The Rhythm of Life and other Essays | Page 5

art of France; he was more eager for the applause that
stimulated him to write romances and to paint panoramic landscape,
after brief training in academies of native inspiration. Even now
English voices, with violent commonplace, are constantly calling upon
America to begin--to begin, for the world is expectant. Whereas there is
no beginning for her, but instead a continuity which only a constant
care can guide into sustained refinement and can save from
decivilisation.
But decivilised man is not peculiar to new soil. The English town, too,
knows him in all his dailiness. In England, too, he has a literature, an
art, a music, all his own--derived from many and various things of price.
Trash, in the fulness of its in simplicity and cheapness, is impossible
without a beautiful past. Its chief characteristic--which is futility, not
failure--could not be achieved but by the long abuse, the rotatory
reproduction, the quotidian disgrace, of the utterances of Art, especially
the utterance by words. Gaiety, vigour, vitality, the organic quality,
purity, simplicity, precision--all these are among the antecedents of
trash. It is after them; it is also, alas, because of them. And nothing can
be much sadder than such a proof of what may possibly be the failure
of derivation.

Evidently we cannot choose our posterity. Reversing the steps of time,
we may, indeed, choose backwards. We may give our thoughts noble
forefathers. Well begotten, well born our fancies must be; they shall be
also well derived. We have a voice in decreeing our inheritance, and
not our inheritance only, but our heredity. Our minds may trace
upwards and follow their ways to the best well-heads of the arts. The
very habit of our thoughts may be persuaded one way unawares by
their antenatal history. Their companions must be lovely, but need be
no lovelier than their ancestors; and being so fathered and so husbanded,
our thoughts may be intrusted to keep the counsels of literature.
Such is our confidence in a descent we know. But, of a sequel which of
us is sure? Which of us is secured against the dangers of subsequent
depreciation? And, moreover, which of us shall trace the contemporary
tendencies, the one towards honour, the other towards dishonour? Or
who shall discover why derivation becomes degeneration, and where
and when and how the bastardy befalls? The decivilised have every
grace as the antecedent of their vulgarities, every distinction as the
precedent of their mediocrities. No ballad-concert song, feign it sigh,
frolic, or laugh, but has the excuse that the feint was suggested, was
made easy, by some living sweetness once. Nor are the decivilised to
blame as having in their own persons possessed civilisation and marred
it. They did not possess it; they were born into some tendency to
derogation, into an inclination for things mentally inexpensive. And the
tendency can hardly do other than continue. Nothing can look duller
than the future of this second-hand and multiplying world. Men need
not be common merely because they are many; but the infection of
commonness once begun in the many, what dulness in their future! To
the eye that has reluctantly discovered this truth--that the vulgarised are
not UNcivilised, and that there is no growth for them--it does not look
like a future at all. More ballad-concerts, more quaint English, more
robustious barytone songs, more piecemeal pictures, more anxious
decoration, more colonial poetry, more young nations with withered
traditions. Yet it is before this prospect that the provincial overseas lifts
up his voice in a boast or a promise common enough among the
incapable young, but pardonable only in senility. He promises the
world a literature, an art, that shall be new because his forest is

untracked and his town just built. But what the newness is to be he
cannot tell. Certain words were dreadful once in the mouth of desperate
old age. Dreadful and pitiable as the threat of an impotent king, what
shall we name them when they are the promise of an impotent people?
'I will do such things: what they are yet I know not.'

A REMEMBRANCE

When the memories of two or three persons now upon earth shall be
rolled up and sealed with their records within them, there will be no
remembrance left open, except this, of a man whose silence seems
better worth interpreting than the speech of many another. Of himself
he has left no vestiges. It was a common reproach against him that he
never acknowledged the obligation to any kind of restlessness. The
kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, but as he did none there was
nothing for it but that the kingdom of heaven should yield to his leisure.
The delicate, the abstinent, the reticent graces were his in the heroic
degree. Where shall I find a