Gurdjieff and Orage

Chapter One

1873–1922

THE MYSTIC OF FLEET STREET

"New Age No Wage"

He who attempts to penetrate into the Rose Garden of the Philosophers without the key resembles a man who would walk without feet.

—Atalanta Fugiens¹

It is easily assumed by historians that Orage led a perilously divided life trying to reconcile urgent interests in esoteric lore with a journalistic career whose main thrust was to have art serve economic and political reform. I will argue in the pages that follow that there was no essential conflict between these interests in Orage's mind and, ultimately, in his varied activities. Orage sensed and promoted a collaboration between these two vectors of his energy in the service of the world in general, and England and America (as he called the United States) in particular. From the moment he began his career as an editor in London, he strove to bring art, economy, and esotericism into a public harmony. To these, eventually, he joined the private pleasure of family. Everything he did in his life up to the moment he left England in October 1922 for Paris and Gurdjieff, prepared him for this consolidation of energies. It is to demonstrate that point that I present the following review of Orage's London career.

The cultural atmosphere of the London to which Orage went from Leeds in 1906 is known blandly by cultural historians as Edwardian. Although the vibrancy of the metropolis in the early days of the century belies the typical portrait of the post-Victorian monarchs, Edward VII and George V, like their reigns, their age was one of crucial shifts in artistic, social, and political change. Decadence, pre-Raphaelite aesthetics, art for art's sake, and naturalism were giving way to the impressionism, imagism and vorticism that underlie what critics now call modernism, the prevailing artistic thrust in entre-guerre Europe. This was an age in which American writers, profiting from a healthy growth of native impulses, brought fresh perspectives back across the Big Pond to republican France and Italy, and to their formerly alienated English cousins. Among the Americans already abroad before Orage set up editorial shop in London were William Dean Howells and Mabel Dodge who branched out from New York and Paris to Italy, Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney, who flourished in France, and Mark Twain, James Whistler, Stephen Crane, Harold Frederic, and Henry James, whose talents enriched English soil. In the next wave came Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Courtenay Lemon (Djuna Barnes' ex-husband), and John Gould Fletcher. Orage played literary and philosophical guide to them all. It was Pound, in 1913, who introduced Frost to Orage, beginning an acquaintance that lasted through Orage's New York years. Not every American literary aspirant found Orage receptive. Raymond Chandler, later to become America's best-known crime writer, was working for the Daily Express in London when he asked Orage to consider a couple of short pieces. Orage thought they showed talent, but didn't fit The New Age format.

Orage's literary activities in London with The New Age did not include, but rather steered toward, the two grand projects that would occupy his life after World War I—Major Douglas's Social Credit and Gurdjieff's Harmonious Development. Socialism of one kind or another had been noticeably in the air since the middle of the 19th-century. In Orage's cultural milieu, the social reform conceptions of Morris and Ruskin were lively topics of discussion. The Fabian Society, named after the Roman warrior-statesman Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, was formed in 1884 to promote social reform by peaceful means, rather than through the violence of revolution that Marx had predicted. Five years after its founding on 15 February 1889, Oscar Wilde, who had been attracted to Fabian Socialism by George Bernard Shaw, wrote a review of Edward Carpenter's Chants of Labour, in which he quipped: To make men socialists is nothing, but to make socialism human is a great thing.²

Orage, whose Fabian sympathies had prompted his founding of the Leeds Art Club, collaborated with Arthur J. Penty to establish a Fabian Arts Society in London. Furthermore, he made it his mission later in The New Age to present a program of humane social egalitarianism in the service of economic and political reform. In Leeds, between 1896 and 1902, Orage wrote some seventy-five items for the weekly Labour Leader. Although almost all were reviews of the literary scene in Britain and the United States, there was a generous sprinkling of articles on social and philosophical questions, and one poem of his own, Hide and Seek.³ From 1902 until 1907, he was a regular contributor to the Theosophical Review (some thirty-five articles).

In the name of egalitarian justice, Orage, very soon after his arrival in London, took up the suffragette cause with Beatrice Hastings. He wrote Women Leading On for the Theosophical Review in January 1907, the same issue in which he reviewed The Gospel of Gnosis. This was followed, in the next issue, by In defense of Agnosticism. These three articles incited letters criticizing Orage's stance on gender and religion. Two months later, Orage drew considerable public attention, if not scorn, for being the only male arrested along with some seventy-five women who stormed the House of Commons in the spring of 1907 under the wondering gazes of Lloyd George and Herbert Gladstone. He was duly sentenced to fourteen days in jail.⁴

Early in his life, Orage read Ruskin as a sensible man committed to badly needed reforms, rather than as the poetic visionary others saw in him.⁵The fin-du-siècle medievalism of William Morris and the innovative forms of art nouveau attracted Orage toward Penty's project to restore the medieval guild system.⁶ With S. G. Hobson (1868–1940), Orage reshaped Guild Socialism out of principles of Ruskin and Morris⁷ to center attention on medieval localism—the interlocking interests of all those engaged in a single industry. Such a structure for economic exchange would repeal, they hoped, the invidious effects of modern industrialism.⁸ Between 1907 and 1913, in his regular The New Age column, Unedited Opinions, Orage wrote several articles on Socialism, economics, and trade unionism, which Orage called the egg liberty laid in capitalism to destroy the wage system.⁹ In his private life, he initiated exchanges with leading reformers of his day, such as the American Upton Sinclair, and H. G. Wells.¹⁰At this time, Orage and other far sighted social critics like Wells were recognized as imaginative activists challenging old-guard Fabians,¹¹ one of whom was Orage's sponsor, Shaw.¹² Articles in The New Age throughout 1910 and 1911 indeed suggested that a New Age was, in fact, at hand.¹³

Seven months after the first issue of The New Age was published, Jackson surrendered sole proprietorship of the journal to Orage, partly because Orage refused to take in advertising and partly because Shaw refused to put up more money and to contribute copy gratis. Not only did Shaw feel that Orage's drift away from Fabianism left The New Age politically powerless, but Orage had written a study of Shaw to which Mrs. Shaw took exception. Orage withdrew it from publication. Finally, in 1913, Shaw and Sidney Webbs founded The New Statesman to take up the cause they felt Orage had deserted.¹⁴

Although he never made any money from sales, Orage worked tirelessly to encourage new talent and stir up new social and critical issues. He introduced Katherine Mansfield to his public in 1910; Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Keith Chesterton were early contributors. Llewelyn Powys, brother of John Cowper Powys, got his first encouragement from Orage in 1914. Orage opened his journal to almost any writer who was motivated by the good and the just. Pound, who joined Orage in 1911, observed that he demanded from his writers only an ideograph of the good.¹⁵ He also looked for the new, and Orage's own articles in 1918 and 1919 on Jung and Freud were among the first on psychoanalysis to appear in the British press. He had, himself, written on Nietzsche in 1908, and, in 1909, on women's suffrage. In 1912, he voiced a New View of Women. To justify the eclectic mix of art with economic and political commentary in the pages of The New Age, Orage wrote in 1912: The literature and art of today are the parallels of the economic situation of today.¹⁶

More than two thirds of Orage's articles were on literary subjects, many of which were collected and published as The Art of Reading in 1930. He was one of the few critics to take particular interest in the development of American literature and language. As early as 1916, he had reviewed H[enry] L[ewis] Mencken's critical writing on English literature, and The Little Review solicited a review of Henry James. His good reading command of French gave him critical access to French literature as well, and in 1916, he wrote about Stendhal on Love. He was among the first to recognize in print the talent of the Bulgarian-born Armenian novelist Michael Arlen [Dikran Kouyouomdjian], who became a good friend. All in all, critics agreed that The New Age was, for its day, the most brilliant journal that has ever been written in English.

In National Guilds, written in December 1913, Orage exposed the imbalance in British labor between goods and services and its effect on national policy. A commodity is something that has exchange value, he wrote; labour is priceless, and therefore, its value cannot be expressed. . . . Economic power precedes political power.¹⁷ Orage's appreciation of Ruskin's convictions about the cultural responsibility of art allowed him to depreciate current romantic claims for the autonomy of literature. He advised John Gould Fletcher, for example, to abandon the Romantics and read Walt Whitman.¹⁸ In The New Age, in 1915 he made the oft-quoted statement that art includes utility, but it also transcends utility.¹⁹ As one critic observes: Orage used Ruskin in his eclectic program to anesthetize socialist attempts at reform.²⁰

In effect, Orage's economics had their origin in his early reading in Plato, but they were shaped by his reading of John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), whose Essay on Some Unsettled Questions in Political Economy (1844) discussed the influence of consumption on production and the relation between wages and profit. Even closer to Orage's eventual interests was Mill's Principles of Political Economy (1848), which attacked a policy of distribution of goods and monies that condemned the laboring class to penury. Like Mill, Orage developed an economic theory that involved broad humanitarian interests. Ezra Pound, writing out of Orage's thoughts near the end of the war, explained: "Fundamentally I do not care ‘politically,’ I care for civilization, and I do not care who collects the taxes, or who polices the thoroughfares. Humanity is a collection of individuals, not a whole divided into segments or units. The only things that matter are the things which make individual life more interesting."²¹ Of course, for Orage, art in general and literature in particular were the primary things making life interesting, but social survival came first. He identified his own interests with the predicament of the working class and the causes of poverty. A starving man needs food, not instruction, he wrote in 1912. A year later, in his popular column Readers and Writers, he proclaimed that literature affects life for better or worse.²²

Under Orage, The New Age probed with intense urgency the relation of socialism to art and philosophy. Orage considered political and economic problems inseparable from the problems of culture as a whole. On 10 October 1912, he wrote: If I were asked upon what I rely for the renaissance of England, I should say a miracle, but it does not follow that because we cannot define the cause of miracles, miracles are not therefore to be understood. They can be understood easily enough if they are regarded as works of art instead of works of logic. . . . We can both divine what it will be and prepare for its coming.²³ His first biographer remarks that Orage, above all else, sought to cooperate with the purposes of life, to enlist in that noble service, the help of serious students of the new contemplative and imaginative order.²⁴ In 1914, Orage was known throughout London's cultural circles as a man of the highest imaginative order and taste. The gifted Augustus John cried out, when his project for Ormande Terrace was being debated, We ought to have Orage as dictator.²⁵ Looking back to that time forty years later, Pound considered Orage a quintessential Englishman: Wonder was the ANY english or if Orage (with a French spelling) was the ONLY englander cent pure.²⁶ For John Cowper Powys, who preferred American openness to English snobbery, Orage restored faith in his origins. When I beguiled Mr. Orage to come to tea with me in our ramshackle alley, he wrote, all my fancies about English snobbishness seemed to melt away. This subtle critic struck me as one who might have been wearing a friar's cord under his discreet dress.²⁷

It is deceptively easy to say from all this that Orage was committed to the elevation of the public weal, as Pound recalled vividly after his death:

Orage wrote into a public that had been blindfolded by generations of books produced under the heel of the profit system, fouled by the mentality of decades oppressed by university and educational systems warped by the profit system, by a bureaucracy of education, the bureaucrat being a man who avoids dangerous knowledge, who can almost indefinitely refrain from taking, officially, cognisance of anything whatsodamnever that is likely to disturb his immediate comfort or expose him to the least convenience or ridicule. . . . There were, and are, arrears of learning for the public to make up, and against this siltage Orage battled until his last heart gripe. It was the sea of stupidities, not a clear sea, it was the bog, the mud storm, the quicksand of obfuscation.²⁸

Orage's commitment to human relations was more than a public editorial principle. He manifested it in all of his personal relations. Most of the testimonies about his personal relations come from those he advanced in their careers as their reader and editor. John Gould Fletcher recalled that, as a critic, Orage was neither contemptuous nor condescending.²⁹ Pound praised Orage as "that necessary and rare person, the moralist in criticism: not the inquisitor who tries to impose [his] morals upon literature, but the critic who perceives the moral of literature.³⁰ As a recent observer remarks: Orage sought to collapse the aesthetic realm—not by undermining its claims for value—but by expanding it not only beyond the writing of literary genres but also beyond writing itself. This was the ultimate goal of Orage's journalism."³¹ Though Orage habitually denigrated journalism as a form of art, he raised his own to the level of a literary genre comparable to its 18thcentury status. Perhaps Pound was thinking of a basic value of The New when he said, in a letter to Scofield Thayer, the editor of Dial, in November, 1920: A magazine is important in proportion to amount of good stuff it prints which wd. not be printed (or even written), if the magazine did not exist.³²

Few profited more from Orage's humanity than Pound. Although The New Age was known to it contributors affectionately and less affectionately as No Wage (because Orage, instead of paying fees, promised not to censor contributions), Orage involved himself personally in the welfare of his associates. Pound includes in his draft for Canto CXI a glance at Orage's compassione, which identified the extent to which Orage's humanitarianism must have stood for Pound as the antithesis to [Wyndham] Lewis's scorn for ‘the herd.’³³ Pound recalled, in a letter dated 25 October 1919 to John Quinn, that Orage, of course, willing to do anything he can for me.³⁴ Anything consisted, for some years, in their collaboration of four guineas a month as a sort of salary—not much, but Pound managed to live on it. He wrote from Rapallo to John Drummond on 30 May 1934: Orage's 4 guineas a month . . . was the SINEWS, by gob the sinooz.³⁵ He went on to say that: he did more to feed me than anyone else in England, and I wish anyone who esteems my existence would pay back whatever they feel is due to its stalvarrdt sustainer.³⁶ More significantly, Orage protected Pound from a hostile British public who resented the American's attacks on British cultural tastes. With the exception of The New Age, the English press was closed to Pound, but Orage remained loyal to Pound's talent, and to his editorial conscience. Orage tried to steer him [Pound] to literary subjects, notes Leon Surette, but Pound clung stubbornly to his platform for vituperation.³⁷

In effect, as he had done for others, Orage shaped Pound for the brilliant career awaiting him. As a recent critic reflects: Orage's common sense, clarity of insight, and ready criticism were crucial stabilizing influences for Pound, and once they were removed, Pound's decline into confusions and self-deception was swift. Both in introducing Pound to new intellectual interests and in opening his eyes to new dimensions of interests that they found they already held in common, Orage more than anyone else provided Pound with his real ‘postgraduate education.’³⁸

Furthermore, Orage instilled in Pound a fundamental optimism about human nature and a belief in the basic decency of ordinary people, all of this despite fundamental differences in their points of view concerning literature. Orage described Pound in The New Age on 3 October 1918 as one of the most gifted, slovenly, arrogant and spirited writers of our day.³⁹ Pound himself reflected years later: For twentythree years I don't think that either of us ever took the other seriously as a critic of letters, and now thinking of it in retrospect, I wonder how far the difference of view was a mere matter of the twelve years between us.⁴⁰

The Great War, 1914–1918, changed Orage's economic views, as well as, in general, his philosophical views. He had not believed a war was possible, but when it loomed large on the horizon in August 1914, he championed England's role in it, because England is necessary to Socialism, as Socialism is necessary to the world.⁴¹ When the war had begun, however, he lamented that England was compelling the poor to fight for the rich in war as they sweat for the rich in peace.⁴² A week later, he wrote on the tension between Civilisation and War. Orage saw that the war continued the same class struggle abroad that marked English society at home. In March 1916, he launched an attack on the wartime banking system and the Bank of England's issuing of treasury notes.⁴³ In April, he focused on The Ethic of War. In a lengthy series of fifteen articles written throughout 1916 and 1917, Notes on Economic Terms, he elaborated on the relationship between labor, war, and profits. In August 1918, he observed that, since credit is really the dominant form of economic power, the ordinary people should have access to it, rather than industry alone.⁴⁴ As Pound cogently puts it, he was a moralist, and then an economist.⁴⁵

Throughout the war, Orage continued his attack on the inequality between service and sacrifice. Men, not capital, were conscripted, and, while lives were being lost in the trenches, profits were being made in industry. From the battlefield, between November 1915 and March 1916, at Orage's urging, T. E. Hulme contributed war notes to The New Age, before he was killed at the front. By autumn 1918, Orage noted, over 50 percent of British infantrymen in France were under 19 years of age. At home, Orage fought against a censorship of the press that limited his dialectic against social inequalities. In September 1916, he wrote: The power of the Daily Press is the power of the rich men who own and control it, claiming that the articulation of truth is impeded if the truth threatens interests of the privately wealthy.⁴⁶

Orage's articulation of truth acquired a new ally in Major Clifford Hugh Douglas, a former engineer and a proponent of Guild Socialism who, attracted by Orage's articles on economic disparities, submitted an article to Orage in 1916. Orage, taken by Douglas's economics but numbed by his inept prose, taught him to write. In return, Douglas taught Orage a social scheme whose efficient distribution of capital would render a society less apt to go to war. He gave the label Social Credit to this distribution and explained it as a process whereby work would be rewarded, not by money passing into financial institutions where it would be susceptible to hoarding and exploitation, but by public credit to be drawn upon by individuals. Orage introduced Douglas to Pound in 1918 and published Douglas's first article on 2 January 1919. He then helped Douglas put his first book, Credit Power and Democracy, through the press in 1920, and added a 58-page commentary.⁴⁷ Orage's own explanation of Social Credit, foreshadowing some of the credit-card principles of the last quarter of the 20th century, described it as a system of matching consumer capacity to buy with industry's capacity to produce. A later pupil and friend put it succinctly for the American public: The purpose of Social Credit is to give the community a dollar to buy every dollar's worth produced by its industry.⁴⁸ T. S. Eliot has a character in The Rock denounce the financiers in Orage's terms: It's all profit what nobody gets and nobody knows 'ow they gets it.⁴⁹ The use of credit rather than debt as the basis of economic exchange would obviate the weakness of the gold standard,⁵⁰ Orage believed. He explained that the theory is at least no more difficult to understand than a thousand and one others . . . and, in comparison with the theory of the Gold Standard . . . it is elementary.⁵¹ It was a theory involving, not the overthrow of the present economic system, but its overhaul. After being convinced of its merit, his friend Chesterton declared Orage to be the most lucid exponent of economic philosophy of our time.⁵²

The marvelous mix in The New Age of new writing, economical and political commentary, and cultural criticism—including an innovative look at the cinema as an art form (October 1917)—produced a journal his public appreciated as both lively and eccentric.⁵³ Orage had his doubters then, however, just as he has them now. There are three journalistic issues on which Orage has been questioned. The first is the anti-Semitic strain in The New Age. A recent critic accuses Orage's vision of a better world, an anti-Semitic one,⁵⁴ and adds that Orage himself is known for anti-Semitism along with Yeats, Eliot, and Lawrence.⁵⁵ Another commentator replies that, while Pound and Douglas drifted toward anti-Semitism, Orage and The New Age stood against usury, not Jews.⁵⁶ A third explains that "the NA was not an anti- Semitic journal, but Orage did not censor his contributors' material, even when he objected to some of it.⁵⁷ Orage himself would have none of anti-Semitism. In the late 20s, he wrote to Pound: After all, there are lots of Jewish Social Creditors (not Munson, except by marriage), and there's Waldo Frank."⁵⁸ More to the point, as early as 14 August 1913, he wrote an article in The New Age titled, The Folly of Anti-Semitism, and followed in May 1921 with Anti-Semitism.

Secondly, Orage has been criticized for the rapidity with which he changed ideological direction. One critic cites Orage's changing intellectual allegiances and his open-mindedness as the cause of his failure to achieve any lasting goal.⁵⁹ Richard Curle records Ramiro de Maeztu's observation during the war that: Orage knows the shape of everything and the weight of nothing, but there was something noble about the perpetual search for the harmony of nothing.⁶⁰ In his defense, I would point to Orage's strength, rather than his weakness, in a heterodoxy that consisted of a willingness to entertain a number of disparate ideas until one above the others dominated his attention. Pound stressed this aspect of his mind in his contribution, He Pulled His Weight, in The New Age memorial issue in November 1934, saying: Orage's impersonality was his greatness, and the breadth of his mind was apparent in the speed with which he threw over a cumbrous lot of superstition, and a certain number of fairly good ideas for a new set of better ones. . . . I take it that in 30 years of journalism Orage never printed a lie he didn't believe.⁶¹ Edwin Muir recalled: He was a born collaborator, a born midwife of ideas, and consequently, a born editor.⁶² Augustus John's biographer observes that Orage, a man of sense, was a "brilliant wayward editor of The New Age who, like a Mohammed always changing his Allah, had first elected Nietzsche as god, then ousted him with the Douglas Credit Scheme which gave way before the deity of psycho-analysis, and was finally replaced in New York and Fontainebleau, by Gourdjieff's [sic] book of tricks—at which point John lost him. Like John, he had the mind of a disciple and the temperament of a leader, which led even this last association with Gourdjieff to break up."⁶³

Orage's deity, Gurdjieff, was often cited in negative assessments of Orage's heterodoxy. His conversion to Gurdjieff, however, was neither startling nor new to those acquainted with him. He had been drawn to Nietzsche by Jackson in Leeds. Nietzsche and the Baghavad Gita, to which he had introduced Jackson, were, for Orage, matched steppingstones on a straight path toward Gurdjieff.⁶⁴ It was, according to Orage himself in a letter to Holbrook Jackson, the inspiration of Yeats' Nietzschism in On Baile's Strand—performed in Leeds in 1905 with Orage's sponsoring—that prompted him to strike out for London.⁶⁵ By the time Orage arrived in London, he had a full-length study of Nietzsche ready for the press—Nietzsche in Outline, which was published the next year. In this work, Orage, in terms suggesting his future involvement with Social Credit and Gurdjieff, rewrote Nietzsche's definition of virtue as the instinctive desire to pour out life and not to preserve or amass life: the will to spend and not to acquire, the virtue of liberality, courage, gaiety, strength, the sense of inexhaustible powers, the atmosphere of an original fount and source of life, the spirit of selfgiving, of prodigality, of ecstasy, of careless rapture in action, of spontaneity.⁶⁶

Earlier in the study, Orage aligns certain humans with lower animals who live a

. . . yet undifferentiated mode of life, in which all our faults are . . . active in a single sense. Feeling, willing, and knowing . . . form a single strand. In the human mind, on the contrary, the various threads are separated. A certain retardation is given to various aspects of the undifferentiated instinct. . . . But when the mind becomes lucid, free, ethereal, the retardation may be supposed no longer to take place. . . . Instinct, reason, and intuition may be said to stand for unity, disintegration, and renewed units of the instinctual life. These phases correspond . . . to animal, human and superman.⁶⁷

Such categories, limited as they are, recall Gurdjieff's scale of being from motion to sense to emotion to reason, and his triad of tramp, lunatic, and householder, in ascending order.

Early in his career, Orage had scanned the works of Annie Besant, Madame [Helena Petrovna] Blavatsky, and Charles Leadbeater, whose theosophy, Orage thought, was in need of a psychosynthesis. While still a schoolteacher in Leeds, Orage had written about things that would occupy his literary talents much later. In 1903, for one example, he submitted an article to the Theosophical Review on The Mystical Value of Literature. Soon after his arrival in London, he joined meetings of G. R. S. Mead's Quest Society and D. N. Dunlop's Theosophists. He lectured to the Fabian Society on esoteric doctrines, and, before long, he assembled at 146 Harley Street his own psycho-syntheses group, which included, at one time or another, Havelock Ellis, James Young, Maurice Nicoll, J. A. M. Alcock, David Eder, and Rowland Kenney.⁶⁸ Later, they met in Lady Rothermere's studio and at the Kensington Quest Society rooms,⁶⁹ then settled finally at 38 Warwick gardens. Throughout this period, he published articles of his own on theosophy for Theosophical Review, and still later published articles in the columns of the The New Age by M. M. Cosmoi. Cosmoi was the pseudonym of the Serb prophet and mystic Dmitri Mitrinovic who espoused a doctrine of panhumanism that had a magnetic appeal for Orage.

Such contacts gave Orage, now known familiarly as the Mystic of Fleet Street, occasion to expose his own ideas at length. The science he preached, says one critic, was spiritual evolution, a mystical extension of Darwin.⁷⁰ It became widely known in intellectual circles that Orage had almost magnetic powers of voice. Gerald Cumberland writes that Orage, in his subtle devilishly clever way, would lead his listeners on to the very threshold of occult knowledge and leave them there wideeyed and wonder-struck.⁷¹ Anthony Ludovici remembers how I was struck then . . . by the intense intellectuality that radiated from every part of his being, particularly, of course, his eyes.⁷² Jacob Epstein observes that Orage was a man of extraordinary mental vigour. He had a magnetic personality. . . . His charm of voice and manner drew listeners to him and he went about like a Greek philosopher or rhetor, with a following of disciples.⁷³ Orage was the most distinguished of those men of influence on modern thought, remarked another, who then continued: "Orage has more than a touch of genius . . . He also has the eternal spirit of youth.⁷⁴

Among his disciples were a countless number whose good fortune it was to have been instructed in writing by Orage. Katherine Mansfield was but one. Another was the poet and art critic Herbert Read, who read The New Age in the trenches on the French front, before returning to England to be hired by Orage, who then polished his prose to The New Age perfection. Then, there was Pound and John Gould Fletcher.

Orage's brilliance of voice, appearance, and literary judgment may have combined to heighten the attraction he held for women, an attraction he reciprocated. Mary Gawsthorpe, in recalling Orage's seductiveness, wondered at his quite deliberate testing of his sexual appeal with women, both married and single, and his open display of delight with success.⁷⁵ William Patterson speculates that Orage's central weakness, which he never overcame, was his desire for women.⁷⁶ It would be fairer to say, however, that he preferred women's desire for him. Cumberland recalls with delight that Orage's gospel, always preached with his tongue in cheek, that every man and woman should do precisely what he or she desires, acted like a heady wine on the gasping and enthusiastic young ladies who used to sit in rows worshipping him. Nonetheless, he regrets that along with his gifts there went . . . a knack of gathering charlatans around him.⁷⁷ Curiously, Orage himself had spoken publicly of the danger of popular philosophy, by which he meant a drawing of undue attention to the philosopher rather than to his philosophy, as Bergson was doing in Paris.⁷⁸ James Webb suggests that: Under Orage's successful exterior was a latent insecurity which craved applause of others, and when the trappings of success were denied him, this self-doubt came to dominate him entirely.⁷⁹ Self-doubt in Orage, however, seems to have been more a function of his constant inquiry into self and an incentive toward self-observing and exploring. Of course, there were those who cast doubt on the quality of Orage's fundamental interests in theosophy. Beatrice Hastings, in her diatribe against the The New Age and its propxrietor, whose side she had quit in 1913, insisted that Orage's attraction was to sorcery, that his spiritual intimate was Aleister Crowley, and that he was under the merciless influence of Mead and his Quest Society.⁸⁰

The turning point in Orage's theosophical quest came in November 1911, when F. S. Flint introduced him to the ideas of the 33- year-old Russian philosopher P[yotr] D[emianovich] Ouspensky. Two years later, Orage met Ouspensky, who was returning via England to Russia from a voyage to the East. A year later, Orage read parts translated for him from Ouspensky's Tertium Organum (1912), which divulged fresh views into what Orage knew of esoteric doctrine. Subsequently, he corresponded with Ouspensky, and, in late 1919, published Ouspensky's Letters from Russia in The New Age. Claude Bragdon, who had become a good friend of Lady Rothermere, finished his translation of Tertium Organum in 1919, and saw it through press in 1920. After he got Ouspensky's address from Bragdon, Orage sent royalties to the author, who arrived himself in London in August 1921 with other refugees from the Russian Revolution. He was soon lecturing in Lady Rothermere's studio at St. John's Wood on Gurdjieff's system to a fascinated, if baffled, English audience that included Orage and T. S. Eliot.⁸¹ After hearing him the first time, Orage wrote Bragdon: Mr. Ouspensky is the first teacher I have met who has impressed me with ever-increasing certainty that he knows and can do.⁸² Ouspensky's lectures gave Orage a view of a new evolutionary stage, but one that required special education toward the Sacred Brotherhood of Higher Consciousness. Orage decided almost at once that he should take a sabbatical from The New Age, and wrote to ask one of his newest collaborators, the young and brilliant Herbert Read, whether he might consider taking over the editorial reins for a year.⁸³ Read was hesitant, and Orage bided his time while awaiting the promised arrival of Gurdjieff in England.

In the meantime, the war had ended, and the benefits Orage had hoped for in postwar England were a disappointment. As he wrote in 1926, looking back in An Editor's Progress to his separation from the world of journalism, Art as we know it today has no power over the conscience of mankind.⁸⁴ Orage had seen the human implications of Social Credit and had supplied it with a spiritual force. As one observer notes, however, Orage emerged from the war and the inflationary aftermath with a profound sense that a swindle had been perpetrated on the British public. . . . He was disillusioned over his lack of effect.⁸⁵

Like Ruskin's reform ideas a half-century earlier, Orage's socialism had affiliations with theosophy, art, crafts, and psychology, but its proponent lacked the power to transmit a conviction of its necessity to contemporary England. Pound had left for Paris before the end of 1920. Now, Orage contemplated leaving England to fight his battle for social justice on foreign soil. As Pound went south to Italy, where he found Mussolini with an attractive economical political premise, Orage went west to New York in the service of a universalistic psychology.

On 23 February 1922—the same day a $2,000,000 gift from John D. Rockefeller was announced for the foundation of a London School for Hygiene, and Lloyd George's meeting with Raymond Poincaré for a continuing entente was set—Orage was in an audience in Kensington listening to Gurdjieff outline a system of work. Having heard Ouspensky's earlier introduction to the system and its teacher, Orage was both prepared and eager to hear Gurdjieff. Although Gurdjieff himself did not know enough English to address the audience personally, he was on the dais while his Russian interpreter spoke his words. Others in the audience recall that Gurdjieff interrupted more than once in Russian to add elaboration on one point or another, which the interpreter translated. There was an English translator as well, to transmit questions from the audience. Orage asked a couple of questions, one about the possibility of changing along lines Ouspensky had suggested in his talks.⁸⁶ Orage was greatly impressed with both the talk and the response to his question, and he decided right away to follow up his earlier inclinations to take a leave of absence to become one of Gurdjieff's pupils.

What Orage hoped to find in his quest is a matter of diverse conjecture. The facts, however, seem clear enough. Gurdjieff had come to London at Ouspensky's invitation, not only to address people already following Ouspensky, but to scan the possibilities of establishing there the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man he had thought of in Moscow in 1913 and organized briefly in Constantinople in 1919. Gurdjieff was encouraged by what he heard of possibilities in Hampstead. Despite the intervention on his behalf by Maurice Nicoll, Lady Rothermere, and Orage, however, the British foreign office was not in favor of granting Gurdjieff a visa. They suspected that he had been a tsarist agent with the name Dordjieff who had opposed British interests in Tibet a quarter of a century earlier.⁸⁷

Shortly before his London visit, Gurdjieff had considered Berlin and Hellerau, in Germany, as possible locales for an Institute, but was attracted further west. On Bastille Day, 14 July 1922—a year to the day after Emanuel Radnitzky had arrived in Paris from New York to launch a brilliant career as a photographer under the name of Man Ray—Gurdjieff arrived in the City of Light with a blueprint for the reconstruction of man's harmonious development. He soon found a suitable temporary location for the Institute. Orage, after hearing that Gurdjieff had found a base for his teaching in Paris, put pen to paper to apply for admission. Effectively, he wrote himself into a new life.

A critical point of view has it that his conversion . . . to the system of Gurdjieff was no ‘synthesis’ of socialism and spiritualism, but a leaving off of attempted combinations in order to pursue what Douglas' project was unable to accommodate.⁸⁸ Perhaps the conversion did not signal a