IMPRESSION IST AN D LIBERATOR

The World of Dreams. By Havelock Ellis. (Constable. 6s.

Affirmations. By Havelock Ellis. (Constable. 6s. net.)

IT is not certain that if anyone were asked to name the writers who have had most hand in forming the views of the typical well-informed and cultivated man of to-day, Mr. Havelock Ellis's name would come spontaneously to mind. None the less, by his sweet and extreme reasonableness, his desire to discuss everything under the sun without repression, his graceful style, and his alertness to the interests of the time, his influence has been pervasive. We might call him the most humanistic of pathologists. Outside the territory of psycho- analysis itself, no one has done more to popularize the morbid peculiarities of the mind ; and no one has written so tactfully and inoffensively upon such subjects.

Perhaps his anxiety to be reasonable at all costs leaves bins less vigorous in presentation. It is hard to combine this mild humanity with deep-grounded convictions and the magnetism of confidence. His essays are a little spoilt by the self- consciousness of culture. Even in his style we sometimes feel more chastity and fineness than strength. The most impor- tant of these reprints, The World of Dreams, a scientific study

of theories, begins as though it were designed for a prose anthology

" When we fall asleep we enter a dim and ancient house of shadow, unillumined by any direct ray from the outer world of waking life.' We are borne about through its chambers, without" conscious' volition of our own ; we fall down its mouldy and rotten staircases; we are haunted by strange sounds and odours from its mysterious recesses ; we move among phantoms we cannot consciously control."

There are times when the jargon of technical journals seems a marvel of concision- and Sturdiness. At least they give us no such preliminary gestures, no such wanderings and hap- hazard grandeurs.

It is this habit of elaboration that makes Impressions and Comments disappointing. The entries are more fragmentary than we expect even from casual impressions ; each is a short- essay which had no time to get under way. Here, for example, is a typical instance from the second volume :— " As though the emerald should say, ' Whatever happens I must be emerald.' From of old that saying of Marcus Aurelius has been in my thoughts, and now, as the tide of life recedes and I am left more and more alone, it has sunk deeper than ever and ever becomes endeared. One may ask : Why cherish the virtue of a mere stone, as it were a pebble cast up on the shore ? The virtue of vitality lies in response, in a perpetual internal adjuStment to external changes. The virtue of the emerald is for living things death. Yet, on the other hand. all the progress of life towards its. higher forms is by increased .stability and greater fixity. It is the lower forms of life which yield to a touch and adapt themselves to every kind of influence. All high life is associated with increased inhibition by the higher 'centres over the irritable autonomic. system."

This is a " Comment " rather than an " impression " ; but we can hardlY imagine Mr. Ellis jotting it down in haste; for

fear of losing the quick-thought. It has an over-premeditated

air ; and Mr. Ellis was writing neither science nor philosophy, but pure and distressing " literature."

The Affirmations are more interesting. Here we have a number of acute portraits of famous men ; a small band of heroes that Mr. Ellis has chosen for himself. The company is queer—Nietzsche, Casanova and St. Francis are strange book-fellows. The biographies are told simply, and the discussions are temperate. The book is the author's best venture into criticism. - - When he has a notable subject and sets himself more to a

scientific survey of theories than to self-expression Mr.. Havelock Ellis is at his best. The World of Dreams is a valuable

and illuminating study. It is impossible to say whether we can really hope to express the drearn4orld in the terms of ordinary conscious life. Giant problems 'raise themselves up

when we bring reason to the task. Our remembrance of dreams, to take one instance, is-an act of conscious life ; and

we may have played tricks of the most astonishing kind in translating and interpreting the psychic states of sleep into terms of wakefulness.

The most ordinary example of our double-dealing is the knock at the bedroom door, which seems in our dream to have been an explosion at the climax of a series of dream-events.

There can be little doubt that we invent all the events after hearing the sound, as an imaginative explanation of it, and reverse the time-series by self-deception and chicanery. But it would be possible to argue, of all dreams, that we make them up after waking, out of the mere organic states we experience passively in sleep. Mr. Ellis makes too little of one argument for the comparative real consciousness in some dreams (that is to say, the actual experience of dreaming). It is difficult for anyone who has felt during his dream, that he was dreaming, to allow the utter unsubstEntiality of dream remembrance. It even happens that a dreamer can feel himself in charge of

his dreams, foresee that the trend of the dream is towards catastrophe and avert the natural end, change his dream while he is dreaming. This seems to be a rare experience

with most people ; and on some theories it would be impossible. But it would be difficult to convince a man who had known this experience to deny that some part of day consciousness, with some kind of appreciation of successions in time, persists in dreams.

However involved the theory of dreams may appear, there has been much accomplished in our own century towards bringing dreams into significance for life, and preventing them from being mere useless abstirdities. Mr. Havelock Ellis's book is the most inclusive' account' in English of the logical problems involved, and it gives' useful classifications of the types of dreams.