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Page 2
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 _un_civilised, 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 pen fastidious enough to define and limit
and enforce so many significant negatives? Words seem to offend by too
much assertion, and to check the suggestions of his reserve. That
reserve was life-long. Loving literature, he never lifted a pen except
to write a letter. He was not inarticulate, he was only silent. He had
an exquisite style from which to refrain. The things he abstained from
were all exquisite. They were brought from far to undergo his judgment,
if haply he might have selected them. Things ignoble never approached
near enough for his refusal; they had not with him so much as that
negative connexion. If I had to equip an author I should ask no better
than to arm him and invest him with precisely the riches that were
renounced by the man whose intellect, by integrity, had become a presence-
chamber.
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