364
STEPHEN SPENDER
the earth in search precisely of a tradition which he felt to be lacking
as much among his "own" people as among the Bloomsbury intel–
lectuals. Moreover the traditions- whether of Italian peasants, Etru–
scans, Aztec or pueblo Indians--of which he went in search were
precisely those which, from the point of view of the literary socio–
logists who are concerned with establishing effective connections
be–
tween past and present, were most illusory and useless.
The reason why Lawrence in fact refused the role now being
thrust on him of leader of an English alternative tradition puritan
revival is, surely, that he rejected the idea of being that kind of
partisan. Although he was as much against the English upper class
and the Oxbridge common rooms as any inmate of a Red Brick
University common room could wish, he was not
fOT
Nottingham
and the mines either. He had virtuous weaknesses which made partisan
action impossible for him-a complete inability to co-operate with
sociological types, and professors: above all a blind, hysterical hatred
of industrial ugliness, and an utter unwillingness to work for any
cause which had to deal in its terms. But the real objection is that
he was, despite his contempt for
all
the literary sets, in the most
essential respect a modern: that is to say, he saw contemporary
civilization as a whole consciousness which would eventually engulf
all the future and which already had only left in primitive civiliza–
tions those pockets of uncontemporary existence which he sought
out. And in thinking that hope for the future could only begin by
a change of consciousness occurring within the individual, and between
individuals in their mutual spiritual and physical awareness, he was
committing his trust to people who were points of consciousness of
what had happened to the whole of civilization and who realized
that the answer to this was also the total change of consciousness.
What I have described here as the revolutionary concept of
tradition was, then, of fundamental importance to the modern move–
ment, because it permitted creative minds to view the whole significant
past of art at all times and places as an available tradition out of
which modern forms and style might derive. The reversal to the
idea of institutionalized or continuous tradition probably contributed
more than any other cause to the collapse in literature of the modern
movement. The difference between all that was what Hodin calls "a
tradition of its own choice" and connected, institutionalized tradition,
