Page:Adams - Australian Essays.djvu/22

6 But the matter does not end here. When we took the instance of the books and the people "at the sign of the rainbow," 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 civilization 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