Tradition and the Individual Talent
1 In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its
absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying
that the poetry of So-and-so is “traditional” or even “too traditional.” Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear
except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work
approved, of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English
ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology.
2 Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation,
every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the
shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we
know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method
or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are “more critical”
than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous.
Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should
be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about
it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light in this
process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least
resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is
the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors,
especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be
enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best,
but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their
immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of
full maturity.
3 Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate
generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be
discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than
repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you
must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly
indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical
sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense
compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole
of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a
simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the
timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer
traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his
own contemporaneity.
4 No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the
appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him,
for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical,
criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new
work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The
existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new
(the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order
to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so
the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity
between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English
literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is
directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.
1 In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its
absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying
that the poetry of So-and-so is “traditional” or even “too traditional.” Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear
except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work
approved, of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English
ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology.
2 Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation,
every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the
shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we
know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method
or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are “more critical”
than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous.
Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should
be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about
it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light in this
process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least
resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is
the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors,
especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be
enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best,
but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their
immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of
full maturity.
3 Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate
generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be
discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than
repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you
must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly
indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical
sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense
compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole
of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a
simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the
timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer
traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his
own contemporaneity.
4 No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the
appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him,
for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical,
criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new
work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The
existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new
(the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order
to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so
the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity
between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English
literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is
directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.
No comments:
Post a Comment