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Updated: June 21, 2025
It has been sometimes argued that there is no truer criterion of the vitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spirits of that time in grotesque; and certainly in the instance of Gothic art there is no disputing the proposition.
There is no doubt that our continuous receipt of this commodity has had a bracing effect on our national character. We used to be rather phlegmatic, used we not? We have learnt to be vibrant. Of Kolniyatsch, as of all authentic master-spirits in literature, it is true that he must be judged rather by what he wrote than by what he was.
Why should they not be so? They furnish us the means, and the only means, whereby we may hold communion with the master-spirits of all ages. They bring us acquainted with the best thoughts which the human mind has produced, expressed in the noblest language. As we read, the mind expands with the horizon, and becomes broad as the blue heaven above us.
This is the greatness which belongs to philosophers, and to the master-spirits in poetry and the fine arts. Next comes the greatness of action; and by this we mean the sublime power of conceiving bold and extensive plans; of constructing and bringing to bear on a mighty object a complicated machinery of means, energies, and arrangements, and of accomplishing great outward effects.
Because those master-spirits which guide the present age, have given birth to a species of poetry more legitimate and useful in its design, and more valuable in its tendencies and characteristics. Instead of the "namby pamby" verses of the period I have alluded to, and the coarse scurrility of style which runs with a discolouring vein through the satirical pages of Dr.
On my mind the effect was thrilling: I have pictured to myself angels as poets have described them, and have often before looked upon them such as they have been conceived by Angelo, Correggio, and other master-spirits amongst men, and have seen faces of theirs on which I could have looked unsatiated again and again, and forms I could have loved with all my heart; but never beheld an emanation of the Spirit of God, a thing only to be gazed on holily and worshipped humbly, until I met with this angel of Murillo's.
Ostensibly because one quite commonplace Austrian gentleman had been foully murdered, but really because a vain and ambitious and rapidly increasing nation, living on an arid and insufficient soil, had come to consider themselves the master-spirits of humanity, and therefore entitled to possess the earth, or at least give law to all other nations.
But the invisible powers of evil have no mercy on their instruments after they have worked their will, and Time has turned them into objects of contempt. Nor were the German people themselves, any more than their master-spirits and spokesmen, spared the shame of their duplicity in those early days of August 1914.
Indeed the expulsion of the foreign tyrants, and the restoration of that golden age which had preceded the irruption of Charles the Eighth, were projects which, at that time, fascinated all the master-spirits of Italy. The magnificent vision delighted the great but ill-regulated mind of Julius. It divided with manuscripts and sauces, painters, and falcons, the attention of the frivolous Leo.
And the great phenomenon of the age is the collecting of all those revolutionary particles into one compact mass, arranged and preordained by some master-spirits of evil, who would be leaders not of a state or nation only, but of a universal republic embracing first Europe, and then the world.
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