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,
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