Francis Adams

“ What an appalling solution to an educational difficulty is this:—A small class made up of our squatters, professional men, and wealthy tradesmen, forming a sort of intellectual and spiritual aristocracy; our Upper-class not only itself intellectually and spiritually dull and debased, but debasing and dulling all the better spirits which, in their social ascension, pass into it from the ranks of the People. The thought of such a future to those of us to whom the progress onward and upward, whether of England or of Australia, is a care, is appalling, heartrending, unendurable! ”

“ O what, O what are these who call you coward in the night?
Ay, what are we who struggled for the cause of Science, say,
Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Häckel, marshalling our stern array?
We who raised the cry for Culture, Goethe’s spirit leading on,
Marching gladly with our captains, Renan, Arnold, Emerson?
We, we are not tinkers, tinkers of the kettle cracked and broke,
Tailors squatted cross-legged, patching at the greasy worn-out cloak!
We are those that faced mad Fortune, cried: “The Truth, and only she!
Onward, upward! If we perish, we at least will perish free!” ”

“ They press the stamp of their struggle into the very brow of their city. It is they who bring home to us the lean and rigid, the hard and naked side of the best life of their city. While it is to their successful brothers that we owe what of us is phenomenal, it is to them, the unsuccessful, that we owe what of us is premature. They are the men who have formulated that exceeding bitter cry of “Cruel London.” Yes, London is cruel in this sense of the word, and so, to a less degree (In a hundred years shall we be able to say this?) is Melbourne. I do not think anyone would call Sydney cruel. ”

“ All society groans under the slavery of stupendous toil and a pittance wage. The negro slavery of the Southern States of America was better than the white slavery of to-day all over the earth, but more particularly in Europe and in America. Capitalism is built on the dreadful wrong of recompensing Labour, not according to the worth of its work, but according to the worth of its members in the market of unlimited competition, and that soon comes to mean the payment of what will hold body and soul together when in the enjoyment of health and strength. ”

“ The People like you to look at their wounds and sores and casualties 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Look, in her deep slow eyes
The mists of her sleep of faith
Stir, and a gleam of light,
The ray of a blood-red sun,
Beams out into the dusk.
From far away, from the west,
From the east, from the south, there come
Faint sweet breaths of the breeze
Of plenteous warmth and light.
And she moves, and around her neck
She feels the iron-scaled Snake
Whose fangs suck at the heart
Hid by her tattered dress,
By her lean and hanging teat.
Russia, O land of faith,
O realm of the ageless Slav,
O oppressed one of eternity,
This darkest hour is the hour,
The hour of the coming dawn! ”

“ 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!” ”

“ So, Poet, must thy singing be;
O Painter, so thy scene;
Musician, so thy melody,
While misery is queen.
Nay, brothers, sing us battle-songs
With clear and ringing rhyme;
Nay, show the world its hateful wrongs,
And bring the better time!
THE PEASANTS’ REVOLT. [35] Thro’ the mists of years,
Thro’ the lies of men,
Your bloody sweat and tears,
Your desperate hopes and fears
Reach us once again. ”

“ 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 idleness, 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? ”

“ All the wrong and rapine past hers,
Of her lords and her task masters,
Is not this the larger hope of all as night gives birth to day!
For the lords and liars are quaking
At the People’s stern awaking
From their slumber of the ages; and the Peoples slowly rise,
And with hands locked tight together,
One in heart and soul for ever,
Watch the sun of Light and Liberty leap up into the skies! ”

“ 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. ”

“ To see these immense docks, the home of that more immense machine, British Commerce, crowded with huge and stately ships, steamers, and sailors the first in the world, and to watch with intelligent eyes by what means the colossal work of loading and unloading them is carried out; this is to face a sacrificial orgy of human life—childhood, youth, manhood, womanhood, and age, with everything that makes them beautiful and ennobling, and not merely a misery and a curse—far more appalling than any Juggernaut progress or the human holocausts that were offered up to Moloch. ”

“ 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. ”

“ My bleeding heart!
II. We hate you—not because of cruel deeds
Staining a glorious effort. They who live
Learn in this earth to give and to forgive,
Where heart and soul are noble and fate’s needs
Imperious: No, nor yet that cruel seeds
Of power and wrong you’ve sown alternative,
We hate you, we your sons who yet believe
That truth and justice are not empty creeds!
No, but because of greed and golden pay,
Wages of sin and death: because you smother
Your conscience, making cursèd all the day. ”

“ The chime of melody and beauty here is, if sweet, far off. Pleasure light and fair is as yet but drawing breath. The outer public life and the inner are but feeling their way to a perception of an individuality, to an individuality that seeks after that form of happiness whose chief expression is in melody and beauty. But in Melbourne there is nothing, or scarcely anything, of this. If no one would think of calling Sydney cruel, neither would anyone think of calling Melbourne sweet. ”

“ But mine eyes were fixed on the people that sought this horrible den,
And they mounted in thronged battalions, children and women and men,
Right out from the low horizons, more far than the eye could see,
From the north and the south and the east and the west, they came perpetually—
Some silent, some raving, some sobbing, some laughing, some cursing, some crying,
Some alone, some with others, some struggling, some dragging the dead and the dying
Up to the central Wheel enormous with its wild devouring breath
That winnowed the livid smoke-clouds and the sickening fume of death. ”

“ 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 ”

“ In the fiery cheer and impulse of our serried battle-line—
Than to stand and watch your comrades, in the hail of fire and lead,
Up the slopes and thro’ the smoke-clouds, thro’ the dying and the dead,
Till the sun strikes through a moment, to our one victorious shout,
On our bayonets bristling brightly as we carry the redoubt!
O half-hearted, pusillanimous, faltering heart and fuddled brain
That remembered Egypt’s flesh-pots, and turned back and dreamed again—
Left the plain of blood and battle for the quiet of the hills,
And the sunny soft contentment that the woody homestead fills. ”

“ 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 superstition 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? ”

“ And had closed those eyes heroic, weary for the final peace.
Byron maimed and maddened, strangled in the anguish that was Greece—
For this noontide passed to darkness, brooding doubt and wild dismay,
Where the silly sparrows chirruped and the eagles swooped away,
Till once more the trampled Peoples and the murdered soul of man
Raised a haggard face half-wondering where the new-born day began,
Where the sign of Faith’s renewal, Faith’s, and Hope’s, and Love’s, outgrew
In the golden sun arising; and we hailed it, we and you! ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ A soul that knows not love nor trust nor shame,
But cuts itself with knives to bawl and bleed—
If thou we’ve known of late, art still the same,
What need, O soul, to sign thee with thy name?
Once on thy lips the golden-honeyed bees
Settling made sweet the heart that was not strong,
And sky and earth and sea burst into song: [87b]
Once on thine eyes the light of agonies
Flashed through the soul and robbed the days of ease. [87c]
But tunes turn stale when love turns babe, and long
The exiled gentlemen grow fat with wrong.
And peasants, workmen, beggars, what are these? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here the verses throb with a realistic agony, a lyric Zolaism, that chains the eyes to the page with a virile fascination. It is so simple, too—the coarse, strong meat of the poetry of first principles. The lines are hot and fervid; the poet’s pulses keep time with the great heart of human woe. This is socialism in verse, anarchism in the guise of a Grecian statue. ‘Outside London’ breathes thick and heavy with the vapours of gutterdom. It is despair, hunger, prophecy, hate, revenge. Francis Adams, a ripe and true scholar, in this shows his devotion to truth and to art. ”

“ It is quite useless to murmur here, “Melbourne—movement—progress—conscious power;” the words only pass into a dry tuneless jingle, like Gordon at his worst, wherein nothing can be heard but, “Leanness and rigidness—hardness and nakedness.” We see the throng of the virtuous wives of the Bourke Street tradespeople and of “our wealthy lower orders” moving about in that badly constructed room, with its badly chosen and badly hung pictures. We think of the low, low ebb at which the intellect of the metropolis has left its sense of melody and beauty. ”

“ We love a poet more for what he has suffered than what he 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.” ”

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

“ 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. ”

“ Russia at present has not the guaranteed protection of its men’s and women’s liberties which the English of the fourteenth, 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And the female faces that did know of life, the faces of women like George Sand, Charlotte 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, καλον κἀγαθον, 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 youthfulness, “grows in wisdom and stature” to the perfect self.—But this face that he had seen for a moment, was, he thought, really beautiful. ”

“ 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. They are apt to care so little for the propagation of either their species or their Culture. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You must not mock at joy, for joy is the gift not only of childhood which precedes, but of maturity which follows, 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.” ”

“ 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’Israeli’s delightful Berengaria ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”