Review of Reviews
ber), Donald Davie on R. P. Blackmur's important and infuriating Language as Gesture (February), and Martin Dirndl on Stendhal (March). We were evidently meant to take note of the Cambridge issue continuing the war declared at the publication of 1 he Emperor's Clothes. This issue aroused wide—and deserved -in• terest, including attention which 1 understand, is to be devoted to it in these columns in the issue of April 29. 'We shall never pretend to offer the public eighty pages of original writing twelve times a year,' says the editor of Mandrake. And he is to be congratulated for his frankness and for the con• centration his resolve has achieved in the current number. Mari• drake is to appear regularly from now on and this will be the real test of its vitality.
The recent Essays in Criticism contains an unassuming article on Robert Graves by Ronald Hayman which invites intelligent discussion and perhaps disagreement. In his editorial Mr. Bateson tells us that the time has come to 'move,' not merely to 'stand half way between Scrutiny and The Review of English Studies.' A good starting point for improvements might be a more economic use of 'The Critical Forum.'
The best level of The London Magazine has been reflected in such pieces as J. M. Cocking's 'Proust and Combray' (December), in an admirably creative critique like W. W. Robson's—a critical history of the novel in miniature—of Walter Allen's The English Novel (January) and in John Wain's article on Blackmur (cf. Davie above) in the present number. The recent exchange between L. D. Lerner and Dr. Leavis about Scrutiny contains wholesome food for thought in the present situation of literary criticism, but nog'. seems (April) to have fizzled out into plain irresponsibility.
In Encounter one finds things of the calibre of Philip Toynbee'l attack on logical positivism (November), Leslie A. Fiedler./ sensible 'Walt Whitman' (January) and—this worth turning over beside the Mandrake review of books on Caravaggio by Roger Rinks and Berenson—Michael Kitson's excellent exposition of Caravaggio's empiricism (February). Such articles do something to compensate for those palpable fill-ups like the November poetry' discussion or the P. G. Wodehouse Berlin broadcasts.
In many ways Mandrake is most deserving of congratulation during the last quarter. It is, at least, a signpost in the direction of the intelligent purposiveness which marks recent issues of L Revue des Lewes Modernes and the comprehensiveness of the winter number of the American Kenyon Review. The second con' trasts sharply with Perspectives, the one American periodical dig' tributed by an English publisher. It is unfortunate and significant that Perspectives possesses no such centrality under its appearance
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