The Outsider (21 page)

In this chapter, we have examined three distinct types of Outsider, and three distinct kinds of discipline designed to combat their
^‘
Outsiderishness
’
: discipline over the intellect, discipline over the feelings, discipline over the body. We have
seen that none of these forms of discipline is complete in itself. Van Gogh and Nijinsky went insane; Lawrence
’
s mental suicide is really the equivalent of Nijinsky
’
s insanity: both men gave up the struggle and turned their faces away from the problems. Nijinsky
’
s madness was as
voluntary
as Lawrence
’
s enlistment in the R.A.F.

The most interesting observation to be made from comparison of the three concerns their degree of
^‘
lostness
’
. Nijinsky lived so close to his instincts that it took a great deal of complexity and confusion to wrench him away from his inner certainties and make him reason about those certainties. Lawrence, on the contrary, reasoned all the time, and never knew the ground of his instincts as Nijinsky did. Yet, here is the point: Lawrence
could,
with an immense effort, have thrown himself into comprehension of Nijinsky
’
s state of mind; he could, if you like, have
become
a Nijinsky in all essentials. Nijinsky could never have become a Lawrence; the effort needed to develop the reasoning powers would have separated him from his instinctive certainties long before he would be capable of writing a
Seven Pillars.
In other words, Lawrence was paradoxically the most
‘
lost
’
of the three, the most destroyed by self-doubt and yet the least lost. Nijinsky was the least lost because his instincts made a better compass than Lawrence
’
s intellect, and yet the most lost as far as his possible development went. If the ideal combination were a compound of Lawrence
’
s powerful intellect, Van Gogh
’
s mystical nature-love and Nijinsky
’
s realization of his body
’
s potentialities, then it would be better, as it were, to start from Lawrence and add the other two to him, than to start from Van Gogh or Nijinsky and try to develop .them up to Lawrence
’
s level. This is not to say that Lawrence was a greater
‘
artist
’
or what have you than Nijinsky or Van Gogh; I am not at the moment concerned with them as artists, but as Outsiders. As far as the Outsider is concerned, it is more important to have a powerful intellect than a highly developed capacity to
‘
feel
’
.

But the most important assumption that is tacit in this chapter is that the Outsider
’
s chief desire is
to cease to be an Outsider.
He cannot cease to be an Outsider simply to become an ordinary bourgeois; that would be a way back,
‘
back into the wolf or the child
’
, and Harry Haller has already stated that this way is impracticable, is no true solution
of the Outsider
’
s problems. His problem is therefore
how to go forward.
Lawrence, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, all went back. All three were defeated, and our examination has told us something of why they were defeated. In the next chapters, we shall have to follow the hints picked up from these three men, and see how far other Outsiders have succeeded where they failed.

We can see now that we must examine all attempts at solution carefully, in case they are not really solutions. There is a way forward and a way back. Either way resolves the Outsider
’
s problems. And the Outsider can follow both ways at once; a part of him can go forward and press a discipline to its conclusion, another part accept a compromise like Lawrence
’
s mental suicide. In such a case, the man will claim to have found a valid solution of the Outsider
’
s problems, and in examining his solution, we shall have to apply the distinctions we have developed in this chapter—the three disciplines— and find if his solution would have fitted the Nijinsky type of Outsider as well as the Van Gogh or Lawrence type. If we detect a ring of truth in Hesse
’
s dictum that no man has ever yet attained to self-realization, we shall be predisposed to believe that no man has ever solved the Outsider
’
s problems fully.

What
is
certain is that the Outsider
’
s problems have begun to resolve themselves into terms of Ultimate Yes and Ultimate No; for the intellectual Outsider, the Existentialist form: being or nothingness? for the emotional Outsider: Eternal love or eternal indifference? and for the Nijinsky type of Outsider, the man of action, the physical Outsider, it is a question of life or death, the body
’
s final defeat or triumph, whether the final truth is
‘
I am God
’
or an ultimate horror of physical corruption. The last words of Nijinsky
’
s
Diary
are an affirmation:

My little girl is singing:
‘
Ah ah ah ah.
’
I do not understand its meaning, but I feel what she wants to say. She wants to say that everything ... is not horror, but joy.
³⁹

The Outsider
’
s problem is to balance this against Van Gogh
’
s last words: Misery will never end. It is a question no longer of philosophy, but of religion.

THE PAIN THRESHOLD

T
he title of this
chapter is an expression coined by William James in his
Varieties of Religious Experience.
This is how he defines it:

Recent psychology
...
speaks of the threshold of a man
’
s consciousness in general to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a high threshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with a low threshold would be immediately waked.
...
And so we might speak of a
‘
pain threshold
’
, a Year threshold
’
, a
‘
misery threshold
’
, and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying too high in others to be often reached by their consciousness. The sanguine and healthy minded habitually live on the sunny side of their misery line; the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension.
¹

James goes on to ask:

Does it not appear as if one who lived habitually on one side of the pain threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other?

This is the problem towards which our consideration of the Outsider has been imperceptibly leading us. Our findings point more and more to the conclusion that the Outsider is
not
a freak, but is only more sensitive than the
‘
sanguine and healthy-minded
’
type of man; Steppenwolf makes no bones about it, but declares that he is a higher type of man altogether. If by religion we mean a
way of life
that resolves man
’
s spiritual tensions, the Outsider will refuse to admit that the
‘
sanguine and healthy-minded
’
man has a religion at all; unless a man
lives by
a belief, the Outsider objects, then it is no more material
to him than whether he believes that Mount Everest or Mount Meru is the highest mountain in the world. The Outsider begins with certain inner tensions; we have asked ourselves the question:
‘
How can these tensions be resolved?
’
and, in the course of our investigation, we have discovered that the healthy-minded man
’
s confident answer,
‘
Send him to a psychiatrist
’
, does not fit the case at all. The next stage is to say:
‘
Very well, let us treat it as a mathematical problem.
’
Let us, in other words, ask the healthy-minded man:
If
your pain threshold lay as low as this, how would you resolve these tensions? The Outsider we are to consider in this chapter will illustrate a determined and objective approach to this question, but before we pass on to him, it would perhaps be as well to enlarge on the tensions, or rather the problems that cause them; in this way we shall have a broader idea of what the Outsider means by
‘
Ultimate No
’
.

Obviously, we are back at Pessimism, and we could conveniently begin by mentioning the Shakespearean type:

As flies to foolish boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport
...

It is the problem of the uncertainty of life, of how man can set up any aim or belief when he is not certain whether he will
‘
breathe out the very breath he now breathes in
’
. A lesser-known example than Gloucester
’
s lines is the Duke
’
s speech from Beddoes
’
s
Death
’
s Jest Book:

The look of the world
’
s a lie, a face made up

O
’
er graves and fiery depths, and nothing
’
s true

But what is horrible. If man could see

The perils and diseases that he elbows

Each day he walks a mile, which catch at him,

Which fall behind and graze him as he passes,

Then would he know that life
’
s a single pilgrim

Fighting unarmed among a thousand soldiers .
²

It is worth mentioning here that Beddoes
’
s negation ended, like Van Gogh
’
s, in suicide. His plays breathe a sort of romantic death-worship that probably owes something to Novalis and Tieck; they remind us of Keats
’
s:

Now more than ever it seems rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
...
³

In this connexion, too, we might mention many writers of the nineteenth century, especially of its last three decades; and the poets Yeats called
‘
the tragic generation
’
: Lionel Johnson, Dowson, Verlaine, Corbiere, men who are the tail-end of nineteenth-century romanticism; and their immediate forebears, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Lautreamont and the Italian Leopardi. James Thomson
’
s
‘
City of Dreadful Night
’
deserves more space than we can afford to give it here, as being a sort of nineteenth-century forerunner of T. S. Eliot
’
s
‘
Waste Land
’
, with its insistence on the illusory nature of the world:

For life is but a dream whose shapes return

Some frequently, some seldom, some by night... we learn

While many change, and many vanish quite

In their recurrence with recurrent changes,

A certain seeming order; where this ranges

We count things real; such is the memory
’
s might.
⁴

Which invites comparison with:

Unreal city

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn .. ,
⁶

De Lisle Adam
’
s
Axel
belongs to the same period, and its hero would almost have served as a symbol of the Outsider as well as Barbusse
’
s hole-in-corner man: he, the young Count Axel, lives in his lonely castle on the Rhine, and studies the Kabbala and Hermetic philosophy in his oak-panelled study; in irritation at the vulgarity of his
‘
man of the world
’
cousin, the Commander, he runs him through with his sword. In the last Act, he and the beautiful runaway nun Sarah stand clasped in each other
’
s arms in the vault of the castle, and vow to kill themselves rather than attempt the inevitably stupid and disappointing business of living out their love for each other.
‘
As for living, our servants can do that for us.
’