[In the following negative review of Orage's The Art of Reading, Grattan finds few ideas of lasting import despite Orage's reputation.]

A. R. Orage has a vast reputation for profundity, and indeed is more than a literary critic in the eyes of his intimates: he is a sage. But I fail to see what it is that so interests our Columbuses of the spirit, for I can find nothing in the man except an Englishman who happens to be a fairly interesting critic. And it would be a gross bit of flattery to say that as a critic he deserves the majuscule.

This latest book of his [The Art of Reading] is made up of selected excerpts from literary notes originally printed in the New Age. It is amusingly miscellaneous, and whoever tried to get some order into the chaos did not do a very good job. In fact the book would have been just as interesting if it had not been marked off into sections, and more interesting if the labor so expended had gone into dating the excerpted passages. Fortunately Orage knows how to write, and however they are presented his remarks have point. They were, most of them, written controversially, and they still bite and sting. They make good literary paragraphs.

Of course in a book made up of paragraphs the number of ideas which the author presents is large, but with a fair degree of accuracy it may be said that Orage's principal beliefs are these: (1) that the first duty of a literary critic is that he study texts; (2) that style is the man; (3) that biography and literary gossip are a plague and a nuisance; (4) that most current literature is journalism; (5) that we have gone as far as we can with the intelligence, and what we now need is to draw upon some other human faculties for knowing; (6) that Western European literature is hopelessly dry and uninteresting and needs to be revived by contact with a radically new fecundating force, which force, in his opinion, is bound to be the “Mahabharata.”

(1) No one in his right senses would deny that Mr. Orage is quite correct in insisting that the business of criticism is the study of the texts of literature. (2) In his effort to prove that style is the man Mr. Orage carries his dogma to absurd extremes, even deducing the moral character of a writer from the nature of his prose. (3) His anxiety that the text be studied leads him into an excessive depreciation of biographical fact. So far does he go in this direction that my impulse is to defend even literary gossip rather than admit the validity of Orage's strictures. (4) Calling what one doesn't happen to like “journalism” is a quite popular dodge, but so overworked as to be unimpressive, especially when one's author writes: “… popular writers (I mean journalists) like Zola, Bourget, Maurice Barrès, and André Gide …” (5) I have many times lately had occasion to say that I do not agree that intelligence has yet proved itself an incompetent instrument for solving the problems facing mankind. And certainly when the appeal is from intelligence to mysticism, true or false, one cannot but draw back with reasonably polite disdain. (6) Orage's appeal to the “Mahabharata” as the body of literature which is to bring in a Western European renaissance leaves one pretty cold, since it is obvious that his reason for thinking so is its mystical content.

Together with these major ideas one finds in Orage a host of minor notions which are even less appealing. He makes a monotonous appeal to tradition. For instance, he writes that a “critic's principles of judgment should be the established principles of the world's literature,” and on another occasion makes reference to “the established laws of literature.” What are these “laws” beyond such elementary ideas as the necessity for communication, the revelation of original insight before the writer deserves the honor of praise, and others of the kind? So long as they remain undefined they are concealed blackjacks for knocking out the unsuspecting aspirant. Orage is a linguistic imperialist, holding that anything written in the so-called English language must be judged by English standards. This is a curious notion to find in a man like Orage, but it is there. At bottom every Englishman is a nationalistic patriot and most of them are imperialists. Orage talks too much about the common and vulgar (like an Englishman!) on the one hand, and the noble on the other, that is, he is a snob in his thinking and has never analyzed these terms to discover that they are survivals from a feudalistic social situation and have a distinctly snobbish connotation when used today.

Mr. Orage's reputation as a sage seems to rest on two pillars: first, his constant reference to Sanskrit writings, and, second, his devotion to “psychological exercises,” whatever they may be. There is, it is alleged, an aura which hangs about him, and his mere presence plus the utterance of a few commonplace words is enough to change the course of one's life. By way of illustration I may refer the reader to Margaret Anderson's “My Thirty Years' War,” pages 268-270. In any case, the point is that Mr. Orage is a pleasant fellow, well read in literature, who has a weakness for the esoteric and the vague. He makes a pretty obvious appeal to the soft spot in the American mentality, the spot that allows men like Count Keyserling to flourish in this country.

It is not at all curious, I think, that but two American critics, so far as I know, would acknowledge the influence of Mr. Orage: Gorham B. Munson and, with a chuckle in his beard, Ernest Augustus Boyd.