“Tradition” is a weighty word with asinine connotations. Most people, in the Anglophone world at least, when pressed on what it is, would make some vague suggestions of tweed jackets and mustachioed young men with an aesthetic characterised by a premature ageing. Those of a particularly left-wing persuasion will spit it with the vehemence of a pejorative and an accusation of collaborationism with some abstract idea of Toryism, or the Ancien Regime for that matter. For those individuals on the Right, it is often a monolith for the ‘good old days’ of empire, kings and queens, public Christian morality, and an established hierarchy providing a settled, agricultural way of life; or at least a pre-internet age where all of those things can be envisaged as if in a garden of Eden, the songs of our innocence before our being plunged into the world of experience.
I want to offer something much more specific than a litany of effects; I want to drive at the heart of what tradition actually is so that we can better define it. In defining, we may be able to see more clearly, and in seeing, take command of that thing Mahler referred to as not being ashes, but a living fire.
Tradition is nothing more or less than the collected weight of culture and cultural memory. It is neither good nor bad in and of itself—the traditions of the Carthaginians brought them to immolate their children in great numbers in the flames of the temple of Moloch—but merely a mode of being. That is to say that culture is a way of ‘being’ in the world. And more, since time moves us inexorably forwards through its vicissitudes, culture is a great stepping forward into the world. Most importantly, we do not inhabit the world alone, therefore this is a process that we necessarily do ‘together.’
The codification of traditions, either orally (as in the case of the Greeks and their Homer) or scripturally (the Hebrews and their Bible) is merely a variation in transmission rather than a variation in kind. The fundamental thing is that a tradition comprises a collection of thoughts, feelings, and ideas that are understood as the reference points of a coherent and particular view of the world. Since this is a shared experience, this view is grammatically ascertained within the first-person plural and is a consequence of our cohabitation and formation within a distinct cultural milieu: in England this has historically been delineated through the family, the parish, the county, and, finally, the country.
T.S. Eliot spent much time attempting to explain that tradition—and in his context, working within a tradition—is something that necessitates just this sentiment. Traditional poetry, he argues in his essay Tradition and The Individual Talent, “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.” It is this presence of history in the present that
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.
Notice, this is not a dead adherence to the past. It treats the past as present. The past becomes an active force with which we can re-enchant our present world, since our present world is the consummation of all the glories and all the great victories of the past. From here, we are impelled into an obligation to work on the development of the future. A blind adherence to old forms is the path to sterility and death, we must instead act as emissaries of a living flame, a flame that we possess by virtue of our singular relationship with its past.
Yet today, instead of a living tradition we have sterility. This sterility is not without parallel; it is well illustrated by Gibbon in The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, a work of history and literature that all educated people should be conversant with. In surveying the advanced peace and prosperity of the Antonine emperors, he declaims the absolute cultural anaesthesia of that era. He notes that this “age of indolence” passed away without having produced a single writer of genius, and that the poets and orators, instead of “kindling a fire like their own, inspired only cold and servile imitations,” and further, “that if any ventured to deviate from those models, they deviated at the same time from good sense and propriety.” And more forcefully still, ‘The name of Poet was almost forgotten; that of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.’
This is a mirror of our own times as we sit, fat in the lap of post-history and the indolence of the Pax Americana. It is also the driving force behind my own exhortation for European conservatives to move away from a culture of criticism to one of creation. To not merely exult in the glory of Europe’s past genius, but to extend it. Our task as European man is to contend with this legacy and to impart in new language and new modes of being the cultural empire of Europe to the furthest horizons of the world and of the human spirit.
In returning to Eliot again, cognizant in some way of the spirit of which Gibbon speaks, he is careful to caution against the worship of ashes, that is to a “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.”
When specifically looked at through the prism of the art of poetry, he explains it thus,
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 any one 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.
For a man steeped in the King James Version of the Bible, and being a convert to both the Anglican Church and to an allegiance to a British Empire in which India played so prominent and important a part, Eliot, through his work, lived as he preached. Take for instance these famous lines from The Four Quartets
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
We are taken, by way of the cadence of the Psalmist, through the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita (then much in vogue amongst the bohemian and avant-garde circles that set the tone of good taste in post-Edwardian, entre-deux-guerre, England), juxtaposed so elegantly with the strawberries of an English field and the gardens of an English world. All directed towards the poetic sense of the timeless and eternal in a world then rocked by the hard task of reconciliation and reconsecration made necessary by the European conflagration.
This is the true process of human development, one that happens within a culture and tradition. For, it is the case that we differentiate ourselves within a culture, not ex nihilo from outside of it. One path is the path of generation, the other the road of negation. Tradition and culture are bound together as the driving force of generation and human flourishing. The financial and human resources of the wider conservative movement must be channeled to the benefit of conservative art in all its manifestations; poetry, architecture, film, painting, publishing, and more must be encouraged and developed to the maximum in order to fulfil a future vision of life steeped in our patrimony.
