NEW ENGLISH WEEKLY

Living as I did in Ireland I met him but rarely until this last year when I think my friendly feeling for Orage was met by him as if we had been born under the same star. I came to believe there was in him a mind which had never fully manifested its greatness or its depth. There are writers who know their own most precious thoughts and shape them into precious sentences which we treasure. But we are disappointed when we meet those writers for we find nothing more in the man than was revealed in the book. What I continually met in Orage was a mind whose range and depth could not be manifested fully even in the most brilliant journalism. He would not draw upon the magical weapons of the spirit to slay ephemera that could be killed by an epigram or a scornful sentence that revealed its stuffing of sawdust. As I came to more intimacy with his mind I found that his best wisdom had never been printed. There was hardly anything I made question of which he could not illuminate out of his own depths. Did I speak of the most profound aphorism of some Eastern sage, I found he was familiar with it and the fiery particle of thought had been already one of the lanterns in his mind. Was it the interpretation of a philosophy, a difficulty in the psychology of an intricate character, or the depths one discovers in meditation, he had a lamp within him which could illuminate the darkness. Almost everywhere I explored in his mind I found the long corridors lit. In the deeps behind that conscious mind which is related to the light of day, we create our own light, in the ardours of meditation and by the high and heaven-assailing will. There is never a light in those depths unless there have been struggle, labour, sacrifice, the internal conflict in which we make our nobilities out of our basenesses. The lights within us are only born out of a conflict in which somewhere in ourselves we have transmuted the dark, the opaque, and made them transparent. We get nothing for which we have not paid, and I surmise endless effort and groping within himself to have the house of his soul so lighted, that an adventurous friend like myself, exploring there, could find everywhere almost the comfort of the lit ways and the signs guiding onward.

I noticed the ready hospitality he gave to the thoughts of others. If he found in even a stumbling speech the germ of an idea he would take it, and rapidly as the phantom blossom flickers under the fingers of an Eastern fakir the idea would have grown to be a shapely thing in his mind. Laotze says "To see a thing in the germ, this I call intelligence," and Orage had that intelligence. It enabled him in the days of the New Age to discover much new talent, and I do not think I can remember him ever praising poor or pretentious work. I have no doubt he soon would have attracted to himself as brilliant a company in the New English Weekly.

I think sadly of those lights in the deeps of his mind which now shall never be brought to light our day. Of such a mind which never fully revealed itself there can be no adequate memorial. Yet I am certain that one who went through all that glittering journalism done from the years before the war could select a volume of aphorisms, profundities, subleties, political, economic, and cultural, which would be treasured by many, for in writing of the things that pass he was continually saying things that we would not like to pass or be forgotten. I hope some one of his many friends who knew him more intimately than I will try to make a collection of such memorabilia. If done rightly it would be a book to be kept by the bedside of economists, statesmen and writers and would not lightly be forgotten.

I had a feeling of loss when Orage gave up the New Age and went to America; I had a feeling of relief when he returned and started the New English Weekly; I had a feeling of very deep loss when I read of his death the other day. It was not a personal loss, for my meetings with him, over a period of some eighteen years, had been infrequent and in public places. It is something quite as disturbing as a private loss: it is a public loss.

Many people will remember Orage as the tireless and wholly disinterested evangelist of monetary reform; many will remember him as the best leader-writer in London—on Wednesday mornings I always read through the first part of the New English Weekly before attending to any other work. A smaller number will remember him, as R. H. C. of the New Age, as the best literary critic of that time in London. Some will remember him as the benevolent editor who encouraged merit and (what is still rarer) tolerated genius. He was something more than the sum of these. He was a man who could be both perfectly right and wholly wrong; but when he was wrong one respected him all the more, as a man who was seeking the essential things and therefore was unafraid of making a fool of himself—a very rare quality indeed. What was great about him was not his intelligence, fine as that was, but his honesty and his selflessness. Most of us have not the self-knowledge to realise how parasitic we are upon the few men of fixed principle and selfless devotion, how the pattern of our world depends, not so much upon what they teach us, but just upon their being there. But when a man like Orage dies, we ought to admit that his no longer being there throws us, for the time, into disarray; so that a more thorough reorganisation is necessary than we should have believed possible.

I don't think any interests can have been more remote from his than mine were in 1912–13. Greek poetry, its revival in the Renaissance, the French Symbolistes, and the beginnings of free verse in England were hardly the sort of thing he wanted to encourage. Nevertheless he published some of my versions of Latin-Italian poets and a series of articles (mighty juvenile) describing my first adventures in Italy. I have since suspected that he paid for these out of his own pocket. My own poems were too much for him, but in those days every editor in England thought likewise, and we had to go to Paris and the United States to be published at all. Orage who thoroughly disliked what we were trying to do used to write admirable critical articles rebuking us, with long quotations from Dr. Johnson. But he published us, he gave us a chance; what was more he paid us the compliment of taking us seriously. Who can forget or be ungrateful for such friendship and such services?

As an editor, Orage had the uncommon gift of inspiring contributors to do their best, often for no monetary reward. As a journalist, he wrote with remarkable clarity, vigour and independence. I think I admired his integrity most of all. With his great gifts he could easily have made a name and a large income if he had been willing to sell his convictions for the sake of a career. I can guess the temptations which must have come his way, and honour his memory for the courage with which he remained true to his convictions. Unconsciously such a man inspires younger men, sets them a standard. Orage did that for us. I wish I could say that I know of somebody to take his place.

I was grieved when I heard of his death. I wish he could have lived longer, I wish he could have received greater acknowledgment of his gifts and of his unceasing fight for what he believed to be the truth. As always, such regrets are useless. For my own part I shall not forget that Orage gave me encouragement and published my writings at a time when such help was valuable.

Once, when I was reading a collection of essays which had just been published. "What are you reading that for?" asked Orage. "I don't know," I replied, "but I find it very difficult to understand." "Then don't read any more," he went on, "men who write like that don't intend to be understood; they live by their obscurity." I believe it is true. Anyway, from that conversation I date my emancipation from learned ignorance.

When in 1906 he came up to town he welcomed my "Restoration of the Guild System" and together we attempted to start a propaganda organisation to advocate Guilds. But the attempt was premature. In those early days our co-operation was close; but a time came when our paths diverged. We discovered fundamental differences in our attitude towards life and society that could not be bridged; but we remained friends, and co-operated from time to time for immediate objects. Orage was a very satisfactory man to differ from, because one always knew exactly why; his incisive mind always probed everything to the bottom. As a result of this I discovered that every political and economic difference I had with him was to be traced to a philosophical difference.

Orage would respect differences of opinion provided one knew clearly why one differed from him. What he could not endure was woolliness; and he would not suffer fools gladly. His great achievement was to create a centre of free intellectual discussion which in our time has led to nothing less than a revolution in thought on social questions. Only those whose memory goes back before 1907 can realise the magnitude of that achievement. Free discussion was practically non-existent. If we live in a different atmosphere to-day it is to no small extent because of Orage, who was the first to break the ice and open a way for us. He was unequalled in exposition and intellectual courage. In one sense I feel I owe him everything, for he was the first to urge me to write, and to print what I wrote. His death is not only a public but a personal loss, and I shall always cherish his memory.

Death brings in its train a hundred poor activities for the most adjacent friends. It is in the first pause from these that I write.

I do not write only of Orage, but of his friends—they are all that remains of him. They are that life of him which is still continuing—that part of ourselves which we owe to him is still Orage.

The defect of obituary reference is its suggestion of impossible perfections. I do not wish to be guilty of this. I would merely say that there was in Orage a congeries of human qualities that invited one to believe in and work for some perfections.

He evoked in all the respect which goes to the effortless superiority of sheer personal fabric. I say in all—no enemy dispised him. I have fought him, but I have never differed with him on any matter of moment without ultimately, often with egotistical reluctance, arriving at the ground on which he stood. With him thought sprang panglessly from some hidden reservoir—there were none of the prematurities, the miscarriages of us others—his thoughts walked at birth, as much as it could be said of any man he was always right—his wrongnesses were local and temporary—his rightnesses were built for all time. Even his occasional despairs about life had the quality of making the living of it—what shall I say—a man's job! I have used the word "man" in a laudatory sense. All men are not admirable, but to be purely man in the intellectual area is admirable and rare. The masculinity of Orage was a beacon in an area in which a brilliant hermaphroditism is everywhere conquering. He was our leader and the leader is dead. What of us who were led?

Here was the secret standard by which we judged ourselves. I know now that over years of absence and with the width of the world between us I have always somehow sought the approval of a part of myself that owed what toughness it had to the influence of Orage. Now it can be said of us that we are alone in the world and for myself I will confess one thing—I have a suspicion that at the back of my thoughts I am vaguely trembling for my own safety. It is almost as though I were saying, "What is to become of me?"

It is not an insistent thought. If I take it out of the nebulousness which envelops it, it seems sheer nonsense. What can happen to me—I am a grown man. But in my depths I know that much can happen to me. I know that I may no longer resist the presence of evil things which his sheer presence made me think so worth resisting.

In a sense one quality in my life may deteriorate in his absence— addressing those scattered friends who feel as I do a sense of personal weakness I say "our lives." I know that what I say is no merely personal confession.

There is but one thing we can do. We can live as though our friend were alive—almost as though he had become us.

We cannot bring him back again, but we can keep here the things he left.

Those who acknowledge a debt to him can discharge it in only one way—through our continued allegiance to the things he served. Only by this one thing can we remember the wasteful implacability of Death.

His best monument is that the things he fostered shall continue to live.

I first met Orage in 1901. He was in his late twenties, and restive under the thrall of elementary school teaching, for although he was a born teacher, his setting under the Leeds educational authority was as incongruous as that of Swinburne at Eton, or Shelley at Oxford. Not that he was unhappy. Good health, a sense of superiority tempered with humour, and a genius for nonpossessive friendships, endowed him with a gaiety of spirit which he rejoiced to pass on to others as rapidly as it was generated. Inspired by this gay spirit he spent his evenings and week-ends teaching these strange doctrines to his older contemporaries.

Groups formed round him automatically. At one time for the reading and exposition of Plato. At another of Blavatzky. His interpretations of the "Secret Doctrine" and "Isis Unveiled" fluttered the dovecots of Theosophy. There were excursions also into the "Upanishads" and the "Bhagavat-Gita," and F.W.H. Myers and the Society for Psychical Research were pressed into the service of a new cosmology. Then came Nieztsche. That was my fault. Orage went over the top and so did the group. We all developed supermania. He wanted a Nietzsche circle in which Plato and Blavatzky, Fabianism and Hinduism, Shaw and Wells and Edward Carpenter should be blended, with Nietzsche as the catalytic. An exciting brew.

I was a Fabian and my heroes were William Morris and Bernard Shaw, a mixture which proves that I was the wrong sort of Fabian. I had taken Nietzsche in small doses as a stimulant for some time and found none to share my taste, until one Saturday night I lent Orage "Zarathustra." Next morning he walked from his cottage at Chapel Allerton to mine at Headingley with a new light in his eye. He had spent the night with "Zarathustra," and the time for action had come—and the Leeds Arts Club was born.

We worked together at this adventure (admitted by him long afterwards to have been the most enjoyable of his life) from 1902 to 1906. The Club made a noise which was heard and echoed in Hull and Bradford, although we never mustered more than 100 members, and our audiences were rarely that number, except when there was a lion hunt, and particularly on a famous occasion when the lion was G.B.S. The object of the Club was "to affirm the mutual dependence of Art and Ideas," with special application to Leeds and its sociological and æsthetical salvation. Leeds was amused but otherwise unmoved.

Up to that time Orage had looked upon mysticism as an end in itself. He repudiated purpose. He now turned one of his famous somersaults. The "inward light" and "the voice of the silence" were not abandoned, they were made to serve "practical imagination." He became nearly a militant. We devised a periodical, the "Path of Action," but it got no further than a sketch-dummy. We demanded a new aristocracy to guide a bewildered democracy into Utopia. Then came Penty from York with proposals for the restoration of the Guild System. We grabbed him and made him an honorary member, and out of this incident grew the idea of Guild Socialism, the forerunner of Social Credit in the "New Age."

He came to London in 1905. I followed next year. Our activities were re-united in the "New Age" and the Fabian Arts Group, which we looked upon as extensions of our work in Leeds. The partnership was dissolved in 1908. We remained friends to the end. And now he is dead. Orage is dead! A bright lamp has gone out.

Through all his mutations he was true to one master—Socrates. And as I stood by his coffin in Hampstead Church I thought of his favourite passage in the "Phædo": "How shall we bury you?" asked Crito. "As you please," Socrates answered, "only you must catch me first." We did not bury Orage last Friday: he will not die until those who knew him are dead—and perhaps not then.