THE DIAL: A RETROSPECT
57
never seen anything effected with less ado or greater care; these scien–
tifically businesslike proceedings relating themselves pertorcc with the
simplified aspect of the Bucks County Barn and often reproduced winding
litair-turn.
Decorum, generosity, and some genial pictorial improvements to the
proof-sheets, were matched in Gordon Craig by an aesthetic unsubservience
justifying the surname crag as synonym for Craig. I recall Ezra Pound's
precision as translator of Boris de Schloezer,-reinforced by an almost
horrendous explicitness on returned proofs. But nothing supplants in
recollection, the undozing linguistics and scholarly resourretulness of
Ellen Thayer as Assistant Editor; the inevitable occasional untender accu–
sation of stupidity or neglect of author's revisions being found invariably
to he reversible.
Padraic Colum's clemency and effiatus are not confined to the printed
page, and upon his visits to the office, routine atmosphere was transformed
into one of discovery. And John Cowper Powys, inalienable verbalist and
student of strangeness, inventor of the term "fairy cardinal" for Padraic
Colum, seemed himself, a supernatural being; so good a Samaritan, any
other phase of endowment, was almost an overplus. Indeed as has been
said by Mrs. Watson of his conversation, "He is so intense, you don't know
whether he's talking or listening." And his brother Llewelyn's dislike of
"a naturalist with an umbrella," of shams and pickthank science, come
hack to one in connection with his gift for metaphor. At all events, one
who has known the shallows of a tree-bordered stream is not likely to
forget his phrase, "the cider-coloured reaches of The Stour." And though
suicidally kind to victims of injustice, he was as aloof from the world of
non-hooks as some subterranean depth inhabited by fish without eyes.
Above all, for an aesthetically inflexible morality against "the nearly
good enough''; for non-exploiting helpfulness to art and the artist, for
living their own doctrine that "the love of letters knows no frontiers,"
Scofield Thayer and Dr. Watson stand foremost. One of my first recollec–
tions of their literary partnership was their support of James Joyce when
The Little Review
was censored for publishing
Ulysses.
"Our insistence
that
The
Dial's
award is not a prize is frequently taken to be a character–
istic pedantry on our part," they said, but "a prize is something competed
for, an award is given." And on another occasion,
"it
is given to afford
the recipient an opportunity to do what he wishes and out of that to enrich
and develophis work." Nor was a gift ever more completely transferred,
without victimizing envolvements.
A!.
it was Abraham Lincoln's ideal to lift "artificial weights from all
ehoulders ... and afford all an unfettered start," so here. And in lifting
weights, money has its part. Contributions were paid for on acceptance;
for prose, two cents a word; for verse, twenty dollars a page or part of a
page; reviews for the Briefer Mention department, two dollars each. There
were not special prices for special contributors,-a phase of chivalry
toward beginners that certain of them suspiciously disbelieved in. Any
