The bookstore has an old-fashioned name. The sign above the wooden facade, painted green and white, says:
Wm Caxton Ltd
Bookseller & Publisher
And inside, a visitor will find narrow aisles and wooden bookshelves stuffed floor to ceiling with musty old books.
It is glorious.
On one trip through there, I picked up an old Scott Library edition of The New Spirit by Havelock Ellis. I had no idea who Havelock Ellis was, and had never heard of the title before. But it attracted my eye. It is small, green, and weathered, and when I pulled it off its shelf and flipped it open to its preface, I read this:
From our earliest days we look out into the world with wide-eyed amazement, trying to discover for ourselves what it is like. Instinctively we must spend a great part of our lives in searching and probing into the nature and drift of the things among which, by a volition not our own, we were projected. To-day, when we stand, as it were, at the beginning of a new era, and when we have been celebrating the centenary of the most significant event in modern history, an individual who, for his own guidance, has done his part in this searching and probing, may perhaps be allowed to present some of the results, not claiming to be an expert, not desiring to impose on others any private scheme of the universe.
A man trying to understand his world, a world he feels is on the precipice of transformation, moving from what was and into what will be.
A large part of one’s investigations into the spirit of one’s time must be made through the medium of literary personalities. I have selected five such typical individuals; it is the intimate thought and secret emotions of such men that become the common property of after generations.
And as his guide, he will select authors; authors whose works have captured the spirit of his time. But Ellis’s study will be deeper, penetrating through the books and into the men themselves.
I want to get at the motive forces at work in the man; to know what his intimate companions thought of him; how he acted in the affairs of every day, and in the great crises of his life; the fashion of his face and form, the tones of his voice. How he desired to appear is of little importance; I can perhaps learn all that it imports me to know from a single involuntary gesture, or one glance into his eyes.
This is the attitude in which I have recorded, as impersonally as may be, these impressions of the world to-day, as revealed in certain significant personalities; by searching and proving all things, to grip the earth with firmer foothold.
It may be hard to see through all the archaic language and phraseology, but Ellis here sets out to do in The New Spirit very much what I have been attempting to do on this blog for years. Take the written word, mine it for the wisdom it contains, and bring into a clearer rendering the hidden truths that define us and our age.
And later, in his introduction, he even hits on the specific value that fiction plays in fulfilling our shared quest.
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.
Ellis published The New Spirit in 1890, so the century that he is talking about is the 19th, as his selection of authors to focus on will reflect. But note what he is saying here. The truth of an age is best reflected in its fiction. Strange then, that among his selected authors, only one can truly be considered a novelist. The authors are Denis Diderot (1713-1784), a French philosopher, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), a German poet, Walt Whitman (1819-1892), an American poet, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), A Norwegian playwright, and Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), a Russian novelist.
Only two made a deep impression on me.
Brand
In “Brand” Ibsen produced a poem which for imagination and sombre energy stands alone. It is perhaps the most widely known of all his works; in Germany it has already found four translators, and there is reason to hope that before long a translation will appear in England. “Brand” is the tragedy of will and self-sacrifice in the service of the ideal -- a narrow ideal, but less narrow, Ibsen seems sometimes to hint, than the ideals of most of us. The motto on which Brand acts in all the crises of his life is, “All or nothing;” and with him it means in every case the crushing of some human emotion or relationship for the fulfilment of a religious duty.
One of the things that unifies all of Ellis’s authorial choices is the way each seems to explore more humanist and less monastic themes in the works. And “Brand” appears, from Ellis’s description of it, to explore that shift from the monastic point of view The plot, such as it is, seems grim.
Soon after the commencement of the poem Brand became the pastor of a gloomy little northern valley, between mountains and glaciers, into which the sun seldom penetrates. He is accompanied by his wife Agnes, a pathetic image of love and devotion. A child is born to them, but soon dies in this sun-forsaken valley. There are few passages in literature of more penetrating pathos than the scene in the fourth act in which, one Christmas eve, the first anniversary of the child’s death, Brand persuades Agnes to give her Alf’s clothes -- the last loved relics -- to a beggar-woman who comes to the door with her child during a snowstorm. Soon Agnes also dies. In the end, stoned by his flock, Brand makes his way, bleeding, up into the mountains. Here, amid the wild rocks and his own hallucinations, he is met by a mad girl who mistakes him for the thorn-crowned Christ. This scene, in which, overwhelmed at last by an avalanche, Brand dies amid his broken ideals, attains an imaginative height not elsewhere reached in modern literature, and for the like of which we have to look back to the great scene on the heath in “Lear.”
Brand seems a quixotic character -- patterned perhaps literally on Don Quixote -- but with far less humor, the crash of his ideals against the uncaring universe exposing far more tragedy than devotion.
Here and elsewhere, however, Ibsen brings in supernatural voices, which scarcely heighten the natural grandeur of the scene, and which seem out of place altogether in a poem so entirely modern. “Brand” brings before us a wealth of figures and of discussions, carries on in brief, clear, musical, though irregular, metrical form, and it would be impossible to analyze so complex a work within moderate compass.
Ibsen seems to be toying with old themes here, casting them in their most unflattering light, on the brink, as Ellis describes, of a new age. Certainly a work to add to my to-read list.
Tolstoy
A much more exciting find for me was the story and works of Leo Tolstoy, whom I referred to above as a novelist, but who was, in actuality, just a little bit more. In Ellis’s telling, Russia is culturally-distinct, a place of competing ideologies, and as such, produced in the 19th century a literature of its own, based on the tensions of that milieu. One dramatic influence on Tolstoy specifically was a religious sect known as the Soutaiefftsky, named after its exemplar.
Basil Soutaieff, an uneducated mason, belonging to the centre of Russia, from his early years pondered and dreamed over the misery of the world. To obtain light he visited the priests, and one referred him to the Gospels. His zeal induced him to learn and read, and he studied the New Testament eagerly. One day he carried to the church the body of a young son for burial. The pope asked fifty kopecks for the ceremony; Soutaieff had only thirty, and the pope began to bargain with him over the corpse. Soutaieff indignantly took up the body and buried it in his own garden. From that time dated his criticism of the Church, and side by side grew up also a criticism of the world. He observed in his own trade the tricks of commerce and the perpetual effort to amass money and to deceive the worker. He abandoned his work as a mason and returned from St. Petersburg to the country to cultivate the earth, distributing to the poor the money he had previously earned. But in the country he found, from pope to peasant, the same vices as in the town, and with no wish to found a new sect, he became, by example as well as by precept, the teacher of a religion of universal love and pity.
Soutaieff is one of Tolstoy’s inspirations and, now that I’ve learned about him, he will be one of mine. Someone who has pondered and dreamed over the misery of the world, and who, disillusioned by the false remedies of existing religions, invents a creed all his own.
Soutaieff rejects all ceremonies, including baptism and marriage (for which he substitutes a simple blessing and exhortation to a just life), and all those external manifestations of religion which render men hypocritical. At the same time he rejects all faith in angels or devils, or in the supernatural generally, and is absolutely indifferent to the question of a future life. We have to occupy ourselves with the establishment of happiness and justice on this earth; what happens above, he says, I cannot tell, never having been there; perhaps there is nothing but eternal darkness.
Perhaps there is nothing but eternal darkness. In good Russian fashion, that might sound like nihilism, but don’t forget about the other realization -- that we have to occupy ourselves with the establishment of happiness and justice on this earth. Like the denizens of Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
He recognizes that the moral regeneration of men is closely connected with social and economic questions. Private property is the source of the hatreds, jealousies, and miseries of men. The proprietors must give up the land of which they have arbitrarily gained possession, and work for their living. But this end is to be gained, not by violence, but by persuasion; men will recognize the hypocrisy and injustice of their lives, and those who persist in evil will be shut out from the fraternal community. Soutaieff refused, at one period at all events, to pay taxes. Once he went to St. Petersburg to explain the state of things to the Emperor; great was his indignation when not only was an interview refused, but he was summarily expelled from the city. Soutaieff and his disciples refuse military service, for them men of all nations and religions are brothers: why should they quarrel?
Not sure I’m on board with the elimination of all private property, but it is interesting the way the seeds of communism are baked this way into the bread that Soutaieff is making. He is right when he says that the moral regeneration of men is closely connected with social and economic questions. Men of different social and economic standings have different moral positions, and indeed, have varying levels of freedom. An equality of morality and freedom should be the goal, and where social or economic disparities prevent that, they should be addressed.
This is the substance of Soutaieff’s teaching. Large numbers of persons come to hear him, sometimes out of curiosity, more often as disciples. He leads the life of a simple peasant. One evening, it is said, on going to his barn, he found several men carrying away sacks of flour. Without saying a word, he entered the barn and found a sack that the robbers had not yet carried off. He pursued them, and on catching up with them, he said: “My brothers, you must be in need of bread; take the sack that you have forgotten.” The following day the robbers brought back the flour, and asked Soutaieff’s forgiveness.
A parable, surely. But the point is made.
He had himself summed up his teaching. “What is truth?” a hearer once asked him. “Truth,” answered Soutaieff with conviction, “truth is love, in a common life.”
Tolstoy, too, is a man who has pondered and dreamed over the misery of the world -- perhaps nowhere more famously than in the pages of Anna Karenina.
“Anna Karenina'' is full of biographic material of intense interest. In Vronsky, doubtless much of [Tolstoy’s] earlier experience, and in Levine, [Tolstoy’s] own inner history at that time, are written clearly enough. From this standpoint the book has the vivid interest of a tragedy; we see the man whose efforts to solve the mystery of life we can trace through all that he ever wrote, still groping, but now more restlessly and eagerly, with growing desperation. The nets are drawn tight around him, and when we close the book we see clearly the inevitable fate of which he is still unconscious.
Anna Karenina is the only work of Tolstoy’s that I have some familiarity with, having listened to it on audiobook way back in 2005. My notes indicate that I did not enjoy that experience, but it may now be worth revisiting.
I once lived on the road to the cemetery of a large northern town. All day long, it seemed to me, the hearses were trundling along their dead to the grave, or gallopping gaily back. When I walked out I met men carrying coffins, and if I glanced at them, perhaps I caught the name of the child I saw two days ago in his mother’s lap; or I was greeted by the burly widower of yesterday, pipe in mouth, sauntering along to arrange the burial of the wife who lay, I knew, upstairs at home, thin and haggard and dead. The road became fantastic and horrible at last; even such a straight road to the cemetery, it seemed, was the whole of life, a road full of the noise of the preparation of death. How daintily soever we danced along, each person, laughing so merrily or in such downright earnest, was merely a corpse, screwed down in an invisible coffin, trundled along as rapidly as might be to the grave-edge.
It was at such a point of view, Ellis tells us, that Tolstoy arrived in his fiftieth year.
“When I had ended my book ‘Anna Karenina,’” he wrote in his “Confessions,” “my despair reached such a height that I could do nothing but think, think, of the horrible condition in which I found myself. … Questions never ceased multiplying and pressing for answers, and like lines converging all to one point, so these unanswerable questions pressed to one black spot. I was nearly fifty years old when these unanswerable questions brought me into this terrible and quite unexpected position. I had come to this, that I -- a healthy and happy man -- felt that I could no longer live. … Bodily, I was able to work at mowing hay as well as a peasant. Mentally, I could work for eighteen hours at a time without feeling any ill consequence. And yet I had come to this, that I could no longer live. … I only saw one thing -- Death. Everything else was a lie.”
The deep reflection prompted by this midlife ennui, and the forging of some kind of path forward takes place initially in Anna Karenina -- although there, according to Ellis, we’ll find more of the struggle and less of the solutions -- and continues more successfully in other works, first his Confessions, and then My Religion.
Tolstoi sums up his own doctrine under a very few heads: -- Resist not evil -- Judge not -- Be not angry -- Love one woman. His creed is entirely covered by these four points. “My Religion” is chiefly occupied by the exposition of what they mean, and in his hands they mean much. They mean nothing less than the abolition of the State and the country. He is as uncompromising as Ibsen in dealing with the State. “It is a humbug, this State,” he remarked to Mr. Stead. “What you call a Government is mere phantasmagoria. What is a State? Men I know; peasants and villages, these I see; but governments, nations, states, what are these but fine names invented to conceal the plundering of honest men by dishonest officials?” Law, tribunals, prisons, become impossible with the disappearance of the State; and with the disappearance of the country, and of “that gross imposture called patriotism,” there can be no more war.
Gosh. He sounds like a libertarian, doesn’t he? But wait…
In place of these great and venerable pillars of civilization, what? The first condition of happiness, he tells us, is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken, that he may enjoy the sky above him, and the pure air and the life of the fields. This involves the nationalization of the land, or rather, to avoid centralizing tendencies, its communalization. “I quite agree with George,” he remarked, “that the landlords may be fairly expropriated without compensation, as a matter of principle.”
No, not a libertarian. No State AND no private property? That sounds like something dangerously close to an anarchist.
But perhaps not. Because Ellis seems to go out of his way to point out that, at the end of the day, Tolstoy is not a demagogue -- a polemist with a hard-coded set of beliefs and understandings of the world -- but rather a flawed and struggling human being, someone with the imagination needed to ask and explore the tough questions of existence -- both for the individual and for the collective -- but finally and fatally without the wisdom to determine the ultimate answers.
“People say to me, ‘Well, Lef Nikolaivitch, as far as preaching goes, you preach; but how about your practice?’ The question is a perfectly natural one; it is always put to me, and it always shuts my mouth. ‘You preach,’ it is said, ‘but how do you live?’ I can only reply that I do not preach -- passionately as I desire to do so. I might preach through my actions, but my actions are bad. That which I say is not preaching; it is only my attempt to find out the meaning and the significance of life. People often say to me, ‘If you think that there is no reasonable life outside the teachings of Christ, and if you love a reasonable life, why do you not fulfil the Christian precepts?’ I am guilty and blameworthy and contemptible because I do not fulfil them; but at the same time I say, --not in justification, but in explanation, of my inconsistency, --Compare my previous life with the life I am now living, and you will see that I am trying to fulfil. I have not, it is true, fulfilled one eighty-thousandth part, and I am to blame for it; but it is not because I do not wish to fulfil all; but because I am unable. Teach me how to extricate myself from the meshes of temptation in which I am entangled, --help me, --and I will fulfill all. I wish and hope to do it even without help. Condemn me if you choose, --I do that myself, --but condemn me, and not the path which I am following, and which I point out to those who ask me where, in my opinion, the path is. If I know the road home, and if I go along it drunk, and staggering from side to side, does that prove that the road is not the right one? If it is not the right one, show me another. If I stagger and wander, come to my help, and support and guide me in the right path. Do not yourselves confuse and mislead me and then rejoice over it and cry, ‘Look at him! He says he is going home, and he is floundering into the swamp!’ You are not evil spirits from the swamp; you are also human beings, and you also are going home. You know that I am alone, --you know that I cannot wish or intend to go into the swamp, --then help me! My heart is breaking with despair because we have all lost the road; and while I struggle with all my strength to find it and keep in it, you, instead of pitying me when I go astray, cry triumphantly, ‘See! He is in the swamp with us!’”
It is a remarkable insight. Tolstoy, like all of us, is wandering lost in the philosophical forest. Most of us fear to stray from the well-worn paths, pretending we know where they will lead us, but Tolstoy has the courage to stray into the brush and undergrowth, hoping to find something new and useful. We may not like where he goes, but we shouldn’t fault him for the things that he finds. Remember…
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, no 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.
Ellis
I said earlier that I had no idea who Havelock Ellis was. As I prepared for writing this post, I looked him up on Wikipedia.
Henry Havelock Ellis (2 February 1859 – 8 July 1939) was an English physician, eugenicist, writer, progressive intellectual and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He co-wrote the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and inclinations, as well as on transgender psychology. He is credited with introducing the notions of narcissism and autoeroticism, later adopted by psychoanalysis.
Ellis was among the pioneering investigators of psychedelic drugs and the author of one of the first written reports to the public about an experience with mescaline, which he conducted on himself in 1896. He supported eugenics and served as one of 16 vice-presidents of the Eugenics Society from 1909 to 1912.
Might be worth finding a few more of his books.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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