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.