Old Stephan culls the plumpest fruit, Plantin will brew us savoury herbs, And Baskerville with opiate flowers Entwine his psalming lute.

No storms we fear, no cares we know, Recline we on the folioge,

And crown us with the octavo bays 'Neath the duodecimo."

MY DEAR X,

XIX

LITERARY TRADITION (1)

Is literary tradition valid or not? In this letter I will attempt not to put a didactic point upon the matter, but to hold myself responsible for my temper or attitude towards tradition. Please do not imagine I am such a fool as to think myself able to catch the flying skirts of truth; but I do feel there is a case for tradition in modern letters, and the neglect of it has done the literature of to-day no small amount of harm. To show you that I am aware it behoves me to walk delicately over a quaking ground I will, incontinent, call up the speakers of the opposition. Let us give ear to Hazlitt-a powerful adversary:

"What actual benefit do we reap from the writings of a Laud or a Whitgift, or of Bishop Bull or Bishop Waterland, or Prideaux' Connections, or Beausobre, or Calmet, or St. Augustine, or Puffendorf, or Vattel, or from the more literal but equally learned and unprofitable labours of Scaliger, Cardan and Scioppius?"

Or again :

"The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal

generalities and sees only the glimmering shadows of things, reflected upon the minds of others. Nature puts him out."

faults. He was in many He is dogmatic, full of

Now Hazlitt of course has grave ways a metallic kind of critic. testy prejudices, and fond of bristling. He is often incorrigibly superficial, as when he called Sidney's sonnets jejune and frigid" and Carew (of "The Rapture" and "The Elegy on Donne ")" an elegant Court trifler." He had nothing of the intuitive grasp of the metaphysics of expression that inspired the criticism of Lamb and Coleridge. But he was impatient of shams; he pounced like a hawk on the false; he was honest and solid and tempered like steel, and he knew a fool when he read one. But these passages do not daunt me because book-worming is not the same thing as faith in tradition, learning is not the same thing as knowledge, knowledge itself not the same thing as understanding, and St. Augustine is not the same thing as Scioppius, Cardan, Puffendorf or Bishop Waterland. Of two of the four indeed (Puffendorf I seem to have met in Boswell's parlour as an advocate of corporal chastisement for children, and Cardan, by chance, I found to be a two-headed twin with More called "Thaumast" in Rabelais) I confess I have never heard. Let them rot with Spondanus and Spence in the library of Limbo! I would go perhaps even further than Hazlitt would. I should like to see Rhadamanthus introduce Shakespeare to his commentators; I care not a dried and wasted fig for Beowulf, Caedmon or Cynewulf or Gower or Lydgate or Henryson or the ten thousand other pitchy ink-fountains from that royal prig King Alfred to the present day. I do not read the classics in

the original, partly because I have forgotten nearly all my Greek and Latin, partly because I prefer them in my own language (especially in the Elizabethan versions, as being robuster, more imaginative, fresher, fuller of the magic of words, and altogether jollier). They may not be very accurate but they are literature.

Hazlitt's argument indeed defeats itself. It is a non sequitur, because his sword is lifted, not against tradition but a slavish and mechanical imitation of it; not against St. Augustine but Puffendorf.

The prosecution, however, has more substantial evidence than the mere charge of pedantry. It is sharp enough to recognize that the plaintiff is no mere laudator temporis acti. A better argument is that tradition is a deterrent to present inspiration and that preoccupation with our forerunners turns literature into a hunchback, with the hump of the past bending its knees and rounding its spine. Without constant experiment, without free hospitality to the throng of new ideas which stamp on its threshold, literature remains stiff and dour in its Bleak House. Where would your Elizabethans have been had they only preserved the medieval continuity of literary fashion? Where Bunyan, had he been stuffed with literature (Bunyan, who had the greatest tradition of all behind him-the Bible)? To what was Shakespeare indebted but to the whirlwind of his own creative force? Tradition is but custom and authority writ large, and custom and authority are the two horns of Satan. Literature is the snake that every spring renews its skin; its freedom of movement is not increased by wrapping itself in a dozen discarded skins. Do you want the artist to be a Public School Gentleman and to express himself

like an admirable prize essay? Is he to conform to the best models like a respectable suburban householder, clumsily aping the metropolitan ease? Is he by imitation, by cowering under antiquity, to escape the exposure of his mediocrity and mental sloth?

The modernist sans phrase will even capture the trenches of the foe and turn his own machine-guns upon them. He will quote Daniel's "Defence of Rhyme":"It is not bookes, but only that great book of the world, and the all over-spreading grace of Heaven that makes men truly judicial" (as if true books were anything other than commentaries upon the "great book of the world "), or Young's "Conjectures on Original Composition": "True poesy, like true religion, abhors idolatry." And others. The modernist will even yoke the defenders of tradition with all those wrong-headed doctrinists (if it will be compatible with his attitude to know them) who at one time and another have tilted their pens at originality—with Gabriel Harvey and the "Areopagites" who plumped not only for the ancients but their quantitative metres in English poetry; with the Puritans scandalized by the Elizabethan dramatists on account of their departure from Biblical material; with Ben Jonson and his theories of the dramatic unities; with Campion's prudish disdain of rhyme, Campion, so happily forsworn in his melodies ; with Goldsmith, Johnson, and Rymer in their classical advocacy; with the Quarterly and the art critics in their braggadochio contempt of Keats and Whistler. The critics in their antiquated armour are always wrong. The young Davids of originality slay these pompous Goliaths with their stones of spontaneous power.

That, I believe, is as fair a statement as I

can construct.