There is a Moral sense, and there is an Immoral Sense. History shows us
that the Moral Sense enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it,
and that the Immoral Sense enables us to perceive immorality and how to
enjoy it.
-Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
Melbourne spreads around over an immense area of ground. It is a stately
city architecturally as well as in magnitude. It has an elaborate system
of cable-car service; it has museums, and colleges, and schools, and
public gardens, and electricity, and gas, and libraries, and theaters,
and mining centers, and wool centers, and centers of the arts and
sciences, and boards of trade, and ships, and railroads, and a harbor,
and social clubs, and journalistic clubs, and racing clubs, and a
squatter club sumptuously housed and appointed, and as many churches and
banks as can make a living. In a word, it is equipped with everything
that goes to make the modern great city. It is the largest city of
Australasia, and fills the post with honor and credit. It has one
specialty; this must not be jumbled in with those other things. It is
the mitred Metropolitan of the Horse-Racing Cult. Its race-ground is the
Mecca of Australasia. On the great annual day of sacrifice--the 5th of
November, Guy Fawkes's Day--business is suspended over a stretch of land
and sea as wide as from New York to San Francisco, and deeper than from
the northern lakes to the Gulf of Mexico; and every man and woman, of
high degree or low, who can afford the expense, put away their other
duties and come. They begin to swarm in by ship and rail a fortnight
before the day, and they swarm thicker and thicker day after day, until
all the vehicles of transportation are taxed to their uttermost to meet
the demands of the occasion, and all hotels and lodgings are bulging
outward because of the pressure from within. They come a hundred
thousand strong, as all the best authorities say, and they pack the
spacious grounds and grandstands and make a spectacle such as is never to
be seen in Australasia elsewhere.
It is the "Melbourne Cup" that brings this multitude together. Their
clothes have been ordered long ago, at unlimited cost, and without bounds
as to beauty and magnificence, and have been kept in concealment until
now, for unto this day are they consecrate. I am speaking of the ladies'
clothes; but one might know that.
And so the grand-stands make a brilliant and wonderful spectacle, a
delirium of color, a vision of beauty. The champagne flows, everybody is
vivacious, excited, happy; everybody bets, and gloves and fortunes change
hands right along, all the time. Day after day the races go on, and the
fun and the excitement are kept at white heat; and when each day is done,
the people dance all night so as to be fresh for the race in the morning.
And at the end of the great week the swarms secure lodgings and
transportation for next year, then flock away to their remote homes and
count their gains and losses, and order next year's Cup-clothes, and then
lie down and sleep two weeks, and get up sorry to reflect that a whole
year must be put in somehow or other before they can be wholly happy
again.
The Melbourne Cup is the Australasian National Day. It would be
difficult to overstate its importance. It overshadows all other holidays
and specialized days of whatever sort in that congeries of colonies.
Overshadows them? I might almost say it blots them out. Each of them
gets attention, but not everybody's; each of them evokes interest, but
not everybody's; each of them rouses enthusiasm, but not everybody's; in
each case a part of the attention, interest, and enthusiasm is a matter
of habit and custom, and another part of it is official and perfunctory.
Cup Day, and Cup Day only, commands an attention, an interest, and an
enthusiasm which are universal--and spontaneous, not perfunctory. Cup
Day is supreme it has no rival. I can call to mind no specialized annual
day, in any country, which can be named by that large name--Supreme. I
can call to mind no specialized annual day, in any country, whose
approach fires the whole land with a conflagration of conversation and
preparation and anticipation and jubilation. No day save this one; but
this one does it.
In America we have no annual supreme day; no day whose approach makes the
whole nation glad. We have the Fourth of July, and Christmas, and
Thanksgiving. Neither of them can claim the primacy; neither of them can
arouse an enthusiasm which comes near to being universal. Eight grown
Americans out of ten dread the coming of the Fourth, with its pandemonium
and its perils, and they rejoice when it is gone--if still alive. The
approach of Christmas brings harassment and dread to many excellent
people. They have to buy a cart-load of presents, and they never know
what to buy to hit the various tastes; they put in three weeks of hard
and anxious work, and when Christmas morning comes they are so
dissatisfied with the result, and so disappointed that they want to sit
down and cry. Then they give thanks that Christmas comes but once a
year. The observance of Thanksgiving Day--as a function--has become
general of late years. The Thankfulness is not so general. This is
natural. Two-thirds of the nation have always had hard luck and a hard
time during the year, and this has a calming effect upon their
enthusiasm.
We have a supreme day--a sweeping and tremendous and tumultuous day, a
day which commands an absolute universality of interest and excitement;
but it is not annual. It comes but once in four years; therefore it
cannot count as a rival of the Melbourne Cup.
In Great Britain and Ireland they have two great days--Christmas and the
Queen's birthday. But they are equally popular; there is no supremacy.
I think it must be conceded that the position of the Australasian Day is
unique, solitary, unfellowed; and likely to hold that high place a long
time.
The next things which interest us when we travel are, first, the people;
next, the novelties; and finally the history of the places and countries
visited. Novelties are rare in cities which represent the most advanced
civilization of the modern day. When one is familiar with such cities in
the other parts of the world he is in effect familiar with the cities of
Australasia. The outside aspects will furnish little that is new. There
will be new names, but the things which they represent will sometimes be
found to be less new than their names. There may be shades of
difference, but these can easily be too fine for detection by the
incompetent eye of the passing stranger. In the larrikin he will not be
able to discover a new species, but only an old one met elsewhere, and
variously called loafer, rough, tough, bummer, or blatherskite, according
to his geographical distribution. The larrikin differs by a shade from
those others, in that he is more sociable toward the stranger than they,
more kindly disposed, more hospitable, more hearty, more friendly. At
least it seemed so to me, and I had opportunity to observe. In Sydney,
at least. In Melbourne I had to drive to and from the lecture-theater,
but in Sydney I was able to walk both ways, and did it. Every night, on
my way home at ten, or a quarter past, I found the larrikin grouped in
considerable force at several of the street corners, and he always gave
me this pleasant salutation:
"Hello, Mark!"
"Here's to you, old chap!
"Say--Mark!--is he dead?"--a reference to a passage in some book of mine,
though I did not detect, at that time, that that was its source. And I
didn't detect it afterward in Melbourne, when I came on the stage for the
first time, and the same question was dropped down upon me from the dizzy
height of the gallery. It is always difficult to answer a sudden inquiry
like that, when you have come unprepared and don't know what it means.
I will remark here--if it is not an indecorum--that the welcome which an
American lecturer gets from a British colonial audience is a thing which
will move him to his deepest deeps, and veil his sight and break his
voice. And from Winnipeg to Africa, experience will teach him nothing;
he will never learn to expect it, it will catch him as a surprise each
time. The war-cloud hanging black over England and America made no
trouble for me. I was a prospective prisoner of war, but at dinners,
suppers, on the platform, and elsewhere, there was never anything to
remind me of it. This was hospitality of the right metal, and would have
been prominently lacking in some countries, in the circumstances.
And speaking of the war-flurry, it seemed to me to bring to light the
unexpected, in a detail or two. It seemed to relegate the war-talk to
the politicians on both sides of the water; whereas whenever a
prospective war between two nations had been in the air theretofore, the
public had done most of the talking and the bitterest. The attitude of
the newspapers was new also. I speak of those of Australasia and India,
for I had access to those only. They treated the subject argumentatively
and with dignity, not with spite and anger. That was a new spirit, too,
and not learned of the French and German press, either before Sedan or
since. I heard many public speeches, and they reflected the moderation
of the journals. The outlook is that the English-speaking race will
dominate the earth a hundred years from now, if its sections do not get
to fighting each other. It would be a pity to spoil that prospect by
baffling and retarding wars when arbitration would settle their
differences so much better and also so much more definitely.
No, as I have suggested, novelties are rare in the great capitals of
modern times. Even the wool exchange in Melbourne could not be told from
the familiar stock exchange of other countries. Wool brokers are just
like stockbrokers; they all bounce from their seats and put up their
hands and yell in unison--no stranger can tell what--and the president
calmly says "Sold to Smith & Co., threpence farthing--next!"--when
probably nothing of the kind happened; for how should he know?
In the museums you will find acres of the most strange and fascinating
things; but all museums are fascinating, and they do so tire your eyes,
and break your back, and burn out your vitalities with their consuming
interest. You always say you will never go again, but you do go. The
palaces of the rich, in Melbourne, are much like the palaces of the rich
in America, and the life in them is the same; but there the resemblance
ends. The grounds surrounding the American palace are not often large,
and not often beautiful, but in the Melbourne case the grounds are often
ducally spacious, and the climate and the gardeners together make them as
beautiful as a dream. It is said that some of the country seats have
grounds--domains--about them which rival in charm and magnitude those
which surround the country mansion of an English lord; but I was not out
in the country; I had my hands full in town.
And what was the origin of this majestic city and its efflorescence of
palatial town houses and country seats? Its first brick was laid and
its first house built by a passing convict. Australian history is almost
always picturesque; indeed, it is so curious and strange, that it is
itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer, and so it pushes
the other novelties into second and third place. It does not read like
history, but like the most beautiful lies. And all of a fresh new sort,
no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises, and adventures, and
incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all
true, they all happened.