The New Spirit

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 f

on, for instance, which is earliest in date, seems to me now rather formal and

ue, 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] mentio

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[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 Gustave Moreau, come short of the consistent and completely realised art which

e 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 stupendou

rise out 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 synthesis 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

t 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 apolog

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 co

catives. I wished at the outset to take a bird’s-eye view of the world as it presented itself to me personally, 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 increasing and multiplying the countless forms of life. Death itself is but an accidental after-thought,[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

or mystics—we may stand aside, contemplate her great object, and impudently elevate our fingers to our nose. It amuses us,[xvi] and scarcely hurts her. She cannot refuse us the by-play o

.

, 1892.