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It is difficult to speak of Melbourne fitly. The judgment of neither native nor foreigner can escape the influence of the phenomenal aspect of the city. Not fifty years ago its first child, Batman’s, was born; not forty, it was a city; a little over thirty, it was the metropolis of a colony; and now (as the inscription on Batman’s grave tells us) “Circumspice!” To natives their Melbourne is, and is only, “the magnificent city, classed by Sir George Bowen as the ninth in the world,” “one of the wonders of the world.” They cannot criticise, they can only praise it. To a foreigner, however, who, with all respect and admiration for the excellencies of the Melbourne of to-day as compared with the Melbourne of half-a-century ago, has travelled and seen and read, and cares very little for glorifying the amour-propre of this class or of that, and very much for really arriving at some more or less accurate idea of the significance of this city and its civilization; to such a man, I say, the native melodies in the style of “Rule Britannia” which he hears everywhere and at all times are distasteful. Nay, he may possibly have at last to guard himself against the opposite extreme, and hold off depreciation with the one hand as he does laudation with the other!

The first thing, I think, that strikes a man who knows the three great modern cities of the world—London, Paris, New York—and is walking observingly about Melbourne is, that Melbourne is made up of curious elements. There is something of London in her, something of Paris, something of New York, and something of her own. Here is an attraction to start with. Melbourne has, what might be called, the metropolitan tone. The look on the faces of her inhabitants is the metropolitan look. These people live quickly: such as life presents itself to them, they know it: as far as they can see, they have no prejudices. “I was born in Melbourne,” said the wife of a small bootmaker to me once, “I was born in Melbourne, and I went to Tasmania for a bit, but I soon came back again. I like to be in a place where they go ahead.” The wife of a small bootmaker, you see, has the metropolitan tone, the metropolitan look about her; she sees that there is a greater pleasure in life than sitting under your vine and your fig-tree; she likes to be in a place where they go ahead. And she is a type of her city. Melbourne likes to “go ahead.” Look at her public buildings, her New Law Courts not finished yet, her Town Hall, her Hospital, her Library, her Houses of Parliament, and above all her Banks! Nay, and she has become desirous of a fleet and has established a “Naval Torpedo Corps” with seven electricians. All this is well, very well. Melbourne, I say, lives quickly: such as life presents itself to her, she knows it: as far as she can see, she has no prejudices.

As far as she can see.—The limitation is important. The real question is, how far can she see? how far does her civilization answer the requirements of a really fine civilization? what scope in it is there (as Mr. Arnold would say) for the satisfaction of the claims of conduct, of intellect and knowledge, of beauty and manners? Now in order the better to answer this question, let us think for a moment what are the chief elements that have operated and are still operating in this Melbourne and her civilization.

This is an English colony: it springs, as its poet Gordon (of whom there will presently be something to be remarked) says, in large capitals, it springs from “the Anglo-Saxon race ... the Norman blood.” Well, if there is one quality which distinguishes this race, this blood, it is its determined strength. Wherever we have gone, whatever we have done, we have gone and we have done with all our heart and soul. We have made small, if any, attempt to conciliate others. Either they have had to give way before, or adapt themselves to us. India, America, Australia, they all bear witness to our determined, our pitiless strength. What is the state of the weaker nations that opposed us there? In America and Australia they are perishing off the face of the earth; even in New Zealand, where the aborigines are a really fine and noble race, we are, it seems, swiftly destroying them. In India, whose climate is too extreme for us ever to make it a colony in the sense that America and Australia are colonies; in India, since we could neither make the aborigines give way, nor make them adapt themselves to us, we have simply let them alone. They do not understand us, nor we them. Of late, it is true, an interest in them, in their religion and literature, has been springing up, but what a strange aspect do we, the lords of India for some hundred and thirty years, present! “In my own experience among Englishmen,” says an Indian scholar writing to the Times in 1874, “I have found no general indifference to India, but I have found a Cimmerian darkness about the manners and habits of my countrymen, an almost poetical description of our customs, and a conception no less wild and startling than the vagaries of Mandeville and Marco Polo concerning our religion.” Do we want any further testimony than this to the determined, the pitiless strength of “the Anglo-Saxon race ... the Norman blood?”

Well, and how does all this concern Australia in general and Melbourne in particular? It concerns them in this way, that the civilization of Australia, of Melbourne, is an Anglo-Saxon civilization, a civilization of the Norman blood, and that, with all the good attendant on such a civilization, there is also all the evil. All? Well, I will not say all, for that would be to contradict one of the first and chief statements I made about her, namely that “as far as she can see Melbourne has no prejudices,” a statement which I could not make of England. “This our native or adopted land,” says an intelligent Australian critic, the late Mr. Marcus Clarke, “has no past, no story. No poet speaks to us.” “No,” we might add, “and (thus far happily for you) neither, as far as you can see, does any direct preacher of prejudice.” And here, as I take it, we have put our finger upon what is at once the strength and the weakness of this civilization.

Let us consider it for a moment. The Australians have no prejudice about an endowed Church, as we English have, and hence they have, what we have not, religious liberty. As far as I can make out, there is no reason why the wife of a clergyman of the Church of England should in this colony look down upon the wife of a dissenting minister as her social inferior, and this is, on the whole, I think, well, for it tends to break up the notion of caste that exists between the two sects; it tends, I mean, to their mutual benefit, to the interchange of the church’s sense of “the beauty of holiness” with the chapel’s sense of the passion of holiness. Here, then, you are better off than we. On the other hand, you have no prejudice, as we at last have, against Protection, and consequently you go on benefiting a class at the expense of the community in a manner that can only, I think, be defined as short-sighted and foolish. Here we are better off than you. Again, however, you have not the prejudice that we have against the intervention of the State. You have nationalized your railways, and are attempting, as much as possible, to nationalize your land.[1] You are beginning to see that a land tax, at any given rate of annual value, would be (as Mr. Fawcett puts it) “a valuable national resource, which might be utilized in rendering unnecessary the imposition of many taxes which will otherwise have to be imposed.” Here you are better off than we, better off both in fortune and general speculation. Again, you have not yet arrived at Federalism, and what a waste of time and all time’s products is implied in the want of central unity! Now the first and third of these instances show the strength that is in this civilization, and the second shows a portion of the weakness, at present only a small portion, but, unless vigorous measures are resorted to and soon, this Protection will become the great evil that it is in America. There is just the same cry there as here: “Protect the native industries until they are strong enough to stand alone”—as if an industry that has once been protected will ever care to stand alone again until it is compelled to! as if a class benefited at the expense of the community will ever give up its benefit until the community takes it away again!

On one of the first afternoons I spent in Melbourne, I remember strolling into a well-known book-mart, the book-mart “at the sign of the rainbow.” I was interested both in the books and the people who were looking at or buying them. Here I found, almost at the London prices (for we get our twopence or threepence in the shilling on books now in London), all, or almost all, of the average London books of the day. The popular scientific, theological, and even literary books were to hand, somewhat cast into the shade, it is true, by a profusion of cheap English novels and journals, but still they were to hand. And who were the people that were buying them? The people of the dominant class, the middle-class. I began to enquire at what rate the popular, scientific, and even literary books were selling. Fairly, was the answer. “And how do Gordon’s poems sell?” “Oh they sell well,” was the answer, “he’s the only poet we’ve turned out.”

This pleased me, it made me think that the “go-ahead” element in Victorian and Melbourne life had gone ahead in this direction also. If, in a similar book-mart in Falmouth (say), I had asked how the poems of Charles Kingsley were selling, it is a question whether much more than the name would have been recognized. And yet the middle-class here is as, and perhaps more, badly—more appallingly badly—off for a higher education than the English provincial middle class is. Whence comes it, then, that a poet like Gordon with the cheer and charge of our chivalry in him, with his sad “trust and only trust,” and his

“weary longings and yearnings

for the mystical better things:”

Whence comes it that he is a popular poet here? Let him answer us English for himself and Melbourne:

“You are slow, very slow, in discerning

that book-lore and wisdom are twain:”

Yes, indeed, to Melbourne, such as life presents itself to her, she knows it, and, what is more, she knows that she knows it, and her self-knowledge gives her a contempt for the pedantry of the old world. Walk about in her streets, look at her private buildings, these banks of hers, for instance, and you will see this. They mean something, they express something: they do not (as Mr. Arnold said of our British Belgravian architecture) “only express the impotence of the artist to express anything.” They express a certain sense of movement, of progress, of conscious power. They say: “Some thirty years ago the first gold nuggets made their entry into William Street. Well, many more nuggets have followed, and wealth of other sorts has followed the nuggets, and we express that wealth—we express movement, progress, conscious power.—Is that, now, what your English banks express?” And we can only say that it is not, that our English banks express something quite different; something, if deeper, slower; if stronger, more clumsy.

But the matter does not end here. When we took the instance of the books and the people “at the sign of the rainbow,” we took also the abode itself of the rainbow; when we took the best of the private buildings, we took also the others. Many of them are hideous enough, we know; this is what Americans, English, and Australians have in common, this inevitable brand of their civilization, of their determined, their pitiless strength. The same horrible “pot hat,” “frock coat,” and the rest, are to be found in London, in Calcutta, in New York, in Melbourne.

Let us sum up. “The Anglo-Saxon race, the Norman blood:” a colony made of this: a city into whose hands wealth and its power is suddenly phenomenally cast: a general sense of movement, of progress, of conscious power. This, I say, is Melbourne—Melbourne with its fine public buildings and tendency towards banality, with its hideous houses and tendency towards anarchy. And Melbourne is, after all, the Melbournians. Alas, then, how will this city and its civilization stand the test of a really fine city and fine civilization? how far will they answer the requirements of such a civilization? what scope is there in them for the satisfaction of the claims of conduct, of intellect and knowledge, of beauty, and manners?

Of the first I have only to say that, so far as I can see, its claims are satisfied, satisfied as well as in a large city, and in a city of the above-mentioned composition, they can be. But of the second, of the claims of intellect and knowledge, what enormous room for improvement there is! What a splendid field for culture lies in this middle-class that makes a popular poet of Adam Lindsay Gordon! It tempts one to prophesy that, given a higher education for this middle-class, and fifty—forty—thirty years to work it through a generation, and it will leave the English middle-class as far behind in intellect and knowledge as, at the present moment, it is left behind by the middle-class, or rather the one great educated upper-class, of France.

There is still the other claim, that of beauty and manners. And it is here that your Australian, your Melbourne civilization is, I think, most wanting, is most weak; it is here that one feels the terrible need of “a past, a story, a poet to speak to you.” With the Library are a sculpture gallery and a picture gallery. What an arrangement in them both! In the sculpture gallery “are to be seen,” we are told, “admirably executed casts of ancient and modern sculpture, from the best European sources, copies of the Elgin marbles from the British Museum, and other productions from the European Continent.” Yes, and Summers stands side by side with Michaelangelo! And poor busts of Moore and Goethe come between Antinous and the Louvre Apollo the Lizard slayer! But this, it may be said, is after all only an affair of an individual, the arranger. Not altogether so. If an audience thinks that a thing is done badly, they express their opinion, and the failure has to vanish. And how large a portion of the audience of Melbourne city, pray, is of opinion that quite half of its architecture is a failure, is hideous, is worthy only, as architecture, of abhorrence? how many are shocked by the atrocity of the Medical College building at the University? how many feel that Bourke Street, taken as a whole, is simply an insult to good taste?

“Yes, all this,” it is said, “may be true, as abstract theory, but it is at present quite out of the sphere of practical application. You would talk of Federalism, and here is our good ex-Premier of New South Wales, Sir Henry Parkes, making it the subject of a farewell denunciation. ‘I venture to say now,’ says Sir Henry Parkes, ‘here amongst you what I said when I had an opportunity in London, what I ventured to say to Lord Derby himself, that this federation scheme must prove a failure.’ You talk of Free-trade and here is what an intelligent writer in the Argus says apropos of ‘the promised tariff negotiations with Tasmania.’ ‘In America,’ he says, ‘there is no difficulty in inducing the States to see that, whatever may be their policy as regards the outside world, they should interchange as between each other in order that they may stand on as broad a base as possible, but we can only speculate on the existence of such a national spirit here.’—These facts, my good sir,” it is said, “as indicative of the amount of opposition that the nation feels to the ideas of Free-trade and Federalism, are not encouraging.”—They are not, let us admit it at once, but there are others which are; others, some of which we have been considering, and, above and beyond everything, there is one invaluable and in the end irresistible ally of these ideas: there is the Tendency of the Age—the Time-Spirit, as Goethe calls it. Things move more quickly now than they used to do: ideas, the modern ideas, are permeating the masses swiftly and thoroughly and universally. We cannot tell, we can only speculate as to what another fifty—forty—thirty years will actually bring forth.

Free-trade—Federalism—Higher Education, they all go together. The necessities of life are cheap here, wonderfully cheap; a man can get a dinner here for sixpence that he could not get in England for twice or thrice the amount. “There are not,” says the Australasian Schoolmaster, the organ of the State Schools, “there are not many under-fed children in the Australian [as there are in the English] schools.” But the luxuries of life (and let us remember that what we call the luxuries of life are, after all, necessities; they are the things which go to make up our civilization, the things which make us feel that there is a greater pleasure in life than sitting under your vine and your fig-tree, whatever Mr. George may have to say to the contrary)—the luxuries of life, I say, are dear here, very dear, owing to, what I must be permitted to call, an exorbitant tariff, and, consequently, the money that would be spent in fostering a higher ideal of life, in preparing the way for a national higher education, is spent on these luxuries, and the claims of intellect and knowledge, and of beauty and manners, have to suffer for it. Here is your Mr. Marcus Clarke, for instance, talking grimly, not to say bitterly, of “the capacity of this city to foster poetic instinct,” of his “astonishment that such work” as Gordon’s “was ever produced here.” He is astonished, you see, that the claims of intellect and knowledge, and of beauty and manners are enough satisfied in this city to produce a talent of this sort; he is astonished, because he does not see that there is an element in this city which, in its way, is making for at any rate the intellect and knowledge—an element which is a product, not of England but of Australia; a general sense of movement, of progress, of conscious power.

Free-trade—Federalism—Higher Education, they all, I say, go together; but if one is more important than the other, then it is the last. Improvement, real improvement, must always be from within outwards, not from without inwards. All abiding good comes, as it has been well said, by evolution not by revolution. “Our chief, our gravest want in this country at present,” says Arnold, “our unum necessarium, is a middle-class, homogeneous, intelligent, civilized, brought up in good public schools, and on the first plane.” How true is this of Australia too, of Melbourne! There are State schools for the lower-class, but what is there for the great upper educated class of the nation? The voluntary schools, the “private adventure schools.” And what sort of education do they supply either in England or here? “The voluntary schools,” says a happy shallow man in some Publishers’ circular I lit on the other day, “the voluntary schools of the country” [of England] “have reached the highest degree of efficiency.” This, to those who have taken the trouble to study the question, not to say to have considerable absolute experience in the English voluntary schools—this is intelligence as surprising as it ought to be gratifying. To such men, the idea they had arrived at of the English voluntary schools was somewhat different; their idea being that these schools were, both socially and intellectually, the most inadequate that fall to the lot of any middle class among the civilized nations of Europe. “Comprehend,” says Arnold to us Englishmen, and he might as well be saying it to you Australians, “comprehend that middle-class education—the higher education, as we have put it, of the great upper educated class—is a great democratic reform, of the truest, surest, safest description.”

“But there are many difficulties to be overcome—so many, that we doubt these abstract theories to be at present within the sphere of practical application. There is such a mass of opposition to the idea of Federalism. And, as for the idea of Free-trade, we can only speculate on the existence of a national spirit here. The thinking public is quite content with its State schools for the lower class, and cares little or nothing about State schools and a higher education for the upper class. They are much more interested in the religious questions of the day—the Catholic attitude, the conflict between Mr. Strong and his Presbytery on the subject of Religious Liberalism or Latitudinarianism, as you may please to call it, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”—All this is so, let us admit it at once, but it does not discourage us. We know, or think we know (which is, after all, almost the same thing), that these three questions—Free-trade, Federalism, Higher Education—are the three great, the three vital questions for Australia, for Melbourne. We know that, sooner or later, they will have to be properly considered and decided upon, and that, if Melbourne is to keep the place which she now holds as the leading city, intellectually and commercially, of Australia, they will have to be decided upon in that way which conforms with “the intelligible law of things,” with the Tendency of the Age, with the Time-Spirit. For this is the one invaluable and, in the end, irresistible ally of Progress—of Progress onward and upward.

December, 1884.

Note.—No one, speaking of Free-trade and Federalism in Australia, can omit a tribute of thanks to the Argus and the Federal Australian for what they have respectively done for the two causes. The cause of Higher Education, however, still waits for a champion in the Press.