THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 B&UWISSSXXH XJ JBWaaBIBlWBk
 
 /3fcv— &* 
 
 '■£$
 
 TWO SHILLINGS AND SIXPEJN 
 
 Australian 
 
 Essays. 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANCIS W. L. ADAMS. 
 
 AUTHOR ()/ - 
 "LEICESTER, AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY:' 
 
 Contents : 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 MELBOURNE AND HER CIVILIZATION. 
 
 THE POETRY OF ADAM LINDSAY GORDON 
 
 THE SALVATION ARMY. 
 
 SYDNEY AND HER CIVILIZATION. 
 
 CULTURE. 
 
 "DAWNWARDS:" A DIALOGUE. 
 
 Printed and Published by 
 
 ■.i.uam Ingi.is & Co., 37, 3*. & 39 Flinders m-rei 
 
 MELBOURNE. 
 
 London: Griffith, Farran & Co. , 
 j«86. 
 
 W 
 
 -*<■„.*
 
 
 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 

 
 A')' THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 Leicester, an Autobiography. (Redway, Publisher, York Street, 
 ( ovenl ( harden, London : 6s.) 
 
 Poems. (Elliot Stock. Publisher, Paternoster Row, London; $s.) 
 Tin BRUCES, A Novel. (Shortly). 
 
 Modern English Poets. (Shortly). 
 Voyage <>n the Adelaide. (Shortly).
 
 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANCIS W. L. ADAMS. 
 
 A UTHOR OF 
 ' ' LE/CES TEN, AX All TOBIOGRA PHY." 
 
 Melbourne: 
 
 William Inglis & Co., Flinders Street East. 
 London Publishers: Griffith, Farran & Co. 
 
 MIX TCI. xxxvi.
 
 MELBOURNE : 
 
 WILLIAM INGLIS AND CO., PRINTERS, 
 
 FLINDERS STREET EAST.
 
 
 
 X-> 
 
 TO 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 IN ENGLAND. 
 
 ' Master, with this I send you, as a boy 
 that watches from below some cross-bow bird 
 sivoop on his quarry carried up aloft, 
 and cries a cry of victory to his flight 
 with sheer joy of achievement — So to you 
 I send my voice across the sundering sea, 
 weak, lost within the winds and surfy waves, 
 but with all glad acknowledgment fulfilled 
 and honour to you and to sovran Truth /' 
 
 January, 1SS6. 
 
 633099
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Preface - 
 
 Melbourne and Her Civilization 
 The Poetry of Adam Lindsay Gordon 
 The Salvation Army 
 Sydney and Her Civilization - 
 Culture ----- 
 " Dawnwards," a Dialogue 
 Introduction 
 
 I. - ... 
 
 II. - 
 
 III. . . . - . 
 
 IV. - 
 
 v. 
 
 VI. ----- 
 
 Page. 
 
 ix. 
 
 I 
 
 II 
 
 27 
 5° 
 73 
 
 90 
 
 97 
 
 105 
 
 114 
 
 122 
 
 13S 
 146
 
 JIKVJKW . 
 "AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS."* 
 
 This little work contains matter of high in- 
 terest and importance not only on topics purely 
 Australian, but ou some of the vital questions 
 that are more or less agitating the minds of 
 thinking men throughout the civilised world. 
 Naturally, however, the portions of the work 
 which refer more immediately to the aspects of 
 Australian life are those which invite, and 
 (thanks to a fascinating style) secure, our 
 keenest attention ; and we may as well avow at 
 once that we have not hitherto met with any 
 work which displays so great a power of seizing 
 upon the special characteristics of the social 
 life of these communities as is shown in Mr. 
 Adams's modest volume. The writer appears 
 to possess in a high degree the faculty of obser- 
 vating, and tbat still higher power of discrimi- 
 nation among the results of observation which 
 enable the student of character to reach and 
 grasp that which alone is truly typical. This 
 is the essence of the gift on which critics be- 
 stow, and rightly bestow, the name of 
 "insight," and if there is anyone who 
 is not perfectly certain that he knows 
 the meaning of the term, as used 
 in modern criticism, he could not do 
 belter than read Mr. Adams's essays on the 
 different aspects of civilisation in Sydnoy and 
 Melbourne. We are by no means disposed to 
 commie ourselves to a unit'ona ftgreppa<ept with 
 all that Mr. Adams- has to say about us, nor is 
 it possible for such of us who look upon our- 
 selves as Australians to read these essays 
 without occasionally feeling that the author's 
 homilies are delivered a little too much dv haut 
 en baa. The tone of many passages indicates 
 somewhat of that " condescension in 
 foreigners" which, in another connection, 
 roused the wrath of even the amiable Lowell. 
 However, we are accustomed to that sort of 
 thing, and those of us who are Englishmen- 
 plus Australians are in the habit of avenging 
 ourselves by mentally registering it as a token 
 of that "insularity" which it is our pride to 
 have in a great degree thrown off. In spite of 
 this fault — which it seems almost ungenerous 
 to mention in view of so much genuine merit — 
 no Australian who is anxious to see himself as 
 others see him can afford to neglect so true an 
 exposition of the special characteristics of 
 society in these colonies as is - to be found iu 
 the essays under consideration. 
 
 But apart from the articles which deal with 
 moral and social phases and questions, Aus- 
 tralians owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Adams 
 for hia attempt— which we consider a 
 successful one — "to bring out the real, deep, 
 true significance of the work of Adam Lindsay 
 Gordon." As a literary estimate, as a true 
 criticism, it stands alone in Australian litera- 
 ture. We say advisedly Australian literature, 
 for as the work is on Australian subjects, and 
 waa written, printed, and published in Aus- 
 tralia, and, moreover, as the author professes 
 in his preface — which preface, by the way, the 
 volume woull be better without — to be a 
 member of the Australian Press, we think we 
 may consider the book as a contribution to our 
 literature, and may also, contrary to our usage 
 as regards things colonial, be proud of it as 
 such. 
 
 * "Australian Essays." By Francis W. L. 
 Adams. Me. bourne: W. Inglis and 'Jo.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 +-++- 
 
 IT would be absurd to suppose that it will not seem clear, to 
 whatever readers this little book may find here, that one of 
 the principal characters of the Dialogue is a man for whom 
 we all, I think, feel more interest, admiration, and respect than 
 any other among us. That this is so in reality, I must beg to 
 deny, and I hope that, when I state that I neither have myself, 
 nor know anyone who has, the honour of his acquaintance — 
 nay, that I have never even seen him — I hope that I shall 
 stand acquitted of all charges of personality. As for the other 
 characters, there will too, I daresay, be found people ready to 
 declare who are the originals, and to explain everything which 
 is inconsistent with their theory by ascribing it to designed 
 mystification on the part of the Author. For this, it seems, is 
 an occupation like another. The Author believes that so 
 much of a man's life as is public belongs to the public, and is 
 at the fair use of the public's literary analysts, videlicet the 
 critics, and that it is by no means an unfair use, to take such a 
 life and freely present it in that individual form which it 
 actually has to us in our moments of imagination and reflection. 
 It seems, then, to him foolish, in considering, (to take it in the 
 form of a well-known example), a book like D'Israeli's "Lothair" 
 or "Endymion," to be trying to identify the characters with 
 actual men. D'Israeli simply uses as much of actual men and 
 actual events as he requires for his criticism of the time he is 
 portraying, and is careless of the rest. I see here no attempt 
 at mystification. I simply see an artist picking out the 
 choicest materials he has to hand. 
 
 As regards both the Dialogue and the Essays, I would like 
 to point out that they are professedly didactic, and, as such, 
 are of course cast into the form which I believe most calculated 
 to achieve their object. I am sure that I have neither the 
 intention nor the wish to impugn the competency of the 
 australian Press to deal with things australian. I am myself
 
 X PREFACE. 
 
 a member, a very humble member of it, and am quite ready to 
 do myself the sincere pleasure of praising it. At the same 
 time I cannot blind myself to the fact that its criticism is not 
 (let us say) ideal. The "business of criticism," says the first 
 of living critics, " is simply to know the best that is known and 
 thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to 
 create a current of true and fresh ideas." Well now, I cannot, 
 I say, look upon this australian Press, of which I am so humble 
 a member, as the creator of such a current ; and, (1 will make 
 a clean breast of it at once !), bright and charming as I have 
 always found him in the " Echoes of the Week" and places of 
 like resort, I have viewed the triumphal approach of Mr. Sala 
 to us, and his even more triumphal progress among us, with 
 (as someone will presently be saying of me) — " with a jaundiced 
 eye." And why? The truth, the real truth, is, (May I be 
 forgiven for saying so?), that I do not believe that even Mr. Sala 
 can help us australian pressmen, (since I dare to place myself 
 in a company which includes such stupendous personages as 
 "The Vagabond" and the Editor of the Melbourne Herald), 
 to create that " current of true and fresh ideas" to which we 
 have alluded. Truth, alas, is the private property of no man 
 — not even of Mr. George Augustus Sala. And I confess to 
 finding myself at the point of wishing that, even for mere 
 variety's sake, we should hear more than we do of the ideas of 
 such personages as Goethe, Emerson, Renan, Arnold, and so 
 on: writers, of course, familiar to us all, and whom I, at any rate 
 must still continue to consider as not wholly exhausted. They 
 may not have the depth of thought, the accuracy of detail, 
 the exquisite tact of expression which distinguish the genial 
 litterateur, and make his work, as one of my fellow pressmen 
 said the other day, "epoch-making," but I really do stili 
 continue — I must still continue — to think that, despite all 
 these disadvantages, they are still capable of helping us a little 
 to that critical haven where our souls would be — to the source 
 of "a current of true and fresh ideas." 
 
 September, 1885.
 
 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 MELBOURNE, AND HER CIVILIZATION, 
 
 AS THEY STRIKE AN ENGLISHMAN. 
 
 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 cf 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 
 
 i;
 
 2 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 Melbourne is made up of curious elements. There is some- 
 thing 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 metro- 
 politan tone. The look on the faces of her inhabitants is the 
 metropolitan look. These people live quickly : such as life pre- 
 sents 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 metro- 
 politan 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 civiliza- 
 tion answer the requirements of a really fine civilization ? what 
 scope in it is there (as Mr. Arnold would say) for the satisfac- 
 tion 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 dis- 
 tinguishes 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
 
 .MELBOURNE, AND HER CIVILIZATION. 3 
 
 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 destroy- 
 ing 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 Aus- 
 tralian 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 clergy- 
 man of the Church of England should in this colony look
 
 4 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 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 interven- 
 tion ot the State. You have nationalized your railways, 
 and are attempting, as much as possible, to nationalize your 
 land.* 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 
 
 J The remark is, of course, general. Most of Victoria, as we all know, is unfortunately 
 
 definitely sold.
 
 MELBOURNE, AND HER CIVILIZATION. 5 
 
 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?" " Ok 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 sell- 
 ing, 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 : 
 
 " \ ou 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 build- 
 ings, 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, no7c>, 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.
 
 6 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 But the matter does not end here. When we took the 
 instance of the books and the people "at the sign of the rain- 
 bow," 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 civiliza- 
 tion 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
 
 MELBOURNE, AND HER CIVILIZATION. 7 
 
 casts of ancient and modem 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 cf 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 applica- 
 tion. You would talk of Eederalism, 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, what- 
 ever 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 Tune-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.
 
 S AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 We cannot tell, we can only speculate as to what another fifty 
 — forty — thirty years will actually bring forth. 
 
 Free-trade — Federalism —Higher Fducation, 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 Austra- 
 lian [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 necessariitm, 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
 
 MELBOURNE, AND HER CIVILIZATION. 9 
 
 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 ques- 
 tion, 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, 
 etcerera, 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 Mel- 
 bourne. 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 f with
 
 IO 
 
 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 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 ami 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.
 
 THE POETRY OF ADAM LINDSAY GORDON. II 
 
 THE POETRY OF ADAM LINDSAY GORDON. 
 
 " In the whole range of English literature," says an Australian 
 critic reviewing the complete edition of Gordon's poems, " in 
 the whole range of English literature there have been few poets 
 possessed of a finer lyrical faculty than Adam Lindsay Gordon. 
 
 . . ' Ashtaroth,' " continues our critic now warm at his 
 work, " 'Ashtaroth' is worthy to rank with any of Tennyson's 
 songs, and is far more musical than the best of Browning's." 
 Then there is " the beauty of his ballad poetry, such as 
 ' Fauconshawe' and ' Rippling Water,' which are perfect of their 
 style;" and so on in the same strain, more or less, until the 
 reader is surprised that our critic ends up with no further claim 
 for his poet than that he " deserves to be ranked with the 
 genuine poets of his generation." One does not propose to 
 criticise, verbally, criticism of this sort : it would be unkind to 
 do so, and, above all, it would be useless. This is a native 
 melody in the style of " Rule Britannia :" " Australia, and 
 especially Victoria, is great and therefore her poet must be great 
 also. Let us say that Melbourne is the equal of any English 
 city save London, and Gordon the equal of any English poet 
 save Shakspere and Milton ! " 
 
 Now let us hear what another Australian critic, one who 
 cares more about finding out the real deep true significance of 
 Gordon and his poetry than of glorifying the amour-propre of 
 this class or of that : let us hear what Mr. Marcus Clarke has 
 to say. "Written as they were" (as Gordon's poems were) 
 " at odd times in leisure moments of a stirring and adventurous 
 life, it is not to be wondered at if they are unequal and 
 unfinished. The astonishment of those who knew the man, 
 and can gauge the capacity of this city to foster poetic instinct, 
 is, that such work was ever produced here at all." — What a 
 different tone is this from that of our first and enthusiastic 
 critic ! " Unequal and unfinished" — "astonishment that sueh 
 work was ever produced here at all/" But this is not all that Mr. 
 Clarke has to say about Gordon's poetry : he has also to notice
 
 12 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 what influence was at work in it, and (most important of all !) 
 what is its real deep true significance. He talks of Gordon 
 "owning nothing but a love for horsemanship and a head full 
 of Browning and Shelley," and follows this up by saying that 
 "the influence of Browning and of Swinburne"' (who, as we all 
 know, has been, creatively and demonstratively, the chief 
 prophet in his generation of the poet who, he likes to think, is 
 ' beloved above all other poets, being beyond all other poets — 
 in one word, and the only proper word, — divine') — "the 
 influence of Browning and of Swinburne upon the writer's taste 
 is plain. There is plainly visible also, however, a keen sense 
 of natural beauty and a manly admiration for healthy living." 
 Well, and the conclusion of the whole matter? " The student 
 of these unpretending volumes will be repaid for his labour. 
 He will find in them something very like the beginnings of a 
 national school of Australian poetry." 
 
 Let us hasten to offer up our small tribute of praise and 
 thanks to Mr. Clarke for his critical sagacity here, and let us 
 venture to hope that the " Poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon" 
 may go down to posterity accompanied always by this small 
 " Preface" of Mr. Clarke, who both "knew the man" and was 
 yet the first to appreciate this aspect of his work. 
 
 What, however, Mr. Clarke has to say about the facts of 
 Gordon's life is, at best, inaccurate. It is Mr. Sutherland to 
 whom our gratitude is due here, gratitude for having discovered 
 for us all the details of the poet's life which it is necessary for 
 us to know.* 
 
 What, then, remains for any other critic to do ? There 
 remains to him, as it seems to me, the task of doing what Mr. 
 Clarke tells us he did not propose to do, "of criticising these 
 volumes," and also of trying, as befits one who comes later, 
 and to whom, therefore, the events of the past have fallen into 
 that symmetry and proper porportion that the events of the 
 present can scarcely ever fall into : of trying, I say, to bring 
 out more clearly (one aspect of which he has done little more 
 than indicate), the real, deep, true significance of the poet's 
 work ; in a word, of trying to understand, instead of being 
 " astonished" at it. 
 
 The first thing to notice about Gordon's poetry is, that it is 
 almost all in regular and rymed rhythms. There is not a line 
 
 * Melbourne Review, October, 1883. (No. 32.)
 
 THE POETRY OF ADAM LINDSAY GORDON. I J 
 
 of blank verse in it. Now, a " fine faculty" for regular and 
 rymed rhythms is by no means a synonym for a " fine lyrical 
 faculty." Shelley, oar greatest master in poetry of pure 
 melody, has a " fine faculty " for regular and rymed rhythms, 
 but has also a fine faculty for irregular rhythms : lines in 
 which the regular rhythm is broken, in order that a more 
 subtle melody may be expressed, are frequent in him. In Mr. 
 Swinburne such lines are rare — he has a fine faculty for regular 
 and rymed rhythms, but his faculty for irregular rhythms is (let 
 us say) less fine. Gordon, who is the disciple of this first side 
 of Mr. Swinburne's technical talent, who, in his turn, is a 
 disciple of the first side of Shelley's — Gordon, I say, is in this 
 respect to Mr. Swinburne what Mr. Swinburne is to Shelley. 
 
 Mr. Hammersley, one of the few survivors of that peculiar 
 phase of colonial and Victorian feeling which produced the 
 poetry of Gordon, and who " may say he knew him intimately" 
 — tells us* how he " was often amused to hear him quote from 
 the poets, and his recitations used to make me laugh outright. 
 One day I said, ' Hang it, Gordon, you can write good poetry, 
 but you can't read.' " What was the matter with his "reading," 
 then? He used to "read" in "a sing-song fashion." Mr. 
 Woods, too, tells usf that " Gordon had an odd way of 
 reciting poetry, and his delivery was monotonous ; but," he 
 adds, " his way of emphasising the beautiful portions of what 
 he recited was charming from its earnestness." Gordon's 
 criticism on his own verses was : " They don't ring so badly 
 after all, old fellow, do they?" He had no faculty for 
 irregular rhythms. He cannot, then, be said to possess a 
 " fine lyrical faculty ;" he possessed a fine faculty for regular 
 and rymed rhythms. (As for his rymes, as rymes, they are 
 as a rule excellent, although there is often too little of the 
 "poet or prophet," as he says, in them, and too much of the 
 "jingler of rymes," the dealer in "verse-jingle chimes.") 
 Since, however, this faculty of his is a fine faculty, it must not 
 be described as (in the usual and bad sense of the word) 
 imitative. There are, I think, passages in him that Byron 
 might have written ("To my Sister"), that Lord Tennyson 
 might have written ("The Road to Avernus," scene x.), that 
 Mr. Swinburne might have written (" A Dedication "), and 
 the latter are frequent. In no other poets, save Wordsworth 
 and the earlier works of Mr. Arnold, do I find precisely this 
 
 "Victorian Review, May, 1884. (No. 55). ^Melbourne Review, April, 1884. ("No. 34)*
 
 14 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 same sort of (shall I say) parallelism of feeling and expression 
 on certain subjects that 1 do in Mr. Swinburne and Gordon. 
 But it is, I think, very open to question whether Gordon 
 would have grown, as Mr. Arnold has, into a purely distinctive 
 6tyle of his own. Gordon is terribly lacking in variety ; to live 
 with a close study of him for several days is one of the most 
 trying of critical tasks. " My rymes," he asks — 
 
 " My rymes, are they stale ? If my metre 
 is varied, one chime rings through all ; 
 one chime — though I sing more or sing less, 
 I have but one string to my lute." 
 
 I doubt, I say, whether under any circumstances Gordon 
 would have produced, as Mr. Hammersley thought, " poems 
 worthy to be ranked with some of the masterpieces of the 
 English language." He had not patience enough, he had not 
 clear-sightedness enough ! " A more dare-devil rider," says 
 Mr. Hammersley, " never crossed a horse. . . As a steeple- 
 chase rider he was, of course, in the very first rank, and his 
 name is indelibly associated with many of the most famous 
 chases run in Victoria, although in my opinion, and I think in 
 that of many good judges too, he was deficient in what is 
 termed 'good hands,' and when it came to a finish was far 
 behind a Mount or a Watson." (And, considering his short- 
 sightedness, which Mr. Woods designates as "painful," this is 
 not to be wondered at). It is the same with his poetry. All 
 in his poetry that is good has been done at a rush ; the rest is 
 inferior, poor, and sometimes quite worthless. He has little, if 
 any, sense of real artistic workmanship either in whole or in 
 parts : " he is deficient in what is termed ' good hands.' ' 
 Take, for instance, his dramatic lyric, "Ashtaroth." It is 
 worth reading. There are two beautiful songs in it, " On 
 the Current," and "Oh ! days and years departed." There 
 are a few fine passages, a few fine dramatic touches, in it, and 
 one splendid outburst of Orion's (" I hate thee not, thy grievous 
 plight"), but the poem, taken as a whole is, I say, worth 
 reading. Many of the speeches are weak, and some are 
 not poetry at all, but rymed prose, and bad at that. A sus- 
 tained effort, such as a piece like this requires, was impossible 
 to him. I say nothing of the ludicrous attempt at an adapta- 
 tion of Faust, Mephistopheles and Margarete, which is the 
 basis of the poem : I merely remark that, judged by its own 
 poor standard of judgment, it is quite a failure. Perhaps
 
 THE POETRY OF ADAM LINDSAY GORDON. 1 5 
 
 some day we shall have a selection from the poet's work, from 
 which what is worthless will be eliminated, in order that all 
 our attention may be fixed on what is good, and perhaps the 
 selector will have the courage to dismiss all this poem, save 
 some dozen or so of extracts, into the gulf of oblivion or 
 an appendix. Encumbered as Gordon at present is with such 
 an amount of worthless work, there is a danger that much of 
 what is good may perish also. 
 
 All his poetry that is good, I say, has been done at a rush. 
 The dramatic touches in it are as frequent as they are fine. 
 Take, for instance, this from the " Rhyme of Joyous Guard." 
 —Lancelot, old, worn-out, feeling that " there is nothing good 
 for him under the sun but to perish as " (his bright past) " has 
 perished," is thinking of the close of his career and Arthur's : 
 of the discovery of his amour with Guinevere, his siege in 
 Joyous Guard, his encounters with " brave Gawain," whom he 
 virtually slew, and then "the crime of Modred," and "the 
 king by the knave's hand stricken " — 
 
 " And the once-loved knight, was he there to save 
 that knightly king who that knighthood gave? 
 Ah, Christ I will he greet me as knight or knave 
 in the day when the dust shall quicken ?" 
 
 This is splendid! And, as I have said, it by no means 
 stands alone. As a set-off against this excellence of his, is the 
 defect of prolixity. Byron had it, but Byron was an unsur- 
 passed improvises, not an artist. Like, too, his technical 
 master of the " Poems and Ballads" when he gets hold of a 
 regular or rymed rhythm that pleases him, Gordon will go on 
 making it "ring," listening as the "verse-jingle chimes," 
 till we are all quite weary of it. He is regardless of what Goethe 
 calls "the aesthetic whole." Indeed, it may justly be said that 
 few, very few, of his poems are " aesthetic wholes " at all, but 
 only passages. 
 
 So much, then, for the outward form of his poetry. We 
 have now to consider what is the significance to us of his life 
 and work, of his personality, and of his "criticism of life." 
 
 In the first place, let us begin by stating that Gordon has a 
 personality. Mr. Hamtnersley tells us how "at times Gordon 
 was the strangest, most weird, mysterious man I ever saw, and 
 I could not help feeling almost afraid of him, and yet there 
 was a fascination about him that made me like to see him." 
 There was the fascination of his converse. " He was one of
 
 I 6 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 the few men I have known in the colonies," asseverates Mr. 
 Hammersley, " that never made me tire of listening to him." 
 And there was the fascination of his individuality : " His wild 
 haunting eye," "a look something like what is termed the evil 
 eye." (This reminds one of what Mr. Clarke has to say about 
 "the dominant note of Australian scenery: Weird Melan- 
 choly.") Mr. Woods' whole article bears witness to this 
 personal fascination of Gordon's. Well, it is the same in his 
 poetry : I mean, that it is the same as Mr. Hammersley means. 
 There is attraction in Gordon. We want to go to see any- 
 thing that he has had to do with. We seek out his grave and 
 brood over it.* He is the Australian fellow to Baudelaire and 
 James Thomson, the last martyrs, let us hope, to our terrible 
 period of transition from the Old World into the New, from 
 Medievalism into Modernity. There is attraction in Gordon. 
 We should like to have seen and known the original of 
 Laurence Raby, of Maurice, of the man of the " Sea-spray 
 and Smoke-Drift," and "Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes." 
 He is an individuality, and a modern and a colonial in- 
 dividuality. He looks at life as it is, not as it is repre- 
 sented. 
 
 " In thy grandeur, oh sea ! we acknowledge, 
 in thy fairness, oh earth ! we confess, 
 hidden truths that are taught in no college, 
 hidden songs that no parchment express." 
 
 And, as for the pedants of the Old World, why ! (as we know) 
 
 " They are slow, very slow, in discerning 
 that book-lore and wisdom are twain." 
 
 Here, then, is the first charm in Gordon, and his work ; they 
 are modern, they represent the main-current of the age, not 
 some side-water or back-water, that are perhaps nice enough 
 in their way, but still — side-waters or back-waters, and otily 
 side-waters or back-waters. 
 
 Gordon and his work are modern, but not wholly modern ; 
 he belongs, as I have said, to a period of transition. Like 
 
 * I may parenthetically remark that the idea that Gordon is buried in St. Kilda 
 Cemetery is incorrect, as my doing so may perhaps save others from the trouble of a 
 fruitless pilgrimage there, not to say an examination of all the Cemetery books. He is 
 buried in Brighton Cemetery. The tombstone is a block of blue-stone, topped with a 
 shattered column crowned with a laurel-wreath. The four sides of the block have 
 marble tablets let into them, on which are severally written : " The Poet Gordon. Died 
 June 24, 1870, aged 37 years ;" " Sea-Spray and Smoke-Drift ;" " Bush Ballads and 
 (ialloping Rhymes ;" Ashtaroth." The Cemetery is wooded and wild, the vegetation, 
 including the grave-flowers, stragglingly luxuriant. Not altogether an unfitting 
 " sleeping place " for him.
 
 THE POETRY OF ADAM LINDSAY GORDON. 1 7 
 
 Mary Magdalene, he feels that " they have taken away my 
 Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him." He has 
 lost the Old, and he has not won the New Faith. He is a 
 poet of the twilight and the dawn. " On this earth so rough," 
 he says, 
 
 " on this earth so rough, we know quite enough, 
 and, 7 sometimes fancy, a little too much," 
 
 and so, we have to suffer ! Burns, Byron, Leopardi, Heine, 
 Musset, Baudelaire, Clough, Thomson — greater and lesser, this 
 is true of them all ! Their early life is embittered by it, their 
 later life made desperate. " Years back," says Gordon, 
 
 " Years back I believed a little, 
 and as I believed I spoke." 
 
 Years back lie could utter prayer, years back when he was a 
 child. He cannot utter it now : " For prayer must die since 
 hope is dead." Now he can only wonder 
 
 " Is there nothing real but confusion? 
 is nothing certain but death ? 
 is nothing fair, save illusion ? 
 
 is nothing good that has breath ? . 
 
 " I can hardly vouch," he says, again, 
 
 " I can hardly vouch 
 for the truth of what little I see. . . . 
 On earth there's little worth a sigh, 
 and nothing worth a tear." 
 
 But ah, 
 
 " the restless throbbings and burnings 
 
 that hope unsatisfied brings, 
 the weary longings and yearnings 
 
 for the mystical better things. . . . 
 There are others toiling and straining 
 
 'neath burdens graver than mine — 
 They are weary, yet uncomplaining — 
 
 I know it, yet I repine. 
 I know it, how time will ravage, 
 
 how time will level, and yet 
 I long with a longing savage, 
 
 I regret with a fierce regret. 
 
 We are sorely tired, " we, with our bodies thus weakly, with 
 hearts hard and dangerous." 
 
 " We have suffered and striven 
 till we have grown reckless of pain, 
 though feeble of heart, and of brain."
 
 iS AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 Who has expressed the malady of our time better? "Our 
 burdens are heavy, our natures weak," he says again. We 
 cannot escape from them : 
 
 " Round about one fiery centre 
 
 wayward thoughts like moths revolve ;" 
 
 We cannot write a description of a horse-race without letting 
 them come in, without calling our description by a name ex- 
 pressive of them — " Ex fumo dare lucem :" 
 
 " Till I lie good is brought forth from evil, 
 
 as day is brought forth from night. — 
 Vain dreams ! for our fathers cherished 
 
 high hopes in the days that were ; 
 and these men wondered and perished, 
 
 nor better than these we fare ; 
 And our due at least is their due, 
 
 they fought against odds and fell ; 
 " En avant les enfants perdus /" 
 
 We fight against odds as well." 
 
 Enfant perdu: so the dying Heine calls himself. Enfants 
 perdus, that is what they were ! The storms of our terrible 
 period of transition raged about them: " they could not wait 
 their passing," as Arnold says — 
 
 " they could not wait their passing, they are dead." 
 
 " I am slow," says Gordon, 
 
 " I am slow in learning, and swift in 
 
 forgetting, and I have grown 
 so weary with long sand-sifting ! 
 
 T'wards the mist, where the breakers moan 
 the rudderless bark is drifting, 
 through the shoals of the quick-sands shifting- - 
 In the end shall the night-rack lifting, 
 
 discover the shores unknown?" 
 
 The idea of killing himself seems to have been with him from 
 almost the first. It was not " bitter " to him : " man in his 
 blindness" taught so; but, to him that 
 
 " mystic hour 
 when the wings of the shadowy angel lower," 
 
 was not without its charm. "When I first heard the sad 
 news," Mr. Hammersley tells us, " I was not the least sur- 
 prised. I really expected that what did happen would 
 happen." We all know Gordon's poem, " De Te." The last 
 two verses of it are the best criticism that we have to offer "of
 
 THE POETRY OF ADAM LINDSAY GORDON. 1 9 
 
 him,"' "found dead in the heather, near his home, with a bullet 
 from his own rifle in his brain :" 
 
 " Xo man may shirk the allotted work, 
 
 the deed to do, the death to die ; 
 at least I think so — neither Turk, 
 
 nor Jew, nor infidel am I — 
 And yet I wonder when I try 
 
 to solve one question, may or must, 
 and shall I solve it by-and-bye, 
 
 beyond the dark, beneath the dust ? 
 / trust so, and I only trust. 
 
 " Aye what they will, such trifles kill. 
 
 Comrade, for one good deed of yours, 
 your history shall not help to fill 
 
 the mouths of many brainless boors. 
 It may be death absolves or cures 
 
 the sin of life. 'Twere hazardous 
 to assert so. If the sin endures, 
 
 say only, ' God, 7cho has judged him thus, 
 be merciful to him, and us:' " 
 
 And his work, his "criticism of life?" Is there nothing in 
 it but this "trust and only trust?" There is more, much 
 more! "There is plainly visible," says Mr. Clarke, "a keen 
 sense of natural beauty, and a manly admiration for healthy 
 living. . . a very clear perception of the loveliness of duty 
 and of labour." Let us see if this, too, is so, or if any 
 qualification of this remark is needed ; and, if so, what quali- 
 fication. 
 
 Gordon's life and work were a failure. He himself would, I 
 am sure, have been the first to admit it and have assigned the 
 cause, and rightly, to bad luck in general and certain failings 
 in himself in particular. Is it not bad luck to be born into an 
 age that makes of its poets its martyrs ? Gordon struggled 
 and schemed. He was a livery-stable keeper, a landowner, a 
 member of assembly, a keeper of racehorses, and a failure in 
 all. It was only as jockey and stockrider that he was a success 
 —that is to say, an object of admiration to others and of 
 happiness to himself. "He sometimes," says Mr. Woods, 
 " compared the lot of a bushman with that of other states of 
 mankind, saying that it was in many ways preferable to any 
 one," and for himself he was right. Let us not lament his 
 failure in what he was not meant to be a success. Gordon, 
 happy in life and love, might well have become at best a 
 dilettante, at worst a materialized blockhead, he has so little
 
 20 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 patience, so little clear-sightedness ! Perhaps it is, after all, 
 better as it is. The axe cuts down the sandal tree, and the 
 tree sheds forth its perfume. 
 
 " Our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought." 
 
 We love a poet more for what he lias suffered than what lie has 
 done, and yet ultimately, if we will only see it, what he suffers 
 and what he does are the same. As boys we love our Byron 
 and our Shelley ; as men our Goethe and our Shakspere. 
 Gordon, I say, as poet and failure is better than prose-man and 
 success. But see now what he has to say about this life in 
 which he failed so. 
 
 Firstly, there is all the doubt and bewilderment of a period 
 of transition : 
 
 " We are children lost in the wood." 
 " Lord," prays this woman that loves Laurence Raby, 
 
 " Lord, lead us out of this tangled wild, 
 
 where the wise and the prudent have been beguiled, 
 and only the babes have stood." 
 Meantime, 
 
 " Onward ! onward ! still we wander, 
 
 nearer draws the goal ; 
 Half the riddle's read, we ponder 
 
 vainly on the whole 
 
 Onward ! onward ! toiling ever, 
 
 weary steps and slow ; 
 doubting oft, despairing never, 
 
 to the goal we go !" 
 
 To what goal ? Well, 
 
 " The chances are I go where most men go." 
 
 Let us leave the rest with God — God whose " dealings with us " 
 are unfathomable, God who is "fathomless." Thus he achieves 
 his resignation. But he never blinds himself to things ; he 
 never answers " the painful riddle of the earth " by " stopping 
 up his mouth with a clod " (as Heine says). This world is a 
 
 " world of rapine and wrong, 
 where the weak and the timid seem lawful prey 
 for the resolute and the strong." 
 
 Sometimes there rises in him the 
 
 " wail of discordant sadness for the wrongs he never can right," 
 
 for the brothers, and ah for the sisters, he cannot help. But 
 sometimes, also, he bursts forth into " a song of gladness, a 
 paean of joyous might." Both are in him : the wail for the
 
 THE POETRY OF ADAM LINDSAY GORDON. 2 1 
 
 lost Lord and the thanksgiving to God for his "glorious 
 oxygen." (The capitals are his own.) With the first, we 
 have done : let us look at the second and see what he has to 
 show us of living and loving, of action and women, and then 
 see what he has to show us of life as a whole, "the conclusion 
 of the whole matter." 
 
 I have said elsewhere that there is in Gordon the cheer and 
 charge of our chivalry. There is. He was well worthy of a 
 place in the charge of our cavalry at Waterloo, or Balaclava. 
 There is in him that " magnificence " which now, alas, as the 
 Frenchman, truly said, "is not war." These men "glory in 
 daring that dies or prevails." And when, as at Balaclava, they 
 die, their poet exclaims (in capitals) — 
 
 " not in vain, 
 as a type of our chivalry ! " 
 
 What exclamations of rapture such a sight draws from him ! 
 
 " Oh ! the moments of yonder maddening ride, 
 long years of life outvie ! . . . . 
 God send me an ending as fair as his, 
 
 who died in his stirrups there ! . . . ." 
 
 Here is a race : — 
 
 " They came with the rush of the southern surf, 
 on the bar of the storm-girt bay ; 
 and like muffled drums on the sounding turf 
 their hoof-strokes echo away." 
 
 I know no poetry that describes the rush of horsemen quite as 
 Gordon does. Take this description of the Balaclava charge 
 from his " Lay of the Last Charger." 
 
 " Now we were close to them, every horse striding 
 madly ; — St. Luce pass't with never a groan ; — 
 Sadly my master look'd round — he was riding — 
 on the boy's right, with a line of his own. 
 
 " Thrusting his hand in his breast or breast-pocket, 
 while from his wrist the sword swung by a chain, 
 swiftly he drew out some trinket or locket. 
 kiss"t it (I think) and replaced it again. 
 
 " Durst, while his fingers reclined on the haft, 
 jarring concussion and earth-shaking din, 
 Horse counter'd horse, and I reel'd, but he laugtft, 
 •a went his man, cloven clean to the chin .' " 
 
 Lord Tennyson has watched his charge through Mr. Russell's 
 field-glass, and we follow his view of it, but Gordon has ridden 
 it and takes us with him. Old and miserable, the friend of the
 
 2 2 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 man who had ridden this " Last Charger," offers up the same 
 prayer as the man who had " visioned it in the smoke : " 
 
 '• Would to God I had died with your master, old man," 
 for— 
 
 " he was never more happy in life than in death." 
 
 What I find so admirable in Gordon, and in almost all his 
 
 characters is, that they are men, I mean men as opposed to 
 
 dreamers or students. His Lancelot is Lancelot, the knight 
 
 who has lived and loved largely. Tennyson's is not. I must 
 
 confess that I really think that "The Rhyme of Joyous Guard" 
 
 is worth all the other "Idylls of the King," save "Lancelot 
 
 and Elaine," and " The Passing of Arthur," put together. I 
 
 mean that I really think it has more real deep true significance. 
 
 Take this conclusion, the last prayer of Lancelot, old and 
 
 passed from the world : 
 
 " If ever I smote as a man should smite, 
 
 if I struck one stroke that seem'd good in Thy sight, 
 
 by Thy loving mercy prevailing, 
 Lord ! let her stand in the light of Thy face, 
 cloth'd with Thy love, and crown'd with Thy grace, 
 when I gnash my teeth in the terrible place 
 
 that is fill'cl with weeping and wailing." 
 
 This is splendid ! His men, I say, are men, men such as we 
 find in Byron. Orion (Satan) says that 
 
 " The angel Michael was once my foe ; 
 He had a little the best of our strife, 
 yet he never could deal so stark a blow.'''' 
 
 The lover in " No Name," thinking of meeting " the slayer of 
 the soul " he loved, says : 
 
 " And I know that if, here or there, alone, 
 I found him fairly, and face to face, 
 having slain his body, I would slay my own, 
 that ?ny soul to Satan his soul might chase : 
 
 a remark in the strain of Heathcliff. Most of his lovers love 
 passionately and sensuously, and only passionately and sensu- 
 ously : The poet " revels in the rosy whiteness of that golden- 
 headed girl:" if one thing is harder to forgive to a successful 
 rival than another it is that 
 
 " he has held her long in his arms, 
 and has kissed her over and over again :" 
 
 his chief regret over a dear dead girl is 
 
 " for the red that never was fairly ki.ss'd — 
 
 for the white that never was fairly press'd :"
 
 '-3, / ,1 - - 
 
 THE POETRY OF ADAM LINDSAY GORDON. 23 
 
 and, when he leaves his love for ever, he is in anguish at the 
 thought that 
 
 " 'twill, doubtless, be another's lot 
 those very lips to press :" 
 
 a remark in the more morbid strain of Keats to Fanny Brawne. 
 When Lancelot first kisses Guinevere, he, the mighty knight, 
 " well nigh swoons." Love, with Gordon's lovers, " consumes 
 their hearts with a fiery drought." " Laurence," says Estelleto 
 her lover, 
 
 " Laurence, you kiss me too hard :" 
 
 and the man of " Britomarte " is at hand with the appropriate 
 criticism that 
 
 " men at the bottom are merely brutes." 
 
 But we must not think that all Gordon's lovers love in this 
 way, any more than that all his men merely charge and cheer. 
 The battle is over. 
 
 " And what then? The colours reversed, the drums muffled, 
 the black nodding plumes, the dead march and the pall, 
 the stern faces, soldier-like, silent, unruffled, 
 the slow sacred music that floats over all." 
 
 This is beautiful, and no less beautiful is the tenderness of his 
 love. 
 
 " A grim grey coast, and a sea-board ghastly, 
 and shores trod seldom by feet of men — 
 where the batter'd hulk and the broken mast lie, 
 they have lain embedded these long years ten. 
 Love ! when we wandered here together, 
 hand in hand through the sparkling weather, 
 from the heights and hollows of fern and heather, 
 God surely loved us a little then."' 
 
 Nor is it rare to find passages in him 
 
 " with the song like the song of a maiden, 
 with the scent like the scent of a flower." 
 
 For " dark and true and tender is the north" with all its storm 
 and stress. 
 
 Poor "sick stock-rider " and poet, with his wild eyes and 
 wild words, and that "shyness and reserve which kept him 
 locked up, as it were, in himself!" Our proud, passionate 
 heart " out-wore its breast " as " the sword outwears its sheath," 
 and so we " took our rest," but not before we had won out- 
 resignation and known, or almost known, the truth, even as 

 
 24 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 Empedocles did, and yet died because " he was come too late" 
 — or too soon — 
 
 " and the world hath the day, and must break thee, 
 not thou the world."' 
 
 Gordon won his resignation, and knew, or almost knew, the 
 truth. The "criticism of life " that we find in the first two 
 scenes of " The Road to Avernus " is almost ripe : pessimistic, 
 it is true, but almost ripe. Laurence has lost his love, (and 
 Laurence, let us remember, is the lover that " kisses too 
 hard!") Does he despair in the strain of "Rolla," or 
 " bluster," and take refuge in the breast of " the wondrous 
 mother age," and the "vision of the world " in the strain of the 
 man of " Locksley Hall?" No, he has lost his love, and the 
 loss is bitter, but 
 
 " such has been, and such shall still be, here as there, in sun or star. 
 These things are to be and will be ; those things were to be and are." 
 
 " As it was so," he says again, 
 
 " as it was so in the beginning, 
 it shall be so in the end." 
 
 There is the feeling here of a man who is striving to see things 
 as they are. He will not blind himself to things : he will not 
 answer " the painful riddle of the earth " by " stopping up his 
 mouth with a clod." He will have true faith, or no faith. 
 Fate rules us, he sees : 
 
 " Man thinks, discarding the beaten track, 
 
 that the sins of his youth are slain, 
 when he seeks fresh sins, but he soon comes back 
 
 to his old pet sins again .... 
 Some flashes like faint sparks from heaven, 
 
 come rarely with rushing of wings ; 
 We are conscious at times, we have striven, 
 
 though seldom, to grasp better things ; 
 These pass, leaving hearts that have faltered, 
 
 good angels with faces estranged, 
 antl the skin of the .Kthiop unalter'd, 
 
 and the spots of the leopard unchanged." 
 
 And yet life, life as life, independent of living and loving, of 
 activity and women, is not altogether hopeless : 
 
 " Doubtless all are bad, yet few are 
 cruel, false, and dissolute." 
 
 He never gets any farther than this. He sees, or almost 
 sees, truth, as Moses saw Canaan, and then he fails. He has
 
 THE POETRY OF ADAM LINDSAY GORDON. 25 
 
 not had patience enough, not clear-sightedness enough ! He 
 cannot enter the Promised Land. " In defiance of pain and 
 terror he has pressed resolutely across the howling deserts of 
 Infidelity;" but he has not the strength left to do more than 
 reach "the new, firm lands of Faith beyond." He has loved 
 life, living and loving, activity and women, and he has not 
 feared to look into the reality of things, man and Nature and 
 God, their sunshine and their shadow, their life and their 
 death, and there is no hesitation in his message to us — 
 " Onward ! Onward !" — But that is all. He knows nothing of 
 how we are to go onward, or to where. He has had enough 
 to do to get himself as far as he has got, to achieve what he 
 has achieved. His life and work are a failure. We cannot 
 tor a moment think of calling him a great poet : his claim on 
 our interest as a poet is that he is one of the poets, one of the 
 martyrs, of our terrible period of transition, and that in him is 
 to be found " something very like the beginnings of a national 
 school of Australian poetry." Of this second aspect of him — 
 of how he is representative of what I have taken to be the 
 distinctive marks of this Australian, this Melbourne civilisation, 
 its general sense of movement, of progress, of conscious power: 
 of this aspect of him I have spoken elsewhere, too, and there 
 seems no need to do more here than to repeat the assertion. 
 But, for my part, I cannot lay the stress on either this aspect 
 of him, or the other which makes him " the poet of Australian 
 scenery," that I do on the first aspect of him. Gordon's life 
 and work are a failure, but they are a failure with enough 
 redeeming points to raise them from local, or even colonial, 
 into general interest. As our first and enthusiastic critic puts 
 it : " he deserves to be ranked with the genuine poets of his 
 generation," and I feel sure that he ultimately will be. For he 
 is representative not only of Australian, but of modern feeling: 
 he tells not only of Australia from the fifties to the seventies, 
 but of our terrible period of transition from the Old World into 
 the New, from Medievalism into Modernity. 
 
 Poor " sick stock-rider " and poet, with his wild eyes 
 and wild words — Our proud, passionate heart "outwore its 
 breast," as "the sword outwears its sheath," and so we "took 
 our rest." "Sleep !" says Mr. Swinburne, in the most beautiful 
 and satisfactory of his poems, " Ave atque Vale," the lament 
 over another of the martyrs — the author of " Les Fleurs 
 du Mai:"—
 
 26 
 
 AUSTRALIAN KSSAVS. 
 
 " Sleep ; and, if life were bitter to thee, pardon, 
 
 if sweet, give thanks ; thou hast no more to live : 
 and to give thanks is good, and to forgive . 
 Content thee, howsoe'er, whose days are done ; 
 There lies not any troublous thing before, 
 nor sight nor sound to war against thee more, 
 for whom all winds are quiet as the sun, 
 all waters as the shore." 
 
 January, 1SS3.
 
 THE SALVATION ARMY. 
 
 THE SALVATION ARMY, 
 
 I. 
 
 When a man speaks of Modern Europe, he is generally 
 taken to mean the Europe of steam and electricity. As a 
 matter of fact, Modern Europe really dates back to about the 
 middle of the last century, when certain ideas which we call 
 " modern " first began to be promulgated. And these ideas 
 were not, as in this expression " Modern Europe " it is tacitly 
 supposed, merely scientific ; they were not only concerned 
 with steam and electricity ; they were social. And thus, when 
 we use the expression, if we are to use it, in this particular 
 sense, we should remember that it means, not only that the 
 whole world is netted with railways and telegraphs, but also 
 that, speaking generally, the European races are no longer 
 governed by kings or aristocracies, but by middle-classes or, 
 as some prefer to put it, by peoples. And this, as I take it, is 
 far the more important fact of the two. I will go further, and 
 say that it is the most important fact of our civilization — nay, 
 that it is our civilization, and that, therefore, whoever would 
 seek to understand the meaning of any movement, great or 
 small, which is taking place in our civilization, must seek it 
 here, and here only ! Our civilization is our government by 
 the Middle-class or, as some prefer to put it, by the People. 
 But that these individuals who prefer to put it so are, let us 
 say, if not mistaken, at any rate inaccurate, is precisely what I 
 want in this little article to try to show, and in as striking a 
 manner as I can, so that, not only may I try to do something 
 towards making clear to us the real deep true significance of a 
 much misunderstood movement, but also that of a much more 
 misunderstood power — the Middle-class of the European races. 
 I do not propose to go through my subject thoroughly : to do 
 so would require more time and more space than any editor 
 could afford me. I shall merely touch on one phase of the 
 great spiritual movement which is at present permeating the 
 European races, and then turn to consider another phase of it — 
 a phase which is of peculiar interest to us of England, America, 
 and Australia.
 
 28 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS 
 
 II. 
 
 In Europe there is but one country that still suffers the 
 despotism of an aristocracy, and that country is Russia. The 
 modern ideas, the modern social ideas, have taken all this 
 time to pass from France, Germany, and England into Russia, 
 and have seized on what, for lack of a better word, I might 
 call, its nascent middle-class. The results have been, and still 
 are, wonderful and terrible. A group of men (for they are- 
 little more) has suddenly realised that the immense mass of 
 the People is being despotised over in the interest of a group 
 in reality little larger than itself. All, I will not say 
 freedom, but possibilities of freedom are resolutely withheld. 
 Russia at present has not the guaranteed protection of its 
 men's and women's liberties which the English of the four- 
 teenth, the thirteenth, the twelfth, the eleventh, the tenth 
 centuries had ! This to-day is a state of things which cannot 
 continue. The group of men who see and feel this, not 
 clearly and quietly as we outsiders can, but intensely and 
 passionately, is waging a duel to the death with the other 
 group, with the despotism, for the bare principles of freedom. 
 On the one hand are knowledge and light, on the other 
 ignorance and darkness, the modern against the ancient 
 spirit. But, thanks to the fact that there are men whose whole 
 interest is to resist the one and support the other to the last, 
 the light has become lightning and not only irradiates but 
 Strikes. It is considered by some a question whether this 
 despotism, armed with all resources of wealth and military 
 power, will be able to stamp out this group before the immense 
 mass of the People is awakened to the meaning of it all. 
 Others, however, merely consider whether the Russian govern- 
 ment will be destroyed by a revolution or constitutionalized by 
 a reform. We English, you see, consider it all clearly and 
 quietly as mere outsiders, and so, as regards the aspect of the 
 problem, we are ; but not, not as regards the problem itself! 
 These modern ideas, these social ideas, are working not only 
 in Russia, where the abuses which surround them make them 
 burn so fiercely, but more or less all over Europe, and in 
 England rather more than less. Ireland, we all see, smoulders 
 with them. And why, pray? Because England and Ireland 
 are always snarling at one another, "it being their nature to?" 
 Not so. It is because that aspect of the problem which is 
 presented to Great Britain generally is a little more pressing
 
 THE SALVATION ARMY. 29 
 
 in Ireland than in England or Scotland. The trouble in 
 Ireland is not national but social. The strife is not between 
 Irish and English : it is between peasants and landlords. 
 Unhappily many landlords are English : unhappily many 
 peasants believe that the English as a nation support the land 
 lords as a class. Hence whatever Irish hatred of England 
 there may be ; but the trouble is not, I repeat, national, it is 
 social. It is the People rising against the Middle-class. 
 
 Well, this movement, whether it be in Russia, in England, in 
 Germany, in France, in America, we are all pretty well agreed 
 to call the Socialistic movement. It represents the effort of 
 the People after social improvement. It took its rise not from 
 within the people, but from without. The French, English, 
 and German Socialists were originally groups of men who sud- 
 denly realized that the immense mass of the People was being 
 despotized over in the interest of the Middle-class. Each 
 country has its peculiar aspect of this fact, but the fact is the 
 same in each. In France the Middle-class made and sup- 
 ported the Empire, and, having stamped out the People's wild 
 attempt at power in '71, made and supports the Republic. In 
 Germany — dismembered Germany — the problem was pushed 
 back before the apparently greater one of national unity, but 
 now it arises again and demands solution. In England the 
 landed proprietors, and still more the capitalists, are beginning 
 to have qualms ; but the real struggle does not lie between 
 them and the Socialists : they are but overgrown individuals of 
 a class. There will be no more Tories and no more Con- 
 servatives : the future lies in the struggle between Liberals and 
 Socialists, the Middle-class and the People. 
 
 This Socialistic movement, then, took its rise not from 
 within the People but from without, and not in connection 
 with Religion, the great ally of the powers that were, the 
 Middle-class, but on the whole antagonistic to it. This move- 
 ment took its rise in men of intellect who had little or no care 
 for Religion, and its tendency is intellectual and careless of 
 Religion. The Middle-class has shown nothing but dislike to 
 this movement : the Middle-class has understood enough of the 
 ideas of this movement to know that they are subversive of its 
 own superiority. As for the People, they have understood 
 little or nothing. Socialists tell them, what is indeed the 
 truth, that they are the masters : that to-morrow, if they 
 pleased, they could send a parliament up to Westminster that
 
 30 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 should dictate what terms they pleased to " their lords and 
 masters, the landowners and the capitalists." The People does 
 not happily believe it. They are so hopeless : they have been 
 deceived so often by those who said they would help them. 
 ( Bill here, you see, with a wife and six children, all living in a 
 den that the Zoological people would consider unfit for a 
 lnena — Bill cannot be made to understand how the question 
 comes home to him ! ) Besides which, let us say it at once 
 and insist upon it, the People is the most long-suffering of all 
 things : it desires to despoil no man, it only desires the happi- 
 ness which mere food, clothing, and a house will give it. 
 
 In this state of affairs — the powerlessness of the Socialists to 
 bring home to the People the great idea of social improve- 
 ment — lie the causes of the religious movement whose best- 
 known and best representative is the Salvation Army. 
 
 III. 
 
 Consider it — first generally and then particularly. 
 
 In Russia the People has religion and no freedom. In 
 England the People has freedom and no religion. (In both, 
 let us add, the People has misery unspeakable). The one 
 question presses for solution in the one country, the other in 
 the other. The two most piteous spectacles in Europe are the 
 religious People of Russia, and the free People of England. 
 The Aristocracy which governs the one, the Middle-class 
 which governs the other, both are equally indifferent to the 
 People. Add to the fact of the utter want of religion of the 
 English People (it is understood that by People I mean the 
 masses), the fact of their utter want of, I will not say the com- 
 forts, but the necessities of life, and you have a field for revo- 
 lution such as nowhere else, I believe, presents itself save in 
 Russia herself. — I speak in the present, as if the problem 
 presented itself to me to-day just as it did years ago, and I am 
 delighted to notice that at last the English Middle-class is 
 awakening to the fact of the misery of the People, and also of 
 the danger of letting that misery continue. But it is quite a 
 mistake to suppose that either the one or the other is mitigated, 
 not to say ended, or that it will be so for years to come. 
 
 Religion in England — and Religion has, inaptly enough, 
 become a synonym for Christianity, in which general sense of 
 the term I use it here — Religion in England, just like every- 
 thing else, is conducted in the interest of the Middle-class. Go
 
 THE SALVATION ARMY. 3 1 
 
 into the London back-streets on a Sunday morning. You will 
 find the men leaning against the walls, the women at the 
 doors, the children in the gutters. The public-houses, you 
 observe, are closed : the Middle-class does not like that the 
 People should be drinking beer and spirits while they them- 
 selves are indulging in religious worship. Enter the church or 
 the chapel. What are the services like? We all know them — 
 a performance on the part of the choir, or a discreet, sibilant, 
 half-articulate murmur on the part of the congregation. The 
 clergyman or minister reads out a portion of the wonderful and 
 beautiful history of Jesus in a fine meaningless monotone, and 
 "here endeth the second lesson." But of the passion and the 
 peace of the Galilean story, what does he know ? He has 
 forgotten or never known Jesus, but he can tell you plenty 
 about Christ. Listen to the sermons. What do they treat of? 
 Matters that are likely to interest the men and women outside 
 there? The sermons are empty of Jesus and full of Christ — • 
 empty of the truth of the Master and full of the dogmas of the 
 Pupils. Theology, theological dogmas, Catholic or Protestant, 
 are perhaps interesting to men and women who are well to do, 
 and like to have something to argue about ; but what does 
 poverty care for them ? The man who has eaten a good 
 breakfast and is waiting for a good dinner may care to have it 
 shown to him, that he and his fellows are the one body of 
 Christians that is absolutely and entirely orthodox ; but 
 the man with an empty belly, and little or no prospect of 
 filling it, may perhaps be forgiven for not caring a jot whether 
 these are blasts of true or false doctrine, or not. The matter 
 does not affect him : he stops outside. So should we. 
 
 Now, I would not for a moment imply that there are not 
 priests, clergymen, and ministers who have done, and are 
 doing, fine and noble work among the People. There are 
 many such. But what I do say is, that, speaking generally, the 
 church and the chapel have both utterly failed to seriously 
 affect the mass of the People, and that they have done so for the 
 reasons I have given above. — " In the year 1865," says Mr. 
 Booth in one of the Salvation Army pamphlets, "Mr. Booth 
 was led, by the Providence of God, by no plan or idea of his 
 own, to the East of London, where the appalling fact that the 
 enormous bulk of the population were totally ignorant and 
 deficient of real religion, and altogether uninfluenced by the 
 existing religious organizations, so impressed him that he
 
 32 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 determined to devote his life to making these people hear and 
 know God, and thus save them from the abyss of misery in 
 which they were plunged, and rescue them from the damnation 
 that was before them. The Salvation Army is the result." 
 The Salvation Army is the result. He simply states the fact. 
 It was " by no plan or idea of his own." He has, so far as I 
 know, never explained more than the phenomena of it.* I 
 have talked with one of his sons on the subject, and all he has 
 to tell me in explanation of 859 corps or stations, 2041 paid 
 officials, and War Cry newspapers with a weekly circulation of 
 550,000, is how, as he takes it, the Salvationists "get at" the 
 People ; but he knows, and probably cares, absolutely nothing 
 about the why. "The grate was set," I say, "Youwerethe 
 match, and behold the fire !" " It is the Lord," he says, and I 
 do not think of contradicting him. It is not natural that a 
 man who takes part in a movement should know more than the 
 how of it, should know the why. If he did, he would not be 
 as unhesitating as he is in his belief that his movement is so 
 good. To achieve little we must aim at much. He who lives 
 passionately in the present must leave the dead to bury their 
 dead and the babes unborn to consider their suckling : he must 
 create, he has not time to criticise. At the same time how 
 important it is that there should be not only doers but 
 watchers ; not only creators but critics ; not only those who 
 concern themselves with the how but also those who concern 
 themselves with the why, for the why unlocks the gates of both 
 the past and the future : it tells us not only the whence but also 
 the whither. 
 
 Now, as I have said, in a certain state of affairs which we 
 have noticed lies this why, and there, if we can only look well 
 enough, we shall find it. The Salvation Army is, like every- 
 thing else an organism. It has its seed, and all its stages of 
 development up to its maturity and down into its decay, when 
 it, too, like everything else, will go to form nutriment for other 
 organisms, just as others have for its own. 
 
 Now, nothing will help us more in cur search after this why 
 than a knowledge of the how, and, since this knowledge is, at 
 any rate among the governing classes, wonderfully limited, I pro- 
 pose giving a short account of how the Salvation Army and its 
 work has struck me personally. It seems almost needless to 
 state that I am an unprejudiced observer. The Salvation 
 
 * His little article on it in the Contemporary Review is a mere circular.
 
 THE SALVATION ARMY. 33 
 
 Army, as the Salvation Army, is literally nothing to me : my only 
 interest in it lies in the influence which it exerts, whether for 
 good or evil, on the People. I have no cause to plead. If 
 anyone can point out mistakes of mine, or even demonstrate 
 to me that my whole view of this matter is an illusion, no one, 
 I am sure, will be more pleased and grateful than myself. 
 Those are our real benefactors who demonstrate to us an 
 illusion and open the way to a better view of things. 
 
 IV. 
 
 I propose, I said, giving a short account of how the Salva- 
 tion Army and its work has struck me personally. When I 
 was in England I studied it, as I study all movements that are 
 going on around me, with more or less care. Since I have 
 been~in Australia I have done the same, and, as I have found 
 the differences between the English and Australian Salvation 
 Armies to be immaterial ones, and as I am now addressing an 
 Australian audience, I shall speak of the Salvation Army as I 
 have seen it here, so that he who cares may go and see for 
 himself whether I am correct or incorrect in my view of it. 
 This, too, will enable him more easily, if he desires it, to point 
 out my mistakes and even demonstrate to me that my whole 
 view is an illusion, and make me his pleased and grateful 
 debtor for life. First, however, let me just notice what these 
 differences between the English and Australian Salvation 
 Armies are. In one word the Australian is less exaggerative. 
 The People in Australia breathes free: it does not feel the 
 weight of the two great divisions of the Middle-class that is 
 above it, the well-to-do and the gentlemen. Workmen here 
 do not go slouching down the streets, as they do in England, 
 crushed under the sense of their inferiority. This is a true 
 republic, the truest, as I take it, in the world. In England 
 the average man feels that he is an inferior : in America he 
 feels that he is a superior : in Australia he feels that he is an 
 equal. This is indeed delightful. It is the first thing that 
 strikes a new arrival in this country, and although Australia's 
 sins — sins against true civilization, I mean — are as many as they 
 are heinous, still a multitude of them, as it seems to me, is 
 covered by this — namely, that here the People is neither servile 
 nor insolent, but only shows its respect of itself by its respect 
 of others. Nowhere else but in France is there, I think, 
 anything quite like it. 
 
 i>
 
 34 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 There is, then, naturally less exaggerativeness in the Aus- 
 tralian than the English Salvation Army. When a man is, as 
 they say, "saved" there, it is from a far deeper "abyss of 
 misery " than it is here. The very atmosphere of England is 
 heavy with the degradation of the People. For a man to 
 become, no longer passively, but actively aware of this, is 
 almost overwhelming, and so is his feeling when he believes 
 that he has escaped from it. Hence those wild words and acts 
 of the Salvationists which have offended so many. Add to 
 this the excitement caused by a large gathering, religious 
 emulation, etc., etc., and the matter is a simple one. 
 
 Now let us go to a Salvationist popular service, and see their 
 manner of work there. The hall is crowded. The great bulk 
 of the congregation is made up of the upper stratum of the 
 People, servants, small shopkeepers, etc. There are also a not 
 inconsiderable number of the lower stratum of the People, 
 labourers. Many outsiders have come from curiosity. On the 
 stage or platform are a certain number of the regular paid 
 officials in their uniforms, and of " hallelujah lasses " in their 
 straight dresses and poke-bonnets. Considering these men and 
 women attentively, what most strikes us is that the generality 
 are, as Jeffrey said lightly of Carlyle, "terribly in earnest." 
 Some have the business-like air of all officials, religious or 
 otherwise : some have a somewhat disgusted air, as if they were 
 rather wearying of it all, now that the novelty has worn off. 
 But the generality of them are, there is no doubt of it, 
 " terribly in earnest." Presently the head officials enter, and 
 the service is opened with a hymn. The Salvationists sing 
 well : I remember that, at the first Salvationist service at 
 which 1 was present, this singing of theirs was something like 
 a revelation to me. It was not its "go," as we say, that 
 affected me : it was its depth and sweetness. It comes from 
 the heart and goes to the heart. This is the only language the 
 People can either use or understand. 
 
 Just beside me a little boy of four or five, standing between 
 his father's knees with shut eyes and waving arm, is shouting 
 and bawling out the words of the hymn, so that he may attract 
 attention and be an "edification." It is painful. (Later on 
 during a prayer he lies along the floor on his stomach and eats 
 a green apple and pinches a bigger boy's legs. Myself, I 
 prefer him like that.) During the prayers there are frequent 
 interruptions, chiefly from the platform, of " Hallelujah,"
 
 THE SALVATION ARMY. 35 
 
 " Praise God," and so on, for the most part in a business-like 
 fashion, quite formal. A man cannot repeat the same words 
 and acts for long with impunity. — These, and things like these, 
 are the inevitable accompaniments of all services, religious or 
 otherwise. We take them for granted, and pass on. 
 
 Presently a man is brought forward to give his testimony. 
 He begins by saying that he never thought to address such a 
 gathering as this, that he is a poor ignorant man, and so on, 
 but that he trusts in Jesus to help him through alright. He 
 tells his tale. It is a tale for ever old and for ever new. He 
 was a drunkard, he was debauched, a blasphemer. He used 
 his wife and children ill, he paid no heed to the clergyman and 
 the minister. Then a Salvationist came to him and told him 
 about Jesus. And that converted him, and now, etc., etc., 
 etc. His excitement grows : his voice rises to a high-pitched 
 monotone. He implores, he begs, he entreats, he abjures. 
 " Come to Jesus, come to Jesus ! It's only him can make you 
 happy ! You don't know how he loves you ! — O dear people," 
 he bursts out at length, "I could die for you, if you would only 
 come to him!" In the end, it is painful: the high-pitched 
 monotone oppresses us, and we are glad when he has ended. 
 
 Another follows, but with little or no variety. Then a girl 
 speaks, "happy Janet" (say). She has just the same tale to 
 tell : it is all Jesus, nothing but Jesus ! " To think," I heard 
 one of these girls say, hushed and awed, " to think that the 
 Son of God loved us so that he suffered all this for us! To 
 think of the thorns wounding his beautiful brow ! " and her 
 voice broke. — Janet cannot say too much about the suffering 
 of Jesus, because it was because he loved us all so, that he 
 suffered. Then she tells how she had a brother, and the 
 brother thought he was old enough to be by hisself, and do 
 for hisself, and he went away, away to Man-chester, and thev 
 were all very sad about it, e-specially mother. And the days 
 and the weeks and the months went by, and they never heard 
 anythink about him, and they went out and up and down the 
 town, hoping he might come back and they might see him 
 again, for he might be ashamed, they thought, to come into 
 the house. And sometimes mother 'd come to wake her up 
 early in the morning, and say : "Come, Janet, let's go out and 
 look for Tom : maybe we'll find him this morning." And 
 they used to go out and look for him in the early morning, and 
 thev couldn't find him. But at last he did come back, and O,
 
 36 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 dear people, how thin he was! Yes, he'd had enough of it ! 
 He found he couldn't do for hisself after all, so he came back 
 to mother and us, and we loved him more than ever. — And O, 
 dear people, that's the way with us and Jesus. We think we're 
 old enough to be by ourselves and to do for ourselves. But 
 we ar'n't : we're never old enough to do without Jesus ! He's 
 always loving us and strengthening us and giving us peace. 
 So come to him; don't wait any longer but come to him! 
 Don't think you're too wicked. No one's too wicked for 
 Jesus : he suffered for us and he died for us, for you and me, 
 and he loves us more than all the others do, and we can't tell 
 how glad it makes him when we come to him !" Here, as in 
 the singing, it is not the "go," the excitement, which affects us 
 most, it is the depth and sweetness. It comes from the heart 
 and goes to the heart. It is the only language the People can 
 either use or understand. 
 
 Jesus ! — It is always Jesus, I say, never or very rarely Christ. 
 These Salvationists feel and know their Master. With them 
 he lives : with us he exists. And Jesus is to them as some one 
 dowered with all the possibilities of mortal happiness who yet 
 renounced everything from his great love for the People, and 
 suffered and died for them a cruel death. Herein is the secret 
 of the sempiternal influence of Jesus : he is the great Lover. 
 I do not for a moment think that these Salvationists have any 
 connected scheme of the character or life of Jesus. They 
 cannot argue about him, they would say : they know that he 
 lives. They lay little or no stress on the risen Jesus, the 
 Christ. Their concern is with the living Jesus, him who loved 
 the flowers and the children and the publicans and the harlots, 
 him who showed his love by his life and above all by his cruel 
 death. This Jesus was not a philanthropist : he was better, he 
 was a lover. " He, who might have been a great king, actually 
 preferred to come and suffer and die a cruel death because he 
 loved us so ! " This love, this pity seems to them unique, 
 godlike. " To think of the thorns wounding his beautiful brow." 
 Hence the power of Jesus to awaken in men a sense of sin. 
 and, still more, a hope of salvation. " Why," they ask, " did 
 this wonderful beautiful Jesus suffer all this? — why?" Then 
 comes the answer. "Because he saw that I was a shiner and 
 he loved and pitied me so, that he suffered all this for my sake" 
 It is an overwhelming fact. Once get a man to see it and his 
 life is revolutionised : he believes in Love.
 
 THE SALVATION ARMY. 37 
 
 Napoleon, we remember, was puzzled by this sempiternal 
 influence of Jesus. He remarked that he himself understood 
 how to awaken in his own behalf the enthusiasm of men, but 
 he was alive, whereas Jesus was dead. " ] Jerusalem , Jeru- 
 salem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are 
 sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children 
 together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, 
 but ye -would not ."'' Yearning love like this was a mystery to 
 our wonderful destructive Emperor : he would have called it 
 foolish. And to many others beside him this sempiternal 
 influence of Jesus has been, is, and will be the same. Here is 
 our good Man of Science, the immortal dunce who dates 
 knowledge from " Social Statics" and the " Origin of Species," 
 who thinks Jesus was a very fine character, you know, 
 but full of superstition and delusion. And here is our 
 most irrational of Rationalists who has a pathetic faith in the 
 method of the late lamented Bishop Colenso, a method which 
 consists in the profound consideration of the geometry of 
 the empyrean and the colour of mathematical figures. And 
 lastly, here is our dear blatant Secularist whose discourse so 
 pleasantly shows us how a man who was a blockhead as a 
 Christian can be doubly a blockhead as a Secularist. — Here, I 
 say, are these three types, or let us take them as individuals. 
 Here is our good friend Mr. Caffyn, who was writing such 
 brilliant letters to the Argus the other day, letters which 
 show a nice acquaintance with the books of Dr. Maudsley 
 and the rudiments of modern physiology; and here is 
 the late lamented Sir Richard Hanson of Adelaide, whose 
 mantle is just now descending on Mr. Justice Williams; and, 
 lastly, here is our loquacious friend at the Hall of Science, Mr. 
 Joseph Symes. All these gather around the poor ignorant 
 labourer who is "saved," and demonstrate to him his foolish- 
 ness in believing in such an outworn piece of nonsense as 
 Christianity. "As for this Jesus of yours, my good man," 
 they say after their several fashions, " he was a very fine 
 character, you know, but — he was only a man just like you or 
 me ! " To whom the poor ignorant labourer answers with a 
 .smile : "Whether lie be a fine character or not, I know not : 
 one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see." Come 
 away, Mr. Caffyn: come away, ghost of Sir Richard: come- 
 away, Mr. Symes. It is quite useless to talk with a besotted 
 Christo-maniac like this. Why, he absolutely believes that he
 
 38 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 has a spiritual experience of which you are ignorant, and can 
 afford to smile at you! After this, the deluge! — Gentlemen, 
 hadn't you better go home to dinner, and leave the poor devil 
 alone ? 
 
 To return to the meeting, which is not yet concluded. — 
 When the testimonies are all given, those who feel that they 
 have been leading a life of sin are exhorted to come forward 
 and profess. The hall empties. Ten or twelve, men and 
 women, young men and girls, come forward and kneel down at 
 a bench in front of the platform. Some are inclined to be 
 hysterical. The Salvationists, men and women, come and 
 talk to them, leaning against them, their arms round their 
 shoulders, exhorting and encouraging. This, you see, is 
 Religious Socialism. No one can love Jesus, "the divine 
 Communist" (as Heine calls him), with impunity. If you 
 love, and to love is to know, Jesus, you must get others to 
 love and to know him, and your desire to get others fills you 
 with the same yearning love for them that Jesus has for you : 
 " O dear people, J could die for you, if you would only come to 
 him ! " 
 
 Then, when no more will come forward, the service con- 
 cludes with each of those who is " saved," speaking before 
 them all — saying what has come to him to make him repent, 
 and expressing his firm determination to lead a better life. 
 The first step has now been taken — the man by his public 
 confession is compromised. He cannot now so easily fall 
 back. He is known to his fellows, who will exhort and 
 encourage him. He has every incentive to date a new life 
 from to-day, not to put it off over and over again to " to- 
 morrow." 
 
 What, is all this, then, a trap ? Yes, if you care to call it 
 so. Men, to whom the "saved" and the "unsaved" life, the 
 bliss of heaven and the anguish of hell, is a passionate reality, 
 speak of it passionately to the ignorant or the careless, and 
 then (like true guilefully guileless religionists) take advantage 
 of the moment of realization which they have aroused in a soul, 
 to compromise that soul before the world to lead a new life of 
 continual realization. You see, these Salvationists are of the 
 men and women of the People and they know the men and 
 women, not only of the People, but of each and every class of 
 us : they know how frail is unaided resolution, and they act on 
 their knowledge. Do not think, though, that they believe that
 
 THE SALVATION ARMY. 39 
 
 weakness of will is to be found only among the People. Far 
 from it ! They attack Respectability, they attack the hypocrisy 
 of the Middle-class, as fearlessly as they attack the open sin of 
 the People. Our good clergymen and ministers, for whom I 
 have, in many respects, so much admiration, are afraid to 
 attack the Middle-class : the Middle-class is the payer of pew- 
 rents. Alas, alas, ye cannot serve God and Mammon ! It is 
 really a great nuisance ; but ye cannot ! Now these Salva- 
 tionists do not happen to have pews : so they need not stand 
 hat in hand before Respectability. They can say boldly that 
 the Publican is as good as the Pharisee : that hypocrisy is no 
 better, if it is not far worse, than open sin. Look to it, my in- 
 so-many-respects-admirable clergymen and ministers, you are 
 not masters here but pupils ! 
 
 V. 
 
 I am not going to discuss the question of Salvationist ritual. 
 Brass bands and concertinas give but a" poor idea of "the 
 beauty of holiness : " a dissenting chapel does the same. 
 Banners and handkerchiefs and so on are apt to be tawdry : so 
 are dressed statues, standards, incense, and the rest. But who, 
 considering the hideousness of Protestantism and the tawdri- 
 ness of Catholicism, would therefore call Protestantism hideous 
 and Catholicism tawdry? Certainly not I who am so sincere 
 an admirer of them both. Neither, then, considering what we 
 hear called the Christy-Minstrelism and Music-Hallism of the 
 Salvation Army, must we think that, when we have called their 
 meetings Christy Minstrels or Music Halls, we have quite dis- 
 posed of them. Alas, my dear Middle-class, cannot you see 
 that the People is what you, who govern the People, have 
 made it ? Might I, a humble unit of your millions, suggest to 
 you that it is just because, what you call, your Upper Ten 
 Thousand is hideous that you are more hideous ? and that it 
 is just because you, my dear Middle-class, are more hideous 
 that the People is most hideous? Will it be many ages, I 
 wonder, before you can be got to see this ? — to see that you 
 had better take the mote out of your own eye before you are 
 so enthusiastic about taking the beams out of the eyes of your 
 neighbours ? 
 
 If, however, anyone wants to see what Mr. Booth himself 
 has to say in defence of his "Colours, Bands of Music, Pro- 
 cessions, and other sensational methods employed " (as he
 
 40 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 says), I would refer him to a little penny pamphlet called 
 " All about the Salvation Army," which can be got at the 
 Salvation Army Head-quarters in Russell Street. For myself, I 
 have nothing to do with this side of the question : I profess that 
 
 I consider most church-bells are as bad as most brass-bands, 
 and am profoundly indifferent as to whether they are, as Mr. 
 Booth would like to know, " unscriptural " or not. I am of 
 opinion that the admirers of church-bells and brass-bands had 
 better fight it out among themselves. 
 
 I have as good as said that what makes the outer strength of 
 the Salvationists is their realization of Jesus as liver and lover. 
 Love, yearning love, is undoubtedly the chief characteristic of 
 Jesus. But, just as the sun gives forth not only heat but 
 light, so did he. His life was love : his death was peace. 
 
 II My peace I leave with yon." And it is just here, just in 
 their realization of " the mildness and sweet reasonableness" of 
 Jesus that the Salvationists are apt to be lacking : and it is just 
 here that the Church of England more than any other Christian 
 sect is, as it seems to me, so strong. The Hymns Ancient and 
 Modern are, on the whole, the best song-book extant of this 
 " mildness and sweet reasonableness." We must not, however, 
 think that this demand for the peace as well as the love of 
 Jesus is not recognised by the Salvationists : it is, but I cannot 
 think that it is recognised adequately. As soon as a man is 
 "saved" and has "professed," there are open to him, what 
 they call, the Holiness Meetings. These are the answer to the 
 demand for peace. But they differ only particularly from the 
 other meetings. They are smaller, and hence quieter, than 
 the others ; but there is, so to speak, too much heat and too 
 little light in them. Here is the weak point in the Salvationist 
 movement, just as it is the strong point in (I always take the 
 best example our Christianity can give us) the Church of 
 England. Here it is the turn of the Salvationists to be not 
 masters, but pupils. Let us hope that they will see this, and 
 not only teach, but also (which is so much more difficult) be 
 ready to learn irom, us. 
 
 VI. 
 
 There are still two parts of the work of the Salvationists to 
 consider— their work with the inmates of the prisons, and their 
 work with the inmates of the brothels. Here again we have 
 everything to learn from them, from them the true disciples of
 
 THE SALVATION ARMY. 4 1 
 
 " the divine Communist." The former work they have made 
 a speciality of, and they are rapidly making the latter. I 
 doubt very much that our churches and chapels (I am not 
 speaking now of the Catholics, whose work is almost ex- 
 clusively among the Irish, and the Irish are of a race that, 
 save in the matter of agrarian crime and a curious cruelty to 
 dumb animals, is truly admirable for the honesty of its men 
 and the chastity of its women) : I doubt very much, I say, that 
 our churches and chapels will ever get much at either the 
 criminals or the prostitutes. Our clergymen, who are so 
 gentlemanly, and our ministers who are so respectable, can 
 neither speak nor understand much the language of the 
 People, the language of the heart. The clergymen are 
 shocked by the foulness, the ministers by the ferocity, of the 
 People. Both feel that they are condescending — the one 
 from the height of refinement, the other from the height of 
 righteousness. The people has no love for condescension of 
 this sort. There are few words that stink more in its nostrils 
 than that of charity, and indeed charity, when it means a gift 
 from a superior to an inferior, is hateful enough. It is a popular 
 delusion with the " charitable " that street beggars and the 
 inmates of the workhouses are the People. Far otherwise is 
 it, O " charitable" ones: these are not independent animals, 
 they are parasites: they are (if you will pardon me saying so) 
 your spiritual lice ; so please make the best of them, since it is 
 not only on account of, but on, you that they live. 
 
 Well, now, wherein is it that these fanatical ignorant Salva- 
 tionists do get at the People ? One of them answers us at 
 once : " No one's too wicked for Jesus, and so no one's too 
 wicked for me who am the simple follower of Jesus. If he 
 could do with publicans and harlots, why cannot I ? " They 
 say, as Walt Whitman says to " a common prostitute," 
 
 " Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you, 
 
 Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for 
 you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you." 
 
 This, you see, is Religious Socialism. It proclaims the spiritual 
 equality of all men. The spiritual equality, let us notice; it 
 will have nothing to do with the social equality. " My king 
 dom is nut of this world. . . . Give unto Ciesar the things 
 -which be Ccesar's, and to God the things which be God's*" 
 " Honour all men," says Peter, "love the brotherhood, fear 
 Clod, honour the king." And more : Religious Socialism has
 
 42 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 a tendency to be careless of the dogmas of the creeds. " Is 
 the Army hostile," asks Mr. Booth, "to-the existing evangelical 
 denominations ? Just the contrary. Numbers of its converts 
 go to swell the membership of the churches. More than 400 
 persons, converted and trained in its ranks, have been engaged 
 by other different religious organisations as Evangelists, Minis- 
 ters," etc., etc., etc. We notice that he says "evangelical 
 denominations ? " The Catholics, of course, from (who shall I 
 say ?) Augustine to Pascal and Newman, are poor belated 
 idolaters, only slightly better than the heathen. This, you 
 see, is where Mr. Booth, like Mr. Spurgeon and the rest, so 
 pleasantly shows us what nonsense an earnest short-sighted 
 man is capable of believing and brandishing about the world 
 with a godless blatancy. Personally, I cannot make myself 
 angry with any of them for it. For what would an earnest 
 man be without his faults ? without, as D'Israeli puts it, a 
 single redeeming vice ? 
 
 In Melbourne there is a tendency now to let the Salvation 
 Army have its own way unmolested with the criminals and the 
 prostitutes. "It can't do any harm," people say, "and it may 
 do good, and really, you know, the — the Social Evil wants 
 looking to." Nay, more: having made this nice expression 
 " Social Evil," we are at last plucking up courage to acknow- 
 ledge that it exists, and that it is not necessarily a sign of 
 filthy-mindedness to wish to discuss it. We speak of it now in 
 papers which come under the eye of those dear creatures about 
 whose stainless purity of mind we are all so anxious (even that 
 Puritanic print, the Melbourne Bulletin is anxious, and the 
 Sydney Bulletin, also, for all I know to the contrary) — "our 
 wives and daughters." Why, possibly there are those among us 
 who will live to see the day when the expression " fearful 
 sinner," as applied to some poor girl driven out into the miseries 
 of the streets, will be confined to the utterance of our good 
 friends of the Scotch Presbytery, and other few such like. 
 Then, it -will be amusing : at present, it is only detestable. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Now let us go to the Barracks of the Prison Brigade, and 
 see what has to be seen there. The officials (all, I believe, old 
 criminals) and the men that they have just got hold of, are 
 gathered for a sort of home service. Man after man, boy after 
 boy, rises to give his " experience." The " experiences " can
 
 THE SALVATION ARMY. 43 
 
 be pretty easily imagined. Then there are hymns, choruses, 
 addresses by the higher officials present. All, or almost all 
 here, there is no doubt of it, are " terribly in earnest." The 
 interruptions, "Hallelujah," "Praise God," and so on, are ail 
 earnest. One boy with a maimed face gets up and says : " I 
 was miserable in the streets, I'm very happy now. God bless 
 the Major," and sits down again. For me, I confess that, over 
 and over again, I have not known whether to answer the 
 word and acts of these men, or shall I say children, with smiles 
 or tears. Now and then I have answered them with both. 
 
 Afterwards we are shown the bedrooms, observing that we 
 do not want to see them. I have seen many bedrooms that 
 were delightful, and many keepers thereof whose hearts were 
 as clean and hard as the floors. Also I have seen bedrooms 
 that were poor and crowded, and the keepers thereof whose 
 hearts were as rich as love and as soft as pity. I prefer the 
 latter, myself, if I must choose between them, but tastes of 
 course are different. Then the boy with the maimed face is 
 brought in, to tell his tale and show his wounded leg. The 
 People like you to look at their wounds and sores and casual- 
 ties generally. It is painful. It is like the young ladies of the 
 Middle-class who like you to look at their drawings and 
 paintings, or listen to their playing and singing. I do not 
 know which habit is the more painful of the two — perhaps, 
 on the whole, the latter. The first only hurts my senses : 
 the second hurts my soul. It makes me lose hope in my 
 ideas for the future of the Middle-class : it makes me think it 
 is doomed to the hideousness of clap-trap for ever. It is like 
 a visit to the sculpture at the Melbourne Public Library. 
 
 They show us the rooms and bring us the boy, you notice, 
 in that practical English spirit which is intent on making it 
 clear that their cry is proportionate to their wool, a fact of 
 which we are not altogether ignorant. Hence our carelessness 
 about more than a glance at the rooms, or a short talk with 
 the boy with the maimed face. I think I could tell him as 
 much about himself as he can tell me. I have known him 
 many times before. 
 
 It is pleasing to notice here how much they insist on the 
 new life, how comparatively little stress they lay on the "con- 
 version," on the being " saved." Also, that the Salvationists 
 know how to laugh. It is only men who keep their religion 
 for a fine heavy diet on Sunday who cannot pray at one
 
 44 
 
 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 moment and laugh at another. If my religion is a part of me, 
 it is also clearly a part of my laughter. 
 
 Now let us go the rounds of the opium dens and brothels 
 round about Little Bourke Street. We walk, my Salvationist 
 and I, into any house that we wish. No one opposes us : only 
 once in the whole evening are we spoken to other than 
 respectfully. " You see," says the mistress of the most facially 
 contorted Chinee I have yet seen, " You see, the Salvationists 
 helps the girls, that's why we likes "em!" Here we are in a 
 den, a girl" lying on one side of the bed (the Chinese beds are 
 like large alcoves. In the middle is the opium-tray, con- 
 taining the pipe, a lamp, etc.), a Chinee on the other, 
 gettinsr her pipe ready for her. We sit and chat with 
 her. She tells us about herself simply enough, show- 
 ing no signs of wishing to alter her condition. Then the 
 other girl comes in, and we chat with her. My Salvationist 
 recognises her : she was at Bella's funeral. (Bella was a girl 
 who fell down dead in the brothel opposite, and the Army 
 buried her. All " the girls " about clubbed together, hired cabs, 
 and went to the funeral.) " O yes," says the girl to him, "you 
 said the service for Bella." She too tells us about herself 
 simply enough. Her mother is at Ballarat— " Does she know 
 you're here?" — "O yes, she knows." — "Does she think you're 
 in service?" — " O no, she knows what I'm doing ;" and so on. 
 Presently I go into the other room and talk pigeon English 
 with the remarkable spectacled Chinee, who is like a venerable 
 old ape. Why will the English girls come and live with the 
 Chinese ? The answer is simple : the Chinese both pay 
 them well and are kind to them. These girls are not bruised 
 on the face and arms as most of the others are. 
 
 You perceive now how the Salvationists work here ? They 
 are the " friends " of the girls : they " help " them. Find out 
 from a girl if she is miserable: find out if she would sooner go 
 back to a respectable life. Go everywhere fearlessly : Find 
 out if any girl is being detained against her wishes. Be gentle 
 with them as with equals. Make'them feel that you care for 
 them for their own sakes. Work upon their feelings— speak of 
 their home, their mother, their father, their brothers, their 
 sisters. Offer them a new start. Then, the moment that of 
 their own free will the) are ready to come, put them into a cab 
 and drive straight away with them to the Home. Here they 
 come under the influence of the women officials of the Army,
 
 THE SALVATION ARMY. 45 
 
 (some of whom, however, also do visiting work), the same 
 system being pursued with them as with the men. They are 
 not made to feel that they are dealing with people more loftilv 
 refined or more loftily righteous than themselves. They are not 
 made to feel that they are " fearful sinners." They are made 
 to feel that sin is fearful and that they have sinned fearfully, 
 but that they have every hope before them, hope of a new life 
 before God and man. As for the women officials of the Salva- 
 tion Army, I will say this, that in no body of female re- 
 ligionists, except the Catholic Sisters, have I found so many 
 sweet true women. I have also known Anglican Sisters who 
 were well worthy of a place beside them. Such women are 
 the essence of Christianity. They are the true children of 
 Mary Magdalene and Monica, of the love and of the affection 
 of the soul. Preference for any one of these three classes, 
 there can be none. I cannot exalt true love above true affec- 
 tion any more than I can exalt heat above light : their joy is 
 equal. But in one respect the Salvationist women have an 
 advantage over the others, just as the Salvationist men have 
 over the celibate priests — in just that, in the fact that they need 
 not be celibates. Many of these Salvationist girls and women 
 are the sweethearts or wives of their fellow-workers. This, I 
 think, is as it should be. He who neglects or despises that 
 great law of Nature and God, passion, will be assuredly 
 punished for it. To make a large body of men and women 
 celibates is to put a premium on immorality and hypocrisy. 
 This great rock the Salvation Army has avoided, and herein it 
 has done most wisely. Here, where Rome is weak, it is 
 strong. We must not, however, think that there is nothing to 
 be said in behalf of celibacy : there is much, very much. If 
 we were all men like Francis of Assissi or Vincent de Paul, it 
 would be perfect ; but unfortunately we are not. At the same 
 time, he who has seen the work of Catholic priests and of 
 Protestant clergymen or ministers in times of plague and pest 
 must feel how great a clog to perfect courage are those 
 hostages a man has given to fate in wife and children. On the 
 other hand, observe that times of pest and plague are com- 
 paratively rare, and that every great idea when put into 
 practice is but a mixed good. What we have to do is to 
 choose that which has least evil, or shall we say most good, 
 and this can, we feel sure, be only chosen in conformity with 
 all of those few great primeval laws which are the guides of life, 
 which are the direct words of Nature and of God.
 
 46 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 So much, then, for the how of the Salvation Army. Let us 
 now consider if it has helped us to the why — nay, if it has 
 not absolutely told us the why ! Did we not instinctively catch 
 at something we saw two or three times rising before us as with 
 small but teleological significance in it? Did we not feel, as 
 we uttered that expression with which this something inspired 
 us, that here was the why in propria persona? Religious 
 Socialism. 
 
 In this state of affairs — the powerlessness of the Socialists 
 to bring home to the People the great idea of social improve- 
 ment : in the misery unspeakable of the People ; in the 
 atmosphere heavy with the degradation of the People — what is 
 it that the People has done ? It has evolved a movement, no 
 longer from without, but from within itself. It has sought for 
 consolation for its unspeakable wretchedness in the pereiinial 
 spring of Religion, of the yearning love of Jesus. It has, at the 
 touch of the first match that came to it, blazed up into the flaming 
 fire of Religious Socialism. 
 
 In the early part of the thirteenth century the People did 
 the same, the People of Italy. But what a heaven lies between 
 the man who led that movement and the man that is lead- 
 ing this ! O my eloquent Rationalists, O my loquacious 
 Secularists, both of you whom I esteem so much — how ready 
 are you to talk of the degradation which that gigantic supersti- 
 tion and delusion, Christianity, wrought upon the People ! 
 Whenever are you tired of brandishing "starry Galileo" and 
 scattering the scattered dust of poor old Copernicus in the face 
 of Catholicism, making it to tremble and sneeze fearfully? 
 Does it never occur to you that that divine Goddess Scientia, 
 whom you worship with such noble devotion, has wrought a 
 far deeper degradation on the people than Catholicism ever 
 did ? Have you never seen, crouching under the shadow of 
 your railways and your telegraphs and all your improved 
 machinery, the unspeakable wretchedness of London, of Bir- 
 mingham, of Manchester, of Glasgow? And now that this 
 People, whose lives your Goddess has made of such a sort that 
 they will not stand too favourable a comparison with those of 
 dogs — now that this People, in its passionate searching after 
 some consolation, however slight, of whatever sort, seizes on this 
 creature of superstition and delusion, this Jesus who is only a 
 man, just like you or me, and whom you have so triumphantly
 
 THE SALVATION ARMY. 47 
 
 proved so, and makes him the text for this flaming fire of 
 Religious Socialism — has it never struck you, O my eloquent 
 Rationalists, O my loquacious Secularists, what an appalling 
 difference there is between Salvation Army banners, handker- 
 chiefs, brass-bands, and concertinas, and the " green boughs, 
 flags, music, and songs of gladness " that came forth from the 
 Umbrian towns and villages to welcome Francis of Assissi ? 
 have you never felt that there is any essential difference 
 between the perpetual Revivalist hymn of " My Jesus to know 
 and to feel his blood flow," and the "Canticle of the 
 Creatures?" But, above all, have you never felt that it is 
 more to that divine Goddess Scientia, whom you worship with 
 such noble devotion, than to anything else that this appalling 
 difference is due ? 
 
 And you, O my Middle-class, of whom I am so humble a 
 unit, did it ever occur to you that it is rather a foolish thing to 
 paint a boy's face black and then be shocked at it ? If the 
 People, its foulness and its ferocity, makes you shiver and 
 shudder, who pray made it foul and fierce but you who govern 
 it? — What do you say? "It was no business of yours ? " 
 That was what Cain said, but respectable Christians like you 
 are not surely going to take that eminent casuist as your 
 mouth-piece? If you were Atheists or Agnostics, now, wor- 
 shippers of "the struggle for existence and survival of the 
 fittest," of course that would be another matter, but you are 
 Christians, respectable Christians who always wear black coats 
 on Sundays, and object to having the Library and Picture- 
 Gallery open. 
 
 Well, there ! I cannot make myself angry with you, my dear 
 Middle-class. I admire your good qualities too much for that 
 — too much indeed, as I often tell myself; for who shall say 
 but that my belief in your ultimate regeneration and new birth 
 unto a really glorious place in a true civilization be not, after 
 all, but infatuation? Here is Carlyle, whom we all love and 
 admire so, trying to be our benefactor by demonstrating to us 
 our illusions on this matter, and telling us, ever since 1830, of 
 the " steady approach of democracy with revolution (probably 
 explosive) and a finis incomputable to man ; steady decay of 
 all morality, political, social, individual ; this once noble 
 England getting more and more ignoble, and untrue in every 
 fibre of it, till the gold (Goethe's composite king) will all be 
 eaten out, and noble England will have to collapse in shapeless
 
 48 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 ruin, whether for ever or not none of us can know." Really 
 there are hours when I am made quite to suffer by thinking of 
 what is going to happen to my dear Middle-class when the 
 People rise unanimously against it, — "roaring million-headed 
 unreflecting, darkly suffering, darkly sinning 'Demos'" (as 
 Carlyle says again), " come to call its old superiors to account 
 at its maddest of tribunals." It will, 1 fear, be little good for 
 the Mr. Caffyns of those times to write letters to the Argus of 
 those times, explaining the physiological aspects of the move- 
 ment. On such an occasion in Paris, in 1793, Mr. Caffyns 
 went up into the arms of La Guillotine for much less heinous 
 offences than that, and who would be left capable of recording 
 whether, in this case, they went up " with a tripping move- 
 ment " (as Mr. Caffyn tells us the fanatical "Hallelujah lasses" 
 go), or whether they marched, as perhaps Mr. Caffyn himself 
 marches to church or chapel every Sunday morning, to the 
 edification of all beholders? But let us not think of such an 
 appalling spectacle. Mr. Caffyn is still with us, and the Argus 
 is still with us, and perhaps some morning we shall have some 
 more brilliant letters on the physiological aspects of Mr. 
 Caffyn's friends, the hallelujah lasses. 
 
 I cannot, I say, make myself angry with you, my dear 
 Middle-class of England (and you might plausibly suggest that 
 it would not matter much if I did), and how then shall i even 
 trown at this Middle-class of Victoria, about whom (if Carlyle 
 is right) I am more infatuate still? Does not the People 
 breathe free in Australia? Are we not liberated here from 
 that charming " Upper Ten Thousand " which monopolises the 
 best of the bad education England has to offer, the Public 
 Schools and the Universities ? Is there not a hope that, now 
 that the primary education of the People is progressing so 
 satisfactorily, some of our young rising politicians, (or even 
 some of the old ones), may bring home to us the fact that we 
 want equally — nay, far more ! — a secondary education for the 
 Middle-class? so that Victoria may step forward as a com- 
 petitor with the most universally civilized nation in the world, 
 France, and teach England the unspeakable glory and ad- 
 vantage of (we should call it) an Upper-class, " homogeneous, 
 intelligent, civilized, brought up in good public schools " (and 
 not, as now, in more or less good, or more or less bad, denomi- 
 national, and " private adventure " schools) " and on the first 
 plane."
 
 THE SALVATION ARMY. 49 
 
 If only this Upper-class of Victoria and of Australia generally 
 could be brought to see it ! If only it would confess its sins, 
 many and heinous, against true civilization and be "converted " 
 and lead a new life! Nothing, I think, strikes an Englishman 
 more, coming out here, than the brightness and intelligence of 
 the Victorian girls! ("Our daughters," you know.) And 
 how heart-rending to discover that all this brightness and in- 
 telligence is wasted on the mere accidents and incidents of 
 every-day existence! Two-shilling novels are her idea of 
 literature : " Some day " and " Ehren on the Rhine " her idea 
 of music : the coloured illustrations of the illustrated papers, 
 her idea of art. And her brother is in a worse state ! The 
 tortoise English girl is, after all, better than the Australian 
 hare, and the young male bull-dog than the kangaroo. 
 
 Everything crys out for the education, for the civilization, of 
 the Upper-class, the ruling class. Educate it, civilize it, let it 
 know what Truth is and what Beauty is, and abolish the bells 
 and the brass-bands for ever ! If the Upper-class is beautiful, 
 its beauty will react on the Lower-class. Give us public 
 schools for the Upper-class, as there are public schools for the 
 Lower-class. Fight tooth and nail against any attempts after 
 an "Upper Ten Thousand," whether it be of land or of wealth. 
 Keep clearly before us the ideal of an Upper-class that is 
 homogeneous. Let us have the man of business as cultured as 
 the professional man, and the professional man as cultured as 
 the man of means. Let us be a true Republic, offering every 
 opportunity to the intelligence of the Lower-class to attain to 
 the culture of the Upper. Let us not have ten thousand 
 aristocrats, but ten hundred thousand, ever more and more, 
 and never less and less! On the other hand, let us learn from 
 the People the great lesson which they have to teach us — the 
 lesson of the language of the heart. Let us learn from them 
 the softness of pity, yea and the richness of love. Let us give 
 them our Social Socialism and let us take their Religious ; for, 
 in the perfect marriage of light and heat, is the perfect day, the 
 true civilization, the beauty of the truth of Nature and of God. 
 
 February, 1885.
 
 50 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 SYDNEY AND HER CIVILIZATION, j 
 
 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 constitu- 
 tion. 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 contra- 
 dicting him. That elemental characteristic of the British 
 architect, " the impotence to express anything," is in no 
 danger of disappearing in Sydney, nor yet, let us again hasten 
 to add, in Melbourne ; but, if it be possible to distinguish the 
 matter thus, I should say that in Sydney he had found his 
 happy hunting-grounds, whereas in Melbourne he was just 
 beginning to feel that there was a rival about. 
 
 No, it is just where Sydney is ?<//-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,
 
 SYDNEY AND HER CIVILIZATION. 5 1 
 
 in which the Sydney perception of its individual life has striven 
 to express itself. The Sydney perception of its individual life 
 is not strong. As a local guide-book puts it more particularly, 
 "in the nomenclature of the streets Sydney shows intense 
 loyalty, and the lover of history will be delighted by the 
 associations which some of the names will summon to his 
 memory. For instance, his historical predilections will be 
 gratified in noticing that the principal street is named after 
 George the Third, during whose reign the colony was 
 founded." Of course, when the local guide-book tells us that a 
 thing is so, it is so; and when it says that our predilections, 
 historical or otherwise, will be gratified and delighted, they are 
 gratified and delighted. But these Sydney men and women, 
 with their intense loyalty, or rather what the writer in the local 
 guide-books means thereby, have not, what we called, the 
 metropolitan look — have not the metropolitan feeling. Mr. 
 Marcus Clarke, in the cleverest and also the most fantastic of 
 his clever but often fantastic criticisms, " The Future Aus- 
 tralian 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 fret- 
 ful, clever, perverse, irritable race," showing us what, under all 
 their superficial differences, the people of Victoria and of New 
 South Wales have, he thinks, in common. I do not believe 
 that the whole secret of the matter is here laid open before us. 
 Mr. Marcus Clarke had an admirable acuteness of perception, 
 but he was apt, having swiftly perceived one aspect of a thing, 
 to write it down at once as the aspect without staying for a 
 second or third look at the thing itself. The consequence is 
 that he rarely reaches the whole secret of a thing : witness, for 
 instance, his view of Christianity, (but Mr. Arnold notices 
 how even a critic of Sainte-Beuve's calibre was capable of 
 illusion here), or of the significance of Gordon's poetry, which 
 I have spoken of elsewhere ; and it is lamentable to think how 
 much of this false tendency in him was due to the circumstance 
 that he was a man of letters, and an Australian man of letters. 
 1 do not believe, I say, that, when he tells us that the really
 
 52 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 distinctive characteristic of Sydney is (for " will be " is only 
 "is" unmaterialized) fashion and luxury, and Melbourne 
 intellect, he has laid open before us the wliole secret of the 
 present tendencies of these cities, or yet when he sees them 
 united with the common characteristics of fretfulness, clever- 
 ness, 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 Mel- 
 bourne is about theirs. The Sydney Morning Herald and the 
 Sydney Mail do not hold the same position in Melbourne as 
 the Argus and the Australasian do in Sydney. The Sydney 
 people are captious in their criticism on the younger capital, 
 just as Boston is on New York : they talk about being 
 " dragged at the chariot wheels ot 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 percep- 
 tion 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
 
 SYDNEY AND HER CIVILIZATION. 53 
 
 "as much"' into "more." I, however, who have no preten- 
 tions to be a good judge, and am, as an acute English critic of 
 mine so aptly put it once, only " Whitman and water :" I must 
 still cling to the belief that perfection is to be found, and only 
 to be found, in the union of these two qualities— of emotion 
 and intellect, of poetry and prose. Or, as I said the other day,* 
 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 them- 
 selves, 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 com- 
 panionship with the inanimate things about him, or in the 
 settled intercourse of country life, married or single, will have 
 a quite different look, a quite different tone, from the man 
 whose days are passed in the brisk interchange of words and 
 thoughts of the life of the city. And how much will this 
 difference be accentuated by the fact that the city is a seat of 
 large and intense ideas, that the very air is impregnated 
 with the passionate thoughts, words, and acts of the whole 
 civilized world ! It is in such men that we find the metro- 
 politan 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 ave- 
 rage intelligent man, the labourer of the past, the partner of 
 
 Victorian Review, February, 1885, in a scries of articles on contemporary English 
 poets.
 
 54 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 the present, the master of the future ! Put this man, however, 
 into a state of stress, intellectual or emotional, in his business 
 or in his private life, and that fine nervous face of his will 
 become lean and rigid, those quick clear eyes hard and naked. 
 And, just as it is the pleasure of our civilization to see this 
 man in the first stage, so is it the pain thereof to see him, alas 
 too often, in the second. These are the most dread spectres 
 that haunt metropolises : their anguish wrings the heart with 
 an intensity, with an abidingness that the sight of mere misery 
 brutal and degraded does not and cannot inspire us. London 
 and New York swarm with such, and our miniature Australian 
 intellectual capital, too, knows them only too well. They press 
 the stamp of their struggle into the very brow of their city. It 
 is they who bring home to us the lean and rigid, the hard and 
 naked side of the best life of their city. While it is to their 
 successful brothers that we owe what of us is phenomenal, it is 
 to them, the unsuccessful, that we owe what of us is premature. 
 They are the men who have formulated that exceeding bitter 
 cry of " Cruel Loudon." 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 admira- 
 tion for the intellect of the average intelligent metropolitan in 
 general and the Melbourne metropolitan in particular, should 
 not think of contradicting him here. My only wish here is, as 
 I have said, to find out wherein these people whom he calls, 
 with such fine scorn, "provincials" and "shopkeepers," show 
 themselves his equals, and whether they do show themselves 
 his equals, or that I shall stand convicted of a delusion on the 
 subject. 
 
 I believe much in first impressions (good ones, that is) pro- 
 vided only that we bring, what I have called, a second and 
 third look to bear on the thing which has impressed us. And 
 since I am graceless enough to speak of my own little private 
 beliefs, let me add that I often find some difficulty in making 
 my last impressions as good as my first, which is provoking to
 
 SYDNEY AND HER CIVILIZATION. 55 
 
 anyone who has a dread and dislike of " impressionists " and 
 an attraction and affection towards "students." Hence I find 
 myself quite ready, when in the latter humour, to call my first 
 impressions shallow and careless, and when in the former, to 
 call my last impressions dead-dark and pedantic, so that Mr. 
 Marcus Clarke delights me not nor (some laborious scholar of 
 the Australasian future) neither, and all is vanity and vexation 
 of spirit ! Let me, however, on this occasion retail my first 
 impressions with a trustful pen, for, as they were unself- 
 conscious 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 civiliza- 
 tion. 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 British- 
 ness — 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 Amnion when the Tiber flowed into the Nile : 
 Woden and the Cod 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 
 Cod that is " a jealous Cod." And further. These people in 
 Sydney have clung, not only to the faith but to the very 
 raiment of their giant. The same gloomy dresses, cumbrous 
 on the women, hideous on the men, that we see in England ! 
 Now in Melbourne, where those dear "old-country" days, 
 wherein spring, summer, autumn, and winter alternate with a
 
 56 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 fifth season excruciatingly peculiar to the place itself, are not 
 infrequent; in Melbourne, I say, an attachment to the very 
 tricks of one of the worst climates in the world might not be 
 so unnatural ; but in Sydney such an attachment becomes 
 positively monstrous. The same food, the same overeating 
 and overdrinking, and (observe how careful we are) at the 
 same hours ! If there is one thing, I believe, that the people 
 of Sydney really grudge to Melbourne, it is her factories. If 
 they could only make the atmosphere of Sydney (they do 
 their best, however, with - their steamers for the harbour) as 
 supremely filthy as that of London, Birmingham, Manchester, 
 Glasgow, the people, the intensely loyal people of Sydney, 
 would be happy. As it is, they have reluctantly to concede a 
 point in favour of, what the newspapers call, " her younger 
 rival." And yet how can I say this in the face of their 
 eminently successful pollution of their harbour and their very 
 streets with their drainage ? 
 
 It is no wonder, then, we see, that, unlike Melbourne, 
 Sydney's perception of her individual life is weak, miserably 
 weak, all but imperceptible. She has to point to her natural 
 advantages and her age. Now it is very nice to have a fine 
 harbour, and Mr. Trollope is in his grave and we may safely 
 say that he had a profuse literary talent, like many writers who 
 lived before and many who will live after him ; but the chief 
 point of interest in the harbour, at any rate to your dis- 
 interested 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 con- 
 siderable 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.* No 
 
 * It is gratifying to notice at the Technological Museum, where one would least 
 expect it, the number of Sunday visitors more than halves that of all the other days put 
 together.
 
 SYDNEY AND HER CIVILIZATION. 57 
 
 neighbouring town, so far as I know, partakes in the virtuous 
 hatred of Geelong to Sunday boats. The harbour is plied by 
 a large number of small steamboats. The Middle-class and 
 the People, thanks to the short hours of work (hence in large 
 part Australia's excellence in sports) and the Saturday half- 
 holiday, can disport themselves on its banks or where they 
 please. " Our harbour," then, and our parks too, are of more 
 real use than merely, as they say, to blow about ; and so far, so 
 good. Pleasure, that light fair Pleasure which should find its 
 natural home in every fine climate, is undoubtedly drawing 
 breath in the Sydney air. Mr. Marcus Clarke's acuteness of 
 perception did not deceive him when he followed up this 
 pallid plant into the full-grown tree with its flower and 
 fruit of fashion and luxury. Yes, climate will ultimately 
 work a transformation upon even the six-fingered six-toed 
 giant. Moloch's fire will cease to burn and brand : Jehovah's 
 jealousy will lose its harshness, and the sweet bright love 
 of the White Christ will brood over and temper the 
 hearts of this people to beauty and melody. Meantime, 
 down there in Melbourne, Pleasure when it opens its mouth 
 to breathe, will also open it to bite : the taint of cruelty will 
 be upon it as it is upon all things purely intellectual, all things 
 in which emotion has no part. " Melbourne," the wise 
 man of Sydney will say then, " Melbourne is the city of stew- 
 pans and stockbrokers. They know how to make money, but 
 not how to spend it. If they have pleasure, it borders on pain 
 as lust does on love. All the beauty they know is the beauty 
 of light ; heat is a stranger to them. Their music lacks the 
 minor keys. Years ago their one poet, Gordon, ran away 
 from the city, and took refuge in the bush : if he were alive 
 now, he would come to Sydney. No poet, no painter, no 
 musician will be brought forth out of Melbourne. — You will 
 make fine logicians, you Melbournians, and it does a man's heart 
 good to think of your cog-wheels ; but believe me that you 
 know no more of life than that it is an existence, or of death 
 than that it is the stopping of a mouse-wheel." Thus our 
 problematical "provincial," returning fine pity for the fine 
 scorn of our problematical " metropolitan." Or, to drop the 
 symbolism, thus my first impressions of the actual or inherent 
 melody and beauty of the Sydney life, as evolved from my last 
 impressions of the leanness and rigidness, the hardness and 
 nakedness that is to be found so easily in life in Melbourne.
 
 58 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 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 
 pozcer;" the words only pass into a dry tuneless jingle, like 
 Gordon at his worst, wherein nothing can be heard but, ''Lean- 
 ness 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,* would have made of 
 that people, of that city, whose capacity to foster poetic 
 instinct was "gauged" with such grimness by Mr. Clarke.f 
 
 ' r A volume of his, in which is included his " Miscellaneous Poems " and "Convict 
 Once," has lately appeared — at last another book, out of so much of this hopelessly 
 worthless colonial literature, which counts ! 
 
 + Three of Miss Ironsides' pictures were, when I was in Sydney, housed in a sort of 
 shed behind the temporary Picture Gallery. On one side of it the windows were open 
 to the dust and rain! One of the pictures, the " Ars Longa, Vita Brevis," was much 
 spoiled; another, the "Adoration of the Magi," a little. 1 did what I could to alter 
 this state of affairs, but I could do nothing. The Trustees do not know to whom the pic- 
 tures belong, and there is not room enough in the Gallery, as it is, for even the purchased 
 pictures. Perhaps when these three pictures are permanently spoiled, something will 
 be done. For me, I must confine myself to pointing out the wonderful depth of quiet 
 feeling which is the chief characteristic of the work of this remarkable girl. This is to 
 be noticed most in the " Marriage " picture and the " Ars Longa." At the same time
 
 SYDNEY AND HER CIVILIZATION. 59 
 
 And then we turn to this room, this people, and this city, and 
 the fatuity of their intense loyalty seems a venial offence beside 
 the arid barrenness of their intellectual neighbours. Such a 
 construction (and, alas, not a merely temporary but a quite 
 everlasting one) as the Melbourne Picture and Sculpture 
 Galleries, such a choice, such an arrangement of pictures and 
 statues, would not satisfy these men and women of Sydney, as 
 it does the virtuous wives of the Bourke Street tradespeople and 
 of " our wealthy lower orders." I do not say that the Morning 
 Herald would burst out into correspondence on the subject, 
 nor yet that that company of eminent men who legislate for an 
 ungrateful country would speak with scorn or pity of these 
 things. The chime of melody and beauty here is, if sweet, far 
 off. Pleasure light and fair is as yet but drawing breath. The 
 outer public life and the inner are but feeling their way to a 
 perception of an individuality, to an individuality that seeks 
 after that form of happiness whose chief expression is in 
 melody and beauty. But in Melbourne there is nothing, or 
 scarcely anything, of this. If no one would think of calling 
 Sydney cruel, neither would anyone think of calling Mel- 
 bourne sweet. The average intelligent man in Melbourne 
 worships at the master-shrine alone : Intellect is his god, 
 Intellect with its speech of clear nervous prose and its poetry 
 of vigorous, if rather meretricious metres and "galloping 
 rymes." He has no, or very little, care for Art as Art : that is 
 an affair for women, and, as the only organised female public 
 opinion is that of the virtuous tradeswoman and the wife of the 
 wealthy lower orders, spiritual leanness and rigidness, hardness 
 and nakedness are the popular product of the day. 
 
 Now there is, I will venture to say, not one social 
 phenomenon, good or evil, in Victoria and New South Wales 
 that cannot be traced to these their spiritual conditions which 
 I have been trying to express. Let us take, what I have 
 
 there is something of passionate— of passion suppressed, but none the less existent and 
 strong— -which adds a peculiar flavour and attraction to her work. The mother's face in 
 the "Adoration" and the girl playing on the harp in the " Marriage" are really beauti- 
 ful in thought and execution. For pure execution, however, I would direct attention to 
 the drapery of the angel in the former picture, or, in a particular shape, the thorns hi 
 the " Ars Longa." I suppose that there is such a plethora of work like this of Miss 
 Ironsides' in both Sydney and Melbourne that only one or two mentally impoverished 
 people like myself can be expected to trouhle about it, and h is iii the hope dI attracting 
 the attention ol one 01 two such that I write this. There are, however, three pictures by 
 Mr. Poling by in the Melbourne Gallery which would, I am sure, look quite nice in one 
 of our new aesthetically furnished hotels, Mr. Hosie's ( ay) or the Grand, and then 
 
 Eerhaps omeom might put Miss Ironsides' in their places. This would be a gain for 
 oth the Hotels and the ' l.dlery.
 
 60 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 called, the three vital questions of the day — Free Trade — 
 Federalism- — Higher Education. New South Wales is in 
 favour of Free Trade. Her perception of her individual life is 
 weak : she clings to the past, she considers the present. 
 Whereas Victoria — Victoria with her swarm of intelligent 
 labourers and men of business — strong in her reliance on her 
 intellect, resolutely turns to the future from which she thinks 
 she will be able to carve out all her desires. Like America, 
 she wants no help from without, she will brook no interference. 
 She will not let her mineral products lie idle as New South 
 Wales does. She is impatient of the true British characteristic, 
 the slow patient evolution of things, the 
 
 " broadening down 
 From precedent to precedent." 
 
 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 civiliza- 
 tion, 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 South
 
 SYDNEY AND HER CIVILIZATION. 6 1 
 
 Wales 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 ot 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 horseman- 
 ship. 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 
 lozver orders, italking 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, " Is it to be ?" Has not this acute perceiver of 
 ours been once more writing down one aspect of the thing as 
 the aspect, 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 ot 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 ten- 
 dencies, 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, having 
 
 \
 
 02 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 first 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 potitry and 
 
 prose. 
 
 " 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 
 d a y — Higher Education. When, on ist 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 some- 
 thing 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 dis- 
 appointment. 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 unscrupulous- 
 ness, 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 convic- 
 tion 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 Wes- 
 leyans, et hoc genus omtie, but not a word, and apparently not a 
 thought, for the legitimate checks on "the abuses of educa- 
 tional power 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 cares
 
 SYDNEY AND HER CIYILIZATION. 63 
 
 little 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 misunder- 
 stood. 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. Moor- 
 house, 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, 188s. 
 
 [Note. — I am tempted to republish here a letter, which I sent lately to 
 the Sydney Morning Herald wherein one aspect of the secondary education
 
 64 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 question 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 con- 
 sideration 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 ex- 
 perience 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 adventure
 
 SYDNEY AND HER CIVILIZATION. 65 
 
 schools,' 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 what- 
 ever to him, either in the culture of himself or in the prosecu- 
 tion 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, Bowen- 
 fels, 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, to 
 the education of the People, and from that 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 intel- 
 lectual and spiritual man), which, accordingly, provide an 
 education, even when judged by its own miserable standard, 
 
 F
 
 66 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 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 intel- 
 lectual 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 aristo- 
 cracy which, with all its charm (let us suppose) of social 
 manners and of intellectual and spiritual culture (and this is
 
 
 SYDNEY AND HER CIVILIZATION. 6] 
 
 Ut wTt- 6.-, Js*^ s~ P"yv»»6~^ La+s^/l,**'*- ***** 
 
 supposing 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 off- 
 spring. 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) than / 
 am, with the efforts of such men as " A. N." and Mr. Edwin 
 Bean to reproduce, or try to reproduce, in Australia as far as 
 maybe, "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 Denomina- 
 tional 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 uni- 
 versities ; 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 left
 
 68 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 out 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 
 ot 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 per- 
 functory 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 recapitu- 
 late, 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 neces- 
 sary for every citizen will be somewhat extended in scope, but 
 no account will be taken of the higher culture hitherto deemed 
 necessary fur 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. 

 
 SYDNEY AND HER CIVILIZATION. 69 
 
 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 medio- 
 crities, the aggressive. " Great qualities," cried Empedocles, 
 facing the same problem as we do, 
 
 " Great qualities are trodden down, 
 and littleness united 
 is become invincible." 
 
 If this, then, is to be the case in Europe, what will it be in 
 America, and still more in Australia? Aristocracies may not 
 be ideal, but they have their use : they establish a certain high 
 tone of social intercourse which is certainly valuable as one 
 element in a really fine civilization ; and, when they have 
 passed away, it still lives as a tacit influence. France to-day, 
 for instance, is a republic, but her outward manners, despite 
 all that has happened, bear something of the mark of the 
 Grand Siecle. England, again, is swinging away with heavy 
 speed from her old ideal of Puritanism, and yet, as Mr. Arnold 
 says so well, " the seriousness, solemness, and devout energy of 
 Puritanism are a prize once won, never to be lost ; they are a 
 possession to our race for ever." But America? but Aus- 
 tralia? America is not leavened by Puritanism as England is, 
 neither has she any hereditary tone of social intercourse to be 
 compared with that of England, not to say of France. America 
 must settle her own problem for herself, despite all the outer 
 influence which is brought to bear on her : two hundred miles 
 out from the Amazon mouth the water is still fresh, but it is 
 salt at last. Put consider this Australia where the Puritanism
 
 70 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 only began to operate when its sincerity was souring into cant, 
 where the tone of social intercourse flourishes in the hands of 
 those who attain to it as the imitation of an imitation ! What 
 can be so disastrous for Australia as the thrusting into power of 
 a class of this sort, to be followed by a class which is to the 
 first as the first is to its prototype in England ? How this 
 future presents itself has already been considered here. Mr. 
 Marcus Clarke's picture of it stands like a perpetual nightmare. 
 What hope, then, remains to us except in that very "higher 
 culture hitherto deemed necessary for a leisured and governing 
 class," which Mr. Arnold tells us our local private schools will 
 not have influence enough to create as "a class and a power?" 
 Is the only aristocracy possible to us to be, not a broad one 
 like that of Athens, but a narrow one like that of Rome? We 
 all know the picture Juvenal has painted of the decadence of 
 this last, and Johnson's application of it to the London of his 
 time is not a memory altogether pleasant. " The lustre of a 
 capital," says M. Renan, with his eye on that of his own 
 country, "'springs from a vast provincial dung-heap, where 
 millions of men lead an obscure life, in order to bring forth 
 some brilliant butterflies which come to burn themselves in the 
 light." And if for capital we substitute plutocracy, and for 
 butterflies creatures of a nature less savoury, we see something 
 like the sort of future with which we are threatened here. 
 Political life at present in Europe can scarcely be called noble, 
 but here in Australia it is positively so base that there is a 
 danger of its becoming the monopoly of men whose verbose 
 incompetence is only equalled by their jovial corruption. The 
 Plutocracy, such as it is, is being thrown in upon itself. Its 
 present generation, it is true, is content to work — and, indeed, 
 can find its only happiness in work ; but this wili not be so with 
 the next, and still less with the third, generation. The desire 
 to enjoy will grow into a lust, and this lust will spread. The 
 end of this we know, and there will not lack writers to look 
 back upon the present, even as so many of us look forward to 
 the future, with a sort of eager envy. Well, and what is to be 
 done to prevent this, if it is to be prevented ? To cease from 
 trying to obtain a secondary education for the Upper-class ? to 
 obtain Australian Rugbies, not only for the Plutocracy, but for 
 the Upper-class, and for any one of the People that has the 
 care to climb up to them and the best education which his age 
 and country can afford him ? to create a class and power that
 
 SYDNEY AND HER CIVILIZATION. 7 1 
 
 shall, in their turn, create a really fine civilization ? — are we to 
 cease from all direct struggle for this, and meet the present 
 crisis by simply trying "to keep up the love of genuine culture 
 in ourselves, and so to create an ever larger force in the nation to 
 favour it?" I cannot believe that this is so; I cannot even believe 
 that, good way as it is, it is " the best way." We have all been 
 reading lately what Mr. Arnold had to say in favour of this 
 indirect method, this creation of a Remnant that should at last 
 become a power, and I am sure I should be the last person to 
 say a word against it. All I have to say is, that I have too 
 much belief in the power of institutions (a power "the benefits 
 of which," Mr. Arnold has just been telling us, "he had not 
 properly appreciated " before his trip to America) to neglect 
 anything that could bring them to the side of Culture. I 
 appreciate the indirect method, and I believe that, in the long 
 run, it is the method which gives permanent solidity, but I can- 
 not blind myself to the immense importance of the direct 
 method. If it is necessary to conduct a river into a city, the 
 pipes must first be made, and care taken that they are not too 
 small. The French Revolution was a violent attempt and a 
 premature one, and yet, such as it was, it brought a greater 
 volume of happiness into France than the abortive attempt that 
 we made in England. We have still to face the problem of the 
 happiness of the few and the debasement of the many, and I 
 cannot see that it is an easier problem to resolve than that 
 which is presenting itself to the French just at present. I 
 still, then, must continue to believe that it is not wise in 
 England, and how much more in America, and how much 
 more in Australia, to refrain from the direct struggle for a higher 
 education for our Upper-class. Our aim is not for the few but 
 for the many, and not for elementary Culture for the many, 
 but for the possibilities of a really fine Culture. We have, too, 
 our distrust of Remnants. We dread their tendency to take to 
 lotus-eating. '1 hey are apt to care so little for the propagation 
 of either their species or their Culture. 
 
 " Let us alone ! What pleasure can we have K. y^ 
 to war with evil ? Is there any peace 
 in ever climbing up the climbing wave?" 
 
 It is with difficulty, with great and perpetual difficulty, that a 
 Goethe can keep his duty to his art and his duty to his neigh- 
 bour at the perfect poise. It is so hard to keep your duty to 
 yourself from running into your duty to your selfishness.
 
 72 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 Light, and the love of light, and the love of bringing light to 
 others, is after all impossible without a certain admixture of 
 heat. Let us, then, still continue to nourish our enthusiasm 
 for a direct purpose, which shall be the future to that great 
 mass of average human beings who are thoughtlessly moulded 
 by whatever they find is strong enough to mould them. Let 
 us be jealous of individuals. " Non Angli, sed angeli." 
 
 " Leave not a Jut man soul 
 to grow old in darkness and pain .'" 
 
 October, 1885. 

 
 CULTURE. 73 
 
 CULTURE. 
 
 Everyone nowadays has something to say about Culture. 
 Even the politicians have heard of it, and some morning we 
 may read in our newspapers that one of them is of opinion that 
 there is some meaning in the term. Naturally enough we have 
 all of us for some time been groping after the thing itself. 
 The Time-Spirit is like a skilful driver of sheep. He may 
 have considerable trouble with his flock, but, thanks to his 
 unruffled intelligence and the ceaseless exertions of his dog 
 Genius, he brings them all in in time for the market. It is 
 now almost a century since the Idea of Culture took definite 
 shape in the mind of a single man, and ever since then the 
 number of its followers has kept on increasing, until at last 
 everyone, as I remarked, has now something to say about it. 
 If, however, one enquires of people, not what they think of 
 Culture, (For everyone from the Vatican (Ecumenical Council* 
 to the author of " In Memoriam " f is agreed as to the 
 advantage ot it), but what culture is, one may go far for a 
 satisfactory answer. Women are growing dissatisfied with the 
 sphere of their work. What is it that they need ? " More 
 breadth of culture," answers the Prince of Tennyson's Princess 
 readily enough, " more breadth of culture ! " And it will be 
 said that it is easy to see that what the Prince means is, that 
 women should have thrown open to them the education that 
 has so far been the monopoly of men. But is this Culture ? 
 is this the whole truth about it? — simply the giving to the 
 many — to women, to the Middle-class and to the People — 
 what is the education of the few ? would that man in whose 
 mind the Idea of Culture first took definite shape have been 
 satisfied with the sight of ubiquitous Harrows and Etons and 
 Grammar Schools of Melbourne and Geelong ? There can be 
 no doubt but that such a sight would have pleased, but it 
 certainly won Id not have satisfied him. " Schools," he would 
 have said, "are of high importance, but what is taught in them 
 is of importance still higher." 
 
 ' Crescaf et proficiat tarn singulorum quam omnium, tarn unius hominis quam totius 
 Ecclesia;, Intclligentia Scientia Sapientia. 
 " In Memoriam," cxiv.
 
 74 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 And so we come back again to our question as to what 
 Culture is with a sense that the ready answers to it are only 
 half answers. Now everyone has heard of Goethe, and every- 
 one has read some of his writings — " Faust," at any rate — and, 
 as it is to Goethe that we owe the Idea of Culture (as indeed 
 most things that are really good in the sphere of modern 
 thought), it would be best to at once quote his own words on 
 the matter, and see if we cannot find a definition, or at any 
 rate a description, of Culture that shall satisfy us. Poetry, how- 
 ever, does not exactly lend itself to definitions of such things as 
 this, or even to descriptions. In Faust himself the idea may 
 be more or less, as they say, incarnated, but we plain practical 
 people, who like things put as much in black and white as may 
 be, have some difficulty in these matters, and would far rather 
 hear of them in simple English prose which means what it says 
 and says what it means, than in poetry (and particularly 
 German poetry) which seems to us to do exactly the reverse. 
 Well, then, let us turn away from this parabolic Goethe for a 
 little, and see if we cannot find someone who shall be his 
 expounder to us. And who else should this be, at any rate in 
 this case, than he whom the newspapers like to call the Apostle 
 of Culture, Mr. Matthew Arnold ? Let us go to Mr. Matthew 
 Arnold, and say : " Sir, you are constantly talking about 
 Culture, and you have said many uncomplimentary things to 
 us all about our w T ant of it. Now would you be so kind as to 
 tell us precisely what you mean by it ? And we warn you that 
 we are plain practical people who like things put as much in 
 black and white as may be, and that we have a decidedly poor 
 opinion of your efforts to make us believe that ' the Eternal 
 not ourselves that makes for righteousness ' is the same thing 
 as our ' loving and intelligent Governor of the Universe,' and 
 that it makes no difference to us when we eat our Christmas 
 goose and plum pudding whether we believe that we do so 
 because those shepherds and those Three Kings did come that 
 day to Christ in the Bethlehem manger, to the accompaniment 
 of an angelic concert, or did not. We want, Sir, a definition 
 of this Culture of yours, or, if you cannot give us that (But, 
 really now, you are so clever at definitions that we shall be 
 quite disappointed if you cannot !), then you must give us a 
 good description of it, so that we may be able to arrive at 
 a proper decision about it.'' Then an expression of bland 
 patience would cross Mr. Arnold's countenance, as he sat in
 
 CULTURE. 75 
 
 his study chair, listening with that "native modesty" of which 
 he has told us all, to the words of our curious foreman ; and, 
 after a short pause, he would perhaps answer : " Gentlemen, I 
 am much honoured by this deputation and inquiry. Long ago 
 in some remarks of mine on translating Homer. . . . But 
 I will refer you to a more recent period. A new and revised 
 edition of a little book of mine called 'Literature and Dogma' 
 has just been issued in a cheap form by Messrs. Smith, Elder 
 and Co. You will find that in the Preface to it the following 
 words occur, which I venture to think may, on investigation, 
 be found to answer the question with which I am now 
 honoured. But, as you possibly may not remember it, (for I 
 cannot expect you, any more than myself, to be always study- 
 ing my works), I will quote it to you. ' Culture,' I said (Culture 
 in italics) — ' Culture, knowing the best that has been thought 
 and known in the world.' I can give no better definition than 
 this. ' True Culture,' I say again, ' true Culture implies not 
 only knowledge, but right tact and justness of judgment, 
 forming themselves by and with judgment.' Or, yet again : 
 'Culture is reading' (Reading in italics), 'but reading with a 
 purpose to guide it, and with system.'" — And with this, and a 
 renewal of compliments on both sides, our jury bows itself out, 
 and presently the sound of the closing hall-door mounts up to 
 the silent chamber. 
 
 " But an awful pleasure bland 
 spreading o'er the Poet's face, 
 when the sound climbs near his seat, 
 the encircled library sees ; 
 as he lets his lax right hand 
 which the lightnings doth embrace 
 sink upon his mighty knees." 
 
 This, then, it seems, is Culture — knoiving the best that has 
 been thought and known in the world — not only knowledge, but 
 right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and 
 with judgment — reading, but reading with a purpose to guide it, 
 and with system. And is not this something like what Goethe 
 meant in that enigmatic sentence of his, which we have heard 
 so often quoted by people who understood it as much as we 
 did: "Vom Halben zu entwohnen; Im Ganzen, Guten, Schonen 
 rcsolut zu leben." "I resolved to wean myself from halves, and 
 to live for the Whole, the Good, the Beautiful." But even 
 now, even now that we know what it is (And after all, we say, 
 what much more is it than saying that we ought to try for the
 
 76 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 best article, and not rest content with anything but the best 
 article?), wherein are we, we plain practical people with our 
 attachment to black and white, helped to the attainment of it ? 
 Culture, we are told, is reading, but reading with a purpose to 
 guide it and with system. The purpose, it is presumed, is 
 attainment, but what is the system? We are to have know- 
 ledge, and not only knowledge but right tact and justness of 
 judgment, forming themselves by and with judgment. All 
 very nice, we say, but how are we to get them? You say to a 
 man who hobbles, "Run :" he is quite as capable of saying it 
 as you are. Either show him how to run, or hold your 
 tongue! — unless it be that he thinks he is running, and even 
 then it seems useless enough to undeceive him without you 
 can teach him how to do what he now thinks he is. What, 
 then, is this system of which you speak ? what is the receipt 
 for it ? is it a system possible to us ? 
 
 Well, I really have not the courage to go and face Mr. 
 Arnold again. Handlers of the lightnings like he is can be so 
 disagreeable when they please. Where is the joy of figuring 
 in some ludicrous or contemptible attitude in their writings for 
 the next few hundred years or so ? It is all very well to say 
 that we shall all of us be in our graves presently, and all 
 equally ignorant of what our descendants may think of us, but 
 the truth is no one likes to be held up to the nations as a fool 
 or a knave, and especially if he be both. I see nothing for it 
 but to let the oracle alone. I for one will have nothing to do 
 with stirring up Phoibos again. I have done so more than 
 once already, and am too grateful for a whole hide to tempt 
 the arrows further. We must be our own Oidipous. At most 
 we can reverently finger the Sibylline leaves, and see if any- 
 thing of " pleasant to the eye and good for food " can be 
 extracted therefrom. 
 
 To begin with, however, does it not seem best to say at 
 once that, after all, there is no receipt for not saying 
 and doing foolish things except not to be foolish ? No 
 system in the world will give wings to a worm. On the 
 other hand, there is really no reason why the descendants 
 of that worm should not one day navigate the sky ; and, 
 as a matter of fact, they do. Similarly with the stupidest 
 and the most degraded of us, I cannot see why a single 
 moment should be lost in attempting to better them. The 
 earth is likely to be inhabitable for the next eight millions
 
 CULTURE. 7 7 
 
 of years or so, it seems, and I am sure that is long enough for 
 us. We need not be in such a hurry as the Socialists would 
 have us, nor yet creep along on all fours in the Conservative 
 manner ; but we must not, of course, undervalue either fashion 
 of progress, since both wheels and a drag are important parts 
 of a carriage in uneven country. But here again, as is always 
 the case, we are brought face to face with the question, not 
 only of the wheels and the drag, not only of the carriage 
 itself, and not only of even the driver of it, but of the end 
 of the journey. " The purpose," we said a moment ago 
 in our ready way, " is, it is presumed, attainment, but what 
 is the system ? — Never mind," we say, " about where we 
 are going to : let us hear about the carriage we are going 
 in ! Let us have Etons and Harrows and Melbourne and 
 Geelong Grammar Schools everywhere, and then we shall be 
 alright. Let us resolve to have the best article, and not rest 
 content with anything but the best article, and that's all ! " 
 
 Alas, for the impatience of mankind! In order to try for 
 the best article, not to say to have it, must we not first know 
 what the best article is ? should we not know where we are 
 going to, before we construct our carriage and purchase our 
 horses ? And yet, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, are 
 we not content to go, and leave more or less to chance where 
 we are going to? do we not waste half our lives in over- 
 coming difficulties with which we ought to have had nothing 
 to do? It is so easy to talk and to act: it is so difficult to 
 think, and mould your words and actions to your thoughts 
 rather than your thoughts to your words and actions. It is the 
 weary old tale of the more haste and the less speed, the weary 
 old tale that is for ever new\ And yet we will not listen to it. 
 Sooner than trouble ourselves with the whys of things, we will 
 throw ourselves with energy into the first hows that present 
 themselves, and leave the rest to chance, or, as Dr. Moorhouse's 
 good "unintelligent orthodox" people say, to God. But nothing 
 real, nothing lasting, is achieved in this way. Nature does not 
 work in this way : God does not work in this way. The beasts 
 do and the vast majority of men do, and that is why, in 
 Hamlet's words, life is such "an unweeded garden that grows 
 to seed ; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely." 
 No. it we are to understand, not only Culture hut anything at 
 all, we must begin at the very beginning : we must learn the 
 whys. Take care of the whys, we might say, and the lunvs
 
 78 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 will take care of themselves. And let us not for a moment be 
 deceived by those who tell us that our fathers got along very 
 well without inquiring into the whys, into the causes of things, 
 and so can we. This is not so. Whatever success has been 
 achieved has been achieved by a recognition, conscious or 
 unconscious it may be, of the causes of the thing worked 
 upon. Instead of our fathers having had any success from 
 their ignorance of causes, or their reliance on good fortune, 
 they have had success in despite in these, and only so far as they 
 banished the one and knew how to turn to account the other. 
 
 And Culture ? what has this to do with Culture ? Every- 
 thing ! — In this, as in so many other cases, we concentrate all 
 our attention on the hotv and leave the why to take care of 
 itself. " More breadth of Culture, more breadth of Culture," 
 cry the Princes and the Priests, and everyone else, in emulous 
 chorus. But when they are asked what they mean by Culture 
 — what Culture is, then they have no answer ready save one 
 (as Shelley says), 
 
 " pinnacled dim in the intense inane ;" 
 
 and this sort of thing will, in the end, satisfy no man. 
 
 Well, we have heard what Culture is — knowing the best that 
 has been thought atid known in the world. But we have been 
 brought up sharply at the very next step : Culture is reading, 
 but reading with a purpose to guide it. What is the purpose ? 
 Attainment. Yes, but how 1 how and why ? 
 
 But before we try to answer that, let us think a moment 
 whether the expounder of our parabolic Goethe has given us a 
 definition that is quite satisfactory. We have nothing to say 
 against his definition of Culture itself. It expresses Goethe's 
 " the Whole, the Good and the Beautiful " perfectly. But what 
 about this second definition ? what about Culture being read- 
 ing, but reading with a purpose to guide it ? Is this a pure 
 parallel equivalent of the first, or has it something of a 
 limitation in it? Can we, indeed (supposing us the happy 
 possessors of a certain purpose and system), achieve a know- 
 ledge of the best that has been thought and known in the world 
 — of the Whole, the Good and the Beautiful — by reading, and 
 by reading only ? is this what Goethe has to say to us ? is 
 this the lesson of Goethe's life ? If it is, why is it that he lays 
 such stress on the absolute personal experience of things? If 
 Faust could have achieved Truth in his study, why does
 
 CULTURE. 7 9 
 
 Goethe show us his achievement of it by taking him away 
 from his reading, and flinging him in the arms, first of Love 
 and then of Life? Faust does not leave his reading and his 
 thinking behind him : they accompany him everywhere, from 
 Margarete's bedroom to the witch-revel on the Brocken. And 
 what does this mean but that, to achieve a knowledge of the 
 best that the world has thought and known, two things are 
 necessary — reading and experience ; or, in the same words, 
 thought and knowledge. No amount of reading will compen- 
 sate for want of experience. It is useless for me to think I 
 have attained to Truth, if I have never felt her absolute presence. 
 Is idealization the essence of true love ? Is there a more real 
 inspiration to be found in the faery princesses of Shelley, than 
 in the breathing women of Wordsworth ? Idealization is good, 
 but it must have a firm foundation in reality, or it is barren of 
 anything but fantasticality. So it is with thought and know- 
 ledge. No man who has not himself lived and loved can tell 
 us the truth of love and life. Gibbon had immense reading, and 
 a purpose and a system in it (I do not here enter upon their pre- 
 cise nature), and his history of the Decline and Fall of Rome 
 is in many respects quite admirable, but he does not attain to 
 truth in it. And why ? Because he has not experience, he 
 has not knowledge. All his reading, all his purpose, all his 
 system will not compensate for the want of their corollary. No, 
 Culture, the achieving of the best that has been thought in the 
 world, is not reading, not reading with any purpose or system 
 that has been or will ever be devised. Culture is the combina- 
 tion of reading with experience, of thought with knowledge. 
 The one thing acts as a check on the other; the one is the 
 spirit and the other the body; the one, in Shakspere's words, the 
 "judgment" and the other the "blood," and in their "co- 
 mingling" is found the perfect man. The purpose, the system 
 remain unchanged. We have only, as it seems to me, to 
 develop our second definition : to say that Culture is reading 
 and experience, but reading arid experience with a purpose to 
 guide them, and a system. 
 
 And so, having disposed somewhat of the why, we come 
 back to the how, the purpose and the system. In reality the 
 two are one. Mr. Arnold speaks once of Goethe's " pro- 
 found impartiality," and elsewhere he lays the greatest 
 stress on that which alone can help criticism " to produce 
 fruit for the future " — disinterestedness. By disinterestedness
 
 8o AUSTRALIAN KSSAYS. 
 
 lie means the sincere endeavour, the pure and simple 
 endeavour, to get at the truth of things, to see them as 
 they really are. And what is this hut Goethe's determina- 
 tion to " wean himself from halves," from partial views of 
 things ? Now nothing is easier than to say that you seek for 
 Truth and Truth only, and nothing is more difficult to do. 
 Who is there that does not make this profession ? And yet 
 how few, how infinitely few, are those who turn it into practice ! 
 And why is this ? The answer of course is because, say what 
 they may, the pursuit of most men is merely relative. I no 
 more attain to Truth by saying " Go to, I will attain to it," than 
 I should fly over the moon by a like formula. It is only the 
 really honest and sincere, the really pure and simple endeavour 
 to find Truth that makes me competent to even set out in 
 search of it, and it is only by the ceaseless use of a system of 
 resolute patience and clear-sightedness that I can hope to 
 proceed with any success upon my way. This is indeed a hard 
 saying ; but who, except him who ought to feel it least, feels 
 that Truth is a goal to be won by rose-crowned processions to 
 the sound of cymbals and dances ? Some people, indeed, 
 have a conviction that a special exception has been made in 
 their case, and that what has been hidden from the wise and 
 prudent has been revealed to babes and sucklings ; and I am 
 sure it is a pleasant sight enough to see the way the babes and 
 sucklings enjoy this idea, and will continue to do so as long 
 as the milk lasts. (And, indeed, at this very hour when the milk 
 is running rather low, what a dismal howl the poor little things 
 are setting up, and how on earth are we ever going to wean 
 them ?) No, it is only by utter and unwearying honesty, by 
 the obstinate determination to admit of no delusion or 
 illusion, however attractive, however pleasant to our souls, 
 that we can hope to attain to anything like Truth. How often, 
 when we think we have found the jewel, must we put it down 
 and remove ourselves, now to this side, now to that, to be sure 
 that the cutting is indeed flawless ! how much must we give 
 up, and how much must we win, before our mind is trained to, 
 as it were, of itself, effortlessly, spontaneously, look at things 
 with that patient clear-sightedness which reaches to their 
 essence ! This, then, is our purpose in Culture, and this our 
 system, and this is the fruit of it — a habit of thought which 
 shall have not only thought and knowledge, but right tact 
 and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and with 
 judgment. And so our scheme is complete. 

 
 CULTURE. S ! 
 
 Now, leave this theoretical consideration of it for a moment, 
 and see with what result it has been applied to actual things. 
 It has been applied, it is being applied, everywhere and to 
 almost everything. Take the domain of Science, where it has, 
 so far, been applied in a manner which appeals most to most 
 people — practical success, as we call it. There is no need for 
 me to sing the praises of this practical success. It rises all 
 round me in choruses and peans and hosannas. What I want 
 to say about it is, that all this practical success is due solely 
 and entirely to the fact that its creators have applied that 
 purpose and system of ours on, it is true, a more virgin soil 
 than most, but also with a more thoroughness than any. Look 
 at the patience and clear-sightedness that breathes and shines 
 in every page Darwin wrote ! It was well said of him, that 
 you could be sure no one would state the case against any- 
 thing he had to say more fully than he did himself. What a 
 serenity the man had, what depths of power and peace ! It 
 was my privilege to have had for father one who, to his own 
 depths of serenity, and power, and peace, added those drawn 
 from his friendship with this great Darwin, and from an 
 unrivalled appreciation of his work. When I think of that 
 method of the pursuit of the truth of things which I have 
 myself seen in the late Professor Leith Adams, my father, I seem 
 to myself to despair of ever thoroughly mastering the reality of 
 anything at all. I am overwhelmed with the mystery of 
 Butters' Spelling Book : I dare not lift up my eyes to criticise a 
 barrel-organ, and the young lady so painfully practising scales 
 there is a whole heaven above me. We cannot too much 
 praise the complete singleness of heart and soul with which the 
 Scientists have faced their problems. When I compare Lord 
 Tennyson's consideration of the Struggle in Nature in In 
 Memoriam, with Darwin's in his Descent of Man, the 
 radical insincerity of the former, I confess, disgusts me, and I 
 fear to do some one or other of its good qualities an injustice. 
 What intellectual exercise all this despair is ! The poet's mind 
 is made up before he starts, and all this paraphernalia of doubt 
 is really simply to show that he can enter into the opposite 
 point of view to his own, and yet retain his original convictions ! 
 What is the sum total of it ? That here is a man of the past, 
 born into a present from which none but those of the future 
 can evolve that future. Five are five and ten are ten, and he 
 adds them together and makes seven ! With how different a
 
 82 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 temper does Darwin face his problem ! He has become "as a 
 little child " in his simple attitude towards things. "Where'er 
 thou leadest, will I follow thee." And it was just because this 
 was so, that what he had to say to us prevails more and more ; 
 for, having attained to the secret of the purpose and system of 
 patience and clear-sightedness, he had not only knowledge but 
 right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by 
 and with judgment; and so he achieved Truth for himself 
 and for others. Nor does the good of such a man, his life 
 and his work, end here. He has communicated to all who 
 have anything to do with his work, his secret or something of 
 his secret, even as Goethe did before him. Why, here we have 
 Professor Huxley warning the coming race of Scientists against 
 taking for granted the very things in the discovery and revela- 
 tion of which he has himself toiled all his life, and the cry has 
 been taken up with enthusiasm. " All is possible," said 
 Professor Clifford, " to him who doubts." What an admirable 
 temper is this. Imagine Cardinal Newman warning the young 
 Catholics against taking the Infallibility of the Church for 
 granted ! Or Lord Tennyson assuring us that that fine 
 personal individuality theory of his ("I am I, thou art thou," 
 and so on) must not be considered by young Churchmen as 
 finally settled ! And yet it is in the possession or non- 
 possession of this temper, I say, that lies the essential difference 
 between the men of the past and the men of the future. Mr. 
 Arnold laments that Cardinal Newman, " that exquisite and 
 delicate genius," was not born a little later, so that the Time- 
 Spirit might have touched and transformed him. The same may 
 be said of Lord Tennyson, and will be said in another fifty 
 years. But let us have an end to such laments. To these men, 
 as to their contemporaries, the light came, and they chose the 
 twilight where others chose the dawn, and, having had their 
 hour of victory in the applause of the mass of their time, the 
 doubters and the believers, let us recognize that, at any rate as 
 influences on thought, they are but ghosts in the bright day- 
 time, speechless and ineffectual. 
 
 I have, despite myself, been singing the praises of the 
 Scientists. And why not ? Have they not shown us that they 
 have (as Darwin says so gracefully of Mr. Wallace) " an innate 
 genius for solving difficulties ?" But they, too, have their 
 assailable side. I have spoken of Professor Clifford. His 
 talent we were all bound to admire, and his sincerity ; but how
 
 CULTURE. 83 
 
 wonderfully inept he was when he came to consider things 
 outside his own immediate sphere ! We all remember what he 
 had to say about Christianity. He had the same narrowness 
 towards Christianity that the Christians have towards Science. 
 In them it is excusable, perhaps. Circumstances have been 
 all against them. They have had such little opportunity of 
 attaining to the secret of the purpose and system of Culture. 
 It has taken its rise outside their pale, and has been combated 
 as a foe, and is still combated. But in a man who had this 
 secret, how inexcusable the not being able to apply it outside 
 his own immediate sphere ! and how doubly inexcusable to 
 apply to his opponents that very method which had made them 
 so ! Really he should have known better. And unfortunately 
 there are so many of the young Scientists that are following in 
 his footsteps, and not in the footsteps of Darwin. And this is 
 a great misfortune, and should be struggled against with all our 
 powers. But otherwise (since I cannot end here with the note 
 of blame), how truly admirable is the temper of these men 
 when they are only let alone in their own sphere ! Compare 
 the teaching of Science in our colleges and universities with 
 that of Literature ! And yet, slow as is the progress of 
 Literature in its application of the purpose and system of 
 Culture to things, it is a progress. The success of that 
 charming series of biographies, the English Men of Letters 
 — nay. of the little shilling Literature Primers — is a sign of 
 it. And the same thing, too, is being done with regard to 
 Philosophy ; but, so far, the men of Science have the lead, 
 and they deserve it ; for, as I have said, theirs has 
 been the most complete singleness of heart and soul with 
 which Truth has been sought out, they have the most 
 thoroughly applied the secret of the purpose and system of 
 Culture. 
 
 Now, let us again leave our consideration of these things, 
 and see wherein this question of Culture concerns us plain 
 practical people with our attachment to black and white ; how 
 does it, in a word, come into our daily life. I can only 
 answer ;is before, everywhere ! — The other day the son of a 
 friend of mine, (say) Jones, wished to apprentice himself as a 
 brewer, or, rather, wished to start as a brewer at once. His 
 father sent him to a well-known brewer to be, as the father said, 
 put through his paces. Tin- young man returned crestfallen. 
 What was the matter ? The father could not understand it,
 
 84 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 and I was set to find it out. — " Tom hasrit enough Culture" I 
 reported. — "What do you mean?" asked the father. — "He 
 doesn't know the best that has been thought and known in the 
 world in the matter of brewing," I replied, "I should advise 
 a course of practical chemistry." — "But I'm sure X . . ., the 
 brewer's father, didn't know anything about chemistry, or his 
 father before him."—" Probably ; but, if X . . . didn't, I 
 expect he'd have to give up brewing," I said. And it is the 
 same in everything. More and more the perception that things 
 move by fixed laws, which must be obeyed if we would direct 
 ourselves with success, spreads and intensifies. The necessity 
 of moulding our words and actions to our thoughts, rather than 
 our thoughts to our words and actions, is becoming apparent 
 to all men who would avoid the workhouse, actual or meta- 
 phorical. The whys of things press upon us. It is no use 
 contenting ourselves with the hows. If we do, someone else 
 finds out the whys, and we are left in the lurch. The other 
 day an intelligent sheep- breeder told me an amusing tale. He- 
 had with much trouble and cost purchased in Tasmania a small 
 stud of prize sheep, which he took up to his station in the 
 North. The flower of the first generation he sent to a neigh- 
 bouring show. The wool of the sheep was thick and close, 
 unlike that of the locky sheep which are considered the best 
 there. His sheep was laughed at by all the judges, who 
 wondered such a sensible man should have sent such a sense- 
 less sheep ! These judges were deficient in Culture : they did 
 not know the best that has been thought and known in the 
 world in the matter of sheep-breeding. The sheep of these 
 men were shearing on an average less by more than two pounds 
 of wool than the sheep of the more scientific sheep-breeders 
 further south ! It is a question, then, whether their children 
 will be so jubilant when they are brought face to face with the 
 competition of an enormously increased home wool-production, 
 and a still more enormously increased wool-production from 
 South America. You cannot now with impunity be wanting in 
 Culture. The stream of life flows too fast for the straws that 
 want to go exploring back-waters, or stopping to admire the 
 scenery. 
 
 And Australia — this Australia in which we live — what a need 
 for Culture is here ! I see nothing here of the best, and much 
 of the worst. Take this very question of sheep-breeding. 
 Australia is in advance of England, for sheep-breeding is the 
 

 
 CULTURE. 85 
 
 staple support of the one country, and only an item in the 
 produce of the other. But in what a backward state it is to 
 what, as a staple support, it ought to be ! By what rough and 
 ready methods things are still done here. What a dearth of 
 real intelligence there is ! of that patience and clear-sightedness 
 which is the secret of the purpose and system of Culture. 
 'Who seems to see that in this, as in all matters, the why is the 
 important matter on which the how will follow, and not the 
 reverse ? There is abundance of shrewdness to hand, and 
 finger and thumb wisdom, but who sees that the great 
 necessity is sheer knowledge ? Australia was made by men of 
 this stamp, and they still rule it, but their rule is passing, as it 
 was bound to pass, before the unruffled intelligence of the 
 Time-Spirit. These were the men who gave us our absurd 
 nomenclature of birds and flowers. If they saw a bird was 
 black and had one dissonant cry, they called it a jay, and it 
 sufficed. A flower is yellow and little : call it a primrose. And 
 so on. Then their children arose in their turn, and found 
 themselves rich, and took to building cities, and we have (what 
 Mr. Sala calls) Marvellous Melbourne, with the Picture- 
 gallery and Statue-gallery which we know, and the crowning 
 glory of its Government House, perhaps the most hideous 
 hospital in existence. Or the good Sydney people would like 
 to decorate their Post-office with emblematic sculpture, and the 
 result is, what has at last become, the mockery of a Continent. 
 And at last, too, the Picture Gallery at Melbourne is coming 
 into disrepute, and some day, perhaps, the Government House 
 will do the same. It would be pleasant, I think, to see it 
 turned into an asylum. No nation that calls itself civilized 
 stands in more need of Culture, of the best that has been 
 thought and known in the world, in each and every branch of 
 it, than Australia does. Some faint perception of this seems 
 positively to be beginning to dawn upon its complacency. Let 
 us do all we can to forward this. "The Australians," said an 
 Australian to me the other day, " are much more fond of 
 beautiful things than the English." "Alas," I answered, 
 "that is not saying much, but I have not yet remarked it." 
 No, the one commendable wish that the Australians have, is 
 that they really do want the best article in things, and for the 
 best article the)' are ready to pay. The unfortunate thing is, 
 that there seems nothing in which they are yet qualified to 
 know the best article when they see it 1 "We want fine
 
 86 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 pictures," say the Victorians, and they are befooled by 
 ship-loads of London tea-trays, which no one but members of 
 Assembly and the wives of tradespeople and squatters would 
 take for anything else. — And yet, how is it possible for me to 
 continue to pile up anathemas like this against these Aus- 
 tralians for whom 1 hope so much, unless it be that I think in 
 this way to do the little best I can towards helping to the 
 realization of my hopes ? But this is an old tale now, and we 
 will say no more of it. 
 
 In every aspect of life, then, from its highest to its lowest, 
 let us remember this idea of Culture, let us make for the best 
 article, and be secure in its possession. The other day a Mel- 
 bourne lady was saying to me how pretty and charming a place 
 the Fitzroy Gardens were as a public park. " But the brown 
 plaster statues," I said, " and the concrete water-shrines." 
 And this Melbourne lady trankly declared her allegiance to 
 these things, and, when in my disagreeable unsatisfied way I 
 began to compare them with the marble copies from the 
 Antique which are to be seen in the Inner Domain and 
 Botanical Gardens in Sydney, she frankly told me that after all 
 it was only a matter of opinion, and my opinion was this and 
 hers was that! "And so," I said, "my dear lady, it is, after 
 all, only a matter of opinion whether the Apollo of the Bel- 
 videre or the Venus of Milo is more beautiful or less beautiful 
 than the statue of Burke and Wills in Collins Street, not to 
 say the brown-plaster statues in the Fitzroy Gardens ?" And 
 then this Melbourne lady, who had read many novels and 
 magazines, and several volumes of sermons and even popular 
 "philosophy books," maintained her original assertion with the 
 charming assurance of her sex ; and I could only think that it 
 was a pity she had not Culture — did not know the best, or 
 even the second or third best, of what has been known and 
 thought in the world in the matter of sculptural beauty, for then 
 she would not have helped to persuade her husband to vote for 
 the erection of any more brown-plaster statues and concrete 
 water-shrines in the public places of his city. But, as it is, I 
 am so thankful that the Sydney people have decorated one of 
 their public places with really fine marble copies from the 
 Antique (which none of these Australians, with their superior 
 love for beautiful things has yet, so far as I am aware, thought of 
 defacing), that I wonder at myself for thinking of saying it is a 
 pity to see beside these so many poor modern and perhaps
 
 CULTURE. 87 
 
 colonial products ; for who can be wise — do I say in an 
 hour, in a day, in a year, in a life-time ? nay, rather, in a 
 generation ? Certainly not the architects and public decor- 
 ators of Australia. Let us be thankful for what we have 
 got, and diligently go on showing our thankfulness by asking 
 for more. 
 
 But no ; the time has passed when silly people can say that 
 silliness is, after all, only a matter of opinion — or, if it has not 
 passed, then we ought all of us to be striving our utmost to 
 make it be passed. Culture is possible to so many ! Its text- 
 books are no longer in the hands of the incompetent : we have 
 really no excuse for thinking Mr. Martin Tupper is preferable 
 as a poet to Lord Tennyson, or Miss Eliza Cook to Mr. 
 Arnold ; and I will confess that I look with suspicion on the 
 intellectual attainments of a man who sees no difference in the 
 opinion of Darwin or Professor Huxley and of the popular 
 Theologians and Mr. Lilly. Look, I say, at the text-books of 
 Culture now, of the best which has been known and thought 
 in the world. We have all seen Professor Huxley's little primer 
 of Physiology. Well, that is for Science. Then there is Mr. 
 Stopford Brooke's little primer of English Literature. That is 
 for Literature ; and these are only examples. Really, now, we 
 have no excuse for reading the wrong books and thinking the 
 wrong thoughts any more. And we have not, either, to 
 confine ourselves to the thought of our own language. Every- 
 where excellent translations of noteworthy works are to be 
 found. We would get to know something of the literature of 
 Greece ? At the end of Mr. Jebbs' excellent little primer of 
 Greek Literature, we shall find a list of the best translations. 
 We have heard people talking of Professor Haeckel and his 
 wonderful physiological work? Good translations of his best- 
 known books are to hand. And so on throughout the whole 
 domain of thought. 
 
 Let us sum up and conclude. We see, then, I think, what 
 Culture is, and what is the purpose and system which should 
 form and guide it. There is only one thing more to say about 
 it, and that is that Culture, in this sense of the word, is the 
 distinct product of our own times. No other country at no 
 other time possessed it. The Jews possessed an unrivalled 
 insight into Religion, into the sense of Righteousness. It is to 
 a Jew that we owe most of what is best in Religion. Indeed, 
 to the great majority of us his name is still a synonyme for
 
 #3 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 Religion. But Righteousness is not the sole necessity of life 
 
 — tlure is also Beauty. " Beauty," says Keats, 
 
 " beauty is truth, truth beauty : this is all 
 ye know on earth or that ye need to know." 
 
 But Keats, we remember, was a Pagan, a modern Greek, and 
 
 men like this are quite as apt to think that Beauty is "the one 
 
 thing needful " as the other stamp of man is to think that 
 
 Righteousness is "the one thing needful;" whereas the real 
 
 fact is that both are needful. What an advantage, then, have 
 
 we over both Jews and Greeks in our appreciation of this ! At 
 
 the best, it is not possible to look upon either Paul or Plato as 
 
 exponents of anything final. It requires two wings to soar 
 
 with, and who can think that this " ugly little Jew," as M. 
 
 Renan has it, who talked nonsense about an Art which at 
 
 best seemed to him mostly diabolical, was dowered with two ? 
 
 Nor yet can we think this of that "high Athenian gentleman," 
 
 as Carlyle retorts, with his illustrious Master who would have 
 
 been so "terribly at ease in Zion." Let us recognize it at 
 
 once : the Jews are great and the Greeks are great, but neither 
 
 of them by themselves can satisfy us. Nay, further ; to the 
 
 sense of Righteousness and Beauty must now be added that 
 
 sense which Bacon first brought with any fertility to us — the 
 
 sense of Science. "And we," says Arnold, 
 
 " and we have been on many thousand lines, 
 and we have shown, in each, spirit and power." 
 
 And it is just from the combination of the results of our 
 spirit and power on these many thousand lines that this 
 Culture of ours, this unique product of our times, springs. It 
 was not before this possible. How could Paul understand the 
 Greek Art ? how could Plato have understood the Hebrew 
 Righteousness ? It was not till the Renascence, till Shakspere, 
 that such a thing was possible, and it was not till Modernity, 
 till Goethe, that it was possible to find these two senses, the 
 sense of Beauty and of Righteousness, united to that third 
 great sense, the sense of Science. I do not say that our age 
 is necessarily a peculiarly great age : you may call it the dwarf 
 on the giant's shoulders, if you please ; but what I do say is, 
 that it is the first age which has been able to attain to anything 
 like a really comprehensive Culture, a knowledge of the best 
 that has been known and thought in the world. Possibly 
 we are only on the threshold of Truth : possibly it will be left 
 to another age to work out and complete what we have but
 
 CULTURE. 
 
 8 9 
 
 begun ; but this I think is certain : We are on the threshold, 
 and the sooner we realize it, the sooner shall we realize that 
 we are men in whom it is incumbent to put off childish 
 things, the sooner shall we advance into the palace and very 
 home. 
 
 Ah, then, let us no longer content ourselves with anything less 
 than the best article ! Let us live for the Idea of Culture, for 
 and by it — for the best that has been thought and known in 
 the world ! Let us, too, like Goethe, resolve to wean our- 
 selves from halves, from partial and prejudiced views ot 
 things, and to live " im Ganzen, Giiten, Schonen" — "for the 
 Whole, the Good, the Beautiful !" 
 
 December, 1&85.
 
 
 90 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 "DAWNWARDS:" 
 
 AN AUSTRALIAN DIALOGUE. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Horace Gildea was the grandson of one of those self-reliant 
 energetic men of the English upper Middle-class, who at an 
 early period of life conceive a particular ambition, and devote 
 themselves wholly to the successful achievement of it. Edward 
 Gildea, the man in question, desired, or we may even say in- 
 tended, to possess both wealth and position, and he was, as the 
 expression goes, still young (between forty and fifty years of 
 age, that is) when his intentions were fulfilled. A baronetcy 
 was conferred on him by a grateful Conservative government : 
 his marriage with the only daughter of Lord Mainwaring had 
 already brought him a considerable amount of landed 
 property ; and now, having bought more, he retired from the 
 troublous and busy world to the " easeful dignity " of the life 
 of a rich and respected English country magnate. Our Aristo- 
 cracy is adaptive (here, indeed, lies its strength, as compared, 
 for instance, with that of France) : it will enrol among its 
 members of to-day an outgrowth of the Middle-class, upper and 
 lower, professional or trading, with the same ready complacency 
 with which it enrolled among its members of yesterday the 
 offspring of some poor royal amour or other ; and this is not 
 surprising, when we perceive how little difference there is, 
 intellectually speaking, between the three classes. The aris- 
 tocratic ideal in England does not, or did not, soar much 
 higher than grouse to shoot, land to shoot them on, and 
 savoury cooking to eat them with ; and the aristocratic ideal is, 
 with slight modifications, the ideal of the country at large. In 
 one generation the Gildeas were counted among, what is
 
 DAWN WARDS. 9 1 
 
 called, the best people. The two sons of Sir Edward were 
 educated at public schools and Oxford and Cambridge, and 
 passed, the one into parliament, the other into the Diplomatic- 
 service, where neither distinguished themselves. Horace 
 Gildea, too, an only child, was sent to a public school and 
 Oxford, and with the same result. At Oxford, however, 
 although he did nothing more, educationally, than take his 
 degree, he did not spend his time in mere amusement- 
 Thanks to the friendship of Sir James Gwatkin, the well-known 
 aesthetic critic, Gildea learned to appreciate the delights of that 
 wonderful modern production which we call Culture. He had 
 sufficient knowledge of Greek and Latin to enter into the 
 spirit of their art and poetry, and he learned French, German, 
 and Italian in the pleasant sexual manner prescribed by Byron, 
 He travelled more or less all over Europe, " living and loving 
 largely," but (unlike Byron) saved from that excess whose 
 inevitable fruit is satiety, by the talisman with which Sir James 
 had dowered him. Gildea had, too, what the Romans called 
 curiositas. The merely physical ideal of the English viveur 
 did not satisfy him : he used to say that, if he was to be a 
 blackguard, he should like to be a fine blackguard, and how 
 can you be a fine blackguard if you know nothing but what 
 can be known by any fool that can pay for it ? 
 
 Several years after the death of his father, Gildea, living a 
 life of considerable enjoyment between the pleasures of the 
 countries and the capitals of Europe, began to perceive that, 
 after all, his talisman was not omnipotent : it could not lay, it 
 could only distance, that ancient spectre which he now for the 
 first time learned to face, if not to dread, Satiety. At this point, 
 however, Fortune, whose child he seemed, came to the rescue ; 
 he fell in love. The best definition of love is, perhaps, the 
 care of someone else more than yourself, and (the passionate 
 would add) than anything. Gildea, then, did indeed fall in 
 love; but as his care for himself or for anything was not very 
 great, it cannot be said that he fell in love deeply. But 
 Fortune, having given him a spell with which to once more 
 distance the ancient spectre, now deserted him. The lady he 
 loved did not love him in return : her friendship — and friend- 
 ship from so sweet and passionate a nature as hers was of a 
 somewhat intense character, partaking more of the warm sun- 
 light than the clear moonlight — her friendship she eagerly gave 
 to him, but her love was, past recall, given to someone else.
 
 92 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 On the day on which he first realized this, Gildea, who had 
 hoped otherwise, left England in his little yacht the " Petrel," 
 
 alone. He had intended visiting the east with her, returning by 
 Naples, Rome, and Paris, with many sweet years, nomadic or 
 otherwise, in the radiant future. Now he was quite careless 
 where he went : for the first time in his life he knew what it 
 was to feel miserable. The loss of this woman was a loss from 
 himself. He felt a void in his soul, in his future. " And yet, ; ' 
 he used to tell himself, " she was not ' the twin soul that 
 halved my own :' we should not have made perfect lovers, 
 passionate, deep, abiding ! None the less do I — or did I — 
 long for her. She is the most beautiful soul I have yet seen, 
 or probably shall ever see. Who would not straightway go and 
 sell all that he had to possess her ? — and willingly chance the 
 rest !" 
 
 A violent storm caught the " Petrel" as she was about half- 
 way down the Bay of Biscay, and hurried her past Gibraltar. 
 When Gildea perceived this, and was asked by his skipper if 
 they should put back, he kept silence for a moment. Then, 
 looking up with an amused smile, said : 
 
 " No, Barry. We'll go straight on to Madeira for provisions 
 — from thence to St. Helena, and then double the Cape and 
 make for Australia." 
 
 Gildea had not been to Australia : it was one of the few 
 places in the world to which he had not been. He might, he 
 thought now, as well go there as anywhere. Several things in 
 Australia interested him, and this was enough reason to make 
 him, in his present state, care to go. 
 
 One bright, showery november afternoon, then, the " Petrel" 
 passed Port Phillip Heads : was piloted up the harbour to 
 Port Melbourne pier, and Gildea disembarked. He knew one 
 person in Melbourne, and only one, Charles Maddock. 
 Maddock, and his father before him, had been friends of the 
 Gildea family. Maddock was some fifteen years older than 
 Gildea, whom he had known well as a boy at Katharinasbury, 
 he himself at that time being in the midst of his brilliant 
 scholastic career at Cambridge. Almost immediately after his 
 ordination, Maddock came out to a high ecclesiastical position in 
 Australia. It had been the wish of his life to work in one of the 
 Pacific Colonies, and now his wish was fulfilled. The appoint- 
 ment of one so young to the post he had at first held, had 
 caused a little murmuring both at home and in the Colony, it
 
 DAWN WARDS. 93 
 
 being known that he was possessed of the highest influence ; but 
 the murmuring had soon passed into pleasant greeting, and was 
 now swelled to a regular chorus of applause from friends, foes, 
 and indifferent alike. Maddock had great charm of manner : 
 he was a more or less refined scholar, yet was not lacking in 
 that spiritual robustness which goes so far to make up what is 
 called a personality. It would not be too much to say that he 
 was the most popular man in the colony. Society delighted in 
 the gentleman : the outer world in the man, and both were 
 right, for (here was the secret !) he sympathized with both. 
 
 Gildea on his arrival took up his abode at an hotel until he 
 saw rooms that pleased him, and began, after his fashion, to 
 examine the city and its inhabitants. He went everywhere and 
 saw everything, happy to find that his curiositas was not after 
 all dead in him. Pleasure, in the sense of living, is in Mel- 
 bourne but, what Tennyson says of the pleasure of London, 
 " gross mud-honey," and had not much attraction to one who 
 had been through the best specimens thereof in London, Paris, 
 New York, and Vienna. Gildea, however, if he did not go 
 through it here, mingled with it as an amused half-spectator 
 half-actor, seeking out its meaning as regards this dawning 
 civilization which was interesting him just at present. He 
 fell in with Sydney Medwin, a squatter's son and ex-Cambridge 
 undergraduate, whom he had known by repute as an inter- 
 university runner and would-be rake, and they spent some 
 pleasant days together. Medwin's father wished him to take to 
 station work, but Medwin, having tasted the "gross mud- 
 honey" of London, Paris, and the Continent generally, was 
 doggedly determined to do no such thing. 
 
 "Damn it all," he said once in his half-acute way to Gildea, 
 " there's quite enough money made already in the family, and 
 now it's time to spend it. If my governor had wanted me to 
 look after sheep, he shouldn't have sent me to Europe." 
 
 Europe was to Medwin — to Medwin held down by his 
 inexorable " governor" to an allowance and a place in the home 
 establishment — a sort of far-off beautiful dream which had 
 once to a certain extent been his and, he feared, would never 
 be his again. His life was reckless : he was knowingly doing 
 his best to spoil a fine constitution by his excesses, and looked 
 forward to death within ten or fifteen years with stupid stoicism. 
 
 After a little Gildea thought that he would like to see some- 
 thing of colonial society, social and intellectual, and presented
 
 94 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 himself to Maddock. Maddock knew the Medwins well, and 
 even Sydney Medwin who, in his unreflective way, had a great 
 respect for him. 
 
 "The governor," Medwin said once to Gildea, "the 
 governor has ruined my life ! I had an ambition — I was 
 ambitious; yes, I was ambitious / But I had to keep it dark! 
 I can't argue about it, you know : I haven't thought for 
 years, and now I can't. But if Christianity's good enough 
 for Maddock, it's good enough for me. I believe in Mad- 
 dock." 
 
 Accordingly, whenever Maddock was to be met at the 
 Medwins', Sydney Medwin was to be seen listening attentively 
 to everything the Doctor said, trying to think, trying to under- 
 stand, the look of intelligence varying on his face with the look 
 of puzzlement. 
 
 " A fuddled intelligence," said Gildea once, smiling and 
 laughing; "now he'll be off and get drunk with one of his 
 girls at Dicks'." (Dicks' was a private hotel where " the set," 
 as Medwin and his friends called themselves, often met for the 
 purposes of recreation.) 
 
 Maddock was very pleased to meet Gildea again, and during 
 the next month they saw much of each other. Gildea mingled 
 with the Colonial society as he had mingled with the outer 
 world, but with less interest. The Colonial outer world is at 
 any rate original : it does not imitate, it is. Colonial society, on 
 the other hand, imitates and imitates badly. It is a case of the 
 new wine in the old bottles. The young people wish to break 
 away from all the old social convenances and bien-seances : 
 they have almost a contempt for the old people ; but the old 
 people rule, and their rule is as yet too strong to be openly dis- 
 obeyed. The young people, therefore, lack social self-reliance: 
 they have no distinctive " style " of their own as in America. 
 " Indeed," as Medwin used to say, " no one has any style out 
 here, except the people at Government House. — And they," he 
 would add, admiringly, "look down upon us all as louts." The 
 young people, then, feel their ideas of happiness to be frail, 
 immature : pleasure is not, as in the European capitals, pro- 
 vided for them ; they must provide it for themselves. Pleasure, 
 however, is their aim, and pleasure, so soon as they rule in 
 their turn, they will have. The question is whether this 
 pleasure is to be " mud-honey " — " mud-honey " with its gross- 
 ness drained somewhat, but still " mud-honey" — or whether
 
 DAWN WARDS. 95 
 
 that wonderful modern production which we call Culture is 
 going to intervene and complicate matters. 
 
 Gildea soon wearied of a society in such a painful state of 
 transition. Having arrived at these conclusions on its ten- 
 dencies, or what he took to be its tendencies, the painfulness of 
 it began to afflict him. At the same time his interest in the 
 problem of this small social hot-house did not, somewhat to 
 his surprise, show signs of leaving him. 
 
 One evening, at a large ball, he had been dancing and 
 talking with a singularly bright and intelligent girl, who had 
 pleased him by herself expressing her consciousness of this 
 state of social transition of theirs, and ascribing the true reasons 
 for it. They sat out several dances together, he enjoying her 
 talk as that of a clever child, she with her woman's vanity 
 pleased to be monopolizing the most distinguished man in the 
 room, and also glad of his mental appreciation of her. He 
 half lay in a low chair beside her, looking at her with smiling 
 eyes and smiling lips, amused. She was a little excited, just 
 enough to give extra brilliance to her words and acts. She was 
 not speaking to him alone : she was aware of the audience of 
 guests, all of whom, she felt, were noticing her, and some 
 catching parts of the conversation. He, who read her soul as 
 if it were transparent, became more and more amused as she 
 proceeded, and by an occasional movement helped her out with 
 the impression he saw she wished to give her friends, namely, 
 that he was more or less entranced by her. The thought of 
 taking her to Paris and introducing her to its society, of 
 watching her intense capacities of social pleasure expanding 
 there in their natural atmosphere, occurred to him and pleased 
 him. He had arrived at that spiritual state when much of our 
 pleasure is in watching the pleasure of other people. 
 
 " Well," he said at last, " and do you not find yourself 
 lonely here, with all these wonderful ideas of yours, Miss 
 Shepherd ? All the other Melbourne young ladies do not, 
 surely, participate in them?" 
 
 She was not quite sure for a moment whether he was 
 mocking at her or not ; but, looking at his face, decided in the 
 negative. 
 
 "Yes," she said, "I am lonely — rather. The other girls 
 want to see things. They want to go to Europe — London, 
 Paris, and all that. But they say it's such a bother, and 
 they've no memory. They don't know what they want : they
 
 96 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 only know that they don't want what they've got. — But I — ,"' 
 she added, turning to him, and catching her lower lip lightly 
 with her pretty visible teeth, one hand on her knee closing 
 slightly. 
 
 " But you ?" 
 
 "/want to— /&<?/" 
 
 A pause. 
 
 "Ah," he said, " that means that some day you will want to 
 die." 
 
 " I daresay! But I shall have lived first! — This Melbourne 
 s just waking up. I wish, O I wish I had not come into it till 
 it was awake !" 
 
 " You would like to go to Paris, then ?" 
 
 " Paris !" (She stopped breathing.) — " O that," she said, 
 looking at him again, " is simply heaven !" 
 
 " How do you know that, Miss Shepherd ?" 
 
 " Oh, I have read it ! I have read all Alphonse Daudet's 
 novels, and a lot of Balzac's." 
 
 As Gildea strolled through the warm night streets, smoking a 
 cigar, he thought of her again for a moment, and laughed to 
 himself. 
 
 "The one Parisienne I have met out of Paris," he said to 
 himself, " She is of the tribe of the fine steel-pearl mangeuses 
 who rend life with their dear little white teeth for the pleasure 
 of rending. She should have been born in a concierge's lodge, 
 with a future in ermine — and the Morgue. And yet she is 
 better than the mere mangeuse : she has intelligence. She has 
 to thank Australia for that. For a month, or even two, she 
 would be supportable — but the " Petrel " would take three to 
 get her to Naples, perhaps, and it would be more trouble to 
 loose her and let her go then than now." 
 
 He had been strolling about the streets for more than an 
 hour. He was not quite sure where he was. He stopped for 
 a moment to look about him. A short well-moulded figure in 
 a close dress and a poke bonnet passed him and turned down a 
 narrow street ten or twelve yards ahead. He threw away his 
 cigar. 
 
 " Janet," he said to himself, " sweet child ! And she recog- 
 nized me and went on." 
 
 Janet, a Salvation Army "lass," going down into the Little 
 Bourke Street slums had indeed recognised him. The figure 
 of a man, in a light overcoat open in front showing that he
 
 DAWNWARDS. 
 
 97 
 
 was in evening dress, was remarkable enough, to have attracted 
 anyone's attention there. She had looked up for a moment : 
 caught a glimpse of his face and, with a wild throbbing 
 heart and quivering lips, hurried by, and on, and away. 
 Gildea's investigations into the social condition of the place 
 had made him many unexpected friends. Here was one who 
 was something more than a friend, a lover, and he knew it. 
 
 " I am sick of it," he said to himself, almost bitterly, " I 
 will go away. I want change." 
 
 At about five o'clock that morning Sir Horace Gildea was 
 rowed aboard of the " Petrel," which passed out of the Heads 
 a little after one, and turned to the east, making for Sydney. 
 
 I. 
 
 It was about eleven o'clock in the morning of a day late in 
 april. The sun shone with bright warmth, a fresh breeze 
 blowing in from the sea. Great deep masses of cloud, 
 luminous-white or here and there shaded with that slaty black 
 which denotes incipient rain, were moving in the blue vault of 
 the heavens. Gildea was descending the steps of the entrance 
 to St. Mary's Cathedral, accompanied by a young man of about 
 his own age. At the foot of the steps they both paused. 
 
 " Well," said Gildea with a look, "You will be at my rooms 
 in time for lunch, you say ?" 
 
 The other nodded, and, in a few moments, saluting one 
 another with a movement of the hand, they parted. The 
 young man went with a quick firm step in the direction of St. 
 James' Church, while Gildea sauntered across the road into 
 the Domain. He was thinking of the young man, Francis 
 Fitzgerald, a young Jesuit whom he had met years ago at a 
 seaside place in the south of France, and who, as he said, for 
 the sake of his health, had come out on a voyage to Australia. 
 
 " It is wonderful," said Gildea to himself, " how quickly and 
 thoroughly the religious bodies are waking up to the intellec- 
 tual necessities of the time. Romans — Anglicans — Lutherans, 
 and even Calvinists are sucking lustily at the two paps of the 
 Modern Spirit which we call Science and Culture. It is the 
 instinct of self-preservation. If they do not suck they will 
 starve. But ah, how many of us are cross-tempered enough to 
 prefer to starve rather than imbibe the milk of a cross- 
 tempered mother ! " He looked up with a fine smile, suddenly 
 
 H
 
 98 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 realizing his humour of thought. " I am quite serious," he 
 said to himself, the smile deepening and broadening, lighting 
 up his face with amusement, "which shows how adaptive I 
 am. Really now, I listened to Fitzgerald's hopes and beliefs 
 in the future of Romanism with quite as much interest as if I 
 were a Romanist myself. I can quite conceive of myself 
 taking very considerable pains to forward a cause in which 
 somebody else believed. This surely was the central idea of 
 my attachment to Olivia Bruce ? I used to think I should be 
 quite satisfied to live the life of a poet in that of my poetess ? 
 So far, this power of living your own life in the life of one 
 you love has been a female gift. And indeed I have 
 often thought that I should have been better as a woman. I 
 can quite imagine myself as Lady Bellfield or d'lsraeli's 
 delightful Berengaria ; whereas now, I am but an aimless 
 wanderer on the face of an aimless planet, a pilgrim without a 
 shrine." 
 
 He walked on half-thoughtful half-amused, till he had 
 crossed the Domain and found himself opposite the Picture 
 Gallery and the Botanical Gardens. He entered the gardens, 
 and was proceeding down one of the walks when, some fifteen 
 yards before him, he beheld a well-known figure. It was 
 Maddock, Maddock standing at the side of the walk, observing 
 a plant through his pince-nez with serene interest. Gildea 
 came up to him with pleasure. 
 
 " Ah, Doctor," he said, "you here ! This is a surprise !" 
 
 They shook hands : greeted one another, and exchanged 
 health notes both of themselves and Mrs. Maddock, as they 
 went on down the walk together, the Doctor rubbing his 
 glasses with his silk handkerchief and keeping step. 
 
 " The truth is, my dear fellow," he said, his head up and 
 moving from side to side as he drew into himself the enjoy- 
 ment of the fine morning air and scene, " the truth is, I am 
 here for a holiday — or rather, for half a holiday. Sydney is a 
 favourite place of mine. — But," he added in his humorous 
 confidential way, "you know I don't care for the. people! They 
 are not in earnest enough ! I would sooner, I believe, have an 
 earnest atheist than a lukewarm orthodox man. Isn't it your 
 friend Renan who says somewhere, that the atheist has an idea 
 of things, a quite inadequate idea, it is true, but still an idea, 
 whereas 'the average sensual man' has none? — or something 
 to that effect."
 
 DAWNWARDS. 99 
 
 "Yes," said Gildea, "he says so; and he adds elsewhere 
 that ' atheism is one sense the grossest of anthropomorphisms. 
 The atheist sees justly that God does not act in this world 
 after the manner of man ; hence he concludes that he does not 
 exist ; he would believe if he beheld a miracle — in other 
 words, if God acted as a finite force with a determinate object 
 in view.' " 
 
 "That is good," said Maddock, "I did not give Renan 
 credit for saying such a thing." 
 
 " No," said Gildea, "you have never got much further in 
 Biblical criticism than the Germans. Strauss satisfies you as 
 the great Against, and poor Westcott as the gigantic For!" 
 
 They both laughed. 
 
 "Come, come," said Maddock, "you must not poke fun at 
 me!" 
 
 "It is impossible," Gildea answered, "to poke fun at an 
 ecclesiastic who calls Heine 'a great poet and brilliant philo- 
 sopher.' " 
 
 " Ah, you have been reading my last polemic, I see ? — Yes, 
 you must have been reading it ; for no newspaper man would 
 ever think of quoting an opinion like that." 
 
 " I have been reading it with admiration and wonder : ad- 
 miration at its excellence as polemical work, and wonder that 
 you should take the trouble to castigate a production which 
 you yourself declare to be, as a contribution to theological 
 knowledge, utterly useless." 
 
 "Yes, but did I not explain myself? The book is funda- 
 mentally vicious. It confirms the shallow heterodox in their 
 heterodoxy, the shallow orthodox in their orthodoxy. It gives 
 forth light to no one and darkness to everyone. Progress in 
 foolishness and stupidity, that is all that it signalises ; the 
 foolishness of 'go-aheadism,' the stupidity of re-action. I have 
 no patience with a man of presumable intelligence who could 
 write such a book." 
 
 " But do you not think that your attack on it will only, by 
 bringing it into public notice, increase its powers of mischief?" 
 
 " 1 hope not. I hope that I have sufficiently laid bare its 
 gross ignorance of the subject of which it treats to bring it into 
 that contempt whose fruit is oblivion." 
 
 " In England — -in London or in any country or capital 
 where there is a large intellectual life — this might be so. But 
 am I not right, Doctor, in believing that this Victorian
 
 IOO AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 Melbourne of yours is a place where pure intellectual life 
 scarcely exists? You have the mass of intelligent money-makers 
 who care, or who do not care, for things (I will not say religious 
 but) sectarian. Then there are those who care for things 
 political ; but where will you find any number of men who aim 
 at making their life the purely intellectual life ? They are all 
 partizans here. When, therefore, you attack a Rationalist like 
 Judge Parker, all the Rationalists rally round him, just as the 
 orthodox rally round you ; and the result is, as the A>gus says, 
 a boxing match, wherein the great thing is to at all price shout 
 down their man and shout up your own. Truth turns away 
 in disgust from such an exhibition of blind deaf bawling 
 partizanary. These men are not of the sort that are open to 
 reason : you cannot lay bare to such as these the gross 
 ignorance or perfect science of their champion : they will only 
 hiss or applaud as you blame or praise him. I may be wrong : 
 my observation of your so-called intelligent public, is, you 
 know, necessarily but small." 
 
 Maddock kept silence with rumpled brows. At last : 
 
 "I do not know," he said, "that you are not, after all, to a 
 large degree right. We are very narrow here. A thing done 
 in the street is done in the city, and indeed in the whole 
 country !" 
 
 " And am I not right in thinking that the only two native 
 subjects, which are capable of arousing public interest and 
 curiosity here, are those which appeal to the two portions of 
 your mass of intelligent money-makers — things pertaining to 
 business, and things sectarian?" 
 
 The Doctor suddenly regained his humour. 
 
 "Are," he said, the deep humorous smile playing about his 
 mouth, "are all the fashionable young men who come out here 
 in yachts as acute observers as you, Sir Horace ? — But I object 
 to your word sectarian : you should say religious. I am quite 
 ready to admit that (to put it as a Melbourne printer put it to 
 me the other day) the only subject that will pay for book- 
 printing here is Religion, and Religion, alas, in its polemical 
 aspect. But I cannot look upon this, as you seem to do, as a 
 great misfortune. I — I . . . well, I may say candidly, that 
 I rather like a bit of polemics now and then, and the shouts of 
 the men round the ropes do not altogether disgust me, as of 
 course " (his eyebrows went up) " they ought to do ! No, I do 
 not look upon that purely intellectual life of yours as by any
 
 DAWNWARDS. IOI 
 
 means the ideal for us to aim at. It smacks too much of 
 dilettantism for me/" 
 
 Gildea smiled. 
 
 "Dear Doctor," he said, "we all know that you prefer a 
 climate where the sky is not always a cloudless vault of blue 
 insipidity. The sound and feel of a buffeting wind is pleasant 
 to you. As I said just now, you prefer Strauss to Renan, and 
 the good secular Saint Matthew Arnold finds small favour in 
 your eyes. Now too that you are taking to science, I expect 
 every day to hear you tell us Cuvier was a greater man than 
 Darwin, and that Huxley is an impudent young amphioxus that 
 has no place beside the dignity of our dear old behemoth, 
 Owen." 
 
 "Now I really won't let you poke fun at me," said the 
 Doctor, " I really won't ! The next thing is, that you will 
 be saying something rude about Professor Mosley and his 
 " Ruling Ideas in Early Ages," and scoffing at my idea of 
 having some of his essays reproduced in our Daily Tele- 
 graph." 
 
 "Oh no, Doctor, I will not do that. Even Mosley's essays 
 are better than the sermons of the local ecclesiastics." 
 
 "You are very impudent," said Maddock, his face all beam- 
 ing, "to call me a local ecclesiastic! I shall have to get you 
 to write a pamphlet on my review of 'Religionless Religion,' so 
 as to be able to denounce you ex cathedral" 
 
 " Well, I should very much like to do so, only . . . you 
 know my cowardice : I cannot write " 
 
 " Even letters to your best friends, to explain that you have 
 only gone off to sea at an hour's notice, and are not, as they 
 anxiously expected, drowned, or murdered and secreted in 
 some hole in the slums." 
 
 "I prostrated myself in apology to Mrs. Maddock." 
 
 "Yes, in over a week! As for Dr. Maddock, of course 
 such a casual acquaintance as he could not expect. . . Ah, 
 you are a cmite too eccentric young man, Sir Horace ! I wish 
 you were well married, with a definite aim in life. Someday 
 one of your wild freaks will end you, and then, what, what 
 will have been the result of those great abilities with which 
 God has gifted you? — Now," proceeded the Doctor, "this is 
 not an extract from the Daily Telegraph sermon corner, but 
 only the expression of the affectionate anxiety of one who 
 hopes you will allow him to call himself your true friend."
 
 102 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 Gildea kept silence for a moment. Talk of this sort only 
 served to show him how completely his real inner view of 
 things was unknown to his companion, and so the idea of 
 making an answer did not occur to him : he felt how useless it 
 would be. Then he genially thanked the Doctor for his 
 friendship and its kind wishes, and added lightly : 
 
 "You ask what will be the result of, as you are pleased to 
 say, those great abilities with which God has gifted me. The 
 result (you perceive it) will be nothing; but, Doctor, what, let 
 me ask you, in a hundred years will be the result of those great 
 abilities with which God has gifted you? In the hundred and 
 first year we shall start equal ; and I, who have not a belief in 
 a personal God and a personal immortality as^you have, find 
 the whole matter, I confess, rather absurd ! This would 
 not probably have been so always. If I had lived in the days 
 when action indeed contained the highest stakes of life, I 
 should have played for them; but, as it is, the highest stakes 
 now belong to the thinker, the writer, and I — I cannot write . . 
 even letters! I, like all my contemporaries, am more or less 
 under the sad dominion of the perception of, what Leopardi 
 calls, the ' infinita vanita del tutto,' but, unlike the best of 
 them, I have no care for the only immortality we have left, the 
 immortality of Art or Science. I think of the hundred, or 
 thousand, or million and first year, and find myself smiling." 
 
 Gildea was soliloquising, Maddock forgotten. He had, then, 
 after all, drifted into making the answer, the idea of making 
 which had, by reason of its clear uselessness, not occurred to 
 him ; and yet he had not made it to Maddock, but to himself. 
 Maddock, indeed, did not altogether understand it, but the 
 feeling of it, the belief that inspired it, he felt and hastened to 
 reply to. He laid his hand gently on Gildea's arm, bringing 
 him to a pause, and said simply : 
 
 "Look!" 
 
 They had come down as far as Farm Cove — skirted it, 
 turning off along Lady Macquarie's Walk — then mounted up 
 onto the drive, and, having passed by the Chair, were now 
 standing on the brow of the slope with an open view of 
 Garden Island (Clark Island being hidden), the harbour, and 
 the woody hills behind it. Great deep masses of cloud, 
 luminous-white or here and there shaded with that slaty black 
 which denotes incipient rain, were moving in the blue vault of 
 the heavens. Light and shade lay everywhere in alternate
 
 DAWNWARDS. I03 
 
 streaks or patches. One round piece of water to the left was 
 like a burnished blazing mirror of steel. Other parts were 
 blue, gray, or dark, reflecting the cloud-colours above them. 
 The anchored ships rose and fell gently, their flags fluttering. 
 A steamer came stealing out of One of the harbour arms into 
 the open. The only sounds of life were the far-off hammer- 
 strokes of the builders, the occasional cry of the white fleeting 
 sea-gulls, the striking of a ship's bells, the cricket humming at 
 their feet. 
 
 " And," Maddock said, in his deep voice of earnestness, "in 
 the face of such a scene as this — the free glory of nature so 
 great and so glad, the wonderful toil and effort and happiness 
 of mankind — you will say to yourself : ' There is no soul in me, 
 for there is no God to give it/" Ah, my dear Sir Horace, you 
 surprise and grieve me ! Are you not — you, oh heavens, you ! 
 — at heart an atheist ? are you not guilty of that grossest of 
 anthropomorphisms yourself?" 
 
 Gildea smiled, a fine sweet smile of sadness that made even 
 the strong steady heart of his companion turn faint for a 
 moment and sick. There was something so absolutely 
 inevitably hopeless, as it seemed to Maddock, in this strange 
 soul that he saw before him, now for the first time laid bare. 
 Here was a patient for which the physician felt he had no 
 power of healing or even alleviation. What view of christian 
 faith and hope and love did not this strange soul know ? 
 Maddock, for the first time in his life, felt himself in the 
 presence of one, the breadth and depth and height of whose 
 spiritual experience encompassed him like an ocean. The 
 words of remonstrance died on his lips : exhortation lay lifeless 
 in him : silence and sorrow possessed him. He turned away 
 with a heavy sigh, a sigh which was the unconscious acknow- 
 ledgment to himself that life and death, time and eternity, 
 man and God, could indeed be read in two diametrically 
 different ways. For the first time in his life he realized the 
 truth of " the Everlasting No " in a human soul greater than 
 his own. 
 
 They walked on together for a little in silence. Then 
 Gildea said as simply and naturally as if nothing unusual had 
 happened : 
 
 "Now, Doctor, tell me will you come and have lunch with 
 me ? Mrs. Maddock, you say, has shaken you off for the 
 sake of a long morning with Lady Whitfield, and why should
 
 104 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 you not retort on her spinster's dejeuner with a bachelor's 
 lunch ? I ought to have thought of it before." 
 
 The Doctor again suddenly regained his humour. 
 
 " Thank you," he said, "I shall be charmed." 
 
 " Nay," said Gildea, smiling, " but I must bid you pause a 
 moment, aimless dreamer that I am, and tell you who you will 
 meet there. Perhaps you will want your assent back again." 
 
 "Speak on," said Maddock, " and, provided it is not some 
 one who will object to my smoking afterwards, I ... I don't 
 think I shall !" 
 
 " The guests, then, are three in number. Firstly, James 
 Alcock, who, they tell me, is the most secular and scientific 
 member of all the Australian Legislative Assemblies " 
 
 " Go on," said Maddock. 
 
 " Doctor," Gildea said, " he reads Haeckel and swears by 
 no other prophet of Science. Pause before it is too late. 
 They say too that he sleeps every Saturday and sunday with 
 Mill "On Liberty" under his pillow, and all Spencer's 
 " Principles" strewed about the counterpane. He knew my 
 father years ago in England, and his heart warms towards 
 me as towards an incipient disciple." 
 
 " Secondly—" 
 
 " Secondly, Francis Fitzgerald, a young man learned with all 
 the learning of the Egyptians ; a pilgrim and devotee at that 
 simple west-England shrine which holds the Catholic pearl 
 beyond all price, John Henry Newman ; a scholar of the 
 Parisian seminaries ; a pupil of the inner Jesuit circle — " 
 
 "Thirdly—" 
 
 " Frank Hawkesbury, the young Australian poet ; a Socialist, 
 delighting in Trades-Unions, Religious Revivals (the Salvation 
 Army is a hobby of his), and Secular Organizations with a 
 grand impartiality ! Nay, it is even whispered that he had 
 dealings with Holden and the Irish and Continental Nihilists 
 two years ago in London. Our friend Mrs. Medwin almost 
 fainted when Sydney Medwin asked her if she would care to 
 know him." 
 
 "I have looked through one of the young man's books of 
 poems," Maddock said, serenely, " and rather liked them. 
 He is in earnest. Your lunch will be amusing. — It smacks 
 to me," he added, with a touch of grimness in his humour, 
 "a little of those shows one sees now and then at the street- 
 corners. They call them, I believe, happy families."
 
 DAWNWARDS. 105 
 
 Gildea laughed. 
 
 "Yes, Doctor," he said, "but what if the animals should 
 take to fighting ? Alas, then, for the canaries and the mice, 
 who will be worried and eaten by the dogs and the cats." 
 
 " Which are who, or who are which ?" 
 
 " Let us say that Alcock is a dog, and Fitzgerald a canary." 
 
 "Then you, I suppose, are the mouse and /the cat? But 
 what is your voung Australian poet to be ? You have left him 
 out." 
 
 " Oh, he will be a rabbit. You will see that he can 
 burrow. It is the forte of Socialists, burrowing.- — Now,'' 
 he proceeded, " we must go this way if we are to get to my 
 rooms in time. And as we go, will you let me first express 
 some tentative thoughts of mine, and then ask you a few 
 questions about your friend Mr. Parker and yourself?" 
 
 "Ask on," said Maddock, getting into step, "and I will do 
 my best to answer you." 
 
 II. 
 
 " It is about this little book of his," Gildea said, with 
 slow reflectiveness, " Religionless Religion." I found it in- 
 teresting." 
 
 "Indeed?" said Maddock, "As interesting as the produc- 
 tion of your dear continental sceptics?" 
 
 "Well now," Gildea said, in a tone that implied a certain 
 amount of candour, " to tell, what the French call, the true 
 truth, I was struck by several things both in it and in your 
 reply to it. I thought that it would have been difficult to have 
 found a more typical example of the average intelligent 
 secular view of theological Christianity than that of our good 
 Judge." 
 
 " I agree with you, and that was one of the reasons that 
 made me decide to attack it. It is typical." 
 
 " And, therefore, to anyone who is, though only as an 
 amateur, an observer of things contemporary, it is interesting. 
 Its very deficiencies will be instructive. Well, what I want 
 you to do, Doctor, if you will be so good, is to help me with 
 your superior knowledge of the things treated of to arrive at 
 the spiritual condition of the treater. Perhaps you will not 
 find the attempt too uninteresting, or . . ." He paused with a 
 movement of courtesy.
 
 106 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 Maddock, who had a faint suspicion that Gildea was 
 mocking, half grumbled out humorously : 
 
 " (lo on, then ! Qualify yourself as a psychologist, my dear 
 fellow, and then we will have a plunge into social metaphysics. 
 It is refreshing in a country where they are all partizans, and 
 Matthew Arnold and the purely intellectual life are not 
 appreciated. Sic itur ad astra. In the name of all the 
 lucidities, forward !" 
 
 " In the first place, then, we have to notice, have we not, 
 that the little book is polemical, which, at any rate to the 
 amateur observer of things contemporary, detracts somewhat 
 from its historical value ; for, after all, is not a polemist, to a 
 large extent a man who defends the delusions of his friends 
 against the delusions of his enemies, and leaves Truth, like the 
 proverbial pounds, to look after herself? But, if we always 
 remember to take off a percentage for the polemics, we need 
 not miss what it is that the polemist really means and feels?" 
 
 " IIws yap ov ?" said Maddock. 
 
 "And the more easily, as our Parker is in earnest about, 
 what he calls, ' his most serious and difficult task.' ' 
 
 " Forensic flourishes !" 
 
 " — In earnest as far as suits the disposition of a theistic 
 polemist." 
 
 " — Microscopically, that is to say. The lawyer's, and 
 especially the successful lawyer's, habit of thought tends 
 towards earnestness as the sparks fly downwards." 
 
 " For the average lawyer's habit of thought is perhaps the 
 most typical example of the average intelligent secular view of 
 things. Is it not the final fruit of what is called common- 
 sense, that is to say of the sense of common people? Our good 
 Judge more than once speaks of himself and his audience as 
 " persons of ordinary common-sense," as opposed to " meta- 
 physicians," and especially " ecclesiastical metaphysicians." 
 He wants clear solid statements which his mind can see, and 
 as it were, touch and handle. He scoffs at all statements other 
 than these, looking upon them as at bottom sophistical. It 
 follows that, when he comes to criticise the Bible, he claims 
 the right to criticise it, not only with the same spirit, but with 
 the same manner, as he would criticise any other book. He 
 will not only look at it straight, fearlessly, logically, but he will 
 demand of its statements that they be clear and solid, that they 
 bear the ordinary interpretation of ordinary statements. He
 
 DAWNWARDS. 107 
 
 will apply the same principles of examination to Moses and 
 Jesus as he would do to Blackstone or Chitty. And all the 
 secular persons of ordinary common-sense cry out : ' Hear, 
 hear !' " 
 
 "With the Judge," said Maddock, "a metaphysician is a 
 man who examines the Bible by the aid of principles other than 
 those of one who is ignorant of all contemporary history save 
 that which the Bible gives him." 
 
 " The consequence of which is, that he is capable of such 
 a statement as, that ' without question early Christianity was 
 far more free from paganism and from the taint of super- 
 stition than the Christianity of our own time,' and others of a 
 like force." 
 
 " He has no notion whatever of the philosophy of history — ■ 
 of, what I call, the development of divine Truth." 
 
 " And yet he is contradictory enough, while asserting the 
 degradation of the Christian ideal, to lay much stress on the 
 development of Divine truth in a civilization that has, till 
 comparatively lately, been Christianic. Yes, he sees the 
 development of divine Truth, but he does not understand the 
 forms which that development has taken in Christianity. 
 The Trinity — the Atonement — the Deity of Christ — are to him 
 ' mere crude superstitions which disfigure and obscure pure 
 and true religion.' It never seems to have occurred to him 
 that, although these doctrines may be empty formulae to him, 
 they were and are passionate realities to others." 
 
 "That is very true." 
 
 " He will talk with the same ignorance of what he would 
 call Jesuolatry as a Protestant will of what he calls Mariolatry, 
 neither he nor the Protestant understanding any more of a deep 
 spiritual truth than its cut-and-dried dogmatical letter." The 
 Doctor assented, though with a movement of slight qualification. 
 
 " We agree at starting, then, that his criticism as that of an 
 historical Bible student does not exist. The authorities he 
 quotes are, as you point out in your Reply, ludicrous. They 
 culminate in his poor little some 'celebrated Unitarian 
 minister ' or other, than whom the habit of thought of the 
 legal Biblical critic can, it is to be hoped, no further go ! He 
 is too, we agree, careless and superficial even in his own style, 
 hut we must not lay too much stress on individual cases of this 
 in the face of his request for ' indulgence ' for his ' doubtless 
 many imperfections here.' "
 
 IOS AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 "When a man speaks publicly of such a grave matter as reli- 
 gion," said Maddock, "he should not be careless, he should not be 
 superficial ! We have a right to demand of those who make ex- 
 plosives, that they, at any rate, do not smoke in the magazine." 
 
 "True; but, if we all got our deserts, who, you know, 
 should escape whipping? Certainly not the producers of 
 orthodox religious literature." — (The Doctor, after a pause, 
 assented as before). — " Well, we will proceed further against 
 our good Judge, and say that his appreciation of what is, as he 
 says, 'good and ennobling' is ludicrously inadequate. What can 
 be said of a man who seriously speaks of Jesus, ' when, in the 
 garden of Gethsemane, he went apart and prayed, three times 
 over, the same prayer to God, within a short period,' — of Jesus 
 thus ' doing that which he told his disciples not to do — u use not 
 vain repetitions, as the heathen do," for the reason that your 
 heavenly Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye 
 ask Him." Habemus confitentem asinum ! We can only burst 
 out laughing : a reply to such a statement is impossible ! The 
 lawyer's habit of thought is at its apogee, and (as Heine says) 
 ' Gegen die Dummheit kampfen iair Go tier selbst vergebensJ — 
 Against stupidity the very gods themselves struggle in vain." 
 The Doctor assented smiling. 
 
 " And statements similar to this are not scarce here. Our 
 good Judge, then, has not, it is clear, much experience of the 
 spiritual life, of those who live in the spirit. The ' sudden 
 conversion of Paul,' for instance, strikes him as one of the 
 (it is supposed) 'improbabilities so forcible that no sane 
 thinking man or woman can accept ' the inspiration of the 
 Scriptures which relate them. Now, any one who knows 
 anything of human nature other than that of 'persons of 
 ordinary common-sense,' knows that such 'sudden conver- 
 sions ' are not only not improbable, but passably fre- 
 quent. In some cases, as in that of Staniforth, quoted 
 by Arnold in his ' St. Paul and Protestantism,' the circum- 
 stances approach so closely to those of Paul's that we are 
 enabled to assign to them a definite place in the science of 
 psychology. Nor are our good Judge's ' errors,' as you say, 
 exhausted yet. We have still to bring against him the charge 
 of, what Celsus calls, Kov^orqs, and Arnold translates ' want of 
 intellectual seriousness.' So confused and incoherent is his 
 knowledge of the real position that the secular biblical critic 
 takes up, that he absolutely calls the position taken up by the
 
 DAWNWARDS. log 
 
 orthodox biblical critic (that is to say, biblical critics who are 
 orthodox ; as, for instance, you yourself, my dear Doctor) : he 
 absolutely calls this position critically ' untenable,' not per- 
 ceiving that it is his own only differing in degree ! — This is 
 simply appalling ! The xovcf>oTip of the Secularists is not a 
 whit better, after all, than that of the Christians !" 
 
 " Yes," said Maddock, disregarding the last remark, " but 
 then you must remember that the Judge ' does not intend to 
 resort to any process of subtle argument, nor to make any 
 display of scholastic knowledge, nor to indulge in learned dis- 
 quisitions.' He merely writes ' popular, clear, and simple ' 
 nonsense for ' the doubter who is trying to grope his way to 
 the light, but cannot ; to the Atheist who believes in nothing, 
 neither in a Supreme Power, nor in a future life.' And your 
 secular ingratitude to him, Sir Horace, strikes me, I must 
 confess, as keener-toothed than the winter wind of orthodoxy !" 
 
 "Doctor," said Sir Horace, "you are poking fun at me! 
 But I, who am, as Shelley said of himself ' rather serious ' — I 
 proceed in my examination, whose sole confirmation as truth I 
 find in your words or gestures of approval. You will, I hope, 
 forgive me for any repetition I may make of your own criticism, 
 as a master should a humble disciple ? It is only a proof of 
 attention and admiration." 
 
 "Go on," said Maddock, "mocker!" 
 
 " All these faults, then, which we have remarked in our good 
 Judge — his polemically ; his ignorance of the grammar (or, 
 perhaps, as your Reply says, the alphabet) of historical 
 criticism ; his ludicrously inadequate conception of the good 
 and the ennobling, of the spiritual calibre of such men as, for 
 instance, St. Paul ; his superficial acquaintance with the data of 
 the subject of which it is treating; and, finally, his kov<j>oti]$, 
 his want of intellectual seriousness — all these faults, are we not 
 agreed, are the faults of the average intelligent secular view, in 
 its negative consideration of Christian Theology ? The ques- 
 tion that now arises is, has this view nothing but faults ? — has 
 it no excellencies ? Does there remain, after the attack on it 
 of so admirable a theological polemist as Dr. Maddock is, no 
 residuum of real and vital truth ? Let us try and see. — To 
 begin with, did we not find that, despite a contradiction, our 
 good Judge perceived the reality of, what you so finely call, the 
 development of divine Truth ? — 
 
 " Yet I doubt not thro' 1 the ages one increasing purpose runs, 
 
 and the thoughts of ?nen are widened with the process of the suns"
 
 IIO AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 "No," said Maddock, "I cannot grant him even that ! A 
 faint glimmering of a thing cannot be called a perception. 
 Consider this very contradiction of his ! Consider, again, his 
 unspeakably gross and ignorant treatment of the Old Testa- 
 ment which he brands with blood-thirstiness and impurity. He 
 works by a rule of thumb. The higher spiritual mathematics 
 are mere names to him. He is — I must declare — too much 
 of a blockhead to ever rise beyond the spiritual Rule of 
 Three." 
 
 " I agree to a large extent, clear Doctor ; but you will 
 admit, I think, that even the Rule of Three is not without its 
 use, without its real and vital truth ?" 
 
 " Not when the schoolboy cannot use it properly ! I have 
 pointed out, for example, that, in attacking the doctrine of the 
 Divine Sonship, he only attacks a dummy doctrine of his own. 
 Your schoolboy does not know which of the three is his third 
 quantity ! He wants, then, to be whipped and put onto the 
 dunce's stool — to encourage the others !" The Doctor spoke 
 for the first time with a little testiness. 
 
 " Be it so," Gildea said. " our good Judge is not to be 
 allowed more than a faint glimmering of that fine theory of 
 ours of the world's unseen reXos. The ' divine far-off event ' is 
 not more than a fog-lamp to him, which he will not, then, 
 mistake for the moon, or its light for moonshine. But that he 
 is too much of a blockhead to even rise beyond the spiritual 
 rule of thumb, the spiritual Rule of Three, seems to me, I 
 confess, dear Doctor . . well, a rather strong statement. 
 The average intelligent secular view of things is, is it not, less 
 pedantic, less given to accepting the conventional value of 
 things as their true value, than the average intelligent orthodox 
 view ? Are not, indeed, these tears a most convincing proof of 
 it ? Is it not just because our good Judge refuses, for instance, 
 to accept the orthodox view of Jesus and of God that he wrote 
 his little book, and you replied to it ? Now the orthodox view 
 of God is, if you will let me say so, excessively pedantic : it 
 adheres to the expressions of a belief in which in its heart it 
 does not believe at all. Parker's criticism on this is excellent. 
 ' It is impossible,' he says, 'to lay down any definition of God 
 which will even satisfy man's conception of God.' What, 
 then, is the good, he asks, of holding up this ' magnified non- 
 natural man ' of yours, and asking me to fall down and 
 worship it ? Common-sense revolts against such an idea and
 
 DAWNWARDS. Ill 
 
 common-sense, dear Doctor, is, will you not agree, for once 
 right ?" 
 
 " You surprise me, Sir Horace," said Maddock. "Are you 
 too going to spend your time and trouble in demolishing the 
 survivals of verbal inspiration ?" 
 
 "Certainly //#// I am only trying to see wherein common- 
 sense is a safe guide as a biblical critic. We are agreed, then, 
 — you, that is, the Judge and I — that we must unite in 
 opposing many of ' the statements which,' as the Judge says, 
 ' the orthodox are pleased to call evidence.' Because, for 
 instance (to continue with the Judge's own words), 'the fallible 
 man Paul says in a letter to Timothy that the Scriptures were 
 inspired, it does not make them so.' We are agreed here?" 
 "We are agreed here," said Maddock, with deliberation. 
 " Or again, to take another instance, when Matthew and 
 Luke, for whatever purpose, strive in their genealogical tables 
 ' to give Jesus ' (I always use the Judge's words) ' a divine 
 origin, conceived of a virgin by the Holy Ghost, and yet to 
 connect him with David by making Joseph the natural father 
 of Tesus.' — are we not here faced by two ideas which ' no one 
 short of an ecclesiastical metaphysician,' or, as you say, a 'very 
 bad critic,' would or could ' reconcile ?' — We are still agreed, 
 of course." 
 
 " We are still agreed — to a certain extent." 
 " Nay, let us go further, then, and chime in with the Judge 
 to the effect that ' on far stronger evidence (if evidence it can 
 be called) than that which supports ' — let us say, almost all — 
 ' of the events or miracles ' of the Scriptures, ' the Roman 
 Catholic Church propound to the world their miracles,' which 
 'the Protestant section of Christianity reject as incredulous.' " 
 " Proceed," said Maddock. 
 
 " Nay, let us go further still, and notice how we no longer 
 look on the Genesis account of the Creation as more than 
 allegory, of the Flood as being strictly accurate ; of the tower 
 of Babel as, again, more than allegory, and so on in many 
 other similar cases. And how in the same way we do not look 
 upon the statements of Christ, and after him of the author of 
 the ' Revelations,' of the close approach of the Apocalypse, as 
 literal but only figurative. 'The statement of Jesus,' as the 
 Judge puts it, ' as to his coming again before the then genera- 
 tion have passed away does not mean that he will so come : 
 1 generation ' being merely used figuratively, but when he
 
 I I 2 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 does come he is still to come in the clouds of heaven, and with 
 great glory, sounds of trumpets, rushings of winds, and mourn- 
 ing of tribes; for' (Gildea paused) — 'all this has not yet been 
 falsified by the event.' This is, I think, undoubtedly the con- 
 clusion at which common-sense arrives, but common sense is of 
 
 course wrong. 
 
 " Common-sense is wrong," said Maddock. 
 
 " Common-sense too, as exemplified in this its typical block- 
 head who cannot ever rise beyond the spiritual Rule of thumb 
 and Three ; common-sense observes of the development of 
 divine Truth, as exemplified in the Christian theology of 
 yesterday and to-day, that its ' golden rule apparently is to 
 adopt those interpretations' of its Scriptures 'which best 
 satisfy the exigency of the particular position of the time 
 being,' and thus we have no further guarantee that the God of 
 to-day will be the God of to-morrow than that the God of 
 yesterday is certainly not the God of to-day. ' Heaven forgive 
 me,' exclaims ' that great poet and brilliant philosopher,' Heine, 
 ' but I often feel as if the Mosaic God were but a reflected 
 image of Moses himself.' And we all remember with what 
 contempt Taine speaks of this God of Christianity, revised and 
 amended to suit the latest edition of scientific and historical 
 discovery — rooted up out of the earth and momentary inter- 
 course with man — driven out of the clouds and the occasional 
 interposition of his strong right hand — spied and telescoped 
 from the radiant bowers of the stars, and finally lodged out of 
 sight, and all but out of mind, in the eternal infinitudes of 
 Time and Space ! After all, then, may not our good Judge 
 have had, not of course a perception, but a faint glimmering, 
 of sapience, when he spoke of the position taken up by the 
 orthodox biblical criticism as critically ' not only untenable, 
 but absolutely suicidal ?' The thought is, as we agreed before, 
 simply appalling. Spirits of Butler, Paley, Neander, Weiss, 
 Westcott, Lightfoot, and many another mortal or immortal 
 immortal, rise and thunder ' No /' When this exponent of 
 the average secular intelligence declares that contemporary 
 Theology is an impossible compromise between Reason and 
 Absurdity ; that the Protestant is quite inconsistent who with 
 one face rejects 'the events or miracles propounded by the 
 Roman Catholic Church because they involve a violation or 
 suspension of unvarying natural laws ; because such things do 
 not happen, and because reason refuses to give credence to
 
 DAWNWARDS. 113 
 
 them,' and with another face accepts as truth the sojourn of 
 Jonah in the belly of some sea-monster (at present con- 
 veniently extinct, even to the bones), or the communications 
 of, what Gordon describes as, 
 
 ' that duffer at walls, 
 the talkative roadster of Balaam : — ' 
 
 rise, I say, and in Olympian accents demonstrate to him and 
 his benighted audience, that these were but links ' in the 
 development of divine Truth,' and that ' one lesson at a time 
 of this difficult kind was enough, and as history shows more 
 than enough, for human weakness.' " 
 
 "You are a treacherous and malicious young man," said 
 Maddock, laughing in spite of himself, "and have no right 
 to quote my words in such an irreverent and grotesque 
 manner !" 
 
 " It is my orthodox ingratitude," said Gildea, " — And yet," 
 he added suddenly, with a complete change of tone and 
 manner, " in less than fifty years polemics like these will be 
 looked upon as childish, and, those who spent their life and 
 energy upon them, as we now look on the mediaeval School- 
 men. It is a sad thought." 
 
 Maddock was a little puzzled at these swift chameleon 
 changes in his friend. 
 
 "And now," said Gildea, looking up with yet another change 
 of tone and manner, "and now we have done with the 
 negative side of the good Judge's criticism and can turn to 
 the affirmative. — But that," he added, " must, I am afraid, be 
 after lunch — if you will, Doctor?" 
 
 " I will," said Maddock, " and you shall not then find me 
 so passive, for your treachery and malice are now quite laid 
 bare to me." 
 
 Gildea smiled. 
 
 " But not my loyalty and admiration ? Believe me, Doctor, 
 that, if it were only for this one remark of yours, I could never 
 fail in my interest and gratitude to you. ' Our blackfellows,' 
 you say, ' had no punishment for offences against their element- 
 ary ideas of purity but spearing. And it was infinitely better that 
 they should spear for impurity than lose their first step toivards 
 a higher life.' . . But here we are," he said, "This is the 
 house. Fitzgerald and Hawkesbury have to leave us soon after 
 lunch. Mrs. Medwin and her niece, Miss Medwin, are coming 
 later to make tea for me, and then we are going out for a sail in 
 
 1
 
 114 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 the yacht. Mr. Mechvin is thinking of a legislative career, and 
 so Alcock is to be cultivated. Can you come with us ? You 
 know how pleased it would make us all." 
 
 The Doctor explained that he was due at his hotel at half- 
 past three to meet Mrs. Maddock, and both he and Gildea 
 expressed their due regrets at his not being able to make one 
 of the party on the yacht. 
 
 III. 
 
 Gildea led the way upstairs and ushered Maddock into the 
 sitting-room. It was in reality two rooms joined together by a 
 large folding-door, which was now thrown open and draped 
 with four looped-up curtains, two of some dark-red material 
 behind two of delicately-wrought muslin. The two rooms were 
 of the whole depth of the house, the large bay-windows, open 
 and with a glass-door in the middle of them open also, at one 
 end looking out over the city, at the other over the harbour. A 
 grass-slope, and a garden with flower-beds and rustling trees, 
 spread all round and down to the water's edge ; while, a little 
 way out, the " Petrel " rode at peaceful anchorage, her boat 
 behind her. Maddock was for the moment so taken up with the 
 beauty of the place within and without — the room with all its 
 harmonies of form and colour, the garden and harbour scene — 
 that he did not notice that someone was standing, half hidden 
 by the curtains, in the next room on the hearth-rug. Then 
 Gildea passed through and greeted this person whom he 
 brought forward and introduced to Maddock as Mr. Hawkes- 
 bury. 
 
 Hawkesbury was a small but well-made man with a tendency 
 to muscular leanness. His face was striking and interesting, 
 and betrayed a strongly-defined individuality. At one moment 
 he might have been called handsome, and his manner frank, 
 free, and open : at another his features took such a contracted 
 intensified look, and his movements were so nervously acute, 
 that the whole man seemed to have suffered distortion. It 
 seemed as if he were suddenly seized by some keen pain, 
 spiritual and physical, and was being racked by it. When 
 Gildea entered, there was for a moment a trace of this latter 
 manner in Hawkesbury : his sensitive pride found something 
 antagonistic in, what seemed to him, the consummate luxury 
 which surrounded him and even in the consummate culture of
 
 DAWNWARDS. 1 1 5 
 
 its owner : he was almost asking himself what right this man 
 had to spend so much money and care in decorating a few 
 rooms for a few months, this man whose life was so radically 
 selfish? Hawkesbury's was, he might have said, the feeling of 
 one who was a socialist and worker by intense conviction, 
 finding himself opposed to one who was an aristocrat and 
 hedonist by the mere chance of birth and fortune. But, when 
 Gildea met and greeted him with the frank sweet unconscious 
 cordiality of an equal whose acquaintance is pleasant, the dark 
 look passed from Hawkesbury's face and he gave himself up 
 to the simple pleasure of the situation. His unexpected intro- 
 duction to Maddock, who represented to him the more or less 
 sumptuous aristocrat of religion, for a moment, it is true, 
 threatened to bring back the evil spirit to him ; but Maddock, 
 with his fine social tact, almost divining the state of affairs, was 
 equally frank, sweet, unconscious and cordial in his manner, 
 and Hawkesbury was at his ease. 
 
 The three men stood talking together, Maddock in the 
 middle, in the bay-window that looked out over the harbour. 
 
 " Why, Sir Horace," said Maddock, " you will never be 
 able to get away from this enchanting place again ! Are you 
 sure you do not intend to make it into a home ? You did not 
 honour your Melbourne rooms with such care — such choice of 
 furniture, and . . " (He raised his arm and outspread hand, 
 smiling humorously). 
 
 "'Man delights not me,'" answered Gildea, "'No, nor 
 woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.'" 
 The smile broke out on Hawkesbury's face too. It was 
 soothing and very pleasant to find these two talking in his 
 presence of such an intimate matter as that alluded to here : 
 he was not accustomed, in the company of, what in Australia 
 and even England goes by the name of, ladies and gentlemen 
 to this complete absence of social and individual constraint. 
 
 Then Edgar, Gildea's valet, ushered in someone else, Mr. 
 Fitzgerald, and there was a movement and introductions 
 between Maddock, Hawkesbury, and the new-comer, the three 
 being left alone for a moment while Gildea was giving some 
 directions to Edgar about domestic arrangements. 
 
 Maddock and Fitzgerald fell almost immediately into a con- 
 versation, Hawkesbury playing the part of silent member. 
 The Doctor was interested in finding out what the impressions 
 of a cultured Roman Catholic were of Australia and more
 
 Il6 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 particularly of Victoria and New South Wales. He asked a 
 few questions, the answer to which, he thought, would show 
 him whether Fitzgerald had observed things with care and 
 sympathy, and was answered with a gentle readiness that 
 pleased and satisfied him. The two men felt themselves to a 
 certain extent on common ground, and, Fitzgerald touching 
 incidentally on the education question, they began to parallel- 
 ise each other's views with cordiality. 
 
 " We quite recognise," said Fitzgerald, "all the difficulties 
 of the case — the danger of the unfair influence of catholic 
 teaching over protestant children, or vice versa, just as each 
 happens to be stronger in the particular place and school. 
 But we would accept this danger — accept it, even supposing we 
 were the losers by it — rather than have the present state of 
 things continue. As our Archbishop said only the other day at 
 Leichardt : ' Besides the faculties of intellect and of reason, 
 there are certain passions of the soul,' and to develop the 
 former and wholly neglect the latter is to send a boy out into 
 the world with only one eye. You have prepared him for the 
 temporary business of life, and unfitted him for the glorious 
 service of eternity : you have given his ship fine sails, and for- 
 gotten to add a rudder ! He may be an acute man of 
 business, but he will be a bad citizen ; for, in taking away from 
 him his sense of religion, you will take away from him his 
 sense of morality, of honesty, of integrity ! We can, at the 
 present stage, see for Australia no future save that of corruption 
 — a corrupt political life, a corrupt national life, the unlimited 
 worship of Mammon !" 
 
 " I agree with you to a large extent," said Maddock, "and 
 we all know that, practically speaking, the talk about ' religious 
 education at home ' is mere verbiage. If the education of a 
 child is secular, his spiritual lungs, so to speak, end in being 
 able to inhale no other air and thrive on it." 
 
 " And," Fitzgerald said, " the education is secular ! Every 
 effort is being made to drive the voluntary schools out of the 
 field. Their state aid here in New South Wales is withdrawn : 
 in England it is reduced to a pittance and hedged about with 
 annoyance. And this, although the educational reports, drawn 
 up by a secular commission, show that, at any rate the 
 catholic schools educate on the average both better and more 
 cheaply than the state-schools do ! We only ask for fair play, 
 and now it has come to this pass that we cannot get it ! All
 
 DAWNWARDS. T I 7 
 
 over England the protestant voluntary schools are failing and 
 disappearing. But we, we Catholics, who cannot, as Protest- 
 ants do, console ourselves with the reflection that the atmo- 
 sphere of the state-schools, if secular, will be tempered by that 
 of our own beliefs — we will not fail and disappear ! We are 
 the poorest of all religious bodies in England ; but I will 
 venture to say, that not a single case can be found of a catholic 
 school which has surrendered itself up, as these others did, 
 into the hands of the Secularists. Our educating priests and 
 laymen have to suffer much privation : I know, shall I say 
 hundreds, of them who deny themselves all but the bare 
 necessities of life : but— we stand our ground / . . . You 
 see," he added smiling gently, " we Catholics cannot labour 
 under any delusion here. We recognize that this is a stupend- 
 ous crisis in the world's history. We will have no compromise 
 and secular tempering of the wind to the shorn Christian. We 
 will stand to our guns, and, if we must perish, perish there !" 
 
 Maddock was impressed, and so even was Hawkesbury. 
 This man's enthusiasm was so quiet, so clear, and yet so 
 radiant. Gildea returned and joined them. 
 
 "We were speaking of the popular education," said Fitz- 
 gerald, turning to him, " and I would persuade Dr. Maddock 
 that his cause and ours are here identic." 
 
 "I need no persuading," said Maddock, "I have for some 
 time been persuading myself !" 
 
 "And yet," Fitzgerald put in gently, "the alliance between 
 us and you seems farther off than between us and the Dis- 
 senters." 
 
 "And that, I think," Gildea said, "is because you have more 
 in common. You are afraid of one another. In the one case, 
 you know that the frontier of your alliance will be observed, in 
 the other there is a chance that it may not. At present the 
 must dangerous opponents of Catholicism in England are, what 
 they call, the High Churchmen. The Church of England is a 
 compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism ; hence 
 its adaptiveness, hence its strength ! It more nearly, in my 
 opinion, approaches ideal Christianity than any other sect in 
 existence. It unites the Faith, the Poetry, of Catholicism, 
 with the Freedom, the Prose, of Protestantism." 
 
 "We thank you," said Maddock. 
 
 "Logically speaking, however," added Gildea, "it is an 
 absurdity. '
 
 Il8 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 They all began to laugh. 
 
 " Ah," said Maddock, " I was right when, even while 
 thanking you, Sir Horace, I thought to myself: Tirneo Danaos, 
 et dona fere rites." 
 
 " The Christianity of the Future," Gildea proceeded gravely, 
 " lies, I believe, in two transformations — in Catholicism learn- 
 ing that its kingdom is not of this world, that it no longer 
 requires a Pope, a Rome, as a Palladium whereby it may 
 fight ; in a word, in learning the lesson of Protestantism, of 
 Freedom : and in Protestantism doing the converse, and 
 absorbing into itself the catholic Faith, the catholic Poetry !" 
 
 " And what are the Secularists going to do in your Future ?" 
 asked Hawkesbury, " are Messrs. Arnold and Huxley to be 
 put up on a shelf in your spiritual Museum, in two large spirit 
 bottles, labelled respectively ' Culture ' and ' Science ?' " 
 
 "Culture," answered Gildea, "is, after all, but Secular 
 Catholicism, just as Science is but Secular Protestantism. 
 They too will each learn their lesson of the other." 
 
 " Humph !" said Maddock, who again had a faint suspicion 
 that Gildea was mocking, " and so, after all, Sir Horace is an 
 optimist." 
 
 " We do not lay stress," Fitzgerald said gently, " on the 
 temporal power of the Holy Father. As Sir Horace implied, 
 this temporal power was once the one shining light in a 
 chaotic world, and it was well that it should be set on a 
 hill. But now the light is diffusing itself. It is our wish that, 
 as the Vatican (Ecumenical Council declared : ' Intelligence, 
 Knowledge, and Wisdom may grow and perfect themselves — as 
 much with the mass as with individuals, with one man as with 
 the whole church !' We are no foes to Freedom. What we 
 are foes to, is Anarchy ! At the Reformation you gave the 
 right of deciding on the deepest religious questions to every 
 ignorant man that chose to discuss them, and the seamless 
 robe of Christianity was rent into a hundred pieces ! Look at 
 all these miserable little protestant sects and sub-sects, Ply- 
 mouth Brethren, Primitive Methodists, Ana-baptists, and I 
 know not what noisy, ignorant fanatics. At the Revolution, you 
 did the same for social questions, and what is the result ? The 
 Dynamiters of Russia, of Germany, of Ireland, initiated by 
 what you, Dr. Maddock, so well call ' such gentleness as was 
 revealed in the diabolical deeds of the Commune,' — to say 
 nothing of those of the Reign of Terror."
 
 DAWNWARDS. 1 1 9 
 
 Maddock half-deprecated, half-approved by a gesture and an 
 inarticulate sound. 
 
 " Yes, but," said Hawkesbury with the thrilled voice of 
 suppressed passion, "has not history justified the Reformation? 
 and how can you say that it will not justify the Revolution ? 
 These, as it seems to me, are the two fiery portals which lead 
 to Religious and Social Liberty. But you are right to de- 
 preciate them : they knew nothing of the poetry of Culture and 
 Catholicism, or of the prose of Protestantism and Science. 
 They were volcanic eruptions of the People. Heine says well, 
 when he talks of 'the divine brutality' of Luther, and we do not 
 shrink from the same phrase for Hugo or Whitman. Sir 
 Horace has painted us a Future which is indeed heavenly. It 
 is thronged with sweet-singing angels, and there is not a shadow 
 in its perfect light. But what has become of the men, and 
 what, O what, has become of the devils ? They have no place 
 in this Future. You do not care for the People, I say, except 
 as you care for your dog which, if he is quiet and docile, shall 
 have a kennel and the bones and scraps from your table ; or, 
 if he is surly, shall be chained up ; or, if he goes mad, shall be 
 shot ! Ah believe me, gentlemen, the People has a place in 
 the Future, for the People, and none other, is the Future ! 
 ' All for the modem] cries Whitman, ' all for the average man 
 of to-day.' But you — you only care for the Upper and the 
 Middle-class. Your scheme of civilization does not reach to 
 the People. The Upper-class is exhausted : it needs in- 
 vigorating. 'Cultivate the Middle-class] is the cry, ' Give us 
 Higher Education for the Middle-class /' This is the whole 
 social teaching of the best representative man you have, 
 Matthew Arnold. Now we, we Socialists as you call us, love 
 the People, and (you will pardon me) hate the Middle-class ;— 
 the dispossessed, the sufferers, not the possessors, the usurpers ! 
 The People is the Prodigal Son. What sympathy have we, 
 then, with a man like Arnold who has devoted himself to the 
 edification of the Elder Brother? Arnold says once that he has 
 evolved that perfect style of his which we know so well — that 
 style which encloses a minimum of ideas in a maximum of 
 catch-words— or, as he likes to call it, ' plain popular exposi- 
 tion ' — for the especial benefit of the British Philistine, the 
 divine Middle-class, who otherwise could not be got to read 
 him ! He would have done better, perhaps, if he had not 
 turned to the setting, but to the rising sun. The People are
 
 I 20 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 the masters of the Future, and the People's great men will be 
 the great men of the Future." 
 
 There was a pause. Then : 
 
 " There is much truth in what Mr. Hawkesbury says," says 
 Gildea, "Just at present we think too much of the ultimate 
 Culture of the Middle-class and too little of that of the 
 People. But the fact is, that the question of the Middle-class 
 is pressing : they are, as you say, Hawkesbury, the possessors ; 
 they are the Present ! And this, I think, is why men like 
 Arnold, who believe that, in the organization of the Present, 
 lies the only hope of the success of the Future, are so anxious 
 about it. It is a case, as he believes, of ' Culture or Anarchy ' 
 — Culture now or Anarchy then. And Carlyle, a disciple of 
 whom Mr. Hawkesbury has, in the admirable Preface to his 
 second book of Poems, declared himself to be ; Carlyle too, 
 who laid much stress on what he calls ' the radical element ' in 
 himself, yet mocks at 'Mill and Co.' as he says, in whom he 
 declares the opposite element was ' so miserably lacking.' 
 Carlyle had no respect for 'Rousseau fanaticisms,' even in a 
 man like Mazzini : he saw that, if the Middle-class were pur- 
 blind and slow, the Socialists were only purblind and quick. 
 Supposing that we grant that the Dynamiters of Russia 
 are justified in meeting an absolutely dense despotism with 
 violence, what excuse but impatience can we find for the 
 Dynamiters of Ireland ? The first have no means of free 
 agitation, the second have every means. Ireland has been 
 wronged : no one denies it ; and never, in the whole course 
 of her history, has England shown such alacrity as she is doing 
 now to right the wrong ; never, not even for herself. But the 
 Irish Socialists are impatient : their cry is for everything to-day, 
 this very hour ! To grant it them would be the greatest 
 unkindness possible. Well, they too have taken to dynamite 
 as a hypochondriac takes to opium. The Russian Nihilists 
 are noble people, none nobler, but they taught fools and knaves 
 an appalling lesson when they inaugurated the reign of terror 
 in Petersburg. At the present moment, as Heine clearly 
 foresaw, the Civilization, not of Europe, but of the whole world 
 is in danger." 
 
 "You speak well, Sir Horace," said Maddock, " and express 
 my opinions better than I could myself, but — Timeo." 
 
 He, Gildea, and Fitzgerald smiled. Hawkesbury was grave. 
 There was a pause. Then :
 
 DAWNWARDS. 121 
 
 " I think," he said, " that you do the People wrong. These 
 extreme Socialists, the Nihilists as they are called, are not from 
 the People, but from the Middle-class. They are, as a rule, 
 men who have received the best education of the time, and 
 who yet find themselves unrecognized and unrewarded. Most 
 of them are journalists. It would astonish you, I think, to see 
 the amount of really first-rate talent that is being flogged to 
 death in the shafts of the modern Press. These men cannot 
 work in shops and banks : the narrow material life has been 
 made impossible to them. The only opening for the life they 
 would — nay, that they must live, or perish, is that of Literature. 
 Literature caters for the Middle-class, the ruling class. These 
 men, then, are the slaves of the great caterers, the news- 
 paper editors. One of the most thorough Socialists I ever 
 knew, Holden, in fact, was on the regular staff of the 
 English Spectator, the organ of the enlightened portion of 
 the Middle-class ; and there, as he said to me, he went 
 as near Socialism as he could for threepence ! (Threepence 
 is the price of the paper.) This same man wrote, too, political 
 articles for a distinguished radical politician, and I have 
 seen the proof-sheets of these hacked and mauled by the 
 patron to suit the palates of the Radicals. It was this man 
 who once seriously contemplated dropping a bomb in the 
 House of Lords, to show that herd of hereditary liars, as he 
 put it, that there was such a thing as justice in the world ! He 
 loved the People : he hated the Middle-class, but the People 
 cared nothing for him. It is, then, I think, a mistake to lay 
 the paternity of Nihilism to the charge of any but the over-fed 
 tyrannous Middle-class." 
 
 "What you say," Maddock said slowly and courteously, 
 "is very interesting and instructive, Mr. Hawkesbury, and 
 I perceive that the ground which you, and I think I may 
 say Mr Fitzgerald," (Fitzgerald smiled and bowed), " and 
 myself have in common is large enough to admit of our 
 working — at any rate not in opposition to one another. 
 Is not our mutual object the enlightenment of the unintel- 
 ligent mass of the People and of the Middle-class ? I am, 
 I am sure, grateful to you, sir, for the manner in which you 
 have brought this home to me. I always felt that underneath 
 all our differences — I mean, the differences of our beliefs, 
 religious or social — we had a common ground, the advance- 
 ment of a really good and true Civilization, and now, I think,
 
 122 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 I know this. He renders us a great service who makes our 
 feelings self-conscious, who turns them into the articulate 
 thought of words." 
 
 There was a slight pause. 
 
 "And now," said Gildea, in his half-amused way, "we will, if 
 you please, go down to lunch. Mr. Alcock particularly asked 
 me not to wait for him, and we have waited, it seems uncon- 
 sciously, for over half-an-hour." 
 
 They went down together into the dining-room, chatting 
 lightly and pleasantly. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The dining-room was the corresponding room on the ground 
 story to the sitting-room up above. It was quite as well fur- 
 nished, but in a different style. A fine rather than an exquisite 
 form of beauty had been sought after. It was a saying of 
 Gildea's that a dining-room ought to give you an impression 
 somewhat similar to that of a beach-brake in spring : the 
 architecture and furniture should have clear outlines, the 
 colours should be clear, the lights should be clear. All 
 massiveness and duskiness was to be avoided. A meal ought 
 to be a repast, not a feast : we should rise pleasantly satisfied, 
 not dully satiated. In a sitting-room, on the other hand, the 
 sworn abode of the sweet and delicate talk and music of 
 women, just as the dining-room was that of the serene dis- 
 cussions of men, there should be something of the lush 
 luxuriance in shape and colour of the midsummer woods, 
 knights and ladies and all the figures of romance and fairy-tale 
 passing together. But such an arrangement of rooms as this, 
 he would say with his bright half-mocking smile, was at 
 present like a damsel of the Middle Ages suddenly awakened 
 in the dull derisive streets of London or Manchester. This 
 will only come to pass in that wonderful Future, when we have 
 all learned that Beauty and Truth are synonyms, and Keats 
 has statues and altars like Sophokles of old. 
 
 Considerable time, wealth and trouble had been spent on 
 this house. Sydney and Melbourne had been ransacked for 
 beautiful things worthy of Gildea's ideas of "the nest," as he 
 called it to himself, that he desired ; for this was indeed one, 
 and not the least remarkable, of his freaks. It had been 
 aroused in this fashion. One afternoon, sauntering across a
 
 DAWN WARDS. 1 23 
 
 road in the Domain, he had almost been run over by someone 
 riding a splendid bay horse. Looking up, with a fine touch of 
 anger, he had perceived that it was a lady, who was looking 
 down at him with a look, he suddenly felt, so precisely his own 
 that, the ludicrous aspect of the thing coming upon him, he 
 smiled. She too, at once following his change of feeling, 
 smiled, and then in a moment, with a slight courteous move- 
 ment of hand and body, had passed. It had all taken place in 
 a few seconds. Her face and form made up between them, he 
 thought, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he 
 had not seen few so-called whether in Europe or elsewhere. 
 Beauty in women was, according to Gildea, a thing which was 
 not in reality to be seen in the present world, implying, as it 
 did, perfection of form and perfection of spirit, kciAov KuyaOov. 
 The Athens of Perikles had produced female beauty ; in the 
 face and form of the Venus of Milo the highest physical and 
 spiritual perfection of the time is apparent. Florence too, in 
 such a woman as Vittoria Colonna, had produced female 
 beauty, and the Renascence had incarnated it in a Marie 
 Stuart ; but, so far, our Modernity was not ripe for it. Lovely 
 female faces it, as all times, had in abundance, but these faces 
 knew nothing of spiritual perfection : they knew nothing of 
 life, they were not beautiful. And the female faces that did 
 know of life, the faces of women like George Sand, Char- 
 lotte Bronte, George Eliot, were quite wanting in physical 
 perfection. They imply mental passion, the struggle of pain : 
 they have not reached to the serene pleasure of spiritual 
 sovereignty. No, Beauty, kuXov KayaOov, is to be a produce 
 of the Future when Modernity has passed through the pangs 
 of its travail and, in the bright light of health and youthful- 
 ness, " grows in wisdom and stature " to the perfect self. — But 
 this face that he had seen for a moment, was, he thought, really 
 beautiful. 
 
 A few yards from him a man was standing looking back at 
 the rider passing along under the trees. Gildea came to him, 
 and asked him courteously if he happened to know who the 
 lady was? 
 
 " No," said the man, " I don't know who she is, but I often 
 see her." 
 
 And on this incident Gildea had founded a freak which had 
 for some time amused him. He intended to see this woman 
 again, and, if he was correct in his supposition (which he used
 
 124 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 amusedly to doubt to himself) that she was some phenomenal 
 anticipation of the Future, to possess her. He set about 
 choosing and furnishing a house, therefore, which should, as 
 far as possible, be worthy of such an individual, and much 
 amusement it occasionally afforded him. A private enquiry- 
 office was meantime seeking her out ; and, about a month ago, 
 Gildea to his surprise had been informed that she was, beyond 
 doubt, a Miss Medwin, niece of the well-known squatter, 
 english, eccentric even to the extent of riding about and 
 shooting in man's clothes on one of Mr. Medwin's stations in 
 New South Wales, and, moreover, strongly suspected of having 
 had, and of still having, an intrigue with a Mr. Frank Hawkes- 
 bury, a writer and man of uncertain means, in Melbourne. 
 Gildea laughed much on receiving this unasked-for report, 
 (He had just by accident made the acquaintance of Hawkes- 
 bury), and his interest in his freak somewhat revived ; but his 
 all but conviction that he was incorrect in his view of Miss 
 Medwin (if it were indeed she), prevented him from having any 
 great interest in the matter or any great anticipations of suc- 
 cess. As usual, however, he w r as satisfied to find that he had 
 any interest or anticipations at all. He learned from Mrs. 
 Medwin that she was in a short time coming to Sydney for a 
 week or so on her road up to one of Mr. Medwin's New South 
 Wales stations to which she had not been for years, and would 
 be pleased to see him. A few days ago, then, she and Miss 
 Medwin had arrived, and were waiting for Mr. Medwin who 
 was detained by business in Melbourne. Hence Gildea's 
 invitation to Mrs. Medwin and her niece, to come and make 
 tea for him and go for a sail in the "Petrel." 
 
 The party arranged itself round the table, Maddock at one 
 end, Gildea at the other, an empty place on Gildea's right 
 hand for Alcock, Hawkesbury on his left with Fitzgerald next 
 to him. Maddock, as before, could not help observing with 
 admiration the beautiful room in which they were sitting. 
 Hawkesbury, however, following out a train of thought sug- 
 gested by his own last words, sat serious, looking at the table- 
 cloth. 
 
 The lunch began. Gildea and Fitzgerald could both, when 
 they pleased, excel in that graceful sweetness of manner which 
 is supposed to be the peculiar gift of women. They pleased 
 now. The talk flowed lightly and pleasantly, and soon re- 
 turned to, what seemed to be to them all, the most interesting
 
 DAWN WARDS. I 25 
 
 t0 pi c — the People. Fitzgerald spoke of the far greater ease 
 and leisure of the People here than in England, and that led 
 on to a consideration of the question of Labour here. 
 
 " Carlyle declared long ago," said Hawkesbury suddenly, 
 " that the great question of the time was no other than the 
 organization of Labour. Well, Labour is at last organizing. The 
 consequence is that, as Mr. Fitzgerald remarked, there is 
 greater ease and leisure among the People, not only here in 
 Australia where Labour is comparatively scarce, but even in 
 England where it is plentiful. — The question here, however," 
 he added, " shows signs of complication. The employers 
 are to form — nay, have already formed — a union : ' The 
 Victorian Employers' Union.' The only wonder is that it is 
 in Victoria and not in England that this idea has first been 
 adopted. In Trades-Unionism in England, let me say it at 
 once, there have been many abuses ; but, let me hasten to 
 add, not nearly so many abuses as there were under the old 
 despotism of Capital. Trades-Unionism, which so few people 
 seem to understand, originally meant the combination of many 
 oppressed small units against a great oppressing unit. Now it 
 means more : it means the determined effort of the People 
 after happiness." 
 
 "That is very true, I think," said Gildea, "The People, 
 ever since the deception practised upon them by the com- 
 promise Reform Bill of '32, have been slowly learning to 
 organize themselves and to rely on themselves alone. Such a 
 fact soon makes itself apparent. There is not a single con- 
 siderable political measure since '32 which has not a socialistic 
 tendency." 
 
 Hawkesbury acknowledged Gildea's remark, and proceeded : 
 
 " The People, and by the People I mean of course the 
 masses, is everywhere realizing that there is something better 
 worth living for than frantic competition and the scramble for 
 wealth. Trades-Unionism, then, is the sworn foe of all this. 
 I am not speaking either for or against Trades-Unionism : I 
 am simply stating what it wants, what it is ! The Trades-hall 
 delegates, in the late conference anent the Bootmakers' strike 
 in Melbourne, refused to let a bootmaker work for more than 
 eight hours a day, although, by so doing, he might better him- 
 self, and by not so doing might keep himself for ever a mere 
 journeyman. ' Further argument with men of such a way 
 of thinking,' says Mr. Bruce .Smith, the chief mover of the
 
 
 126 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 ' Victorian Employers' Union,' ' further argument seemed use- 
 less.' And it was indeed as it seemed; for these men were of 
 opinion that if, in the frantic competition and scramble for wealth, 
 one or two journeymen did rise and become rich, hundreds and 
 thousands would have to lead lives which would not stand 
 too favourable a comparison with those of dogs. 'Therefore,' 
 the delegates would say, ' we will check this frantic competition 
 and scramble for wealth, and we will even be so wicked as to 
 sacrifice the one or two possible journeymen who might rise 
 and become rich, for the sake of the actual hundreds and 
 thousands whose lives otherwise would not stand too favour- 
 able a comparison with those of dogs.' Well, and what will be 
 the end of this new phase of the great battle of Capital versus 
 1 .abour on which we seem to be now entering here ? Let me 
 not be thought a terrorist, if I remark, what is indeed patent 
 to all, that, in a country with a franchise like ours, Labour, if 
 driven into a corner and confronted by Capital triumphantly 
 brandishing its sword of ' Frantic-competition-and-the-scramble- 
 for-wealth — Labour, I say, might make things excessively 
 uncomfortable for the community in general and Capital in 
 particular. I am not hinting at mobs and sticks and stones. I 
 am merely stating a fact that is patent to all. Our good 
 friends the Landed-proprietors, videlicet the squatters, have 
 experienced in Victoria and elsewhere— are indeed now ex- 
 periencing even in Queensland * — the undoubted benefits of 
 a little judicious legislation. Might not someone suggest to 
 the ' Victorian Employers' Union ' and Mr. Bruce Smith, who 
 seem to have such quaint notions of what Trades-Unionism 
 really wants and is, that the same fate may possibly be in store 
 for our other good friends, the Capitalists ?" 
 
 "It is a pity," said Gildea smiling, "that we have not 
 a Capitalist here to answer you. But, I think, I know 
 what one of them, Mr. Alcock, would say. He would 
 say that the great law of Nature is this very frantic struggle 
 which you deprecate, and that, if you attempt to put 
 a check on it, you will only end by first arresting and 
 then destroying all progress. He would oppose the inter- 
 ference of organized Labour quite as much as of organized 
 public opinion, that is to say the State. He would of course 
 recognize all the evils of the frantic struggle, but he would say 
 that it yet contained the great ascending and progressive power 
 
 *In the Land Act that came into force in March, 1885.
 
 DAWNWARDS. 1 27 
 
 of Nature, it was yet capable of Evolution ; whereas the arti- 
 ficial state of popular leisure and ease contains the great 
 de-scending and retrogressive power of Nature, Dissolution. — 
 But here," he said, "at the very nick of time, he comes himself." 
 
 Edgar, who had just left them, returned ushering in Alcock, 
 who came forward with somewhat off-hand apologies to shake 
 hands with Gildea. He was then introduced to Maddock and 
 shook hands with him, compromising the matter, as he thought, 
 with the others by a bow and an expression of his pleasure at 
 making their acquaintance. He sat down in his place and, 
 having told Edgar what he chose to eat, was ready for a few 
 moments' talk before setting somewhat vigorously to work on 
 the victuals. Gildea explained to him the conversational con- 
 text, and what he himself had ventured to say in the person of 
 the typical scientific capitalist. 
 
 " Well," Alcock said, with a half-pleased half-amused look 
 on his face, when Gildea had finished, " I will observe that, on 
 the whole, you didn't put my sentiments so badly, Sir Horace. 
 — I am opposed to all state interference," he declared, turning 
 to Maddock, "It doesn't pay in the long run; it enervates 
 people ! Look at this New South Wales here. They can't put 
 a bridge across a creek now, without petitioning government 
 for assistance ! In England a half-dozen men or so would have 
 got together and settled the matter themselves. And they 
 want more state interference in Victoria ! Why, it'll drain out 
 all their independence, and energy ; and, in twenty years, they'll 
 be as lazy and lackadaisical as they are here in New South Wales ! 
 Competition's the law of Nature." By this time Alcock's mouth 
 was full, and he was beginning to enjoy the delicate food and 
 wines, for he was hungry and thirsty. There was a pause. 
 
 " True," said Fitzgerald, gently breaking it, " but does not 
 Mr. Alcock too think, that it is just where the law of Nature 
 ends that the law of Humanity begins? Surely this is the 
 essential position of Christianity, that it says to the brutality of 
 Nature : 'Thus far shalt thou go, and no further.'" 
 
 " You can't," answered Alcock with his mouth full, too intent 
 on the victuals to be more explicit, " You can't interfere — 
 impunity — great law — nature — struggle — existence — survival 
 —fittest." 
 
 " Here, then," said Fitzgerald who ate little and drank less, 
 turning to Hawkesbury, " we are at one, I think, as opposed 
 to the pure Scientists ?"
 
 128 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 " I do not believe," Hawkesbury said, "and I do not think 
 any Socialist believes, in carrying the initiative of the indi- 
 vidual to the extent that Herbert Spencer would like. But we 
 are not in favour of state interference. We want to nationalize 
 things, the land, the unearned increment, the great public 
 enterprises, but we include in this term the State also. The 
 State at present means the tool of the Middle-class, worked by 
 Capital and the Land Interest. This arrangement partakes 
 too much of the nature of a political joint-stock company to 
 please Socialists." 
 
 " And you think," asked Gildea, his hand on his wine glass, 
 looking at Hawkesbury, "you think that when the People 
 wins, as it of course ultimately will win, the control of things, 
 that it will not work the State in its own interest, just as the 
 Aristocracy did and as the Middle-class does?" 
 
 " You know," Hawkesbury said, " I believe in the People ! 
 The People is the only unselfish part of society. Their one 
 desire is for justice and mercy; and, when they could not get 
 it themselves, they have always died readily for those who, 
 they believed, wished to give it them. Herein lies the secret 
 of all great popular devotions — from that of Christ to that of 
 Napoleon." 
 
 " I," said Alcock, "do not believe in the People, as you call 
 them, and their unselfishness has not yet come under my 
 notice. The People, like everyone else, are led by what they 
 believe to be their interests, their immediate interests, and our 
 great effort should be, by giving them a good sound practical 
 education, to get them to see that their true interest lies in 
 e-volution and not in re-volution. Let us have a fair chance 
 for everybody, and let the best men win." 
 
 "Yes," said Hawkesbury, with suppressed eagerness, "but 
 the trouble is that, in this so-called free competition of yours, 
 the best don't win ! In Nature the best win, I agree ; but 
 Civilization has complicating clauses that modify and all but 
 change, what you rightly call, her great law — the struggle for 
 existence and survival of the fittest." 
 
 " I do not see that," said Alcock, returning to his victuals 
 which he had left for a few moments. 
 
 " I will give you an instance," said Hawkesbury, " A, B, 
 and C are three men who start as beggars in the market of free 
 competition. A has the best wits, and A accordingly wins, 
 and makes a fortune. Good : we applaud ! Then A, B, and
 
 DAWNWARDS. I 29 
 
 C all die, leaving sons D, E, and F, the best-witted of whom 
 does not happen to be D, A's son, but E, the son of B. Does 
 E therefore win and make a fortune, and D sink down to his 
 proper level with F ? Not a bit of it ! D has not only his 
 own second-rate powers to help him: he has also the wealth 
 which he inherits from his father. E, then, has no chance 
 against him : the second-rate man with wealth overwhelms the 
 first-rate man with beggary. What are the consequences, 
 generally speaking ? Why, that, instead of the best surviving, 
 the second or third or fourth or fifth-best survive, and the 
 market is drugged with successful mediocrity. Here, I think, 
 is the delusion under which Herbert Spencer's social philo- 
 sophy labours : he does not see that Civilization, as we know 
 it at present, is not a natural but an artificial state, and that 
 therefore the laws which hold good in Nature by no means 
 necessarily hold good in Civilization. Look at the bees or ants, 
 whose Civilization is a natural and not, as ours is, an artificial 
 one : do they encourage free competition with its inevitable 
 concomitants of wealth and power accumulated in the hands of 
 a few to the prejudice of the community ? Not so. To each 
 is assigned an equal, if varying, share in the economy of the 
 community. With them work has its duty, and, as for idle- 
 ness, it is not possible. But what duty has the successful 
 business man, except to his own success? what duty has the 
 wealthy aristocrat, except to his own pleasure?" There was a 
 slight pause. 
 
 " It won't work" said Alcock, his eyes a little opened, 
 sitting considering this young man with sudden interest. 
 (Alcock had so far thought that, in the present company, 
 nothing would be acceptable save, what he called, a popular 
 exposition of his own views) — " Believe me," he added with 
 gravity to Hawkesbury, " I have gone through all this at length, 
 repeatedly, and with care, and I am convinced that, with many 
 drawbacks, free competition within and without is the only 
 thing which will give us a civilization of progress. The real 
 tendency of everything else, I say, is towards stagnation or 
 retrogression. Free competition universal, the great problem 
 of which is to be the dominant race will proceed to settle itself 
 quickly and thoroughly. Until that problem is settled, we 
 cannot hope for a Civilization worthy of the name. All the 
 inferior races must be stamped out, all the stagnatory or 
 retrogressive ideas eliminated, and the best men with the best
 
 I30 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 knowledge left masters of the situation. It is impossible to 
 foresee what such men may achieve. We may yet, perhaps, 
 open communications with the planets and even modify the 
 courses of the stars." 
 
 " Well," said Fitzgerald smiling, "we have had the Vision 
 of the Future from the Christian, the Cultured, the Socialistic 
 point of view, and now we see that Science too has her dreams. 
 I have no objection myself to any of these Visions which, as I 
 take it, all contain a not inconsiderable amount of truth. I 
 would only observe that I believe them to be all impossible 
 solely and individually. The Socialistic Future that would 
 banish Christ, the Scientific that would also banish God, can 
 no more exist as, in Mr. Alcock's phase, masters of the situa- 
 tion, than the Future of Christianity that would ignore the 
 glory of our discoveries in Natural Law, or the Future of 
 Culture that would deny to the People our highest joy." 
 
 " No," said Alcock drily, " we don't want Superstition 
 mixed up with Religion, that is clear enough." 
 
 " Nor yet," added Fitzgerald sweetly, " do we want Super- 
 stition mixed up without Religion." (Alcock, with the look of 
 a man who does not understand a thing and does not much 
 care to, took a drink at his champagne, which, it was evident 
 from the new expression on his face, was to his taste. Fitz- 
 gerald proceeded suavely to the table at large and more 
 particularly to Maddock.) "For, as perhaps Mr. Alcock," 
 (with a slight bend of the head to Alcock), " will permit me to 
 say, the purely scientific view of things, which sees, in the 
 unrestrained application to civilized life of the brutality of 
 Nature, the undoubted parent of a Civilization worthy of the 
 name, may be after all, and I believe is, a great superstition. 
 Is not a superstition a belief in a thing not worthy of that 
 belief? And is it not, then, a superstition, in calculating the 
 progress of Humanity, to leave out of all account, as the pure 
 Scientists seem to me to do, the most distinctive thing in 
 Humanity — Religion." 
 
 "/should say," observed Alcock, " that Reason is the most 
 distinctive thing in Humanity." 
 
 " Indeed ?" asked Fitzgerald, " You surprise me ! Is it not 
 generally admitted now that the rudiments of Reason, and 
 considerably more than the rudiments, are to be found in the 
 animals? But I am not aware that anyone, not even Ernst 
 Haeckel, has discovered in them the rudiments of Religion.
 
 DAWNWARDS. I 3 1 
 
 Can we not, then, agree with Max Miiller that it is ' certain that 
 what makes man man, is that he alone can turn his face 
 to heaven ; certain that he alone yearns for something that 
 neither sense nor reason can supply ?' " 
 
 Alcock had the look of a man who feels the prompting of 
 flippancy and, restraining it, is amused at what his flippancy 
 would have said. Fitzgerald, perceiving this, answered it : 
 
 "Miiller," he proceeded, "in criticising Kant, who is of 
 course the Father of all the worshippers of Reason, again says 
 finely that ' he closed the ancient gates through which man had 
 gazed into Infinity ; but, in spite of himself, he was driven, in 
 his " Criticism of Practical Reason," to open a side-door 
 through which to admit the sense of duty, and with it the 
 sense of the Divine. — This is the vulnerable point in Kant's 
 philosophy,' he goes on, 'and if philosophy has to explain 
 what is, not what ought to be, there will be and can be no rest 
 till we admit, which cannot be denied, that there is in man a 
 third faculty, which I call simply the faculty of apprehending 
 the Infinite, not only in religion but in all things, a power 
 independent of sense and reason, a power in a certain sense 
 contradicted by sense and reason, but yet a very real power, 
 which has held its own from the beginning of the world, 
 neither sense nor reason being able to overcome it, while it 
 alone is able to overcome both reason and sense.' " 
 
 " That it has held its own from the beginning of the world," 
 said Alcock, " is no proof that it will do so to the end." 
 
 Fitzgerald smiled. 
 
 " What you say," he answered, "makes clear to me, then, 
 that you do not accept this 'faculty of apprehending the 
 Infinite,' and philosophically make the best of it, but you wish 
 to call it mere childishness or, as you say, superstition and — 
 ' eliminate ' it ! And yet you talk of Religion ! What, may I 
 ask, does a pure Scientist, as you seem to be, Mr. Alcock, 
 mean by Religion ?" 
 
 "Well," said Alcock frankly, " I confess that, to me, it means 
 little more than credulity. I am not, of course, hostile to 
 Religion; on the contrary, I support it. It helps to keep 
 society together." 
 
 " It will do," said Hawkesbury, "for the People ! Pending 
 the arrival of that education, which is to teach them the high 
 satisfaction of social evolution, the masses may amuse them- 
 selves with such used-out mummeries as the Devil, Christ, and
 
 132 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 God. The People is grateful. It has, it knows, as much to 
 expect from Science as from Culture." 
 
 Fitzgerald was quite amused. 
 
 "Mr. Alcock," he said, "since you pure Scientists are 
 generally reckoned as the foes of us Christians, we can ask 
 you to do us no kinder service than to nail these colours of 
 yours to the mast in the sight of all men. I do not alone mean 
 your belief that Religion is all but a synonyme for credulity ; 
 but this general conception of things of yours which includes 
 no further consideration for Religion than elimination. We 
 can have no doubt of the results. The world will doubtless 
 find in our conception of things a certain amount of, what Mr. 
 Hawkesbury has called, used-out mummery (for man's free-will 
 has ever turned use into abuse), but it will find also things 
 which savour of the kindly earth and the genial sun ; whereas, 
 if you will let me say so, in yours all that it will find will be 
 the steel-cold atmosphere of some heatless planet, filled with 
 the dreary whirr of abstract machinery. Superstition with 
 Religion, they will say, is better than Superstition without. 
 And then, after they have given you a trial — and a trial they 
 will give you, and such a great and long trial that we shall be 
 eliminated almost as much as even you, Mr. Alcock, could 
 wish us to be — then they will come back to us, and, having 
 been driven by sore anguish of soul to re-discover, as their 
 Father did, the sense of duty and of the Divine, they will find 
 that this first step leads inevitably to another, and that to yet 
 another. And, in the end, all high souls, and after them of ( 
 course all other souls (for the wisdom of to-day is the common 
 sense of to-morrow), will see that their best and truest Father 
 was a man who, passing through all this before them, has 
 these years stood with clear and radiant faith, his longing 
 hands held out to all that would take their strong help and 
 guidance to that place of joy and of peace !" 
 
 Alcock, supposing this man to be Jesus and having made it 
 a rule never in mixed company to speak of that to him, under 
 such circumstances, embarrassing personage, kept silence, 
 looking at the table-cloth. Hawkesbury too did not under- 
 stand the allusion, which even Maddock, unless he had been 
 warned by Gildea of Fitzgerald's connection with Cardinal 
 Newman, might have missed. As it was, Gildea, perceiving 
 and amused at Alcock's misunderstanding, was ready to at 
 once dissipate it.
 
 DAWNWARDS. 133 
 
 " Newman," he said, " is indeed the great modern example 
 of a man of high intellect and all spiritual powers giving, not 
 only, as Heine did, ' his tribute of admiration,' but everything 
 he had, ' to the splendid consistency of the Roman Catholic 
 doctrine.' I remember once hearing a rather able High- 
 churchman say that he could not see, any more after than 
 before reading the celebrated Apologia, why Newman had 
 joined the Church of Rome : which is to say, that he could 
 not see that, to a certain type of mind, the only two logical 
 positions for a man of thought to-day are those of Scientific 
 Atheism or of Catholic Faith." 
 
 " He leaves no place, then," said Hawkesbury, " for the 
 Theists or the Pantheists ?" 
 
 "The Theists," answered Gildea, "leave no place for them- 
 selves — except in the spiritual out-houses and the Unitarian 
 chapels. There is not, I think, in modern times, one man of 
 first, or second, or even third-class intellectual power that has 
 believed in a personal God and not believed in a divine Christ. 
 All men of thought are really now divided into two classes, 
 Christians and Atheists : the first believing in a personal Christ 
 and a personal God, the second in Law. All other differences 
 are, as it seems to me, at heart mere divergences of symbolism. 
 We are accustomed, for instance, to call those who hold that 
 matter produces spirit Materialists, and those who hold that 
 spirit produces matter Idealists, and those who hold that 
 matter and spirit are identic and divine, Pantheists ; but really 
 they are all Atheists. There is no Atheism, no disbelief in a 
 personal God, more intense than that of our Idealists, Renan, 
 Arnold, Emerson, who never cease, however, to talk of God 
 and bid us find in Him our only comfort and guide : they are 
 the true children of Goethe whose conception of God was 
 Humanity in Nature, and of Religion Humanity in Art." 
 
 "So we Catholics feel," said Fitzgerald, "and this is, as I 
 have implied, the great truth which we owe to the life and 
 work of Newman. He has saved us from any temptation to 
 compromise with Atheism. We are to stand to our guns, and, 
 if we must perish, perish there !" 
 
 "The only thing is," Gildea answered ruefully, "that no 
 great spiritual movement, religious or otherwise, was ever yet 
 produced, retained, or destroyed by the action of logic, and 
 they have all partaken largely of the nature of compromise. 
 Voltaire and the philosophies sent such a douche of logic onto
 
 134 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 Christianity in France that they literally beat it out of the 
 country, but it came back again. And why ? Because it con- 
 tained the satisfaction of the demands of one side of Humanity 
 which Logic had not, and could not have. Well, they compro- 
 mised the matter, and the result is, (Dare I declare it, Fitz- 
 gerald?), none other than men like the fine and intellectual 
 ecclesiastics who presided over the education of that lay priest, 
 as he calls himself, Ernest Renan. History repeats itself. 
 What Logic tried to do yesterday, Science is trying to do 
 to-day. And, as you," (he turned his eyes to Fitzgerald), 
 " foresee, Christianity, and Religion generally will suffer a 
 defeat and even decapitation, only to return with processions, 
 ringing of bells and the glad shouts of the populace. Then 
 the Parliament will shut up all the Sunday theatres, and the 
 skeletons of Professor Huxley and Herbert Spencer will be 
 removed from the Pantheon at Westminster and lodged in 
 Madame Tussaud's, and the land have rest — for the space of 
 forty years !" 
 
 "Well," said Alcock, "you young gentlemen are getting too 
 far head for steady-going seniors like Dr. Maddock and my- 
 self. We will ask for matches, and smoke a cigar, while you 
 tell us all about our great-great-grandchildren." 
 
 Cigars, cigarettes, and lights were brought and, with some 
 pleasant small talk, the party loosened and eased its position at 
 table and physical and mental state generally. 
 
 "Talking of compromise," said Hawkesbury, taking his 
 cigarette from his lips and leaning the elbow of the hand that 
 held it on the table, " between Religion and Logic, or Reason, 
 is not, what is called, Positivism an attempt to organise such a 
 compromise?" 
 
 Gildea began to laugh. 
 
 "Ah," he said, "is not Arnold's 'grotesque old french 
 pedant,' a late foolish Monsieur Comte, as Carlyle would say, 
 to leave me alone even beyond ' the long wash of Australian 
 seas?' Am I to be persecuted even here by his tiresome 
 adaptations and school-boy notions, all bundled up in super- 
 latively bad French? — You do not know," he added, "what I 
 chance to have suffered at the hands of my positivist friends at 
 home, or I am sure you would not ask me to discuss them 
 here where I am come for a holiday. They and Mr. Mallock are 
 the most tiresome people in existence. You have heard of Mr. 
 Mallock out here? and of his tilts with the junior Positivists?"
 
 DAWNWARDS. 1 35 
 
 Hawkesbury acquiesced. 
 
 " We have heard of everything out here," he said smiling. 
 
 " Mr. Mallock," said Gildea, " was a young man who wrote 
 a charming book called 'The New Republic,' one of the most 
 charming books that had been written for several years, and 
 then took to polemics, and has been logically agonizing there 
 ever since. For this too we all ought to owe this religio- 
 intellectual pedantry called Positivism a grudge. And, when 
 we remember what Positivism did for George Eliot, — reduced 
 a good quarter of herself and her characters into edificatory 
 machines— I think that all of us, to whom Nature and Art are 
 precious, should look upon Positivism as the contemporary 
 accursed thing." Gildea spoke with a certain exaggerative- 
 ness of tone and manner that to Maddock, observing and 
 listening to everything with humour, was somewhat puzzling. 
 Maddock with average profundity suspected that here was a 
 case of some personal memory of a more or less disagreeable 
 character ; but average profundity, when it has to deal with 
 that which is out of the range of the average, nearly always 
 makes mistakes. Gildea was subject to sudden losses of 
 interest in what he was saying or doing, spiritual twinges of 
 that terrible wound from which he suffered : to those to whom 
 " the endless emptiness of all things " is a reality, moments of 
 acute weariness and disgust are ever lying in wait, and then 
 the harness of life and living is often resumed with impatience 
 or even pettishness. It had been so just now with Gildea. 
 He had looked forward to his meeting with Miss Med win, and 
 heard those beautiful lips open and sounds come forth that 
 showed that, however fine the harp, its strings were unattuned. 
 The sense of his intense and perpetual loneliness had rushed 
 upon him, and he had gone back again into his surroundings 
 with an irritation that in a few moments amused him at him- 
 self. 
 
 The talk passed onwards, Maddock for the first time taking 
 his share in it. And yet again it came round to the People. 
 It was clear that the strongest impression that had been given 
 to the party was that of Hawkesbury's Socialism. 
 
 " If I had been speaking of it some five or six years ago," 
 said Fitzgerald, " I should have certainly said that I thought 
 the Secularists had made most impression on the People of 
 late years. Put, in the face of the American Revivalist meet- 
 ings and the Salvation Army, I have had to modify my views."
 
 136 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 "These movements or rather this movement," said Gildea, 
 " strikes me as reactionary. British Middle-class Liberalism 
 and Secularism have been at work, with much cry, and the 
 egregious littleness of the wool has disgusted the People who 
 have rushed off into the opposite extreme. The workmen, the 
 skilled workmen, are I think secular. I remember hearing a 
 lecturer on art who had been on a tour in America say, that 
 the American workmen all asked him if he knew Darwin 
 or Huxley or Tyndall, and expressed little or no care about 
 anyone else, which seemed to surprise him." 
 
 " Cardinal Manning," Fitzgerald remarked, " said well, then, 
 that 'the spiritual desolation of London alone would make the 
 Salvation Army possible' — 'this zealous but defiant move- 
 ment.' Are we right in our supposition, do you think. Mr. 
 Hawkesbury ? " 
 
 Hawkesbury assented. 
 
 "There are three movements," he said, "at present going 
 on among the People — the Socialistic, the Religious, and the 
 Secular. They are all strong. In Ireland I have seen the 
 tw r o first clash, and the first was almost invariably victorious. 
 If the priests will not go with the People in their socialistic 
 views, (For of course the Irish Question is really a socialistic 
 one, although it is not spoken of as such), then the priests are 
 given up. Usually, however, the priests, being themselves of 
 the People, are in full sympathy with them. The Socialists 
 are by no means necessarily Atheists, but they are not 
 Christians. 'The sooner,' I heard one of them say once, 
 when pressed on the point, ' the sooner Christ is made a thing 
 of the past and Jesus a thing of the present, the better it will 
 be for all of us.' That expresses them excellently. The same 
 idea lies at bottom in the popular Religious movement. — We 
 Socialists," he added with a touch of bright humour, "like the 
 Booths better than we like the Bradlaughs, but we recognise 
 that both are in earnest and working for the People." 
 
 "And what, religiously speaking," asked Fitzgerald, "do you 
 believe is to be the future state of the People, and of us all ?" 
 
 Hawkesbury had another touch of bright humour. 
 
 "Socialism," he said, "nothing but Socialism! We are all 
 Socialists, whether we know it or not. Just, then, as in the 
 first and second centuries the platonistic Time-spirit radically 
 influenced before it was absorbed into the christianic : so in 
 the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has the christianic
 
 DAWN WARDS. I 37 
 
 Time-spirit radically influenced, before it shall be finally 
 absorbed in, the socialistic. Socialism has, after all, its uni- 
 versal modern expounder in Goethe. Goethe was the first to 
 look upon Civilization as a great organic whole, every part of 
 which has fixed pleasures and duties. He was the first, we 
 believe, to conceive a natural as opposed to an artificial 
 Civilization. Carlyle, too, felt something of the sort, although 
 he could not express it, any more than he could not express 
 what he took God to be. But we know Carlyle loved us, and 
 therefore we love Carlyle. As for your Idealists, Sir Horace, — 
 Renan, Emerson, and Arnold — we have no care for them, 
 nor they for us. I remember once hearing Holden call 
 Arnold ' the man who slew so many Philistines with the jaw- 
 bone of an ass.' Well, the remark is expressive of his attitude 
 towards Culture." Gildea and Fitzgerald were laughing, 
 Maddock smiling. 
 
 "The end of it all," said Maddock, "seems to be, then, Mr. 
 Hawkesbury, that ' the People,' as we say, is the great un- 
 known quantity of the social equation. We all more or less 
 feel its power, and we all more or less wish that power to be 
 arrayed on our side, but no one quite knows what it is and 
 everyone is a little afraid of it." 
 
 " You say truly," said Hawkesbury, " The People is the 
 great unknown power, and it puzzles us. Pharaoh has 
 dreamed a dream, and there is none of all the magicians of 
 Egypt and all the wise men thereof that can interpret it unto 
 him. What to make of the People's noisy Tichborne or Salva- 
 tion Army devotions but political and religious infatuations ? 
 Be it so ! But I will say this, that the People has a shrewd 
 humorous instinct for both politics and religion that is a whole 
 heaven above the purblind prudence of the Middle-class." 
 He sighed, the sigh of a man who has somewhat outspoken 
 himself. " ' — And all these things,' he added as if to conclude 
 the matter, 'are only known to the Deity.' " 
 
 Gildea smiled. 
 
 "Well," he said, "Are there not those among us who look 
 forward to what is to come with the brightest faith or with the 
 darkest despair ? And there are those who dream and those 
 who doubt, — and those too who possess their souls with 
 patience, nourishing a modest hope. Eor 
 
 " what was before we know not, 
 
 and we know not what .shall succeed.
 
 I38 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 " Haply the river of Time — 
 
 as it grows, as the towns on its marge 
 
 lling their wavering lights 
 
 on a wider, statelier stream — 
 
 may acquire, if not the calm 
 
 of its early mountainous shore, 
 
 yet a solemn peace of its own." 
 
 Little more was said after this of the chief subjects of their 
 talk, and presently both Fitzgerald and Hawkesbury took their 
 leave, Maddock and Fitzgerald, and Alcock and Hawkesbury, 
 expressing mutual hopes of seeing one another again. 
 
 V. 
 
 Maddock went out into the balcony and stood there, leaning 
 on the rails, reflectively smoking his cigar and looking out at 
 the scene stretched before him like a panorama. Alcock held 
 quiet converse with Gildea for a few moments, apologetically 
 asking permission to go and write a letter, the importance of 
 which he would have explained at length, had not Gildea 
 interposed. 
 
 " By all means," said he ; and, with a word of excuse to and 
 gesture of acknowledgment from Maddock, took Alcock off 
 into a room opposite, a study, where he ensconced him at the 
 desk and, having pointed out the position of all the epistolatory 
 necessities and told him to ring the bell for Edgar who would 
 see that the letter was posted at once, withdrew and rejoined 
 Maddock on the balcony. 
 
 " You will excuse Alcock," Gildea said, lighting a cigarette, 
 " He has a letter of importance to write, which he does not 
 care to leave till we come back." 
 
 Maddock at once acquiesced. There was a pause, both 
 smoking with leisure. 
 
 At last : 
 
 " Well," said Gildea, taking his cigarette from his lips, " and 
 how did you like the happy family ? You were a very quiet 
 member of it." 
 
 " Yes," said Maddock, " I refrained from mewing and sat 
 still, purring and pleasantly watching the others. It struck me, 
 shortly after Alcock came in, that we were a very representative 
 happy family." 
 
 " We only wanted a genial Theist to make the pile complete. 
 Your good Judge is a Theist. Now if we could only . . ."
 
 DAWN WARDS. I 39 
 
 " Ay, ay," said Maddock with something like a chuckle, 
 "Judge Parker is a Theist ! As your friend the Argus said, he 
 was ' the learned gentleman who discovered Unitarianism in the 
 early months of 1S85.' — Come now," he proceeded with a 
 sudden concentration of interest, " what are you going to say of 
 the affirmative side of this man's criticism, after your remark 
 that there was not, in modern times, one man of real intellec- 
 tual power that has believed in a personal God and not believed 
 in a divine Christ ? Are you going to turn upon me again with 
 your precious purely intellectual view of things, and say : ' The 
 question that now arises is, has not Theism, after all,' et cetera, 
 et cetera, et cetera ? " 
 
 " Certainly I am," said Gildea laughing, " but all hope of 
 utilizing the purely intellectual view seems lost after my unwary 
 committal of myself. — No," he added more seriously, " I have 
 of course little more left to do than to try and get you to join 
 me in abuse of the good Judge for his superstition, that is to 
 say his Theism, and that other egregious vice of his — his 
 ludicrously inadequate conception of what is ' good and 
 ennobling.' To take the last first, I will say, as I once heard 
 Hawkesbury say on a like occasion, that I would far sooner 
 believe in the Orthodox Christ than in the Unitarian Jesus- 
 Indeed I might broaden my saying, and declare to the whole 
 Rationalistic conception of Christ and Christianity generally, 
 what Carlyle declared to Voltaire : ' Cease, my much respected 
 Herr Von Voltaire, shut thy sweet voice ; for the task appointed 
 thee seems finished. Sufficiently hast thou demonstrated this 
 proposition, considerable or otherwise : That the Mythus of the 
 Christian Religion looks not in the eighteenth century as it did in 
 the eighth. . . . Take our thanks, then, and — thyself away.'" 
 
 "Judge Parker's view of Our Lord," said Maddock frowning, 
 "is, — not to say blasphemous, — simply fatuous / I do not 
 know whether indignation at impudence or contempt at stupidity 
 the most possesses a man, when he is told, by such an one as 
 this, that ' the Christian Theist, who regards Jesus as man, 
 considers, and rightly from his point of view, that it is within 
 his power to attain to the life of, and to follow the example of, 
 Christ.' Imagine Judge Parker attaining to the life of anyone 
 but a blatantly successful lawyer in the truculent spiritual quag- 
 mires of a colonial capital !" 
 
 "Our good Judge's discovery and investigation of the cha- 
 racter of Jesus," said Gildea, almost ready to laugh outright at
 
 14° AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 Maddock's concluding dythramb, " are certainly not unlike 
 those of a man who should charter a penny steam-boat for a 
 trip up the Nile, and proceed, on his return to England, to give 
 a lengthy description of certain large triangular-shaped build- 
 ings which, he should say, bore considerable resemblance to 
 the common-sense conception of pyramids ! And it is possible 
 perhaps to denominate such a description as fatuous. His 
 conception of Jesus is, we are agreed- -inadequate : 'an 
 exemplar . . . who merits all praise, all esteem, and love, 
 and admiration for that, being human, he led so pure, so 
 blameless, so noble and unselfish a life.' This, what this with 
 our good Judge means, is an inadequate conception of Jesus. 
 He perceives nothing of the real essence of Jesus. Any- 
 thing that Arnold, whom he quotes so often, may have said 
 of ' the mildness and sweet reasonableness ' of Jesus, or that 
 Renan may have said of the wonderful powers of personal 
 attraction that are in Jesus — all this has fallen like water on the 
 judicial back of our duck here ! It is for none of these that 
 our good Judge, our typical man of common-sense, goes 
 to his New Testament. ' Mildness and sweet reasonable- 
 ness,' the yearning of a consuming personal love, are not 
 clear solid spiritual qualities which his mind can see and 
 touch and handle. They have no place in the copy-books 
 of the soul, nor yet in the sum-books thereof, and you 
 shall search its ' Little Arthur's History ' from beginning 
 to end and find no mention of them. Their only place 
 is in the thoughts, words, and actions of the men and 
 women who have moved thousands and millions of their 
 fellows, in the radiant days of high civilizations, in the agonies 
 of the travail or the destruction of peoples and races. ' It is 
 apparent,' says he, ' that we can collect from the Christian 
 Bible, a purer, more beautiful, and more advanced ethical 
 code, than is to be obtained from any other book or books.' 
 O good Judge, O beloved Judge, if all that is to be got out of 
 the Christian Bible is an ' ethical code,' then the sooner 
 Martin Tupper and Mr. Harrison are deified, the sooner will 
 the human soul have reached its apogee ! " 
 
 "That is well," said Maddock, "but, at the same time, there 
 are few things that disgust me more than the man of the oppo- 
 site sort — he who, like so many of these Socialists of yours, 
 will sing the love of Christ with passion, and then go out and 
 commit a hundred of the grossest sins. Christ is morality."
 
 DAWN WARDS. I4I 
 
 " Ah no," said Gildea, " he is something better ; he is re- 
 ligion ! It is immoral to commit adultery : it is moral to punish 
 it : (' Infinitely better that they should atone for it, than lose a 
 step towards a higher life ') : it is religious, not to condemn it, 
 but to bid go and sin no more. It is immoral to take 
 your share in your father's substance and waste it in violent 
 living : it is moral to punish this prodigal, to whom repentance 
 has only come with a belly that was fain to fill itself with the 
 husks of the swine : it is religious to kill the fatted calf for such 
 a penitent, and rejoice and make glad. Jesus' sole criticism 
 on practical morality, on the realization of an ethical code in 
 everyday life, is, that ' it was not so from the beginning.' 
 
 " Just so ; but this is precisely the difference of the ethical 
 code of the Old and of the New Dispensation." 
 
 " Will you let me say, that it has nothing to do with any 
 ethical code at all ? For, surely, the essence of ethical codes is 
 justice, and the essence of the religious code, of the code of 
 Jesus, is love. The Amazon may be a big river, but you shall 
 compass all time in trying to put into it the unspeakable ocean. 
 — No, it is just here that, as Fitzgerald would say, all these 
 good people are superstitious. They believe that the spiritual 
 progress of humanity is synonymous with the progress of one 
 portion of the spirit of humanity, namely the ethical portion ; 
 and this, being a belief in a thing not worthy of that belief, 
 may justly, as it seems to me, be denominated a superstition. 
 It is superstition without religion." 
 
 " And what, then," asked Maddock, " do you call the belief 
 of men like your friend Hawkesbury ? " 
 
 " Those who are immoral ? men and women who, as most 
 of these Socialists, work in the spirit of Jesus and act (as a 
 polemist would say) in the manner of Bradlaugh ?— what is 
 their belief?" 
 
 " Yes," said Maddock. 
 
 "Why, clearly," answered Gildea smiling, "religion with 
 superstition ! The men of enthusiasm like Hawkesbury, and 
 the men of morality like Judge Parker, are surely both of them 
 right, and surely both of them wrong : right in their apprecia- 
 tion of the truth of one portion of the spiritual life, wrong in 
 their ignorance of another portion. They both possess truth, 
 and they both possess superstition." 
 
 " And what of a man like our friend Alcock here, who is 
 ignorant of religion and more or less lax as regards morality ? "
 
 142 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 " He too," answered Gildea, "as Fitzgerald clearly demon- 
 strated, is a victim of superstition. But he is not, for all that, 
 ■without his belief, without his appreciation of truth. He be- 
 lieves in that portion of the spiritual life which we call intellect. 
 Men like him have their enthusiasm, for which they are ready 
 to suffer and do suffer all things ; and that enthusiasm is the 
 enthusiasm for that portion of truth which we call Science." 
 
 " And your Fitzgerald — is he too both right and wrong ?" 
 
 " Of course he is ; for has he not both belief and negation? 
 All belief is truth, not the 7cho/e truth, but a part of the truth. 
 There is but one thing that is the whole truth." 
 
 " God ?" 
 
 "No, not God, for God does not include Nature, from 
 which He is the outcome — not God, not Nature, but that which 
 contains them both, Everything, the All !" 
 
 " Pooh," said Maddock, " flat Pantheism !" 
 
 "And suppose" cried Gildea, "it were Yot-theism, if the 
 thing is true!" (He laughed outright.) " — That answer of 
 Carlyle's," he said, " is immortal." 
 
 " Oh, it was Carlyle said it ?" said Maddock, " I had 
 forgotten. — And so," he proceeded, "the secret is out, and 
 Sir Horace Gildea 'stands confessed a Pantheist in all his 
 charms !' " 
 
 " Two of the happy family still remain unaccounted for," 
 Gildea said, " although they too have not probably attained to 
 perfect truth." 
 
 " Oh, that is you and I. As for me, I can describe myself 
 without your aid. I believe in morality and religion, with a 
 touch of superstition in both." 
 
 "Worse," said Gildea, "worse !" 
 
 " What, then ?" 
 
 " You believe in theology which is as bad a superstition as, 
 what Judge Parker calls, ' the calm blissful sea of pure theistic 
 belief (You notice how emphatic he is about his superstition 
 and casual about his truth ?) " 
 
 " Stop a moment now, my bright Apollo, and explain to me, 
 what you have not yet attempted to, what the superstition of 
 Theism is ?" 
 
 " What is Theism ? — 'It is a faith,' answers our good 
 Judge, ' which is the faith of all others ' (that is to say the faith 
 of Judge Parker and all the ' celebrated unitarian ministers '), 
 ; to be clung to, cherished and maintained as long as man exists
 
 DAWNWARDS. 1 43 
 
 - — belief, trust in, and love for the All-loving, All-righteous, All- 
 wise Universal Spirit of God.' Now observe that this faith, 
 this unique faith of faiths, is ' refreshing, and invigorating in 
 its simplicity' — (as, we might add, is .also its formulator, if we 
 did not shun flippancy as we would the pest) — 'warm and 
 glowing in its absolute unclouded devotion to, love for, and 
 perfect trust in God alone — proclaimed by Nature !' O wise 
 Judge, O upright Judge, O Judge much more elder than thy 
 looks, where, when, and how, in the name of all observers of 
 Nature from Darwin through Haeckel to Tennyson, did you 
 discover therein either this love or righteousness of which you 
 make such mention ? ' The struggle for existence and survival 
 of the fittest,' the parent of theistic righteousness and love ! 
 ' Proclaimed by Nature !' — and Nature in italics ! O im- 
 memorial phrase that eats up all the others even as Aaron's 
 rod swallowed up all the rods of the magicians ! — Who, after 
 this, would care to trouble himself with all the other potent 
 items of this faith of faiths ? The idea of God, God ' the All- 
 loving, All-righteous, All-wise Universal Spirit ' ' originated in 
 instinct,' and is not the slow and painful growth of time ? 
 Think of the love of Jehovah ! the righteousness of Baal ! the 
 wisdom of Moloch ! — The beauty and sympathy and warmth of 
 the theistic form of belief," he added, " are recognizable as a 
 half-hearted mixture of the clap-trap of Religion and Science — 
 Superstition, which knows that it is naked, and sews fig-leaves 
 together, and make itself an apron !" 
 
 Maddock, however, could have no confidence in the ex- 
 pressed views of this man, from whose face the light of amuse- 
 ment, amusement at others and himself, seemed never to be 
 absent long. There had, indeed, been moments when it 
 required all Maddock's intuition to prevent his perception 
 rising in absolute revolt against what seemed Gildea's flagrant 
 insincerity : then his perception had said to him that this was 
 but a youth, endowed with brilliant abilities, the mere exercise 
 of which was a pleasure and satisfaction to him, caring too 
 little for any one thing to owe it loyalty. Whereto his 
 intuition had replied that this was not a youth but a man, and 
 a man whose secret could not thus be read. And the feeling 
 that Maddock had, once before that day, felt towards Gildea 
 returned now with an intensity and strangeness that seemed to 
 Maddock, when he afterwards considered it, as little short 
 of wonderful. Maddock's profundity was often beyond the
 
 144 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 average, and herein indeed lay his secret, herein nestled " the 
 heart of his mystery." 
 
 " And yet," said Gildea, " here, as in the other case, the 
 common-sense view of belief has, of course, its excellence. ' To 
 take nothing else,' says the Judge, ' the very idea of " space " 
 and "distance" that astronomy has given us fills the mind 
 with wonder and with awe, clothing nature with a sublimity, a 
 majesty, and a beauty which, otherwise, we had never known.' 
 For observe that Space and Time, these two inexhaustible ideas, 
 are not, to our average intelligent secular view of things, the mere 
 words that they are to the orthodox : they are realities thus far, 
 that they help us to perceive that ' there exists throughout 
 space, — throughout the vast limitless universe, — motion, order, 
 beauty ; that there is behind all motion, all order, all beauty, a 
 force that produces the motion, the order, and the beauty.' 
 And further. They are realities thus far, that they help us to be 
 (whatever Dr. Maddock, in a polemico-theological spirit, may 
 declare) earnest in our life and earnest in our wish to bring 
 home to others the truth of that life, a ' most serious and 
 difficult task !' They help us to all this, and an unrecognized 
 intuitional belief in the essence which, in other forms and 
 other men whom we fail to appreciate, not to say understand, we 
 condemn — our intuitional belief, I say, in the Faith, Hope, and 
 Love, which are the great movers of the progress of Humanity 
 both upward and onward, will not let the forms that portions of 
 this belief may take in us make the whole grow cold, lifeless, 
 petrified, but the beauty and melody of our acts will often be 
 found to contradict the deformity and discord of our words." 
 
 " I confess, Sir Horace," said Maddock, " that you are a 
 puzzle to me. I really should not be surprised to see you some 
 day walking side by side with the Judge, the best friends in 
 the world !" 
 
 " And perhaps," said Gildea, " the Judge would not subse- 
 quently be surprised to see me doing the same with yourself! 
 For that indeed is the only use of such poor creatures as I : we 
 see the good in opponents and serve as links in the spiritual 
 bridge of Humanity." 
 
 "I should very much like," said Maddock, " to hear how you 
 would abuse me to him. I think I see the urbane expression 
 with which you w r ould delight him by shewing how, in this 
 ecclesiastical, metaphysical, theological polemist here, habemus 
 confitentem asinum ; and then turn upon him and say : ' The
 
 DAWNWARDS. 145 
 
 question that now arises, my dear Judge, is, has this man 
 nothing but faults- — has he no excellencies ? does there 
 remain, after the attack on him of so eminent a biblical critic 
 as Judge Parker is, no residuum of real and vital truth ? Let 
 us see.' " 
 
 " Doctor, Doctor," said Gildea, " to make me laugh so, is 
 cruel !" 
 
 "You do not consider me," said Maddock, " in the least." 
 
 They both laughed heartily. 
 
 "And now," said Maddock, "in order to complete the 
 matter, tell me, what is your superstition ? Here are Alcock 
 and Parker with their respective superstitions of x\theism and 
 Theism, of purely scientific and purely ethical progress. Here 
 is Hawkesbury with his superstition about the unselfishness of 
 the People and the practical neglect of Morality. Here is 
 Fitzgerald with his superstitious belief in a Church whose 
 splendid logical consistency will prove its ruin. Here am I, a 
 member of a sect that more nearly approaches ideal Christian- 
 ity than any other sect in existence, and is a logical absurdity — ■ 
 blessed with the superstition of theology and, worse, of polemi- 
 cal theology, with . . . But I cannot express all my super- 
 stitions : they seem more in number than the hairs of my 
 head !" 
 
 " Let us say broadly, then, that Alcock and the Judge are 
 those who have superstition without, and Fitzgerald, you, and to 
 a certain degree Hawkesbury, those who have superstition with, 
 Religion." 
 
 " And that you ?" 
 
 " And that / am he who unites in my proper person the 
 superstitions of all with the actualities of none." 
 
 There was a pause. Then : 
 
 " Sir Horace," said Maddock, " I take you seriously. And 
 I will confess that I would sooner, far sooner, be any one of us 
 than you. — Verily and indeed," he added, solemnly, " I cannot 
 see why you should care to live." 
 
 " Nor yet," said Gildea, "why I should care to die ?" 
 
 Maddock was possessed by sadness. The absolute, inevit- 
 able hopelessness of this man made him again turn faint and 
 sick at heart. 
 
 "Nor yet," he said, "why you should care to die." 
 
 There was a long pause. Never again could Maddock be 
 illuded into momentary misunderstanding of this man : he had 
 
 L
 
 146 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 now not only seen this strange soul laid bare before him and 
 felt the influence of that sight, but had felt as if he had, as it 
 were, almost received it into his own, almost made it a part of 
 himself. 
 At last : 
 
 "I asked you to believe," he said with a touch of wistfulness 
 in face and tone, " that I was your true friend. You will per- 
 haps, forgive me if I . . if I offer you the one token of it 
 that seems left to me to offer. Some day — I cannot tell, but so 
 I trust — you may care to think that, each night you close your 
 eyes in sleep, there is one whose prayers for you are rising, as 
 he believes, to the God and Father of us all, to bless and keep 
 you, to lift up the light of his countenance upon you, and to 
 give you peace." 
 
 The two men stood facing each other for a few moments in 
 silence : then their hands met in a close, long clasp, and 
 parted ; and they turned, standing almost touching each other, 
 looking out over the lovely scene of earth and water and sky. 
 At last : 
 
 "Those clouds," said Gildea softly, "they have a peerless 
 radiancy. One seems to understand how the men of the past 
 days saw a spirit therein, and held converse with it with wonder 
 and delight and awe. Those were days of a music and beauty 
 and sweetness such as we shall never know again." 
 " If not, said Maddock as softly, 
 
 if not the calm 
 of its early mountainous shore, 
 yet a solemn peace of its own." 
 
 A footstep was heard behind them. It was Edgar, come to 
 say that Mrs. and Miss Medwin had arrived and were up in 
 the drawing-room with Mr. Alcock. 
 
 Gildea stepped out onto the lawn. 
 
 " Let us go up by the balcony," he said to Maddock. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Mrs. Medwin was the only native-born australian lady who 
 was " good style." So at least a Governor's wife, about the 
 " goodness " of" whose " style " there could be no question, had 
 declared. It was not, this Governor's wife had explained, that 
 there were no ladies in Australia, (There were not however 
 many, par parenthese, and such style as they had was at best 
 but second-rate american), but they none of them had that
 
 DAWN WARDS. 1 47 
 
 manner of dressing, moving, and speaking which charac- 
 terizes what (to use this rather objectional term again, for 
 want of a better) we call " good style." This Governor's wife, 
 with her usual delicate feminine instinct, had felt on the occa- 
 sion of this now socially celebrated description of Mrs. 
 Medwin, that she had not quite satisfied herself, that the 
 description did not contain the truth, all the truth, and 
 nothing but the truth, of the matter ; and she was right, it 
 did not. Mrs. Medwin undoubtedly possessed that serene 
 refinement of movement and speech which go so far to making 
 up that all but defunct individuality, a " lady," but she was 
 wanting in the final gift of a " lady," social charm. The flower 
 was scentless, or rather the scent it had was of another descrip- 
 tion. Her life had not, indeed, been favourable to the 
 development of this final gift. She had been married early, a 
 ready enough victim to the convenience of her family, to a 
 man with whom she had little in common and much in opposi- 
 tion. He was liked by none and feared by all those who had 
 any personal dealings with him : his savage outbursts of pas- 
 sion recalled to memory the dark stories that were told of his 
 father who had, as the Australians euphemistically put it, come 
 out at the government expense. But she, having calmly decided 
 to accept Medwin and life with him, set herself by the sheer 
 intrepidity of her sweet high beauty, to dominate them. She 
 succeeded. And she won, not only the control, but the deep, 
 admiring love, of the man. Then came the catastrophe which 
 those who knew him had prophesied and recanted. In one of 
 his savage outbursts of passion, he struck her. The blow was a 
 cruel one and its results life-long. Much as she then suffered 
 in body and soul, she could have no other feeling for him than 
 that of pity. For days he would take no food, but sat in a chair 
 outside her door, like a dog that waits in silence on an idolized 
 master ; and, when he was first permitted to enter, flung him- 
 self onto his knees by the bedside, sobbing and moaning and 
 covering her hand with kisses. And she, who had had little or 
 no care for him before, save as the principal incident in her 
 life, now to her own surprise found that from out this appal- 
 ling misery was born affection for him and even love. Her 
 life from then onwards had been spent in a struggle far more 
 terrible than that which she had waged with him. At first the 
 idea of wasting away inch by inch on a diseased sick-bed 
 almost overwhelmed her : she longed, she prayed for death.
 
 148 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 But death did not come ; and then her spiritual pride began to 
 reassert itself, and, like the captain of a battered ship, she once 
 more thought how she could rule these waters that had ruled 
 her. For long it seemed as if the effort would be too much for 
 her : she said to herself one sleepless horrible night that she was 
 being consumed alive. Her very latest gift seemed but as an 
 added thorn to her; for now that she had affection and even love, 
 she had also jealousy. The spell of her sweet, fearless health 
 and strength and beauty was passed from him save as a 
 memory : his love, deepened it might be by his abiding 
 remorse, was (as she thought) deprived of that admiration 
 which had been her first and strongest hold on him. Nothing 
 more pitiful, than to see the womanliness in her assert itself 
 against her pride and speak in jealousy ! With wonderful 
 intuition, however, she divined and with wonderful determina- 
 tion carried out, what was the only plan of still keeping for 
 herself his admiration. She, who since she had married him 
 had not given his business affairs a thought, now gave herself 
 up to the mastery of them. She had herself taught all arithmetic 
 thoroughly, and, in little less than three years after her misfor- 
 tune, knew more of all his business affairs than he did himself. 
 And more. She stirred up in him the ambition to become the 
 leader of that great amorphous section of colonial society of 
 which he was a member, the land-owners, the "squatters." She 
 had a certain liking for society, and when she was in England 
 went into it as much as her extremely delicate health would per- 
 mit her : in Australia, however, where, as she said, there was no 
 society, or only of a sort which she did not like, she yet enter- 
 tained a good deal, as she wished her husband to be popular 
 in view of his entering parliament and attempting to organize 
 his party. But her entertainment was more after the fashion 
 of a listless social empress than an interested hostess : she did 
 not care enough about these people to make, what would have 
 been to her, a painful physical effort to attract them. She had 
 indeed something of the feeling of one of the old aristocrats 
 forced by the pressure of the time to open their houses to the 
 Middle-class ; she acknowledged the salute of her guests, and 
 provided them with fine rooms, music, amusement, foods and 
 drinks, and what more could they want ? Her coldness was 
 generally ascribed to her notorious ill-health, but the young 
 people felt instinctively that she condemned them, and were 
 not drawn to her. Between her and Gildea, however, there
 
 DAWNWARDS. 1 49 
 
 was an understanding that was not without either charm or 
 brightness to both. He understood her, and she half-felt this 
 and, never having been really understood before, was in a way- 
 pleased at it and drawn to him. She amused him and at 
 times, thanks to the pity with which her sweet courage inspired 
 him, affected him. He was not too without respect for her 
 intuitional capacities. He said once to Sydney Medwin, who 
 was complaining that his mother was fifty years behind the 
 time, (Airs. Medwin supported her husband in his views for 
 their elder son), that, on the contrary, she was fifty years 
 before ; for she was the only person he had met or heard of in 
 the Colony who clearly saw that the Land Question was upon 
 them. Mrs. Medwin indeed, as has been noticed, saw that 
 the attempt of the Australian land-owners to repeat the per- 
 formance of those of England and form a dominant aristocracy, 
 would be met with keen opposition, and that the only hope of 
 success lay in creating out of an amorphous class a party, and 
 organizing it. The feeling of possession and caste had grown a 
 strong one in her, in her more or less absorbed in the life of her 
 husband. Hers, then, with all its powers of passionate attach- 
 ment to an individual, was one of those not frequent female souls 
 that see beyond a man into the cause which he represents. 
 Her elder son she looked upon as a failure, as useless, as 
 worth no more than making behave himself. Her younger 
 son, Stephen, she was training with some care, and to him the 
 far greater bulk of his father's wealth and property was at 
 present destined. Miss Medwin, whom Mrs. Medwin called 
 her niece, and who called Mr. and Mrs. Medwin respectively 
 uncle and aunt, but who was in reality no such relation, being 
 the daughter of Mr. Medwin's father's brother's son ; of Miss 
 Medwin it will perhaps be enough to state, that the report 
 which Gildea had unexpectedly received of her from the 
 Private Enquiry Office was correct, and that she was the 
 possessor of a moderate fortune who had come out to Austra- 
 lia, half for a change from her english life of which she was 
 weary, half in search of an old schoolfellow to whom she was 
 much attached. 
 
 (lildea and Maddock stepped out' together along the lawn 
 and mounted the steps that led up to the sitting-room 
 balcony. The sunlight, intercepted by an angle of the house, 
 covered half of this portion of it, almost so exactly half that 
 the glass door, open in the middle of the bay window, was 

 
 I50 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 partly in the sun and partly in the shade. As they reached the 
 balcony, Gildea, with the gesture of a courteous host, indicated 
 to Maddock to enter first, but he, with the no less courteous 
 gesture of a guest, refused and returned the indication. Gildea 
 stepped into the open doorway and, as he stood there for a 
 moment with the sunlight and shade playing upon him, met 
 the gaze of Miss Medwin, seated upright, looking almost 
 proudly before her. Behind her was the dark red of the curtain 
 with its subdued white of delicately wrought muslin. Two rays 
 of sunlight lay along the rich variegated colours of the carpet, 
 diffusing a little light about her. She was very beautiful. 
 They had recognized one another at once. And more. They 
 both were undergoing that feeling of half-forgotten recollec- 
 tion that affects us with such unprepared and mystic strange- 
 ness. Had they, then, seen one another before that day when 
 she had almost ridden over him under the Domain trees? 
 had they met in some way similar to their meeting now ? At 
 such moments the past, the present, and the future, all half 
 unknown, seem to join hands, and kiss, and part with eyes 
 dimmed with a regretless regret. 
 
 It had passed in a few moments. Gildea, with something 
 that might be called a sudden freak of tact, stepped into the 
 room, turning a quite self-possessed face to Mrs. Medwin. She 
 was sitting on a sofa dispensing serene little nothings to 
 Alcock, whose face and manner beamed with social polish. 
 Gildea came straight to her and made his greetings with 
 winning grace : then, obeying a slight gesture of hers, moved 
 aside and she introduced him to her niece, Miss Medwin. 
 With the same winning grace, head courteously bowed, he 
 stepped to Miss Medwin, and lightly raised the hand she held 
 up to him. Maddock was greeting Mrs. Medwin. 
 
 " I think," said Gildea smiling slightly, " I think, Miss Med- 
 win, that we are not quite strangers." 
 
 "And how is Mrs. Maddock ?" asked Mrs. Medwin, " I hope 
 she is quite well." Gildea sat down in a chair by Miss Medwin. 
 
 " No," answered Miss Medwin gravely, " I was careless 
 enough to have almost ridden onto you." 
 
 "The carelessness was mine. I was dreaming. Day-dreamers 
 should be awakened." Maddock was assuring Mrs. Medwin 
 that Mrs. Maddock was in excellent health, and at this very 
 moment enjoying herself quite satisfactorily without the society 
 of her lord and master.
 
 DAWXWARDS. 151 
 
 " Indeed," said Mrs. Medwin, " I hope we shall be able to 
 see her before we leave Sydney. We are stopping at Wins- 
 low's." 
 
 "That," Miss Medwin said gravely again, "seems to me to 
 depend a good deal on the day." 
 
 " Mr. Medwin is with you, Mrs. Medwin ?" interrogated 
 Alcock with his politest manner, " I understood that I 
 should not have the pleasure of seeing him till monday or 
 tuesday ?" 
 
 " It is true," said Gildea, " that to-day the reality of things is 
 so troubling to the peace and pleasure of many of us, that it 
 is cruel to wake us from our dreams." 
 
 " Oh no !" said Mrs. Medwin with her usual unruffled 
 serenity, " Mr. Medwin is not coming up till tuesday or 
 perhaps Wednesday." 
 
 A swift sense of the humour of a social scene like this, 
 where the tendency of things is for the dramatis personam to 
 beat unlimited time with musical voices, graceful gestures, and 
 a charming expression of countenance, dawned upon Gildea 
 as a memory of almost distant days. The poetry of society is 
 mostly expended in its common-places. To be able to do this 
 is an art, an art of which provincial and colonial society is 
 ignorant. Hence Gildea's sense of the humour of the present 
 scene was as an almost distant memory. " Here," he thought, 
 " we have four excellent musicians who would make the most 
 charmingly meaningless quartet possible, Alcock being reduced 
 to the part of accidental audience." It was not, of course, 
 that Gildea's talk with Miss Medwin was social time-beating : 
 it was, rather, spiritual time-beating, rendered in a manner that 
 partook of the social. Miss Medwin had not recovered from 
 the to her strange sensations of this second sudden meeting 
 with him : she was neither as consummate a master of her 
 emotions as he was, nor careful of becoming one, nor yet 
 was she prepared, as he was, for their meeting : she was 
 left by it as one is who has had some swift revelation of good 
 or evil in himself — considering himself if he really was this, is 
 that, and will be something that contains them both. The 
 individualities of other men she had known had touched her 
 as much, or almost as much, as his had on that day in the 
 Domain, but none had ever entered into her and, as it were, 
 " blown a thrilling summons to her will" as his had, as he stood 
 looking at her in the shadowy sunlit doorway there. And her
 
 152 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 will had answered that summons, and instantaneously. To him 
 that sight of her, sitting upright, looking almost proudly before 
 her, was ever to be as the sight of an Antigone, one who felt 
 "it was better not to be than not be noble," -the depth of 
 whose scorn for unworthiness was equal to her love, high as 
 the everlasting hills, deep as the unplumbed sea. 
 
 " Yes," she said, " it is sometimes cruel to wake us from our 
 dreams, and yet it is best, I think." 
 
 " — You think it is best to modify our poetry with prose? 
 Was it better to have awakened Shelley, and given us his 
 ' Prometheus ' with wooden limbs of a day's social dogmatism, 
 than to have let him make delicate music in the italian woods 
 and by the italian shores, for ever sweet and fair ?" 
 
 " So he told me," said Alcock, " and I was very glad to hear 
 it. The interests of all wealth, whether in land or in money, is 
 identic. But we have no organization. — And Labour," he 
 added with a look to Maddock, "as Mr. Hawkesbury just told 
 us, is organizing, if it is not already organized." 
 
 If it had been possible for Mrs. Medwin to be amazed at 
 anything, she would have been amazed at this. Hawkesbury 
 had a few years ago been an employe on one of Medwin's 
 stations, the very station to which she was now on her road. 
 This was a reflection which was positively annoying to her. 
 " It would," she had once simply remarked, " have been as 
 well perhaps, if he had eaten some poisoned meat when he was 
 there, as they used to say the troublesome blacks did. He is 
 a danger to society." Sydney Medwin, who liked to do his 
 best to ruffle his mother's serenity now and then, used 
 not unfrequently to speak in praise of Hawkesbury (his 
 friend Hawkesbury, a clever fellow too, and who would 
 make his mark out here yet !) and had once even, as Gildea 
 told Maddock, offered to introduce him to her. " You know, 
 Sydney," said Mrs. Medwin simply, " I am not interested in 
 Mr. Hawkesbury. If you like to make up a shooting-party at 
 Lathong," (a station of Medwin's in Victoria), " with all the 
 men on the station, I daresay he would be pleased to join 
 you." — What, then, was the meaning of Mr. Alcock's remark 
 that this firebrand socialist, this impertinent journalist and 
 pamphleteer, had been just telling something to Mr. Alcock, 
 Dr. Maddock, and presumably Sir Horace ? 
 
 "I'm sure," said Alcock with his politest manner again, 
 " that we all of us cannot be too — too pleased to have found a
 
 DAWNWARDS. 1 53 
 
 lady who realized this, and could help us to what we so much 
 want — a . . a sort of general rallying-point. — Nothing," he pro- 
 ceeded, "struck me so much in England as the use that the 
 political parties made of their social gatherings, and they tell 
 me that this was much more the case once than it is at 
 present." Alcock found a certain amount of difficulty in 
 saying that he thought women might, after all, be made of 
 some use in political life, in a manner that should be pleasing 
 to this woman. 
 
 The talk progressed more or less easily, Maddock, with a 
 humorous perception of the effect Alcock's innocent allusion 
 to Hawkesbury had produced on Mrs. Medwin, playing the 
 part of conversational mediator between the two. 
 
 " You are not, then," said Gildea, in answer to a remark of 
 Miss Medwin's, " in sympathy with dreams and dreamers ?" 
 
 " No," she answered shaking her head, " not if they take 
 their dreams for realities. It is just, I think, because we have 
 been dreaming so long and dreaming so much, that our waking 
 is so miserable. — You speak of prose and poetry," she con- 
 tinued, turning her head a little and looking at him, " as if the 
 prose had something disagreeable in it. Well, so it may have 
 — to the dreamers. I too am a dreamer, of course, in my 
 way ; but I dream about the earth and the things of the earth, 
 and so my dreams are real as the wind is real, or the sunlight, 
 or the moonlight, or the light of the stars, none of which fear 
 the contact of the earth or the water. But these people seem 
 to me to dream of the things of heaven, filling all space with 
 them. But space is empty — at any rate of things like theirs." 
 
 "You do not believe," he said, "as Taine does, that 'at 
 bottom there is nothing truly sweet and beautiful in our life 
 but our dreams?' " 
 
 "Yes," she said, "yes and no! But what does it matter 
 what I believe ? I have no opinion of my own in this way. 
 You would make me dogmatic. Now I shall always try not to 
 be dogmatic. I rebel against defining things, especially things 
 that I like ; they are never the same afterwards. But I am 
 often doing this, and I have to suffer for it. This comes of 
 being born in an age which can describe everything and do 
 nothing. — You see, you make me petulant !" 
 
 It flashed across Gildea's mind as she finished speaking that 
 there was a great difference between the manner of his talk 
 with this girl and with that bright intelligent girl in Melbourne.
 
 154 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 He perceived the difference, and the greatness of the differ- 
 ence, but not much farther. It was many years, and in point 
 of spiritual time many ages, since Gildea had been blind to the 
 fact that another nature was influencing and being influenced 
 by his own with the force of fatality. It is the distinguishing 
 mark of the moderns that they are not blind in this respect. 
 None of Shakspere's men, not even the intellectual Hamlet, 
 get beyond a suspicion that Fate is playing upon them. The 
 chief cause of Hamlet's delay lies in this suspicion and his 
 antagonism to it : the others submit blindly, and only recognise 
 fatality when the " wheel has come full circle," but the process 
 of fatality is all unknown to them, not even a mystery. Miss 
 Medwin too was in the same state as Gildea but even deeper 
 in it. She spoke to him as she had never spoken to anyone 
 else in her life, as to a comrade, without leaning, without sup- 
 porting, with complete simplicity. The spell that compels a 
 mutual truthfulness is the perception that you understand and 
 are understood. 
 
 " I see," he said, " that you complain of your age because 
 its senses are deranged, and idlers like me because the gifts 
 that it assigns to the doers, as opposed to the thinkers, are 
 not gold but tinsel." 
 
 "No, no," she said, "I do not complain of my age ! If I 
 complained of anything, it would be of myself who am unfit 
 for my age. And I do not think that the gifts of our actions 
 are tinsel." 
 
 " Perhaps you are right, and the fault is mine because my 
 senses are deranged ?" 
 
 " There is great room for action now, as it seems to me. If 
 a man appeared to-morrow with the secret of attraction in him 
 — the secret that Napoleon had or Byron — he would control us 
 as much as they did. They are ours too, these men." 
 
 " But we think too much ? we can describe everything, and 
 do nothing ?" 
 
 " I do not know," she said, " I have no opinion !" 
 
 "Alice," said Mrs. Medwin. 
 
 " Yes, aunt," answered Miss Medwin. 
 
 " Will you please make the tea ?" she said. 
 
 Miss Medwin rose at once, Gildea rising too, smiling. It 
 was Mrs. Medwin's peculiar charm that, at certain apparently 
 eccentric moments, she would speak and act with the pretty 
 spontaneous sweetness of a young girl. This was the scent
 
 DAWN WARDS. 155 
 
 this wonderful flower had retained, despite all the terrible heats 
 of the noontide and frosts of the dawn that had fallen upon 
 its life. She had spoken in this manner now. 
 
 Miss Medwin went behind the tea-table which Edgar had 
 just brought in and on which he was placing the bright silver 
 tea-urn, and the water-can with its blue-violet-flamed spirit- 
 lamp ; then, at a nod from Gildea, disappeared. Miss Medwin 
 poured out a cup of tea which Gildea took to Mrs. Medwin, 
 returning for the milk and sugar, while Miss Medwin took the 
 second cup to Maddock, who received it with suave and 
 charming thanks. Mrs. Medwin thanked Gildea, who passed 
 on with the milk and sugar to Maddock, and, as he returned 
 to the tea-table for the cakes and biscuits, passed Miss Medwin 
 with the third cup on her way to Alcock. Alcock received her 
 with thanks profuse and jocular. 
 
 " Do you take milk and sugar ?" asked Miss Medwin. 
 
 " No, no, thank you, Miss Medwin," returned Alcock, " I 
 take neither !" 
 
 Gildea arrived, with a plate of cakes in one hand and a plate 
 of biscuits in the other. Mrs. Medwin recognised in the 
 biscuits those of a sort to which she was somewhat addicted, 
 and divined that Gildea had noticed the fact. 
 
 "Thank you, Sir Horace," she said, with her manner of 
 pretty spontaneous sweetness, " And presently Alice shall 
 play for you. I know you will find her style of playing a 
 treat." 
 
 Sir Horace made a suitable reply and passed on with the 
 cakes and biscuits. Mrs. Medwin and Maddock began to talk 
 together, Alcock playing the part of silent member. 
 
 "There is your tea," Miss Medwin said to Gildea as he 
 came back to the tea-table. She was standing with her own 
 cup in her hand as if about to move away to a seat. Gildea 
 proffered the biscuits. She took one. He put down the 
 plates and took up his cup. 
 
 " You are an epicure in tea," she said, sipping a little of hers 
 from her tea-spoon, "are you not?" 
 
 "I do not know," he answered with a slightly amused look, 
 "but I believe that the Russians are the only people in Europe 
 who understand it." 
 
 " They take neither sugar nor milk, do they ? and a slice of 
 lemon floating in the tea?" 
 
 They were moving back to their places. He assented.
 
 156 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 " And who are the only people in Europe who understand 
 coffee ?" she asked. 
 
 " Undoubtedly the French." 
 
 " Ah, you mean the cafe au lait — with the milk and coffee 
 both boiling and poured in together? I like it that way, but 
 not with too much milk. We had a french cook once who 
 used to make it for us, and, as I liked it, of course I found out 
 how to make it myself." 
 
 "Yes," he said, "certainly coffee with cold milk is a bar- 
 barism ; but the shape in which I like coffee best is as, what 
 the French call, cafe noir." 
 
 Miss Medwin said she had never seen it in that way, and, in 
 answer to Gildea's slight expression of surprise, explained that 
 she had never been in France. Gildea described the cafe noir 
 and the proper manner in which to drink it. 
 
 " You fill the spoon with cognac," he said, " into which you 
 put a lump of sugar — In France the sugar is in little thin slabs, 
 not, as with us, in squares — and then you set the cognac alight. 
 This melts down the sugar and, when all the spirit is burnt up, 
 except that which saturates the sugar, and goes out, you put in 
 your spoon. The flavour of burnt sugar and cognac is pleasant." 
 
 " It is indeed, Sir Horace," said Alcock, tired of playing the 
 part of silent member in the other conversation, " I drank it 
 that way myself in Paris. A friend of mine, an American told 
 me of it. Paris is a very pleasant place. You have a treat in 
 store for you, going there, Miss Medwin." 
 
 "Yes," she answered, "I should like to go to Paris; the 
 Louvre is there." 
 
 "A very fine collection," said Alcock, " I was much struck 
 with it ! Unfortunately all the best works of art are now either 
 in collections, or so expensive that they are out of the reach of 
 us Australians who have claims upon us more pressing. You 
 saw the Picture Gallery in Melbourne ?" 
 
 "Yes, I saw it. I think it is rather painful. I liked the 
 Library better." 
 
 "The building— the room, you mean ?" 
 
 " No, I meant the books. I used to go and sit there and 
 read." 
 
 " Oh indeed ?" said Alcock. " And what now do you think 
 of the Picture Gallery here ?" 
 
 "Alice," said Mrs. Medwin, "you are not to say! I won't have 
 you say that the things in Sydney are better than in Melbourne !"
 
 DAWNWARDS. I 5 7 
 
 "Very well, aunt," said Alice, "then I will not say it." 
 
 "And now," said Mrs. Medwin, "I want you to play for 
 us." 
 
 Miss Medwin rose at once with a look for the piano, which 
 was on the other side of the curtains. Both she and Gildea 
 were amused and delighted by Mrs. Medwin's characteristic 
 interruption and command : Maddock was amused : even 
 Alcock, who did not yet know her ways, was too much influ- 
 enced by the charm of this her happiest manner to think it 
 rude or imperious. " She is such an invalid," he said, recount- 
 ing this incident as an anecdote to a friend of his at the Mel- 
 bourne Club, " and rules everyone about her like a little 
 empress. But her manner is irresistible, really irresistible ; and 
 it doesn't offend you in the least — in fact you rather like it. 
 There is no woman in Melbourne who could help us to con- 
 solidate a party in the english social manner as sJie could. 
 And I really attach — I really do ! — considerable importance to 
 the idea." Such was the subsequent expression of the thoughts 
 which were passing through the mind of Alcock as Gildea, 
 having held back the curtain for Miss Medwin to pass, was 
 opening the piano for her. Mrs. Medwin sat in serene uncon- 
 sciousness of the possibility of her manners being considered as 
 otherwise than her own, and would have been surprised if she 
 had heard that anyone thought they were open to question. 
 
 " Is there any piece, aunt," asked Miss Medwin, bending 
 back so as to see Mrs. Medwin through the curtains, " that you 
 would like me to play ?" 
 
 " Oh no !" Mrs. Medwin said, " Why, I wanted you to play 
 for Sir Horace, not for me !" 
 
 Miss Medwin smiled assent, and, after a few moments' 
 pause to consider what piece she would play and to collect her 
 thoughts, began. The piece was the one which she considered 
 would most please her audience, and which of course she knew. 
 It was Chopin's Eleventh Nocturne. It suited her humour at 
 many times, but particularly at the present. The Nocturne is 
 divided into two parts : passionate and half-weary wandering, 
 and rest in which passion is merged in peace. To her it con- 
 jured up the vision of a twilight road winding up between 
 woody rolling fields and a plantation. The dark figure of the 
 man, whose passionate and half-weary wandering is here ex- 
 pressing itself, is coming slowly up the road. Low down and 
 far away behind the close straight stems of the plantation lie a
 
 I 58 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 few pallid veins of sunset light. The shadows are stealing 
 swiftly around him. He is near to hopelessness, near to the 
 
 wish to 
 
 lie down like a tired child, 
 and weep away the life of care 
 which he has borne and yet must bear : 
 
 but passion and yearning are still too strong in him for self- 
 abandonment. Then he hears sounds — a strain of music and 
 voices — the nuns or monks perhaps, singing an evening hymn to 
 the blessed Mary, mother of passion and of peace ! He moves 
 on slowly and softly, listening. His hopelessness, his weariness 
 are soothed into rest : trust enters into him, trust in the aims of 
 life, that general life in which his own is now merged, even as 
 the yearning of passion is lost in the sweetness of peace. . . . 
 
 When she had finished, there was a long pause, and then 
 Gildea thanked her for the pleasure she had given him. Mrs. 
 Medwin and Maddock began to speak of the piece, Maddock 
 expressing his pleasure at it and his admiration for Miss 
 Medwin's playing. 
 
 " You are, then, a lover of this Chopin ?" said Gildea to 
 Miss Medwin, " But he is not your Master, as you would say ?" 
 
 "No," she answered, "he is not my Master. — I suppose you 
 mean Beethoven by that ?" she added, looking up at him. He 
 assented. 
 
 "And yet," she said, "I cannot somehow call even him 
 Master. I do not love music as I ought to do — especially 
 Beethoven and Wagner. They are great, these men, very great, 
 but I cannot lose myself in their spirit as I should do. I often 
 feel this." 
 
 " It was one of Heine's few fantastic sayings," said Gildea, 
 "that Chopin was the Raphael of the piano, and indeed a 
 piece like this, or the stately opening of the Thirteenth Nocturne 
 . — You remember it?" (She assented) — "or the Marche 
 Funebre, help to see what he meant ; but to call him a Raphael 
 seems to me inapt. No Raphael, for instance, would have 
 dreamed of so entirely giving himself up to the influence of 
 his passion as Chopin does. Surely it is not in his spirit that 
 you can lose yourself?" 
 
 " No," she said, " less than in Beethoven's. But perhaps 
 Heine only meant his expression about Chopin comparatively. 
 Chopin, you remember, is the only great composer who 
 devoted himself to the piano. Certainly he is a master of it,
 
 DAWNWARDS. 159 
 
 but his style of art is not like Raphael's — at least so far as I 
 know of Raphael." 
 
 They came back talking into the other room, where Gildea, 
 from a glance at Mrs. Medwin's face, perceived that she now 
 wished them to go down to the yacht. In a few minutes he 
 brought the conversation round to the subject and, having 
 asked and she having expressed her wish, the party was pre- 
 sently crossing the lawn on its way down to the small landing- 
 stage, close to which the " Petrel " had now been brought in. 
 Mrs. Medwin, between Maddock and Alcock, was some yards 
 ahead of Gildea and Miss Medwin who were following them. 
 
 " You did not know," Gildea was saying to her, " that Mr. 
 Hawkesbury was a friend of mine ? He has been having 
 lunch with us, and only just went away before you arrived. 
 He, and another friend of mine whom you perhaps have met 
 in Melbourne, Mr. Fitzgerald — No ? — were unable to stay." 
 
 " So I supposed," said Miss Medwin, " or something like 
 that. — You do not perhaps know," she added, "that my aunt 
 has a dislike for him that really almost amounts to antipathy?" 
 
 "Yes," said Gildea, " I was aware of it : his social opinions 
 are too much for her, and Sydney Medwin annoys her by con- 
 stantly mentioning both them and him. A meeting would 
 have been awkward indeed, but I made my calculations care- 
 fully, and I should have regretted not giving my friend Fitz- 
 gerald the opportunity of making Hawkesbury's acquaintance. 
 In a few days one will be going due north and the other due 
 south, but I hope they will meet again later on. Two more 
 charming examples of the two species of enthusiast it would be 
 hard to find." 
 
 " What do you call the two species ? " 
 
 " The enthusiast of heat and the enthusiast of light : both 
 are to me equally beautiful, equally charming ! " 
 
 " Mr. Hawkesbury, then," she said, "is the enthusiast of heat ? 
 I have never known any man so much in earnest as he is. He 
 seems to understand nothing but devotion or abhorrence ; and 
 yet how well he generally conceals this from those whom be- 
 thinks unworthy of the knowledge of it ! His patience and 
 courtesy have often astonished and filled me with admiration. I 
 have heard him arguing with a stupid opponent, and I have 
 heard him addressing a crowd. His self-restraint, his clear- 
 ness, were simply wonderful. Has he ever spoken to you of 
 his friend and Master, as he says, — James Holden ? "
 
 l6o AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 " No," answered Gildea, " but I happen to have seen 
 Holden myself. — But here we are !" 
 
 Alcoek from the deck and Maddock from the shore had as- 
 sisted Mrs. Medwin over the plank into the " Petrel," and now 
 Miss Medwin, after shaking hands, expressing her regrets that he 
 could not come, and saying good-bye to Maddock, followed. 
 
 Mrs. Medwin, Miss Medwin, Alcoek and Gildea gathered 
 opposite Maddock, with whom they talked while the ropes 
 were being cast loose and the yacht got ready for starting. 
 Then, as she glided away, bending slightly as the wind caught 
 and filled her sails, Maddock took off his hat and stood bare- 
 headed, bowing and waving farewell. 
 
 A more charming day for such a trip, it would have been 
 hard to choose. The air was warmer than in the morning, but 
 the breeze was still strong enough to prevent the volumes of 
 foul smoke which issued from the funnels of the harbour 
 steamers from polluting the air and spoiling the view. The 
 " Petrel " made straight for the main channel ot the harbour in 
 the direction of the Heads. 
 
 While Gildea was away talking with his skipper about the 
 arrangements that had been made for the trip, the other three 
 passengers moved about looking at the yacht, praising and 
 admiring its neatness and cleanness. And it was worthy too 
 both of the praise and admiration which they bestowed on its 
 general completeness, that namely of silence, and of the praise 
 and admiration which they who were skilled in such matters 
 bestowed on its sailing-powers. 
 
 Presently Gildea rejoined them, and the conversation flowed 
 on lightly and pleasantly. 
 
 "I notice," said Miss Medwin, "that you carry very little gear 
 up aloft. Your masts too are unusually tall, are they not ? " 
 
 Gildea gave a pleased smile. 
 
 "Yes," he said, "they call her the ghost yacht at Cowes. I 
 use as little hempen rope as I can. When the great point is 
 speed, every extra inch that you give to the prise of the wind 
 is of importance. The steel, you see, does not offer half as 
 much resistance as the ordinary hempen rope. Besides which, 
 I have in several cases done away with a rope altogether where 
 I believed one, if properly handled, could do for two." 
 
 Miss Medwin, who knew the rigging and handling of a sail- 
 ing-ship fairly well, asked for an explanation of how one or two 
 things were done, which he gave her with a certain pleasure.
 
 DAWNWARDS. l6l 
 
 "And what," she said, "do your sailors think of your altera- 
 tions ? " 
 
 He laughed. 
 
 " They say the Old Alan — that is my name with them — " 
 
 " It is the name of all skippers with their sailors, is it 
 not ? " she asked smiling. 
 
 He assented. 
 
 " — They say, or rather used to say, that I had a twist that 
 way. The conservatism of sailors and builders as regards ships 
 is quite wonderful. Imagine that, when they came to build iron 
 sailing ships instead of wood, they actually had and have the 
 stupidity to put up masts of the same circumference as the 
 old wooden ones, although thereby they gain no extra strength, 
 and expose square yards on yards needlessly to the prise of 
 the wind ! I would venture to say that this alone makes a 
 difference of three for four knots per hour in a head wind to 
 the speed of the vessel." 
 
 Miss Medwin thought Gildea more charming in his capacity 
 of intelligent amateur captain than as consummate master of 
 things social. They moved down together towards the stern, 
 and stood there talking and looking forward. Mrs. Medwin 
 and Alcock were standing together talking a little way in front 
 of them. Then Edgar appeared with seats and rugs, which he 
 offered to Mrs. Medwin and Alcock, who sat down, Mrs. 
 Medwin with a rug over her knees, and then came aft to the 
 other two, who accepted two chairs, but for the present 
 remained standing as they talked. 
 
 Presently there came a pause in the conversation and Miss 
 Medwin sat down, Gildea following suit. The pause became a 
 silence. At last he broke it. 
 
 " You have noticed," he said, "how different is the effect on 
 you of the sea, in a steamer and in a boat?" 
 
 " Yes," she said, " I have noticed it. The steamer goes its 
 own determined way, breaking its sympathy with winds and 
 waters, and you — you are so high up that you cannot mingle in 
 the being of the spirits, the breathings of their lips, the wavings 
 of their hands, the tossings of their hair." 
 
 " Where" he said smiling, 
 
 " where the ~<viL{ white horses play, 
 
 champ and chafe and loss in the spray." 
 
 She smiled in turn. She was looking before her across the 
 sunny rolling billows to where, against some high brown jagged 
 
 M
 
 1 62 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 rocks, the foam-mantle of the breakers rose ever silently and 
 fell. She was breathing in gently and serenely the delight of 
 the sea, the bright breeze, the movement of the yacht, the 
 divine blue free expansion of the clouds and skies. There 
 was a silence. 
 
 " You are not fond of steamers, then ? " he asked with a 
 side-look. 
 
 "No," she said, "except in rough weather, and then I too 
 feel the elation of my kind, — the frail race of men which can 
 yet dominate the winds and waters and make their paths along 
 the neck of the untameable sea. — -You do not know," she 
 added, leaving her extraneous delight for a moment and look- 
 ing at him with a touch of self-amusement, "you do not know 
 how I swell with pride when I watch a great man-of-war sailing 
 on and on with such serene confidence, dominating the expanse 
 of water like a thing of self-evident strength and beauty. I 
 remember once making sand-forts with some children in 
 England in a little rock-girt cove, and suddenly I looked up 
 and there, almost filling our narrow horizon, was a great white 
 troop-ship passing close to the shore. It struck me quite dumb 
 for a moment ; and then I began to applaud and shout like a 
 Bacchant, the children following suit." She turned her face 
 away again, laughing, looking here and there, delighting again 
 in what she felt and saw. 
 
 "You are a true daughter of kindly men," he said, laughing 
 too, all suspicion of mockery passed away from look and tone. 
 There was another silence. Gildea was beginning to perceive 
 in himself a feeling he had never felt before, the feeling that he 
 was in the presence and even in the influence of a girl-woman, 
 (Such was the idea presented to him), of a spiritual force as 
 consummate as, but wholly differing from, his own. In a few 
 moments he had recognized this, and by a wonderful stroke of 
 intuition divined the meaning of it. It partook of the nature 
 of a revelation. He seemed to see all his past life in a new 
 light. He felt that she — she, this woman, this girl, this child 
 here — had, by some unknown wonderful means, won the true 
 talisman of life, that talisman whose omnipotence is perpetuity. 
 It was, then, possible, after all, to combine perfect knowledge 
 of life with the radiant joy and peace of perfect trust in it ! — It 
 partook of the nature of a revelation and, to second thoughts, 
 of a delusion. His lip curled : he almost despised himself for 
 the swift speed with which a suddenly begotten hope had
 
 DAWNWARDS. 1 6 
 
 O 
 
 leaped to a birth whose form and pressure was hut the mask of 
 credulity. "There has been no man," he said to himself, 
 " save Goethe, who knew what life was and yet could have a 
 weariless joy in it. Carlyle well said that this man was to 
 have no imitators or successors. —Nostra vita a che vail solo a 
 spregiarla." And yet the idea of a new life, a life wherein 
 might be found something more than sweet resignation, 
 hedonistic merely or even optimistic, but supplying thought, 
 action, and speech with a motive-power whose strength should 
 be in its truth — the idea would not be shaken off by mere 
 self-contempt at credulity in it. 
 
 "To tell you the truth," he said to her, "I could almost envy 
 you your pure free joy in things." 
 
 She looked at him, surprise passing swiftly into serene obser- 
 vation. 
 
 " What troubles you," she said, " that you should not have 
 it yourself?" 
 
 He smiled slightly as he answered her. 
 
 " Pleasure, however sweet, however clear, is not joy. — And 
 yet," he added quickly, " I would not change my pleasure for 
 your joy." 
 
 " No ? " 
 
 "A child has joy, a man has pleasure : joy, then, is a step 
 backward. It may excel in height, as we should say, but 
 breadth is the finer quality. The mountains are noble, but the 
 sea, encompassing all lands, is great." 
 
 "The sea also is deep, it has its valleys whose shadow is 
 nadir to the zenith peaks and light. I will not grant you your 
 simile. You must not mock at joy, for joy is the gift not 
 only of childhood which precedes, but of maturity which fol- 
 lows, manhood. I would sooner be a Christian and have joy 
 than a Heathen with only pleasure." 
 
 " Christianity," said Gildea, " is spiritual opium. You do 
 not eat it ? " 
 
 " No," she said, " I see no use in drugs. But, as I said, I 
 would sooner take drugs that give me joy than live on meats 
 and wines that only gave me pleasure. Joy is mine, but 
 pleasure is every one's." 
 
 " You had, then, once the temptation of drugs ? " 
 
 " Yes," she assented a little dreamily, "I had the tempta- 
 tion. — And yet," she added with a sudden return of interest, 
 "it is wonderful how little of these drugs you can take, and live
 
 X^4 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 with energy and joy. Are the lips of Monica pallid or her 
 eyes stony ? Theresa has a clear mind : she can set her house 
 in order. The songs and glories of the Creatures, do they not 
 pass purely and freely, as you say, through the lips of Saint 
 Francis ? " 
 
 " True, hut for us this aspect of the thing is past. The cen- 
 tral trust in the Christ-God is a skeletoned shadow, that the 
 grate holds up a moment beyond its time of falling in. You 
 see it lying, a pile of shapeless ash, and wonder it ever stood. 
 The Mother of Love and Grief appears no more save in the 
 brilliant burning of distorted vision. It is a case of opium or 
 nothing ! " 
 
 "You are right," she said, "and so I saw it." 
 
 " What, then, remains," he asked, "but resignation? There 
 is no joy in patience. Nay, worse, there is little pleasure. I 
 too take drugs, and I have more than once thought that, if 
 Fate had not kindly given me the wherewithal to buy them, I 
 should have ended the dreary business for ever. What is the 
 good of our life except to despise it ? says Leopardi. It is just 
 bearable with drugs, but, without, I cannot think it worth the 
 bearing. Pure indifference keeps more of its high souls alive 
 now than the world wots of. They are careless of life, but 
 they are equally careless of death. They live merely waiting 
 for chance to kill them, or for life to become unendurable 
 enough for them to care to kill themselves Such men are not 
 miserable. Sometimes, it is true, they suffer disgust ; but they 
 know nothing of despair, for despair means illusion, and they 
 have the truth. Sometimes, again they have pleasure. But 
 how, tell me, is it possible to have at once both truth and 
 joy ? " 
 
 " All this," she said, " I too felt, and not so long ago — 
 although I could not have put it to myself so clearly. You, I 
 think, have learned your belief more by living than by reading : 
 with me it was different. Before I began properly to live, — to 
 be free, that is, to examine and try everything for myself, — I 
 had arrived at my belief, and all my living has only confirmed 
 me in it." 
 
 " What is your belief?" he asked. 
 
 She smiled and shook her head. 
 
 " I will not try to tell it you explicitly," she said, " for fear of 
 harming it. Analysis is a mistake, and now I have so long 
 known this, that I have little temptation to give way to it. 

 
 DAWN WARDS. 1 65 
 
 You, it seems, have tried to be a Heathen. You gave yourself 
 up to the natural joy of your youth and fortune, your health 
 and strength and riches and powers, until the joy turned to 
 pleasure and the pleasure to almost pain. Then you went for 
 interest to the spiritual life of those about you, and again joy 
 turned to pleasure and pleasure to almost pain. But you — you 
 were not one that knew how to be resigned ! You could not, as 
 your great Master could, add to the ' Vanity of Vanities, all is 
 vanity ' the ' Fear God and keep his commandments ; for this 
 is the whole duty of man.' Far otherwise with you, as you 
 have told me, was ' the conclusion of the whole matter.' " 
 
 "And you ?" he said with the tone of comrade to comrade, 
 " and you ? " 
 
 " 1 had a revelation. It took place in a London fog in front 
 of a fire in a little backroom where I had my books. And, as 
 it were, scales fell from my eyes, and I saw men as trees walk- 
 ing." Gildea, the true arch-mocker, for the first time in his 
 life had to undergo the sensation of doubt whether or no he 
 was being mocked at. 
 
 " Well ? " he said. 
 
 "Well, I was in a rather miserable state at the time. Some- 
 one to whom I was attached had had to leave me. I was sick 
 of trying to satisfy myself with the life of pleasure as pleasure, 
 and I had the temptation to take spiritual drugs, for I felt an 
 appalling loneliness of soul. I thought, that no one had ever 
 looked at things as I felt I should like to look at them, and I 
 was at times almost afraid that I was suffering under a delusion 
 that might end in something very like madness. Then I had 
 my revelation. I found out that there had been a whole race 
 whose central belief was the one I was stretching out my arms 
 to." 
 
 " Greece ? " said Gildea, " Greece ? " 
 
 "Yes, Greece! Here I found were men who realized the 
 secret of life, who knew what Truth was. They looked at life 
 as it was, and they saw calmly and clearly that the butterfly's 
 life is enough for the butterfly, and the man's for the man. 
 They took no spiritual opium as the Christians do : they have 
 no yearning love. They have not resignation as the Heathens 
 have, resignation that sullenly accepts the evil, or that brightly 
 determines to make the best of the good in things. They have 
 better ; they have truth and light and joy ! Take, then, your 
 Christian Faith and Love : your Heathen Trust and Hope: /
 
 I 66 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS. 
 
 am a Pagan, and my care is Truth and Light ! — And I found," 
 she went on, " I found, after a time, that there had been others 
 in these later days that had looked, or striven to look at things, 
 as I did. Such was Goethe, such was Keats. With Goethe 
 the freedom of his Paganism was bought at a great price, but 
 Keats was born free. When Goethe recognised what it was to 
 have been a Christian, to be a Heathen, and to wish to be a 
 Pagan, he renounced his past and present with all the strength 
 of his soul, and fixed his eyes resolutely on his future. But he 
 never won it — that is to say, as he had won the others. He 
 was never a Pagan as he was a Heathen or a Christian. The 
 Second Part of Faust is not like the First. It is not with 
 impunity that we have passed through the Christianity of 
 Catholicism and the Heathenism of the Renascence. A Dante 
 or a Shakspere could not be shaken off by a Goethe, and a 
 Sophokles wholly put on. Is a great pagan soul possible yet ? 
 How shall we say no with what Keats might have become 
 before us ? — Sometimes I think," she said a little dreamily, 
 " that I am the only one of my time who understood these 
 great men ; Goethe, the god of the Transition, Keats, the 
 Herakles of Modernity, strangled in his cradle by the serpents 
 of Hera ! And, for either of them, I would readily have given 
 my life." . . . 
 
 Mrs. Medwin turned round towards them, Alcock turning 
 too, as if they had reached a point in their conversation in 
 which a break was expedient. Then Mrs. Medwin and Alcock 
 rose and came up to them. 
 
 " Is not the water exquisitely clear ?" she said to Gildea, 
 " It reminds me of Capreae. It only wants the beautiful coral 
 rocks." 
 
 Gildea smilingly assented. He remembered a remark of 
 Mrs. Medwin's to the effect that, as you approached Mel- 
 bourne from the north, it was like the bay of Naples with 
 Vesuvius. 
 
 " Miss Medwin," he said, with the smile changing on his 
 face and becoming sweet and radiant, " Miss Medwin has just 
 been explaining to me a passage from Goethe which I never 
 understood." 
 
 "Indeed?" said Mrs. Medwin, "I did not know you read 
 German, Alice. Was it a passage from Faust ? I think Faust 
 is very difficult, and I do not understand the Second Part in 
 the least."
 
 DAWN WARDS. 1 6 7 
 
 "No," answered Gildea, "It was not from Faust. — 
 
 Yom Halben zu entwohnen ; 
 im Ganzen, Guten, Schonen 
 resolut zu leben." 
 
 "That is not very difficult, Sir Horace," said Mrs. Medwin. 
 
 Gildea, in answer to the dumb look on Alcock's face, who 
 did not happen to know German, translated it with courtesy : 
 
 " ' I resolved to wean myself,'" he said, " ' from halves, and 
 to live for the Whole, the Good, the Beautiful.'" 
 
 "And what does it mean ?" asked Alcock. 
 
 "Ah," answered Gildea smiling, " Miss Medwin must tell 
 you that !" 
 
 April, 1885. 
 
 THE END.
 
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