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,