The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

In Fiction and the Reading Public, Q. D. Leavis has argued that the change was entirely for the worse; that sugary sentimentality and second-hand morality had replaced the racy vigour of The Pilgrim’s Progress and Tom Jones. But this is only half the story. Bunyan, Defoe and Fielding were objective because they had no alternative; it never entered their heads that literature was a medium for discussing their feelings. For them it was a kind of mirror that reflected the world they saw around them. Compared to Rousseau and Goethe they were in a state of primal innocence. In fact, it would hardly be inaccurate to describe them as ‘pre-bicameral’. It is true that they are bicameral in the sense that they are self-conscious; they are aware of questions of religion and morality. Yet their sense of identity is simple and unambiguous. As you read Pilgrim’s Progress, you feel that in spite of his agonies about his salvation, John Bunyan felt he was John Bunyan and nothing but John Bunyan. He accepted his left-brain sense of identity as the total truth about himself. Young Werther, on the other hand, is already concerned about the difference between his identity when he is alone with nature and his identity when he is among other people. And Goethe’s Faust sees his social identity – the grey-bearded professor who is respected by his students – as a kind of grotesque mask, like the persona of the ancient Greek actor.

But what is most important about Faust is his underlying conviction that he is not an actor or a professor, but a god:

I, image of the gods, who thought myself

Close to the mirror of eternal truth,

Who bathed in heaven’s light and clarity,

Leaving the earthly part of me behind;

I, more than angel, I whose boundless strength,

Seemed even then to flow through nature’s veins,

And revel in creation like the gods…

(My own free translation.)

This is the essence of romanticism: the paradoxical feeling that man might, after all, be a god. This is what Mrs Leavis is failing to grasp when she criticises the romantics for retreating into a sickly world of fantasy. Three centuries after the Renaissance, man has again begun to suspect that he has the power to alter the course of nature and to grasp eternal truth.

What has happened, of course, is that man has begun to suspect that ‘other identity’, the being in the other half of the brain. That sense of time flowing at half its proper speed which we experience on reading Robinson Crusoe and Pamela is ‘right brain awareness’. The left brain is obsessed by time; the right is indifferent to it. In his early letters, young Werther expresses a floating sense of timeless-ness:

The solitude in these blissful surroundings is balm to my soul… My whole being is filled with a marvellous gaiety, like sweet spring mornings…

When the mists in my beloved valley steam all around me, when the sun rests on the surface of the impenetrable depths of my forest at noon, and only single rays steal into the inner sanctuary, when I lie in the tall grass beside a rushing brook, and become aware of the remarkable diversity of a thousand little growing things on the ground, with all their peculiarities, when I feel the teeming of a minute world amid the blades of grass and the innumerable, unfathomable shapes of worm and insect closer to my heart and can sense the presence of the Almighty, who in a state of continuous bliss bears and sustains us – then, my friend, when it grows light before my eyes and the world around me and the sky above come to rest wholly within my soul like a beloved, I am filled often with yearning, and thinking that if I could only express it all on paper, everything that is housed so richly and warmly within me, so that it might be the mirror of my soul as my soul is the mirror of Infinite God… ah, my dear friend, but I am ruined by it, I succumb to its magnificence.

This interminable sentence, with its failure to reach a proper conclusion, nevertheless conveys a sense of floating in blissful ecstasy. It is almost like a radio set that has tuned in to some frequency whose existence we never even suspected.

But the new awareness brings its own problems, for Werther, like Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, suffers from ‘too keen a sensibility’, and it brings him to suicide. This was the dilemma of the romantics. Should they try to pursue these new sensations to their limits, and risk insanity, or would it be more sensible to try to come down to earth and get on with the practical business of living? The new sensibility had turned the artist into a social misfit, an ‘outsider’ who seemed doomed to peer at life through a keyhole. He was, in a word later coined by Karl Marx, ‘alienated’ from his society.

While Defoe, Richardson, Rousseau and Goethe were creating their inner revolution, another kind of revolution was transforming their society.

Because the English had kept out of the Thirty Years War, England in 1700 was already more prosperous than France or Germany, and farmers and businessmen began to concentrate on more efficient ways of production. In 1733 came an invention that revolutionised weaving more than anything since the invention of the flat frame in the fourteenth century: the fly shuttle. On the old loom, two men had to stand on either side to toss the shuttle back and forth. A weaver named John Kay invented a method that would send the shuttle – on small wheels – flying back and forth under blows from wooden hammers. It increased the speed of weaving, but it robbed the two men of their job. Kay became intensely unpopular in Colchester, where he introduced the fly shuttle, and had to move to Leeds. There his fly shuttle was eagerly adopted, but the manufacturers refused to pay him for its use and forced him into expensive litigation that ruined him. In his native town of Bury, his house was wrecked by a mob; he moved to Manchester and was forced to escape hidden in a wool sack. He died a pauper, the first victim of the ‘restrictive practices’ that have continued into the late twentieth century.

Mining was becoming an increasingly important industry; but mines tended to flood with water. In the 1650s, Otto von Guericke had invented a vacuum pump. By the end of the century, a Frenchman named Denis Papin had discovered that a pump could be worked with steam power. The pump was attached to one end of the see-saw, and at the other there was a piston in a cylinder; the piston would be driven up by steam from a boiler and then would descend – driven by a heavy weight – as the steam condensed. Naturally, this was a slow business. Around 1700, an ironmonger named Thomas Newcomen was experimenting with a pump when there was an accident; melting solder allowed cold water to leak into the cylinder, and the piston descended with such a bang that it wrecked the pump. But Newcomen realised that he had discovered a better method of making the piston descend; a little cold water was sprayed into the cylinder at the end of every upward-stroke, and the new engine worked at twice the speed. Newcomen engines were soon in use all over Europe.

In 1763, a young Scott named James Watt was repairing a model of the Newcomen engine at Glasgow university when he saw how it could be improved. By cooling the cylinder down and heating it up again, three-quarters of the energy was being wasted. What was needed, he saw, was a pump with two separate chambers – a cooling chamber, and a permanently hot piston chamber. He found a rich partner named Boulton, and in 1769 was able to patent his new engine. And the world entered the industrial age.

It so happened that large numbers of people were available to work in the new factories. Landowners had perfected better methods of farming – fertilisers, the drill-seeder, the horse-drawn hoe. What now stood in the way of efficiency was the enormous amount of ‘common land’ that surrounded most villages. This was usually poor land on which everyone had a right to pasture their animals or grow low-yield crops; moreover, it was often interspersed with the land on which the farmers wanted to carry out their new experiments. Landowners petitioned parliament, and parliament responded by passing ‘Acts of Enclosure’, which required common land to be divided up between various owners, every one of whom had to fence off his portion. The small owners usually preferred to sell out. And the poor who had lived on the commons in wooden huts found themselves homeless. This is why increasing numbers of country folk found their way into the towns and the new factories.