The difficulty of dealing--in the course of any critical duty--with
decivilized man lies in this: when you accuse him of vulgarity--sparing
him no doubt the word--he defends himself against the charge of
barbarism. Especially from new soil--remote, colonial--he faces you,
bronzed, with a half conviction of savagery, partly persuaded of his own
youthfulness of race. He writes, and recites, poems about ranches and
canyons; they are designed to betray the recklessness of his nature and
to reveal the good that lurks in the lawless ways of a young society. He
is there to explain himself, voluble, with a glossary for his own artless
slang. But his colonialism is only provincialism very articulate. The
new air does but make old decadences seem more stale; the young soil does
but set into fresh conditions the ready-made, the uncostly, the refuse
feeling of a race decivilizing. He who played long this pattering part
of youth, hastened to assure you with so self-denying a face he did not
wear war-paint and feathers, that it became doubly difficult to
communicate to him that you had suspected him of nothing wilder than a
second-hand (figurative) dress coat. And when it was a question not of
rebuke, but of praise, even the American was ill-content with the word of
the judicious who lauded him for some delicate successes in continuing
something of the literature of England, something of the art of France;
he was more eager for the applause that stimulated him to write poems in
prose form and to paint panoramic landscape, after brief training in
academies of native inspiration. Even now English voices are constantly
calling upon America to begin--to begin, for the world is expectant.
Whereas there is no beginning for her, but instead a fine and admirable
continuity which only a constant care can guide into sustained advance.
But decivilized 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 fullness of its insimplicity 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 that 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 decivilized 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 decivilized to blame as having
in their own persons possessed civilization 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 dullness in
their future! To the eye that has reluctantly discovered this truth--that
the vulgarized are not _un_-civilized, 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 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."