The Outsider

by Colin Wilson

  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.

  What Fox knew was that he could achieve moments when things that were going on inside him became so absorbingly interesting that he forgot everything else. And he also discovered that when he emerged from these states of watching his own interior mechanism, he was no longer the same person.

  This, of course, is nothing so strange; anyone can notice the same phenomenon when he comes out of a theatre or concert or cinema, having been completely taken ‘out of himself. No one would expect to pass through an intense emotional experience and not feel ‘a different person’ afterwards. But in a cinema, you only pass out of your own life into other people’s; you learn nothing new about yourself; hence the change, the mental relaxation, wrought by it can hardly be expected to last for more than a few hours. There is nothing to hold it in place. It would be a different matter if the film had shown you things about yourself that you had never realized before; told you that you were capable of things that you wouldn’t have dreamed of attempting; pointed out that all your conceptions of yourself and everybody else were based on misunderstandings, and that you had only to shake off these conceptions to begin to live for the first time.

  And this is what happened to Fox after three years of wandering up and down the country, in constant spiritual conflict. He began to see visions and hear voices; or perhaps it would be truer to say that he went through emotional experiences that could only be expressed by speaking of visions and voices:

  And I saw the mountains burning up and the rubbish, and the rough and crooked ways and places made smooth and plain that the Lord might come into his tabernacle. These things are to be found in man’s heart.. .14

  His Outsider’s insight, as far as other people were concerned, was unabatedly keen:

  And I saw Professors and priests and people were whole and at ease in that condition that was my misery, and they loved that which I would have been rid of... their minds are in bondage. And they are brittle and changeable, and tossed up and down with windy doctrines and thoughts....16

  But now he felt he knew the way to cease to be an Outsider. Or rather, he knew how to cease to be miserable as an Outsider; for he felt by this time that to be an Outsider means to be able to perceive the corruption and delusions of ‘the world’, and that there can be no way back out of that condition: only a forward way. It meant telling the world, as loudly and as frequently as possible, that it was corrupt and deluded, that, to make no bones about it, it was damned.

  For Fox, one of the chief enemies was the Church. This is often so with spiritual reformers. They may be intellectual men who find that the saints and mystics are kindred spirits, and who are therefore happy to belong to the same organization. There are others who can only see that the ‘visible Church’ is represented by men who are neither devout nor strong-willed, and who can therefore see no good in it. It is usually the intellectual spiritual reformers who can reconcile themselves with the Church: Newman, Hulme, Mr. Eliot. George Fox detested it and made it one of his chief targets. Tramping from town to town, wearing leather breeches for hard wear, he stood up in the market-place and preached his fiery message. He got into the habit of interrupting clergymen in Church, a proceeding that was not without physical hazards:

  But the people fell upon me in a great rage, struck me down and almost stifled and smothered me, and I was cruelly beaten and bruised by them, and their hands, Bibles and sticks. Then they haled me out, though I was hardly able to stand, and put me into the stocks, where I sat for some hours; and they brought dog whips and horse whips...16

  This sort of entry is a commonplace in the Journal; we get the impression that Fox enjoyed the beatings; they proved his toughness to himself, and gained him sympathizers and admirers.

  His astounding success as a preacher must remain a mystery to our generation. There must have been ‘something about him’ that struck home to his listener’s hearts, or perhaps it was simply that the ‘dry souls’ were there as tinder to his convictions. Anyone who has ever wandered around Hyde Park on a Sunday afternoon will understand what a hopeless business
preaching can be; how men who are absolutely chock-full of conviction and fire can fail to arouse the slightest enthusiasm from a crowd. But Fox collected followers who were willing to go to prison for him, willing to undergo persecution from the government and the clergy and their fellow-townspeople, simply to declare themselves ‘friends’, to declare that they looked to their ‘inner light’ rather than to the church for guidance.

  The rest of the story is no longer an Outsider’s story; it is the story of a religious movement that belongs to history. Fox had ceased to be a Barbusse-type Outsider, a man-on-his-own in a world that did not understand him, and had become a leader of a movement that soon became thousands strong. He had accepted his ‘Outsider-ishness’, not as a symptom of some strange disease, but as a sign that his healthy soul was being suffocated in a world of trivial, shallow, corrupted fools. From then on, there was no more trouble. He was like a ship that had been sailing hopelessly lop-sided, shipping water, and now he had shifted his ballast and rearranged his cargo, and the whole bulk righted itself in the water. It was plain sailing henceforward. And he states:

  The pure and perfect law of God is over the flesh to keep it and its works, which are not perfect, under, by the perfect law; and the law of God that is perfect answers the perfect principle in everyone.17

  If we look at these words in the light of what has gone before, and don’t allow the words ‘law of God’ to put us off, we can see in this credo the Outsider’s attempt to explain what has happened in him. We may, if we find his terminology old-fashioned, want to substitute our own expressions but there can be no doubt about the accuracy of his gist. There was a dynamo inside him, and while that dynamo was converted to driving the unimportant needs of the flesh—a full belly and social security—his greater needs starved. He calls these greater needs ‘the perfect principle of God’, and whether we like the words or not, our examination of the Outsider can have left us in no doubt whatever about their existence. He who finds a ‘definitive act’ to express the ‘principle of God’ is acting in accordance with the Law of God. As to this law, Fox adds grimly: ‘He that can receive it, let him.’ And the others; well, the Outsider has never known quite what to do about the others. No doubt if Fox had ever been in the position of the Grand Inquisitor, he might have been driven to the Grand Inquisitor’s answer: bread and amusements and Divine Authority. As it happened, Fox never had to face this problem, and he spent his life in the assured faith that everyone could receive the full burden of freedom and self-determination. His practice of this type of spiritual anarchism was not unsuccessful. Like Christ, he preached the doctrine that every man is responsible for his own salvation, and that he’d better look to it and do something about it. He was not a great psychologist, like Pascal and Newman, to ask himself difficult questions such as: What degree of self-knowledge must a man attain before he can be considered saved? (That is a question that usually leads to Hesse’s answer: No man has ever achieved salvation.) His doctrine was robust and common-sensible, like Yeats’s Salvationist who told his street-corner audience The Kingdom of God is within you, and it would take a big pill to get it out.’ He felt that urging people to a higher level of personal conduct was a valid method of’saving them’. His aim, the aim he set before his followers, was not to achieve heaven after death, but to feel certainty of the presence of God in this lifejustashehad.

  He reasoned like this: What is wrong with the ‘unredeemed’ man? Well, he is lazy, he lacks high ideals, he cannot see beyond tomorrow. What, therefore, is his salvation? Not to be afraid of aiming high, not to be afraid of feeling that the mantle of all the poets and prophets who ever lived has descended on his shoulders, his alone; that upon him depends the future state of all the race. When Fox accepted this for himself, he ceased to be a miserable Outsider and became a great leader. He advised everyone to try the same remedy. But surely, one could object, all men are not Outsiders? Nonsense, Fox would say, let any man open his eyes to the world he lives in, and he’ll become an Outsider immediately. He will begin by thinking he sees ‘too deep and too much’; he will end by realizing that you cannot see too deep and too much.

  This is obviously another way of saying (with Novalis) ‘All men could be men of genius if they weren’t so lazy’: a doubtful and difficult proposition, fraught with difficulties. Because the answer is that it may have been true for Novalis, and for Nietzsche; it may happen to be true for me and for you because we both happen to be men of genius; but to say it is always true for everybody is a different thing. And the same goes for salvation and holiness. If salvation means self-knowledge, then it looks as if most men are predestinately damned.

  Let us, at the risk of forgetting Fox, digress for a moment to take a closer look at this question of self-knowledge. The world’s history is full of men who, by sheer spiritual force, escaped one set of circumstances and moved into another and higher set. This happens most frequently in the field of the arts, especially literature. A modern example would be D. H. Lawrence, who was born in the Nottingham coal country, son of a miner. If Lawrence had accepted the circumstances of his birth as the inevitable boundaries of himself (as most of us do) he would have become a coal-miner, or perhaps (being delicate) a clerk in an office or a schoolteacher. His struggles for self-expression that eventually produced Sons and Lovers were nothing less than a course in self-knowledge.

  And this is true of many writers. The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison of oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one’s own potentialities. In the same way, Dickens would have remained in a blacking factory, Shaw in a Dublin office, Wells in a draper’s shop, Rilke in the Prussian Army, except for that persistent desire towards self-discovery that made them all into major writers and intellectual driving-forces in their age. Yet can we say that any of these men ultimately ‘realized themselves’ ? No: Rilke was a hypochondriac; Wells was a political witchdoctor, full of quack remedies for the age; Dickens a sentimentalist who helped to poison our language, and Shaw— perhaps the greatest of the four—even Shaw became a complacent, self-satisfied old man.

  So how can we speak of ultimate self-knowledge, Ultimate Salvation? D. H. Lawrence saved himself from becoming an overworked schoolteacher only to become, in the course of ten years or so, the irritating self-worshipper who wrote Kangaroo and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And this comment is not just wanton sniping at a very great writer. There is an immense problem there. Let any readers who fancy their psychological insight try reading the lives of the five men I have just mentioned, and then try, as a sort of spiritual crossword puzzle, to work out how they would have lived the same lives, given the same circumstances. Let them recognize that all these men came to suffer from a lack of self-criticism that caused a deterioration of their ‘inspiration’, and then ask: ‘How could it have been avoided?’ They will realize that there is no danger to self-knowledge so great as being universally accepted as a spiritual leader.

  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, w
e 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.