Francis Adams

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ But you are right to depreciate 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. ”