LAUGH AND LIE DOWN
51
tions are involved. And for still another, in them the
New Yorker,
with not a trace of its customary fastidious horror of the banal, bases
its argument on the same old slogans already worn threadbare in the
Republican press. The Court Plan is an assault on "liberty," and the
Newspaper Guild threatens the "freedom of the press."
There are humorous magazines which attempt no more than to
be "funny" in a miscellaneous way.
Punch
and the old
Life
were
such, and so is
Judge.
There are also those with a consistent class
viewpoint, and these are likely to be both more profitable and longer-
lived. Such are
Punch
and the
New Yorker.
The
New Yorker
is com-
paratively infantile, but already it has struck roots deep into the
American scene.
Punch
gives the English ruling class a sense of the
continuity of their tradition. The
N ew Yorker
gives our ruling class
the even more satisfactory sensation of establishing a tradition in a
landscape notably barren of such ornaments.
It is worth while spending a few words on the
New Yorker's
critic-
ismof art and letters as an instance of what might be called the Park
Avenue attitude toward the arts. The chief quality of
New Yorker
criticism is its amiability. Since to Park Avenue, art is important
chiefly as a means of killing time, what is required is not critics but
tipsters.Park Avenue wants tips on the really amusing books and plays
just as it wants tips on the really amusing night clubs. And it wants
them delivered as painlessly as possible. So the
New Yorker's
critic-
ism is, above all, "sprightly." Mr. Robert A. Simon is able to talk
about music in the same breezy, casually well-bred accents as the
colleaguewho signs "Foot-Fault" to his comments on tennis. "The
Vivaldiconcerto had a poetic slow movement, surrounded by a couple
of bouncing divisions of a sort which Vivaldi could probably write
whileyou waited." Or: "Mr. Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto
... was a five star finale." Or: "Miss Andreva was a snappy Musetta,
but she gave in to a temptation to whoop things up, and Puccini's
musichits back when it's whooped." (Music criticism also hits back
whenit's whooped.) The least bad of the critics is Clifton P. Fadi-
man. But he, too, is a master of the "easy" (to say the least) style.
Thus: "...
lovely as it is,
The Years
is just the merest mite dull."
Or his summary of Osborn's
Freud and Marx:
"Mr. Osborn takes
the first step toward bringing the boys together." The most amiable
of the critics is Lewis Mumford, who "does" art. For catholicity of
tastehe is second only to the lady who does dresses and hats, and in
masteryof the
cliche
he is her superior. In a singue issue last winter,
Mr. Mumford (1) called John Singleton Copley "the first great
Americanartist," (2) pointed out "the strength and delicacy of
ArnoldFriedman's paintings," (3) spoke of Burliuk as "a painter
whoinvests the commonplace with a very personal fantasy," (4-)
