EDITORIAL NOTES
OUR last notes in this place were written "in the dark." We sketched, in a general way, our attitude, our intentions, and our hopes whilst we were still without more evidence than our private enquiries could produce as to the degree of confidence that our proposals would inspire and the amount of support that we should receive. We are now more fully informed; and we may honestly say that, although our expectations were not, perhaps, coloured by an excessive diffidence, they have been more than realised.
The extraordinarily cordial reception given us, both by critics in the Press and by our readers, has proved that there is a demand for a paper on the lines which we have laid down, and that our first number was regarded as a satisfactory beginning. We must express our profound gratitude to those—there are hundreds—who have written to us in terms of unqualified appreciation and benevolence, and to the reviewers, whose kindness is more encouraging than they probably know. It now remains for us to attempt to live up to the promises we have made.
One more thing we must add before we turn to detail. Editors do not normally discuss the economics of their enterprises in public, and nobody wishes that they should. But before the London Mercury appeared, we made a special effort to start it on a firm basis by securing a large number of Original Subscribers. That effort was remarkably successful; thousands of persons subscribed for a year before they had seen a copy of the paper. These proved by their willingness to buy a pig in a poke that they were thoroughly interested in our scheme; and we are entitled to assume that they will be interested to hear that our initial success has been so great that our immediate future is securely guaranteed. In other words (though much ground remains to be won), we have been spared the wearing and worrying struggle to obtain a position and a "hearing" which so often embarrasses literary and artistic periodicals. A direct result of this is that we shall be under no necessity to experiment hastily, but shall be able to give due consideration to every possible development that occurs to us. A direct implication of it is that should we, in the long run, fail to satisfy the public, we should have nothing and nobody but ourselves to blame. Either our conception would have been proved unpopular or our execution would have been deemed inadequate. It is the most comfortable of situations. That is all we need say on the subject. We have spoken frankly about it (rather than affect an impassive indifference) simply because we think our readers would like us to do so.
We have as yet received no great number of detailed criticisms or suggestions for improvement. But there have been some, both in the Press and in the letters from our correspondents. Some of the suggestions that have been made we shall adopt; some we shall not; one or two of the most interesting are based on a misunderstanding. The most noticeable of these derive from the notion that the London Mercury was intended to be an exact analogue of the Mercure de France, and borrowed its title from that excellent paper. We may as well explain, once and for all, that the similitude with the Mercure de France, happy though it may be, was reached by accident; our own title was derived directly from the Mercuries which were the earliest products of the English periodical Press; and for our scheme we are indebted to no paper, British or foreign. A Scottish critic observes that "Belgian literature owed its notable capture of Europe largely to its [the Mercure's] whole-hearted welcome, and the new movement in Germany associated with the names of Rilke and Zweig found its first foreign recognition in its pages. Moreover, it surveyed the whole field of human intellectual achievement—philosophy, science, religion—in its articles.... The name of M. Davray at the foot of a Mercure article has made more than one British writer's reputation in Paris, and Europe would have been entirely ignorant that there was a new and rich literature in Spanish-America had not the Mercure discovered it and blazoned forth its merits." We might, if we would, make some remark on the detail of this. Rilke is not a major poet; Zweig is an unimportant, over-exuberant critic who tried, in vain, to persuade the late Emile Verhaeren that he was a German; the fame of Spanish-American literature, trumpeted though it may have been by the Mercure, has not yet reached London. But we prefer to concentrate on the more important point, and that is that our functions, as we conceive them, are not those of the Mercure de France. We have already published letters from French and American correspondents; we shall shortly publish letters from Italian, Russian, and German correspondents; we shall from time to time publish fuller articles about recent developments in foreign countries. But there are certain limits to our space, and there is a centre in our plans. It is an admirable thing to disseminate the works of good Belgian and Spanish-American authors, and we hope that we shall not overlook anything really important that comes from any quarter of the globe. But our principal object is to assist people to read the good English authors of the past, and to stimulate the popularity of good English authors of the present. There are those to whom any foreigner, writing in some mysteriously wonderful language, like French or Polish or Spanish-American, is a portent; but we are not amongst them. We desire to keep the British public in touch with all foreign developments that may be considered likely to be of special interest to the British public; but we certainly do not intend to devote to the study of foreign authors space that might more profitably be given to the examination of a dead or living man who has written in our own tongue. The Mercure bestows a great deal of attention on foreign authors; it publishes political articles; it concerns itself largely with problems of philosophy and religion. Some of these questions will be ignored by the London Mercury. Some it will discuss; regarding some its functions will be purely that of a recorder. But it does not propose to deflect from its original purpose, which was to publish the best contemporary "creative work" that it could obtain, to criticise new books and old, and to minister to the other needs of the British reader and the British book-collector. It is just as well that this should be clear.
In the present number one or two slight changes are to be observed. There is a minor, but not insignificant, typographical change, and two new, and we hope welcome, "features" have been added. These had already been premeditated, but we made them with all the more satisfaction in that several correspondents had recommended—we had almost said demanded—them. We hope, in an early issue, to add to these a section on Architecture, similar to the sections on Art, Music, and the Theatre.