Address on Literature and Arts. 117 



(ioldsmith and Burke. Yet we are not, therefore, behind 

 our fathers in love of intellectual culture, and it is a 

 pitiful cynicism which can see in literary societies only 

 a sham enthusiasm, an attempt to galvanise into a sem- 

 blance of life the taste and interest that have long been 

 dead. Rather is it matter for surprise, that for years past 

 there has been in Melbourne no society having for its object 

 the study of literature and art. There have been Browning 

 and Shelley societies ; there is — to the astonishment and 

 confusion of the critics who croaked at its birth — a 

 Shakspeare Society, flourishing in vigour still ; there are 

 also divers associations of skilled votaries of music and art — 

 these, however, are almost professional in their character ; 

 but for those who can pretend to no special gifts or 

 training, there is no place and little interest in these. And 

 meanwhile the world's inspired work goes on ; its poets sing 

 as seldom they have sung in times past ; its romancers 

 weave their wonder-webs ; its musicians, now as in Shak- 

 speare's day, " hale men's souls out of their bodies ;" its 

 painters kindle the light that never was on sea or land ; and 

 of all this each of us sees and hears and notes a little, in 

 fragments, overlooking much, and missing the significance of 

 more, forming half judgments, and receiving fast-fading 

 impressions. In casual meeting with friends who are like- 

 souled, he may compare thoughts, and find how much of the 

 past and the present a solitary reader is in danger of missing, 

 and may taste how good a thing it is to interchange ideas, 

 and to tell and hear of pilgrimages into the fairyland of 

 mind, and to discourse together of work that will endure, of 

 names that will be enshrined, of ever-living presences that 

 will be enthroned long after the sand-ripples of politics have 

 been a myriad times washed out and re-moulded by the 

 tides of time, and the babble of society gossip is become 

 as the withered leaves that fluttered to the ground in 

 forgotten autumns. 



To substitute for such casual communication of thought 

 some system of mutual help and guidance, to gather and 

 focus the literary interest of a great city, to make something 

 nobler than a coterie, something more unselfish than a clique, 

 was the aim of those who proposed to quicken into life this 

 literature and art section of the Boyal Society of Victoria. 

 There is something peculiarly British in the instinct for the 

 old paths, which prompted them, not to burst upon the 

 world with a new society of imposing title, but to avvaken a 



