The New Age, April 9 1914

It often happens that the journals I read lead me to other texts. Their combination of curation and criticism, combined with their dialogic nature, means the art happening out of the journal is often as important as the art within it. This week's The New Age is an example of this. Orage's (I believe)  "Present Day Criticism" is a fascinating, socially engaged close reading of a poem by J.C. Squire. It in turn is a pretty amazing poem. I had to find it after beginning Orage's column. Here's the link to it on Project Gutenberg, click on this link to open Squire's poems and search "in a restaurant." The poem's title is "Ode: In a Restaurant," and it has Orage up in arms, performing one of the closest readings that I have found of a poem of length in any periodical so far. Quick synopsis: a poet drinking whiskey at the restaurant muses over his transcendental powers, but moves from scorn to empathy with the proprietors and servers, muses over the globalization of food that the restaurant represents, and finally surrenders to mundane reality. Orage opens by explaining that the poem is a satirical soliloquy of a modern poet, "carried out even to  realistic extreme in reproduction of the alternating metrical order and disorder which betrays the nerves scorified..." (720). Squire's poem is on the psychology of modernism, then, reproduced down to form from an observer. This is part of the satirical tradition of modernism that is so vibrant in The New Age, and its importance might be hinted at by the fact that Orage almost never likes a poem outside of TNA: the poem was published in The New Statesman, a journal not stocked by the MJP, but maybe I'll try to find it. It's a kind of proto-Prufrock, down to the music from the farther room:

The weak unsatisfied strain
        Of a band in another room;
        Through this dull complex din
        Comes winding thin and sharp!
        The gnat-like mourning of the violin,
        The faint stings of the harp.
        The sounds pierce in and die again,
Like keen-drawn threads of ink dropped into a glass
Of water, which curl and relax and soften and pass.
Briefly the music hovers in unstable poise,
Then melts away, drowned in the heavy sea of noise.
        And I, I am now emasculate.
        All my forces dissipate;
        Conquered by matter utterly,
        Moving not, willing not, I lie,
        Like a man whom timbers pin
        When the roof of a mine falls in.

I think that's excellent. I think one of the reasons Orage writes so much about this poem is that it is a moving target, a serious satire, a dramatic monologue, a psychological romantic poem that is about material goods. Here's what I mean: "This piece, as a satire, is terrible. The author spares never. We are made to hear the last words of the damned man, word of cynicism against self, and everything else. The poet knows that henceforth he is tied henceforth to his inexorable ame-damnee: 'Fool! Exert your will/ Finish your whiskey up, and pay your bill" (720). That's just a taste of the essay. Hopefully it is sufficient to give a quick taste, and anyone who wants more can go find it. One last note: Orage interprets this poem through his politics. It's very much a socialist reading, what we'd now call Marxist criticism, as the depicted consciousness's relationship to material culture is the whole point. 

I'm going to write more about that poem in this journal, but not here or now. Moving on to the issue as a whole, I noticed that this is another of those special New Age-s that has a loosely defined, central concern. This time it is about the relationship between the producer and the produced. I'll do my usual quick notes with that in mind.

"Notes of the Week" continues discussion of the Curragh incident, in which British troops made it known that they would not attack Ulster (more complicated than that, sorry for abbreviating). The New Age suggests that this fracture between what the army wants and what the troops will do marks the time for a general revolution. Amazing. This kind of instability, right before WWI breaks out.

A. J. Penty writes on economic reform, revolution, and Fabianism vs. Medievalism. Thesis: value in life is from a positive relationship to work, which will require a guild system.

Orage jokes about Henry James as biographer in "Readers and Writers," claiming that James would be his  choice to write the life of Orage. Jokes aside, there is a fascinating passage just past that explains TNA's view of contemporary literature:

Readers occasionally find fault with THE NEW AGE for apparently having no literary policy-as if you had only to sit down and imagine a policy and then proceed to expound it. But a policy is not arrived at in that way. That way lies idiosyncrasy. To formulate a  true policy, two things  are required-first, a good standard, and, secondly,  a perceptible drift and tendency in one’s age. While aiming to possess good standards, I affirm that our age is for the present too distracted and puzzled to have any particular tendency. Our writers are revolving very busily on their axes, and some, even, set off for somewhere; but who can say that so much as a  school are  going in the  same direction? (722).

As a so-called scholar of "modernism," this is interesting because it shows that even the most well-read critics of the time did not see any unifying features of modernism. His chosen example is "energetics," apparently suggested by Gosse as a common feature of modernism. Sounds right: modernism is about energy, which would gather Futurism, nascent Vorticism, etc. underneath a single umbrella. Orage, though, points out that there are anti-energetic poets (his example: Tagore). Whether or not Orage really thinks this, it highlights the murkiness of being contemporary.

Anthony Ludovici contributes an essay critiquing the arts and crafts movement directly, especially the furniture of Romney Green. He finds it clunky and impractical, and using this failure to call for more and better craft.

Walter Sickert eulogizes Spencer Frederick Gore as a "Perfect Modern." Another definition.

Much more, as always, remains in the issue. I've neglected these student essays, though, for too long. Until next time--