which letters are a part. It is this quality of disinterestedness which makes him interested in good writing and clear thinking wherever they occur. It makes him hospitable to undergraduates and amateurs and foreigners; and at the same time it makes him merciless to their faults. He analyses the cult of youth in almost the same words as those of Benedetto Croce; he adds, "The once-born are creatures of pure circumstance, owing their youth to the accident of time alone; but the twice-born are self-creations defying time; they never grow old, though they are always growing up." These are necessary reflections in the course of a critical essay; it is impossible for Mr Orage ever to take his eyes for long away from the created work to worry about the youth or age of the artist. That is why new writers and unusual publications, The Dial and The Little Review among them, receive from Mr Orage a critical welcome depending upon their work alone. That is why, with Swift and Sterne as his acknowledged idols, he does not believe that the best has already been in English prose and writes with as much vigour of the English quietists as he does of Mr Ezra Pound who is alternately the villain and the hero of the first portion of the book.
I suggest that all of these characteristics are "not literary" because the professional literary life, as we know it, so markedly has ceased to be interested in letters and has devoted itself to the trivial exploitation of trivial ideas or to moral criticism. Mr Orage is a mystic, a philosopher and a religious man, one gathers; in his capacity as editor of The New Age he is eminently concerned with social reconstruction. These things are the background of the literary essays; they come naturally to the surface in the few which deal with politics, philosophy, and religion. But I do not often find him in the position of a pretender, using one thing as a pretext for another. In that, and in the simplicity with which he exposes an exceptional critical equipment, I find him superior to his contemporaries, both in his country and in ours.
