from what it can do, and cannot do, seems to be a curious mixture
of practicality and sentiment; in other words, of water and fire.
The elements are so blended that nature cannot stand up and say with
confidence, This is a woman. There is nothing a woman dislikes so much
as being called sentimental; but there is nothing she takes to so
kindly as sentiment. It is her essence, her _metier_, a part of the
air she breathes; she repudiates it in words, but acknowledges it in
practice every day. And yet, with all this extraordinary sentiment,
with all this drift towards emotionalism, the Australian girl combines
in some mysterious and inexplicable fashion a singular faculty for
holding her own, and a marvellously clear eye for the main chance.
In the vagaries of her wildest mood there is a concealed art and a
sound method. In the whirlwind of her emotionalism there is a certain
immovable common-sense. The storm may blow hither and thither, but it
blows on sufferance. The cold Angel of reason, with the ruling rod of
prudence, is never out of sight and hearing. To understand the position
it is only necessary to recollect that the Australian girl, albeit
disinclined by temperament to hard routine and cold formality, has been
instructed from infancy in many things that were quite unknown to her
English sister, at any rate until recent years. She has been taught to
rely much upon herself; she is not chaperoned and she is not shut in.
Thus it is that, while she is artistically susceptible to every mode of
emotion, she will not, except when she is under the age of seventeen,
throw herself recklessly away on the first individual who is to be
encountered strolling in the garden of Romance; not even though he be a
pleasant person and goodly to look upon.
For the reasons just stated or implied, a love affair with an
Australian woman is usually an interesting, and often an instructive,
experience. In suggesting for his bored and _blasé_ King of Ruritania
(or some such place) a love affair with a red-haired woman, Mr Henry
Harland was following slavishly in the tracts of physiology. But that
kind of science is always unsatisfactory, and, more often than not,
misleading. The woman of this continent--Mr Harland had never been
in Australia--does not require red hair to prove an antidote for
dulness. Her inborn strain of sentiment makes her the finest of natural
players in the game of hearts. Her marked individuality and abundance
of common-sense render her anything but an easy bird to capture. As
a matter of fact, she is more often the pursuer than the pursued. If
she sustains a reverse in one direction she recovers it in another.
She does not stand to be shot at; she has a thousand subterfuges, a
thousand weapons both of defence and attack. It is only experienced
players who can encounter her with safety. The crude beginner is almost
certain to sustain damage, if, indeed, he is not battered out of
recognisable shape.
It is the histrionic faculty again. The more one observes it, the more
admirable and the more dangerous it appears. A clever woman talking to
an eligible man in a drawing-room--or anywhere else for that matter--is
undoubtedly the noblest work of art. Observe how her own individuality
and her own ideas are kept in the background, while she seems to be
waiting with prettily veiled impatience for the words of wisdom that
she knows are about to fall from the man she is talking to. Observe
how the electric light has a habit of falling on her profile every now
and then. Observe how on occasion it lights up her eyes. Observe also
with what artless art she will bend forward her rapt soul in her eyes,
and again lean musingly or languorously back. She gives the man every
opportunity. If he has anything to say she flatters him by wanting to
listen, by drinking it thirstily in. If it becomes evident that he
can’t talk, or wont talk, she will talk for him, rally him, entertain
him, be brilliant for him, make him imagine that _he_ is brilliant in
listening to her. Glancing across the room, we wonder why she does it.
We don’t know her motive, but we recognise that the man isn’t worthy.
We see that she is wasting her time, throwing herself away. She should
be talking to us. We should be talking to her.
“Nature,” said a well-known painter to me only the other week, “is
hateful, horrible; it is only art that can make her endurable.” He
was speaking in the Melbourne Gallery, and he pointed to a picture of
his--a “Symphony,” it was called--which he had given away for a couple
of hundred pounds. The finished work was a symphony no doubt; but the
copied thing was to any but the artistic eye a dull conglomeration of
twig and leaf and timber. We have to thank this painter for creating
out of common and unattractive material a feast of colour that must
appeal to every beholder. We are not always as grateful as is necessary
to the individual who makes himself look other--and incidentally
better--than he really is. The world is full of intensely natural and
intensely uninteresting people. The unrefined product of nature when
presented in its native shape is alarming and calculated to make the
beholder flee into the wilderness. To be natural is to be condemned.
Let us thank the Australian girl for the fine example, for the clear
lead she has given. Let us endeavour to be as artificial, as histrionic
as we can.
IX
TWO CITIES
Where, O Earth! is a fairer city
Than this by night, when the Quay’s half circle ...
Lights the dusk of the city’s face?
Miss Mack’s verses to Sydney are the kind of tribute one would wish
to pay to a lover of happier days. For that reason they may awake
some kind of echo in the breasts of many hundreds of persons who will
confess to a fondness for Sydney, but who are indifferent to the ways
and methods of the lofty rhyme. For the place has a strong personality.
One never thinks of it as merely so many houses and so many people.
An entity, a living thing, a friend, a mistress, a consoler, a woman
with soft breath and warm-tinted hair, a queen of men and yet their
servant--it is any or all of these, and much besides.
The new-comer should arrange to enter Sydney by night. If he does
this he will experience the strong and always remembered sensation of
emerging from Cimmerian darkness into the blaze of a lighted arena. The
waters of the Tasman sea are usually cold and stormy. If you have been
ploughing across them for the best part of a week, if you have been
beset with bad weather, or sea-sickness, or boredom, or with the three
combined, you will hail as one of the pleasant sounds of a lifetime the
news that there is visible a glimmer from South Head. Thereafter the
transformation is rapid. Sydney by night does not _grow_ upon you; it
_bursts_ upon you, and the impression is not soon forgotten. Whatever
you have read and whatever you have dreamed of Eastern cities by the
Tigris; whatever you have seen of lime-light effects on a brilliant,
gaily coloured, thronged and animated stage; whatever you have pictured
to yourself of islands and gardens and palaces by the water’s edge--all
these and more are around you and in front of you as the ship winds
past promontory after promontory, island after island, on its passage
towards a mooring place in Darling Harbour. The panorama has an
unreal and fairy-like splendour. For a minute or two, perhaps for half
an hour, you expect that everything will presently dissolve, and the
conditions of blackness and vacancy reassert themselves. But the boat
passes on, and the picture remains. You realise after a while that it
is the city itself welcoming you, beckoning to you, smiling at you with
all its arcs and crescents and its glittering phantasmagoria of lights.
In the daytime all this is changed. Sydney by day is the real Sydney,
the working Sydney, and like every other place in which men work and
congregate, it has its dull and drab and depressing features. But
the strangely marked personal characteristics are there still. They
have taken on new phases, and they make a different kind of appeal.
Your mistress has no longer the sparkle in her eyes and the diamonds
on her brow; she no longer scintillates to dazzle you, and no longer
challenges you to admiration by her life and movement. She has grown
languorous as the land of the lotos-flower, enervating as the Island of
Circë. True, she has her marts and her merchandise, her busy streets,
her ships, and her people who toil and spin. But they are a people on
whom she has set her imprint, and who have drunk the wine of love and
of laughter at her hands. The fact is that neither by day nor by night,
neither in summer nor winter, can Sydney look consistently hard or
repellant. Now and then a bracing wind blows up from the waste places
of the Pacific and talks menacingly of storm and stress and shipwreck.
But it loses itself or dies to nothing when in the heart of the
city, or when endeavouring to make its way along such good-tempered,
well-protected thoroughfares as George and Pitt Streets. Sometimes
it rains, sometimes it blusters a little, but only with an amusing
semblance of anger. In an hour or two the sun is shining again.
A city that has grown has always an advantage, in point of
attractiveness, over one that has been merely made. It is easy to
understand the reason. No one cares for the display of qualities
that seem to be the result of artificial training. Every one admires
spontaneity, or rather the appearance of spontaneity. The thing itself
may be a product of the finest art. But that matters nothing. As it is
with individuals, so it is with a city. The straight, uncompromising
lines which appeal to the draughtsman are of interest to no one else.
It is a mistake to cultivate a prim demeanour or to attempt to keep
a straight face if Nature has in view something else. The friend who
keeps calling “Duty, duty, duty” in your ear is not really wise, and
is always certain to be disliked. Equally tedious is the architect, or
the surveyor, or the mathematician, who says dogmatically that certain
streets should always meet at such and such an angle; that there should
be certain spaces for parks and certain widths reserved for traffic;
that there should be buildings modelled on particular lines, and
conglomerations of houses arranged after a particular fashion; that
there should be a scientific method observed in building the thing to
be called a city, just as there are particular rules for turning out a
baker’s oven or for making a carpenter’s box.
Sydney, as it does not take long to discover, has grown up after a
careless and wilful fashion of its own. It is neither consciously
straight, nor consciously irregular. Of modern improvements it takes
what it pleases, and leaves what it does not want. Buildings cluster
round the harbour and bedeck themselves with red-tiled roofs and
flaunt their pleasant inertia in the sun. Some of the more recent
structures--hotels, warehouses, public markets and the like--are
showy and even magnificent. But the main streets make no pretence to
symmetry or modernity, and are strongly reminiscent in their narrowness
and grime of second and third-rate towns in France and England. The
resemblance would be more striking did not Australia lack the pointed,
old-world architecture that gives historic quaintness and interest
even to the dirtier and more tumbledown villages of Europe. Sydney is
suspicious of new inventions, and would prefer that the disturbing,
scientific spirit of the age left it alone. Until lately it knew of no
better means of locomotion than its steam trams. It is only within the
last year or two that it has had its electric cars. The energy with
which these gigantic structures rush to and fro and disturb traffic
is quite out of keeping with the atmosphere of the place. There are
numerous accidents, because so many of the Sydneyites have not the
energy to get out of the way.
The people, as a rule, are not ambitious. They have not the restless
unquiet temperament associated with the Anglo-Saxon race in other
and less pleasant parts of the globe. For that reason they are often
excellent companions. They know how to enjoy life, and they are willing
to share their knowledge with the stranger. They have no cast-iron
formulas, either of etiquette or of morals. They have not yet succeeded
in reducing orthodoxy to a fine art. It matters comparatively little to
them, before or after they have made your acquaintance, whether your
education was finished at Oxford or in Lower George Street, whether
your father was a pawnbroker or an admiral, whether your nearest
relations keep a grocer’s shop, or are something connected with the
Established Church. Are you an agreeable person? Have you a pleasant
humour? Do you know how to make life entertaining? Can you help others
to pass the time? If the answer to any of these questions is in the
affirmative, the gates of many desirable places will be thrown open
to you. You will be allowed to tread the primrose path to the music of
lutes, to the sound of soft voices, to the rustle of silk and satin
embroideries, to the rhythm of Government House waltzes, to the popping
of Vice-regal champagne. The possession of wealth is an advantage, but
it is not indispensable. The Sydney creditor is as accommodating as
most creditors. Even this class is not absolutely proof against the
influence of climate and surroundings.
Among the men who do the mental work of Sydney--the writers, the
scholars, the financiers, the preachers, the politicians, the social
reformers, and the rest--you find this lack of ambition and of
sustained effort particularly noticeable. A degree of ability is
common enough. But it is not husbanded and utilised with that fierce
concentration of purpose which marks the North of England man when he
packs his bag for London, or the Western American when he sets out for
New York. The journalism of Sydney is intermittently clever, sometimes
brilliant, never consistently good. It may be that a man has a vein
of humour, a descriptive faculty, a sense of colour in words. It is
little use telling this man that if he works and waits, and waits and
works--if he denies himself the cheap laurels of newspaper favour, and
the thin rewards of journalistic achievement--he may ultimately win a
place in the inner circle of approved and recognised authorship. He
knows that he can get a guinea for a couple of hours’ application. What
is the advantage, then, of going elsewhere? A guinea is a guinea; and
Sydney is an excellent place in which to spend it. Thus he reasons in
act, if not in words. The consequence is that the intellectual tone
of the city, as set by the writers and thinkers, is for the most part
a blend of opportunism and of _laisser faire_. If you want to learn
something, if you want an incentive to act, if you want to live the
strenuous life, you must leave Sydney and go somewhere else.
The women of Sydney are in a class by themselves. They are as
distinctive in their way as the city in which they live is distinctive
in its way. There is little doubt that in a measure they obtain their
character from the place, though it is also true that they assist to
give the place its character. To think of them, after the lapse of
years, is to conjure up pleasant memories. There is reason to believe
that the Cytherea of the ancient Greeks was born in Sydney, or at least
lived there in prehistoric days, long before settlement crowded the
approaches to the harbour, long before Governor Philip sighted the
Heads, long before the country knew anything of modern habitations,
and while it still slumbered in the embraces of the Golden Age. The
waters still smile when they remember the vision that once rose from
them; and to this day they impart something of the warmth and colour
of the foam-born Aphroditë to the women who dwell by their fringing
shores. Not that the daughters of Sydney are classical, or Grecian,
or faultless in form and feature. The symmetry of the marble statue
is no part of their equipment. They are deficient, for the most part,
in correct outlines. Such charm as is theirs is mainly the result
of manner, of temperament, of suggestion, of look. They convey the
impression that their sympathies would not soon be alienated, that
their welcome would never be ungenerous, that they could, if they
wished, make of existence a pleasant thing.
The character of the people has been a subject for uneasy speculation.
It is darkly hinted that the city is a refuge ground for many strange
sins. The majority of the residents do not trouble about these matters.
But there are a few estimable people who do. The women belonging to
the W.C.T.U., and the I.O.G.T., and the I.O.R., and the rest of the
alphabet devoted to temperance and the higher life, work consistently
hard. In their display of zeal they almost make up what they lack
in numbers. They are troubled voices calling in a moral wilderness,
but they do not despair. They have one friend and confidant--the
Colonial Secretary for the time being. The tales of depravity that are
poured into the ears of this patient individual each month would fill
many volumes. His official life is a round of dreadful discoveries.
He begins his Ministerial career a cheerful optimist, and ends it
with every vestige of illusion gone. Virtuous and estimable women
belonging to every reforming agency in the metropolis are constantly
at his elbow, are constantly telling him of fresh detachments of
young children found in opium dens, of fresh batches of drunkards
picked up in the gutter, of new contingents of women discovered on
the street. The Colonial Secretary is asked, entreated, and commanded
to do something. Exactly what it is his auditors do not know, but
_something_, he is told, must be done. The unhappy man listens,
shudders, sympathises, and protests that he is passionately grateful to
the earnest women who have thought fit to lighten his mental darkness.
He agrees that something must be done, and knows in his heart of hearts
that nothing can be done. Meantime the social life of Sydney goes on,
and the place, with its agreeable men and graceful women, is a place to
be desired and pleasant to the eyes.
It is always pleasant--pleasant to linger in, pleasant to look
forward to, pleasant to look back upon. Not very intellectual, not
very strenuous, not very inspiring, it has all the aids to enjoyment
that have been discovered in the last twenty centuries, and all the
ingenious devices that have ever been invented to make time pass. A
city that has from its birth been cradled in soft airs; a city that
spreads against the storm and stress of dissatisfied ambition, the
protection of mild and lulling wings; a city intended by Nature to
please the artist and bring the practical man relief and rest; a city
that rescues humanity from the stern and unlovely asceticism of a gray
and narrow school; a city that is indifferent to morals, and cares
for religion only on the picturesque side; a city that holds always
with the Persian poet and tells its people to enjoy themselves, for
to-morrow they may be with yesterday’s seven thousand years.
To leave Sydney and to go to Melbourne is to enter a new world. Instead
of resemblances there are contrasts. In place of Australianisms there
are Anglicanisms, Americanisms, and foreign “isms” of various kinds.
Climate may have something to do with the difference, and topographical
conditions may have something more. The reception that Sydney gives
you is that of a woman in a luxurious room, with soft lights falling
on rich curtain hangings, with glitter of glass and silver ornament,
with lavish display of elegance and outward charm. The woman rises
seductively, looks at you languorously and invites you, not so much by
word as by gesture, to make yourself at home. It is delightful; but
yet there is something wanting. The reflection comes that you are not
being specially favoured; that this is the manner of the hostess to all
and sundry; that there may be something unhealthy in this mellifluous
atmosphere; that the smile of welcome is less that of the friend than
that of the courtesan. The reception you get from Melbourne is of quite
another character. The woman this time is cold and calm, and superbly
indifferent. If she seems to smile it is probably the reflection of
your own hopefulness. She offers you nothing; she barely acknowledges
you; she does not want you; it is certain that she is not anxious to
know you. All her panoply of architectural ornament is arrayed against
you. And yet the thought supervenes that this cold woman may be better
worth knowing in the end than the other one; that her harder outlines
may conceal a more genuine worth; that her good opinion may be better
worth striving for than that of the other--the one with the redder
lips, and the flaunting, unchanging smile.
But the wide streets and the flat unoccupied spaces of Melbourne
are an outward semblance calculated to strike the newcomer with a
shuddering sense of chill and desolation. More especially if they
are encountered for the first time on a winter’s afternoon. For the
winter that merely dallies and trifles in Sydney, and makes but a
pretence of bringing with it cold weather, is genuine in the Southern
city. There is no bleaker thoroughfare on earth than Collins Street
or Burke Street on a blustering July day. From Spring Street to the
railway station there is a clear, unbroken passage for the Arctic wind.
The occasional tramcar and the infrequent pedestrian are cheerless
objects around which the Sou’-Wester disports itself, seeking always,
in return for some ancient grievance, a grim and unnecessary revenge.
If the day happens to be a Saturday, or a public holiday, the outlook
is rendered ten times more dismal by the deathly appearance of the
streets, from which all but an unreal semblance of life and movement
has departed. A wilderness of grim-looking window shutters, and a
Sahara of pavement--that is all. The wind drives the dust in front of
it, then follows on shriekingly. When it has finished playing with the
dust it brings in the rain. And Melbourne, with its wide, shelterless
streets swept from end to end by a rain-storm--Melbourne with its blank
spaces and its vanished crowds--is the one place on earth where the new
arrival would choose _not_ to be.
But this appearance and mannerism of the Queen city--it clings to
the name, though the boom era which gave the name a meaning has
departed--must be lived through, and lived down. Presently the sun will
shine again. Presently the holiday will be over; and the people who
have been abroad in the suburbs, or cultivating their garden patches,
or hiding themselves in their own houses, will be once more visible,
and the pavement will once more echo to the sound of feet. By a seeming
miracle the streets have become almost full. Melbourne has become an
intelligible place to live in. The shops, now that the window shutters
are down, are seen to be beautifully fitted up. The buildings are for
the most part new, and they are never grimy. One remembers that in the
heart of Sydney there are pervading evidences of smoke and grime. One
must give Melbourne its due. It has something to boast about. It has
been magnificently laid out. Its measurements are on a generous scale.
It is fine and large and bracing. One forgets the chill sensation left
by those deserted streets and those grim-looking window shutters. The
Block has become a centre of bustle and animation. Again the thought
presents itself that this place may have a heart of its own, that it
may have a personality, even a warmth, concealed behind those set
features and those formal lines.
Further acquaintance with Melbourne increases the respect felt for it.
One gets to like it for the same reason that the Londoner gets to like
London. It is not a question of beauty, or simplicity, or gentleness
of form and feature. One gets to like it because of its greatness,
and because of its strength; perhaps also, in the case of the older
residents, because of the thought of the splendid life and animation
that were part of it fifteen or twenty years ago, and that may be
part of it again. The Melbourne man, after a certain lapse of time,
acquires a personal feeling for his self-contained, self-respecting
city. He learns to recognise its various moods--for even Melbourne has
moods--and to enter into them all. He would not care for it if it were
flashy and volatile like other places. He can admire it for its reserve
and its silences. He knows that, go where he will, he will not find a
cleaner, wider, more spacious city to dwell in. And he is fully aware
that for him Melbourne reveals much of what she keeps hidden from the
stranger; that she will show to him as to one of her lovers a warmth
and friendliness that are the more satisfying because not universally
shared.