CHAPTER XV.
JOHANNESBURG.
It is a delicate matter to indulge in platitudes about a city. For a city is an organism more self-conscious than a state, and a personality less robust than an individual. Comments which, if made on a nation, would be ignored, and on an individual would be tolerated, awaken angry reprisals when directed to a municipal area. The business is still more delicate when the city concerned is not yet quite sure of herself. Johannesburg is a city, though she has no cathedral to support the conventional definition, or royal warrant to give her dignitaries precedence; but she is a city still on trial, sensitive, ambitious, profoundly ignorant of her own mind. Her past has been short and checkered. She has done many things badly and many things well; she has been the target for universal abuse, and still with one political party fills the honourable post of whipping-boy in chief to the Empire. Small wonder if her people are a little dazed—proud of themselves, hopeful of her future, but far from clear what this future is to be.
At first sight she has nothing to commend her. The traveller who drags his stiff limbs from the Cape mail sees before him a dusty road, some tin-roofed shanties, with a few large new jerry buildings humped above them: a number of straggling dusty pines and gums, a bit of bare hillside in the distance, and a few attenuated mine chimneys. Everything is new, raw, and fortuitous, as uncivilised and certainly as ugly as the desert ridge on which an old Bezuidenhout planted his homestead. The chief streets do not efface the first impression. Some buildings are good, but the general effect is mean. The place looks as if it had sprung up, like some Western township, in a night, and as if the original builders had been in such a desperate hurry to get done with it that they could not stop to see that one house kept line with its neighbours. It is a common South African defect, but there is here no mise-en-scène to relieve the ugliness. Looking at Pretoria from the hills one sees a forest of trees, with white towers and walls rising above the green. The walls may be lath and plaster, but the general effect is as pretty as the eye could wish. For Johannesburg there is no such salvation. Looked at from one of her many hills, the meanness and irregularity are painfully clear. She has far more trees than Pretoria, but she is so long and sprawling that the bare ribs have pushed aside their covering. An extended brickfield is the first impression: a prosperous powder-factory is the last.
Yet in her way she has many singular beauties. Doubtless in time to come she will be so great that she will contain more cities than one in her precincts, and there may well be a residential quarter as fine as any in Europe. The Rand is a long shallow basin with hilly rims, within which lie the mines and the working city. The southern rim shelves away into featureless veld, but the northern sinks sharply on a plain, across forty miles of which rise the gaunt lines of the Magaliesberg. What fashionable suburb has a vista of forty miles of wild country, with a mountain wall on the horizon? Below on the flats there are many miles of pine woods, valleys and streams and homesteads, and the Pretoria road making a bold trail over a hill. In winter the horizon is lit with veld-fires; in summer and spring there are the wild sunsets of the veld and soft mulberry gloamings. The slope behind shuts out the town and the mine chimneys, and yet the whole place is not three miles from Market Square. Whatever happens, nothing can harm the lucky dwellers on the ridge. Though the city creep ten miles into the plain beneath, there is still ample prospect; and not all the fumes from all the industries on earth can spoil the sharp vigour of the winds blowing clean from the wilds.
But the place has not yet found itself. The city proper is still for the future; for the present we have a people. What the real conception, current in England, of this people may be it is not easy to tell, the whole matter having been transferred to party politics, and presented, plain or coloured, to partisan spectators. So we are given every possible picture, from that of Semitic adventurers nourishing the fires of life on champagne, to that of a respectable and thoroughly domesticated people, morbidly awake to every sentiment of Empire. “Judasburg,” “the New Jerusalem,” “the Golden City,” and a variety of other pet names, show that to the ordinary man, both in and out of parties, there is something bizarre and exotic about the place. And yet no conception could be more radically false. Johannesburg is first and foremost a colonial city, an ordinary colonial city save for certain qualities to be specified later. You will see more Jews in it than in Montreal or Aberdeen, but not more than in Paris; and any smart London restaurant will show as large a Semitic proportion as a Johannesburg club. For a “Golden City” it is not even conspicuously vulgar. For one fellow in large checks, diamonds, and a pink satin tie, you will meet fifty quietly dressed, well-mannered gentlemen. A man may still be a beggar to-day and rich to-morrow, but less commonly and in a different sense. The old mining-camp, California-cum-Ballarat character of the gold industry on the Rand has utterly passed away. Gold-mining has ceased to be a speculation, and has become a vast and complicated industry, employing at high salaries the first engineering talent of the world. The prominent mine-owner is frequently a man of education, almost invariably a man of high ability. In few places can you find men of such mental vigour, so eagerly receptive of new ideas, so keenly awake to every change of the financial and political worlds of Europe. The blackguard alien exists, to be sure, but he is rarely felt, and the hand of the law is heavy upon him. That Johannesburg is made up wholly of adventurers and Whitechapel Jews is the first piece of cant to clear the mind of.
The second is the old slander that the people think of nothing but the market, are cowardly and selfish, indifferent to patriotism and honour. It says little for Englishmen that they could believe this falsehood of a place where the greater part of the inhabitants are English. The war meant dismal sufferings for the artisan class, who had to live in expensive coast lodgings or comfortless camps; and it is to the credit of Johannesburg that she stood nobly by her refugees. The old Reform movement was not a fortunate enterprise, but there was no lack of courage in it; and even those who may grudge the attribute can scarcely deny it to the same men at Elandslaagte and Ladysmith. There have been various sorts of irregular regiments—many good, some bad, one or two the very scum of the earth; but no irregular soldiers showed, from first to last, a more cool and persistent courage than the men who for years had sought to achieve by persuasion an end which required a more summary argument. The truth is that the Johannesburger has suffered by being contrasted, as the typical townsman, with the Boer, as the typical countryman. Dislike the particular countryman as we may, we have at the back of our minds a feeling that somehow, in George Eliot’s phrase, an unintelligible dialect is a guarantee for ingenuousness, and that slouching shoulders indicate an upright disposition. It is Johannesburg’s misfortune that this anomalous contrast should be forced on us. It is as if a sixteenth-century peasant, without enterprise, without culture, wholly un-modern and un-political, believing stoutly in a sombre God, were living side by side with a race of intellectuels, scientists, and successful merchants. Whatever reason or, as in this case, patriotism may say, most men have a sneaking fondness for the peasant.
In every community which is worth consideration we find two forces present in some degree—the force of social persistence and the force of social movement. Critics of Johannesburg would have us believe that the second only is to be found, and in its crudest form: the truth is that, considering the history of the place and its novelty, the first is remarkably strong. The point is worth labouring at the risk of tediousness. It must be some little while before a mining city shakes off the character of a mining camp. Men will long choose to live uncomfortably in hotels and boarding-houses, looking for their reward on their home-coming, discomfort none the less unpleasant because it is tempered with unmeaning luxury. To its inhabitants the place is no continuing city,—only a camp for the adventurer, who, when he has made the most of it, returns to enjoy the fruits of his labour in his own place. And then, after many years, there suddenly comes a day when a man here and a man there realise that they have lost the desire to return: they like the place, settle down, and found a home. Whenever there is any fair proportion of this class in a mining city, then we have a force of social persistence. The tendency is found in every class of society. At one time the miner from Wales or Cornwall saved his earnings and returned home; now he has his wife out and settles for good. There is also a large commercial class, traders and small manufacturers, who belong as thoroughly to the place as the South African born. And with the more educated classes the same thing is true. The price of building sites in the suburbs and the many pretty houses which have arisen show that even for this class, which was most nomadic in its habits, domesticity has become a fact.