The New Spirit / Third Edition

by Havelock Ellis

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 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 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 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 commercial 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.