The Outsider (39 page)

Now, the beetle-man Outsider, the Sartre or Barbusse hero, might well envy Fox his confidence and conviction, and yet feel that there are insuperable barriers to prevent him from doing the same sort of thing. Fox is a man who sticks at nothing. He is the perfect example of the Outsider in revolt. When his convictions are stirred, he lowers his head and charges like a bull, just like the
‘
man of action
’
that we found Dostoevsky
’
s beetle-man admiring in Chapter VI. A brick wall does not worry him. He is the sort of man that the beetle-man can admire, and feel contempt for. Fox accepts things that the beetle-man
cannot accept: his own identity, for instance.
‘
If George Fox says: Verily, there is no altering him.
’
The beetle-man could never make such a boast.

Yet anyone who has read the
Journal
will know that there is a great deal more than a bull at a gate about George Fox. The self-confidence has arisen as the result of a long course in self-doubt. And this is what the beetle-man cannot understand, for his self-doubt never drives him to seek for a solution with the determination of a desperate man. Consequently, he never discovers what he might be capable of.

The one thing that no reader of the
Journal
can doubt is that George Fox was once as complete an Outsider as the hero of
Notesfrom Under the Floorboards.
This was in his early days, when he was barely nineteen. He tells us how, at that age, he began to feel the stirrings of the discontent that separated him from his family and friends. One holiday he joined his cousin in the local pub, and there, quite suddenly, felt a savage disgust against all the merrymaking. He stood up and left them, and:
^‘
I returned home, but did not go to bed that night, nor could not sleep, but sometimes walked up and down, and sometimes prayed and cried to the Lord: Thou seest how young people go together into vanity, and old people into the earth, and thou must forsake all, both young and old, and keep out of all, and be a stranger to all.
’
⁴

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief....

Fox
’
s feelings at nineteen are not difficult to parallel in modern literature. The way Outsiders feel about the general mass of men doesn
’
t change much in three hundred years.

And many that professed religion sought to be aquainted, but I was afraid of them, for I was sensible they did not possess what they professed.
⁵

Like all Outsiders, Fox was sensitive to the fact that what people call religion is mostly an ersatz substitute. He admits that:

... at Barnet a strong temptation to despair
came upon
me... and some years I continued in that condition, and fain
would have put it from me. And I went to many a priest
to look for comfort, but found no comfort from them
…
⁶

We can imagine Fox, a serious-minded, inwardly tormented young man, moving from place to place like Van Gogh or a Hesse wanderer, feeling deeper needs than other people seem to feel, and wondering if he is not merely a misfit in the world. But Fox was a little better off than the modern Existentialist Outsider, for to the modern, all religions and creeds seem to be outworn lies; in Fox
’
s day, the words of the Old Testament could still stir the blood with a sense of authenticity; only the year before, Cromwell
’
s brigade of specially picked
‘
men of religion
’
had scattered the King
’
s forces at Marston Moor, so that Cromwell could write:
‘
God made them as stubble to our swords.
’
Reform was in the air, and Fox too wanted to find other men who could share his sense of urgency; he wanted to find men and women like himself, who felt a
‘
hunger and thirst after righteousness
’
, for whom the question of their salvation was of burning importance. Instead, what did he find?

From Barnet I went to London, where I took a lodging,
and was under great misery and trouble there, for I looked
upon those who professed religion in the city of London, and
I saw all was dark and under the chain of darkness
…

And I had an uncle, one Pickering, a baptist ... yet I could not import my mind to him, nor join with him, for I saw all, young and old, where they were.
⁷

That is to say (to alter his language slightly) that he saw too deep and too much. Other people cannot help. He tells of the discussions he engaged in with the priest at his home village, where Fox talked of Christ
’
s despair and temptations, with the terrible insight of the Outsider, and of how disgusted he felt to hear his own words repeated on Sunday in the priest
’
s sermon. Later experiences with priests were, if anything, even more disillusioning:

After this I went to another ancient priest at Mancetter in Warwickshire, and reasoned with him about the ground
of despair and temptations, but he was ignorant
of
my condition, and bade me take tobacco and sing psalms.
...
⁸

(We can compare this with Broadbent in
John Bull
’
s Other Island
telling the Outsider-priest Keegan: Try phosphorus pills. I always take them when my brain
’
s overworked.
’
)

…
then I heard of a priest living about Tamworth was accounted an experienced man, and I went seven miles to him, but I found him like an empty hollow cask.. .. Then I heard of one doctor Cradock of Coventry, and I went to him, and asked him the ground of temptation and despair,
and how troubles came to be wrought in man Now as we
were talking together in his garden, the alley being narrow, I chanced in turning to set my foot on the side of a flower bed, at which the man was in such a rage as if his house had been on fire.
...
I went away in sorrow, worse than when I came. ... I thought them miserable comforters, and saw they were all as nothing to me, for they could not reach my condition.
⁹

Like all Outsiders, Fox wanted to be understood, wanted someone to look into his soul and soothingly set things to right. And, like all Outsiders, he had to learn to work out his own salvation. It is the hardest message of all, that there is a final enemy whom every man and woman carries about with them, who cannot be fought vicariously. It is a truth that the doctrine of the Atonement was invented to make less terrible: this final, internal enemy, against whom there can be no appeal for outside help. All saints and religious teachers have made recognition of this last enemy the basis of their creeds. Many great spiritual teachers have left accounts of their
‘
struggles for light
’
. The characteristics of the struggle are often like Steppenwolf
’
s description of his
‘
average day
’
: failure, dullness, deadness of the senses, lack of a sense of urgency, often
resulting, after long effort, in a sudden relaxing, an intensity and warmth:

And though my exercises and troubles were very great yet they were not so continual but that I had some intermissions, and was sometimes brought into such a heavenly joy that I thought I had been in Abraham
’
s bosom
...
¹⁰

And Fox
’
s
‘
spiritual combat
’
resulted in a sudden realization:

Then the Lord did let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition, namely, that I might give him all the glory; for all are concluded in sin, and shut-up in unbelief as I had been, that Jesus Christ might have the pre-eminence...
¹¹

Translating this out of its religious terminology into the language of the Existentialist Outsider, we can see that when Fox reached some kind of internal resolution of his Outsider problems, he felt glad that he had not been tempted to resolve them easily by accepting other people, or some easy creed or faith.
‘
That he might give God all the glory
’
,
^‘
that Jesus Christ might have pre-eminence
’
,
...
even if these terms mean nothing to us, it is obvious that they have some psychological counterpart, some meaning that
is
relevant to the Outsider. It is not so far from Steppenwolf
’
s recognition that he must
‘
traverse, not once more but often, the hell of his inner being
’
, and even in this term
‘
the
hell
of his inner being
’
, we have an acknowledgement of the reality of this internal enemy. Fox, like Steppenwolf, like Van Gogh and Nijinsky and Sartre
’
s hero, has moments when all is supremely well, when he can
say yes
to everything, even to the terror of his inner conflict. And these moments are common to most poets and artists, as well as to religious men like Fox. Rilke, in the direct Nietzschean tradition, spoke of
‘
to praise in spite of
(dennock preisen),
and began the greatest of his ten Elegies:

May I, emerging at last from this terrible insight

Burst into jubilant praise to assenting angels
...
¹²

All this can help us to understand what was going on in Fox
’
s heart of hearts, what processes are described, under this terminology that in so many ways means less to us than to Fox
’
s contemporaries, and yet which can, in all important respects, mean even more if we can grasp its inner meaning. What we can say, without fear of misrepresenting Fox, is that these struggles were of the same nature as those of Lawrence, Van Gogh, Nietzsche: that when he spoke of
‘
inner torments
’
, he meant that same striving for self-expression, like a drowning man gasping for air, and that same view of the world
’
s terror and misery that Rilke called his
grimmige Einsicht,
terrible insight. And for Fox, just as for Ivan Karamazov, the temptation was to give God back his entrance ticket.

At this point we enter into that difficulty that I spoke of at the end of the section on Nijinsky: the difficulty of telling how far an Outsider has really solved the- problem, and how far he has compromised. As we read Fox
’
s
Journal,
trying to understand what was happening to him in the terms of the Barbusse Outsider, the difficulties increase. All this torment we can understand; but passages like the following are more difficult:

My desires after the Lord grew stronger, and zeal in the pure knowledge of God and of Christ alone, without the help of any man, book or writing. For though I read the scriptures that spoke of Christ and of God, yet I knew him not by revelation....

And I found there were two thirsts in me: the one
after the creatures, to have gotten help and strength there,
and the other after the Lord the creator and his son Jesus
Christ
…
¹³

What exactly does he mean by
^‘
the Lord the creator and his son
’
? Let us dismiss at once the notion that he believed in them as a child believes in fairies, or that they may have represented vague religious emotions as Finn Macool represents vague patriotic emotions to an Irishman. Fox was an Outsider, and we know enough about Outsiders to know that his symbols usually correspond to a psychological reality. Besides, Fox
’
s
‘
thirst after the creatures
’
is common to all Outsiders; we can recall that desire of Henry James the elder to call his wife when
he felt the presence of something
‘
evil
’
in the room. Now James turned back to
‘
the creatures
’
as his salvation: his whole solution is contained in the title of his book:
Society, the Redeemed Form of Man.
Fox
’
s phrase would seem to intimate—and we must be very cautious about this—that he can believe in some solution quite apart from other men, quite apart from
outside sources.
He seems to mean that he does not intend to change his relation to society, or to change society
’
s relation to him; he intends, it would seem, to change only his relation to his
^‘
inner-self
’
. Fox would no doubt grow impatient if he could overhear this hair-splitting, and say roundly that he intended to do nothing of the sort, that he intended to have done with relations with men and establish a direct relation with God. (
‘
And does not the soul, sighing after such fictions, commit fornication against thee?
’
St. Augustine writes, considering the years in which he cared more about human beings than about God.) But in that case, what is a
‘
relation with God
’
if not a synonym for complete self-expression? (
^‘
No man has ever achieved complete self-realization
’
, Hesse wrote.) Self-expression is impossible in relation with other men; their self-expression interferes with it. The greatest heights of self-expression—in poetry, music, painting—are achieved by men who are supremely alone. And it is for this reason that the idea of
‘
the beatific vision
’
is easier for the artist to grasp than for anyone else. He has only to imagine his moment of
‘
greatest aloneness
’
intensified to a point where it would fill up his life and make all other relations impossible or unnecessary. They never are, of course, for the artist; his moments of highest inspiration leave him glad enough to get back to people, but at least he knows something of that complete independence of other human beings the theoretical existence of which most people prefer to doubt.