SYDNEY AND HER CIVILIZATION, AS THEY STRIKE AN ENGLISHMAN.

It was in 1770 that Cook entered the bay to which he gave the name of Botany: in ’88 that Philip landed in Port Jackson with his convict settlement: in 1849 that the settlers refused to receive any more convicts: and in ’56 that the settlement was acknowledged as a colony and dowered with a constitution. These few facts have a very different significance to those which correspond to them in the history of Melbourne. The epithet phenomenal cannot be applied to the former in the same sense as to the latter; nor yet, let us hasten to add, the epithet premature. English people, who carry to a quite quaint degree their modern representative poet’s dislike of

“Raw Haste, half-sister to Delay,”

find Melbourne “too American,” as they say, and reserve all their praise for “picturesque Sydney” and the harbour about whose description Mr. Trollope went (as we are all never likely to be able, at any rate in Sydney, to forget) into diffuse despair. “The business thoroughfares,” says a simple English traveller, “as well as the shops themselves, have a far more English appearance than those of the capital of Victoria,” and shuns all comment as superfluous. Let us not think of contradicting him. That elemental characteristic of the British architect, “the impotence to express anything,” is in no danger of disappearing in Sydney, nor yet, let us again hasten to add, in Melbourne; but, if it be possible to distinguish the matter thus, I should say that in Sydney he had found his happy hunting-grounds, whereas in Melbourne he was just beginning to feel that there was a rival about.

No, it is just where Sydney isun-English that she has charm. I do not now refer to her natural position, nor to her age—age which will tone down, and perhaps some day almost mellow, the masterpieces of even the British architect. I refer to those buildings in the town, few and far between enough, it is true,in which the Sydney perception of its individual life has striven to express itself. The Sydney perception of its individual life is not strong. As a local guide-book puts it more particularly, “in the nomenclature of the streets Sydney shows intense loyalty, and the lover of history will be delighted by the associations which some of the names will summon to his memory. For instance, his historical predilections will be gratified in noticing that the principal street is named after George the Third, during whose reign the colony was founded.” Of course, when the local guide-book tells us that a thing is so, itisso; and when it says that our predilections, historical or otherwise, will be gratified and delighted, theyaregratified and delighted. But these Sydney men and women, with their intense loyalty, or rather what the writer in the local guide-books means thereby, have not, what we called, the metropolitan look—have not the metropolitan feeling. Mr. Marcus Clarke, in the cleverest and also the most fantastic of his clever but often fantastic criticisms, “The Future Australian Race,” says boldly: “It is more than likely that what should be the Australian Empire will be cut in half by a line drawn through the centre of the continent.... All beneath this line will be a Republic, having the mean climate, and, in consequence, the development of Greece. The intellectual capital of the Republic will be in Victoria; the fashionable and luxurious capital on the shore of Sydney Harbour.” Then he adds that “the Australians will be a fretful, clever, perverse, irritable race,” showing us what, under all their superficial differences, the people of Victoria and of New South Wales have, he thinks, in common. I do not believe that the whole secret of the matter is here laid open before us. Mr. Marcus Clarke had an admirable acuteness of perception, but he was apt, having swiftly perceived one aspect of a thing, to write it down at once astheaspect without staying for a second or third look at the thing itself. The consequence is that he rarely reaches the whole secret of a thing: witness, for instance, his view of Christianity, (but Mr. Arnold notices how even a critic of Sainte-Beuve’s calibre was capable of illusion here), or of the significance of Gordon’s poetry, which I have spoken of elsewhere; and it is lamentable to think how much of this false tendency in him was due to the circumstance that he was a man of letters, and an Australian man of letters. I do not believe, I say, that, when he tells us that the reallydistinctive characteristic of Sydney is (for “will be” is only “is” unmaterialized) fashion and luxury, and Melbourne intellect, he has laid open before us thewholesecret of the present tendencies of these cities, or yet when he sees them united with the common characteristics of fretfulness, cleverness, perverseness, irritability. But here, undoubtedly, is one aspect of the matter expressed admirably. The men and women of Sydney do not live so fast mentally as the men and women of Melbourne: they give more free play to their emotional passions. As we say, they “take things easier.” They cling to the past which Melbourne throws away: they consider the present, which Melbourne has very little time for. Their attachment to “the old country” is deeper; they have intense loyalty, as the writer in the local guide-book says. They are much more possessed by the affairs of Melbourne than Melbourne is about theirs. TheSydney Morning Heraldand theSydney Maildo not hold the same position in Melbourne as theArgusand theAustralasiando in Sydney. The Sydney people are captious in their criticism on the younger capital, just as Boston is on New York: they talk about being “dragged at the chariot wheels of Victoria,” and asseverate that they will not endure it. Melbourne people criticise Sydney good-humouredly, and justly so, since in that aspect of them both, which people seem to think is alone worth criticising, Melbourne is undoubtedly far superior. Intellect in the modern world is the master: emotion is the handmaid. Or, to put it in another way, our best average work at present is being done in clear, nervous prose, while poetry is praised and left to starve. Science is a better paymaster than Art, and nearly all the best average intelligence of the world has turned to the rising, and from the setting, sun. And Melbourne, I say, Melbourne with her perception of movement, progress, conscious power, has out-stripped this Sydney, whose perception of her individual life is so weak that all she has to point to are her natural advantages, her age, and the meagre fact that her “business thoroughfares, as well as the shops themselves, have a far more English appearance than those of the capital of Victoria.” And yet, undoubtedly, Sydney has—or so it seems to me—a rich and rare possession of her own, and one which is worth as much as that of Melbourne, even as emotion is worth as much as intellect, as poetry is worth as much as prose. And there are, as we know, good judges who would change the“as much” into “more.” I, however, who have no pretentions to be a good judge, and am, as an acute English critic of mine so aptly put it once, only “Whitman and water:” I must still cling to the belief that perfection is to be found, and only to be found, in theunionof these two qualities—of emotion and intellect, of poetry and prose. Or, as I said the other day,[7]true science (which is essentially intellectual) and true faith (which is essentially emotional) are to be, as they must be, harmonies, eternal harmonies, the “perfect music” and “noble words” of truth.

Well now, let us try and find out a little more definitely wherein these men and women of Sydney, these who have not the metropolitan look, the metropolitan feeling, show themselves, at any rate to the disinterested seeker after a really fine civilization, as the equals of our intellectual men and women of Melbourne. (“Intellectual,” we are agreed, is here used as meaning that spiritual quality which is opposed to emotional). First of all, however, let us examine this phrase of ours, metropolitan look, metropolitan feeling, for fear it should be nothing but a phrase, a mere catchword, and, as such, worthy only the places where sawdust is stored.

Nothing is more certain than that our individual lives form, if not our faces, the expression of them. Our eyes and all the facial muscles are at the command of our natural inherited dispositions as modified by the circumstances of our lives. The average man who spends his days in the open air in companionship with the inanimate things about him, or in the settled intercourse of country life, married or single, will have a quite different look, a quite differenttone, from the man whose days are passed in the brisk interchange of words and thoughts of the life of the city. And how much will this difference be accentuated by the fact that the city is a seat of large and intense ideas, that the very air is impregnated with the passionate thoughts, words, and acts of the whole civilized world! It is in such men that we find the metropolitan look, the metropolitan feeling. Their faces seem stripped of all useless flesh like the body of an athlete: their eyes are quick and clear, ready servants of the quick clear brain behind them. This is what we call the average intelligent man, the labourer of the past, the partner ofthe present, the master of the future! Put this man, however, into a state of stress, intellectual or emotional, in his business or in his private life, and that fine nervous face of his will become lean and rigid, those quick clear eyes hard and naked. And, just as it is the pleasure of our civilization to see this man in the first stage, so is it the pain thereof to see him, alas too often, in the second. These are the most dread spectres that haunt metropolises: their anguish wrings the heart with an intensity, with an abidingness that the sight of mere misery brutal and degraded does not and cannot inspire us. London and New York swarm with such, and our miniature Australian intellectual capital, too, knows them only too well. They press the stamp of their struggle into the very brow of their city. It is they who bring home to us the lean and rigid, the hard and naked side of the best life of their city. While it is to their successful brothers that we owe what of us is phenomenal, it is to them, the unsuccessful, that we owe what of us is premature. They are the men who have formulated that exceeding bitter cry of “Cruel London.” Yes, London is cruel in this sense of the word, and so, to a less degree (In a hundred years shall we be able to say this?) is Melbourne. I do not think anyone would call Sydney cruel.

“Well,” retorts the metropolitan, “perhaps not; but, on the other hand, the provincial look, the dull look of intellectual death, is far more common with such towns than with us. For me, I would sooner have heaven with hell than purgatory by itself.—Pah,” he says, “Sydney is the city of smells and shopkeepers!” And I for my part, with all my admiration for the intellect of the average intelligent metropolitan in general and the Melbourne metropolitan in particular, should not think of contradicting him here. My only wish here is, as I have said, to find out wherein these people whom he calls, with such fine scorn, “provincials” and “shopkeepers,” show themselves his equals, and whether theydoshow themselves his equals, or that I shall stand convicted of a delusion on the subject.

I believe much in first impressions (good ones, that is) provided only that we bring, what I have called, a second and third look to bear on the thing which has impressed us. And since I am graceless enough to speak of my own little private beliefs, let me add that I often find some difficulty in making my last impressions as good as my first, which is provoking toanyone who has a dread and dislike of “impressionists” and an attraction and affection towards “students.” Hence I find myself quite ready, when in the latter humour, to call my first impressions shallow and careless, and when in the former, to call my last impressions dead-dark and pedantic, so that Mr. Marcus Clarke delights me not nor (some laborious scholar of the Australasian future) neither, and all is vanity and vexation of spirit! Let me, however, on this occasion retail my first impressions with a trustful pen, for, as they were unselfconscious and therefore unconnected with any theory on the subject in hand, I believe they are really the best offering I have to make on its altar.

The first thing, then, that struck me on walking about Sydney one afternoon, looking at the place and the people, was the appalling strength of the British civilization. In Melbourne, for reasons spoken of elsewhere, this fact is not so striking. Melbourne, I have said, has something of London, Paris, New York, and of its own. The prevailing characteristic of Sydney is its Britishness—the happy hunting grounds of the British architect with his “impotence to express anything,” the intense and gratifying and delightful loyalty of the nomenclature of the streets, and the rest. Everywhere are the thumb marks and the great toe marks of the six-fingered six-toed giant, Mr. Arnold’s life-long foe, the British Philistine! I call this strength appalling; for observe that this is a country lying in a band of some five or six degrees south of the tropic of Capricorn, whereas England is a country lying in a band of some twenty-five or six degrees north of the corresponding tropic of Cancer, and yet here are the two peoples living lives almost identic! Rome changed her Jupiter into Ammon when the Tiber flowed into the Nile: Woden and the God of the Christians blended into one another; but the Jehovah (or shall we say the Moloch?) of Puritanism, of Calvinism, is the same in Sydney as in London, in Melbourne as in Edinburgh! There is nothing like it, save in the history of that wonderful people which produced this God that is “a jealous God.” And further. These people in Sydney have clung, not only to the faith but to the very raiment of their giant. The same gloomy dresses, cumbrous on the women, hideous on the men, that we see in England! Now in Melbourne, where those dear “old-country” days, wherein spring, summer, autumn, and winter alternate with afifth season excruciatingly peculiar to the place itself, are not infrequent; in Melbourne, I say, an attachment to the very tricks of one of the worst climates in the world might not be so unnatural; but in Sydney such an attachment becomes positively monstrous. The same food, the same overeating and overdrinking, and (observe how careful we are) at the same hours! If there is one thing, I believe, that the people of Sydney really grudge to Melbourne, it is her factories. If they could only make the atmosphere of Sydney (they do their best, however, with their steamers for the harbour) as supremely filthy as that of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, the people, the intensely loyal people of Sydney, would be happy. As it is, they have reluctantly to concede a point in favour of, what the newspapers call, “her younger rival.” And yet how can I say this in the face of their eminently successful pollution of their harbour and their very streets with their drainage?

It is no wonder, then, we see, that, unlike Melbourne, Sydney’s perception of her individual life is weak, miserably weak, all but imperceptible. She has to point to her natural advantages and her age. Now it is very nice to have a fine harbour, and Mr. Trollope is in his grave and we may safely say that he had a profuse literary talent, like many writers who lived before and many who will live after him; but the chief point of interest in the harbour, at any rate to your disinterested enquirer into the present and future social state of the owners, is,what effect does it, and the climate generally, have upon them?not whether Mr. Trollope or anyone else “despairs of being able to convey to any reader his own idea of the beauty” of either. Now we all know what effect the “sabbath rest” has on the Middle class and People of England, and we all know how zealously all those “pious and simple-minded” people who, as Dr. Moorhouse puts it so well, live “entrenched in the old fortifications of unintelligent orthodoxy,” are striving that that effect should not be in any way lessened—striving, not only in London but in Melbourne, and, so far, with considerable success in both. But here in Sydney, where, at first sight, one would least expect it, they are more liberal in these matters: their public institutions, Museums, Picture Gallery, and so on, are thrown open to the public on sundays.[8]Noneighbouring town, so far as I know, partakes in the virtuous hatred of Geelong to sunday boats. The harbour is plied by a large number of small steamboats. The Middle-class and the People, thanks to the short hours of work (hence in large part Australia’s excellence in sports) and the saturday half-holiday, can disport themselves on its banks or where they please. “Our harbour,” then, andour parkstoo, are of more real use than merely, as they say, to blow about; and so far, so good. Pleasure, that light fair Pleasure which should find its natural home in every fine climate, is undoubtedly drawing breath in the Sydney air. Mr. Marcus Clarke’s acuteness of perception did not deceive him when he followed up this pallid plant into the full-grown tree with its flower and fruit of fashion and luxury. Yes, climate will ultimately work a transformation upon even the six-fingered six-toed giant. Moloch’s fire will cease to burn and brand: Jehovah’s jealousy will lose its harshness, and the sweet bright love of the White Christ will brood over and temper the hearts of this people to beauty and melody. Meantime, down there in Melbourne, Pleasure when it opens its mouth to breathe, will also open it to bite: the taint of cruelty will be upon it as it is upon all things purely intellectual, all things in which emotion has no part. “Melbourne,” the wise man of Sydney will say then, “Melbourne is the city of stew-pans and stockbrokers. They know how to make money, but not how to spend it. If they have pleasure, it borders on pain as lust does on love. All the beauty they know is the beauty of light; heat is a stranger to them. Their music lacks the minor keys. Years ago their one poet, Gordon, ran away from the city, and took refuge in the bush: if he were alive now, he would come to Sydney. No poet, no painter, no musician will be brought forth out of Melbourne.—You will make fine logicians, you Melbournians, and it does a man’s heart good to think of your cog-wheels; but believe me that you know no more of life than that it is an existence, or of death than that it is the stopping of a mouse-wheel.” Thus our problematical “provincial,” returning fine pity for the fine scorn of our problematical “metropolitan.” Or, to drop the symbolism, thus my first impressions of the actual or inherent melody and beauty of the Sydney life, as evolved from my last impressions of the leanness and rigidness, the hardness and nakedness that is to be found so easily in life in Melbourne.

More than once that afternoon did this melody of beauty come back to me wandering, like a sweet far-off chime. It is years since I heard that chime, the chime of Pleasure light and fair, breathing around me—years ago, in its imperial haunt of Paris. Other chimes have their several melodies and beauties, melodies and beauties perhaps above compare with this one, but this one is pre-eminent for sweetness, and sweetness is a rich and rare offering to the soul. The afternoon was not a fine one, and I had just been spending two months in peerless weather by the Riverina. I had, then, no meteorological “pathetic fallacy,” as Mr. Ruskin says, to help me to a thoughtless faith in the actual or inherent melody of Sydney. On the contrary, the rain rained, and the wind blew, and the bursts of sunshine were few and far between, so that the Genius of the place had to speak out if he wished to be heard. And, as we have noticed, he did speak out, and was heard, and was, and is, approved of.

Pass now from the outer public world into the inner: pass from the parks and streets into the Picture Gallery, and think of a similar passage in Melbourne. It is quite useless to murmur here, “Melbourne—movement—progress—conscious power;” the words only pass into a dry tuneless jingle, like Gordon at his worst, wherein nothing can be heard but, “Leanness and rigidness—hardness and nakedness.” We see the throng of the virtuous wives of the Bourke Street tradespeople and of “our wealthy lower orders” moving about in that badly constructed room, with its badly chosen and badly hung pictures. We think of the low, low ebb at which the intellect of the metropolis has left its sense of melody and beauty. We wonder what Adelaide Ironsides, whom Mr. Brunton Stephens has told us of in some charming verses,[9]would have made of that people, of that city, whose capacity to foster poetic instinct was “gauged” with such grimness by Mr. Clarke.[10]And then we turn to this room, this people, and this city, and the fatuity of their intense loyalty seems a venial offence beside the arid barrenness of their intellectual neighbours. Such a construction (and, alas, not a merely temporary but a quite everlasting one) as the Melbourne Picture and Sculpture Galleries, such a choice, such an arrangement of pictures and statues, would not satisfy these men and women of Sydney, as it does the virtuous wives of the Bourke Street tradespeople and of “our wealthy lower orders.” I do not say that theMorning Heraldwould burst out into correspondence on the subject, nor yet that that company of eminent men who legislate for an ungrateful country would speak with scorn or pity of these things. The chime of melody and beauty here is, if sweet, far off. Pleasure light and fair is as yet but drawing breath. The outer public life and the inner are but feeling their way to a perception of an individuality, to an individuality that seeks after that form of happiness whose chief expression is in melody and beauty. But in Melbourne there is nothing, or scarcely anything, of this. If no one would think of calling Sydney cruel, neither would anyone think of calling Melbourne sweet. The average intelligent man in Melbourne worships at the master-shrine alone: Intellect is his god, Intellect with its speech of clear nervous prose and its poetry of vigorous, if rather meretricious metres and “galloping rymes.” He has no, or very little, care for Art as Art: that is an affair for women, and, as the only organised female public opinion is that of the virtuous tradeswoman and the wife of the wealthy lower orders, spiritual leanness and rigidness, hardness and nakedness are the popular product of the day.

Now there is, I will venture to say, not one social phenomenon, good or evil, in Victoria and New South Wales that cannot be traced to these their spiritual conditions which I have been trying to express. Let us take, what I havecalled, the three vital questions of the day—Free Trade—Federalism—Higher Education. New South Wales is in favour of Free Trade. Her perception of her individual life is weak: she clings to the past, she considers the present. Whereas Victoria—Victoria with her swarm of intelligent labourers and men of business—strong in her reliance on her intellect, resolutely turns to the future from which she thinks she will be able to carve out all her desires. Like America, she wants no help from without, she will brook no interference. She will not let her mineral products lie idle as New South Wales does. She is impatient of the true British characteristic, the slow patient evolution of things, the

“broadening downFrom precedent to precedent.”

“broadening down

From precedent to precedent.”

She believes in the modern scientific spirit, and in none other. “Let us, then,” she says, in her heart, “let us, then, by all means, move towards Federalism. Union is strength.” But the eager grasping nature of her swarm of intelligent labourers will not let her see that the wisdom of her penny tariffs is but the foolishness of the pounds to come. New South Wales, on the other hand, is adverse to Federalism. She does not understand this modern scientific spirit—she dreads it, is jealous of it, and admires it! It is so self-reliant, so self-confident! And she, poor thing, is too much under the sway of the ancient historical spirit to perceive that there is also a modern historical spirit, and that it is good and at her doors. Hence her changeableness, hence her irresolution in the matter. Like her clever unscrupulous politician, Sir Henry Parkes, yesterday she wanted Federalism, to-day she does not: she will not be dragged at the chariot wheels of this dreadful modern scientific spirit which she does not understand, with Victoria shouting and cracking a stockwhip to urge on the horses faster and faster. Is she not the “Queen of the Pacific?” did not Governor Philip tell her she would be “the centre of the southern hemisphere—the brightest gem of the Southern Ocean?” and who shall say he counted her chickens before they were hatched?

To the disinterested seeker, then, after a really fine civilization, it is hard to say which is the more painful sight—Victoria, with her resolute pursuit of a purely intellectual future, which must end in arid barrenness, or New SouthWales with her fatuous attachment to the monstrous aspect of the past and present. Which, after all, is the better or the worse, illusion or delusion? Is Victoria never going to perceive that logicians and engineers are not the highest product of civilization? Will New South Wales never shake off the British architect, spiritual and material, and begin to evolve an individual life of her own? Is Mr. Marcus Clarke right when he tells us that “in another hundred years the average Australasian will be a tall, coarse, strong-jawed, greedy, pushing, talented man, excelling in swimming and horsemanship. His religion will be a form of Presbyterianism, his national policy a democracy tempered by the rate of exchange. His wife will be a thin, narrow woman, very fond of dress and idleness, caring little for her children, but without sufficient brain-power to sin with zest.” Yes, this is indeed the future of the two tendencies, which are represented by the illuded progress of Victorian, the deluded stagnation of New South Wales. “The virtuous tradeswoman and the wife of the wealthy lower orders, walking in the happy hunting-grounds of the British architect!” What a picture! It is a satisfaction to think that, if it is to be, we shall never live to see it. But the question arises, “Isit to be?” Has not this acute perceiver of ours been once more writing down one aspect of the thing astheaspect, without staying for a second or third look at the thing itself? is not this a clever view of a part, but a fantastic view of the whole? has not Mr. Clarke, in a word, been leaving us this appalling picture of our future in much the same spirit as the world-wounded Hamlet left his cruel dowry to Ophelia? This, we are agreed, was indeed the future of the two tendencies, which are represented by the illuded progress of Victoria, the deluded stagnation of New South Wales; but we should add—only if they are left to themselves.

Only if they are left to themselves; and it is our hope, our trust that they will not be. We hope, we believe, that these two countries will learn from one another, each the lesson which the other will be competent to teach: that Victoria will awake to the vital importance of giving her Upper Class a Higher Education to correspond to the Elementary Education that she is giving her Lower Class, and that this Higher Education may be one filled with what we have called the modern historical spirit, with culture, with literary Culture: that New South Wales, leading and instructing Victoria here, havingfirst learned from her example to have the courage to evolve an individual life of her own, will in her turn imbibe the modern scientific spirit, will imbibe what I may call scientific Culture; and thus we shall be brought on to the day in which the people of Victoria and New South Wales shall, from their superficial differences, be united by common qualities better than those of fretfulness, cleverness, perverseness, irritability: For in this people lies the possibility of a really fine civilization, in the marriage in them of emotion and intellect, of poetry and prose.

“Is the goal so far away?Far, how far no tongue can say.Let us dream our dream to-day.”

“Is the goal so far away?

Far, how far no tongue can say.

Let us dream our dream to-day.”

One last word on the last of the three vital questions of the day—Higher Education. When, on 1st April, Mr. Patterson, who presides over the Victorian Education Department, went down to Malmsbury to lay a foundation-stone for the Wesleyan denomination, and favoured us with his views on this question, or rather on the education system as it at present stands in Victoria, we had a hope (a faint hope) that he would do something more than sing the praises of the denominational schools in general, and the state schools (“those majestic monuments to enlightenment,” as he says in his profuse political way, “that adorn and bless even the remotest portions of this colony”)—the state schools in particular. Our hope was destined to disappointment. Mr. Patterson had something to say about “the only legitimate checks on the abuse of political power when conferred upon the masses,” and about “the unscrupulousness, as well as the boldness beyond reason” of that man who “would deny that the rising Australians, for sobriety and unassuming intelligence, would compare favourably with the old stock,” so that he “was bound to record his conviction that the future of Australia would be quite safe in the hands of the Australians.” He had also ready a defence of the secular character of the teaching in the state schools, and some nice little left-handed compliments for our good Wesleyans,et hoc genus omne, but not a word, and apparently not a thought, for the legitimate checks on “the abuses ofeducationalpower when conferred” on a middle-class as unprepared for rule as the worst education in the world can make it. “The Australian public,” he says, “desires, above all things, to ensure good citizenship.” The Australian public careslittle that, in the state schools which it has founded for that especial purpose, dead dry intellectual knowledge is rampant—“that asinine feast of sow-thistles and brambles,” as Milton disgustedly puts it, “which is commonly set before our youth as all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and most docile age”—“inanimate mechanical gerund-grinding,” as Carlyle equally disgustedly called it—gerund-grinding and spiritual cockatoo screeching. Nor yet does it care that, in the denominational schools in which its own children are being brought up, the only supplement to the dead dry educational knowledge of the gerund and the cockatoo, is the merest flimsy smattering of Science caricatured and Literature misunderstood. Let us not, however, despair because our sucking colonial statesmen cannot see more than a few educational inches in front of their noses. Have we not got Dr. Moorhouse, our good Bishop of Melbourne, with us, “a mighty man with broad and sinewy hands?” And does he not, on every available opportunity, batter against the brazen walls of the gerund and the cockatoo, and bid them leave off grinding and screeching, and listen to reason? And here, too, is our good Roman Catholic Bishop of Sydney, Dr. Moran (whom we are all so sorry to think of losing), expressing his “fears that the atmosphere of the public schools is too chilly for a great many of our youth?” Perhaps one of these mornings the Victorian public will wake up, tired of listening to the chatter of the religious and secular dogmatists gathered together like eagles over the carcase of “Religion without Superstition,” and there may arise a curiosity and a care for Higher Education and High Schools; and we will hope, then, that no one will be foolish enough to say that they have been a very doubtful success in New South Wales and in Sydney—in Sydney, the home-elect of the six-fingered and six-toed giant of British Philistinism! And, perhaps, some day poor little Culture, putting off the cumbrous armour with which the gerund and the cockatoo want to load him, taking his sling in his hand and a few smooth stones from the brook, may smite great Goliath in the forehead, and cut off his head, and there be a signal rout of all the Philistines, even unto Gath and Gaza and the utmost borders of the land.

May, 1885.

[Note.—I am tempted to republish here a letter, which I sent lately to theSydney Morning Heraldwherein one aspect of the secondary educationquestion was (more or less unconsciously) being discussed. No one, so far as I am aware, thought the letter worth serious consideration: at any rate no one thought it worth replying to, perhaps the reasons for its insertion were simply those which the “able Editor” assigned to me for the insertion of all his correspondence, namely that it be not either too illiterate or too offensive for publication. Well, I am sure that for my own part I am grateful for even so much toleration as this, and shall strive, as becomes my humble position in this great Australian press, to continue to deserve it.]

A RUGBY FOR NEW SOUTH WALES.(To the Editor of the Herald.)Sir,—In your issue of Saturday, May 9th, Mr. Edwin Bean, of All Saints’ College, Bathurst, brought under serious consideration the suggestion made by your correspondent “A. N.,” as regards what he called “A Rugby for New South Wales.” Anything that a schoolmaster of Mr. Bean’s talent and experience has to say must be interesting to those of us (alas, too few!) to whom the question of secondary education, whether in England or Australia, is a care. He will understand, then, that when I pass over, almost without notice, his criticisms on the individual aspects of the “reproduction” here “of that which is certainly best,” as he says, “in the English Public schools, viz., what is called the Public school spirit”—that the only reason of my doing so is the fear of encroaching too much on your “valuable space.” For, interesting as these criticisms are, the interest which lies in what I take to be the two real points at question here is, I must think, greater: these two points being (1),the growing sense in all competent judges of discontent with the present condition of middle-class secondary education in Australia; (2),the means of ameliorating this condition.As regards the first point, I must here almost take it for granted, in the face of the fact that, so far as I am aware, there is not a single colonial politician who seems to realise that if the education of the People, the rulers of the future, is of vital importance to us all, the education of the Middle-, or, as we should say now, the Upper-class, the rulers of the present, is of importance at least quite as vital. The mass of intelligent men here, then, or, as we are wont to say, the intelligent public, naturally enough, holds the same opinion about upper-class secondary education that their political representatives do. “It is all right,” they say. “What are you grumbling at in these ‘private adventureschools,’ as you call them? They do well enough, we think, for us upper-class people; and if you want your son to have a really first-rate education, why, are there not plenty of fine Denominational schools about—the King’s School, Newington, and so on, and our splendid Grammar-school?” The only answer to “prophesyings” of this sort is, that the Upper-class, as a class, are, whatever they may think themselves, simply abominably educated; their education is, even when judged by its own miserable standard, superficial, incoherent, impalpable; and the sole necessary proof of this is, that a good three-quarters of the knowledge acquired by an average boy at an average private adventure school is of no subsequent use whatever to him, either in the culture of himself or in the prosecution of his business or trade. As for the best Denominational schools where a secondary education is to be obtained, if inadequate, at any rate much superior to that of the private adventure schools, these are out of the reach of the pockets of the average upper-class people, who, even if they appreciate this misfortune (which, as a rule, they do not), are unable to remedy it.Here, then, as it seems to me, lies the difficulty; and we have now to look at the solution which the apparent tendency of things is proffering to us. “If ‘A. N.,’” says Mr. Bean, “had resided in Victoria, he would have learnt that the Public schools (as they are there called) of Geelong and Melbourne are already taking something of the position, and aspiring to fulfil the functions, of the English public schools.... And,” he goes on, “at Paramatta, Stanmore, Bathurst, Bowenfels, and elsewhere, there are already boarding-schools, not private, but belonging to Denominational corporations, which, if fostered by private assistance, will eventually grow into something resembling the Public schools of England.” Mr. Bean is, of course, right. If things progress in the way in which they are now progressing, if our colonial statesmen turn all their attention, and as much of ours as we will give them,tothe education of the People, andfromthat of the Upper-class, then, I say, more and more will the Upper-class be thrown into the hands of schools which are mere private speculations, which are really under no control but that of personal caprice (and the personal caprice, great heavens! of what a stamp of intellectual and spiritual man), which, accordingly, provide an education, even when judged by its own miserable standard,superficial, incoherent, impalpable. And these other schools, I say, the best Denominational and Corporation schools, the Australian Public schools of the future, will become more and more the educational monopoly of the professional and wealthy portion of the Upper-class, just as in England they have become that of the aristocracy and these portions of the Middle-class. These “great schools,” exclaims Mr. Bean justly of the English Public schools—“which have done so much to form the character of the English gentleman.” Of the English gentleman? Yes, and alas! of the English middle-class man, that terrible and pathetic being whom Mr. Arnold has taught us to know as the British Philistine. “I declare,” says General Gordon, the hero-elect of this very class, “I declare I think there is more happiness among these miserable (Soudan) blacks, who have not a meal from day to day, than among our middle-classes. The blacks are glad of a little handful of maize, and live in the greatest discomfort. They have not a strip to cover them; but you do not see them grunting and groaning all day long as we see scores and scores in England, with their wretched dinner-parties and attempts at gaiety where all is hollow and miserable.”What a future for the Upper-class, the by far largest class of Australia! What an appalling solution to an educational difficulty is this:—A small class made up of our squatters, professional men, and wealthy tradesmen, forming a sort of intellectual and spiritual aristocracy; our Upper-class not only itself intellectually and spiritually dull and debased, but debasing and dulling all the better spirits which, in their social ascension, pass into it from the ranks of the People.The thought of such a future to those of us to whom the progress onward and upward, whether of England or of Australia, is a care, is appalling, heartrending, unendurable! There is nothing that we could do, by the devotion of our powers, energies, and means, that we should not, would not, do to prevent it. And we should be, and are, encouraged in our struggle against it by the reflection that the real deep true spirit of the time is against all monopoly, practical and physical, intellectual and spiritual—that once the Upper-class, and after them the People, is aroused to the realisation of the fact that there is a danger here of the formation of a new aristocracy, an aristocracy which, with all its charm (let us suppose) of social manners and of intellectual and spiritual culture (and this issupposing a very great deal), means nothing less than the materialisation, the dulling and the debasing, of everything beneath it—when the Upper-class and the People, I say, are aroused to the realisation of this, we may be sure that they will not rest till they have prevented it.And how, it is asked, is such a future to be prevented? how such a present to be ameliorated? By the formation, not of Denominational and Corporation schools at a charge which places them out of the reach of all save the richer among us, but by the formation of Public State schools that provide a secondary education as good, and, we will hope, better, than that of these others, and at a charge that is within the reach of the average upper-class people. “Yes, but,” at once is answered, “such schools already exist in the High schools, and they have not been a success.” I will not here contest, although I well might, the first assertion; but I cannot, if I would, contest the second. I began by noticing the cause of it, this general satisfaction of “the intelligent public” with the educational pabulum provided for its offspring. I deplore it; I hope for the day of its removal to the gulf of oblivion. In the meantime all that can be done is to strive to assist this “consummation devoutly to be desired” earnestly and perpetually.One word more. No one is more in sympathy (if I may be pardoned for speaking of such an unimportant entity) thanIam, with the efforts of such men as “A. N.” and Mr. Edwin Bean to reproduce, or try to reproduce, in Australia as far as may be, “that which is certainly best in the English Public schools, viz., what is called the Public school spirit.” I have not the least prejudice against English Public schools, at one of the oldest and most conservative of which I was myself educated, and from which I almost entirely derived the circle of my most valued friends; nor yet against the Denominational and Corporation schools here. I have only to remark to Mr. Bean, what I am sure he will at once admit, that if the danger of State schools is the excessive interference of the State, the danger—nay, the absolute abuse—of endowed Public schools is that they become mere feeders of the universities; and in England to such an appalling extent was this the case that the State absolutely had to alter and narrow its Indian Civil Service examinations in order to bring them within reach of the Public schools, which were being quite leftout in the cold! Doubtless, then, the Australian endowed Public schools would have their danger too, a danger which “even no less a thinker than Herbert Spencer,” as Mr. Bean says, has not perhaps, in the application to artificial civilization of the laws of the natural “struggle for existence and survival of the fittest,” quite comprehended.With all apologies to you for the amount of your “valuable space” on which I have encroached in even this far too perfunctory consideration of the matter in hand,I am, etc.,

A RUGBY FOR NEW SOUTH WALES.

(To the Editor of the Herald.)

Sir,—In your issue of Saturday, May 9th, Mr. Edwin Bean, of All Saints’ College, Bathurst, brought under serious consideration the suggestion made by your correspondent “A. N.,” as regards what he called “A Rugby for New South Wales.” Anything that a schoolmaster of Mr. Bean’s talent and experience has to say must be interesting to those of us (alas, too few!) to whom the question of secondary education, whether in England or Australia, is a care. He will understand, then, that when I pass over, almost without notice, his criticisms on the individual aspects of the “reproduction” here “of that which is certainly best,” as he says, “in the English Public schools, viz., what is called the Public school spirit”—that the only reason of my doing so is the fear of encroaching too much on your “valuable space.” For, interesting as these criticisms are, the interest which lies in what I take to be the two real points at question here is, I must think, greater: these two points being (1),the growing sense in all competent judges of discontent with the present condition of middle-class secondary education in Australia; (2),the means of ameliorating this condition.

As regards the first point, I must here almost take it for granted, in the face of the fact that, so far as I am aware, there is not a single colonial politician who seems to realise that if the education of the People, the rulers of the future, is of vital importance to us all, the education of the Middle-, or, as we should say now, the Upper-class, the rulers of the present, is of importance at least quite as vital. The mass of intelligent men here, then, or, as we are wont to say, the intelligent public, naturally enough, holds the same opinion about upper-class secondary education that their political representatives do. “It is all right,” they say. “What are you grumbling at in these ‘private adventureschools,’ as you call them? They do well enough, we think, for us upper-class people; and if you want your son to have a really first-rate education, why, are there not plenty of fine Denominational schools about—the King’s School, Newington, and so on, and our splendid Grammar-school?” The only answer to “prophesyings” of this sort is, that the Upper-class, as a class, are, whatever they may think themselves, simply abominably educated; their education is, even when judged by its own miserable standard, superficial, incoherent, impalpable; and the sole necessary proof of this is, that a good three-quarters of the knowledge acquired by an average boy at an average private adventure school is of no subsequent use whatever to him, either in the culture of himself or in the prosecution of his business or trade. As for the best Denominational schools where a secondary education is to be obtained, if inadequate, at any rate much superior to that of the private adventure schools, these are out of the reach of the pockets of the average upper-class people, who, even if they appreciate this misfortune (which, as a rule, they do not), are unable to remedy it.

Here, then, as it seems to me, lies the difficulty; and we have now to look at the solution which the apparent tendency of things is proffering to us. “If ‘A. N.,’” says Mr. Bean, “had resided in Victoria, he would have learnt that the Public schools (as they are there called) of Geelong and Melbourne are already taking something of the position, and aspiring to fulfil the functions, of the English public schools.... And,” he goes on, “at Paramatta, Stanmore, Bathurst, Bowenfels, and elsewhere, there are already boarding-schools, not private, but belonging to Denominational corporations, which, if fostered by private assistance, will eventually grow into something resembling the Public schools of England.” Mr. Bean is, of course, right. If things progress in the way in which they are now progressing, if our colonial statesmen turn all their attention, and as much of ours as we will give them,tothe education of the People, andfromthat of the Upper-class, then, I say, more and more will the Upper-class be thrown into the hands of schools which are mere private speculations, which are really under no control but that of personal caprice (and the personal caprice, great heavens! of what a stamp of intellectual and spiritual man), which, accordingly, provide an education, even when judged by its own miserable standard,superficial, incoherent, impalpable. And these other schools, I say, the best Denominational and Corporation schools, the Australian Public schools of the future, will become more and more the educational monopoly of the professional and wealthy portion of the Upper-class, just as in England they have become that of the aristocracy and these portions of the Middle-class. These “great schools,” exclaims Mr. Bean justly of the English Public schools—“which have done so much to form the character of the English gentleman.” Of the English gentleman? Yes, and alas! of the English middle-class man, that terrible and pathetic being whom Mr. Arnold has taught us to know as the British Philistine. “I declare,” says General Gordon, the hero-elect of this very class, “I declare I think there is more happiness among these miserable (Soudan) blacks, who have not a meal from day to day, than among our middle-classes. The blacks are glad of a little handful of maize, and live in the greatest discomfort. They have not a strip to cover them; but you do not see them grunting and groaning all day long as we see scores and scores in England, with their wretched dinner-parties and attempts at gaiety where all is hollow and miserable.”

What a future for the Upper-class, the by far largest class of Australia! What an appalling solution to an educational difficulty is this:—A small class made up of our squatters, professional men, and wealthy tradesmen, forming a sort of intellectual and spiritual aristocracy; our Upper-class not only itself intellectually and spiritually dull and debased, but debasing and dulling all the better spirits which, in their social ascension, pass into it from the ranks of the People.The thought of such a future to those of us to whom the progress onward and upward, whether of England or of Australia, is a care, is appalling, heartrending, unendurable! There is nothing that we could do, by the devotion of our powers, energies, and means, that we should not, would not, do to prevent it. And we should be, and are, encouraged in our struggle against it by the reflection that the real deep true spirit of the time is against all monopoly, practical and physical, intellectual and spiritual—that once the Upper-class, and after them the People, is aroused to the realisation of the fact that there is a danger here of the formation of a new aristocracy, an aristocracy which, with all its charm (let us suppose) of social manners and of intellectual and spiritual culture (and this issupposing a very great deal), means nothing less than the materialisation, the dulling and the debasing, of everything beneath it—when the Upper-class and the People, I say, are aroused to the realisation of this, we may be sure that they will not rest till they have prevented it.

And how, it is asked, is such a future to be prevented? how such a present to be ameliorated? By the formation, not of Denominational and Corporation schools at a charge which places them out of the reach of all save the richer among us, but by the formation of Public State schools that provide a secondary education as good, and, we will hope, better, than that of these others, and at a charge that is within the reach of the average upper-class people. “Yes, but,” at once is answered, “such schools already exist in the High schools, and they have not been a success.” I will not here contest, although I well might, the first assertion; but I cannot, if I would, contest the second. I began by noticing the cause of it, this general satisfaction of “the intelligent public” with the educational pabulum provided for its offspring. I deplore it; I hope for the day of its removal to the gulf of oblivion. In the meantime all that can be done is to strive to assist this “consummation devoutly to be desired” earnestly and perpetually.

One word more. No one is more in sympathy (if I may be pardoned for speaking of such an unimportant entity) thanIam, with the efforts of such men as “A. N.” and Mr. Edwin Bean to reproduce, or try to reproduce, in Australia as far as may be, “that which is certainly best in the English Public schools, viz., what is called the Public school spirit.” I have not the least prejudice against English Public schools, at one of the oldest and most conservative of which I was myself educated, and from which I almost entirely derived the circle of my most valued friends; nor yet against the Denominational and Corporation schools here. I have only to remark to Mr. Bean, what I am sure he will at once admit, that if the danger of State schools is the excessive interference of the State, the danger—nay, the absolute abuse—of endowed Public schools is that they become mere feeders of the universities; and in England to such an appalling extent was this the case that the State absolutely had to alter and narrow its Indian Civil Service examinations in order to bring them within reach of the Public schools, which were being quite leftout in the cold! Doubtless, then, the Australian endowed Public schools would have their danger too, a danger which “even no less a thinker than Herbert Spencer,” as Mr. Bean says, has not perhaps, in the application to artificial civilization of the laws of the natural “struggle for existence and survival of the fittest,” quite comprehended.

With all apologies to you for the amount of your “valuable space” on which I have encroached in even this far too perfunctory consideration of the matter in hand,

I am, etc.,

There is no one whose opinion on this question of secondary education is more worthy of our attention than that of Mr. Matthew Arnold. Our debt of gratitude to him for the general advancement of the Idea of Culture, not only at home, but everywhere where our language is spoken, is so great that we have begun to accept it almost as an impersonal fact. The work which he did long ago, and has never ceased to recapitulate, for the cause of middle-class secondary education, can only be appreciated by those whose attention has been turned to it more especially. This, I hope, will hold me excused to him for quoting here from a letter of his to me, some expressions of his, and the more so as they seem to show something like a modification of the view he has so far publicly enunciated. “I think,” he says, “I see signs that the education question is likely to present itself at no distant date in this wise: ‘Shall the majority give public money for any education except the education necessary for every citizen?’ The education necessary for every citizen will be somewhat extended in scope, but no account will be taken of the higher culture hitherto deemed necessary for a leisured and governing class, and to which so great a mass of endowment has been made to contribute. On the Continent of Europe a great change will be produced if this new view prevails, for the endowments have in general been seized by the State, and the State has directly subsidised secondary and superior instruction. In England it has not, but the endowments which these instructions enjoyed have been left to them. Probably they will not be taken away, but further public aid will hardly be given. Nor do I think it will be given in the Colonies; and as there the endowment of secondary and superior instruction is inconsiderable, these instructions will be, as they are now, at a great disadvantage.The wealthiest people will send their sons to be educated in England; private schools will, of course, exist locally, but I do not think they will have influence enough to create a class and a power out of those they train. Society will thus be, on the whole, much more homogeneous than with the old nations of Europe; but, as in the United States, this condition of things will have its own dangers and drawbacks. The best way to meet them is for individuals to keep up a love of genuine culture in themselves, and so to create an even larger force in the nation to favour it.” Of the truth, or very probable truth, of the educational future here drawn out, there can, alas, be little question. M. Renan, whose work for France can well be paralleled with that of Mr. Arnold for us, takes an even gloomier view. We may count ourselves lucky, he says, if Democracy will consent, not to encourage, but to tolerate independent study. Democracy, he says, again, is the advent of universal mediocrity, of that most terrible of mediocrities, the aggressive. “Great qualities,” cried Empedocles, facing the same problem as we do,

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