Spiritual Crisis

This book, an inquiry into the nature of the sickness of mankind in the mid- twentieth century, has been received with acclamation by critics overseas. It is necessary, however, to examine it without preconceptions of its value. Mr Wilson, we gather, is a young man; he is also a wise one, for he speaks for no special school of thought and raises no flag of revolution against the ruling cliques of literary opinion. He is truly concerned to find out the truth about modern man, and the integrity of his research carries him undamaged over ground where the best might stumble.

Briefly, his argument is this – that our own age has produced men with special spiritual qualities, men who grapple in their lives and work with problems of negation, evil, and the absence of God; and further, that their special experience divides them as Outsiders from the Insiders whose experience of these problems has lacked the same total urgency. It is indeed a fascinating and persuasive study; and particularly hard to assess because Mr Wilson proceeds more by a series of insights than by logical sequence. His list of Outsiders is heterogeneous – H.G. Wells, Sartre, Camus, Boehme, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Hemingway, James Joyce, T.E. Lawrence, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, T.S. Eliot, George Fox, W.B. Yeats, William Blake, Ramakrishna, Gurdjieff, and several others – but one thing is noticeable, that most, though not all of them, are artists. True, Mr Wilson (rather arbitrarily) cites Shakespeare and Dante as artists who were Outsiders but one feels that, broadly speaking, he tends to regard majorpage 306 artists as initiates of an Orphic ceremony which makes them members of a spiritual elite.

The grain of truth in this conjecture, as he presents it, skilfully, sincerely, and even humbly, prevents his book from becoming a mere apologia for aesthetic self-determination. The sizeable grain of error proceeds from his apparent ignorance that the spiritual experiences of Insiders can be as remarkable, as devastating, though not so articulate, as those of any artist. Perhaps Mr Wilson would reply that such people are Outsiders in disguise. In that case his dividing line would become so tenuous that no one could apply it. Yet, as a study of spiritual crisis among culturally prominent individuals, his book is of unique value and may shake the defences of many who believe that the problems of our time are soluble in terms of Land Lease or Moral Rearmament.

1956 (147)