The New Spirit,

by Havelock Ellis (G. Bell and Sons),

 is presented to the public by the author, evidently a young man, as "a bundle of sphygmographic tracings." We fear that there are readers ignorant enough, with this critic, not to know what this may mean. It might be a tin of mixed biscuits or a bag of shavings. Up to the present time we have taken, in American phrase, no kind of stock in sphygmography. Seeking about for a clue to the mystery in Mr Havelock Ellis's own pages, we seem to flounder hopelessly in a sticky mass of words. According to his preface he is "an individual" who has been "searching and probing into the nature and drift of the things into which we were projected. " The pulse of life, we are told with a gush of confidence, "runs strong and fast. " Mr Ellis has made it his duty to " bring a sensitive lever to that pulse here and there" —to "determine" as "delicately " as he could " its rhythms. " Still, we fail to discover where the sphyg—what do you call it, comes in. The application of a lever to a pulse with a view of determining its rhythms is a process which seems to belong to the mechanics of the occult philosophy. By-and-by we discover that it is Mr. Havelock Ellis's purpose to give us a new spirit of the age, in the shape of brief essays upon the lives and works of some of the men whom he takes to be the prime motive forces presently at work in the world. These men are Diderot, Heine, Whitman, Ibsen, and Tolstoi—certainly a very mixed lot. The one great pulse which beats through all of them, and makes them specially interesting as sphygmographists, is that they are essentially religious men. We should not have supposed so of the apostate Jew Heine, the anarch Whitman, the scoffing Diderot, the matter-of-fact Ibsen, and the materialist Tolstoi, but so it is. All these men are said to bring us "subtly in contact with that ineluctable shape "— namely, religion. This "vast and many shaped religious element of life" will not let Mr Ellis pass it by. It has fixed him so that he must needs preach to us, in his queer jargon, of all sorts of things which seem to belong to some new kind of philosophy, but are mostly unintelligible and not worth trying to understand.


 The Argus  5 July 1890, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article8414753