gentlefolk (in the undebased meaning) and that a nation of gentlefolk is a chosen people.

That innocent-seeming word " tradition "-does it not slide the roof off a legion of devils? In younger days, when I used to read problem plays and take myself desperately to task, because I could not like them, literary tradition formed insidiously up with Tariff Reform. It might have been a member of the Primrose League. But nowadays I am convinced that all literature depends for its life upon a choice of traditions. Therein lies the salvation of letters from a mere predestinationin the element of choice. It does not indeed take away from the difficulty of this plea that one has to steer a wary course between the devil and the deep sea—as well as to reckon with the misinterpretations that literary tradition has to put up with. But once define this devil and this deep sea as anarchy and impotent conservatism (not infrequently allied in the hurly-burly of latter-day social affairs) and literature is already on its posture of defence. So much on its defence that I mean to use this opportunity for putting a couple of quotations at the head and front of these letters to serve as their polemic, their summary, their apology and the instigation I had in attempting them. The one is from Henry James, to my mind the profoundest critic who has blessed us since Coleridge: "It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition and an endless amount of tradition to make even a little taste and an endless amount of taste, by the same token, to make even a little tranquillity." The other from Sir Joshua Reynolds' "Discourses": "The only food and nourishment of the mind of an artist is found in the great works of his

predecessors. Serpens nisi serpentem comederet non fit Draco' is a remark of a whimsical natural history which I have read. . . . However false as to dragons, it is applicable enough to artists.”

But, as this letter is introductory and I desire neither to forestall its offspring nor to give a false impression that I have the least intention of writing a stiff and ponderous ad hoc treatise, I will, except for a statement, a question and a suggestion, go no further. Literary traditions, unlike secular ones, cannot lose their meaning; do the moderns ever ask themselves whether they want to become a part of tradition-for posterity? And literary tradition can surely be as democratic in effect (witness the old ballads) as in aim and feeling it is aristocratic.

An indispensable part of tradition is form, for form is the guarantee of survival. By that I do not mean to say that all the literature that has survived into our century has been rescued from forgetfulness by the elixir of form. Obviously, composite motives and circumstances account for these preservations. What I do mean is that form is so vital and (in the full and achieved literary result) so indistinguishable a part of literary expression that the artist cannot be accepted or judged as having carried through the significance and purpose of his art without it. I will call upon Henry James again: "There is no complete creation without style any more than there is complete music without sound." Does not this imply not only that form is to be stretched just about as far as it will go (like the ox-hide with which Dido mapped out Carthage) but although there are a multiplicity of forms that there is only one Form?

These forms may or may not unite or correspond with form, but the form itself is the ultimate defiance of oblivion. Form therefore interprets tradition, in the sense that it makes the past coeval with the present; in the sense that it is even more present and actual than that present itself. Form and tradition are the defeat of time; the present is merely its army in the field. Dr. Johnson said, "When you have matter, you will easily find form," and though he might have thundered against my so committing him, there is a great deal to be said for a theory that style should be automatic upon the realization of the material. More, at any rate, than that which conceives it as a superimposition upon the material.

Here indeed is the source of all those easy errors of definition which are heaped on the back of form. It has become almost an axiom that a champion of form must refer back to the eighteenth century. But (leaving out of account its manly prose) I deny that the eighteenth century had form; that Pope had form. Form is not a matter of diagram, of carpentry; it is more even than a matter of proportion.

To give all this ambiguous discussion at least a negative solidity—it is not technique. From this point of view I can drag Swinburne in by the heels as a very present help-Swinburne who achieved not form, but forms, not music, but tunes. Swinburne possessed a full-toned, an incomparable technique, not form. He imposed upon and made too much of what poetic substance he possessed. His attitude to it was not unlike that of an advocate in the lawcourts, who is supposed to say the same thing in several different ways. The speech of Swinburne is a diluted speech.

Lamb, on the other hand, had style and form-Lamb, the conscious artist of ramification, of superb digression and irrelevance. For, with this irrelevance, with this digression, Lamb hardly wrote an essay in which the purist could strike out this sentence and that sentence and yet preserve the entity and continuity of the essay. So with Donne and Browning, whom you may call the changelings of our literature. To my mind it is preposterous to deny form to Browning. His form was mobile rather than static, but it was there-the fledged and shining phoenix adventurously winged out of the ashes which were once the strenuous fires of the artist's encounter with life. Has Donne too nothing but the harsh and crabbed metrical result of an intellect intently and curiously at work upon a boundless passion? Read "The Apparition" and behind the almost intolerable hate which seems to devour its victim heedless of anything but its appetite, there is a kind of tranquillity, of repose, a sense of all said and all finished which is the sense of form making tolerable that hate and endowing it with even a moral elevation. And his language is precisely fitted to his rich, profound and analytic thought. No, the question is not-form or no form, but whether form is a living or a dead thing. I fancy that the people who flout it find it convenient to regard it as dead. Form, indeed, is vision contained and made manifest; forms may or may not be an exercise. Art comes not to destroy but to fulfil the law.

I can see that this is becoming a cautionary rather than an introductory letter. But with the assumptions of the superior person on one's right hand and the catchwords of the man in the street (who is so ascetic that he can

live on air-mostly heated) on one's left, is it to be wondered that I am filled with caveats? The formalities I conceive to be the adversary as much as the anarchies and the war made them monstrous twins.

For a mere technical proficiency may be and often is the obverse, the complement of formlessness-the dragon whose hundred mouths devour us. It would be well for this generation to learn that chaos resides in institutions, that appetite and confusion prefer a polite exterior and that out of the decencies and correctitudes of society, politics and business, out of the savage materialism that governs them burst the war. Out of the war itself burst not only the naked and ravening malformations of the pit but the precise little disciplines and regimentations of man's soul and mind which clap this fair world between a couple of sandwich-boards. Coercion and incoherence have struck up a strange fellowship.

So that the servant of literature has something of a mission towards his fellows-literature that laughs at locksmiths and academies and is the rich emblem of order, peace and repose. Mankind cannot be dragooned into learning what is good for it-though it can be it seems into experiencing what is bad for it. But it can be softened and consoled by persuasion to a sweet alternative—that if there is a transitory winter there is also a perpetual spring and that literature is a rough imitation or a pallid echo of the voice of God, the apple of the human mind and at least a counter to blood and newspapers.