[In the following essay, originally published in 1968, Hynes finds that despite Orage's personal failings, he was ultimately a successful editor who published works from some of the most groundbreaking and original thinkers of the day.]

Alfred Orage was a man who, as Shaw observed, ‘did not belong to the successful world’. He was an editor who never ran a profitable paper, a socialist who backed Guild Socialism against the Fabians, an economist who preached Social Credit against the Keynesians, a literary critic who found Ulysses repellent and disliked the poems of Yeats, a mystic who expected the Second Coming. In thirty years of public life he never supported a winning cause, or profited from a losing one; the movements that consumed his energies are dead, and so are the journals that he edited, and the books that he wrote.

Yet when Orage died in 1934 he was remembered, and mourned, by many men more celebrated than he. The memorial number of the New English Weekly (of which he was the founder and first editor) included elegiac notes from Eliot, Chesterton, Shaw, A. E., Pound, Wells, Augustus John, Richard Aldington, Herbert Read, Middleton Murry, G. D. H. Cole, Frank Swinnerton, Edwin Muir, and St John Irvine, all expressing a sense of loss, and all for different reasons. Eliot praised the literary critic, A. E. the guru, Pound the economist; others admired Orage's brilliance as an editor, his flair for discovering talent, his prose style, his disinterestedness, his obstinacy. There is no doubt that to his contemporaries Orage was important; the question is, what importance, if any, remains?

One might say, first of all, that Orage is important as a representative of a type—the lower-middle-class provincial intellectual who turned up in considerable numbers around the beginning of this century and gave a new thrust and tone to English literary life. He belongs, that is, with Wells and Bennett and Lawrence. And he had all the characteristics of the type; he was learned but half-educated, arrogant and quick to take offence, charming but humourless, grimly serious about art and ideas (‘a judge of literature cannot afford to indulge in witticisms’, he said, and he never did). He was extremely susceptible to conversion, and it could be said of him, as Wells remarked of Nietzsche, that he was so constituted that to get an idea was to receive a revelation. He had many revelations, and like Wells and Lawrence he had a messianic itch to turn his revelations into dogmas. Part radical reformer and part heterodox evangelist, he helped to give Edwardian intellectual life its characteristic tone of strenuous but sombre zeal.

Orage is most representative of his type in the variety of his enthusiasms. Like many another man of his time he had gone to the two sources of Victorian values—science and liberalism—and had found them bankrupt.

Spencer and Darwin had mechanized the world [he wrote] and carried the industrial revolution into thought. Tennyson on his lawn had prettified it and hung it with paper garlands. But nothing could conceal the fact that the new world was repellent and that nothing was better than the only certainty promised by it.

For a born believer like Orage, such nihilism was not in fact possible, and he turned instead to newer, less orthodox systems in search of values. In his earlier years he was a Theosophist, a Nietzschean, and a Fabian Socialist; later he tried psychoanalysis, Social Credit, and Gurdjieff's ‘institute’ at Fontainebleau. Some of his spiritual restlessness one must attribute to the temper of the time, but the eccentric forms in which it was expressed is a function of the type; a man like Orage, rooted neither in a traditional education nor in a fixed social role, will regard society and its ideas as infinitely revisable because he has no stake in either. And he will set few limits on the intellectual instruments that he employs to re-build society and its ideas so that they will include him.

Orage's own roots were in Yorkshire, and in poverty. His father was an improvident schoolmaster who died when his son was a year old, and his mother supported her family by taking in washing. Alfred, the clever child of the family, was encouraged by the local squire, who sent him to a teachers' training college. He became, like Lawrence, a schoolmaster, and settled in Leeds. There he joined the Theosophical Society, the Fabian Society, and a ‘Plato Group’, and helped to found the Leeds branch of the Independent Labour Party and the Leeds Arts Club. This is a remarkable range of intellectual activities for a provincial city in the 1890s, but for Orage it was insufficient. In 1906 he left Leeds, his teaching career, and his wife, and went up to London to become a full-time intellectual.

In London Orage entered into political activities, and became at once two kinds of socialist: he joined the Gilds Restoration League, and he re-joined the Fabian Society. His intentions as a socialist are made clear in a letter that he wrote to Wells in July 1906:

I beg to enclose for your consideration a draft of the objects of a Gilds Restoration League. You have, I know, advocated at the Fabian Society and elsewhere a propaganda of Socialism among the middle classes. The main objection to Socialism which I have found amongst those classes is to its materialism. This, of course, is due to the accident that Socialism has been largely bound up with trades unionism. Which in its turn has been necessarily an economic protestant movement. Thus the real obstacle to middle class conversion to Socialism is the fear that it may involve government by trades union officials.

The defect of the Trades Union movement is felt however quite as much by many Socialists as by non-Socialists. Most of the artists and craftsmen I have met are in favour of the Labour Programme on grounds of Justice but not on grounds of art. As explained in the enclosed draft the Arts and Crafts Movement while really as much a social reform movement as trades unionism, has nevertheless kept itself since Morris' day aloof from actual politics. And this absence of the artists and craftsmen as artists from the Socialist movement really accounts for the objections raised by the middle classes. The object of the proposed Gilds Restoration League is to bring about a union between the economic aims of the Trades Unionists and the aesthetic aims of the craftsmen. Hitherto, the collectivist proposals have been designed solely to make economic poverty impossible; it is necessary to design them not only to make economic but also aesthetic poverty impossible. This, of course, would involve a considerable modification of the usual Collectivist formulas, on the lines, I think, sketched in your Modern Utopia. However, I am proposing to issue the enclosed in printed form and over a wide area during the coming autumn: and to call together all those who are interested for the purpose of discussing the best methods of procedure.

As a member of the Fabian Society, I should have been glad to see that Society take up the present propaganda; but I am afraid the major part of the Fabians is too rigidly bound to the collectivist formulas to make such a hope practicable.

This William-Morrisy mixture of romantic medievalism and aestheticism may strike one as improbable, and as altogether incompatible with the statistical rationalism of the Fabian Society, but socialism in 1906 was a slumgullion of fads and dissensions that could accommodate any view, so long as it was unconventional. It was, Orage later recalled,

a cult, with affiliations in directions 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 from my personal predilections and experience I added a good practical knowledge of working classes, a professional interest in economics which led me to master Marx's Das Kapital and an idealism fed at the source—namely Plato.

If this socialist anthology seems an odd account of a Fabian, one need only remind oneself that the society began as The Fellowship of the New Life, a front-parlour discussion group that included communists, spiritualists, psychic researchers and single taxers, and that for a long time it remained receptive to members from the queer fringes of radicalism.

Orage's conception of his role in the Fabian Society became clear very quickly; he was to be a leader of the philosophical and aesthetic wing. With his friend Holbrook Jackson he created the Fabian Arts Group, with the ostensible aim of making an appeal to ‘minds that remained unmoved by the ordinary Fabian attitude’, and of providing ‘a platform for the discussion of the more subtle relationships of man to society which had been brought to the front in the works of such modern philosopher-artists as Nietzsche, Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Bernard Shaw’. One might think that the Fabian leaders, faced with this frank contempt for their methods and opinions, would have discouraged Orage, but instead they encouraged him to buy a paper. In the spring of 1907 Orage and Jackson raised enough money to buy the New Age, a failing weekly of uncertain convictions and no circulation, and the Fabian News announced the birth of a new socialist journal, to be run strictly ‘on Fabian Lines’. If the Fabians had paused to consider the sources of Orage's funds, they might have viewed the birth of his paper with less confidence; he had got £500 from Shaw, but the other £500 had come from a theosophical banker in the City. This curiously mixed parentage one may take as symbolical; for from birth the New Age was at best a bastard socialist.

The New Age gives Orage another kind of importance. He edited it, almost without help, for fifteen years. During those years he published a more impressive list of contributors than any other British journal: among more than 700 were Belloc, Bennett, Bierce, Brooke, Burns, Carpenter, Chesterton, Cunninghame Graham, Havelock Ellis, Ervine, Galsworthy, Gogarty, Harris, Hulme, John, Mansfield, Murry, Pound, Herbert Read, Sassoon, Shaw, Sickert, Swinnerton, Webb, Wells, West, and Zangwill; art work reproduced included drawings by Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, Sickert, and Picasso. ‘Great editorship’, Orage said, ‘is a form of creation, and the great editor is measured by the number and quality of the writers he brings to birth—or to ripeness.’ By this standard, Orage was the greatest English editor of this century; nowadays, when that title is often awarded to Ford Madox Ford for his English Review, it is worth noting that Ford ran his review for little more than a year, lost £5,000, and was fired, while Orage kept the New Age going for fifteen years with an initial investment one-fifth the size of Ford's, and resigned. Ford was brilliant, but Orage lasted.

Orage's notion of a great editor says nothing about ideas, principles, or editorial policy, and the paper that he edited had little intellectual coherence; it was, like its editor's socialism, an anthology of views. It first appeared as ‘an Independent Socialist Weekly’ with impeccable socialist credentials—the first issue carried letters of congratulation from Sidney Webb, Edward Pease (the Secretary of the Fabian Society), and Prince Kropotkin. But it also contained an editorial that those congratulators must have read with sinking hearts. ‘Socialism as a progressive will’, the editors observed,

is neither exclusively democratic nor aristocratic, neither anarchist nor individualist. Each of the great permanent moods of human nature, as imperfectly reflected in the hierarchy of society, has its inalienable right to a place in the social pyramid.

Believing that the darling object and purpose of the universal will of life is the creation of a race of supremely and progressively intelligent beings, The New Age will devote itself to the serious endeavour to cooperate with the purposes of life, and to enlist in that noble service the help of serious students of the new contemplative and imaginative order.

This untidy mixture of socialism, Nietzscheanism, and mysticism is a fair expression of Orage's untidy thought, and the journal that he edited was similarly eclectic. It published, for example, the reactionary philosophical essays of T. E. Hulme as well as the heretical socialism of Wells, and found space both for Ford's support of women's suffrage and Orage's fierce opposition to it. If it had an editorial policy at all, it was simply an open-door policy. ‘One used to write to The New Age’, Belloc later recalled, ‘simply because one knew it to be the only paper in which the truth with regard to our corrupt policies, or indeed with regard to any powerful evil, could be told. And when Hulme was asked why he wrote for such a radical journal, he replied simply, ‘Because they'll print me’. The New Age may have set out to be an ‘independent socialist weekly’, but the emphasis was on ‘independent’, and one can see why the Webbs soon gave up hope of seeing it run on Fabian lines, and founded the New Statesman to serve that purpose.

The greatest appeal of such a farraginous chronicle was to people like Orage, provincial intellectuals in search of a faith, and it is not surprising that such people made up a substantial number of both its contributors and its readers. The regular writers—the now forgotten journalists who attended Orage's salon in the basement of the Chancery Lane ABC—were mostly, like Orage, poor intellectual outsiders. And the subscribers included people like young D. H. Lawrence, who shared the paper with the Eastwood intelligentsia and liked it more for its literature than for its politics. One may guess that it was far better read in Eastwood than in Westminster, because it meant more there; it was the voice of rebellion and liberation, not clear, perhaps, but loud.

This point of authorship and audience may in part account for the fact that the New Age, for all its vigour and occasional distinction, seems to have had little impact on the direction of English thought in its time. But a more important factor is that it had little direction itself. Eclecticism may stimulate, but it does not move, and the New Age left behind vivid impressions of its editor's personality, but no impressions of its policies.

When Orage left the journal in 1922, he left a remarkable record of achievements. He had run a weekly for fifteen years virtually without capital. He had persuaded most of the important writers of the time to write for him, and to write for nothing (Arnold Bennett, that most cash-conscious of writers, wrote a weekly piece in the New Age for eighteen months without payment). He had not only published Ezra Pound, but had made him into a music critic. He had encouraged many young writers, and had published the first works of a number who later made names for themselves, including Katherine Mansfield, Richard Aldington, and Middleton Murry. He had taught and demonstrated the importance of good writing, the style, as he called it, of ‘brilliant common sense’. But most important, he had brought new ideas to a new audience, and had helped to redefine the English intellectual class.

Having said so much, one should note also the New Age's limitations. It never published an excellent poem, rarely a good story. It opened its pages to a good deal of rubbish, simply because it was new rubbish. In the post-war years Orage indulged his strong mystical streak, and published the incomprehensible writings of a Serbian prophet called Mitrinović; at the same time he was giving space to Major Douglas and Social Credit, and the result was a concentrated unreadability that diminished Orage's reputation, and nearly destroyed the paper.

Orage's own contributions were sometimes examples of the brilliant common sense that he preached, and these won him the admiration of distinguished contemporaries like Chesterton, who described Orage as ‘a man who wrote fine literature in the course of writing fighting journalism’, and Eliot, who admired him both as a leader-writer and a critic. For Orage these elements—the literary quality, the editorial vigour, and the critical judgment—were not distinct, and his ideal writing was a prose that would combine them all. Recalling his ‘Readers and Writers’ columns in the New Age, which he wrote weekly for seven or eight years, Orage wrote:

My original design was to treat literary events from week to week with the continuity and policy ordinarily applied to comments on current events; that is to say, with equal seriousness and from a similarly more or less fixed point of view as regards both means and ends. This design involved of necessity a freedom of expression distinctly out of fashion …

When he achieved this goal, he was very good indeed, and his two books of these essays—Readers and Writers and The Art of Reading—do give a lively sense of the literary politics of those years. But the art of the leader-writer is a transitory one, and it is not surprising that Orage's essays are not read now; for by treating literature as current events, he had guaranteed his own swift obsolescence. But even when they were written many of his pieces must have seemed unworthy of his talents, for his doctrine of free expression encouraged vigorous writing at the expense of judgment and restraint, and he was capable of crude brutality in his criticisms, and of windy vagueness in his philosophizing. As his causes failed and his voice lost authority, he became more and more negative in his own defence, and less readable.

Orage's last years, after his resignation from the New Age, are puzzling and sad. He became a disciple of Gurdjieff and laboured for him for a year at Fontainebleau. Then he went to New York as Gurdjieff's representative and stayed six years, teaching and raising funds for the ‘institute’. In 1931 he returned to England to found a new paper, the New English Weekly, which he edited until his death.

The New English Weekly clearly set out to be another New Age, and was greeted as such by the dozens of old admirers who wrote their testimonies for the first issue—A. E., Epstein, Henry Nevinson, Swinnerton, Herbert Read, Gogarty, Havelock Ellis, Eric Gill, T. Sturge Moore. These were the readers, and in most cases the writers, of Orage's first paper, and what they hoped for was more of the same. To a considerable degree they got it: Pound returned with Cantos and economic theories, Major Douglas contributed his own economic essays, A. J. Penty, from the Gild Restoration days, was still around offering alternatives to communism. But the times had changed, and so had Orage; his mind was fixed on economic issues, and economics, even in the 1930s, could not make a paper lively. He continued to demonstrate his good eye for promising young writers—one finds Walter Allen, Basil Bunting, Erskine Caldwell, Emily Hahn, Storm Jameson, Stephen Potter, and Michael Roberts in early issues—and he had improved his taste in poetry (or his advisers) remarkably, with poems by David Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, and William Carlos Williams, but he never found a formula, or an audience, that would make the paper succeed.

Looking back over Orage's life, one can see that his need to follow was as great as his need to lead, and that his submission to Gurdjieff's beliefs and discipline was inevitable. But to the unconverted the spectacle of a strong mind capitulating is depressing, and Orage's later life seems a waste of a lively intelligence. In his memoir of Orage, Eliot remarked his ‘restless desire for the absolute’; the desire one may call a strength in Orage's character, but the restlessness dissipated that strength, drove him aimlessly from faith to faith, and made his life, in the end, incoherent. ‘Gurdjieff once told me’, Orage said, ‘that he knew my ambition. He said I wanted to be one of the “elder brothers” of the human race, but that I had not the ability it required.’ That observation will do for Orage's epitaph.