THE REAL AUSTRALIA

THE
REAL AUSTRALIA

BY

ALFRED BUCHANAN

AUTHOR OF
“BUBBLE REPUTATION”

Where the water-blossoms glister,

And by gleaming vale and vista,

Sits the English April’s sister

Soft and sweet and wonderful.—Kendall.

PHILADELPHIA

GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO.

PUBLISHERS

1907

[All rights reserved.]

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

The object of a novel is, as a general rule, to reflect life and temperament in a selected environment. For various reasons it has become the fashion to achieve this end by indirect means. An author goes to Italy, and writes a book about Italy. He tells us the things about Italy, and the people of Italy, that we want to know; but in order to discover these things we have to read many pages dealing with imaginary persons, for whose adventures we may or may not care, and in whose personality we may or may not believe.

The present work is merely an attempt, and an obviously imperfect one, to do directly what the travelled and cosmopolitan novelist does in an indirect way. That is to say, it is an attempt to mirror in some fashion the social life, the literary life, the individual life, the present-day life, of a developing continent and four millions of people.

The author is aware that books of this kind are usually written by travellers of more or less distinction. He knows that it is the easiest thing possible for your up-to-date journalist to rush across to Japan or Siberia and to be back in six months with the MSS. of a book that will exhaust the subject. He knows this; and he is bound to admit that he may be lacking in that breezy and picturesque point of view which follows naturally on an acquaintance of ten weeks, but is liable to vanish with a knowledge of ten years.

Yet he does not apologise; certainly not for the subject matter, nor yet for the fact that he writes about Australia as a resident Australian. The living world should be at least as worthy of interpretation as the dead world, or the world that existed only in some writer’s brain. What he does apologise for is the treatment, should that prove altogether inadequate to the theme.

CONTENTS

THE REAL AUSTRALIA

I

VIRTUES AND VICES

Over the ball of it,

Peering and prying,

How I see all of it,

Life there outlying!

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as national character. That is to say, there is no set of qualities peculiar to any one nation. In every known country extremes meet. They meet now, as they met in the days when history began. Greece has had its Zeno and its Epicurus, Rome its Octavian and its Vitellius, France its Barrère and its Chateaubriand, Germany its Heine and its Bismarck, England its Cromwell and its John Wilkes. Why multiply the list? Why assert of the contrasted characters that exist always side by side that one is typical of the people as a whole, and the other is not? Why imply that one class of individual ceases to exist at a particular parallel of latitude, and another begins there and then to take its rise?

But while there is no such thing as national character—except in the sense that historians find it convenient to use—it is yet a fact that certain people encourage each other in certain practices, and that these practices come in time to assume the proportions of public virtues and vices. One environment may permit an individual to wear a species of garment, or to indulge in a form of language that would be among other surroundings either legally forbidden, or frowned out of existence. The unwritten law in regard to externals insensibly modifies both the law of conduct and the habit of thought. In Australia there are opposing tendencies at work. There is, in the first place, the tendency to freedom and to license which the remoteness from an older civilisation fosters. Opposed to this, and rapidly overcoming it, is the tendency of a country, as it develops settled institutions, to mould itself on the ambitious models of fashionable society elsewhere. As a third factor, and an undoubtedly powerful one, there is the influence of climate. This is tending in Australia to produce a different race of beings, physically and morally, from that in the Northern Hemisphere. It is tending to do so—but up to the present it has produced a crop of half results, of insufficiently proven theories, and of partially established types.

There are certain qualities—virtues, they may be called—that come prominently under notice in Australia and appear, from their habit of repeating themselves, to form some integral part of the life of the community. The foremost of these good qualities is that of hospitality. And here a singular anomaly presents itself. Politically the Australians are the most exclusive and the most inhospitable race on earth. Their only rivals in this respect must be looked for among the bottled-up Confucians of China, or the mysterious Buddhists of Thibet. The “white-ocean” policy of the Federal Parliament, no less than the present Immigration Restriction Act, with its humorous travesty of an education test, is the most glaring instance of political bigotry that has come to light in modern times. The whole of this legislation has been described by an Australian Prime Minister as a “monstrous outrage” on every tolerant sentiment and every democratic ideal. Yet the law has been in force for three years and no Minister or Government has dared to repeal it. It is true that a certain concession has been made in favour of the Japanese. But it is only a partial concession. There the law stands on the statute-book; and there it seems likely to remain until the excluded victors of Tsu-shima show a desire to argue the question from the vantage ground of a battle-ship. In the latter event anything might come to pass.

The anomaly consists in the fact that the Australians, desiring to live politically like frogs in a well, are, as individuals, among the most open-hearted and hospitable in the world. The prevailing temper is shown in small things as in great. In England, if you are in doubt as to your locality, you feel some hesitation in asking a stranger to put you on the right road. The hesitancy may do the Englishman an injustice, but his manner explains it. In Australia you have only to enquire as to the whereabouts of a certain street or of a particular house, to be accompanied half the way there by a man who is manifestly and unmistakeably pleased to be in a position to give the information. The same hospitality is shown in the average householder’s desire to surround himself with as many people as possible, to entertain as many as possible, and to have as many as possible sampling his wines and his coffee and his cigars. If you are thirsty in Australia—and the thirst of the nation is proverbial—it is usual to look for some one who will drink with you. The hermit temper is not common, nor is the prevailing type that of the individual who wishes to be let alone, and to enjoy things alone. If there is a new lawn, or a new piano, or a new motor-car, the owner has a real anxiety that its merits should be tested, and its benefits shared by as large a circle as practicable. Vanity may have something to do with this desire, but however accounted for, it exists. The inconsistency between the temper of the unit and the policy of the Government—of each successive Government—runs from A to Z. The elector who will vote to have black men deprived of the means of earning a living, brown men deported, and blind or sick men refused the right to set foot on land, will, if he meets the alleged undesirable immigrant in the ordinary paths of life, come to his assistance with an alacrity that the good Samaritan of sacred history might equal, but could not surpass.

There are other qualities that must compel admiration. The Australians are receptive-minded, tolerant—except in the political sense just mentioned—and ready to learn. The intense conservatism of older countries is not theirs. Standards are not arbitrarily fixed as they are in Britain. The social groove is not artificially restricted. It is narrowing, but it is still fairly broad. The slavish adherence to a certain set of rules, designated collectively as “good form,” is not a characteristic of the people. In the unwritten code that finds most favour there is the principle that a person may be worth cultivating even though he does not pronounce his “a’s” as if they were “ai’s,” and even though certain monosyllables, by the aid of which the smart set avoids the trouble of conversation, form no part of his vocabulary. The Australian holds—in theory, at any rate—the revolutionary doctrine that every one should be given a chance. Now and again an individual is found who acts up to this unfashionable and somewhat crude precept.

There is something elastic in the people’s attitude to life. They have not become socially or mentally atrophied by centuries of convention, by centuries of custom, by centuries of meaningless and idiotic routine. The atrocious crime of being a young nation, with much of what the word youth implies, is still to be laid at their door.

A certain warmth, a certain generous instinct, a certain spontaneity of thought and action, a certain buoyancy of temper, must be placed to the credit side of the ledger. A certain fairness to opponents must also be conceded, despite the remarks of a noted English cricketer to the contrary. This fairness becomes all the more praiseworthy when it is remembered that the only topic on which the Australians, as a people, hold any definite opinions is that of sport. Such being the case, it is inevitable that some feeling should be shown when matters of sport—that is to say, matters of far more general interest than the fate of Governments or the choosing of Parliaments—are being decided. Invidious comparisons are sometimes drawn between the behaviour of crowds in Sydney or Melbourne, and the behaviour of crowds at Lords’ or at the Oval. The fact is usually overlooked that the London rough, who is the counterpart of the Australian larrikin, is not to be met with in any numbers at an athletic contest. For one thing he has not the money to go there, and for another thing he has not the desire. But the more boisterous and more objectionable type of Australian has a habit of finding his way to cricket matches in Sydney or in Melbourne. Broadly speaking, it is a select crowd that watches the game in England—a crowd made select by the price of admission. It is a crowd less select in Australia, for the reason that the price of admission is more easily obtainable. Allowing for all the circumstances, and measuring unit for unit, it is a fact that the virtue of fairness to opponents is one that the new nation can confidently claim.

Much might be said—in fact much has already been said, and much more will be said—of the vices of the people. This is a topic on which it would be foolish to dogmatise, seeing that so much depends on the individual point of view. Vice itself has become a term of obscure meaning. What with our logicians and metaphysicians, our up-to-date moralists, and our new hedonists—what with our emancipated lady novelists, our reforming social philosophers, and our revolting sisters and brethren—what with all these, we have no arbitrary rules of conduct, and no definitions that can for a moment be relied upon. Even so correct and comparatively orthodox a writer as Edmund Burke has made a statement implying that vice practically ceases to exist when it is sufficiently embroidered and set among sufficiently magnificent surroundings. To be vicious to the accompaniment of fine phrases and minuet-like movements—to be vicious while the rich embroideries are sweeping the floor, and the lights are falling on velvet curtains, and “the stately silver shoulder stoops”—that is not really to be vicious at all. Such at least would appear to be the general opinion. And if the general opinion is not to be taken as a guide in these matters it is difficult to say what is.

So far as national vices come under the heading of national crimes—and the terms are more or less related, though they are not identical—it can be easily shown that Australia is neither very much better nor very much worse than other countries. The number of people who are punished each year for crimes of various kinds is, relative to population, much the same as the number similarly punished in the United Kingdom. Statistics of drunkenness are incomplete and unreliable, but there is the authority of Mulhall for the statement that while the United Kingdom consumes 3.57 proof gallons of intoxicants per inhabitant, Australasia consumes no more than 2.50 gallons. Illegitimacy is somewhat more prevalent in the Southern Hemisphere than in Great Britain, but the difference is not considerable. The proportion of illegitimate births is 6 per cent. in Australasia and only 4.15 per cent. in England and Wales, but in Scotland, where morals are understood to be rather austere, the proportion of illegitimate births is 7 per cent. And so it is in regard to most other offences—in regard to burglaries, assaults, thefts, murders and the rest. The lot of the average policeman is neither more nor less unhappy, neither more nor less strenuous, in Australia than in England. The chances of being murdered in one’s sleep—though the middle-class English household may disbelieve the statement—are not appreciably greater in Australia than they are in Great Britain.

Yet a nation that is outwardly law-abiding may be inherently vicious. The habit that saps vitality may not be the habit that advertises itself in the police-court. As a matter of fact, a heavy crop of burglaries, and assaults with violence, may be quite a healthy sign, tending to show that national vigour is unimpaired. Every philosopher knows that the abounding energy which, in the one case, drives the possessor to break open doors and to hit other people on the head will, in ninety-nine other cases, impel him to daring feats in exploration, or in athletics, or in war. It is the drug-taking habit, the cigarette-smoking habit, the card-playing habit, the gambling habit, the loafing, swearing, work-shirking habit that produces the most insidious results, and tells the most disastrous tale. None of these practices are liable, in the ordinary course, to land the perpetrator in a Court of Law. There is no statistician who can say anything definite about them. But that they are all unduly and dangerously prevalent in Australia is a fact admitting of no reasonable doubt.

The most pervading phase of Australian character is its irresponsibility. If this is not a vice in itself, it is the parent of a great many vices. The term by which it is usually designated is lack of principle, or of moral sense. The average Englishman may be innocent of much outward profession of virtue, or, for that matter, of any definite, cut-and-dried standard of beliefs. He may be a very long way from the ideal of the just man made perfect. But very often he is discovered to possess something that may be neither creed nor conscience, but that is more potent than either. It is more than a fear of the law. It is more than regard for the opinion of others. It is more, even, than sense of shame. It is the inner something—accumulated instinct, if you will—that makes a man prefer, when the pinch comes, to do the honourable thing. At the very least, and at the very worst, it makes him silent as to his vices, and conscious of the fact that they are not virtues. But the Australian is beginning to run into a different mould. It is the commonest occurrence in the world to find him talking and boasting, jesting and laughing, over that about which he should be most inexorably dumb. Of his successes with women, of his breakages of the seventh commandment, of his nights at bridge or in a public-house, of his supposed power of cajoling man, woman, or child—and more especially woman—he will talk as long and as often as he can get an audience to listen to him. The larger the audience the better he is pleased. It is an unfortunate tendency of the people, and the fact that there are conspicuous exceptions to the rule just laid down does not make the tendency any less noticeable or less unfortunate.

When this irresponsibility reaches its zenith, its nadir, its crown and summit of perfection or imperfection, it produces the Australian larrikin. Every one knows this product of the hour. His fame has spread from hemisphere to hemisphere, and from pole to pole. All the hooligans of London, all the gamins of Paris, all the lazzaroni of Naples, all the miscellaneous ruffians of Cairo and Port Said, have not eclipsed, or even approached, the reputation acquired in the space of a very few decades by this child of beneficent skies and benign, smiling weather. It is impossible to say anything new about the Australian larrikin, just as it is impossible to exaggerate the heights of his lawlessness, or to plumb the depths of his depravity. But from the scientific and psychological points of view he is both interesting and valuable. There are a number of well-informed and earnest people who are distressed and disgusted by the all-pervading hypocrisy of our social laws and conventions. Mirabeau, who was exceedingly well informed, and very much in earnest, made it a boast that he had mastered all formulas. He had in fact reached the summit of irresponsibility. The Australian larrikin is in precisely the same position. But when you take weight off one man you enable him to redeem a nation; when you take weight off another you make him what he is—a living monument of hopeless vulgarity and inexpressible vice. In view of the fact that the temper of the average man is more disposed to make of him a larrikin than a Mirabeau, it becomes evident that artificial restraints are, in the aggregate, the salvation of the race. From the member of the “Rock’s Push” and of the “Flying Angels” we learn valuable lessons—lessons which such enthusiasts as Godwin and Condorcet would have us ignore. We learn that conventional laws are necessary, that artificial restraint is admirable, that people must be prevented by force from being what most of them left to themselves would become.

Of a somewhat similar type to the larrikin, though not occupying such a dizzy pre-eminence, is the cad of common or everyday life. This individual is not quite hopeless. If he were taken in hand and disciplined, drilled, and tutored, made to shoulder a rifle and practise a compulsory goose-step, fined every day for using bad language, forbidden to stand at street corners, imprisoned for the habit of expectoration, and under no circumstances allowed the use of a bicycle, he might come in time to be a valuable citizen. At present he is left too much to his own devices. Lord Roberts had his English counterpart in view when he announced that the future of the Empire depended on the adoption of a scheme of conscription. A warlike race is not to be discovered at street corners. It does not grow there. Neither is it over-much given to frequenting unregistered race meetings, and “two-up” schools. It swears occasionally, but only when circumstances appear to call for emphasis. Something will require to be done with the youth who perambulates its main streets before Australia will be able to supply the world with a new Thermopylæ, or even another Yalu.

The form of vice that is more or less prevalent in all countries—a form that is continually being warned against by the social brigade of the Salvation Army, and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and a worthy Colonial Secretary, and some less worthy members of the police—is a form much in evidence in Australia. The warfare, it need hardly be said, is scarcely as profitable, while it is as unending as the warfare of the Pigmies against the Cranes. There is scarcely a main street in which, after dark, the evidences are not visible of that which the hypocrite censures, and which the wise man merely deplores. In this continent all social currents follow their own bent. There is no attempt to make people moral by Act of Parliament. There is not even an attempt to save them by Act of Parliament from certain possibilities arising from their own actions. So the woman goes her way. Her unending sacrifice—for there is no doubt that it is a sacrifice, chosen as the less of two sacrifices—brings in the usual rewards, social outlawry, criminal associates, a fiery, unquenchable thirst, and a slum in which to draw the curtain. It is a very ancient story. In matters of this kind one does not look for novel and revolutionary features. The life of pleasure here is as pleasurable as it is elsewhere. As much, and no more. The pleasure, facetiously so called, is the outcome of an industrial system under which the working womanhood of the country is expected to feed and clothe and house itself on ten shillings a week, or less. By the toil of feminine hands—so long as they choose to toil—factories abound, industries keep themselves going, manufacturers grow rich. By the sacrifice of feminine respectability the carrion kites of society are fed. It is an obvious truth that Australia is always in danger of being injured, politically, by its statesmen, while it is always being rescued, socially, by its nymphs of the street.

There are certain acts, certain qualities, which it is impossible to forgive. On the other hand, there is a certain species of wrong-doing that is readily pardoned. Vice, as already pointed out, is to some extent a relative term; and if the motive is not petty or sordid, if the actor can rise to great occasions, if the man or woman is superior to the occasional outbreaks of his or her worse nature, it is safe to say that the nation is still capable of great things, and is by no means inherently bad. The most noteworthy characteristic of the Australian is his mental attitude to life. It is an attitude that is in danger of becoming crudely materialistic. It is impossible to build on this anything lasting. The pursuit of pleasure may be pardonable enough; but it is distinctly disquieting, from the point of view of one who wishes his country to be anything or to accomplish anything, to discover that the word pleasure is being given only one meaning. “Patient, deep-thinking Germany” was at one time laughed at by the wits of Vienna and Paris. But Germany has had its Koniggratz and its Sedan, and is laughed at no longer. The moral is that it is better, in the national sense, to be patient and deep-thinking than to be shallow and pleasure-loving. The charge that is being brought against the typical Australian is that he is not self-contained enough, not deep enough, not patient enough, not idealistic enough. The pleasure that he understands, that he works for, that he gives himself over to, that he is limited by, is the obvious pleasure that is dependent on sense, and the things of sense; and that must inevitably, sooner or later, become pallid and dead. He seems to be learning—in very many cases he has already learned—

To say of shame, what is it?

Of virtue, we can miss it;

Of sin, we can but kiss it,

And it’s no longer sin.

And he threatens—it may be only a threat—to flutter down from the stage of spasmodic enterprise to that of foolish indifference, from that of energy to that of ineptitude, from that which commands the respect, to that which invites the contempt of nations physically stronger and more enduring than his own.

Australia has so far achieved nothing great from the national standpoint. It cannot be said to have failed, because it has not yet been called upon. There are people who declare that they have the utmost confidence in its future. And if certain present-day tendencies could be overlooked, or if they could be obviated, as they might be, this confidence would be abundantly justified. The country has still indefinite room for expansion. It is not over-populated, and for at least another century is not likely to be. The wild-eyed enthusiast who imagines, with Milton, that he can see a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man from sleep, and shaking her invincible locks, must, if he forsake the rôle of prophet for that of the sober speculator, find some habitation and dumping-ground for the people that are to be born hereafter. And there are not many regions remaining where new growths can be attempted without decided inconvenience to the old. Apart from South America, Australia is practically the only country offering—the only country, that is to say, where there are millions of acres of unoccupied land, and a soil and climate that do not actually forbid approach. But the people, if they are to do great things, if they are not to become a tributary of some foreign power, or an appendage of Eastern Asia, must be prepared sooner or later to make a few changes, and even a few sacrifices. They must be prepared to give up the habit of looking to their big brothers for ideas on art and literature, and dress, and dining, and ball-room dancing, and methods of pronunciation, and national defence. They must be prepared to get a belief of some kind, a religion of some kind. They must be fanatical on some point—whether a religious point or a point of national honour, it does not matter—or they will go down before the Oriental fanatic as surely as the grass goes down before the scythe. No one imagines that a dilettante preference can stand against a consuming fire.

Be it a mad dream or God’s very breath,

The fact’s the same,—belief is fire.

The Australian must be prepared, in the event of great emergency, to die for something or for somebody. When he is thus prepared, his virtues and vices will not greatly matter; they will learn as a matter of course to adjust themselves.

II

SOCIETY

The gods their faces turn away

From nations and their little wars;

But we our golden drama play

Before the footlights of the stars.

George Eliot, in a passage that has become famous, lets it be understood that good society is a terribly expensive product, that it is accustomed to float on gossamer wings of light irony, and that in order to bring it to perfection infinite labour is required from common people who sweat in factories, and toil in coal-mines, and tramp heavily about in agricultural districts “when the rainy days look dreary.” The novelist was dealing particularly with England; but the circumstances which she had in mind repeat themselves more or less exactly in most civilised countries. Even in Australia, which has not been civilised very long, men are sweating in factories, and toiling in coal-mines, and grubbing industriously on way-back selections for the benefit of other people who live in large houses and give a social tone to populous cities. Much interest attaches to this thing called “good society.” Is it, as a matter of fact, floated on gossamer wings of light irony, or on gossamer wings of any sort? Is it as delicate and ethereal as George Eliot says it ought to be?

There are certain truisms that do not require to be insisted upon. They are self-evident. Mr Henry Crosland, who has become quite famous through his ingenious habit of turning positives into negatives, and negatives into positives, says that the moral tone of English upper-class circles is excellent, while that of English middle-class circles is deceitful and desperately wicked. But the ordinary man, with no literary reputation to weigh him down, declares confidently that the facts are neither as George Eliot nor as Mr Crosland declare them to be. The term society, as commonly used and understood, refers to the limited number of people who have come into possession either of a certain property or of a certain name. The atmosphere of this circle is not light and buoyant. It is heavy, and blasé, and tired, and dull. This good English society does not float on gossamer wings; it drags itself round two continents with very conscious endeavour. It is not ironical; to be that, requires mental effort, while it is easier and more effective to be supercilious. This same society is not moral; the whole scheme and purpose of conventional morality is narrow and circumscribed, and therefore unattractive to those unprejudiced people who perceive that arbitrary rules of conduct are made for slaves. The set in question is in no single particular what its apologists and admirers declare it to be. It is not really exclusive; a man with sufficient means can always enter it. There is only one thing to which it is actively antagonistic, and that is ability. It is not antagonistic to poverty; it is merely disdainful. Its arrogance is appalling. Its lack of creative power is more appalling still.

And yet while the characteristics of the best London society are of this nature—while the whole edifice would suggest the Jugurtha reflection that the city is for sale, and will perish quickly when it finds a purchaser—it is undeniably true that the passion to enter the comparatively limited circle is steadily growing. The desire is the natural result of that envy which the man or woman who is everywhere circumscribed feels for the individual who is in all things privileged. The important circumstance at present is that the London “four hundred” were never more run after than they are to-day. Their patronage and presence were never in greater demand. We may swear that this smart set is a very dull set; we may vow with the earnestness of conviction that its very atmosphere is fatal to initiative and inimical to brains, and more destructive to morals than to either; but there is not a woman, scarcely a man among us who does not bear witness, in the way he dresses, or dines, or parts his hair, or takes the hand of a lady in a ball-room, that he is a humble imitator of the example set him by the people who live in large houses and flourish in the pages of De Brett. There is not a man outside this narrow pale, be he English or Australian, who could walk along Piccadilly in the company of two members of the aristocracy, effete though that aristocracy may be, without a sense of elation bordering on vertigo. With all its vice and frippery and inanity and boredom, the thing called society is an influence, a power, a far-reaching entity, a commanding and controlling force. From a distance we can criticise it and discover what it really means, what it actually is. But at close quarters it makes cowards of us—that is to say, of all who are not hermits or desperadoes, of all who are not phenomenally rich or abysmally poor.

Good society, as already mentioned, is a peculiarly English institution. Nevertheless, it has flourishing offshoots in different parts of the world. In Australia, there is rapidly growing up a set of conventions and a habit of speech founded on a close study of the older community. There is such a thing as Australian society. It exists. It is ambitious. It aspires to be recognised. It wants to grow. Some of its members have been presented at Court and have brought back with them large social aspirations. Certain of its women have been taken into dinner by members of the British peerage. Quite a number of Australian tailors have been in Bond Street and have made observations. A proportion of Australian dressmakers has seen something of Paris. These dealers in cloth and millinery have magnificent ideas. They have impressed themselves and their notions on the home-staying community. So it has come about that dress, wealth, reputation, fashion, and appearance have done a great deal between them to create the nucleus of a favoured clientèle, and to scatter to the winds the obsolete idea that in a democracy all things are equal, and all people are socially on a par.

What, it may be asked at the outset, is meant by the term “Australian society”? It has been agreed that something of the kind has been evolved. But who are the individuals? Where are they? How can they be recognised? For purposes of rough-and-ready definition, they may be classified as the people who are in the habit of receiving invitations to Government House. It is the business of the aide-de-camp to discover who is who in Australia. The task is impossible to the statistician or the scientist, but it seems in some mysterious fashion to fit in with the temperament and abilities of an aide-de-camp. There are no definite rules that can be relied upon. The dividing line between desirables and non-desirables is of the most shifty, and uncertain, and elusive character. Yet, when mistakes are made, as they always will be, the social uproar is tremendous. The unfortunate official whose business it is to request the pleasure of So-and-so’s company at a Vice-regal dance, or a garden party, is for ever voyaging upon troubled waters, with scarcely a beacon or a land-mark to guide him. His eye may light upon a few judges, a few prominent politicians, one or two naval and military officers, half a dozen wealthy land-owners, and a few prosperous warehousemen. So far as they are concerned, he knows he is safe. But there remain the grocer, the land-agent, the brewer, the confectioner, the lawyer, the singer, the actor, the doctor, the grass-widow, and many more—a miscellaneous assortment which cannot be entirely ignored or collectively accepted, and which presents a problem baffling in the last degree.

It is almost unnecessary to say that the social world of Australia is controlled by women. It is they who set most store upon artificial distinctions. It is they who value most the receipt of a request to disport themselves on His Excellency’s lawn, or in His Excellency’s ball-room. It is they who understand best how far the Vice-regal card of invitation exalts them over their sisters who have not come in for a like attention. The average man, if left to his own devices, would not sparkle with animation at the prospect of either a Government House dance, or a Government House garden party. This average man—unless he happens to be very young and very volatile—is not an enthusiastic exponent of those ball-room exercises in which Ouida’s heroes excel. Neither has he any delight in the formality and stiffness, the silk hats and the long coats inseparable from a two hours’ promenade on some distinguished person’s lawn. If it were a matter of personal inclination, he would confess that he knew better ways of amusing himself. But the Australian woman is socially ambitious. Her passion for social festivities is unquenchable. When the tocsin has sounded she will march with the procession—at the head of it, if she can. And the man of her circle, whether he likes it or not, must march with her.

All the mannerisms that do duty in the society of one hemisphere come in their turn to do duty in the society of the other. The puppets advance and retire to identical sets of rules. If the high handshake is fashionable in England, it must become fashionable in Australia. If it is the custom to take your partner’s arm in the West End of London, it has to be the custom, a little later, in certain quarters of Melbourne and Sydney. If it is the correct thing for the young English lordling to talk in tired monosyllables to the daughter of the Marquis, it is equally the correct thing for the Australian young man of means to look as bored as possible when conversing with the daughter of the host. One artificiality follows another. The imitative processes extend to the manner of using a finger-bowl, and of handling an eye-glass. If white waistcoats and gaudy ties are the rule among certain people in England, they become the rule among certain people in Australia. Society in either country is raised, fortified, buttressed, and embellished with shams—with shams that have nothing to recommend them on the score of cleverness, or ingenuity, or outward grace or hidden meaning. They represent, simply and solely, the desire of a certain class to do certain things in a manner peculiar to itself.

As to the inner life of this fashionable society, as it exists in Australia, there is little new to be said. The object in view is simply that in view everywhere else, namely, that of obtaining as much amusement as possible, and of being left to one’s own devices as little as possible. All the distractions known to civilised man are drawn upon in one country as in another. The men bet on racecourses, drink, and play cards. The women do all three, and in addition smoke and talk scandal. In one respect Australian society has an advantage over that of London, or of Paris. It has more physical energy with which to pursue its vices and its follies to the bitter end. Its opportunities for extravagant display may be fewer, but its zest is greater. It has no series of inter-marriages to look back upon. It has no titled and blasé families to support. Its fathers or its grandfathers belonged to the race of hardy pioneers. The present generation is the product of a virile stock. As a consequence it has not exhausted its physical equipment. There is a certain buoyancy about its mental attitude, a certain juvenility in its pursuit of the bubbles of the moment. The nil admirari manner, borrowed from London drawing-rooms, sits awkwardly on its shoulders. If it could only get away from old-world traditions, if it were willing to stand upon its feet, if it would leave its absurd mannerisms to the people who first invented them, this Australian society, with all its health and youth and unimpaired vitality, with all its magnificent opportunities furnished by variety of scene and splendour of climate, might set an example of living which other countries would have reason to envy, if they had not the power to imitate. For Australia, if the fact were only recognised, is a country in which it is possible to enjoy oneself finely, or to deny oneself greatly, as the mood pleases, independently of the world.

One characteristic of Australian society is its vulgarity; another is its snobbery; another is its lack of ideals. The vulgarity is apparent on the surface. It is usually explained on the ground of want of familiarity with the more luxurious and the more cultivated conditions of living. To endow a man who commenced life as a small shopkeeper with a large house, a carriage, some superior furniture, and still more expensive possessions in the shape of wife and daughters, is not to make him refined. The glorified tradesman is the pivot of the social life of the continent. The distinction between the wholesale and the retail dealer, which is still more or less observed in England, does not obtain here. If a man has the money he is accepted at his own valuation. He can go anywhere. Government House throws its gates open to him, unless, indeed, it should have happened that certain incidents of an unusually lurid character have reached the ears of the painstaking aide-de-camp. The landowner, if his lands are extensive enough, is another who helps to set the standard. He also is usually a novice at the pursuits and mannerisms that find favour with the more seasoned upper classes. The trail of newness, of gaucherie, of awkward, although of lavish ostentation, is over the whole social fabric. The people have zest and energy. They dine well, drink well, gamble well. But they have not yet learned to do these things with the nonchalant air that comes of heredity or of much experience.

The snobbery of Australian society is a matter equally beyond the reach of question. It is an elementary principle in all speculations as to human conduct that the man or woman who is intrinsically best worth knowing is the one who asserts himself or herself least. The plutocrats of Australia are continually and tirelessly asserting themselves. They all advertise—possibly because of the survival of the shopkeeping instinct, which prompted them in earlier days to get ahead of the man next door by making a finer display of haberdashery or of cold meat. The advertising habit does not die out in one generation. At present it dominates the social life of the community. This is the reason why the man who does not care to advertise, or feels he has no need to advertise, prefers to stay away from gatherings at which the resplendent tradesmen are the observed of all observers. There are many men of sensibility, of imagination, of delicacy of thought and refinement of feeling, in Australia. There are women equally gifted. But these are not the people who besiege the Vice-regal Residence most determinedly, or appear in the papers most often. If they have means, or leisure, or culture—and often they have all three—they look for congenial souls, or are satisfied to remain apart.

The selfishness of Australian society is more or less implied in what has been already stated; but a special significance is often given to the word in connection with the declining birth-rate. The population of the continent is by no means stationary. The birth-rate is about 28 per thousand, and the death-rate scarcely 13 per thousand. In fifty years, even at the present rate of increase, there will be 8,000,000 people in the Commonwealth. But the preachers and politicians are not satisfied. They want the increase to be still greater, the births to be still more numerous. They have discovered that the cradle of the working man—when he can afford such an article of furniture—is seldom empty, while the cradle of the rich mother has only an occasional inmate. The cry has gone up that the women of the well-to-do class are furnishing a bad precedent. A committee of nine, appointed by the New South Wales Government, recently investigated the whole question. And the conclusion arrived at is that Australia, and more especially its middle and upper classes, are socially and morally in a bad way.

It is remarkable that so much unnecessary alarm should have been created over this subject. To say that the diminishing birth-rate is necessarily a bad sign is to ignore great part of the teaching of history, and of science, and of civilisation. Birth is stronger than death, and has been throughout the ages. It was so when the barbarians were knocking at the gates of the Eternal City; when the tens of thousands of Attila were falling before the tens of thousands of Aetius; when Goth and Vandal, Frank and Scythian, were transforming Central Europe into a charnel pit; when famine and pestilence were assisting the war-god of the Middle Ages to keep population in check. Yet population grew then, and is growing now. Science, by checking disease, and humanitarian sentiment, by preventing war, are helping it to grow still faster. No one can pretend to say what the end will be. The temper of Australian society is probably no more unselfish and no more moral than is that of any other society equally endowed with means and leisure time. But even out of evil good may come; and if selfishness and immorality are evils, it has yet to be shown that a declining birth-rate belongs to the same category.

The tone of what is called society is, as a matter of fact, the outward expression of the country’s ideal. Australia badly wants an ideal. At present it has none worthy of the name. It is not looking for one; at least there are few indications of a search. What is everybody striving for? Unto what altar is the mysterious priest of nationhood leading his followers? Of what nature are the offerings? Who are the deities that are being invoked? These are all questions that should interest the speculative mind. As to the habits and inspirations of the working classes, there is not much uncertainty. They are aiming—and it is an honourable and straightforward aim—at improved mental and material conditions of living. But as the present argument deals with methods of employing leisure, and the workers are understood to have no leisure, they may be omitted from the general conclusion. The leisured classes, the privileged classes, the social classes have one, and only one objective. Their familiar gods are those of the worshippers in Atalanta in Calydon—Pan by day, and Bacchus by night. Their mission is to pass the time, to kill it in the most agreeable way, to accompany its exit with the music of flutes, to see that its obsequies are attended by the most lulling effects, the most soothing harmonies, the most insidious appeals to brain and sense that money will allow.

Once upon a time there were ideals. The patriotic ideal was one of these, and it was decidedly useful, though from the logical standpoint rather absurd. The march of intelligence teaches that the willingness to die for one’s country is the survival of a crude and primitive instinct; that it is much finer, as well as much safer, to entertain a cosmopolitan feeling of regard for the foreigner, and not to put oneself unnecessarily in his way. Leonidas, when he put himself in the way at Thermopylæ, illustrated the earlier man’s fondness for an ideal. From his country’s point of view his ideal was a good one, though for himself it had no concrete value. Another manifestation that is occasionally to be met with in Europe and elsewhere is what might be called the aristocratic ideal. This is an inheritance from feudal times. Yet a third variety is the intellectual ideal. France in the time of Louis XIV. grew tired of looking up to the people of high birth, and for a brief space looked up to the people of high intelligence. Every member of the best society carried his sonnet about with him as the modern man carries his walking-stick. The age of Louis and of Molière was the heyday of the intellectual ideal.

In Australia there is no real acknowledgment of any of these three. There is no inducement to the average citizen to be patriotic. The quality, so far from being idealised, is hardly recognised. Times have altered since King Xerxes looked out over Salamis and since Arnold von Winkelreid fell at Sempach. The people of the new continent have never been called upon to defend themselves. Where there is no desire for fighting, no military spirit, no past history, no present danger, there is not likely to be a patriotic ideal. If you were to ask the average Australian whether it was not his highest ambition to die for his country he would take you either for a person of weak intellect, or for an eccentric amateur comedian. Neither is there any quality in the people that corresponds to the ancient practice of idealising noble birth. The country has no aristocracy of its own. It has no special desire for one. Whatever ambitions or aspirations it may acknowledge, they have nothing to do with a titled class. Neither is the typical Australian given to worshipping intellect as such. When the particular brand of intellect brought under his notice has been commercially successful, and can command a high market value, he is appreciative and respectful. But for the quality itself he has no special regard, and in nine cases out of ten does not recognise it when it is there.

Without any such ideals as connect themselves with patriotism, with good birth, and with intellect, Australia bestows its enthusiastic idolatry on the individual possessed of great riches. Patriotism, good conduct, character, intelligence, imagination, fancy, unselfishness, brilliancy of expression—all these things are quite unnecessary in local social circles. It is only when they have been translated into a cash value that they can be seriously considered. It is not that brains are ruled out of court. They are always tolerated. But it is only when they have allied themselves with some kind of commercial success that they are sought after. The ideal before the community—the ideal that finds expression in society, that shines through the restless eyes of the women, and stamps itself on the dissatisfied faces of the men—is nothing if not a monetary one. Strictly speaking, therefore, it is not an ideal at all. Money will purchase everything that the country has to offer, and for want of something else it does duty as the country’s ideal.

It is unfortunate that the continent should be in this position—the position of having nothing but a large fortune, a motor car, and a quantity of expensive furniture to aim at. Henry Lawson and one or two other poorly appreciated writers of talent have endeavoured to inspire the people with a martial sentiment, but as yet without success. All invocations to the “star of Australia” have so far fallen on deaf ears. There is no star of Australia. It has not set, and it has never risen. Until something unforeseen happens it does not seem likely to rise. How can it? The well-spring from which patriotic aspirations mount up has not yet been discovered. People with admirable intentions have recommended Australia, as an escape from mere frivolous amusements, to cultivate various forms of the strenuous life—for example, the life in barracks, the life in libraries, the life on the intellectual mountain top, the life in the home. It is unquestionable that a new development of some kind is badly needed. Australia would reap a substantial benefit, and one reflected throughout all ranks and conditions, if in the near future it evolved something, whether it were a patriotic ideal, a jingoistic ideal, a home-life ideal, a moral, intellectual, religious, or even a physical ideal. If it is to play a respectable part in future questions of magnitude it must, at any rate, develop some variation in the pleasure-seeking, money-making, work-shirking propensities that represent the greater part of its social life. Probably the salvation, when it does come, will be wrought by the working classes; for though they have blundered industrially, and failed more than once politically, they have the confidence of numbers, they are emancipated, and they are quick to learn. The ultimate destiny of the Australian continent is very largely in their hands.

III

JOURNALISM

The many waves of thought, the mighty tides,

The ground swell that rolls up from other lands,

From far-off worlds, from dim eternal shores

Whose echo dashes on life’s wave-worn strands.

The people who are connected with journalism in Australia, as elsewhere, fall naturally into three classes—managers, sub-editors, and newspaper writers. There are numerous subdivisions, but these are the three cardinal ones. The outside public does not always appreciate the value of the classification just given. The outside public may, therefore, in its tolerance, submit to be informed. For modern journalism has become a vast and comprehensive and complex thing. It touches every one, interests every one, more or less attracts every one, more or less mystifies every one. The man who is not an outsider, but who has had the lot to

See with eye serene

The very pulse of the machine—

who has been caught up and whirled round by the wheels, so to speak—should be able to claim the privilege of describing his observations and his sensations.

The managerial class is deserving of much respect, and usually gets all that it deserves. Its members are few, but its influence is undoubtedly great. Only a short account need be given of the character and abilities of the handful of men who either own or manage the great “dailies” of Australia.

For them the anonymity of the profession does not exist. They live much in the public eye. They collect the praise; they accept the flattery; they grow rich on the proceeds. The blame, when there is blame, is also theirs. But what terrors can the breath of outside criticism have for men who sell their papers at the rate of 30,000 or 40,000, or 100,000 a day? What profit is there in kicking against the pricks? These men who control the city newspapers form a separate oligarchy, and a powerful one. They are not troubled with any misgivings as to their own potentialities in the cosmos. They have a practical working knowledge of the world, and a vast confidence in themselves. Sometimes they know how to write, sometimes they do not. In any case it does not matter. Whatever brains they want they can easily purchase. They live in large mansions in the suburbs, arrive at their offices at eleven o’clock in the morning, go regularly to Government House, and deal in Napoleonic fashion with complaints from the sub-editor, with suggestions from the commercial world, with expostulations from aggrieved politicians, and with applications for increases of salary from unsatisfied members of the staff. They have won their way to big positions, and they know it. It is an excellent and a pleasant thing to be the proprietor or the manager of a large newspaper in Australia.

The sub-editors, again, form a class by themselves; they resemble the managers in that they are not really journalists. Possibly at some stage of their individual careers they may have been, but they are so no longer. As a matter of fact they are the sworn enemies of journalism. They stand like the British infantry at Waterloo—a sort of cold iron palisade against which the effervescence of youthful journalistic enterprise dashes itself in vain. They represent not so much the literary, as the commercial instinct of the paper. They are the outposts which a cautious management sets to keep watch against the Philistines. The sub-editor has tremendous responsibility and very little power. Therein lies the tragedy of his existence. Before he begins his long series of vigils under the electric lamp, he knows that while he will get no manner of praise if everything goes right, he will get short and decisive shrift if anything goes wrong. He knows this very well; and the knowledge makes him what he is.

A strange existence, a strange personality is that of the sub-editor. He seems to resemble the patient, sleepless Eremite of Keats’s last sonnet; he is always there, and he is always “watching with eternal lids apart.” It is impossible not to admire him. He must, to be in any sense worthy of his post, possess great abilities. The machine that he controls is vast, unwieldy, and yet sensationally rapid in its flight. The Rio Grande of Paterson’s Steeplechase did not require a touch half so firm or half so fine to keep him in his course. Of the thousand objectionable, offensive, libellous, dangerous, unnecessary or unwise things that come under the sub-editor’s notice every week, how many get past him? How many does he suffer to see the light of day? It is impossible not to admire the sub-editor, but it is difficult to like him. He must be a man without pity and without remorse. If he made allowance for good intentions, if he judged otherwise than by results, he would ruin his paper in a month. If he did not effectively discourage the swarm of budding writers who attempt to rush him, he would speedily have to cease publication. If he were not constantly saying unpleasant things, he would inaugurate a reign of chaos. And yet there are one or two first-class sub-editors in Australia who are well liked, and by none better than by their victims. It is a strange anomaly, but there it is. In any case it is a great tribute to the personality of the man.

Of the third class, the order of journalists proper, a great deal might be said. This class includes all those who get their living by furnishing copy to the newspapers of the country. They are a motley crowd; they number in their ranks representatives of all the professions, and of no profession at all. They embrace men and women of good social position, and men and women who are distinctly outside the pale. They have no definite organisation, no professional status, no formal rules of etiquette, no exclusive caste, no artificial barriers against membership. They have one standard of living, unorthodoxy; one bond of fellowship, Bohemianism; one passport to success, ability; one aversion, dulness; one insidious enemy, human nature; one unreliable friend—the world.

For these workers of the community there should be, in the aggregate, a feeling of considerable respect and of no little sympathy. Of respect, because in the mass they accomplish great things. The really first-class journalist showers a wealth of good phrasing, clever word-painting, wise discrimination, light fancy, brilliant humour, and saving common-sense on the breakfast-tables of a quarter of a million people each morning. He does all this and more. The result has come to be looked upon as necessary, obvious, mechanical, in a sense inevitable. It represents to the average reader the outpourings of a great machine. And a machine it certainly is, but one that is intricately fashioned, piece by piece, out of the minds and bodies, and hopes and fears, and personal gifts and graces of tens of hundreds of unrecognised writers. Unrecognised—the word that expresses always the salvation of the bad journalist, and always the detriment, or the ultimate ruin, of the good one.

These men are entitled to sympathy, or would be if they did not include in their ranks so many specimens of moral obloquy, so many hopeless outcasts from all the paths of reasonably sane and tolerable behaviour. Journalism makes a man acquainted with strange bed-fellows. Yet, taking it right through it contains probably more ability than all the rest of the professions put together, though possibly less knowledge than is to be found in any one of them. The newspaper writer, considered as a type, is always overworked, and always underpaid. Australia in this respect is no exception to other parts of the world. The men who labour behind the veil of anonymous journalism are rewarded for the most part with a living wage, and are swept out of sight as the new generation comes along. When their initiative goes, they go. Time is their deadliest enemy. Instead of fighting for them as it fights for the barrister and the medical man, it is constantly threatening them with loss of initiative, with loss of energy, with loss of brilliance. Honey is proverbially sweet for a season; but no one knows better than the journalist that the laurel which he wins this morning cannot last till to-morrow.

As to the products of this handiwork—what is to be said of them? The Australian newspaper has already developed a character of its own. Its place is somewhere between the startling sensationalism of New York and San Francisco, and the solemn impressiveness of the older London school. The representative editor balances himself between these two modes of journalism. He is seldom quite free from the English traditions, but he knows his readers; he knows that they, too, are somewhat under the influence of the older and more respectable associations; he knows that, while they have no taste for solid reading, and are always ready to be excited or amused, they have yet a contempt for machine-made sensationalism, for foolish and frothy elaboration, for staring capital letters, for shriekful epithets, for the flimsier kind of composition that rears itself on a basis of sand. Hence it may be that the press of the Commonwealth has followed, for the most part, a middle course, and has endeavoured to be neither too dull nor too picturesque. The effort has often resulted in insignificance; but it has now and again achieved great success.

For purposes of illustration it is not necessary to go beyond Melbourne and Sydney. The smaller capital cities, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Perth, are content as a rule to follow their leaders. Whatever is good or bad, or in any way distinctive at the centre, you will find reflected, though in a slighter and paler fashion, in the towns further north and further west. The same lines of demarcation hold good throughout the continent. In each city one morning paper calls itself “liberal” or “national,” while its rival goes one better, and styles itself “radical” or “democratic.” The word “conservative” has become a taunt, and is never an acknowledged title. The predominant tendency is for the younger and more democratic organ to go beyond its older and more serious competitor. The only important exception seems to be that in Perth, where the West Australian occupies a unique position. It is the accented mouthpiece of “groperism”; that is to say, of those privileged few who came to the State in early days, and monopolised as much of the earth as seemed worthy of their attention. Needless to add, these people are more conservative than they care to admit. The newspaper of their choice is singularly popular considering the circumstances. Under the guidance of an extraordinarily far-seeing and subtle-minded editor who has a rare faculty for flattering a democratic audience, while really ruling and guiding it—who knows also how to bend to the storm when to beat against it is no longer possible—the West Australian is more widely read, and more influential, to-day than it ever was, and that in the midst of a people containing a stronger socialistic infusion than is to be met with elsewhere in Australia.

It is in Melbourne and Sydney, however, that we get the most useful and instructive illustrations of the working of the journalistic machine. The Age and Argus in the former city; the Morning Herald and Daily Telegraph in Sydney, represent the best that Australia has yet been able to accomplish in this field of enterprise. The Age is referred to first because it claims, and with an emphasis that frightens contradiction, to have the largest circulation of any daily south of the line. Its political influence, though perhaps hardly what it was, has also to be reckoned with. The Age has been in existence just fifty-two years; it has been consistently fortunate in the men behind it. More especially it has been fortunate in its proprietor. It owes its power, its prestige, its circulation, its character, its very existence to David Syme, who is still, at a venerable age, an active, working journalist, and who has the distinction of being the most respected and the most disliked man in Australia—perhaps also one of the very best liked by the few who know him really well. That he has used his immense power fearlessly, and on the whole for good, is unquestionable. The present editor of the Age acts up to the policy of the proprietor. Never laying claim to pyrotechnical skill as a writer, and not giving too much rein to his imagination, he is yet pre-eminently shrewd, far seeing, clear-sighted, well informed, capable, and where business interests are concerned, inflexible as death itself. In private life no man could be more popular or more deferentially urbane.

The Argus suffers now, and has always suffered, from want of definite and decisive leadership. On its general staff it has had during the past ten or fifteen years more brilliant men—considered as reporters, at any rate—than any other daily paper in the English language. But instead of advancing to meet the times it has stood still, and talked impressively of many things. More particularly it has talked about the dangers of empiricism, and the responsibilities of the press. People read it, and will continue to read it, not so much for its opinions, as for the graceful manner in which most of its writers contrive to deal with the English language. For the rest its views on Imperialism and Free-trade fall on unwilling ears.

The Morning Herald is the oldest paper in the Commonwealth, and is built on the same lines as the Argus. It has done great things for the tone and temper of Australian journalism. Latterly, it has been showing signs of democratic restlessness that have caused its older admirers a certain amount of alarm.

The Daily Telegraph is the Mary Jane of Australian journalism. It is the most active, the most aggressive, the most tireless, the most sensation-loving, the most hysterical, the most shrill-voiced, the most daring, and the most inventive paper published on the continent. It is a slab of San Francisco tumbled down in the vicinity of Botany Bay.

This reference to certain leading journals brings up a large question—the question of the power of the newspaper press in Australia. Is it an excessive power? And how does it compare with the power of the press in other countries? So far as their political creeds are concerned, the Australians have been called a newspaper-ridden community. They are often too tired to think, and they let the paper think for them. The writer recollects calling upon a prominent official who had just returned to Melbourne after a visit for political purposes to England. The first, and almost the only observation this gentleman made, was that “They are not afraid of the newspapers in the old country.” It was this circumstance that had impressed him more than anything else, although during his absence he had been everywhere, and had seen a great deal. If you are a public man you must read and despise the papers. If you do not read them, you will miss something. If you do not despise them, they will worry the life out of you. The Age is the stock instance of a paper from which tens of thousands of adult, and supposedly intelligent voters have been content to take their opinions. This journal has made and unmade many Ministries. The Sydney Daily Telegraph is aspiring to fill the same rôle, but so far with not the same success. It is quite certain, however, that Australian newspapers of the larger class possess more influence in certain directions than is good either for themselves or for the community.

Another question very often debated is that of the fairness or otherwise of the press of the Commonwealth. Some of the leading journals have a habit of assuring the public that they are scrupulously fair; others discreetly say nothing on the subject; but almost every one has adopted an admirable and impressive motto which it places on view in a conspicuous place over the leading columns. The motto may be intended as a salve for the consciences of the management. There is a well-known story of a man who was not religious, but who always took off his hat when passing a church. Having paid that homage to his better instincts, he naturally felt more at liberty to cultivate his other ones. Having hoisted his motto, and having made obeisance to the abstract idea of fairness, the newspaper proprietor feels that he must not allow himself to be regarded as in any sense a bigot, or a moral fanatic. He has passed the church and taken off his hat. For the rest, there are the interests of his paper to think about. If these interests do not always coincide with the interests of individuals, the circumstance is much to be regretted—from the point of view of the individuals.

Some admirable diatribes have been uttered from pulpits and platforms, and from Supreme Court benches, on the subject of newspaper morality in Australia. During the hearing of a recent libel case in Melbourne, a learned judge lashed himself into a white-heat of indignation over the sinfulness of press writers who advocate views which they do not hold, and refrain from publishing statements which they do not like. His Honour found it hard to believe that such monsters could be discovered walking the earth in the guise of men. Similar sentiments have been echoed and re-echoed everywhere. There is nothing in the world quite so fine as the average man’s idea of what a newspaper ought to be. No matter what this average man may be prepared to do, or to advocate, or to believe himself, he is shocked beyond measure to find that even an influential newspaper may have commercial instincts, that it may not be disposed to love its enemies, that it may object to publishing statements which tell against it, that it may be both unable and unwilling to set an example of sublime innocence and spotless purity to the people who read its pages.

A newspaper’s virtue, like a woman’s, has a special meaning, and the meaning which outsiders attach to the word “virtue,” as applied to a newspaper, is not necessarily that which obtains within the craft. The goal which every management has in view is the goal of success—not spiritual or ethical, but hard, financial, and materialistic success. The proprietor’s virtue, the editor’s virtue, the writer’s virtue, are synonymous, among members of the profession, with the ability to produce a readable, a saleable, and an otherwise valuable article. No one blames a lawyer for advocating a cause in which he does not believe; no one censures a grocer for selling a brand of tea which he does not personally like; no one objects to a carpenter putting up houses in which he would not care to dwell. Why should the newspaper be accused of unfairness when it does what is best for itself? Like every private individual, it must keep within bounds. If it commits a transgression there is always the libel law. If it indulges in personal malice, there is always the gaol. The singular thing is that so many journals—particularly the patriarchs of Sydney and Melbourne—should be so anxious to assure the public of the excellence of their intentions. As though good intentions had ever a market value, as though the commercial instinct and the highest moral principles were not always and necessarily opposed!

What of the newspaper writer’s calling as such? Is it worth following? From the outside it looks attractive enough. Even from the inside it has its charms, meretricious and otherwise. There is a certain glitter and glamour about the profession, particularly in its early stages. The absence of class distinctions helps the journalist, and makes his work infinitely more agreeable. To a man with a real literary turn—or what is even better, a news’ instinct—promotion comes rapidly. He escapes the dull routine of other callings; he comes almost immediately into the larger portion of his inheritance. The reputation that blossoms towards the end of life, the rewards that come eventually, but with glacial slowness, the solid and sure gains of experience, all these are no part of his outlook. But he acquires in a few months a reputation and a standing that elsewhere are only the product of years. He steps at once into a wide and breezy circle; he is thrown into daily contact with the most interesting, the most notorious, and the most illustrious personages of the time. About the work itself there is a peculiar, mirage-like quality; it always seems to be pointing beyond the desert of daily drudgery, beyond the arid region of hack-work and small salaries, to the smiling country of fortune and literary fame. The young newspaper writer “never is, but is always to be, blest.”

There are many people who do not require to be warned against journalism; they drift into it, or fall into it, after chequered experiences elsewhere. But to the youth who has a choice of professions, and who thinks of choosing this one, a word of counsel may be tendered. There is no calling that makes such demands on talent, that asks so much, or that treats its tried servants so badly in the end. The man on the general staff of a big Australian daily, may for a year or two, or for a dozen years, have a good share of what the heart desires. He may have a degree of reputation, an amount of ready money, a following of friends; but the money, the friends, the reputation are all liable to vanish at brief notice. The more brilliant the writer is, the more quickly does he exhaust his stock of nervous energy. After the first few years, time, as already remarked, begins to work, not for, but against him; the more capable and the more talked of he is, the more insidiously do adverse influences begin to grow up. As a rule, his is not the temperament which weighs chances, or lays up store for the future: and when the day of his mental ascendancy is past, the management regretfully but firmly shows him the door.

The writer has in mind four representative Australian journalists whose abilities were, or are now, of the very highest. From the ranks of any profession, or from all the professions together, it would be difficult to pick in Australia four men who could boast in the aggregate a greater measure of natural or of practised ability. Each of these four has, time after time, charmed, interested, and amused, hundreds of thousands of perceptive and critical readers. Had they given half the same talent to law or medicine, to science or politics, each of the four would beyond doubt have become rich and famous. But what has happened? One of them, possibly the most brilliant of the brilliant quartette, died early, in some measure a victim to the hospitality and conviviality that his own unique personality and charm of manner invited. Journalists in Australia will not need to be told that the reference is to the late Davison Symmons. The other three are still living. One of them, whose work conferred lustre on the Sydney Morning Herald during the middle ’nineties, was in part the victim of circumstances, in part the prey of his own temperament. The knowledge that he was receiving 30s. or 40s. a column for his efforts, while worse writers in England were getting paid for theirs at the rate of shillings a line, drove him first to misanthropy, and afterwards to other things. The third of the quartette is the writer who is known throughout the continent by the pen-name “Oriel.” He is at the top of the profession; he is one of the few men in Australia who have combined social orthodoxy with newspaper brilliance; he has worked hard, and he has not thrown himself away. But what prospects of a tangible monetary reward are there for the gifted “Oriel,” or for writers like “Oriel,” in comparison with those which always await the cattle dealer, the rag merchant, or the bluffing attorney? The fourth of these typical journalists is he who disguised himself in the columns of the Melbourne Argus and chronicled cricket, football, and other small beer for quite a number of years. He might have continued to do so indefinitely, had not the accident of the South African war given him a reputation and a name.

These are only a few illustrations, but they will suffice. The individual who launches out on the inky way must be prepared to be judged critically on his merits, and to be treated without leniency or favour. He must submit, for a time at any rate, to do the bidding of a man who is also a journalist, and perhaps a less competent one than himself. He must throw his illusions overboard; he must learn to give and take; he must be watchful and ready, prompt to observe, and quick to act; and he must be prepared to go without the richer prizes that can be won in the warehouse, or in the domain of medicine, or at the Bar.

Yet, if the would-be journalist possesses certain qualifications, in addition to literary skill, he may be recommended to join the ranks of the unlisted legion. If he has a saving sense of self-restraint; if he has the faculty for seeing ahead; if he has a definite amount of moral stamina; if he can treat the profession, not as an end, but as a means to an end; if he can live through it and eventually rise above it—if he can do this, the press is his most perfect and his ideal medium. The monetary test is not the final one. The working journalists can at least take to themselves one or two reflections. The ways of the grocer and of the apothecary, of the lawyer and the bill-discounter, are not their ways. Government House may not know them, and the drawing-rooms of Toorak and Potts’ Point may forget their feet. But they have their consolations. They are the rebels and the outlaws, and yet a strange paradox—the entertainers, the instructors, the beacons of the whole reading world.

IV

THE GAME OF POLITICS

Is it not better, youth

Should strive, through acts uncouth,

Toward making, than repose on aught found made?

The game of politics as played in Australia has a certain vogue with almost every class. In numerous directions are to be found striking evidences of the pervading character of this form of recreation. Every state, including those whose population is only half that of a decent sized English town, has its two Houses of Legislature, and all of the states in unison have their double-barrelled Federal Parliament. Thus we get a total of fourteen Houses of Parliament, and nearer seven hundred than six hundred members to represent barely four millions of people. The amount of space these fourteen Houses and these six hundred and seventy odd members take up in the newspapers, and other chronicles of the time, is enormous. Looking at some of the facts, one would be inclined to say that the word “recreation” was a misnomer, that the whole business was intensely and almost preternaturally serious. If a man confined his reading to the journals of Australia, if he talked to mechanics on their way home from work, or to business men over their coffee, if he attended only a few of the open-air meetings that are a feature of the life of the country, he would inevitably come to the conclusion that the whole duty of man in Australia was to record his vote, to watch his representative in Parliament, to burn incense to the proved and faithful servant, and to hurl violently from his seat any individual who ventured to tamper for a moment with the principles of justice, equality, democracy, individualism, socialism, or whatever the prevalent principle happened to be.

This would be a reasonable conclusion in certain circumstances, but it would be an entirely erroneous one. As a matter of fact the game is never really serious. In a land like Australia where many things are dull, and lifeless, and mechanical, the tone and temper of public affairs must be regarded as a pleasant relief. From the deadly seriousness of cricket and horse-racing to the essentially humorous quality of politics, is the most agreeable of transitions. It is an incontestable fact that Australia is distinguished among all civilised countries for the buoyant atmosphere, the mirth-provoking attributes, and the Gilbertian features associated with its politics—features that constitute, indeed, the whole substance and essence of the game.

To be a successful player, you require a certain amount of aptitude, and a large measure of good fortune. Let it be assumed that you are a spectator, and desire to be something more; that you are anxious to get among the players, to handle the stakes, to hold a winning chance. The task is easier—much easier—in Australia than it is in Great Britain, but yet it is never altogether easy. The unwritten laws governing success and failure are uncertain and peculiar. You are anxious to sit at the table among the players. It remains to be seen what kind of hand you have got. There are certain cards it is very desirable to hold; others you can do without. Take it for granted that fortune has dealt you enterprise, ambition, intelligence, power of grasping political questions, faculty of speech, capacity for winning friends. This is a useful hand, but will not of itself get you what you want. If somebody plays the stronger card, that is to say the power of the purse, you will go under in nine cases out of ten; you will remain always among the onlookers in the outer ring, and will never get to the table. It is necessary to make this point clear. To say that the moneyed man can do what he likes in Australia, and that wit, eloquence, industry, and the rest are always beaten by a large banking account, would be to commit oneself to a foolish and palpable exaggeration. But no sane man would deny that, in the game now under consideration, Power of the Purse is the Ace of Trumps, and that to counterbalance it a very strong collection of cards indeed is required.

There are many things that have to be reckoned with by the man who desires to enter politics in Australia, but there is little outside the cloven hoof of mammon that he can safely reckon on. The sands of public opinion are shifting, changing. Even that useful attribute, gift of speech, is by no means a certain passport to the post of command. The crowd is jealous and suspicious of too much ability. It is not pleasant for mediocrity to see itself outstripped by talent. A man may talk himself into Parliament. On the other hand, he may talk himself out of the possibility of ever getting there. So much depends on the impression the crowd gets of the speaker’s sincerity, of his earnestness, of his moral, social, and other qualities. It may happen—in thousands of cases it has happened—that a man who can speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and whose whole life has been patriotically unselfish, has been unable to gain a place in the counsels of the nation. For some reason the onlookers would not take to him; they have disliked or misread his cards, disliked or misread the man. The influence of the Trades’ Union is one powerful lever. Many a man has succeeded in entering public life by its aid; but the Trades’ Union is becoming to a greater extent each year a political conglomeration of fiercely ambitious units, and nine-tenths of the speakers who declaim at a Trades’ Hall or Union meeting have Parliament in view. Every speaker watches, criticises, and mistrusts every other speaker. In the rush for the spoils it is difficult to say who will, and who will not, come eventually to the front. Capacity has to be shown, friends have to be made, opponents have to be silenced, rival interests have to be placated, cliques have to be frustrated, logs have to be rolled, wires have to be pulled, and much else has to be done before the goal can be attained. To the participant it is all very exciting, and to the onlooker it is very droll indeed.

But it is in Parliament that the fascination of the game really begins. So fascinating is it to the great majority of the participants who have reached this stage, that you will scarcely find one in a hundred who will offer to give up his place at the table, no matter how his chances of winning a large stake may have dwindled, no matter how much he may be out of pocket, no matter how his fellow-players may be wishing him somewhere else. To say this is not to suggest the worst kind of motive, or to cast reflections on individuals. The writer knows a great many Australian politicians, and is inclined to think that on the whole he likes them better than any other class. He regards them as, for the most part, genial, pleasant fellows. Speaking broadly, they are not dull-witted, and they are not corrupt. There was a time when the average member of an English Parliament was both. The Australian politician is usually a good sportsman: he can take his winnings without boasting, and he can take his failures like a man. He is under no illusions as to his own aims, or his own qualities. He knows that it is to his interest to be considered as a patriot, and he knows also, in his heart of hearts he knows, that he is only a player. Let us quote Browning, and thank God that the meanest politician boasts two soul-sides, one to face his constituents with, one to show to the man or woman who knows him. Let us thank God, for if it were otherwise the race of public men would cease to exist. They would be consumed in the fires of their own simulated fervour. And some highly interesting proceedings would be lost to the world.

It is assumed, then, that the first step has been taken, that you have got to the playing table, that you are directly under the eye of the marker who calls the game. The fun is now about to commence, and with it the danger. You are untried, and practically unknown. The first thing to do in the circumstances is to get into opposition. The manner of doing this requires a great deal of tact and finesse. Many a man, and many a possessor of a naturally strong hand, has spoilt it irrevocably by playing a wrong card at this early stage. The probabilities are that you were carried into Parliament on a wave of enthusiasm for the Government. You were chosen to sit behind the front Ministerial Benches. Your constituents expect this of you. Now, it is just possible to do precisely what your constituents do not expect of you, and yet, not only keep their good opinion, but rise very much higher in it. This, I say, is possible, but so far from being easy, it is distinctly the hardest piece of strategy in the whole political manœuvre.

However, something has to be done. You are unknown, and far from rich; you are ambitious, and cannot afford to remain for years an obscure unit among the followers of the party in office. The fascination of the play is upon you; there are tens of thousands of spectators watching intently, keenly interested, waiting to applaud. The temptation to catch their eye—that large collective eye which overlooks the continent—is irresistible. You are invisible because of the Ministerial phalanx in front of and around you, and it is necessary to get clear, to break away.

The opportunity will almost certainly arrive before long. The clever gamester is he who recognises the chance when it appears and makes the most of it. You must have a certain amount of patience. It is ruinous to be too precipitate, but it will almost certainly happen, and probably before the end of your first triennial term, that the Premier will come down with certain proposals to which you are not committed before the eyes of your constituents, and which are intrinsically important enough to arouse popular feeling. This is the opportunity to break with the Government. But as you represent a government constituency you must be careful. You must go to the electors and take them into your confidence; you must explain that after a tremendous and heart-breaking struggle between devotion to a political leader and devotion to principle, the latter carried the day. It is well to point out—as truthfully you may do—that your threats, tears, and entreaties have been fruitless to turn the Premier from his fell purpose; that your expostulations have fallen on deaf ears. Henceforth, you may add, all personal attachments, all private longings, all political amenities, are to you as nought; all the friendships of a lifetime have been laid on the altar; for the future you live only in the endeavour humbly but unswervingly to give effect to those eternal principles in comparison with the majesty of which, the life and aspirations of the individual are as the small dust in the balance, are a not worth naming sacrifice.

Once in opposition it will be found that your sphere has extended, your reputation increased. It is now possible to marshal all your forces. Allusions can be made that would previously have been inadmissible; words can be used that before would have been treason. At this period of the game it is advisable to cultivate a method, a manner of your own. It is desirable to be in some way distinctive. There is much virtue in a particular look, in a mode of speech, in a mannerism. If you have not the main thing, which is natural ability and power of carrying conviction, it is possible to get something else—something that will focus the attention of the spectators in the outer ring. Every one knows the story of the man who laughed. He has had his counterpart, and a very successful counterpart, in Australian politics. It will be recorded of one man of obscure beginnings that he was a genial, capable, extremely popular person, who laughed, and became Premier of Victoria. If laughing is not your metier, if it goes against the grain, it is just as effective, or even more so, to cultivate a cast-iron demeanour. The “cool, calm, strong man” has been played admirably on several occasions, by none more finely and successfully than by Mr W. H. Irvine, of Victoria. Yet another pose that will often be found extremely useful is that of the bluff devil-take-you kind of individual, as impersonated by Mr Thomas Bent, of contemporary fame, and by Sir George Dibbs, of happy memory. The astute Cornwall in King Lear says some words to the effect that this kind of knave—the bluff, outspoken knave—has more craft than any other kind that could be mentioned. However that may be, the gruffly candid demeanour has proved useful in Australian politics in the past, and is likely to prove useful again. Then there is the humorous pose, of which Mr G. H. Reid furnishes the best living example. This is invaluable at times, but its successful adoption is so difficult that it cannot be generally recommended. Only the highest kind of ability should venture to undertake this manner. It may be of advantage to affect a plain, or even a dowdy, appearance. The first Federal Treasurer wore an old suit of brown clothes for a lengthy period, and with conspicuously good results. But, whatever you cultivate, whether it is the manner of the sage or the buffoon, of the circus or of the graveyard, it is necessary to cultivate something, and to cultivate it well.

With a modicum of good luck, and a sufficiency of good management, almost any one can rise to Ministerial rank in Australia, or for that matter can obtain the highest post of vantage, namely the Premiership. The comparative shade of private membership is no sooner left behind than the game takes on still different phases. The cards are reshuffled, the partners are altered, the rules are revised. The play is as fascinating as ever—even more so—but it has become much more difficult, much more complex. One has only to reflect for a moment on the absence of any really live question in colonial politics to understand the trouble that the head of a Government must have to keep up some semblance of enthusiasm in the country, and to retain his place. There is no large Imperial question. There is no Home Rule question. There is no longer a tariff question, although there are occasional murmurings and mutterings from one or two sections of the people, and from one or two dissatisfied newspapers. It is impossible to beat up a party, either in the State or the Federal Parliament, on such lines as Imperialism, Nationalism, Jingoism, Fiscalism, Conservatism, or any other “ism” belonging to the larger domain of national affairs. What is there left to fight about? There is very little. In three cases out of four the incoming Government takes up the measures of its predecessor. In three cases out of four the differences, other than the personal ones, are barely discernible. In this political atmosphere of Australia, Amurath with Amurath is eternally being confounded.

The rise of the Labour Party has been the most remarkable feature of the situation during the past three or four years, and the whole history of the Labour Party is the most conspicuous illustration of the general truth of what has just been said. In Opposition it has been magnificently strong and war-like. It has talked, through its leaders and its units, firmly and finely of the necessity of checkmating capitalistic greed, of nationalising industries, of abolishing the large land-owner, of setting up a State Bank, of establishing a State iron industry, of taxing the wealthy for the benefit of the poor, of granting pensions to the aged workers, of saving the weak from the strong, of improving industrial conditions, of giving every man a fair return for his labour, of shortening hours, of widening the avenues of employment, of adding something material and tangible to the pleasures of the people. The Labour Party out of office has talked impressively of all these things—so impressively, indeed, that it has been taken at its word. During the last year or two, Labour Ministries have been in power in the Federal Parliament, in Queensland, and in Western Australia. What has happened? Where is the monopoly that has been nationalised? Where are the wages that have been increased? Where is the Bank that has been established? Where is the land tax that was promised? Where are the old age pensions in Queensland, in Western Australia or in the Federal Parliament? More than this: where are the records of any serious attempt on the part of one of the Labour Ministries of Australia to nationalise even one industry, to check capitalisation, to pay old age pensions, to run a State Bank, or to do anything that the average Liberal, or even the so-called Conservative Opposition would not cheerfully undertake? Not only has there been nothing revolutionary accomplished, but nothing revolutionary has been even tried.

To keep your place at the inner table, to be able for any length of time to set the pace for the rest of the numerous company, it is necessary to remember that the other players, and not yourself, are the actual masters of the situation. By proceeding warily, and by showing a thorough knowledge of every unwritten rule and precept, you may get as much as a reasonable man should require. You may have the appearance, if not the substance of power, and all the honours, emoluments, lime-light and other accessories connected with it. But to attempt to run a crusade of your own, or to attempt to put into practice the sentiments you preached in opposition, is merely to commit hari-kari, to rush on your own doom. The Labour Party, or the more intelligent members of it, have found this out. My own opinion is that the Labour leader is a trifle less insincere on the whole, than the average leader of any other party or section. Yet the difference between the fighting Labourist’s word in opposition and his performance in office is great and ghastly. It is not necessary to blame him. He has simply had to realise that Australia is in a condition, politically speaking, of being willing to listen to everything, and of being able to accomplish nothing. It is always talking about its breathless speed, and perpetually falling down in the mud.

Undoubtedly the most humorous, the most delightful, and at the same time the most useful institution known to the continent is the Upper House, or Legislative Council. What the Premier of the day would do without this stand-by, it is barely possible to surmise. To the head of an allegedly Radical government, the Tory Chamber is always a God-send. Even the cleverest tactician finds now and again that he must press forward when in office with measures that he advocated when sitting on the left hand benches. It is an awkward predicament for many reasons. He knows that if the reform is carried, it will probably bring about a reaction, and that he himself will almost certainly be hurled from office at the next election. Yet he dare not jettison the principal plank in his fighting platform. What is he to do? Amid the storm clouds that are all round him, out of the night that encompasses him, above the tempest that is driving him irresistibly forward there gleams one ray of light—the light of the Legislative Council. There it is, straight ahead, standing between himself and swift and sudden extinction. Confidently he presses on. His vessel triumphantly breasts the waves of the Representative House, and is dashed to pieces on the adamantine rock of the Council’s inaccessibility. But he himself is safe. He gains breathing time while the fragments of his craft are being pieced together again. His constituents are satisfied. He comes back stronger than ever from the next election, and goes through the performance again.

Will any one deny that all these possibilities, all these variations, all these moves and countermoves, all these chances of success, all these risks of failure, go to make the pursuit of the political prize in Australia one of the most absorbing in which man can engage? The governing fact as already stated is that the game is not confined to a privileged class, as is practically the case in England. Subject to certain conditions, it is open to all. It is true that the possessor of a banking account has an advantage. In the language of pedestrianism, he beats the pistol; he gets a certain start every time. But the start is not so great that it cannot by a display of agility be overtaken. And the fact remains that the chief attraction of Australia from the player’s point of view, and one of the chief risks from the point of view of the spectator, is that political competitions are conducted actually, as well as nominally, irrespective of wealth, or rank, or status in life.

It is hardly profitable to indulge in generalisation as to the kind of ability that is needed for success in public life. A certain kind of man flourishes, and another kind—the opposite kind—is seen to fall; but in a year or two the positions are reversed, and the set of qualities which seemingly commanded success are those which invite or compel failure. Therefore the generalising process is for the most part vain. But if one were asked to name the attribute that is most useful to an Australian politician—the attribute that it is ruinous to be without—one might be tempted to mention knowledge of human nature. The phrase implies a great deal. It implies such characteristics as tact, foresight, and sense of the fitness of things; power of being genial, or of seeming to be genial; knowledge of when to strike, and when to refrain from striking. It means the capacity to put yourself in the place of those for whom you are legislating, to whom you are appealing. It suggests in the possessor a degree of intellect, combined with a degree of sensibility. It is the opposite of narrowness, of bigotry, of fanaticism, and of folly of the more glaring kind.

A second quality to be considered eminently desirable is that of accessibility. In the vernacular this is usually called “absence of frill.” It is an asset well-nigh indispensable for any successful public man in Australia, though it must not be confounded—as it sometimes is—with lack of dignity. Most of the leaders of ministries and heads of parties that I have met in Australia have been, and are, extremely dignified; and, as a rule, the most dignified have been the most accessible. It is not the kind of dignity that surrounds itself with much outward pomp and ornament; not the kind that emulates Mr Forcible Feeble, and proclaims its existence as loudly as possible, for fear that it should be overlooked. It is the dignity that results from mental processes not visible to the eye of the vulgar. It can unbend, jest, laugh, look stern, wear the mask of folly or any other mask, because it is sure of itself. The fortifications of reserve, and the serried front of isolation, utilised by the typical English Prime Minister, are not wanted in Australia. Here the obscure unit and the political chief meet on equal social terms, to the advantage not merely of the one, but of the other as well.

A third qualification which may be mentioned as very desirable, if not as absolutely necessary, has been already alluded to as the gift of speech. To accomplish much in public life in Australia, it is necessary to talk, and to talk a great deal. Whether it is on a platform or in the open air; whether it is within the walls of Parliament or outside them, you must, if you desire to become well known, tell the public something, and keep on telling it to them. The Australians are quick, impressionable, receptive-minded. Their highest awards are given, in nine cases out of ten, to the man who can appeal to them in the most direct, the most personal, and the most intelligible way.

The four men who have held office as Prime Minister of the Commonwealth form, in the aggregate and as individuals, the best illustrations of the qualities just enumerated. Each has displayed a sound knowledge of human nature, evidencing the knowledge by his many-sidedness, his tact, his judgement, his mingled daring and caution, his willingness to compromise. Each has made himself readily approachable, alike to indignant people who had grievances to ventilate, to friendly people who had congratulations to utter, to newspaper people who had questions to ask—in fact to all sorts and conditions of people who used the right means of approach. And each has been endowed with the gift of speech. Two of them—Mr Reid and Mr Deakin—have exhibited it in a singular and superlative degree. Sir Edmund Barton is a speaker of the very front rank. Even Mr Watson, though not a fiery, forensic orator, is a very able debater. Only those who have heard and watched him in Parliament know how keen and capable and resourceful he really is. Quite apart from these individual instances, facts may be found to show that one may apply over the whole field of Federal and State politics the conclusions just arrived at.

To be a prominent public man in Australia it is not necessary to do great things, but to act as though you could do them, or wished to do them, or would be certain of doing them if you got the chance.

’Tis not what man does which exalts him, but

what man would do.

Achievement is dangerous, or fatal; the promise of achievement is brilliant or inspiring. The truth of the matter is that Australians are engaged, individually and collectively, in a game of which they cannot see the end. Politically speaking, they don’t yet know where they are, or where within the course of a generation they are likely to arrive.

V

PSEUDO-LITERARY

This world’s no blot for us,

Nor blank; it means intensely and means good:

To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

It is strange that a people possessed of literary instincts, and of the literary temper, should be without a literature of their own; but so it is. The shadow of a remembered personality does indeed flit now and then across the brief page of Australian history. There was a writer of verses named Lindsay Gordon, and a novelist of repute named Marcus Clarke. Each of these struck out a path for himself. Each left a record that will not soon be forgotten. But neither was a product of the Southern Hemisphere; neither could be described as native, “and to the manner born”; and neither of the two, nor both together, could be credited with creating a literature for the country in which their work was done.

It is true there have been, and there are, others of note. There was a poet who wrote some very fine lines about the yellow-haired September, about waste places of Kerguelen, about lost Lorraines, about a frail, flower-like, dead Araluen, and about much besides. It would argue ignorance of the subject to be unaware that the book of rhymes beginning with an account of the man from “Snowy River” has sold to the extent of 30,000 copies, or more. There is the statement, made on what seems reliable authority, that the author of Our Selection was paid for a continuation of that work the remarkable sum of £500. And Victor Daley was, until a few months ago, alive amongst us. The torch of inspiration is, therefore, not quite gone out. Throughout the continent it flickers and falters, never shining with a steady and continuous flame, rarely giving the wayfarer a light to guide him, but every now and then dancing with a faint, fleeting, will-of-the-wisp quality before his astonished eyes.

He sees a reflection, or he catches an echo, and then he is in the dark.

Of rhymes and storyettes there are any number in Australia. The local printing presses shed them in great profusion. They are more numerous than leaves in Vallambrosa, or than wattle blossoms in September. Nor is their musical and poetic quality to be despised. Many of them—the majority of them—are ephemeral and worthless; but taking them either in the aggregate, or in the unit, they represent a fairly high journalistic standard. Frequently can there be discovered among them a new image, a clever piece of workmanship, even an original idea. Their metrical quality is often admirable. In the Melbourne Argus there have been many good verses—verses so good that one regrets they should have been consigned to so perishable a receptacle as a penny print. For genuine melody, of something better than a topical sort, one would not go further than the lines written to a light-footed, golden-haired, pathetically-dead, dancing girl—lines that bring her back among the living:—

When the scene is lighted brightly, and we

watch the players nightly,

The peasant, and the prince, and the page.

The patriotic note has been struck often, sometimes clumsily, and sometimes with good effect. Mr Essex Evans gives it a local application in the rather formal verses beginning:—

Awake! Arise! The wings of Dawn

Are beating at the gates of Day.

And another Australian writer gives it an Imperial significance when he says of England, in lines that have been much praised and incidentally awarded a substantial monetary prize by a London paper, that:—

She triumphs, moving slowly down the years.

Again, for pure romance we have Daley’s fantasy, with its very fine exordium:—

The bright lights fade out one by one

And like a peony,

Drowning in wine, the crimson sun

Sinks down in that strange sea.

For a compound of sensuousness and sadness and lyric sweetness, we have Von Kotze’s Island Lover with its invocation, and its lament:—

Oh, Tuahina, that youth’s full measure

Should pass away like a summer’s eve!

That just the one gift that women treasure

Should be so helpless, so poor, and leave

A hint of sweetness, a taste of pleasure

And—grey-hued twilight to mourn and grieve!

These are only a few specimens, somewhat above the average as regards workmanship and finish, but representative of what the continent is producing every day.

So far as prose is concerned, the Australian topical and occasional writer can hold his head up in any company. If you want a scene described, if you want an incident related, if you want the pith of a situation dexterously extracted, if you want an impression vividly conveyed, if you want to catch from the paper the spirit and atmosphere of a crowd, of a race-meeting, of a procession, of a play, of a joke, of a tragedy, of a wedding, of a funeral; if you want any or all of these things, there are a score or two of men in Australia who will supply the requirement as well as it can be supplied anywhere in the world.

But to say this is not to say there is a national literature. The term, it must be remembered, means something more than a few dexterous verses, a few patches of local colour, and a few characters that can be held up to admiration as “racy of the soil.” That last phrase hangs like a pall over the continent. If it were only possible to forget that there is such a thing as a gum-tree in Australia the average quality of the writing—particularly of the more ambitious and sustained kind of writing—would considerably improve. If a national literature implies anything, it implies the correct artistic and adequate expression of the country’s thought and action; it signifies the outward and visible form of what is real and vital and permanent in the inner and intellectual life of a people. In other words it is alien to what is merely topical and incidental. It is not a record of the peculiarities of shearers and rouseabouts, or of the feats of jockeys or stock-drovers. America would hardly be a literary country if it had to rely exclusively on Bret Harte and Mark Twain. England would not be literary if it had only Mr Punch and Mr Bernard Shaw. And Australia, so long as its most characteristic and successful compositions deal with the obvious peculiarities of a few local people, cannot really be said to have a literature deserving of the name.

The position of things is curious. There is on the continent a population of four million people, possessing a complete net-work of state schools, high schools, art schools, academies, universities, professorships, and chairs of learning innumerable. Education is both free and compulsory. Complete illiteracy is almost unknown. The ignorance and stolidity of the London docker, of the Irish peasant, of the Russian serf, of the central European farm labourer, have no equivalent in Australia. The people of this country are facile and quick-minded. They turn naturally to pen and ink. The writer’s ambition is rampant among them. It is more insidious and more pervading even than stage fever or cricket frenzy. Every second dwelling of the middle class is cumbered with unfinished or unpublished manuscripts. If the son is not guilty, it is probably the daughter, or the governess, or the parent. Every newspaper editor, if he felt disposed, could each day fill his columns ten times over with contributions submitted by outsiders. A Sydney paper offered last year a hundred pound prize for a serial story. The result was a staggering mass of manuscript, weighing in the aggregate more than half a ton, the work of one hundred and thirty-four unknown and previously unsuspected authors. The same set of circumstances repeats itself indefinitely. Most Australians have ideas which seem to the possessors original. They want a vehicle of expression, and they rush impetuously to the only one provided.

Yet the result is not great, or satisfying, or impressive. And the reason is that the goal of all this endeavour—in so far as it is a serious and sustained endeavour—is the hall-mark of the English publisher. No one can compute the number of people in Melbourne and Sydney, to say nothing of those in the country towns, who have either accomplished, or are at present meditating, a descent on London with an unpublished manuscript. The objective of the literary person is always London. The recognised fount of honour is London. The banners in the literary sky wave always in the vicinity of Paternoster Row and of Leicester Square. Henry Kendall, who knew what he was talking about, wrote feelingly of things that may happen to “the man of letters here.” And circumstances have not materially altered since Kendall had his furniture sold under him, and since he sat all night on doorsteps in a suburb of Melbourne. While confident enough in most things, Australians have shown no confidence in their own literary judgement. They still look timidly and obediently towards the other hemisphere. If their man of talent can get an English publisher to take him up, they smile with fatuous approval. If he cannot, they pity and despise him. As a consequence the Daleys and Quinns and Lawsons who have chosen to rely, for the most part, on the country of their upbringing, and who have carried their wares, for the most part, to a local market, have found it hard to make a living. Had they been obliged to rely exclusively on literature their living would have been a precarious one indeed.

These facts are so obvious that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them. But a word has to be said for the other side. The Australian publisher, like the Australian manufacturer, or the Australian politician, has his interests at home. It is part of his policy, part also of his desire, to encourage the literature of the country in which he lives. But he has paid so frequently for doing this that he is now extremely wary. For a local author to tempt him is the hardest task in the world. The publisher’s suspicions, founded on bitter experience, have communicated themselves in some subtle fashion to the possible purchaser, and to the country at large. At the present time it would puzzle a psychologist to say which has the greater fear and distrust of the other—the Australian author of the Australian publisher, or the Australian publisher of the Australian author. The present writer has seen men in the witness box, and in the criminal dock, and has noted the guilty and self-accusing look on some of their faces. But for a spectacle of absolute doubt and misgiving, for a written confession of wrong about to be committed, for an unspoken avowal that the act in contemplation is one of the blackest and meanest in the calendar, commend him to the individual who, hailing from Australia, stands up before an Australian publisher and admits that he has perpetrated a manuscript with a view to it seeing the light of day.

The result is what might have been expected. The people are going through a transition stage, a transition stage which, to use a mild paradox, threatens to become permanent. They are quick to appreciate cleverness, and, as readily as any other, that form of it which finds expression in print. But they want to know where they are. They dislike risks, and more especially intellectual risks. Before they begin the task of assimilating a work of any length they desire the assurance of some one in authority that the labour is not to be in vain. They want the imprimatur of an English critic, or of an English public. They appreciate good writing, and many of them know how to write, but the confidence which is a mark of most of their pursuits, of their virtues and their vices, deserts them entirely when it is a question of estimating the worth of books written by their own countrymen in their midst.

Hence a result that can be seen and read of all men. The gospel of brevity is proclaimed everywhere. It has become recognised that the longer and more ambitious efforts of imagination or of erudition have not much chance of emerging into the daylight; and that even if they do emerge, they have a still more remote chance of paying expenses, much less of winning a profit for the ambitious author. The short article may, however, prove remunerative. An editor who would be aggrieved and insulted by the very suggestion of something three columns long will put down his spectacles and smile almost cheerfully at the unknown scribe who tenders him a column. The publisher who is firmly convinced that the bearer of a full-length manuscript novel is a person to be shunned like the plague, will listen with an open mind to proposals having to do with skits and humorous episodes, with short stories and novelettes.

From all this can be deduced the reason of the spasmodic quality, the flashiness of the writing that is done in Australia. The warm climate and the tired feeling may have something to do with the phenomenon; but the main causes are those previously mentioned. It is now apparent why the journalism of the country is one of its more admirable features. The newspaper man has no time to waste, and no space to give away. He must get his effects into narrow compass. He must, to employ the vernacular, come at once to the points and leave out the superfluous verbiage. He endeavours to do so, and often with much success. The publisher of books does not want him, but if he wishes to be original he can be so—to the extent of a column. If he wishes to be humorous he can be so—to the same limit. If his vein is descriptive he has the like opportunity—which runs also to the extent of one column. On the approaches to every printing machine in the country, the word “Brevity” is blazened in letters of dread significance. The Duke of Wellington’s admonition to his chaplain “Be brief” rings sharply through the pseudo-literary atmosphere of Australia.

It would savour of affectation to ignore the existence of the Sydney Bulletin, or to attempt to deny that it is an important semi-intellectual factor in the life of the continent. The circumstance is unfortunate, and that for obvious reasons. The Bulletin combines in itself most of what is smart, and flashy, and cynical, and superficial, and verbally witty in the people among whom it circulates. Now, if a man happens to be very smart and very witty, and very cynical, we may admit that he is a clever and interesting person. We may hand him the laurel wreath of contemporary fame and journalistic renown with no other feeling than one of pure appreciation and good-will. But when his smartness and his flashiness and his cynicism are set up as models for every one else to copy; when they are watered down among a thousand imitators and served up every week with slight variations, or with no variations at all; when we find half the educated people of a country trying to be smart and flashy, because they imagine that by so doing they will be able to fit their ideas into the narrow columns of a certain publication—then we are bound to wonder whether we in Australia are really an intelligent, right-thinking nation, or a number of animated and extremely foolish marionettes.

It is the readers of the paper, rather than the paper itself, who are to blame. The sins of the copyists must rest on their own heads. And while we get tired of certain characteristics that are always repeating themselves, we are bound to admit the invaluable work that the Sydney paper has done in more than one direction. By encouraging certain writers—by gaining for them an audience and winning for them a reputation—it has conferred a favour on the whole of Australia. It is the kind of favour that can hardly be reckoned out on a monetary basis. Nine-tenths of that which is musical and distinctive and valuable in Australian verse of the last twenty years owes its publicity, if not its existence, to the Bulletin. To say this is to say a great deal. It stands to the lasting discredit of rich proprietary newspapers of this country that they have invariably leaned towards the reprint and the borrowed article. They have never made what could be called a decisive stand on behalf of the struggling, underpaid man of talent who has taken off his hat in their managerial sanctum, or has left his wares on their guarded doorstep. They have never championed this man; but the Bulletin has always championed him. A paper that has done this can be forgiven much. It can be forgiven the army of cheap paragraphists, the tawdry tiresomeness of repeated phrase, the forced ingenuity of distorted facts, the constant disparagement of the kindred nation over-sea.

There is some soul of goodness in things evil

Would man observingly distil it out.

And the truth of this in the case of the Bulletin we would be the last to impugn.

Although it must be repeated that there is no such thing as a national literature, there are at least three distinct schools—perhaps it would be more correct to say distinct forms of writing—in Australia. The first of these is what might be called the humorous, descriptive style. This may be a poor thing, but it is our own. Some kinship may be claimed for it with the method of Mark Twain and his disciples—the method, that is to say, of calm and grotesque exaggeration. Nor is it wholly unconnected with the thunder-and-lightning, vividly blasphemous style of Rudyard Kipling in his earlier days. But it is in character and essence neither American nor English; it is distinctively Australian. We have evolved it, and should take the credit or discredit of it. To be a successful writer of the descriptively humorous kind it is merely necessary to attend to a few simple rules. It is necessary to get together as many adjectives as you can, and always to apply them in a context unlike that to which they have grown accustomed. Thus, if you are describing something tragic and awful—say, a murder—it is a good plan to make use of such adjectives as commonly do duty for an artistic criticism or a musical performance. Conversely, if you are dealing with a drama, or a piece of music, it is useful to have at hand the terms most frequently employed in connection with a murder. String together all the unlikely and dissimilar phrases you can invent or remember; make a liberal and generous use of “and’s” and “also’s”; be prodigal of semicolons and sparing of full-stops; above all cultivate an appearance of abruptness and of brevity. Men have been known to score a brilliant reputation, and, incidentally, to get long manuscripts accepted, merely by leaving out the pronoun at the beginning of a sentence, and thus giving an air of curtness and epigrammatic force to their composition. Stick at nothing, spare nothing, be afraid of nothing, and your fame as a descriptively humorous writer is assured.

There is another school, which may be called the flippant school. It must not be confused with the one just mentioned. The flippant school is mainly the preserve and playground of women. The lady journalists of Australia are as fond of a varnish of cynicism on their social writings as certain of their sisters are of a suggestion of rouge on their faces. The amusing part of it is that in neither case does the deception deceive any one. A few years ago there lived a woman named Ina Wildman, who wrote under the pseudonym of Sappho Smith. A gifted woman she was, with a wonderful eye for bizarre effects and a mind like a scintillating surface of light. She was a conspicuous journalistic success, and deserved to be. The Sydney Bulletin discovered her, and deserves the credit of the discovery. But one penalty of success is persistent imitation. The truism has in her case been proved up to the hilt. It matters nothing to Sappho Smith—she is beyond the reach of that kind of vexation—but it is distressing to the patriotic Australian to find so many of his countrywomen rushing pell-mell into a literary groove that can only be safely trodden by those possessed of quite singular ability and quite exceptional discernment. Over all of the larger Melbourne and Sydney journals there is now the trail of the flippant woman writer. Not a line of the product rings true. Every word of it is imitation. Whether it is a wedding, or an engagement, or an infant baptism, or a crush at Government House, or a Lady Mayoress’s reception, or an afternoon tea-party, or a display of new millinery, or a theatre, or a football match, the Sappho Smiths of these times bring to bear the same set of phrases, the same slap-dash methods, the same cynical suggestion of a roué of seventy in a garden of growing girls. This style of composition is specially remarkable when the topic is a wedding. If the Australian woman expressed her real thoughts about a wedding she would speak of it as the most tragic and fateful, the most joyous and the most serious event on earth. But when she gets a pen in her hand she finds it necessary to revel in the slang of two continents. For this the example of the Bulletin and of its greatest woman contributor is mainly to blame.

Then, in the third place, we have the erotic school. This also has certain Australian characteristics. These manifest themselves not in the prose, but in the verse of the country. The local rhymester has been more than once exhorted to give the rein to his fancies—to let himself go. The advice is not uncongenial, even apart from the fact that he has probably been reading Swinburne, and is more or less under the influence of the master mind. A certain biblical institution was told that it was condemned, because it was luke-warm. The reproach can hardly be levied against the youthful poets who fill unvalued spaces of the print that is their medium for the time being. Amid all this intensity—bogus intensity, be it understood—there is very seldom the note of contentment, still less of genuine mirth. Australia is a bright, sunlit, open, and breezy country; but the minor poets that it produces in abundance have, for the most part, gloom dwelling in their inmost souls. The Australian child of the Muses is willing enough to clasp his Amaryllis to his palpitating breast, and to tell every one who likes to listen about the subtle and permeating sweetness of her eyes and lips and hair; but at the next moment, or in the very same breath, he is inviting us to contemplate a desolated life, a dead body, a tombstone, or a grave. In the verse of this people intense eroticism and profound melancholy are continually blended. The Northerner may, on the average, be less fluent and less imaginative, but he seems, when at his best, to develop a finer idealism, a better thought. He writes in the Pall Mall Gazette:—

Lean, love, a little nearer; shine, moon, a little clearer;

You cannot make her dearer, or a thousandth part more fair,

But only you can show me the kisses she would throw me,

The guardian angels that shall go before me everywhere.

While his fellow rhymester in Australia alternates between telling us in a burst of fervour that

Hilda’s kisses seem in German

Just as sweet as any way—

And most tragically exclaiming:—

God! the irony of bringing her with garments wet and clinging

Close to my feet that lagged for her upon the sands alone—

The better English journal can teach the better Australian journal nothing in respect of technique; but there is sometimes an artistic restraint about the one which the other might copy without suffering any loss. It is well, however, to recognise the day of small things, looking to the day when greater things will come to pass. From Dan to Beersheba everything is not barren; in fact there are springs and oases in cheerful profusion. And it must be remembered that if Australia, with all its effervescence of youth and ambition, has not yet found its intellectual footing, it is merely exemplifying a familiar stage in the life of man, which has a counterpart and analogy in the larger life of a nation.

VI

ADAM LINDSAY GORDON

Life is mostly froth and bubble,

Two things stand like stone;

Kindness in another’s trouble,

Courage in your own.

Since the finding of his body on the Brighton beach one morning, thirty-five years ago, the fame of Gordon has been steadily growing. He is the acknowledged Australian poet; but what do his countrymen really know about him? Considering all things, the literature that has to do with him is meagre and inadequate. There is the appreciation of Francis Adams—good, on the whole, but fragmentary, and too exclusively insistent on the merits of one poem. There is the life of Gordon, told briefly, with a few strictly orthodox comments, in the book of Messrs Turner and Sutherland. There is also the work of Mr Desmond Byrne—correct, but formal, and consequently little read. Of late years the daily or weekly journalist has taken a fancy to revive interest in the poet, and to bring under notice some fresh phase or incident in his life. But there is yet a great deal that could be said. For the present the average Englishman knows nothing of Gordon, and even the well-read Englishman knows only the name attached to some galloping rhymes. The Australian is familiar with the name of Lindsay Gordon, and is not lacking in appreciation, but as often as not he reserves his praises for what is least admirable and least characteristic.

To think of Gordon is to think of a succession of pictures on an always darkening screen. The opening vistas are rose-coloured; but each successive glance at the moving canvas leaves on the mental retina an image more gloomy than the one before it. The result of the life itself was a great tragedy; the result of the work was a signal triumph. The contrast between these two—between this splendid artistic success and this dire personal failure—have helped to create for Gordon a sympathy and affection out of proportion to the amount, though scarcely out of keeping with the quality of his writing. He resembles somewhat the fleeting figure in Shelley’s Adonais:—

A pard-like spirit beautiful and wild,

A joy in desolation masked.

The spirit was beautiful, but the joy—what visitations there were of it—was always hedged round with desolation. And the tendency was always away from the light, instead of towards it; the clouds were always gathering as the day went on.

Yet the series of views thrown upon the moving screen begins brightly. On an island of the Azores, amid surroundings which rest the eye and charm the sense, a child is growing up to manhood. Listen to what his father, a retired army officer, says of Lindsay Gordon:—“A sweet little fellow he is! indeed, I think him almost too pretty. Very slight and upright, carrying his little curly head well back, and almost swaggering along. He talks with a sweet, full, laughing voice, and a face dimpled and bright as the morning. He is seen here, perhaps, to too great an advantage, in very light clothing, scampering amid the large and airy playrooms.” This is the opening picture of the series, and there is no suggestion of shadow about it. The promise is of a life healthful and happy, proof against all morbid fancies, singularly unfettered, mentally and physically free.

But the operator is busily at work; and he quickly changes the landscape from the Azores to England. The next glimpse of Gordon is that of a youth on the deck of a ship outward bound for Australia. The rose and gold tints are less noticeable now, but there is still no occasion for excess of sympathy. There is every reason why the young man of twenty should find a prosperous career in the new and rapidly developing continent. He stands on the deck of a ship with the salt spray of the channel blowing a keen reviving breath upon his forehead. The light of imagination is in his eyes. The flush of expectation is on his face. It is not a situation to merit sympathy, even though home and England are soon to vanish on the sky-line. Only—and the shadow will assert itself a little here—there is a morbid tendency, possibly associated in some fashion with the state of mind of his mother, who has developed a form of religious melancholia. And Gordon’s mother and father are first cousins. It is a circumstance of sinister omen.

Once the life in Australia has begun, the unseen hand that is manipulating the screen makes feverish haste to get forward. Two years of experience as a member of the South Australian mounted police are passed rapidly in review. There is a following period of seven years; but this also need not delay the onlookers. It shows the young man of destiny carrying on business as a professional horse-breaker, and incidentally writing verses. His means are limited; his social advantages non-existent; his opportunities of intellectual intercourse and improvement practically nil. During these first nine years in Australia the spectre of inherited melancholia, though never quite in the ascendant, is never entirely laid. Yet the life must have had its compensations. The recollection of many a lonely ride, of many a starry midnight, of many a breaking sunrise, of many a drifting fancy, wild and subtle as the music of the Spectre Bride, are conveyed in the spirit rather than in the words of verses that Gordon wrote at this period of his life.

Then, for a brief space, there are indications of a turn of the tide. Fortune ceases to frown. It seems desirous all at once of petting Gordon, of consoling him, of giving him fresh chances, of making up to him what nature and heredity had taken away. It flings into his lap a legacy of £7,000; it makes him a member of the Legislature of his colony; it wins him success and fame as a cross-country rider, as a master of that daring game which can always be relied upon to draw the wildest plaudits from the crowd. But even this mood, this smiling, flattering, relenting mood, does not avail. And as a matter of fact, it does not last. The legacy is lost in speculation; the Parliamentary career is abandoned; the steeplechase successes are punctuated with accident and failure. The sands begin to run downward faster than before.

There is just one picture, in the dissolving series, on which it is sometimes tempting to linger. Gordon is by this time thirty-seven years old. He is without robust health, without money, and without regular employment. It is quite true that he can write verses; he is not altogether confident about them, but he believes they are good verses. One or two people who ought to know have praised them. But these Melbourne publishers will pay nothing for them; no doubt, the author admits, because they would lose money if they did. What is a man to do whose health is shaky, and who has nothing but unpaid bills and unpublished verses in his pocket? He dare not dwell on the prospect; it must at all cost be forgotten, pressed back, kept out of sight.

There is one man who will help him to forget, and that man is Henry Clarence Kendall. The two meet in Collins Street, Melbourne, on the last morning but one of Gordon’s life. It is a meeting pleasant to think about, pleasant to dwell upon. For Kendall at least appreciates, and Kendall understands. That appreciation is warmly, generously, enthusiastically expressed, and it must convey a great deal to Lindsay Gordon, though he is to die by his own hand next day. For to the true poet the clamorous praise of the crowd means very little. If there is any elysium for him on earth, it is found in the recognition of the few whose knowledge and perceptions are not of the earth, earthy. Perhaps for an hour or two while he talked with Kendall in the Melbourne hotel, and drank with him the drink, both of the successful and the despairing, perhaps for a moment he had an inkling of the truth that he had not lived altogether in vain.

It is never easy to estimate a man’s place in the domain of poetry. It is practically impossible in his lifetime, and it is difficult after he is dead. There is not merely the metrical, formal quality, not merely the imaginative power, not merely the originality of treatment that have to be considered. The whole question of individual taste and temperament, whether of the writer or the reader, is at work upon the scales. It may be impossible to prove on mathematical lines that Gordon was a great poet. Yet it can be asserted confidently that his verse is marked by three qualities which between them go a long way to make up greatness. These are its spontaneity, its musical quality, and its refinement. Everything else is included under one or other of these three heads.

To take the first of the three—spontaneity, Gordon was above all things a natural singer. This naturalness, this unforced quality, is undoubtedly his first and his finest merit. He hoped for nothing—at least for nothing tangible—from his verses. In one sense, he did not wish to write. He much preferred action. If some one had given him a troop of cavalry and shown him a battery of opposing artillery, he would, in the rush and forgetfulness of one wild, sweeping movement, have experienced more real life, more real pleasure, than he was ever destined to know. Such an experience might have laid once and for ever the ghosts that always haunted him; might have made him feel that he was born to act, as his soldier-fathers had acted, instead of being obliged to sit down in a strange land and listen to memories of action that sang fitfully through his brain. It is for this reason—for the reason that temperament, and heredity, and poetic impulse forced him to find relief in verse whether he wished to or not, whether he was proud of the performance or ashamed of it—that he occupies his unique place. The pen and ink processes are invisible in his best work; it is as though

A wistful, wandering zephyr presses

The strings of some Æolian lyre.

To illustrate the spontaneous manner of Gordon would be to run through a complete list of his published poems. There is no need to go much further than the opening lines of The Rhyme of Joyous Garde. It is instructive to notice how in this, as in others of his poems, the picture seems to create itself:—

Through the lattice rushes the south wind, dense

With fumes of the flowery frankincense

And hawthorn blossoming thickly.

No preparations, no apologies, no preliminary turning and scraping; only the rush of a few lines which sweep the reader, whether he likes it or not, into the enchanted world of dreams. Equally natural, and quite as resistless, is the sentiment of Podas Okus. Here again we feel, so to speak, the pulse-beat of the inevitable; we get again the impression that Gordon could not help the writing; that he himself, and not the Greek, is lying at a tent’s entrance; that for him the hues of sunset are blending with the brief glories of an almost vanished life; that it is he, and not Achilles, who murmurs to the golden-haired Briseis:—

Place your hand in mine, and listen,

While the strong soul cleaves its way

Through the death mist hovering o’er me,

As the strong ship cleaves the wave,

To my fathers gone before me,

To the gods who love the brave.

The musical quality of Gordon is a kindred though a distinct merit. A poet may be natural and spontaneous without being particularly musical, just as he may achieve a musical result by what are manifestly artificial means. A lyric poet must, however, aim at musical effect. If he fails to attain this, he is not what he professes to be. Does the reader receive an impression of melody? Does it please him? Does he carry it away with him? These are some of the questions by which the writer of verses must always be judged. The novelty, or even the abstract merit of the idea does not matter so much. Occasionally, as in Swinburne’s Triumph of Time, there are to be found some striking ideas wedded to lines that are musically splendid. Occasionally, as in the same author’s Ballad of Dreamland, there is delicate and subtle harmony, associated only with the faint flicker of an idea. The school of self-styled poets founded by Euphues made the cardinal mistake of supposing that the form of expression mattered little; that their chief business was to get hold of fresh fancies, and previously unheard-of conceits. We know better than that nowadays. We can put up with the old idea if the treatment is artistic enough and musical enough. In lyric poetry the new or the startling idea creates a kind of metaphysical check, and is not really wanted. In Gordon there is enough of the familiar, enough of the sentimental idea to satisfy every-day requirements, while there is musical quality enough to proclaim the genuine lyric poet. The man had a sensitive ear. It is rarely that he strikes discordant notes. His versification is not flawless; it is not always of the quality of The Swimmer or of the Autumn Song, but in reading him one feels that Australia has produced a poet in whom there dwelt the rare faculty of music, the genuine gift of melodic form.

The third distinguishing attribute of Gordon is his refinement. This is a word that has come to require explanation. It has some rather unfortunate associations. A young ladies’ academy is nothing if not refined. Bunthorne, in Patience is extremely refined. The heroes of Richardson and of Miss Burney are refinement itself. When the term is applied to a man or an author in these days, it is necessary to be explicit in order to avoid misunderstanding. One of the merits of Gordon, and one that must tend to make the memory of the man loved, even more than his poetry is admired, is the habit of thought which reflects a fine and clear and elevated temperament; a temperament, that does not lend itself to vice; a temperament, in other words, that is refined. To say that Gordon was so constituted is not to say that he lacked emotional strength or force. He had abundance of either. He had also passion, though it was a passion that ran to self-restraint, to fatalism, and to sombre thought. It never brought him to realism, or even to the verge of it. When he follows a certain impulse and writes:—

From a long way off to look at your charms

Made my blood run redder in every vein,

While he—he has held you long in his arms,

And kissed you over and over again—

he is going as far as his finer nature will let him go in the painting of pictures dear to the fleshly school. It is almost incredible that a lyric poet who had come under the influence of Shelley and Swinburne should go no further than this. But Gordon’s verses are not like most other love verses—they show no indulgence in that more blatant form of sensualism which will insist on its red lips and its soft arms, on its tropic midnights and its reiterated embraces. It is only “from a long way off” that he looks upon the vision splendid; he never vulgarises it by coming too near it; in the better and more enduring sense of the word, he is refined.

To understand Gordon it is necessary to remember that his was a dual personality. First of all he was a man of action. He wrote as a man who loved action, for other men who loved action. There was enough of the soldier about him, enough of ingrained modesty, or of patrician reserve, to make him rather ashamed of a parade of his own feelings. It was very much finer, to his way of thinking, to do something than merely to write about something. He lived much on horseback and rode in many races, because the speed of a steeplechase could persuade him for a moment that he was acting; could make him forget the piping times in which he lived. But while all his sympathy and all his desires were towards action, his temperament was largely that of the dreamer. It is a rare combination, and one that explains a great deal. When he put his dreams into words—when he set his fancy free in such compositions as Doubtful Dreams, Cui Bono, A Song of Autumn, and others of the kind, it did not occur to him that he was doing anything remarkable. It did not seem to him that fame was to be won in that way. It did not appeal to him that this class of work might call forth rarer qualities, might establish a better claim to gratitude and remembrance, than could the actions of the man who went with a tomahawk into the wilderness, or of the man who led a forlorn hope right up to the cannon’s mouth. He wrote not so much to please others as to please himself, and because he was unable to be always silent. He wrote because voices that sang through him would not remain dumb.

There are three classes into which his poetry can be divided. The first and the largest class is that in which the man of action preponderates. These are the verses that tell of deeds of daring, most of them accomplished on horseback. The lines have about them the genuine ring of saddle and sabre. The air seems to be rushing past as one reads them. Almost the whole of what praise or credit came to Gordon in his lifetime was due to what he wrote about men on horseback. Even now he is known to the great majority of his countrymen by such verses as How we beat the Favourite, The Roll of the Kettledrum, From the Wreck, and others of the kind. Poetry of this description may not be the highest possible, but Gordon did it very well. He did it so well that he may be said to have beaten all competitors in this particular line—and that despite his uneven quality, and his occasional lapses into the inartistic and the commonplace. His friend Kendall raised an incredulous smile by writing in the Australasian that the shy and reserved man who said so little and rode so well was superior to Whyte Melville in the latter’s special domain. It was thought then that a compliment had been paid to Gordon; it would be considered now that the compliment was wholly to Whyte Melville. The Australian has out—distanced most of his rivals; but he did not know of the fact in his lifetime, and on the banks of the Styx he may not much care.

Of all these poems of action there is none better, perhaps none quite so fine as regards conception and execution, as the Romance of Britomarte. It is a remarkable piece of work. The artistic finish of it does not strike the reader while he is reading. To watch a really fine actor is to forget he is acting; to listen to a tale that is properly told is to forget the teller. It is rarely, indeed, that the mechanical processes do not obtrude themselves. Of genius there has never yet been a satisfactory definition; but the word may surely be reserved for the man or woman who can write a book, or act a piece, or compose a poem, of such quality that the reader or onlooker will forget for the moment everything but that which is placed before him. It is almost impossible to begin reading Britomarte and to put it down unfinished, or to be conscious of anything but the dramatic interest of the story. The verve and swing of the opening lines

I’ll tell you a story—but pass the jack,

And let us make merry to-night, my men—

carry the reader on a rushing wave from beginning to close. It is a tale of great and successful daring, purporting to be told by the chief actor himself; but no crudeness, or bad taste, or braggadocio mars the effect. Thinking of such a piece one forgets to be sorry for the author. Irrespective of fame, or the lack of fame, he must have known that the work was good; he must have known that criticism could neither help it, nor harm it; he must have experienced the joy of creation, which comes only to certain natures, and not often to them.

On the second class of his poetry, which may be described as fatalism set to music, opinions are likely to differ widely. The majority of people prefer How we Beat the Favourite to Doubtful Dreams, but then the majority of people have from time immemorial been the worst judges of poetry. These verses that belong to the second class—the class not of action, but of brooding fancy—are well represented by the piece entitled The Swimmer. All the philosophy in them is contained in the four lines:—

A little season of light and laughter,

Of love and leisure, and pleasure and pain,

And a horror of outer darkness after,

And dust returneth to dust again.

All the music of them is exemplified in the same piece, for example in the lines commencing:—

I would that with sleepy, soft embraces

The sea would fold me, would find me rest

In luminous depths of her secret places

In gulfs where her marvels are manifest.

They are melancholy and mystic, and not hopefully inspiring, these verses in which the writer seeks to link the unsatisfactory present with the unknown beyond. Yet they have a sweetness of their own. The strings that throbbed in Gordon to the touch of his mother, the Night, have, indeed, a siren quality, akin to the lute of Orpheus when heard on the eve of everlasting sleep in the garden of Prosperinë. Preferable sometimes to the utterance of a noisy and blatant optimism—finer than the blare of brass instruments or the shouting of crowds—is the voice of the reed shaken by the wind.

As a final word something may be said of Gordon’s third and highest class of achievement, namely his blending in verse of the active with the melancholic temper. He could do two things: he could write of action, and he could write of sadness. Now and again he combines in one poem all that is best and most distinctive in these two sides of his nature. There are times when he devotes his verse to enterprises of some kind, to feats on horseback, or to feats in war. There are other times when he discards action, and lets the sombre mood of the moment envelop him. The hour of his greatest and rarest inspiration is when he mixes the action with the sentiment; when he unites the warrior with the poet; when he fuses in the same fire the contrasted (but not necessarily antagonistic) temperaments of a Bayard and a Byron, of a Lancelot and a Lamartine.

It is undeniable that The Rhyme of Joyous Garde represents the summit of Gordon’s poetic achievement. And the reason is that it brings together in complete harmony the two spirits which alternately strove for mastery in the life of the man. The movements in The Rhyme of Joyous Garde are varied, but they fit into each other, and grow out of each other, as do the movements in a Beethoven symphony. First of all there is the atmosphere of pure idealism, of pure romance. There is the breath of the south wind, rich with the glory of the hawthorn and the frankincense. It is the man of action, who is also a poet, that is speaking. The setting is that of Arthurian England. Every line of the opening verse is flooded with the sentiment of a romantic country—a country in which brave men lived, and in which great deeds were done.

Against this rich, warm-tinted background is outlined a battle picture. Here begins the second movement. First the country itself, with its sunny fields and blossoming hedges; then the memory springing to life of great daring and heroic achievement:—-

Pardie! I nearly had won that crown

Which endureth more than a knight’s renown,

When the pagan giant had got me down,

Sore spent in the deadly grapple.

In a couple of resonant verses he explains why. The third movement begins when the woman enters. It is romance again, but romance of a more intense, more personal, more richly emotional kind. It forms the dominant note of this varied theme:—

The brown thrush sang through the briar and bower,

All flushed or frosted with forest flower,

In the warm sun’s wanton glances;

And I grew deaf to the song-bird—blind

To blossom that sweetened the sweet spring wind,

I saw her only—a girl reclined

In her girlhood’s indolent trances.

The realism of the picture is carried no further. With fine artistic sensibility Gordon recognises that he has said enough. The woman has entered; the man has grown blind to the blossom and deaf to the song-bird; the eternal tragedy, which is not altogether a tragedy, has begun.

For the rest, the poem plays upon two strings. Alternately there are echoes from the fields of undying renown, and again voices of sad and hopeless and unending regret. The well-known lines beginning:—

Then a steel-shod rush, and a glittering ring,

And a crash of the spear staves splintering

are a memorable piece of versification. They arrest and perpetuate the fighting Arthurian spirit, they convey in words the actual clash of arms, and they bring back the forgotten mood of the man of personal valour as possibly no other verses have yet done. Such a word picture might be expected to leave weak and tame anything that followed; but with equal conviction, and with equal command of tone and touch, Gordon strikes again the chord of intense spiritual shame and sorrow, gradually merging it into one of religious appeal and exhortation. On this latter note the poem closes.

The man who had done this great thing surely deserved something in this existence, or in some other existence, in return for what he had given to the people among whom he lived. Surely, one likes to think, there must be, somewhere, at some time or another, a compensation, a recompense, for the tragedy of a life that merited so much success and vanished, or seemed to vanish, in such utter dark.

VII

THEATRES AND AMUSEMENTS

Then to the well-trod stage anon,

If Jonson’s learned sock be on,

Or sweetest Shakespeare, fancy’s child,

Warble his native wood-notes wild.

Australians are fond of the drama, but have no drama of their own. Even those people who talk occasionally of an Australian literature have nothing to say on the subject of an Australian stage. Not only the masterpieces, but the hack-pieces are borrowed; the star actors and actresses are borrowed also. In nothing is the population more imitative than in what pertains to theatres and theatre-going. It is only the buildings that can be described as the country’s own, and even here the great borrowing habit is illustrated by the names that are blazoned on the outside of them. “His Majesty’s,” and “Her Majesty’s,” and “The Princess,” and “The Royal” repeat themselves with monotonous iteration. The appearance of the majority of these theatres is fine and large, in the literal acceptation of the words. There are not many things that impress the visitor more than the size and the configuration and artistic finish of the places of amusement in Australia.

So far as the audiences are concerned, they are in a transition stage—the stage of development between being delighted with everything and being satisfied with nothing. It is still comparatively easy to attract a crowd to a performance that can boast of novel features, or of moderately good credentials from abroad. In fact, the Australian is willing, at the outset, to take a great deal on trust, even though he is quick to resent what looks like an imposition on his good nature. An indifferent company may have one successful tour of the continent, but it will scarcely have a second. It is the failure to recognise this fact that causes stranded actors to be plentiful as blackberries. The local theatre-goer is good-natured up to a certain point; beyond that point, it is impossible to move him.

Speaking generally, the country is not kind to its own theatrical children. The actor, like the prophet, has to look for his honours abroad. His fellow-countrymen find a difficulty in recognising him, or at least in approving him, until he has broken in upon them from over-seas. The stage in Australia is looked at, not through opera-glasses, but through a telescope; the thing near at hand is not clarified, but distorted. The man of purely local experience is in no danger of being spoilt by adulation. However tolerated or even admired he may have been, he is expected to seek the shades of a graceful retirement the moment that Brown, of Jones’s English theatre, is announced. There is not an Australian-born actor or actress who could not testify to this fact; many of them resent it, but others have come to accept it as a matter of course.

It is true, that there are among the four million people who inhabit Australia, a certain number possessed of discernment. In the exercise of this faculty they now and again perceive that an individual playing a comparatively small part is endowed with special ability. Then, if they are sufficiently interested, they may take steps to secure his acquaintance; or disdaining this formality, they may buttonhole him, remark that they have been impressed by his performances, and invite him to discuss the situation over a glass of wine. An invitation of this kind is seldom refused. The supporters of local talent remark to the Thespian that he is being wasted in Australia; that there is no scope for him in Australia; that he really ought to remove himself from Australia at the first opportunity. It is then discovered that this is the advice his friends and relatives have been tendering him for months past. If he declines to go, or suggests that his own country is quite good enough for him, he is set down as a man of no ambition, and probably of very little soul. More often than not, he is persuaded to go. The favourable opinion entertained of him is found, by a curious chance, to coincide with his opinion of himself. He goes. Perhaps he will be given a few small parts in London and return to Australia a hero. Possibly he will be swallowed out of sight in the world’s vortex, and that will be the end of him. More probably, he will return disgusted and disillusioned, not with his own abilities, but with the blasts of indifference and the chevaux-de-frise of cosmopolitan neglect that have met him abroad.

If the actor of purely local experience finds it hard to make a living, the task is quite beyond the capacity of the local dramatic author. One or two men born at the Antipodes have made their mark in England as writers of plays. But that has only been after leaving the country of their birth, and after surviving years of hard work and discouragement. Where is the rising school of Australian dramatists? Where are even the faint beginnings of it? And where are the supporters of such a school? Echo answers to these questions. It is curious that there should be such a blankness of enterprise and of inspiration in this domain. The country is out of its literary swaddling clothes; it can support any number of theatres; it can find minor parts for any number of Australian actors and actresses; but it is incapable—in its present frame of mind, it is totally incapable—of supporting a single Australian dramatist. The idea that it might be asked to do so seems never to have been seriously considered. There have, indeed, been a few performances, mostly by third-rate, barn-storming companies, of plays dealing with the Kelly Gang. And that excellent comedian and manager, Mr Bland Holt, has given us a few stage pictures representing Sydney and Port Philip harbours, and a few melodramatic incidents supposed to have taken place in Australia. But if an audience, on being invited to witness high-class comedy or tragedy of the more intellectual sort, were to find itself confronted with Circular Quay and Darlinghurst, or with Collins Street and Toorak, or with the people inhabiting them, it would receive such a shock that it would not recover until it had got outside the theatre door—and possibly not then. It would feel at first amazed, and then insulted. The recognised understanding is, that nothing worth looking at in the theatrical sense, and nothing worthy of presentation to an enlightened public, can by any chance take place unless it takes place in England, or on the continent of Europe, or in America, or in Japan.

For the reasons mentioned, English actors usually do well in this part of the world. The old country imposes now and then on the inexperience of the new one. It has a habit of sending here, not merely its second and third best, but its dead-beats and its derelicts. The celebrated English actor of the play-bills is, as often as not, celebrated only in the lively imagination of the entrepreneur who brings him out. He comes, however, with a certain flourish of trumpets and glamour of romance. The very fact that he hails from a distance of 12,000 miles is an aureole round his head. He can be sure of a good reception, of an interested, expectant audience. If he has any colourable qualities, they will be loudly, even rapturously, applauded. If he is very indifferent, or if he is unspeakably bad, he will scarcely be told so—at least not at first. The worst he will receive from the critics of the great “dailies” will be a kind of faint questioning, a troubled note of uncertainty, a dim reminder of some one else who played the part differently. They may damn him with faint praise; but they will be loth, at the outset, to do more. The fact that the actor is understood to have won applause in England goes for a good deal, and the commercial and social instincts of the big papers go for rather more. A few of the week-end journals may bark out vituperation, but they do not really count. It is well known that they are just as likely to attack the supremely good as the atrociously bad. In the long run, it may be—and perhaps before very long—audiences will fall away from the imported actor who is manifestly fourth and fifth rate; for Australian play-goers are not naturally dull. They are, however, under the spell of foreign associations; they are influenced, to a greater or less extent, by newspaper criticism; and they have unquestionably given a number of well-boomed and press-belauded visitors better support than, on their merits and by comparison with the local substitute, they deserved.

So far there has been no American invasion. The plays and the topical allusions in vogue south of the Line are either English in origin, or filter through an English channel. Productions hailing from the United States have made their appearance and have fretted their hour, but they have not succeeded in leaving a lasting mark. One reason is, that the associations and atmosphere of the land of the dollar are not sufficiently familiar. What do we know in Australia of the Bowery? What do we know of Fifth Avenue? What do we know, or care, for the Waldorf, or the Astoria? The local colour of Fleet Street, of Westminster, of Petticoat Lane, and of Kensington, is, owing to numerous stage acquaintanceships, something with which every audience feels at home. But to talk to the average Melbourne or Sydney man of the streets and hotels and public buildings of Boston and New York and Philadelphia, is to talk to him in a foreign language. In the majority of cases he does not know, and when he does know, he does not care.

Another reason is, that the typical American production lacks depth and height. It catches something of what is flitting on the surface of America; but it forgets that America, though topographically a large place, is only a fraction of the intellectual and artistic world. The country has not yet its Sardou, or its Sudermann, or its Ibsen, nor yet its D’Annunzio, or its Pinero, or even its Henry Arthur Jones. A dramatist spoken of as the American Sardou made his bow in Melbourne a year or two ago, with a tragedy named Nadjezda. It was soon made manifest that he had not come to stay. Neither have such productions as A Trip to Chinatown or The Belle of New York, or Leah Kleschna, been responsible for much genuine success. The Yankee playwright is clever with words and indifferent with ideas. As to emotions, he has heard that they exist.

Yet there is one important, non-English product that has won a great welcome from Australian audiences. This is the American actress. She has not been able to acclimatise the works of her own countrymen; she has usually refrained from attempting to do so. Clothing her individuality in the language of Shakespeare and Sheridan, of Ibsen and Bjornsten, of Sudermann and Maeterlinck, of Sardou and Rostand and the Younger Dumas; heralded always by a tremendous flourish of trumpets, and accompanied usually by an astute stage manager; restraining her national prejudices and reducing her American accent to a few pretty words and phrases, she has been enabled to accomplish a great deal. The lady from the United States brings with her youth as a foremost asset. She knows that it is difficult to “star” through a continent without this ally. She has it proclaimed—loudly proclaimed—as part of her equipment. Everywhere she plays the Young American Actress. It is the first and the most effective piece in her repertoire. For the rest, she finds it advisable to cultivate a manner, and a certain distinction of style, when off the stage. Sometimes she is effusive, even demonstrative, and inclined to be gracious to interviewers. Sometimes she is magnificently cold and distant, with a coldness that is only comparable to the fierce warmth of the characters in which she revels behind the footlights. But always in Australia—whether she is on the stage or off it—she is acting, acting, acting. Stage-struck people send her flowers; infatuated people write her verses. She accepts them all and welcomes them all as tributes to her artistic success. She is brilliantly clever, with a cleverness that is all of the head. She gets a great deal, and she deserves what she gets.

To come back to Australian audiences, it requires very little argument to show there is only one kind of play that really appeals to them. It is the kind of play that hovers about the confines of a socially fashionable, and morally unorthodox, world. It is edged round with impropriety; it is coloured, permeated, enlivened with what the immortal author of Bab Ballads calls “guilty splendour.” In the background are the lilies and languors of virtue, but in the foreground, placed there for the people to smile at and to condemn, are the raptures and roses of vice. The theme, no doubt, has endless variants: sometimes the end is tragic, and sometimes it is amusing; sometimes a majority of the commandments suffer, and sometimes only one. It is advisable that there should be a kind of supposed moral purpose running through the production. It is an advantage to have one or two high-minded characters as foils to the others; and as a concession to custom, or as a salve to the uneasy British conscience, it is always a wise policy to bring the immoral people to grief in the last act. But no one can pretend to deny that it is these latter—these fashionable rakes and brilliantly attired courtesans—who constitute the real attraction of the Australian stage to-day. If any one doubts this, let him attempt to run a theatrical season without them, and let him put on the boards a drama dealing only with conventional or with virtuous people. His downfall will be swift and convincing and sure.

For psychology, the typical Australian audience cares little. For poetry on the stage, it cares less. For blank verse it has no inclination. For sustained dignity it has no time. With intellectual fireworks it is but indifferently and partially amused.

Comedy that lies hid in delicate shades and nuances, comedy that is chiefly a matter of scintillating words and phrases, is not asked for by the multitude. Even the brilliancy of Mr Bernard Shaw at his best can command but a limited circle of admirers. Even the problem, considered merely as a problem, is devoid of drawing power. When it attracts, it attracts because of its dazzling pictures of luxury and licentiousness.

Tragedy requires to be carefully handled. It is only when it is decked out in certain robes, only when embroidered with certain trappings, only when set to certain music, that it will crowd the benches. The merely sordid themes have lost their hold, if they ever had one. An immoral play that persists in showing its characters in a garb of sackcloth and ashes has little chance of gaining an extended hearing.

One play that has had a marvellously successful run in Australia is entitled Woman and Wine. The name might just as appropriately have been given to nine out of every ten productions that have held, for any length of time, the local stage. Whether it is Camille, or The Second Mrs Tanqueray, or The Gay Lord Quex, or Dolores, or Zaza, or Quo Vadis, or Sweet Nell of Old Drury, or The Country Mouse, or The Marriage of Kitty, or The White Heather, or any other melodrama of the unfailing Bland Holt and Anderson pattern, the title might, with equal appropriateness, have been that of the popular piece of work already mentioned. A theatre-going public—any theatre-going public—is reached less easily through its intellect than through its senses. What wonder, therefore, that a management should find it advisable to stage Woman and Wine?

Caring only for one kind of play, Australian audiences are quite willing, in their restless desire for novelty, to coquet with others. That last expression of national boredom and ineptitude, musical comedy, has its following at the Antipodes. This form of amusement, like the others, is borrowed. It is doubtful whether Australian audiences would ever have taken to it, had they not been assured that it was regarded in England as the correct thing. Now that it has obtained a footing, it is found to have a certain attractiveness. It has become almost a rage. The reason is to be found in the circumstance that it relieves the onlooker from the necessity of having to think. This is a consideration that cannot well be over-estimated. For the rest, it boasts a number of shapely-looking chorus girls, and a funny man, whose business it is to be as mirthfully suggestive, and as suggestively mirthful as possible. There is also some music, but this scarcely counts. The comedy that is dubbed musical is not seriously vicious, but then it has nothing to do with virtue. The latter circumstance, combined with its gaudy colours, its short skirts, and its chorus girls, helps it joyously on its way.

The claim is occasionally made, that one part of the continent is more favourable to high dramatic art than another. Melbourne, which is always endeavouring to be superior to every other city in Australia, is accustomed to delude itself with the idea that it is fond of intellectual plays. It makes a decent pretence, now and again, of attending a revival of Shakespeare. If the brief season proves a failure, as it usually does, the critics unkindly tell the performers that it is they, and not the Bard of Avon, or the taste of the Melbourne public, that are at fault. Sydney, to do it justice, is given over to no such unnecessary make-believe. Shakespeare has been expurgated so much that there is no risk, and consequently no excitement, in going to see him, and Sydney stays away.

Outside the drama there are amusements which, between them, take up most of the thought and most of the spare time of the people. But little requires to be said of them, because, while they resemble the drama in that they are borrowed from abroad, they give much less scope for the play of individual taste and temper and sensibility. Racing is the national recreation, just as gambling is the national vice. The two insensibly melt into each other. It is a great sporting continent. When the word “sport” is used—when a certain individual is called a sportsman, and another individual is referred to as a follower of “the game”—the reference is invariably to the game in which the horse and the bookmaker play the leading parts. No writer, however admirable his intentions, and however lurid his language, has been able to exaggerate the hold which racing has over the whole population from Port Darwin to Cape Otway, and from Brisbane round to Perth. The office boy reads his racing intelligence in the papers with as much zest, and usually with as much critical discernment, as does the man of wealth and leisure. The man who never goes to horse races and never talks horse, is to be met with, but he is distinctly uncommon. He stands apart from the rest of the community. He is a modern Isaac Newton, given to voyaging through strange social seas alone.

The assertion that racing is a noble and improving pastime—improving to the breed of horses and incidentally to the people who look on—is continually being made by writers who should know something of the subject. A few delusions of the respectable sort are considered necessary in the life of a people, and the decent efforts of sporting authorities to keep these delusions alive are not treated with disrespect. But any one who wishes to discover the real facts can easily do so. The public who support racing care as much for improving the breed of horses, as they do for civilising the Solomon Islanders, or for christianising the Chinese—as much and no more. The horse is emphatically not the thing; he is not the end; he can hardly be called the means to the end; he is merely a useful pawn in the great and insidious gambling game. In this game there are certain rules which have to be observed. That is to say, they must not be broken in too open, or too defiant, or too glaring a manner. But under cover of these rules, and under pretext of observing them, every one does his best to swindle every one else. The owner begins by deceiving the public; the trainer, if it is sufficiently worth his while, misleads the owner; the jockey scores repeatedly off the trainer; the bookmaker does his best to make a profit out of the other three. The people who pay in the last resort are the public. It is all very interesting, and very expensive. The atmosphere of speculation is buoyant and breezy, and, for the time being, exhilarating. Yet for all except those who have learned how to move about in it—for all except the owners, and, trainers, and jockeys, and bookmakers, and a few others—it is decidedly unhealthy. While it is possibly advisable to have national amusements, it is an advantage to understand what we are doing. The man in Mrs Thurston’s novel, who keeps talking about “nerves,” when he means opium, becomes, after a time, an infliction. And the individual who is always referring to “sport,” when he means horse-racing, is in danger of growing tedious.

The continent has its athletic games, although none of these can be called national in the sense that racing is national. Not even cricket. The Englishman sees more of Australian cricketers than he does of Australian horses, and may be inclined to think that a country which has beaten him at Lords, while it has been unable to raise a decent gallop at Epsom, must perforce pay more attention to cricket than it does to horse-racing. The idea, if it exists, is amusingly erroneous. How do the attendances at Club cricket compare with the attendances at local race meetings? How does the sprinkling of enthusiasts at the one fixture look beside the tens of thousands, who, week in and week out, follow the racing game in every centre of population in the Commonwealth? An international cricket match will always draw a crowd; but international cricket matches are few and far between. The truth is that the speculation fever, the gambling fever, the fever to which the horse acts as the main irritant, runs in the blood of the people. The other excitements are transitory, and merely endemic.

In the realm of sport, to use the generic word, there is nothing that the people will not attempt, nothing on which they have not turned a roving eye. They play football, golf, tennis, croquet, hockey, lacrosse, bridge, ping-pong, and a great deal else. They indulge in skating on artificial ice, and, in the middle of a tropic summer, struggle with dumplings and roast beef. They seek amusement everywhere. In the mass, they are far more impressed by skill at some kind of game than by any intellectual achievements. The hero-worship goes out, in the first place, to the successful cricketer, and in the next place, to the leading jockey, with the politician an indifferent third, and the local poet or litterateur entirely out of the running. It is an undeniable fact that his countrymen were more proud of that amiable and pleasant youth, Mr Victor Trumper, after his English season of 1902, than they have ever been of any Prime Minister, actor, author, singer, poet, or professor of metaphysics in the land.

In the world of sport and of recreation, just as in the world of the stage, there is the tendency to borrow, and to borrow again. The games that are played in England are played here, just as the kind of drama that is acted in England is acted here. It matters little whether the climate and temperament and other conditions are suitable, or the reverse. The initiative faculty is stronger than its surroundings. To watch a game of Rugby football in progress at Charters Towers, or at Brisbane, is to wonder whether a new race of Salamanders, gifted with tireless energy and some marvellous kind of asbestos physique, has struck the earth. There is only one thing that may in the end kill the initiative faculty, and that is the national dislike for too much exertion. There are not wanting faint indications that Australia is beginning to find the strain of these more strenuous pastimes too severe, that it is slowly but surely coming to the conclusion that training for football and for sculling matches necessitates more sustained effort than the result is worth. It may be all very well for the Englishman to keep himself warm by vigorous exercise. His climate requires heroic treatment. The Australian, though still ready to abase himself before the successful athlete, is slowly working round to the conviction that certain pursuits are better adapted for the Northern Hemisphere than for his own. The day is coming, and may not be far distant, when the Australian people will revolt from their Christmas dumplings, and abandon their Rugby football; when they will be content, from North to South, with backing unreliable steeds on a race-course, with playing poker in a shady room, and with watching from the stalls of a theatre, the swaying forms of lightly clad heroines, and the graceful movements of dancing feet.

VIII

THE ETERNAL FEMININE

“But still I see the tenor of man’s woe

Holds on the same, from woman to begin.”