[In the following essay, Coyle expounds upon Orage's influence in shaping both Ezra Pound's literary career and his socialist views as well as examining the restless intellectual needs of Orage's that drove him from movement to movement.]

Under these circumstances, no designing or any other development of beautiful art will be possible.

—John Ruskin, 1859

So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on.

—William Morris, 1884

The literature and art of today are the parallels of the economic situation of today.

—A. R. Orage, 1912

A vicious economic system has corrupted every ramification of thought.

—Ezra Pound, 1934

I

Despite the impotent fury with which he pursued the topic of economic reform, Ezra Pound's writings on economics generate no more interest today than they did during his own lifetime: the same elements of his work that isolated him during the twenties and thirties continue to do so. This essay shall not attempt to make Pound's economic preoccupations attractive or to establish their “humanistic” interest; but it will propose that, far from marking him as an impassioned crank, Pound's concern to integrate economic and poetic discourse stemmed from one of the most powerful and popular traditions in English literature. In fact, one should in this instance use the word “literature,” as Pound himself so often did, ironically: this tradition, which I shall call “Ruskinian,” was in large part concerned to resist idealist attempts to protect and isolate the “literary,” or the experience of culture, from the conditions of material civilization. I shall use the term “Ruskinian” even though this essay will attend more particularly to the subsequent figures through whom Pound seems to have absorbed Ruskin's aims and methods. Our identification of Pound's participation in this tradition will have important consequences, for it will suggest that Pound's moral failures were the result, not simply of madness or personal idiosyncrasy, but of the working out of a broad cultural heritage. This is not to excuse Pound but to observe the manner in which he kept a very literal faith with promises that may have been, as he wrote in “Mauberley,” “wrong from the start.”

In January of 1935, in the usually polite pages of Eliot's The Criterion, Pound snarled that

Any ass can see the contradictions between the three living theories: the Corporate State, Douglas, Gesell. Or between these and the technocrats. Superficial imbeciles can see the contradiction between these systems and those of Marx or Henry George. A few dozen people see the convergence of the live systems, and can see the main currents working in Time.

Pound regarded the “perception” of “convergence” among these theories as an exceptional and beleaguered faculty. Having begun by distinguishing between “convergence” and “contradiction,” Pound went on to distinguish convergence from identity:

Even Douglas seems unaware of the profound harmony between his economics and fascism. I am not talking about the surface of his politics. Obviously the “harmony” does not occupy all the space in these two so different systems, but there is more of it than most people think.

It is fairly typical to find Pound claiming to discern more “profound” meanings than those apparent on the surface of things. It was less usual, however, for him so to qualify the nature of his assertion. To propose that between two ideas there may be both convergence and contradiction itself seems at once a keen insight and yet an obtuse negotiation: insightful in its perception of both generic multiplicity and the probably unwitting aptness with which it characterized much of Pound's own writing and thought; obtuse in that it had almost no chance of moving Douglas, a man more or less stolidly dedicated to the rightness of a single controlling idea. But then, by 1935, Pound had probably lost any real hope of moving Douglas—if he had ever honestly entertained such a hope. Indeed, he may primarily have seen Douglas as a kind of wedge, a way into problems which had held his imagination for some time.

The rapidity with which he “reassessed” the significance of Douglas' analysis would seem to confirm such a suspicion. It had been, in 1935, only a year since Pound had met Odon Por, Guild Socialist cum fascist, whose critiques of capitalism had a “substantial” impact on Pound's interpretation of Douglas; it had been hardly even that long since Pound first read Silvio Gesell's Natural Economic Order.¹ That Pound broke ranks so quickly after fifteen years of stumping for the cause would suggest that he never “was” a doctrinaire social-creditor. But more than this I want to propose that it was the very things that led Pound to Social-Credit that eventually led him away from it. Chief among these was his obsession with problems of “method.” It was on the level of method, and not of principle, that Pound discerned Douglas' convergence with the far right. It was to the level of method that Pound referred when, with a wave of his hand, he dismissed talk about “the surface” of Douglas' economics. Pound's perception of “convergence” between Douglas and the corporate state was in other words generated by principles not immediately related to particular economic issues. It was rather an exercise of the methodological “dissociation” which Pound had absorbed from the work of Remy de Gourmont: a concern to free ideas from obfuscating associations.²

Douglas himself would have been little interested in the distinctions between “contradiction” and mere difference. He saw immediately the “contradiction” between his plans for economic democracy and Gesell's right-wing prescriptions. Douglas had often before been troubled by the innovations of would be allies and fellow-travelers. For example, the adoption of Social Credit in 1927 by John Hargrave's bizarre legion, the “Kibbo Kift,” and the reorganization of that group six years later as “the Green Shirt movement for Social Credit” had already warned Douglas that indiscriminate attempts to broaden the base of his support would endanger doctrinal purity. While The New Age characteristically “saw it as a strength that Hargrave was sufficiently eclectic to have drawn ‘something useful from St. Paul, Mme. Blavatsky, Charlie Chaplin, Cromwell, Lao Tze, Nietzsche, Noah and Tolstoy,’” Douglas remained, at the very least, circumspect.³ These earlier troubles, occasioned by men with claims to some popular support, left Douglas impatient with the increasingly isolated Pound. Unimpressed by Pound's relentless efforts to improve upon his analysis, and having come to regard Pound as a nuisance, Douglas eventually repudiated their association.⁴ That Pound did not reciprocate that repudiation but continued, albeit with ever increasing difficulty, to invoke Douglas' authority indicates a great deal about the combinatory nature of his thinking. This is an important recognition. It can help us to understand not only how Pound's later economic interests developed from his enthusiasm for Douglas, but also how that enthusiasm developed out of economic projects that had, by 1919 (the year of Pound's supposed conversion to Douglas' economic policies), occupied Pound for the better part of a decade.

Pound's twelve year association with The New Age and its editor Alfred Richard Orage constitutes one of the least understood aspects of his career. Pound's own comments about those years have not helped because, after the 1919 “conversion” for which Orage was so responsible, Pound became uneasy—even embarrassed—by his earlier ties with the Guild Socialism which Orage had sponsored throughout the previous decade. Despite his later suggestion that guild socialism was an important step towards “the corporate state,” Pound came to see a contradiction between his earlier involvement with Orage and his cherished public persona as a man up-to-date on matters artistic and economic.⁵ But, in uncovering connections which Pound would just as soon have left forgotten, my emphasis shall not be on locating “the origin” either of his interest in economics, or of his inclusion of economics in the Cantos. Rather, I shall consider Pound's relationship with Orage as a means of illuminating the broad concerns that drew Pound into the arena of economic debate and fostered his incipient combinatory procedures.

It is testimony to the thoroughness of contemporary academic efforts to treat the Cantos in strictly “aesthetic” terms that Pound's relations to The New Age have figured so slightly in accounts of his poetic development. For the years of Pound's closest association with Orage were precisely the years during which he was working through “imagism” and “vorticism” and into the Cantos. Orage and The New Age performed a vital role in enlisting Pound's participation in the broad and heterogeneous tradition of combining social and aesthetic analysis which followed from the British assimilation, in the nineteenth century, of the continental idealism of the late enlightenment. Once we recognize how Orage's journalism infected Pound's poetry it will no longer be possible to preserve the familiar pigeon-hole of “Pound's economics,” no longer possible to treat as marginal and symptomatic what was—perhaps rampantly so—transformative and part of a seminal post-Enlightenment tradition. That we prefer today to disjoin the poetry and the economics constitutes a significant reconstruction of Pound's work, and points up our continuing resistance to a humanist tradition which unforseeably nurtured a generation of political monsters.

Of course, Pound's handling of economic issues presents its own problems, not least because he eventually sought to combine the hitherto opposed genres of lyric and didactic essay; even William Morris, who wrote in both genres, preserved their differences. But, if the Cantos attempted major conceptual revisions, those were very much dependent on Victorian reconceptualizations of artistic experience. The mediation of Orage who, like Ruskin, often relied upon the periodical to pursue his ends and, like Morris, could never wholly embrace socialism because it meant the sacrifice of his medieval ideals, played for Pound a role no less important. During a period in his career that was at once both vigorous and yet tentative, Pound often followed Orage's lead in political and economic questions. As Wallace Martin has observed, Orage's most fundamental critical aim was to reconcile flamboyantly romantic claims for the autonomy of literature with Ruskinian convictions about cultural responsibility. Thus, in 1915, Orage submitted that “art includes utility, but it also transcends utility.”⁶ This view was by no means a platitudinous compromise; these two views of art were, in their traditional terms, irreconcilable, and Orage entered the argument by striving to transform the notion of utility. This move was not lost on Pound who, as Paul Smith has said, redefined poetry so that materiality would not distort substance. So it was that, by 1922, when holding forth to Felix Schelling that “it's all rubbish to pretend that art isn't didactic,” and that “only aesthetes have pretended to the contrary,” Pound expanded into one of his most provoking phrases: “Art can't offer a patent medicine. A failure to dissociate that from a profounder didacticism has led to the errors of ‘aesthete's’ critiques.”⁷

Orage's editorial ideals, although probably not his actual example, helped shape Pound's determination to modernize his critical and journalistic style, and—ultimately—his conception of the aims and nature of poetry.⁸ Orage contributed not only to the subject matter that interested Pound, but also to the manner in which he addressed those subjects. Consider, for example, Pound's attack on the conventional journalistic essay form: an attack launched in his digressive series “Pastiche: the Regional,” and published by Orage in The New Age (29 October 1919). Pound argued that

the newspaper criterion that “an article must run straight through from start to finish” might be attributed to the tone of this period [“the Shavo-Bennetian of English secondary literature”]; the criterion is of excellent newspaper technique; it is almost pure kindness designed not to make the reader think, but to make him accept a certain conclusion; literature and philosophy constantly diverge from this groovedness, constantly throw upon the perceptions new data, new images, which prevent the acceptance of an over facile conclusion.

Pound's alternative was what he variously called the “ideogrammic method” or “the ‘new’ historic sense”; that is, the method that would in the coming years characterize the writing of the Cantos. It is important that Pound did not regard that method as strictly “poetic”: important too that, at a time when his poetry was only beginning to work out and apply that historical method (his most recent collection still only the trial poetic sequences of Quia Pauper Amavi: “Langue d'Oc,” “Moeurs Contemporaines,” and “Three Cantos”), it was already a part of his journalism. Pieces like “Pastiche” did more than talk about that method—they put it into action, employing the criticism of “newspaper technique” which I have just cited. Two months earlier, for instance, in an earlier installment of “Pastiche,” Pound had written:

The city of Beziers was burned because Simon de Montfort attacked with a small force of knights and a great troup of “ribbands,” tinkers, and religious pilgrims or “croises.” The tinkers broke through the walls and took possession of the rich houses and plunder; the knights drove out the tinkers in order to get the booty for themselves; the tinkers then burnt the place. The violence of the Church ultimately profited the centralization of the French monarchy.

Richelieu destroyed Beaucaire. Montmorency was taken at the altar. Montsegur outlasted the treachery against the surrendered Albigeois, and was destroyed, I have been told, by order of Louis XIV. …

Snippets of this kind build up our concept of wrong, of right, of history … Any historical concept and any sociological deduction from history must assemble a great number of such violently contrasted facts, if it is to be valid. It must not be a simple paradox, or a simple opposition of two terms.

I have quoted from this passage at length in order to show the procedure of “assemblage” Pound was then already exploring in his journalistic prose. The historiographical position that Pound developed in the thirties, with its insistence on the inclusion of actual written texts (“whole slabs of the record”) over references such as those in the example above, was crucial. But the point is that Pound's development was not purely “poetic.” Throughout the teens, Pound ventured experiments in prose that his deeply held notions about “true Helicon” still prevented him from trying in his poetry.⁹ At the same time, these innovations created problems that Pound did not solve to his own satisfaction until well into the Cantos, if even then. It was not the mere consciousness of socio-economic issues that gradually moved Pound out of his early aestheticism, but particular ways of writing about and conceptualizing them. In this respect, Orage and The New Age were invaluable.

II

Ultimately, the impression of national character or national honesty is a literary impression.

—Pound, 1915

Unfortunately, the genre in which Orage chose to pursue the largest part of his life's work has for some time now been devalued, and even refused the place among the ranking “literary” genres which it had held for much of the eighteenth century. Far from being interested in Orage's influence upon the various work Pound contributed to periodicals, most critics lament that it was at all necessary for Pound to have to write for a living. Every hour Pound spent on ephemeral journalism, so it goes, was an hour stolen from his “real”—poetic—work. It is difficult not to sympathize with this view, which has in our time become normative. Few critics today would challenge Samuel Butler's conclusion that “writing for reviews or newspapers is bad training for one who may aspire to write works of more permanent interest,” any more than they would contest the insistence of Cyril Connolly that “the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece … no other task is of any importance.”¹⁰ Indeed, Orage himself paradoxically maintained that “nothing is more fatal to culture than journalism.” Pound too was often sensitive about this matter, as when in 1920 he attacked what he saw as George Bernard Shaw's effort “to obscure the division between literature and journalism.”¹¹ But Pound could also dismiss prejudice against journalism as the “airy contempt” of “the normal professional attitude” (in “For Action,” April 1922); and his own definition of literature as “news that stays news,” by its very defining of literature in terms of a broader and nurturing matrix, unsettles any simple opposition between the “ephemeral” and the “timeless.” Even when making a case for a distinctiveness in literary writing Pound tended to do so in terms of intersecting continua; so it was that he wrote in 1935 that “literary ability is not something less than or lower than journalistic ability, it is something solider and more durable.”

The “solidity” that Pound regarded as the distinguishing characteristic of “literature” came from its inclusion of economics and history: “every piece of serious literature starts with a free examination of the data.” Just how much of his prose Pound believed to be “serious literature” is unclear. But the fact remains that Pound devoted to his journalistic work considerable time and energy, and did so often when there was little or no hope of remuneration. To ignore this aspect of his work is understandable enough, so long as our critical aim is to constitute the Cantos as an aesthetic construct removed from history. But it can hardly be justified in any effort to understand the way in which the Cantos includes and grows out of history, or economics, or any of its other generic constituents. For genres are themselves concrete historical practices, originating, continuing, and changing in time, and Pound's poetic development was tied ineluctably to his work in other genres. His poetic procedures took shape on the basis of their dialogic and dialectical relations with his experiments in translation, journalism, explanatory or critical prose, even in musical composition. Pound's association with Orage affords one especially rich opportunity to examine the complex intersections of these heterogeneous areas of endeavor.

Moreover, Orage's changing intellectual allegiances exhibit a pattern of accommodation and adaptation very like Pound's own. By the time that Pound met him in 1911, Orage had already been through a number of intellectual conversions. Indeed, the restlessness of his intellect was such as to suggest Pound's description of his own inability to find peace: “the mind as Ixion, unstill, ever turning”—ever denied Faustian synthesis. During the nineties Orage had found no contradiction in simultaneous participation in the Independent Labour Party and the Theosophical Society. Between 1893 and 1900 he devoted as well seven years to the study of Plato, but abruptly punctuated that study to plunge into a seven years study of Nietzsche. Here too Orage became restless, and began organizing a “Guilds Restoration League” with A. J. Penty, and founded a “Fabian Arts Group” with Holbrook Jackson, groups which renewed his commerce with the socialism of Ruskin and Morris.¹² These frequent and, one would think, jarring realignments invite the conclusion that Orage was but a trifler with ideas, too shallow for enduring convictions.

The problem with such a hypothesis is that it ignores the way Orage's different interests came together, and the fact that they never did so easily. This difficulty suggests the usefulness of a historical approach concerned precisely with the nature of Orage's “conversions,” the way that his career prompted the mixing of often conflicting discourses. Orage's conversion to the scientific analysis of Major Douglas in 1918 constituted a deliberate break from the attempted synthesis of Guild Socialism, and a return to the “scientific applications” of socialism which had previously led him to break with the Fabians. His conversion three years later to the system of Gurdjieff was no “synthesis” of socialism and spiritualism, but a leaving off of attempted combinations in order to pursue what Douglas' project was unable to accommodate. Even then Orage's vacillations did not end. Ten years later he returned to London hoping to reassume his role as editor of The New Age and, when denied that hope, founded a new journal which he intended to pick up where he had left off a decade earlier. He called this venture The New English Weekly, and announced its purpose to be the continuation of his earlier struggle to win an audience for Douglas' ideas. Orage's death only two years later may well have given this last turn an unimagined finality: for according to Philip Mairet, Orage had “kept alive his interest in [Gurdjieff's teachings] and was on the point of swinging over to advocating them openly when he died.”¹³

John Finlay has speculated that the “open-mindedness” which spurred Orage's incompatible enthusiasms “was probably the cause of his failure” to achieve any lasting goal: “the fact that guild socialism presented twin appeals, via economics and via morals, was not a source of strength but of weakness” (pp. 65 and 118). Finlay's attitude about discursive mixtures, which refuses the heterogeneous enthusiasms that had prevailed within The New Age circle, derives from his aim to make a case for Social Credit as scientific analysis. So it is that Finlay observes that the principle origins of Orage's Guild Socialism were not in scientific economics, but in the literary-humanist tradition of “the Victorian sages.” If anything, Orage's eclecticism derived from an impulse to carry the consideration of economic problems even further from the realm of the quantifiable, and so from the analytical coolness of Fabian socialism, orthodox economics, or—Orage seems to have worried—Social Credit. The lack of hard science, or hard-nosed dogmatism to which Orage's detractors have always pointed was precisely Orage's ideal. He sought even as a younger man to dislocate economic discourse from the direction which, with an ever deepening commitment, it has taken ever since.

As even more argumentative contemporaries like T. E. Hulme knew, Orage was not an indecisive man. His unwillingness to commit himself to a single program really ought in itself to be seen as a commitment, however ineffectual it may seem to us. Orage's hopes for economic reform were from the first tied to programs which sought to integrate economic and cultural discussion, and to deny any privileged status to economic discourse. On another level, Orage sought to decenter economic authority, and to put it “back” in the hands of artisans and other producers. As Finlay notes, these programs betray the impact of Orage's early excitement over the anarchist socialism of Tom Mann. But, more profoundly, Orage's attitudes embodied a deep-seated rejection of nineteenth century confidence in progress and social evolution. So it was that G. S. H. Cole, one of Orage's contributors, described Guild Socialism as a fine balance between “the spirit of solidarity” among wage earners, “and the spirit of devolution” [Finlay, p. 81].

With regard to the guild revival movement led by Orage's friend A. J. Penty, devolution meant the division of political and economic authority among the various trade-unions and guilds. By 1907, when Orage first became an advocate, the guild revival movement was already in decline—its neomedievalism having proven inadequate to the problems of post-industrialist labor. But Orage took up its standard because he saw in the guild concept an idea he wanted to salvage from the wreck of the Guilds League. That idea, as Wallace Martin has explained, was that “workers should have more control over the standards and conditions of their labor”; over the next four years Orage continued to argue for that need, maintaining as well other convictions which had implicitly informed the guild revival: that neither men nor society were perfectible, and that all men were not equally gifted.¹⁴ Orage apparently developed Guild Socialism, without any other fixed end in mind, by selecting and appropriating congenial aspects from larger projects. He did not begin putting his platform together until 1912, leaving him but three years to work at integrating the guild concept into some politically viable program before world war imposed its own solution to the labor problem.

The result, formulated for the most part in the pages of The New Age, Orage and his cohorts dubbed “Guild Socialism.” Historians have remembered it, when at all, with little sympathy, and few would quarrel with Samuel Hyne's description of it as an “untidy mixture” that reflected “Orage's untidy thought.” Hyne's description is fair enough. And yet it was just the “untidiness,” the obvious heterogeneity of Orage's economics that, I believe, most appealed to Pound. Orage's work allows us to view the very mechanisms of change, and presents us with a confluence of recognizably nineteenth and twentieth century ideals much like that we encounter with Pound. What Hynes calls an “untidy mixture,” and Martin an “ingenious synthesis of political Socialism and industrial Syndicalism” might well be called both. But a description satisfied merely to emphasize its partial intersections and divergences would be more valuable still, especially since, as commentators have reminded us, Guild Socialism proved seminal only insofar as it interacted with more enduring agendas. Orage himself described English socialism of this period as

a cult with affiliations now quite disowned—with theosophy, art and crafts, vegetarianism, the “simple life,” and almost, one might say, with the musical glasses. Morris had shed a medieval glamour over it with his stained-glass News from Nowhere, Edward Carpenter had put it into sandals, Cunninghame Graham had mounted it upon an Arab steed to which he was always saying a romantic farewell. Keir Hardie had clothed it in a cloth cap and a red tie. And Bernard Shaw, on behalf of the Fabian Society, had hung it with innumerable jingling epigrammatic bells—and cap. My brand of socialism was, therefore, a blend or, let us say, an anthology of all these, to which [I added] my personal predilections and experience.¹⁵

Such was Orage as Pound met him in the fall of 1911 in the Frith Street salon where Hulme was lecturing on Bergson's concept of “the image.” This was an appropriate setting, since Hulme's Frith Street group was as heterogeneous as The New Age: attended by artists as unlike one another as Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis, poets as unlike as John Drinkwater and Ezra Pound, playwrights and actresses, editors and critics, and even the literary executor of Oscar Wilde—a marvelous illustration of the non-conformance of history with our attempts to posit distinct periods. Within this group Orage seems to have occupied a somewhat special position. For one thing, he was editor of The New Age, the first and then still most prestigious socialist weekly in London. For another, although generally known for his good-will, he was nonetheless recognized to be Hulme's “most stubborn contestant.” Gorham Munson even described Orage as not only “the best talker I have ever listened to,” but a veritable “fisher of men.”¹⁶ One can only imagine that Pound was quick to seek his approval, and Orage ready enough to give it; for, by that November, Pound was publishing in The New Age.

III

I affirm that future art criticism will be able to tell the component of usury tolerance. How far the TOLERANCE of usury prevailed, or did not prevail when a given picture was painted.

—Pound, radio speech of 1942

By January of 1912, even when writing on “technique,” Pound began to show signs of commerce with Orage's Guild Socialism. Taking up the question, “what have all men in common,” Pound answered “money and sex and tomorrow,” and wryly observed that the first was most often called “fate,” the second associated with poetry—at least ever since poetry “stopped being epic,” and the third “we none of us agree on.” Nevertheless, he went on,

Every man who does his job really well has a latent respect for every other man who does his own job really well; this is our lasting bond; whether it be a matter of buying up all the little brass farthings in Cuba and selling them at a quarter per cent. advance, or of delivering steam engines to King Menelik across three rivers and one hundred and four ravines, … the man who really does the thing well, if he be pleased afterwards to talk about it, always gets his auditor's attention … As for the arts and their technique—technique is the means of conveying an exact impression of exactly what one means in such a way as to exhilarate.¹⁷

Already, although not yet consistently, Pound was mixing his considerations of poetic technique with questions of money and trade. Whether he did so as a result of Orage's example, or whether he sought Orage's company because of his own inchoate interests, the two men began to meet regularly. It was the beginning of an association that would endure until Pound left London, and even then (1921) it was in The New Age that he would present his axiomatic “final testament” to English culture.

It was no accident that Orage should use the literary term “anthology” to describe the combinatory nature of Edwardian socialism. His “affiliations” were not only heterogeneous but, rather than establishing links with strictly political or economic thinkers, they were also “literary” in inspiration. In citing Morris, for example, Orage focused on his utopian novels, and suggested that Morris' medievalism subsequently “colored” British socialism and taught it to envision the future through, as it were, gothic stained glass. Similarly, Orage's mention of Graham implied a view of socialism inextricably caught up in romantic ideals, which both ennobled its subject and made it untenable. And as for Shaw, Orage proposed that for all its pretensions to scientific analysis, Fabian writing too depended on literary devices, on witty epigrams delivered from a position that purported to play no active part in political struggle.

These instances underscore the extent to which the “literary” quality of Orage's politics meant, more than attractive accoutrements, a distinctive group of organizational strategies. For Orage, and for the intellectuals like Pound who—however loosely—formed The New Age circle, literary models informed socialist ideals, as well as many different ways of arguing for them. These models effected not only what these often zealous men saw, but how they saw. For Pound, Orage's development of such models was doubly important, involving not only clusters of ideas but also ways of joining together like and unlike in an attempt to broaden the basis of cultural critique.

In his discussion of the origins of Social Credit, Finlay acknowledges the contributions which Orage's combinatory platform made to the subsequent work of Douglas, mentioning in particular one aspect of Orage's published work:

The development of the Guild Socialist critique on the twin basis of economics and ethics gave Orage the incentive to put out a little book of observations on economics: in which he paid tribute to the “sensible” Ruskin.

[p. 77]

The book to which Finlay refers is An Alphabet of Economics (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1917), and we shall consider its sketch of Ruskin as a “sensible” reformer momentarily. I want first, however, to establish its importance for Pound as a generic model. Orage's attempt to popularize certain ideas about economics was by no means unprecedented. In fact, the significance of Orage's Alphabet for our study derives from its participation in a generic tradition that gathered considerable momentum during the late Victorian period, as economic discourse diverged ever further from common parlance. Most of these works have since been forgotten; but to name even a few instances suffices to give a general sense of their common constituent elements. Indeed, the formula requires little discussion precisely because this genre remains as heavily trafficked today as it was a century ago (just as it continues to receive little notice from the academic genres). Restricting ourselves to the field of economics, and to earlier instances than Orage's, we might cite such books as An Alphabet of Finance (1877) by Simon Newcomb, An Alphabet in Finance (1880) by Graham McAdam, The Alphabet of Economic Science: Elements of the Theory of Value or Worth (1888) by Phillip Henry Wicksteed, or The ABC of the Federal Reserve System (1918) by E. W. Kemmerer. However little these works are now respected, they belonged to a genre or class of writings which served the important function of disseminating difficult information and of proposing the common value of fairly elite activity.

In the first quarter of the twentieth century this genre came to be very attractive to conservative thinkers, insofar as it offered a means of opposing the popular appeal of Marxian and socialist critiques of capitalism. We can discern something of the strength of this appeal in the ease with which, by 1912, Rudyard Kipling could adapt it for his distopian story Easy as ABC. In 1924 Hilaire Belloc published An Economic Guide for Young People, a book rejoined four years later by Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928). Not surprisingly, the economic turmoil of the thirties occasioned the publication of a renewed welter of such economic handbooks, among which were numerous books by social creditors known to Orage. Albert Newsome published “a glossary for the plain man” which he entitled, formulaically enough, An Alphabet of the New Economics. E. S. Holter competed for attention with The ABC of Social Credit. Philip Mariet, a frequent contributor to The New Age and later one of Orage's biographers, also prepared a “handbook … outlining Social Credit”: The Douglas Manual. It is in the company of writings like these that we can best understand such of Pound's texts as ABC of Economics (1933), ABC of Reading (1934), Social Credit: An Impact (1935), or even Guide to Kulchur (1938) as something more than eccentric, crank departures from reason. It was not just the ideas of Social Credit that Pound took up, however incompletely, but also certain ways of presenting those ideas.

Of course, Pound's handbooks also varied significantly from more typical generic instances, substituting his “ideogrammic” presentation for the constructions of expository journalism. But Pound's attraction to techniques and generic features common among popular handbooks was not limited to his “ABC's” and “guides”; it contributed to the composition of the Cantos. In fact, much of Pound's work suggests a fundamental revision of the relations between expository and poetic writing, and in this development his association with Orage was highly instrumental. We must make this point carefully. Pound owed his preoccupation with the materiality of language to the likes of Browning and Swinburne; similarly, the work of Flaubert, James, or Ford had already impressed upon him what the mastery of prose could accomplish. But it was Orage, and his Ruskinian insistence that “art includes utility but it also transcends utility,” that most immediately encouraged Pound's conviction that the reforming of the world and the creation of a poetry fit to meet it were integrally related activities. It is here that we should return to Finlay's notice of Ruskin's importance for Orage, since it can help us understand much about Orage's, and so about Pound's, reception of Social Credit. Finlay proposes that, in seeking to resolve the ethical contradictions inherent in contemporary economic practice,

Orage was led to a restatement of much of the Ruskinian tradition. But he went on to add points which the prophet had not mentioned. Thus, where Ruskin attacked the senseless accumulation of profit, Orage went beyond this to attack the very notion of work. “In economics,” he said, “progress means the advance towards the idea of production without labour.”

[Finlay, p. 78]

Finlay's account affirms that Orage held a rather different view of Ruskin than that customarily taken by contemporary literary critics.¹⁸ Orage did not regard Ruskin as a poetic visionary but as a “sensible” man committed to badly needed reforms. This was a perspective well familiar to Orage's contemporaries: J. A. Hobson, seeking in 1898 to perpetuate Ruskin's legacy, entitled his monograph John Ruskin, Social Reformer; G. B. Shaw, endeavoring in 1919 to make over that legacy, called his critique Ruskin's Politics. Pound's few explicit allusions to Ruskin situate his importance on this same contested ground. Consider his review of Swinburne's Letters, published the same year as Shaw's book on Ruskin. Pound wrote that when Swinburne's publishers and friends advised him to suppress Atalanta in Calydon “poor old Ruskin accepted the work, and later went mad in a society that wouldn't.” Pound's remark not only suggests that Ruskin went “mad” in a country incapable of appreciating Swinburne's work, but also that Ruskin went “mad” in a society blind to its own moral outrage. Continuing in this way, Pound then grouped Swinburne and Ruskin together, along with Shelley, Byron and Landor, as victims of a “Platonic res publica” that has “no place for disturbing authors.” In other words, Ruskin was for Pound, as for Orage, not primarily a critic of “art” but of the culture that produced it.

We can get a sense of the use Pound made of Ruskin's work by quickly considering Ruskin's Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1871-1878, 1880-1884) in ways that reflect on such works of Pound's as Section: Rock-Drill (1955). Like Rock-Drill, Fors was a late work characterized by a keen solicitude for its author's public. The title, Ruskin insisted, was an attempt “shortly to mark my chief purpose”: “fors” meant “Chance, guided by the hidden hand of fate. Clavigera meant that chance carried a club, or nail or a key.” While Ruskin allowed that his title might have other connotations, he himself “interpreted” it to mean “Chance, the fate that hits the nail on the head.”¹⁹ There was a serious concern behind this apparent whimsy. What Ruskin was proposing was that even the most “chance” occurrences can be made to reveal the essential condition of an entire culture. In effect, Ruskin's thinking here and elsewhere attributed to culture a unified organic life analogous to that which Romantic aestheticians discerned in individual works of art. This way of thinking about culture characterized Pound's work as well. His enthusiasm for Remy de Gourmont, which—because Gourmont played so crucial a role in Pound's thoughts about method—is no random example, partly derived from his perception that Gourmont shared this way of thinking: “You could … have said to De Gourmont anything that came into your head, you could have sent him anything you had written with a reasonable assurance that he would have known what you were driving at.”²⁰

Ruskin's example is evident in much of Pound's work during the years he was associated with Orage—evident even in the way that Pound sometimes handled “purely technical” problems. Pound's review “Robert Bridges' New Book” (Poetry, October 1915) offers an illuminating case in point. Pound took the occasion of this review to defend “vers libre” from its detractors by pointing to its use by Bridges, poet laureate and so the embodiment of orthodoxy. However, it is how Pound moved to that conclusion which is of interest here. He began by pointing out that the various kinds of vers libre, like “practically all forms of verse, date from antiquity: China and India and Greece had free verse before some forgotten Italian got stuck in the beginning of a canzone and called the fragment a sonnet.” Leaping then to the immediate past, Pound built towards a climax in good Ruskinian fashion—with a loosely biblical, catalogic “and”:

And after all these things came the English exposition of 1851 and the Philadelphia Centennial, introducing cast-iron house decorations, and machine-made fretwork, and there followed a generation of men with minds like the cast-iron ornament, and they set their fretful desire upon machine like regularity.

Criticism like this may have been new to the pages of Harriet Monroe's Poetry, but Ruskin had established its precedent over a half-century earlier. Pound's move from technical discussion of verse form to sweeping Jeremiad was sudden and unanticipated. His “and” asserted an inevitability between hypotasized verse forms, machine-made fret-work, and fretful desires that was righteously assumed rather than rigorously argued. This piece of journalism does not mark any turning point in Pound's thinking. Pound had ceased to hesitate over regarding poets in extra-aesthetic terms well before 1919. On the contrary, it is the very fact that this was a book review which Pound wrote in haste, with no special self-scrutiny, that makes its evident assumptions of interest. Its transparency permits us to observe how Pound was already mixing aesthetic and economic discourse years before his persuasion by Douglas. Without denying Pound's own originality, we should see that his manner of mixing these discourses was Ruskinian in manner, and Oragean in focus.

IV

Don't imagine that I think economics interesting—not as Boticelli or Picasso is interesting. But at present they are interesting as a gun muzzle aimed at one's own head is “interesting,” when one can hardly see the face of the gun holder and is wholly uncertain as to his temperament and intentions.

—Pound, 1921 review of Douglas' Credit Power and Democracy

Nevertheless, Pound's review of Bridges also points us to his single greatest point of contention with Orage. For all the Ruskinian fervor of his notions about economics and culture, Orage never much altered his early convictions about the autonomy of poetic language. He always insisted on the traditionally formal and “poetical” qualities of poetry, and in this regard too he was more like Ruskin than not. Yet, unlike Ruskin, whose sense of organic form and whose faith in his own vision permitted him expansive experiments in prose form, Orage could never discover a vehicle adequate to his needs. The periodical seemed the form most conducive to eclectic tolerance, and to his ultimately didactic purpose; but even periodical form had demonstrable limits, since it had to maintain enough consistency of orientation and texture to sell copy. In none of his periodical work did Orage ever manage long to reconcile the conflicting claims of, on the one hand, scientific socialism and its purported dependence on clear-sighted analysis, and on the other, spiritualism and its call for vision. As we have noted, Pound faced similar difficulties in his own early work, and until the twenties produced poetry that for the most part bore out Orage's romantic (and Ruskinian) prejudice that “true” poetry was above material concerns: that it was the role of poetry and art to raise the incidents of ordinary life “to sublimity” and so provide “the natural perfected, and hence robbed of its moral obligations.”²¹ Pound's struggle, which so intensified in the years immediately after the first world war that he created little poetry that he felt worth keeping, was to develop a poetry capable of joining analysis and vision, economics and poetry.

Orage however always exempted poetry from service in his cause. His interest was in a vigorous didactic prose, one which, in its perfection

will be anything but a sedative after a full meal of action. It will be not only action itself, but the cause of action; and its deliberate aim will be to intensify and refine action and to raise action to the level of a fine art. Anything less than a real effect upon real people in a real world is beneath the dignity even of common prose.²²

This was the lesson that Orage found in “the sensible Ruskin,” and then, largely by example of The New Age, impressed upon Pound. In effect, Orage sought to collapse the aesthetic realm—not by undermining its claims for value—but by expanding it not only beyond the writing of literary genres but also beyond writing itself. This was the ultimate goal of Orage's journalism, and of his editing of The New Age, and it was an ambition which Pound too shared. But Pound carried the brand into the very citadel of the aesthetic realm by attempting a poetry that would “intensify and refine action.” This meant something more than, as Clark Emery has proposed, putting ideas into action.²³ What Orage's phrase proposes is an aestheticization of “action” itself, a notion which executed a kind of Paterian turn within what we have been calling the Ruskinian tradition. Pound's determination to pursue these ends with poetic discourse was one with which Orage could never have felt full sympathy. To be plain, Orage's reviews of Pound's work seldom offered more than a distant and qualified approval: in separate reviews of 1918, for instance, Orage doubted Pound's critical ability, and found his “irregular metrics” to be “defective;” and as late as 1921 Orage complained that his friend “has always a ton of precept for a pound of example.” Still, the poetic that eventually led Pound to extra-aesthetic aims, and to combine poetry with so many non-poetic and even non-literary genres, constituted at least in this sense an innovation upon Orage's model, or for that matter upon Ruskin's. At no point did Pound find in Orage's work consistent inspiration. Pound advocated few of Orage's interests; he was, although the Guild idea remained a positive motif in the Cantos up through its last fragments, never a committed partisan of Guild Socialism. But Orage's work brought to the insistence of Ford Madox Ford “that poetry should be at least as well written as prose” a new dimension of possibility.

“Social Credit” as Pound came to know it had already incorporated many elements of Orage's Guild Socialism. By 1918 the guild movement had been polarized and disabled by the contention over the proper response to the Bolshevik Revolution; the eventual dominance of radical communists within the movement shattered the equilibrium of what had always been a fragile coalition. Moderates like Orage and his closer associates soon grew unable to preserve their old influence, and so Orage's “going over” to Douglas only formalized a de facto disintegration.²⁴ Social Credit, however, did what Guild Socialism could never do: it offered Pound and many others a concise program. It proffered solutions to immediate international problems and did so in terms of a handful of simple precepts. By restricting its concerns it was also able to provide formulas suitable for popular consumption: formulas like the “A+B Theorem,” so simple that they have since been dismissed as credos, mere articles of faith. Nevertheless, the significance of Social Credit for Pound's writing at least needs to be qualified. Pound's sense of what an economics should do, and of how it should be written, was formed prior to his earliest contacts with Douglas. While it would be an overstatement to speak of Pound's “tutelage” to Orage, it would be an oversight not to recognize the importance for his largest projects of Orage, The New Age, and the Ruskinian tradition. I have looked to these in order to suggest how the economic and social criticism of Orage and his circle contributed to Pound's determination to alter the nature of aesthetic norms. Pound's interaction with Orage prompted both his turn from the slopes of “true Helicon,” and his attempt to produce writing that would “be not only action itself, but the cause of action.” It was finally just this impulse that propelled Pound into one of the most ambitious and problematic artistic projects of the modern world. His continued insistence upon the materiality of language encouraged him to attempt radical condensations of history, while yet counting on its intelligibility. Whether Pound's confidence was justified remains a matter of concern. His attempts to develop an art that “includes utility” but also transcends it—to create “a poem including history”—clearly transformed the many kinds of texts he so included; his “radiant nodes” altered the nature of the “ideas” constantly rushing from, through and in them. Nevertheless, we should see even in these more famous formulations of Pound's vorticist manifesto the divergent claims of two distinctly different conceptions of art, by whose synthesis Pound hoped to produce at last “a profounder didacticism.”

Notes

1. Pound's response to Odon Por, a Hungarian by birth and living in London when Pound met him, has been discussed by Peter Nicholls in his valuable study Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 84. Silvio Gesell's Natural Economic Order was first published in 1911, but not translated into English until 1934.

2. For a careful and critical account of Pound's debt to Gourmont, see Richard Sieburth's Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).

3. See John L. Finlay, Social Credit: The English Origins (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1972), p. 155.

4. See Douglas' “taunting epistle” to Pound, of 7 January 1936, quoted in C. David Heymann's Ezra Pound: The Last Rower (New York: Viking, 1976) p. 78. The distinction between Douglas' notion of “economic democracy” and the proto-fascist economics which attracted Pound is, however, not to be made easily. As critics like Finlay, Nicholls, and Leon Surette have observed, Douglas himself moved ever further to the right after his initial failures to win national attention for his ideas.

5. See, for example, Pound's letter to The New English Weekly for 2 July 1936. Pound's letter was in part occasioned by a letter from Gladys Bing, published in TNEW for 18 June—and it is interesting to note that the one part of Bing's letter that did not upset Pound was her identification of Social Credit and Fascism. Pound's response was simply to attempt the dissociation of fascism from the likes of Oswald Mosley, and align it with the “PROLETARIAN” tradition of “Guild Socialism, syndicalism, and the CORPORATE STATE.”

6. Orage, in The New Age Vol. 18, p. 761; quoted in The New Age Under Orage, ed. Wallace Martin (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 180. Compare Orage's position with Ruskin's assertion in The Laws of Fesole IX. 1. (1877) that: “Art is only in her right place and office when she is subordinate to use; her duty is always to teach, though to teach pleasantly; she is shamed, not exalted, when she has only graces to display, instead of truths to declare.” Pound expressed much the same idea more succinctly in ABC of Reading (p. 64): “Beauty is aptness of purpose.”

7. Letter of 8 July, 1922, Ezra Pound: Selected Letters 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1950), p. 180.

8. Sieburth has written authoritatively on Gourmont's influence upon Pound's prose style (see especially Chapter Three). The interaction of Gourmont's and Orage's examples might here be usefully compared with the twin effect of the poetic models Pound observed in Yeats and Ford. In any case, the result was, as Pound remembered in a letter to Iris Barry of July 1916 (printed in Poetry, September 1950), that he recognized he had “ruined” his “English prose for five years trying to write English as Tacitus wrote Latin.” That false step had been initiated by Pound's admiration for some translations done by a writer who embodied “the poor damned soul of the late Walter Pater.”

9. For an example of Pound's early discussions of the poetically proper, see his review of Jules Romaines' Odes ed Prieres, published in Poetry, August, 1913, p. 187-189.

10. Butler's remark is from Chapter LXXXI of The Way of All Flesh (1906), Connolly's from the opening of The Unquiet Grave (1945). With regard to Pound, the definition of “literature” was an issue that often interested him during the years of his closest associations with Orage; see, for example, “Affirmations VII” (February, 1915), or “The Pleasing Art of Poetry” (July, 1915), in The New Age. Such denial of absolute distinctions between literary and nonliterary writing became more pronounced as Pound moved into the Cantos. By 1929, in How to Read, Pound was willing to venture that “great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree” (Literary Essays p. 23).

11. Pound made this charge against Shaw in two places on the same day. I have quoted from “London and Its Environs,” published in the Belgian biweekly L'Art Libre, 1 January, 1920, a translation of which was published by Archie Henderson in Paideuma, Vol. 13, no. 2; see also “The Revolt of Intelligence IV,” (The New Age, 1 January 1920). Interestingly enough, Pound's next article in L' Art Libre (15 January 1920), (also translated by Henderson) concluded by questioning whether “the Symbolist attitude of proud isolation [can] suffice for our generation.” Pound's dismissal of Shaw's utilitarian didacticism was a necessary part of his own effort to develop one that could prove “profounder.”

12. Penty, for example, paid explicit homage to Ruskin, and to Carlyle and Arnold in his Preface to The Restoration of the Guild System (1906). See also Wallace Martin's history of Orage's activities during these years in The New Age Under Orage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), which I have consulted throughout this study.

13. Mairet is quoted in Finlay, p. 65; further references to Finlay's work will be identified in the text.

14. See Martin, pp. 214-217. Incidentally, as Martin points out, the Guilds League nearly outlasted Guild Socialism, not formally dissolving until 1922.

15. Quoted in Samuel Hynes, Edwardian Occasions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 42.

16. Gorham Munson, The Awakening Twenties: A Memoir-History of a Literary Period (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), p. 258.

17. Ezra Pound, “Technique,” the fourth installment of “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” reprinted in Selected Prose, pp. 32-33, but originally published in The New Age.

18. See, for example, Harold Bloom's introduction to The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin, ed. Bloom, (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1969). Bloom is primarily interested in Ruskin “the aesthetic visionary, fascinated by the world of form and color.” My point is not that Bloom and contemporary critics are wrong to be concerned with an “aesthetic” or “visionary” Ruskin, nor is it that nineteenth century responses were more interesting. Rather, in this changing response to an author of continuing importance we can recover an important perspective on an aspect of Pound's career which has come to be seen as anomalous. Pound's work resembles Ruskin's precisely to the extent that it lends itself to both aesthetic and meliorative responses, and one of the greatest tasks facing Pound's critics at this time is to understand in more than thematic terms how he combined economic and poetic discourses.

19. Quoted in Robert Hewison, John Ruskin: the Argument of the Eye (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 180. This phrase of Ruskin's may well inspissate Pound's fulmination in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir that “when words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish. Rome went mad because it was no longer in fashion to hit the nail on the head. They desired orators.” (p. 114) [my emphasis].

20. Quoted in Sieburth, p. 42.

21. Quoted in Orage as Critic, ed. Wallace Martin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 142; the essay was originally published in The New Age in 1915.

22. Quoted in Orage as Critic, p. 195; the essay was originally published in The New Age in 1921 as “Perfecting English Prose.”

23. Clark Emery, Ideas Into Action: A Study of Pound's Cantos (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1958). Although I qualify Emery's conclusion here, his book has long served as an important corrective to overly formal readings of Pound's work.

24. See Finlay for a full account of how the demise of Guild Socialism effected the growth of the Social Credit movement.