The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays

								

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