The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays

								

part of each life that the law is learnt so definitely as to do away with
the hope or fear of continuance.  That young sorrow comes so near to
despair is a result of this young ignorance.  So is the early hope of
great achievement.  Life seems so long, and its capacity so great, to one
who knows nothing of all the intervals it needs must hold--intervals
between aspirations, between actions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses
of sleep.  And life looks impossible to the young unfortunate, unaware of
the inevitable and unfailing refreshment.  It would be for their peace to
learn that there is a tide in the affairs of men, in a sense more
subtle--if it is not too audacious to add a meaning to Shakespeare--than
the phrase was meant to contain.  Their joy is flying away from them on
its way home; their life will wax and wane; and if they would be wise,
they must wake and rest in its phases, knowing that they are ruled by the
law that commands all things--a sun's revolutions and the rhythmic pangs
of maternity.

DECIVILISED

The difficulty of dealing--in the course of any critical duty--with
decivilised 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--transatlantic, 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 decivilising.  American fancy
played long this pattering part of youth.  The New-Englander 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 dress coat.  And
when it was a question not of rebuke, but of praise, 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 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,