The Outsider (4 page)

Barbusse has suggested that it is the fact that his hero
sees deeper
that makes him an Outsider; at the same time, he states that he has
‘
no special genius, no message to bestow
’
, etc., and from his history during the remainder of the book, we have no reason to doubt his word. Indubitably, the hero
is
mediocre; he can
’
t write for toffee, and the whole book is full of
clichés
. It is necessa
r
y to emphasize this in order to rid ourselves of the temptation to identify the Outsider with the artist, and so to oversimplify the question: disease or insight? Many great artists have none of the characteristics of the Outsider. Shakespeare, Dante, Keats were all apparently normal and socially well-adjusted, lacking anything that could be pitched on as disease or nervous disability. Keats, who always makes a very clear and romantic distinction between the poet and the ordinary man, seems to have had no shades of inferiority complexes or sexual neuroses lurking in the background of his mind; no D. H. Lawrence-ish sense of social-level, no James Joycian
need to assert his intellectual superiority; above all, no sympathy whatever with the attitude of Villiers De Lisle Adam
’
s Axel (so much admired by Yeats):
‘
As for living, our servants can do that for us.
’
If any man intended to do his own living for himself, it was Keats. And he is undoubtedly the rule
rather than the exception among great poets. The Outsider may be an artist, but the artist is not necessarily an Outsider. What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, of unreality. Even Keats could write, in a letter to Browne just before he died: 1 feel as if I had died already and am now living a posthumous existence.
’
This is the sense of unreality, that can strike out of a perfectly clear sky. Good health and strong nerves can make it unlikely; but that may be only because the man in good health is thinking about other things and doesn
’
t look in the direction where the uncertainty lies. And once a man has seen it, the world can never afterwards be quite the same straightforward place. Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality.
‘
He sees too deep and too much
’
, and what he sees is essentially
chaos.
For the bourgeois, the world is fundamentally an orderly place, with a disturbing element of the irrational, the terrifying, which his preoccupation with the present usually permits him to ignore. For the Outsider, the world is not rational, not orderly. When he asserts his sense of anarchy in the face of the bourgeois
’
complacent acceptance, it is not simply the need to cock a snook at respectability that provokes him; it is a distressing sense
that truth must be told at all costs,
otherwise there can be no hope for an ultimate restoration of order. Even if there seems no room for hope, truth must be told. (The example we are turning to now is a curious instance of this.) The Outsider is a man who has awakened to chaos. He may have no reason to believe that chaos is positive, the germ of life (in the Kabbala, chaos—
tohu bohu
—is simply a state in which order is latent; the
egg
is the
‘
chaos
’
of the bird); in spite of this, truth must be told, chaos must be faced.

The last published work of H. G. Wells gives us an insight into such an awakening.
Mind at the End of Its Tether
seems to have been written to record some revelation:

The writer finds very considerable reason for believing that within a period to be estimated by weeks and months rather than by aeons, there has been a fundamental change in the conditions under which life—and not simply human life but all self-conscious existence—has been going on since
its beginning. If his thinking has been sound ... the end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded. He is telling you the conclusions to which reality has driven his own mind, and he thinks you may be interested enough to consider them, but he is not attempting to impose them on you.
⁸

This last sentence is noteworthy for its curious logic. Wells
’
s conviction that life is at an end is, as he says, a
‘
stupendous proposition
’
. If it is true, then it negates the whole pamphlet; obviously, since it negates all life and its phenomena. Vaguely aware of the contradiction, Wells explains that he is writing
‘
under the urgency of a scientific training that obliged him to clarify the world and his ideas to the limits of his capacity
’
.

His renascent intelligence finds itself confronted with strange, convincing realities so overwhelming that, were he indeed one of those logical, consistent people we incline to claim we are, he would think day and night in a passion of concentration, dismay and mental struggle upon the ultimate disaster that confronts our species. We are nothing of the sort. We live with reference to past experience, not to future events, however inevitable.
⁹

In commenting on an earlier book called
The Conquest of Time,
Wells comments:
^‘
Such conquest as that book admits is done by time rather than man.
’

Time like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away They fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day.
¹⁰

This is the authentic Shakespearian pessimism, straight out of
Macbeth
or
Timon.
It is a surprising note from the man who had spent his life preaching the credo: If you don
’
t like your life you can change it: the optimist of
Men Like Gods
and
A Modern Utopia.
Wells declares that, if the reader will follow him closely, he will give the reason for this change of outlook:

The reality glares coldly and harshly upon any of those who can wrench their minds free ... to face the unsparing question that has overwhelmed the writer. They discover
that a frightful queerness has come into life The habitual
interest of the writer is his critical anticipation. Of everything he asks: To what will this lead? And it was natural for him to assume that there was a limit set to change, that new things and events would appear, but that they would appear consistently, preserving the natural sequence of life. So that in the present vast confusion of our world, there was always the assumption of an ultimate restoration of rationality.
...
It was merely the fascinating question of what forms the new rational phase would assume, what over-man, Erewhon or what not would break through the transitory clouds and turmoil. To this the writer set his mind.

He did his utmost to pursue that upward spiral... towards their convergence in a new phase in the story of life, and the more he weighed the realities before him, the less he was able to detect any convergence whatever. Changes had ceased to be systematic, and the further he estimated the course they seemed to be taking, the greater the divergence. Hitherto, events had been held together by a certain logical consistency, as the heavenly bodies have been held together by gravitation. Now it is as if that cord had vanished, and everything was driving anyhow to anywhere at a steadily
increasing velocity The pattern of things to come faded
away.
¹¹

PAGE NOTE:
Readers of Professor Whitehead will probably feel that Wells is a bad example of Whitehead’s old enemy, ‘the bifurcation of nature’, i.e. that as a man of science, he has gone to extremes of dividing nature into ‘things as they are’ (i.e. the things science is concerned with) and things as they are perceived by human beings (i.e. the things art and music are concerned with), and that Wells’s feeling that mind and nature have ceased to run parallel is only an extreme consequence of his attitude. Certainly Whitehead’s ‘philosophy of organism’ is concerned with making the same demands for a
wholeness
of conception of mind and nature that I am concerned with in this book; a parallel of the thought of Professor Whitehead with that of T. E. Hulme would probably shed a great deal of light on the problems of contemporary humanism.

In the pages that follow, these ideas are enlarged on and repeated, without showing us how they were arrived at.
‘
A harsh queerness is coming into things
’
, and a paragraph later:
‘
We pass into the harsh glare of hitherto incredible novelty.
...
The more strenuous the analysis, the more inescapable the sense of mental defeat.
’
The cinema sheet stares us in the face. That sheet is the actual fabric of our being. Our loves, our hates, our wars and battles, are no more than
phantasmagoria dancing on that fabric, themselves as insubstantial as a dream.
’

There are obviously immense differences between the attitudes of Wells and Barbusse
’
s hero, but they have in common the Outsider
’
s fundamental attitude: non-acceptance of life, of human life lived by human beings in a human society. Both would say: Such a life is a dream; it is not real. Wells goes further than Barbusse in the direction of complete negation. He ends his first chapter with the words: There is no way out or round or through.
’
There can be no doubt that as far as Wells is concerned, he certainly sees
‘
too deep and too much
’
. Such knowledge is an impasse, the dead end of Eliot
’
s Gerontion:
‘
After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
’

Wells had promised to give his reasons for arriving at such a stupendous proposition. In the remainder of the pamphlet (nineteen pages) he does nothing of the sort; he repeats his assertion.
‘
Our doomed formicary
’
,
‘
harsh implacable hostility to our universe
’
,
‘
no pattern of any kind
’
. He talks vaguely of Einstein
’
s paradox of the speed of light, of the
‘
radium clock
’
(a method geologists use to date the earth). He even contradicts his original statement that
all
life is at an end; it is only the species
Homo sapiens
that is played out.
‘
The stars in their courses have turned against him and he has to give place to some other animal better adapted to face the fate that closes in on mankind.
’
In the final pages of the pamphlet, his trump of the last judgement has changed into the question: Can civilization be saved?

‘
But my own temperament makes it unavoidable for me to doubt that there will not be that small minority who will see life out to its inevitable end.
’
¹²

All the same, the pamphlet must be considered the most pessimistic single utterance in modern literature, together with T. S. Eliot
’
s
‘
Hollow Men
’
. And Eliot
’
s despair was essentially religious; we should be tempted to assume that Wells
’
s despair is religious too, if it were not for his insistence that he is speaking of a scientific fact, an objective reality.

It is not surprising that the work received scant attention from Wells
’
s contemporaries: to make its conclusions credible it would need the formidable dialectical apparatus of Schopenhauer
’
s
Welt als Wille und Vorstellung
or Spengler
’
s
Decline of the West.
I have heard it described by a writer-contemporary of
Wells as
‘
an outburst of peevishness at a world that refused to accept him as its Messiah
’
. Certainly, if we accept it on the level on which he wrote it—acquiescing to every sentence— we feel the stirring of problems that seem to return into themselves. Why did he write it if he can hold out no hope of salvation? If the conclusions he has reached negate his own past life, and the possible futures of all the human race, where do we go from there? Wells
’
s thesis is that we have never been going anywhere—we have been carried along by our delusions, believing that any movement is better than none. Whereas the truth is that the reverse,
no movement,
is the final answer, the answer to the question: What will men
do
when they see things as they are?