It is hard to explain how we enter into past lives if this is not done. We become human by repetition. Every human being will pass through the ancestral pattern, from birth to childhood and youth and manhood and age and death. He will feel hope and fear and love and hate and perhaps forgiveness. Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, and essential.
Art consists of limitation.
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse. The tradition in English literature which treats moral issues in a comic but not a frivolous manner is precisely what links Fielding, Amis, and Wodehouse together, and it is a typically conservative way of looking at experience. It reminds people of their limitations, teaches them to be modest about themselves and suspicious of grand ideas, is tolerant of venial failings, pessimistic about changing either society itself or the less admirable side of human nature, respects the established conventions without falling into idolatry or snobbishness, and has strong analogies with the passage in the Hippocratic oath which urges doctors, above all else, to do no harm.