The Outsider (38 page)

THE OUTSIDER AS VISIONARY

The visionary
is inevitably an Outsider. And this is not because visionaries are a relatively small minority in proportion to the rest of the community; in that case, rat-catchers and steeple-jacks would be Outsiders too. It is for the very different reason that he starts from a point that everybody can understand, and very soon soars beyond the general understanding. He starts from the
‘
appetite for fruitful activity and a high quality of life
’
, the most profound and ineradicable human instinct. And before long you have him making statements
like
this:

I assert for myself that I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not action; it is as the dirt upon my feet, no part of me.
‘
What,
’
it will be questioned,
‘
when the sun rises do you not see a round disc of fire, something like a guinea?
’
Oh no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying:
‘
Holy holy holy is the Lord God Almighty.
’
¹

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 him 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).