The New Spirit Third Edition — Reading Notes

Ellis’s Method: Biography as Evidence

Ellis builds his portraits from concrete biographical details, treating a writer's life as the key to their work. In the Ibsen chapter, for instance, he reconstructs the playwright's childhood from family accounts and earlier biographies. He notes that after his father's bankruptcy, young Henrik 'did not play like the other children' but barricaded himself in a kitchen alley, reading and drawing. Ellis connects this isolation directly to the proud defiance of Dr. Stockmann in An Enemy of the People. He also cites Ibsen's own recollection of a 'big black book'—Harryson's History of London—which later appears in The Wild Duck as Hedvig's treasured volume. Such cross-references between life and art are typical of Ellis's approach: he treats each writer's output as a coherent expression of their personal history.

The Selection of Subjects: A Deliberate Canon

Ellis anticipates the question of why he omits major philosophers. In the preface, he lists Kant, Hegel, Comte, Mill, and Spencer as names he 'cannot remember ever proposing to include.' Instead, he reveals that he once considered adding the painter Burne-Jones, whose 'Merlin and Vivien' he encountered as a youth in Sydney. That encounter, he writes, brought 'all the mystery and the charm' of Renaissance art into the modern world. This anecdote clarifies Ellis's criterion: he values artists who 'suggest that infinitely remote world while accepting the austere conditions of our own earth.' The five chosen figures—a philosopher, a poet, a dramatist, a novelist, and a critic—all share this ability to fuse the ideal with the concrete.

Diction and the Texture of Argument

Ellis's own prose is marked by a formal yet vivid diction. He describes Burne-Jones's art as making 'angels walk tip-toe on lily cups,' a phrase that combines precision with a hint of whimsy. His sentences often build through parallel clauses, as when he notes that the fifteenth-century artists 'delighted like children to scatter rich fruits on the golden floors, and to stick peacocks’ feathers into the bejewelled walls.' This rhythmic accumulation mirrors his argument that the new spirit is not a break with tradition but a transformation of it. He avoids abstract jargon, preferring concrete images: the 'pale ghosts of Puvis de Chavannes’ frescoes' or the 'sombre and tragic cast' of Ibsen's character, which he traces to the 'little town' of Skien with its 'active commercial life and its equally active religious life.'

The Role of Place in Shaping a Writer

Ellis repeatedly emphasizes how geography and local culture inform a writer's sensibility. For Ibsen, the provincial town of Skien—with its 'pillory, the barred windows, the pale criminals'—explains the 'absence in his work of the sea and the forest' that appear in Björnson and Lie. Instead, Ibsen's dramas are 'purely human and reflective,' rooted in the social cleavages of small-town life. Ellis also notes that Ibsen's first job in an apothecary's shop at Grimstad was formative: 'the apothecary’s shop is the place where all the loungers meet in the evening to discuss the events of the day,' providing raw material for a dramatist. This attention to setting extends to the other subjects, though the excerpts focus on Ibsen. Ellis treats place not as background but as a causal force in the creation of art.

Readers approaching The New Spirit should expect a series of intimate intellectual portraits rather than a systematic treatise. Ellis writes as a sympathetic observer, drawing on letters, memoirs, and the works themselves to construct a coherent vision of each figure. The book rewards those who read it as a demonstration of its own thesis: that the most individual voices become the most representative. The preface's admission that the Conclusion now seems 'rather formal and metaphysical' hints at Ellis's own evolution as a thinker, making the earlier chapters a record of his own developing sensibility.

I’ve spent many evenings with The New Spirit, watching Ellis trace how Diderot and Tolstoy each wrestled honesty out of their lives. That same patient reverence for a writer’s inner weathering lives in Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 3 Essays on Literature, Biography, and Antiquities — Themes and Context, where old German voices hum alongside. They sit separately on my shelf, yet share one quiet breath—the belief that character shapes every paragraph.