Part 9

There are two recognised kinds of political women on the continent. One of these, and by far the more numerous, is the dilettante, the feminine dabbler. She has a pretty, graceful way of deprecating too much knowledge of her subject. She rarely comes into prominence except at election times. She is convinced that Smith is a better man for the country than Jones, but she is far from pretending to know what Smith’s views are on the fiscal question, whether he is a single taxer, a preferential trader, or a person of secret anarchical tendencies. If you ask her why she supports Smith she will probably tell you that she dislikes Jones. She is an expert and resourceful canvasser; like the _pallida mors_ of the Roman poet she knocks impartially at the huts of the poor and the mansions of the rich. She goes to the poll if a conveyance is handy, or if it is not too far to walk, and she wins, or helps to win, many elections.

Unlike her is the other type of political woman--the intensely serious, aggressive type. This type is not numerous, but what there is of it is formidable. It is the very latest thing in Australian public life. It is determined to regenerate the world by the _deus ex machina_ of the ballot box. It has a mania for contesting seats in Parliament. Its opinion of the opposite sex is quite unfit for publication--nevertheless it is often published. The type of this description is unusual and rather abnormal, yet there are not wanting indications that it is growing in numbers.

Another kind of woman often met with has made a special cult of æstheticism. With the sex in Australia, æstheticism and theosophy usually go together. The writer has been unable to discover what difference, if any, exists between the two, or where the one begins and the other leaves off. It is surprising to think what a number of girls, particularly during recent years, have taken to professing themselves theosophists. The Anglican curate and the young non-Conformist preacher have but a modified social success in Australia. They are not the toys and darlings of any but a very limited sisterhood. On the other hand, the man who can talk mysticism, and quote Plato or Edwin Arnold, can be sure of a wide and growing feminine _clientèle_. If, in addition, he can play the violin, he leaps at once into a blaze of popularity. It is an interesting phrase of the feminine temperament, this leaning towards a spiritualistic-cum-theosophic-cum-Buddhist-cum-æsthetic School. The underlying principle, the subtle essence pervading the whole, is a yearning for the higher life. This yearning is not actually expressed in common words “understanded” by the vulgar, but is implied in certain lines borrowed from _The Light of Asia_, in certain names taken from the Sacred Books of the Vedas, in a certain transcendentalism of appearance, a certain intensity of manner, a certain trick of the voice, now and then in a certain severe simplicity in arranging the hair.

At the opposite pole from the æsthetic, is the athletic woman. This latter type is very often to be met with. Considering the languorous and enervating climate that she has, for the most part, to contend against, her performances are more than creditable. She sweeps a wide gamut of athletic achievement. Golf is one of her specialties, but it does not operate to the exclusion of other things. She plays tennis with a tremendous amount of energy, more particularly when it is a question of a ladies’ four, and the masculine onlooker or player is absent. In the curious and indefinite pastime known as “mixed doubles,” she is a perpetual source of astonishment, alternating between sudden fits of energy and a graceful quiescence in the middle of the court. Her partner is never quite sure whether she is secretly wild with rage at him for taking her shots, or whether she is disgusted with his laziness in leaving so much to her. The athletic woman will also row vigorously, walk untiringly, play hockey till she is red in the face, and dance the strongest male partner off his feet. In the ordinary course of things she is independent of companionship, and has no use whatever for a chaperone. The least attractive feature about her is her language. In this respect she can out-Herod Herod, and out-slang the slangiest barracker at the most exciting football match that was ever played on the Australian field. Even Professor Morris has no clue to certain of the terms which she evolves either from the recesses of her memory, or from the depths of her inner consciousness. It is stated that she can, on occasion, skip lightly across the border of colloquialism into the stormy regions of profanity. That may be so. In any case, there is not a great deal to choose between the lady who sometimes borrows an Australia curse word, and her whose ready-money is the aforesaid awful vernacular.

Yet another type is the scholastic woman. The lingering mediævalism of Oxford and Cambridge would be surprised if it knew to what an extent in Australia masculine prerogative in the matter of higher education has broken down. We teach our girls everything from classics to metaphysics, from the theory of music to the practice of medicine, from botany to jurisprudence, from dressmaking to trigonometry, from cookery to architecture, from domestic economy to Egyptology, from plain sewing to conic sections. There is nothing in which they are not being perpetually instructed; and for the result you have only to look around. The erudite woman is everywhere. Sometimes she teaches in a High School or College; sometimes she is to be encountered at home, just returned from a finishing tour to Europe, half shuddering at the prospect of contact with numerous illiterate and unfinished persons, half inclined to envy her sister the loaves and fishes of common domestic life. This scholarly woman--not the one who possesses merely a smattering of scholarship, but the one who has used her cleverness in a sustained attempt to acquire knowledge--the one who has taken degrees and passed examinations by the dozen--is usually unattractive to the eye. She is inclined to be pale, inclined to be angular, inclined to wear spectacles. She has learned too much to have any illusions. She has worked too hard to have much feminine fancy remaining. It is impossible for her to make a hero of a man, because through a long course of scientific and experimental observations she has become perfectly well acquainted with his thousand weaknesses, vices, physical failings, and mental limitations. The man knows that he stands before her like an open book. Knowing this, he trembles, as he has every reason to do.

As a matter of fact no one of these four types, nor all four together, nor any others that might be given a place in the category, represents, in any general sense, the Australian woman. There is reason for believing that most, if not all the phases of activity just mentioned, together with others that might be mentioned, are sublimely insincere, are magnificently built up on shams. The political woman does not really care for politics. The æsthetic woman is only interested in the picturesque side of æsthetics. The athletic girl considers fame at golf or lawn tennis as at best a means to an end. The lady graduate is not in love with her degree. The woman has not yet been identified who can lay her hand on her heart, and swear that the study of higher mathematics, or even a profound analysis of the Latin poets, is an altogether satisfying pursuit. The age is one of experimentalism, so far as the Australian woman is concerned. She is attempting many things; she is looking for new interests in many directions; she has taken to playing several fresh parts; she has learned quite a number of new tricks. Yet there is a suspicion that they are only tricks after all.

The Australian girl--with the accent on the definite article--remains yet to be defined. Some of her attributes, or accomplishments, or phases are readily enough made out, but many of these are merely incidental modes of the moment; others are to be regarded as streaks of colour on an always variegated landscape; they are not the landscape itself. We know well enough that certain things will invariably take her fancy. A love of dress, a fondness for jewellery, a passion for display, a taste for theatres, a tendency to gush, a dislike for solitude, a mania for admiration--all these are manifestations that are continually meeting the eye of the casual observer. But they are not peculiar to the Australian woman, or to the sex in any one country. And, on the other hand, there are discernment, subtlety, artistic sensibility, grace of movement, warmth of temperament, quickness of sympathy, and much else that could be mentioned. These latter qualities, for all that is known to the contrary, may be in the majority of cases more outward than inward. That is to say, they may be dexterously woven into the garment for purposes of effect. In any case, it does not matter. If the resulting product can please the eye and satisfy the sense it is foolish to begin raising doubts about its precise texture or its wearing capabilities.

Womanhood, _per se_, apart from incidental gifts and graces, apart from what it can do, and cannot do, seems to be a curious mixture of practicality and sentiment; in other words, of water and fire. The elements are so blended that nature cannot stand up and say with confidence, This is a woman. There is nothing a woman dislikes so much as being called sentimental; but there is nothing she takes to so kindly as sentiment. It is her essence, her _metier_, a part of the air she breathes; she repudiates it in words, but acknowledges it in practice every day. And yet, with all this extraordinary sentiment, with all this drift towards emotionalism, the Australian girl combines in some mysterious and inexplicable fashion a singular faculty for holding her own, and a marvellously clear eye for the main chance. In the vagaries of her wildest mood there is a concealed art and a sound method. In the whirlwind of her emotionalism there is a certain immovable common-sense. The storm may blow hither and thither, but it blows on sufferance. The cold Angel of reason, with the ruling rod of prudence, is never out of sight and hearing. To understand the position it is only necessary to recollect that the Australian girl, albeit disinclined by temperament to hard routine and cold formality, has been instructed from infancy in many things that were quite unknown to her English sister, at any rate until recent years. She has been taught to rely much upon herself; she is not chaperoned and she is not shut in. Thus it is that, while she is artistically susceptible to every mode of emotion, she will not, except when she is under the age of seventeen, throw herself recklessly away on the first individual who is to be encountered strolling in the garden of Romance; not even though he be a pleasant person and goodly to look upon.

For the reasons just stated or implied, a love affair with an Australian woman is usually an interesting, and often an instructive, experience. In suggesting for his bored and _blasé_ King of Ruritania (or some such place) a love affair with a red-haired woman, Mr Henry Harland was following slavishly in the tracts of physiology. But that kind of science is always unsatisfactory, and, more often than not, misleading. The woman of this continent--Mr Harland had never been in Australia--does not require red hair to prove an antidote for dulness. Her inborn strain of sentiment makes her the finest of natural players in the game of hearts. Her marked individuality and abundance of common-sense render her anything but an easy bird to capture. As a matter of fact, she is more often the pursuer than the pursued. If she sustains a reverse in one direction she recovers it in another. She does not stand to be shot at; she has a thousand subterfuges, a thousand weapons both of defence and attack. It is only experienced players who can encounter her with safety. The crude beginner is almost certain to sustain damage, if, indeed, he is not battered out of recognisable shape.

It is the histrionic faculty again. The more one observes it, the more admirable and the more dangerous it appears. A clever woman talking to an eligible man in a drawing-room--or anywhere else for that matter--is undoubtedly the noblest work of art. Observe how her own individuality and her own ideas are kept in the background, while she seems to be waiting with prettily veiled impatience for the words of wisdom that she knows are about to fall from the man she is talking to. Observe how the electric light has a habit of falling on her profile every now and then. Observe how on occasion it lights up her eyes. Observe also with what artless art she will bend forward her rapt soul in her eyes, and again lean musingly or languorously back. She gives the man every opportunity. If he has anything to say she flatters him by wanting to listen, by drinking it thirstily in. If it becomes evident that he can’t talk, or wont talk, she will talk for him, rally him, entertain him, be brilliant for him, make him imagine that _he_ is brilliant in listening to her. Glancing across the room, we wonder why she does it. We don’t know her motive, but we recognise that the man isn’t worthy. We see that she is wasting her time, throwing herself away. She should be talking to us. We should be talking to her.

“Nature,” said a well-known painter to me only the other week, “is hateful, horrible; it is only art that can make her endurable.” He was speaking in the Melbourne Gallery, and he pointed to a picture of his--a “Symphony,” it was called--which he had given away for a couple of hundred pounds. The finished work was a symphony no doubt; but the copied thing was to any but the artistic eye a dull conglomeration of twig and leaf and timber. We have to thank this painter for creating out of common and unattractive material a feast of colour that must appeal to every beholder. We are not always as grateful as is necessary to the individual who makes himself look other--and incidentally better--than he really is. The world is full of intensely natural and intensely uninteresting people. The unrefined product of nature when presented in its native shape is alarming and calculated to make the beholder flee into the wilderness. To be natural is to be condemned. Let us thank the Australian girl for the fine example, for the clear lead she has given. Let us endeavour to be as artificial, as histrionic as we can.

IX

TWO CITIES

Where, O Earth! is a fairer city Than this by night, when the Quay’s half circle ... Lights the dusk of the city’s face?

Miss Mack’s verses to Sydney are the kind of tribute one would wish to pay to a lover of happier days. For that reason they may awake some kind of echo in the breasts of many hundreds of persons who will confess to a fondness for Sydney, but who are indifferent to the ways and methods of the lofty rhyme. For the place has a strong personality. One never thinks of it as merely so many houses and so many people. An entity, a living thing, a friend, a mistress, a consoler, a woman with soft breath and warm-tinted hair, a queen of men and yet their servant--it is any or all of these, and much besides.

The new-comer should arrange to enter Sydney by night. If he does this he will experience the strong and always remembered sensation of emerging from Cimmerian darkness into the blaze of a lighted arena. The waters of the Tasman sea are usually cold and stormy. If you have been ploughing across them for the best part of a week, if you have been beset with bad weather, or sea-sickness, or boredom, or with the three combined, you will hail as one of the pleasant sounds of a lifetime the news that there is visible a glimmer from South Head. Thereafter the transformation is rapid. Sydney by night does not _grow_ upon you; it _bursts_ upon you, and the impression is not soon forgotten. Whatever you have read and whatever you have dreamed of Eastern cities by the Tigris; whatever you have seen of lime-light effects on a brilliant, gaily coloured, thronged and animated stage; whatever you have pictured to yourself of islands and gardens and palaces by the water’s edge--all these and more are around you and in front of you as the ship winds past promontory after promontory, island after island, on its passage towards a mooring place in Darling Harbour. The panorama has an unreal and fairy-like splendour. For a minute or two, perhaps for half an hour, you expect that everything will presently dissolve, and the conditions of blackness and vacancy reassert themselves. But the boat passes on, and the picture remains. You realise after a while that it is the city itself welcoming you, beckoning to you, smiling at you with all its arcs and crescents and its glittering phantasmagoria of lights.

In the daytime all this is changed. Sydney by day is the real Sydney, the working Sydney, and like every other place in which men work and congregate, it has its dull and drab and depressing features. But the strangely marked personal characteristics are there still. They have taken on new phases, and they make a different kind of appeal. Your mistress has no longer the sparkle in her eyes and the diamonds on her brow; she no longer scintillates to dazzle you, and no longer challenges you to admiration by her life and movement. She has grown languorous as the land of the lotos-flower, enervating as the Island of Circë. True, she has her marts and her merchandise, her busy streets, her ships, and her people who toil and spin. But they are a people on whom she has set her imprint, and who have drunk the wine of love and of laughter at her hands. The fact is that neither by day nor by night, neither in summer nor winter, can Sydney look consistently hard or repellant. Now and then a bracing wind blows up from the waste places of the Pacific and talks menacingly of storm and stress and shipwreck. But it loses itself or dies to nothing when in the heart of the city, or when endeavouring to make its way along such good-tempered, well-protected thoroughfares as George and Pitt Streets. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it blusters a little, but only with an amusing semblance of anger. In an hour or two the sun is shining again.

A city that has grown has always an advantage, in point of attractiveness, over one that has been merely made. It is easy to understand the reason. No one cares for the display of qualities that seem to be the result of artificial training. Every one admires spontaneity, or rather the appearance of spontaneity. The thing itself may be a product of the finest art. But that matters nothing. As it is with individuals, so it is with a city. The straight, uncompromising lines which appeal to the draughtsman are of interest to no one else. It is a mistake to cultivate a prim demeanour or to attempt to keep a straight face if Nature has in view something else. The friend who keeps calling “Duty, duty, duty” in your ear is not really wise, and is always certain to be disliked. Equally tedious is the architect, or the surveyor, or the mathematician, who says dogmatically that certain streets should always meet at such and such an angle; that there should be certain spaces for parks and certain widths reserved for traffic; that there should be buildings modelled on particular lines, and conglomerations of houses arranged after a particular fashion; that there should be a scientific method observed in building the thing to be called a city, just as there are particular rules for turning out a baker’s oven or for making a carpenter’s box.

Sydney, as it does not take long to discover, has grown up after a careless and wilful fashion of its own. It is neither consciously straight, nor consciously irregular. Of modern improvements it takes what it pleases, and leaves what it does not want. Buildings cluster round the harbour and bedeck themselves with red-tiled roofs and flaunt their pleasant inertia in the sun. Some of the more recent structures--hotels, warehouses, public markets and the like--are showy and even magnificent. But the main streets make no pretence to symmetry or modernity, and are strongly reminiscent in their narrowness and grime of second and third-rate towns in France and England. The resemblance would be more striking did not Australia lack the pointed, old-world architecture that gives historic quaintness and interest even to the dirtier and more tumbledown villages of Europe. Sydney is suspicious of new inventions, and would prefer that the disturbing, scientific spirit of the age left it alone. Until lately it knew of no better means of locomotion than its steam trams. It is only within the last year or two that it has had its electric cars. The energy with which these gigantic structures rush to and fro and disturb traffic is quite out of keeping with the atmosphere of the place. There are numerous accidents, because so many of the Sydneyites have not the energy to get out of the way.

The people, as a rule, are not ambitious. They have not the restless unquiet temperament associated with the Anglo-Saxon race in other and less pleasant parts of the globe. For that reason they are often excellent companions. They know how to enjoy life, and they are willing to share their knowledge with the stranger. They have no cast-iron formulas, either of etiquette or of morals. They have not yet succeeded in reducing orthodoxy to a fine art. It matters comparatively little to them, before or after they have made your acquaintance, whether your education was finished at Oxford or in Lower George Street, whether your father was a pawnbroker or an admiral, whether your nearest relations keep a grocer’s shop, or are something connected with the Established Church. Are you an agreeable person? Have you a pleasant humour? Do you know how to make life entertaining? Can you help others to pass the time? If the answer to any of these questions is in the affirmative, the gates of many desirable places will be thrown open to you. You will be allowed to tread the primrose path to the music of lutes, to the sound of soft voices, to the rustle of silk and satin embroideries, to the rhythm of Government House waltzes, to the popping of Vice-regal champagne. The possession of wealth is an advantage, but it is not indispensable. The Sydney creditor is as accommodating as most creditors. Even this class is not absolutely proof against the influence of climate and surroundings.