so impossible. This review would mean for them status, reputation, and
opportunity. They would deal with contemporary fiction, with
contemporary speculative literature, and with the style, logic, methods
and vocabulary of scientific and philosophical writers. Their work
would form the mass of the magazine, but there would also be (highly
paid) occasional writers, towards whose opinions the regular staff
would very carefully define their attitude. The project, of course, in
foolish hands, might be very foolishly misinterpreted. It might be
quite easy to drive a team of egregious asses in this way over
contemporary work, leaving nothing but hoof-marks and injuries, but we
are assuming the thing to be efficiently done. It is submitted that
such a magazine, patiently and generously sustained for a few years,
would at last probably come to pay its way. Unless the original
selection of the staff was badly done, it would by sheer persistent
high quality win its way to authority with the reading public, and so
fill its covers with a swelling mass of advertisement pages. And once
it paid, then forthwith a dozen rivals would be in the field, all of
them, of course, also paying highly for critical matter and competing
for critics of standing. Such an enterprise would be a lever for
criticism through the whole of our literary world.]

Then it should also be possible to endow university lectureships and
readerships in contemporary criticism, lectureships and readerships in
which questions of style and method could be illustrated by quotation
(not necessarily of a flattering sort) from contemporary work. Why
should there not be an endowment which would enable a man of
indisputable critical capacity to talk through an illuminating course,
to sit before a little pile of marked books and reading sometimes here
and sometimes there and talking between, to distinguish the evil from
the good? What a wholesome thing to have Mr. Henley, for example, at