A New Quarterly

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 407, 11 April 1947, Page 5

A New Quarterly

VERYBODY knows where good intentions lead when they remain intentions, but it is not.so clear what happens to them when they get into print. The new quarterly that has just come off the Caxton Press (Landfall, edited by Charles Brasch) should be a safe enough investment for a year; but it would be flying in the face of experience to suggest that it may last longer. If we suggest that, it is because we so strongly wish it, but we have no historical reason for arguing that the bad old indifferent days are over. We say merely that they ought to be over now that the youngest of our settlements is a hundred years old. How long a country takes .to reach cultural maturity depends on some circumstances that it can control and on some others that it can’t; but it. depends a good deal on the opportunities it has for education. Those opportunities in New Zealand have been consistently good. Our university is now teaching the great grandchildren of its first students, and the working week of far more than half the population is one of the shortest in the world. We can’t say that we have no facilities for culture, or no time. We can say that we have no inclination for it, and with many that would still be the simple truth; but the number of subscribers necessary to support a literary quarterly is perhaps 2,000, or less than one in 700 of those over 25. If that would put a bigger strain on our cultural crust than it will at present carry, the fact must be accepted that we still are primitives. _ But it seems reasonable to make the test again. Because Landfall is a literary review its appeal is first of all to those who speak in words. But a literary review soon becomes an expression of life in general, finds itself discussing all the arts, and involved in them all. If it is true, as the editor (quoting Charles Morgan) argues, that "art is news of reality not to be expressed in other terms,’ Landfall is an attempt to find out whether New Zealand has begun yet to be aware of that other language.