ABSTRACT
The word 'tradition' has reached the state of depreciation where it can mean anything to anybody, with the result that one is stricken with cold vertigo whenever it appears. 'Surrender' describes the attitude of the reader for whom tradition is an absolute; when cornered, he invokes tradition with the fervour of a thirteenth-century Crusader invoking the True Cross. Dr. Leavis qualifies tradition with the adjective 'great', and The Great Tradition is his Hamlet's rapier with which he lays into the arras of modern literature, slaying his many Polonaises. The English novelist has been an intellectual in the French sense, rarely a philosopher in the German sense, but he has been concerned with what people, objects, society are really like. The plain style and the comic combine in Molt Flanders to create realism in the English novel. The device of the first person, which Defoe maintains strictly throughout the novel, is in itself of course a source of realism.
