A Declaration of Peace

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY

VOLUME 177

NUMBER 1

JANUARY, 1946

89th YEAR OF CONTINUOUS PUBLICATION

by THE EDITOR

FOR six of my eight years as editor, I have had to build a magazine out of war materials. Now at last comes a new year in which one can plan with some confidence for peace. There are, I realize, sapient elders, like H. G. Wells, whose thinking may have been depressed by fatigue and for whom civilization seems to have less than a fifty-fifty chance for survival. Such counsels of despair can be had for a dime a dozen. I do not want them; nor, I think, do men of vitality and good-will here, in Britain, and in Russia.

Man is a social animal. He is not obsolete; he is passing, as even the lower forms of life pass, through a crucial period of readaptation and social growth. And as one who believes that this nation has not lost its capacity for either growth or sociability, I think it purposeful to draw up a Declaration of Peace for the Atlantic.

FRANCIS H. UNDERWOOD, who was as much responsible for the founding of the Atlantic as any man, says that the magazine “was started with the definite purpose of concentrating the efforts of the best writers upon literature and politics, under the light of the highest morals.” The editors, of whom I am the ninth, have adhered to that creed, letting the emphasis fall as circumstances and their own temperaments have dictated.

In that serene decade, 1871 to 1881, when William Dean Howells was the editor, I find that the Atlantic published but a single article on the Franco-Prussian War. Instead of war or the threat of Pan-Germanism I find the short stories of H. James, Jr., novels in serial form by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “How Santa Claus Came to Simpson’s Bar” by Bret Harte, “The Poet at the Breakfast-Table,” and poems by George Eliot, Longfellow, and Whittier. I also find much gracious writing, both signed and unsigned, by Mr. Howells himself, and literary criticism of a high order from those writers here and in England whom he valued.

Walter Hines Page raised the level of political writing in the magazine. But under Horace Scudder and under Bliss Perry the Atlantic again was primarily a literary periodical. Then in 1914, as during the last six years, war broke into the sanctum, and duty imposed itself on literature.

In war, fiction dries up because the men who could give it vigor are silent; the novels which are written by the women on the home front are wistful and faintly amorous, like Helen on the walls of Troy. Poetry is sporadic and preoccupied with death; it takes immense fortitude to rise above the destruction as Laurence Binyon did in his five poems “The Burning of the Leaves.” The reflective essay is seldom written — simply because there is no sanctuary for reflection; it is symbolic that the library of H. M. Tomlinson, England’s most eloquent essayist, was blown to bits, the books and prints ripped and burned by a V-bomb.

In place of belles-lettres, the editor must choose from the personal chronicles — adventuresome and sardonic in their humor. He will be offered autobiographical writing, much of which harks back to the golden days; he will have his choice of letters gay and valiant; and his daily anxiety will be to keep his pages from being too weighted with problems and controversies, for in time of crisis comes the conflict of ideas and with it, in full voice, pamphleteering, passionate, pleading, and accusing.

Copyright 1945, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

IN 1946 I shall try to restore that balance between literature and politics which could not be maintained in the emergency. I mean to increase the number of short stories from two to four in each issue and to hold out a special incentive for Atlantic “Firsts”: the first stories of writers, not all of them young, who make their debut in our columns. I shall have more room for poetry and for the occasional long poem. I shall encourage scientists to look ahead and to speak their minds in thoughtful, detailed papers. I shall double the space for the serial, publishing up to 20,000 words of a book at one sitting. And in a department which will begin in February under the heading of Books and Men, I shall restore to the magazine with both hands those essays of criticism and appraisal which made the Atlantic both provoking and a pleasure in times past.

James Norman Hall has been asked to write of his lifelong hero, Captain Cook; George Whicher of Amherst to tell us of Emily Dickinson at home. I want to have H. M. Tomlinson’s contemplation of Melville; Branch Cabell’s Letter to General Lee and his charming tribute to Southern Ladies; I want the journal of Albert J. Nock. Wilmarth S. Lewis will lead us back to eighteenth-century London and Strawberry Hill in his essays on collecting Horace Walpole. Chauncey Brewster Tinker, a connoisseur of English poetry and portraiture, has explored that most enticing of relationships between the sitter and the artist, and Francis Henry Taylor, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is putting the finishing touches to his definitive history of art-collecting, The Tastes of Angels, chapters of which are to be published in the Atlantic.

Who can tell the new direction which education will take in these formative years ahead? Who better than Sir Richard Livingstone in England and James Bryant Conant here at home? Sir Richard, now the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, crossed the Atlantic recently to deliver three momentous lectures at Victoria College, Toronto. The Atlantic must have them, as it must have President Conant’s conclusions on the future of public education in America.

This new year will see history take shape — such history as President James Phinney Baxter of Williams is now writing about that marvelous team of 6000 scientists, physicists, doctors, chemists, and engineers who served under Dr. Vannevar Bush in the Office of Scientific Research and Development. His history is to be called Scientists Against Time and significant chapters of it we shall publish in the Atlantic.

Now we shall have time to savor the richness, the diversity, and the temper of biography. Chapters will be selected from The Scarlet Tree, Sir Osbert Sitwell’s perceptive and ironic account of his Victorian boyhood. We shall hear Lucien Price’s appraisal of one of the most beloved headmasters in New England, Lewis Perry. And in the early summer Ernest J. Simmons will regale us with his authoritative and colorful biography of Tolstoy in maturity.

IMAGINATIONS which have been battle-scarred need the solace of clear thinking and fine writing. To say this is not to lessen our political responsibility. Let me recall the words which appeared on the back cover of the first issue of the Atlantic, for they give our political aim: —

In politics, the Atlantic will be the organ of no party or clique, but will honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea. It will deal frankly with persons and with parties, endeavoring always to keep in view that moral element which transcends all persons and parties, and which alone makes the basis of a true and lasting national prosperity. It will not rank itself with any sect of anties: but with that body of men which is in favor of Freedom, National Progress, and Honor, whether public or private.

We have advanced far enough in this winter of discontent to know the staggering weight of the problems which we Americans must continue to carry because of the exhaustion of strength elsewhere. We are paying now, as our allies are paying in kind, for the overexertion of the war. Reaction — the reaction of tired, suspicious people — has set in and will rise higher: reaction against regulation, reaction against UNRRA, reaction against Britain and Russia, without whom it would have been impossible for our democracy to survive. All this makes me apprehensive. It makes me realize that editing in wartime is no more exacting than in the search for peace.

Surely it is the responsibility of the Atlantic to warn readers lest this reaction grow into a hard-faced American imperialism; to see that in labor as in race relations there is more reason and less stubbornness; to make sure that the men and women coming out of uniform are not a lost but a guiding generation; to underscore the scientific and political truths of atomic energy which we as a nation have yet to assimilate; and to bestir in every community that leadership which must reach up to the troubled men in Washington. This is our Declaration of Peace.