22
EXPOSÉ No. 1
The Dial is, I suppose, generally considered to be
America’s leading magazine of literary expression. One
critic has even called it the recognized organ of the
young generation! True, there is not much competition
for these honors, and the career of the Little Review
has been sufficiently obscure for the réclame brought
by size, money, circulation and famous names to over
shadow it in public esteem. What, then, is our „leader“
like?
It boasts: „We have freed ourselves from commer
cialism and manifestos, from schoolmen and little
schools, from a little nationalism and a snobbish cos
mopolitanism". That is, it has freed itself from a fixed
point for judging, the absence of which for morality
Pascal found so lamentable, but which happily exists
for art. It has liberated itself from a definite direction.
It feels no obligation to homogeneity. Naturally, its
chief effect is one of diffuseness. It is late Victorian,
Yellow Book, philosophic, naturalistic, professorial,
dadaistic, traditional, experimental, wise, silly, inter
national and nationalistically concerned in a developing
literature. It prints Anatole France, Thomas Hardy,
Santayana, Yeats, Beerbohm, Sherwood Anderson,
Pierre Loving (!), professorial articles on German
literature and Thomas Moore, Kenneth Burke, E. E.
Cummings, James Oppenheim, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound,
Jean Cocteau, D. H. Lawrence and an article on
Higher Education in China! A stringent catholicity is
admirable, but where is the reconciliation here? With
this array of irreconcilables, it is no wonder a copy
of the Dial gives the impression of splitting apart in
one’s hand.
As an intellectual cable across the Atlantic, the
Dial has informed America that Remy de Gourmont
has lived and died. The news of Guillaume Apollinaire
is still * untransmitted.
It features a wallowing ox of a stylist who retails
each month acres of vague impressionistic excrement
on music, painting, and books. Still, his uncouth attempts
* February, 1922.