The New Spirit / Third Edition

by Havelock Ellis

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 humour, 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 possible to him—the unity that comes of a recognized and accepted lack of unity. In the lambent 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 Börne 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, 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 transition; 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 mediæval 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 significance of Heine will be lost; that it is not yet lost the eagerness with which his books are read and translated sufficiently testifies.

WHITMAN.

I.

If we put aside imaginative writers—Hawthorne, Poe, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain—America has produced three men of world-wide significance.[5] 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 peacefully 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 austere 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 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, unless 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 education. Every one, for some brief period in early life, should be thrown on his own resources in the solitudes of Nature, to enter into harmonious 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 mysteries 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 frequently clenched, and there was an air of concentrated energy about him; otherwise nothing specially notable, and he was frequently supposed “a pedlar of small wares.” He possessed, 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 photographic register of all he saw and heard.”