Katherine Mansfield and Edwin Muir in the New Age

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Chapter 5 We Moderns: Katherine Mansfield and Edwin Muir in the New Age

Chris Mourant

In 1911, Holbrook Jackson privately printed a book of aphorisms titled Plati- tudes in the Making, which he circulated amongst his close friends. In the copy given to G.K. Chesterton are a series of jottings made in green ink under each of Jackson’s aphorisms, a response either endorsing or emphatically rejecting each maxim with an alternative. Under ‘He who reasons is lost’, for instance, Chesterton wrote: ‘He who never reasons is not worth finding’ (Jackson and Chesterton 19). Beneath ‘Don’t think – do’, he declared: ‘Do think! Do!’ (19). In this text, the Christian apologist challenges the enthusiast of Nietzsche’s Dio- nysian philosophy. For these writers, aphorisms not only enabled the display of individual linguistic wit, but also provided a common ground for debate: the form is inherently dialogic, inviting either identification, or the articulation of a radically alternate point of view. And it is not coincidental that both Jackson and Chesterton were regular contributors to the New Age at this time, a periodical that invited such dialogic exchanges and positioned the aphorism as a form synonymous with modernity. Together with Alfred Richard Orage, Jackson became co-editor of the New Age in 1907. This magazine became hugely important in disseminating and pro- moting aphoristic writing in the early twentieth century. Young writers were encouraged to develop their craft by composing aphorisms for publication in the periodical; as such, the aphorism form became associated in the New Age with a new generation of modernist writers and their developing ideas of the ‘modern’. Launched in 1894 as a Christian Socialist weekly, Orage and Jackson bought the New Age with the financial backing of George Bernard Shaw and a Theosophist banker, Lewis Alexander Wallace, with the aim of turning it into a journal that would present modern, socialist perspectives on contemporary politics, literature, and art. While Jackson was co-editor of the New Age for only the first volume of the ‘New Series’, Orage continued to edit the periodical until 1924, making it one of the most important publication venues for the develop- ment and dissemination of modernist literature and culture. Katherine Mansfield’s first published stories in England appeared in the New Age between 1910 and 1911. In 1921, she sent a letter to Orage recognising

Katherine Mansfield and Edwin Muir in the New Age 95 his influence, calling him ‘my master’ and stating: ‘you taught me to write, you taught me to think; you showed me what there was to be done and what not to do’ (Collected Letters 4:177). When Orage founded the New English Weekly in 1932, he received hundreds of letters expressing a similar sentiment to Mans- field, crediting him with helping to foster literary talent in the old days of the New Age. Ashley Dukes, for instance, wrote: ‘They were grand years from 1907 to 1914, when so many of us were doing our apprenticeship under your shrewd direction’. About the New Age, E.H. Visiak recalled: ‘How well one remembers the enthusiasm of the new writers it attracted! How many a name, now famous, it brought to light!’ And, about the periodical, S.G. Hobson concluded: ‘It is uni- versally recognised that it was the most stimulating and formative influence of that period’.1 After Orage’s death in 1934, the New English Weekly published a memorial issue of tributes to its late editor from a range of writers and artists, including Shaw, Chesterton, Ezra Pound, Augustus John, H.G. Wells, Richard Aldington, Herbert Read, John Middleton Murry, Eric Gill, Storm Jameson, and Edwin Muir. In his contribution to this memorial issue, T.S. Eliot notes that Orage’s death ‘is a public loss’, while arguing that he would be remembered ‘as the best literary critic of that time in London’, and ‘the benevolent editor who encouraged merit and (what is still rarer) tolerated genius’ (‘Orage: Memories’ 100). The New Age functioned as the print equivalent of the community of writers and thinkers that Orage and Jackson had first brought together with the estab- lishment of the Leeds Arts Club in 1903. Inviting the leading literary figures of the day to speak, such as Chesterton, Shaw, Wells, W.B. Yeats, Edward Carpen- ter, and Wyndham Lewis, among many others, the Leeds Arts Club reflected the commitment of Orage and Jackson to bringing the latest political and aesthetic ideas out of the metropolitan centre of London to the provinces. Like- wise, the New Age helped to foster the literary talents of young writers from peripheral spaces, such as Edwin Muir, originally from the Orkney Islands, and Mansfield, originally from New Zealand. Like the Leeds Arts Club, the New Age sought to encourage debate and dialogue between writers. Ann Ardis has analysed how the periodical stoked competing visions of modernity and modernism by publishing ‘writers side by side with articles challenging their work’, including ‘visual and verbal parodies of modernist texts, artists, and manifestos; columns by the editor and other regular contributors questioning specific aesthetic precepts; and letters to the editor that continued debate about such concerns from one issue to the next’

1 Ashley Dukes, E.H. Visiak, and S.G. Hobson. Letters to A.R. Orage. File 22. bc MS 20c Orage. Alfred R. Orage Archive. Special Collections, University of Leeds, Leeds. 3 July 2015.