Chapter IV: Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One play that has had a marvellously successful run in Australia is entitled _Woman and Wine_. The name might just as appropriately have been given to nine out of every ten productions that have held, for any length of time, the local stage. Whether it is _Camille_, or _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_, or _The Gay Lord Quex_, or _Dolores_, or _Zaza_, or _Quo Vadis_, or _Sweet Nell of Old Drury_, or _The Country Mouse_, or _The Marriage of Kitty_, or _The White Heather_, or any other melodrama of the unfailing Bland Holt and Anderson pattern, the title might, with equal appropriateness, have been that of the popular piece of work already mentioned. A theatre-going public--any theatre-going public--is reached less easily through its intellect than through its senses. What wonder, therefore, that a management should find it advisable to stage _Woman and Wine_?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

THE ETERNAL FEMININE

“But still I see the tenor of man’s woe
Holds on the same, from woman to begin.”
“From man’s effeminate slackness it begins,
(Said the Angel) who should better hold his place.”

If a writer were always able to put down on canvas his earlier and more enthusiastic impressions, he might draw a pretty picture of the Australian woman. She should be the crown and glory of every Southern landscape; she should have the dawn in her eyes, and the sun upon her hair. In a street along which the heat waves were dancing with a joyous and unrestrained fervour; in a ball-room which echoed and re-echoed to rhythms of music; on a lawn that was decked with hundreds of sun-shades and fringed with myriads of garden flowers; by the shade of trees, on the brink of rivers, in the starlight of conservatories, on the slopes of undulating plains, whenever and wherever the scene wanted a touch of life to add to its romantic interest, she would be the subtle something imparting to the new and matter-of-fact continent a tinge of the colour of dreams. She should be all this and more, if one could put the clock back to the days before the fiery sword of experience laid bare the garden of imagination; if one could, by dint of any mental, metaphysical, or chemical process, gather up and refurnish the snows of a year ago.

On a subject of this kind it is easy to adopt one or other of two contrasted veins: either the idealistic vein of that thin-spun romanticist, Mr Richard le Gallienne, or the critical vein of that earnest searcher after paradox, Mr Crosland. Is the Australian girl to be idealised? She would hardly thank you. Is she to be satirised? She would thank you less. Is the truth to be told about her? She would meet you with Pilate’s question, and ask you to say where it is to be found. Of all tasks, that of idealising is the least profitable, and in some respects, the most dangerous. You are liable to suffer in your own estimation and in hers, by finding at some later stage that you have idealised the Australian woman for the qualities of which she possesses least, and for which she has no kind of sympathy. She prides herself on her modernity, and on her knowledge of the world. She boasts--and it is her most frequent boast, though it is quite unjustified--that she is not sentimental. She declares that she wishes only to know the truth; and the truth, despite what Mr le Gallienne and Mr Crosland may write to the contrary, it should be the business of every conscientious chronicler to tell.

It is necessary to say something about the position of women in the social and public life of Australia. It is a position in many respects enviable. In this country, be it understood, we have shaken ourselves free of sex prejudices. It is undeniable that there are a certain number of rich but respectable people who would fain rescue the public life of the continent from the threatening danger of a feminine invasion. These individuals for the most part occupy seats in a Legislative Council, and own warehouses in Flinders Lane, and run wool stores along Circular Quay: but they do not represent public opinion. There are only enough of them to fill one or two Houses of Parliament. Being in a hopeless minority, they may be left, for purposes of the present discussion, on one side.

The public sense of the community is represented by the man about town, and this man, in theory, at any rate, is free of sex prejudices. He is much more free of them than is the average Englishman or the typical European--if there is such a type--or the male biped of the yellow, or brown, or any coloured variety. He is on a level with the progressive American; even, so far as the question of the franchise is concerned, ahead of him. He does not deny the fairness of admitting women to the learned professions. He is seldom willing to stand up and assert, with the blatant unwisdom that is the heritage of past centuries, that they are mentally or otherwise unfitted to exercise a vote at elections. Liberty, equality, freedom for both sexes, are ideals that he can understand. In theory he is an emancipator, a reformer. Such prejudices as he possesses do not take the shape of definite views and opinions; they are the unconscious relics of custom working down through the ages. Theoretically he believes in woman’s advancement; but practically he has no desire to see his bride-elect, or any one of his feminine relations, declaiming politics from a platform, or laying down the law to judges, or teaching logic to a school of metaphysicians. He is in no danger of becoming infatuated with the women who do these things; but neither would he be any party to an arbitrary edict forbidding that they should be done.

It goes without saying that the feminine type most sought after in this country, or in other countries, is the picturesquely foolish type. As it happens, the Australian woman is by no means foolish; on the contrary, she is unusually clever. Nothing comes amiss to her; there is no part that she could not play if called upon to do so. With the unusual gift of perception that is part of her mental equipment, she understands always what _rôle_ is calculated to make her most attractive in the eyes of the world. She knows that the average man, despite his occasional glimmerings of reason and of intelligence, is rendered _uneasy_ by too much cleverness in a woman, just as a mediocre piano player is alarmed by the display of virtuosity in a rival. For various reasons, the average woman finds it still to her interest to placate the average man. She sets to work accordingly. In the great game of make-believe she has no equals. She is full of quaint and illogical surprises. For dissimulation she has the prettiest art imaginable. She will always plume herself--more especially in those moments of confidence that are shared with you and the stars--on the precise qualities that are not hers. If she happens to be a brilliant University student, she will talk mainly of her performances with a sewing-machine. If she is a high-class musician, and has no literary faculty whatever, she will talk, not of her interpretations of Brahms and Chopin, but of some journalistic composition that a mendacious editor thought fit to praise. If she is ignorant of the difference between a flat-iron and a rolling-pin, she will tell you of an imaginary confection of hers that excited the raptures of a fictitious gathering of _gourmands_. If she is intensely practical she will play very dexterously for your amusement on a sentimental string. The artistic sense in her is not dulled by a prosaic adherence to facts. She is anything but what she seems.

It is something more than a coincidence that both the churches and the theatres in Australia should be mainly supported by women. Both institutions go beyond the region of commonplace realities; both appeal to the finer sense--the sense of something that is not prosaic. It is melancholy to think what might happen to ecclesiastical institutions in Australia if women did not go to church. It is interesting to reflect that there are more stage-struck girls in the community than in any other of the same size on earth. Those who cannot act behind the footlights, act at home and in the houses of their neighbours. They carry into the walks of everyday life the histrionic faculty, without which grace is a thing unknown, and unadorned human nature is painfully crude and severe. The man is seldom an adept in these matters. As a rule he has no skill at concealing his deficiencies. He flounders badly amid uncongenial surroundings. The Australian girl, on the other hand, will adapt herself with great readiness to any set of circumstances, will look happy when she is feeling exasperated, will smile cordially on women she detests, will listen with charming and intelligent sympathy to monologues on subjects for which she cares not at all, will be intensely Bohemian or rigidly conservative just as she thinks is required.

There are certain types that have latterly been attracting attention, and one of these is the political woman. With her natural talent for experimenting the Australian woman has paid some attention to politics, and she has found the pastime moderately interesting, so long as nothing more intrinsically important has been to hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

TWO CITIES

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

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

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

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

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

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