A memorable period in the history of Europe which we call the Renaissance

The New Spirit by Havelock Ellis is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. INTRODUCTION

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 efflorescence 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 Troyes. It was in the strength of 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 Revolution. 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 structure, now, in the opinion of many, slowly and fearfully toppling down. The nineteenth century has seen the rise and fall of middle-class supremacy. 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[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 Carlyle 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 sometimes 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 discords of his time in the austere calm of Stoicism; the calm of souls

“who weigh

Life well and find it wanting, nor deplore;

But in disdainful silence turn away,

Stand mute, self-centred, stern, and dream no more:”

practically, however, Arnold found it neces[4]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 vesture this same vague unrest, resolved it by the aid of his profound religious sense in refined and æsthetic 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 Quincey, we see a refined development of the passive sensory sides of the human organism with corresponding atrophy of the motor sides. It is clearly impossible 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[5] destructive of man’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 movement 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 relative 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 transforming power by virtue of his method and spirit, his immense patience, his keen observation, 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] 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 Société d’Anthropologie 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[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 consciously 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 inspiring member, often called typical, of the company of those who are filled with the scientific 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] 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 pretending 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 suspicion; 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 years before we conquered the world.[9] We know at last that it must be among our chief ethical rules to see that we build the lofty structure 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 emancipation which is now sweeping across the civilized world means nominally nothing more than that women should have the right to education, freedom to work, and political enfranchisement—nothing in short but the bare ordinary 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[10]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 directness, 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 cannot 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 Transfigurations, the construction of systems of metaphysic, 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,[11] any occasion to fear the rivalry of women. Such things are 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 preponderance in women of the lower, that is, the more important and fundamental nervous centres.[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[12] 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 scientific 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;[13] the man who shared with Darwin the honour of initiating a new scientific era becomes a land nationaliser, 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 accomplished fact, and we can distinctly trace its gradual development; the influence of women is on the eve of attaining its outward consummation, and it is not altogether impossible to forecast 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 instincts. 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] 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 generously democratic colonies of Australia show few brilliant results by this test. It is hard to get rid of the old distinction between a governing class and a governed, and to recognize that every man must be a member of the government.

If democracy means a state in which every man shall be a freeman, neither in economic nor intellectual nor moral subjection, two processes 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 virtually secured to every child in all civilized countries. To this kind of education, however, it is no longer possible to attribute any satisfying[15] sort of virtue. It may produce a very inferior order of clerk; but education—the reasonable development of the individual—it cannot deserve 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 environment 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 essential 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 development. 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 process 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[16] movements and popular needs; it is to the advantage of all that there should be no impassable 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 intellectual 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[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 movement has given enthusiasm to the County Council. 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 of the English people tolerate any considerable amount of “State interference.” The communalization of certain social functions corresponds—without being an exact analogy—to the process by which physiological actions become automatic. As it becomes a State function 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 developing, individual development so far from[18] 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 socializing 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 constitute 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 beginning to open up possibilities which a few years ago would have seemed Utopian. It cannot 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 plébiscite of the adult population of Europe, of whose life-blood these twenty-eight millions are, to-morrow—and what would the régime of militarism be worth? We must certainly expect to see the same process repeated between nations which has everywhere taken place among individuals.[19] 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 tribunal 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 approaching disappearance of war. The wars of modern times have, to a large extent, had commercial 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, we 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] 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[21] 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 dominating Asia. To the English it has never been easy to find a modus vivendi with lower races, or races which we are pleased to consider lower; the very qualities which give us insular independence and toughness of fibre, unfit us for the other task. But the Russian temperament, as is now generally recognized, is peculiarly adapted 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 satisfaction 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] 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, supplying 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[23] nations to emerge from barbarism—that now promise to dominate the world are by temperament 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 careful 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 fundamental 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 developing 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 conditions are now rapidly ceasing; the Suez Canal, which has dealt so decisive a blow to the com[24]mercial 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 adulterate manufactured condition. We witness to-day the wonderful development of India as a centre of production. In the colonies the beginnings 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. Everywhere, for those who have been born in the[25] colonies, 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 sentiment, 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 Fenchurch Street and Cheapside through an atmosphere of old romance. Yet this emotional attitude 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 throughout this book are acting. What impresses one is the vast resonance which now accompanies every human achievement, because of the communalization and extension of the methods of intercourse. It has become one of the chief tasks of science to attain unity, unity of standard[26] 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[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. But 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 indifferent 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 harmonics of his prose, the things that make for rest and for consolation—and who is not sometimes weary and distracted, and in need of rest? We English, it is[28] true, are not an aboriginally religious people; we are great in practical life, and we are marvellous 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 Lâo-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 dialectics: “Truth cannot be discovered by ratiocination,” 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[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 paralyzed. 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 harmonious 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 hyperæsthesia 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 commercialism that has filled so much of our century made art impossible—so impossible that beyond[30] one or two voices, raised to hysterical scream, no one dared to protest against it. The satisfaction 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 conception at the foundation of his lovely and substantial 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 are faithfully 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 collection 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[31] often seemed to me that the novels of this century 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. Many 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] 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 peculiarly personal tenderness. Whitman represents, 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[33] the interpretation of life, though such a marvellous power of presentation; yet a massive elemental force, groping slowly and incoherently 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 instinctively 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 Ecclesiastes beneath your arm.

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