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] mention other names I once wished to include, although—partly doubting my competence3 to discuss them, partly fearing that their introduction might seem to interfere4 with the unity5 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 frankly6 supernatural world, and they delighted like children to scatter7 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 infinitely8 remote world while accepting the austere9 conditions of our own earth. The pale ghosts of Puvis de Chavannes’ frescoes10 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, curdling11 amid the flowers; the rich-robed daughters of Apollo among the olives; the[ix] mystic elephant in solemn festival, gathering12 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 has been attained13 by the painter who stands forth14 in the eyes of Europe as the greatest imaginative 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 sinuous15 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 delightful16 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 indented17 clay. It was left for the sculptors18 of Egypt and of Greece and of Italy to form human figures of stone, not as a mere19 symbol of the reality, but as a revelation of their own moods and visions of beauty or passion; and since then the[x] 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 representation in painting which Millet20 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 remains21 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 marvel22 how expression can be carried so far without passing the bounds of nature and simplicity23. It is far from the method of Michelangelo, Rodin’s immediate24 predecessor25, 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 inverted26 dreams. In Rodin’s work, it is through a relentless27 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[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 charmingly told on that gate that was thought worthy28 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 prodigy29 that he could never learn to play the piano, impelled30 by a strange instinct has yet wrought31 music and the stage to a poetic32 height never before approached. Just as our arts 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 impersonal33 synthesis yet attainable34 of the personal influences that thrill our lives, and has built it on the broadest physiological35 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 cacophony36 and confusion—is truly called religion. It will take some time yet before we understand its place[xii] 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 sensory37 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 pungent38, penetrating39, 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, repels40 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 beckon41 men away from the world to a home on the other side of the sky, but the robust42 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[xiii] most ancient modes of human emotion. I sought to emphasise43 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 virtues44 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 acceleration45. The greatest manifestation46 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 hind47 legs, so developing the skilful48 hands and restless brain that brought sin into the world. That strange and perilous49 method of locomotion—which carried other diseases and disabilities in its train, more concrete than sin—marked a revolutionary outburst of new life worth contemplating50. Yet even among the later and minor51 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] personal element has a large place in this study of the “New Spirit.” And it is true that, however honest a piece of mechanism52 your sphygmograph 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 incapable53 of slinging54 facts at the head of the British Goliath (with purely55 benevolent56 intentions), but on this occasion I wrote for my own pleasure: let me apologise to Goliath for any annoyance57 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 pièces justificatives. 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 specially58 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 bent59 on her own ends, and with infinite ingenuity60 uses all our energies to carry out her idea of increasing and multiplying the countless61 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 immortal62 germ-cells which has grown so large and arrogant63 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 delusion64, her délire à forme chronique. But the malady65, if it is one, is incurable66. A friend of mine, under the influence of nitrous oxide67, once found himself face to face with the Almighty68. Being a man of earnest and philosophic69 temperament70, he took advantage of the opportunity to demand passionately71 the meaning and aim of this tangled72 skein of things in which we find ourselves: “Why have You placed us here? For what purpose have You submitted us to all this strife73 and misery74? What is the solution of the riddle75 of life?” And then, uttered in a characteristic bass76, 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, contemplate77 her great object, and impudently78 elevate our fingers to our nose. It amuses us,[xvi] and scarcely hurts her. She cannot refuse us the by-play of her own adaptations. For it all comes of that primitive79 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.
7th October, 1892.
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1
alterations
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| n.改动( alteration的名词复数 )；更改；变化；改变 | |
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aboriginal
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| adj.（指动植物）土生的，原产地的，土著的 | |
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competence
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| n.能力，胜任，称职 | |
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interfere
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| v.(in)干涉，干预；(with)妨碍，打扰 | |
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unity
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| n.团结，联合，统一；和睦，协调 | |
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frankly
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| adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说 | |
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scatter
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| vt.撒，驱散，散开；散布/播；vi.分散，消散 | |
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infinitely
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| adv.无限地，无穷地 | |
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austere
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| adj.艰苦的；朴素的，朴实无华的；严峻的 | |
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frescoes
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| n.壁画( fresco的名词复数 )；温壁画技法，湿壁画 | |
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curdling
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| n.凝化v.（使）凝结( curdle的现在分词 ) | |
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gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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attained
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| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的过去式和过去分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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sinuous
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| adj.蜿蜒的，迂回的 | |
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delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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indented
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| adj.锯齿状的，高低不平的；缩进排版 | |
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sculptors
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| 雕刻家，雕塑家( sculptor的名词复数 )； [天]玉夫座 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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millet
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| n.小米，谷子 | |
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remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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marvel
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| vi.(at)惊叹vt.感到惊异；n.令人惊异的事 | |
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simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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predecessor
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| n.前辈，前任 | |
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inverted
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| adj.反向的，倒转的v.使倒置，使反转( invert的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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relentless
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| adj.残酷的，不留情的，无怜悯心的 | |
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worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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prodigy
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| n.惊人的事物，奇迹，神童，天才，预兆 | |
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impelled
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| v.推动、推进或敦促某人做某事( impel的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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wrought
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| v.引起；以…原料制作；运转；adj.制造的 | |
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poetic
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| adj.富有诗意的，有诗人气质的，善于抒情的 | |
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impersonal
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| adj.无个人感情的，与个人无关的，非人称的 | |
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attainable
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| a.可达到的，可获得的 | |
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physiological
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| adj.生理学的，生理学上的 | |
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cacophony
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| n.刺耳的声音 | |
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sensory
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| adj.知觉的，感觉的，知觉器官的 | |
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pungent
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| adj.（气味、味道）刺激性的，辛辣的；尖锐的 | |
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penetrating
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| adj.（声音）响亮的，尖锐的adj.（气味）刺激的adj.（思想）敏锐的，有洞察力的 | |
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repels
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| v.击退( repel的第三人称单数 )；使厌恶；排斥；推开 | |
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beckon
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| v.(以点头或打手势)向...示意，召唤 | |
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robust
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| adj.强壮的，强健的，粗野的，需要体力的，浓的 | |
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emphasise
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| vt.加强...的语气，强调，着重 | |
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virtues
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| 美德( virtue的名词复数 )； 德行； 优点； 长处 | |
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45
acceleration
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| n.加速，加速度 | |
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manifestation
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| n.表现形式；表明；现象 | |
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hind
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| adj.后面的，后部的 | |
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skilful
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| (=skillful)adj.灵巧的，熟练的 | |
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49
perilous
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| adj.危险的，冒险的 | |
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contemplating
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| 深思，细想，仔细考虑( contemplate的现在分词 )； 注视，凝视； 考虑接受（发生某事的可能性）； 深思熟虑，沉思，苦思冥想 | |
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51
minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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52
mechanism
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| n.机械装置；机构，结构 | |
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incapable
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| adj.无能力的，不能做某事的 | |
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54
slinging
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| 抛( sling的现在分词 )； 吊挂； 遣送； 押往 | |
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purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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benevolent
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| adj.仁慈的，乐善好施的 | |
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57
annoyance
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| n.恼怒，生气，烦恼 | |
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specially
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| adv.特定地；特殊地；明确地 | |
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bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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ingenuity
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| n.别出心裁；善于发明创造 | |
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countless
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| adj.无数的，多得不计其数的 | |
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immortal
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| adj.不朽的；永生的，不死的；神的 | |
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arrogant
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| adj.傲慢的，自大的 | |
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delusion
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| n.谬见，欺骗，幻觉，迷惑 | |
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malady
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| n.病，疾病(通常做比喻) | |
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incurable
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| adj.不能医治的，不能矫正的，无救的；n.不治的病人，无救的人 | |
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oxide
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| n.氧化物 | |
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almighty
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| adj.全能的，万能的；很大的，很强的 | |
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philosophic
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| adj.哲学的，贤明的 | |
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temperament
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| n.气质，性格，性情 | |
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passionately
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| ad.热烈地，激烈地 | |
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tangled
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| adj. 纠缠的，紊乱的 动词tangle的过去式和过去分词 | |
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strife
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| n.争吵，冲突，倾轧，竞争 | |
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misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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riddle
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| n.谜，谜语，粗筛；vt.解谜，给…出谜，筛，检查，鉴定，非难，充满于；vi.出谜 | |
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76
bass
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| n.男低音(歌手)；低音乐器；低音大提琴 | |
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contemplate
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| vt.盘算，计议；周密考虑；注视，凝视 | |
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impudently
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primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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