In the words of Emil František Burian:

Tradition. A hiding place. And it doesn't cost us a lot of sweat to find the usual philistinism and unconscious conservatism in it. It is one of those words that we can throw countless times and it will never come back to us, not even discredited. How many reviews, articles, and analyses abound in this overused definition:

If you are a futurist, you are not traditional.

If you are a dadaist, same thing.

If you are a poetist, still the same.

If you are a romantic = ?

Impressionist = ?

Decadent = ?

If you are traditional, you are a romantic, impressionist, decadent (everything that does not mean tradition for the Czechoslovak Republic).

If you are traditional, you are a conservative, an epigon, chewing the cud of everything tried, tested, and true, ad nauseam.

Why are you a conservative (in the above sense)? Because it hasn't occurred to you to be anything else, because “you are not gifted from above, you cannot buy it at a pharmacy.”

Tradition, the comfortable “pharmacy,” provides you with a peaceful life, disturbed by nothing. You dissolve with happiness that you, too, are finally a creative artist. It authorizes you, though (and this is the main thing), to be for once in your life a competent artist, provides you the advantage of a “licensed” poet or painter, leads you infallibly by impassible roads and gives you the crest of modernism.