LIFE AS AN ART
The Dance of Life. By Havelock Ellis. 8vo. 248 pages. Houghton Miflin Company. $3.
MORALISTS, in the main, have been a somewhat forbidding race. Their main preoccupation has usually been to try to prevent people from doing what they wanted to do, on the ground—formerly explicit, but now seldom avowed—that the natural man is wicked. Psychoanalysed, such moralists would be found to be moved principally by envy: being themselves too old or too sour or too stiff for the pleasures of life, they feel a discomfort, when they see others enjoying themselves, which appears in consciousness as moral reprobation. Accordingly the things they condemn are not things which cause pain, but things which cause pleasure, and in order to be able to condemn such things they put fantastic interpretations on religious precepts. The commandment not to work on Saturdays is interpreted as a commandment not to play on Sundays. This particular rule of morality is dying out, but many that are still insisted upon have equally little foundation in reason.
Mr Havelock Ellis is a moralist, but not of the usual sort. He is best known as the author of a monumental work of research, which the authorities, in their wisdom, have seen fit to make unobtainable for ordinary men and women, on the ground that no one would be virtuous except through ignorance, and that therefore the spread of knowledge must be illegal. It is true that a host of wise men, from Socrates onwards, have taught that wrong conduct always springs from ignorance, but that has never been the view of the police, who have always believed that people must be either ignorant or wicked, without telling us which of the two they considered themselves to be.
Those who know nothing else of Mr Havelock Ellis might expect to find in him the temperament of a rebel, with possibly some bitterness against "folly, doctor-like, controlling skill." But although his views on most subjects are unorthodox, he is far too urbane to be properly described as a rebel. He surveys the world calmly and genially; he does not try to scold men out of their evil
