SOURCE: "The Greatness of Gurdjieff," in The Saturday Book, Vol. 10, 1951, pp. 86-91.

In the following essay, Walker provides an appreciation of Gurdjieff.

What constitutes a great man? In the past I have often asked my friends this question and none of them have ever been able to give me a satisfactory answer. It is a searching question because actually we know far less about the nature of man than about anything else. It is easy to describe the good points of a horse, but we can only define the qualities of a great man if we know the direction in which it is possible for man to evolve, and there is no agreement on this subject.

Because they have no clear ideas about it, novelists come badly to grief whenever they attempt to describe the superman or the more highly evolved human being. After James Hilton, in Lost...