Chapter XVI: Conclusion

Tolstoi brings us face to face with religion. If we think of it, every personality we have considered has brought us subtly in contact with that ineluctable shape. It is strange: men seek to be, or to seem, atheists, agnostics, cynics, pessimists; at the core of all these things lurks religion. We may find it in Diderot’s mighty enthusiasm, in Heine’s passionate cries, in Ibsen’s gigantic faith in the future, in Whitman’s not less gigantic faith in the present. We see the same in the music-dramas of Wagner, in Zola’s pathetic belief in a formula, in Morris’s worship of an ideal past, in the aspirations of every Socialist who looks for the return of those barbarous times in which all men equally were fed and clothed and housed. The men who have most finely felt the pulse of the world, and have, in their turn, most effectively stirred its pulse, are religious men.

One is forced to ask oneself at last: How can I make clear to myself this vast and many-shaped religious element of life? It will not let me pass it by. Can I--without any attempt to theorize or to explain--reduce it to some common denominator, so that I may at least gain the satisfaction that comes of the clear and harmonious presentation of a complex fact? When we have settled the question of the evolution of religion, another more fundamental question may still be asked: What is the nature of the impulse that underlies, and manifests itself in, that sun-worship, nature-worship, fetich-worship, ghost-worship, to which, with occasional appeal to the vast reservoir of sexual and filial love, we may succeed in reducing religious phenomena? On the one hand, this impulse must begin to develop at least as early as the earliest appearance of worship; on the other hand, we cannot ascertain its distinctive characters unless we also examine and compare its more specialized forms. What is there in common between the religious attitude of the child of to-day, enfranchized from creeds, and that of, let us say, Lâo-tsze, the child of a day that is twenty-five centuries old; or between these and the far more primitive adoration of the Dravidian for his cattle? If the vague term “religion,” which, as commonly used, contains at least three elements--moral, scientific, emotional--covers any distinct and persistent human impulse, what is the nature and scope of that impulse? I wish to represent to myself, as precisely and as broadly as may be, man’s religious relation.

When we look out into the universe we see a vast medium, the world, gradually merging itself indistinctly in a practical infinite, and in the centre a certain limited number of souls, souls like the theoretical atoms of the physicist, never under any circumstances touching. Let two souls approach ever so nearly, there is yet a subtle chasm, through which

“The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea”

still flows. These souls are made up essentially of mind and body. There can be no change of consciousness without a corresponding change in the vascular circulation. There can be no thrill of body in a soul without a correlated thrill of mind. Matter and mind in the soul are co-extensive. When we speak of the “spirit” as ruling the body, or as yielding to it, we are, it must be remembered, using a traditional method of speech which had its origin in a more primitive theory, just as we still speak of sun-rise. In the soul the spiritual can no more be subordinated to the material, strictly speaking, than in water the oxygen be subordinated to the hydrogen. The old dispute for supremacy between mind and matter no longer has any significance. Both matter and mind are in the end equally unknown: _exeunt in mysterium_.

The soul is born and then dies. What do we mean by _birth_ and _death_? According to the old Hebrew conception a spirit was created out of nothing and put into a mould of matter, and then at death again passed back into nothing. But to-day this conception is impossible. _Ex nihilo nihil fit._ It is clear that both the elements that make up the soul must be, under some form, equally eternal. By a marvellous cosmic incident, our little planet has broken forth into a strange and beautiful efflorescence. We rise from the world, whom we are, on this variegated jet of organic life, to fall back again to our true life, by whatever unknown ways and under whatever change of form, conscious, it may be, but, as before birth, no longer with any self to be conscious of, no longer organic.

Now souls, although they always remain isolated, are acted upon by the world and by other souls, and when so acted upon they yield an emotional response. And for the present purpose these actions may be divided into two classes, corresponding to the two classes of sympathetic nerve fibres--vaso-constrictor and vaso-dilator--which control the vascular system, the rougher daily contacts of life, which contract though they strengthen the soul with their legacy of strong desires and griefs, and the incomparably rarer contacts at which the soul for a while and in varying degrees expands with a glad sense of freedom. As every bodily change in the compacted soul is correlated with a mental change, these responses may be spoken of indifferently in mental or material terms. We know that they are on the bodily side vaso-motorial; that a thrill of joy is accompanied by a change in arterial tension, and we can therefore use this expression of the part as the symbol of the whole. It is this enlarged diastole of the soul that we call _religion_.

“The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual,--namely, to You.” From the religious standpoint this is essentially true. The soul is situated at the centre of the world, exposed to a practically infinite number of appeals, to which it is capable of yielding a practically infinite number of responses or initiations. Every moment a stream of influences is striking against the soul and producing a multitudinous stream of responses, new stops growing, as it were, beneath the player’s touch. We know that for the most part the harsh and jarring discords predominate, that a soul that answers to the world’s touch with a music that is ever large and harmonious, is so rare that we call it by some divine ideal word. Yet the field of the soul’s liberation is a large one, whether we look at it on the physical or on the mental side. The simplest functions of physiological life may be its ministers. Everyone who is at all acquainted with the Persian mystics, knows how wine may be regarded as an instrument of religion. Indeed, in all countries and in all ages, some form of physical enlargement--singing, dancing, drinking, sexual excitement--has been intimately associated with worship. Even the momentary expansion of the soul in laughter is, to however slight an extent, a religious exercise. I do not fear to make this assertion; the expansions of the soul differ indefinitely in volume and quality. If this is but a low rung of the ladder along which pass the angels of our gladness, at the other end is that vision of divine self-sacrifice, so marked in the more highly developed religions, which has sustained through sorrow and defeat some of the world’s loftiest spirits. They differ, as much as we will, in degree, but between them what hint by which to draw a line? Whenever an impulse from the world strikes against the organism, and the resultant is not discomfort or pain, not even the muscular contraction of strenuous manhood, but a joyous expansion or aspiration of the whole soul--there is religion. It is the infinite for which we hunger, and we ride gladly on every little wave that promises to bear us towards it.[13]

[13] It may be said that religion, as even the etymology of the word witnesses, has been a force on the side of repression. That also is true; it cannot indeed be too strongly emphasized. Only in the strength of that joyous expansion could men have acted and suffered such intolerable torture in the service of religion. (It must be remembered, however, that in certain stages of civilization religion is largely identified with morality). It is necessary to generalize from the most various and highly specialized cases in order to arrive at a reasonable definition.

When we try to classify the chief of these affections of the soul according to the impulses that arouse them, we find that they may be conveniently divided into four classes:--(1.) Those caused by the liberation of impulses stored up in the soul. (2.) Those caused by impulses from other souls. (3.) Those caused by impulses from the world, as distinct from souls. (4.) Those caused by an intuition of union with the world.

(1.) Here we are, above all, concerned with art. It is not necessary here to distinguish between the emotion of the artist and that of him who merely follows the artist, passing his hand as it were over the other’s work, and receiving, in a less degree it may be, the same emotion. We are all artists potentially. The secret of the charm of art is that it presents to us an external world which is manifestly of like nature with the soul. “Non merita nome di Creatore,” according to Tasso’s saying, “se non Iddio ed il Poeta.” The work of art--poem, statue, music--succeeds in being what every philosophy attempts to be. Neither change nor death can touch it; also it is immeasurable; we feel that we are in the presence of the infinite. No art has ever succeeded in embodying those visions of the infinite which are commonly regarded as specifically religious--so that even to-day we respond with a thrill of dilatation--as the old fragmentary art of Egypt in the ruined temples of the Thebaid. Greek art, also, is a manifestation of the infinite; we may lose ourselves among those subtle curves of man’s or woman’s body. A Gothic cathedral of the thirteenth century is an embodiment of the infinite world itself. The soul responds expansively to all these things. When that response is wanting, and the art therefore, however interesting, is not religious--as in the art of Pompeii and the Italian post-Raphaelite art--it will generally be found technically inferior. The subject, one may note, has little or nothing to do with the matter. A representation of God the Father rarely evokes any religious response. De Hooge, by means of mere sunlight and the rubbish of a back-yard, awakes in us an enlarging thrill of joy. In music the most indefinite and profound mysteries of the soul are revealed and placed outside us as a gracious and marvellous orb; the very secret of the soul is brought forth and set in the audible world. That is why no other art smites us with so powerfully religious an appeal as music; no other art tells us such old forgotten secrets about ourselves.

“O! what is this that knows the road I came?”

It is in the mightiest of all instincts, the primitive sexual traditions of the races before man was, that music is rooted.

There are perhaps two instincts, a motor and a sensory, lying at the bottom of art and the delight in art. All the constructive instincts of living things, from bees and ants and worms and birds upwards, have gone to mould our delight in the fashioning of a whole, and in the contemplation of its fashion. The same process was carried on into human life. The primitive potter who took clay and wrought with her hands, and dinted with her nails, the cup or pot or jar, wrought it through long ages ever more lovely and perfect, embodying therein all that she knew of the earth’s uses and saw of its beauty, and by a true instinct she called her work a living creature. The baskets that early men wove, and the weapons that they carved for themselves, and their rhythmical cries in war-dance or worship, are part of a chain that presents itself again in Gothic cathedrals or Greek and Elizabethan dramas.

Even stronger than this motor instinct of art is the sensory delight in beauty which has its root in the attraction of sex. Not indeed the only root; all the things in the world that give light and heat and food and shelter and help gather around themselves some garment of loveliness, and so become the stuff of art; the sun and the reindeer are among the very first things to which men tried to give artistic expression. But the sexual instinct is more poignant and overmastering, more ancient than any as a source of beauty. Colour and song and strength and skill--such are the impressions that male and female have graved on each other’s hearts in their moments of most intense emotional exaltation. Their reflections have been thrown on the whole world. When the youth awakes to find a woman is beautiful, he finds, to his amazement, that the world also is beautiful. Who can say in what lowly organism was stored the first of those impressions of beauty, the reflections of sexual emotion, to which all creators of beauty--whether in the form of the Venus of Milo, the Madonna di San Sisto, Chopin’s music, Shelley’s lyrics--can always appeal, certain of response? One might name finally as the highest, most complex summit of art reached in our own time--a summit on which art is revealed in its supreme religious form--Wagner’s “Parsifal.” These things sprang from love, as surely as the world would have been wellnigh barren of beauty had the sexual method of reproduction never replaced all others. Beauty is the child of love; the world, at least all in it worth living for, was the creation of love.

Yet another art, more subtle and complex, has played a large part in the history of religion--the art of metaphysic. The savage finds religious gratification in the exercise of his coarser senses, in singing or dancing or drinking; the man of large and refined intellectual development, a Plato, a Spinoza, a Kant, finds it in philosophy. Such men, indeed, are few, but by force of intelligence they have been enabled to thrust their pictures of the world on inferior minds; their arts have become articles. But every man who has reached the stage of development in which he can truly experience the joy of the philosophic emotion will construct his own philosophy. A philosophy is the house of the mind, and no two philosophies can be alike because no two minds are alike. But the emotion is the same, the emotion of expansive joy in a house not built with hands, in which the soul has made for herself a large and harmonious dwelling.

(2.) It is true that souls remain for ever apart. The lover seeks to be absorbed altogether in the heaven of the loved personality, but in the end the heaven remains unsealed.

“_Adfigunt avide corpus junguntque salivas oris et inspirant pressantes dentibus ora, nequiquam._”

And yet a large or lovely personality is not the less an outlook towards the infinite. We cannot think of certain men of immense range or power or sweetness--St. Francis, Leonardo, Napoleon, Darwin--without experiencing a movement of liberation. To pronounce the names of such men is of the nature of an act of worship. I cannot for a moment think of Shakespeare without a thrill of exultation at such gracious plenitude of power. No person, probably, ever made so ardent a personal appeal to men as Jesus. He discovered a whole new world of emotional life, a new expansion of joy, a kingdom in which slave and harlot took precedence of priest and king. To the men for whom that new emotional world was fresh and living, torture and shame and death counted as nothing beside so large a possession of inward gladness. The weakest and lowest became heroes and saints in the effort to guard a pearl of so great price. There are few more inspiring figures in the history of man than the white body of the slave-girl Blandina, that hung from the stake day after day with the beasts in the amphitheatre at Lyons, torn and bleeding, yet, _instar generosi cujusdam athletæ_, with the undying cry on her lips, _Christiana sum!_ It is open to everyone to give liberating impulses to his fellows. It is the distinction of Jesus that he has, for us, permanently expanded the bounds of individuality. We all breathe deeper and freer because of that semi-ideal carpenter’s son. “_Fiat experimentum in corpore vili_,” said the physician in the old story, by the bedside of a wretched patient. “_Non est corpus tam vile pro quo mortuus est Christus_,” unexpectedly returned the dying man. The charm of Jesus can never pass away when it is rightly apprehended.

But it is not alone the large mystery of exceptional personalities which calls out this response. To certain finely-tempered spirits no human thing is too mean to fail in making this emotional appeal. The chief religious significance of Walt Whitman lies in his revelation of the emotional value of the entire common human personality and all that belongs to it. The later Athenians (as also Goethe) placed above all things the harmonious development of the individual in its higher forms. It still remained to show the loveliness of the complete ordinary personality. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” cannot in this respect be over-estimated.[14]

[14] The late William Cyples, in his charming and neglected _magnum opus_, “The Process of Human Experience” (p. 462), rightly traces this form of religion to the feeling generated between lovers, friends, parent and children. “A few have at intervals walked in the world,” he adds, “who have, each in his own original way, found out this marvel ... it has proved sufficient for them even to wish enough to help their race; instantly these secret delights have risen in their hearts. Straightway man in general has become to them so sweet a thing that the infatuation has seemed to the rest of their fellows to be a celestial madness. Beggars’ rags to their unhesitating lips grew fit for kissing, because humanity had touched the garb; there were no longer any menial acts, but only welcome services. It was the humblest, the easiest, the readiest of duties to lay down life for the ignorant, the ill-behaved, the unkind,--for any and all who did but wear the familiar human shape. That this ecstasy of humanity should rise so much higher than any other is according to the plain working of the law of accumulation of finer consciousness by complexity in the occasioning activity. Remember by how much man is the subtlest circumstance in the world; at how many points he can attach relationships; how manifold and perennial he is in his results. All other things are dull, meagre, tame beside him. If the most part of us are only as dross to one another, in place of being of this priceless value, it can only be from the lack of mutual services among us. Without these how can we but want sufficient adaptiveness of mood,--how can we help groaning under the weight of instincts half organized or wholly unfulfilled?”

(3.) There is a religion of science. It is rarer than has sometimes been supposed, and among men of science, probably, it is seldom found. Strauss’s “Old Faith and New” is one of the chief attempts by a man of science to present the scientific attitude as food for the religious consciousness. The result is dreary in the extreme, in the end almost ludicrous. Herbert Spencer’s attitude towards the Unknowable is a distinct though faint approximation to the religious relationship. Positivism, with its quasi-scientific notions, was founded on a curiously narrow conception of the nature of religion, and its religious sterility is probably inevitable. The man of science has little to do with magnificent generalizations; he is concerned chiefly with the patient investigation of details; it is but rarely that he feels called upon, like Kepler or Newton, for any emotional response to the grandeur and uniformity of law. Yet to many this vision of universal law has come as a light moving over chaos, a glad new discovery of the vastness and yet the homeliness of the world.

An æsthetic emotion is not necessarily religious, even within the field of inanimate nature. So also the elusive tints, the subtle perfumes of things, so far from liberating the soul, may excite a tormenting desire to grasp and appropriate what is so lovely and so intangible. Still, there is a distinct class of emotions aroused by nature which is of the religious order. A large expanse of air or sea or undulating land, or the placid infinity of the star-lit sky, seems necessary to impart that enlarging and pacifying sense of nature alike to poets and peasants. Some sight or sound of nature, either habitually, or under some special conditions in the percipient, may strike upon the soul and liberate it at once from the bonds of commonplace actuality. Perhaps no modern man has better expressed the religious aspects of nature than Thoreau. Of the American wood-thrush Thoreau can rarely speak without using the language of religion. “All that was ripest and fairest in the wilderness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted to us in the strain of the wood-thrush.... Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Wherever he hears it, there is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him. Most other birds sing, from the level of my ordinary cheerful hours, a carol, but this bird never fails to speak to me out of an ether purer than that I breathe, of immortal vigour and beauty.” Generally, however, this emotion appears to be associated, not so much with isolated beautiful objects, as with great vistas in which beauty may scarcely inhere--

“all waste
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.”

It is indeed myself that I unconsciously project into the large and silent world around me; the exhilaration I feel is a glad sense of the vast new bounds of my nature. That is why, at the appearance of another human being, I sink back immediately into the limits of my own normal individuality. I am no longer conterminous with the world around me; I cannot absorb or control another individuality like my own. I become a self-conscious human being in the presence of another self-conscious human being.

(4.) The supreme expression of the religious consciousness lies always in an intuition of union with the world, under whatever abstract or concrete names the infinite not-self may be hidden. The perpetual annunciation of this union has ever been the chief gladness of life. It comes in the guise of a κάθαρσις of egoism, a complete renunciation of the limits of individuality--of all the desires and aims that seem to converge in the single personality--and a joyous acceptance of what has generally seemed an immense external Will, now first dimly or clearly realized. In every age this intuition has found voice--voice that has often grown wild and incoherent with the torrent of expansive emotion that impelled it. It is this intuition which is the “emptiness” of Lâo-tsze, the freedom from all aims that centre in self: “It is only by doing nothing that the kingdom can be made one’s own.” This is the great good news of the Upanishads: the _âtman_, the soul, may attain to a state of _yoga_, of union, with the supreme _âtman_; free, henceforth, from doubts and desires which pass over it as water passes over the leaf of the lotus without wetting it; acting, henceforth, only as acts the potter’s wheel when the potter has ceased to turn it: “If I know that my own body is not mine, and yet that the whole earth is mine, and again that it is both mine and thine--no harm can happen then.” The Buddhist’s Nirvana, whether interpreted as a state to be attained before or after death, has the same charm; it opens up the kingdom of the Universe to man; it offers to the finite a home in the infinite. This is the great assertion of Christ, “I and my Father are one;” and whenever Christianity has reached its highest expression, from Paul’s day to our own, it has but sung over again the old refrain of joy at the “new birth” into eternal life--the union, as it is said, of the soul through Christ with God--a tender Father, a great sustaining Power on which the soul may rest and be at peace:

“E la sua volontade è nostra pace.”

And that again is but in another form the Sufiism of Jelal-ed-din--the mystic union of the human bridegroom with the Divine Bride. Even the austere Imperial Stoic becomes lyrical as this intuition comes to him: “Everything is harmonious with me which is harmonious to thee, O Universe!” As far back as we can trace, the men of all races, each in his own way and with his own symbols, have raised this shout of exultation. There is no larger freedom for man.

* * * * *

It seemed well to name at least the chief implications contained in a broadly generalized statement of man’s religious relation to the universe. It is important to remember that they are but an individual mode of representation. I can only say that I am conscious of myself in varying attitudes or relations. The terms of those relationships, stated with however much probability, will ever remain matter for dispute. Moreover, various attitudes reveal various metaphysical implications.

The scientific attitude, for example, has a series of implications of its own. In its solvents all things are analyzed and atomized; the “soul” of our religious world--the vast pulsating centre, at the bottom of which, according to the profound saying of the old mystic, lies that unutterable sigh which we call God--is resolved into a momentary focus of ever-shifting rays of force; it is but an incident in a huge evolution of shifting forces which we may, if we like, personify as Nature, but which, none the less, we cannot conceive as a whole. The scientific attitude has its own implications, and their far-reaching significance, their immense value for the individual and for the race, can scarcely be overrated.

Again, the moral attitude is equally distinct. The criminal after a successful piece of villainy may feel a thrill of ecstasy. It is indeed well known that criminals in every country are the children of (more or less superstitious) religion. We may regard morality as grounded in the sense of personality, gradually extending by imagination and sympathy to every individual. Or we may regard it as springing, in a sense of adhesiveness, from the family and resulting relationships, and thence growing into a consciousness of the oneness of all human interests, the individuals finding themselves to be, according to that Stoic conception which has moulded European laws and is still a leavening influence in European ethics, members one with another in the same natural body of humanity. In any case, as a moral being the individual finds himself dependent on other individuals, and with a duty, therefore, laid upon him to live harmoniously with those individuals; there being no response forthcoming to the demands of his own nature unless he also responds to the demands of other natures. Religion, however, knows nothing of the scientific “nature” or of the ethical “man;” its impulse is from within and of free grace.

At the dawn of civilization, it is true, religion and morals are inextricably mingled; they only become disentangled by a gradual evolution. The Toda who regards as sacred an ancient cattle-bell is obeying an impulse of adoration whose foundation is, probably, largely ethical, for the bull is intimately connected with the beginnings of civilization. A religious impulse will sometimes have an ethical element; morals will sometimes find an ally in religion. But religion with its internal criterion and morals with its more external criterion remain essentially distinct, sometimes antagonistic: “to reject religion,” Thoreau said, “is the first step towards moral excellence.” That is but a puny religion that is based on morals; on the other hand, the morals that rests on religion will sooner or later collapse with it in a common ruin. That has been too often seen. Religions change: every man is free to have his own, or to have none. No man, scarcely even a Crusoe, is free to have no morals, and the ideal morality cannot widely vary for any two societies.

Yet religion cannot live nobly without science or without morals. It is only by a strenuous devotion to science, by a perpetual reference to the moral structure of life, that religion--so made conscious of its nature and its limits--can be rendered healthful.

“None can usurp this height....
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest;”

so spake Moneta to Keats, among all English poets the purest artist.

A man takes sides with religion, or with science, or with morals; oftener he spends the brief moments of his existence in self-preservation, fighting now on one side, now on the other. But for a little while we are allowed to enter the house of life and to gather around its fire. Why pull each other’s hair and pinch each other’s arms like naughty children? Well would it be to warm ourselves at the fire together, to clasp hands, to gain all the joy that comes of comradeship, before we are called out, each of us, into the dark, alone.

The other elements fall away from religion, leaving the emotional, deeper and more fundamental than either of the others; just as the brain itself is controlled by the sympathetic system which outlives it and holds in its hands the centres of life. That element underlay the crude imaginings of the primitive man who first created a spiritual world out of the stuff of his dreams and his primitive delight in the most marvellous object he saw, the sun, that as he truly divined is the source not only of light but of life; just as it underlies also our more complex imaginings to-day. In religion, we are appealing not to any narrow or superficial element of the man, but to something which is more primitive than the intellectual efflorescence of the brain, the central fire of life itself.

Our supreme business in life--not as we made it, but as it was made for us when the world began--is to carry and to pass on as we received it, or better, the sacred lamp of organic being that we bear within us. Science and morals are subservient to the reproductive activity; that is why they are so imperative. The rest is what we will, play, art, consolation--in one word, religion. If religion is not science or morals, it is the sum of the unfettered expansive impulses of our being. Life has been defined as, even physically and chemically, a tension. All our lives long we are struggling against that tension, but we can truly escape from it only by escaping from life itself. Religion is the stretching forth of our hands toward the illimitable. It is an intuition of the final deliverance, a half-way house on the road to that City which we name mysteriously Death.

THE WALTER SCOTT PRESS, NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE.

PRESS OPINIONS ON “THE NEW SPIRIT.”

“It is easy to dislike his book, it is possible to dislike it furiously; but the book is so honest, so earnest, so stimulating in its tolerant but convinced unconventionality, that it claims for itself a like sincerity and seriousness in the reader.... Mr. Ellis has produced a book which will be hotly discussed, no doubt, for it is nothing if not initiative, we might almost say revolutionary; but it is not a book to be disregarded.... It has sincerity and it has power; and sincerity and power compel at least attention.”--_Speaker._

“Mr. Havelock Ellis has discovered a ‘New Spirit.’ We have read him with care and patience, and we should be sorry to describe it; we only know that it is not intoxicating.”--_Scots Observer._

“Welcome is warmly due to this fresh, buoyant, and sincere volume of essays by Mr. Havelock Ellis.... There are parts of the study of Heine which are not unworthy to be named--it is high praise--with Matthew Arnold’s inimitable paper upon that writer, a paper almost as classic as Heine himself.... The last word upon so suggestive and finished a piece of work ought to be one of ungrudging praise.”--_Academy._

“Mr. Carlyle described, it seems to us, Mr. Havelock Ellis himself with great exactness in the person of a certain biographer of Voltaire, ‘an inquiring, honest-hearted character, many of whose statements must have begun to astonish even himself.’ Mr. Ellis must be very ‘inquiring,’ for we have seldom met with one who knows so many things that other people do not know.”--_Athenæum._

“Each of these essays is a thorough and well-considered piece of work, admirable in information, firm in grasp, stimulating in style, appreciative in matter, and the survey afforded is broad.... It is an altogether unusual work, both for its ambition and for its matter; it brings the reader near to some of the marked ideas of the time.”--_Nation._

“The points of the New Spirit are its passion for getting things right in the matter of property and in the matter of true human worth.”--_Daily News._

“The only coherent constituent of the New Spirit which this book professes to set forth, is a vehement hatred, amounting to a passion, against conventional unveracities, and a determination that they should be swept away.... We cannot imagine anything of which it could be more necessary for human nature, so taught [by our Lord], to purge itself, than the New Spirit of Havelock Ellis.”--_Spectator._

“Mr. Havelock Ellis has written an interesting and significant book, which it is quite easy to ridicule, but which certainly deserves a fair hearing.... Apparently these writers are chosen because they all agree in a hatred of shams, in looking facts in the face, and in demanding provision for the healthy satisfaction of animal wants.... Mr. Ellis writes with force and insight; but, whether from brevity or want of caution, he leaves with regard to these subjects an impression which he would probably not himself desire to produce.”--_Murray’s Magazine._

“The concluding chapter, wherein Mr. Ellis expresses his own ‘intimate thought and secret emotion,’ is one of the best utterances of the New Spirit which we have ever read.”--_Echo._

“Un volume de haute critique littéraire qui rappelle le style fort et la méthode stricte de Hennequin.”--_Mercure de France._

“A more foolish, unwholesome, perverted piece of sentimental cant we have never wasted our time over.”--_World._

“Excellent examples of appreciative criticism of an exceedingly interesting series of authors, of whom every one ought to know at least as much as Mr. Ellis here tells us so freshly and vivaciously.”--_Scottish Leader._

“We only refer to this unpleasant compilation of cool impudence and effrontery to warn our readers against it.”--_Dundee Advertiser._

“Beautiful both in thought and expression. But Mr. Ellis seems to have laid aside altogether the wise restraint which characterises his volume on ‘The Criminal.’... The scientific spirit, of which at other times he has shown himself a distinguished exponent, should have prevented him from such error.”--_Arbroath Herald._

“Ardent, enthusiastic, and eloquent.”--_Boston Literary World._

“It is not often that the weary and heart-sore reviewer, struggling to keep abreast of the Protean outpourings of the press, falls in with anything so well informed, so rich in thought and suggestion as _The New Spirit_.”--_Wit and Wisdom._

_AUTHORISED VERSION._

_Crown 8vo, Cloth, Price 6s._

PEER GYNT: A Dramatic Poem.

BY HENRIK IBSEN.

TRANSLATED BY

WILLIAM AND CHARLES ARCHER.

_This Translation, though unrhymed, preserves throughout the various rhythms of the original._

“In _Brand_ the hero is an embodied protest against the poverty of spirit and half-heartedness that Ibsen rebelled against in his countrymen. In _Peer Gynt_ the hero is himself the embodiment of that spirit. In _Brand_ the fundamental antithesis, upon which, as its central theme, the drama is constructed, is the contrast between the spirit of compromise on the one hand, and the motto ‘everything or nothing’ on the other. And _Peer Gynt_ is the very incarnation of a compromising dread of decisive committal to any one course. In _Brand_ the problem of self-realisation and the relation of the individual to his surroundings is obscurely struggling for recognition, and in _Peer Gynt_ it becomes the formal theme upon which all the fantastic variations of the drama are built up. In both plays alike the problems of heredity and the influence of early surroundings are more than touched upon; and both alike culminate in the doctrine that the only redeeming power on earth or in heaven is the power of love.”--Mr. P. H. WICKSTEED.

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THE INSPECTOR-GENERAL

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A RUSSIAN COMEDY.

BY NIKOLAI VASILIYEVICH GOGOL.

Translated from the original Russian, with Introduction and Notes, by A. A. SYKES, B.A., Trinity College, Cambridge.

Though one of the most brilliant and characteristic of Gogol’s works, and well-known on the Continent, the present is the first translation of his _Revizór_, or Inspector-General, which has appeared in English. A satire on Russian administrative functionaries, the _Revizór_ is a comedy marked by continuous gaiety and invention, full of “situation,” each development of the story accentuating the satire and emphasising the characterisation, the whole play being instinct with life and interest. Every here and there occurs the note of caprice, of naïveté, of unexpected fancy, characteristically Russian. The present translation will be found to be admirably fluent, idiomatic, and effective.

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15 Byron’s Letters and Journals. Selected, with Introduction, by Mathilde Blind.

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18 Great Musical Composers. By G. F. Ferris. Edited, with Introduction, by Mrs. William Sharp.

19 The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Edited by Alice Zimmern.

20 The Teaching of Epictetus. Translated from the Greek, with Introduction and Notes, by T. W. Rolleston.

21 Selections from Seneca. With Introduction by Walter Clode.

22 Specimen Days in America. By Walt Whitman. Revised by the Author, with fresh Preface.

23 Democratic Vistas, and Other Papers. By Walt Whitman. (Published by arrangement with the Author.)

24 White’s Natural History of Selborne. With a Preface by Richard Jefferies.

25 Defoe’s Captain Singleton. Edited, with Introduction, by H. Halliday Sparling.

26 Mazzini’s Essays: Literary, Political, and Religious. With Introduction by William Clarke.

27 Prose Writings of Heine. With Introduction by Havelock Ellis.

28 Reynolds’s Discourses. With Introduction by Helen Zimmern.

29 Papers of Steele and Addison. Edited by Walter Lewin.

30 Burns’s Letters. Selected and Arranged, with Introduction, by J. Logie Robertson, M.A.

31 Volsunga Saga. WILLIAM MORRIS. With Introduction by H. H. Sparling.

32 Sartor Resartus. By Thomas Carlyle. With Introduction by Ernest Rhys.

33 Select Writings of Emerson. With Introduction by Percival Chubb.

34 Autobiography of Lord Herbert. Edited, with an Introduction, by Will H. Dircks.

35 English Prose, from Maundeville to Thackeray. Chosen and Edited by Arthur Galton.

36 The Pillars of Society, and Other Plays. By Henrik Ibsen. Edited, with an Introduction, by Havelock Ellis.

37 Irish Fairy and Folk Tales. Edited and Selected by W. B. Yeats.

38 Essays of Dr. Johnson, with Biographical Introduction and Notes by Stuart J. Reid.

39 Essays of William Hazlitt. Selected and Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Frank Carr.

40 Landor’s Pentameron, and Other Imaginary Conversations. Edited, with a Preface, by H. Ellis.

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42 Vicar of Wakefield. By Oliver Goldsmith. Edited, with Preface, by Ernest Rhys.

43 Political Orations, from Wentworth to Macaulay. Edited, with Introduction, by William Clarke.

44 The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table. By Oliver Wendell Holmes.

45 The Poet at the Breakfast-table. By Oliver Wendell Holmes.

46 The Professor at the Breakfast-table. By Oliver Wendell Holmes.

47 Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son. Selected, with Introduction, by Charles Sayle.

48 Stories from Carleton. Selected, with Introduction, by W. Yeats.

49 Jane Eyre. By Charlotte Brontë. Edited by Clement K. Shorter.

50 Elizabethan England. Edited by Lothrop Withington, with a Preface by Dr. Furnivall.

51 The Prose Writings of Thomas Davis. Edited by T. W. Rolleston.

52 Spence’s Anecdotes. A Selection. Edited with an Introduction and Notes, by John Underhill.

53 More’s Utopia, and Life of Edward V. Edited, with an Introduction, by Maurice Adams.

54 Sadi’s Gulistan, or Flower Garden. Translated, with an Essay, by James Ross.

55 English Fairy and Folk Tales. Edited by E. Sidney Hartland.

56 Northern Studies. By Edmund Gosse. With a Note by Ernest Rhys.

57 Early Reviews of Great Writers. Edited by E. Stevenson.

58 Aristotle’s Ethics. With George Henry Lewes’s Essay on Aristotle prefixed.

59 Landor’s Pericles and Aspasia. Edited, with an Introduction, by Havelock Ellis.

60 Annals of Tacitus. Thomas Gordon’s Translation. Edited, with an Introduction, by Arthur Galton.

61 Essays of Elia. By Charles Lamb. Edited, with an Introduction, by Ernest Rhys.

62 Balzac’s Shorter Stories. Translated by William Wilson and the Count Stenbock.

63 Comedies of De Musset. Edited, with an Introductory Note, by S. L. Gwynn.

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66 Our Village. By Miss Mitford. Edited, with an Introduction, by Ernest Rhys.

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68 Tales from Wonderland. By Rudolph Baumbach. Translated by Helen B. Dole.

69 Essays and Papers by Douglas Jerrold. Edited by Walter Jerrold.

70 Vindication of the Rights of Woman. By Mary Wollstonecraft. Introduction by Mrs E. Robins Pennell.

71 “The Athenian Oracle.” A Selection. Edited by John Underhill, with Prefatory Note by Walter Besant.

72 Essays of Sainte-Beuve. Translated and Edited, with an Introduction, by Elizabeth Lee.

73 Selections from Plato. From the Translation of Sydenham and Taylor. Edited by T. W. Rolleston.

74 Heine’s Italian Travel Sketches, Etc. Translated by Elizabeth A. Sharp. With an Introduction from the French of Theophile Gautier.

75 Schiller’s Maid of Orleans. Translated, with an Introduction, by Major-General Patrick Maxwell.

76 Selections from Sydney Smith. Edited, with an Introduction, by Ernest Rhys.

77 The New Spirit. By Havelock Ellis.

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LIFE OF LONGFELLOW. By PROF. ERIC S. ROBERTSON.

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LIFE OF COLERIDGE. By HALL CAINE.

“Brief and vigorous, written throughout with spirit and great literary skill.”--_Scotsman._

LIFE OF DICKENS. By FRANK T. MARZIALS.

“Notwithstanding the mass of matter that has been printed relating to Dickens and his works ... we should, until we came across this volume, have been at a loss to recommend any popular life of England’s most popular novelist as being really satisfactory. The difficulty is removed by Mr. Marzials’s little book.”--_Athenæum._

LIFE OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. By J. KNIGHT.

“Mr. Knight’s picture of the great poet and painter is the fullest and best yet presented to the public.”--_The Graphic._

LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON. By COLONEL F. GRANT.

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LIFE OF DARWIN. By G. T. BETTANY.

“Mr. G. T. Bettany’s _Life of Darwin_ is a sound and conscientious work.”--_Saturday Review._

LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË. By A. BIRRELL.

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LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. By R. GARNETT, LL. D.

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LIFE OF ADAM SMITH. By R. B. HALDANE, M.P.

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LIFE OF KEATS. By W. M. ROSSETTI.

“Valuable for the ample information which it contains.”--_Cambridge Independent._

LIFE OF SHELLEY. By WILLIAM SHARP.

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LIFE OF SMOLLETT. By DAVID HANNAY.

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LIFE OF GOLDSMITH. By AUSTIN DOBSON.

“The story of his literary and social life in London, with all its humorous and pathetic vicissitudes, is here retold, as none could tell it better.”--_Daily News._

LIFE OF SCOTT. By PROFESSOR YONGE.

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LIFE OF BURNS. By PROFESSOR BLACKIE.

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LIFE OF VICTOR HUGO. By FRANK T. MARZIALS.

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LIFE OF EMERSON. By RICHARD GARNETT, LL.D.

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LIFE OF GOETHE. By JAMES SIME.

“Mr. James Sime’s competence as a biographer of Goethe is beyond question.”--_Manchester Guardian._

LIFE OF CONGREVE. By EDMUND GOSSE.

“Mr. Gosse has written an admirable biography.”--_Academy._

LIFE OF BUNYAN. By CANON VENABLES.

“A most intelligent, appreciative, and valuable memoir.”--_Scotsman._

LIFE OF CRABBE. By T. E. KEBBEL.

“No English poet since Shakespeare has observed certain aspects of nature and of human life more closely.”--_Athenæum._

LIFE OF HEINE. By WILLIAM SHARP.

“An admirable monograph ... more fully written up to the level of recent knowledge and criticism than any other English work.”--_Scotsman._

LIFE OF MILL. By W. L. COURTNEY.

“A most sympathetic and discriminating memoir.”--_Glasgow Herald._

LIFE OF SCHILLER. By HENRY W. NEVINSON.

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LIFE OF CAPTAIN MARRYAT. By DAVID HANNAY.

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LIFE OF LESSING. By T. W. ROLLESTON.

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LIFE OF MILTON. By RICHARD GARNETT LL.D.

“Has never been more charmingly or adequately told.”--_Scottish Leader._

LIFE OF BALZAC. By FREDERICK WEDMORE.

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LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT. By OSCAR BROWNING.

“A book of the character of Mr. Browning’s, to stand midway between the bulky work of Mr. Cross and the very slight sketch of Miss Blind, was much to be desired, and Mr. Browning has done his work with vivacity, and not without skill.”--_Manchester Guardian._

LIFE OF JANE AUSTEN. By GOLDWIN SMITH.

“Mr. Goldwin Smith has added another to the not inconsiderable roll of eminent men who have found their delight in Miss Austen.... His little book upon her, just published by Walter Scott, is certainly a fascinating book to those who already know her and love her well; and we have little doubt that it will prove also a fascinating book to those who have still to make her acquaintance.”--_Spectator._

LIFE OF BROWNING. By WILLIAM SHARP.

“This little volume is a model of excellent English, and in every respect it seems to us what a biography should be.”--_Public Opinion._

LIFE OF BYRON. By HON. RODEN NOEL.

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LIFE OF HAWTHORNE. By MONCURE CONWAY.

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LIFE OF SCHOPENHAUER. By PROFESSOR WALLACE.

“We can speak very highly of this little book of Mr. Wallace’s. It is, perhaps, excessively lenient in dealing with the man, and it cannot be said to be at all ferociously critical in dealing with the philosophy.”--_Saturday Review._

LIFE OF SHERIDAN. By LLOYD SANDERS.

“To say that Mr. Lloyd Sanders, in this little volume, has produced the best existing memoir of Sheridan, is really to award much fainter praise than the work deserves.”--_Manchester Examiner._

LIFE OF THACKERAY. By HERMAN MERIVALE and F. T. MARZIALS.

“The monograph just published is well worth reading, ... and the book, with its excellent bibliography, is one which neither the student nor the general reader can well afford to miss.”--_Pall Mall Gazette._

LIFE OF CERVANTES. By W. E. WATTS.

“We can commend this book as a worthy addition to the useful series to which it belongs.”--_London Daily Chronicle._

LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. By FRANCIS ESPINASSE.

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