Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/13

 or wise enough to deserve such licence. Of messianic literature we have sufficient.

From what has been said it should appear that the ideal literary review will depend upon a nice adjustment between editor, collaborators and occasional contributors. Such an adjustment must issue in a 'tendency' rather than a 'programme'. A programme is a fragile thing, the more dogmatic the more fragile. An editor or a collaborator may change his mind; internal discord breaks out; and there is an end to the programme or to the group. But a tendency will endure, unless editor and collaborators change not only their minds but their personalities. Editor and collaborators may freely express their individual opinions and 1ideas, so long as there is a residue of common tendency, in the light of which many occasional contributors, otherwise irrelevant or even antagonistic, may take their place and counteract any narrow sectarianism..

2 (a) and (b). The solution of the second dilemma—that of being either too general or too strictly 'literary'—involves a working notion of the term 'literature'. Too wide an inclusion of subject matter is a fault similar to that of indiscriminate inclusion of contributors and needs no further elucidation. The vice of making a review too narrowly literary is not so evident. On the contrary, many readers have criticised The Criterion for not being literary enough. But I have seen the birth and death of several purely literary periodicals; and I say of all of them that in isolating the concept of literature they destroy the life of literature. It is not merely that there is not enough good literature, even good second-rate literature, to fill the pages of any review; or that in a purely literary review the work of a man of genius may appear almost side by side with some miserable counterfeit of his own style. The profounder objection is the impossibility of defining the frontiers, or limiting the context of 'literature'.