The New Age, June 25, 1914

So, in real life -100, the Archduke is dead but England hasn't really noticed the oncoming war yet. I need to rewind a little to catch the last issue of The New Age before the assassination:

This issue is significant because of its aggression against the avant-garde artists associated with other periodicals (though many have appeared in its pages). The always-vicious context-free essence of scissor-clipped bile that is "Current Cant" opens with salvos against Pound, Lewis, and Marinetti. I also noticed that they stab at Max Nordau and Holbrook Jackson. Nordau just because he's been cropping up lately. Jackson's more interesting: he was the co-founder of The New Age as a socialist paper, along with Orage, back in 1908. I'll try to dig up the reason for such a breakdown in relations.

I'm going to skim over the other stuff and focus on the issue-wide attack against non-representational avant-garde art.

"Readers and Writers" opens with a discussion of Richard Curle's new book on Conrad (a travelogue of his trip to Greece also occurs in this issue). My suspicion is that this was strategic, because clearly Orage wants to discuss Nevinson and the Futurists more, but doesn't want to dignify them with pride of place. Here's how he opens his analysis of Futurism:

"One of my colleagues  observed the other day that the defect of Futurism  is  that it  is a reaction against Art not against Life. It is a fine critical observation and  I wish  I had made it first. Hearing Messrs. Marinetti and Nevinson the other evening I was  struck by their fury against  their  predecessors  remote  and of yesterday. It was to distinguish themselves from  these  that  it  appeared their  campaign  was  being  undertaken.  This will never  do, for  to  be moved by art  is  just  not  to be moved by life" (181).

Here we see his problem, and it sounds familiar: the avant-garde is a reaction against institutionalized art, and can have no existence outside of this binary. Orage goes on to note that they also claim to have no thoughts about the immortality of their work, which makes it "vulgar." For Orage, the present is not an isolable temporal condition--art must contain the past and the future. Pound agrees in parallel publications in The Egoist, not mentioning Orage by name.

Orage continues: "What perhaps is of value  in  Futurism  is its affirmation of the claim of the age upon art. Use, its exponents say, the material of your own time for your art, for every other is more or less alien. There is something in this; but, once  more,  it  is  a question of insight. To see deeply into one’s contemporary life is to  see life much as it  has  always been and  always will be. Plato writing to-day would write much the same as  Plato  writing  two  thousand five hundred  years  ago. The dialect of truth does  not  alter much."

This is the fundamental difference: the Futurist vision is founded on the uniqueness of the times and the development of individual powers. Orage believes in a stasis of human nature, even across time and culture. 

Moving from Orage's relatively even-handed treatment to Hasting's satire, she takes down Nevinson's address in a segment of Pastiche titled "Wake Up England!" In it, she adopts Nevinson's bombastic voice and moves point by point through his speech, revealing how wrong Nevinson is by contrast. She uses Turner's "Steam Train" as a counterexample to their claims that their art is the only art that represents speed, and yes, "Steam Train" is very prescient of Giacomo Balla, at least. Even cooler, she draws cinema and photography into the discussion, anticipating parts of Benjamin's argument in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" here:

"People should constantly buy new pictures. A picture should never be lived with. Who could live with any picture ever painted ? Live, eating, drinking, sleeping, sitting, smoking, staring every instant at one picture? I, for  instance,  wouldn’t  have the Monna Lisa as a gift! Simply because I have seen her smile reproduced all round Europe. Of course, there is no difference between the smile as painted  by Da Vinci and  that reproduced by the camera ! As an  artist, I stake  my  reputation on this." (185).

She's talking about aura and the destruction of aura through mass production of representations of art, but pseudo-Nevinson's distaste for the real thing because of its proliferation is exactly what's being satirized here.

Last stop, The Egoist. C. E. Bechofer has been writing a mostly-irritating series on "Contemporaries," short sketches of people around London, and in this week's issue he lampoons The Egoist. Alas, the Modernist Journals Project doesn't seem to have gotten the joke, as their catalog lists Richard Aldington as the actual author when this is clearly (signed) satire (even Homer nods?).

(See page 186, or this brief digest):

Marsden for her incomprehensible a-morality
Aldington for his buddy-buddy relationship with people like F.S. Flint and the speed at which he swaps movements
Huntly Carter, for being Huntly Carter: " What is art ?” my Carter-hoarse  critics ask.  Let  me try  to explain to  their feeble intelligences. Art is Soul ! Soul is Art ! Soul is everything! Soul is pine-apples ! Art IS ! Pine-apples ARE !
Lastly, and brilliantly, they satirize The Egoist's correspondents: pinging at Joyce, Havelock Ellis, and The Egoist's tendency to self-celebrate in the correspondence columns.