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Updated: May 23, 2025
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.
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.
A perfectly free man must be either uncivilised or decivilised a savage stronger than his fellows or an undetected anarch armed with a bomb, A free society is a plain contradiction, for a society must be controlled by law, and law is an instant curtailment of Liberty. And, if you would pursue this chimera, it is not in a democracy that you are likely to surprise it.
The modern world becomes an immense spectacle of unsatisfactory groupings; here childless couples bored to death in the hopeless effort to sustain an incessant honeymoon, here homes in which a solitary child grows unsocially, here small two or three-child homes that do no more than continue the culture of the parents at a great social cost, here numbers of unhappy educated but childless married women, here careless, decivilised fecund homes, here orphanages and asylums for the heedlessly begotten.
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.
It is open to any one to say that these tales are barbarous, and what Mrs Meynell, in a very clever and amusing essay, has called "decivilised." Certainly there is a wide gulf separating life on a Pacific island from the accumulated culture of centuries of civilisation in the midst of which such as Mrs Meynell move and have their being.
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.
Abject domesticity, ignominies of married life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old common jape against the mother-in-law; ill-dressed men with whisky ill- dressed women with tempers; everything that is underbred and decivilised; abominable weddings: in one drawing a bridegroom with shambling sidelong legs asks his bride if she is nervous; she is a widow, and she answers, 'No, never was. In all these things there is very little humour.
In literature as in all else man merits his subjection to trivialities by a kind of economical greed. A condition for using justly and gaily any decoration would seem to be a certain reluctance. Ornament strange as the doctrine sounds in a world decivilised was in the beginning intended to be something jocund; and jocundity was never to be achieved but by postponement, deference, and modesty.
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