Last Words

For 16 years the most distinguished literary quarterly in the English language has been The Criterion, published in London under the editorship of T. S. Eliot. The current issue carries Editor Eliot's announcement that The Criterion is at an end. To the reading public at large, this news meant little, not so to many a writer and serious reader on both sides of the Atlantic.

Founded with the backing of Viscountess Rothermere in 1922, while T. S. Eliot was still on the staff of a London bank, The Criterion was expensive (7s. 6d --$1.75), highbrow, never attained a wide circulation (900). Yet its influence unquestionably exceeded that of any other English literary journal. Its first issue printed T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, probably the most influential modern poem. It was the first English periodical to publish the work of Marcel Proust, Paul Valery, Jean Cocteau, many another since-famed major European writer. The list of its contributors--James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats. Robert Graves--is an honor roll of contemporary letters.

Though Eliot himself earned the label of No. 1 tenant of the contemporary Ivory Tower, The Criterion also published the first poems of W. H. Auden. Stephen Spender, many another young radical. A Tory in politics,, an Anglo-Catholic in religion, Eliot held to his own beliefs in criticism. As an editor he acknowledged the talent, scholarship and imagination of writers whose social and political beliefs he sharply opposed.

If, as appears likely, the death of The Criterion marks the end of a post-War literary epoch, then Editor Eliot's last words to his readers may well stand as that epoch's classic obituary. At the beginning of the depression, he records, "The 'European mind,' which one had mistakenly thought might be renewed and fortified, disappeared from view: there were fewer writers in any country who seemed to have anything to say to the intellectual public of another. . . . Perhaps for a long way ahead, the continuity of culture may have to be maintained by a very small number of people indeed." His greatest regret: that the price of The Criterion barred it ''to most of the readers who are qualified to appreciate what is good in it, and to criticise what is faulty."

"A feeling of staleness has crept over me," he confesses. "The present state of public affairs has induced in myself a depression of spirits so different from any other experience of fifty years as to be a new emotion. . . ."

But as with his poetry, which best crystallized post-War pessimism, Eliot's post-Munich pessimism is not the paralyzing kind. "On the contrary," he says, "it is all the more essential that authors who are concerned with that small part of 'literature' which is really creative--and seldom immediately popular--should apply themselves sedulously to their work, without abatement or sacrifice of their artistic standards on any pretext whatsoever."

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