Uncommon Sense

THE ART OF READING--A. R. Orage-- Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

For 15 years Alfred Richard Orage was editor of the London New Age. This book is a selection of his literary criticism published there. Rational, skeptical, lucid, Critic Orage looks to common sense as his guide. Says he: "In its simplest form common sense is the sustained resolve of the mind to hold nothing as true that is not implicit in the common mind. . . . Young man, I say, first learn to write common sense; then study to be wise, and beauty will afterwards be added to you." The role of the critic is to train writers ("Artists are born, but critics make them"), but criticism, says Critic Orage. is today in a parlous state: " . . As good writers exist today as at any time, save the greatest in our history, but . . . our critics are, without exaggeration, the worst ever known in any world of letters."

An example of Critic Orage's own criticism (of a passage by Paradoxologist Gilbert Keith Chesterton): "Read one after the other in the ordinary way, they [the paradoxes] stun the mind like a series of shocks; no meaning can survive them. And considered sentence by sentence they scarcely repay the trouble."

Critic Orage, 57, was born in Yorkshire, England. Great & good friend of the late great Katherine Mansfield, he was the first to print her stories. Other contributors to the New Age: Dikran Kouyoumdjian (Michael Arlen), Jack Collings Squire, W. L. George, Llewelyn Powys. During his editorship, 54 books were dedicated to him. Orage now lives in Manhattan, lectures on the art of writing, on the psychological methods of Religionist Georges Gurdjieff (TIME, March 24). Other books by him: An Alphabet of Economics; Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism; Friedrich Nietzsche; The Dionysian Spirit of the Age; Consciousness: Animal, Human and Superhuman; Readers and Writers.

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