NOT LITERARY
Readers and Writers. By A. E. Orage. 12mo. 177 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $1.75.
"MY original design," says Mr Orage, "was to treat literary events from week to week with the continuity, consistency, and policy ordinarily applied to comments on current political events; that is to say, with equal seriousness and from a similarly more or less fixed point of view as regards both means and end." It is useless to pretend that with or without such a design most writers of weekly causeries accomplish so much; and Mr Orage has accomplished it. The articles appeared in The New Age over the initials R. H. C. They are interesting in themselves and they are interesting as proof that the thing can be done.
Mr Orage hasn't outlined his policy and I shall not pretend to do it for him; a few general ideas recur so frequently that they may be accepted as dominant in his criticism. But the value of this republication of scattered essays is greater than the value of his ideas and is not seriously diminished by the extraordinary judgements which Mr Orage occasionally sets down. It seems incredible that any one could have called James Joyce a studio writer after The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and nearly one third of Ulysses had appeared; or that any one should have laughed, nothing but laughed, at Mr Strachey's Eminent Victorians. To another reader it may seem equally absurd to call Swift "the greatest English writer the world has yet seen"; to another the remarks about Mr Clive Bell may seem trivial. I think that points of dissent ought not to make it impossible for a reader to enjoy a critic; at least not until the critic's whims, idiosyncrasies, tastes, and judgements seem to erect themselves into a hostile system of ideas.
The idea to which Mr Orage returns with the fondest confidence is that the perfect English style is still to be written. This does not sound important, but it is important because it indicates that Mr Orage is interested in the thing he is writing about; unlike many others he is not using letters as a pretext for lectures or propaganda on any subject whatever—with the possible exception of culture, of
