10 OCTOBER 1931, Page 22

Modern Love and Modern Virtue

More Essays of Love and Virtue. By Havelock Ellis. (Con- stable. • 7s. 6d.)

MANY times as one reads Mr. Havelock Ellis' pages one is driven to the reflection that he is one of the most under-rated prose stylists of- to-day. The controversial character of so much of what Mr. Ellis has said has left little room for. atten-

tion to the beauty and perfection of _his way of saying it. And,. in any case, Mr. Ellis' prOse is so quiet, so unobtrusive, so smooth that its quality might easily have been overlooked. And yet what skill he has - How perfectly, for. example, is cadence suited to sense in this passage :

" For it should be among the precious gifts of age that it releases us from the solemnity of youth, and that we learn to hold loosely and lightly and playfully the things that once we persistently clung to ; and this not alone because they must soon fall from our hands altogether, but because we have learnt to know them better, and perhaps to realize how much nearer were our loves to "our hates, and our hates to our loves, than at the outset we had assumed. That process of age is—as it should be— a movement in the direction of dissolution and death ; but mean- while it is a phase of sweetness and mellowness, the fruit's one moment of ripeness, or of what, more or less foolishly, men call

wisdom.' "

In this mellow and tranquil spirit Mr. Ellis approaches and illuminates many of our most important modern problems. His views, once Considered so inflammatory, are to-day thought of by many people as ordinary to the point of being unoriginal. And now that the smoke Of the rather hysterical battle has cleared away we see that what Mr. Ellis has always been saying so quietly and so gently (if, as was thought thirty years ago, so provocatively), about human life and its 'problems was never rightly understood. He was a man who cared so strongly for morality that he could not bear it to be perverted to base and stupid ends. This does not mean that Mr. Ellis is not in his own way still a vigorous ,critic of his time : a man passionately anxious to cut the dead wood out of society in order that the living tree may grow better. Here is his comment on modern England : .

"I belong to a land where all who are truly Wive are to-day specially called upon to live daringly, and where virtue, in the antique and genuine sense, as the impulse to demand things that are great and rare, becomes a prime duty. For I am surrounded by traditions that once were living and now are dead, not only in the spiritual world but even in the industrial and commercial world, and yet are clung to with a passionate tenacity which blinds those who hold them to the fate they are bringing down on themselves. I see government entrusted to men of no virtue, by the votes of men and women made of the same stuff, and guided by principles—if they deserve the name—that may once have been those of sanity but in the light of a later age are imbecility. To-day virtue is an adventure."

Of the six essays which make up _this volume every one is interesting, and there is not one which contains a word which could shock the most sensitive reader. The chapter on " The New 'Mother " is wise and temperate, while the second essay, on the renovation of the Family, contains a statement of the case for the family unit as the imperishable foundation of all human society, which could not be more strongly put. After admitting that many mothers are not fitted, or do not fit them- selves, for the proper rearing of children, he shows that to deduce from this fact the conclusion that children should be taken from their mothers and be given over to other specially trained. women is a piece of completely muddled thinking. The real solution is to train the real mothers.

" But to be content to leave the mothers in ignorance and to train-up-in the knowledgeof the duties -of maternity tr body of women who are not intended to be mothers, except for other womeizsit children, seems a perverted attempt to escape the aiffi, culty. It is not calculated to benefit, and stilrlesa to

happy, the real mothers, the artificial mothers, or the children. An institution on so unreal a foundation cannot possibly compete with one on a sound biological basis_ which is just as susceptible to any necessary 'cultivation and development as the other."

He protests passionately against our habit of penalizing professional women, such as school teachers, who desire to marry and have children. In the case of teachers, he is par- ticularly shocked that we should entrust the youth of the nation to women who have specifically been denied the know- ledge and sympathy which motherhood can alone bring. - His comment on this performance is a good example of his quietly devastating style. " In spite of the recent progress of science, the depths of human imbecility have not yet been plumbed."

The essay on the " Function of Taboos " also contains a strong defence of the institution of taboos as an absolutely essential part of civilization. More controversial is his con- clusion in his essay called " The Revaluation of Obscenity," in which he comes down definitely on the side of those who would abolish all censorship altogether On this questions he writes:

" The problem of the child remains. It ought to be clear that we are not entitled to protect children by laws which also extend to adults and thus tend (sometimes with too much success) to convert adults into children. It is for the parents and teachers, one cannot too often repeat, to protect the children, and to protect them, above all, by teaching them to protect themselves, which can only be done by facing evil, and not by fleeing from it."

The last two essays, ," The Control of Population " and " Eugenics and the Future " have a wider and less purely personal interest than the earlier papers, and Mr. Ellis' political conclusions are more open 'to question. They contain, however, many interesting and stimulating suggestions, and are well worth reading.