BOOKS.
"THE NEW SPIRIT," BY HAVELOCK ELLIS.* MR. HAVELOCK ELLIS,—if " Mr." be the proper title, of which we have considerable doubt,—has not very well defined to him- self what it is that he really wishes to praise under the name of "the New Spirit" Scientific audacity is, no doubt, a great part of it ; distaste and even hatred for conventionalism is another great part of it ; a strong desire for strong emotions is a third great part of it; a profound belief that the new attitude to be taken by women in affairs is to introduce a far-reaching and a wholesome revolution into the social spirit of the age, is a fourth element of considerable potency in the book ; and perhaps the fifth may be a hesitating impression that an age of Socialism is at hand. But these various elements are very vaguely delineated and very much confused, and when we lay the book down, we feel that the only thing we can certainly say about it is, that the " New Spirit " is to bring with it a return to moral chaos with hardly any guiding principle at all.
• The New Spirit. By Havelock Ellis. London : George Hull and Sons.
Perhaps the nearest thing to a definition of "the New Spirit," is to say that it is the spirit which is common to Diderot, Heine, Walt Whitman, Ibsen, and Tolstoi ; and as that which is common to three at least of these writers is chiefly an enthusiastic immodesty, we may safely assert that a very potent element in " the New Spirit" is to be what Havelock Ellis would call a "frank paganism," and what we should have described by a much less agreeable phrase. Never to be ashamed of facts, is the only very coherent exhortation running through the book. The five writers we have named are studied and described with a good deal of force, and apparently after a very con- scientious study of them, though of the two best known to the present writer, Heine and Whitman, we should say that the criticism is quite inadequate, and that the author is so delighted to detect the disappearance in them of shame, that every fault is forgiven so soon as that " note " of "the New Spirit" is perceived. It certainly does seem to be remarkable that what is expected from the emancipation of women, is something like the exclusion of modesty from amongst the rank of human virtues. Havelock Ellis seems to ground his view of this side of woman's activity on her very great superiority to man in the arts of prac- tical organisation. He admits, and even contends for, the superiority of man in the ideal region, in all that is called genius ; but genius he treats as possibly a morbid growth :-
" The rise of women—who form the majority of the race in most civilised countries—to supreme power in the near future, is certain. Whether one looks at it with hope or with despair one has to recognise it. For my own part I find it an unfailing source of hope. One cannot help feeling that along the purely masculine line no striking social advance is likely to be made. Men are idealists, in search of wealth usually, sometimes of artistic visions ; they have little capacity for social organisation. It is sometimes said that the fundamental inferiority of women is shown by the very few surpassing women of genius in the world's history. In their anxiety to combat this argument women have even enlisted Semiramis and Dido into their ranks. But it is a fact. For all great solitary and artistic achievements—the writing of Divine Comedies, the painting of Transfigurations, the construction of systems of metaphysic, the inauguration of new religions—men are without rivals ; the more abstract and unsocial an art is, the easier it is for men to attain eminence in it ; in music and in the art of erecting philosophies men have had, least of all, any occasion to fear the rivalry of women. Such things are precious, although it may be that what we call `genius' is something abnormal and distorted, like those centres of irritation which result in the pearls we likewise count so precious. Women are comparatively free from genius.' Yet it might probably be maintained that the average level of women's intelligence is fully equal to that of men's. Compare the men and women among settlers in the Australian bush, or wherever else men and women have been set side by side to construct their social life as best they may, and it will often be to the disadvantage of the men. In practical and social life—even perhaps, though this is yet doubtful, in science—women will have nothing to fear. The most important mental sexual difference lies in the relative and absolute preponderance in women of the lower, that is, the more important and fundamental nervous centres. What new forms the influence of women will give to society we cannot tell. Our most strenuous efforts will be needed to see to it that women gain the wider experience of life, the larger education in the full sense of the word, the entire freedom of development, without which their vast power of interference in social organisation might have disastrous as well as happy results."
And on the ground that women are asserted to be stronger in "the lower, that is, the more important nervous centres," it is assumed that they can and will face the facts of life more
audaciously than men, and that they will help men in getting rid of that conventional insincerity which ignores the unlovely parts of human life, and beautifies its general aspect at the cost of injurious social figments, which men have not the courage to expose. At all events, the only coherent constituent of " the New Spirit " which this book professes to set forth, is a vehement hatred, amounting to a passion, against conventional unveracities, and a determina- tion that they should be swept away. To which we reply, that by all means they should be swept away, but not by ignoring and destroying the truths of which most social conventions are the low-water mark, but by bringing the conscience of society to the point at which these truths shall be fully realised, and at which their drift shall not be allowed to dwindle to is mere pretence. Convention, of course, may sink into a sham, and a sham may become even a hypocrisy in time ; but it is seldom indeed that a convention gets firmly established in human society which does not rest on some great truth of our social nature ; and we are quite sure that the conventions which Heine, who possessed one of the most aweless and licentious natures to be found anywhere amongst the great modern poets, set himself to break down, rested on the most natural and authoritative principles implanted in human nature. Heine, however, was a man of supreme genius. No one can deny that he knew well what modesty meant when he was most immodest, and what true reverence meant when he was most irreverent. But as for Walt Whitman, of whom Havelock Ellis makes so much, we are sincerely convinced that he has never known the difference between the baldest stiltedness and the grandest sublimity, between a deliberately inflated egotism and a deep sense of human dignity, between gross and loath- some indecency and the moral courage that can calmly ignore conventional etiquettes for the sake of something that lies deeper than etiquette. That Walt Whitman was an heroic hos- pital nurse during the Secession War we gladly recognise ; but tenderness and pity are perfectly compatible with illimitable obtuseness to the bathos of moral and intellectual inflatedness.
Walt Whitman can only be partially excused for his deliberate and detestable indecency on the ground that he has never had the moral sensitiveness to distinguish between boldness and nakedness, between an aspiration and a gasp, between natural grandeur and a theatrical pose. We would as soon believe that the greater part of what he has written will be admired in the next century, as that Martin Farquhar Tupper, who is neither so revolting nor quite so swollen out with a pseudo- self-importance, will be admired in the next century. Tupper is the more thorough Philistine of the two ; but Walt Whitman only misses the Philistinism of democratic and stentorian self- admiration by representing a world which is fresher and, to Englishmen, more interesting, than the world of Tupper.
Havelock Ellis admires Walt Whitman, so far as we can judge, precisely for what is most repulsive in him, his moral shamelessness, his unlimited power of puffing himself out and appearing gigantic to himself, and his supreme indifference to all that literature might have taught him. Is not Havelock Ellis guilty of the same sort of exaggeration in making so much of Ibsen ? The present writer knows nothing of Ibsen. except Miss Lord's translation of The Doll's House. But so far as that gives any fair sample of Ibsen's work, it is surely ridiculous beyond measure to speak of him as a great dramatist. There is not a character in that play which really
lives before one's eyes. The grievance of women in not being admitted to anything like intellectual and moral equality with men is strongly brought out ; but for the rest, there is no more play of character and life in the play than there is in the commonest of the Adelphi melodramas. However, the present writer cannot pretend to form any judgment on
Ibsen's literary powers ; but of this he is sure, that these eternal attacks on mere conventionalism, as if conventionalism
meant pure hypocrisy, are mischievous mistakes. Conven- tionalism is usually a petrified form of a social faith that once had vivid life in it, and the way to attack it is to confront it with what it once meant, and what in some deeper sense it ought to mean still, and not to ridicule it as if it had never represented a true social insight. But the truth is, that Havelock Ellis yearns to destroy exactly what we believe that he ought to wish to restore. He hankers after what he calls "the sane and lofty sensuality of Boccaccio" (p. 111), " that sane and cheerful sensuality" (p. 114) which he finds in a still higher form in Walt Whitman. His doctrine appears to be, that whatever comes genuinely out of the heart of man is to be trusted, whereas Christ tells us that it is that which_ comes genuinely out of the heart of man which defiles no less than purifies man. Out of the heart proceed all the long train of perfectly sincere evil passions no less than all the long train of devout resolves and prayers; and a great propor- tion of the evil is just as much in earnest, just as frank, as a great proportion of the good. The practical teaching of this book would lead those who adopted it to a willing surrender to every impulse which is for the time eager and imperious; and as for its theoretical teaching, we have not the smallest idea what it is. Anything more confused, chaotic, and unin- telligible than the last chapter, headed " Conclusion," which professes to sum up the drift of the five essays on Diderot. Heine, Whitman, Ibsen, and Tolstoi, we have never read. Here is a specimen of its philosophy, a specimen the last sentence of which we cannot even construe, much less dimly understand :—
" The soul is born and then dies. What do we mean by birth and death ? According to the old Hebrew conception, a spirit was created out of nothing and put into a mould of matter, and then at death again passed back into nothing. But to-day this concep- tion is impossible. Er nihilo nihil fit. It is clear that both the elements that make up the soul must be, under some form, equally eternal. By a marvellous cosmic incident, our little planet has broken forth into a strange and beautiful efflorescence. We rise from the world, whom we are, on this variegated jet of organic life, to fall back again to our true life, by whatever unknown ways and under whatever change of form, conscious, it may be, but, as before birth, no longer with any self to be conscious of, no longer organic."
The real teaching of this book is the old Antinomianism, a teaching which, we venture to say, would be as fatal to the veracities of which Havelock Ellis wishes to be the prophet, as it is to the spiritual subjugation of the passions, and the dominion of the higher affections,—the affections which are grounded in reverence and pledged to constancy,—over the lower elements of man's nature. Nothing can really plead effectually the cause of veracity, which is not born of the conscience. Without the conscience veracity is non-existent, and with the conscience, that to which you are bound to be true is the law to which the conscience bears -witness. Havelock Ellis says that " the charm of Jesus can never pass away when it is rightly apprehended." If his book means what it appears to say in every chapter, the "charm " of Jesus excites in him a mere swelling wave of emotion towards one who had " permanently expanded the bounds of individuality." That was not our Lord's claim for himself. He claimed for himself that he was one with the righteousness of God, and could help the race to purify itself at the same flame. We cannot imagine anything of which it could be more necessary for human nature, so taught, to purge itself, than the " New Spirit" of Havelock Ellis.
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