SOURCE: Gibbons, Tom H. “Art For Evolution's Sake: Alfred Orage.” In Rooms in the Darwin Hotel: Studies in English Literary Criticism and Ideas 1880-1920, pp. 98-126. Nedlands, Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 1973.

[In the following essay, Gibbons charts Orage's flirtations with many radical movements of the early twentieth century: from socialism, vorticism and Fabianism to his ultimate alignment with G. I. Gurdjieff's brand of mysticism.]

Alfred James Orage, familiarly known as Alfred Richard Orage, was born on 22 January 1873, at Dacre in Yorkshire. When his father died soon afterwards, the widow and her four children returned to Fenstanton, the village in Huntingdonshire from which the family originated. The family was so poor that Orage could not have continued to attend the village school without the help of the local squire, who also helped him to attend a teachers training college at Abingdon, near Oxford, during 1892 and part of 1893.

In 1893 Orage went as an elementary-school teacher to Leeds, in Yorkshire. He had been converted to socialism during his time at college, and once in Leeds helped form a local branch of the newly founded Independent Labour Party. Between 1895 and 1897 he wrote a weekly ‘Bookish Causerie’ for Keir Hardie's weekly socialist magazine The Labour Leader. In 1896 he married, and in or about the same year joined the local branch of the Theosophical Society, of which he became a leading member. In 1900 he met the young Holbrook Jackson, who introduced him to the work of Nietzsche, and in the same year the two men joined forces with the architect Arthur J. Penty to form the lively and successful Leeds Art Club.

In 1905, having taught for twelve years in Leeds, Orage resigned from his position, left his wife, and went to London. Here he stayed for a time with Arthur Penty, who had preceded him to London, and tried to live by serious journalism. During 1906 and 1907 he published articles in The Monthly Review, The Theosophical Review and The Contemporary Review. His first book, Friedrich Nietzsche: The Dionysian Spirit of the Age, was published in 1906. Two more books were published in 1907: Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism, and Consciousness: Animal, Human, and Superman. The two works on Nietzsche were the first systematic introductions to Nietzsche's thought to be published in book form in England.

During these early years in London Orage also attempted to found a Gilds [sic] Restoration League with Arthur Penty. This venture failed, but Orage and Holbrook Jackson, who had also come to London, succeeded in founding a Fabian Arts Group. This group was intended as a rallying-ground for socialists who thought the arts of fundamental importance, and who were consequently opposed to the bureaucratic Fabian socialism of Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their supporters.

Early in 1907 Orage and Jackson bought an existing periodical called The New Age for £1,000, half of which was put up by George Bernard Shaw. Orage and Jackson became joint editors, but Jackson resigned after a few months as a result of disagreement over policy. Under Orage's editorship The New Age quickly established itself as a leading journal of political, literary and artistic debate. Established writers such as Wells and Shaw contributed free of charge, and articles by the English Nietzscheans (J. M. Kennedy, A. M. Ludovici and Oscar Levy) appeared regularly. Always eager to encourage new talent, Orage was the first editor to publish work by Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, Katherine Mansfield, Edwin Muir and Middleton Murry. According to one of his letters Ezra Pound owed his life to Orage's financial support.¹ Orage was also the first editor to publish the work of T. E. Hulme, and between 1912 and 1914 The New Age regularly reproduced cubist and vorticist paintings and drawings.

The New Age was always a journal of discussion and debate, in whose pages Orage himself often disputed with his own editorial staff. In the first three years of his editorship its policy appears to have been mainly that of providing a forum in which the many varieties of current socialist opinion could be expressed. After 1910, however, in a period of rapidly mounting social and political violence, The New Age became increasingly a vehicle for political and literary neo-feudalist views, and in 1912 it began to advocate guild-socialist policies editorially.

Although the outbreak of war in 1914 rendered the guild socialist movement virtually irrelevant, a National Guilds League was formed in April 1915, and The New Age continued as the official organ of the movement until this foundered through internal dissension in 1920. For some time before this happened, however, Orage's own interests had been turning in other directions. He had become increasingly involved in the Social Credit policies of Major C. H. Douglas, the mystical doctrines of P. D. Ouspensky, and the psychoanalytical doctrines of Freud. These changes of direction in Orage's thinking after the 1914-18 war are reflected in the changed subtitle of The New Age. Previously ‘A Weekly Review of Politics, Literature, and Art’, it became in January 1921 ‘A Socialist Review of Religion, Science, and Art’.

In 1922 the mystical teacher G. I. Gurdjieff arrived in London, and plans were made to found the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau-Avon in France. In October 1922 Orage resigned from The New Age in order to join Gurdjieff at the Institute. In December of the following year he went to New York to lecture on the aims of the Institute, remaining in the United States in this capacity until 1930. During this period he published a series of retrospective articles entitled ‘An Editor's Progress’ in The New Age for 1926, and two collections of his earlier weekly literary articles for The New Age: Readers and Writers (1922) and The Art of Reading (1930). His own contributions to The New Age between 1907 and 1922 had been as follows: ‘Towards Socialism’ (ten articles in 1907); the mainly political ‘Notes of the Week’ between 1909 and 1922; ‘Unedited Opinions’ (a series of eighty-six Platonic dialogues, between 1909 and 1916); seven anti-feminist ‘Tales for Men Only’ (1911, 1912, 1916); ‘Readers and Writers’, a weekly article of literary reviews and comment which appeared between 1913 and 1921.

Orage returned to England in 1930, but did not resume editorship of The New Age. He decided to found a new periodical during the financial crisis of 1931, and The New English Weekly began publication in April 1932 as the organ of the Social Credit movement. Orage died in November 1934, and was succeeded as editor of The New English Weekly by Philip Mairet, his subsequent biographer. Among the many admiring letters on Orage published in the obituary number of The New English Weekly of 15 November 1934 was one by T. S. Eliot, who described him as being, during his editorship of The New Age, ‘the best literary critic of that time in London’.

Orage's Selected Essays and Critical Writings were edited by Herbert Read and Denis Saurat and published posthumously in 1935. His Political and Economic Writings were edited by Montgomery Butchart and others, including T. S. Eliot, and published in the following year. His translation of Gurdjieff's Meetings with Remarkable Men was not published until 1962.

II

Socialism in the 1890s was no merely economic plan for the State-ownership of the means of production. As Orage described it in 1926 it was ‘much more of a cult, with affiliations in directions now quite disowned—with theosophy, arts and crafts, vegetarianism, the “simple life,” and almost … with the musical glasses. Morris had shed a mediaeval glamor over it with his stained-glass News from Nowhere. Edward Carpenter had put it into sandals …’²

Of these various affiliations and influences, the two most obvious in Orage's own early writings for The Labour Leader are those of the arts and crafts movement, and of Theosophy. As a follower of William Morris (and, behind Morris, of Carlyle and Ruskin), Orage holds the Liberal creed of commercial competition responsible for the decadence and disintegration of contemporary art and society. As a Theosophist he looks to spiritual evolution as a means of restoring wholeness to art and to social life.

Orage's unremitting campaign against social and literary decadence began in The Labour Leader in 1895, which was the year of Nordau's Degeneration and the Wilde trial. Reviewing a new American literary magazine entitled Moods, he writes as follows: ‘America needs … a physician. It is down with the “yellow fever.” The English “Yellow Book” has got cured just too late to stop the spread of the infection, and America has now its “Moods.” The usual symptoms appear, things Weirdsley wonderful, impressionism, and weakness.’³ This decadence has not been brought about by the degenerate nature of individual artists, however, but by commercial competition:

I do not believe in the absolute decadence and degenerateness of modern times. … But it is … only too obvious that the ‘damnable commercialism which buys and sells all things’ is sliming our literature and lowering for a while our standard of art. This degradation … is the natural outcome of the same spirit manifested in our system of economy, in science, in politics, and in life.⁴

It is commercial competition, according to Orage, which has caused some modern writers to go ‘hopelessly astray … in the pursuit of mere commercial success’, and as a consequence ‘The high traditions of literature have fallen into the hands of men who betray them for thirty pieces of silver.’ Although much modern literature is ‘mere literary pathology, analysing, dissecting, diagnosing disease’, this is the fault of the commercial system, which is itself ‘an unnatural life which has brought about the conditions which our novelists describe’.⁵ Commercialism has also corrupted the standards of criticism, complains Orage in his obituary article on William Morris:

Our system of competition, based on the degradation of the vast majority of mankind, has won us baubles which we fondly believe to be pearls of great price, but at the cost of works of priceless value, the best that human souls might do, in art, literature, craftsmanship, life, for whose loss no future age can forgive us, and for whose loss it is our shame that we can still forgive ourselves.⁶

In attacking a society based exclusively upon commercial competitiveness Orage reveals the direct influence of Morris. Elsewhere in his articles for The Labour Leader he reveals the Theosophical ‘affiliations’ of his socialism, making it clear that the sources of his guiding beliefs in Theosophy and evolution are mainly literary. Among those whom he describes as having helped to familiarize Western students with ‘the “divine science” of the East’ are not only Max Müller, Schopenhauer and the Theosophists, but Sir Edwin Arnold, Rudyard Kipling, the authoress Flora Steel, and, especially, Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter.⁷

The basis of Orage's Theosophy is his belief in the concept of the universal self or world-soul, which he was to describe in 1907 as ‘a perfectly similar underlying consciousness common to all living things, visible and invisible’. Orage was converted to this doctrine of the universal self by reading Edward Carpenter's Towards Democracy and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and it was Whitman who also confirmed his belief in mankind's evolutionary progress towards god-head. Whitman, says Orage, ‘taught us plainly what the oldest Rig Vedas had mistily written, … that God himself is perfect man, and the goal of every speck of dust’.⁸

The critical applications of Orage's evolutionary mysticism are best seen in his two articles for The Labour Leader on Edward Carpenter's Towards Democracy. In the first of these he defends Carpenter's use of free verse on the grounds that it embodies the rhythms of the life which pervades the universe, and that it consequently enables the poet of democracy to integrate men more closely into the universal self to which he and they belong:

to knit men closer with themselves and nature by expressing nature in man; to electrify and vitalise the dormant nerves which connect the heart of Nature with her outlying limbs; to express the universal in terms of humanity—this is the function of the poet of Democracy.⁹

It may not be immediately apparent that Orage is here proposing a social function for poetry: poetry creates social wholeness, knitting closer together men who have been disunified and set against each other by ‘our system of competition’.

Although poetry has this extremely important function, Orage is reluctant to discuss the kind of meaning that it possesses. In his second article on Carpenter he defines poetry as ‘the expression in words of the universal in man’ and poetic rhythms as ‘the embodiment in words of the movement of life’. These definitions are probably less important than the grounds upon which Orage justifies them. ‘It will be said that these are vague phrases …’, he comments. ‘Vagueness, however, is inevitable from the very nature of great poetry; but it is the vagueness of [trying to discuss] the illimitable.’¹⁰ As will be seen in the next section of the present chapter, these views did not change when, after 1900, the thought of Nietzsche was added to the already diverse list of influences upon Orage's socialism. Great art was always to remain for Orage ‘an expression of the illimitable’, and though he was always a fervent advocate of great works of literature, holding them to be of the highest social importance, he was always reluctant to discuss their meaning in any detail.

Before his Nietzschean phase is discussed, it is worth remarking that the views put forward in 1896 by this twenty-three-year-old elementary-school teacher in his articles on Edward Carpenter, and published in an obscure socialist weekly, have certain basic similarities to those expressed some three years later by Arthur Symons in The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Orage's universal self is another name for the universal consciousness which Symons puts forward as ‘the central secret of the mystics’ in The Symbolist Movement. For both men, literature of the proper kind serves as a unifying force. ‘What is Symbolism’, asks Symons, ‘if not an establishing of the links which hold the world together?’¹¹ For both men it is the sounds of poetry which achieve this unification by embodying the occult universal life which permeates all created things. As Orage puts it:

if poetry is to express the ‘Universal Idea’, it must embody the ‘Universal Idea’: that is, it must be the counterpart in words of the universal in essence.

… that rhythm most nearly approaches perfection which most nearly corresponds to the rhythm of life. Colour, form, and sound—all of which words may suggest—have their place also; and generally speaking the more perfect the form of poetry the more perfect its embodiment of the rhythm, colour, form, and sound of life.¹²

The difference between prose and poetry, according to Orage in the latter of these two articles, is that ‘prose must have something to say, while poetry has only something to express’. Prose makes statements about life, in other words, while poetry embodies and expresses the universal life force itself.

III

In the third section of this chapter I discuss the ideas expressed by Orage in a number of books and articles published between 1902 and 1907, when he was responding enthusiastically to the doctrines of Nietzsche. I examine in turn Orage's highly evolutionistic views upon three inter-related topics: the coming of what Galton had called a ‘highly gifted race of men’, the place of this race in the socialist State of the future, and the rôle of the arts in furthering the development of this new society.

According to Holbrook Jackson it was a momentous occasion when he introduced Orage to the work of Nietzsche in the year 1900: ‘did we not on that occasion build a bridge from the Orient to the Occident? You left behind you … a translation of the Bhagavad Gita; and you carried under your arm my copy of the first English version of Thus spake Zarathustra.’¹³

The occasion is a revealing one. It reveals of course that intelligent young Englishmen at the turn of the century were keenly interested in Indian mysticism and the thought of Nietzsche. The occasion is more neatly symbolic than at first appears, however, for the bridge was built from orient to occident and not in the reverse direction. Orage, like a number of his contemporaries, did not by any means abandon his existing beliefs under the influence of Nietzsche. Instead he adapted Nietzsche's views to a predominantly Theosophical view of things, presenting him as a mystic who was no longer consciously in sympathy with his own mysticism. No-one who really understands Nietzsche, he tells us, ‘will doubt that behind all his apparent materialism there was a thoroughly mystical view of the world’.¹⁴ On one occasion he even went so far as to describe Nietzsche's doctrine of the will-to-power as ‘perhaps the nearest Western approach to the intellectual formulation of one of the aspects of the mystical Trinity’.¹⁵ Just as J. M. Kennedy saw Nietzsche as a second Benjamin Disraeli, so Orage (in company with Arthur Symons¹⁶ and W. B. Yeats¹⁷) saw him as a second William Blake. ‘… he who has read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and grasped its significance’, writes Orage, ‘will have little to learn from the apostle of Zarathustra.’¹⁸

Similarly, Nietzsche's gospel of the superman was grafted by Orage onto notions of man's high evolutionary destiny which he had already derived from a variety of sources. His first mention of Nietzsche is in fact contained in an article on Lytton's Zanoni in The Theosophical Review for 1902. Here he approves of the desire of Mejnour, Zanoni's fellow magus, to create a ‘mighty and numerous race’ of superhuman occult adepts, even if this necessitates the sacrifice of thousands of aspirants for the sake of a single success. ‘Such an ideal’, writes Orage, ‘can be paralleled perhaps in the work of a real man … Frederic Nietzsche; and the parallel is almost complete when one finds Mejnour saying of himself, “my art is to make man above mankind”.’¹⁹

The superiority of the Nietzschean superman is not of course physical. ‘Nowhere is Nietzsche to be taken less grossly than in his conception of power’, writes Orage in his Nietzsche in Outline (1907). ‘The men of power in his eyes are not the men of sinew and brawn, but men in whom the power of mastery over both themselves and others is greatest.’²⁰ Nor is the superman ‘merely man writ large’, he writes in his Friedrich Nietzsche (1906). ‘It is probable … that new faculties, new modes of consciousness, will be needed, as the mystics have always declared; and that the differencing element of man and Superman will be the possession of these.’²¹

In his Consciousness: Animal, Human, and Superman (1907) he suggests that ‘superman consciousness’ will in fact be a continuous state of visionary ecstasy. In the course of evolution, animal consciousness has become ‘folded’ upon itself and produced human self-consciousness. A second evolutionary folding will by analogy produce the ecstasis of superconsciousness:

superman, or … cosmic consciousness, is consciousness in three dimensions, or human consciousness folded upon itself … the typical product of [this] folding is to create another observer appearing to stand outside the human mind, as the human observer appears to stand outside the animal mind. If analogy is any guide, we may … say that the dominant characteristic of the superman state in relation to the human state is a standing outside, or ecstasis.²²

In short, Orage's superman will be a mystic who has attained to a permanent condition of ‘cosmic consciousness’. On balance he appears to owe less to Nietzsche than to the race of superhuman mystical adepts foreshadowed earlier for English readers by Bulwer Lytton and Madame Blavatsky.

Like his books on Nietzsche and superman consciousness, Orage's articles of 1906-07 on education, politics, and the arts and crafts movement are primarily devoted to the fostering of a new race of men of genius, to the encouragement of ‘the few alone who give new significances to things’. In his two articles on education (‘Esprit de Corps in Elementary Schools’ and ‘Discipline in Elementary Schools’) he criticizes the ‘appalling uniformity of schools and teachers’ in State schools. In his article entitled ‘Politics for Craftsmen’ he condemns the English socialist parties for their drift towards policies of State collectivism. All three articles strongly oppose standardization and social levelling, and call for measures to increase individualism. ‘The hope of Europe lies in its great individuals’, according to Orage, and they alone can check what he calls ‘the devastations of democracy’.²³

The socialist movement as a whole, he claims in ‘Politics for Craftsmen’, has betrayed ‘the interests of artists, craftsmen and imaginative minds generally’ by concentrating all its efforts on improving the economic conditions of the working class. He protests against this ‘exclusive association of Socialism, which in its large sense is no less than the will to create a new order of society, with the partial and class-prejudiced ideals of the working man’.²⁴

The inspiration of socialism is nothing less than the creation of a new civilization, states Orage in his series of articles entitled ‘Towards Socialism’, which appeared in The New Age during 1907. The improvement of purely economic conditions is no more than a preliminary to the accomplishment of this utopian task: ‘Abolish poverty for us, and our men of genius will then begin their cyclopean task of building a civilisation worthy of the conquerors of titans.’²⁵ Great individuals are necessary to the creation of this new socialist civilization because men are led forward by such ‘noble illusions’ as religion, nationalism, beauty, honour and glory. These illusions are usually formed for them by the small number of men of creative imagination upon whom a civilization ultimately rests. ‘Civilisation’, says Orage, ‘is no more than the possession by a people of individuals … capable of inspiring great enthusiasms, and of individuals … capable of being so inspired. The rest is all but leather and prunella.’²⁶

In an article of 1907 entitled ‘The New Romanticism’, Orage equates these great individuals with the ‘guardians’, the élite class of Plato's ideal republic. Life is intolerable, he states, without some illusion to pursue, and the function of legislators is to provide the majority with a viable illusion. ‘The question for legislators (I have Plato's guardians in my eye, Horatio) is which of the possible illusions is at once most necessary, most beneficent, and most enduring.’²⁷ Whether or not these great individuals were to constitute a definite aristocratic caste is a matter upon which Orage equivocates. In ‘Politics for Craftsmen’ he rebukes the Labour Party for having no interest in a ‘reconstructed society arranged in some such hierarchy of human values as Plato sketched and Mr. Wells has lately revived.’ (The reference is to Wells's A Modern Utopia, which is governed by an aristocratic caste of so-called Samurai.) In ‘Esprit de Corps in Elementary Schools’ Orage proposes ‘that almost forbidden word aristocracy’ as his possible alternative to the uniform and egalitarian society aimed at by the collectivists. ‘Call it if you will’, he says ‘… the Hierarchy. The idea at least is the same, namely the classification of children, schools, institutions, yes, the whole State, in the ancient Platonic way of iron and brass and silver and gold.’²⁸

In ‘Towards Socialism’ Orage appears to reverse these views, however, claiming that contemporary advocates of a new aristocracy have been misled. Mankind basically prefers ‘all the horrors of freedom to the amenities of benevolent slavery’, he says. ‘Hence not only a hereditary aristocracy is ridiculous, inhuman, and in the long run impossible, but an aristocracy of intellect, character, or what not, as well.’²⁹ He makes it clear however that his ideal socialist state of the future is to be led by an evolutionary élite of noble minds. Socialism will provide increasing opportunities for the development of great creative individuals. These will command the service of the majority not by coercion, however, but by the beauty of their visionary ideas, and Orage looks forward to a ‘State in which personal desire is poured out like wine in offering to the great lords of life’.³⁰

That the ‘great lords of life’ come from Zanoni rather than Zarathustra is a point of minor interest. The major interest of Orage's élitism is twofold: it is entirely characteristic of the period 1880-1920 that evolution should be thought of as producing a new breed of men of genius, or great individuals, and it is equally characteristic that these new evolutionary notions should be used in support of proposals which were far from new, such as ‘the ancient Platonic way’.

In his articles on Edward Carpenter's Towards Democracy Orage had claimed that poetry such as Carpenter's served a social purpose: that of bringing men closer together in socialist brotherhood. Nietzsche provided him with a quite different concept of the way in which literature might help in the creation of a new socialist civilisation, and one of the guiding principles of his criticism after he had absorbed the influence of Nietzsche may fairly be expressed in the phrase ‘art for evolution's sake’. While Nietzsche modified Orage's views on the function of art, as will be seen, he did not however modify Orage's views on the content of art in the least. ‘Nietzsche's main view emerges clearly enough in this form’, he writes in his Nietzsche in Outline. ‘“Ecstasy as both cause and effect of all great Art.”’³¹

This belief that art communicates the indefinable ecstasis of the visionary artist continues to be central to all Orage's affirmative criticism. In 1902, for example, reviewing Arthur Machen's Hieroglyphics, he agrees with Machen that ‘All great art is symbolic’. Art is not concerned with the everyday world, he says, but with the spiritual world by which we are surrounded. Only the mystic knows where art and literature originate, ‘for his whole life lies in the world whence literature and art have come—the world that begins where the world enclosed by the five senses ends’. It is the duty of Theosophists, whom Orage has chided for their neglect of the arts, to work for the revival of a literature which expresses these transcendental realities:

far from having nothing to say to the literary man the Theosophist has everything to say; … no less than the rejuvenation of religion, is his work the restoration of its ancient lights to literature, that literature may become, as once it was, the handmaid of the Spirit sacramental in its nature, and divinely illumining for the darkling sight of men.³²

The view of art presented in Orage's Consciousness is equally other-worldly. According to this book, art is one of the chief means by which an evolving mankind is made aware of its ‘marvellous powers to come’. Like religion, love, nature and great men it is ‘a perpetual reminder of the reality and … the possibility of the continuous ecstatic state’, lifting us ‘out of our duality into a sphere where for an instant we become one of Plato's spectators of time and existence’, and in which we are ‘above our human mode of consciousness, freed and released, superconscious’.³³

As far as the function of art is concerned, the most important chapter in Orage's two books on Nietzsche is that on ‘Willing, Valuing and Creating’ in his Nietzsche in Outline. Here he emphasizes that artists and philosophers are uniquely important in the evolutionary process of ‘becoming’ which constitutes the sole raison d'être of the universe, for they alone are capable of creating the new imaginative values which will inspire mankind to create the superman. According to Orage's paraphrase of Nietzsche, the world as we perceive it is entirely ‘an imaginative creation, the work of great creative and imaginative artists who … brooded upon the face of shapeless and meaningless chaos’.³⁴ Artists, that is, provide mankind with meaningful interpretations of the human situation, and in doing so create ideals: ‘where the artist leads there the people follow; he is the standard-bearer, the inspiring pioneer, the creator of new worlds, new values, new meanings …’ It follows from this that art cannot be an end in itself. It has a moral value, although its morality is not that of any specific or transient moral code:

In the sense that Art is thus the great stimulus to life, the enchanter who unfolds or creates alluring vistas, and so seduces the will to the task of the eternal becoming, Art is moral. But the morality is not that of any creed or Sinaitic tablets or transient mode of life, but of life itself. Art for Art's sake means in effect, says Nietzsche, no more than ‘Devil take morality.’³⁵

In the past, to continue Orage's paraphrase, the philosopher's rôle has been to test the new values created by the artist, on behalf of the human race as a whole. In the future, however, their rôles will be reversed. It is the philosopher who will create the new ends and meanings which will lead mankind towards the superman, while the artist's rôle will be to make these attractive, to ‘glorify and englamour them’.

Given the concept of the superman as the goal of human progress, states Orage in his Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘it becomes possible to estimate the values of things in specific terms’. For Orage himself it now appeared possible to judge art and ideas in terms of their evolutionary value. Far from being an incidental to human life, art was crucially important in a double sense, for by rendering attractive things which were inimical to the evolutionary process the artist might subvert life instead of enhancing it: ‘Because … Art is the great seducer to life it may also be the great seducer to death … and the artist may be saviour or traitor to the race.’ Orage readily accepted the Nietzschean view that ‘All art … is either ascendant or decadent, either leads the will upwards to increase and power, or downwards to decrease and feebleness.’³⁶ Decadent art is that which works against evolutionary progress towards the superman, in other words, and ascendant art is whatever encourages it. Or, as Orage put it in The New Age during 1920, ‘The test of literature is whether it gives and intensifies life or takes away and diminishes life.’³⁷

One cannot complain that Orage does not think sufficiently highly of the arts, nor would one wish to quarrel with the view that works of literature, for example, can provide us with new interpretations and evaluations of human experience. As we have seen, Orage talks of the ‘new ends and meanings’ which philosophers are to create and artists are to make attractive. His visionary concept of great art made him always reluctant to discuss these ends and meanings in any detail, however. In his criticism for The New Age, to which I now turn, he continued to maintain that the meaning of great literature could not be discussed on an everyday level, stating for example that poetry is ‘mystical, super-rational’,³⁸ and that ‘Drama begins where reason leaves off.’³⁹

IV

The fourth and fifth sections of this chapter are devoted to the increasingly polemical criticism published by Orage in The New Age after 1910. In the present section I discuss his attacks upon social anarchy and literary realism between 1910 and 1912, and in the section which follows I discuss his weekly articles entitled ‘Readers and Writers’, which began to appear in 1913.

There is a marked change in Orage's attitudes and tone from late 1910 onwards, whether he is discussing politics, feminism or literature. In his articles of 1907 entitled ‘Towards Socialism’ he had taunted the cautious and bureaucratically minded Fabian socialists by declaring that every good socialist was a utopian. His attitudes only four years later were very different. The only remaining Conservatives, he wrote in 1911, ‘are a handful of Tories … and a few Socialists like ourselves. All the rest have joined in the wild goose chase after “social reform”, “progress”, “democracy”, or some equally chimerical fowl.’⁴⁰

The increasing conservatism of Orage's attitudes and the increasingly violent tone in which he expressed them are probably best understood in the light of the major social upheavals which were taking place at the time. ‘As the summer of 1914 opened’, writes Paul Johnson, ‘Britain was on the verge of civil war …’⁴¹ The years 1910 and 1911 in Great Britain introduced a period of social anarchy which, but for the outbreak of war, would have culminated in the projected general strike of 1914. The spread of syndicalist doctrines caused an unprecedented number of industrial strikes during 1911, and a general strike was threatened for August of that year. The battle for women's suffrage intensified in violence after the riots of Black Friday (18 November 1910), while the constitutional crisis of 1911 concerning the House of Lords was followed by equally desperate political struggles over the Irish Home Rule Bill and Lloyd George's National Insurance Bill. The latter was regarded by many, including Orage and Hilaire Belloc, as an ominous move in the direction of a collectivist ‘servile State’.

Orage's opinions on the suffragette movement provide a good index of his increasingly conservative attitudes during these years. In one of his ‘Unedited Opinions’ of 1909 entitled ‘Votes for Women’ he had spoken approvingly of female emancipation. In 1912, however, he attacked the movement as one of feminine self-contempt, declaring in the following year that the female revolt could occur only because ‘the instincts have lost their unity and become anarchic’.⁴²

During 1911 and 1912 Orage also published in The New Age six ‘Tales for Men Only’, moral fables which describe in great psychological detail the disastrous effects of female influence upon the masculine creative imagination. The structure of all six tales is basically the same, the narrator R. H. Congreve (Orage's usual pen-name) being primus inter pares of a group of artist-philosophers who are ‘intent on creating between them a collective soul or superman’. In their evolutionary attempt to ‘form a communal mind, which … shall constitute a new order of being in the hierarchy of intelligent creation’,⁴³ they have found women to be their greatest obstacle. In the second of these tales, for example, the poet Freestone is warned that his poetry will inevitably deteriorate if he continues to rank his girl-friend higher than his poetic muse: ‘From mythopoeia you will descend to symbolism, and if that is too obscure for the girl, down you will go to valentines.’⁴⁴

The fourth of these tales stands out from the rest by reason of its greater satirical liveliness. Its protagonist, the political scientist Tremayne, is guilty of ‘the last infirmity of noble minds … the ambition to cure a woman of femininity’. He unsuccessfully attempts to educate a Mrs. Foisacre, a woman whose furnishings are as ‘promiscuous’ as her mind and morals:

Her room was quaintly furnished, for all the world as if relays of minor poets had each been given a cubic yard to decorate. On this wall were the deposits of the French Symbolist school—drawings of spooks and of male and female figures shaped like vegetables. On that wall were photographic reproductions of the Parthenon friezes; the high-water mark, I suspected, of some pseudo-classic youth who yearned to be strong. The floor was covered with matting, and an earthenware fountain in the midst played by means of a pump. There was a piano and a host of divans. Oh, divans, I thought. Divans! What a lollipop life we are in for! Turkish delight, scented cigarettes, lotus-land, minor poetry, spooks—and where is the guitar? There, as I live, hanging behind the door!⁴⁵

Mrs. Foisacre is also described as an embodiment of ‘Maya’ (the world of illusory appearances) and ‘the mob’. She is clearly and revealingly intended by Orage as a complex emblem of contemporary social anarchy, sexual promiscuity, cultural disunity, and artistic decadence.

There is an equally strong change of emphasis in Orage's comments upon literature after 1910. In 1909 he had confidently announced that ‘We are now standing … at the cradle of a second English Renaissance in Art, Literature, and the Drama.’⁴⁶ In his ‘Unedited Opinions’ of 1910 he began a series of violent attacks upon the realistic novelists of the day for ‘poisoning’ their readers. He was not alone in voicing criticism of this kind, however, for a number of critics were complaining at this time of the ‘sordid’ and ‘blasphemous’ elements in the works of such authors as John Galsworthy, John Masefield, Eden Philpotts, Laurence Housman, and Lascelles Abercrombie. In 1912, for example, in The Nineteenth Century and After, the well-known English positivist Frederic Harrison attacked what he called ‘The Cult of the Foul’ in contemporary literature,⁴⁷ while Degeneration itself rose from the depths again in April 1913 after an interval of fifteen years.

In his own strong opposition to realism, as in his belief that ‘all great art is symbolic’, Orage is extremely close to the Arthur Symons who wrote The Symbolist Movement in Literature. He is equally close to Oscar Wilde, who in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891) had earlier distinguished between the ‘imaginative reality’ of Balzac and the ‘unimaginative realism’ of Zola, describing Zola's realism as ‘the true decadence … from [which] we are now suffering’.⁴⁸ When Orage attacks realism as the product of commercialism, and rejects certain literary topics on aesthetic rather than moral grounds, he displays the influence of William Morris. Where he differs from such ‘nineties men’ as Wilde, Morris and the earlier Symons, and what characterizes him as a ‘man of 1914’, is above all the violence of his tone.

Orage announces the general grounds of his opposition to realism in his dialogue on ‘Modern Novels’ (1910). He also reveals in passing two sources of his belief in neo-feudalism and occult supermen (Disraeli and Lytton respectively). Contemporary realistic novelists are so severely criticized by his reviewers for The New Age, he says, because they poison their readers with commonplace representations of reality. Instead of doing this, they should provide their readers with a stimulus to the noble life. ‘Disraeli and Lytton are in my opinion the two English novelists who aimed highest’, writes Orage, ‘though I admit they fell far short in actual achievement. Their heroic characters were at least planned on the grand scale.’⁴⁹

So strong is Orage's concern for correct evolutionary development that he will not allow literary artists to describe ugly and sordid aspects of life in order to condemn them, for even this is to run the risk of making vice attractive: ‘To add to the poison-fangs of the snake its glittering fascinating eye is … to give it strength’, he claims.⁵⁰ Nor will he even allow art to acquaint us with the worst aspects of life in order that we may face them more courageously. The purpose of art is not to involve itself with the concerns of everyday life at all, he writes, but to promote spiritual progress: ‘Progress in the spiritual meaning is … a perpetual running away from what is generally called life. … How mistaken to define as the purpose of art the very contrary of the purpose of the most spiritual! Yet such as declare that art is for the purpose of bracing us for life obviously do this.’⁵¹

In these New Age dialogues, as in his earliest articles for The Labour Leader, Orage relates realism in literature to commercialism in society. The great artist, he claims in ‘Money-Changers in Literature’, cannot give of his best in an atmosphere poisoned by commercially minded authors who ‘teach the world to measure success by circulation, to regard literature as a commodity to be advertised and boomed like pills, to despise poor artists as living out of touch with their times, to attach to literature the meretricious adjuncts of contemporary gossip, social utility, fashionable crazes, topical discussions …’⁵²

It is consequently the duty of critics, who ‘cannot be too severe’, to reveal the destruction caused by these commercial authors or ‘usurping demagogues’. Critics must first expose the second-rate artists who deal in pain and brutality, the nine out of ten modern artists who ‘do nothing but glorify mad-houses, lock-hospitals and ugly accidents’.⁵³ But they must also be severe with certain genuine and dedicated artists who mistakenly believe that the subject-matter of works of art should be free from restrictions. ‘With our modern ideas of liberty, universality and democracy’, writes Orage, ‘it is difficult for artists to remember that these ideas are not for them. They resent … the limitations which former artists deliberately put upon themselves; with the consequence that the most uncouth materials are to be found in modern works.’ Orage criticizes the ‘uncouth materials’ to be found in realistic novels, not on moral grounds, but on aesthetic grounds. Against the view that it is only the literary treatment of a subject that matters, he argues that certain types of subject-matter can never be made beautiful:

… I should say that disease ought never to be treated by the artist; likewise vulgar murders, rapes, adulteries, kitchen squabbles, the doings and sayings of vulgar and repellent persons, the sexual affairs of nonentities, the trivial, the base, the sordid, the mean. … The rejection is not primarily on moral grounds, but on aesthetic grounds. These things simply cannot be made beautiful. … The literary artist should no more employ his pen on them than a painter would put mud and rubbish on his palette.⁵⁴

Orage presents his moral critique of realism as an aesthetic critique because of his reluctance to allow that literature communicates ideas in the everyday sense of the word, a reluctance particularly evident in his strictures upon realism in the contemporary drama. He condemns as ‘mummery’ the type of play in which ideas are discussed, and dismisses the notion of propagandist art as a contradiction in terms. ‘The sole object of a work of art’, he argues, ‘is to reveal beauty and to leave that beauty to affect whom it may. Surely, it argues a small belief in beauty if we must add to it a moral or a purpose other than itself. … It is in the nature of all spiritual things that they are above utility.’⁵⁵ Writing in 1912 he describes genuine drama as being, like all genuine art, ‘sacramental’, a claim which is virtually identical with that made for symbolist works by Arthur Symons. According to Orage true drama is a ‘pentecostal art’, a religious ceremony which concerns and addresses man's immortal soul, and which like the Mass conveys an experience which cannot be communicated in words:

Actions that we can rationalise, explain, forecast, determine, are actions motivated in the reasoning brain. With them drama has nothing to do, for drama is the representation of a mystery. … Drama begins where reason leaves off. … Drama is the representation and therewith the illumination of the subconscious. We are made to feel that we understand, though we are aware that our understanding cannot be expressed in words. Deep calleth unto deep.⁵⁶

That our understanding of great literature cannot be expressed in words is a position which Orage continued to maintain in his ‘Readers and Writers’ articles of 1913-21, to which I now turn. In these articles he continues the polemical critique of contemporary social and literary decadence which he had begun in 1910, frequently undertaking to demonstrate the decadence of contemporary literature by making what would now be called a ‘practical criticism’ of chosen extracts. He continues to be reluctant to discuss great works of literature in any detail, however. Their greatness is apparently subject to no such demonstration as applies in the case of decadent writing, and we must consequently rely upon Orage's assertion that certain works are supremely great. Orage's statements that the highest poetry is ‘in the octave beyond the rational mind’,⁵⁷ and that in Milton's prose ‘The sense is nothing, but the supersense is everything’,⁵⁸ remain consistent with his earliest claims that great poetry communicates ‘the illimitable’ and can therefore be discussed only in the most general terms.

V

Orage resumed his criticism of contemporary literature and society in his weekly ‘Readers and Writers’ column, which began in The New Age in 1913 and continued until 1921. Extremely polemical at first, the tone of his criticism became less so after 1915, by which time the entire social and literary situation had been changed by the Great War.

Instead of discussing general issues as he had done in his dialogues of 1910-12, Orage intended in this column to discuss the particular events of each week, consistently, seriously, and with definite ends in view. In other words, his literary criticism was intended as an integral part of a much wider programme, the aim of which was to create a unified and orderly guild-socialist commonwealth in place of a society rendered in his view increasingly anarchic by the divisive Liberal creed of unrestricted commercial competition. Because weekly literary events follow no obvious pattern, as Orage later conceded, his hopes for this column were not entirely fulfilled. Nevertheless, in its strategy and its critical attitudes it possesses a consistency which is far from apparent in such published selections from it as Readers and Writers and The Art of Reading. Removed from the context of The New Age, moreover, its significance as part of a programme of cultural reform is also entirely lost.

As we would expect, much of Orage's criticism in ‘Readers and Writers’ is directed against the commercialization of literature. He regularly indicts such manifestations of commercialism as the best-sellers of H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, the ‘booming’ of books by publishers, the critical irresponsibility of such literary journals as The English Review (at that time under the editorship of Austin Harrison), and the type of journalistic reviewing, such as that of the Daily News, which can describe a trilogy of novels by Oliver Onions as ‘the highest sustained product of English literary creative genius in the present century’.⁵⁹

Decadence continues to be another of Orage's favourite targets. Concerning that ninetyish magazine The Gypsy, for example, he writes: ‘The association of art with luxury, of beauty with disease, of aesthetic emotion with strange and sought sensations, is the unholy union of god and ape that we have set ourselves to annul.’⁶⁰ By ‘decadence’ however he means much more than the eroticism of the 1890s. He claims that decadence in literature exemplifies the decadence and anarchy (and for Orage the terms are virtually interchangeable) of the entire age. Concerning a proposed study of the poet John Davidson by Frank Harris he writes, for example: ‘A study of such a congeries of moods unhappily gathered in a single consciousness must be a diagnosis more of our times than of a man; and its name should not be Davidson but Anarchism.’⁶¹

On similar grounds he attacks a variety of allegedly interrelated targets: contemporary realist authors, for example, and such contemporary exponents of ‘infantilism’ and ‘decadence’ as the imagists, vorticists and futurists. He suggests that a connection exists between ‘Imagism and Savagery, between anarchic verse and anarchic conduct, between Mr. Pound's images and Mr. Wyndham Lewis’ “Blast.”’⁶² Of Professor Gilbert Murray he writes that his mind is ‘eclectic, that is to say, it lacks unity, is anarchically tolerant of incongruities’.⁶³ Ezra Pound's prose-style he describes as ‘a pastiche of colloquy, slang, journalism and pedantry. Of culture in Nietzche's sense of the word—a unity of style—it bears no sign’.⁶⁴ Of G. K. Chesterton and the age as a whole he writes: ‘… Mr. Chesterton, though a critic of our days, is its most complete incarnation; all styles are to be found in him save any style; all ideas save any idea; all points of view save any point of view’.⁶⁵ Examples need not be multiplied. It appears highly likely that in mounting his attack upon contemporary social and literary decadence in ‘Readers and Writers’ Orage made fuller use of what I have earlier called Bourget's formula than any other English cultural critic before or since.

In this column he continues to attack the commercially inspired book-reviewing of the day and frequently calls for severer standards of criticism. Describing contemporary critics as the worst ever known in any period of literature, he insists that it is the business of the critic to make judgements, and that these should be moralistic in intent. ‘I can imagine no critic worth his office’, he writes, ‘who does not judge with a single eye to the upholding of the moral laws. Far from being an offence to literature, this attitude of the true critic does literature honour. It assumes that literature affects life for better or worse.’⁶⁶

Orage's own judgements in ‘Readers and Writers’ are uncompromisingly harsh, and their unusual freedom of expression brought The New Age, as he commented later, into ‘somewhat lively disrepute’.⁶⁷ They rest, however, on two basic assumptions: that literature should have (a) an evolutionary function, and (b) a visionary content.

As he expresses it in ‘Readers and Writers’, Orage's view of the proper function of literature is that it should further evolutionary progress. The writer's duty is to lead men forward by creating noble illusions to which they will aspire. ‘If poets and imaginative writers want subjects for poetry’, he agrees with the French socialist philosopher Proudhon, ‘let them make it out of the visions of what humanity may and ought to become.’⁶⁸ The business of the artist, he states elsewhere, is to ‘forward Nature by divining her plans and manifesting what is in her mind’.⁶⁹ An evolutionistic view of the function of literature also underlies his Wildean distinction between realism of a Zolaesque kind and that ‘true’ or ‘imaginative’ realism which foretells what Nature will or might produce in the future, and thereby ‘raises literature to a great art again’. In ‘Readers and Writers’ Orage praises writers so unalike as Longinus, Sorel, and (time and again) the author of the great Hindu epic the Mahabharata, because these authors have in common the qualities of nobility and sublimity which are essential to evolutionary progress.

Orage's undeviating insistence that the proper content of literature is visionary is seen at its clearest in a statement, reprinted in his Selected Essays and Critical Writings, in which he concludes that art has ‘nothing to do either with emotions or with ideas’. Art, he goes on to say:

arises from the creative contemplation of the artist and arouses in the beholders a corresponding appreciative contemplation. Both artist and critic are on the superconscious plane: the one creating symbols for its expression and the other experiencing its life in contemplation. All art thus plunges the beholder into a high state of reverie or wonder or contemplation or meditation; and that is both its nature and its purpose. We should suspect a work professing to be art when it arouses either [emotion] or thought. Unless it can still both of these inferior states, and arouse us to contemplation, it is human, all too human.⁷⁰

This distrust of ‘thought’ in art and literature leads Orage to claim in ‘Readers and Writers’ that the ‘quasi-magical effect of certain forms of literature is independent of the ostensible content’, so that in Milton's prose ‘It is not what he says that matters in the least, but it is the style in which he says it. The sense is nothing, but the supersense is everything.’⁷¹ Elsewhere Orage distinguishes between the ‘common sense or matter’ of literature and the ‘super-sense of words, or style’.⁷²

In ‘Readers and Writers’ Orage often undertakes a practical criticism or detailed critical analysis of particular passages. These probably represent an effort to secure for his judgements something of the prestige attaching to the scientific method, and he does on one occasion claim that ‘we ought to be able to apply a scientific stylometry to literature in general’.⁷³ The questionable and Bourget-like assumption behind Orage's critical analyses, however, is that an author's moral decadence is evident in the decadence of his literary style. Although Havelock Ellis had urged his readers to recognize that ‘decadence is an aesthetic and not a moral conception’, Orage claims to be able to perceive moral decadence ‘in the very construction of a man's sentences, in his rhythm, in his syntax’.⁷⁴ In fact, whether he is analysing Meredith or the military critic of The Times, he devotes nearly all his attention to the rhythm of the passage which he has selected, and scarcely any to its paraphrasable meaning. He always prefers to say, not that an author's thinking is illogical or that his ideas or attitudes are morally unacceptable, but (with Bourget and Nietzsche) that his style is decadent. Orage's stylistic analyses thus allow him to pass moralistic judgements upon an author's work whilst ignoring the morality of the views which the work itself advances.

In his unwillingness to discuss the meaning of even a poor piece of literature Orage is being entirely consistent with his views on the nature of art as we have seen them expressed above. His other-worldly concept of art renders him extremely reluctant to concede that the meaning of any work of art, good or bad, can be adequately discussed. ‘It is not without reason’, says Arthur Symons in The Symbolist Movement in Literature, ‘that we cannot analyse a perfect lyric.’⁷⁵ Here, as in a number of important respects, Orage is at one with him, claiming that the more great literature is analysed, ‘the more mysteriously beautiful it becomes’.⁷⁶ I return to this and allied topics in my final chapter after making my concluding remarks upon Orage.

VI

Orage might be considered as a type-figure of the critic in the Age of Evolutionism. Evolutionistic assumptions play a dominant part in all his thinking, whether he is advocating that society be led by a new breed of men of genius or attacking literary decadence because it is contrary to desirable evolutionary tendencies. He is equally typical in using these evolutionistic assumptions as a means of restating thoroughly traditional ideas. His guild socialism is firmly rooted in the neo-mediaeval tradition of Pugin, Disraeli and Morris. Furthermore, as noted in Chapter 1, he believes that evolution is proceeding to the golden age backwards: ‘To go back is to go forward’, he writes in 1915. ‘… the rediscovery of ancient Indian culture will give us the Europe of to-morrow. Nothing else will.’⁷⁷

He is also a characteristic figure of the period 1880-1920 in his belief in Theosophy and mysticism, those movements which, as we also saw in Chapter 1, replaced for many serious-minded people a Christian world-view apparently discredited by biblical criticism and by High Victorian scientism. Orage's visionary aesthetic, which is an important corollary of his mysticism, is also characteristic of the period. So too is his use of the prestige of science itself in carrying out his ‘stylometric’ critical analyses. Although I have not discussed the developing interest in psychoanalysis which is apparent in ‘Readers and Writers’, it appears characteristic of Orage and a number of his contemporaries that this new and would-be scientific development should have been quickly incorporated into a programme for achieving super-consciousness.

Orage's criticism also importantly exemplifies that shift in tone, noted in Chapter 1 and already mentioned in connection with the final phase of Arthur Symons's criticism, which appears to be an important element in the shift from symbolism to expressionism. A basic hostility to realism links Orage to Yeats and the later Symons on the one hand, and on the other hand to such avant-garde modernists of the next generation as Pound, Lewis and Hulme. This hostility to realism also links him to Oscar Wilde, in whose ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ and ‘The Decay of Lying’ are to be found a significant number of notions which Orage was later to express far more polemically. Although he decisively rejected what he called the ‘yellow fever’ of the nineties, Orage continued to respect Wilde for his Nietzschean view that nature imitates art, just as the vorticists continued to respect the implicit anti-realism of Pater's theories⁷⁸ and of Beardsley's practice.⁷⁹ Orage himself appears to have been instrumental in re-stating the aestheticism and the symbolism of the nineties in the new hard and assertive language of early-twentieth-century expressionism.

As John Holloway has pointed out, Orage's attack upon the commercial debasement of literature and of literary criticism anticipates attitudes which were later taken up in The Calendar of Modern Letters and Scrutiny.⁸⁰ Orage's detailed critical analyses of particular passages, to which he regarded biographical and historical information as irrelevant, anticipate in certain important respects the subsequent approach to literature of I. A. Richards and the New Critics. As an important platform for classicist and neo-feudalist views concerning literature and politics, The New Age from about 1910 onwards anticipates much that was to appear later in the thought of Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot.

The New Age was not by any means, of course, solely a platform for views of this kind. Although Orage himself was committed to guild socialism as an editor, as a political commentator, and as a literary critic, The New Age was above all an arena for controversy and debate. In his rôle of severe and intolerant critic Orage fiercely condemned both futurism and imagism. In his rôle of tolerant and broad-minded editor, on the other hand, he was one of the first to publish the work of both futurist painters and imagist poets. He constantly sought and encouraged new talent; as a result of his editorial catholicity The New Age continues to merit our attention and admiration as without doubt the most intellectually alive and seminal periodical of its day.

Notes

1. D. D. Paige (ed.), The Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907-1941 (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1950), p. 259.

2. N.A. XXXVIII, 20 (18 March 1926), p. 235.

3. The Labour Leader VII, 86 n.s. (30 Nov. 1895), p. 3. I have silently corrected minor printing errors in quotations from this periodical.

4. Ibid. VIII, 106 n.s. (11 April 1896), p. 122.

5. Ibid. VIII, 105 n.s. (4 April 1896), p. 114.

6. Ibid. VIII, 132 n.s. (10 Oct. 1896), p. 352.

7. Ibid. VIII, 103 n.s. (21 March 1896), p. 102; VIII, 121 n.s. (25 July 1896), p. 258.

8. Ibid. VIII, 127 n.s. (5 Sept. 1896), p. 308.

9. Ibid. VIII, 114 n.s. (6 June 1896), p. 197.

10. Ibid. VIII, 117 n.s. (27 June 1896), p. 218.

11. The Symbolist Movement in Literature, p. 146.

12. The Labour Leader VIII, 114 n.s. (6 June 1896), p. 197.

13. Holbrook Jackson, Bernard Shaw: a Monograph (London, Grant Richards, 1907), pp. 11-12.

14. A. R. Orage, Friedrich Nietzsche: The Dionysian Spirit of the Age (London & Edinburgh, T. N. Foulis, 1906), pp. 74-5.

15. N.A. XVI, 2 (12 Nov. 1914), p. 42.

16. Arthur Symons, William Blake, pp. 1-2.

17. W. B. Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil, p. 201.

18. Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 12.

19. ‘Readings and Re-Readings: “Zanoni”’, The Theosophical Review XXXI, 184 (15 Dec. 1902), p. 344.

20. Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism (Edinburgh & London, T. N. Foulis, 1907), p. 47.

21. Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 75.

22. Consciousness: Animal, Human, and Superman (London & Benares, Theosophical Publishing Society, 1907), p. 74.

23. ‘Esprit de Corps in Elementary Schools’, The Monthly Review XXV, 75 (Dec. 1906), p. 50. (‘Discipline in Elementary Schools’ appeared in The Monthly Review for May 1907.)

24. ‘Politics for Craftsmen’, The Contemporary Review XCI (June 1907), p. 785.

25. N.A. I, 23 (23 Oct. 1907), p. 362.

26. N.A. II, 1 (31 Oct. 1907), p. 10.

27. ‘The New Romanticism’, The Theosophical Review XL, 235 (March 1907), p. 55.

28. ‘Esprit de Corps in Elementary Schools’, loc. cit. p. 48.

29. N.A. II, 4 (21 Nov. 1907), p. 70.

30. N.A. II, 3 (14 Nov. 1907), p. 50.

31. Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism, p. 66.

32. ‘Readings and Re-Readings: The Mystic Valuation of Literature’, The Theosophical Review XXXI, 185 (15 Jan. 1903), p. 430.

33. Consciousness: Animal, Human, and Superman, p. 83.

34. Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism, p. 124.

35. Ibid. pp. 65-6.

36. Ibid. p. 61.

37. N.A. XXVIII, 3 (18 Nov. 1920), p. 30.

38. N.A. IV, 20 (11 March 1909), p. 399.

39. N.A. X, 16 (15 Feb. 1912), p. 371.

40. N.A. X, 3 (16 Nov. 1911), p. 49.

41. George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London, McGibbon & Kee, 1966), p. 12.

42. N.A. XI, 17 (22 Aug. 1912), p. 388.

43. N.A. XI, 16 (15 Aug. 1912), pp. 373-4.

44. N.A. IX, 22 (28 Sept. 1911), p. 518.

45. N.A. XI, 4 (23 May 1912), p. 85.

46. N.A. IV, 19 (4 March 1909), p. 379.

47. Frederic Harrison, ‘Aischro-Latreia—The Cult of the Foul’, The Nineteenth Century and After 420 (Feb. 1912), p. 333.

48. Oscar Wilde, Intentions (London, Osgood McIlvaine, 1891), p. 22.

49. N.A. VIII, 9 (29 Dec. 1910), p. 204.

50. N.A. IX, 24 (12 Oct. 1911), p. 563.

51. Ibid.

52. N.A. IX, 2 (11 May 1911), p. 35.

53. N.A. X, 24 (11 April 1912), p. 564.

54. N.A. IX, 23 (5 Oct. 1911), p. 539.

55. N.A. IX, 24 (12 Oct. 1911), p. 562.

56. N.A. X, 16 (15 Feb. 1912), p. 371.

57. N.A. XVII, 25 (21 Oct. 1915), p. 597.

58. N.A. XVIII, 20 (16 March 1916), p. 470.

59. N.A. XIII, 17 (21 Aug. 1913), p. 486.

60. N.A. XVII, 6 (10 June 1915), p. 133.

61. N.A. XIII, 11 (10 July 1913), p. 297.

62. N.A. XVI, 3 (19 Nov. 1914), p. 69.

63. N.A. XIII, 13 (24 July 1913), p. 362.

64. N.A. XIII, 26 (23 Oct. 1913), p. 761.

65. N.A. XIV, 8 (25 Dec. 1913), p. 241.

66. N.A. XIII, 22 (25 Sept. 1913), p. 634.

67. A. R. Orage, Readers and Writers (1917-1921) (New York, Knopf, 1922), preface.

68. N.A. XIII, 27 (30 Oct. 1913), p. 792.

69. N.A. XVII, 13 (29 July 1915), p. 309.

70. A. R. Orage, Selected Essays and Critical Writings, ed. Herbert Read & Denis Saurat (London, Stanley Nott, 1935), pp. 152-3. The version quoted prints ‘caution’ for what should clearly be ‘emotion’.

71. N.A. XVIII, 20 (16 March 1916), p. 470.

72. N.A. XVI, 24 (15 April 1915), p. 642.

73. N.A. XXI, 12 (19 July 1917), p. 267.

74. N.A. XVIII, 4 (25 Nov. 1915), p. 85.

75. The Symbolist Movement in Literature, p. 90.

76. A. R. Orage, The Art of Reading (New York, Farrar & Rinehart, 1930), p. 73.

77. N.A. XVIII, 5 (2 Dec 1915), p. 110.

78. Ezra Pound, ‘Vortex’, Blast 1 (20 June 1914), p. 154.

79. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Modern Caricature and Impressionism’, Blast 2 (July 1915), p. 79.

80. Boris Ford (ed.), The Pelican Guide to English Literature (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1961), Vol. 7, pp. 88-9.