[In the following review of Orage as Critic, edited by Wallace Martin, Young praises Orage's honesty and conviction of belief in his role as a cultural critic.]

A. R. Orage (1873-1934) wrote weekly columns for Keir Hardie's The Labour Leader and for his own reviews The New Age and The New English Weekly. Wallace Martin has edited a selection from this writing [Orage as Critic] so that we may follow Orage's opinions as they developed on a number of important questions about critical attitudes, principles and methods, literary language, and the relationship between the arts and society.

The inevitable ‘bittiness’ of such regular short review journalism is more than compensated for by the editor's selection and skilful arrangement of the material and by the fact that Orage's thinking was naturally, directly, and seriously stimulated by the literary and social circumstances and events of his own times.

‘The duty of a reader and writer’ is, he held, ‘to be a contemporary among contemporaries.’ The failure of the Georgian poets, for example, stemmed, in his view, chiefly from their refusal to be seriously involved in the social and political issues of their day. On the other hand, discussing the antics of Marinetti and the Futurists, he declared that ‘to see deeply into one's contemporary life is to see life much as it has always been and always will be.’ For Orage, these beliefs entailed a responsibility to forge a positive and discriminating attitude towards both his English contemporaries and English and European cultural traditions, creative and critical. He realised that this was likely to be a difficult and not very rewarding task in an age that lacked any sense of ‘a great order of society’, but he believed that the critic's primary duty during a ‘characterless’ age is to keep up civilised standards at all costs.

Plato and Nietzsche, or, rather, his reading of Plato much modified by his later reading of Nietzsche, were among the major intellectual influences of his young manhood. These influences, together with his earlier conversion to Socialism, led him directly into the late-Victorian and Edwardian ‘radicalism’ of G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells. Like Wells, from a lower-middle-class upbringing he had progressed through the pupil-teacher route to training college. In Leeds, where he helped to organise the Independent Labour Party, he taught in an elementary school, wrote for Socialist journals, and lectured to various philosophical and other groups (including the Theosophical Society). Orage's manner retained always something of the eager schoolmaster, but there is no talking down to inferiors; rather, we have the atmosphere of the senior common room of a highly civilised and progressive institution. Not that his belief in reasonableness, balance, and commen-sense—values which Orage shared with G. E. Moore and other Edwardian philosophers—was so neutral as to lack punch. On the contrary, one of Orage's strengths was his courageous belief in the critic's need to express plainly and publicly truths which had been rigorously and honestly pursued. Passionate affirmation of the efficacy of reason (rather than Platonic or scientific rationalism), the reality of objective standards of true judgment, and human dignity and individual worth remained strong throughout his life, and it is his unaffectedly optimistic urbanity which enables us to accept even his sharpest observations without much rancour. Some dismissals of contemporary poets and attitudes might seem rash or foolish unless we remind ourselves of the strength of Orage's hatred of relativism in values. In 1916, for example, he wrote of Rupert Brooke:

I have lately been re-reading him to discover what, perhaps, my well-known prejudice against living writers might have led me to underrate in him while he was still alive. But I confess that his somewhat pathetic death has made no difference to my judgment. Dead he is as bad a poet as he was alive.

Such a cruel judgment is excusable, perhaps, only in a critic who sincerely believed, as Orage did, that his duty was to find and to express the truth because, finally, his own opinion did not matter, because, finally, every true judgment would coincide:

a judge—that is to say, a true judge—is he with whom everybody is compelled to agree, not because he says it, but because it is so.

If this sounds rather like the High Toryism of David Hume (and Orage, almost echoing Hume, deplored the idea that one could ‘invite Tom Dick and Harry to offer their opinions as of equal value with the opinions of the cultivated’) we must remember that Orage also believed that the opinions of the cultivated would eventually become those of ‘common sense’, that education and the concept of an educated consensus are genuinely possible.

Orage is most interesting on the moderns because his respect for their serious artistic professionalism was tempered by distrust of their intellectual arrogance, their often triumphant sense of separation from the masses. It seems a pity, perhaps, that one of the few examples of Orage's use of practical criticism given by Wallace Martin is a somewhat inept analysis of the first sentences of Joyce's Ulysses, an analysis which exhibits the dangers and deficiencies of the method when the containing formal structures and wider sense-units of a work are left out of the reader-critic's consideration. It might have been more interesting and useful to have had Orage's demonstration (cited by the editor as the best example of his practical criticism) of why, on the basis of an examination of his known verse, one of the Shakespeare claimants, Edward de Vere, could never have written the plays? Yet there is so much in Orage's frustrated examination of those writers he recognised and admired as the genuinely gifted writers of his age—especially Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis—that even his struggles to understand make profound demands on our own understanding. His doubts and questions about Vorticism and Blast, about vers libre, about the post-war Little Review, and about the whole work and career of Ezra Pound up to 1921, for example, provide sound starting-points for a critique of literary modernism.

He valued most of all the restoration of craftsmanship and professionalism to English literary life by the moderns, and he deplored Pound's final departure from England in 1920-21 because the cultural need was mutual:

Taken by and large, England hates men of culture until they are dead. But all the same, it is here or nowhere that the most advanced trenches of the spirit are to be found; and it is here, I believe, that the enemy will have to be defeated.

In The New Age as later in The New English Weekly Orage led his own campaign against unreason, relativism, despair, and incompetence in English letters. Much of his basic attitude (his passion for a common pursuit of true judgment) was taken up and developed by writers and critics of the next generation, and many of the questions which he debated are still current. His views about technology (of which he approved) and scientific rationalism (of which he disapproved), about the attempts to standardise English spelling and pronunciation or to make grammar a science rather than an art based on good taste (all of which he thought misguided), and many other issues are refreshingly, honestly, and plainly argued.

Wallace Martin's introduction is informative and shrewd: many readers of this book will be persuaded to read his ‘The New Age’ under Orage (1967) and several, guided by his useful notes, will be stimulated to seek out and read through the files of The New Age itself.