A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

with a series of sad tales and hard-luck stories; beggars, madwomen, prostitutes, all tell their stories
of the hard-hearted world. The hero himself is shattered by the news that his lady-love is to marry
another, and there is an affecting scene in which she tells him she loves him just before he dies. He
is, says the narrator, the victim of ‘too keen a sensibility’, and this was regarded as being entirely to
his credit. Groups of people used to read The Man of Feeling aloud to have the satisfaction of
shedding tears in public. Fifty years later, a correspondent of Sir Walter Scott describes how she
recently attended a reading of The Man of Feeling and everyone roared with laughter. Yet this was
not a sign that people were becoming more callous: only that they had become inured to
Mackenzie’s pathos. A little more than ten years later, they were crying just as uninhibitedly over
the death of Little Nell.
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: