There was, indeed, I have always thought, a streak of morbid eccentricity in Brown’s intellectual make-up. A careful reader of his letters will notice many moods of fierce exaltation engendered by wholly inadequate and inexplicable causes. His sudden death was perhaps a blessing in disguise.
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There are in London two or three men, not known to the general public, whose influence on modern thought is most profound and most disturbing. Of these men A. R. Orage, the editor of The New Age, is quite the most distinguished. What circulation his paper enjoys, I do not know; it cannot be large; probably it is not more than two or three thousand; perhaps it is not even so much as that. But the men and women who read it are men and women who count—people who welcome daring and original thought, who hold important positions in the civic, social, political and artistic worlds, and who eagerly disseminate the seeds of thought they pick up from the study of The New Age. Tens of thousands of people have been influenced by this paper who have never even heard its name. It does not educate the masses directly: it reaches them through the medium of its few but exceedingly able readers.
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]The New Age is professedly a Socialist organ, but the promulgation of socialistic doctrines is only a part of its policy and work. Its literary, artistic and musical criticism is the sanest, the bravest and the most brilliant that can be read in England. It reverences neither power nor reputation; it is subtle and unsparing; and, if it is sometimes cruel, it is cruel with a purpose. All sleek money-makers in Art have reason to fear Orage, for his rapier wit may at any moment glance and slide between their ribs and release the hot air that is at once the inspiration and the material of all their works.
Orage has more than a touch of genius. It was Baudelaire (wasn’t it?) who said that genius was the power to look upon the world with the eyes of a child. Well, Orage has the all-seeing, non-rejecting eyes of a child. He has also the eternal spirit of youth. One cannot imagine him growing old. Perhaps his most interesting characteristic is his power of attracting and holding friends; he is the most hero-worshipped of men. Having once given his friendship, however, he exacts the utmost loyalty; treachery is the one sin that can never be forgiven.
I knew Orage years ago, when he was still in Leeds teaching the young idea how to shoot. He was then a prominent member of the Theosophical Society and lectured a good deal—and rather dangerously, I think—on Nietzsche. His gospel, always preached with his tongue in his cheek, that every man and woman should do precisely what he or she desires, acted like heady wine on the gasping and enthusiastic young ladies who used to sit in rows worshipping him. They wanted to do all kinds of terrible things, and as Orage, backed by “that great German,” Nietzsche, had sanctioned their most secret desires, they were resolved to begin at once their career of licence. They used to “stay behind” when the lectures were over, and question Orage with their lips and [132] ]invite him with their eyes, and it used to be most amusing and a little pathetic to listen to the gay and half-veiled insults with which Orage at once thwarted and bewildered his silly devotees.
He had in those days a wonderful gift of talking a most divine nonsense—a spurious wisdom that ran closely along the border-line of rank absurdity. The “cosmic consciousness” of Walt Whitman was a great theme of his, and Orage, in his subtle, devilishly clever way, would lead his listeners on to the very threshold of occult knowledge—and leave them there, wide-eyed and wonder-struck.
I have never known an editor more jealous of the reputation of his paper than Orage is of The New Age. No consideration of friendship would induce him to print a dull article, however sound, and when one of his contributors becomes sententious, or slack, or banal—out he goes, neck and crop. Among the contributors to The New Age I remember writers as different in mental calibre as John Davidson and Edward Carpenter, Frank Harris and Cecil Chesterton, Arnold Bennett and Janet Achurch. These and scores of equally distinguished people have written for Orage. Why? For money? Well, scarcely; The New Age’s rates of pay must be very modest. For what, then? They have written because in The New Age they can tell the unadulterated truth and because they are proud to see their work in that paper.
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To many people Norman Angell is a rather sinister figure, and the people who attack him most violently to-day are precisely those who praised him most when he wrote his first book. He has been overpraised and spoilt. His intellectual attainments are not greatly above the average, and his thinking is not always honest. In the early days of the war it used to be amusing to see him working among his spectacled and yellow-skinned [133] ]assistants; he was small but magisterial, and he was always tucking sheets of foolscap into long envelopes and looking very important as he did so. I really believe that in those days of August, 1914, he had a vague idea that he and his helpers could stop the war at any moment they chose. Certainly, he was very cross with the war. Europe was behaving in her old, mad way without having previously consulted him.