Part 6

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.”