cam. For the process of carding, additions and improvements of great
ingenuity were affixed to the carding-cylinder patented by Lewis Paul in
1748, transforming it into an entirely new machine. The most important
of these were the crank and comb, said to have been used by Hargreaves,
but which it is now known that Hargreaves stole from Arkwright; the
perpetual revolving cloth called the feeder, said to have been used by
John Lees, a Quaker of Manchester, in 1778, but which Arkwright had
undoubtedly used previously at Cromford; and filleted cards on the
second cylinder, which also must have been used by Arkwright in 1778,
although a manufacturer named Wood claimed to have first used them in
1774. Indeed, the whole of the complicated self-acting machinery, which
without the intervention of hand labor performed the different processes
necessary to change raw cotton into thread suitable for warp, was
substantially the invention of Arkwright; and while each separate
machine was in itself a remarkable triumph of inventive skill, the
construction of the whole series, and the adaptation of each to its
individual function in the continuous succession of operations, must be
regarded as an almost unique achievement in the history of invention.
INTELLECTUAL REVOLT OF GERMANY
GOETHE'S "WERTHER" REVIVES ROMANTICISM
A.D. 1775
KARL HILLEBRAND
The latter half of the eighteenth century was, throughout Europe, a
period of revolt against the old ideas, the outworn bonds of mediæval
society. In art and literature the older system, with its elaborately
planned rules and formulas, is technically called "classicism"; and the
outburst against it established "romanticism," the spirit of desire, the
longing for higher things, an impulse which ruled the intellectual world
for generations, and which many critics still believe to be the chief
hope for the future.
Romanticism found expression, more or less impassioned and defiant, in
every land, but its earliest and strongest impulse is generally regarded
as having sprung from Germany. The sceptical, half-cynical rule of
Frederick the Great had left men's minds free, and imagination was
everywhere aroused. The early culmination of its extravagance is found
in the youth of Goethe and Schiller, Germany's two greatest poets; and
Goethe's famous novel, _The Sorrows of Young Werther_, became the
text-book of the rising generation of romanticists. Werther kills
himself for disappointed love, and the book has been seriously accused
of creating an epidemic of suicide in Germany. Hillebrand, writer of the
following analysis of the period and the movement, is among the foremost
of present-day German authorities upon the subject.
Goethe was twenty-six years old when he accepted (1775) the invitation
of Charles Augustus, and transported to Weimar the tone and the
_allures_ of the literary bohemia of Strasburg. There, to the terror of
the good burghers of that small residence, to the still greater terror
of the microscopic courtiers, began that "genial" and wild life which he
and his august companion led during several years. Hunting, riding on
horseback, masquerades, private theatricals, satirical verse,
improvisation of all sorts, flirtation particularly, filled up day and
night, to the scandal of all worthy folk, who were utterly at a loss to
account for his serene highness saying "_Du_" to this Frankfort
_roturier_. The gay Dowager Duchess, Wieland's firm friend, looked upon
these juvenile freaks with a more lenient eye; for she well knew that
the fermentation once over, a noble, generous wine would remain. "We are
playing the devil here," writes Goethe to Merck; "we hold together, the
Duke and I, and go our own way. Of course, in doing so we knock against
the wicked, and also against the good; but we shall succeed; for the
gods are evidently on our side." Soon Herder was to join them there,
unfortunately not always satisfied with the results of his teaching
about absolute liberty of genius.
The whole generation bore with impatience the yoke of the established
order, of authority under whatever form, whether the fetters were those
of literary convention or social prejudice, of the state or the church.
The _ego_ affirmed its absolute, inalienable right; it strove to
manifest itself according to its caprices, and refused to acknowledge
any check. Individual inspiration was a sacred thing, which reality with
its rules and prejudices could only spoil and deflower. Now, according
to the temperament of each, they rose violently against society and its
laws, or resigned themselves silently to a dire necessity. The one in
Titanic effort climbed Olympus, heaving Pelion on Ossa; the other wiped
a furtive tear out of his eye, and, aspiring to deliverance, dreamed of
an ideal happiness. Sometimes in the same poet the two dispositions
succeed each other.
"Cover thy sky with vapor and clouds, O Zeus," exclaims Goethe's
Prometheus, "and practise thy strength on tops of oaks and summits of
mountains like the child who beheads thistles. Thou must, nevertheless,
leave me my earth and my hut, which thou hast not built, and my hearth,
whose flame thou enviest. Is it not my heart, burning with a sacred
ardor, which alone has accomplished all? And should I thank thee, who
wast sleeping whilst I worked?"
The same young man who had put into the mouth of the rebellious Titan
this haughty and defiant outburst, at other moments, when he was
discouraged and weary of the struggle, took refuge within himself. Like
Werther, "finding his world within himself, he spoils and caresses his
tender heart, like a sickly child, all whose caprices we indulge." One
or the other of those attitudes toward reality, the active and the
passive, were soon taken by the whole youth of the time; and just as
Schiller's _Brigands_ gave birth to a whole series of wild dramas,
_Werther_ left in the novels of the time a long line of tears. More than
that, even in reality Karl Moor found imitators who engaged in an open
struggle against society, and one met at every corner languishing
Siegwarts, whose delicate soul was hurt by the cruel contact of the
world.
What strikes us most in this morbid sentimentality is the eternal
melancholy sighing after nature. Ossian's cloudy sadness and Young's
dark Nights veil every brow. They fly into the solitudes of the forests
in order to dream freely of a less brutal world. They must, indeed, have
been very far from nature to seek for it with such avidity. Many, in
fact, of these ardent, feverish young men became in the end a prey, some
to madness, others to suicide. A species of moral epidemic, like that
which followed upon the apparent failure of the Revolution in 1799, had
broken out. The germ of Byronism may be clearly detected already in the
Wertherism of those times. Exaggerated and overstrained imaginations
found insufficient breathing-room in the world, and met on all sides
with boundaries to their unlimited demands. Hearts, accustomed to follow
the dictates of their own inspiration alone, bruised themselves against
the sharp angles of reality. The thirst for action which consumed their
ardent youth could not be quenched, in fact, in the narrow limits of
domestic life; and public life did not exist. Frederick had done great
things, but only, like the three hundred other German governments, to
exclude the youth of the middle classes from active life. Thence the
general uneasiness. _Werther_ was as much an effect as a cause of this
endemic disease; above all, it was the expression of a general state of
mind. It is this which constitutes its historical importance, while the
secret of its lasting value is to be found in its artistic form.
Besides, if I may say so without paradox, the disease was but an excess
of health, a juvenile crisis through which Herder, young Goethe,
Schiller, and indeed the whole generation had to pass.
"Oh," exclaimed old Goethe fifty years later in a conversation with
young Felix Mendelssohn, "oh, if I could but write a fourth volume of my
life! It should be a history of the year 1775, which no one knows or can
write better than I. How the nobility, feeling itself outrun by the
middle classes, began to do all it could not to be left behind in the
race; how liberalism, Jacobinism, and all that devilry awoke; how a new
life began; how we studied and poetized, made love and wasted our time;
how we young folk, full of life and activity, but awkward as we could
be, scoffed at the aristocratic propensities of Messrs. Nicolai and Co.,
in Berlin, who at that time reigned supreme." "Ah, yes, that was a
spring, when everything was budding and shooting, when more than one
tree was yet bare, while others were already full of leaves. All that in
the year 1775!"
Old pedantic Nicholai, at whom he scoffed thus, foresaw, with his prosy
common-sense, what would happen "with all those confounded striplings,"
as Wieland called them, "who gave themselves airs as if they were
accustomed to play at blind-man's buff with Shakespeare." "In four or
five years," said he in 1776, "this fine enthusiasm will have passed
away like smoke; a few drops of spirit will be found in the empty
helmet, and a big _caput mortuum_ in the crucible." This proved true
certainly for the great majority, but not so as regards the two coursers
which then broke loose, and for him who had cut their traces and
released them. Goethe, indeed, modified, or at least cleared up, his
early views under the influence of a deeper study of nature and the
sight of ancient and Renaissance art in Italy (1786-1788); Schiller put
himself to school under Kant (1790), and went out of it with a
completely altered philosophy: Kant himself became another after, if not
in consequence of, the great King's death (1786); Herder alone remained
faithful throughout to the creed he had himself preached.
The way opened by Herder, although partly and temporarily abandoned
during the classical period which intervened, was followed again by the
third generation of the founders of German culture, the so-called
Romanticists, and by all the great scholars, who, in the first half of
this century, revived the historical sciences in Germany. Herder's ideas
have, indeed, penetrated our whole thought to such a degree, while his
works are so unfinished and disconnected, that it is hardly possible for
us to account for the extraordinary effect these ideas and works
produced in their day, except by marking the contrast which they present
with the then reigning methods and habits as well as the surprising
influence exercised by Herder personally. From his twenty-fifth year,
indeed, he was a sovereign. His actual and uncontested sway was not, it
is true, prolonged beyond a period of about sixteen years, albeit his
name figured to a much later time on the list of living potentates. It
is also true that when the seeds thrown by him had grown luxuriantly,
and were bearing fruit, the sower was almost entirely forgotten or
wilfully ignored. The generation, however, of the "_Stuermer und
Draenger_,"[58] or, as they were pleased to denominate themselves, the
"original geniuses," looked up to Herder as their leader and prophet.
Some of them turned from him later on and went back to the exclusive
worship of classical antiquity; but their very manner of doing homage to
it bore witness to Herder's influence. The following generation threw
itself no less exclusively into the Middle Ages; but what, after all,
was it doing if not following Herder's example, when it raked up Dantes
and Calderons out of the dust in order to confront them with and oppose
them to Vergils and Racines? However they might repudiate, nay, even
forget, their teacher, his doctrines already pervaded the whole
intellectual atmosphere of Germany, and men's minds breathed them in
with the very air they inhaled. To-day they belong to Europe.
Herder, I repeat, is certainly neither a classical nor a finished
writer. He has no doubt gone out of fashion, because his style is
pompous and diffuse, his composition loose or fragmentary; because his
reasoning lacks firmness and his erudition solidity. Still, no other
German writer of note exercised the important indirect influence which
was exercised by Herder. In this I do not allude to Schelling and his
philosophy, which received more than one impulse from Herder's ideas;
nor to Hegel, who reduced them to a metaphysical system and defended
them with his wonderful dialectics. But F.A. Wolf, when he points out to
us in Homer the process of epic poetry; Niebuhr, in revealing to us the
growth of Rome, the birth of her religious and national legends, the
slow, gradual formation of her marvellous constitution; Savigny, when
he proves that the Roman civil law, that masterpiece of human ingenuity,
was not the work of a wise legislator, but rather the wisdom of
generations and of centuries; Eichhorn, when he wrote the history of
German law and created thereby a new branch of historical science which
has proved one of the most fertile; A.W. Schlegel and his school, when
they transplanted all the poetry of other nations to Germany by means of
imitations which are real wonders of assimilation; Frederick Schlegel,
when, in the _Wisdom of the Hindoos_ he opened out that vast field of
comparative linguistic science, which Bopp and so many others have since
cultivated with such success; Alexander von Humboldt and Karl Ritter,
when they gave a new life to geography by showing the earth in its
growth and development and coherence; W. von Humboldt, when he
established the laws of language as well as those of self-government;
Jacob Grimm, when he brought German philology into existence, while his
brother Wilhelm made a science of Northern mythology; still later on,
D.F. Strauss, when, in the days of our own youth, he placed the myth and
the legend, with their unconscious origin and growth, not alone in
opposition to the idea of Deity intervening to interrupt established
order, but also to that of imposture and conscious fraud; Otfr. Mueller,
when he proved that Greek mythology, far from containing moral
abstractions or historical facts, is the involuntary personification of
surrounding nature, subsequently developed by imagination; Max Mueller,
even, when he creates the new science of comparative mythology--what
else are they doing but applying and working out Herder's ideas? And if
we turn our eyes to other nations, what else were Burke and Coleridge,
B. Constant and A. Thierry, Guizot and A. de Tocqueville--what are Renan
and Taine, Carlyle and Darwin doing, each in his own branch, but
applying and developing Herder's two fundamental principles, that of
organic evolution and that of the entireness of the individual? For it
was Herder who discovered the true spirit of history, and in this sense
it is that Goethe was justified in saying of him:
"A noble mind, desirous of fathoming man's soul in whatever direction it
may shoot forth, searcheth throughout the universe for sound and word
which flow through the lands in a thousand sources and brooks; wanders
through the oldest as the newest regions and listens in every zone."
"He knew how to find this soul wherever it lay hid, whether robed in
grave disguise, or lightly clothed in the garb of play, in order to
found for the future this lofty rule: Humanity be our eternal aim!"
Among the young literary rebels who, under Herder's guidance, attempted,
toward and after 1775, to overthrow all conventionalism, all authority,
even all law and rule, in order to put in their stead the absolute
self-government of genius, freed from all tutorship--the foremost were
the two greatest German poets, Goethe and Schiller. Goethe's _Goetz_ and
_Werther_, Schiller's _Brigands_ and _Cabal and Love_, were greeted as
the promising forerunners of the national literature to come. Their
subjects were German and modern, not French or classic; in their plan
they affected Shakespearean liberty; in their language they were at once
familiar, strong, and original; in their inspiration they were protests
against the social prejudices and political abuses of the time, vehement
outbursts of individuality against convention.
Not twenty years had passed away, when both the revolutionists had
become calm and resigned liberal conservatives, who understood and
taught that liberty is possible only under the empire of law; that the
real world with all its limits had a right as well as the inner world,
which knows no frontiers; that to be completely free man must fly into
the ideal sphere of art, science, or formless religion. Not that they
abjured "the dreams of their youth." The nucleus of their new creed was
contained in their first belief; but it had been developed into a system
of social views more in harmony with society and its exigencies, of
æsthetic opinions more independent of reality and its accidents, of
philosophical ideas more speculative and methodical. In other words,
Goethe and Schiller never ceased to believe, as they had done at twenty,
that all vital creations in nature as in society are the result of
growth and organic development, not of intentional, self-conscious
planning, and that individuals on their part act powerfully only through
their nature in its entirety, not through one faculty alone, such as
reason or will, separated from instinct, imagination, temperament,
passion, etc. Only they came to the conviction that here existed general
laws which presided over organic development, and that there was a means
of furthering in the individual the harmony between temperament,
character, understanding, and imagination, without sacrificing one to
the others. Hence they shaped for themselves a general view of nature
and mankind, society and history, which may not have become the
permanent view of the whole nation; but which for a time was
predominant, which even now is still held by many, and which in some
respects will always be the ideal of the best men in Germany, even when
circumstances have wrought a change in the intellectual and social
conditions of their country, so as to necessitate a total transformation
and accommodation of those views.
We cannot regard it merely as the natural effect of advancing years if
Goethe and Schiller modified and cleared their views; if Kant, whose
great emancipating act, the _Critique of Pure Reason_, falls
chronologically in the same period (1781), corrected what seemed to him
too absolute in his system, and reconstructed from the basis of the
conscience that metaphysical world which he had destroyed by his
analysis of the intellect. The world just then was undergoing profound
changes. The great "Philosopher-king" had descended to the tomb (1786),
and with him the absolute liberty of thought which had reigned for
forty-six years. The French Revolution, after having exalted all
generous souls, and seemingly confirmed the triumph of liberty and
justice which the generation had witnessed in America, took a direction
and drifted into excesses which undeceived, sobered, and saddened even
the most hopeful believers. As regards personal circumstances, the
Italian journey of Goethe (1786-1788) and his scientific investigations
into nature, the study of Kant's new philosophy to which Schiller
submitted his undisciplined mind (1790 and 1791), were the high-schools
out of which their genius came strengthened and purified, although their
æsthetic and moral doctrines did not remain quite unimpaired by them. I
shall endeavor to give an idea of this double process and its results at
the risk of being still more abstract and dry than before.
Man is the last and highest link in nature; his task is to understand
what she aims at in him and then to fulfil her intentions. This view of
Herder's was Goethe's starting-point in the formation of his
_Weltanschauung_ (or general view of things).
"All the world," says one of the characters in _Wilhelm Meister_,
"lies before us, like a vast quarry before the architect. He does not
deserve the name if he does not compose with these accidental natural
materials an image whose source is in his mind, and if he does not do it
with the greatest possible economy, solidity, and perfection. All that
we find outside of us, nay, within us, is object-matter; but deep within
us lives also a power capable of giving an ideal form to this matter.
This creative power allows us no rest till we have produced that ideal
form in one or the other way, either without us in finished works or in
our own life."
Here we already have in germ Schiller's idea that life ought to be a
work of art. But how do we achieve this task, continually impeded as we
are by circumstances and by our fellow-creatures, who will not always
leave us in peace to develop our individual characters in perfect
conformity with nature? In our relations with our neighbor, Goethe--like
Lessing and Wieland, Kant and Herder, and all the great men of his and
the preceding age, in England and France as well as in Germany--recommended
absolute toleration, not only of opinions, but also of individualities,
particularly those in which Nature manifests herself "undefiled." As
to circumstances, which is only another name for fate, he preached
and practised resignation. At every turn of our life, in fact, we
meet with limits; our intelligence has its frontiers which bar its
way; our senses are limited and can only embrace an infinitely small
part of nature; few of our wishes can be fulfilled; privation and
sufferings await us at every moment. "Privation is thy lot, privation!
That is the eternal song which resounds at every moment, which, our
whole life through, each hour sings hoarsely to our ears!" laments
Faust. What remains, then, for man? "Everything cries to us that we must
_resign_ ourselves." "There are few men, however, who, conscious of the
privations and sufferings in store for them in life, and desirous to
avoid the necessity of resigning themselves anew in each particular
case, have the courage to perform the act of resignation once for all;"
who say to themselves that there are eternal and necessary laws to which
we must submit, and that we had better do it without grumbling; who
"endeavor to form principles which are not liable to be destroyed, but
are rather confirmed by contact with reality." In other words, when man
has discovered the laws of nature, both moral and physical, he must
accept them as the limits of his actions and desires; he must not wish
for eternity of life or inexhaustible capacities of enjoyment,
understanding, and acting, any more than he wishes for the moon. For
rebellion against these laws must needs be an act of impotency as well
as of deceptive folly. By resignation, on the contrary, serene
resignation, the human soul is purified; for thereby it becomes free of
selfish passions and arrives at that intellectual superiority in which
the contemplation and understanding of things give sufficient
contentment, without making it needful for man to stretch out his hands
to take possession of them; a thought which Goethe's friend, Schiller,
has magnificently developed in his grand philosophical poems. Optimism
and pessimism disappear at once, as well as fatalism; the highest and
most refined intellect again accepts the world, as children and ignorant
toilers do: as a given necessity. He does not even think the world could
be otherwise, and within its limits he not only enjoys and suffers, but
also works gayly, trying like Horace, to subject things to himself, but
resigned to submit to them when they are invincible. Thus the simple
Hellenic existence which, contrary to Christianity, but according to
nature, accepted the present without ceaselessly thinking of death and
another world, and acted in that present and in the circumstances
allotted to each by fate, without wanting to overstep the boundaries of
nature, would revive again in our modern world and free us forever from
the torment of unaccomplished wishes and of vain terrors.
The sojourn in Italy, during which Goethe lived outside the struggle for
life, outside the competition and contact of practical activity, in the
contemplation of nature and art, developed this view--the spectator's
view--which will always be that of the artist and of the thinker,
strongly opposed to that of the actor on the stage of human life.
_Iphigenie_, _Torquato Tasso_, _Wilhelm Meister_, are the fruits and the
interpreters of this conception of the moral world. What ripened and
perfected it so as to raise it into a general view, not only of
morality, but also of the great philosophical questions which man is
called upon to answer, was his study of nature, greatly furthered during
his stay in Italy. The problem which lay at the bottom of all the vague
longing of his generation for nature _he_ was to solve. It became his
incessant endeavor to understand the coherence and unity of nature.