It is difficult to speak of Melbourne fitly. The judgment of neither
native nor foreigner can escape the influence of the phenomenal aspect
of the city. Not fifty years ago its first child, Batman’s, was born;
not forty, it was a city; a little over thirty, it was the metropolis
of a colony; and now (as the inscription on Batman’s grave tells us)
“_Circumspice!_” To natives their Melbourne is, and is only, “the
magnificent city, classed by Sir George Bowen as the ninth in the world,”
“one of the wonders of the world.” They cannot criticise, they can only
praise it. To a foreigner, however, who, with all respect and admiration
for the excellencies of the Melbourne of to-day as compared with the
Melbourne of half-a-century ago, has travelled and seen and read, and
cares very little for glorifying the _amour-propre_ of this class or of
that, and very much for really arriving at some more or less accurate
idea of the significance of this city and its civilization; to such a
man, I say, the native melodies in the style of “Rule Britannia” which he
hears everywhere and at all times are distasteful. Nay, he may possibly
have at last to guard himself against the opposite extreme, and hold off
depreciation with the one hand as he does laudation with the other!
The first thing, I think, that strikes a man who knows the three great
modern cities of the world—London, Paris, New York—and is walking
observingly about Melbourne is, that Melbourne is made up of curious
elements. There is something of London in her, something of Paris,
something of New York, and something of her own. Here is an attraction to
start with. Melbourne has, what might be called, the _metropolitan tone_.
The look on the faces of her inhabitants is the _metropolitan look_.
These people live quickly: such as life presents itself to them, they
know it: as far as they can see, they have no prejudices. “I was born in
Melbourne,” said the wife of a small bootmaker to me once, “I was born in
Melbourne, and I went to Tasmania for a bit, but I soon came back again.
_I like to be in a place where they go ahead._” The wife of a small
bootmaker, you see, has the _metropolitan tone_, the _metropolitan look_
about her; she sees that there is a greater pleasure in life than sitting
under your vine and your fig-tree; she likes to be in a place where they
go ahead. And she is a type of her city. Melbourne likes to “go ahead.”
Look at her public buildings, her New Law Courts not finished yet, her
Town Hall, her Hospital, her Library, her Houses of Parliament, and
above all her Banks! Nay, and she has become desirous of a fleet and has
established a “Naval Torpedo Corps” with seven electricians. All this is
well, very well. Melbourne, I say, lives quickly: such as life presents
itself to her, she knows it: as far as she can see, she has no prejudices.
_As far as she can see._—The limitation is important. The real question
is, _how_ far can she see? how far does her civilization answer the
requirements of a really fine civilization? what scope in it is there (as
Mr. Arnold would say) for the satisfaction of the claims of conduct, of
intellect and knowledge, of beauty and manners? Now in order the better
to answer this question, let us think for a moment what are the chief
elements that have operated and are still operating in this Melbourne and
her civilization.
This is an English colony: it springs, as its poet Gordon (of whom there
will presently be something to be remarked) says, in large capitals, it
springs from “_the Anglo-Saxon race ... the Norman blood_.” Well, if
there is one quality which distinguishes this race, this blood, it is
its determined strength. Wherever we have gone, whatever we have done,
we have gone and we have done with all our heart and soul. We have made
small, if any, attempt to conciliate others. Either they have had to
give way before, or adapt themselves to us. India, America, Australia,
they all bear witness to our determined, our pitiless strength. What
is the state of the weaker nations that opposed us there? In America
and Australia they are perishing off the face of the earth; even in New
Zealand, where the aborigines are a really fine and noble race, we are,
it seems, swiftly destroying them. In India, whose climate is too extreme
for us ever to make it a colony in the sense that America and Australia
are colonies; in India, since we could neither make the aborigines give
way, nor make them adapt themselves to us, we have simply let them alone.
They do not understand us, nor we them. Of late, it is true, an interest
in them, in their religion and literature, has been springing up, but
what a strange aspect do we, the lords of India for some hundred and
thirty years, present! “In my own experience among Englishmen,” says an
Indian scholar writing to the _Times_ in 1874, “I have found no general
indifference to India, but I have found a Cimmerian darkness about the
manners and habits of my countrymen, an almost poetical description
of our customs, and a conception no less wild and startling than the
vagaries of Mandeville and Marco Polo concerning our religion.” Do we
want any further testimony than this to the determined, the pitiless
strength of “the Anglo-Saxon race ... the Norman blood?”
Well, and how does all this concern Australia in general and Melbourne
in particular? It concerns them in this way, that the civilization of
Australia, of Melbourne, is an Anglo-Saxon civilization, a civilization
of the Norman blood, and that, with all the good attendant on such a
civilization, there is also all the evil. All? Well, I will not say all,
for that would be to contradict one of the first and chief statements
I made about her, namely that “as far as she can see Melbourne has no
prejudices,” a statement which I could not make of England. “_This our
native or adopted land_,” says an intelligent Australian critic, the
late Mr. Marcus Clarke, “_has no past, no story. No poet speaks to us._”
“_No_,” we might add, “_and (thus far happily for you) neither, as far
as you can see, does any direct preacher of prejudice_.” And here, as I
take it, we have put our finger upon what is at once the strength and the
weakness of this civilization.
Let us consider it for a moment. The Australians have no prejudice about
an endowed Church, as we English have, and hence they have, what we have
not, religious liberty. As far as I can make out, there is no reason why
the wife of a clergyman of the Church of England should in this colony
look down upon the wife of a dissenting minister as her social inferior,
and this is, on the whole, I think, well, for it tends to break up the
notion of caste that exists between the two sects; it tends, I mean, to
their mutual benefit, to the interchange of the church’s sense of “the
beauty of holiness” with the chapel’s sense of the passion of holiness.
Here, then, you are better off than we. On the other hand, you have no
prejudice, as we at last have, against Protection, and consequently you
go on benefiting a class at the expense of the community in a manner that
can only, I think, be defined as short-sighted and foolish. Here we are
better off than you. Again, however, you have not the prejudice that we
have against the intervention of the State. You have nationalized your
railways, and are attempting, as much as possible, to nationalize your
land.[1] You are beginning to see that a land tax, at any given rate of
annual value, would be (as Mr. Fawcett puts it) “a valuable national
resource, which might be utilized in rendering unnecessary the imposition
of many taxes which will otherwise have to be imposed.” Here you are
better off than we, better off both in fortune and general speculation.
Again, you have not yet arrived at Federalism, and what a waste of time
and all time’s products is implied in the want of central unity! Now the
first and third of these instances show the strength that is in this
civilization, and the second shows a portion of the weakness, at present
only a small portion, but, unless vigorous measures are resorted to and
soon, this Protection will become the great evil that it is in America.
There is just the same cry there as here: “Protect the native industries
until they are strong enough to stand alone”—as if an industry that has
once been protected will ever care to stand alone again until it is
compelled to! as if a class benefited at the expense of the community
will ever give up its benefit until the community takes it away again!
On one of the first afternoons I spent in Melbourne, I remember strolling
into a well-known book-mart, the book-mart “at the sign of the rainbow.”
I was interested both in the books and the people who were looking at
or buying them. Here I found, almost at the London prices (for we get
our twopence or threepence in the shilling on books now in London),
all, or almost all, of the average London books of the day. The popular
scientific, theological, and even literary books were to hand, somewhat
cast into the shade, it is true, by a profusion of cheap English novels
and journals, but still they were to hand. And who were the people that
were buying them? The people of the dominant class, the middle-class. I
began to enquire at what rate the popular, scientific, and even literary
books were selling. Fairly, was the answer. “And how do Gordon’s poems
sell?” “_Oh they sell well_,” was the answer, “_he’s the only poet we’ve
turned out_.”
This pleased me, it made me think that the “go-ahead” element in
Victorian and Melbourne life had gone ahead in this direction also. If,
in a similar book-mart in Falmouth (say), I had asked how the poems of
Charles Kingsley were selling, it is a question whether much more than
the name would have been recognized. And yet the middle-class here is as,
and perhaps more, badly—more appallingly badly—off for a higher education
than the English provincial middle class is. Whence comes it, then, that
a poet like Gordon with the cheer and charge of our chivalry in him, with
his sad “trust and only trust,” and his
“weary longings and yearnings
for the mystical better things:”
Whence comes it that he is a popular poet here? Let him answer us English
for himself and Melbourne:
“You are slow, very slow, in discerning
that book-lore and wisdom are twain:”
Yes, indeed, to Melbourne, such as life presents itself to her, she
knows it, and, what is more, she knows that she knows it, and her
self-knowledge gives her a contempt for the pedantry of the old world.
Walk about in her streets, look at her private buildings, these banks
of hers, for instance, and you will see this. They _mean_ something,
they _express_ something: they do not (as Mr. Arnold said of our British
Belgravian architecture) “only express the impotence of the artist to
express anything.” They express a certain sense of movement, of progress,
of conscious power. They say: “Some thirty years ago the first gold
nuggets made their entry into William Street. Well, many more nuggets
have followed, and wealth of other sorts has followed the nuggets, and we
express that wealth—we express movement, progress, conscious power.—_Is
that, now, what your English banks express?_” And we can only say that
it is not, that our English banks express something quite different;
something, if deeper, slower; if stronger, more clumsy.
But the matter does not end here. When we took the instance of the books
and the people “at the sign of the rainbow,” we took also the abode
itself of the rainbow; when we took the best of the private buildings, we
took also the others. Many of them are hideous enough, we know; this is
what Americans, English, and Australians have in common, this inevitable
brand of their civilization, of their determined, their pitiless
strength. The same horrible “pot hat,” “frock coat,” and the rest, are to
be found in London, in Calcutta, in New York, in Melbourne.
Let us sum up. “The Anglo-Saxon race, the Norman blood:” a colony made
of this: a city into whose hands wealth and its power is suddenly
phenomenally cast: a general sense of movement, of progress, of conscious
power. This, I say, is Melbourne—Melbourne with its fine public buildings
and tendency towards banality, with its hideous houses and tendency
towards anarchy. And Melbourne is, after all, the Melbournians. Alas,
then, how will this city and its civilization stand the test of a
really fine city and fine civilization? how far will they answer the
requirements of such a civilization? what scope is there in them for the
satisfaction of the claims of conduct, of intellect and knowledge, of
beauty, and manners?
Of the first I have only to say that, so far as I can see, its claims
are satisfied, satisfied as well as in a large city, and in a city of
the above-mentioned composition, they can be. But of the second, of the
claims of intellect and knowledge, what enormous room for improvement
there is! What a splendid field for culture lies in this middle-class
that makes a popular poet of Adam Lindsay Gordon! It tempts one to
prophesy that, given a higher education for this middle-class, and
fifty—forty—thirty years to work it through a generation, and it will
leave the English middle-class as far behind in intellect and knowledge
as, at the present moment, it is left behind by the middle-class, or
rather the one great educated upper-class, of France.
There is still the other claim, that of beauty and manners. And it is
here that your Australian, your Melbourne civilization is, I think,
most wanting, is most weak; it is here that one feels the terrible need
of “a past, a story, a poet to speak to you.” With the Library are a
sculpture gallery and a picture gallery. What an arrangement in them
both! In the sculpture gallery “are to be seen,” we are told, “admirably
executed casts of ancient and modern sculpture, from the best European
sources, copies of the Elgin marbles from the British Museum, and other
productions from the European Continent.” Yes, and Summers stands side by
side with Michaelangelo! And poor busts of Moore and Goethe come between
Antinous and the Louvre Apollo the Lizard slayer! But this, it may be
said, is after all only an affair of an individual, the arranger. Not
altogether so. If an audience thinks that a thing is done badly, they
express their opinion, and the failure has to vanish. And how large a
portion of the audience of Melbourne city, pray, is of opinion that quite
half of its architecture is a failure, is hideous, is worthy only, as
architecture, of abhorrence? how many are shocked by the atrocity of the
Medical College building at the University? how many feel that Bourke
Street, taken as a whole, is simply an insult to good taste?
“Yes, all this,” it is said, “may be true, as abstract theory, but it is
at present quite out of the sphere of practical application. You would
talk of Federalism, and here is our good ex-Premier of New South Wales,
Sir Henry Parkes, making it the subject of a farewell denunciation. ‘I
venture to say now,’ says Sir Henry Parkes, ‘here amongst you what I
said when I had an opportunity in London, what I ventured to say to Lord
Derby himself, that this federation scheme must prove a failure.’ You
talk of Free-trade and here is what an intelligent writer in the _Argus_
says _apropos_ of ‘the promised tariff negotiations with Tasmania.’ ‘In
America,’ he says, ‘there is no difficulty in inducing the States to see
that, whatever may be their policy as regards the outside world, they
should interchange as between each other in order that they may stand on
as broad a base as possible, but we can only speculate on the existence
of such a national spirit here.’—These facts, my good sir,” it is said,
“as indicative of the amount of opposition that the nation feels to the
ideas of Free-trade and Federalism, are not encouraging.”—They are not,
let us admit it at once, but there are others which are; others, some
of which we have been considering, and, above and beyond everything,
there is one invaluable and in the end irresistible ally of these
ideas: there is _the Tendency of the Age_—_the Time-Spirit_, as Goethe
calls it. Things move more quickly now than they used to do: ideas,
the modern ideas, are permeating the masses swiftly and thoroughly and
universally. We cannot tell, we can only speculate as to what another
fifty—forty—thirty years will actually bring forth.
Free-trade—Federalism—Higher Education, they all go together. The
necessities of life are cheap here, wonderfully cheap; a man can get a
dinner here for sixpence that he could not get in England for twice or
thrice the amount. “There are not,” says the _Australasian Schoolmaster_,
the organ of the State Schools, “there are not many under-fed children in
the Australian [as there are in the English] schools.” But the luxuries
of life (and let us remember that what we call the luxuries of life
are, after all, necessities; they are the things which go to make up
our civilization, the things which make us feel that there is a greater
pleasure in life than sitting under your vine and your fig-tree, whatever
Mr. George may have to say to the contrary)—the luxuries of life, I say,
are dear here, very dear, owing to, what I must be permitted to call, an
exorbitant tariff, and, consequently, the money that would be spent in
fostering a higher ideal of life, in preparing the way for a national
higher education, is spent on these luxuries, and the claims of intellect
and knowledge, and of beauty and manners, have to suffer for it. Here
is your Mr. Marcus Clarke, for instance, talking grimly, not to say
bitterly, of “the capacity of this city to foster poetic instinct,” of
his “astonishment that such work” as Gordon’s “was ever produced here.”
He is astonished, you see, that the claims of intellect and knowledge,
and of beauty and manners are enough satisfied in this city to produce a
talent of this sort; he is astonished, because he does not see that there
is an element in this city which, in its way, is making for at any rate
the intellect and knowledge—an element which is a product, not of England
but of Australia; a general sense of movement, of progress, of conscious
power.
Free-trade—Federalism—Higher Education, they all, I say, go together;
but if one is more important than the other, then it is the last.
Improvement, real improvement, must always be from within outwards,
not from without inwards. All abiding good comes, as it has been well
said, by evolution not by revolution. “Our chief, our gravest want in
this country at present,” says Arnold, “our _unum necessarium_, is a
middle-class, homogeneous, intelligent, civilized, brought up in good
public schools, and on the first plane.” How true is this of Australia
too, of Melbourne! There are State schools for the lower-class, but what
is there for the great upper educated class of the nation? The voluntary
schools, the “private adventure schools.” And what sort of education do
_they_ supply either in England or here? “The voluntary schools,” says
a happy shallow man in some Publishers’ circular I lit on the other
day, “the voluntary schools of the country” [of England] “have reached
the highest degree of efficiency.” This, to those who have taken the
trouble to study the question, not to say to have considerable absolute
experience in the English voluntary schools—this is intelligence as
surprising as it ought to be gratifying. To such men, the idea they had
arrived at of the English voluntary schools was somewhat different; their
idea being that these schools were, both socially and intellectually,
the most inadequate that fall to the lot of any middle class among the
civilized nations of Europe. “Comprehend,” says Arnold to us Englishmen,
and he might as well be saying it to you Australians, “comprehend that
middle-class education—the higher education, as we have put it, of the
great upper educated class—is a great democratic reform, of the truest,
surest, safest description.”
“But there are many difficulties to be overcome—so many, that we
doubt these abstract theories to be at present within the sphere of
practical application. There is such a mass of opposition to the idea of
Federalism. And, as for the idea of Free-trade, we can only speculate on
the existence of a national spirit here. The thinking public is quite
content with its State schools for the lower class, and cares little or
nothing about State schools and a higher education for the upper class.
They are much more interested in the religious questions of the day—the
Catholic attitude, the conflict between Mr. Strong and his Presbytery
on the subject of Religious Liberalism or Latitudinarianism, as you may
please to call it, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”—All this is so, let
us admit it at once, but it does not discourage us. We know, or think
we know (which is, after all, almost the same thing), that these three
questions—Free-trade, Federalism, Higher Education—are the three great,
the three vital questions for Australia, for Melbourne. We know that,
sooner or later, they will have to be properly considered and decided
upon, and that, if Melbourne is to keep the place which she now holds
as the leading city, intellectually and commercially, of Australia,
they will have to be decided upon in that way which conforms with “the
intelligible law of things,” with the _Tendency of the Age_, with
the _Time-Spirit_. For this is the one invaluable and, in the end,
irresistible ally of Progress—of Progress onward and upward.
_December, 1884._
NOTE.—No one, speaking of Free-trade and Federalism in Australia, can
omit a tribute of thanks to the _Argus_ and the _Federal Australian_ for
what they have respectively done for the two causes. The cause of Higher
Education, however, still waits for a champion in the Press.
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