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The New English Weekly, 6 (15 Nov 1934) 100 1

I had a feeling of loss when Orage gave up the New Ageand went to America; I had a feeling of relief when he returned and started the New English Weekly; I had a feeling of very deep loss when I read of his death the other day. It was not a personal loss, for my meetings with him, over a period of some eighteen years, had been infrequent and in public places. It is something quite as disturbing as a private loss: it is a public loss. 2

Many people will remember Orage as the tireless and wholly disinterested evangelist of monetary reform; many will remember him as the best leader-writer in London – on Wednesday mornings I always read through the first part of the New English Weeklybefore attending to any other work. A smaller number will remember him, as R. H. C. of the New Age, as the best literary critic of that time in London. 3 Some will remember him as the benevolent editor who encouraged merit and (what is still rarer) tolerated genius. He was something more than the sum of these. He was a man who could be both perfectly right and wholly wrong; but when he was wrong one respected him all the more, as a man who was seeking the essential things and therefore was unafraid of making a fool of himself – a very rare quality indeed. What was great about him was not his intelligence, fine as that was, but his honesty and his selflessness. Most of us have not the self-knowledge to realise how parasitic we are upon the few men of fixed principle and selfless devotion, how the pattern of our world depends, not so much upon what they teach us, but just upon their being there. But when a man like Orage dies, we ought to admit that his no longer being therethrows us, for the time, into disarray; so that a more thorough reorganisation is necessary than we should have believed possible.

t. s. eliot

Published By:   Faber & Faber logo    Johns Hopkins University Press

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