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4 THE NEW SPIRIT IN THE CINEMA
to attain his fiftieth birthday.1 No doubt Mr. Galsworthy would have understood me better if I had said, The New Purpose, or even New Movement, although movement is not what I have in mind. Then he would have altered his question and inquired, "Is there a New Movement? " and might, without waiting for my reply have added, " Yes. You are of course referring to the Talkie Revolution."
I am not referring to the " Talkie Revolution," new though that event appears to the man in the street, and to one or two persons of sense who are still undecided as to its merit. I refer to a purpose in the Cinema which has been there from the first, which has been striving to assert itself throughout the Cinema's comparatively short career, but has been held down by the commercial hand.
I remember receiving a letter from a friend, Professor Wincenty Lutozlawski, of Wilno, Poland. It seemed that his attention had been drawn to two books of mine by their titles,2 and having read the books he was curious to know whether I attached a spiritualistic meaning to the term " New Spirit." I will take the liberty of quoting an extract or two from his letters. He explained that he is a student of reincarnation and has written an important book on the subject3 in which he " Proves by new convincingly decisive arguments that old truth so well known in India, Greece, Celtic Gaul, now very much acknowledged chiefly in Poland, and France, also by such modern English writers as Tennyson, Browning, Kipling, Matthew Arnold, Carpenter, Lafcadio Hearn, etc. — that many of us have lived in human shape many times before, and we reap now what we have sown ages ago." After which he inquired, " Do you think that the New Spirit consists in the awakening of the soul, in the discovery that we are eternal beings with a long past which explains the present? "...
1 World's Press News, November 7, 1929, p. 3.
2 " The New Spirit in the European Theatre " (Benn). " The New Spirit in the Russian Theatre " (Brentano).
3 " Pre-existence and Reincarnation," 1928.