24
in the Triumph of the Egg, „I have a wonderful story
to tell, but I know no way to tell it“, since his diction,
construction, characters, ideas, and emotions are in a
most hopeless sprawl. He is, literally, a monotonous
pilgrim on the road from nowhere into nothing. In
everything in writing that the generation under twenty-
five values, he is incomplete.
„ . . . what makes us understand the rack and the
wheel is the assurance from our friends that if we
dropped everything modern we should have a great
magazine. Possibly they are right. We will not say
that in that case we should have a great dead
magazine; but we are certain that we should be doing
half our job and no more“. — The Dial. The Dial
condescends to include certain young writers, some of
whom are both very promising and desperately
impecunious. Motives of safety, shall we say since its
editors have repudiated commercialism, lead it to
insulate them by the cooling remains of pre-war
literature and to assign its award to a man with an
influential public.
It would be less compromising to go one way or
the other. Stay on dry land like the Atlantic Monthly
or leap headfirst into the contemporary stream. If you
wish a good swim, take off your life-belt!
I should not like to see the Dial annihilated, but
I should enjoy seeing its pretences abandoned. Vulga
rization is a legitimate business. Some large^American
publisher might well bring out the Dial as Emile Paul
Frères publishes Les Ecrits Nouveaux. That would be
a frank undertaking.
The existence of this Yale -Review- in -a- Harvard -
blazer is one of the bitter necessities calling for Secession.
G. B. M.