Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/14

 Even the purest literature is alimented from non-literary sources, and has non-literary consequences. Pure literature is a chimera of sensation; admit the vestige of an idea and it is already transformed.

We must then take the vague but quite adequate concept of literature as the beautiful expression of particular sensation and perception, general emotion and impersonal ideas, merely as the centre from which we move; and form a literary review, not merely on literature, but on what we may suppose to be the interests of any intelligent person with literary taste. We will not include irrelevant information, subjects of technical and limited interest, or subjects of current political and economic controversy. We must include besides 'creative' work and literary criticism, any material which should be operative on general ideas—the results of contemporary work in history, archæology, anthropology, even of the more technical sciences when those results are of such a nature to be valuable to the man of general culture and when they can be made intelligible to him. In such a structure we must include—the statement ought to be superfluous—the work of continental writers of the same order of merit as our own; and especially the writers who ought to be known in England, rather than those whose work is already accepted here. And here again, as in the choice of authors, our catholicity must be ordered and rational, not heterogene and miscellaneous. Above all the literary review—which might be called a review of general ideas, except that such a designation emphasises the intellectual at the expense of the sensational and emotional elements—must protect its disinterestedness, must avoid the temptation ever to appeal to any social, political or theological prejudices.

Such, then, are the principles which I hold to be valid for any literary review; many other reviews than The New Criterion might be formed on these principles. As for