SOURCE: Welch, Louise. “A. R. Orage.” Gurdjieff International Review 2, no. 3 (spring 1999): 1-2.

In the following essay, originally published in 1969, Welch details Orage's expertise in a myriad of fields while simultaneously demonstrating the esteem with which he was held by many literary figures of note.

The brilliant editor of the New Age, regarded by T. S. Eliot as London's best literary critic of his time, abandons his journal and is next heard of cleaning stables in the farmyard of a French chateau. The magnet is a then little-known Greek named Gurdjieff, called by some a mystic and by others a magician. How could that departure from his lifework be understood by the friends of Alfred Richard Orage in 1923?

“He was a man who could be both perfectly right and wholly wrong,” said Eliot, “but when he was wrong one respected him all the more, as a man who was...