MODERN AS VISION
361
The idea of tradition as an explosive force, an unknown quantity
almost, an apocalyptic mystery, something sought out from the past
and chosen by the modern artist, perhaps in a spirit of grotesque
mimicry, something disturbing and shocking, belongs to the early
phase of modernism in poetry and fiction. In painting it still retains
the enormous eclecticism of Malraux's
Mush Imaginaire,
the whole
of visual art contained within the walls of the contemporary skull,
and in one timeless moment. In an important paper on The Spirit
of Modern
Art
(published in
The British Journal of Aesthetics,
Vol. I, No.3, June 1961) J. P. Hodin, discussing the visual arts,
offers
a.
definition of the modern:
Modern Art is cognition, the findings of which, often highly
specialized and elaborated on an analytical basis, are organized into a
new visual order. Linking up with a tradition of its own choice, of
universal significance and without limitations in time and thus break–
ing with the chronological tradition generally acknowledged in art
history, it strives for a synthesis in the work of the individual artist
and through the mutual influence of its different trends upon one
another; a many-faceted process moving towards a new unitary con–
cept, a new artistic tonality, in other words, a style.
j:fr,f"'...,
I "
This definition would scarcely apply to poetry and criticism
in the English language since the 1920's. It throws light on the
breaking up of the once single modern movement into different
tendencies in each art. One sees this process in Eliot's development.
The Waste Land
admits of a complete eclecticism in the choice of
tradition. But with
Ash Wednesday
and
Four Quartets
the choice has
been narrowed to the Christian and, more specifically, to the English
Church. Parallel with this, there is in Eliot's criticism, a corresponding
narrowing down of the concept of tradition. When Eliot defended
Ulysses
and the earlier work of Ezra Pound,
his
concept of tradition
surely extended to the pagan. He greatly admired Frazer's
TM
Golden Bough
and I surmise that he thought that whatever could
be
used as a myth was suitable as tradition.
In Yeats's
A Vision,
a book in which he considered that he had
compiled the storehouse of symbols, myths and imagery for
his
poetry,
there is also freedom of choice in tradition. And of course
