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 ways, but to win them to the life that he considers good by the portrayal of its delights. The holders of power, reinforced by their sycophants among parsons and professors, view the lines of others as consisting essentially of work, with only such intervals of rest as are physiologically necessary. Mr Havelock Ellis views life as essentially play, interrupted by the need of a certain minimum of work to secure the necessaries of existence. He begins with a chapter on the art of dancing, and goes on to maintain that all life ought to be as like a dance as possible. This is not suggested in Bacchic spirit, as a way of drowning our sorrows; the mood is not that of:
"Is it not fine to dance and sing
While the bells of death do ring?"
The tragic facts of human life seem to have lost their sting for him, and to have been somehow harmonized as they are in tragic drama. This is explained by his very interesting account of his conversion to mysticism at the age of nineteen—a conversion which was permanent in spite (or because) of its almost complete freedom from dogma.
"My whole attitude towards the universe was changed. It was no longer an attitude of hostility and dread, but of confidence and love. My self was one with the Not-self, my will one with the universal will. I seemed to walk in light; my feet scarcely touched the ground; I had entered a new world."
This mystic illumination underlies the views set forth on thought, on religion, and on morals, all of which spring from the elimination of Satan. There are many people—the present reviewer is among them—who find it harder to give up Satan than any other item of orthodox religion. Mr Havelock Ellis has given him up, and has abandoned along with him all the sterner side of morals and religion and thought. He does not believe, with Jeremiah, that "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." Consequently morality is not to be restrictive, but expansive: it is to be more like the training of an athlete, designed to cultivate a natural excellence. It is not, however, to be a matter of obedience to a set of rules, but must at every moment depend on feeling.
"No reasonable moral being may draw breath in the world without an open-eyed freedom of choice; and if the moral world is to be governed by laws, better to people it with automatic machines than with living men and women. In our human world the precision of mechanism is for ever impossible."
This is one of the points where the author's optimism becomes apparent, and where the Devil's Advocate sees his chance. "Automatic machines" are what men and women are becoming; "the precision of mechanism" is what the industrial system is forcing them to acquire. The present reviewer, as a devout believer in Satan, holds that in our age he is incarnate in the captain of industry, whether trust magnate or communist commissar. But to say to the ordinary person: "Remain a living man or woman; do not become an automatic machine," is equivalent to saying: "Die of hunger, and do not attempt to earn your living." Advice of this sort is apt to be coldly received. Moreover the state of an automaton, once achieved, is pleasant; a life which is entirely habitual involves a minimum of friction and responsibility. The Bolsheviks and the Fabians, quite rightly, insist that love of spontaneity is anarchic and aristocratic. All true democrats in the present day mean by "democracy" the reduction of the few to the level of the many, not the raising of the many to the level of the few; consequently they welcome increasing mechanization, and wish it to become universal. The power of Satan, therefore, is just as great as in past times.
To speak without diabolic metaphors, the question is whether life is to be conceived as a game or a fight. In the former case, we may agree with all that Mr Havelock Ellis says; in the latter case, we shall import something of traditional morals into our outlook. Let us agree at once that life ought to be a game, that there is nothing intrinsically desirable about fighting, and that the disappearance of the sterner virtues, if it were permanently possible, would be an unmitigated boon. But if—to take an analogy—the game of football were illegal, it could only be played by organizing a subsidiary team to take on the police, and this team would have to be much larger than the teams that were playing. In this case, the preservation of football would require a high order of self-sacrifice in those who faced prison to protect players. It happens that football is not illegal, but many occupations quite as innocent and quite as productive of a balance of pleasure are illegal. Bishops and other busy-bodies employ an army of detectives to spy upon couples in the Parks, for fear they should not suffer from lack of housing accommodation so much as is hoped. Female teachers, in most parts of England, are required to be unmarried, which means that they must be childless and either celibate or very skilfully deceptive. It would be no more cruel to insist that they should be blinded or have their hands cut off. Uncivilized races are compelled to work in mines or other industrial enterprises, and are drilled to spread terror and starvation among the weaker nations of Europe. In China, an ancient civilization which has almost all the characteristics that Mr Havelock Ellis admires is being deliberately destroyed by the military and financial ambitions of nations with stronger armies and navies, to the accompaniment of cant about integrity and inde- pendence and the Open Door.
In such a world, all who are not a menace to their neighbours are bound to be exterminated by war or economic pressure. Art is almost extinct; science still flourishes because it ministers to homicide, but must perish when it has perfected its work by destruction. How is one to say, in such a world, "my will is one with the universal will"? Mr Havelock Ellis professes that his mysticism is free from dogma; but if he supposes that we have anything to do with a universal will other than that of organized mankind, he has adopted all that is essential in the dogma of theism. The only "universal will" visible to me is that of human groups, which are all bent upon mutual destruction. With this universal will I am emphatically not at one. Agreeing with Mr Havelock Ellis as to the ends of life, I find it difficult to agree as to means. I believe that those who value these ends must temporarily submit to the yoke of organization and co-operation, since otherwise they will be crushed in detail by clever energetic maniacs. If one could believe in some cosmic purpose, worked out through the folly and wickedness of men, it might be possible to wait patiently for the happy consummation. But if one believes that there is no purpose in the non-human world—at any rate in that part of it with which we are in contact—it is useless to look to anything but human effort to extricate us from the dangers of the time. Science and machinery have given men new powers over nature and over each other. Unfortunately, the more humane portion of mankind is also the less executive portion, and therefore the new powers have fallen into the hands of men who use them almost wholly to produce misery and crush out whatever is excellent and spontaneous or individual. Unless the champions of humanism rouse themselves to enter the practical world and make themselves masters of the new powers, their cause is doomed.
It is possible, however, that this outlook is mistaken, and that the serpent may be charmed by sweet songs. Men may grow weary of strenuous futility; the ideal of "efficiency" may lose its appeal. If so, what is most needed is to set forth persuasively the conception of life as an art. The Dance of Life does this with great charm; every page is interesting, and the author has our sympathy throughout. May his words, and those of men who feel as he does, prove potent beyond our expectation.