The Outsider (41 page)

And this point carries us back naturally to George Fox. How far does the history of Fox
’
s life present us with a final, convincing solution of the Outsider
’
s problems? We must admit, it doesn
’
t. His
Journal
can move us, even inspire us in places, but beyond a certain point, there is a sense of anticlimax. Fox wasted himself fighting the stupidities of his age. The Quaker movement, admittedly, was a fine and valuable thing. But is that all? Let us recall Evan Strowde, in Chapter II, for a moment:

Strowde: Save me from the illusion of power! I once had a glimpse—and I thank you for it, my dear—of a power that is in me. But that won
’
t answer any call.

Joan: Not even that of a good cause?

Strowde: Excellent causes abound. They are served—as they are—by eminent prigs making a fine parade, by little minds waiting for what
’
s to happen next. Track such men down
...
search for their strength, which is not to be borrowed or bargained for ... it must spring from the secret life.

Well, we can see that Fox made a better show than Strowde, tracking his
‘
inner powers
’
to the roots, and harnessing them to action. Fox refused second-bests, that
‘
devil
’
s own second-best
’
, and made himself into a great man. But what then?

It looks an unanswerable question, and we had better pass over it for the moment. When the Outsider
’
s problems seem to lead to an impasse, the best thing is to go back and try another approach. If Fox had ended his life being taken up in a fiery chariot, like Elijah, we would probably still feel that he was ultimately a failure, like all other Outsiders. Or are they? Meursault realized that
‘
I had been happy, and I was happy still
’
. But what is the use of being happy if you don
’
t realize it until you are about to die ?

Fox was better off than the Barbusse Outsider or the beetle-man. He had made an
‘
attempt to gain control
’
. He was better
off, in a way, than Van Gogh or Lawrence, for his attempt led to more success than theirs.

But in what sense was he not successful?

Strowde has pointed us in the direction of the answer. Illusion. Fox accepted the world as it appears. He did not accept the common moral interpretation, but he adopted the common metaphysical interpretation. Reality is what it seems to be.

Let us cast our minds back to Nietzsche for a moment, Nietzsche at twenty, discovering a tattered volume in a Leipzig bookshop, and reading it through almost immediately: Schopenhauer
’
s
Welt a
ls
Wille und Vorstellung,
The World as Will and Appearance
’
.

...
here there gazed at me the full, unbiased eye of art
...
here I saw a mirror in which I observed the world, life and my own soul in frightful grandeur... .
¹⁸

Schopenhauer made Nietzsche aware of something that, as a poet
and an Outsider,
he had been subconsciously aware of for a long time: that the world is not the human bourgeois surface it presents. It is Will, and it is delusion. Schopenhauer was fond of borrowing a phrase from the Upanishads and calling it
Maya,
illusion. This is the view of the Vedantic philosophy: that the world is an appearance of the absolute Brahman, which is supreme and characterless. The Christian religion has its counterpart of this belief when it says: God is everything. But it is one thing to say it because it is in your catechism, another to see it or feel it because you happen to be an Outsider.

The Outsiders I dealt with in the first chapter had that in common, an instinct that made them doubt the
‘
reality
’
of the bourgeois world (I call it this for want of a better word; in practice, I mean the world as it appears to the human social animal). All of the meaning of this attitude is compressed in De Lisle Adam
’
s
^‘
As for living, our servants will do that for us
’
. It means that the human personality is conceived almost as an enemy; when it comes into contact with
‘
the world
’
, it tells the soul lies, lies about itself and its relation to other people. Left to himself, in solitude, meditation, study, Axel believes that his soul establishes its true relation with the world. As soon as he begins to
live,
the falsehood begins.
^‘
He wanted to meet in
the real world the unsubstantial image that his soul so constantly beheld
’
, Joyce wrote of Dedalus. So do all Outsiders. So did Fox, in those early days of wandering. But did he ever meet it? Did he create it with the power of his mind over other men?

Judging him by the Outsider
’
s stern criterion, there is nothing for it but to answer: No. He showed a way, an approach. He showed that there is no point in getting neurotic and defeatist about it, and deciding, like Schopenhauer, that the world and the spirit are at eternal, perpetual, unresolvable loggerheads. The
Journal
is a more inspiring document than the
Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.
‘
But not psychologically
truer,
’
the Outsider might urge. But even that will not hold. The sense of the world as Will and delusion is as strong in the early pages of the
Journal
as in Schopenhauer. Only later, there is a sense that Fox had missed the final solution, a sense that brute reality (
‘
stubborn, unreduceable fact
’
, James calls it) has got the upper hand. We suspect that Fox became a little uncritically self-assertive. There was the unpleasant James Nayler affair, for instance.

Nayler was Fox
’
s right-hand man, young, good-looking, a spell-binding orator, second only to Fox in authority in the movement. But he was a far more imaginative man than Fox, and he allowed two women disciples to persuade him that he was the Messiah, and that he had been sent to announce the more-or-less immediate arrival of the Day of Judgement. He allowed himself to be led (in a state of fever) into Bristol, riding on a donkey, and preceded by the two women disciples crying,
‘
Holy, holy, holy.
’
When the police gathered their wits together, they arrested Nayler and charged him with blasphemy. A trial followed, in which Nayler was asked:
‘
Do you claim to be the Son of God,
’
and replied:
‘
I am, and so is everybody.
’
But the judges w
^r
ere not to be put off by such subtle theological points, and Nayler was duly sentenced. He was to be publicly whipped in London and Bristol, to be branded on the forehead with B for blasphemer, and to have his tongue bored through with a hot iron. Everyone was appalled by the savagery of the sentence, even non-Quaker-sympathizers. But Fox was not. He was mainly irritated by Nayler
’
s silly behaviour, and the harm it did to the movement. He refused to listen to the pleas of Friends who asked him to stand by Nayler; he ignored
Nayler
’
s message asking him to visit him in prison (where, even after the whipping and branding, Nayler was still treated with cruelty). Finally, he wrote Nayler a letter, reproving him for accusing him (Fox) of jealousy and telling him: There is no pardon for you in this.
...
’
Nayler was kept in jail for three years, being released in September, 1659. He died a year later, after being attacked by robbers on a journey to the North.

Fox
’
s part in this affair is not so inhuman as it appears at first sight. He showed the same stern devotion to his principles that he had often shown before hostile judges, and he refused to falsify the religious position that he had spent his life making so clear, by giving his support to a man who
had
falsified it. As a leader, his conduct was as justifiable as that of any statesman who allows expediency to rule his personal feelings. But for the Outsider, the horror of the situation is that Fox should ever have been forced into that kind of position. He feels that, somehow, the real Outsider should be concerned with nothing except human psychology, with discriminating between the world as Will and the world as Delusion. All this business is horribly irrelevant. How could any Outsider get himself mixed up with such tomfoolery?

Perhaps it would be fairer to Fox to ask: How could he have avoided it ? Philosophers will tell you that if you have a standard in your head, there must be somewhere a reality or idea that corresponds to that standard. What is this standard by which we are judging Fox?

It is difficult to formulate, because we are not certain about our ultimates. Ask the Outsider what he ultimately wants, and he will admit he doesn
’
t know. Why? Because he wants it instinctively, and it is not always possible to tell what your instincts are driving towards. Young W. B. Yeats wanted a fairy land where
‘
the lonely of heart is withered away
’
. Dowson and Thompson and Beddoes were
‘
half in love with easeful death
’
:

They are not long, the days of wine and roses

Out of a misty dream

Our path emerges for a while, then closes

Within a dream.
¹⁹

Axel wanted to live in imagination alone, in a castle on the Rhine, with volumes on Hermetic philosophy, and Yeats even
made preliminary steps to put the idea into practice, with his plans for a brotherhood of poets who would live in a
‘
Castle on the Rock
’
at Lough Kay in Rosscommon:

I planned a mystical order that should buy or hire the castle, and keep it as a place where its members could retire for a while for contemplation, and where we might establish mysteries like those of Eleusis or Samothrace. ... I had an unshakeable conviction that invisible gates would open, as they opened for Blake, as they opened for Swedenborg, as they opened for Boehme, and that this philosophy would find its manuals of devotion in
all imaginative literature... [
The Trembling of the Veil,
Book III
]

This idea of Yeats
’
s is persistently an Outsider-ideal, persistent even in unromantic Outsiders: solitude, retreat, the attempt to order a small corner of the
‘
devil-ridden chaos
’
to one
’
s own satisfaction. A Marxist critic would snap: Escapism; and no doubt he would not be entirely wrong, but let us look closer. The real difference between the Marxian and the romantic Outsider is that one would like to bring heaven down to earth, the other dreams of raising earth up to heaven. To the Outsider, the Marxian seems hopelessly short-sighted in his requirements for a heaven on earth; his notions seem to be based on a total failure to understand human psychology. (Aldous Huxley
’
s
Brave New World
and Zamyatin
’
s
We
are typical expressions of Outsider c
riticism of social idealism.)
Now George Fox combined the practical-mindedness of the Marxian with the Outsider
’
s high standard for a
‘
heaven on earth
’
, and in so far as he was practical-minded, he failed to penetrate to the bottom of the Outsider
’
s ideal. What did he achieve? He founded the Society of Friends, a very fine thing in itself, but lacking the wearing-quality of older established sects; he conquered his Outsider
’
s sense of exile. And there we have it! As a religious teacher,
he accepted himself and the world,
and no Outsider can afford to do this. He accepted an essentially optimistic philosophy.

When all the Friends had got it into their heads that they had an
‘
inner light
⁵
, they felt that evil had been finally overcome; all that was necessary was to act according to the
‘
inner light
⁵
. The Enemy was minimized. The evil in this was the same as in all sects that set out to give their followers the feeling that they have a monopoly of divine benevolence. For the Outsider, the best place to watch the eternal comedy of human beings deluding themselves (apart from the Jehovah
’
s Witness and the Christian Scientist meetings), is a Quaker congregation on a Sunday evening. The distinction between reality and unreality is lost; neither is it recognized that good is traditionally associated with the real, evil with the unreal; human beings accept themselves and their personalities with no sense of bondage, for all have an
‘
inner light
⁵
, and the inner light can do no wrong. This criticism may seem unduly harsh, but it must be remembered that we are looking at these things from the Outsider
’
s point of view, and it is Roquentin who condemns men who think their existence is necessary as
salauds.
The Outsider
’
s business is to discriminate between real and unreal, necessary and unnecessary. Where Fox fell short of this standard, we must not hesitate to condemn him; the problem is difficult enough without blurring the lines with compromise.

Fox, then, was too much the man of action; his method of trying to persuade all men to become Outsiders was too unsophisticated. It failed to do justice to the complexity of the problem. Consequently, he failed to solve it.

Before we leave Fox, we should acknowledge the greatness of his effort to solve the Outsider
’
s problems; he is perhaps England
’
s major religious teacher, and his faith is an Outsider
’
s faith. Under different circumstances, in another age, he might have been the founder of a new religion instead of a new sect, and the founders of the great religions did not compromise less than Fox, in trying to make the Outsider
’
s solution valid for everybody.