SOURCE: Hynes, Samuel. “Orage and the New Age.” In Edwardian Occasions: Essays on English Writing in the Early Twentieth Century, pp. 39-47. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

In the following essay, originally published in 1968, Hynes finds that despite Orage's personal failings, he was ultimately a successful editor who published works from some of the most groundbreaking and original thinkers of the day.

Alfred Orage was a man who, as Shaw observed, ‘did not belong to the successful world’. He was an editor who never ran a profitable paper, a socialist who backed Guild Socialism against the Fabians, an economist who preached Social Credit against the Keynesians, a literary critic who found Ulysses repellent and disliked the poems of Yeats, a mystic who expected the Second Coming. In thirty years of public life he never supported a winning cause, or profited from a losing one; the movements that consumed...