adaptation, a smothering of the fresh native art? Rather they discovered all these riches and used them for their artistic purpose. Or take our brand-new bureaucracy, commerce, and the whole apparatus of official pomp, both finding and only seeking woolliness and deceit in expression, because they want to avoid trouble, because the precise concrete is death to them, because they are captivated with the hollow and resounding, because their inexperience and incapacity to choose leads them inevitably into floriferous diction. You may call them a vested interest but hardly a vested literary tradition. Is not their language inevitably documental, a convulsive gymnastic to get out of the way of truth and honest meaning? It is a bad thing I am afraid because the awe of its respectability stops ordinary people from using their wits. But it has its appealing side. These officials are like children playing with strutting tin words. I do not want to press the matter too far. Certainly there are examples of tradition damping the sacred fire. The seventeenth-century French drama surrendered to classicism. Ben Jonson insisted on the Aristotelian unities to his hurt. And certainly theory seems to work in here with a corresponding bent and attitude of mind. It is not a mere arbitrary imposition. French literature has nothing like the freedom, the copious, profound and adventurous quality of our own. At its worst, it is fixed and set, at its best as lucid as a full moon. The French are indigenously, instinctively obedient to tradition. They carry it in their ink, and confusion of mind is the last thing you expect from them. But they are liable to set a point upon it, to elevate and formulate their natural sense into a conscious dogma and tyranny. By pursuing only one or part of one tradition they turn it into traditionalism. The superiority of Racine to his successors lies in the fact that he took over the whole of the tradition, including the characterization which his fellows ignored. They took over the shell. So with Ben Jonson. But our free and hearties, our parthenogeneticals, advance their plea by turning traditionalism into tradition. After all, the whole past, and not bits of the past, is behind us. Its infinite beauty and diversity are such that we have but to choose and take; its light is of such radiance that to put it out is to wander in the dark as we, so tragically are doing. "Uneducated people," said Hazlitt, "have the greatest freedom from prejudice." Abominable heresy! Having nothing else in their heads, they are stuffed with it like Christmas turkeys. How easy is it for such people to "swallow gudgeons"? Unacquainted with truth, heedless of the long procession which has set out from its Tabard Inn of holy zeal and hope to find it, what can they do but gobble up lies? Indeed, I would put my whole argument for artistic tradition (as for form) into one means of salvation alone— as a protest and reaction against meaningless decoration in life, against the sort of thing you see on the ceilings and fireplaces of London and suburban houses (including my own!), the sort of thing that forms our politics and social life. That decoration is the grave of the spirit, and I do not pretend that tradition is its birth. But it is the means, the womb of its birth, the great background of its creation. The spirit dies, and its material sprawls into every ugly posture. Whether the future will resurrect it is for our children to say. But let us and let them keep the soil well weeded, turned and watered by the sweet labours of the past. I will conclude my advocacy by giving an example (a somewhat fuller one than I have so far done) from the Elizabethan sonnet. This example is not meant to be anything more than a microcosm by which to show that a devoted loyalty to literary tradition-an almost blind loyalty—does not and need not infringe upon the rights of original interpretation. I will take Drummond of Hawthornden because he is supposed to be an extreme instance of a purely derivative artist. The question is not whether Drummond was a poet but whether he was a first-hand, an original poet. Now Sir Sidney Lee (a splendid scholar) is one of the chief crusaders against the Elizabethan sonnet as the sincere expression of feeling. He has denounced it as a "mosaic of plagiarisms," a "medley of imitative conceits," as, in short, a fashionable literary exercise, as artificial in kind as eighteenthcentury Arcadianism. He has marshalled a mass of evidence from the sonneteers themselves. Sir John Davies, Gabriel Harvey and Chapman wrote parodies of the prevailing conventions. Davies fulminated against "base rhymers who daily beget bastard sonnets to their own shames and poetry's disgrace"; Watson's "Passionate Centurie of Love" brazenly acknowledges its subservience to foreign models; Drayton admitted his own borrowings, and had the audacity to deride his contemporaries for filching " from Desportes' and from Petrarch's pen," and the best of them coolly pocketed one another's and the ring-master's material, without a pretence of the grace of confession. Sir Sidney is concerned with disputing the autobiographical elements in Shakespeare's sonnets, but his contention is much more apposite to Drummond. The general verdict on him is almost agreed upon affirming it. At least one-third (as modern editions testify) of Drummond's output is a direct adaptation or translation of Petrarch, Tasso, Marino (whose "Sospetto d' Herode " was translated by Crashaw), Guarini, Sannazaro, the Pleiade, Boscàn, Garcilasco, the "Arcadia" and the "Astrophel and Stella sonnet sequence. There is indeed hardly an idea or a simile in Drummond's sonnets which cannot be matched in Petrarch and his Italian French, Spanish and English disciples. As Ben Jonson said, his poems were all very good, but smelled too much of the schooles." Against that I will put the following sonnet : "What doth it serve, to see Sunnes burning face? What doth it serve Earth's Beauties to behold The mountaines pride, the Meadowes flowrie grace, The sport of Flouds which would themselves embrace ? This beautiful sonnet, so full of restrained feeling, refers to the death of the poet's betrothed, Miss Cunningham. There are a number of others which put this loss on poetic record, which are superior in unity and independence of expression to those which reflect a more abstract mood. Drummond's model for the sonnet I have quoted was Desportes' "Las que me sert de voir ces belles plaines ? " but the only close verbal resemblance lies in the form of apostrophe, and there is no imaginative affinity between workmanship of this exact and composed finish and Desportes' modishness, his harsh variations and frigid and tortuous phrasing. Sentiments of similar texture are of course bandied about by all the Elizabethan sonneteers, ingeniously twisted and travestied; but in poetic rendering Drummond's sonnet is for all that entirely spontaneous and original. Part of the theory which makes Drummond the slave of tradition is, I suspect, due to the quality of his poetic impulse. With the exception of Shakespeare, Sidney, and Spencer, his sonnets are as a whole the most perfect examples of technical accomplishment within the area of Elizabethan poetry. He has a fine felicity of manner. The most commonplace and the most strained of the contemporary images, analogies and similes are scrupulously rejected from his works. It is difficult to parallel a lapse like the following in the whole body of his poetry : "Prometheus am I, The Heavens my ladyes eye, Find since a vulture on my hart to tyre." His culture, refinement, and sense of melody and proportion strained away much impure and extraneous matter. Critics, pursuing the trail of derivation, have |