The New Spirit

No alterations have been made in this edition. It is true that three of the figures here studied were living when the book was written; but their genius 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 forces, the outcome of the past, the initiators of the future. Apart from this, it seems to me a mistake to manipulate or add to one’s own completed work. If I were to re-write it, I should doubtless write it differently; the Conclusion, for instance, which is earliest in date, seems to me now rather formal and metaphysical. But for the most part I have nothing seriously to alter or to omit.

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 mention other names I once wished to include, although--partly doubting my competence to discuss them, partly fearing that their introduction might seem to interfere with the unity 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 frankly supernatural world, and they delighted like children to scatter 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 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 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 has been attained by the painter who stands forth 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 sinuous 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 delightful 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 indented clay. It was left for the sculptors of Egypt and of Greece and of Italy to form human figures of stone, not as a mere symbol of the reality, but as a revelation of their own moods and visions of beauty or passion; and since then the 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 Millet 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 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 stupendous fantasy twisted the human body into the strange or lovely shapes of his own inverted dreams. In Rodin’s work, it is through a relentless 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 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 worthy 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.