I have tried to obtain and present here a faint tracing of the evolution of the modern spirit, as it strikes a contemporary. In the subsequent chapters we shall be able to trace it yet more distinctly, at different stages, and in various phases. Diderot, eclipsed once, is seen now, as, in a manifold sense which may be claimed for no other man, the initiator of our own day in all its varied manifestations, and, above all, in its practical scientific spirit. In Heine we see the most characteristic, if not the finest, artist of the second quarter of our century, the melodious embodiment of all its discords, the impersonation of a transition which we have all passed through, and which draws us to him with cords of a peculiarly personal tenderness. Whitman represents, for the first time since Christianity swept over the world, the re-integration, in a sane and whole-hearted form, of the instincts of the entire man, and therefore he has a significance which we can scarcely over-estimate. Goethe had done something of this in a more artistic and intellectual shape; it is from no lack of love or reverence for Goethe that I have chosen the American, a democrat rather than an aristocrat, the very roughness of whose grasp of life serves but to reveal the genuine instinct of the modern Greek. All that is finest in aristocracy we see revealed in Ibsen, a keen and sombre figure that reminds one perpetually of Dante--the same curt and awful contempt for lies and for shams, the same vision of a Heaven beyond. Into such Kingdoms of Heaven it needs but a child to enter, and when I see this man with that little diamond wedge of sincerity and the mighty Thor’s hammer of his art, I feel as though no mountain of error could resist the new spirit that he represents. In Tolstoi we see the manifestation of another great modern force; no keenness or clearness here indeed in the interpretation of life, though such a marvellous power of presentation; yet a massive elemental force, groping slowly and incoherently towards the light, so interesting to us because we seem to be conscious of the heart of a whole nation, the great nation of the future, towards which all eyes are turned.