The Outsider

by Colin Wilson

  Poetic allegory, perhaps? Then consider that Blake told Crabb Robinson that he had seen the ghost of Julius Caesar on the previous evening, and that he spent more time conversing with spirits than with human beings. This is either madness or a very strange order of sanity. Another mystic who was also a brilliant scientist and a first-rate engineer stated that he had made a complete tour of heaven and hell, not in poetic fancy, like Dante, but actually, like a Sunday afternoon bus excursion, and that he habitually held conversations with angels. Nevertheless, there are thousands of followers of Emanuel Swedenborg today who believe his books to be as sane as Newton’s Principia and as objective as the Kinsey report on sexual behaviour. It does not simplify the question to say that ‘sanity’ is a relative term, especially where religious sects are concerned. Swedenborg and Blake proclaimed their insights to be real, corresponding to some real object, much as Wells made that claim for Mind at the End of Its Tether; our experience with Wells’s pamphlet should have made us cautious about pooh-poohing these claims.

  In this chapter I intend to deal with two Outsiders who formulated a religious solution to their problems, and who also asserted that they had developed a certain faculty for seeing Visions’ as a consequence of their attempts at solution. Their temperaments were completely unlike: George Fox was primarily a man of action who needed a physical outlet for the impulses that stirred in him; Blake was at once a clear thinker and a dreamer, an obstreperous iconoclast and an otherworldly poet. Fox’s name became known from end to end of England; Blake remained in unrelieved obscurity all his life. These two men achieved, by sheer strength of Will, an intensity of insight that few men have known.

  In speaking of them, it is necessary to remember that what they left recorded on paper was the least important part of their lives. It is the lesson that is expressed in the Chuang Tzu book in the story of the Duke of Ch’i and his wheelwright. It tells how the wheelwright saw the Duke reading, and called to ask him what the book was about. The words of sages,’ the Duke explained. The lees and scum of bygone men,’ the wheelwright said; and when the irritated Duke asked him what the devil he meant by this, the wheelwright told him: There is an art in wheel-making that I cannot explain even to my son. It cannot be put into words. That is why I cannot let him take over my work, and I am still making wheels myself at seventy. It must have been the same with the sages: all that was worth handing on died with them. The rest they put into their books. That is why I said you are reading the lees and scum of dead men.’

  This lesson should be especially taken to heart in reading the works of the visionaries dealt with in the following chapters. The essentials of what they saw died with them. Their value for us does not lie in the ‘visions’ their words can conjure up for us, but in the instructions they left for anyone who should want to see the same things that they saw. It lies, in other words, in the discipline they recommend,

  Certain questions should be asked before we pass on to examine these men. There will be many readers for whom the arguments of Outsiders in Chapters I and II against religion seem unanswerable. The Outsider recognizes with penetrating clearness that all men are dishonest with themselves, that all men blind themselves with their emotions. The ‘answers’ of religion seem to him to be lies designed to make men comfortable. It is not a desire to be an ‘Antichrist’ that makes this type of Outsider reject religion; on the contrary, he may be intensely miserable that he cannot accept them. He can find authority in the Church itself for his attitude: in Meister Eckhart, for instance, with his: ‘If God could backslide from truth I would stick to truth and let God go.5

  The question that arises naturally, therefore, is: Is it not superfluous to quote religious men who are bound to be biased ? And the answer, I think, is that it can do no harm to see what they can teach us about the Outsider. We can admit now that, for the Existentialist Outsiders of the earlier chapters, a specifically Christian solution would be untenable. For the Existentialist would like to say of his solution, not ‘I believe’, but 7 know And this is not unreasonable. Sartre gives an example that illustrates it: that if the phone rang, and a voice at the other end said: ‘This is God speaking. Believe and you are saved; doubt and you are damned,’ the man holding the receiver would be justified in answering: ‘Very well, in that case I’m damned.’ He would be justified because all men have a right to withhold belief in something they cannot know.2

  What we are trying to do in this book is to establish precisely what the Outsider does know, or can know, and our criterion is empirical. Whatever can be experienced can, within this definition, be ‘known’. Very well, then we must ask the Outsider questions until we have an idea of where his experience is lacking; then we can tell him: ‘Go out and look for these experiences, and your doubts will be answered.’ In his rudimentary Outsider parable The History of Mr. Polly, H. G. Wells showed his hero setting his house on fire and leaving his wife, to tramp the roads: ‘If you don’t like your life you can change it.’ Now, Mr. Polly’s solution would have no value for most of the Outsiders we have dealt with, because they are far more complex then Mr. Polly (Hesse, perhaps, is an exception). But at least it is an example of the type of answer we are looking for, a ‘go out and do something’.

  That is why I am starting my analysis with George Fox.

  Fox is one of the greatest religious teachers England has produced; compared with him, Bunyan was weak, Wesley neurotic and Wycliffe bigoted. He was strong-minded, imaginative, level-headed and sympathetic. When Fox, the religious agitator, appeared before Cromwell, the keeper of the peace, the preacher and the soldier paid their respects to each other and parted friends. They both had the same qualities—courage, will-power—and each knew his own mind and wasn’t afraid to speak it.

  Yet with his soldier qualities, Fox united another and totally different set, those of the poet and mystic. The combination often produced strange results:3

  As I was walking with several friends, I lifted up my head and saw three steeple house spires, and they struck at my life. I asked them what that place was; they said ‘Lichfield’. Immediately the word of the Lord came to me, that I must go thither.... As soon as they were gone, I stept away, and went by my eye over hedge and ditch until I came within a mile of Lichfield; where, in a great field, shepherds were keeping their sheep. Then I was commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood there, for it was winter, but the word of the Lord was like a fire in me. So I put off my shoes and left them with the shepherds; and the poor shepherds trembled, and were astonished. Then I walked about a mile, and as soon as I was got within the city, the word of the Lord came to me, saying: ‘Cry: Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield.’ So I went up and down the streets, crying with a loud voice: Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield. It being a market day, I went into the market-place, and went up and down in several places of it, and made stands crying: Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield, and no one touched nor laid hands upon me. As I went down the town, there ran like a channel of blood down the streets, and the market-place was like a pool of blood ... so when I had declared what was upon me and cleared myself of it, I came out of the town in peace about a mile to the shepherds, and there I went to them, and took my shoes, and gave thern some money, but the fire of the Lord was so in my feet and all over me that I did not matter to put my shoes on any more...

  After this, a deep consideration came upon me, for what reason I should be sent to cry against that city: Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield…But afterwards I came to under stand that in the Emperor Diocletian’s time, a thousand Christians were martyred in Lichfield. So I was to go, with out my shoes, through the channel of blood, and into the pool of their blood in the market place, that I might raise up the memorial of the blood of those martyrs, which had been shed above a thousand years before, and lay cold in their streets.

  The first thing that strikes us of this experience is how lucky Fox was to be able to do an apparently irrational thing without misgivings, and ‘declare what was upon hi
m until he had cleared himself of it’. Most of the Outsiders we have considered never got to the point of declaring what was upon them, to express it and clear themselves of it by a definitive act. Steppenwolf, for instance, at the end of a boring day, feeling a suppressed rage that made him want to go and do something violent... with the stuff of a George Fox in him, he would not have remained a bored hypochondriac for long! Dostoevsky made his Raskolnikov more resolute than Hesse’s hero; but then, he made him lose courage after the definitive act, and the parable is a great idea left undeveloped.*

  * PAGE NOTE: This, of course, is not intended as a criticism of Crime and Punishment. Given the situation as Dostoevsky defined it in the first part, the remainder of the book may be artistically inevitable. Since writing the above (and Chapter VI) I have come across a passage in one of Rilke’s letters that makes the same point; speaking of Make, Rilke comments: .. like a Raskolnikov, he remained behind, consumed by his deed, ceasing to act at the very moment when action had to begin, so that his newly acquired freedom turned against him and destroyed him, the weaponless’ (October 19th, 1907. Italics mine).

  Now, the beetle-man Outsider, the Sartre or Barbusse hero, might well envy Fox his confidence and conviction, and yet feel that there are insuperable barriers to prevent him from doing the same sort of thing. Fox is a man who sticks at nothing. He is the perfect example of the Outsider in revolt. When his convictions are stirred, he lowers his head and charges like a bull, just like the ‘man of action’ that we found Dostoevsky’s beetle-man admiring in Chapter VI. A brick wall does not worry him. He is the sort of man that the beetle-man can admire, and feel contempt for. Fox accepts things that the beetle-man cannot accept: his own identity, for instance. ‘If George Fox says: Verily, there is no altering him.’ The beetle-man could never make such a boast.

  Yet anyone who has read the Journal will know that there is a great deal more than a bull at a gate about George Fox. The self-confidence has arisen as the result of a long course in self-doubt. And this is what the beetle-man cannot understand, for his self-doubt never drives him to seek for a solution with the determination of a desperate man. Consequently, he never discovers what he might be capable of.

  The one thing that no reader of the Journal can doubt is that George Fox was once as complete an Outsider as the hero of Notesfrom Under the Floorboards. This was in his early days, when he was barely nineteen. He tells us how, at that age, he began to feel the stirrings of the discontent that separated him from his family and friends. One holiday he joined his cousin in the local pub, and there, quite suddenly, felt a savage disgust against all the merrymaking. He stood up and left them, and: ‘I returned home, but did not go to bed that night, nor could not sleep, but sometimes walked up and down, and sometimes prayed and cried to the Lord: Thou seest how young people go together into vanity, and old people into the earth, and thou must forsake all, both young and old, and keep out of all, and be a stranger to all.’4

  What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

  Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

  You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

  A heap of broken images where the sun beats,

  And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief....

  Fox’s feelings at nineteen are not difficult to parallel in modern literature. The way Outsiders feel about the general mass of men doesn’t change much in three hundred years.

  And many that professed religion sought to be aquainted, but I was afraid of them, for I was sensible they did not possess what they professed.5

  Like all Outsiders, Fox was sensitive to the fact that what people call religion is mostly an ersatz substitute. He admits that:

  ... at Barnet a strong temptation to despair came upon me... and some years I continued in that condition, and fain would have put it from me. And I went to many a priest to look for comfort, but found no comfort from them…6

  We can imagine Fox, a serious-minded, inwardly tormented young man, moving from place to place like Van Gogh or a Hesse wanderer, feeling deeper needs than other people seem to feel, and wondering if he is not merely a misfit in the world. But Fox was a little better off than the modern Existentialist Outsider, for to the modern, all religions and creeds seem to be outworn lies; in Fox’s day, the words of the Old Testament could still stir the blood with a sense of authenticity; only the year before, Cromwell’s brigade of specially picked ‘men of religion’ had scattered the King’s forces at Marston Moor, so that Cromwell could write: ‘God made them as stubble to our swords.’ Reform was in the air, and Fox too wanted to find other men who could share his sense of urgency; he wanted to find men and women like himself, who felt a ‘hunger and thirst after righteousness’, for whom the question of their salvation was of burning importance. Instead, what did he find?

  From Barnet I went to London, where I took a lodging, and was under great misery and trouble there, for I looked upon those who professed religion in the city of London, and I saw all was dark and under the chain of darkness…

  And I had an uncle, one Pickering, a baptist ... yet I could not import my mind to him, nor join with him, for I saw all, young and old, where they were.7

  That is to say (to alter his language slightly) that he saw too deep and too much. Other people cannot help. He tells of the discussions he engaged in with the priest at his home village, where Fox talked of Christ’s despair and temptations, with the terrible insight of the Outsider, and of how disgusted he felt to hear his own words repeated on Sunday in the priest’s sermon. Later experiences with priests were, if anything, even more disillusioning:

  After this I went to another ancient priest at Mancetter in Warwickshire, and reasoned with him about the ground of despair and temptations, but he was ignorant of my condition, and bade me take tobacco and sing psalms....8

  (We can compare this with Broadbent in John Bull’s Other Island telling the Outsider-priest Keegan: Try phosphorus pills. I always take them when my brain’s overworked.’)

  …then I heard of a priest living about Tamworth was accounted an experienced man, and I went seven miles to him, but I found him like an empty hollow cask.. .. Then I heard of one doctor Cradock of Coventry, and I went to him, and asked him the ground of temptation and despair, and how troubles came to be wrought in manNow as we were talking together in his garden, the alley being narrow, I chanced in turning to set my foot on the side of a flower bed, at which the man was in such a rage as if his house had been on fire....I went away in sorrow, worse than when I came. ... I thought them miserable comforters, and saw they were all as nothing to me, for they could not reach my condition.9

  Like all Outsiders, Fox wanted to be understood, wanted someone to look into his soul and soothingly set things to right. And, like all Outsiders, he had to learn to work out his own salvation. It is the hardest message of all, that there is a final enemy whom every man and woman carries about with them, who cannot be fought vicariously. It is a truth that the doctrine of the Atonement was invented to make less terrible: this final, internal enemy, against whom there can be no appeal for outside help. All saints and religious teachers have made recognition of this last enemy the basis of their creeds. Many great spiritual teachers have left accounts of their ‘struggles for light’. The characteristics of the struggle are often like Steppenwolf’s description of his ‘average day’: failure, dullness, deadness of the senses, lack of a sense of urgency, often resulting, after long effort, in a sudden relaxing, an intensity and warmth:

  And though my exercises and troubles were very great yet they were not so continual but that I had some intermissions, and was sometimes brought into such a heavenly joy that I thought I had been in Abraham’s bosom...10

  And Fox’s ‘spiritual combat’ resulted in a sudden realization:

  Then the Lord did let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition, namely, that I might give him all the glory; for all are concluded in sin, and shut-up in u
nbelief as I had been, that Jesus Christ might have the pre-eminence... 11

  Translating this out of its religious terminology into the language of the Existentialist Outsider, we can see that when Fox reached some kind of internal resolution of his Outsider problems, he felt glad that he had not been tempted to resolve them easily by accepting other people, or some easy creed or faith. ‘That he might give God all the glory’, ‘that Jesus Christ might have pre-eminence’,... even if these terms mean nothing to us, it is obvious that they have some psychological counterpart, some meaning that is relevant to the Outsider. It is not so far from Steppenwolf’s recognition that he must ‘traverse, not once more but often, the hell of his inner being’, and even in this term ‘the hell of his inner being’, we have an acknowledgement of the reality of this internal enemy. Fox, like Steppenwolf, like Van Gogh and Nijinsky and Sartre’s hero, has moments when all is supremely well, when he can say yes to everything, even to the terror of his inner conflict. And these moments are common to most poets and artists, as well as to religious men like Fox. Rilke, in the direct Nietzschean tradition, spoke of ‘to praise in spite of (dennock preisen), and began the greatest of his ten Elegies: