LONDON LETTER
89
the story is different. Both
The Criterion
and
The London Mercury
have
closed down, and I feel their passing is important enough for comment.
Not many tears have been shed over the
Mercury:
whatever merit it may
have had in its earliest years, it was already a joke at the beginning of this
decade. Its editor,
J.
C.
Squire, was a rabid anti-modernist and the eclipse
of his paper was inevitable as soon as Eliot had superseded the Georgians.
Thereafter it lingered merely as a commercial property, passing into other
hands and becoming a random rag-bag of current reputations. The sales–
goodwill and a vague belles-lettrist tradition are now amalgamated in
Life
&
Letters Today,
which was itself a kind of decayed
Mercury
until the
present editors transformed it into a well-intentioned leftist journal, ani–
mated by a routine anti-fascism, hospitable to refugees, a little amateurish,
a little dull. Something that was dead has now been buried in something
else that looks rather anaemic.
The Criterion
is a different matter. Its cessation was wholly unex–
pected, and it still had a considerable influence.
In
his last editorial T. S.
Eliot wrote--
"Perhaps for a long way ahead, the continuity of culture may have
to
be
maintained by a very small number of people indeed.... It will not
be
the large organs of opinion, or the old periodicals; it must be the small
and obscure papers and reviews, those which hardly are read by anyone
but their own contributors, that will keep critical thought alive, and encour–
age authors of original talent."
Feeling that changed circumstances require new energies, Eliot stated
that after sixteen years he no longer had sufficient enthusiasm for the job.
The European mind, which
The Criterion
existed to mirror, is fragmented.
The most powerful group of younger writers have not much in common
with Eliot, and there is little public support for any literary review which
is
not at least nominally anti-fascist. I think it would be true to say that
latterly
The Criterion
commanded respect but not enthusiasm. Its main
energy was drawn increasingly from Eliot himself; and the niore personal
it
became, the more freely might its editor consider employing his time in
other ways. It is of course a serious loss to be deprived of what was the
only substantial and authoritative review in England, and-as with Yeats's
death-there is a certain sadness in the disappearance of an intellectual
landmark which had acquired a very great prestige. Eliot himself will not
be
lost to literary journalism, as he is on the editorial board of the
New
English.
Weekly
and will contribute to it the equivalent of his
Criterion
Commentaries.
Available periodicals now are all in the "little review" class, "hardly
read by anyone but their own contributors," financed privately and fre–
quently at a loss, appealing to a limited and specialised audience, and
best
described as workshop bulletins.
New Verse
is still the most efficient
and lively of the "young" journals. It is always playing the ball, as dis–
tinct
from cantering hopefully in the right direction.
Poetry
is a new–
comer, which claims already to have a circulation of 3000 readers.
