MAGA'ZINE CHRONICLE
47
specialty of this magazine; much of it is good; and when an inferior
piece gets published, like G.
W.
Stonier's attack on Pound in the Winter
number, amends are quickly made. Stonier had asserted that Pound was
mainly valuable as the inspirer of T. S. Eliot. And he is answered (in the
April-June issue) by Eliot himself. "That Pound was Poe to my
Baudelaire is simply nonsense," says Mr. Eliot, and discusses at some
length his relations with the older poet in their now legendary youth.
Coming to what might be called the principled reactionaries, namely
the Catholics, we find them swimming, like the rest, in the general cur–
rent of tolerance and
rapprochment;
though in their case, to be sure,
it is rather the international manoeuvers of the Vatican than any specifi–
cally English factor, which determines their conciliatory stand. In any
case,
Arena,
liveliest of England's several Catholic magazines, tries to
streamline sacred doctrine, declares that revolution is "essentially a
Christian process," and responds to the "outstretched hand" movement
on the Continent by devoting an entire issue (October-December, 1937)
to respectful analyses of the alleged fallacies of dialectical materialism.
The literary articles in
Arena
are quite solidly conceived, though far
behind the efforts of a Massis or a Maritain in France; and the January–
March issue (which will be the last, since
Arena
is to be discontinued)
contains, among other readable pieces, an informative study of Kierke–
gaard by Basil Wrightson. Of
Colosseum
I have seen no issue later than
that of December, 1937. This magazine seems to hew more soberly to
the line of churchly reaction than its "revolutionary" colleague. And it is
by so much the less interesting. There is a curious article on Ernest
Hemingway by Mason Wade, which concludes: "it is to be hoped he
has now reached a higher plane of ,mysticism, and that he will write of
life as well as he has of death." Mr. Wade, though doubtless a good
Christian, seems in Hemingway's case to have proved a bad prophet.
One wonders what he will make of John Dos Passos and James T. Farrell,
who are announced as subjects of articles to come.
Like the Catholics, the Stalinists owe their appearance of liberalism,
not to any 'revival of the English tradition, but to directives from 'abroad
-in this case from the Kremlin. And
Left Review's
manifesto against
Chamberlain (April), to which are affixed some of the best names in
Burke's Peerage and the British Army Directory, is merely an English
....ersion of the new national-union manoeuver of the Comintern. Far
gone in dulness and the dry rot of gentility, full of half-baked and mal–
formed little contributions,
Left Review
concentrates on Spain and Bri–
tain,
and significantly ignores the late trial.
Life and Letters T oda}',
which advertizes itself as a "quarterly
Left Review,'"
is considerably better than its self-imposed blurb would
lead one to suspect. The Spring issue contains verse by Muriel Rukeyser,
Delmore Schwartz, George Barker and others; stories by Mary Butts and
H, E. Bates; Thomas Mann's artcle on Masaryk; and reviews of nearly
every book on the English lists, including one on
Sailing and Cruising
(For the Small Boat Owner).
Unlike such people's-front omnibuses as
Left Review
and
Life and
