The Outsider

by Colin Wilson

  Let us cast our minds back to Nietzsche for a moment, Nietzsche at twenty, discovering a tattered volume in a Leipzig bookshop, and reading it through almost immediately: Schopenhauer’s Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, The World as Will and Appearance’.

  ...here there gazed at me the full, unbiased eye of art... here I saw a mirror in which I observed the world, life and my own soul in frightful grandeur... .18

  Schopenhauer made Nietzsche aware of something that, as a poet and an Outsider, he had been subconsciously aware of for a long time: that the world is not the human bourgeois surface it presents. It is Will, and it is delusion. Schopenhauer was fond of borrowing a phrase from the Upanishads and calling it Maya, illusion. This is the view of the Vedantic philosophy: that the world is an appearance of the absolute Brahman, which is supreme and characterless. The Christian religion has its counterpart of this belief when it says: God is everything. But it is one thing to say it because it is in your catechism, another to see it or feel it because you happen to be an Outsider.

  The Outsiders I dealt with in the first chapter had that in common, an instinct that made them doubt the ‘reality’ of the bourgeois world (I call it this for want of a better word; in practice, I mean the world as it appears to the human social animal). All of the meaning of this attitude is compressed in De Lisle Adam’s ‘As for living, our servants will do that for us’. It means that the human personality is conceived almost as an enemy; when it comes into contact with ‘the world’, it tells the soul lies, lies about itself and its relation to other people. Left to himself, in solitude, meditation, study, Axel believes that his soul establishes its true relation with the world. As soon as he begins to live, the falsehood begins. ‘He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image that his soul so constantly beheld’, Joyce wrote of Dedalus. So do all Outsiders. So did Fox, in those early days of wandering. But did he ever meet it? Did he create it with the power of his mind over other men?

  Judging him by the Outsider’s stern criterion, there is nothing for it but to answer: No. He showed a way, an approach. He showed that there is no point in getting neurotic and defeatist about it, and deciding, like Schopenhauer, that the world and the spirit are at eternal, perpetual, unresolvable loggerheads. The Journal is a more inspiring document than the Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. ‘But not psychologically truer,’ the Outsider might urge. But even that will not hold. The sense of the world as Will and delusion is as strong in the early pages of the Journal as in Schopenhauer. Only later, there is a sense that Fox had missed the final solution, a sense that brute reality (‘stubborn, unreduceable fact’, James calls it) has got the upper hand. We suspect that Fox became a little uncritically self-assertive. There was the unpleasant James Nayler affair, for instance.

  Nayler was Fox’s right-hand man, young, good-looking, a spell-binding orator, second only to Fox in authority in the movement. But he was a far more imaginative man than Fox, and he allowed two women disciples to persuade him that he was the Messiah, and that he had been sent to announce the more-or-less immediate arrival of the Day of Judgement. He allowed himself to be led (in a state of fever) into Bristol, riding on a donkey, and preceded by the two women disciples crying, ‘Holy, holy, holy.’ When the police gathered their wits together, they arrested Nayler and charged him with blasphemy. A trial followed, in which Nayler was asked: ‘Do you claim to be the Son of God,’ and replied: ‘I am, and so is everybody.’ But the judges wrere not to be put off by such subtle theological points, and Nayler was duly sentenced. He was to be publicly whipped in London and Bristol, to be branded on the forehead with B for blasphemer, and to have his tongue bored through with a hot iron. Everyone was appalled by the savagery of the sentence, even non-Quaker-sympathizers. But Fox was not. He was mainly irritated by Nayler’s silly behaviour, and the harm it did to the movement. He refused to listen to the pleas of Friends who asked him to stand by Nayler; he ignored Nayler’s message asking him to visit him in prison (where, even after the whipping and branding, Nayler was still treated with cruelty). Finally, he wrote Nayler a letter, reproving him for accusing him (Fox) of jealousy and telling him: There is no pardon for you in this....’ Nayler was kept in jail for three years, being released in September, 1659. He died a year later, after being attacked by robbers on a journey to the North.

  Fox’s part in this affair is not so inhuman as it appears at first sight. He showed the same stern devotion to his principles that he had often shown before hostile judges, and he refused to falsify the religious position that he had spent his life making so clear, by giving his support to a man who had falsified it. As a leader, his conduct was as justifiable as that of any statesman who allows expediency to rule his personal feelings. But for the Outsider, the horror of the situation is that Fox should ever have been forced into that kind of position. He feels that, somehow, the real Outsider should be concerned with nothing except human psychology, with discriminating between the world as Will and the world as Delusion. All this business is horribly irrelevant. How could any Outsider get himself mixed up with such tomfoolery?

  Perhaps it would be fairer to Fox to ask: How could he have avoided it ? Philosophers will tell you that if you have a standard in your head, there must be somewhere a reality or idea that corresponds to that standard. What is this standard by which we are judging Fox?

  It is difficult to formulate, because we are not certain about our ultimates. Ask the Outsider what he ultimately wants, and he will admit he doesn’t know. Why? Because he wants it instinctively, and it is not always possible to tell what your instincts are driving towards. Young W. B. Yeats wanted a fairy land where ‘the lonely of heart is withered away’. Dowson and Thompson and Beddoes were ‘half in love with easeful death’:

  They are not long, the days of wine and roses

  Out of a misty dream

  Our path emerges for a while, then closes

  Within a dream.19

  Axel wanted to live in imagination alone, in a castle on the Rhine, with volumes on Hermetic philosophy, and Yeats even made preliminary steps to put the idea into practice, with his plans for a brotherhood of poets who would live in a ‘Castle on the Rock’ at Lough Kay in Rosscommon:

  I planned a mystical order that should buy or hire the castle, and keep it as a place where its members could retire for a while for contemplation, and where we might establish mysteries like those of Eleusis or Samothrace. ... I had an unshakeable conviction that invisible gates would open, as they opened for Blake, as they opened for Swedenborg, as they opened for Boehme, and that this philosophy would find its manuals of devotion in all imaginative literature... [The Trembling of the Veil, Book III]

  This idea of Yeats’s is persistently an Outsider-ideal, persistent even in unromantic Outsiders: solitude, retreat, the attempt to order a small corner of the ‘devil-ridden chaos’ to one’s own satisfaction. A Marxist critic would snap: Escapism; and no doubt he would not be entirely wrong, but let us look closer. The real difference between the Marxian and the romantic Outsider is that one would like to bring heaven down to earth, the other dreams of raising earth up to heaven. To the Outsider, the Marxian seems hopelessly short-sighted in his requirements for a heaven on earth; his notions seem to be based on a total failure to understand human psychology. (Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Zamyatin’s We are typical expressions of Outsider criticism of social idealism.) Now George Fox combined the practical-mindedness of the Marxian with the Outsider’s high standard for a ‘heaven on earth’, and in so far as he was practical-minded, he failed to penetrate to the bottom of the Outsider’s ideal. What did he achieve? He founded the Society of Friends, a very fine thing in itself, but lacking the wearing-quality of older established sects; he conquered his Outsider’s sense of exile. And there we have it! As a religious teacher, he accepted himself and the world, and no Outsider can afford to do this. He accepted an essentially optimistic philosophy.

  When all the Friends had got it into their heads that
they had an ‘inner light5, they felt that evil had been finally overcome; all that was necessary was to act according to the ‘inner light5. The Enemy was minimized. The evil in this was the same as in all sects that set out to give their followers the feeling that they have a monopoly of divine benevolence. For the Outsider, the best place to watch the eternal comedy of human beings deluding themselves (apart from the Jehovah’s Witness and the Christian Scientist meetings), is a Quaker congregation on a Sunday evening. The distinction between reality and unreality is lost; neither is it recognized that good is traditionally associated with the real, evil with the unreal; human beings accept themselves and their personalities with no sense of bondage, for all have an ‘inner light5, and the inner light can do no wrong. This criticism may seem unduly harsh, but it must be remembered that we are looking at these things from the Outsider’s point of view, and it is Roquentin who condemns men who think their existence is necessary as salauds. The Outsider’s business is to discriminate between real and unreal, necessary and unnecessary. Where Fox fell short of this standard, we must not hesitate to condemn him; the problem is difficult enough without blurring the lines with compromise.

  Fox, then, was too much the man of action; his method of trying to persuade all men to become Outsiders was too unsophisticated. It failed to do justice to the complexity of the problem. Consequently, he failed to solve it.

  Before we leave Fox, we should acknowledge the greatness of his effort to solve the Outsider’s problems; he is perhaps England’s major religious teacher, and his faith is an Outsider’s faith. Under different circumstances, in another age, he might have been the founder of a new religion instead of a new sect, and the founders of the great religions did not compromise less than Fox, in trying to make the Outsider’s solution valid for everybody.

  Fox began to solve his own Outsider problem when he accepted his destiny as a prophet. The Outsider is primarily a critic, and if a critic feels deeply enough about what he is criticizing, he becomes a prophet.

  William Blake prefaced his epic poem ‘Milton5 with a quotation from the Book of Numbers: ‘Would to God that all the Lord’s people were prophets.5 This is a sentiment that Fox heartily endorsed. Yet Fox made it his business to try to make all the Lord’s people into prophets, and his approach was so popular that he had a great deal of success. Blake, on the other hand, spent his life in complete obscurity; the prophetic note never left his voice, but he never spoke from the popular pulpit. During his lifetime, he was considered a madman and a crank; even his friends would have refused to vouch for his genius. Blake didn’t worry; he worked on steadily, producing his unpopular paintings and his even less popular epic poems, living as best he could. He took the healthy view of the Greek Stoic, that he lacked nothing that he really needed:

  I have mental joy and mental health

  And mental friends and mental wealth

  I’ve a wife I love and that loves me

  I’ve all but riches bodily 20

  Blake’s struggle was very like Nietzsche’s; and the resemblances between the two men’s way of seeing the world are astonishing, considering the eighty years between their births that made Blake a contemporary of Dr. Johnson, and Nietzsche of Dostoevsky. Blake, at all events, was lucky in having a wife to share his struggle, a completely docile girl who always regarded her husband as a great man. Such a wife might have saved Nietzsche’s sanity.

  Fame, Blake believed, is unnecessary to the man of genius. Man is born alone and he dies alone. If he allows his social relations to delude him into forgetting his fundamental loneliness, he is hving in a fool’s paradise. From the beginning he was preoccupied with the problem of Solipsism, that you cannot be certain of the existence of anything or anybody except yourself:

  Nought loves another as itself

  Nor venerates another so

  Nor is it possible to thought

  A greater than itself to know.21

  This is Ivan Karamazov’s starting-point; in the face of it, what meaning has the Christian idea of loving your neighbor as yourself, or a love of God that could lead Abraham to sacrifice Isaac? Blake was determined to get his foundations right before he began, and if getting his foundations right meant attacking the ‘fundamentals’ of religion, well, so much the worse for the fundamentals. He states his principle in the opening paragraph of one of his earliest works:

  As the true method of knowledge is experiment, the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty that experiences.22

  This is scientific common sense; it would not be out of place in a Secular Society pamphlet. But in the next paragraph, Blake plunges into his own mysticism:

  ...the poetic genius is the true man, and that the body, or outward form of man, is derived from the poetic genius. Likewise, the forms of all things are derived from their genius, which by the ancients was called Angel and Spirit and Demon.

  The poetic genius is everywhere called the spirit of prophecy.

  Again, the emphasis on prophecy. We can see that Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor would have felt inclined to add Blake to his bonfire as well as George Fox and Christ.

  I have already quoted passages that show Blake thinking along Nietzschean lines—’Energy is eternal delight’; that is, not towards a Christian ethic that proclaims: Blessed are the poor in spirit, but towards a vitalist ethic that exalts the man of genius. Before the end of this book, we shall have to analyse these terms ‘Christian’ and ‘vitalist’, but at this point, I should only like to observe that vitalism is not necessarily a philosophy that regards life as the be-all and end-all, to which all other moral values are subservient. It may be only a way of deriving those values or of renewing them. When Aristotle wrote: ‘Not to be born is the best thing, and death is better than life’; he expressed the view that can be said to he at one extreme of religion. At the other extreme is vitalism; Kirilov’s ‘everything is good’ (note that Kirilov professed himself an atheist). In this sense, vitalism can be regarded as an antinomian reaction:

  The worship of God is: Honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best...23

  and Blake ends a demonstration that Jesus broke all the ten commandments with the statement:

  I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse and not from rules.24

  We can see in such a statement the beginnings of a defence of Raskolnikov and Stavrogin. All impulse is good. ‘Energy is eternal delight.’ In Jerusalem5, Blake wrote—

  When thought is closed in caves

  Then love shall show its root in deepest Hell... 26

  In other words, when self-expression is denied, then energy will find its outlet in crime or violence. Repeatedly in his work, Blake shows indifference to moral issues when self-expression is at stake: ‘Rather murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unsatisfied desire’,

  That he who will not defend truth may be compelled to

  defend a lie... That enthusiasm and life shall not cease.26

  In many other ways Blake was an iconoclast; on the subject of sex, for instance. A century and a half before D. H. Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Blake had preached that sex can raise man to visionary insight. He also preaches that the way to overcome vices is to give them full self-expression; the result will be virtue:

  But Covet was poured full

  Envy fed with fat of lambs

  Wrath with Lion’s gore

  Wantonness lulled to sleep

  With the virgin’s lute

  Or sated with her love

  Til Covet broke his locks and bars

  And slept with open doors

  Envy sung at the rich man’s feast

  Wrath was followed up and down

  By a little ewe lamb

  And wantonness on his own true love

  Begot a giant race.27

  (‘Book of Los’, IV and V.)

  There is even a tradition that Blake was so confi
rmed in his opinion of the senses’ fundamental innocence that he proposed to go to bed with his wife’s maid, an arrangement that Mrs. Blake refused to permit. But the proposal had been in accord with his teaching in the Prophetic Books. In ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’, he makes his heroine promise her husband (Theotormon):

  …to catch for thee girls of mild silver or of furious gold I’ll lie beside thee on a bank and view their wanton play In lovely copulation, bliss on bliss, with Theotormon.28

  This was not mere libertinism; it was a part of Blake’s religious doctrine. He makes Oothoon ask:

  How can one joy absorb another? Are not different joys

  Holy, eternal, infinite? and each joy is a love.

  The question that must be asked is obviously: What was the end of Blake’s system? From these extracts, it seems to have a suspicious smell of Rousseau’s ‘back to Nature’ doctrine.

  The end, in a word, was Vision, Yea-saying. This was Blake’s ultimate, just as it was Nietzsche’s and Rilke’s. ‘To praise in spite of, dennoch preisen.

  For, like Van Gogh and Nietzsche after him, Blake had had moments when he had seen the world as entirely positive, entirely good. Blake also was a painter. Van Gogh had painted cornfields so that they seemed to blaze upward; he painted self-portraits against the same distorted, brilliant background, as if he could not even look at his own face in a mirror without all his vital energies breaking loose and trying to flow out of his paint-brush. Blake’s outlook was the same, but his training was different; he knew how to express vital energy only in two ways: through the human form, and through colour. He preferred water-colours because they are less heavy than oils, and he painted Michelangelesque men and women against vivid backgrounds of light. Unfortunately, Blake was not a great draughtsman like Michelangelo, nor did he know as much about the effects of light as Turner or Monet. His painting is often vivid and electrifying, but it is too light-weight to be really great, in the way that Van Gogh’s painting is great. There is not the intensity.