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is a wonderful June morning in a New England town. Long
before breakfast-time the birds have waked you with
their riotous medley of songs and calls. Probably it
was the oriole in the orchard, talking away in his mellow
syllables, who actually roused you to consciousness
at last. Then you were glad to be awake, for you remembered
you were not in the city any longer, and you gave a
sigh of relief and stretched far down in the cool, clean
linen. But the oriole sang on and the sun was high and
the world was good to see, and you could lie no longer.
Now it is after breakfast, and you stroll out on the
lawn and see the flowers and clover and hear more birds
and watch the people going to church. [Page
175]
There goes by a little lady
in light gown, with her parasol and book, very content
and happy, to rehearse her prayers and praises as her
grandmother did before her. If you look with the artist’s
eye, if you can attain for a moment that magical vision
which sees things not too near nor yet too far, which
notes every detail and yet is detached from the object
and views it as in a dream or a moving picture, you
will perceive that she is not as familiar as you fancied.
In reality her dress and customs are as strange and
foreign as if she were a little Jap or Corean. Why does
she trip away so lightly over the grass, why is she
so assured in her happiness, why does she wear those
needless gloves, that strange hat, those fluttering
ribbons? I see her moving through the picture and ask
myself these things. Why? Tradition, I suppose. Slowly
progressing tradition working for ages has brought about
her dress as it is this morning, and made her set out
for church [Page 176] in that calm,
delightful way. I don’t know whether ladies go
to church in Japan, or whether they have any Sunday.
But, if they have and if they do, how charming we should
think their custom! What a pious and beautiful habit!
Yet it is only tradition.
Is
tradition, then, so great a beautifier of this world
and of our life here? Is it not rather true to say that
all our advances and advantages have been won in a hard-fought
fight with tradition? Is it not by stubbornly opposing
custom and by unflinchingly insisting on change, freedom,
reform, that we have come to our present development?
Am I not right to be a liberal, even a radical, and
set my face like a stone against benumbing tradition?
Tradition makes men bigots and slaves and tyrants and
superstitious yokels. Tradition is the father of persecutions,
the uncle of falsehoods, the brother of ignorance, and
the grandsire of a thousand hideous sins against sweetness
and light. I will have none of tradition. I will abide
by the example of [Page 177] my masters,
those brave thinkers who tried to teach me liberality.
Be others what they may, I will be myself.
“Ah,
my friend, that is all very fine,” said a still,
small voice, as I kept on the smooth, soft grass, “but
look here, look about you. See those yellow lilies there
beyond the tennis-court. All winter they were asleep
in their bulbs, dry and brown, with not a soul to tend
them. Yet this morning there they are, all radiance
and light, the same frail, beautiful creatures their
people have been for a thousand years. How do you fancy
they manage to compass that miracle? Tradition. And
you hear your orioles and your warblers and your robins,
each keeping fresh and fair his own imperishable measure
of gladness. There again is tradition. And just fancy
for a moment, please, what would happen if your oriole
should turn radical and attempt some new strange note,
some violation of the tradition of his kind, or if the
yellow lily should presume to disregard the traditions
of her [Page 178] folk! No more lovely
lilies, no more entrancing orioles, as long as the world
might last.
“Why,
my fanciful friend, the very frame of the universe is
hung upon tradition. Tradition is the cement that holds
the arches of the earth in place; the planets themselves
are hung on that thread. Let it once break, and cosmos
would fall about your ears. If every creature after
its kind, and every herb and flower after their kind,
yes, and every stone and metal after their kind, did
not follow unquestioningly the immutable law of their
activity, the tradition of their race, we could not
exist a moment as we are. We should all be thrown into
primal confusion once more. Tradition is the first letter
in the alphabet of life.”
And
I suppose this is so. Try as we may, few of us can roam
very far from the central peg to which our own peculiar
tradition has tied us. We fancy ourselves reformers
and independents. Let others follow customs, we are
in bond to no law but our instinct. We [Page
179] shall act for ourselves, as we think best.
We shall conform no more, be subservient to none. Let
tradition be hanged, for we have a finer sanction for
conduct within the heart. And so off we fly into quixotic
reforms and a hundred mad schemes for rearranging the
universe in a day and house-cleaning the cosmos in a
week.
It
cannot be done. Tradition is not the bugbear radicals
would have us believe. It safeguards our existence against
our own too rash folly. It keeps us from the ills of
a too precipitate haste. There is a happy mean in conduct
between radicalism and conservatism. I hear my friend
on one side of the room howling at the “hide-bound
conservatives.” I hear my friend on the other
side muttering at the “blatant radicals.”
And I do sympathize with each. If there is one thing
I detest as heartily as I do the stuffy, narrow-minded,
intolerant, unprogressive, conservative, it is the flannel-mouthed
agitator. The one is hopeless, the other is almost [Page
180] worse; he is destructive. And yet it is
to be noted tradition moves. It moves slowly, very slowly,
but it does move. And tradition is, after all, no inhuman
condition, but a habit in which we are immemorially
inured. Tradition changes, too; it is changing every
day, and it is we ourselves who change it. When we give
our energy to the generous tasks of reform, I think
perhaps we should do well to remember this; not to try
to go too fast. At least we should let our knowledge
of tradition reconcile us to the difficulty of progress.
We should remember always that the most thorough method
of reform is that which reforms tradition. It is not
easy to destroy old traditions, but it is possible to
infect them with ridicule so that they presently die,
tardily but surely. Then we must all the while be fostering
new traditions in their place. People are not adapted
as yet to a life without tradition. They are not wise
enough, and they are too timid. Give them time. Meanwhile,
supplant the old traditions [Page 181] with
better ones. Be as thoroughgoing as you please, but
do have some finesse. In order to weed your garden,
it will not be necessary to root up everything that
is green. [Page 182]
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