But my belief, founded on my own experience, is that in most cases
infinitely more benefit is to be obtained by invalids from the
Australian than from any European climate. And climate is not the only
thing to be considered. What is more depressing, more humiliating
to one who seeks to be free, as far as poor humanity may, from the
trammels of enfeebled flesh, than the daily routine of a _poitrinaire_
at a winter watering-place;—the club room, the tittle-tattle of
politics in which he is never likely to take an active part, the
still more insipid gossip about other peoples’ affairs, the whist by
daylight, the weekly weighing to see if flesh is being made or lost?
Compare the net result, mental and physical, of a continuance of this
sort of life with the rich harvest of memories gathered in from a
sight, however limited, of the new southern world. Six months’ absence
from a profession and from ordinary occupations is in many cases fatal
to an immediate resumption of them, and little would really be lost by
extending it to a year and a half, which would give ample time for a
visit to Australia. The time might be distributed thus: Leaving England
by sailing-ship in August or September, and arriving in Melbourne in
November or December, a traveller might spend the summer in Tasmania,
the autumn in Victoria, and the winter and spring in Queensland and
New South Wales, returning to Melbourne some time in the second
summer, and sailing thence so as to get home again before the English
summer begins. In this way both cold weather and also extreme heat
will have been avoided, and two English winters missed. If the whole
of the second summer can be spared for going to New Zealand so much
the better, or if the mail-steamer’s route by way of Galle be taken,
a short stay in India during the cool season may be made. Whichever
way home is chosen, a much pleasanter voyage may be anticipated if
it is begun during the summer months—that is, between the beginning
of November and the end of March; for by Cape Horn the cold, by the
Red Sea the heat, and round Cape Leuwin and the Cape of Good Hope the
adverse winds, become worse as the year advances.
For the reasons already given country life is almost as preferable
in regard to health in Australia as it is in England. Those who are
not strong enough to travel about much will generally do best to take
up their quarters in the country wherever they may have friends or
acquaintance. A very slight introduction will procure a very warm
welcome everywhere in Australia to any traveller from home. Home has
only one meaning there, and long may it keep that meaning. There is
no hospitality more readily and kindly proffered and more delightful
to accept than that of the Bush. Its simplicity is a pleasant change
after the sometimes excessive luxury of English country life. Bed,
board, and a horse are at your service; and for sitting-room there is
the ample verandah with its wooden or cane lounging-chairs, where air,
and light, and sun, will put new strength and vitality into you, if
anything will.
Light and sunshine—that is what a weakly man gets in Australia far
better than anywhere that I know of in Europe. Perhaps he does not
think much about it at the time; but after he is home again, and is
groping or shivering through his first English winter, he begins to
realize the blessings he has been enjoying.
XVI.
A PLEA FOR AUSTRALIAN LOYALTY.
[The _Spectator_ of May 23, 1868, contained a letter signed ‘An
Australian Cynic,’ and also an article founded on it, commenting on
the extraordinary outburst of excitement and indignation at Sydney
occasioned by the attempted assassination of the Duke of Edinburgh,
as manifested in the passing of the Treason-Felony Act and in other
ways. These manifestations, and the attitude of the Australians
generally on the occasion were attributed to a ‘starved appetite for
rank,’ and censured accordingly.
The following Letter was written to endeavour to show that this
view of the case was a mistaken and impossible one. The succeeding
Letter was an answer to the reply of the _Spectator_ that the view
of loyalty implied in my first Letter was itself impregnated with
‘veiled cynicism.’]
Your last number contains a letter from ‘An Australian Cynic’
commenting upon the exhibition of feeling shown in Australia after
the attempt to assassinate the Duke of Edinburgh. It also contains an
article on the same subject, the writer of which would hardly, I should
think, object to being called an English cynic. It seldom happens that
English newspapers find space to notice Australia, or that English
people care to make themselves acquainted with Australian affairs;
and it is unfortunate that when notice is taken of them, the occasion
should call for severe not to say contemptuous, censure. Still, let
censure fall where censure is due, even though it come under the
questionable guise of cynicism. Better too much blame than too little.
But I must confess that to me the spirit which has been shown on this
occasion, so far from seeming contemptible, has appeared, on the
whole, in the highest degree creditable. I have little hope of being
able to bring over you or any of your readers to my way of thinking.
Nevertheless, as Australia cannot answer for itself in less than three
months, I will endeavour to put the case in the light in which it
strikes me.
We Englishmen at home are of all men most devoid of imagination. We
spend our lives on soil teeming with tradition, where the very shape
or colour of every brick and stone tells its story of the past, and
may be a silent but ever-present reminder of some especially honoured
friend or hero, some favourite struggle lost or won. But we do not
know how much these associations are bound up with us; we cannot tell,
till we try, how ill we can dispense with them. I do not believe we
have the least idea of the fidelity with which Australians preserve
old memories; how tenaciously they cling to their right of inheritance
in the history of the past. At first it may be that an emigrant is
altogether engrossed with the occupations of the moment. He must get
his bread; he must strike his roots into the new soil; he has no time
to sit down and think. But as he grows older, when he finally makes
up his mind to make the new country his home, old memories and old
attachments return with immense force. An old weather-beaten settler,
who after a life spent in hardships at last sees his children growing
up about him in prosperity and comfort, will look at them proudly, yet
half sadly, knowing that he has within him an inheritance which he can
transmit to them only in part, doubting whether after all a dinner of
herbs amongst the old scenes and the old traditions, sustaining (so
he fancies) the old beliefs, is not better than a stalled ox without
them. No one who has not experienced Australian hospitality can imagine
the jealous care which they take of a chance visitor from England, how
distressed and almost angry a settler will be if a visitor, although an
utter stranger, puts up at an inn instead of going to his house. And as
you talk to him, the chances are he will speak sadly, even bitterly,
of the carelessness, the indifference of people at home to their
Australian Colonies. They do not know even by name one colony from
another. Melbourne and Sydney are set down as places where a revolver
is as necessary as an umbrella in London; their populations as composed
mainly of convicts, runaways from Europe, dishonest demagogues, or
merchants who care to remain only till they have made their fortunes.
But what he will complain of most bitterly is that a school has grown
up in England which says, ‘Let the Colonies go. All we want of them is
wool and gold. All they want of us is a market. What we both want is
wealth. We can get this as well separate as together, perhaps better.
Traditions, loyalty to the throne, willingness to share danger as well
as security, war as well as peace, with the old country—all this is
sentimental rubbish. We have almost got rid of this sort of thing at
home, they must have quite got rid of it at the Antipodes.’
This, I believe, is false slander. As such, I believe it has been
felt, and felt keenly, by the vast majority of Australians. Can you,
then, wonder that when the news came that the Queen was sending out
one of the Princes, not selfishly, for his own benefit or for that of
the Crown, still less to confer any mere _material_ benefit on the
Australians, it came to them like a chance offered to a maligned man to
clear himself from a false charge—like light thrown on a dark place?
And so, when the Duke, after weeks and months of expectation, at last
arrived, it did not matter whether they did or did not find him all
that they thought an English Prince would be and ought to be; it did
not matter if he disliked politics, was bored by balls and ‘functions,’
was indifferent to the beauty of the country. They refused to look a
gift horse in the mouth. He was the Queen’s son; that was enough. They
would do him all possible honour, and so prove that they were loyal
Englishmen, and cared for Queen and country as well as gold and wool.
And when the news came that the Duke had been shot at and wounded on
their own shores, every one in a strange way seemed to take it to
heart, to be struck with shame and dismay, as though he himself were
in part guilty of the crime. The terror of having to bear, as a body,
the guilt of one wretched man excited them almost beyond belief. At
Hobart Town—distant as Tasmania is from the scene of the occurrence (I
quote from a hurriedly written letter just received)—
‘A meeting was convened within an hour of the arrival of the news by
telegraph; it was attended by every class and sect in the community.
The large town hall could not contain the assemblage; they therefore
gathered outside. The first proceeding, before any resolution, was to
call for the substitution of the Union flag for the municipal one.
Then, regardless of order, but with the order inspired by a common
sentiment, the vast crowd struck up the National Anthem. The effect
drew tears from many eyes—the _effect_ in part, the _earnestness_
with which, under the circumstances, the Anthem was given forth by
those who joined in it, melted them into weakness. And a second
time in the course of the proceedings the same _irregularity_ was
indulged in, without its being possible for any one to say that
anything irregular was done—the ordinary and decorous modes of
expressing popular feeling were insufficient to give utterance to
that by which all were _possessed_. We burned with loyalty to the
Crown and country, intensified by shame and indignation that the
act of one bad man had made it necessary that we should wipe away
reproach or suspicion from us. I am not guilty of exaggeration when
I tell you that the news of what had been done by O’Farrell made
many persons _ill_ amongst us.... I dwell upon this subject, for to
this moment it, more than any other public one, agitates the minds
of the people—but having done so for this simple reason, let me ask
you, as a recent visitant, to do something in our vindication. We are
English—that is, national—in our sentiments, and not as the result
of calculation, but simply because we have not ceased to be and to
feel as Englishmen. Our Tasmanianism is an accident of no more
qualifying influence upon our feelings in what relates to the honour
and integrity of the mother country, than the circumstance might have
of being Kentish men.’
Strange words these, to come, as they do, not from a hot-headed boy,
but from a cool, experienced politician, a reader of solid books, a
grave paterfamilias, a hater of public meetings, who, when the Duke
was in Hobart Town, was ready to escape into the country, rather than
face the fuss and bustle and (to him) annoyance of festivities and
‘functions.’ And column after column of the Australian papers tell
the same story. I do not believe, since the news of Waterloo came to
England, that any body of Englishmen have been heated to so intense and
so unanimous a pitch of enthusiasm. Nor would it be possible to name
any such manifestation more unmixed with selfishness. For ostentatious
loyalty there are no rewards or honours in Australia, whatever there
may be for ostentatious democracy. I am no believer in the _Vox populi
vox Dei_ doctrine. But surely such an outburst as this is a phenomenon
at least worthy of patient examination. What is to be said of the
discernment or of the charity of a writer who can dismiss it with a
passing sneer as ‘the starved appetite for rank’?
How ‘An Australian Cynic’ can say that there is ‘not a tittle of
evidence that a single colonist of New South Wales, native or
immigrant, has ever harboured a thought of treason’ I am at a loss to
conceive. I know little or nothing of what has been going on lately
in New South Wales. But it is not a year since a Roman Catholic
chaplain of one of the convict establishments had to be dismissed for
preaching Fenianism to the prisoners; to say nothing of the original
statement made by O’Farrell himself, which it is as difficult to
disprove as to prove. I doubt if the absurdities and extravagances
of the Treason-Felony Act are worth the pains ‘An Australian Cynic’
has taken to criticize them. The Judges are not likely to allow the
Act to be enforced in an improper manner. Its intention is obvious
enough, and the blunders will probably prove to be harmless surplusage.
Nobody expects much legislative wisdom from a House constituted
as the Lower House of New South Wales is. Nor is the Upper House
likely to be much better, since it consists, not of members chosen
by a superior constituency, like the Victorian Upper House, but of
nominees ostensibly of the Governor, but in reality of successive
administrations. Nor ought we at home to be too ready to ridicule
their legislation, when we recollect that it is we who are responsible
for their Constitution. It was we who at a time of transition and
excitement in Australia allowed our Parliament and Ministers to
pitchfork out to New South Wales a rash, ill-considered scheme, from
which, in the opinion of many, the colony has been suffering ever since.
‘An Australian Cynic’ complains of the newspapers and the public at
Sydney for not being more interested about a murder of five people
which has been committed in the interior. Does he mean to imply that
the police are supine in the matter, and need stimulus, or that the
existing law is inadequate to meet the case? If not, why ought such a
topic to be enlarged upon? Ought all bloodshed to provoke an amount of
discussion exactly in proportion to the number of lives lost? Murder,
unfortunately, is too old and too common a crime not to have been
provided against as far as it is possible to do so. Fenianism, when it
assumes the form of a conspiracy for the wholesale assassination of the
most prominent persons in the State, is a new crime and requires new
precautions. I suppose there must be a sense (since so many hold to the
dogma) in which all men may be said to be equal, though I must confess
I never could discover any—never yet having seen such a phenomenon as
even two men who could in any sense of the word be called equal. But
the common sense of all communities acknowledges that the lives of some
persons are (to take the lowest ground) infinitely more valuable to the
State than those of others, and when for this reason exposed to special
danger they require to be specially protected.
Political assassination is a new crime in England in our days. But
if we go back to the days of Queen Elizabeth, we may be reminded of
conspiracies not unlike the worst manifestations of Fenianism, which
were met by our ancestors in a spirit not altogether unlike that which
has just been shown by their descendants in Australia.
XVII.
LOYALTY AND CYNICISM.
* * * * *
Personally I do plead guilty to holding the belief or doctrine to hold
which you call ‘veiled cynicism.’ But I beg you will not suppose that I
am asserting that the late demonstration of the Australians necessarily
implied that _they_ hold it, or that their loyalty as a people was not
wider and more comprehensive than any particular phase of it which may
specially present itself to me or to any one person. In the following
remarks I shall speak only in my own defence, and try to lift my
‘veil,’ so that it may be seen whether what is behind is, or is not,
cynicism.
I accept the definition of cynicism which you give in your first
paragraph. But I will add another, and a strictly etymological one. A
cynic is a man who treats a deep-seated reasonable belief, or a fair
argument, in a dog-like manner, as if it were a mere dog’s howl; one
who vouchsafes only a kick or an imprecation to what he ought to listen
to with patience, and answer (if he disagrees) with argument. A sham
belief and an utterly worthless argument _ought_ to get only kicks
and imprecations; to treat them otherwise would be priggishness. It is
a critic’s business and difficulty to discover the right path between
these two pitfalls. With all respect to the _Spectator_, I venture to
express my opinion that not only in its recent article on the New South
Wales Treason-Felony Act, but again and again in speaking of matters
pertaining to the Crown and its relation to the people, it has fallen
into the pitfall of cynicism, and (unwittingly, of course) written
what has jarred painfully on the convictions of not a few amongst its
readers.
To define these convictions adequately in general terms is almost
impossible. I do not know how to do so without entering upon
theological questions too deep for me, and which I would rather have
avoided. I do not know how better to express my own conviction than
by saying that I do in a very real sense believe in the ‘divine
right of kings;’ not of course in the sense of the High Church party
of the seventeenth century; more nearly, perhaps, in that of the
eminently national and protestant party, which in the latter part
of the sixteenth century relied upon the doctrine as the truest and
strongest bulwark against Rome and Spain. I believe in the institution
of hereditary monarchy as a divine idea, imparted to mankind, and
answering to true and healthy instincts implanted in them—like in
kind, if differing in degree, to the institution of a priesthood or
clergy. Nations may reject it if they please. In so doing they are
simply rejecting a proffered blessing, just as all of us are rejecting
blessings every day. The non-juring Bishops and their followers
brought discredit on the doctrine by their unphilosophical perversion
of it. They forgot that a dynasty, like an individual Church, may
become so degraded by the unworthiness of its members as to receive its
condemnation, as did the dynasties of Saul and of Ahab.
The history of Europe from the middle ages to the present time
teems with instances of intense attachment to hereditary, or
quasi-hereditary, monarchy, often breaking out in the strangest and
most unaccountable way, and in the teeth of the bitterest tyranny. For
instance, it would be hard, even in the thirteenth century, to find a
monarch who had inflicted more suffering and bloodshed on his subjects
than Frederick Barbarossa inflicted on the Lombards. He was of a
different race, too, and spoke a different language. Yet when his power
had been broken under the walls of Alessandria, and he found himself
face to face with a mass of enemies from whom escape was impossible,
and whom to attack was certain defeat, he could calmly pitch his camp
in the presence of their armed hosts, in the confidence (which the
event justified) that in spite of all they would still acknowledge him
as their Sovereign, and that his life and liberty were safe in their
hands.[17]
What is more remarkable in the death scenes of all the religious
and political martyrs or sufferers, from Sir Thomas More to Sir
Walter Raleigh, staunch as they were to the end each to his religious
creed, than the eagerness with which they repelled as an insult every
imputation of disloyalty to the Throne? And yet at least two out of the
five Sovereigns who reigned were as despicable as a Sovereign can be.
How incredible to us seems the picture of the House of Commons, in the
succeeding reign, with many of its members _in tears_ of shame, that
the Throne, and they with it, should be so degraded by its occupant!
One hears of speeches so absorbing or exciting that men hold their
breath to listen. I used to think this was only a figure of speech; but
it happened to me once, and once only, to find it a literal fact. The
Bishop of New Zealand was preaching at St. Mary’s (Cambridge), which
was crammed with undergraduates. The subject was the Queen’s supremacy.
He described shortly and tersely the ‘shaking of the nations,’ the
abject condition, danger, or dethronement of the Sovereigns of Europe
in 1848. But when he came to our own Queen, and her tranquil security
in the midst of the storm, he used no words of his own; he simply
quoted the text, ‘He took a little child, and set her in the midst.’ It
was then that for, perhaps, ten seconds every hearer held his breath.
The silence was, from its intensity, more startling, less capable of
being forgotten, than any sound I ever heard.
Now, I do not mean to say that the Lombards, on the occasion referred
to, acted like patterns of magnanimous loyalty. I am not quite sure
that they were not, considering all the circumstances, rather fools
for their pains. Nor do I mean to say that the extraordinary effect of
the Bishop’s words was due _solely_ to the intrinsic truth and value
of the idea suggested, or to the eagerness with which his hearers’
instincts went out to meet it, and not in part to the perfect rhetoric
in which it was clothed. But I say that there is a vein of gold in the
substratum of all these incidents, and of hundreds of similar ones,
which refuses to float away upon any such superficial explanation—a
metal the taking away of which would leave poor humanity sadly
impoverished.
Doubtless an hereditary Sovereign is not the only possible object of
loyalty. There may be loyalty to a President, to a ‘House,’ even, I
suppose, to a shadowy, ever-changing idea such as a Constitution. Mr.
Carlyle has taught us, to a greater extent than we can well estimate,
how to choose our heroes. But does he not fall short of entirely
satisfying us, because his conception of a hero is indissolubly bound
up with mere force of will and power of mind? Like Mr. Carlyle’s
heroes, the Presidents of Republics and the leaders of great parties
are of necessity men of iron will, muscular intellect, and, it may
safely be added, invincible digestions. Why should we narrow our field
of choice and contract our storehouse of types of rulers within this
small class? Why should we honour a man for his natural ability any
more than we honoured Tom Sayers or Lola Montez for their strength
and beauty? Does not the Bishop’s quotation suggest a deliverance from
this perplexity? May not our heroes be sometimes chosen for us? In the
long lists of the Sovereigns of past times have we not a St. Louis as
well as a Francis I., an Edward VI. as well as a Henry V., a Margaret
of Navarre as well as a Maria Theresa, an Elizabeth of Hungary as well
as an Elizabeth of England? Can even these few types be found amongst
Presidents of Republics, or could they be selected and enthroned by any
form of suffrage, universal or other?
Therefore it is (as it seems to me) that hereditary sovereignty
naturally commends itself to men’s truest and deepest instincts as
supplying and enlisting more true types of humanity, as more readily
suggesting the idea of perfect humanity and a perfect ruler, as more
symbolic of human-divine government, than any other kind of rule. The
remembrance of sovereigns at once bad and feeble soon slips out of
history. The memory of the good, were they strong or feeble, remains
a rich ever-accumulating treasure to humanity, adding type to type,
building up in all reverent minds an ever loftier ideal of government,
which is not the less precious for being so imperfectly realized.