astonished, because he does not see that there is an element in this city which, in its way, is making for at any rate the intellect and knowledge—an element which is a product, not of England but of Australia; a general sense of movement, of progress, of conscious power.