Foreign Periodicals

The European thought and creative effort of the nineteen-twenties was brought to a focus in three periodicals—The Criterion, Die Neue Rundschau, and Nouvelle Revue Française. Of these, only the NRF continues to play its traditional part, and even it has not wholly escaped the general enfeeblement brought about by prolonged political and economic crisis. For a number of years after Hitler came into power, the Neue Rundschau bravely tried to accommodate itself to Gleichschaltung and at the same time to maintain standards, by avoiding tabooed subjects, retreating more and more into discussions of safely dead writers whose Aryanism was not suspect; recent issues show that it has been firmly harnessed to the wheel of propaganda. In any case its function was assumed two years ago by the exiles’ publication, Mass und Wert, founded by the Manns and published in Zurich, which continues to keep German from becoming a dead language.

In his valedictory editorial, Mr. Eliot suggested that there was no longer sufficient intellectual and literary vigor left in Europe to justify such a periodical as The Criterion. Whether its slow decline was due primarily to this cause or to Mr. Eliot’s increasing distaste for the contemporary world, no British periodical has yet arisen to take its place. Of the quarterlies that have come into this office, Scrutiny, now in its eighth volume, perhaps is closest, although it falls wide of the mark. Its contributions lack the brilliance and the philosophical incisiveness of The Criterion in its best days, the tone is often academic, and there is a more persistent concern with pedagogical than with larger aesthetic issues. The June issue is representative: along with a comprehensive and able review section, it contains “The Ideas of Machiavelli,” by Grattan Freyer; “Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus,” by James Smith; “Classics and Education,” by H. A. Mason; “Edmund Rubbra and Symphonic Form,” by W. H. Metiers; and the second of two articles on “The American Cultural Scene,” by H. B. Parkes. Mr. Parkes thus concludes a survey of American criticism: “The critical approach represented by these men [Tate, Winters and others] is particularly valuable because it means that, almost for the first time in America, literature is being studied as an aesthetic creation and not merely as an incentive to some kind of activity, moral or political, or as an expression of some nationalistic ideal.” Life and Letters Today, which for some time has appeared monthly, continues to print a considerable amount of good work, mixed indiscriminately with fluff. It seems to be making an effort to compromise between the high-brow and the middle-brow public; a weighting toward the latter may be expected since it has taken over the subscription list of the London Mercury, one of whose subscribers writes in to advise that the American Mercury should be taken as the model of the merger! However the fact may be explained, Life and Letters Today still prints writers like Auden, Thomas, Gide, Valéry, Eisenstein, Marianne Moore and W. C. Williams; consequently it may be possible to overlook the editor’s announcement that, as a part of the fare for the next issue, “a selection will be made from articles on handwriting, prisons, the life of deaf people, and television.”