THE REAL AUSTRALIA
THE
REAL AUSTRALIA
BY
ALFRED BUCHANAN
AUTHOR OF
“BUBBLE REPUTATION”
Where the water-blossoms glister,
And by gleaming vale and vista,
Sits the English April’s sister
Soft and sweet and wonderful.--KENDALL.
PHILADELPHIA
GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO.
PUBLISHERS
1907
[_All rights reserved._]
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
The object of a novel is, as a general rule, to reflect life and
temperament in a selected environment. For various reasons it has
become the fashion to achieve this end by indirect means. An author
goes to Italy, and writes a book about Italy. He tells us the things
about Italy, and the people of Italy, that we want to know; but in
order to discover these things we have to read many pages dealing with
imaginary persons, for whose adventures we may or may not care, and in
whose personality we may or may not believe.
The present work is merely an attempt, and an obviously imperfect one,
to do directly what the travelled and cosmopolitan novelist does in
an indirect way. That is to say, it is an attempt to mirror in some
fashion the social life, the literary life, the individual life, the
present-day life, of a developing continent and four millions of people.
The author is aware that books of this kind are usually written by
travellers of more or less distinction. He knows that it is the easiest
thing possible for your up-to-date journalist to rush across to Japan
or Siberia and to be back in six months with the MSS. of a book that
will exhaust the subject. He knows this; and he is bound to admit that
he may be lacking in that breezy and picturesque point of view which
follows naturally on an acquaintance of ten weeks, but is liable to
vanish with a knowledge of ten years.
Yet he does not apologise; certainly not for the subject matter,
nor yet for the fact that he writes about Australia as a resident
Australian. The living world should be at least as worthy of
interpretation as the dead world, or the world that existed only in
some writer’s brain. What he does apologise for is the treatment,
should that prove _altogether_ inadequate to the theme.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. VIRTUES AND VICES 1
II. SOCIETY 23
III. JOURNALISM 45
IV. THE GAME OF POLITICS 68
V. PSEUDO-LITERARY 91
VI. ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 113
VII. THEATRES AND AMUSEMENTS 137
VIII. THE ETERNAL FEMININE 160
IX. TWO CITIES 181
X. THE NOVELIST AND HIS SELECTION 204
XI. THREE WRITERS OF VERSE 225
XII. FOUR PRIME MINISTERS 252
XIII. THE IMPERIALIST 277
XIV. THE LITTLE AUSTRALIAN 296
INDEX 313
THE REAL AUSTRALIA
I
VIRTUES AND VICES
Over the ball of it,
Peering and prying,
How I see all of it,
_Life_ there outlying!
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as national character.
That is to say, there is no set of qualities peculiar to any one
nation. In every known country extremes meet. They meet now, as they
met in the days when history began. Greece has had its Zeno and its
Epicurus, Rome its Octavian and its Vitellius, France its Barrère and
its Chateaubriand, Germany its Heine and its Bismarck, England its
Cromwell and its John Wilkes. Why multiply the list? Why assert of
the contrasted characters that exist always side by side that one is
typical of the people as a whole, and the other is not? Why imply that
one class of individual ceases to exist at a particular parallel of
latitude, and another begins there and then to take its rise?
But while there is no such thing as national character--except in the
sense that historians find it convenient to use--it is yet a fact
that certain people encourage each other in certain practices, and
that these practices come in time to assume the proportions of public
virtues and vices. One environment may permit an individual to wear a
species of garment, or to indulge in a form of language that would be
among other surroundings either legally forbidden, or frowned out of
existence. The unwritten law in regard to externals insensibly modifies
both the law of conduct and the habit of thought. In Australia there
are opposing tendencies at work. There is, in the first place, the
tendency to freedom and to license which the remoteness from an older
civilisation fosters. Opposed to this, and rapidly overcoming it, is
the tendency of a country, as it develops settled institutions, to
mould itself on the ambitious models of fashionable society elsewhere.
As a third factor, and an undoubtedly powerful one, there is the
influence of climate. This is tending in Australia to produce a
different race of beings, physically and morally, from that in the
Northern Hemisphere. It is tending to do so--but up to the present it
has produced a crop of half results, of insufficiently proven theories,
and of partially established types.
There are certain qualities--virtues, they may be called--that come
prominently under notice in Australia and appear, from their habit of
repeating themselves, to form some integral part of the life of the
community. The foremost of these good qualities is that of hospitality.
And here a singular anomaly presents itself. Politically the
Australians are the most exclusive and the most inhospitable race on
earth. Their only rivals in this respect must be looked for among the
bottled-up Confucians of China, or the mysterious Buddhists of Thibet.
The “white-ocean” policy of the Federal Parliament, no less than the
present Immigration Restriction Act, with its humorous travesty of
an education test, is the most glaring instance of political bigotry
that has come to light in modern times. The whole of this legislation
has been described by an Australian Prime Minister as a “monstrous
outrage” on every tolerant sentiment and every democratic ideal. Yet
the law has been in force for three years and no Minister or Government
has dared to repeal it. It is true that a certain concession has been
made in favour of the Japanese. But it is only a partial concession.
There the law stands on the statute-book; and there it seems likely to
remain until the excluded victors of Tsu-shima show a desire to argue
the question from the vantage ground of a battle-ship. In the latter
event anything might come to pass.
The anomaly consists in the fact that the Australians, desiring to
live politically like frogs in a well, are, as individuals, among the
most open-hearted and hospitable in the world. The prevailing temper
is shown in small things as in great. In England, if you are in doubt
as to your locality, you feel some hesitation in asking a stranger
to put you on the right road. The hesitancy may do the Englishman an
injustice, but his manner explains it. In Australia you have only to
enquire as to the whereabouts of a certain street or of a particular
house, to be accompanied half the way there by a man who is manifestly
and unmistakeably pleased to be in a position to give the information.
The same hospitality is shown in the average householder’s desire to
surround himself with as many people as possible, to entertain as many
as possible, and to have as many as possible sampling his wines and
his coffee and his cigars. If you are thirsty in Australia--and the
thirst of the nation is proverbial--it is usual to look for some one
who will drink with you. The hermit temper is not common, nor is the
prevailing type that of the individual who wishes to be let alone, and
to enjoy things alone. If there is a new lawn, or a new piano, or a
new motor-car, the owner has a real anxiety that its merits should be
tested, and its benefits shared by as large a circle as practicable.
Vanity may have something to do with this desire, but however accounted
for, it exists. The inconsistency between the temper of the unit and
the policy of the Government--of each successive Government--runs from
A to Z. The elector who will vote to have black men deprived of the
means of earning a living, brown men deported, and blind or sick men
refused the right to set foot on land, will, if he meets the alleged
undesirable immigrant in the ordinary paths of life, come to his
assistance with an alacrity that the good Samaritan of sacred history
might equal, but could not surpass.
There are other qualities that must compel admiration. The Australians
are receptive-minded, tolerant--except in the political sense just
mentioned--and ready to learn. The intense conservatism of older
countries is not theirs. Standards are not arbitrarily fixed as they
are in Britain. The social groove is not artificially restricted. It
is narrowing, but it is still fairly broad. The slavish adherence to a
certain set of rules, designated collectively as “good form,” is not
a characteristic of the people. In the unwritten code that finds most
favour there is the principle that a person may be worth cultivating
even though he does not pronounce his “_a_’s” as if they were “_ai_’s,”
and even though certain monosyllables, by the aid of which the smart
set avoids the trouble of conversation, form no part of his vocabulary.
The Australian holds--in theory, at any rate--the revolutionary
doctrine that every one should be given a chance. Now and again an
individual is found who acts up to this unfashionable and somewhat
crude precept.
There is something elastic in the people’s attitude to life. They have
not become socially or mentally atrophied by centuries of convention,
by centuries of custom, by centuries of meaningless and idiotic
routine. The atrocious crime of being a young nation, with much of what
the word youth implies, is still to be laid at their door.
A certain warmth, a certain generous instinct, a certain spontaneity
of thought and action, a certain buoyancy of temper, must be placed to
the credit side of the ledger. A certain fairness to opponents must
also be conceded, despite the remarks of a noted English cricketer to
the contrary. This fairness becomes all the more praiseworthy when
it is remembered that the only topic on which the Australians, as a
people, hold any definite opinions is that of sport. Such being the
case, it is inevitable that some feeling should be shown when matters
of sport--that is to say, matters of far more general interest than the
fate of Governments or the choosing of Parliaments--are being decided.
Invidious comparisons are sometimes drawn between the behaviour of
crowds in Sydney or Melbourne, and the behaviour of crowds at Lords’ or
at the Oval. The fact is usually overlooked that the London rough, who
is the counterpart of the Australian larrikin, is not to be met with in
any numbers at an athletic contest. For one thing he has not the money
to go there, and for another thing he has not the desire. But the more
boisterous and more objectionable type of Australian has a habit of
finding his way to cricket matches in Sydney or in Melbourne. Broadly
speaking, it is a select crowd that watches the game in England--a
crowd made select by the price of admission. It is a crowd less select
in Australia, for the reason that the price of admission is more easily
obtainable. Allowing for all the circumstances, and measuring unit for
unit, it is a fact that the virtue of fairness to opponents is one that
the new nation can confidently claim.
Much might be said--in fact much has already been said, and much more
will be said--of the vices of the people. This is a topic on which it
would be foolish to dogmatise, seeing that so much depends on the
individual point of view. Vice itself has become a term of obscure
meaning. What with our logicians and metaphysicians, our up-to-date
moralists, and our new hedonists--what with our emancipated lady
novelists, our reforming social philosophers, and our revolting sisters
and brethren--what with all these, we have no arbitrary rules of
conduct, and no definitions that can for a moment be relied upon. Even
so correct and comparatively orthodox a writer as Edmund Burke has
made a statement implying that vice practically ceases to exist when
it is sufficiently embroidered and set among sufficiently magnificent
surroundings. To be vicious to the accompaniment of fine phrases and
minuet-like movements--to be vicious while the rich embroideries are
sweeping the floor, and the lights are falling on velvet curtains, and
“the stately silver shoulder stoops”--that is not really to be vicious
at all. Such at least would appear to be the general opinion. And if
the general opinion is not to be taken as a guide in these matters it
is difficult to say what is.
So far as national vices come under the heading of national
crimes--and the terms are more or less related, though they are not
identical--it can be easily shown that Australia is neither very
much better nor very much worse than other countries. The number
of people who are punished each year for crimes of various kinds
is, relative to population, much the same as the number similarly
punished in the United Kingdom. Statistics of drunkenness are
incomplete and unreliable, but there is the authority of Mulhall
for the statement that while the United Kingdom consumes 3.57 proof
gallons of intoxicants per inhabitant, Australasia consumes no more
than 2.50 gallons. Illegitimacy is somewhat more prevalent in the
Southern Hemisphere than in Great Britain, but the difference is not
considerable. The proportion of illegitimate births is 6 per cent.
in Australasia and only 4.15 per cent. in England and Wales, but
in Scotland, where morals are understood to be rather austere, the
proportion of illegitimate births is 7 per cent. And so it is in regard
to most other offences--in regard to burglaries, assaults, thefts,
murders and the rest. The lot of the average policeman is neither more
nor less unhappy, neither more nor less strenuous, in Australia than
in England. The chances of being murdered in one’s sleep--though the
middle-class English household may disbelieve the statement--are not
appreciably greater in Australia than they are in Great Britain.
Yet a nation that is outwardly law-abiding may be inherently vicious.
The habit that saps vitality may not be the habit that advertises
itself in the police-court. As a matter of fact, a heavy crop of
burglaries, and assaults with violence, may be quite a healthy sign,
tending to show that national vigour is unimpaired. Every philosopher
knows that the abounding energy which, in the one case, drives the
possessor to break open doors and to hit other people on the head will,
in ninety-nine other cases, impel him to daring feats in exploration,
or in athletics, or in war. It is the drug-taking habit, the
cigarette-smoking habit, the card-playing habit, the gambling habit,
the loafing, swearing, work-shirking habit that produces the most
insidious results, and tells the most disastrous tale. None of these
practices are liable, in the ordinary course, to land the perpetrator
in a Court of Law. There is no statistician who can say anything
definite about them. But that they are all unduly and dangerously
prevalent in Australia is a fact admitting of no reasonable doubt.
The most pervading phase of Australian character is its
irresponsibility. If this is not a vice in itself, it is the parent
of a great many vices. The term by which it is usually designated is
lack of principle, or of moral sense. The average Englishman may be
innocent of much outward profession of virtue, or, for that matter,
of any definite, cut-and-dried standard of beliefs. He may be a very
long way from the ideal of the just man made perfect. But very often
he is discovered to possess something that may be neither creed nor
conscience, but that is more potent than either. It is more than a fear
of the law. It is more than regard for the opinion of others. It is
more, even, than sense of shame. It is the inner something--accumulated
instinct, if you will--that makes a man prefer, when the pinch comes,
to do the honourable thing. At the very least, and at the very worst,
it makes him silent as to his vices, and conscious of the fact that
they are not virtues. But the Australian is beginning to run into a
different mould. It is the commonest occurrence in the world to find
him talking and boasting, jesting and laughing, over that about which
he should be most inexorably dumb. Of his successes with women, of
his breakages of the seventh commandment, of his nights at bridge or
in a public-house, of his supposed power of cajoling man, woman, or
child--and more especially woman--he will talk as long and as often as
he can get an audience to listen to him. The larger the audience the
better he is pleased. It is an unfortunate tendency of the people, and
the fact that there are conspicuous exceptions to the rule just laid
down does not make the tendency any less noticeable or less unfortunate.
When this irresponsibility reaches its zenith, its nadir, its crown
and summit of perfection or imperfection, it produces the Australian
larrikin. Every one knows this product of the hour. His fame has
spread from hemisphere to hemisphere, and from pole to pole. All
the hooligans of London, all the gamins of Paris, all the lazzaroni
of Naples, all the miscellaneous ruffians of Cairo and Port Said,
have not eclipsed, or even approached, the reputation acquired in the
space of a very few decades by this child of beneficent skies and
benign, smiling weather. It is impossible to say anything new about
the Australian larrikin, just as it is impossible to exaggerate the
heights of his lawlessness, or to plumb the depths of his depravity.
But from the scientific and psychological points of view he is both
interesting and valuable. There are a number of well-informed and
earnest people who are distressed and disgusted by the all-pervading
hypocrisy of our social laws and conventions. Mirabeau, who was
exceedingly well informed, and very much in earnest, made it a boast
that he had mastered all formulas. He had in fact reached the summit
of irresponsibility. The Australian larrikin is in precisely the same
position. But when you take weight off one man you enable him to redeem
a nation; when you take weight off another you make him what he is--a
living monument of hopeless vulgarity and inexpressible vice. In
view of the fact that the temper of the average man is more disposed
to make of him a larrikin than a Mirabeau, it becomes evident that
artificial restraints are, in the aggregate, the salvation of the race.
From the member of the “Rock’s Push” and of the “Flying Angels” we
learn valuable lessons--lessons which such enthusiasts as Godwin and
Condorcet would have us ignore. We learn that conventional laws are
necessary, that artificial restraint is admirable, that people must
be prevented by force from being what most of them left to themselves
would become.
Of a somewhat similar type to the larrikin, though not occupying
such a dizzy pre-eminence, is the cad of common or everyday life.
This individual is not quite hopeless. If he were taken in hand and
disciplined, drilled, and tutored, made to shoulder a rifle and
practise a compulsory goose-step, fined every day for using bad
language, forbidden to stand at street corners, imprisoned for the
habit of expectoration, and under no circumstances allowed the use of
a bicycle, he might come in time to be a valuable citizen. At present
he is left too much to his own devices. Lord Roberts had his English
counterpart in view when he announced that the future of the Empire
depended on the adoption of a scheme of conscription. A warlike race is
not to be discovered at street corners. It does not grow there. Neither
is it over-much given to frequenting unregistered race meetings, and
“two-up” schools. It swears occasionally, but only when circumstances
appear to call for emphasis. Something will require to be done with the
youth who perambulates its main streets before Australia will be able
to supply the world with a new Thermopylæ, or even another Yalu.
The form of vice that is more or less prevalent in all countries--a
form that is continually being warned against by the social brigade
of the Salvation Army, and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union,
and a worthy Colonial Secretary, and some less worthy members of the
police--is a form much in evidence in Australia. The warfare, it need
hardly be said, is scarcely as profitable, while it is as unending as
the warfare of the Pigmies against the Cranes. There is scarcely a main
street in which, after dark, the evidences are not visible of that
which the hypocrite censures, and which the wise man merely deplores.
In this continent all social currents follow their own bent. There is
no attempt to make people moral by Act of Parliament. There is not even
an attempt to save them by Act of Parliament from certain possibilities
arising from their own actions. So the woman goes her way. Her unending
sacrifice--for there is no doubt that it is a sacrifice, chosen as the
less of two sacrifices--brings in the usual rewards, social outlawry,
criminal associates, a fiery, unquenchable thirst, and a slum in which
to draw the curtain. It is a very ancient story. In matters of this
kind one does not look for novel and revolutionary features. The life
of pleasure here is as pleasurable as it is elsewhere. As much, and
no more. The pleasure, facetiously so called, is the outcome of an
industrial system under which the working womanhood of the country
is expected to feed and clothe and house itself on ten shillings
a week, or less. By the toil of feminine hands--so long as they
choose to toil--factories abound, industries keep themselves going,
manufacturers grow rich. By the sacrifice of feminine respectability
the carrion kites of society are fed. It is an obvious truth that
Australia is always in danger of being injured, politically, by its
statesmen, while it is always being rescued, socially, by its nymphs of
the street.
There are certain acts, certain qualities, which it is impossible to
forgive. On the other hand, there is a certain species of wrong-doing
that is readily pardoned. Vice, as already pointed out, is to some
extent a relative term; and if the motive is not petty or sordid, if
the actor can rise to great occasions, if the man or woman is superior
to the occasional outbreaks of his or her worse nature, it is safe
to say that the nation is still capable of great things, and is by
no means inherently bad. The most noteworthy characteristic of the
Australian is his mental attitude to life. It is an attitude that is
in danger of becoming crudely materialistic. It is impossible to build
on this anything lasting. The pursuit of pleasure may be pardonable
enough; but it is distinctly disquieting, from the point of view of
one who wishes his country to be anything or to accomplish anything,
to discover that the word _pleasure_ is being given only one meaning.
“Patient, deep-thinking Germany” was at one time laughed at by the
wits of Vienna and Paris. But Germany has had its Koniggratz and its
Sedan, and is laughed at no longer. The moral is that it is better, in
the national sense, to be patient and deep-thinking than to be shallow
and pleasure-loving. The charge that is being brought against the
typical Australian is that he is not self-contained enough, not deep
enough, not patient enough, not idealistic enough. The pleasure that
he understands, that he works for, that he gives himself over to, that
he is limited by, is the obvious pleasure that is dependent on sense,
and the things of sense; and _that_ must inevitably, sooner or later,
become pallid and dead. He seems to be learning--in very many cases he
has already learned--
To say of shame, what is it?
Of virtue, we can miss it;
Of sin, we can but kiss it,
And it’s no longer sin.
And he threatens--it may be only a threat--to flutter down from the
stage of spasmodic enterprise to that of foolish indifference, from
that of energy to that of ineptitude, from that which commands the
respect, to that which invites the contempt of nations physically
stronger and more enduring than his own.
Australia has so far achieved nothing great from the national
standpoint. It cannot be said to have failed, because it has not yet
been called upon. There are people who declare that they have the
utmost confidence in its future. And if certain present-day tendencies
could be overlooked, or if they could be obviated, as they might be,
this confidence would be abundantly justified. The country has still
indefinite room for expansion. It is not over-populated, and for at
least another century is not likely to be. The wild-eyed enthusiast
who imagines, with Milton, that he can see a noble and puissant
nation rousing herself like a strong man from sleep, and shaking her
invincible locks, must, if he forsake the _rôle_ of prophet for that
of the sober speculator, find some habitation and dumping-ground for
the people that are to be born hereafter. And there are not many
regions remaining where new growths can be attempted without decided
inconvenience to the old. Apart from South America, Australia is
practically the only country offering--the only country, that is to
say, where there are millions of acres of unoccupied land, and a soil
and climate that do not actually forbid approach. But the people, if
they are to do great things, if they are not to become a tributary of
some foreign power, or an appendage of Eastern Asia, must be prepared
sooner or later to make a few changes, and even a few sacrifices. They
must be prepared to give up the habit of looking to their big brothers
for ideas on art and literature, and dress, and dining, and ball-room
dancing, and methods of pronunciation, and national defence. They must
be prepared to get a _belief_ of some kind, a religion of some kind.
They must be fanatical on some point--whether a religious point or a
point of national honour, it does not matter--or they will go down
before the Oriental fanatic as surely as the grass goes down before the
scythe. No one imagines that a dilettante preference can stand against
a consuming fire.
Be it a mad dream or God’s very breath,
The fact’s the same,--belief is fire.
The Australian must be prepared, in the event of great emergency,
to die for something or for somebody. When he is thus prepared, his
virtues and vices will not greatly matter; they will learn as a matter
of course to adjust themselves.
II
SOCIETY
The gods their faces turn away
From nations and their little wars;
But we _our golden drama_ play
Before the footlights of the stars.
George Eliot, in a passage that has become famous, lets it be
understood that good society is a terribly expensive product, that
it is accustomed to float on gossamer wings of light irony, and that
in order to bring it to perfection infinite labour is required from
common people who sweat in factories, and toil in coal-mines, and
tramp heavily about in agricultural districts “when the rainy days
look dreary.” The novelist was dealing particularly with England; but
the circumstances which she had in mind repeat themselves more or less
exactly in most civilised countries. Even in Australia, which has not
been civilised very long, men are sweating in factories, and toiling
in coal-mines, and grubbing industriously on way-back selections for
the benefit of other people who live in large houses and give a social
tone to populous cities. Much interest attaches to this thing called
“good society.” Is it, as a matter of fact, floated on gossamer wings
of light irony, or on gossamer wings of any sort? Is it as delicate and
ethereal as George Eliot says it ought to be?
There are certain truisms that do not require to be insisted upon.
They are self-evident. Mr Henry Crosland, who has become quite famous
through his ingenious habit of turning positives into negatives,
and negatives into positives, says that the moral tone of English
upper-class circles is excellent, while that of English middle-class
circles is deceitful and desperately wicked. But the ordinary man, with
no literary reputation to weigh him down, declares confidently that
the facts are neither as George Eliot nor as Mr Crosland declare them
to be. The term society, as commonly used and understood, refers to
the limited number of people who have come into possession either of a
certain property or of a certain name. The atmosphere of this circle
is not light and buoyant. It is heavy, and _blasé_, and tired, and
dull. This good English society does not float on gossamer wings; it
drags itself round two continents with very conscious endeavour. It is
not ironical; to be that, requires mental effort, while it is easier
and more effective to be supercilious. This same society is not moral;
the whole scheme and purpose of conventional morality is narrow and
circumscribed, and therefore unattractive to those unprejudiced people
who perceive that arbitrary rules of conduct are made for slaves.
The set in question is in no single particular what its apologists
and admirers declare it to be. It is not really exclusive; a man
with sufficient means can always enter it. There is only one thing
to which it is actively antagonistic, and that is ability. It is not
antagonistic to poverty; it is merely disdainful. Its arrogance is
appalling. Its lack of creative power is more appalling still.
And yet while the characteristics of the best London society are
of this nature--while the whole edifice would suggest the Jugurtha
reflection that the city is for sale, and will perish quickly when it
finds a purchaser--it is undeniably true that the passion to enter the
comparatively limited circle is steadily growing. The desire is the
natural result of that envy which the man or woman who is everywhere
circumscribed feels for the individual who is in all things privileged.
The important circumstance at present is that the London “four hundred”
were never more run after than they are to-day. Their patronage and
presence were never in greater demand. We may swear that this smart
set is a very dull set; we may vow with the earnestness of conviction
that its very atmosphere is fatal to initiative and inimical to brains,
and more destructive to morals than to either; but there is not a
woman, scarcely a man among us who does not bear witness, in the way
he dresses, or dines, or parts his hair, or takes the hand of a lady
in a ball-room, that he is a humble imitator of the example set him
by the people who live in large houses and flourish in the pages of
De Brett. There is not a man outside this narrow pale, be he English
or Australian, who could walk along Piccadilly in the company of two
members of the aristocracy, effete though that aristocracy may be,
without a sense of elation bordering on vertigo. With all its vice
and frippery and inanity and boredom, the thing called society is an
influence, a power, a far-reaching entity, a commanding and controlling
force. From a distance we can criticise it and discover what it really
means, what it actually is. But at close quarters it makes cowards of
us--that is to say, of all who are not hermits or desperadoes, of all
who are not phenomenally rich or abysmally poor.
Good society, as already mentioned, is a peculiarly English
institution. Nevertheless, it has flourishing offshoots in different
parts of the world. In Australia, there is rapidly growing up a set of
conventions and a habit of speech founded on a close study of the older
community. There is such a thing as Australian society. It exists. It
is ambitious. It aspires to be recognised. It wants to grow. Some of
its members have been presented at Court and have brought back with
them large social aspirations. Certain of its women have been taken
into dinner by members of the British peerage. Quite a number of
Australian tailors have been in Bond Street and have made observations.
A proportion of Australian dressmakers has seen something of Paris.
These dealers in cloth and millinery have magnificent ideas. They have
impressed themselves and their notions on the home-staying community.
So it has come about that dress, wealth, reputation, fashion, and
appearance have done a great deal between them to create the nucleus of
a favoured _clientèle_, and to scatter to the winds the obsolete idea
that in a democracy all things are equal, and all people are socially
on a _par_.
What, it may be asked at the outset, is meant by the term “Australian
society”? It has been agreed that something of the kind has been
evolved. But who are the individuals? Where are they? How can they be
recognised? For purposes of rough-and-ready definition, they may be
classified as the people who are in the habit of receiving invitations
to Government House. It is the business of the aide-de-camp to discover
who is who in Australia. The task is impossible to the statistician
or the scientist, but it seems in some mysterious fashion to fit in
with the temperament and abilities of an aide-de-camp. There are no
definite rules that can be relied upon. The dividing line between
desirables and non-desirables is of the most shifty, and uncertain, and
elusive character. Yet, when mistakes are made, as they always will
be, the social uproar is tremendous. The unfortunate official whose
business it is to request the pleasure of So-and-so’s company at a
Vice-regal dance, or a garden party, is for ever voyaging upon troubled
waters, with scarcely a beacon or a land-mark to guide him. His eye
may light upon a few judges, a few prominent politicians, one or two
naval and military officers, half a dozen wealthy land-owners, and a
few prosperous warehousemen. So far as they are concerned, he knows
he is safe. But there remain the grocer, the land-agent, the brewer,
the confectioner, the lawyer, the singer, the actor, the doctor, the
grass-widow, and many more--a miscellaneous assortment which cannot be
entirely ignored or collectively accepted, and which presents a problem
baffling in the last degree.
It is almost unnecessary to say that the social world of Australia is
controlled by women. It is they who set most store upon artificial
distinctions. It is they who value most the receipt of a request to
disport themselves on His Excellency’s lawn, or in His Excellency’s
ball-room. It is they who understand best how far the Vice-regal card
of invitation exalts them over their sisters who have not come in for
a like attention. The average man, if left to his own devices, would
not sparkle with animation at the prospect of either a Government House
dance, or a Government House garden party. This average man--unless
he happens to be very young and very volatile--is not an enthusiastic
exponent of those ball-room exercises in which Ouida’s heroes excel.
Neither has he any delight in the formality and stiffness, the silk
hats and the long coats inseparable from a two hours’ promenade on
some distinguished person’s lawn. If it were a matter of personal
inclination, he would confess that he knew better ways of amusing
himself. But the Australian woman is socially ambitious. Her passion
for social festivities is unquenchable. When the tocsin has sounded she
will march with the procession--at the head of it, if she can. And the
man of her circle, whether he likes it or not, must march with her.
All the mannerisms that do duty in the society of one hemisphere come
in their turn to do duty in the society of the other. The puppets
advance and retire to identical sets of rules. If the high handshake is
fashionable in England, it must become fashionable in Australia. If it
is the custom to take your partner’s arm in the West End of London, it
has to be the custom, a little later, in certain quarters of Melbourne
and Sydney. If it is the correct thing for the young English lordling
to talk in tired monosyllables to the daughter of the Marquis, it is
equally the correct thing for the Australian young man of means to look
as bored as possible when conversing with the daughter of the host. One
artificiality follows another. The imitative processes extend to the
manner of using a finger-bowl, and of handling an eye-glass. If white
waistcoats and gaudy ties are the rule among certain people in England,
they become the rule among certain people in Australia. Society in
either country is raised, fortified, buttressed, and embellished with
shams--with shams that have nothing to recommend them on the score of
cleverness, or ingenuity, or outward grace or hidden meaning. They
represent, simply and solely, the desire of a certain class to do
certain things in a manner peculiar to itself.
As to the inner life of this fashionable society, as it exists in
Australia, there is little new to be said. The object in view is
simply that in view everywhere else, namely, that of obtaining as much
amusement as possible, and of being left to one’s own devices as little
as possible. All the distractions known to civilised man are drawn
upon in one country as in another. The men bet on racecourses, drink,
and play cards. The women do all three, and in addition smoke and talk
scandal. In one respect Australian society has an advantage over that
of London, or of Paris. It has more physical energy with which to
pursue its vices and its follies to the bitter end. Its opportunities
for extravagant display may be fewer, but its zest is greater. It has
no series of inter-marriages to look back upon. It has no titled and
_blasé_ families to support. Its fathers or its grandfathers belonged
to the race of hardy pioneers. The present generation is the product
of a virile stock. As a consequence it has not exhausted its physical
equipment. There is a certain buoyancy about its mental attitude,
a certain juvenility in its pursuit of the bubbles of the moment.
The _nil admirari_ manner, borrowed from London drawing-rooms, sits
awkwardly on its shoulders. If it could only get away from old-world
traditions, if it were willing to stand upon its feet, if it would
leave its absurd mannerisms to the people who first invented them,
this Australian society, with all its health and youth and unimpaired
vitality, with all its magnificent opportunities furnished by variety
of scene and splendour of climate, might set an example of living which
other countries would have reason to envy, if they had not the power to
imitate. For Australia, if the fact were only recognised, is a country
in which it is possible to enjoy oneself finely, or to deny oneself
greatly, as the mood pleases, independently of the world.
One characteristic of Australian society is its vulgarity; another is
its snobbery; another is its lack of ideals. The vulgarity is apparent
on the surface. It is usually explained on the ground of want of
familiarity with the more luxurious and the more cultivated conditions
of living. To endow a man who commenced life as a small shopkeeper
with a large house, a carriage, some superior furniture, and still
more expensive possessions in the shape of wife and daughters, is
not to make him refined. The glorified tradesman is the pivot of the
social life of the continent. The distinction between the wholesale and
the retail dealer, which is still more or less observed in England,
does not obtain here. If a man has the money he is accepted at his
own valuation. He can go anywhere. Government House throws its gates
open to him, unless, indeed, it should have happened that certain
incidents of an unusually lurid character have reached the ears of the
painstaking aide-de-camp. The landowner, if his lands are extensive
enough, is another who helps to set the standard. He also is usually
a novice at the pursuits and mannerisms that find favour with the
more seasoned upper classes. The trail of newness, of _gaucherie_,
of awkward, although of lavish ostentation, is over the whole social
fabric. The people have zest and energy. They dine well, drink well,
gamble well. But they have not yet learned to do these things with the
nonchalant air that comes of heredity or of much experience.
The snobbery of Australian society is a matter equally beyond the
reach of question. It is an elementary principle in all speculations
as to human conduct that the man or woman who is intrinsically best
worth knowing is the one who asserts himself or herself least. The
plutocrats of Australia are continually and tirelessly asserting
themselves. They all advertise--possibly because of the survival of the
shopkeeping instinct, which prompted them in earlier days to get ahead
of the man next door by making a finer display of haberdashery or of
cold meat. The advertising habit does not die out in one generation.
At present it dominates the social life of the community. This is the
reason why the man who does not care to advertise, or feels he has no
need to advertise, prefers to stay away from gatherings at which the
resplendent tradesmen are the observed of all observers. There are
_many_ men of sensibility, of imagination, of delicacy of thought and
refinement of feeling, in Australia. There are women equally gifted.
But these are not the people who besiege the Vice-regal Residence most
determinedly, or appear in the papers most often. If they have means,
or leisure, or culture--and often they have all three--they look for
congenial souls, or are satisfied to remain apart.
The selfishness of Australian society is more or less implied in what
has been already stated; but a special significance is often given to
the word in connection with the declining birth-rate. The population of
the continent is by no means stationary. The birth-rate is about 28 per
thousand, and the death-rate scarcely 13 per thousand. In fifty years,
even at the present rate of increase, there will be 8,000,000 people in
the Commonwealth. But the preachers and politicians are not satisfied.
They want the increase to be still greater, the births to be still
more numerous. They have discovered that the cradle of the working
man--when he can afford such an article of furniture--is seldom empty,
while the cradle of the rich mother has only an occasional inmate. The
cry has gone up that the women of the well-to-do class are furnishing
a bad precedent. A committee of nine, appointed by the New South
Wales Government, recently investigated the whole question. And the
conclusion arrived at is that Australia, and more especially its middle
and upper classes, are socially and morally in a bad way.
It is remarkable that so much unnecessary alarm should have been
created over this subject. To say that the diminishing birth-rate
is necessarily a bad sign is to ignore great part of the teaching
of history, and of science, and of civilisation. Birth is stronger
than death, and has been throughout the ages. It was so when the
barbarians were knocking at the gates of the Eternal City; when the
tens of thousands of Attila were falling before the tens of thousands
of Aetius; when Goth and Vandal, Frank and Scythian, were transforming
Central Europe into a charnel pit; when famine and pestilence were
assisting the war-god of the Middle Ages to keep population in check.
Yet population grew then, and is growing now. Science, by checking
disease, and humanitarian sentiment, by preventing war, are helping
it to grow still faster. No one can pretend to say what the end will
be. The temper of Australian society is probably no more unselfish
and no more moral than is that of any other society equally endowed
with means and leisure time. But even out of evil good may come; and
if selfishness and immorality are evils, it has yet to be shown that a
declining birth-rate belongs to the same category.
The tone of what is called society is, as a matter of fact, the outward
expression of the country’s ideal. Australia badly wants an ideal. At
present it has none worthy of the name. It is not looking for one; at
least there are few indications of a search. What is everybody striving
for? Unto what altar is the mysterious priest of nationhood leading
his followers? Of what nature are the offerings? Who are the deities
that are being invoked? These are all questions that should interest
the speculative mind. As to the habits and inspirations of the working
classes, there is not much uncertainty. They are aiming--and it is an
honourable and straightforward aim--at improved mental and material
conditions of living. But as the present argument deals with methods
of employing leisure, and the workers are understood to have no
leisure, they may be omitted from the general conclusion. The leisured
classes, the privileged classes, the social classes have one, and only
one objective. Their familiar gods are those of the worshippers in
_Atalanta in Calydon_--Pan by day, and Bacchus by night. Their mission
is to pass the time, to kill it in the most agreeable way, to accompany
its exit with the music of flutes, to see that its obsequies are
attended by the most lulling effects, the most soothing harmonies, the
most insidious appeals to brain and sense that money will allow.
Once upon a time there were ideals. The patriotic ideal was one of
these, and it was decidedly useful, though from the logical standpoint
rather absurd. The march of intelligence teaches that the willingness
to die for one’s country is the survival of a crude and primitive
instinct; that it is much finer, as well as much safer, to entertain
a cosmopolitan feeling of regard for the foreigner, and not to put
oneself unnecessarily in his way. Leonidas, when he put himself in
the way at Thermopylæ, illustrated the earlier man’s fondness for an
ideal. From his country’s point of view his ideal was a good one,
though for himself it had no concrete value. Another manifestation
that is occasionally to be met with in Europe and elsewhere is what
might be called the aristocratic ideal. This is an inheritance from
feudal times. Yet a third variety is the intellectual ideal. France
in the time of Louis XIV. grew tired of looking up to the people of
high birth, and for a brief space looked up to the people of high
intelligence. Every member of the best society carried his sonnet about
with him as the modern man carries his walking-stick. The age of Louis
and of Molière was the heyday of the intellectual ideal.
In Australia there is no real acknowledgment of any of these three.
There is no inducement to the average citizen to be patriotic. The
quality, so far from being idealised, is hardly recognised. Times have
altered since King Xerxes looked out over Salamis and since Arnold
von Winkelreid fell at Sempach. The people of the new continent have
never been called upon to defend themselves. Where there is no desire
for fighting, no military spirit, no past history, no present danger,
there is not likely to be a patriotic ideal. If you were to ask the
average Australian whether it was not his highest ambition to die for
his country he would take you either for a person of weak intellect,
or for an eccentric amateur comedian. Neither is there any quality in
the people that corresponds to the ancient practice of idealising noble
birth. The country has no aristocracy of its own. It has no special
desire for one. Whatever ambitions or aspirations it may acknowledge,
they have nothing to do with a titled class. Neither is the typical
Australian given to worshipping intellect as such. When the particular
brand of intellect brought under his notice has been commercially
successful, and can command a high market value, he is appreciative and
respectful. But for the quality itself he has no special regard, and in
nine cases out of ten does not recognise it when it is there.