all along for singularity of soul, for distinction and elevation of personality, for the rejection of many things from our multitudinous modern life.
Sometimes, as in "Decivilised," it is with the trenchant wit and irony that her sentence has been passed:
"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. . . . 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. . . . 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. . . . Who shall discover why derivation becomes degeneration, and where and when and how
