The new spirit : with a new preface

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THE SCOTT LIBRARY.

THE NEW SPIRIT.

*"%. FOR FULL LIST OF THE VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES,
SEE CATALOGUE AT END OF BOOK.

The New Spirit.
By Havelock Ellis.

" En portant a leur plus haut degie" ses sentiments les phn
intimes, on devient le chef de file d'un grand nombre d'autres
hommes. Pour acque"rir une valeur typique, il faut etre le plus
indlviduel qu'il est possible."

THIRD EDITION, WIT II A NEW PREFACE.

London: Walter Scott, Ltd.,
24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row,

CONTENTS.

PAGE

Preface vii

Introduction i

Diderot 34

Heine 68

Whitman 89

Ibsen 133

Tolstoi 174

Conclusion 228

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.

No alterations have been made in this edition.
It is true that three of the figures here studied
were living when the book was written ; but
their genius had matured, their work was for the
most part done. Nothing they could produce
would seriously modify one's conception of
them as aboriginal personal forces, the outcome
of the past, the initiators of the future. Apart
from this, it seems to me a mistake to manipu-
late or add to one's own completed work. If
I were to re-write it, I should doubtless write it
differently ; the Conclusion, for instance, which
is earliest in date, seems to me now rather
formal and metaphysical. But for the most
part I have nothing seriously to alter or to omit.
I have sometimes been asked why, in a
discussion of some of the new influences of the
past century, I have left out representative men
who have made so great a stir in the world.
Goethe, it may possibly be true, stalks through
every page, but where are Kant, Hegel, Auguste
Comte, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer ? I
cannot remember ever proposing to include
these names. The reason may be clearer if I

viii Preface.

mention other names I once wished to include,
although — partly doubting my competence to
discuss them, partly fearing that their introduc-
tion might seem to interfere with the unity of
the book — I ultimately refrained.

One was Burne Jones. I shall never forget
how, as a youth in the Public Library at Sydney,
I turned over the leaves of a volume of etchings
and suddenly alighted on " Merlin and Vivien."
Something I knew of Botticelli, Lippi and the
rest, and I had brooded over their antique
mystery and charm ; but here were all the
mystery and the charm brought down among
us from the world where saints stand stiff and
aureoled, and angels walk tip-toe on lily cups.
The fifteenth century artists of Flanders and
Venice and Florence introduced us into a
frankly supernatural world, and they delighted
like children to scatter rich fruits on the golden
floors, and to stick peacocks' feathers into the
bejewelled walls. It is a rarer and subtler art
to suggest that infinitely remote world while
accepting the austere conditions of our own
earth. The pale ghosts of Puvis de Chavannes'
frescoes are a far-off suggestion of this art ; and
one thinks too of the modern magician who has
brought before us the twinkling of Salome's feet
by the red blood from the Baptist's head,
curdling amid the flowers ; the rich-robed
daughters of Apollo among the olives ; the

Preface. ix

mystic elephant in solemn festival, gathering the
lotus with his trunk as his feet plash slowly in
the clear waters of the sacred lake. But the
shadowy art of Puvis, the wayward and limited
art of Gustavo Moreau, come short of the con-
sistent and completely realised art which has
been attained by the painter who stands forth
in the eyes of Europe as the greatest imagina-
tive artist of England. It is a new synthesis of
the world of nature and the world of dreams.
The three women who dance in the foreground
of " The Mill " tell us of a country where human
joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, are set to a
different measure, and sung in unknown keys.
A strange and troublous art, it seems sometimes,
— like the sinuous melodies of Renan, which seem
to belong to some far-haunted past, and yet
contain the intimate secrets of our own hearts, —
but it fascinates and holds us as though music
became visible before our eyes. It opens before
us a new and delightful pathway into the land
of dreams.

Another was Auguste Rodin. To mould the
human figure has been an amusement for man
since ever he carved wood or indented clay. It
was left for the sculptors of Egypt and of
Greece and of Italy to form human figures of
stone, not as a mere symbol of the reality, but
as a revelation of their own moods and visions
of beauty or passion ; and since then the

x Preface.

amusement has fallen back into convention
and symbol, although the plastic representation
of the modern human body, etiolated and
hidden, offers fewer difficulties than its repre-
sentation in painting which Millet and Degas
have in varying ways striven to achieve. Now
even the great sculptors of old only suggest to
us beauty or grace or strength that has become
conventional; they reveal nothing. In this
man's work the form that is closest to us of all
forms in the world, that we cling to from the
day of birth, and that remains with us, half-seen
or divined, until the day of death, has been
revealed anew, just as new aspects of light have
been revealed by Claude Monet. It is the
ancient, human way-worn and passion-used form,
rendered with pathetic truth, and yet we feel
that we have never truly seen the human body
before. We marvel how expression can be
carried so far without passing the bounds of
nature and simplicity. It is far from the
method of Michelangelo, Rodin's immediate
predecessor, with whom it has been the fashion
to compare him. Michelangelo's stupendous
fantasy twisted the human body into the
strange or lovely shapes of his own inverted
dreams. In Rodin's work, it is through a
relentless love of nature that we are led to a
new and intimate vision of the body. The
quiet artist in his simple work-room has been

Preface. xi

building up through long years his great Gate
of Hell ; it is the gate of the joy and beauty
and terror of life, expressed otherwise than
those sober stories of the old world so charm-
ingly told on that gate that was thought worthy
of Heaven. But through this gate we are led to
a new insight of that figure in the world which
is closest to us and most precious, such an
insight, it may well be, as Pheidias and Donatello
brought to the men of their time.

Another personality that I desired to analyse,
and perhaps the greatest, was Richard Wagner.
The Leipzig youth, who hated the tawdry tinsel
of the theatre, and was so little of a musical
prodigy that he could never learn to play the
piano, impelled by a strange instinct has yet
wrought music and the stage to a poetic height
never before approached. Just as our arts rise
cut of our industries, so the manifold art of
Wagner — woven of music and poetry and
drama — rises to something that is beyond art.
Wagner has made the largest impersonal syn-
thesis yet attainable of the personal influences
that thrill our lives, and has built it on the
broadest physiological basis of our senses, so
that faith has here become sight. Such harmony
is what we are accustomed to call Heaven, and
such art — to the mere musician cacophony and
confusion — is truly called religion. It will take
some time yet before we understand its place

xii Preface.

in life as a new expression of the human soul.
Generations must pass before it will be possible
for a greater artist, by a still wider sensory
appeal, to lift us to any higher Heaven.

It is not the men of one idea — important as
these are — who most truly represent the spirit
of an age. Such men most often represent the
spirit of some earlier generation, which in them
has become definitely crystallised. It is the
men whose ideas are still free in pungent,
penetrating, often confused solution that we
may count nearest to the natural forces of an
age, and it is these that are most interesting to
analyse. In such men the feebler instincts of
their fellows are concentrated, and the flaming
energy of their spirits attracts few, repels most,
of their fellows. It is, no doubt, because of this
high degree of emotional exaltation that these
men bring us to religion. It all comes to
religion. I would point out to those who think
that this result needs apology, that such men
do not bring before us the pale, animistic
children of dreams, who for so many ages have
sought with their shadowy arms to beckon men
away from the world to a home on the other
side of the sky, but the robust children of our
working life, the offspring of our living energies
and emotions, the harmonised satisfaction of all
that we have lived, of all that we have felt.

So the "new spirit" brings us to one of the

Preface. xiii

most ancient modes of human emotion. I
sought to emphasise this in my Introduction
as well as in the Conclusion, not altogether
successfully for some of my readers, who have
been led to credit me with virtues of modernity
to which I can make no claim. So far from
being " an apostle of modernity," the " new
spirit" that I am concerned with is but a
quickening in the pulse of life such as may
take place in any age, though my tracings are
only of a recent acceleration. The greatest
manifestation of the new spirit that I know of
took place long since in the zoological history
of the race when the immediate ancestor of man
began to walk on his hind legs, so developing
the skilful hands and restless brain that brought
sin into the world. That strange and perilous
method of locomotion — which carried other
diseases and disabilities in its train, more con-
crete than sin — marked a revolutionary outburst
of new life worth contemplating. Yet even
among the later and minor movements of life
it is not the most recent that to me personally
are the most attractive. The Eiffel Tower does
not thrill me like the gray towers of Chartres ;
I find the streets of Zaragoza more interesting
than those of Manchester. And, on the other
hand, there are modernities which seem to me
old, very old, older than life itself.

To say this is no doubt to confess that the

xiv Preface.

personal element has a large place in this study
of the " New Spirit." And it is true that, how-
ever honest a piece of mechanism your sphyg-
mograph may be, if it is alive there is a very
considerable personal equation which you must
make up your mind to reckon with. I believe I
am not altogether incapable of slinging facts at
the head of the British Goliath (with purely
benevolent intentions), but on this occasion I
wrote for my own pleasure : let me apologise to
Goliath for any annoyance I may so have caused
him. I wished to speak for once, so far as
might be, in my own voice, glad if here and
there a reader cared to follow my impatient
track, furnishing from the stores of his own
knowledge and intelligence what was lacking
in commentaries and pieces justificatives. I
wished at the outset to take a bird's-eye view
of the world as it presented itself to me per-
sonally, only indicating by mere hints those
parts of the field in which I was more specially
concerned. And I wished also to indicate —
perhaps once for all — my own faith in those
large facts of nature which are unaffected by
personal equation, and which harmonise all our
petty individual activities. Nature is bent on
her own ends, and with infinite ingenuity uses
all our energies to carry out her idea of increas-
ing and multiplying the countless forms of life.
Death itself is but an accidental after-thought,

Preface. xv

a beneficial adaptation — as Weismann would
have us express it — only affecting the body,
that servant of the immortal germ-cells which
has grown so large and arrogant since the days
when we Metazoa were young in the world.
That is the one master-thought of Nature, or —
shall we say? — her systematised delusion, her
de'lire a forme chroniquc. But the malady, if it
is one, is incurable. A friend of mine, under
the influence of nitrous oxide, once found him-
self face to face with the Almighty. Being a
man of earnest and philosophic temperament,
he took advantage of the opportunity to demand
passionately the meaning and aim of this tangled
skein of things in which we find ourselves :
" Why have You placed us here ? For what
purpose have You submitted us to all this strife
and misery? What is the solution of the riddle
of life?" And then, uttered in a characteristic
bass, came in one word the awful reply which
my friend will never forget : " Procreation" I
fear that that voice is, or might well have been,
divine.

And yet why should one " fear " ? We have
our brief triumph. Seeking out many curious
things, we learn to know and to enjoy the earth.
Nature's naughty children — whether artists or
scientists or mystics — we may stand aside, con-
template her great object, and impudently
elevate our fingers to our nose. It amuses us,

xvi Preface.

and scarcely hurts her. She cannot refuse us
the by-play of her own adaptations. For it all
comes of that primitive manifestation of the
new spirit, the " Fall," which raised us on to
our hind limbs and enabled us to drink of the
cider of Paradise.

H. E.

7 th October, 1892.

PREFACE.

FROM our earliest days we look out into the
world with wide-eyed amazement, trying to
discover for ourselves what it is like. Instinc-
tively we must spend a great part of our lives in
searching and probing into the nature and drift
of the things among which, by a volition not our
own, we were projected. To-day, when we stand,
as it were, at the beginning of a new era, and when
we have been celebrating the centenary of the
most significant event in modern history, an indi-
vidual who, for his own guidance, has done his
part in this searching and probing, may perhaps
be allowed to present some of the results, not
claiming to be an expert, not desiring to impose
on others any private scheme of the universe.
The pulse of life runs strong and fast ; I have
tried to bring a sensitive lever to that pulse
here and there, to determine and record, as deli-
cately as I could, its rhythms : the papers I now
present might be called a bundle of sphygmo-
graphic tracings.

A large part of one's investigations into the
spirit of one's time must be made through the
medium of literary personalities. I have se-

xviii Preface.

lected five such typical individuals ; it is the in-
timate thought and secret emotions of such men
that become the common property of after gene-
rations.

Whenever a great literary personality comes
before us with these imperative claims, it is our
business to discover or divine its fundamental
instincts; we ought to do this with the same
austerity and keen-eyed penetration as, if we
were wise, we should exercise in choosing the
comrades of our daily life. He poses well in
public ; he has said those brave words on the
platform ; he has written those rows of eloquent
books — but what (one asks oneself) is all that to
me ? I want to get at the motive forces at
work in the man ; to know what his intimate
companions thought of him ; how he acted in
the affairs of every day, and in the great crises
of his life ; the fashion of his face and form, the
tones of his voice. How he desired to appear is
of little importance ; I can perhaps learn all
that it imports me to know from a single in-
voluntary gesture, or one glance into his eyes.

This is the attitude in which I have recorded,
as impersonally as may be, these impressions of
the world of to-day, as revealed in certain signi-
ficant personalities ; by searching and proving
all things, to grip the earth with firmer foot-
hold.

H. E.

THE NEW SPIRIT.

xviii Preface.

lected five such typical individuals ; it is the in-
timate thought and secret emotions of such men
that become the common property of after gene-
rations.

Whenever a great literary personality comes
before us with these imperative claims, it is our
business to discover or divine its fundamental
instincts; we ought to do this with the same
austerity and keen-eyed penetration as, if we
were wise, we should exercise in choosing the
comrades of our daily life. He poses well in
public ; he has said those brave words on the
platform ; he has written those rows of eloquent
books — but what (one asks oneself) is all that to
me ? I want to get at the motive forces at
work in the man ; to know what his intimate
companions thought of him ; how he acted in
the affairs of every day, and in the great crises
of his life ; the fashion of his face and form, the
tones of his voice. How he desired to appear is
of little importance ; I can perhaps learn all
that it imports me to know from a single in-
voluntary gesture, or one glance into his eyes.

This is the attitude in which I have recorded,
as impersonally as may be, these impressions of
the world of to-day, as revealed in certain signi-
ficant personalities ; by searching and proving
all things, to grip the earth with firmer foot-
hold.

H. E.

THE NEW SPIRIT.

THE NEW SPIRIT.

INTRODUCTION.

There is a memorable period in the history of
Europe which we call the Renaissance. We do
well to give pre-eminence to that large efflo-
rescence of latent life, but we forget sometimes
that there have been many such new expansions
of the human spirit since that primitive outburst
of Christianity which is the most interesting of
all in modern times. The tree of life is always
in bloom somewhere, if we only know where to
look. What a great forgotten renascence that
is which in the middle of the twelfth century
centres around the name of Abelard ! It was
nothing less than the new birth of the intellect.
Abelard had made anew the discovery that
reason, too, is the gift of God, and faith was no
longer blind ; from all Europe thousands of
students gathered around the great teacher who
dwelt in his rough hermitage on the desert
plains of Troycs. It was in the strength of

2 The New Spirit.

that feast that men wove scholastic cobwebs
so diligently that the human spirit itself
seemed for awhile suffocated. It was a great
renascence of life, a hundred years later, in the
wonderful thirteenth century, when Francis of
Assisi revealed anew in his own person the
ideal charm of Jesus, and a group of fine spirits,
his fellows, who bore the Everlasting Gospel, — '-
Jean de Parme, Pierre d'Olive, Fra Dolcino
and the rest, — sought to rebuild the edifice of
Christendom on the foundation of the Gospels,
only in the end to deluge the world with a plague
of grey friars. And then a great wave, with
Luther on its crest, swept across Europe, reached
at last the coast of England, and left on its
shores, as a dreary monumental symbol, St.
Paul's Cathedral. There is another great vital
expansion about the time of the French Revolu-
tion. Since then, and chiefly as a result of that
final triumph of the middle-class throughout
Europe, of which the French Revolution was the
decisive seal, the energy of Europe, and of
England especially, has found its main outlets
in the development of a huge commercial struc-
ture, now, in the opinion of many, slowly and
fearfully toppling down. The nineteenth century
has seen the rise and fall of middle-class supre-
macy. What has been the result of it ?

One naturally turns first to literature to see
the reflection of the life of a period. The man

Introduction. 3

who seems in the eyes of all Englishmen, so far
as one can make out, to have represented during
this century the claims of humanity, of dignity,
of what is called the spiritual side of life, was
Carlyle ; and Carlylc has been likened again
and again to the Joels and Jeremiahs of that
most material Hebrew race. The whole of his
long day was spent in crying out to a faithless
and perverse generation. Therefore Carlyle never
attained the serenity and hilarity of those two
great spirits, Goethe and Emerson, between whom
he stood midway. Nor is it surprising that he
was often blinded by the smoke and heat of a
land that had become one huge Black Country,
and that he fought against freedom, and some-
times mistook his friends for enemies. Nor
again is it surprising that of the two great poets
who occupy the centre of the century, one found
inspiration in the blunders of a Crimean war and
the royal representative of respectable middle-
class chivalry, while the other gave himself up
to marvellous feats of psychological gymnastic.
Matthew Arnold, for his part, resolved the dis-
cords of his time in the austere calm of Stoicism ;
the calm of souls

" who weigh
Life well and find it wanting, nor deplore ;
Hut in disdainful silence turn away,
Stand mute, self-centred, stern, and dream no more:"

practically, however, Arnold found it neces-

4 The New Spirit.

sary neither to turn away nor to be silent.
There was yet another solution for sensitive
souls : to hide the heart in a nest of roses away
from the world, just as Schopenhauer, who in
Germany represented in more philosophic ves-
ture this same vague unrest, resolved it by the
aid of his profound religious sense in refined and
aesthetic joy. That is the solution sought in
what seems to me one of the most exquisite
and significant books of the century, " Marius
the Epicurean." For Marius, life is made up of
a few rare and lovely visions. All the rough
sorrow and gladness of the world, its Dantesque
bitterness or its Rabelaisian joy, only reaches
him through a long succession of mirrors, and
every strong human impulse as an attenuated
echo. This serious, sweet, and thoughtful book
is the summary of the " sensations and ideas" of
the finest natures of an era ; as in certain of the
distinguished opium-eaters of the beginning of
the century, Coleridge or De Ouincey, we see
a refined development of the passive sensory
sides of the human organism with corresponding
atrophy of the motor sides. It is clearly im-
possible to go any farther on that road.

There is no renascence of the human spirit
unless some mighty leverage has been at work
long previously. Such forces work underground,
slowly and coarsely and patiently, during barren
periods, and they meet with much contempt as

Introduction. 5

destructive of mail's finer and higher nature ;
but, in the end, it is by these that the finer and
higher is lifted to new levels. No great spiritual
eruption can take place without the aid of such
levers. What forces have been at work during
the century that is now drawing to a close ?
Three, I think, stand clearly forth.

At the end of the sixteenth century, it was
above all the sudden expansion of the world
that inspired human effort and aspiration. In
later days science has carried on the same move-
ment by revealing world within world. A chief
element in the spirit of the French Revolution
was, as Taine pointed out, that scientific activity
which centred around Newton. In our own time
the impulse has come from scientific discoveries
much more revolutionary, far-reaching, and rela-
tive to life, than any of Newton's. The conception
of evolution has penetrated every department of
organic science, especially where it touches man.
Darwin personally, to whom belongs the chief
place of honour in the triumph of a movement
which began with Aristotle, has been a trans-
forming power by virtue of his method and
spirit, his immense patience, his keen observa-
tion, his modesty and allegiance to truth ; no
one has done so much to make science — that is
to say, all inquiry into the traceable causes or
relations of things — so attractive. The great
and growing sciences of to-day are the sciences

6 The New Spirit.

of man — anthropology, sociology, whatever we
like to call them, including also that special and
older development, now become a new thing,
though still retaining its antiquated name of
Political Economy. It is difficult for us to-day
to enter into the state of mind of those who once
termed this the dismal science ; if the question
of a man's right to a foothold on the earth is not
interesting, what things are interesting ? Our
hopes for the evolution of man, and our most
indispensable guide, are bound up with all that
we can learn of man's past and all that we can
measure of his present. It was by a significant
coincidence that that great modern science which
has man himself for its subject was created by
Broca, when he founded the Societe d'Anthro-
pologie of Paris in the same memorable year of
1859 which first saw "The Origin of Species."
Man has been brought into a line with the rest
of life ; a mysterious chasm has been filled up ;
a few fruitful hints have been received which
help to make the development of all life more
intelligible. This has, on the one hand, given a
mighty impulse to the patient study of nature
and to the accumulation of facts now seen to
bear such infinite possibilities of farther advance ;
just as the discovery of America in the sixteenth
century produced a like spirit of adventure which
led men to all parts of the globe. On the other
hand, this devotion to truth, this instinctive

Introduction. 7

search after the causes of things, has become
what may be called a new faith. The fruits
of this scientific spirit are sincerity, patience,
humility, the love of nature and the love of
man. "Wisdom is to speak truth and con-
sciously to act according to nature." So spake
the old Ephesian, Heraclitus, to whom, rather
than to Socrates, men are now beginning to look
back as the exponent of the true Greek spirit ;
and so also speaks modern science. It is a
faith that has become a living reality to many ;
Clifford, for instance, as revealed in his "Lectures
and Essays," has long been a brilliant and in-
spiring member, often called typical, of the
company of those who are filled with the scien-
tific spirit. Huxley, one of the most militant
and indefatigable exponents of the scientific
spirit during the past half century, has lately
set forth its aim, which has been that of his own
life : — " To promote the increase of natural
knowledge and to forward the application of
scientific methods of investigation to all the
problems of life to the best of my ability, in
the conviction, which has grown with my growth
and strengthened with my strength, that there
is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind
except veracity of thought and of action, and
the resolute facing of the world as it is, when
the garment of make-believe, by which pious
hands have hidden its uglier features, is stripped

8 The New Spirit.

off." It is important to note that this spirit is
becoming widely diffused ; it would be easy to
point to manifestations in various departments
of this open-eyed, sensitive observation, not pre-
tending to know prematurely, ready to throw
away all prepossessions and to follow Nature
whithersoever her caprices lead, without crying
" Out upon her ! " It is impossible to forecast
the magnitude of the results that will flow from
this growing willingness to search out the facts
of things, and to found life upon them, broadly
and simply, rather than to shape it to the form
of unreasoned and traditional ideals. There was
long abroad in the world a curious dread of all
attempts to face simply and sincerely the facts
of life. This audacious frankness and scarcely
less audacious humility aroused horror and sus-
picion ; and those who marched at the front
heard with considerable pain many members of
the rear black-guard hurling "Materialist ! " and
other such terms of scorn at their backs. The
sting has now died out of these terms. We
know that wherever science goes the purifying
breath of spring has passed and all things are
re-created. We realize that it is, above all, by
following the light that is shed by the low and
neglected things — the " survivals " — of the world,
that the reasonable path of progress becomes
clear. We cried for the moon for so many
thousand vears before we conquered the world.

Introduction. g

We know at last that it must he among our chief
ethical rules to sec that we build the lofty struc-
ture of human society on the sure and simple
foundations of man's organism.

These three great movements are clearly
allied, and certainly the practical applications
of this scientific spirit, of which there is more to
say immediately, will rest very largely in the
hands of women. The great wave of emanci-
pation which is now sweeping across the civi-
lized world means nominally nothing more than
that women should have the right to educa-
tion, freedom to work, and political enfran-
chisement— nothing in short but the bare ordi-
nary rights of an adult human creature in a
civilized democratic state. But many other
changes will follow in the train of these very
simple and matter-of-fact changes, and it is no
wonder that many worthy people look with
dread upon the slow invasion by women of all
the concerns of life — which are, after all, as
much their own concerns as anyone's — as nothing
less than a new irruption of barbarians. These
good people are unquestionably right. The
development of women means a reinvigoration
as complete as any brought by barbarians to an
effete and degenerating civilization. When we
turn to those early societies, which are as lamps
to us in our social progress, we find that the arts
of life are in the possession of women. There-

io The New Spirit.

fore when the torch of science is placed in the
hands of women we must expect them to use it
as a guide with audacious simplicity and direct-
ness, because of those instincts for practical life
which they have inherited.

The rise of women — who form the majority
of the race in most civilized countries — to
their fair share of power, is certain. Whether
one looks at it with hope or with despair
one has to recognize it. For my own part I
find it an unfailing source of hope. One can-
not help feeling that along the purely masculine
line no striking social advance is likely to be
made. Men are idealists, in search of wealth
usually, sometimes of artistic visions ; they have
little capacity for social organization. It is
sometimes said that the fundamental inferiority
of women is shown by the very few surpassing
women of genius in the world's history. In
their anxiety to combat this argument women
have even enlisted Semiramis and Dido into
their ranks. But it is a fact. For all great
solitary and artistic achievements — the writing
of Divine Comedies, the painting of Transfigura-
tions, the construction of systems of metaphy-
sic, the inauguration of new religions — men are
without rivals ; the more abstract and unsocial
an art is, the easier it is for men to attain
eminence in it ; in music and in the art of
erecting philosophies men have had, least of all,

Introduction. T I

any occasion to fear the rivalry of women. Such
things arc precious, although it may be that
what we call "genius" is something abnormal
and distorted, like those centres of irritation
which result in the pearls we likewise count so
precious. Women are comparatively free from
"genius." Yet it might probably be maintained
that the average level of women's intelligence is
fully equal to that of men's. Compare the men
and women among settlers in the Australian
bush, or wherever else men and women have
been set side by side to construct their social
life as best they may, and it will often be to the
disadvantage of the men. In practical and
social life — even perhaps, though this is yet
doubtful, in science — women will have nothing
to fear. The most important mental sexual
difference lies in the relative and absolute pre-
ponderance in women of the lower, that is, the
more important and fundamental nervous cen-
tres.1 What new forms the influence of women
will give to society we cannot tell. Our most
strenuous efforts will be needed to see to it that
women gain the wider experience of life, the
larger education in the full sense of the word,
the entire freedom of development, without

1 The detailed analysis of the elements which women,
by the facts of their constitution, must bring to the
organization of life, cannot be entered into in this volume.
I hope to deal with it in part elsewhere.

i 2 The Neiu Spirit.

which their vast power of interference in social
organization might have disastrous as well as
happy results.

We most of us began in youth with literature ;
the seeds of art and imagination found a kindly
soil in childhood and puberty ; and we spent
our enthusiasm on Scott or Shelley, on Gautier
or Swinburne. As we grew older we tired of
these, developing instincts that craved other
satisfaction, discovering sometimes even that
our idols had clay feet. Then we turned to
the things that had seemed to us before so dull
and stupid that we had scarcely looked at them ;
we began to be fascinated by economics and the
growth of society, the problem of surplus value
turns out to be full of attraction, and the historic
development of the relationship between men
and women as charming as any novel. In the
same way the men of 1859, who were nurtured
on " The Origin of Species," naturally and rightly
turned their militant energies against theology
and fought over the book of Genesis. To-day,
when social rather than theological questions
seem to be the legitimate outcome of the scien-
tific spirit, and when all things connected with
social organization have become the matters of
most vital interest to those who are really alive
to the time in which they live, even in youth
such questions begin to grow enchanting, and
those who are older feel the same fascination ;

Introduction. 1 3

the man who shared with Darwin the honour of
initiating a new scientific era becomes a land
nationalise^ William Morris a socialist, and the
poet laureate who sixty years earlier had sung
fantastic poems of a coming Utopia grasps at
length the concrete problems with which we
have to deal. All this is hopeful, for we have
scarcely yet got to the bottom of the questions
raised by the growth of democracy.

The influence of science on life is an accom-
plished fact, and we can distinctly trace its
gradual development ; the influence of women
is on the eve of attaining its outward consumma-
tion, and it is not altogether impossible to fore-
cast some of the changes which it will involve.
But the influence of democracy, more talked of
than either of the others, is much more vague,
complex, and uncertain. Once it was thought
that we had but to give a vote to every adult —
outside the asylum and perhaps the prison — and
democracy would be achieved. This crude notion
has long since become ridiculous. We see now
that the vote and the ballot-box do not make
the voter free from even external pressure ; and,
which is of much more consequence, they do not
necessarily free him from his own slavish in-
stincts. We see that enfranchisement does not
mean freedom, since the enfranchised are capable
of running in a brainless and compact mob after
any man who is clever enough to gain despotic

14 The Neiv Spirit.

influence over them. This is not democracy,
though it is doubtless a step towards it. If we
test the intelligence of the enfranchised by
examining the persons whom they elect as their
representatives, we soon realize the trifling
character of the step. Even the free and gene-
rously democratic colonies of Australia show
few brilliant results by this test. It is hard to
get rid of the old distinction between a govern-
ing class and a governed, and to recognize
that every man must be a member of the govern-
ment.

If democracy means a state in which every
man shall be a freeman, neither in economic
nor intellectual nor moral subjection, two pro-
cesses at least are needed to render democracy
possible — on the one hand a large and many-
sided education ; on the other the reasonable
organization of life.

The conception of education has within recent
times undergone a curious development. Some
of us can still remember the time when the
word "education" meant as a matter of course
the rudiments of intellectual education only,
and when such education was regarded as a
panacea for many evils ; this kind of education
has, in consequence, we may take it, been virtu-
ally secured to every child in all civilized coun-
tries. To this kind of education, however, it is
no longer possible to attribute any satisfying

Introduction* 1 5

sort of virtue. It may produce a very inferior
order of clerk ; but education — the reasonable
development of the individual — it cannot de-
serve to be called ; it merely puts a certain
rude intellectual instrument into the hands of a
still thoroughly uneducated person. Education,
as we understand it now, must be founded on
the harmonious exercise of body, senses, and
emotions, as well as intellect ; the whole en-
vironment is the agent of education. That is
why we are now extending the meaning of the
word indefinitely. Fresh air, good food, manual
training, the cultivation of the art instincts,
physical exercise and abundant recreation,
wholesome home relationships — these are a few
of the things which we now recognize as essen-
tial parts of the rational education of every boy
and girl, and which we are seeking to obtain for
all. Nor is education in this sense incompatible
with intellectual development ; on the contrary,
it is the only sound foundation for such develop-
ment. There is here no need for fear. We seem,
indeed, to be rapidly approaching a period in
which the excessive intension of knowledge, its
confinement to a few persons, will give way to a
marked extension of knowledge. Such a pro-
cess is in the lines of our democratic advance.
It is for the advantage of the men of science
who have paid for the seclusion of extreme
specialism by incapacity to understand popular

1 6 The New Spirit.

movements and popular needs ; it is to the
advantage of all that there should be no impas-
sable gulf between those who know and those
who are ignorant. It is well to sacrifice much,
if we may thereby help to diffuse the best things
that are known and thought in the world, and
make the scientific attitude, even more than
scientific results, a common possession.

It is clear that education thus understood
leads directly to the other great factor of
democracy. Education is impossible without
social organization : no advanced stage of social
organization is possible without a complex and
diffused education ; they lead up to each other
and go hand in hand. The average working man,
in England at all events, is not an enthusiast for
schemes of technical education ; as things stand,
such schemes constitute a method for supplying
the capitalist with cheap instruments, and the
working man cannot be expected to view with
enthusiasm his own depreciation in the market.
At the same time his lack of education leads
him to overrate the value of a tawdry intellec-
tual equipment, and he views with little anxiety
the growth of a race of inferior clerks, for whom
the world has few uses.

In England the love of independent individual
initiative and the dislike of all harmonious social
organization is certainly stronger than elsewhere;
it is intimately associated with the best and worst

Introduction. 17

qualities of the race, and it has spread over all
the countries we have overrun. For three
hundred years this tendency has had a free
field. But during the last fifty years a new
instinct of social organization has been slowly
developing and gaining strength. Trades unions
have been one of the most potent influences in
this direction. All our factory legislation has
been a sign of its growth, and the same move-
ment has given enthusiasm to the County Coun-
cil. There are very few things in our daily life
which this spirit of social organization is not
embracing or promising to embrace. The old
bugbear of " State interference " (a real danger
under so many circumstances) vanishes when a
community approaches the point at which the
individual himself becomes the State. It might
be added that under no circumstances could the
temper oi" the English people tolerate any con-
siderable amount of " State interference." The
communalization oi' certain social functions cor-
responds— without being an exact analogy — to
the process by which physiological actions be-
come automatic. As it becomes a State func-
tion commerce will cease to absorb the best
energy and enterprise of the world, and will
become merely mechanical.

It may not be out of place to point out that
while this process of socialization is rapidly de-
veloping, individual development so far from
c

1 8 The New Spirit.

stopping, is progressing no less rapidly. It is
too often forgotten that the former is but the
means to secure the latter. While we are socia-
lizing all those things of which all have equal
common need, we are more and more tending
to leave to the individual the control of those
things which in our complex civilization con-
stitute individuality. We socialize what we call
our physical life in order that we may attain
greater freedom for what we call our spiritual life.
The growth of social organization is now be-
ginning to open up possibilities which a few
years ago would have seemed Utopian. It can-
not remain limited within merely national bounds.
It is concerned with the things of which all have
a common need, and the interests of nations are
here inextricably intertwined. This must sooner
or later result in the formation of international
tribunals, and this again will have decisive results
in relation to war — a method of dispute rapidly
becoming antiquated. Twenty-eight millions of
men, ready to be put into the field (is not this a
suggestive euphemism ?) at a moment's notice,
in a corner of the world ! Take a plebiscite of
the adult population of Europe, of whose life-
blood these twenty-eight millions are, to-morrow
— and what would the regime of militarism be
worth ? We must certainly expect to see the
same process repeated between nations which
has everywhere taken place among individuals.

Introduction. 1 9

When a strong power to which appeal can be
made is established, individuals cease to fight
and become litigants ; this was seen in the
Middle Ages, and again, as Maine pointed out,
when a strong British executive was established
in India. As soon as a sufficiently strong tri-
bunal is formed, nations who once went to war
must in the same way become litigants. This
again will have its reaction on democracy and
social life.

Along another line we may observe the ap-
proaching disappearance of war. The wars of
modern times have, to a large extent, had com-
mercial causes at their roots. The downfall of
unrestricted competition, and the organization of
industrialism, will remove this cause of war. In
the profoundly interesting movement, witnessed
to-day in the direction of trusts and syndicates,
wc see the natural and inevitable transition to a
new era. Like all transitions, it can only be
effected with much friction. From one point of
view it is the last barricade of capitalism ; from
a wider stand-point it is the forging of a huge
instrument to be taken up eventually by a vast
international community who will thus control
the means of providing for themselves by methods
of simple and uneventful routine.

Before international organization can be
realized there seems little doubt that a period of
protective national organization must intervene,

20 The New Spirit.

At present there is a floating population of the
weakest and less capable — unable to emigrate to
a new country — always flowing from a poorer
country into a less poor country, and bearing
with them the seeds of vagrancy and crime. No
progress is possible if every little redeemed patch
is at once flooded from over sea. It must be
remembered also, that the dykes necessary to
regulate the floating population are required
even in the interests of the poorer countries.
We are approaching a time when the general
spread of information, especially by means of
newspapers, will render it impossible for any
country to tolerate the fact that the general
level of its people's existence should exceed in
wretchedness that of any other nation. The
evolution of a better state can only take place
by the pressure resulting from the presence of
these outcast elements of society. To reject
them is but to disguise the condition of a nation
and to imperil its destiny.

The destiny and fate of nations has always
fascinated the popular imagination, and the
destinies of nations are now shaping themselves
before our eyes with singular clearness. Within
a measurable period of time France will have
become a beautiful dream ; all Frenchmen will
be Belgians or Italians, the races which have
already in large measure taken possession of
the country ; it is a process which Frenchmen

Introduction. 2 1

themselves observe and chronicle with painful
interest. But France has already accomplished
a great work among the nations. Of wider
significance is the development of Russia. For
various reasons the position of Russia is peculiar.
The youngest of European nations in civilization,
with a strong Asiatic element by position and
race, Russia is approaching the task of social
organization with a different endowment from
that possessed by any other nation. This racial
endowment, while imparting a curious freshness
to its methods of dealing with European problems,
especially fits it for its great mission of domina-
ting Asia. To the English it has never been
easy to find a modus viveiidi with lower races,
or races which we are pleased to consider lower ;
the very qualities which give us insular indepen-
dence and toughness of fibre, unfit us for the
other task. But the Russian temperament, as
is now generally recognized, is peculiarly adap-
ted for mingling harmoniously even with the
fiercest yellow races and bringing them into
relation with the best European influences; all
those who care for humanity view with satisfac-
tion the growing influence of Russia in the East,
an influence which, we may reasonably hope,
will overspread the continent. A very large
field indeed is still left for the other great
expanding race of the world. The English-
speaking races have in their hands the greater

22 The New Spirit.

part of North America, and nearly all Australia,
and here their special qualities find ample scope.
This division gives no ground for quarrel ; the
Russians have never had much capacity for
emigration in the English sense, and the English
are beginning to learn by bitter experience that
they are not suited for the mission of civilizing
Asia ; the Spanish races have, as a field for their
renascence, now so rapidly taking place, nearly
the whole of the rich continent of South
America ; while those slow, yet tenacious and
admirable colonists, the Germans, will be able
to gain ground in that African continent to
which they are most attracted, and which was
long ago claimed by the Dutch for this division
of the Teutonic race. If we English are certain
to make little progress where, as in Asia, the
great task is conciliation, when it is a question
of stamping out a lower race — then is our time !
It has to be done ; it is quite clear that the
fragile Red men of America and the strange
wild Blacks of Australia must perish at the
touch of the White man. On the whole we
stamp them out as mercifully as may be, sup-
plying our victims liberally with missionaries
and blankets.

It is the English race, not England, that is
thus possessing so large a part of the earth.
And it is interesting to observe that both the
races — almost the latest of the great European

Introduction. 23

nations to emerge from barbarism — that now
promise to dominate the world are by tempera-
ment disinclined for monarchic government.
With the Russians their despotic Empire has
been an exotic which they may have worshipped
at a distance, but which, except as a symbol of
the ideal, has had little influence on their lives.
We can only determine the institutions that
will develop healthfully in a country by a care-
ful and patient study of that nation's origin.
Why is the parliamentary system a dubious
success in France, and the jury an acknowledged
failure in Italy ? One watches anxiously to see
whether Russia will find the methods of national
progress in the brilliant but fatal examples of a
foreign Western civilization or in the fundamen-
tal instincts of its own race. The English have
always been impatient of kings and governors,
and have taken every opportunity to establish
republican government. We see this in the
United States. In Australia the race is de-
veloping its most intensely democratic instincts,
and the Australians will certainly not tolerate
any attempt to draw them closer to any country
outside their own land. England has, during
the present century, owing to special conditions,
occupied a position in the world enormously
disproportioned to its size. These special con-
ditions are now rapidly ceasing; the Suez Canal,
which has dealt so decisive a blow to the com-

24 The New Spirit.

mcrcial greatness of England, has made it more
difficult than ever for us to maintain the artificial
position of advantage which we possessed as
distributors ; so that England, as a distributing
power, is being reduced by the failure of the
Cape route to the same condition as Venice was
reduced to by its discovery. Nor is it merely
as a distributing power that England is losing
its position ; it is losing its position — relatively,
that is — as one of the great producing powers of
the world. There will soon be no reason why the
coarse products of a great part of the earth should
be sent all the way to a small northern country
to be returned in a more or less ugly and adul-
terate manufactured condition. We witness to-
day the wonderful development of India as a
centre of production. In the colonies the begin-
nings are small, but they are rapidly increasing;
in these matters it is the first step that costs ;
while a well-marked tendency to protection, not
likely on the whole to diminish, tends to make
both America and Australia self-dependent, and,
in the East, Japan is becoming a controlling force
that has to be reckoned with. We are still,
indeed, far from the time when the chief industry
of England will be the Fremdenindustrie, but we
may already trace the development of England
as a museum of antiquities and as a Holy Land
for the whole English-speaking race. Every-
where, for those who have been born in the

\

Introduction. 2 5

colonics, England is a remote land of glamour
and tradition, a land of sacred associations and
strange old-world customs, and the most radical
colonist is a conservative where the old country
is concerned. Everyone who has lived in the
colonies has come upon this attitude of senti-
ment, perhaps with a shock of surprise; nor is it
easy at once for a prosaic Londoner to realize
the feelings of the man who arrives for the first
time in the land of his fathers and beholds Fen-
church Street and Cheapside through an atmos-
phere of old romance. Yet this emotional atti-
tude will develop mightily with the development
of English-speaking nations, and will but be
strengthened by the dying down of England's
political and commercial activity. Every country
must succumb at last, but to succumb to its own
children is a happier fate than ever befell any
great country of old.

It has been necessary to take this brief survey
of the influences that are now modifying the
face of the civilized world, for it is in this theatre
and under these conditions that the three great
modern forces that we shall meet with through-
out this book are acting. What impresses one
is the vast resonance which now accompanies
every human achievement, because of the com-
munalization and extension of the methods of
intercourse. It has become one of the chief
tasks of science to attain unity, unity of standard

26 TJie New Spirit.

and measure and nomenclature; this has been
the object of numberless conferences. It is to
attain this end that the efforts to manufacture a
universal language have obtained some support,
fruitless as they have hitherto been. It was by
a wholesome instinct that men formerly clung
to Latin as the universal language of educated
Christendom ; the humanizing intercourse which
by means of a common language broke through
the barriers of race, forms one of the most
charming features of the early Middle Ages.
The equally wholesome instinct of individual
development has intervened ; but the other again
becomes dominant, and the universal language
becomes more and more inevitable every day.
Around it will centre the chief struggle and the
chief triumph of the scientific spirit.

The very splendour and inevitable impetus of
these modern movements is producing, here and
there among us, a reasonable reaction, a reaction
against the hurry and excitement of modern life.
And yet, perhaps, less a reaction than their
natural outcome and development.

It is by art and religion that men have always
sought rest. Art is a world of man's own making,
in which he finds harmonious development, a
development that satisfies because framed to
the measuring-rod of his most delicate senses.
Religion is the anodyne cup — indeed of our own
blood — at which we slake our thirst when our

Introduction. 27

hearts are torn by personal misery, or weary and
distracted by life's heat and restless hurry. At
times, the great motor instincts of our nature,
impelling us by a force that we cannot measure
or control, cause us to break up our dainty house
of art, or to dash down bravely the cup of healing.
Hut we shall always return to them again ; they,
too, represent an instinct at the root of our being.
In the recognition of this harmony lies the secret
of wise living.

Religion is hidden by many a strange garment,
but its heart is the same, and built firmly into
the human structure. The old mystic spoke
truly when he defined God as an unutterable
sigh. Now and again we must draw a deep
breath of relief — and that is religion. That no
intellectual belief or opinion is necessarily bound
up with religion, it is nowadays unnecessary to
show. To how many has Schopenhauer — an in-
different philosopher, but a great master of the
secrets of religion — brought from afar, into the
light of the modern world, the mysteries of the
soul that seeks for consolation ? A weary and
distracted creature, at war even with himself, he
was of those for whom the Kingdom of Heaven
is especially made ; he sought and found, and
moulded into the sweet harmonies of his prose,
the things that make for rest and for consola-
tion— and who is not sometimes weary and dis-
tracted, and in need of rest ? We English, it is

2S The New Spirit.

true, are not an aboriginally religious people ;
we are great in practical life, and we are mar-
vellous poets ; but while we have an immense
appetite for imported religion, we have never
ourselves even produced one of those manuals
of piety which, since the days of Lao-tsze, have
become the common possession of the devout
everywhere. One little Encheiridion alone
there is, so far as I know, in which, during
recent years, an English writer has brought
echoes of old times, of exhilaration or of peace,
into forms which enable the children of to-day
to be at one with those of former days. " Quid
nobis cum generibus et speciebus ? " asked the
author of the " Imitation." Hugo de St. Victor
was driven to religion by the barrenness of dia-
lectics: "Truth cannot be discovered by ratio-
cination," he said ; "it is by what he is that man
finds truth." To-day, Edward Carpenter escapes
from the burden of science to find joy for awhile
in the perennial fountain which springs up within,
and which the measuring-rod of science has
never meted. " Towards Democracy " has a
quality of its own, which many have tasted with
delight, and which will probably give it place
with those sources of joy known to few, but well
loved of those few.

For religion is a mystery, into which not all
of us are initiated. The road to the Kingdom
of Heaven, as it was well said of old time, is

Introduction. 29

narrow, and blessed are they who, having reached
it, stay but a little while ! To drink deep of that
cup is to have all the motor energies of life para-
lyzed. Art remains to give us the same joy and
refreshment, in more various, wholesome, and
acceptable forms. For art is nothing less than
the world as we ourselves make it, the world
re-moulded nearer to the heart's desire. In
this construction of a world around us, in har-
monious response to all our senses, we have at
once a healthy exercise for our motor activities,
and the restful satisfaction of our sensory needs.
Art, as no mere passive hyperesthesia to external
impressions, or exclusive absorption in a single
sense, but as a many-sided and active delight in
the wholeness of things, is the great restorer of
health and rest to the energies distracted by our
turbulent modern movements. Thus understood,
it has the firmest of scientific foundations ; it is
but the reasonable satisfaction of the instinctive
cravings of the organism, cravings that are not
the less real for being often unconscious. Its
satisfaction means the presence of joy in our
daily life, and joy is the prime tonic of life. It
is the gratification of the art-instinct that makes
the wholesome stimulation of labour joyous ; it
is in the gratification of the art-instinct that
repose becomes joyous. The fanatical com-
mercialism that has filled so much of our century
made art impossible — so impossible that beyond

30 The New Spirit.

one or two voices, raised to hysterical scream,
no one dared to protest against it. The satis-
faction of the art-instinct is now one of the most
pressing of social needs. In England, William
Morris probably stands first among those who
have perceived this weighty fact. A man of
immense energies and varied activities, one of
the greatest modern masters of English speech
and poet-craft, an ardent advocate of the most
advanced social ideas of his time, he has slowly
felt his way to the realization of the truth, that
the secret of good living is even economically
involved in the communalization of art. Our
most glorious dreamer, he has placed this con-
ception at the foundation of his lovely and sub-
stantial visions.

It is true, indeed, that we have already an art
in which for the great mass of people to-day
our desires and struggles and ideals arc faith-
fully mirrored. The great art of the century
has been fiction. It is common, among some
writers, to speak contemptuously of novels, but
the mass of contemporary fiction has a value
that is little realized, and perhaps is not likely to
be realized, for some time to come. There is a
very large and wonderful and little-read col-
lection of fiction, the " Acta Sanctorum," in which
the whole life and soul of a remote period are
laid bare to us. It is, like our own fiction, a
fiction that is more than half reality, and it has

Introduction. 3 1

often seemed to me that the novels of this cen-
tury will in the future be found to have precisely
the same value as the " Acta Sanctorum." For the
novel is contemporary moral history in a deeper
sense than the De Goncourts meant. ^lany
novels of to-day will be found to express the
distinctive features of our age as truly as the
distinctive features of another age, its whole
inner and outer life, are expressed in Gothic
architecture.

William Morris looks back wistfully towards
the popular art of the Middle Ages, and deals out
scorn to the novel ; he is unjust to our modern
popular art. Yet, by a wholesome instinct. For
fiction is, more than any other art, the art of a
period of repression. The world's great ages
have never much cared to rehearse themselves
in the brooding solitudes that the story-teller
demands. Our faces now are turned in another
direction.

I have tried to obtain and present here a faint
tracing of the evolution of the modern spirit, as
it strikes a contemporary. In the subsequent
chapters we shall be able to trace it yet more
distinctly, at different stages, and in various
phases. Diderot, eclipsed once, is seen now, as,
in a manifold sense which may be claimed for
no other man, the initiator of our own day in all
its varied manifestations, and, above all, in its
practical scientific spirit. In Heine we see the

32 The New Spirit.

most characteristic, if not the finest, artist of
the second quarter of our century, the melodious
embodiment of all its discords, the impersonation
of a transition which we have all passed through,
and which draws us to him with cords of a pe-
culiarly personal tenderness. Whitman repre-
sents, for the first time since Christianity swept
over the world, the re-integration, in a sane and
whole-hearted form, of the instincts of the entire
man, and therefore he has a significance which
we can scarcely over-estimate. Goethe had
done something of this in a more artistic and
intellectual shape ; it is from no lack of love or
reverence for Goethe that I have chosen the
American, a democrat rather than an aristocrat,
the very roughness of whose grasp of life serves
but to reveal the genuine instinct of the modern
Greek. All that is finest in aristocracy we see
revealed in Ibsen, a keen and sombre figure
that reminds one perpetually of Dante — the
same curt and awful contempt for lies and
for shams, the same vision of a Heaven beyond.
Into such Kingdoms of Heaven it needs but a
child to enter, and when I see this man with
that little diamond wedge of sincerity and the
mighty Thor's hammer of his art, I feel as
though no mountain of error could resist the
new spirit that he represents. In Tolstoi we
see the manifestation of another great modern
force ; no keenness or clearness here indeed in

Introduction. 33

the interpretation of life, though such a marvel-
lous power of presentation ; yet a massive
elemental force, groping slowly and incohe-
rently towards the light, so interesting to us
because we seem to be conscious of the heart
of a whole nation, the great nation of the future,
towards which all eyes are turned.

Certainly old things are passing away ; not
the old ideals only, but even the regret they
leave behind is dead, and we are shaping in-
stinctively our new ideals. Yet we are at peace
with the past. The streams of hot lava flow
forth and cover the world ; the lava is but the
minute fragments of former life. We marvel at
the prodigality of nature, but how marvellous,
too, the economy ! ' The old cycles are for ever
renewed, and it is no paradox that he who would
advance can never cling too close to the past.
The thing that has been is the thing that will
be again ; if we realize that, we may avoid many
of the disillusions, miseries, insanities, that for
ever accompany the throes of new birth. Set
your shoulder joyously to the world's wheel :
you may spare yourself some unhappiness if,
beforehand, you slip the book of Ecclesiastcs
beneath your arm.

D

34 The New Spirit.

DIDEROT.

Of the three intellectual heroes of the Revo-
lution, Diderot exercised the least apparent in-
fluence ; he was, for the most part, too far ahead
of his time, and his tremendous energies were
frequently either concealed or dissipated along
innumerable channels. The humane Voltaire,
short-sighted, but so keen within his range, whose
sarcasm was always on the side of benevolence ;
the morbid, wrong-headed, suffering Rousseau,
who spent his life in bringing to birth an exquisite
emotional thrill which is now a common posses-
sion— these two men stood out in the eyes of all,
then and long after, as the standard-bearers of
revolution. On the other hand, Diderot's great
German contemporary, Goethe, the only man
with whom he may fairly be compared, has dur-
ing most part of this century seemed to us the
inaugurator of the spiritual activities of the
modern world. Goethe is still full of meaning ; it
will be long before we have exhausted " Wilhelm
Meister " or " Faust." Perhaps, now that we arc
so anxious to reform the world before reforming
ourselves, we need more than ever the example
of Goethe's self-culture and self-restraint, of his
wise reverence for temperance and harmony.

Diderot. 35

But even Goethe, with that peaceful Weimar
atmosphere about him, seems to us a little
antique and remote from our modern ways.
Diderot, on the other hand, who grew up and
lived among the various and turbulent activities
of the city that was in his time the focus of
European life, appears before us now as a spirit
of the latter nineteenth century, at one with our
aspirations to-day. It was fitting that his works
should wait until our own time for the most
adequate and complete publication yet possible,
and that he should now first receive full and
ungrudging appreciation.1 " At the distance of
some centuries Diderot will appear prodigious ;
men will look from afar at that universal head
with admiration mingled with astonishment, as
we to-day look at the heads of Plato and Aris-
totle." So Rousseau wrote, at the end of his
life, of the friend whose unwearying kindness he

1 The handsome edition of Diderot's "CEuvres" in
some twenty volumes, edited by Assdzat and Tourneux,
contains nearly a fourth of previously unpublished mate-
rial, much of considerable interest. The centenairc
edition of his " CEuvres Choisies," comprised in one
moderate-sized volume, includes all that most people
need read of Diderot's works, and is, on the whole, a
most varied and judicious selection, made by such com-
petent editors as Letourneau, Lefevre, Guyot, Ve"ron, Sec.
Mr. Morley's well-known work on Diderot and the
Encyclopaedists has done more than anything else to
create an intelligent English interest in the matter.

36 The New Spirit.

— almost alone among human beings — had at
last wearied out ; to-day the prophecy seems in
a fair way of fulfilment.

The whole life of Diderot, all his actions and
all his words, everything that he wrote, bears
the impress of his ever-flaming enthusiasm.
That " air vif, ardent et fou," which, in his own
words, marked him in early life, meets us at
every turn. As a boy at the Jesuit College he
wished to go out into the world. "But what
do you wish to be ? " asked over and over again
that most excellent of fathers, the cutler of
Langres. And the young Diderot persisted
that he wanted to be nothing : " mais rien, mais
rien du tout." He was not the last youth who,
feeling the stirring of a deep instinct, would not,
and could not, shut himself down to one narrow
path of life. But to the men of this stamp
" nothing " means " everything." Then ten
years passed, ten years, as his daughter wrote,
passed " sometimes in good society, sometimes
in indifferent, not to say bad, society, given up
to work, to pain, to pleasure, to weariness, to
want, sometimes intoxicated with gaiety, some-
times drowned in bitter reflection." He taught
mathematics : if the scholar was apt, he taught
him all day ; if he was a fool, he left him. " He
was paid in books, in furniture, in linen, in
money, or not at all." When teaching failed he
had to earn money how he could — as by supply-

Diderot. 3 7

ing a missionary with a stock of sermons. Once
he had to starve for a few days. That was
not the least instructive experience to the
youth, for he resolved that, whenever he could
help it, no fellow-creature should suffer the like.
There could have been no better education.
It was the seed-time of all his energies, of his
encyclopaedic knowledge, of his manifold hold
on life, of his extraordinary capacity. He found
time in the midst of it to fall in love with and
marry a pious, honest, and affectionate girl who
happened to be living in a room near him, but
who was so ignorant that she once scolded him
for the amount (very far from excessive) that he
took for his writings ; she could not imagine
that mere writing could be worth so much.
That he was not always faithful to her scarcely
needs to be told ; that could, perhaps, have been
otherwise at no period, least of all in eighteenth-
century Paris. There is a deep pathos in the
brief story of her long life and her devotion to
the husband whose own energies were at the
service of any human being, however poor or
disreputable, who cared to climb up the stairs
to his room. In the early days of poverty she
would make little sacrifices to procure a cup of
coffee or similar trifling luxury for her husband ;
and during his last illness, though she would
have given her life, her daughter wrote, to make
him a Christian, yet realizing how deeply rooted

38 The New Spirit.

his convictions were, she shielded him from the
efforts of the orthodox, and would not leave the
parish cure alone with him for an instant ; at his
death, the daughter adds, she "regretted the
unhappiness he had caused her as another would
have regretted happiness." But we do not
regret unhappiness ; it is but another way of
saying that life is complex and full of mitiga-
tion. In tenderness Diderot was never deficient;
he was clearly a man of deep family affection ;
he seems to have inherited this from his father ;
so judicious a critic as Sainte-Beuve remarks
that of the whole group of philosophes — not
eminent, perhaps, in this respect — Diderot was
the one who " most piously cultivated the rela-
tions of father, of son, of brother, and who best
felt and practised family morality," and we con-
stantly come across traces of this " piety." He
tells us with great glee how, when he was once
walking through his native Langres, a townsman
came up to him and said, " Monsieur Diderot,
you are a good man, but, if you think that you
will ever be equal to your father, you are mis-
taken." His eldest sister seems to have had
something of his own downrightness and soli-
dity ; he loves her, he says, not because she is
his sister, but because he " likes excellent things."
His only brother was an ecclesiastic and a bigot,
but Diderot dwells on the inexhaustible charity
by which this rather eccentric man had im-

Diderot. 39

poverished himself. At the latter part of his
life Diderot's letters are full of proof of his
tender love for his daughter, of the care and
thought he devoted to her education, of the
gentleness with which he sought to open to her
the mysteries of the world.

At the age of twenty-eight Diderot conceived
the plan of that " Encyclopaedia" which became
the central activity of his life. A few years
later he published his first work, a free transla-
tion of Shaftesbury's "Essay on Merit and
Virtue " which indicates well the philosophical
point from which he set out. It was followed,
a year after, by the "Pensees Philosophiques,
a few brief pages, full of condensed and vigorous
satire on the theologians and of robust faith in
man and nature. Perhaps the most memorable
is that in which he imagines that a man, be-
trayed by his wife, his children, his friends,
retired into a cavern to meditate some awful
revenge against the human race, a perpetual
source of dread and misery ; at last the misan-
thrope rushed out of his cavern shouting, "God!
God i " and his fatal desire was accomplished :
this account of the matter at all events indicates
how little, even at this early period of his life,
Diderot sympathized with the fashionable Deism
of his day. The book was condemned to be
burned by command of Parliament, but it was
subsequently reinforced by still more audacious

40 The New Spirit.

additions. So began characteristically, if with
something of the reckless impetuosity of youth,
a series of writings, far too long even to name
here, many that were only published at his
death, some that are only now being published,
a large number that have probably been lost
altogether — all marked by the same prodigious
wealth and variety and eloquence. Yet they
lie apart from the great work of his life. The
" Encyclopaedia " occupied thirty years ; the
appearance of the first volume was retarded by
Diderot's imprisonment at Vincennes, and it
appeared in 175 1 ; the last appeared in 1772.
The "Encyclopaedia" was more than an ency-
clopaedia ; it was not founded on that of Cham-
bers, by which it was suggested, nor is it repre-
sented by our own estimable " Encyclopaedia
Britannica." It was not a simple summary of
the knowledge of the time, for the benefit of a
community trained to appreciate the value of
science. It was in the words of the prospectus,
"a general picture of the efforts of the human
spirit in every field, in every age." It was the
frank and audacious application to the whole of
knowledge of new ideas, for the first time loudly
proclaimed to a society slowly crumbling to
ruin, but still by no means powerless. It was
an evangelistic enterprise among infidels, with
dangers on every side, and where one holds
one's life in one's hands. We may still appre-

Diderot. 4 1

date the significance of such a struggle. The
future in every age belongs to those who can
sec farther ahead than their fellows, and who
fight their way towards the vision that they sec ;
but the risks are equally great under any con-
dition of society, and some sort of Bastille or
Vincennes is always at hand.

Diderot was certainly of all men most fitted
to organize and uphold this great work and to
carry it to triumphal completion. He said once
of himself that he belonged to his windy country-
side of Langres ; " the man of Langres has a
head on his shoulders like the weathercock on
the top of the church spire — it is never fixed at
one point." He was scarcely just to himself;
with all his emotional vivacity and his readiness
to receive new impressions, there was in him
also an infinite patience and a tenacity to hold
on to the end in spite of all. Both his versatility
and his patience were called for here. He was
indefatigable, for ever animating the waverers,
stimulating the slow-paced, fighting Avith timid
publishers, himself having a hand in everything,
ever ready to suggest new ideas or to spend
months in studying the details of machines or
factories, or anything else that had to be done ;
knowing all the time that at every moment he
might be exiled or imprisoned. The personal
qualities of the man, even more than his varied
abilities, carried him through. Someone speaks

42 The New Spirit.

of "his eyes on fire and the prophetic air which
seemed always announcing the enthusiasm of
actual labour; " wehearof his "eloquence fouguese
et entrainante ;" and, with this, of his feminine
sensibility, his wit and tact and fertility of
resource. We divine these qualities in his head
as it has come down to us, though his charac-
teristics do not easily lend themselves to brush
or chisel. He has himself some remarks on
this point. In his Salons he comes upon his
own portrait by Van Loo, and, after some good-
humoured criticism, he adds: "But what will
my grandchildren say when they come to com-
pare my sad books with that smiling, mincing,
effeminate old flirt? My children, I warn you
that I am not like that. I had a hundred diffe-
rent faces in one day, according to the thing
that affected me. I was calm, sad, dreaming,
tender, violent, passionate, enthusiastic, but I
was never as you see me there. I had a large
forehead, very bright eyes, tolerably large
features, a head quite like that of an ancient
orator, a bonhomie which approached stupidity,
and an old-fashioned rusticity. I wear a mask
which deceives the artist, whether it is that there
are too many things mixed together, or that the
mental impressions which trace themselves on
my face succeed one another so rapidly that the
painter's task becomes more difficult than he
expected. I have never been well done except

Diderot. 43

by a poor devil called Garand, who caught rue-
as it happens to a fool who utters a ban mot"
Meister, Grimm's secretary, who knew Diderot
well, says of him : " The artist who would seek
an ideal head for Plato or Aristotle could hardly
meet a modern head more worth his study than
Diderot's. His large forehead, uncovered and
slightly rounded, bore the imposing imprint of
his large, luminous, and fertile spirit. The great
physiognomist, Lavater, thought he detected
there some traces of timidity and lack of enter-
prise, and this intuition, founded only on such
portraits as he could see, has always seemed to
me that of a keen observer.1 His nose was of
masculine beauty, the contour of his upper
eyelid full of delicacy, the habitual expression
of his eyes sensitive and gentle ; but when he
became excited they gleamed with fire; his
mouth revealed an interesting mixture of refine-
ment, of grace, of bonhomie; and, whatever
indifference there might be about his bearing,
there was naturally in the carriage of his head,
especially when he began to talk, much energy
and dignity. Enthusiasm seemed to have be-
come the most natural attitude of his voice, of
his soul, of all his features. When his mental
attitude was cold and calm, one might find in
him constraint, awkwardness, timidity, even a

1 " Timid and awkward in his own cause," says Meister
elsewhere, " he was scarcely ever so in that of others."

44 The New Spirit.

sort of affectation ; he was only truly Diderot,
he was only truly himself, when his thoughts
transported him beyond himself."

It was the inexhaustible profusion and gene-
rosity of Diderot's genius which seems to have
impressed men chiefly. A small literary man
of the time wrote his impression of Diderot, as
he appeared in later life, with what is probably
but a very mild touch of good-natured carica-
ture : — " Some time ago I had a desire to write
a book. I sought solitude in order to meditate.
A friend lent me an apartment in a charming
house amid delightful scenery. Hardly had I
arrived when I learnt that M. Diderot occupied
a room in the same house. I do not exaggerate
when I say that my heart beat violently ; I for-
got all my literary projects, and thought only of
seeing the great man whose genius I so much
admired. I entered his room with the dawn, and
he seemed no more surprised to see me than it.
He spared me the trouble of stammering awk-
wardly the object of my visit. He guessed it
apparently by my air of admiration. He spared
me likewise the long windings of a conversation
which must be led to poetry and prose. Hardly
was it mentioned than he rose, fixed his eyes
upon me, and, it was quite clear, did not see me
at all. He began to speak, at first very low and
fast, so that though I was quite close to him I
could scarcely hear or follow him. I saw at

Diderot. 45

once that my part in the conversation would be
limited to silent admiration, a part which it costs
me little to play. Gradually his voice rose and
became distinct and sonorous ; he had been
almost immovable ; now his gestures became
frequent and animated. He had never seen me
before, and when we were standing he put his
arms round me ; when we were seated he struck
my thighs as though they were his own. If the
rapid courses of his talk brought in the word
' law,' he made me a plan of legislation ; if the
word ' theatre ' came in, he offered me the choice
between five or six plans of dramas. A propos
of the relation between the scene and the dia-
logue, he recalls that Tacitus is the greatest
painter of antiquity, and recites or translates for
me the Annals or the History. But how terrible
that the barbarians should have buried in the
ruins of architectural masterpieces so many of
Tacitus's chefs-d'oeuvre! Thereupon he grows
as tender over those lost beauties as though he
had known them. But if the excavations at
Herculaneum should reveal fresh Annals and
Histories ! And this hope transports him with
joy. But how often in the process of discovery
ignorant hands have destroyed the masterpieces
preserved in tombs ! And here he dissertates
like an Italian engineer on methods of excava-
tion. Then his imagination turns to ancient
Italy, and he recalls how the arts of Athens had

46 The New Spirit.

softened the terrible virtues of the conquerors
of the world. He turns to the happy days of
Laelius and Scipio, when even the conquered
assisted with delight in the triumphs of the
conquerors. He acts for me an entire scene of
Terence ; he almost sings several songs of
Horace. He concludes by actually singing a song
full of grace and wit, an impromptu of his own
at a supper, and recites for me a very agreeable
comedy of which, to save the trouble of copying,
he has had a single copy printed. Then a number
of people entered the room. The noise of chairs
makes him break off his enthusiastic monologue.
Then he distinguishes me in the midst of the
company, and comes up to me as to a person
whom one has previously met with pleasure.
He reminds me that we have talked about many
very interesting things — law, drama, history ; he
acknowledges that there was much to be learnt
from my conversation, and makes me promise to
cultivate an acquaintance the value of which he
appreciates. At parting he gives me two kisses
on the forehead, and snatches his hand from
mine with genuine sorrow." Diderot is recorded
to have laughed heartily at this sketch when he
saw it in the "Mercure" of 1779: "I must be
an eccentric sort of fellow ; but is it such a great
fault to have preserved amid all the friction of so-
ciety some vestiges of the angularity of nature?"
These impressions are confirmed by those of

Diderot. 4 7

the Empress Catherine, whose delicate generosity
in buying Diderot's library and appointing him
librarian smoothed the last years of his life.
She wrote to Mme. Geoffrin : "Your Diderot
is an extraordinary man. I emerge from inter-
views with him with thighs bruised and quite
black. I have been obliged to put a table be-
tween us to protect myself and my members."
He could not understand, his daughter remarks,
that one must not behave the same way in a
palace as in a barn. It must be added, in justice
to Diderot, that Catherine was no lover of cere-
mony, as she certainly let Diderot know.

He was the same to everybody ; not more
ready to furnish the Empress with the plan of a
university on the largest scale, and in accordance
with the most advanced ideas, than to write
laughingly Avis an public for a new pomade to
promote the luxuriant growth of the hair. He
was equally ready to throw out the brilliant sug-
gestions which Helvetius and Holbach worked
into their books " De l'Esprit " and the " Sys-
teme de la Nature," and to assist some poor
devil in tatters who, once at least, after he had
long fed and clothed him, turned out to be a
police spy ; he was none the less bountiful to
every comer. Now we see him devising inge-
nious ruses to obtain succour for a nobleman's
forsaken mistress ; again finding a manager for
Voltaire's comedy, the " Depositaire,"or revising

48 The New Spirit.

Galiani's " Dialogues " on the wheat trade. The
Dauphin dies ; a monument must be erected to
him in Sens Cathedral ; Diderot is sought out
and speedily submits five designs. All the men
of talent and all the people in distress found
their way to Diderot ; dedicatory epistles for
needy musicians, plots of comedies for play-
wrights deficient in invention, prefaces, dis-
courses— no one went away disappointed who
climbed up to that fourth-floor door in the
corner house of the Rue St. Benoit and the Rue
Taranne.

Some of his benevolent schemes were certainly
of a rather dubious character ; there seems to
linger about them a touch of the sanctification
of means by ends which we may, if we like,
attribute to his Jesuit education. In his comedy,
" Est-il bon ? Est-il mediant ? " — no doubt the
best of his plays — he has satirized himself in
the person of the hero, Hardouin, a man who
gets into terrible scrapes with his friends from
the questionable devices by which he tries to
serve them ; obtaining, for instance, a pension
for a widow lady by pretending that her child
is illegitimate, and causing an obdurate mother
to acquiesce eagerly in the marriage of her
daughter by delicately suggesting that she has
already been seduced. We find Diderot carrying
on various benevolent little intrigues of this kind
when we read his letters to Mile. Voland.

Diderot. 49

These letters to Mile. Voland form the most
characteristic and intimately personal record of
himself that Diderot left. He was forty years
old when the correspondence began, and it lasted
for more than twenty years. Of Sophie Voland
almost nothing is known ; we only catch glimpses
of her as a woman of wide sympathies and
decided intelligence, neither very young nor
pretty, and wearing spectacles ; she lived with
her family, who were clearly more orthodox
and conventional than herself, and must not, as
Diderot frequently hints, see everything that he
writes. Of the depth and reality of his affection
for her there is no doubt ; his editors have dis-
cussed the question as to whether this affection
was throughout of the nature of friendship only,
or whether, according to the phrase of Sainte-
Beuve, an hour's passion had served as the
golden key to the most precious and intimate
secrets of friendship. This may be as it will ;
Diderot had found some one in whose presence
he could show himself, without reserve or pre-
caution, on every side of his manifold nature,
and he was always tenderly grateful to the
woman who had procured him this sweetest of
pleasures. " My Sophie is both man and woman,"
he wrote to her, " when she pleases ; " as such he
always addressed her, pouring out recklessly all
that happened to be in his head, narrating the
incidents of the day, telling what he was thinking
E

50 The New Spirit.

about or projecting, repeating current scandal or
sometimes not quite decent story, flashing in-
stinctively into wise or witty reflection ; always
with a swift, almost unconscious pen, forgetting
now and again what he has already said. It is
only in these letters, where he is, as he says,
"rendering an account of all the moments of a
life that belongs to you," that we realize the
personal charm, the exuberant strength and at
the same time the weakness of the man who in
the midst of his manifold energies bursts out : "A
delicious repose, a sweet book to read, a walk in
some open and solitary spot, a conversation in
which one discloses all one's heart, a strong
emotion that brings the tears to one's eyes and
makes the heart beat faster, whether it comes of
some tale of generous action or of a sentiment
of tenderness, of health, of gaiety, of liberty, of
indolence — there is the true happiness, nor shall
I ever know any other."

The " Encyclopaedia " seems to us to-day but
a small portion of the achievement of Diderot's
life, though it represents the part that he played
in relation to the science of his time. His place
in science has sometimes been wrongly stated.
It has been said, for instance, that he anticipated
Lamarck and Darwin. It is true that he wrote,
"The need produces the organ ; the organization
determines the function," and that this contains
the germ of Lamarck's doctrine ; and again,

Diderot. 5 1

" The world is the abode of the strong," and
that this may be said to be the germ of the
doctrine of natural selection ; but at both points
he was simply putting into epigrammatic form
the conceptions of the greatest scientific genius
of his age and country, Buffon, the only man of
that time who was cast in the same massive
mould, and to whom Diderot could turn with
fraternal delight and admiration. It is to Buffon
also, and not to Diderot, that the honour of
anticipating Lyell belongs. It is in his Baconian
thoughts on the interpretation of nature, and
again in such a comprehensive collection of
data as his notes on physiology, discovered of
recent years, that Diderot's searching and inqui-
sitive scientific spirit appears. He frequently
startles us by the way in which he vividly
realizes and follows out to their legitimate con-
clusions those floating ideas of his time which
we are working out to-day. Above all, and
from the first, he clearly grasps the fundamental
value of the human body and its processes in
'the interpretation of mental phenomena ; in one
of his comparatively early works, the " Lettre
sur les Aveugles," he remarks that he has never
doubted that "our most purely intellectual ideas
are closely related to the conformation of our
bodies." " How difficult it is," he says else-
where, "to be a good philosopher and a good
moralist without being anatomist, naturalist

5 2 The New Spirit.

physiologist, and doctor." Holding firmly by
this clue, he was constantly trying to fathom
the mysteries of the soul and to picture the
processes of life ; it is because he has realized
that this can only be done fruitfully from the
physiological side that the " Reve de d'Alem-
bert," his most brilliant effort in this direction,
is interesting after the lapse of a century.

He brought the same eager, impressionable
spirit to his novels and stories. It is indeed no
great step from " Le Reve de d'Alembert " to
" Le Neveu de Rameau," and from that to " La
Religieuse." Whatever he undertook he carried
out with the whole energy and enthusiasm of
his nature, and while this takes from the artistic
symmetry of his work, it adds to its vitality and
significance. It is owing to this quality that
" Les Bijoux Indiscrets," a frivolous novel in the
style of the younger Crebillon, pointless and in-
decent, written, at the age of thirty-five, mainly
to obtain money for his mistress, Mme. de
Puisieux, contains passages which have been con-
sidered among the finest he ever wrote, and by
its reflections on the reform of the theatre, its
criticisms of manners, and philosophical insight
served avowedly as the point of departure for
Lessing's famous " Dramaturgic" It was not
until he read Richardson that Diderot produced
any very noteworthy work in fiction; his admira-
tion for the English novelist was extreme, but

Diderot. 5 3

certainly not out of proportion to Richardson's
historic importance. Richardson not only marks
the first real landmark in the evolution of the
English novel ; he is the point of departure of
the modern French novel, and Diderot, more
than any one else, helped to make his influence
felt in France. Very soon after falling under
the spell of the great English story-teller and
writing his" Eloge de Richardson," Diderot pro-
duced his most famous novel, " La Religieuse."
It is clear how much Richardson influenced this
minute study, in autobiographic form, of the life
and sufferings of a young girl forced into a con-
vent with its uncongenial atmosphere and petty
persecutions. It was a distinct artistic achieve-
ment, the more remarkable as it was certainly
intended as an attack on the small vices of a
community of women isolated from the world.
Even those parts of this attack which have been
considered questionable are always in the tone
of the unsuspecting young girl who writes them,
and only become offensive when a modern
editor removes them in order to substitute
asterisks ; compare these passages with the
more ostentatious propriety and zeal for virtue
of a modern Parisian in " Mademoiselle Giraud
ma Femme." A year later Diderot wrote an
unquestionable artistic masterpiece, only pre-
served for us by a happy chance, " Le Neveu
de Rameau," a dialogue of unfailing spirit be-

54 The New Spirit.

tween himself and a strange social parasite
whom he is analyzing. Some years later he
fell under the influence of Sterne; "Jacques le
Fataliste," so attractive to Goethe and many
others, was the result. But he had no great
affinity for the sinuous humour of Sterne, and,
while he threw himself into it with his usual
energy, the result, though Shandean enough, is
less happy than his great Richardsonian effort.
Yet " Jacques le Fataliste" contains the " Histoire
de Mme. de la Pommeraye," and this little kistoiret
when disentangled from the manifold episodes
which interrupt the hostess of the inn who tells
it, is Diderot's most perfect and most charac-
teristic effort as a story-teller. Even in his
novels it is the directness and the veracity of his
scientific spirit, united to his emotional impres-
sionability, which gives significance to his work.
The same features mark his plays, though here
the result has ceased to be pleasing, and we may
be permitted to-day not to read through the
" Fils Naturel " and the " Pere de Famille." Yet
we must not forget that from them is dated the
modern drama, with the notes of sincerity and
simple realism, peculiar then to Diderot, which
nowadays have become a more common posses-
sion. Diderot's dramas produced a great and
immediate effect in Germany, on Goethe and
Schiller as well as on Iffland and Kotzebue,
and the "Pere de Famille" was translated by
Lessing.

Diderot. 5 5

As a critic of the stage Diderot has, perhaps,
attracted exaggerated attention, though he has
not escaped misunderstanding, most people's
knowledge of his opinions on this head begin-
ning and ending with the " Paradoxe sur le
Comedien." Diderot at first attributed, as from
the nature of his temperament he was sure to
do, the chief part in acting to emotion and
sensibility ; in time he outgrew this youthful
opinion, and in the "Paradoxe" he emphasized
as strongly as he could the part of study and
reflection in the actor's art, a part which must
always be of the first importance, notwithstand-
ing all the tears shed by charming actresses,
and carefully bottled for controversial purposes.
Diderot was far too sane and many-sided to
see only one aspect of so complex an art as
the actor's ; it is, as he says, " study, reflection,
passion, sensibility, the true imitation of nature,"
which go to make up good acting. An inte-
resting and too brief series of letters to Mile.
Jodin is well worth reading from this point
of view. Mile. Jodin, the daughter of an
old friend of his, was a rather wild and im-
petuous young lady of some talent who
had suddenly adopted the life of an actress.
Diderot performed many small services both for
her and her mother, and wrote letters full of
wise and, it appears, much-needed counsel as
to her conduct both on and off the stage.
" Mademoiselle," he writes, " there is nothing

56 The New Spirit.

good in this world but that which is true ; be
true, then, on the stage, true off the stage. . . .
An actor who has nothing but sense and judg-
ment is cold ; one who has nothing but verve
and sensibility is mad. It is a certain tempera-
ment of mingled good sense and warmth which
makes men sublime ; on the stage and in the
world he who shows more than he feels makes
us laugh instead of touching us."

Diderot inaugurated modern art criticism by
the notices of the pictures in the Salon, which he
wrote during many years for " Grimm's Corre-
spondence." One cannot help regretting that he
was not born among a greater group of artists.
Chardin we still esteem, and Greuze is at the
height of his popularity, but it is difficult to take
more than an antiquarian interest in Boucher,
and who cares now for Loutherbourg or Van
Loo ? Even before Joseph Vernet, whose variety,
freshness, and love of nature appealed so strongly
to Diderot, it sometimes requires an effort to be
sympathetic. Diderot now and then criticizes
with severity — as occasionally when he is deal-
ing with Boucher — but the tone of his criticism,
as generally happens with contemporary criti-
cism, seems to us to-day pitched altogether too
high. In one respect, at all events, it is unlike
most old appreciations of now neglected pic-
tures ; it is generally delightful to read, perhaps
sometimes more delightful than the picture can

Diderot. 5 7

ever have seemed. One suspects that Diderot
treated pictures like books ; Holbach, having
read a book he had warmly recommended, came
to him to say that the book contained nothing of
which he had spoken. "Well," replied Diderot,
" if it wasn't there it ought to have been there."

Everything that Diderot touched he vitalized.
There were few things that he left untouched.
There were very few roads of modern life on
which he was not an enthusiastic and often
audacious pioneer. He seems to have known
instinctively the things that we are laboriously
learning. So it is with politics, sexual morality,
various social and politico-economical questions,
education, philosophy. He touched all the social
questions which absorb our attention to-day.
He approached the problem of the place of the
workers in society in the same temper in which
we approach it to-day, and the practical know-
ledge of industries and industrial life which he
had obtained in order to write some of his most
remarkable articles in the "Encyclopaedia" gave
him some right to be heard.

His views on education, chiefly expressed in
the "Plan d'une Universite pour le Gouverne-
ment de Russie," are on a level with the most ad-
vanced views to-day. The education he demands
is free and compulsory, and he is in favour of
giving children free meals at school. He cen-
sures classical teaching, advocates professional

53 The New Spirit.

education and instruction in the natural sciences,
" the study of things rather than the study of
words." " I think," he says, " that we should
give in our schools something of all the know-
ledge necessary to a citizen, from legislation to
the mechanical arts, and in these mechanical
arts I include the occupations of the lowest class
of citizens. The spectacle of human industry is
in itself large and satisfying, and it is good to
know the different ways in which each contributes
to the advantages of society. This kind of know-
ledge is attractive to children, who are naturally
inquisitive." Certainly, from more than one point
of view, such an element in education would
have an important social significance.

Of the functions and position of women — in
most countries, he remarks, that of idiot children
— he speaks often, shrewdly indeed, yet with
peculiar sympathy. The most important expres-
sion of his opinions on sexual morality is con-
tained in the " Supplement au Voyage de Bou-
gainville." Bougainville, the first Frenchman to
sail round the world, had visited the lovely island
of Tahiti, and brought back a strange and vivid
picture of the idyllic innocence and frank license
that existed there. Diderot was aroused to set
forth his views on sexual questions with that
union of fiery enthusiasm, uncompromising
thoroughness, and saving grace of humorous
good sense which always characterizes him. He

Diderot. 59

imagines a dialogue between the chaplain of
Bougainville's expedition and Orou, a Tahitian,
who is anxious to know why the chaplain refuses
to conform to the customs of the country. The
worthy chaplain represents the morality of civi-
lized Europe, and Orou, with a few questions
concerning this morality, easily succeeds in con-
founding him and in pouring keen ridicule on
the inconsistencies of European morals. With
reference to rules of conduct which vary with the
country and the time, Diderot makes Orou say,
"We must have a surer rule, and what shall this
rule be? Do you know any other than the good
of the community and the advantage of the in-
dividual?" "You were unhappy," he remarks
again to the chaplain, "when I presented to you
last night my two daughters and my wife ; you
exclaimed, 'But my religion! my office!' Do
you wish to know what in every time and place
is good and bad ? Concern yourself with the
nature of things and of actions, and with your
relations to your fellows. Consider the influence
of your conduct on yourself and on the com-
munity. You are mad if you think that there is
anything in the universe, above or below, which
can add to or take from the laws of nature."
That rule, he explains, is the polar star on the
path of life, and the invention of crimes, punish-
ments, and remorse will only obscure it. " In
founding morality on the relationships which

60 The Nezv Spirit.

must always exist between men, the religious
law becomes perhaps superfluous ; and the civil
law should only be the enunciation of the law
of nature, which we bear engraved on our hearts,
and which must always be the strongest." At
the end Diderot intervenes with a counsel of
moderation and practical wisdom: "What shall
we do, then ? We will protest against foolish
laws until they are reformed : meanwhile we will
submit. He who by his private authority breaks
a bad law, authorizes others to break good laws.
There is less inconvenience in being mad with
the mad than in being wise by oneself. Let us
say to ourselves, let us proclaim incessantly, that
shame, punishment, and ignominy have been
attached to actions which in themselves are
innocent. But do not let us commit them ; for
shame, punishment, and ignominy are themselves
the worst of evils."

" Every century has its own spirit ; that of
ours seems to be liberty." So in 1776, when
men were beginning to say that it was time to
burn philosophers instead of their books, and a
boy of eighteen was actually burned, Diderot
wrote to Voltaire, in the famous letter in which
he announced that in spite of all he would stay
in Paris, among the enemies of liberty, to carry
on his own mission. Timidity in political
matters was excusable in Diderot's day, and
existed even amonsr the men of his own set.

Diderot. 6 1

Helvctius, for instance, advocated the advan-
tages of paternal government and benevolent des-
potism ; with his usual keen and vigorous good
sense, Diderot shows how unreal these advan-
tages are. When we give a ruler absolute power
to do good, we cannot prevent him assuming
also an absolute power to do evil. Moreover,
as Diderot insisted, it is not possible to make
people good against their wills, nor is it desirable
to treat men like sheep. " If they say, 'We are
well enough here,' or if, even, they say, 'We are
not well here, but we will stay,' let us try to en-
lighten them, to undeceive them, to bring them
to saner views by persuasion, but never by force."
" The arbitrary government of a just and en-
lightened prince is always bad." He insists,
again and again, that we must never let our
pretended masters do good to us against our
wills. "Whenever you see the sovereign autho-
rity in a country extending beyond the region of
police, you may say that that country is badly
governed." Diderot, Goethe, Adam Smith, Bec-
caria, Mill, to mention but a few typical names,
threw all the weight of their influence, some-
times with passionate emphasis, on the side of
individuality and freedom, and their teaching
reached its final consecration when Darwin ac-
cepted as his central theory the fruitful idea of
Malthus. They felt, and rightly felt, that they
were taking the step that was most needed.

62 The New Spirit.

Those who advocated solidarity and social co-
operation mostly went to the wall. Now it is
the turn of the social instincts, and we must
expect them to work themselves out to the
utmost. We have to see to it that the truth to
which Diderot and the rest fought their way is
not meanwhile lost. The general will is itself
to-day in danger of becoming a benevolent
despotism, and perhaps the time will never
arrive when such warnings as these will be quite
out of date. When it is a question of the oppres-
sion of our fellows, we cannot always afford to
wait until the offender listens to the voice of
persuasion; him, at least, we must bring within
"the region of police: " beyond that lies danger.

"Et si j'ai quelque volontd,
C'est que chacun fasse la sienne."

So Diderot wrote in some impromptu verses at
a convivial gathering over which he once pre-
sided ; it was a summary of his views on many
matters. " I am convinced," he wrote, " that
there can be no true happiness for the human
race except in a social state in which there is
neither king nor magistrate, nor priest nor laws,
nor meum nor tuum, nor property in goods or
land, nor vices nor virtues." This is the anarchism
that stands at the end of all social progress, but
as an attainable social state it is still certainly,
as Diderot adds, "diablement ideal." He had

Diderot. 63

no faith in moralization by Act of Parliament.
" There will then be prostitutes ? — Assuredly. —
Mistresses? — -Why not? — Girls seduced? — I ex-
pect there will. — Husbands and wives not always
faithful ?— I fear so. But at least," he adds, " I
shall be spared all those vices which misery,
luxury, and poverty produce. The rest may be
as it will be."

Diderot's robust faith in nature, that finest
fruit of the scientific spirit, comes out again and
again, here and elsewhere. " The evil-doer is
one whom we must destroy, not punish " : that
is the great truth, held by a large number of
the foremost men to-day, which is not even yet
accepted. "Never to repent and never to reproach
others : these are the first steps to wisdom."
And, again : " In the best and most happily
constituted man there remains always much of
the animal ; before becoming a misanthrope,
consider whether you have the right." Not many
men have had so much reason as Diderot for
becoming misanthropic ; few men have had in
them less of the misanthrope. " My life is not
stolen from me," he writes ; " I give it. ... A
pleasure which is for myself alone touches me
slightly. It is for myself and for my friends that
I read, that I reflect, that I write, that I meditate,
that I hear, that I observe, that I feel. ... I
have consecrated to them the use of all my
senses, and that is perhaps the reason why every-

64 The New Spirit.

thing is a little enriched in my imagination and
conversation ; sometimes they reproach me, un-
grateful as they are. Ungrateful ! would I could
make hundreds ungrateful every day ! " He never
seems to waver in his faith in men, nor in the
determination, with which, indeed, that faith
must ever be bound up, to look every fact of
nature squarely in the face. The words with
which his letters to Sophie Voland close seem
to be the constant refrain throughout all his
work : "There is nothing good in this world but
that which is true."

It cannot be said that Diderot performed any
one great and paramount achievement. The
most brilliant of his fragments — the " Reve de
d'Alembert " or " Le Neveu de Rameau " — is
but a magnificent improvisation. He made no
memorable contribution to our knowledge of
the world. Nor was his genius of what may
be called the wedge-shaped order — the genius
of the man who, with every nerve strained to
the solution of one mystery, never rests until
the heart of it is cloven. His genius was essen-
tially fermentative. He knew by a native instinct
every promising germ of thought, and he knew
how to make it fruitful. He was, as Voltaire
called him, Pantophile, the man who loved and
was interested in everything. His extreme sensi-
tiveness to impressions was the source of his
strength and of his weakness. In his sane,

Diderot. 65

massive, and yet so sensitive temperament, as-
pirations keen and lyrical as Shelley's seem to
blend harmoniously with laughter broad and
tolerant as Rabelais's. The latent elements in
him of fantastic extravagance were held in
check by a bourgeois good sense in which we
seem to recognize the shrewd old cutler of
Langres. There is a profound democratic in-
stinct in him ; his never-failing faith in nature
and man seems to be a part of this ; it is a faith
that may possibly be foolish, but for all those
who are born men it is the most reasonable
faith, and it has commended itself most to those
who have been oftenest disillusioned.

There can be no doubt that the immediate
effect of the Revolution of 1789 was to kill the
spirit that Diderot represented — the spirit of
scientific advance, active even to audacity, and
allied with a firm faith in man and in social
development. The party of progress were not
able to recognize progress in the form of the
Revolution, and the more obviously dominating
movement of the century that is now closing
has been the Counter-Revolution, corresponding
in many respects to that Counter-Reformation
which dominated Catholic countries during the
seventeenth century. Putting aside a few stray
enthusiasts, like Shelley or Owen, attractive
personalities with little grasp of practical life,
the men who have directed European thought,
F

66 The New Spirit.

especially in England, have been men whose
imaginations were profoundly impressed, and
their mental equilibrium considerably disturbed,
by that brief convulsion of France ; and they
developed a curious timidity and distrust, visible
even when they had the courage to adopt a short-
sighted optimism. It is very interesting now to
turn back to the essay in which Carlyle, perhaps
the most brilliant and distinguished representa-
tive of the Counter- Revolution, recorded his esti-
mate of Diderot. How curiously old-fashioned
seem to us to-day its mitigated admiration, its
vague mysticism, its sneers at Diderot's loquacity,
his generosity, his dyspepsia — sneers that, in the
light of Carlyle's own life, have aroused feelings
of pain, and even indignation, among some who
in their youth looked up to Carlyle as to a sort
of venerable prophet — its absolute failure to
perceive that here was a man not to be stifled
by a handful of transcendental phraseology. Yet
this was at the time accepted as an adequate and
even generous account of the matter. To-day
we are again in the same position as Diderot,
and we are able to see in him the significance,
hidden from Carlyle, of the light of science fear-
lessly brought to illuminate the whole of life.

When men begin to say that everything has
been done, the men come who say that there
has yet nothing been done. We have con-
gratulated ourselves that many sciences of

Diderot. 67

nature and of man are in the main settled, but
we are always compelled to begin again, and on
a larger and perhaps simpler scale. In many
fields of physical and social knowledge— from
electricity at the one end to criminology at the
other — we are now laying anew great foundations,
and the walls are being raised so rapidly that it
is sometimes hard to know where we are, or to
realize what is being done. When science is
thus renewing itself, and men are on every hand
seeking how, by means of science, they may
enlarge and ennoble life, the spirit that moved
Diderot is again making itself felt. It is worth
while to realize his fellowship for a few moments,
and to sun ourselves, if we can bear it, in his
inspiring enthusiasm.

68 The New Spirit.

HEINE.

I.

Heine gathers up and focuses for us in one
vivid point all those influences of his own time
which are the forces of to-day. He appears
before us, to put it in his own way, as a youth-
ful and militant Knight of the Holy Ghost,
tilting against the spectres of the past and
liberating the imprisoned energies of the human
spirit. His interest from this point of view lies,
largely, apart from his interest as a supreme
lyric poet, the brother of Catullus and Villon
and Burns ; we here approach him on his pro-
saic— his relatively prosaic — side.

One hemisphere of Heine's brain was Greek,
the other Hebrew. He was born when the
genius of Goethe was at its height ; his mother
had absorbed the frank earthliness, the sane and
massive Paganism, of the Roman Elegies, and
Heine's ideals in all things, whether he would
or not, were always Hellenic — using that word
in the large sense in which Heine himself used
it — even while he was the first in rank and the
last in time of the Romantic poets of Germany.
He sought, even consciously, to mould the
modern emotional spirit into classic forms. He
wrought his art simply and lucidly, the aspira-

Heine. 69

tions that pervade it are everywhere sensuous,
and yet it recalls oftener the turbulent temper
of Catullus than any sercner ancient spirit.

For Heine arose early in active rebellion
against a merely passive classicism ; in the
same way that fiercer and more ardent cries, as
from the East, pierce through the songs of
Catullus. The mischievous Hermes was irri-
tated by the calm and quiet activities of the
aged Zeus of Weimar. And then the earnest
Hebrew nature within him, liberated by Hegel's
favourite formu'a of the divinity of man, came
into play with its large revolutionary thirsts.
Thus it was that he appeared before the world
as the most brilliant leader of a movement of
national or even world-wide emancipation. The
greater part of his prose works, from the youth-
ful "Reisebilder" onwards, and a considerable
portion of his poetic work, record the energy
with which he played this part.

But whether the Greek or the Hebrew element
happened to be most active in Heine, the ideal
that he set up for life generally was the equal
activity of both sides — in other words, the har-
mony of flesh and spirit. It is this thought
which dominates " The History of Religion
and Philosophy in Germany," his finest achieve-
ment in this kind. That book was written at
the moment when Heine touched the highest
point of his enthusiasm for freedom and his

jo The New Spirit.

faith in the possibility of human progress. It
is a sort of programme for the immediate future
of the human spirit, in the form of a brief and
bold outline of the spiritual history of Germany
and Germany's great emancipators, Luther,
Lessing, Kant, and the rest. It sets forth in
a fresh and fascinating shape that Everlasting
Gospel which, from the time of Joachim of
Flora downwards, has always gleamed in
dreams before the minds of men as the successor
of Christianity. Heine's vision of a democracy
of cakes and ale, founded on the heights of
religious, philosophical, and political freedom,
may still spur and thrill us, — even now-a-days,
when we have wearied of stately bills of fare
for a sulky humanity that will not feed at our
bidding, no, not on cakes and ale. Heine is
wise enough to see, however imperfectly, that it
is unreasonable to expect the speedy erection of
any New Jerusalem ; for, as he expresses it in
his own way, the holy vampires of the Middle
Ages have sucked away so much of our life-
blood that the world has become a hospital. A
sudden revolution of fever-stricken or hysterical
invalids can effect little of permanent value ;
only a long and invigorating course of the tonics
of life can make free from danger the open-air of
nature. "Our first duty," he asserted in this
book, " is to become healthy."

Heine confesses that he too was anions the

Heine. 7 1

sick and decrepit souls. In reality he was at no
period so full of life and health, so harmoniously-
inspired and upborne by a great enthusiasm. He
laughs a little at Goethe ; he fails to see that the
l'hidian Zeus, at whose confined position he jests,
was the greatest liberator of them all ; but for the
most part his mocking sarcasm is here silent. It
was not until ten years later, when the subtle
seeds of disease had begun to appear, and when,
too, he had perhaps gained a clearer insight into
the possibilities of life, that Heine realized that the
practical reforming movements of his time were
not those for which his early enthusiasm had been
aroused. With the slow steps of that consuming
disease, and after the revolution of 1 848, he ceased
to recognize as of old any common root for his
various activities, or to insist on the fundamental
importance of religion. Everything in the world
became the sport of his intelligence. The brain
still functioned brilliantly in the atrophied body ;
the swift lightning-like wit still struck unerringly ;
it spared not even himself. The " Confessions "
are full of irony, covering all things with laughter
that is half reverence, or with reverence that is
more than half laughter — and woe to the reader
who is not at every moment alert ! In the ro-
mantic, satirical poem of " Atta Troll," written
at the commencement of the last period, this,
his final altitude, is most completely revealed.
It needs a little study to-day, even for a German,

72 The New Spirit.

but it is well worth that study. The history of
a dancing bear who escapes from servitude,
"Atta Troll" is a protest against the radical
party, with their narrow conceptions of progress,
their tame ideal of bourgeois equality, their little
watchwords, their solemnity, their indignation at
the human creatures who smile " even in their
enthusiasm." All these serious concerns of the
tribunes of the people are bathed in soft laughter
as we listen to the delicious child-like monotonous
melody in which the old bear, surrounded by his
family, mumbles or mutters of the future. " Atta
Troll " is not, as many have thought, a sneer at
the most sacred ideals of men. It is, rather, the
assertion of those ideals against the individuals
who would narrow them down to their own petty
scope. There are certain mirrors, Heine said,
so constructed that they would present even
Apollo as a caricature. But we laugh at the
caricature, not at the god. It is well to show,
even at the cost of some misunderstanding, that
above and beyond the little ideals of our im-
mediate political progress, there is built a yet
larger idea) city, of which also the human spirit
claims citizenship. The defence of the inalien-
able rights of the spirit, Heine declares, had been
the chief business of his life.

In the history of Germany, it was her two
great intellectual liberators, Luther and Lcssing,
to whom Heine looked up with the most un-

Heine. 73

qualified love and reverence. By his later vindi-
cation of the rights of the spirit, not less than by
his earlier fight for religious and political progress,
he may be said to have earned for himself a place
below, indeed, but not so very far below, those
hearty and sound-cored iconoclasts.

II.

To reach the root of the man's nature we must
glance at the chief facts of his life. He was born
at Diisseldorf, on the Rhine, then occupied by the
French, probably on the 13th of December, 1799.
He came, by both parents, of that Jewish race
which is, as he said once, the dough whereof gods
arc kneaded. The family of his mother, Betty
van Geldern, had come from Holland a century
earlier ; Betty herself received an excellent edu-
cation ; she shared the studies of her brother,
who became a physician of repute ; she spoke
and read English and French ; her favourite
books were Rousseau's " Emile " and Goethe's
elegies. For novels or poetry generally she cared
little. She preferred logic to sentiment and was
careful of the precise value of words. Some letters
written during her twenty-fourth year reveal a
frank, brave, and sweet nature ; she was a bright,
attractive little person, and had many wooers.
In the summer of 1796 Samson Heine, bearing
a letter of introduction, entered the house of the

74 The New Spirit.

Van Gelderns. He was the son of a Jewish
merchant settled in Hanover, and he had just
made a campaign in Flanders and Brabant, in
the capacity of commissary with the rank of
officer, under Prince Ernest of Cumberland. He
was a large and handsome man, with soft blonde
hair and beautiful hands ; there was something
about him, said his son, a little characterless,
almost feminine ; " he was a great child." After
a brief courtship he married Betty, and settled
at Diisseldorf as an agent for English velveteens.
Harry (so he was named after an Englishman)
was the first child. From his rather weak and
romantic father came whatever was loose and
unbalanced in Heine's temperament, and his in-
eradicable instinct for posing ; it was his mother,
with her strong and healthy nature, well de-
veloped both intellectually and emotionally, and
her great ambitions for her son, who, as he him-
self said, played the chief part in the history of
his evolution.

Harry was a quick child ; his senses were keen,
though he was not physically strong ; he loved
reading, and his favourite books were " Don
Quixote " and " Gulliver's Travels." He used
to make rhymes with his only and much-loved
sister Lotte, and at the age of ten he wrote a
ghost-poem which his teachers considered a
masterpiece. At the Lyceum he worked well,
at night as well as by day. Only once, at the

Heine. 75

public ceremony at the end of a school year, he
came to grief ; he was reciting a poem, when his
eyes fell on a beautiful, fair-haired girl in the
audience ; he hesitated, stammered, was silent,
fell down fainting. So early he revealed the ex-
treme cerebral irritability of a nature absorbed
in dreams and taken captive by visions. It was
not long after this, at the age of seventeen, when
his rich uncle at Hamburg was trying in vain to
set him forward on a commercial career, that
Heine met the woman who aroused his first and
last profound passion, always unsatisfied except
in so far as it found exquisite embodiment in his
poems. He never mentioned her name ; it was
not till after his death that the form standing
behind this Maria, Zuleima, Evelina of so many
sweet, strange, or melancholy songs was known
to be that of his cousin, Amalic Heine.

With his uncle's help he studied law at Bonn,
Gottingen, and Berlin. At Berlin he fell under
the dominant influence of Hegel, the vanquisher
of the romantic school of which Schelling was
the philosophic representative. Heine afterwards
referred to this period as that in which he "herded
swine with the Hegelians ; " it is certain that
Hegel exerted great and permanent influence
over him. At Berlin, in 1821, appeared his first
volume of poems, and then he began to take his
true place.

At this period he is described as a good-natured

y6 The New Spirit.

and gentle youth, but reserved, not caring to
show his emotions. He was of middle height
and slender, with rather long light brown hair
(in childhood it was red, and he was called
" Rother Harry ") framing the pale and beard-
less oval face, the bright, blue, short-sighted eyes,
the Greek nose, the high cheek bones, the large
mouth, the full — half cynical, half sensual — lips.
He was not a typical German ; like Goethe, he
never smoked; he disliked beer, and until he
went to Paris he had never tasted sauerkraut.

For some years he continued, chiefly at Got-
tingen, to study law. But he had no liking and
no capacity for jurisprudence, and his spasmodic
fits of application at such moments as he realized
that it was not good for him to depend on the
generosity of his rich and kind-hearted uncle
Solomon, failed to carry him far. A new idea,
a sunny day, the opening of some flower-like lied,
a pretty girl — and the Pandects were forgotten.

Shortly after he had at last received his doctor's
diploma he went through the ceremony of bap-
tism in hope of obtaining an appointment from
the Prussian Government. It was a step which
he immediately regretted, and which, far from
placing him in a better position, excited the
enmity both of Christians and Jews, although
the Heine family had no very strong views on
the matter ; Heine's mother, it should be said,
was a Deist, his father indifferent, but the Jewish

Heine. 77

rites were strictly kept up. He still talked of
becoming an advocate, until, in 1826, the publi-
cation of the first volume of the " Reisebilder "
gave him a reputation throughout Germany by
its audacity, its charming and picturesque man-
ner, its peculiarly original personality. The
second volume, bolder and better than the first,
was received with delight very much mixed with
horror, and it was prohibited by Austria, Prussia,
and many minor states. At this period Heine
visited England ; he was then disgusted with
Germany and full of enthusiasm for the "land of
freedom," an enthusiasm which naturally met
with many rude shocks, and from that time dates
the bitterness with which he usually speaks of
England. He found London— although, owing
to a clever abuse of uncle Solomon's generosity,
exceedingly well supplied with money— "fright-
fully damp and uncomfortable ; " only the poli-
tical life of England attracted him, and there
were no bounds to his admiration of Canning.
He then visited Italy, to spend there the happiest
days of his life ; and having at length realized
that his efforts to obtain any government ap-
pointment in Germany would be fruitless, he emi-
grated to Paris. There, save for brief periods,
he remained until his death.

This entry into the city which he had called
the New Jerusalem was an important epoch in
Heine's life. He was thirty-one years of age,

78 The New Spirit.

still youthful, and eager to receive new impres-
sions ; he was apparently in robust health, not-
withstanding constant headaches ; Gautier de-
scribes him as in appearance a sort of German
Apollo. He was still developing, as he con-
tinued to develop, even up to the end ; the
ethereal loveliness of the early poems vanished,
it is true, but only to give place to a closer grasp
of reality, a larger laughter, a keener cry of pain.
He was now heartily welcomed by the extraor-
dinarily brilliant group then living and working
in Paris, including Victor Hugo, George Sand,
Balzac, Michelet, Alfred de Musset, Gautier,
Chopin, Louis Blanc, Dumas, Sainte-Beuve,
Quinet, Berlioz, and he entered with eager de-
light into their manifold activities. For a
time also he attached himself rather closely
to the school of Saint-Simon, then headed by
Enfantin; he was especially attracted by their
religion of humanity, which seemed the reali-
zation of his own dreams. Heine's book on
"Religion and Philosophy in Germany" was
written at Enfantin's suggestion, and the first
edition dedicated to him ; Enfantin's name was,
he said, a sort of shibboleth, indicating the
most advanced party in the "liberation war of
humanity." In 1855 he withdrew the dedica-
tion ; it had become an anachronism ; Enfantin
was no longer ransacking the world in search of
la fcmme litre ; the martyrs of yesterday no

Heine. 79

longer bore a cross — unless it were, he added
characteristically, the cross of the Legion of
Honour.

A few years after his arrival in Paris Heine
entered on a relationship which occupied a large
place in his life. Mathilde Mirat, a lively gri-
sette of sixteen, was the illegitimate daughter
of a man of wealth and position in the provinces,
and she had come up from Normandy to serve
in her aunt's shoe-shop. Heine often passed
this shop, and an acquaintance, at first carried
on silently through the shop-window, gradu-
ally ripened into a more intimate relationship.
Mathilde could neither read nor write; it was
decided that she should go to school for a time ;
after that they established a little common house-
hold, one of those menages parisiens, recognized
as almost legitimate, for which Heine had
always had a warm admiration, because, as he
said, he meant by " marriage " something quite
other than the legal coupling effected by parsons
and bankers. As in the case of Goethe, it was
not until some years later that he went through
the religious ceremony, as a preliminary to a
duel in which he had become involved by his
remarks on Borne's friend, Madame Strauss ;
he wished to give Mathilde an assured position
in case of his death. After the ceremony at
St. Sulpice he invited to dinner all those of his
friends who had contracted similar relations, in

80 The New Spirit.

order that they might be influenced by his
example. That they were so influenced is not
recorded.

It is not difficult to understand the strong
and permanent attraction that drew the poet,
who had so many intellectual and aristocratic
women among his friends, to this pretty, laughter-
loving grisette. It lay in her bright and wild
humour, her childlike impulsiveness, not least
in her charming ignorance. It was delightful to
Heine that Mathilde had never read a line of
his books, did not even know what a poet was,
and loved him only for himself. He found in
her a continual source of refreshment.

He had need of every source of refreshment.
In the years that followed his formal marriage
in 1 841, the dark shadows, within and without,
began to close round him. Although he was
then producing his most mature work, chiefly in
poetry — "Atta Troll," " Romancero," "Deutsch-
land " — his income from literary sources re-
mained small. Mathilde was not a good house-
keeper ; and even with the aid of a considerable
allowance from his uncle Solomon, Heine was
frequently in pecuniary difficulties, and was con-
sequently induced to accept a small pension
from the French Government, which has some-
times been a matter of concern to those who
care for his fame. As years passed, the enmities
that he suffered from or cherished increased

Heine. 8 1

rather than diminished, and his bitterness found
expression in his work. Even Mathilde was not
an unalloyed source of joy ; the charming child
was becoming a middle-aged woman, and was
still like a child. She could not enter into
Heine's interests ; she delighted in theatres and
circuses, to which he could not always accom-
pany her : and he experienced the pangs of an
unreasonable jealousy more keenly than he cared
to admit. Then uncle Solomon died, and his
son refused, until considerable pressure was
brought to bear on him, to continue the allow-
ance which his father had intended Heine to
receive. This was a severe blow, and the ex-
citement it produced developed the latent seeds
of his disease. It came on with symptoms of
paralysis, which even in a few months gave him,
he says, the appearance of a dying man. During
the next two years, although his brain remained
clear, the long pathological tragedy was un-
folded.

He went out for the last time in May, 1848.
Half blind and half lame, he slowly made his
way out of the streets, filled with the noise of
revolution, into the silent Louvre, to the shrine
dedicated to " the goddess of beauty, our dear
lady of Milo." There he sat long at her feet; he
was bidding farewell to his old gods ; he had
become reconciled to the religion of sorrow ;
tears streamed from his eyes, and she looked
G

82 The New Spirit.

down at him, compassionate but helpless: "Dost
thou not see, then, that I have no arms, and can-
not help thee ? "

"On eut dit un Apollon germanique" — so Gau-
tier said of the Heine of 1835 ; twenty years later
an English visitor wrote of him — " He lay on a
pile of mattresses, his body wasted so that it
seemed no bigger than a child under the sheet
which covered him — his eyes closed, and the face
altogether like the most painful and wasted
' Ecce Homo ' ever painted by some old German
painter."

His sufferings were only relieved by ever
larger doses of morphia ; but although still more
troubles came to him, and the failure of a bank
robbed him of his small savings, his spirit re-
mained unconquered. " He is a wonderful man,"
said one of his doctors ; "he has only two anxie-
ties— to conceal his condition from his mother,
and to assure his wife's future." His literary
work, though it decreased in amount, never
declined in power ; only, in the words of his
friend Berlioz, it seemed as though the poet was
standing at the window of his tomb, looking
around on the world in which he had no longer
a part.

He saw a few friends, of whom Ferdinand
Lassalle, with his exuberant power and enthu-
siasm, was the most interesting to him, as the
representative of a new age and a new social

Heine. 83

faith ; and the most loved, that girl-friend who
sat for hours or days at a time by the " mattress-
grave" in the Rue d'Amsterdam, reading to him
or writing his letters or correcting proofs. To
the last the loud, bright voice of Mathilde, when
he chanced to hear it, scolding the servants or
in other active exercise, often made him stop
speaking, while a smile of delight passed over
his face. He died on the 16th of February, 1856.
He was buried, silently, in Montmartre, accord-
ing to his wish ; for, as he said, it is quiet there.

III.

Throughout and above all, Heine was a
poet. From first to last he was led by three
angels who danced for ever in his brain, and
guided him, singly or together, always. They
were the same as in " Atta Troll " he saw in the
moonlight from the casement of Uraka's hut —
the Greek Diana, grown wanton, but with the
noble marble limbs of old ; Abunde, the blonde
and gay fairy of France ; Herodias, the dark
Jewess, like a palm of the oasis, with all the
fragrance of the East between her breasts : " O,
you dead Jewess, I love you most, more than
the Greek goddess, more than that fairy of the
North." '

1 " C'est le Bible, plus que tout autre livre," a well-
known French critic wrote, " qui a fa<jonne" le g^nie

84 The New Spirit.

Those genii of three ideal lands danced for
ever in his brain, and that is but another way of
indicating the opposition that lay at the root of
his nature. From one point of view, it may
well be, he continued the work of Luther and
Lessing, though he was less great-hearted, less
sound at core, though he had not that ele-
ment of sane Philistinism which marks the
Shakespeares and Goethes of the world. But he
was, more than anything else, a poet, an artist,
a dreamer, a perpetual child. The practical re-
formers among whom at one time he placed
himself, the men of one idea, were naturally
irritated and suspicious ; there was a flavour of
aristocracy in such idealism. In the poem called
" Disputation " a Capuchin and a Rabbi argued
before the King and Queen at Toledo concern-
ing the respective merits of the Christian and
Jewish religions. Both spoke at great length
and with great fervour, and in the end the King
appealed to the beautiful Queen by his side.
She replied that she could not tell which of

poetique de Heine, en lui donnant sa forme et sa couleur.
Ses ve'ritables maitres, ses vrais inspirateurs sont les
glorieux inconnus qui ont e"crit l'Ecclesiaste et les Pro-
verbes, le Cantique des cantiques, le livre de Job et ce
chef-d'eeuvre d'ironie discrete intitule" : le livre du pro-
phete Jonas. Celui qui s'appelait un rossignol Allemand
niche" dans la perruque de Voltaire fut a la fois le moins
eVange"lique des hommes et le plus vraiment biblique des
pontes modernes."

'

Heme. 85

them was right, but that she did not like the
smell of either ; and Heine was generally of the
Queen's mind. He sighed for the restoration of
Barbarossa, the long-delayed German Empire,
and his latest biographer asserts that he would
have greeted the discovery of Barbarossa under
the disguise of the King of Prussia, with Bis-
marckian insignia of blood and iron, as the
realization of all his dreams. It is doubtful,
however, whether the meeting would be very
cordial on either side. It would probably be
the painful duty of the Emperor, as of the Em-
peror of the vision in " Deutschland," to tell
Heine, in very practical language, that he was
wanting in respect, wanting in all sense of
etiquette ; and Heine would certainly reply to
the Emperor, as under the same circumstances
he replied to the visionary Barbarossa, that that
gentleman had better go home again, that during
his long absence Emperors had become unne-
cessary, and that, after all, sceptres and crowns
made admirable playthings for monkeys.

"We are founding a democracy of gods," he
wrote in 1834, "all equally holy, blessed and glo-
rious. You desire simple clothing, ascetic morals,
and unseasoned enjoyments ; we, on the con-
trary, desire nectar and ambrosia, purple mantles,
costly perfumes, pleasure and splendour, dances
of laughing nymphs, music and plays. — Do not
be angry, you virtuous republicans ; we answer

//

86 The New Spirit.

all your reproaches in the words of one of
Shakespeare's fools : ' Dost thou think, because
thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes
and aje ? ' " What could an austere republican,
a Puritanic Liberal, who scorned the vision of
roses and myrtles and sugar-plums all round,
say to this ? Borne answered, " I can be indul-
gent to the games of children, indulgent to the
passions of a youth, but when on the bloody day
of battle a boy who is chasing butterflies gets
between my legs ; when at the day of our greatest
need, and we are calling aloud on God, the
young coxcomb beside us in the church sees only
the pretty girls, and winks and flirts — then, in
spite of all our philosophy and humanity, we may
well grow angry. . . . Heine, with his sybaritic
nature, is so effeminate that the fall of a rose-leaf
disturbs his sleep ; how, then, should he rest
comfortably on the knotty bed of freedom ?
Where is there any beauty without a fault ?
Where is there any good thing without its
ridiculous side ? Nature is seldom a poet and
never rhymes ; let him whom her rhymeless
prose cannot please turn to poetry ! " Borne was
right ; Heine was not the man to plan a success-
ful revolution, or defend a barricade, or edit a popu-
lar democratic newspaper, or represent adequately
a radical constituency — all this was true. Let us be
thankful that it was true ; Bornes are ever with us,
and we are grateful : there is but one Heine.

Heine. 8 7

The same complexity of nature that made
Heine an artist made him a humorist. But it
was a more complicated complexity now, a
cosmic game between the real world and the
ideal world ; he could go no farther. The young
Catullus of 1825, with his fiery passions crushed
in the wine-press of life and yielding such divine
ambrosia, soon lost his faith in passion. The
militant soldier in the liberation-war of humanity
of 1835 soon ceased to flourish his sword. It
was only with the full development of his hu-
mour, when his spinal cord began to fail and he
had taken up his position as a spectator of life,
that Heine attained the only sort of unity pos-
sible to him — the unity that comes of a recog-
nized and accepted lack of unity. In the lam-
bent flames of this unequalled humour — " the
smile of Mephistopheles passing over the face of
Christ " — he bathed all the things he counted
dearest ; to its service he brought the secret of
his poet's nature, the secret of speaking with a
voice that every heart leaps up to answer. It is
scarcely the humour of Aristophanes, though it
is a greater force, even in moulding our political
and social ideals, than Borne knew ; it is oftener
a modern development of the humour of the
mad king and the fool in " Lear " — that humour
which is the last concentrated word of the human
organism under the lash of Fate.

And if it is still asked why Heine is so modern,

88 The New Spirit.

it can only be said that these discords out of which
his humour exhaled are those which we have
nearly all of us known, and that he speaks with
a voice that seems to arise from the depth of our
own souls. He represents our period of transi-
tion ; he gazed, from what seemed the vulgar
Pisgah of his day, behind on an Eden that was
for ever closed, before on a promised land he
should never enter. While with clear sight he
announced things to come, the music of the past
floated up to him ; he brooded wistfully over the
vision of the old Olympian gods, dying, amid
faint music of cymbals and flutes, forsaken, in
the mediaeval wilderness ; he heard strange
sounds of psaltries and harps, the psalms of
Israel, the voice of Princess Sabbath, across the
waters of Babylon. — In a few years this signifi-
cance of Heine will be lost ; that it is not yet
lost the eagerness with which his books are read
and translated sufficiently testifies,

Whitman. 89

WHITMAN.
I.

If we put aside imaginative writers — Hawthorne,
Poe, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain — America has
produced three men of world-wide significance.1
These three belong to the same corner of the
continent ; they form a culminating series, and
at the same time they complement each other.
It is difficult to consider one of them without
throwing a glance at the others.

Emerson comes first. In Emerson, after two
hundred years, Puritanism seems, for the first
time, to have found voice. The men of Banbury
and Amsterdam were too much distracted by
the outer world to succeed in finding adequate
artistic expression for the joys that satisfied
them and the spirit that so powerfully moved
them. They have been the sport of their enemies,
and have come down to us in literature as a set
of sour fanatics. It was not until the seed was
carried over sea, to germinate slowly and peace-

1 The significance of Lowell, a great writer unques-
tionably, seems to be chiefly national.

90 The Neiv Spirit.

fully in New England, that at length it broke into
flower, and that we know clearly that union of
robust freedom and mystic exaltation which lies
at the heart of Puritanism. In his calm and aus-
tere manner — born of the blood that had passed
through the veins of six generations of Puritan
ministers — Emerson overturned the whole of
tradition. " A world in the hand," he said, with
cheery, genial scepticism, " is worth two in the
bush." With gentle composure, with serene
hilarity, perhaps with an allusion to the roses
that " make no mention of former roses," he
posited the absolute right of the individual to
adjudicate in religion, in marriage, in the State.
Even he himself, while able, like Spinoza and
Goethe, to live by self-regulating laws that are
death to men of less sanity, could not always in
his peaceful haunts at Concord recognize or allow
the fruits of his doctrines.

Emerson was a man of the study ; he seems
to have known the world as in a camera obscura
spread out before him on a table. He .never
seems to come, or to be capable of coming, into
direct relations with other men or with Nature.
Thoreau, an original and solitary spirit, born
amid the same influences as Emerson, but of
different temperament, resolved to go out into
the world, to absorb Nature and the health of
Nature : " I wished to live deliberately, to front
only the essential facts of life, and see if I could

IV hit man. 91

not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I
came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did
not wish to live what was not life, living is so
dear ; nor did I wish to practise resignation, un-
less it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep
and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so
sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all
that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave
close, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to
its lowest terms." So he went into Walden
Woods and built himself a hut, and sowed beans,
and grew strangely familiar with the lives of
plants and trees, of birds and beasts and fishes,
and with much else besides. This period of self-
dependent residence by Walden Pond has usually
been regarded as the chief episode in Thoreau's
life. Doubtless it was, in the case of a man who
spent his whole life in a small New England
town, and made the very moderate living that
he needed by intermittent work at pencil-making,
teaching, land-surveying, magazine-writing, fence-
building, or whitewashing. Certainly it was this
experience which gave form and character to the
activities of his life, and the book in which he
recorded his experiences created his fame. But
in the experience itself there was nothing of
heroic achievement. One would rather say that
in the Walden episode Thoreau has vindicated
the place of such an experience in all educa-
tion. Every one, for some brief period in early

92 The New Spirit.

life, should be thrown on his own resources in
the solitudes of Nature, to enter into harmo-
nious relations with himself, and to realize the
full scope of self-reliance. For the man or
woman to whom this experience has never been
given, the world must hold many needless mys-
teries and not a few needless miseries.

There was in this man a curious mingling of
wildness and austerity, which Mr. Burroughs, in
the most discriminating estimate of him yet
made, traces to his ancestry. On the paternal
side he was French ; his privateering grandfather
came from Jersey : " that wild revolutionary
cry of his, and that sort of restrained ferocity
and hirsuteness are French." But on the mother's
side he was of Scotch and New English Puritan
stock. In person he was rather undersized, with
"huge Emersonian nose," and deep-set bluish-
grey eyes beneath large overhanging brows ;
prominent pursed-up lips, a weak receding chin,
" a ruddy weather-beaten face, which reminds
one of some shrewd and honest animal's." He
was a vigorous pedestrian ; he had sloping
shoulders, long arms, short legs, large hands
and feet — the characteristics, for the most part,
of an anthropoid ape. His hands were fre-
quently clenched, and there was an air of con-
centrated energy about him ; otherwise nothing
specially notable, and he was frequently sup-
posed " a pedlar of small wares." He possessed,

Whitman. 93

as his friend Emerson remarked, powers of
observation which seemed to indicate additional
senses : " he saw as with microscope, heard as
with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photo-
graphic register of all he saw and heard."

It has been claimed for Thoreau by some of
his admirers, never by himself, that he was a
man of science, a naturalist. Certainly, in some
respects, he had in him the material for an
almost ideal naturalist. His peculiar powers of
observation, and habits of noting and recording
natural facts, his patience, his taste for spending
his days and nights in the open air, seem to
furnish everything that is required. Nor would
his morbid dislike of dissection have been any
serious bar, for the least worked but by no
means the least important portion of natural
history is the study of living forms, and for this
Thoreau seems to have been peculiarly adapted ;
he had acquired one of the rarest of arts, that of
approaching birds, beasts and fishes, and exciting
no fear. There are all sorts of profoundly in-
teresting investigations which only such a man
can profitably undertake. But that right ques-
tion which is at least the half of knowledge was
hidden from Thoreau ; he seems to have been abso-
lutely deficient in scientific sense. His bare, imper-
sonal records of observations are always dull and
unprofitable reading ; occasionally he stumbles
on a good observation, but, not realizing its sig-

94 The New Spirit.

nificance, he never verifies it or follows it up.
His science is that of a fairly intelligent school-
boy— a counting of birds' eggs and a running
after squirrels. Of the vital and organic rela-
tionships of facts, or even of the existence of
such relationships, he seems to have no per-
ception. Compare any of his books with, for
instance, Belt's " Naturalist in Nicaragua," or
any of Wallace's books : for the men of science,
in their spirit of illuminating inquisitiveness, all
facts are instructive ; in Thoreau's hands they
are all dead. He was not a naturalist : he was
an artist and a moralist.

He was born into an atmosphere of literary
culture, and the great art he cultivated was that
of framing sentences. He desired to make sen-
tences which would " suggest far more than they
say," which would " lie like boulders on the page,
up and down or across, not mere repetition, but
creation, and which a man might sell his ground
or cattle to build," sentences "as durable as a
Roman aqueduct." Undoubtedly he succeeded ;
his sentences frequently have all the massive
and elemental qualities that he desired. They
have more ; if he knew little of the architectonic
qualities of style, there is a keen exhilarating
breeze blowing about these boulders, and when
we look at them they have the grace and audacity,
the happy, natural extravagance of fragments
of the finest Decorated Gothic on the site of a

Whitman. 95

fourteenth century abbey. He was in love with
the things that are wildest and most untamable in
Nature, and of these his sentences often seem to
be a solid artistic embodiment, the mountain side,
" its sublime gray mass, that antique, brownish-
gray, Ararat colour," or the " ancient, familiar,
immortal cricket sound," the thrush's song, his
ranz des vdches, or the song that of all seemed
to rejoice him most, the clear, exhilarating,
braggart, clarion-crow of the cock. Thoreau's
favourite reading was among the Greeks, Pindar,
Simonides, the Greek Anthology, especially
^Eschylus, and a later ancient, Milton. There
is something of his paganism in all this, his cult
of the aboriginal health-bearing forces of Nature.
His paganism, however unobtrusive, was radical
and genuine. It was a paganism much earlier
than Plato, and which had never heard of
Christ.

Thoreau was of a piece ; he was at harmony
with himself, though it maybe that the elements
that went to make up the harmony were few.
The austerity and exhilaration and simple
paganism of his art were at one with his
morality. He was, at the very core, a preacher ;
the morality that he preached, interesting in
itself, is, for us, the most significant thing
about him. Thoreau was, in the noblest sense
of the word, a Cynic. The school of Antis-
thcnes is not the least interesting of the Socratic

g6 The New Spirit.

schools, and Thoreau is perhaps the finest flower
that that school has ever yielded. He may not
have been aware of his affinities, but it will help
us if we bear them in mind. The charm that
Diogenes exercised over men seems to have
consisted in his peculiarly fresh and original
intellect, his extravagant independence and self-
control, his coarse and effective wit. Thoreau
sat in his jar at Walden with the same origi-
nality, independence, and sublime contentment ;
but his wisdom was suave and his wit was never
coarse — exalted, rather, into a perennial humour,
flashing now and then into divine epigram.
A life in harmony with Nature, the culture of
joyous simplicity, the subordination of science
to ethics — these were the principles of Cynicism,
and to these Thoreau was always true. " Every
day is a festival," said Diogenes, andMetrocles re-
joiced that he was happier than the Persian king.
" I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it
all to myself," said Thoreau, " than be crowded
on a velvet cushion." " Cultivate poverty like
a garden herb, like sage. ... It is life near the
bone, where it is sweetest. . . . Money is not re-
quired to buy one necessary of the soul." He
had " travelled much in Concord." " Mcthinks I
should be content to sit at the back-door in
Concord under the poplar tree for ever." Such
utterances as these strewn throughout Thoreau's
pages — and the saying in the last days of the

]] 'hitman. 97

dying man to the youth who would talk to him
about a future world, " One world at a time "—
are full, in the uncorrupted sense, of the finest
Cynicism. Diogenes, seeing a boy drink out of
his hand, threw away his cup; Thorcau had an
interesting mineral specimen as a parlour orna-
ment, but it needed dusting every day, and he
threw it away : it was not worth its keep. The
Cynics seem to have been the first among the
(I reeks to declare that slavery is opposed to
nature. Thorcau not only carried his indepen-
dence so far as to go to prison rather than pay
taxes to Church or State — " the only govern-
ment that 1 rec< ignize is the power that establishes
justice in the land" — but in 1859, when John
Brown lay in prison in Virginia, Thorcau was
the one man in' America to recognize the great-
ness of the occasion and to stand up publicly on
his side : " Think of him ! — of his rare quali-
ties ! — such a man as it takes ages to make,
and ages to understand ; no mock hero, nor the
representative of any party. A man such as the
sun may not rise upon again in this benighted
land. To whose making went the costliest
material, the finest adamant ; sent to be the
redeemer of those in captivity ; and the only
use to which you can put him is to hang him at
the end of a rope ! "

Every true Cynic is, above all, a moralist and
a preacher. Thorcau could never be anything
II

98 The New Spirit.

else ; that was, in the end, his greatest weakness.
This unfailing ethereality, this perpetual chal-
lenge of the acridity and simplicity of Nature,
becomes at last hypernatural. Thoreau break-
fasts on the dawn : it is well ; but he dines
on the rainbow and sups on the Aurora borealis.
Of Nature's treasure more than half is man.
Thoreau, with his noble Cynicism, had, as he
thought, driven life into a corner, but he had
to confess that of all phenomena his own race
was to him the most mysterious and undis-
coverable. He writes finely : " The whole duty
of man may be expressed in one line : Make to
yourself a perfect body ; " but this appears to be
a purely intellectual intuition. He had a fine
insight into the purity of sex and of all natural
animal functions, from which we excuse our-
selves of speaking by falsely saying they are
trifles. " We are so degraded that we cannot
speak simply of the necessary functions of
human nature;" but he is not bold to justify his
insight. He welcomed Walt Whitman, at the
very first, as the greatest democrat the world
had_seen, but he himself remained a natural
aristocrat. " He was a man devoid of com-
passion," remarks Mr. Burroughs, " devoid of
sympathy, devoid of generosity, devoid of
patriotism, as those words are generally un-
derstood." He had learnt something of the
mystery of Nature, but the price of his know-

Whitman. 99

ledge was ignorance of his fellows. The chief
part of life he left untouched.

Yet all that he had to give he gave fully and
ungrudgingly ; and it was of the best and rarest.
We shall not easily exhaust the exhilaration of
it. " We need the tonic of wildness." Thoreau
has heightened for us the wildness of Nature, and
his work— all written, as we need not be told, in
the open air— is full of this tonicity; it is a sort
of moral quinine, and, like quinine under certain
circumstances, it leaves a sweet taste behind.

II.

Whitman has achieved the rarest of all distinc-
tions : he has been placed while yet alive by the
side of the world's greatest moral teachers,
beside Jesus and Socrates —

" the latter Socrates,
Greek to the core, yet Yankee too."

And his biographer records briefly his conviction
that this man was " perhaps the most advanced
nature the world has yet produced." Yet the
facts of his life are few and simple. He was born
in May, 18 19, on the shores of the great south
bay of Long Island. Like Bret Harte, who has
given classic expression to the young life of
Western America, Whitman is half Dutch, and
this ancestral fact is significant. The well-known

ioo The New Spirit.

portrait prefixed to "Leaves of Grass " shows him
with an expression like his father's ; in later lift-
he bears a singular resemblance to his mother as
she is represented in Bucke's book. He himself,
we are told, makes much of the women of his
ancestry. " I estimate three leading sources and
formative stamps of my own character," — in
his own words — " the maternal nativity-stock
brought hither from far-away Netherlands, for
one (doubtless the best); the subterranean te-
nacity and central bony structure (obstinacy,
wilfulness) which I get from my paternal English
elements, for another ; and the Long Island
birth-spot, sea-shores, childhood's scenes, absorp-
tions, with teeming Brooklyn and New York —
with, I suppose, my experiences afterwards
in the Secession outbreak — for third." His
mother, he wrote, was to him " the ideal woman,
practical, spiritual, of all of earth, life, love, to me
the best."

For thirty years the youth set himself to learn
the nature of the world. There could be no
better education ; he has described its elemen-
tary stages, by barnyard and roadside, in "There
was a child went forth." The same large recep-
tiveness still went with him, as he was by turn
teacher, printer, journalist, government clerk, and
always, and above all, loafer. He loafed year
after year in Broadway, on Fulton Ferry, on the
omnibuses talking to the drivers, in the workshops

Whitman. 101

talking to the artisans. His physical health was
perfect ; he earned enough to live on ; he felt
himself the equal of highest or lowest ; he drank
of the great variegated stream of life before him
from every cup. His culture was, in its own way,
as large and as sincere as Goethe's. Of books,
indeed, he knew little ; he was equally ignorant
of science, of philosophy, of the fine arts ; he
appears to have been content — for his own ends
wisely content — with elemental and mostly
ancient utterances of the race, as the Bible,
Homer, Shakespeare, the Nibelungenlied. And
by-and-by, in 1855, when this new personality,
with its wide and deep roots, had become or-
ganized, Walt Whitman, at the age of thirty-
six, himself printed and published a little book
called "Leaves of Grass."

After this there was but one fresh formative
influence in Whitman's life, but without it his
life and his work would both have suffered an
immense lack. What had chiefly characterized
him so far had been his audacious nonchalance,
the frank and absolute egotism of a healthy
Olympian schoolboy. In i860 the Civil War
began ; from 1862 to 1865 Whitman nursed the
sick and wounded at Washington. During that
period of three years (broken by an attack of
hospital malaria, the first illness of his life, con-
tracted in the discharge of these self-imposed
duties) he visited and tended nearly 100,000 men,

102 The New Spirit.

and the personal presence of the man, his inex-
haustible love and sympathy, were of even more
worth than the manifold small but precious
services that he was enabled to render. He has
himself given a simple and noble record of his
work in the "Memoranda" included in "Speci-
men Days and Collect," and in " Drum Taps,"
a still more precious and intimate record of his
experiences. From this period a deep tenderness,
a divine compassion for all things human, is never
absent from Whitman's work ; it becomes more
predominant than even his superb egotism. It
is this element in his large emotional nature,
brought to full maturity by these war experi-
ences, which so many persons have felt thrilling
through the man's whole personality, and which
probably explains in some measure the devotion
he has inspired. Whitman went to Washington
young, in the perfection of virile physical energy
("He is a J/#/2,"said the shrewd Lincoln, to whom
Whitman was unknown, as he chanced to see him
through a window once) ; he came away old and
enfeebled, having touched the height of life, to
walk henceforth a downward path. Physically
impressive, however, at that time and always,
he remained. He is described, after this time
(chiefly by Dr. Bucke), as six feet in height,
weighing nearly two hundred pounds ; with eye-
brows highly arched ; eyes light blue, rather
small, dull and heavy (this point is of some

Whitman. 103

interest, bearing in mind that with exceptional
creative imagination large bright eyes are asso-
ciated) ; full-sized mouth, with full lips ; large
handsome ears, and senses exceptionally acute.
The peculiar complexion of his face, Bucke de-
scribed as a bright maroon tint ; that of his body
"a delicate but well-marked rose colour," unlike
the English or Teutonic stock ; his gait an
elephantine roll. " No description," his Bos-
wellian biographer, Dr. Bucke, again speaks (and
Mr. Kennedy, a later and equally Boswellian
biographer, supplies confirmatory details), " can
give anyidea of the extraordinary physical attrac-
tiveness of the man," even upon those who came
in contact with him for a moment. In 1 873 he had
a stroke of paralysis (left hemiplegia), and for
three years there seemed little promise of re-
covery. The return to health was slow and in-
complete. In those years he spent much time
bathing, or naked in the open air — "hanging
clothes on a rail near by, keeping old broad-
brim straw on head and easy shoes on feet " —
and considered that that counted for much in his
restoration to health. " Perhaps," he adds, "he
or she to whom the free exhilarating ecstasy of
nakedness in nature has never been eligible, has
not really known what purity is — nor what faith
or art or health really is."

It is not possible to apprehend this man's
work unless the man's personality is appre-

1 04 The New Spirit.

bended. Every great book contains the precious
life-blood of a master-spirit, and no book throbs
with a more vivid personal life than " Leaves of
Grass." It is the whole outcome of a whole
man, audacious and unrepentant, who has here
set down the emotional reverberations of a
manifold life. " For only," according to his own
large saying,

" For only at last, after many years, after chastity, friend-
ship, procreation, prudence and nakedness,

After treading ground and breasting river and lake,

After a loosened throat, after absorbing eras, tempera-
ments, races, after knowledge, freedom, crimes,

After complete faith, after clarifying^ elevations, and
removing obstructions,

After these and more, it is just possible there comes to a
man, a woman, the divine power to speak words."

III.

Of art, in the conventional sense of the word,
there is not much in Whitman. If we wish to
approach him as an artist, J. F. Millet probably
helps us to understand him, more than any
other artist in foreign fields and lands. Millet
has a deep and close relationship to Whitman.
At first sight, their work is curiously unlike :
Whitman, in a great new country, delighting in
every manifestation of joy and youth and hope ;
Millet, the child of an older and colder country,

Whitman. 105

in love with age and suffering and toil. Yet in
essentials it is identical. Even personally, it is
said, Millet recalled Whitman.1 Judging from
the representations of him, Millet, in his prime,
was a colossal image of manly beauty — deep-
chested, muscular, erect, the quiet, penetrating
blue eyes, the delicately expressive eyelids, the
large nose and dilating sensitive nostrils, the
firm mouth and jaw, the thick and dark brown
beard. The consumptive artist — a Keats or a
Thoreau — craves for health and loveliness ; he
turns shuddering from all that is not pleasant.
It is only these men, heroic incarnations of
health, who are strong enough to look sanely
upon age and toil and suffering, and equal to the
prodigious expense of spirit of writing " Leaves
of Grass" with a heart laden with memories of
Washington hospitals.

Millet and Whitman have, each in his own
domain, made the most earnest, thorough, and
successful attempts of modern times to bring the
Greek spirit into art, the same attempt which
Jan Steen, a great artist whom we scarcely yet
rate at his proper value, made in seventeenth
century Holland. It is not by the smooth
nudities of a Bouguereau or a Leighton that we
reach Hellenism. The Greek spirit is the simple,

1 See an interesting paper of " Recollections of J. F.
Millet" in the " Century," May, 1889, to which I am in-
debted for several of the painter's utterances here quoted.

1 06 The New Spirit.

natural, beautiful interpretation of the life of the
artist's own age and people under his own sky,
as shown especially in the human body. It
cannot be the same in two ages or in two lands.
One little incident mentioned by Madame Millet
to a friend is suggestive, "of Millet compelling
her to wear the same shirt for an uncomfortably
long time ; not to paint the dirt, as his early
critics would have us believe, but that the rough
linen should simplify its folds and take the form
of the body, that he might give a fresher and
stronger accent to those qualities he so loved,
the garment becoming, as it were, a part of the
body, and expressing, as he has said, even more
than the nude, the larger and simpler forms of
Nature." There is the genuine Hellenic spirit,
working in a different age and under a different
sky. Millet felt that for him it was not true to
paint the naked body, and at the same time that
the body alone was the supremely interesting
thing to paint. In the "Sower" we see this spirit
expressed in the highest form which Millet
ever reached — the grace of natural beauty and
strength, in no remote discobolus or gladiator,
but in the man of his own country and clime, a
peasant like himself, whose form he had studied
from his own in the mirror in his own studio.
The coarse clothes and rough sabots play the
same part in Millet's work as the bizarre, uncouth
words and varied technical phraseology in

Whitman. 107

Whitman's ; one may call them accidental, but
they arc inevitable and necessary accidents.
" One must be able," Millet said, " to make use
of the trivial for the expression of the sublime."
They both insisted that the artist must deal
with the average and typical, not with the ex-
ceptional. They both tried to bring the large-
ness and simplicity of Nature into their work,
and to suggest more than they expressed. They
both refused to believe any part of Nature
could be other than lovely. "The man who
finds any phase or effect in Nature not beauti-
ful," said Millet sternly, " the lack is in his own
heart."

It is not as an artist that Whitman is chiefly
interesting to us. It is true that he has written
" Out of the Cradle endlessly rocking," " When
Lilacs last in the Dooryard bloomed," " This
Compost," and other fragments from which may
be gained a simple and pure aesthetic joy. Fre-
quently, also, we come across phrases which
reveal a keen perception of the strangeness and
beauty of things, lines that possess a simplicity
and grandeur scarcely less than Homeric ; thus,
"the noiseless splash of sunrise;" or of the
young men bathing, who "float on their backs,
their white bellies bulge to the sun." But such
results are accidental, and outside the main pur-
pose. For that very reason they have at times
something of the divine felicity, unforeseen and

•>

108 The New Spirit.

incalculable, of Nature ; yet always, according
to a rough but convenient distinction, it is the
poetry of energy rather than the poetry of art.
When Whitman speaks prose, the language of
science, he is frequently incoherent, emotional,
unbalanced, with no very just and precise sense
of the meaning or words or the structure of
reasoned language.1 It is clear that in this
man the moral in its largest sense — that is to
say, the personality and its personal relations
— is more developed than the scientific ; and that
on the aesthetic side the artist is merged in the
mystic, wrapt in emotional contemplation of a
cosmic whole. What we see, therefore, is a mani-
fold personality seeking expression for itself in a
peculiarly flexible and responsive medium. It is
a deep as well as a superficial resemblance that
these chants bear to the Scriptures of the old
Hebrews — as Isaiah or the Book of Job — wherein
also the writer becomes an artist, and also absorbs
all available science, but where his purpose is the

1 I think this defective scientific perception is perhaps
as responsible as any failure of moral insight for the
vigorous manner in which an element of " manly love "
flourishes in " Calamus " nnd elsewhere. Whitman is
hardy enough to assert that he expects it will to a large
extent take the place of love between the sexes. " Manly
love," even in its extreme form, is certainly Greek, as is
the degradation of women with which it is always corre-
lated ; yet the much slighter degradation of women in
modern times Whitman sincerely laments.

Whitman. 109

personal expression of a moral and religious con-
ception of life and the world. Whitman has
invented a name for the person who occupies
this rare and, in the highest degree, significant
position ; he calls him the " Answerer." It is
not the function of answerers, like that of philo-
sophers, to arrange the order and limits of ideas,
for they have to settle what ideas are or are not
to exist ; nor is it theirs, like the singers, to cele-
brate the ostensible things of the world, or to
seek out imaginative forms, for they are "not
followers of beauty, but the august masters of
beauty." The answerer is, in short, the maker
of ideals.

Whitman will not minimize the importance of
the answerer's mission. " I, too," he exclaims,
"following many and followed by many, in-
augurate a religion." If we wish to understand
Walt Whitman, we must have some conception
of this religion. We shall find that two great
and contradictory conceptions dominate his
work ; although in his thoughts, as in his modes
of expression, it is not possible to find any
strongly marked progression.

The " Song of Myself " is the most complete
utterance of Whitman's first great conception of
life.

" I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul ;
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is."

iio The New Spirit.

The absolute unity of matter and spirit, and
all which that unity involves, is the dominant
conception of this first and most characteristic
period. "If the body were not the soul," he
asks, " what is the soul ? " This is Whitman's
naturalism ; it is the re-assertion of the Greek
attitude on a new and larger foundation. " Let
it stand as an indubitable truth, which no inquiries
can shake, that the mind of man is so entirely
alienated from the righteousness of God, that he
cannot conceive, desire, or design anything but
what is wicked, distorted, foul, impure and iniqui-
tous ; that his heart is so thoroughly environed
by sin that it can breathe out nothing but cor-
ruption and rottenness." That is the fundamental
thought of Christian tradition set down in the
" Institutes," clearly and logically, by the genius
of Calvin. It is the polar opposite of Whitman's
thought, and therefore for Whitman the moral
conception of duty has ceased to exist.

" I give nothing as duties,

What others give as duties I give as living impulses.

(Shall I give the heart's action as a duty ?) "

Morality is thus the normal activity of a healthy
nature, not the product either of tradition or
of rationalism.

"Whatever tastes sweet to the most perfect
person, that is finally right " — this, it has been
said, is the maxim on which Whitman's morality

Whitman. 1 1 1

is founded, and it is the morality of Aristotle.
But no Greek ever asserted and illustrated it
with such emphatic iteration.

From the days when the Greek spirit found its
last embodiment in the brief songs, keen or
sweet, of the "Anthology," the attitude which
Whitman represents in the " Song of Myself"
has never lacked representatives. Throughout
the Middle Ages those strange haunting echoes
to the perpetual chant of litany and psalm, the
Latin student-songs, float across all Europe with
their profane and gay paganism, their fresh erotic
grace, their " In taberna quando sumus," their
"Ludo cum Caecilia/1 their "Gaudeamus igitur."
In the sane and lofty sensuality of Boccaccio, as
it found expression in the history of Alaciel and
many another wonderful story, and in Gottfried
of Strasburg's assertion of human pride and
passion in " Tristan and Isolde," the same strain
changed to a stronger and nobler key. Then
came the great wave of the Renaissance through
Italy and France and England, filling art and
philosophy with an exaltation of physical life,
and again later, in the movements that centre
around the French Revolution, an exaltation of
arrogant and independent intellectual life. But
all these manifestations were sometimes partial,
sometimes extravagant ; they were impulses of
the natural man surging up in rebellion against
the dominant Christian temper ; they were, for

1 1 2 The Neiv Spirit.

the most part consciously, of the nature of reac-
tions. We feel that there is a fatal lack about
them which Christianity would have filled ; only
in Goethe is the antagonism to some extent
reconciled. Beneath the vast growth of Chris-
tianity, for ever exalting the unseen by the easy
method of pouring contempt on the seen, and
still ever producing some strange and exquisite
flower of ascesis — some Francis or Theresa or
Fenelon — a slow force was working underground.
A tendency was making itself felt to find in the
theoretically despised physical — in those every-
day stones which the builders of the Church had
rejected — the very foundation of the mysteries
of life ; if not the basis for a new vision of the
unseen, yet for a more assured vision of the
seen.

No one in the last century expressed this
tendency more impressively and thoroughly,
with a certain insane energy, than William
Blake — the great chained spirit whom we see
looking out between the bars of his prison-
house with those wonderful eyes. Especially in
" The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," in which
he seems to gaze most clearly " through narrow
chinks of his cavern," he has set forth his con-
viction that " first the notion that man has a
body distinct from his soul is to be expunged,"
and that "if the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man, as it is, in-

Whitman, 1 1 3

finite." This most extraordinary book is, in his
own phraseology, the Bible of Hell.

Whitman appeared at a time when this stream
of influence, grown mighty, had boldly emerged.
At the time that " Leaves of Grass" sought the
light Tourgueneff was embodying in the typical
figure of Bassaroff the modern militant spirit of
science, positive and audacious — a spirit marked
also, as Hinton pointed out, by a new form of
asceticism, which lay in the denial of emotion.
Whitman, one of the very greatest emotional
forces of modern times, who had grown up apart
from the rigid and technical methods of science,
face to face with a new world and a new civiliza-
tion, which he had eagerly absorbed so far as it
lay open to him, had the good inspiration to
fling himself into the scientific current, and so to
justify the demands of his emotional nature ; to
represent himself as the inhabitant of a vast and
co-ordinated cosmos, tenoned and mortised in
granite :

" All forces have been steadily employed to complete and

delight me,
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul."

That Whitman possessed no trained scientific
instinct is unquestionably true, but it is impos-
sible to estimate his significance without under-
standing what he owes to science. Something,
indeed, he had gained from the philosophy of
I

1 1 4 The New Spirit.

Hegel — with its conception of the universe as a
single process of evolution, in which vice and
disease are but transient perturbations — with
which he had a second-hand acquaintance, that
has left distinct, but not always well assimilated
marks on his work ; but, above all, he was in-
debted to those scientific conceptions which,
like Emerson, he had absorbed or divined.
It is these that lie behind " Children of
Adam."

This mood of sane and cheerful sensuality,
rejoicing with a joy as massive and calm-eyed
as Boccaccio's, a moral-fibred joy that Boccaccio
never knew, in all the manifestations of the flesh
and blood of the world — saying, not : " Let us
eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," but, with
Clifford : " Let us take hands and help, for this
day we are alive together" — is certainly Whit-
man's most significant and impressive mood.
Nothing so much reveals its depth and sincerity
as his never-changing attitude towards death.
We know the " fearful thing " that Claudio, in
Shakespeare's play, knew as death :

" to die and go we know not where ;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot ;
. . . . to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts
Imagine howling ! "

And all the Elizabethans in that age of splendid

Whitman. 1 1 5

and daring life— even Raleigh and Bacon— felt
that same shudder at the horror and mystery of
death. Always they felt behind them some
vast mediaeval charnel-house, gloomy and awful,
and the sunniest spirits of the English Renais-
sance quail when they think of it. There was
in this horror something of the child's vast and
unreasoned dread of darkness and mystery, and
it scarcely survived the scientific and philosophic
developments of the seventeenth century. Whit-
man's attitude is not the less deep-rooted and
original. For he is not content to argue, haughtily
indifferent, with Epicurus and Epictetus, that
death can be nothing to us, because it is no evil
to lose what we shall never miss. Whitman
will reveal the loveliness of death. We feel con-
stantly in " Leaves of Grass " as to some extent
we feel before the " Love and Death " and some
other pictures of one of the greatest of English
artists. " I will show," he announces, " that
nothing can happen more beautiful than death."
It must not be forgotten that Whitman speaks
not merely from the standpoint of the most
intense and vivid delight in the actual world, but
that he possessed a practical familiarity with
disease and death which has perhaps never
before fallen to the lot of a great writer. At
the end of the " Song of Myself " he bequeaths
himself to- the dust, to grow from the grass he
loves:

1 1 6 The New Spirit.

"If you want me again, look for me under your boot-
soles,
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood."

And to any who find that dust but a poor
immortality, he would say with Schopenhauer,
" Oho ! do you know, then, what dust is ? " The
vast chemistry of the earth, the sweetness that
is rooted in what we call corruption, the life
that is but the leavings of many deaths, is nobly
uttered in "This Compost," in which he reaches
beyond the corpse that is good manure to sweet-
scented roses, to the polished breasts of melons ;
or again, in the noble elegy, " Pensive on her
dead gazing," on those who died during the
war. In his most perfectly lyrical poem, " Out
of the Cradle endlessly rocking," Whitman has
celebrated death — "that strong and delicious
word" — with strange tenderness; and never has
the loveliness of death been sung in a more sane
and virile song than the solemn death-carol in
" When Lilacs last in the Dooryard bloomed " :

" Dark mother, always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome ?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song, that when thou must indeed come,
come unfalteringly.

Whitman. 1 1 7

" Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,

Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields

and the prairies wide,
Over the dense-packed cities all and the teeming wharves

and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O Death."

Whitman's second great thought on life lies
in his egoism. His intense_sense of individuality
was marked from the first ; it is emphatically
asserted in the " Song of Myself" —

" And nothing, notGod, is greater to one than one's
sell is"; — "

where it lies side by side with his first great
thought. But even in the " Song of Myself" it
asserts a separate existence :

" This day before dawn I ascended a hill and looked at

the crowded heaven,
And I said to my spirit, When we become the enf older s

of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of

everything in them, shall we be filled and satisfied

then ?
And my spirit said, No, we but level that lift to pass and

continue beyond."

Id the end he once, at least, altogether denies
his first thought ; he alludes to that body which
he had called the equal of the soul, or even the
soul itself, as excrement :

•• Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be

burned, or reduced to powder, or buried,
My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres."

ri8 The New Spii'it.

The first great utterance was naturalistic ;
this egoism is spiritualistic. It is the sublime
apotheosis of Yankee self-reliance. " I only am
he who places over you no master, owner, better,
God, beyond what waits intrinsically in your-
self." This became the dominant conception in
Whitman's later work, and fills his universe at
length. Of a God, although he sometimes uses
the word to obtain emphasis, he at no time had
any definite idea. Nature, also, was never a
living vascular personality for him ; when it is
not a mere aggregate of things, it is an order,
sometimes a moral order. Also he wisely re-
fuses with unswerving consistency to admit an
abstract Humanity; of "man" he has nothing
to say ; there is nothing anywhere in the universe
for him but individuals, undying, everlastingly
aggrandizing individuals. This egoism is prac-
tical, strenuous, moral ; it cannot be described
as religious. Whitman is lacking — and in this
respect he comes nearer to Goethe than to any
other great modern man — in what may be
possibly the disease of " soul," the disease that
was so bitterly bewailed by Heine. Whitman
was congenitally deficient in " soul ; " he is a
kind of Titanic Undine. " I never had any par-
ticular religious experiences," he told Buckc,
" never felt the need of spiritual regeneration ; "
and although he describes himself as " pleased
with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist

Whitman. 1 1 9

preacher, impressed seriously at the camp-
meeting," we know what weight to give to this
utterance when we read elsewhere, of animals:

" They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania

of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived

thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."

We may detect this lack of "soul" in his
attitude towards music ; for, in its highest de-
velopment, music is the special exponent of
the modern soul in its complexity, its passive
resignation, its restless mystical ardours. That
Whitman delighted in music is clear ; it is
equally clear, from the testimony of his writings
and of witnesses, that the music he delighted in
was simple and joyous melody as in Rossini's
operas ; he alludes vaguely to symphonies, but

" when it is a grand opera,
Ah ! this indeed is music — this suits me."

ThatWhitman could have truly appreciated Beet-
hoven, or understood Wagner's " Tannhauser,"
is not conceivable.

With Whitman's egoism is connected his
strcnuousness. There is a stirring sound of
trumpets always among these " Leaves of Grass."

1 20 The New Spirit.

This man may have come, as he tells us, to in-
augurate a new religion, but he has few or no
marks upon him of that mysticism — that Eastern
spirit of glad renunciation of the self in a larger
self — which is of the essence of religion. He is
at the head of a band of sinewy and tan-faced
pioneers, with pistols in their belts and sharp-
edged axes in their hands : „

" And he going with me leaves peace and routine behind

him,
And stakes his life to be lost at any moment."

This strenuousness finds expression in the
hurried jolt and bustle of the lines, always
alert, unresting, ever starting afresh. Passages
of sweet and peaceful flow are hard to find in
" Leaves of Grass," and the more precious when
found. Whitman hardly succeeds in the expres-
sion of joy ; to feel exquisitely the pulse of
gladness a more passive and feminine sen-
sibility is needed, like that we meet with in
" Towards Democracy ; " we must not come to
this focus of radiant energy for repose or con-
solation.

This egoism, this strenuousness, reaches at the
end to heights of sublime audacity. When we
read certain portions of " Leaves of Grass " we
seem to see a vast phalanx of Great Companions
passing for ever along the cosmic roads, stalwart
Pioneers of the Universe. There are superb

Whitman.

121

young men, athletic girls, splendid and savage
old men — for the weak seem to have perished
by the roadside — and they radiate an infinite
energy, an infinite joy. It is truly a tremendous
diastole of life to which the crude and colossal
extravagance of this vision bears witness ; we
weary soon of its strenuous vitality, and crave
for the systole of life, for peace and repose. It
is not strange that the immense faith of the
prophet himself grows hesitant and silent at
times before "all the meanness and agony with-
out end," and doubts that it is an illusion and
" that may-be identity beyond the grave a beau-
tiful fable only." Here and again we meet this
access of doubt, and even amid the faith of the
"Prayer of Columbus" there is a tremulous,
pathetic note of sadness.

Yet there is one keen sword with which Whit-
man is always able to cut the knot of this doubt—
the sword of love. He has but to grasp love and
comradeship, and he grows indifferent to the
problem of identity beyond the grave. " He
a-hold of my hand has completely satisfied me."
He discovers at last that love and comradeship-
adhesiveness— is, after all, the main thing, " base
and finale, too, for all metaphysics ; " deeper than
religion, underneath Socrates and underneath
Christ. With a sound insight he finds the roots
of the most universal love in the intimate and
physical love of comrades and lovers.

1 2 2 The New Spirit.

" I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer

morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently

turned over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged

your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you

held my feet.

" Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and know-
ledge that pass all the argument of the earth,

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my
own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my
own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and
the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love."

IV.

This " love " of Whitman's is a very personal
matter ; of an abstract Man, a solidaire Humanity,
he never speaks ; it dees not appear ever to have
occurred to him that so extraordinary a concep-
tion can be formulated ; his relations to men
generally spring out of his relations to particular
men. He has touched and embraced his fellows'
flesh ; he has felt thruughout his being the mys-
terious reverberations of the contact :

" There is something in staying close to men and women
and looking on them, and in the contact and odour
of them, that pleases the soul well,

Whitman. 123

All things please the soul, but these please the soul
well."

This personal and intimate fact is the centre
from which the whole of Whitman's morality
radiates. Of an abstract Humanity, it is true,
he has never thought ; he has no vision of Nature
as a spiritual Presence ; God is to him a word
only, without vitality ; to Art he is mostly indif-
ferent ; yet there remains this great moral kernel,
springing from the sexual impulse, taking prac-
tical root in a singularly rich and vivid emotional
nature, and bearing within it the promise of a
city of lovers and friends.

This moral element is one of the central
features in Whitman's attitude towards sex and
the body generally. For the lover there is nothing
in the loved one's body impure or unclean ; a
breath of passion has passed over it, and all
things are sweet. For most of us this influence
spreads no farther ; for the man of strong moral
instinct it covers all human things in infinitely
widening circles ; his heart goes out to every
creature that shares the loved one's delicious
humanity ; henceforth there is nothing human
that he cannot touch with reverence and love.
" Leaves of Grass " is penetrated by this moral
clement. How curiously far this attitude is from
the old Christian way we realize when we turn to
those days in which Christianity was at its height,
and see how Saint Bernard with his mild and

124 The Nezv Spirit.

ardent gaze looked out into the world of Nature
and saw men as " stinking spawn, sacks of dung,
the food of worms."

But there is another element in Whitman's
attitude — the artistic. It shows itself in a two-
fold manner. Whitman came of a vigorous
Dutch stock ; these Van Velsors from Holland
have fully as large a part in him as anything his
English ancestry gave him, and his Dutch race
shows itself chiefly in his artistic manner. The
supreme achievement in art of the Dutch is their
seventeenth century painting. What marked
those Dutch artists was the ineradicable convic-
tion that every action, social or physiological, of
the average man, woman, child, around them
might be, with love and absolute faithfulness,
phlegmatically set forth. In their heroic earthli-
ness they could at no point be repulsed ; colour
and light may aureole their work, but the most
commonplace things of Nature shall have the
largest nimbus. That is the temper of Dutch art
throughout ; no other art in the world has the
same characteristics. In the art of Whitman
alone do we meet with it again, impatient indeed
and broken up into fragments, pierced through
with shafts of light from other sources, but still
constant and unmistakable. The other artistic
element in Whitman's attitude is modern ; it is
almost the only artistic element by which, un-
consciously perhaps, he allies himself to modern

Whitman. 125

traditions in art instead of breaking through them
by his own volcanic energy — a curious research
for sexual imagery in Nature, imagery often
tinged by bizarre and mystical colour. Rossetti
occasionally uses sexual imagery with rare
felicity, as in "Nuptial Sleep" :

" And as the last slow sudden drops are shed
From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,
So singly flagged the pulses of each heart."

With still greater beauty and audacity Whitman,
in " I sing the body electric," celebrates the last
abandonment of love :

" Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into

the prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-fleshed day."

Or, again, in the marvellously keen " Faces " —
so realistic and so imaginative — when the " lily's
face" speaks out her longing to be filled with
albescent honey. This man has certainly felt
the truth of that deep saying of Thoreau's, that
for him to whom sex is impure there are no
flowers in Nature. He cannot help speaking of
man's or woman's life in terms of Nature's life, of
Nature's life in terms of man's ; he mingles them
together with an admirably balanced rhythm, as
in " Spontaneous Me." All the functions of
man's or woman's life are sweet to him because

, The New Spirit.

u =aVour of the things

,0(tl«-o, app.es and .enroas, of U» painng of
Of.hew^ofwoc^oftbeUppingofwaves-

patches of morbid colour whitman's atti-

There is a third «' ^ W ^^

tude. It is clear that hetad
what may be vaguely ca ed £« ^ a s-g.
in that frank grasp of the body ition

nificance to be measu edby tb P^ .„
it aroused, and by tl e tenaat y bel.

the latest volume £ ^ «* Jg^ of those
Boughs," he sun ms,sts £ t the p^ ^
lines so g.ves breath tc , havg been

the bulk of the P'e«os™,ts omitted. He has
left unwritten were those me „ A Memo_

himself admirably set t hisfo ^ ^ and

randum at a Venture in op after

CoUect." in religmn and £**£, possibility

a great ^\^ But the region of sex is
of liberty and sincerity, o a

stiU, like our moral am social ^ existbarba.

Urge extent ""^'"'^ai Christianity has
rous traditions which "« words 0f Pliny
helped to perpetuate, so that

Whitman. 1 2 7

regarding the contaminating touch of a woman,
who has always been regarded as in a peculiar
manner the symbol of sex— " Nihil facile re-
periabatur mulierum profiuvio magis monstri-
ficum" — are not even yet meaningless. Why
should the sweetening breath of science be
guarded from this spot ? Why should not " free-
dom and faith and earnestness " be introduced
here? Our attitude towards this part of life
affects profoundly our attitude towards life alto-
gether. To realize this, read Swift's " Strephon
and Chloe," which enshrines, vividly and un-
shrinkingly, in a classic form, a certain emo-
tional way of approaching the body. It narrates
the very trivial experiences of a man and woman
on their bridal night. The incidents are nothing ;
they are perfectly innocent ; the interesting fact
about them is the general attitude which they
enfold. The unquestioning faith of the man is
that in setting down the simple daily facts of
human life he has drowned the possibilities of
love in filth. And Swift here represents, in an
unflinchingly logical fashion, the opinions, more
or less realized, more or less disguised, of most
people even to-day. Cannot these facts of our
physical nature be otherwise set down ? Why
may we not " keep as delicate around the bowels
as around the head and heart ? " That is, in
effect, the question which, in "A Memorandum
at a Venture," Whitman tells us that he under-

1 28 The New Spirit.

took to answer. This statement of it was pro-
bably an afterthought ; else he would have
carried out his attempt more thoroughly and
more uncompromisingly.

For I doubt if even Whitman has fully realized
the beauty and purity of organic life ; the scien-
tific element in him was less strong than the
moral, or even the artistic. While his genial
poetic manner of grasping things is of prime
importance, the new conceptions of purity are
founded on a scientific basis which must be
deeply understood. Swift's morbid and exag-
gerated spiritualism, a legacy of medievalism —
and the ordinary " common-sense " view is but
the unconscious shadow of mediaeval spiritualism
— is really founded on ignorance, in other words,
on the traditional religious conceptions of an
antique but still surviving barbarism.

From our modern standpoint of science, open-
ing its eyes anew, the wonderful cycles of normal
life are for ever clean and pure, the loathsomeness,
if indeed anywhere, lies in the conceptions of
hypertrophied and hyperaesthetic brains. Some
who have striven to find a vital natural meaning
in the central sacrament of Christianity have
thought that the Last Supper was an attempt to
reveal the divine mystery of food, to consecrate
the loveliness of the mere daily bread and wine
which becomes the life of man. Such sacraments
of Nature are everywhere subtly woven into the

Whitman. 129

texture of men's bodies. All loveliness of the
body is the outward sign of some vital use.

Doubtless these relationships have been some-
times perceived and their meaning realized by a
sort of mystical intuition, but it is only of recent
years that science has furnished them with a
rational basis. The chief and central function
of life — the omnipresent process of sex, ever
wonderful, ever lovely, as it is woven into the
whole texture of our man's or woman's body —
is the pattern of all the process of our life. At
whatever point touched, the reverberation, mul-
tiplexly charged with uses, meanings, and emo-
tional associations of infinite charm, to the sen-
sitive individual more or less conscious, spreads
throughout the entire organism. We can no
longer intrude our crude distinctions of high and
low. We cannot now step in and say that this
link in the chain is eternally ugly and that is
eternally beautiful. For irrational disgust, the
varying outcome of individual idiosyncrasy,
there is doubtless still room ; it is incalculable,
and cannot be reached. But that rational dis-
gust which was once held to be common property
has received from science its death-blow. In the
growth of the sense of purity, which Whitman,
not alone, has annunciated, lies one of our chief
hopes for morals, as well as for art.

1 30 The ATew Spirit.

V.

Behind "Leaves of Grass" stands the per-
sonality of the man Walt Whitman ; that is the
charm of the book and its power. It is, in his
own words, the record of a Person. A man
has here sought to give a fresh and frank
representation of his nature — physical, intel-
lectual, moral, aesthetic — as he received it, and
as it grew in the great field of the world.
Sometimes there is an element in this record
which, while perhaps very American, reminds
one of the great Frenchman who shouted so
lustily through his huge brass trumpet, seated
on the apex of the universe in the Avenue
d'Eylau. The noble lines to " You felons on
trial in Courts" accompany "To him that was
crucified." Such rhetorical flourishes do not
impair the value of this revelation. The self-
revelation of a human personality is the one
supremely precious and enduring thing. All art
is the search for it. The strongest and most
successful of religions were avowedly founded
on personalities, more or less dimly seen. The
intimate and candid record of personality alone
gives quickening energy to books. Herein is
the might of " Leaves of Grass."

In our overstrained civilization the tendency
in literature — and in life as it acts on literature

Whitman. I31

and is again reacted on by it — is, on the one
hand, towards an artificial mode of presentment,
that is, a divorce between the actual and the
alleged, a divorce which, in the language of
satire, is often called hypocrisy. On the other
hand, the tendency is towards a singleness of
aim and ideal indeed, but a thin, narrow, super-
refined ideal, at the same time rather hysterical
and rather prim. In youth we cannot see through
these Tartuffes and Precieuses; when we become
grown men and women we feel a great thirst for
Nature, for reality in literature, and we slake
it at such fountains as this of " Leaves of Grass."
Like Antaeus of old we bow down to touch
the earth, to come in contact with the great
primal energies of Nature, and to grow strong.
We realize that the structure of the world is
indeed built most gloriously on the immense
pillars of Hunger and Love, and we will not
seek to deny or to attenuate its foundations.
Presenting a truth so abstract in fresh and living
concrete language, this man, as an Adam in a
new Paradise, which is the very world itself,
walks again upon the earth, sometimes with
calm complaisance, sometimes " deliriating "
wildly :

" P.ehold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,
Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as

1 pass,
Be not afraid of my body."

132 The New Spirit.

He has tossed " a new gladness and roughness "
among men and women. He has opened a fresh
channel of Nature's force into human life — the
largest since Wordsworth, and more fit for human
use — "the amplitude of the earth, and the coarse-
ness and sexuality of the earth, and the great
charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also."
And in his vigorous masculine love, asserting
his own personality he has asserted that of all —
" By God ! I will accept nothing which all can-
not have their counterpart of on the same terms."
Charging himself in every place with content-
ment and triumph, he embraces all men, as
St. Francis in his sweet, humble, Christian way
also embraced them, in the spirit of audacity,
and rankness, and pride. So that all he has
written is summed up in one ejaculation : " How
vast, how eligible, how joyful, how real is a
human being, himself or herself 1 "

Ibsen. 133

IBSEN.

Tiik Scandinavian peoples hold to day a position
not unlike that held at the beginning of the
century by Germany. They speak, in various
modified forms, a language which the rest of
the world have regarded as little more than
barbarous, and are looked upon generally as an
innocent and primitive folk. Yet they contain
centres of intense literary activity ; they have
produced novels of a peculiarly fresh and pene-
trating realism ; and they possess, moreover, a
stage on which great literary works may be per-
formed, and the burning questions of the modern
world be scenically resolved. It is natural that
Norway, with its historical past and literary
traditions, should be the chief centre of this
activity, and that a Norwegian should stand
forth to-day as the chief figure of European
significance that has appeared in the Teutonic
world of art since Goethe.

To understand Norwegian art — whether in its
popular music, with its extremes of melancholy
or hilarity, or in its highly-developed literature
■—we must understand the peculiar character of
the land which has produced this people. It is
a land having, in its most characteristic regions,

134 The New Spirit.

a year of but one day and night — the summer a
perpetual warm sunlit day filled with the aroma
of trees and plants, and the rest of the year a
night of darkness and horror ; a land which is
the extreme northern limit of European civiliza-
tion, on the outskirts of which the great primi-
tive gods still dwell ; and where elves and fairies
and mermaids are still regarded, according to
the expression of Jonas Lie, as tame domestic
animals. Such an environment must work
mightily on the spirit and temper of the race.
As one of the persons in Bjornson's " Over
JEvne " observes — " There is something in Na-
ture here which challenges whatever is ex-
traordinary in us. Nature herself here goes
beyond all ordinary measure. We have night
nearly all the winter ; we have day nearly all
the summer, with the sun by day and by night
above the horizon. You have seen it at night
half-veiled by the mists from the sea ; it often
looks three, even four, times larger than usual.
And then the play of colours on sky, sea, and
rock, from the most glowing red to the softest
and most delicate yellow and white! And then
the colours of the Northern Lights on the winter
sky, with their more suppressed kind of wild
pictures, yet full of unrest and for ever changing!
Then the other wonders of Nature ! These mil-
lions of sea-birds, and the wandering processions
of fish, stretching for miles ! These perpend i-

lb sen. 135

cular cliffs that rise directly out of the sea!
They are not like other mountains, and the
Atlantic roars round their feet. And the ideas
of the people are correspondingly unmeasured.
Listen to their legends and stories."

So striking are the contrasts in the Norwegian
character that they have been supposed to be
due to the mingling of races ; the fair-haired,
blue-eyed Norwegian of the old Sagas, silent
and deep-natured, being modified, now (espe-
cially in the north) by the darker, brown-eyed
Lapp, with his weakness of character, vivid
imagination, and tendency to natural mysticism,
and, again (especially in the east), by the daring,
practical, energetic Finn.

However this may be, among the Norwegian
poets and novelists various qualities often meet
together in striking opposition ; wild and fan-
tastic imagination stands beside an exact realism
and a loving grasp of nature ; a tendency to mys-
ticism and symbol beside a healthy naturalism.
We find these characteristics variously combined
in Ibsen ; in Bjornson, with his virile strength
and generous emotions, amid which a mystic
influence now and then appears ; in Jonas Lie,
with his subtle and delicate spirit, so intimately
national ; in Kielland, a realistic novelist of most
dainty and delicate art, beneath which may be
heard the sombre undertone of his sympathy
with the weak and the oppressed. Of these

136 The New Spirit.

writers, and others only less remarkable, one
alone is at all well known in England, and even
he is known exclusively by his early work,
especially by that most delightful of peasant
stories, "Arne." In Germany the Scandinavian
novelists and dramatists have received much
attention, and are widely known through excel-
lent and easily accessible translations. Yet our
English race and speech are even more closely
allied to the northern ; our land is studded with
easily recognizable Scandinavian place-names
and Scandinavian colonies, whose dialects are
full of genuine Scandinavian words unknown to
literary English. It is not likely that this in-
difference to the social, political, and literary
history of our northern kinsmen can last much
longer.

About 1720 a Danish skipper, one Peter Ibsen,
came over from Moen ' to Bergen and settled
there. He married the daughter of a German
who had likew'f JT.Llalt^Vom nii'ovvn coun-

( - - * ' ***** ' o

„ty : ~tKese were the poet's great-great-grand-
parents. Peter Ibsen had a son, Henrik Petersen
Ibsen, who was also a ship's captain. He mar-
ried a lady whose name is given as Wenche

1 This island, I may note in passing, is the home of a
black-haired race, very unlike the typical Norsemen, and
which has been identified with those " black strangers "
spoken of by the Irish chroniclers who described the
Viking invasions.

Ibsen. 137

Dischington, the daughter of a Scotchman
naturalized in Norway. This Henrik Ibsen
settled in Skien, and had a son of the same
name who married a German wife. All these
Ibsens were sailors. Henrik Ibsen's son, Knud
Ibsen, the dramatist's father, like his father mar-
ried a wife of German extraction, Maria Cornelia
Altenburg, the daughter of a merchant who had
begun life as a sailor.

This ancestry is very significant. It will
be seen that Ibsen is on both sides predomi-
nantly German, and that in his German and
Danish blood there is an interesting Scotch
strain. The tendency to philosophic abstrac-
tion and the strenuous earnestness, mingling
with the more characteristically northern imagi-
native influences, are explained by this German
and Scotch ancestry ; it explains also the pecu-
liarly isolated and yet cosmopolitan attitude
which marks Ibsen — why it is that his works
have been so enthusiastically received and so
easily naturalized in Germany, and why, now that
they are beginning to be known, they promise
to make so deep an impression in our own land.

Ibsen's mother possessed a shy, silent, and
solitary nature, which she imparted to her son.
One of her daughters thus describes her : " She
\\ as a quiet, lovable woman, the soul of the
house, devoted to her husband and children.
She was always sacrificing herself. There was

138 The Nezu Spirit.

no bitterness or reproach in her." The father
was of cheerful disposition, a man of sociable
tastes, popular in his circle, but also feared, for
he had a keen wit, and, like his son, he could use
it unmercifully.

Knud Ibsen's eldest son, Henrik,1 was born at
Skien, a busy little town of some 3,000 inhabi-
tants occupied in the timber trade, on the 20th
March, 1828. " I was born," the dramatist writes
in some reminiscences published by Mr. Jaeger
for the first time, " in a house in the market-
place, Stockmann's house it was then called.
The house lay right opposite the church with
its high steps and large tower. To the right,
in front of the church, stood the town pil-
lory, and to the left the town-hall, the lock-
up, and the 'madhouse.' The fourth side of
the market-place was occupied by the Latin
school and the town school. The church lay
free in the middle. This prospect was the first
view of the earth that presented itself to my
eyes. All buildings ; no green, no rural open
landscape." It was in the church tower that the

1 Many books and pamphlets dealing with his life and
works have appeared in Denmark, Sweden, and Germany.
The chief of these are Vasenius's " Henrik Ibsen, ett
Skaldeportratt," Stockholm, 1882; Passarge's "Henrik
Ibsen : Ein Beitrag zur ncusten Gcschichte der norwe-
gischen Nationalliteratur," Lcipsic, 18S3 ; and II. Jaeger's
" Henrik Ibsen, 1828-1888,"' Copenhagen. The last-named,
now translated, is by far the bebt.

Ibsen. 139

baby Henrik received his first conscious ana
deep impression. The nursemaid took him up
and held him out (to the horror of his mother
below), and he never forgot that new and
strange vision of the world from above. Ibsen
goes on to describe the attractions which were
held for him in the gloomy town-hall and the
pillory, unused for many years, a red-brown
post of about a man's height, with a great round
knob which had originally been painted black,
but which then looked like a human face. In
front of the post hung an iron chain, and in that
an iron ring which seemed like two small arms
ready to clasp the child's neck on the least pro-
vocation. And then there was the town-hall.
That, too, had high steps like the church, and
underneath it was the gaol with its barred
windows : " inside the bars I have seen many
pale and dark faces." And then there was the
" madhouse," which in its time had really been
used to confine lunatics. That also was barred,
but inside the bars the little window was filled by
a massive iron plate with small round holes like a
sieve. This place was said to have been the abode
of a famous criminal who had been branded.

These early impressions of the dramatist — the
church tower, the pillory, the barred windows,
the pale criminals — are of no little interest.
They help to explain for us the sombre and
tnigic cast, purely human and reflective, of

1 40 The New Spirit.

Ibsen's character. They explain, too, the absence
in his work of the sea and the forest, of those
things which give such a sweet, wild aroma, now
and again, to the work of Bjornson and Lie.
The little town, with its active commercial life
and its equally active religious life — for Skien
was a centre of pietistic influence — was such a
place as is brought before us in "De Unges
Forbund " and in " Samfundets Stotter," and it
was a fit birthplace for the author of " Brand."

Knud Ibsen belonged to the aristocracy of
Skien, and his house was a centre of its social
life. When Henrik was eight years old there
was an end of this, for his father became a bank-
rupt. After the catastrophe the family retired
to a small and humble home outside Skien,
where they lived with a frugality which was in
marked contrast with their former life. There
can be no doubt that this sudden change of cir-
cumstances, and the insight which it brought
into the social cleavage of a provincial town,
counted for much in Ibsen's development. It is
certain that at this period his marked indivi-
duality began to be perceived. He did not play
like the other children ; while they romped in
the yard, he retired into a little inclosure in an
alley that led to the kitchen, and barricaded
himself against the heedless incursions of the
younger members of the family. Merc he kept
guard, not only in summer, but in the depth of

Ibsen. 141

winter. It is clear that even at this early age
Ibsen had reached the point of proud isolation
and defiance of his fellow-citizens which Stock-
mann ultimately attained. One of his sisters
describes how they used to throw stones and
snowballs at his retreat to make him come out
to join their play, but when he could no longer
withstand the attack and yielded to the assailants,
he could display no skill in any kind of sport,
and soon retired again to his den. Reading
appears to have been one of his chief occupa-
tions there, and Jaeger assures us that the words
which many years afterwards Ibsen put into the
mouth of the little girl Hedwig, who is so pathetic
and tender a figure in one of his latest dramas,
" Vildanden," contain a reminiscence of child-
hood. "And do you read the books?" asked
Gregers. " Oh, yes, when I can. But most of
them are English, and I can't read those. But
then I can look at the pictures. There is one big
black book, called Harryson's ' History of
London ;' it must be a hundred years old, and
that has such a number of pictures in it. First
there is a picture of Death with an hourglass
and a girl. I think that is hideous. But then
there are all sorts of other pictures, with
churches and castles and streets and great
ships that sail on the sea." He also amused
himself with pencil and colour-box. Meanwhile
he went to school, going through the usual

142 The Nezv Spirit.

course and learning a little Latin ; he appears
to have taken a special interest in the Biblical
instruction. At fourteen he was confirmed, and
the time came for him to make his way in the
world.

At this period he wished to become a painter ;
he devoted himself with zeal to drawing, and an
interest in painting has remained with him, the
formation of an excellent little collection of
Renaissance pictures becoming in later life one
of his chief hobbies. In the existing state of the
family means, this career was out of the ques-
tion, and he was sent to an apothecary at Grim-
stad, a little town containing at that time not
more than 800 inhabitants. The apothecary's
shop, Jaeger remarks, is the place where all the
loungers meet in the evening to discuss the
events of the day, and doubtless the apothecary's
shop was an element in the education of the
future dramatist. In his interesting preface to
the second edition of "Catilina" he has himself
described the five years of development that he
went through in this little town. He did not
wish to become a chemist ; he would become a
student and study medicine. At the same time
his poetical activity and the eventful year of
1848 came to arouse in the silent, solitary boy a
healthy interest in the outside world.

It was while reading Sallust and Cicero for
his matriculation examination that he conceived,

Ibsen. 143

and wrote at midnight, his first play, "Catilina."
With the help of two enthusiastic young friends
the tragedy was published and some thirty
copies sold — a result which did not permit of
the proposed tour in the East on which the three
friends had decided to expend the profits of the
sale. Ibsen was now in his twenty-second year,
and he came up to Christiania to carry on his
studies at the school of Heltberg, who seems to
have had a singularly stimulating influence on
young men, and at the university. Here Ibsen
was the comrade of Bjornson, Jonas Lie, and
others who have since become famous. At a
later date Bjornson condensed his youthful im-
pression of his friend in two vigorous lines :

" Tense and lean, the colour of gypsum,
Behind a vast coal-black beard, Henrik Ibsen."

The period now arrived at which Ibsen's
career was definitely settled. He had been
making several unsuccessful literary attempts at
Christiania, having finally abandoned the inten-
tion to study medicine, when, in 185 1, the
famous violinist, Ole Bull, who has done so
much to give artistic shape and energy to the
modern Norwegian spirit, gave him an appoint-
ment at the National Theatre which he had
recently established at Bergen. Ibsen's prentice
hand was now trained by the writing of several
dramas not included among his published works \

144 The New Spirit.

and, like Shakespeare and Moliere in somewhat
similar circumstances, he here acquired his mas-
tery of the technical demands of dramatic form.
In 1855 his apprenticeship may be said to have
ended, and he produced "Fru Inger til Ostraat"
(Dame Inger of Ostraat), an historical prose
drama of great energy and concentration. In
1858 he married Susanna Thoresen, the daugh-
ter of a Bergen clergyman, whose second wife,
Magdalene Thoresen, is a well-known authoress.
At the same period he was appointed artistic
director of the Norwegian theatre at Christiania,
a post previously occupied by Bjornson, who
had just inaugurated the Norwegian peasant
novel by the publication of " Synnove Sol-
bakken." In 1864, having acquired the means,
Ibsen found it desirable to quit the somewhat pro-
vincial and uncongenial atmosphere of his native
country, and has since lived in Rome, in Ischia,
in Dresden, and at other places, but mainly at
Munich, producing on an average a drama every
two years. In 1885 he revisited Norway. Time
had brought its revenges, and he was enthusias-
tically received everywhere. At Drontheim he
made a remarkable speech to a club of working-
men. "Mere democracy," he said, "cannot
solve the social question. An element of aristo-
cracy must be introduced into our life. Of course
I do not mean the aristocracy of birth or of the
purse, or even the aristocracy of intellect. I mean

Ibsen* 145

the aristocracy of character, of will, of mind. That
only can free us. From two groups will this aris-
tocracy I hope for come to our people — from
our women and our workmen. The revolution in
the social condition, now preparing in Europe, is
chiefly concerned with the future of the workers
and the women. In this I place all my hopes
and expectations ; for this I will work all my
life and with all my strength." In private con-
versation, it is said, Ibsen describes himself as a
Socialist, although he has not identified himself
with any definite school of Socialism.

In personal appearance he is rather short, but
impressive and very vigorous. He has a pecu-
liarly broad and high forehead, with small, keen,
blue-grey eyes " which seem to penetrate to the
heart of things." His firm and compressed
mouth is characteristic of " the man of the iron
will," as he has been called by a fellow-country-
man. Altogether it is a remarkable and signi-
ficant face, clear-seeing and alert, with a decisive
energy of will about it that none can fail to
recognize. It is far indeed from the typical
"pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning artist's
face." In middle age it recalled, rather, the faces
of some of our most distinguished surgeons; as
is perhaps meet in the case of a writer who has
used so skilful and daring a scalpel to cut to the
core of social diseases. In society, although he
likes talking to the common people, Ibsen is
L

146 The New Spirit.

usually reserved and silent ; or his conversation
deals with the most ordinary topics ; " he talks
like a wholesale tradesman," it has been said.

Ibsen's dramas (excluding two or three which
have not been published) may be conveniently
divided into three groups, but the division is a
rough one, for the groups merge one into another ;
Ibsen's artistic development has been gradual
and continuous. — 1. Historical and Legendary
Dramas, chiefly in Prose : The youthful " Catilina "
(written in i85o,but revisedatalaterperiod), which
stands by itself, and contains the germ of much of
his later work; "Fru Inger til Ostraat" (Dame
Inger of Ostraat), 1855, an effective melodramatic
play of great technical skill ; " Gildet paa Solhaug "
(The Feast at Solhaug), an historical play of the
fourteenth century, written in 1855, and reprinted
in 1883, with a preface explaining its genesis;
" Hsermaendene paa Helgeland " (The Warriors
at Helgeland), 1858, a noble version of the
Volsunga-Saga, here brought down to more his-
torical times, so as to present a vivid and human
picture of the Viking period; "Kongs-emnerne "
(The Pretenders), 1864, dealing with Norwegian
history in the twelfth century ; " Keiser og
Galilaeer" (Emperor and Galilean), finished in
1873, but begun many years earlier. 2. Dramatic
Poems : " Kjaerlighedens Komedie " (Love's
Comedy), 1862; " Brand," 1866; "Peer Gynt,"
1S67. 3. Social Dramas : "De Ungcs Forbund"

Ibsen. 147

(The Young Men's League), 1S69; "Samfundets
Stotter" (The Pillars of Society), 1877; "Et
Dukkehjem" (A Doll's House), 1879; " Gen-
gangere " (Ghosts), 1881 ; "En Folkefiende "
(An Enemy of Society), 1 882 ; " Vildanden " (The
Wild Duck), 1884 ; " Rosmersholm," 1886 ;" Fruen
fra Havet" (The Lady from the Sea), 1888.

" Hacrmaendene paa Helgeland " is Ibsen's
first great drama ; it has, indeed, been called the
most perfect of his plays. The antique form and
substance which he imposed upon himself com-
pelled him to a severe self-restraint ; the style
also of the drama, which is in prose, is austerely
simple and strong. Yet there is at the same time
a curious and undisguised modern note about this
work, and we feel throughout the presence of that
spirit which gives life to Ibsen's plays of to-day.
The strong, passionate figure of Hjordis fills most
of the field, however finely the lesser figures are
moulded. She is the Brunhild of the ancient
story, yet she is the same woman who is the
heroine and the hero of all Ibsen's social dramas ;
a strong and passionate woman, instinct with
suppressed energy to which the natural outlets
have been closed, and which is transformed into
volcanic outbreaks of disaster. "A woman, a
woman," she says to Dagny, who is shocked at
a remark about using the armour and weapons
of a man, and mixing among men, " there is no
one who knows what a woman can do." Her

148 The New Spirit.

father having been slain, she is brought as
a young girl into the conqueror's household.
She finds a temporary satisfaction in the exer-
cise of her physical strength. When the mild
and honourable warrior Sigurd comes with his
feeble friend Gunnar, both fall in love with
her, and she, without speaking it, returns
Sigurd's love. She promises to give herself
to him who can perform the greatest feat of
strength, and Sigurd, by a ruse, wins her for his
friend Gunnar, himself taking to wife the gentle
Dagny. Henceforth there is something strange
and incalculable in all the deeds of Hjordis, and
a concentrated bitterness in her words. When
afterwards she learns that Sigurd had once loved
her, the proud and reserved woman offers in vain
to put on helmet and breastplate and to follow
him through the earth. " I have been homeless
in the world from the day that you took another
to wife. Ill was that deed of yours. All good
gifts may a man give to his trothful friend, — all,
but not the woman he holds dear. When he does
that deed, he breaks the thread that the Norns
have spun, and wastes two lives." Hjordis is
the woman of the social dramas, but it has not
yet occurred to her that she has a life of her own.
" Emperor and Galilean," l although historical

1 It may be noted that this was the first of Ibsen's
dramas to be translated into English, by Miss Catherine
Ray, in 1 876. To Mr. Gossc belongs the honour of having

Ibsen. 149

and written in prose, is very unlike " Haermaen-
dene paa Helgeland"; it belongs, indeed, in date
as well as in character, almost as much to the
second group. It is made up of two five-act
dramas, presenting a series of brilliant and
powerful scenes in the life of the Emperor Julian,
lacking, however, dramatic unity and culminating
interest. It is probable that the disconnected
character of the work, and its undue length, is
owing to the long period which intervened be-
tween its commencement in Norway and its
completion at Rome. It is, in its parts, un-
doubtedly a fascinating work ; we trace Julian's
life from his youth as a student of philosophy to
his death as Emperor conquered by the Galilean.
The interest of his life lies in his various rela-
tions to the growing Christianity and decaying
Paganism by which he is surrounded. Julian
realizes the possibility of a third religion — " the
reconciliation between nature and spirit, the re-
turn to nature through spirit : that is the task for
humanity." But he imagines that he is himself
the divine representative of this new religion.
His friend Maximus prophesies at the end "The
third kingdom shall come ! The spirit of man

first introduced Ibsen to English readers, in an article in
the " Fortnightly," in 1874. The first of his social dramas
to be translated into English was " The Doll's House"
(under the title of "Nora"), by Miss Frances Lord in
1882.

150 The New Spirit.

shall take its inheritance once more." Julian
failed because he was weak and vain, and be-
cause the age was against him ; he dies with
the cry on his lips, " Thou hast conquered, O
Galilean ! "

" Love's Comedy," the earliest of the poems of
the second group, is the first work in which Ibsen's
characteristic modern tone appears, not again to
vanish. It is a satire on the various conventional
phases of love, exquisite in form but compara-
tively slight in texture. In "Brand " Ibsen pro-
duced a poem which for imagination and sombre
energy stands alone. It is perhaps the most
widely known of all his works ; in Germany it
has already found four translators, and there is
reason to hope that before long a translation
will appear in England. "Brand" is the tragedy
of will and self-sacrifice in the service of the
ideal — a narrow ideal, but less narrow, Ibsen
seems sometimes to hint, than the ideals of most
of us. The motto on which Brand acts in. all
the crises of his life is, " All or nothing ; " and
with him it means in every case the crushing of
some human emotion or relationship for the ful-
filment of a religious duty. Soon after the
commencement of the poem Brand became the
pastor of a gloomy little northern valley, between
mountains and glaciers, into which the sun seldom
penetrates. He is accompanied by his wife Agnes,
a pathetic image of love and devotion. A child

Ibsen. 151

is born to them, but soon dies in this sun-
forsaken valley. There are few passages in
literature of more penetrating pathos than the
scene in the fourth act in which, one Christmas
eve, the first anniversary of the child's death,
Brand persuades Agnes to give her Alf's clothes
— the last loved relics — to a beggar-woman who
comes to the door with her child during a snow-
storm. Soon Agnes also dies. In the end, stoned
by his flock, Brand makes his way, bleeding, up
into the mountains. Here, amid the wild rocks
and his own hallucinations, he is met by a mad
girl who mistakes him for the thorn-crowned
Christ. This scene, in which, overwhelmed at
last by an avalanche, Brand dies amid his broken
ideals, attains an imaginative height not else-
where reached in modern literature, and for the
like of which wc have to look back to the great
scene on the heath in " Lear." Here and else-
where, however, Ibsen brings in supernatural
voices, which scarcely heighten the natural gran-
deur of the scene, and which seem out of place
altogether in a poem so entirely modern.
" Brand " brings before us a wealth of figures
and of discussions, carried on in brief, clear,
musical, though irregular, metrical form, and it
would be impossible to analyze so complex a
work within moderate compass.

"Peer Gynt," is regarded in his own country as
Ibsen's most important achievement, for it is a

1 5 2 The New Spirit.

great modern national epic, the Scandinavian
" Faust." A successful attempt has even been
made to represent it on the stage, the incidental
music being composed by Grieg. The name of its
hero and many incidents in his career have their
home in old Norwegian folk-lore, and Ibsen has
himself declared that Peer Gynt is intended
as the representative of the Norwegian people.
Peer is the child of imagination who lives in a
world in which fantasy and reality can scarcely
be distinguished. He is an egoist with colossal
ambitions ; at the same time he is by no means
wanting in worldly wisdom ; he goes to America,
and makes a large fortune (later on suddenly
lost) by the importation of slaves and the ex-
portation of idols to China, a trade which he
reconciles to his conscience by opening up
another branch of business for supplying mis-
sionaries (at a considerable profit) with Bibles
and rum. The whole is a series of scenes and
adventures, often fantastic or symbolic in cha-
racter, always touched by that profound irony
which is Ibsen's most marked feature. One
scene is so original and penetrative that it stands
alone in literature. It is that scene of peculiarly
Norwegian essence -in which Peer Gynt enters
the hut in which his mother lies dying, with the
fire on the hearth and the old tom-cat on a stool
at the bottom of the bed. He talks to her in
the tone of the days of childhood, reminding her

Ibsen. 153

how they used to play at driving to the fairy-
tale castle of Soria Moria. He sits at the foot of
the bed, throws a string round the stool on which
the cat lies, takes a stick in his hand, imagines
a journey to Heaven — the altercation with St.
Peter at the gate, the deep bass voice of God
declaring that Mother Aase shall enter free —
and lulls her to death with the stories with which
she had once lulled him to sleep. At a much
later date in his career Peer finds himself in a
madhouse at Cairo, where he is assured that his
own guiding principle of the self-sufficiency of
the individual, without regard for the actions or
opinions of others, is carried out to its extreme
limits. He is here acclaimed as emperor and
crowned with a garland of straw. Thus are his
dreams of power fulfilled. In the end he returns,
a white-haired old man, to be eagerly welcomed
by the faithful Solveig, whom, as a girl, he had
forsaken, and who is now an old woman, still
waiting for him with the kingdom of love that he
had missed. The poem ends with the picture of
Solveig singing over her lover a cradle-song of
death. The failure of an over-mastering imagi-
nation and weak will to attain the love that alone
satisfies, that is the last lesson of this marvellous
work, so full of manifold meaning.

It is certainly by the third and latest group —
the Social Dramas — that Ibsen has attracted most
attention both in his own country and abroad.

154 The New Spirit.

They are all written in mature life, and he has
here devoted his early acquired mastery of the
technical requirements of the drama, as well as
the later acquired experiences of men, to a keen
criticism of the social life of to-day. He him-
self, it is said, regards these plays as his chief
title to remembrance. It is scarcely possible to
say so much as this when we think of " Haer-
msendene paa Helgeland," of " Brand," and of
" Peer Gynt." But it certainly does not befit us
of to-day to complain that Ibsen has devoted his
most mature art to work which has a significance
which to-day at all events cannot be over-esti-
mated. That significance may be very easily
set forth ; the spirit that works through Ibsen's
latest dramas is the same that may be detected
in his earliest, " Catilina ; " it is an eager insis-
tance that the social environment shall not ciamp
the reasonable freedom of the individual, to-
gether with a passionately intense hatred of all
those conventional lies which are commonly re-
garded as " the pillars of society." But this
impulse that underlies nearly all Ibsen's dramas
of the last group is always under the control of
a great dramatic artist. The dialogue is brief
and incisive; every word tells, and none is super-
fluous ; there is no brilliant play of dialogue for
its own sake. " The illusion I wish to produce,"
he has himself said, " is that of truth itself. I
want to produce upon the reader the impression

Ibsen. 1 5 5

that what he is reading is actually taking place
before him." In the hands of a meaner artist
such an attempt would be fatal; to Ibsen it
has brought greater strength. If there is fault to
find in the construction of Ibsen's prose dramas,
it lies in their richness of material ; the sub-
sidiary episodes arc frequently dramas in them-
selves, although duly subordinate to the main
purpose of the play. The care lavished on the
development and episodes of these dramas is
equalled by the reality and variety of the persons
presented. These are never mere embodied
" humours " or sarcastic caricatures ; the ter-
rible keenness of Ibsen's irony comes of the
simple truth and moderation with which he de-
scribes these social humbugs who are yet so
eminently reasonable and like ourselves. Every
figure brought before us, even the most insig-
nificant, is an organic and complex personality,
to be recognized without trick or catchword.

"The Young Men's League," the earliest of the
series, deals with the rise and progress of one
Stensgaard. He is a man whose character is
essentially vulgar and commonplace, but who is
undoubtedly clever, and whose ambition it is to
gain political success. At the same time he is
short-sighted, conceited, absolutely wanting in
tact. He is even unstable, save in the great
central aim of his life, which he seeks to bring
about by the formation of a compact majority

156 . The New Spirit.

of voters, of which the nucleus is the Young
Men's League. Stensgaard is always at his best
as an orator ; he is a Numa Roumestan, genial,
almost childishly open-hearted, with a flow of
facile emotion and a great mastery of phrases.
We leave him under a cloud of contempt but
nowise defeated ; and we are given to under-
stand that he is on his way to the highest offices
of state. In this vivid and skilful portrait of
the representative leader of semi-democratized
societies, Ibsen has given his chief utterance on
current political methods. It is scarcely favour-
able. He realizes that government by party
mobs, each headed by a Stensgaard — a phase in
the progress towards complete democratization
illustrated in England to-day — is by no means
altogether satisfactory. " A party," remarks Dr.
Stockmann, in " An Enemy of Society," "is like
a sausage-machine : it grinds all the heads to-
gether in one mash." Something more funda-
mental even than party government is needed,
and in some words written in 1870 Ibsen has
briefly expressed what he conceives to be the
pith of the matter: —

" The coming time — how all our notions will
fall into the dust then ! And truly it is high
time. All that we have lived on up till now has
been the remnants of the revolutionary dishes
of the last century, and we have been long
enough chewing these over and over again.

Ibsen. 157

Our ideas demand a new substance and a new
interpretation. Liberty, equality, and fraternity
are no longer the same things that they were in
the days of the blessed guillotine ; but it is just
this that the politicians will not understand, and
that is why I hate them. These people only
desire partial revolutions, revolutions in exter-
nals, in politics. But these are mere trifles.
There is only one thing that avails — to revolu-
tionize people's minds."

He is not an aristocrat of the school of Carlyle,
eager to put everything beneath the foot of a
Cromwell or a Bismarck. The great task for
democracy is, as Rosmer says in " Rosmers-
holm," "to make every man in the land a
nobleman." " The State must go ! " Ibsen wrote
to G. Brandes in 1870. " That will be a revolu-
tion which will find me on its side. Undermine
the idea of the State, set up in its place spon-
taneous action, and the idea that spiritual rela-
tionship is the only thing that makes for unity,
and you will start the elements of a liberty
which will be something worth possessing."
It is only by the creation of great men and
women, by the enlargement to the utmost of
the reasonable freedom of the individual, that
the realization of Democracy is possible. And
herein, as in other fundamental matters, Ibsen is
at one with the American, with whom he would
appear at first sight to have little in common.

1 58 The New Spirit.

" Where the men and women think lightly of
the laws ; . . . where the populace rise at once
against the never-ending audacity of elected
persons ; . . . where outside authority enters
always after the precedence of inside authority ;
where the citizen is always the head and ideal ;
where children are taught to be laws to them-
selves ; . . . there the great city stands ! " ex-
claims Walt Whitman.

In "The Pillars of Society" — which was se-
parated from " The Young Men's League " by
the appearance of " Emperor and Galilean " —
Ibsen pours delicious irony on those conventional
lies which are regarded as the foundations of
social and domestic life. Here also he pre-
sents us with one of the most eminent of the
group of " governors, teachers, spiritual pas-
tors and masters " that throughout these plays
strive to act as the pillars of the social system.
Straamand in " Love's Comedy," Manders in
''Ghosts," the schoolmaster, Rorlund, here, with
many minor figures scattered through other plays,
notwithstanding slight differences, are closely
allied. The clergyman is for Ibsen the supreme
representative and exponent of conventional
morality. Yet the dramatist never falls into
the mistake of some of his Scandinavian con-
temporaries who make their clerical figures
mere caricatures. Here, as always, it is because
it is so reasonable and truthful that Ibsen's irony

Ibsen. 159

is so keen. Rorlund is honest and conscientious,
but the thinnest veils of propriety are impene-
trable to him ; he can see nothing but the
obvious and external aspects of morality ; he is
incapable of grasping a new idea, or of sym-
pathizing with any natural instinct or generous
emotion ; it is his part to give utterance, im-
pressive with the sanction of religion, to the
traditional maxims of the society he morally
supports. Pastor Manders, in " Ghosts," is less
fluent than Rorlund, and of stronger character.
His training and experience have fitted him to
deal in all dignity with the proprieties and con-
ventions of social morality ; but when he is in
the presence of the realities of life, or when a
generous human thought or emotion flashes
out before him, he shrinks back, shocked and
cowed. He is then, as Mrs. Alving says,
nothing but a great child. That Ibsen is, in
his clerical personages, as some have said,
covertly attacking Protestantism, it is not neces-
sary to assert. It is the traditional morality, of
which the priesthood everywhere are the chief
and authorized exponents, with which he is
chiefly concerned. His attitude towards Chris-
tianity generally we may perhaps gather from
the intensity of feeling with which Julian, in
" Emperor and Galilean," expresses his pas-
sionate repugnance to its doctrine of the evil
of human nature and its policy of suppression.

1 60 The Nciv Spirit.

"You can never understand it, you," he con-
tinues, " who have never been in the power of
this God-Man. It is more than a doctrine which
he has spread over the world ; it is a charm
which has fettered the senses. Whoever falls
once into his hands — I think he never becomes
free again. We are like vines planted in a
foreign soil ; plant us back again and we
should perish ; yet we languish in this new
earth."

"A Doll's House" contains Ibsen's most
elaborate portrait of a woman, and it is his
chief contribution to the elucidation of the ques-
tions relating to the social functions and position
of women in the modern world. It is the tragedy
of marriage, and on this ground it has excited
much discussion, and is perhaps the most widely
known of Ibsen's social dramas. As a work of
art it is probably the most perfect of them. He
has here thrown off the last fragments of that
conventionality in treatment which frequently
mars the two previous plays, and has reached
the full development of his own style. The
play is an organic whole, all its parts are inti-
mately bound together, and every step in the
development is vital and inevitable. Nora her-
self, the occupant of the doll's house, is a being
whose adult instincts have been temporarily
arrested by the influences which have made her
an overgrown child. She is the daughter of a

Ibsen. 1 6 1

frivolous official of doubtful honesty ; she has
been fed on those maxims of conventional
morality of which Rorlund is so able an ex-
ponent ; and her chief recreation has been in
the servants' room. She is now a mother, and
the wife of a man who shields her carefully from
all contact with the world. He refrains from
sharing with her his work or his troubles ; he
fosters all her childish instincts ; she is a source
of enjoyment to him, a precious toy. He is a
man of aesthetic tastes, and his love for her has
something of the delight that one takes in a
work of art. Nora's conduct is the natural out-
come of her training and experience. She tells
lies with facility ; she flirts almost recklessly to
attain her own ends ; when money is concerned
her conceptions of right are so elementary that
she forges her father's name. But she acts from
the impulses of a loving heart ; her motives are
always good ; she is not conscious of guilt. Her
education in life has not led her beyond the
stage of the affectionate child with no sense of
responsibility. But the higher instincts are
latent within her ; and they awake when the
light of day at length penetrates her doll's house,
and she learns the judgment of the world, of
which her husband now stands forth as the stern
interpreter. In the clash and shock of that
moment she realizes that her marriage has been
no marriage, that she has been living all these
M

1 62 The New Spirit.

years with a "strange man," and that she is no
fit mother for her children. She leaves her
home, not to return until, as she says, to live
with her husband will be a real marriage. Will
she ever return ? — The Norwegian poets, it has
been said, like to end their dramas, as such end
in life, with a note of interrogation.

Nora is one of a group of women, more or less
highly developed, who are distributed throughout
Ibsen's later plays. They stand, in their stagnant
conventional environment, as, either instinctively
or intelligently, actually or potentially, the repre-
sentatives of freedom and truth ; they contain
the promise of a new social order. The men in
these plays, who are able to estimate their social
surroundings at a just value, have mostly been
wounded or paralyzed in the battle of life ; they
stand by, half-cynical, and are content to be
merely spectators. But the women — Selma,
Lona, Nora, Mrs. Alving, Rebecca — are full of
unconquerable energy. There is a new life in
their breasts that surges, often tumultuously,
into very practical expression.

As " The Doll's House " is the tragedy of
marriage, so "Ghosts" is the tragedy of heredity.
This wonderful play is the logical outcome and
continuation of " The Doll's Hous'\" Mrs.
Alving is a Nora who had resolved to cling to
her husband in spite of all, and here is the result.
She is a woman of energy and intellect, who lias

Ibsen. 163

managed the estate, and devoted herself success-
full)' to the task of creating an artificial odour of
sanctity around the memory of her late husband.
At the same time she has been gradually throwing
aside the precepts of the morality in which she
has been educated, and has learned to think for
herself. When her son Oswald returns home, in
reality dying of disease that has been latent from
his birth, he seems to her the ghost of his father.
His own life has been free from excess, but he
now drinks too much ; and he begins to make
love to the girl who is really his half-sister,
exactly as his father had done to her mother in
the same place. The scene finally closes over
the first clear signs of his madness. The irony
of the play is chiefly brought about by the in-
voluntary agency of Pastor Manders, the con-
summate flower of conventional morality, and
n the few hours which the action covers the
tragedy of heredity is slowly and relentlessly
Unfolded, with the vanity of all efforts to conceal
or suppress the great natural forces of life.

In " Ghosts," it seems to me, Ibsen reached
the highest point of his art. He deals here with
commonplace characters and everyday scenes ;
most of the action is conveyed in mere drawing-
room dialogue ; but we feel how the clearness and
completeness of this play, itstragic intensity, its im-
mense concentration, have at the back the whole
of Ibsen's various achievement. When we reach

164 The New Spirit.

the end we experience that prolonged shudder
of horror, in which, as Aristotle said, the purifi-
cation of tragedy lies, and we involuntarily recall
whatever is most awful in literature, the " Ores-
teia" of y£schylus, Shakespeare's "Macbeth,"
Shelley's " Cenci." It is only on more intimate
acquaintance that we are able to look beyond
the horror of it, and that we realize here, better
than elsewhere, how Ibsen has absorbed the
scientific influences of his time, the attitude of
unlimited simplicity and trust in the face of
reality. " I almost think," Mrs. Alving says,
" that we are all of us ghosts, Pastor Manders,
It is not only what we have inherited from
our father and mother that ' walks ' in us,— it is
all sorts of dead ideas and lifeless old beliefs
and so forth. They have no vitality, but they
cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid
of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper I
seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines.
There must be ghosts all the country over, as
thick as the sand of the sea." There is the ab-
solute acceptance of facts, however disagreeable.
But, beside it, is the hope that lies in the skilful
probing of the wound that the ignorant have
foolishly smothered up ; the hope also that
lies in a glad trust of nature and of natural
instincts Nowhere else in Ibsen's work can
we feel so strong and invigorating a breath of
new life.

Ibsen. 165

"An Enemy of Society " is closely connected
in its origin with "Ghosts." When "Ghosts"
was published it aroused fierce antagonism.
Such a subject was not suited, it was said, to
artistic treatment. The discussion was foolish
enough ; the wise saying of Goethe still remains
true, that " no real circumstance is unpoetic so
long as the poet knows how to use it." All the
worthy people, however, in whose name Pastor
Manders is entitled to speak, declared, further,
that the play was immoral — as it certainly is
from their point of view — and it was some time
before its first representation on the stage, with
the distinguished northern actor, Lindberg, in
the part of Oswald. Ibsen had expected a storm,
but the storm was even greater than he had
anticipated ; and in the history of Dr. Stock-
mann he has given an artistic version of his own
experiences at this time. It is pleasant that the
only figure in these plays that we can intimately
associate with Ibsen himself is that of the manly
and genial Stockmann. When he discovers
that the water at the Baths, of which he is the
medical director, and which are the chief cause
of the town's prosperity, are infected and pro-
ducing disastrous results to the invalids, he
resolves that the matter shall at once be made
known and remedied. It is in the shock of the
universal disapprobation that this resolution
arouses that our genial and homely doctor is

1 66 The Netv Spirit.

lifted into heroism, and becomes the mouthpiece
of truths with far-reaching significance. The
great scene in the fourth act, in which he calls a
public meeting as the only remaining way to
make his discovery public, and, amid general
clamour, sets forth his opinions, is one of the
most powerful and genuinely dramatic that Ibsen
has ever written.

" The Wild Duck " is, as a drama, the least
remarkable of Ibsen's plays of this group. There
is no central personage who absorbs our atten-
tion, and no great situation. For the first time
also we detect a certain tendency to mannerism,
and the dramatist's love of symbolism, here
centred in the wild duck, becomes obtrusive and
disturbing. Yet this play has a distinct and
peculiar interest for the student of Ibsen's works.
The satirist who has so keenly pursued others
has never spared himself; in the lines that he
has set at the end of the charming little volume
in which he has collected his poems, he declares
that, " to write poetry is to hold a doomsday over
oneself." Or, as he has elsewhere expressed it :
" All that I have written corresponds to some-
thing that I have lived through, if not actually
experienced. Every new poem has served as a
spiritual process of emancipation and purifica-
tion." In both " Brand " and " Peer Gynt " we
may detect this process. In "The Wild Duck"
Ibsen has set himself on the side of his enemies,

Ibsen. 167

and written, as a kind of anti-mask to " The
Doll's House" and "The Pillars of Society," a
play in which, from the standpoint to which the
dramatist has accustomed us, everything is
topsy-turvy. Gregers Werle is a young man,
possessing something of the reckless will-power
of Brand, who is devoted to the claims of
the ideal, and who is doubtless an enthusiastic
student of Ibsen's social dramas. On returning
home after a long absence he learns that his
father has provided for a cast-off mistress by
marrying her to an unsuspecting man who is an
old friend of Gregers'. He resolves at once
that it is his duty at all costs to destroy the
element of falsehood in this household, and to
lay the foundations of a true marriage. His
interference ends in disaster; the weak average
human being fails to respond properly to "the
claims of the ideal ; " while Werle's father, the
chief pillar of conventional society in the play,
spontaneously forms a true marriage, founded
on mutual confessions and mutual trust. If the
play may be regarded, not quite unfairly, as a
burlesque of possible deductions from the earlier
plays, it witnesses also, like " Ghosts," to Ibsen's
profound conviction that all vital development
must be spontaneous and from within, condi-
tioned by the nature of the individual.

In " The Wild Duck " Ibsen approaches in
his own manner, without, however, much insis-

1 68 The New Spirit.

tencc, the moral aspects of the equality of the
sexes. Is a woman, who has had no relation-
ships with a man before marriage, entitled to
expect the same in her husband ? Is a man, who
has had relationships with other women before
marriage, entitled to complain if his wife has
also had such relationships ? These are the
sort of questions which the Scandinavian and
Danish dramatists — Bjornson, Eduard Brandes,
Charlotte Edgren, Benzon — seem never tired
of discussing. Eduard Brandes makes his ad-
mirable little drama " Et Besog," published about
the same time as " Vildanden," hang on this
problem, and although he brings no new idea
into the play, he settles the question in the
same spirit as his great fellow-dramatist. " En
Hanske," also published about the same time,
gives us Bjornson's contribution to the question.
In this play a young woman is in love with a
young man who, as she learns accidentally at
the moment of formally engaging herself to
him, has had previous relationships with other
women. At the same time she discovers that
her own father, an amiable old elegant, has been
frequently unfaithful to his wife, and that her
mother still carries about a suppressed bitter-
ness. The girl realizes that life is not like what
she has been brought up to believe ; she rejects
her lover, and after some unexpected and quite
unnecessary brutalities from him, flings her

Ibsen. 169

glove in his face. All Bjornson's genial vivacity
and emotional expansiveness come out in the
earlier scenes of this play, and there is some
pleasant comedy, especially when the easy-
going father tries to lecture his daughter, to the
accompaniment of her acute comments and the
wife's sarcastic exclamations, on a wife's privi-
leges. " Mere," he says, " is woman's noblest
calling." " As what ? " asks the daughter. " As
what ? — Have you not listened ? As — as the
ennobling influence in marriage, as that which

makes man purer, as, as " " Soap ? " " Soap ?

what on earth makes you think of soap ? " " You
make out that marriage is a great laundry for
men. We girls are to stand ready, each at her
wash-tub, with her piece of soap. Is that how
you mean it ? " On this ground, however, it is
difficult to avoid comparisons with Ibsen, and
we miss here both the artistic and moral grip of
the greater dramatist. Ibsen's solution of the
matter in " The Wild Duck " seems to be that
there can be no true marriage without mutual
knowledge and mutual confession.

In " Rosmcrsholm," social questions have
passed into the background : they are present,
indeed, throughout ; and to some extent they
cause the tragedy of the drama, as the number-
less threads that bind a man to his past, and
that cut and oppress him when he strives to take a
step forward. But on this grey background the

T 70 The New Spirit.

passionate figure of Rebecca West forms a vivid
and highly-wrought portrait. Ibsen has rarely
shown such intimate interest in the development
of passion. The whole life and soul of this ardent,
silent woman, whom we see in the first scene
quietly working at her crochet, while the house-
keeper prepares the supper, are gradually re-
vealed to us in brief flashes of light between the
subsidiary episodes, until at last she ascends and
disappears down the inevitable path to the mill
stream. The touches which complete this picture
are too many and too subtle to allow of analysis ;
in the last scene Ibsen's concentrated prose
reaches as high a pitch of emotional intensity as
he has ever cared to attain.

" The Lady from the Sea " seems to carry us
into an atmosphere rather different from that of
the early social dramas. An element of melo-
drama mingles here with the social interest, and
makes this play one of the least characteristic,
but certainly one of the most dramatically effec-
tive of the group. Ellida, a morbid, romantic
young woman, whose mother died insane, has
met before her marriage the second mate of an
American ship, a "stranger;" he attracts her
with all the charm of the wild life of the sea and
the fascination of the unknown. Having per-
petrated a more or less justifiable homicide, the
second mate is compelled to flee, not before he
has gone through a form of betrothal with Ellida.

Ibsen. 171

Subsequently she marries a well-meaning, com-
monplace widower, but she wanders helplessly
and uselessly through life, like a mermaid among
the children of men, still held, in spite of herself,
by the old fascination of the sea. At length the
mysterious " stranger " turns up again, resolved,
if she wishes, to carry her off in spite of every-
thing. She feels that she must be free — free to
go or free to stay. The husband, naturally, re-
fuses to hear of this, proposes to send the man
about his business. At length he consents to
allow her to choose as she will. Then at once
she feels able to decide against the "stranger,"
who leaps over the wall and disappears. The
charm is broken for ever, and she has the chance
to make something of her life. The moral is
evident : without freedom of choice there can be
no real emancipation or development.

The men of our own great dramatic period
wrote plays which are the expression of mere
gladness of heart and childlike pleasure in the
splendid and various spectacle of the world.
Hamlet and FalstafT", the tragic De Flores and
the comic Simon Eyre, they are all merely parts
of the play. It is all play. The breath of
Ariosto's long song of delight and Boccaccio's
virile joy in life was still on these men, and for
the organization of society, or even for the de^
vclopment and fate of the individual save as a
spectacle, they took little thought. In the modern

i 72 The New Spirit.

world this is no longer possible ; rather, it is only
possible for an occasional individual who is com-
pelled to turn his back on the world. Ibsen,
like Aristophanes, like Moliere, and like Dumas
to-day, has given all his mature art and his
knowledge of life and men to the service of
ideas. "Overthrowing society means an inverted
pyramid getting straight" — one of the audacious
sayings of James Hinton — might be placed as a
motto on the title-page of all Ibsen's later plays.
His work throughout is the expression of a great
soul crushed by the weight of an antagonistic
social environment into utterance that has caused
him to be regarded as the most revolutionary of
modern writers.

An artist and thinker, whose gigantic strength
has been nourished chiefly in solitude, whose
works have been, as he himself says in one of
his poems, " deeds of night," written from afar,
can never be genuinely popular. Everything
that he writes is received in his own country
with attention and controversy ; but he is mis-
taken for a cynic and pessimist ; he is not loved
in Norway as Bjornson is loved, although Bjorn-
son, in the fruitful dramatic activity of his second
period, has but followed in Ibsen's steps; — just
as Goethe was never so well understood and
appreciated as Schiller. Bjornson, with his
genial exuberance, his popular sympathies and
hopes, never too far in advance of his fellows,

Ibseti. 173

invigorates and refreshes like one of the forces of
nature. Pie represents the summer side of his
country, in its bright warmth and fragrance.
Ibsen, standing alone in the darkness in front,
absorbed in the problems of human life, indif-
ferent to the aspects of external nature, has
closer affinities to the stern winter-night of Nor-
way. But there is a mighty energy in this man's
work. The ideas and instincts, developed in
silence, which inspire his art, are of the kind that
penetrate men's minds slowly. Yet they pene-
trate surely, and arc proclaimed at length in the
market-place.

1 74 The New Spirit*

TOLSTOI.

I.

RUSSIA is the natural mediator between Europe
and Asia. It happens with the regularity of an
ethnic law that every race partakes of the cha-
racteristics of neighbouring races. The extinct
Tasmanian, by his curious aberrations from the
Australian type and approximation to that of
Polynesia, furnished an unexpected anthropo-
logical problem that is still unsolved. Every-
where the same mysterious blending or transi-
tion may be witnessed. Apart from complexion,
it has been said, many a Russian peasant might
pass in Lahore or Benares as a native of the
Ganges valley. Whatever the ethnologist may
say, one way or another, as to the racial ele-
ments of the country, anyone who approaches
the study of Russian men and Russian things
perpetually meets with traits that are not fami-
liar to him as European, but which he may have
already learnt to know as Asiatic. Nor is it only
in the little traits of character and daily life that
these Eastern influences appear ; the language
itself has close Oriental affinities, and the old
Sclavonic is nearly related to Sanscrit. In

Tolstoi. 175

trying to make Russia plain to ourselves, it is
constantly necessary to sound this keynote.

A nation's instincts are revealed in its art.
The complex history of the origin and develop-
ment of Russian art is full of interest. " Russia,"
as Viollet le Due wrote in his charming book,
" L' Art russe," " has been a laboratory in which
the arts coming from all parts of Asia have
united to assume an intermediate form between
the eastern and western worlds." The art of
Russia has three great sources, the Scythian,
the Byzantine, and the Mongolian, but when
these are analyzed it is found that each of them
consists largely, when not entirely, of Oriental
elements. Not less than nine-tenths of these
component elements, Persian, Greek, Hindu,
Finnic, and other, may, in Viollet le Due's
opinion, be set down as Eastern. Sometimes
the art of Russia seems to have been almost
effaced by Byzantine or Hindu influences, yet
it ultimately assimilated all these Eastern in-
fluences until it reached its highest point of deve-
lopment at the end of the sixteenth century.
In the gilded bulbous domes we see Hindu
influence. Persian influence was peculiarly
strong ; the beautiful Holy Gate of the Church
of St. John at Rostoff, the work of sixteenth
century Russian artists, is of thoroughly Persian
character. All that Russia took from Central
Asia and Persia strengthened her art, though it

176 The Nav Spirit.

retained its own characteristics, shown partly by
the love of splendour peculiar to a youthful and
semi-barbaric race, as in the fantastic magnifi-
cence of that " gigantic madrepore," the Church
of Vassili Blagennoi in the Kremlin at Moscow;
partly by a freedom of conception and variety of
execution in which the native spirit found
expression. Gothic art, with its whole gamut
of notes, from divine aspiration to grotesque
humour, remained absolutely alien. When Peter
the Great introduced Latin and Teutonic in-
fluences, and German, Italian, English, above
all, French elements poured into the country, an
" official Russia " grew up, speaking a foreign
language and having no contact with the nation.
Russia remained the same, but the dissolution of
Russian art was ensured.

The genuine Russian spirit seems not to have
emerged distinctively into the region of great art
until it was brought into the peculiarly modern
and western shape of the novel by Gogol,
the Ukranian Cossack. "Dead Souls" is the
first great Russian example of the modern story-
teller's art, and still the most popular. Oriental
influences have ceased ; in Gogol we find wes-
tern, especially English, influences, but, unlike
the literary tendencies of the last century, they
are duly subordinated to elements that are
essentially Russian. The direct simplicity of the
Russian, his love of minute realistic detail, which

Tolstoi. 1 7 7

seems to be expressed even in the ancient form
of the Russian cross, his quietism, his profound
human sympathy, have all found adequate voice
in the modern Russian novel. The Russian
painters of to-day, and the artists in bronze,
with their simple realism and constant research
for the expression of life in action, have but fol-
lowed in the steps of the Russian novel, which
has, as its supreme representatives, Tourgueneff,
Dostoieffski, and Tolstoi. Tourgueneff, so delicate
and sensitive in his realism, with its atmosphere
of ineffable melancholy, a Corot among novelists,
as De Vogue calls him, is great not only by the
breadth and insight of his art, but by the unique
position he holds in the development of Russian
literature. The " Stories by a Hunter," published
a few years before the emancipation of the serfs,
to which they are supposed to have contributed,
turned the Russian novel in the direction of
peasant life. The study of the peasant which
occupies so much attention in Russia to-day is
much more than a mere fashion, for the peasant
in Russia represents by far the chief element in
the population ; certainly the interest in him has
already left an ineffaceable mark on those great
Russian novelists whose influence is world-wide.
Tolstoi, Grcgorovitch, Tchedrine, and others,
have drawn the moojik with the breadth and
faithfulness of Millet, in every attitude of god-
like strength, of pathetic resignation, of abject
N

178 The New Spirit.

vice. In Dostoieffski, as in the poet Nekrassoff,
this democratic element is more fundamental than
in either Tourgueneff or Tolstoi. Dostoieffski's
profound science of the human heart could never
get near enough to its primitive and instinctive
elements. There are two or three scenes in
" Recollections of the Dead House," of Dan-
tesque awfulness, which seem to bring nearer
to us than anything else the very flesh and spirit
of humanity. Such is that scene of the convicts
in the bath-room, close and crowded, until, on
the reddened backs, beneath the stress of the
heat and the steam, stand out clearly the old scars
of whips and rods. In all Dostoieffski's books
we are constantly irritated and fascinated by this
same strange penetrating odour of humanity.

Russian art has always been very closely
allied with religion, and the Russian is very reli-
gious. Ever since, a thousand years ago, the
Muscovites swam by thousands into their rivers,
headed by the chiefs, to receive Christian bap-
tism, they seem to have taken great interest in
religion. But their religion has a distinctive
character. It has no clear demarcation from
ordinary life, a characteristic that is reflected in
the similarity of religious and secular art in
Russia. More than this, unlike both the favourite
religions of the Indian and of the Teutonic races,
it is not largely mystical ; it is simply a mystical
communism. Sympathy and the need of com-

Tolstoi. 1 79

radeship, which seem to be deeply rooted in
the national character, are the characteristics of
Russian religion. " Pity for a fallen creature is
a very national trait," wrote Gogol, and among
the great Russian novelists, Dostoieffski, who is
the most intensely Russian, is throughout pene-
trated by the passion of pity. This spirit shows
itself in the remarkable sympathy with which,
in Russian popular stories, the devil is treated.
"He is represented," Stepniak remarks, "as the
enemy of man, doing his best to drag him down
into hell. But as this is his trade he cannot help
it, and the people bear him no malice. He is a
good devil after all." Of the three persons of
the Christian Trinity, the second, most asso-
ciated with images of love, appeals most to the
Russian popular imagination. God the Father,
as an austere personage, lacking in sympathy,
is, on the other hand, regarded with indifferent,
not to say hostile, feelings. This was well
exemplified by the innocent remark of a vene-
rable moojik in a remote part of the country:
"What ! Is the old fellow alive still ?"

The Russian has yet changed but little. The
Scythians, as we see them in the realistic repousse
work of the Nikopol vase of twenty-three cen-
turies ago, are the Russian moejiks of to-day ; the
features and the dress have scarcely changed.
They are, as Herodotus described them, a race
very tenacious of their customs. The sorcerer

1 80 The New Spirit.

still holds his own among them, while the ortho-
dox pope, it is well known, is regarded with no
reverence, but rather as a tradesman.] Propitiatory
sacrifices, it is said, are still paid by fishermen
to the river-gods, and families in the same way
try to keep on good terms with the household
deities. The ancient communistic land customs
still flourish, together with the ineradicable belief
that the land must be the property of everyone.
In some parts of the country it is not uncommon
for a poor man to help himself to the corn of a
rich man, the loan being repaid with interest in
subsequent years. The deeply-rooted indifference
of the people to external laws appears in the
difficulty with which they have been induced to
accept an officially recognized marriage cere-
mony, and in the indulgence which is still felt
towards liberty, which is not always licence, in
such matters. In some parts of Russia, even to-
day, it is said, a kind of Pervigilium Veneris is
held periodically ; the young people ascend a
mountain to sing and to dance, after which it is
de rigueur to separate and to spend the night in
couples. The primitive matter-of-fact simplicity
of the people, as well as their indifference to law
and authority, is shown in an incident that is
said to have occurred only a few years ago. The
peasants in a certain village decided that it was
not desirable for their widowed pope to live alone,
but the priest of the Greek Church is not allowed

Tolstoi. 1 8 1

to re-marry ; therefore the peasants, having ob-
tained the consent of a soldier's widow to be the
pope's mistress, insisted on introducing her into
his house.1 Such incidents often took place in
the western Europe of five centuries ago.

We have to bear in mind these characteristics
when we try to understand the great religious
movements that are going on in Russia. In all
these sects we see the tenacity with which the
Russian people have clung to their inborn practi-
cal instincts of communism, fraternity, and sexual
freedom. This religious movement is but another
aspect of the spirit that shows itself in Nihilism,
and it is a wider, deeper, and more interesting
aspect. Both represent a profound antagonism
to the State and to the official western methods
of social organization promulgated by the State.
Religious nonconformity dates far back into the
Middle Ages, but to Peter the Great is owing
the first great development of Russian sects.
That Tzar, with his hatred of all things Russian,
was naturally regarded by pious and patriotic
Russians as Antichrist, and they perished, in
thousands at a time, by their own hands, rather
than submit to the western notions which, knout

1 I take this, and much of what follows, from N.
Tsakni's interesting book, " La Russie Sectaire." It is
scarcely necessary to refer the English reader to the
valuable series of works in which Stepniak has set forth
the condition of modern Russia.

1 82 The New Spirit.

in hand, he tried to force upon them. On the soil
of poverty, wretchedness and disease, which dis-
tinguishes Russia to-day from the rest of Europe,
these religious sects have everywhere sprung up
and flourished; some of an ascetic type, with
Asiatic tendencies, belonging more especially to
the north of Russia, such as those frantic devotees,
the Skoptsy, who mutilate themselves after the
manner of the Phrygian worshippers of Cybele ;
or of those sects, belonging more to the south,
and rapidly gaining ground over the others, who
desire to lead a life of reason and love, such as
the Doukhobory, who recognize no more divinity
in Jesus than resides in all men, deny all dogmas,
ceremonies, authority, give equal rights to every
man and woman, treat children with the same
respect as the aged, practise free marriages, and
are in their daily lives both more moral and more
prosperous than their neighbours. One of the
most recent of these sects is the Soutaiefftsky,
that first became generally known about 1880.
Basil Soutaieff, an uneducated mason, belonging
to the centre of Russia, from his early years
pondered and dreamed over the misery of the
world. To obtain light he visited the priests,
and one referred him to the Gospels. His zeal
induced him to learn to read, and he studied the
New Testament eagerly. One day he carried to
the church the body of a young son for burial.
The pope asked fifty kopecks for the ceremony ;

Tolstoi. 183

Soutaieff had only thirty, and the pope began to
bargain with him over the corpse. Soutaieff in-
dignantly took up the body and buried it in his
own garden. From that time dated his criticism
of the Church, and side by side grew up also a
criticism of the world. He observed in his own
trade the tricks of commerce and the perpetual
^ flfort to amass money and to deceive the worker.
1 [e abandoned his work as a mason and returned
from St. Petersburg to the country to cultivate
the earth, distributing to the poor the money he
had previously earned. But in the country he
found, from pope to peasant, the same vices as in
the town, and with no wish to found a new sect,
he became, by example as well as by precept, the
teacher of a religion of universal love and pity.

Soutaieff rejects all ceremonies, including
baptism and marriage (for which he substitutes
a simple blessing and exhortation to a just life),
and all those external manifestations of religion
which render men hypocritical. At the same
time he rejects all faith in angels or devils, or in
the supernatural generally, and is absolutely in-
different to the question of a future life. We
have to occupy ourselves with the establishment
of happiness and justice on this earth; what
happens above, he says, I cannot tell, never
having been there ; perhaps there is nothing but
eternal darkness.

He recognizes that the moral regeneration of

1 84 The New Spirit.

men is closely connected with social and econo-
mic questions. Private property is the source
of the hatreds, jealousies, and miseries of men.
The proprietors must give up the land of which
they have arbitrarily gained possession, and work
for their living. But this end is to be gained, not
by violence, but by persuasion ; men will recog-
nize the hypocrisy and injustice of their lives,
and those who persist in evil will be shut out
from the fraternal community. Soutaieft refused,
at one period at all events, to pay taxes. Once
he went to St. Petersburg to explain the state of
things to the Emperor; great was his indignation
when not only was an interview refused, but he
was summarily expelled from the city. Soutaieff
and his disciples refuse military service, for the
men of all nations and religions are brothers :
why should they quarrel ?

This is the substance of Soutaieffs teaching.
Large numbers of persons come to hear him,
sometimes out of curiosity, more often as dis-
ciples. He leads the life of a simple peasant.
One evening, it is said, on going to his barn, he
found several men carrying away sacks of flour.
Without saying a word, he entered the barn
and found a sack that the robbers had not jet
carried off. He pursued them, and on catching
up with them, he said : " My brothers, you must
be in need of bread; take the sack that you
have forgotten." The following day the robbers

Tolstoi. i $5

brought back the flour, and asked Soutaieffs
forgiveness.

He has himself summed up his teaching.
"What is truth?" a hearer once asked him.
" Truth," answered Soutaieff with conviction,
"truth is love, in a common life."

IT.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.
Even Shakespeare's works contain a life of him-
self for those who know how to read it. There
is little difficulty in reading Tolstoi's; moreover,
it is very copious, and possesses the additional
advantage of being written from at least two
distinct points of view. It is seldom necessary
to consult any other authority for the essential
facts of his life and growth. " Childhood, Boy-
hood, and Youth," the earliest of his large
books, and one of the most attractive, tells us
all that we need to know of his early life.
An English critic has remarked that, if Tolstoi
has here described his boyhood, he must have
been a very commonplace child. The early
life of men of genius is rarely a record of pre-
cocities. The boy here described so minutely,
with his abnormal sensitiveness, his shy awkward-
ness and profound admiration of the commc il
faitt, his perpetual self-analysis, his brooding
dreams, his amusing self-conceit, bears in him
the germs of a great artist much more certainly

i S6 TJie New Spirit,

than any small monster of perfection. It is
scarcely necessary to say that the autobiography
here is not one of incident, as some persons have
foolishly supposed ; it is neither complete nor
historically accurate. Tolstoi uses his material
as an artist, but the material is himself. The
artist craves to express the inward experiences
of his past life, of which he can scarcely speak.
He invents certain imaginary events, or re-
arranges actual events as a frame into which he
fits his own inward experiences. Whatever is
most poignant and vivid in the novelist's art is
so produced ; and you say to him, "This is so
real ; you are narrating your own history." He
will be able to reply laughingly, " Oh, no ! my
life is not at all like that." Imagination is a
poor substitute for experience. There is suffi-
cient external evidence extant, even if it were
possible to doubt the internal, that Tolstoi is
here throughout drawing on his own youthful
experiences. Like Irteneff, young Tolstoi fol-
lowed Franklin's injunctions as to the use of
"Rules of Life;" his favourite books are the
same ; like him, also, he early developed a love
of metaphysics, owing to which, young Irteneff
says, " I lost one aftei the other the convictions
which, for the happiness of my own life, I
never should have dared to touch." All the
slight indications in the " Confessions" of young
Tolstoi's spiritual experiences agree with young

Tolstoi. 187

IrtenefTs. Even the plain face, "exactly like
that of a common peasant," the small grey eyes
and thick lips and wide nose, that caused the
boy of the story to look at himself in the glass
with such sorrow and aversion, to pray so fer-
vently to God to be made handsome, correspond
exactly to those of the real hero. No sign of the
boy's early development is left untouched. We
feel that this book, in which the artist is first fully
revealed, was the outcome of an overmastering
impulse to give expression to the accumulated
experiences of an intense and sensitive child-
hood, now receding for ever into the past.

Descended from a well-known minister and
friend of Peter the Great, and belonging to a
family that has been eminent for two hundred
years in war, diplomacy, literature, and art, Lyof
Tolstoi was born in 1828, the youngest of four
sons; his mother, the Princess Marie Volkonsky,
was the daughter of a general in Catherine's
time, and, according to friends of the novelist's
family, she resembled the Marie Bolkonsky of
'• War and Peace." Both parents were, he says,
in the general esteem, " good, cultivated, gentle,
and devout." He was early left an orphan, his
mother dying when he was not yet two years of
age, his father when he was nine. At the age of
fifteen he went to the University of Kazan ; he
left it suddenly to settle on the estate at Yas-
naya Polyana which had fallen to him. In 185 1,

1 88 The New Spirit.

at the age of twenty-three, he became a yunker
(the usual position of a nobleman entering the
army, doing the work of a common soldier and
associating with the officers) in the artillery at the
Caucasus; he was stationed on the Terek. This
expedition to the Caucasus was a memorable
event in young Tolstoi's life. It determined
finally his artistic vocation. A centre of military
activity on the most interesting frontier of the
empire, it is a land of wonderful scenery and
strange primitive customs, hallowed with asso-
ciation with Poushkin and Gogol. Tolstoi's elder
and most loved brother Nikolai had just come
home on leave from the Caucasus; it was natural
that young Lyof, who had never yet left the
neighbourhood ot Moscow, should be attracted
to a land which held for him a fascination so
manifold. Under the influence of this strange
and new environment he became, almost at once,
a great artist, and " Childhood, Boyhood, and
Youth " was written in 1852.

Tolstoi's critics have sometimes regretted that
he never continued this story. The only pos-
sible continuation of " Childhood, Boyhood, and
Youth" is "The Cossacks." The young Irteneff
of the end of the former book corresponds as
closely as possible with the Olyenin who is
analyzed at the beginning of the latter. A (c\v
years only have intervened. These years he
long after summed up briefly and too sternly in

Tolstoi. 189

the " Confessions " : "I cannot think of those
years without horror, disgust, and pain of heart.
There was no vice or crime that in those days I
would not have committed. Lying, theft, plea-
sure of all sorts, intemperance, violence, murder
—I have committed all. I lived on my estate,
I consumed in drink or at cards what the labour
of the peasants had produced. I punished them,
and sold them, and deceived them ; and for all
that I was praised." Tolstoi condemns himself
without mercy, as Bunyan condemned himself
in his "Grace Abounding;" even in the " Con-
fessions" he admits that at this time his aspira-
tions after good were the central element in his
nature, and it was out of desire to benefit his
peasants that he left the university prematurely
to settle on his estate.

Tolstoi's spiritual autobiography is carried on
as accurately as anyone need desire in " The
Cossacks." It was in the Caucasus that he first
powerfully realized what nature is, and natural life ;
he was, for the first time, forced to consider his
own relation to such life. Lukashka, the healthy,
coarse young Cossack soldier, Maryana, the beau-
tiful robust Cossack girl, and the delightful figure
of Uncle Jeroshka, the old hunter, display their
vivid and active life before Olyenin, the child
of civilization. He lives constantly in the pre-
sence of the " eternal and inaccessible mountain
snows and a majestic woman endowed with the

1 90 The New Spirit.

primitive beauty of the first woman ; " he feels
the contrast between this and the life of cities :
" happiness is to be with Nature, to see her,
to hold converse with her ; " and he longs to
mingle himself with the life of Maryana. In
vain. " Now if I could only become a Cossack
like Lukashka, steal horses, get tipsy on
red wine, shout ribald songs shoot men down,
and then while drunk creep in through the
window where she was, without a thought of
what I was doing or why I did it, that would be
another thing, then we should understand one
another, then I might be happy. . . . She fails
to understand me, not because .she is beneath
me, not at all ; it would be out of the nature of
things for her to understand me. She is light-
hearted ; she is like Nature, calm, tranquil,
sufficient to herself. But I, an incomplete
feeble creature, wish her to understand my
ugliness and my anguish." The book is full
of strongly-drawn pictures of the beauty of
natural strength and health ; sometimes recalling
Whitman at his best. They are strange, these
resemblances between three great typical artists
of to-day, so far apart, so little known to each
other, Millet, Whitman, and Tolstoi. In "The
Cossacks " Tolstoi gives his first statement of
that problem of man's natural function in life
which he has been seeking to solve ever since.
Here he has no sort of solution to offer ;

Tolstoi. 191

"some voice seemed to bid him wait, not de-
cide hastily."

In 1854 Tolstoi was transferred at his own
request to the Crimea, to obtain command of a
mountain battery, doing good service at the
battle of the Tchernaya. At this period also he
wrote his " Sketches of Sebastopool." By this
time he had attracted considerable attention as
a writer, and by command of the Emperor, who
said that " the life of that young man must be
looked after," he was, much to his own annoy-
ance, removed to a place of comparative safety.

When peace was made, Tolstoi, then twenty-
six years of age, left the army and settled in St.
Petersburg, where he was warmly received by the
chief literary circle of the capital, then includ-
ing Tourgueneff, Gregorovitch, and Ostroffsky;
the first, who was a comparatively near neigh-
bour at Yasnaya Polyana, becoming one of his
most intimate friends. During the following ten
years he wrote little, but travelled in Germany,
France, and Italy, and devoted himself to the
education of the serfs on his estate, marrying in
1862 the young and beautiful daughter of a
German military doctor at Tula. Although he
wrote little, he was enlarging his conception of
art and studying literature. He admired English
novels, both for their art and naturalism, and
among French novelists he preferred Dumas
and Paul de Kock, whom he called the French

192 The New Spirit.

Dickens. Schopenhauer was a favourite vvritet
at this period. He found his chief recreations
in that love of sport in all its forms which has
left such vivid and delightful traces through-
out his work. In his portraits he appears with
a shaggy bearded face, with large prominent
irregular features, and rather a stern fixed and
reserved expression ; the deep eyes are watch-
ful yet sympathetic, and at the same time
melancholy, and the thick lips are sensitive.
His acquaintances described him as not easy to
approach, very shy and rather wild {trh-farouche
et trh-sauvagc), but those who approached him
found him " extremely amiable." In his later
" Confessions " he thus summarizes his view of
things, and that of the group to which he
belonged, during this literary period of his life,
more especially with reference to the earlier
part of it. "The view of life of my literary
comrades lay in the opinion that in general life
developed itself ; that in this development we,
the men of intellect, took the chief part, and
among the men of intellect we, artists and poets,
stood first. Our vocation was to instruct people.
The very natural question, ' What do I know
and what can I teach,' was unnecessary, for,
according to the theory, one needed to know
nothing. The artist, the poet, taught uncon-
sciously. I held myself for a wonderful artist and
poet, and very naturally appropriated this theory.

Tolstoi. 193

I was paid for it, I had excellent food, a good
habitation, women, society ; I was famous. . . .
When I look back to that time, to my state of
mind then, and to that oi the 'people I lived
with (there are thousands of them, even now), it
seems to me melancholy, horrible, ludicrous ; I
feci as one feels in a lunatic asylum. We were
all then convinced that we must talk, talk, write
and print as quickly as possible and as much as
possible ; because it was necessary for the good
of humanity." This is by no means a satisfac-
tory or final account of the matter.

" War and Peace," Tolstoi's longest and most
ambitious work, which began to appear in 1865,
is from the present point of view of compara-
tively slight interest. His art had now become
more complex, and this was a serious attempt to
give life to various aspects of a great historical
period. Much of himself, certainly, we find scat-
tered through the work, especially in Pierre
BesoukhofT, though it is unnecessary to say that
a very large part of Pierre's experiences had no
counterpart in Tolstoi's; the not very life-like
or interesting Masonic episode, for instance, has
clearly been read up. Pierre, however, appears
before us, from first to last, as Tolstoi appears
before us, a seeker.

"Anna Karenina" is full of biographic mate-
rial of intense interest. In Vronsky, doubtless
much of his earlier experience, and in Levine,
O

194 The Neiv Spirit.

his own inner history at that time, are written
clearly enough. From this standpoint the book
has the vivid interest of a tragedy ; we see the
man whose efforts to solve the mystery of life
we can trace through all that he ever wrote,
still groping, but now more restlessly and
eagerly, with growing desperation. The nets are
drawn tight around him, and when we close the
book we see clearly the inevitable fate of which
he is still unconscious.

I once lived on the road to the cemetery of a
large northern town. All day long, it seemed to
me, the hearses were trundling along their dead
to the grave, or gallopping gaily back. When I
Avalked out I met men carrying coffins, and if I
glanced at them, perhaps I caught the name of
the child I saw two days ago in his mother's
lap ; or I was greeted by the burly widower of
yesterday, pipe in mouth, sauntering along to
arrange the burial of the wife who lay, I knew,
upstairs at home, thin and haggard and dead.
The road became fantastic and horrible at last ;
even such a straight road to the cemetery, it
seemed, was the whole of life, a road full of the
noise of the preparation of death. How daintily
soever we danced along, each person, laugh-
ing so merrily or in such downright earnest,
was merely a corpse, screwed down in an
invisible coffin, trundled along as rapidly as
might be to the grave-edge. — It was at such a

Tolstoi. 195

point of view that Tolstoi arrived in his fiftieth
year.

"When I had ended my book 'Anna Karc-
nina,'" he wrote in his "Confessions," "my
despair reached such a height that I could do
nothing but think, think, of the horrible condi-
tion in which I found myself. . . . Questions
never ceased multiplying and pressing for
answers, and like lines converging all to one
point, so these unanswerable questions pressed
to one black spot. And with horror and a con-
sciousness of my weakness, I remained standing
before this spot. I was nearly fifty years old
when these unanswerable questions brought me
into this terrible and quite unexpected position.
I had come to this, that I — a healthy and happy
man — felt that I could no longer live. . . .
Bodily, I was able to work at mowing hay as
well as a peasant. Mentally, I could work for
eighteen hours at a time without feeling any ill
consequence. And yet I had come to this, that
I could no longer live. ... I only saw one
thing — Death. Everything else was a lie."

The greater part of the " Confessions" is occu-
pied with the analysis of this mental condition,
and with the earlier stages of his deliverance, for
when he wrote the book he was scarcely yet quite
free. The direction in which light was to break
in upon him is very clear even to the reader of
"Anna Karenina." It seemed to him at length

196 The New Spirit.

that the awful questions which had oppressed
him so long had been solved for thousands ol
years by millions upon millions of persons who
had never reasoned about them at all. " From
the time when men first began to live anywhere,"
he says in the "Confessions," "they already
knew the meaning of life, and they carried on
this life so that it reached me. Everything in
me and around me, corporeal and incorporeal, is
the fruit of their experiences of life; even the
means by which I judge and condemn life, all
this is not mine, but brought forth by them. I
myself have been born, bred, grown up, thanks
to them. They have dug out the iron, have
tamed cattle and horses, have taught how to till
the ground, and how to live together and to
order life ; they have taught me to think and to
reason. And I, their production, receiving my
meat and drink from them, instructed by their
thoughts and words, have proved to them they
are an absurdity ! ... It is clear that I have only
called absurd what I do not understand."

When he had made this great discovery the
rest followed, slowly, but simply and naturally.
First, he understood the meaning of God. He
had all his life been seeking God. Now, one day
in early spring, he was in the wood, trying to
catch among the tones of the forest the cry of the
snipe, listening and waiting, and thinking of the
things he had been thinking of for the last three

Tolstoi. • 197

years, especially of this question of God. There
was no God — that he knew was an intellectual
truth. But is the knowledge of God an intellec-
tual matter ? And it seemed to him that he
realized that God is life, and that to live is to
know God. " And from that moment the con-
sciousness of God, as known by living, has re-
mained with me."

Following up this clue, he proceeded to attend
church regularly, and to fulfil all the orthodox
ceremonies. This, however, was a failure. He
could not get rid of the consciousness that these
things were — " bosh." He turned from the church
to the Gospels. At this point the "Confessions"
end. In the year 1879, m which he wrote that
book, he heard of, and met, Soutaieff.

One evening a beggar woman had knocked at
Soutaieff' s door, asking shelter for the night.
She was given food and a place of rest. Next
morning all the family went to work in the field.
The woman took the opportunity of collecting
all the valuables she could lay her hands on, and
fled. Some peasants at work saw her, stopped
her, examined her bundle, and having bound her
hands, led her before the local authorities. Sou-
taieff heard of this, and soon arrived. " Why
have you arrested her ? " he asked. " She is a
thief; she must be punished," they cried. "Judge
not, and you will not be judged," he said solemnly;
" we are all guilty at some point. What is the

198 The New Spirit.

good of condemning her ? She will be put in
prison, and what advantage will that be ? It
would be much better to give her something to
eat, and to let her go in the grace of God."
Such curiously Christ-like stories as this of the
peasant-teacher reached Tolstoi, and made a deep
impression on him. They were in the line of his
mental development, and threw light on his own
experiences. The influence of Soutaieff appears
in "What then must we do?" — a further chapter
in the history of Tolstoi's development, and per-
haps the most memorable of his attempts at the
solution of social questions.

What then must we do ? It was the question the
people asked of John the Baptist, and we know
his brief and practical answer. It was the question
that pressed itself for solution on Tolstoi when
he began to investigate the misery of Moscow,
and to start philanthropic plans for its ameliora-
tion. He tells us in this narrative, which has a
dramatic vividness of its own that will not bear
abbreviation, how he was gradually forced, by
his own well-meaning attempts and mistakes, to
abandon his philanthropic projects, and to realize
that he himself and all other respectable and
well-to-do people were the direct causes of the
misery of poverty.

He investigated the worst parts of the city,
finding more comfort and happiness amidst rags
than he had expected, and only discovering one

Tolstoi. I9O

hopelessly useless class — the class of those who
had seen better days, who had been brought up
in the notions that he himself had been brought
up in as to the relative position of those who
are workers and those who are not workers.

He met with a prostitute who stayed at home
musing the child of a dying woman. He asked
her if she would not like to change her life — to
become, he suggested at random, a cook. She
laughed: "A cook? I cannot even bake bread;"
but he detected in her face an expression of con-
tempt for the occupation of a cook. "This woman,
who, like the widow of the Gospel, had in the
simplest way sacrificed all that she possessed for
a dying person, thought, like her companions,
that work was low and contemptible. Therein
was her misfortune. But who of us, man or
woman, can save her from this false view of life?
Where among us are the people who are con-
vinced that a life of labour is more honourable
than one of idleness, who live according to such
a conviction, and value and respect men accord-
ingly?" He came across another prostitute who
had brought up her daughter of thirteen to the
same trade. He determined to save the child,
to put her in the hands of some compassionate
ladies, but it was impossible to persuade the
woman that she had not done the best for the
daughter whom she had cared for all her life
and brought up to the same occupation as her-

200 The New Spirit,

self; and he realized that it was the mother
herself who had to be saved from a false view of
life, according to which it was right to live with-
out bearing children and without working, in the
service of sensuality. " When I had considered
this, I understood that the majority of ladies
whom I would have called on to save this girl,
not only themselves live without bearing children
and without working, but also bring up their
daughters to live such a life ; the one mother
sends her daughter to the public-house, the other
to the ball. But both mothers possess the same
view of life, namely, that a woman must be fed,
clothed, and taken care of, to satisfy the wanton-
ness of a man. How, then, could our ladies
improve this woman and her daughter ? " He
was anxious to befriend a bright boy of twelve,
and took him into his own house among the
servants, pending some better arrangement to
give him work. At the end of a week this un-
grateful little boy ran away, and was subse-
quently found at the circus, acting as conductor
to an elephant, for thirty kopecks a day. " To
make him happy and to improve him I had
taken him into my house, where he saw — what ?
My children — older, younger, and the same age
as himself — who not only did not work for them-
selves, but in every way gave work to others :
they spoiled everything they came in contact
with, over-ate themselves with sweets and deli-

Tolstoi. 20 1

cacies, broke crockery, and threw to the dogs
what to this boy would seem dainties. ... I
ought to have understood how foolish it was on
my part — I who brought up my children in
luxury to do nothing — to try to improve other
people and their children, who lived in what I
called ' dens,' but three-fourths of whom worked
for themselves and for others." His experience
was the same throughout, and he brings his usual
keen insight to the analysis of his mental atti-
tude when he gave money in charity, and to the
mental attitude of the recipients of his charity.
He found also that, even if his charity were to
rival that of the poor, he would have to give
3,000 roubles to make a gift proportioned to
the three kopecks bestowed by a peasant, or to
sacrifice his whole living for days at a time, like
the prostitute who nursed the dying woman's
child.

It seemed to him that he was like a man trying
to draw another man out of a swamp, while he
himself was standing on the same shifting and
treacherous ground ; every effort only served to
show the character of the ground that he stood
upon himself. When he was at the Night Shelter
at Moscow, and looked at the wretched crowd
who sought admission, he recalled his impres-
sion when he had seen a man guillotined at
Paris thirty years previously, and with his whole
being had understood that murder would always

202 The New Spirit.

be murder, and that he had his share in the guilt.
" So, at the sight of the hunger, cold, and degra-
dation of thousands of men, I understood, not
with my reason, but with my heart and my whole
being, that the existence of ten thousand such
men in Moscow, while I and other thousands
eat daintily, clothe our horses and cover our
floors — let the learned say as much as they will
that it is inevitable — is a crime, committed not
once but constantly, and that I with my luxury
do not merely permit the crime, but take a direct
part in it. The difference in the two impressions
consisted only in this — that before the guillotine
all I could have done would have been to cry
out to the murderers that they were doing evil,
and to try to prevent them. Even then I should
have known beforehand that the deed would not
have been prevented. But here I could have
given, not merely a warm drink or the little
money that I had about me, but I could have
given the coat from my body, and all that I
had in my house. I did not do so, and there-
fore I felt, and still feel, and shall never cease to
feel, that I am a partaker in that never-ceasing
crime, so long as I have superfluous food and
another has none, so long as I have two coats
and another has none."

" My Religion," the best known of Tolstoi's
social works, contains — not, indeed, the latest or
the final statement, for Tolstoi is not a man to

Tolstoi. 203

stand still — the clearest, most vigorous and com-
plete statement of his beliefs. He here frankly
admits that he has arrived by the road of his
own experience at convictions similar to those
of Jesus as expressed in the Sermon on the
Mount. That he has nothing to say in favour
of the Christianity of to-day, which approves of
society as it now is, with its prison cells, its fac-
tories, its houses of infamy, its parliaments, one
need scarcely point out. He has nothing but
contempt for "faith" which he regards as merely
a kind of lunacy. " But reason, which illuminates
our life and impels us to modify our actions, is
not an illusion, and its authority can never be
denied. . . . Jesus taught men to do nothing
contrary to reason. It is unreasonable to go
out to kill Turks or Germans ; it is unreason-
able to make use of the labours of others that
you and yours may be clothed in the height
of fashion and maintain that source of etmui, a
drawing-room; it is unreasonable to take people,
already corrupted by idleness and depravity, and
devote them to further idleness and depravity
within prison walls : all this is unreasonable —
and yet it is the life of the European world."
The doctrine of Jesus is hard, men say. But
how much harder, exclaims Tolstoi, is the doc-
trine of the world ! " In my own life," he says,
"(an exceptionally happy one, from a worldly
point of view), I can reckon up as much suffer-

204 The New Spirit.

ing caused by following the doctrine of the
world as many a martyr has endured for the
doctrine of Jesus. All the most painful moments
of my life — the orgies and duels in which I
took part as a student, the wars in which I
have participated, the diseases that I have en-
dured, and the abnormal and unsupportable
conditions under which I now live — all these are
only so much martyrdom exacted by fidelity
to the doctrine of the world." And what of
those less happily situated ? " Thirty millions
of men have perished in wars, fought in behalf
of the doctrine of the world ; thousands of mil-
lions of beings have perished, crushed by a social
system organized on the principle of the doctrine
of the world. . . . You will find, perhaps to your
surprise, that nine-tenths of all human suffering
endured by men is useless, and ought not to
exist — that, in fact, the majority of men are
martyrs to the doctrine of the world."

Tolstoi sums up his own doctrine under a very
few heads : — Resist not evil — Judge not — Be
not angry — Love one woman. His creed is
entirely covered by these four points. " My
Religion" is chiefly occupied by the exposition
of what they mean, and in his hands they mean
much. They mean nothing less than the aboli-
tion of the State and the country. He is as
uncompromising as Ibsen in dealing with the
State. "It is a humbug, this State," he remarked

Tolstoi. 205

to Mr. Stead. " What you call a Government is
mere phantasmagoria. What is a State ? Men
I know ; peasants and villages, these I see ; but
governments, nations, states, what are these but
fine names invented to conceal the plunder-
ing of honest men by dishonest officials ?" Law,
tribunals, prisons, become impossible with the
disappearance of the State ; and with the disap-
pearance of the country, and of " that gross im-
posture called patriotism," there can be no more
war.

In place of these great and venerable pillars
of civilization, what ? The first condition of
happiness, he tells us, is that the link between
man and nature shall not be broken, that he
may enjoy the sky above him, and the pure
air and the life of the fields. This involves
the nationalization of the land, or rather, to
avoid centralizing tendencies, its communali-
zation. " I quite agree with George," he re-
marked, "that the landlords may be fairly
expropriated without compensation, as a matter
of principle. But as a question of expediency,
I think compensation might facilitate the neces-
sary change. It will come, I suppose, as the
emancipation of slaves came. The idea will
spread. A sense of the shamefulness of private
ownership will grow. Someone will write an
'Uncle Tom's Cabin' about it; there will be
agitation, and then it will come, and many who

206 The New Spirit.

own land will do as did those who owned serfs,
voluntarily give it to their tenants. But for the
rest, a loan might be arranged, so as to prevent
the work being stopped by the cry of confisca-
tion. Of course I do not hold with George
about the taxation of the land. If you could
get angels from Heaven to administer the taxes
from the land, you might do justice and prevent
mischief. I am against all taxation." The
second condition of happiness is labour, the
intellectual labour that one loves because one
has chosen it freely, and the physical labour
that is sweet because it produces the muscular
joy of work, a good appetite, and tranquil sleep.
The third condition of happiness is love. Every
healthy man and woman should have sexual
relationships ; and Tolstoi makes no distinction
between those that are called by the name of
marriage and those that are not so called ; in
either case, however, he would demand that they
shall be permanent. The fourth condition is
unrestrained fellowship with men and women
generally, without distinction of class. The fifth
is health, though this seems largely the result of
obedience to the others. These are the five
points of Tolstoi's charter. They seem simple
enough, but he is careful to point out that most
of them are closed to the rich. The rich man is
hedged in by conventions, and cannot live a
simple and natural life. A peasant can associate

Tolstoi. 207

on equal terms with millions of his fellows ; the
circle of equal association becomes narrower and
narrower the higher the social rank, until we
come to kings and emperors, who have scarcely-
one person with whom they may live on equal
terms. " Is not the whole system like a great
prison, where each inmate is restricted to asso-
ciation with a few fellow-convicts?" The rich
may, indeed, work, but even then their work
usually consists in official and administrative
duties, or the observance of arduous social con-
ventions which are odious to them : " I say
odious, for I never yet met with a person of this
class who was contented with his work, or took
as much satisfaction in it as the man who shovels
the snow from his doorstep." From this stand-
point Tolstoi has never since greatly varied.

Such as he is now he is known throughout the
civilized world. He lives at his old home at
Yasnaya Polyana, surrounded by less luxury
than may be found in many a Siberian cottage,
writing or shoemaking or ploughing, or kneading
clay in a tub to build incombustible cottages, or
spending the day in spreading manure over the
land of some poor widow. Such we see him in
his portraits, in the coarse blouse and the leather
belt that he has always worn, with the massive,
earnest, suffering, baffled face, as of a blind but
unconquered Samson.

2o8 The New Spirit.

III.

With Tolstoi the artist we have here little
concern. Yet from the first he has been an
artist, and in spite of himself he is an artist to
the last. We cannot pass by his art. One
realizes this curiously in reading "What then
must we do?" A profoundly sincere record
without doubt of deeply-felt experiences and of
a mental revolution, it is yet the work of an
artist, a tragedy broadly and solemnly unfolding
the misery of the world, the impotence of every
scheme or impulse of charity, the light that
comes only from freedom and self-development.
Let us read, again, that little popular tract —
"Does a man need much land?" — brimming
over with meaning, about the man who gained
permission to possess as much land as he could
walk round from sunrise to sunset. Can he get
so much into the circuit, not omitting this fine
stretch of land, and this other? His constantly
growing desires, his efforts, are told in brief,
stern phrase, his feverish and failing strain to
reach the goal, that at sunset is reached, and the
man drops down dead. Then the curt and un-
accentuated conclusion: " Pakhom's man took
the hoe, dug a grave for him, made it just long
enough from head and foot — three arshins — and
buried him." All the tragedy of the nineteenth

Tolstoi. 209

century is pressed together into those half-dozen
pages by the strong, relentless hand of the great
artist who deigns to point no moral. From the
early and delicious sketch of the frail musician,
Albert, down to the sombre and awful " Death
of Ivan Ilyitch," Tolstoi has produced an im-
mense body of work that must be considered,
above all, as art. One reads this body of work with
ever-growing delight and satisfaction. Gogol
was a finer artist than Dickens, but there are
too many suggestions about him of Dickens
and the English novelists. Tourgueneff, a very
great artist — how great, those little prose-poems,
" Senilia," would alone suffice to show — an artist
who thrilled to every touch, suffered from the
excess of his sensitiveness, and perhaps also
from an undue absorption in the western world.
In Dostoieffski there is nothing of the west ; he
is intimately and intensely personal, with an
even morbid research of all the fibres of organic
misery in human nature. In all his work we
seem to hear the groans of the prison-house,
the house of the dead in Siberia. When we
have read the wonderful book in which he
has recorded the life of his years there, we
know the source of all his inspiration. Read-
ing all these authors, we are constantly aware
of the neurotic element in Russian life and
Russian character, the restless, diseased ele-
ment that is revealed to us in cold scientific
P

2 1 o The New Spirit.

analysis by Tarnowsky and S. P. Kowalevski
and Dmitri Drill. It is not so when we turn to
Tolstoi. In him we find not merely the insight
and the realistic observation, but a breadth and
sanity and wholeness that the others mostly
fail to give us. His art is so full and broad and
true that he seems able to do for his own time
and country what Shakespeare with excess
of poetic affluence did for his time, and Balzac
for his. He is equal to every effort, he omits
nothing that imports, he describes everything
with the same calm ease and simplicity. It
makes no difference whether, within the limits
of a slight sketch, he is tracing delicately the
life of the drunken artist, Albert, or producing
the largest literary canvas of modern times,
"War and Peace." In "Family Happiness"
he analyzes passion, marriage, parenthood, the
cycle of life, in a simple narration, a few chap-
ters, yet nothing is omitted, and one shudders
at the awful ease with which to this man these
things seem to yield their secret. In " Ivan
Ilyitch" he analyzes death and the house
of death, quietly, completely, with a hand that
never falters. He writes as a man who has
touched life at many points, and tasted most
that it has to offer, its joys and its sorrows, but
he gazes upon it, even from the first, with the
luminous and passionless calm of old age. His
art is less perfect than Flaubert's, but Flaubert's

Tolstoi. 2 1 1

intense personal note, the ferocious nihilism of
the Norman, is absent. He holds life up to the
light, simply, and says : " This is what it is !"

For one who cannot read Tolstoi in the origi-
nal, and who misses the style so much praised
by those who are more privileged, Tolstoi seems
an uncompromising realist. He has therefore
often been compared with Zola, the prodigious
representative and champion of Latin realism.
In vain Zola himself disclaims this position ; it
is he more than any other who has influenced
the novel, especially in the Latin countries, in
the direction, if not of realism, at all events in
that of anti-idealism; not Balzac or Stendhal, who
have reached sure summits of fame, but have
ceased to be living influences ; not the De Gon-
courts, whose style cannot be imitated ; least of
all Flaubert, an idealist of idealists, whose pro-
found art and marmoreal style are of the sort
that it takes generations even to understand. It
is interesting, doubtless, to put Tolstoi beside
Zola, but the resemblance is not deep. Zola is
the avowed prophet of a formula. He has read
and pondered the " Introduction a l'etude de la
Medicine Experimentale," in which the great phy-
siologist, Claude Bernard, expounded the prin-
ciples of the experimental method as applied to
the sciences of physical life. He has asked him-
self: " Can we not apply this same method to the
psychological life ? Can we not have an experi-

2 1 2 The New Spirit.

mental novel ?" " We seek the causes of social
evil," he declares in " Le Roman Experimental,"
a collection of essays not less instructive than
his novels, and more interesting; "we present
the anatomy of classes and of individuals, in
order to explain the aberrations which are pro-
duced in society and in man. This obliges us
often to work on bad subjects, and to descend
into the midst of human miseries and follies.
But we bring the documents necessary to be
known by those who would dominate good and
evil. Here is what we have seen, observed, ex-
plained in all sincerity. Now it is the turn of the
legislators!" To bring the scientific spirit of the
age into the novel : it was a brilliant idea, and
Zola forthwith set to work, with his immense
energy and unshakeable resolution, to draw up a
prods-verbal of human life — for this is the most
that the "experimental method" comes to in the
novel — which has not ceased to this day.

But, one asks oneself, what is reality ? Zola has
frankly explained how a novel ought to be written ;
how one must get one's human documents, study
them thoroughly, accumulate notes, systemati-
cally frequent the society of the people one is
studying, watch them, listen to them, minutely
observe and record all their surroundings. But
have we got reality then ? Does the novelist I
casually meet, and who has opportunities to take
notes of my conversation and appearance, to

Tolstoi. 213

examine the furniture of my house and to collect
gossip about me, know anything whatever of the
romance or tragedy which to me is the reality of
my life, these other things being but shreds or
tatters of life ? Or if my romance or tragedy has
got into a law-court or a police-court, is he really
much nearer then ? The unrevealable motives,
the charm, the mystery, were not deposed to by
the policeman who was immediately summoned,
nor by the servant-girl who looked through the
key-hole. Certain disagreeable details : do they
make up reality ? To select the most beautiful
and charming woman one knows, and to set a
detective artist on her track, to follow her about
everywhere, to keep an opera-glass fixed upon
her, to catch fragments of her conversation, to
enter her house, her bedroom, to examine her
dirty linen,— would Helen of Troy emerge beau-
tiful from this proch-verbalf And on which side
would be most reality? Nature seems to resent
this austere method of approaching her, and when
we have closed our hands the reality has slipped
through our fingers. A great artist, a Shake-
speare or a Goethe, is not afraid of any fact,
however repulsive it may seem, so long as it is
significant. But it must be significant. Without
sympathy and a severe criticism of details, the
truly illuminating facts will be missed or lost in
the heap. It is interesting to note that Zola
himself recognizes this, and admits that he has

2 1 4 The New Spirit.

been carried away by his delight and enthusiasm
in attempting to vindicate for Art the whole of
Nature. Whatever is really fine in Zola's work
—"La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret," or the last
chapters of " Nana " — is fine because the man
of a formula is for awhile subordinated to the
artist.

Zola may work as hard as he will in the cause
of the formula ; he remains, above all, a man of
massive temperament and peculiarly strong indi-
viduality. That is the real secret of his influence.
A youth, developed in the poverty and hunger of
a garret on the outskirts of Paris, who was fas-
cinated by the great city he has lovingly painted,
as it was there spread out before him, in " Une
Page d'Amour," and condemned to see it only
from the outside, — here was material for that
irony, unending and absolutely pitiless, that runs
through the whole of the vast Rougon-Macquart
drama of the world. He is an austere moralist,
with no tenderness for human weakness, " un
tragique qui se fache," as he calls himself, a Re-
publican in spirit long before the Republic was
proclaimed, a hater of all hypocrisies and empty
prettinesses and fine phrases and elegant cir-
cumlocutions, a fighting man ready to fight to
the last, with rude weapons but in fair combat.
He represents the revolt against the French
romantic movement — "une 6meute de rh^tori-
ciens," he calls it — which found its supreme

Tolstoi. 2 1 5

incarnation in Victor Hugo. The Forty Im-
mortals may have laughed serenely, but when
Zola declared that he was carrying on the classic
tradition he was not altogether wrong. The
classic tradition of France is marked by a very
vivid sense of life ; it has a close grip of the
practical and material side of things, a whole-
some contempt for all pretence, and sometimes
a certain rather rank savour of audacity. Zola
will scarcely stand beside Rabelais and Mon-
taigne and Moliere ; the artist in him is too
much crushed by ideas, and he has altogether
run too much to seed ; but he is fighting on the
same side, and he has been proved to possess
one quality which leaves little more to be said,
effectiveness. Whatever the value of his work, he
has turned the tide of novel literature, wherever
his influence has spread, from frivolous inanities
to the painstaking study of the facts of human
life. Whatever we may think for the moment,
that is a very wholesome and altogether moral
revolution.

As for great art, that is neither here nor there.
Shakespeare, Goethe, Flaubert, — for such men
the extremes of poetry and of realism are equally
welcome. Tolstoi, it is clear, is more of a realist
than a poet, but his realism is of the kind that
grows naturally out of the experiences of a man
who has lived a peculiarly full and varied life.
It is life sur Ic vif, not studied from a garret

2 1 6 The New Spirit.

window. Nothing is omitted, nothing is super-
fluous ; the narrative seems to lead the narrator
rather than the narrator it, and through all we
catch perpetually what seems an almost acci-
dental fragrance of poetry. See the account of
the storm in the " Childhood, Boyhood, and
Youth," or of the child in the raspberry bush, or of
the mowing, or the horse-race, in "Anna Karen-
ina," with their peculiar, intangible yet vivid
reality. But these things, it may be said, are
poetry, the effluence of some divine moment of
life, the record of some unforgetable thrill of blood
and brain. Compare, then, the account of a child-
birth in "Anna Karenina" (there is an earlier and
less successful attempt in "War and Peace") with
a similar scene which is the central episode in
Zola's " La Joie de Vivre." The latter, doubtless,
is instructive from its fidelity; every petty detail
is coldly and minutely set forth. Its artistic
value is difficult to estimate ; it can scarcely be
large. Zola presents the subject from the point
of view of a disinterested and impossible spec-
tator ; in Tolstoi's scene we have frankly the
husband's point of view. There is no room here
for instructive demonstration of the mechanism
of birth, of all its physical details and miseries.
It is real life, but at such a moment real life is
excitement, emotion, and the result is art.
What, again, can be more unpromising than a
novel about a remote historical war ? But read

Tolstoi. 2 1 7

" War and Peace " to sec how lifelike, how vivid
and fascinating, the narrative becomes in the
hands of a man who has known the life of a
soldier and all the chances of war.

Tolstoi is not alone among Russian novelists
in the character of his realism. Gogol's " Dead
Souls" hassomethingof the wholesome naturalism
as well as of the broad art and the good-natured
satire of Fielding. He is perpetually insisting
on the importance to the artist of those " little
things which only seem little when narrated in a
book, but which one finds very important in
actual life." In his letters on "Dead Souls"
Gogol wrote : " Those who have dissected my
literary faculties have not discovered the essen-
tial feature of my nature. Poushkin alone per-
ceived it. He always said that no author has
been gifted like me to bring into relief the
triviality of life, to describe all the platitude of a
commonplace man, to make perceptible to all
eyes the infinitely little things which escape our
vision. That is my dominating faculty." Tour-
gueneff declared that the novel must cast aside
all hypocrisy, sentimentality, and rhetoric for
the simple yet nobler aim of becoming the his-
tory of life. Dostoicffski, that tender-hearted
student of the perversities of the human heart,
so faithful in his studies that he sometimes seems
to forget how great an artist he is, justifies him-
self thus : " What is the good of prescribing to

2 1 8 The New Spirit.

art the roads that it must follow ? To do so is
to doubt art, which develops normally, according
to the laws of nature, and must be exclusively-
occupied in responding to human needs. Art
has always shown itself faithful to nature, and
has marched with social progress. The ideal of
beauty cannot perish in a healthy society ; we
must then give liberty to art, and leave her to
herself. Have confidence in her ; she will reach
her end, and if she strays from the way she will
soon reach it again ; society itself will be the
guide. No single artist, not Shakespeare him-
self, can prescribe to art her roads and aims."
Tolstoi but followed in the same path when, in
one of the earliest of his books, the " Sebastopol
Sketches," he wrote : " The hero of my tale,
whom I love with all the strength of my soul,
whom I have tried to set forth in all his beauty,
and who has always been, is, and always will be,
most beautiful, is — Truth."

It is, after all, impossible to disentangle Tol-
stoi's art from the man himself and the ideas
and aspirations that have stirred him. When
we consider his history and development we arc
sometimes reminded of our own William Morris.
They are both men of massive and sanguine
temperament, of restless energy, groping their
way through life with a vague sense of dissatis-
faction ; both pure artists through the greater
part of their career, and both artists still, when

Tolstoi. 2 1 9

late in life, and under the influence of rather
sectarian ideas, they think that they have at
length grasped the pillars of the heathen temple
of society in which they have so long been
groping, and are ready to wreak on it the pent-
up unrest of their lives. But they go to work in
not quite the same way. Both, it is true, having
apparently passed through a very slight religious
phase in early life, have had this experience in
later life, and in both it has taken on a social
character ; both, also, have sought their inspira-
tion, not so much in a possible future deduced
from the present, as in the past experiences of
the race. Tolstoi with his semi-oriental quietism
has returned to the rationalistic aspects of the
social teaching of Jesus. Morris, who regards
Iceland rather than Judaea as the Holy Land of
the race, looks to Scandinavian antiquity for
light on the problems of to-day. It is on the
robust Scandinavian spirit of independence and
comfortable well-to-do intolerance of all oppres-
sion and domination that Morris relies for the
redemption of his own time and people. So far
from identifying art, as Tolstoi is inclined to do,
with the evil and luxury of the world, Morris
finds in art a chief hope for the world. It is not,
therefore, surprising that his art has suffered
little from the fervour of his convictions, while
his varied artistic activities have given him
a wholesome grip on life. His new beliefs, on

2 20 The New Spirit.

the other hand, have given new meaning to his
art. His mastery of prose has only been ac-
quired under the stress of his convictions. It is
prose of massive simplicity, a morning fresh-
ness, unconscious and effortless. There is about
it something of the peculiar charm of the finest
Norman architecture. The " Dream of John
Ball," a strong unpretentious piece of work,
penetrated at every point by profound social
convictions, yet with the artist's touch through-
out, may be read with a delight which the
complex and artificial prose we are accustomed
to cannot give. England, it is said, is pre-
dominantly a Scandinavian country ; Morris is
significant because he gives expression in an
extreme form to the racial instincts of his own
people, just as Tolstoi expresses in equally
extreme form the deepest instincts of his
Sclavonic race.

Against the " Dream of John Ball," we may
place the work produced at the same time by
the Russian's keener and more searching hand,
" The Dominion of Darkness." This sombre
and awful tragedy is a terribly real and merci-
less picture of the worst elements in peasant
life, a picture of avarice and lust and murder.
Only one pious, stuttering, incoherent moojik,
whose employment is to clean out closets, ap-
pears as the representative of mercy and justice.
So thick is the gloom that it seems the artistic

Tolstoi. 22 1

effect would have been heightened if the con-
cluding introduction of the officers of an external
and official justice had been omitted, and the
curtain had fallen on the tragic merriment of
the wedding feast. The same intense earnest-
ness taking, almost unconsciously, an artistic
shape, reveals itself in the little stories of which
in recent years Tolstoi has produced so many,
some indeed comparatively ineffective, but others
that are a fascinating combination of simplicity,
realism, imaginative insight, brought to the ser-
vice of social ideas. Such is " What men live
by," the story of the angel who disobeyed God,
and was sent to earth to learn that it is only in
appearance that men are kept alive through care
for themselves, but that in reality they are kept
alive through love.

Tolstoi's voice is heard throughout the vast
extent of Russia, not by the rich only, but by
the peasant. That is why his significance is so
great. Sometimes the religious censure pro-
hibits his books ; sometimes it allows them ; in
either case they are circulated. Published at a
few halfpence, these little books are within the
reach of the poorest, and Tolstoi gives free per-
mission to anyone to reproduce or translate any
of his books. His drama, " The Dominion of
Darkness, or when a bird lets himself be caught
by one foot he is lost," was intended for the
public who frequent the open-air theatres of

222 The New Spirit,

fairs, and eighty thousand copies were sold
during the first week, although certainly not
altogether among the audience he would have
preferred. The stories for children are circu-
lated in scores of editions of twenty thousand
copies each. Tolstoi has nothing to teach that
he has not learnt from peasants, and which thou-
sands of peasants might not have taught him.
He has used his character and genius as a sound-
ing-board to enable his voice to reach millions
of persons, many of whom, even the most intel-
ligent, are not aware that he is but repeating
the lessons he has learnt from unlettered moojiks.

Now his voice has reached the countries of
the West, and it sounds here far more un-
familiar than in a land so stirred by popular
religious movements as Russia. " My Religion,"
that powerful argument ad hominem to the Chris-
tian from one who accepts both the letter and the
spirit of Jesus's simplest and least questionable
teaching, has had an especially large circulation
in the West. Such a challenge has never before
been scattered broadcast among the nations.
What, one wonders, will be the outcome ?

To most people the simplicity of the challenger
is a cause of astonishment. After the assassina-
tion of Alexander II. and the sentence on the
assassins, Tolstoi wrote to the present Tzar im-
ploring him not to begin his reign with judicial
murder, and he was deeply and genuinely dis-

Tolstoi. 223

appointed at the inevitable reception of his
appeal. Count Tolstoi, the author of " War
and Peace " and " Anna Karenina," made the
same mistake as the simple peasant Soutaieff.
That little incident throws much light on his
mental constitution. It is the attitude of a
child, absorbed wholly in one thing at a time,
unable to calculate the nature and the strength
of opposing forces. It is the same fact of
mental structure which leads the world-re-
nowned novelist to delight to learn from chil-
dren, to be mortified when they do not like his
stories, and to experience one of the greatest
excitements of life when he thinks he detects
the dawn of genius in a child of ten. The same
characteristic appears in his treatment of science.
He had heard, he told Mr. Kennan, that a Rus-
sian scientist had completely demolished the
Darwinian theory. In " Life," one of his latest
books, this tendency has carried him far away
into a sterile and hopeless region of mystical
phraseology. He dismisses scientific men briefly
as the Scribes. It has not occurred to him
apparently that this book, "Life," is a book of
science. And, certainly, if science could pro-
duce nothing better than " Life," the language
that Tolstoi uses regarding it were not one whit
too strong. This childlike simplicity is not
peculiar to Tolstoi ; it is more or less the atti-
tude of every true Russian, of the peasant who

224 The Nezv Spirit.

sets up the kingdom of Heaven, as of the
Nihilist who thinks he can emancipate his
country by destroying a few Tzars. It is a
weakness that must often mean failure because
it cannot estimate the strength of difficulties.
At the same time it is a power. It is by this
intense concentration on one desired object,
this heroic inability to see opposition, that the
highest achievement becomes possible.

Whatever Tolstoi's limitations and failures of
perception, those things which he believes he
has seen he grasps with inexorable tenacity.
The violence and misery of the world — that is a
reality ; a reality, he feels, which must be fought
at all costs. Mr. Kennan tells how he pressed
home on Tolstoi the cases of extreme brutality
and oppression that he had known practised on
political prisoners in Siberia, and how, though
Tolstoi's eyes filled with tears as he imagined
the horrors described, he still pointed out in
detail how, by opposing violence to violence
in the cases cited, the misery of the world would
be increased : " At the time when you interposed
there was only one centre of evil and suffering.
By your violent interference you have created
half-a-dozen such centres. It does not seem to
me, Mr. Kennan, that that is the way to bring
about the reign of peace and good-will on earth."1

1 See the interesting paper, "A Visit to Count Tolstoi,"
in "Century," June, 18S7.

Tolstoi. 225

Tolstoi possesses that social imagination
which, though growing among us, is still so rare.
If at the dinner where cheerful guests prolong
their enjoyment, there were placed behind each
chair a starved, ragged figure, with haggard and
haunting face — would not the meal be broken up
as speedily as if every guest had found the
sword of Dionysius hanging by a thread above
his head ? Yet it is only a lack of imagination
which prevents us from seeing through the few
layers of bricks that screen us off from these
realities. For him who has seen it there is little
rest, " so long as I have superfluous food and
another has none, so long as I have two coats
and another has none."

With tears in his voice, and in words whose
intense reality pierces through the translation,
though this, we are told, cannot reproduce the
graphic vividness of the original, Tolstoi speaks
to us through his life and his work as he once
spoke to the interviewer wrho came to him :

" People say to me, ' Well, Lef Nikolaivitch,
as far as preaching goes, you preach ; but how
about your practice ? ' The question is a per-
fectly natural one ; it is always put to me, and
it always shuts my mouth. ' You preach,' it is
said, ' but how do you live ? ' I can only reply
that I do not preach — passionately as I desire
to do so. I might preach through my actions,
but my actions are bad. That which I say is not
Q

226 The New Spirit.

preaching ; it is only my attempt to find out the
meaning and the significance of life. People
often say to me, ' If you think that there is no
reasonable life outside the teachings of Christ,
and if you love a reasonable life, why do you not
fulfil the Christian precepts ? ' I am guilty and
blameworthy and contemptible because I do not
fulfil them ; but at the same time I say, — not in
justification, but in explanation, of my inconsis-
tency,— Compare my previous life with the life
I am now living, and you will see that I am
trying to fulfil. I have not, it is true, fulfilled
one eighty-thousandth part, and I am to blame
for it ; but it is not because I do not wish to
fulfil all, but because I am unable. Teach me
how to extricate myself from the meshes of
temptation in which I am entangled, — help me,
— and I will fulfil all. I wish and hope to do it
even without help. Condemn me if you choose,
— I do that myself, — but condemn me, and not
the path which I am following, and which I
point out to those who ask me where, in my
opinion, the path is. If I know the road home,
and if I go along it drunk, and staggering from
side to side, does that prove that the road is not
the right one ? If it is not the right one, show
me another. If I stagger and wander, come to
my help, and support and guide me in the right
path. Do not yourselves confuse and mislead
me and then rejoice over it and cry, ' Look at

Tolstoi. 227

him ! He says he is going home, and he is
floundering into the swamp ! ' You are not evil
spirits from the swamp ; you are also human
beings, and you also are going home. You know
that I am alone, — you know that I cannot wish
or intend to go into the swamp, — then help me !
My heart is breaking with despair because we
have all lost the road ; and while I struggle with
all my strength to find it and keep in it, you,
instead of pitying me when I go astray, cry
triumphantly, ' See ! He is in the swamp with
us I

228 The New Spirit.

CONCLUSION.

Tolstoi brings us face to face with religion.
If we think of it, every personality we have
considered has brought us subtly in contact
with that ineluctable shape. It is strange : men
seek to be, or to seem, atheists, agnostics, cynics,
pessimists ; at the core of all these things lurks
religion. We may find it in Diderot's mighty
enthusiasm, in Heine's passionate cries, in Ibsen's
gigantic faith in the future, in Whitman's not
less gigantic faith in the present. We see the
same in the music-dramas of Wagner, in Zola's
pathetic belief in a formula, in Morris's worship
of an ideal past, in the aspirations of every
Socialist who looks for the return of those bar-
barous times in which all men equally were
fed and clothed and housed. The men who
have most finely felt the pulse of the world, and
have, in their turn, most effectively stirred its
pulse, are religious men.

One is forced to ask oneself at last : How can
I make clear to myself this vast and many-
shaped religious element of life ? It will not let
me pass it by. Can I — without any attempt to
theorize or to explain — reduce it to some common
denominator, so that I may at least gain the

Conclusion. 229

satisfaction that comes of the clear and harmo-
nious presentation of a complex fact ? When we
have settled the question of the evolution of
religion, another more fundamental question may-
still be asked : What is the nature of the im-
pulse that underlies, and manifests itself in,
that sun-worship, nature-worship, fetich-worship,
ghost-worship, to which, with occasional appeal
to the vast reservoir of sexual and filial love, we
may succeed in reducing religious phenomena ?
On the one hand, this impulse must begin to
develop at least as early as the earliest appear-
ance of worship ; on the other hand, we cannot
ascertain its distinctive characters unless we also
examine and compare its more specialized forms.
What is there in common between the religious
attitude of the child of to-day, enfranchized from
creeds, and that of, let us say, Lao-tsze, the
child of a day that is twenty-five centuries old ;
or between these and the far more primitive
adoration of the Dravidian for his cattle ? If the
vague term "religion," which, as commonly used,
contains at least three elements — moral, scientific,
emotional — covers any distinct and persistent
human impulse, what is the nature and scope of
that impulse ? I wish to represent to myself, as
precisely and as broadly as may be, man's reli-
gious relation.

When we look out into the universe we see
a vast medium, the world, gradually merging

230 The New Spirit.

itself indistinctly in a practical infinite, and in
the centre a certain limited number of souls,
souls like the theoretical atoms of the physicist,
never under any circumstances touching. Let
two souls approach ever so nearly, there is yet a
subtle chasm, through which

" The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea "

still flows. These souls are made up essentially
of mind and body. There can be no change of
consciousness without a corresponding change
in the vascular circulation. There can be no
thrill of body in a soul without a correlated
thrill of mind. Matter and mind in the soul
are co-extensive. When we speak of the
" spirit " as ruling the body, or as yielding to
it, we are, it must be remembered, using a tra-
ditional method of speech which had its origin
in a more primitive theory, just as we still speak
of sun-rise. In the soul the spiritual can no
more be subordinated to the material, strictly
speaking, than in water the oxygen be subor-
dinated to the hydrogen. The old dispute for
supremacy between mind and matter no longer
has any significance. Both matter and mind
are in the end equally unknown : exeunt in
mysterium.

The soul is born and then dies. What do we
mean by birth and death ? According to the
old Hebrew conception a spirit was created out

Conclusion. 231

of nothing and put into a mould of matter, and
then at death again passed back into nothing.
But to-day this conception is impossible. Ex
nikilo fii/iil fit. It is clear that both the ele-
ments that make up the soul must be, under
some form, equally eternal. By a marvellous
cosmic incident, our little planet has broken
forth into a strange and beautiful efflorescence.
We rise from the world, whom we are, on
this variegated jet of organic life, to fall back
again to our true life, by whatever unknown
ways and under whatever change of form, con-
scious, it may be, but, as before birth, no longer
with any self to be conscious of, no longer
organic.

Now souls, although they always remain iso-
lated, are acted upon by the world and by other
souls, and when so acted upon they yield an
emotional response. And for the present pur-
pose these actions may be divided into two
classes, corresponding to the two classes of
sympathetic nerve fibres — vaso-constrictor and
vaso-dilator — which control the vascular system,
the rougher daily contacts of life, which contract
though they strengthen the soul with their legacy
of strong desires and griefs, and the incom-
parably rarer contacts at which the soul for a
while and in varying degrees expands with a
glad sense of freedom. As every bodily change
in the compacted soul is correlated with a men-

232 The New Spirit.

tal change, these responses may be spoken of
indifferently in mental or material terms. We
know that they are on the bodily side vaso-
motorial ; that a thrill of joy is accompanied by
a change in arterial tension, and we can there-
fore use this expression of the part as the symbol
. of the whole. It is this enlarged diastole of the
soul that we call religion.

" The whole theory of the universe is directed
unerringly to one single individual, — namely, to
You." From the religious standpoint this is
essentially true. The soul is situated at the
centre of the world, exposed to a practically
infinite number of appeals, to which it is capable
of yielding a practically infinite number of re-
sponses or initiations. Every moment a stream
of influences is striking against the soul and
producing a multitudinous stream of responses,
new stops growing, as it were, beneath the
player's touch. We know that for the most
part the harsh and jarring discords predominate,
that a soul that answers to the world's touch
with a music that is ever large and harmonious,
is so rare that we call it by some divine ideal
word. Yet the field of the soul's liberation is a
large one, whether we look at it on the physical
or on the mental side. The simplest functions
of physiological life may be its ministers.
Everyone who is at all acquainted with the
Persian mystics, knows how wine may be re-

Conclusion. 233

garded as an instrument of religion. Indeed,
in all countries and in all ages, some form of
physical enlargement — singing, dancing, drink-
ing, sexual excitement — has been intimately
associated with worship. Even the momentary
expansion of the soul in laughter is, to however
slight an extent, a religious exercise. I do not
fear to make this assertion ; the expansions of
the soul differ indefinitely in volume and quality.
If this is but a low rung of the ladder along
which pass the angels of our gladness, at the
other end is that vision of divine self-sacrifice,
so marked in the more highly developed re-
ligions, which has sustained through sorrow and
defeat some of the world's loftiest spirits. They
differ, as much as we will, in degree, but be-
tween them what hint by which to draw a line ?
Whenever an impulse from the world strikes
against the organism, and the resultant is not
discomfort or pain, not even the muscular
contraction of strenuous manhood, but a joy-
ous expansion or aspiration of the whole soul
— there is religion. It is the infinite for which
we hunger, and we ride gladly on every little
wave that promises to bear us towards it.1

When we try to classify the chief of these

1 It may be said that religion, as even the etymology of
the word witnesses, has been a force on the side of re-
pression. That also is true ; it cannot indeed be too
strongly emphasized. Only in the strength of that

234 The New Spirit.

affections of the soul according to the impulses
that arouse them, we find that they may be
conveniently divided into four classes : — (i.)
Those caused by the liberation of impulses stored
up in the soul. (2.) Those caused by impulses
from other souls. (3.) Those caused by im-
pulses from the world, as distinct from souls.
(4.) Those caused by an intuition of union with
the world.

(1.) Here we are, above all, concerned with art.
It is not necessary here to distinguish between
the emotion of the artist and that of him who
merely follows the artist, passing his hand as it
were over the other's work, and receiving, in a
less degree it may be, the same emotion. We
are all artists potentially. The secret of the
charm of art is that it presents to us an external
world which is manifestly of like nature with the
spul. " Non merita nome di Creatore," ac-
cording to Tasso's saying, "se non Iddio ed il
Poeta." The work of art — poem, statue, music —
succeeds in being what every philosophy attempts
to be. Neither change nor death can touch it ;
also it is immeasurable ; we feel that wc are in

joyous expansion could men have acted and suffered
such intolerable torture in the service of religion. (It
must be remembered, however, that in certain stages of
civilization religion is largely identified with morality).
It is necessary to generalize from the most various and
highly specialized cases in order to arrive at a reasonable
definition.

Conclusion. 235

the presence of the infinite. No art has ever
succeeded in embodying those visions of the
infinite which are commonly regarded as speci-
fically religious— so that even to-day we respond
with a thrill of dilatation— as the old fragmen-
tary art of Egypt in the ruined temples of the
Thcbaid. Greek art, also, is a manifestation of
the infinite ; we may lose ourselves among those
subtle curves of man's or woman's body. A
Gothic cathedral of the thirteenth century is an
embodiment of the infinite world itself. The
soul responds expansively to all these things.
When that response is wanting, and the art
therefore, however interesting, is not religious—
as in the art of Pompeii and the Italian post-
Raphaelite art— it will generally be found tech-
nically inferior. The subject, one may note, has
little or nothing to do with the matter. A re-
presentation of God the Father rarely evokes
any religious response. De Hooge, by means of
mere sunlight and the rubbish of a back-yard,
awakes in us an enlarging thrill of joy. In
music the most indefinite and profound mysteries
of the soul are revealed and placed outside us as
a gracious and marvellous orb ; the very secret
of the soul is brought forth and set in the audible
world. That is why no other art smites us with
so powerfully religious an appeal as music ; no
other art tells us such old forgotten secrets about
ourselves.

236 The New Spirit.

" O ! what is this that knows the road I came ? "
It is in the mightiest of all instincts, the primi-
tive sexual traditions of the races before man
was, that music is rooted.

There are perhaps two instincts, a motor and
a sensory, lying at the bottom of art and the
delight in art. All the constructive instincts of
living things, from bees and ants and worms and
birds upwards, have gone to mould our delight
in the fashioning of a whole, and in the contem-
plation of its fashion. The same process was
carried on into human life. The primitive potter
who took clay and wrought with her hands, and
dinted with her nails, the cup or pot or jar,
wrought it through long ages ever more lovely
and perfect, embodying therein all that she knew
of the earth's uses and saw of its beauty, and by a
true instinct she called her work a living creature.
The baskets that early men wove, and the
weapons that they carved for themselves, and
their rhythmical cries in war-dance or worship,
are part of a chain that presents itself again in
Gothic cathedrals or Greek and Elizabethan
dramas.

Even stronger than this motor instinct of art
is the sensory delight in beauty which has its
root in the attraction of sex. Not indeed the
only root ; all the things in the world that give
light and heat and food and shelter and help
gather around themselves some garment of love-

Conclusion. 237

liness, and so become the stuff of art ; the sun
and the reindeer are among the very first things
to which men tried to give artistic expression.
But the sexual instinct is more poignant and
overmastering, more ancient than any as a
source of beauty. Colour and song and strength
and skill — such are the impressions that male
and female have graved on each other's hearts in
their moments of most intense emotional exalta-
tion. Their reflections have been thrown on the
whole world. When the youth awakes to find a
woman is beautiful, he finds, to his amazement,
that the world also is beautiful. Who can say
in what lowly organism was stored the first of
those impressions of beauty, the reflections of
sexual emotion, to which all creators of beauty — ■
whether in the form of the Venus of Milo, the
Madonna di San Sisto, Chopin's music, Shelley's
lyrics — can always appeal, certain of response ?
One might name finally as the highest, most
complex summit of art reached in our own
time — a summit on which art is revealed in
its supreme religious form — Wagner's " Parsifal."
These things sprang from love, as surely as
the world would have been wellnigh barren of
beauty had the sexual method of reproduction
never replaced all others. Beauty is the child
of love ; the world, at least all in it worth living
for, was the creation of love.

Yet another art, more subtle and complex, has

238 The New Spirit.

played a large part in the history of religion —
the art of metaphysic. The savage finds reli-
gious gratification in the exercise of his coarser
senses, in singing or dancing or drinking ; the
man of large and refined intellectual develop-
ment, a Plato, a Spinoza, a Kant, finds it in phi-
losophy. Such men, indeed, are few, but by
force of intelligence they have been enabled to
thrust their pictures of the world on inferior
minds ; their arts have become articles. But
every man who has reached the stage of develop-
ment in which he can truly experience the joy
of the philosophic emotion will construct his own
philosophy. A philosophy is the house of the
mind, and no two philosophies can be alike
because no two minds are alike. But the emo-
tion is the same, the emotion of expansive joy
in a house not built with hands, in which the
soul has made for herself a large and harmonious
dwelling.

(2.) It is true that souls remain for ever apart.
The lover seeks to be absorbed altogether in the
heaven of the loved personality, but in the end
the heaven remains unsealed.

" Adfigunt avide corpus junguntque salivas

oris et itispirant pressantes dentibus ora,

nequiquatn."

And yet a large or lovely personality is not

the less an outlook towards the infinite. We

cannot think of certain men of immense range

Conclusion. 239

or power or sweetness — St. Francis, Leonardo,
Napoleon, Darwin — without experiencing a
movement of liberation. To pronounce the
names of such men is of the nature of an act of
worship. I cannot for a moment think of
Shakespeare without a thrill of exultation at
such gracious plenitude of power. No person,
probably, ever made so ardent a personal ap-
peal to men as Jesus. He discovered a whole
new world of emotional life, a new expansion of
joy, a kingdom in which slave and harlot took
precedence of priest and king. To the men for
whom that new emotional world was fresh and
living, torture and shame and death counted as
nothing beside so large a possession of inward
gladness. The weakest and lowest became
heroes and saints in the effort to guard a pearl
of so great price. There are few more inspir-
ing figures in the history of man than the white
body of the slave-girl Blandina, that hung from
the stake day after day with the beasts in the
amphitheatre at Lyons, torn and bleeding, yet,
instar generosi cnjusdam athletce, with the un-
dying cry on her lips, Christiana sum ! It is
open to everyone to give liberating impulses to
his fellows. It is the distinction of Jesus that
he has, for us, permanently expanded the
bounds of individuality. We all breathe deeper
and freer because of that semi-ideal carpenter's
son. " Fiat experimentum in corpore vi/i," said

240 The New Spirit.

the physician in the old story, by the bedside of
a wretched patient. " Non est corpus tarn vile
pro quo mortuus est Christus," unexpectedly re-
turned the dying man. The charm of Jesus can
never pass away when it is rightly apprehended.
But it is not alone the large mystery of excep-
tional personalities which calls out this response.
To certain finely-tempered spirits no human thing
is too mean to fail in making this emotional ap-
peal. The chief religious significance of Walt
Whitman lies in his revelation of the emotional
value of the entire common human personality
and all that belongs to it. The later Athenians
(as also Goethe) placed above all things the
harmonious development of the individual in
its higher forms. It still remained to show
the loveliness of the complete ordinary per-
sonality. Whitman's " Song of Myself " cannot
in this respect be over-estimated.1

1 The late William Cyples, in his charming and neg-
lected magnum opus, " The Process of Human Ex-
perience " (p. 462), rightly traces this form of religion to
the feeling generated between lovers, friends, parent and
children. " A few have at intervals walked in the world,"
he adds, " who have, each in his own original way, found
out this marvel. ... It has proved sufficient for them
even to wish enough to help their race ; instantly these
secret delights have risen in their hearts. Straightway
man in general has become to them so sweet a thing
that the infatuation has seemed to the rest of their fellows
to be a celestial madness. Beggars' rags to their un-

Conclusion. 241

(3.) There is a religion of science. It is rarer
than has sometimes been supposed, and among
men of science, probably, it is seldom found.
Strauss's " Old Faith and New " is one of the
chief attempts by a man of science to present
the scientific attitude as food for the religious
consciousness. The result is dreary in the ex-
treme, in the end almost ludicrous. Herbert
Spencer's attitude towards the Unknowable is
a distinct though faint approximation to the
religious relationship. Positivism, with its
quasi-scientific notions, was founded on a
curiously narrow conception of the nature of

hesitating lips grew fit for kissing, because humanity
had touched the garb ; there were no longer any menial
acts, but only welcome services. It was the humblest,
the easiest, the readiest of duties to lay down life for the
ignorant, the ill-behaved, the unkind, — for any and all
who did but wear the familiar human shape. That this
ecstasy of humanity should rise so much higher than any
other is according to the plain working of the law of
accumulation of finer consciousness by complexity in the
occasioning activity. Remember by how much man is
the subtlest circumstance in the world ; at how many
points he can attach relationships ; how manifold and
perennial he is in his results. All other things are
dull, meagre, tame beside him. If the most part of us
are only as dross to one another, in place of being of this
priceless value, it can only be from the lack of mutual
services among us. Without these how can we but want
sufficient adaptiveness of mood,— how can we help groan-
ing under the weight of instincts half organized or wholly
unfulfilled ? "

R

242 The New Spirit.

religion, and its religious sterility is probably
inevitable. The man of science has little to do
with magnificent generalizations ; he is con-
cerned chiefly with the patient investigation of
details ; it is but rarely that he feels called upon,
like Kepler or Newton, for any emotional re-
sponse to the grandeur and uniformity of law.
Yet to many this vision of universal law has
come as a light moving over chaos, a glad new
discovery of the vastness and yet the homeliness
of the world.

An aesthetic emotion is not necessarily re-
ligious, even within the field of inanimate
nature. So also the elusive tints, the subtle
perfumes of things, so far from liberating the
soul, may excite a tormenting desire to grasp
and appropriate what is so lovely and so in-
tangible. Still, there is a distinct class of emo-
tions aroused by nature which is of the religious
order. A large expanse of air or sea or undulat-
ing land, or the placid infinity of the star-lit
sky, seems necessary to impart that enlarging
and pacifying sense of nature alike to poets and
peasants. Some sight or sound of nature, either
habitually, or under some special conditions in
the percipient, may strike upon the soul and
liberate it at once from the bonds of common-
place actuality. Perhaps no modern man has
better expressed the religious aspects of nature
than Thoreau. Of the American wood-thrush

Conclusion. 243

Thoreau can rarely speak without using the lan-
guage of religion. " All that was ripest and
fairest in the wilderness and the wild man is
preserved and transmitted to us in the strain of
the wood-thrush. . . . Whenever a man hears
it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring.
Wherever he hears it, there is a new world and
a free country, and the gates of heaven are not
shut against him. Most other birds sing, from
the level of my ordinary cheerful hours, a carol,
but this bird never fails to speak to me out of
an ether purer than that I breathe, of immortal
vigour and beauty." Generally, however, this
emotion appears to be associated, not so much
with isolated beautiful objects, as with great
vistas in which beauty may scarcely inhere —

" all waste
And solitary places ; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be."

It is indeed myself that I unconsciously project
into the large and silent world around me ; the
exhilaration I feel is a glad sense of the vast
new bounds of my nature. That is why, at the
appearance of another human being, I sink
back immediately into the limits of my own
normal individuality. I am no longer conter-
minous with the world around me ; I cannot
absorb or control another individuality like my
own. I become a self-conscious human being

244 The New Spirit.

in the presence of another self-conscious human
being.

(4.) The supreme expression of the religious
consciousness lies always in an intuition of union
with the world, under whatever abstract or con-
crete names the infinite not-self may be hidden.
The perpetual annunciation of this union has
ever been the chief gladness of life. It comes in
the guise of a KaOapvis of egoism, a complete re-
nunciation of the limits of individuality — of all
the desires and aims that seem to converge in
the single personality — and a joyous acceptance
of what has generally seemed an immense ex-
ternal Will, now first dimly or clearly realized.
In every age this intuition has found voice — voice
that has often grown wild and incoherent with
the torrent of expansive emotion that impelled
it. It is this intuition which is the " emptiness "
of Lao-tsze, the freedom from all aims that
centre in self: " It is only by doing nothing that
the kingdom can be made one's own." This is
the great good news of the Upanishads : the
dtman, the soul, may attain to a state of yoga, of
union, with the supreme dtman; free, henceforth,
from doubts and desires which pass over it as
water passes over the leaf of the lotus without
wetting it ; acting, henceforth, only as acts the
potter's wheel when the potter has ceased to
turn it : " If I know that my own body is not
mine, and yet that the whole earth is mine, and

Conclusion. 245

again that it is both mine and thine — no harm
can happen then." The Buddhist's Nirvana,
whether interpreted as a state to be attained
before or after death, has the same charm ; it
opens up the kingdom of the Universe to man ;
it offers to the finite a home in the infinite. This
is the great assertion of Christ, " I and my
Father are one; " and whenever Christianity has
reached its highest expression, from Paul's day
to our own, it has but sung over again the old
refrain of joy at the " new birth " into eternal
life — the union, as it is said, of the soul through
Christ with God — a tender Father, a great sus-
taining Power on which the soul may rest and
be at peace :

" E la sua volontade e nostra pace."

And that again is but in another form the
Sufiism of Jelal-ed-din — the mystic union of the
human bridegroom with the Divine Bride. Even
the austere Imperial Stoic becomes lyrical as
this intuition comes to him : " Everything is
harmonious with me which is harmonious to
thee, O Universe ! " As far back as we can
trace, the men of all races, each in his own way
and with his own symbols, have raised this shout
of exultation. There is no larger freedom for
man.

It seemed well to name at least the chief im-

246 The New Spirit.

plications contained in a broadly generalized
statement of man's religious relation to the
universe. It is important to remember that they
are but an individual mode of representation. I
can only say that I am conscious of myself in
varying attitudes or relations. The terms of
those relationships, stated with however much
probability, will ever remain matter for dispute.
Moreover, various attitudes reveal various meta-
physical implications.

The scientific attitude, for example, has a
series of implications of its own. In its solvents
all things are analyzed and atomized; the "soul"
of our religious world — the vast pulsating centre,
at the bottom of which, according to the pro-
found saying of the old mystic, lies that unutter-
able sigh which we call God — is resolved into a
momentary focus of ever-shifting rays of force ;
it is but an incident in a huge evolution of
shifting forces which we may, if we like, personify
as Nature, but which, none the less, we cannot
conceive as a whole. The scientific attitude has
its own implications, and their far-reaching sig-
nificance, their immense value for the individual
and for the race, can scarcely be overrated.

Again, the moral attitude is equally distinct.
The criminal after a successful piece of villainy
may feel a thrill of ecstasy. It is indeed well
known that criminals in every country are the
children of (more or less superstitious) religion.

Conclusion. 247

We may regard morality as grounded in the
sense of personality, gradually extending by
imagination and sympathy to every individual.
Or we may regard it as springing, in a sense of
adhesiveness, from the family and resulting rela-
tionships, and thence growing into a conscious-
ness of the oneness of all human interests, the
individuals finding themselves to be, according
to that Stoic conception which has moulded
European laws and is still a leavening influence
in European ethics, members one with another
in the same natural body of humanity. In any
case, as a moral being the individual finds him-
self dependent on other individuals, and with a
duty, therefore, laid upon him to live harmo-
niously with those individuals ; there being no
response forthcoming to the demands of his own
nature unless he also responds to the demands
of other natures. Religion, however, knows
nothing of the scientific "nature" or of the
ethical " man ; " its impulse is from within and
of free grace.

At the dawn of civilization, it is true, religion
and morals are inextricably mingled ; they only
become disentangled by a gradual evolution.
The Toda who regards as sacred an ancient
cattle-bell is obeying an impulse of adoration
whose foundation is, probably, largely ethical,
for the bull is intimately connected with the
beginnings of civilization. A religious impulse

248 The New Spirit.

will sometimes have an ethical element ; morals
will sometimes find an ally in religion. But
religion with its internal criterion and morals
with its more external criterion remain essentially
distinct, sometimes antagonistic : " to reject reli-
gion," Thoreau said, "is the first step towards
moral excellence." That is but a puny religion
that is based on morals ; on the other hand, the
morals that rests on religion will sooner or later
collapse with it in a common ruin. That has
been too often seen. Religions change : every
man is free to have his own, or to have none.
No man, scarcely even a Crusoe, is free to have
no morals, and the ideal morality cannot widely
vary for any two societies.

Yet religion cannot live nobly without science
or without morals. It is only by a strenuous
devotion to science, by a perpetual reference to
the moral stmcture of life, that religion — so made
conscious of its nature and its limits — can be
rendered healthful.

" None can usurp this height ....

But those to whom the miseries of the world

Are misery, and will not let them rest ; "

so spake Moneta to Keats, among all English
poets the purest artist.

A man takes sides with religion, or with
science, or with morals ; oftener he spends the
brief moments of his existence in self-preserva-
tion, fighting now on one side, now on the other.

Conclusion. 249

But for a little while we are allowed to enter the
house of life and to gather around its fire. Why
pull each other's hair and pinch each other's
arms like naughty children ? Well would it be
to warm ourselves at the fire together, to clasp
hands, to gain all the joy that comes of com-
radeship, before we are called out, each of us,
into the dark, alone.

The other elements fall away from religion,
leaving the emotional, deeper and more funda-
mental than either of the others ; just as the
brain itself is controlled by the sympathetic
system which outlives it and holds in its hands
the centres of life. That element underlay the
crude imaginings of the primitive man who first
created a spiritual world out of the stuff of his
dreams and his primitive delight in the most
marvellous object he saw, the sun, that as he
truly divined is the source not only of light but
of life ; just as it underlies also our more com-
plex imaginings to-day. In religion, we are ap-
pealing not to any narrow or superficial element
of the man, but to something which is more
primitive than the intellectual efflorescence of
the brain, the central fire of life itself.

Our supreme business in life — not as we made
it, but as it was made for us when the world
began — is to carry and to pass on as we received
it, or better, the sacred lamp of organic being
that we bear within us. Science and morals are

250 The New Spirit.

subservient to the reproductive activity ; that is
why they are so imperative. The rest is what we
will, play, art, consolation — in one word, religion.
If religion is not science or morals, it is the
sum of the unfettered expansive impulses of our
being. Life has been defined as, even physically
and chemically, a tension. All our lives long we
are struggling against that tension, but we can
truly escape from it only by escaping from life
itself. Religion is the stretching forth of our
hands toward the illimitable. It is an intuition
of the final deliverance, a half-way house on the
road to that City which we name mysteriously
Death,

THE WALTER SCOIT PRESS, NEWC.CSTLE-ON-TVN E.

PRESS OPINIONS
ON "THE NEW SPIRIT."

" It is easy to dislike his book, it is possible to dislike it furiously;
but the book is so honest, so earnest, so stimulating in its tolerant but
convinced unconventionality, that it claims for itself a like sincerity and
seriousness in the reader. . . . Mr. Ellis has produced a book which
will be hotly discussed, no doubt, for it is nothing if not initiative, we
might almost say revolutionary ; but it is not a book to be disre-
garded. ... It has sincerity and it has power; and sincerity and
power compel at least attention." — Speaker.

" Mr. Havelock Ellis has discovered a ' New Spirit.' We have read
him with care and patience, and we should be sorry to describe it ; we
only know that it is not intoxicating." — Scots Observer.

" Welcome is warmly due to this fresh, buoyant, and sincere
volume of essays by Mr. Havelock Ellis. . . . There are parts of the
study of Heine which are not unworthy to be named — it is high praise
— with Matthew Arnold's inimitable paper upon that writer, a paper
almost as classic as Heine himself. . . . The last word upon so
suggestive and finished a piece of work ought to be one of ungrudging
praise. " — Academy.

" Mr. Carlyle described, it seems to us, Mr. Havelock Ellis himself
with great exactness in the person of a certain biographer of Voltaire,
'an inquiring, honest-hearted character, many of whose statements
must have begun to astonish even himself.' Mr. Ellis must be very
' inquiring,' for we have seldom met with one who knows so many
things that other people do not know." — Alhenaiim.

"Each of these essays is a thorough and well-considered piece of
work, admirable in information, firm in grasp, stimulating in style,
appreciative in matter, and the survey afforded is broad. ... It is an
altogether unusual work, both for its ambition and for its matter ; it
brings the reader near to some of the marked ideas of the time."
— Nation.

"The points of the New Spirit are its passion for getting things
right in the matter of property and in the matter of true human worth."
— Daily News.

" The only coherent constituent of the New Spirit which this book
professes to set forth, is a vehement hatred, amounting to a passion,
against conventional unveracities, and a determination that they should
be swept away. . . . We cannot imagine anything of which it could be
more necessary for human nature, so taught [by our Lord], to purge
itself, than the New Spirit of Havelock Ellis." — Spectator.

" Mr. Havelock Ellis has written an interesting and significant book,
which it is quite easy to ridicule, but which certainly deserves a fair
hearing. . . . Apparently these writers are chosen because they all
agree in a hatred of shams, in looking facts in the face, and in demand-
ing provision for the healthy satisfaction of animal wants. . . . Mr.
Ellis writes with force and insight ; but, whether from brevity or want
of caution, he leaves with regard to these subjects an impression
which he would probably not himself desire to produce." — Murray's
Magazine.

"The concluding chapter, wherein Mr. Ellis expresses his own
' intimate thought and secret emotion,' is one of the best utterances of
the New Spirit which we have ever read." — Echo.

" Un volume de haute critique litteraire qui rappelle le style fort et
la methode stricte de Hennequin." — Mereure de France.

"A more foolish, unwholesome, perverted piece of sentimental cant
we have never wasted our time over." — World.

" Excellent examples of appreciative criticism of an exceedingly
interesting series of authors, of whom every one ought to know at least
as much as Mr. Ellis here tells us so freshly and vivaciously." — Scottish
Leader.

" We only refer to this unpleasant compilation of cool impudence
and effrontery to warn our readers against it." — Dundee Advertiser.

"Beautiful both in thought and expression. But Mr. Ellis seems to
have laid aside altogether the wise restraint which characterises his
volume on * The Criminal.' . . . The scientific spirit, of which at
other times he has shown himself a distinguished exponent, should
have prevented him frcm such error." — Arbroath Herald.

"Ardent, enthusiastic, and eloquent." — Boston Literary World.

" It is not often that the weary and heart-so :e reviewer, struggling to
keep abreast of the Protean outpourings of the press, falls in with any-
thing so well-informed, so rich in thought and suggestion as 7 he New
Spirit. " — Wit and Wisdom.

London : WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane.

A UTHORISED VERSION.

Crown Svo, Cloth, Price 6s.

PEER GYNT: A Dramatic Poem.

BY HENRIK IBSEN.

TRANSLATED BY

WILLIAM AND CHARLES ARCHER.

This Translation, though unrhymed, preserves throughout the
various rhythms of the original.

" In Brand the hero is an embodied protest against the poverty of
spirit and half-heartedness that Ibsen rebelled against in his country-
men. In Peer Gynt the hero is himself the embodiment of that spirit.
In Brand the fundamental antithesis, upon which, as its central theme,
the drama is constructed, is the contrast between the spirit of com-
promise on the one hand, and the motto ■ everything or nothing ' on
the other. And Peer Gynt is the very incarnation of a compromising
dread of decisive committal to any one course. In Brand the problem
of self-realisation and the relation of the individual to his surroundings
is obscurely struggling for recognition, and in Peer Gynt it becomes the
formal theme upon which all the fantastic variations of the drama are
built up. In both plays alike the problems of heredity and the influence
of early surroundings are more than touched upon; and both alike
culminate in the doctrine that the only redeeming power on earth or in
heaven is the power of love." — Mr. P. H. Wicksteed.

London : Walter Scott, Limited, 24 Warwick Lane.

Foolscap Svo, Cloth, Price y. 6a.

THE INSPECTOR- GENERAL

(Or "REVIZOR.")

A BUSSIAN COMEDY.

By NIKOLAI VASILIYEVICH GOGOL.

Translated from the original Russian, with Introduction and
Notes, by A. A. SYKES, B.A, Trinity College, Cambridge.

Though one of the most brilliant and characteristic of
Gogol's works, and well-known on the Continent, the
present is the first translation of his Revizbr, or Inspector-
General, which has appeared in English. A satire on
Russian administrative functionaries, the Revizbr is a
comedy marked by continuous gaiety and invention, full
of " situation," each development of the story accentuating
the satire and emphasising the characterisation, the whole
play being instinct with life and interest Every here and
there occurs the note of caprice, of naivete', of unexpected
fancy, characteristically Russian. The present translation
will be found to be admirably fluent, idiomatic, and
effective.

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New Illustrated Edition.

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CONTENTS.

Hints to Travellers — Everyday Expressions — Arriving
at and Leaving a Railway Station — Custom House
Enquiries — In a Train — At a Buffet and Restaurant —
At an Hotel — Paying an Hotel Bill — Enquiries in a
Town — On Board Ship — Embarking and Disembarking
— Excursion by Carriage — Enquiries as to Diligences —
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The contents of these little handbooks are so arranged
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1 MALORY'S ROMANCE OF KING ARTHUR AND THE

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2 THOREAU'S WALDEN. WITH INTRODUCTORY NOTE

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4 THOREAU'S ESSAYS. EDITED, WITH AN INTRO-

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5 CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, ETC.

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6 LANDOR'S IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. SELECTED,

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7 PLUTARCH'S LIVES (LANGHORNE). WITH INTRO-

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9 SHELLEY'S ESSAYS AND LETTERS. EDITED, WITH
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to SWIFT'S PROSE WRITINGS. CHOSEN AND ARRANGED,
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11 MY STUDY WINDOWS. BY TAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

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12 LOWELL'S ESSAYS ON THE ENGLISH POETS. WITH

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21 SELECTIONS FROM SENECA. WITH INTRODUCTION

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24 WHITE'S NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. WITH

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26 MAZZINI'S ESSAYS : LITERARY, POLITICAL, AND

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7 PROSE WRITINGS OF HEINE. WITH INTRODUCTION
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28 REYNOLDS'S DISCOURSES. WITH INTRODUCTION

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29 PAPERS OF STEELE AND ADDISON. EDITED BY

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33 SELECT WRITINGS OF EMERSON. WITH INTRO-

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34 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LORD HERBERT. EDITED,

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35 ENGLISH PROSE, FROM MAUNDEVILLE TO

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36 THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY, AND OTHER PLAYS. BY

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37 IRISH FAIRY AND FOLK TALES. EDITED AND

Selected by \V. B. Yeats.

38 ESSAYS OF DR. JOHNSON, WITH BIOGRAPHICAL

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39 ESSAYS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT. SELECTED AND

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40 LANDOR'S PENTAMERON, AND OTHER IMAGINARY

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41 POE'S TALES AND ESSAYS. EDITED, WITH INTRO-

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42 VICAR OF WAKEFIELD. BY OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

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43 POLITICAL ORATIONS, FROM WENTWORTH TO

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44 THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. BY

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45 THE POET AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. BY OLIVER

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47 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS TO HIS SON.

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49 JANE EYRE. BY CHARLOTTE BRONTE. EDITED BY

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50 ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND. EDITED BY LOTHROP

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51 THE PROSE WRITINGS OF THOMAS DAVIS. EDITED

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52 SPENCE'S ANECDOTES. A SELECTION. EDITED

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53 MORE'S UTOPIA, AND LIFE OF EDWARD V. EDITED,

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54 SADI'S GULISTAN, OR FLOWER GARDEN. TRANS-

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55 ENGLISH FAIRY AND FOLK TALES. EDITED BY

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56 NORTHERN STUDIES. BY EDMUND GOSSE. WITH

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57 EARLY REVIEWS OF GREAT WRITERS. EDITED BY

E. Stevenson.

58 ARISTOTLE'S ETHICS. WITH GEORGE HENRY

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59 LANDOR'S PERICLES AND ASPASIA. EDITED, WITH

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60 ANNALS OF TACITUS. THOMAS GORDON'S TRANS-

lation. Edited, with an Introduction, by Arthur Gal ton.

61 ESSAYS OF ELIA. BY CHARLES LAMB. EDITED,

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62 BALZAC'S SHORTER STORIES. TRANSLATED BY

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63 COMEDIES OF DE MUSSET. EDITED, WITH AN

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64 CORAL REEFS. BY CHARLES DARWIN. EDITED,

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65 SHERIDAN'S PLAYS. EDITED, WITH AN INTRO-

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66 OUR VILLAGE. BY MISS MITFORD. EDITED, WITH

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67 MASTER HUMPHREY'S CLOCK, AND OTHER STORIES.

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68 TALES FROM WONDERLAND. BY RUDOLPH

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69 ESSAYS AND PAPERS BY DOUGLAS JERROLD. EDITED

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70 VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN. BY

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71 "THE ATHENIAN ORACLE." A SELECTION. EDITED

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72 ESSAYS OF SAINTE- BEUVE. TRANSLATED AND

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73 SELECTIONS FROM PLATO. FROM THE TRANS-

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74 HEINE'S ITALIAN TRAVEL SKETCHES, ETC. TRANS-

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75 SCHILLER'S MAID OF ORLEANS. TRANSLATED,

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76 SELECTIONS FROM SYDNEY SMITH. EDITED, WITH

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77 THE NEW SPIRIT. BY HAVELOCK ELLIS.

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Volumes already Issued —

LIFE OF LONGFELLOW. By Prof. Eric S. Robertson.
" A most readable little work."— Liverpool Mercury.

LIFE OF COLERIDGE. By Hail Caine.

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skill."— Scotsman.

LIFE OF DICKEN 3. By Frank T. Marzials.

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Marzials's little book."— Athenceum.

LIFE OF DANTE 'GABRIEL ROSSETTI. By J. Knight.

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LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON. By Colonel F. Grant.

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LIFE OF DARWIN. By G. T. Bettany.

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LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE. By A. Birrell.

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Birrell's pleasant book."— St. Jamet' Gazette.

LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. By R. Garnett, LL.D.

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fairer than the way in which he takes us through Carlyle's life and
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LIFE OF ADAM SMITII. By R. B. Haldane, M.P.

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LIFE OF KEATS. By W. M. Rossetti.

"Valuable for the ample information which it contains. — Cambridge
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LIFE OF SHELLEY. By William Sharp.

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LIFE OF SMOLLETT. By David Hannay.

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LIFE OF GOLDSMITH. By Austin Dobson.

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and pathetic vicissitudes, is here retold, as none could tell it better."— Daily
A'ews.

LIFE OF SCOTT. By Professor Yonge.

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LIFE OF BURNS. By Professor Blackie.

" The editor certainly made a hit when he persuaded Blackie to write
about Burns."— Pall Hall Gazette.

LIFE OF VICTOR HUGO. By Frank T. Marzials.

" Mr. Marzials's volume presents to us, in a more handy form than any
English or even French handbook gives, the summary of what is known
about the life of the great poet."— Saturday Review.

LIFE OF EMERSON. By Richard Garnett, LL.D.

" No record of Emerson's life could be more desirable."— Saturday Review.

LIFE OF GOETHE By James Sims.

"Mr. James Sime's competence as a biographer of Goethe is beyond
question." — Manchester Guardian.

LIFE OF CONGREVE. By Edmund Gosse.

"Mr. Qosse has written an admirable biography."— Academy.

LIFE OF BUNYAN. By Canon Venables.

"A most intelligent, appreciative, and valuable memoir."— Scotsman.

LIFE OF CRABBE. By T. E. KEBBEL.

" No English poet since Shakespeare has observed certain aspects of
nature and of human life more closely." — Athenaeum.

LIFE OF HEINE. By William Sharp.

" An admirable monograph . . . more fully written up to the lovel of
recent knowledge and criticism than any other English work."— Scotsman.

London : Walter Scott, Limited, 24 Warwick Lane.

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LIFE OF MILL. By W. L. Courtney.

" A most sympathetic and discriminating memoir." — Glasgow Ilerald.
LIFE OF SCHILLER. By Henry W. Nevinson.

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LIFE OF CAPTAIN MARRYAT. By David Hannay.

"We have nothing but praise for the manner in which Mr. Hannay has
done justice to him." — Saturday Review.

LIFE OF LESSING. By T. W. Rolleston.

" One of the best books of the series." — Manchester Guardian.
LIFE OF MILTON. By Richard Garnett, LL.D.

" Has never been more charmingly or adequately told."— Scottish Leader.
LIFE OF BALZAC. By Frederick Wedmore.

" Mr. Wedmore's monograph on the greatest of French writers of fiction,
whose greatness is to be measured by comparison with his successors, is a
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LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT. By Oscar Browning.

"A book of the character of Mr. Browning's, to stand midway be-
tween the bulky work of Mr. Cross and the very slight sketch of Miss
Blind, was much to be desired, and Mr. Browning has done his work with
vivacity, and not without skilL"— Manchester Guardian.

LIFE OF JANE AUSTEN. By Goldwin Smith.

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LIFE OF BROWNING. By William Sharp.

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LIFE OF SCHOPENHAUER. By Professor Wallace.

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LIFE OF CERVANTES. By W. E. Watts.

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IBSEN'S FAMOUS PROSE DRAMAS.

Edited bv WILLIAM ARCHER.

Complete in Five Vols. Crown 8vo, Cloth, Price 3/6 each.

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11 We seem at last to be shown men and women as they are ; and at first it
is more than we can endure. . . . All Ibsen's chatacters speak and act as if
they were hypnotised, and under their creator's imperious demand to reveal
themselves. There never was such a mirror held up to nature before : it is
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Vol. I. "A DOLL'S HOUSE," "THE LEAGUE OF
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Vol. III. "LADY INGER OF OSTRAT," "THE VIKINGS
AT HELGELAND," "THE PRETENDERS." With an
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Vol. IV. "EMPEROR AND GALILEAN." With an
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Vol. V. "ROSMERSHOLM," "THE LADY FROM THE
SEA," "HEDDA GABLER." Translated by William
ARCHER. With an Introductory Note.

The sequence of the plays in each volume is chronological ; the complete
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THE CANTERBURY POETS.

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THE CHRISTIAN YEAR By the Rev. John Keble.

COLERIDGE Edited by Joseph Skipsey.

LONGFELLOW Edited by Eva Hope.

CAMPBELL Edited by John Hogben.

SHELLEY Edited by Joseph Skipsey.

WORDSWORTH Edited by A. J. Symington.

BLAKE Edited by Joseph Skipsey.

WHITTIER Edited by Eva Hope.

POE Edited by Joseph Skipsey.

CHATTERTON Edited by John Richmond.

BURNS. Poems Edited by Joseph Skipsey.

BURNS. Songs Edited by Joseph Skipsey.

MARLOWE Edited by Percy E. Pinkerton.

KEATS Edited by John Hogben.

HERBERT Edited by Ernest Rhys.

HUGO Translated by Dean Carrington.

COWPER Edited by Eva Hope.

SHAKESPEARE'S POEMS, Etc Edited by William Sharp.

EMERSON Edited by Walter Lewin.

SONNETS OF THIS CENTURY Edited by William Sharp.

WHITMAN Edited by Ernest Rhys.

SCOTT. Marmion, etc Edited by William Sharp.

SCOTT. Lady of the Lake, etc Edited by William Sharp.

PRAED Edited by Frederick Cooper.

HOGG Edited by his Daughter, Mrs. Garden.

GOLDSMITH Edited by William Tirebuck.

LOVE LETTERS. Etc By Eric Mackay.

SPENSER Edited by Hon. Roden Noel.

CHILDREN OF THE POETS Edited by Eric S. Robertson.

JONSON Edited by J. Addington Symonds.

BYRON (2 Vols.) Edited by Mathilde Blind.

THE SONNETS OF EUROPE Edited by S. Waddington.

RAMSAY Edited by J. Logie Robertson.

DOBELL Edited by Mrs. Dobell.

London: Walter Scott, Limited, 24 Warwick Lane.

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DAYS OF THE YEAR With Introduction by William Sharp#

POPE Edited by John Hogben.

HEINE Edited by Mrs. Kroeker.

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER Edited by John S. Fletcher.

BOWLES, LAMB, &c Edited by William Tirebuck.

EARLY ENGLISH POETRY Edited by H. Macaulay Fitxgibbon.

SKA MUSIC Edited by Mrs Sharp.

HERRICK Edited by Ernest Rhys.

BALLADES AND RONDEAUS Edited by J. Gleeson White.

IRISH MINSTRELSY Edited by U. Halliday Sparling.

MILTON'S PARADISE LOST Edited by J. Bradshaw, M.A., LL.D.

JACOBITE BALLADS Edited by G. S. Macquoid.

AUSTRALIAN BALLADS Edited by D. B. W. Sladen, B.A.

MOORE Edited by John Dorrian.

BORDER BALLADS Edited by Graham R. Tomson.

SONG-TIDE By Philip Bourke Marston.

ODES OF HORACE Translations by Sir Stephen de Vere, Bt.

OSSIAN Edited by George Eyre-Todd.

ELFIN MUSIC Edited by Arthur Edward Waite.

SOUTHEY Edited by Sidney R. Thompson.

CHAUCER Edited by Frederick Noel Paton.

POEMS OF WILD LIFE Edited by Charles G. D. Roberts, M. A.

PARADISE REGAINED Edited by J. Bradshaw, M. A., LL.D.

CRABBE Edited by E. Lamplough.

DORA GREENWELL Edited by William Dorling.

FAUST Edited by Elizabeth Craigmyle.

AMERICAN SONNETS Edited by William Sharp.

LANDOR'S POEMS Edited by Ernest Radford.

GREEK ANTHOLOGY Edited by Graham R. Tomson.

HUNT AND HOOD Edited by J. Harwood Panting.

HUMOROUS POEMS Edited by Ralph H. Caine.

LYTTON'S PLAYS Edited by R. Farquharson Sharp.

GREAT ODES Edited by William Sharp.

MEREDITH'S POEMS Edited by M. Betham-Edwards.

PAINTER-POETS Edited by Kineton Parkes.

WOMEN POETS Edited by Mrs. Sharp.

LOVE LYRICS Edited by Percy Hulburd.

AMERICAN HUMOROUS VERSE Edited by James Birr.

MINOR SCOTCH LYRICS Edited by Sir George Douglas.

CAVALIER LYRISTS Edited by Will H. Dircks.

GERMAN BALLADS . . ~ Edited by Elizabeth Craigmyle.

SONGS OF BER ANGER Translated by William Toynbee.

POEMS OF THE HON. RODEN NOEL. With an Introduction by
Robert Buchanan.

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THE

Music of the Poets

A MUSICIANS' BIRTHDAY BOOK.

EDITED BY ELEONORE D'ESTERRE KEELING.

This is a unique Birthday Book. Against each date are
given the names of musicians whose birthday it is, together
with a verse quotation appropriate to the character of their
different compositions or performances. A special feature of
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graphs, and autographic music, of living composers. Three
sonnets by Mr. Theodore Watts, on the "Fausts" of Berlioz,
Schumann, and Gounod, have been written specially for thi3
volume. It is illustrated with designs of various musical
instruments, etc.; autographs of Rubenstein, Dvorak, Grieg,
Mackenzie, Villiers Stanford, etc., etc.

" To musical amateurs this will certainly prove the most at-
tractive birthday book ever published."— Manchester Guardian.

" One of those happy ideas that seems to have been yearning
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music stand." — Scottish Leader.

London : Walter Scott, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row.

Nausr JUN1SI&.

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