This month The New Criterion commences its fifteenth year of
publication. This is in itself something of a feat for a monthly review of art and culture that is avowedly conservative in its
political views and unabashedly modernist in its outlook on the arts. For ours has necessarily been a voice of embattled dissent in a period that has seen American cultural life held hostage to the imperatives of a Left-liberal ideology in politics and an ugly
“postmodernist” assault on the arts. To dissent from the baleful influence of the cultural Left on the life of art and culture in our society has indeed been one of the primary purposes of The New Criterion from the outset, and it remains one of our primary functions today, when that influence continues to prosper in the
academy, in the media, and in so many of the other institutions that
shape our values and determine our standards.

It has not been our only function, however. Of even greater
urgency, in our view, has been our effort to restore to American
cultural life a standard of criticism and a respect for tradition
that are essential to the arts if they are to survive as an
intellectually autonomous enterprise and not be permanently
condemned to ideological servitude. Important as it has been for us
to resist the Left’s subversion of disinterested criticism and its
demonization of tradition, we have taken it to be a fundamental
purpose of our mission to advance the kind of criticism that upholds aesthetic standards and illuminates the crucial role which an
enlightened understanding of tradition plays in the formulation of such standards.

Hence the priority that The New Criterion has given to what, for
want of a better name, we are unembarrassed to call the traditional
practice of criticism—meaning, among much else, criticism that is
concerned to make distinctions of quality and is sufficiently
informed to do so with authority; criticism that is as judicious in
lavishing praise as it is rigorous in applying censure; criticism
that is loyal, above all, to the experience of the art that is its
principal object of interest and resistant to the temptation to
sacrifice that experience in the pursuit of deconstructive scenarios
and political partisanship—even, it must be said, when we happen to
be in sympathy with the politics in question.

In practice, moreover, we have always aspired to publish criticism
that is a pleasure to read, criticism that is capable of engaging
difficult and challenging ideas without resorting to academic
jargon or hermetic theory, criticism that is itself a literary
accomplishment of some distinction. We reject the notion, now so
widely accepted in the academy, that criticism is most serious when
it is most hermetic, most profound when it is least accessible, most
deserving of our support when it is most esoteric and obscurantist.
This prejudice in favor of obscurantism does not account for the
greatest criticism of the past, and it doesn’t account for what is
valuable in criticism today. Indeed, the perverse celebration of obscurantism
is itself a repudiation of our finest critical traditions, and adherence to it
has done great damage to the enterprise of criticism.

“Judgment is forced upon us by experience,” as Samuel Johnson
observed in his life of Pope. “He that reads many books must
compare one opinion or one style with another, and when he compares,
must necessarily distinguish, reject, and prefer.” In literary
criticism, as in the criticism of the other artistic and humanistic
disciplines, this remains the fundamental donnée of the critical
vocation. To deny it is to deny the experience of art itself, and
make of it a purely instrumental—which is to say, purely
political—enterprise. It was our conviction in launching
The New Criterion that there was a compelling need for criticism of this traditional
persuasion, and it has been our good fortune to have found so many
devoted readers—and so many gifted writers—
eager to support us in that belief. It is therefore to our readers and our writers that
we dedicate this special issue as we commence our fifteenth year of publication.