It was in 1770 that Cook entered the bay to which he gave the name of
Botany: in ’88 that Philip landed in Port Jackson with his convict
settlement: in 1849 that the settlers refused to receive any more
convicts: and in ’56 that the settlement was acknowledged as a colony
and dowered with a constitution. These few facts have a very different
significance to those which correspond to them in the history of
Melbourne. The epithet phenomenal cannot be applied to the former in the
same sense as to the latter; nor yet, let us hasten to add, the epithet
premature. English people, who carry to a quite quaint degree their
modern representative poet’s dislike of
“Raw Haste, half-sister to Delay,”
find Melbourne “too American,” as they say, and reserve all their praise
for “picturesque Sydney” and the harbour about whose description Mr.
Trollope went (as we are all never likely to be able, at any rate in
Sydney, to forget) into diffuse despair. “The business thoroughfares,”
says a simple English traveller, “as well as the shops themselves, have a
far more English appearance than those of the capital of Victoria,” and
shuns all comment as superfluous. Let us not think of contradicting him.
That elemental characteristic of the British architect, “the impotence
to express anything,” is in no danger of disappearing in Sydney, nor
yet, let us again hasten to add, in Melbourne; but, if it be possible to
distinguish the matter thus, I should say that in Sydney he had found his
happy hunting-grounds, whereas in Melbourne he was just beginning to feel
that there was a rival about.
No, it is just where Sydney is _un_-English that she has charm. I do
not now refer to her natural position, nor to her age—age which will
tone down, and perhaps some day almost mellow, the masterpieces of even
the British architect. I refer to those buildings in the town, few and
far between enough, it is true, in which the Sydney perception of its
individual life has striven to express itself. The Sydney perception of
its individual life is not strong. As a local guide-book puts it more
particularly, “in the nomenclature of the streets Sydney shows intense
loyalty, and the lover of history will be delighted by the associations
which some of the names will summon to his memory. For instance, his
historical predilections will be gratified in noticing that the principal
street is named after George the Third, during whose reign the colony
was founded.” Of course, when the local guide-book tells us that a thing
is so, it _is_ so; and when it says that our predilections, historical
or otherwise, will be gratified and delighted, they _are_ gratified and
delighted. But these Sydney men and women, with their intense loyalty,
or rather what the writer in the local guide-books means thereby, have
not, what we called, the metropolitan look—have not the metropolitan
feeling. Mr. Marcus Clarke, in the cleverest and also the most fantastic
of his clever but often fantastic criticisms, “The Future Australian
Race,” says boldly: “It is more than likely that what should be the
Australian Empire will be cut in half by a line drawn through the centre
of the continent.... All beneath this line will be a Republic, having
the mean climate, and, in consequence, the development of Greece. The
intellectual capital of the Republic will be in Victoria; the fashionable
and luxurious capital on the shore of Sydney Harbour.” Then he adds that
“the Australians will be a fretful, clever, perverse, irritable race,”
showing us what, under all their superficial differences, the people of
Victoria and of New South Wales have, he thinks, in common. I do not
believe that the whole secret of the matter is here laid open before us.
Mr. Marcus Clarke had an admirable acuteness of perception, but he was
apt, having swiftly perceived one aspect of a thing, to write it down
at once as _the_ aspect without staying for a second or third look at
the thing itself. The consequence is that he rarely reaches the whole
secret of a thing: witness, for instance, his view of Christianity,
(but Mr. Arnold notices how even a critic of Sainte-Beuve’s calibre was
capable of illusion here), or of the significance of Gordon’s poetry,
which I have spoken of elsewhere; and it is lamentable to think how much
of this false tendency in him was due to the circumstance that he was a
man of letters, and an Australian man of letters. I do not believe, I
say, that, when he tells us that the really distinctive characteristic
of Sydney is (for “will be” is only “is” unmaterialized) fashion and
luxury, and Melbourne intellect, he has laid open before us the _whole_
secret of the present tendencies of these cities, or yet when he sees
them united with the common characteristics of fretfulness, cleverness,
perverseness, irritability. But here, undoubtedly, is one aspect of the
matter expressed admirably. The men and women of Sydney do not live so
fast mentally as the men and women of Melbourne: they give more free play
to their emotional passions. As we say, they “take things easier.” They
cling to the past which Melbourne throws away: they consider the present,
which Melbourne has very little time for. Their attachment to “the old
country” is deeper; they have intense loyalty, as the writer in the local
guide-book says. They are much more possessed by the affairs of Melbourne
than Melbourne is about theirs. The _Sydney Morning Herald_ and the
_Sydney Mail_ do not hold the same position in Melbourne as the _Argus_
and the _Australasian_ do in Sydney. The Sydney people are captious in
their criticism on the younger capital, just as Boston is on New York:
they talk about being “dragged at the chariot wheels of Victoria,” and
asseverate that they will not endure it. Melbourne people criticise
Sydney good-humouredly, and justly so, since in that aspect of them both,
which people seem to think is alone worth criticising, Melbourne is
undoubtedly far superior. Intellect in the modern world is the master:
emotion is the handmaid. Or, to put it in another way, our best average
work at present is being done in clear, nervous prose, while poetry is
praised and left to starve. Science is a better paymaster than Art, and
nearly all the best average intelligence of the world has turned to the
rising, and from the setting, sun. And Melbourne, I say, Melbourne with
her perception of movement, progress, conscious power, has out-stripped
this Sydney, whose perception of her individual life is so weak that all
she has to point to are her natural advantages, her age, and the meagre
fact that her “business thoroughfares, as well as the shops themselves,
have a far more English appearance than those of the capital of
Victoria.” And yet, undoubtedly, Sydney has—or so it seems to me—a rich
and rare possession of her own, and one which is worth as much as that of
Melbourne, even as emotion is worth as much as intellect, as poetry is
worth as much as prose. And there are, as we know, good judges who would
change the “as much” into “more.” I, however, who have no pretentions
to be a good judge, and am, as an acute English critic of mine so aptly
put it once, only “Whitman and water:” I must still cling to the belief
that perfection is to be found, and only to be found, in the _union_ of
these two qualities—of emotion and intellect, of poetry and prose. Or, as
I said the other day,[7] true science (which is essentially intellectual)
and true faith (which is essentially emotional) are to be, as they must
be, harmonies, eternal harmonies, the “perfect music” and “noble words”
of truth.
Well now, let us try and find out a little more definitely wherein
these men and women of Sydney, these who have not the metropolitan
look, the metropolitan feeling, show themselves, at any rate to the
disinterested seeker after a really fine civilization, as the equals of
our intellectual men and women of Melbourne. (“Intellectual,” we are
agreed, is here used as meaning that spiritual quality which is opposed
to emotional). First of all, however, let us examine this phrase of ours,
metropolitan look, metropolitan feeling, for fear it should be nothing
but a phrase, a mere catchword, and, as such, worthy only the places
where sawdust is stored.
Nothing is more certain than that our individual lives form, if not our
faces, the expression of them. Our eyes and all the facial muscles are
at the command of our natural inherited dispositions as modified by the
circumstances of our lives. The average man who spends his days in the
open air in companionship with the inanimate things about him, or in
the settled intercourse of country life, married or single, will have a
quite different look, a quite different _tone_, from the man whose days
are passed in the brisk interchange of words and thoughts of the life
of the city. And how much will this difference be accentuated by the
fact that the city is a seat of large and intense ideas, that the very
air is impregnated with the passionate thoughts, words, and acts of the
whole civilized world! It is in such men that we find the metropolitan
look, the metropolitan feeling. Their faces seem stripped of all useless
flesh like the body of an athlete: their eyes are quick and clear, ready
servants of the quick clear brain behind them. This is what we call the
average intelligent man, the labourer of the past, the partner of the
present, the master of the future! Put this man, however, into a state
of stress, intellectual or emotional, in his business or in his private
life, and that fine nervous face of his will become lean and rigid, those
quick clear eyes hard and naked. And, just as it is the pleasure of
our civilization to see this man in the first stage, so is it the pain
thereof to see him, alas too often, in the second. These are the most
dread spectres that haunt metropolises: their anguish wrings the heart
with an intensity, with an abidingness that the sight of mere misery
brutal and degraded does not and cannot inspire us. London and New York
swarm with such, and our miniature Australian intellectual capital, too,
knows them only too well. They press the stamp of their struggle into the
very brow of their city. It is they who bring home to us the lean and
rigid, the hard and naked side of the best life of their city. While it
is to their successful brothers that we owe what of us is phenomenal, it
is to them, the unsuccessful, that we owe what of us is premature. They
are the men who have formulated that exceeding bitter cry of “_Cruel
London_.” Yes, London is cruel in this sense of the word, and so, to
a less degree (In a hundred years shall we be able to say this?) is
Melbourne. I do not think anyone would call Sydney cruel.
“Well,” retorts the metropolitan, “perhaps not; but, on the other hand,
the provincial look, the dull look of intellectual death, is far more
common with such towns than with us. For me, I would sooner have heaven
with hell than purgatory by itself.—Pah,” he says, “Sydney is the city of
smells and shopkeepers!” And I for my part, with all my admiration for
the intellect of the average intelligent metropolitan in general and the
Melbourne metropolitan in particular, should not think of contradicting
him here. My only wish here is, as I have said, to find out wherein
these people whom he calls, with such fine scorn, “provincials” and
“shopkeepers,” show themselves his equals, and whether they _do_ show
themselves his equals, or that I shall stand convicted of a delusion on
the subject.
I believe much in first impressions (good ones, that is) provided only
that we bring, what I have called, a second and third look to bear on
the thing which has impressed us. And since I am graceless enough to
speak of my own little private beliefs, let me add that I often find
some difficulty in making my last impressions as good as my first, which
is provoking to anyone who has a dread and dislike of “impressionists”
and an attraction and affection towards “students.” Hence I find myself
quite ready, when in the latter humour, to call my first impressions
shallow and careless, and when in the former, to call my last impressions
dead-dark and pedantic, so that Mr. Marcus Clarke delights me not nor
(some laborious scholar of the Australasian future) neither, and all
is vanity and vexation of spirit! Let me, however, on this occasion
retail my first impressions with a trustful pen, for, as they were
unselfconscious and therefore unconnected with any theory on the subject
in hand, I believe they are really the best offering I have to make on
its altar.
The first thing, then, that struck me on walking about Sydney one
afternoon, looking at the place and the people, was the appalling
strength of the British civilization. In Melbourne, for reasons spoken
of elsewhere, this fact is not so striking. Melbourne, I have said, has
something of London, Paris, New York, and of its own. The prevailing
characteristic of Sydney is its Britishness—the happy hunting grounds
of the British architect with his “impotence to express anything,” the
intense and gratifying and delightful loyalty of the nomenclature of the
streets, and the rest. Everywhere are the thumb marks and the great toe
marks of the six-fingered six-toed giant, Mr. Arnold’s life-long foe, the
British Philistine! I call this strength appalling; for observe that this
is a country lying in a band of some five or six degrees south of the
tropic of Capricorn, whereas England is a country lying in a band of some
twenty-five or six degrees north of the corresponding tropic of Cancer,
and yet here are the two peoples living lives almost identic! Rome
changed her Jupiter into Ammon when the Tiber flowed into the Nile: Woden
and the God of the Christians blended into one another; but the Jehovah
(or shall we say the Moloch?) of Puritanism, of Calvinism, is the same
in Sydney as in London, in Melbourne as in Edinburgh! There is nothing
like it, save in the history of that wonderful people which produced this
God that is “a jealous God.” And further. These people in Sydney have
clung, not only to the faith but to the very raiment of their giant. The
same gloomy dresses, cumbrous on the women, hideous on the men, that we
see in England! Now in Melbourne, where those dear “old-country” days,
wherein spring, summer, autumn, and winter alternate with a fifth
season excruciatingly peculiar to the place itself, are not infrequent;
in Melbourne, I say, an attachment to the very tricks of one of the
worst climates in the world might not be so unnatural; but in Sydney
such an attachment becomes positively monstrous. The same food, the same
overeating and overdrinking, and (observe how careful we are) at the same
hours! If there is one thing, I believe, that the people of Sydney really
grudge to Melbourne, it is her factories. If they could only make the
atmosphere of Sydney (they do their best, however, with their steamers
for the harbour) as supremely filthy as that of London, Birmingham,
Manchester, Glasgow, the people, the intensely loyal people of Sydney,
would be happy. As it is, they have reluctantly to concede a point in
favour of, what the newspapers call, “her younger rival.” And yet how can
I say this in the face of their eminently successful pollution of their
harbour and their very streets with their drainage?
It is no wonder, then, we see, that, unlike Melbourne, Sydney’s
perception of her individual life is weak, miserably weak, all but
imperceptible. She has to point to her natural advantages and her age.
Now it is very nice to have a fine harbour, and Mr. Trollope is in his
grave and we may safely say that he had a profuse literary talent, like
many writers who lived before and many who will live after him; but the
chief point of interest in the harbour, at any rate to your disinterested
enquirer into the present and future social state of the owners, is,
_what effect does it, and the climate generally, have upon them?_ not
whether Mr. Trollope or anyone else “despairs of being able to convey to
any reader his own idea of the beauty” of either. Now we all know what
effect the “sabbath rest” has on the Middle class and People of England,
and we all know how zealously all those “pious and simple-minded” people
who, as Dr. Moorhouse puts it so well, live “entrenched in the old
fortifications of unintelligent orthodoxy,” are striving that that effect
should not be in any way lessened—striving, not only in London but in
Melbourne, and, so far, with considerable success in both. But here in
Sydney, where, at first sight, one would least expect it, they are more
liberal in these matters: their public institutions, Museums, Picture
Gallery, and so on, are thrown open to the public on sundays.[8] No
neighbouring town, so far as I know, partakes in the virtuous hatred of
Geelong to sunday boats. The harbour is plied by a large number of small
steamboats. The Middle-class and the People, thanks to the short hours
of work (hence in large part Australia’s excellence in sports) and the
saturday half-holiday, can disport themselves on its banks or where they
please. “Our harbour,” then, and _our parks_ too, are of more real use
than merely, as they say, to blow about; and so far, so good. Pleasure,
that light fair Pleasure which should find its natural home in every fine
climate, is undoubtedly drawing breath in the Sydney air. Mr. Marcus
Clarke’s acuteness of perception did not deceive him when he followed up
this pallid plant into the full-grown tree with its flower and fruit of
fashion and luxury. Yes, climate will ultimately work a transformation
upon even the six-fingered six-toed giant. Moloch’s fire will cease to
burn and brand: Jehovah’s jealousy will lose its harshness, and the sweet
bright love of the White Christ will brood over and temper the hearts
of this people to beauty and melody. Meantime, down there in Melbourne,
Pleasure when it opens its mouth to breathe, will also open it to bite:
the taint of cruelty will be upon it as it is upon all things purely
intellectual, all things in which emotion has no part. “Melbourne,” the
wise man of Sydney will say then, “Melbourne is the city of stew-pans
and stockbrokers. They know how to make money, but not how to spend it.
If they have pleasure, it borders on pain as lust does on love. All the
beauty they know is the beauty of light; heat is a stranger to them.
Their music lacks the minor keys. Years ago their one poet, Gordon, ran
away from the city, and took refuge in the bush: if he were alive now, he
would come to Sydney. No poet, no painter, no musician will be brought
forth out of Melbourne.—You will make fine logicians, you Melbournians,
and it does a man’s heart good to think of your cog-wheels; but believe
me that you know no more of life than that it is an existence, or
of death than that it is the stopping of a mouse-wheel.” Thus our
problematical “provincial,” returning fine pity for the fine scorn of our
problematical “metropolitan.” Or, to drop the symbolism, thus my first
impressions of the actual or inherent melody and beauty of the Sydney
life, as evolved from my last impressions of the leanness and rigidness,
the hardness and nakedness that is to be found so easily in life in
Melbourne.
More than once that afternoon did this melody of beauty come back to me
wandering, like a sweet far-off chime. It is years since I heard that
chime, the chime of Pleasure light and fair, breathing around me—years
ago, in its imperial haunt of Paris. Other chimes have their several
melodies and beauties, melodies and beauties perhaps above compare with
this one, but this one is pre-eminent for sweetness, and sweetness is a
rich and rare offering to the soul. The afternoon was not a fine one, and
I had just been spending two months in peerless weather by the Riverina.
I had, then, no meteorological “pathetic fallacy,” as Mr. Ruskin says,
to help me to a thoughtless faith in the actual or inherent melody of
Sydney. On the contrary, the rain rained, and the wind blew, and the
bursts of sunshine were few and far between, so that the Genius of the
place had to speak out if he wished to be heard. And, as we have noticed,
he did speak out, and was heard, and was, and is, approved of.
Pass now from the outer public world into the inner: pass from
the parks and streets into the Picture Gallery, and think of a
similar passage in Melbourne. It is quite useless to murmur here,
“_Melbourne_—_movement_—_progress_—_conscious power_;” the words only
pass into a dry tuneless jingle, like Gordon at his worst, wherein
nothing can be heard but, “_Leanness and rigidness_—_hardness and
nakedness_.” We see the throng of the virtuous wives of the Bourke Street
tradespeople and of “our wealthy lower orders” moving about in that badly
constructed room, with its badly chosen and badly hung pictures. We think
of the low, low ebb at which the intellect of the metropolis has left
its sense of melody and beauty. We wonder what Adelaide Ironsides, whom
Mr. Brunton Stephens has told us of in some charming verses,[9] would
have made of that people, of that city, whose capacity to foster poetic
instinct was “gauged” with such grimness by Mr. Clarke.[10] And then
we turn to this room, this people, and this city, and the fatuity of
their intense loyalty seems a venial offence beside the arid barrenness
of their intellectual neighbours. Such a construction (and, alas, not a
merely temporary but a quite everlasting one) as the Melbourne Picture
and Sculpture Galleries, such a choice, such an arrangement of pictures
and statues, would not satisfy these men and women of Sydney, as it
does the virtuous wives of the Bourke Street tradespeople and of “our
wealthy lower orders.” I do not say that the _Morning Herald_ would
burst out into correspondence on the subject, nor yet that that company
of eminent men who legislate for an ungrateful country would speak with
scorn or pity of these things. The chime of melody and beauty here is,
if sweet, far off. Pleasure light and fair is as yet but drawing breath.
The outer public life and the inner are but feeling their way to a
perception of an individuality, to an individuality that seeks after
that form of happiness whose chief expression is in melody and beauty.
But in Melbourne there is nothing, or scarcely anything, of this. If
no one would think of calling Sydney cruel, neither would anyone think
of calling Melbourne sweet. The average intelligent man in Melbourne
worships at the master-shrine alone: Intellect is his god, Intellect with
its speech of clear nervous prose and its poetry of vigorous, if rather
meretricious metres and “galloping rymes.” He has no, or very little,
care for Art as Art: that is an affair for women, and, as the only
organised female public opinion is that of the virtuous tradeswoman and
the wife of the wealthy lower orders, spiritual leanness and rigidness,
hardness and nakedness are the popular product of the day.
Now there is, I will venture to say, not one social phenomenon, good or
evil, in Victoria and New South Wales that cannot be traced to these
their spiritual conditions which I have been trying to express. Let us
take, what I have called, the three vital questions of the day—Free
Trade—Federalism—Higher Education. New South Wales is in favour of Free
Trade. Her perception of her individual life is weak: she clings to the
past, she considers the present. Whereas Victoria—Victoria with her swarm
of intelligent labourers and men of business—strong in her reliance on
her intellect, resolutely turns to the future from which she thinks she
will be able to carve out all her desires. Like America, she wants no
help from without, she will brook no interference. She will not let her
mineral products lie idle as New South Wales does. She is impatient of
the true British characteristic, the slow patient evolution of things, the
“broadening down
From precedent to precedent.”
She believes in the modern scientific spirit, and in none other. “Let
us, then,” she says, in her heart, “let us, then, by all means, move
towards Federalism. Union is strength.” But the eager grasping nature of
her swarm of intelligent labourers will not let her see that the wisdom
of her penny tariffs is but the foolishness of the pounds to come. New
South Wales, on the other hand, is adverse to Federalism. She does not
understand this modern scientific spirit—she dreads it, is jealous of it,
and admires it! It is so self-reliant, so self-confident! And she, poor
thing, is too much under the sway of the ancient historical spirit to
perceive that there is also a modern historical spirit, and that it is
good and at her doors. Hence her changeableness, hence her irresolution
in the matter. Like her clever unscrupulous politician, Sir Henry Parkes,
yesterday she wanted Federalism, to-day she does not: she will not be
dragged at the chariot wheels of this dreadful modern scientific spirit
which she does not understand, with Victoria shouting and cracking a
stockwhip to urge on the horses faster and faster. Is she not the “Queen
of the Pacific?” did not Governor Philip tell her she would be “the
centre of the southern hemisphere—the brightest gem of the Southern
Ocean?” and who shall say he counted her chickens before they were
hatched?
To the disinterested seeker, then, after a really fine civilization,
it is hard to say which is the more painful sight—Victoria, with her
resolute pursuit of a purely intellectual future, which must end in
arid barrenness, or New South Wales with her fatuous attachment to
the monstrous aspect of the past and present. Which, after all, is the
better or the worse, illusion or delusion? Is Victoria never going to
perceive that logicians and engineers are not the highest product of
civilization? Will New South Wales never shake off the British architect,
spiritual and material, and begin to evolve an individual life of her
own? Is Mr. Marcus Clarke right when he tells us that “in another hundred
years the average Australasian will be a tall, coarse, strong-jawed,
greedy, pushing, talented man, excelling in swimming and horsemanship.
His religion will be a form of Presbyterianism, his national policy a
democracy tempered by the rate of exchange. His wife will be a thin,
narrow woman, very fond of dress and idleness, caring little for her
children, but without sufficient brain-power to sin with zest.” Yes, this
is indeed the future of the two tendencies, which are represented by
the illuded progress of Victorian, the deluded stagnation of New South
Wales. “_The virtuous tradeswoman and the wife of the wealthy lower
orders, walking in the happy hunting-grounds of the British architect!_”
What a picture! It is a satisfaction to think that, if it is to be, we
shall never live to see it. But the question arises, “Is _it to be_?”
Has not this acute perceiver of ours been once more writing down one
aspect of the thing as _the_ aspect, without staying for a second or
third look at the thing itself? is not this a clever view of a part,
but a fantastic view of the whole? has not Mr. Clarke, in a word, been
leaving us this appalling picture of our future in much the same spirit
as the world-wounded Hamlet left his cruel dowry to Ophelia? This, we
are agreed, was indeed the future of the two tendencies, which are
represented by the illuded progress of Victoria, the deluded stagnation
of New South Wales; but we should add—_only if they are left to
themselves_.
_Only if they are left to themselves_; and it is our hope, our trust that
they will not be. We hope, we believe, that these two countries will
learn from one another, each the lesson which the other will be competent
to teach: that Victoria will awake to the vital importance of giving her
Upper Class a Higher Education to correspond to the Elementary Education
that she is giving her Lower Class, and that this Higher Education may
be one filled with what we have called the modern historical spirit,
with culture, with literary Culture: that New South Wales, leading and
instructing Victoria here, having first learned from her example to
have the courage to evolve an individual life of her own, will in her
turn imbibe the modern scientific spirit, will imbibe what I may call
scientific Culture; and thus we shall be brought on to the day in which
the people of Victoria and New South Wales shall, from their superficial
differences, be united by common qualities better than those of
fretfulness, cleverness, perverseness, irritability: For in this people
lies the possibility of a really fine civilization, in the marriage in
them of emotion and intellect, of poetry and prose.
“Is the goal so far away?
Far, how far no tongue can say.
_Let us dream our dream to-day._”
One last word on the last of the three vital questions of the day—Higher
Education. When, on 1st April, Mr. Patterson, who presides over the
Victorian Education Department, went down to Malmsbury to lay a
foundation-stone for the Wesleyan denomination, and favoured us with
his views on this question, or rather on the education system as it
at present stands in Victoria, we had a hope (a faint hope) that he
would do something more than sing the praises of the denominational
schools in general, and the state schools (“those majestic monuments to
enlightenment,” as he says in his profuse political way, “that adorn
and bless even the remotest portions of this colony”)—the state schools
in particular. Our hope was destined to disappointment. Mr. Patterson
had something to say about “the only legitimate checks on the abuse
of political power when conferred upon the masses,” and about “the
unscrupulousness, as well as the boldness beyond reason” of that man who
“would deny that the rising Australians, for sobriety and unassuming
intelligence, would compare favourably with the old stock,” so that he
“was bound to record his conviction that the future of Australia would
be quite safe in the hands of the Australians.” He had also ready a
defence of the secular character of the teaching in the state schools,
and some nice little left-handed compliments for our good Wesleyans, _et
hoc genus omne_, but not a word, and apparently not a thought, for the
legitimate checks on “the abuses of _educational_ power when conferred”
on a middle-class as unprepared for rule as the worst education in the
world can make it. “The Australian public,” he says, “desires, above
all things, to ensure good citizenship.” The Australian public cares
little that, in the state schools which it has founded for that especial
purpose, dead dry intellectual knowledge is rampant—“that asinine feast
of sow-thistles and brambles,” as Milton disgustedly puts it, “which is
commonly set before our youth as all the food and entertainment of their
tenderest and most docile age”—“inanimate mechanical gerund-grinding,”
as Carlyle equally disgustedly called it—gerund-grinding and spiritual
cockatoo screeching. Nor yet does it care that, in the denominational
schools in which its own children are being brought up, the only
supplement to the dead dry educational knowledge of the gerund and the
cockatoo, is the merest flimsy smattering of Science caricatured and
Literature misunderstood. Let us not, however, despair because our
sucking colonial statesmen cannot see more than a few educational inches
in front of their noses. Have we not got Dr. Moorhouse, our good Bishop
of Melbourne, with us, “a mighty man with broad and sinewy hands?” And
does he not, on every available opportunity, batter against the brazen
walls of the gerund and the cockatoo, and bid them leave off grinding
and screeching, and listen to reason? And here, too, is our good Roman
Catholic Bishop of Sydney, Dr. Moran (whom we are all so sorry to think
of losing), expressing his “fears that the atmosphere of the public
schools is too chilly for a great many of our youth?” Perhaps one of
these mornings the Victorian public will wake up, tired of listening to
the chatter of the religious and secular dogmatists gathered together
like eagles over the carcase of “Religion without Superstition,” and
there may arise a curiosity and a care for Higher Education and High
Schools; and we will hope, then, that no one will be foolish enough to
say that they have been a very doubtful success in New South Wales and in
Sydney—in Sydney, the home-elect of the six-fingered and six-toed giant
of British Philistinism! And, perhaps, some day poor little Culture,
putting off the cumbrous armour with which the gerund and the cockatoo
want to load him, taking his sling in his hand and a few smooth stones
from the brook, may smite great Goliath in the forehead, and cut off his
head, and there be a signal rout of all the Philistines, even unto Gath
and Gaza and the utmost borders of the land.
_May, 1885._
[NOTE.—I am tempted to republish here a letter, which I sent lately
to the _Sydney Morning Herald_ wherein one aspect of the secondary
education question was (more or less unconsciously) being discussed.
No one, so far as I am aware, thought the letter worth serious
consideration: at any rate no one thought it worth replying to, perhaps
the reasons for its insertion were simply those which the “able Editor”
assigned to me for the insertion of all his correspondence, namely that
it be not either too illiterate or too offensive for publication. Well,
I am sure that for my own part I am grateful for even so much toleration
as this, and shall strive, as becomes my humble position in this great
Australian press, to continue to deserve it.]