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Notes 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 archæological reconstruction. You can
hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring
science of archæology.
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.
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 anyone 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 contemporaneity.
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 æsthetic,
not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not
one-sided; 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.

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