The New Republic, November 7, 1914

This one's a backtrack to the first issue of The New Republic, a new journal that's been attracting a lot of buzz around the modernist journal scene. I have access to a scan of a bound volume (much like my big bound volume of Poetry and Drama), so I'm missing out on all the cool paper-grain, coffee-stain, bibliographic code that one gets at the Modernist Journals Project, and I only have access through my school library. Not ideal. I'm guessing that this is because The New Republic still exists, and might defend its archives?

I'm going back this far in time to greet the new journal, but particularly because Rebecca West an essay, "The Duty of Harsh Criticism," for it. Despite my claims to horizontal reading, I'm still a sucker for my favorite names, and I've missed West since she dropped out of The New Freewoman. 

West attacks complacent, congratulatory, and academic criticism, claiming the need to "rebel against the formidable army of Englishmen who have achieved the difficult task of becoming men of letters without having written anything" (19). A common feeling, but more unusually, she claims that criticism matters more now because literature has expanded its scope from the representation of emotional life to the representation of all life, which has the concomitant effect that they must be constantly representing life in order to capture its changes. The result is a sort of blurry photograph: "often it happens that because of their haste they receive a blurred impression or transmit it to theri readers roughly and without precision." Criticism exists to slow them down. She follows this with criticism of Shaw and Wells. Her critique of Shaw seems to be, actually, less harsh--his problem is that his critics don't see him as a poet, a "spiritual teacher," so that his best work gets lost to bad criticism. Wells is raked over hotter coals. I'm more interested in her approval of Shaw because West takes a load of buckshot from The New Age over it in the current January issues (stay tuned).

Following this is an essay by "L.S.," "Panic in Art." This is nice because of how closely it shadows some more-recent theories of the avant-garde: "One conviction, however, [radical painters] hold in common: art, which has been the courtesan of princes and the holiday playmate of republics, is dead. Painting, which began with Giotto, has completed its cycle, and a new art made possible by a new freedom is to begin" (20). L.S. follows this with a summary of the new painting, contrasting its ravenous search for inspiration in other times and cultures with its radical rethinking of objects as unstable illusions.

That's all for this back-issue, but I'll be checking in on TNR from time to time in the future...