Culture and Tradition

I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I likegardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humor (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.

 

It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past.

 

The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.

 

He comes of the Brahmin caste of New England. This is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy referred to, and which many readers will at once acknowledge.

 

Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.

 

A delicate wit is a corruption which a nation takes a long time to acquire. It is only worn-out nations that possess it.

Wherever learning breeds specialists, the sum of human culture is enhanced thereby. That is the illusion and consolation of specialists.

It is a very curious fact that, with all our boasted “free and equal superiority over the communities of the Old World, our people [Americans] have the most enormous appetite for Old World titles of distinction.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

Everywhere the basis of principle is tradition.

The preacher’s garment is cut according to the pattern of that of the hearers, for the most part.

The people like neither the true nor the simple; they like novels and charlatans.

The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable. Good-breeding is surface-Christianity.

Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms and social intercourse.

It is not that the Englishman can't feel—it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks—his pipe might fall out if he did.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

Hogmanay, like all festivals, being but a bank from which we can only draw what we put in.

 

Art must be parochial in the beginning to be cosmopolitan in the end.

Oh, this age! How tasteless and ill-bred it is!

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality.

We wear the cape of civilization But our souls live in the stone age.

Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

 

The gardener Adam and his wife Smile at the claims of long descent.

 

In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of makingan after-dinner speech without the help ofpoetry. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse.