THIS QUARTER
7
views of Paris, Berlin, Madrid; it should try to provide London with
"a local forum of international thought." But from about the year
1926 "one began slowly to realize that the intellectual and artistic
output of the previous seven years had been rather the last efforts
of an old world, than the first struggles of a new." The subsequent
history of
The Criterion
was one of ground lost to an emergent
social crisis, of retreats forced by the obvious disintegration of old
Europe. The magazine began to print material of an economic and
political character; it published the work of the radical younger
generation; it became thoroughly eclectic. And meanwhile the editor
became less and less the partisan of one line of thinking, more and
more the grave apostle of detachment. Now Eliot's decision to dis–
continue the magazine would appear to signify his conviction that the
principle of detachment, like his militant religious humanism of the
past, has, as he remarks of
The Criterion
itself, "served its purpose."
In other countries the literary humanists have been forced into
physical exile. In England, if Eliot's decision is a symptom, they
are preparing to retire into voluntary seclusion.
There are many reasons why
The Criterion
will be missed.
It
published the work of young writers and paid them well; its reviews
and chronicles were the most informative of their kind in English.
But the influence of
The Criterion
in these latter days has not been
constructive. It is one thing for Eliot himself to cultivate abstraction
from worldly issues; this is, paradoxically, the concession to reality
of a platonic reactionary who is also a great poet of modem ex–
perience. But to English intellectuals the plea for aloofness came as
a
dry
wind to the drought-stricken. Detachment? They were already
perishing of it! In the latest and last number of
The Criterion
there
are-to use a favored
Criterion
word-some "amusing" examples
of the almost monumental futility of the intellectual products of
the British
rentier
system. Thus a reviewer of Edmund Wilson's
The
Triple
Thinkers
remarks: "This is not to say that I can quite accept
Mr. Wilson's interpretation of
The Turn of the Screw;
I am, perhaps
wrongly, inclined to shy at Freud when he is brought into the field
of literary criticism." Shying at Freud, this nervous critic, when he
is
confronted by politics, can only attempt the kind of snub exploited
by Eliot around 1921. Of Wilson's analysis of a Shaw play, he de–
clares: "True, this latter is to show Shaw's drifting political attitudes,
but
it
is difficult to see of what interest these can be to anyone but
Shaw." . . . Another writer in the same issue, reviewing American
periodicals, remarks generously that he has "nothing but praise for
PARTISAN
REVIEW."
He enjoyed reading Leon Trotsky's letter
on
"Art
and Politics" ; Trotsky is "one of the few politicians I can
