udgements Thirty Years Old
The Genius of Europe..By Havelock Ellis. (Williams and Norgate. 125. 6c1.) THIS is not perhaps the most fortunate moment to have chosen for the publication of Havelock Ellis's reflections upon national genius. The essays this book contains were mostly written during the 1914-18 war, or, as in the case of "France and Great Britain," some time earlier. Much that they say may seem to us today self- evident or faintly absurd, and the manner in which it is said a little trite. It is no doubt thanks to men like Ellis that we take for granted nowadays that the French are not such awfully wicked people ; on the other hand, after the experience of 1940 (the year after his death), so much insistence upon the prevalence of discipline in French life is unconvincing.
The genius of England, according to Havelock Ellis in 1916, was that of the sea-faring adventurer stabilised into the sportsman and the gentleman. " English gentlemanliness," he wrote, "is analogous to French politeness, which is a highly polished surface absolutely necessary for the avoidance of friction among a people of very mixed racial elements with strong social impulses and tense nervous systems." Above all, Ellis's Englishman is individualistic to a fault. "The claim of Socialism can only be commended to the English- man by the argument that, by the removal of social friction and economic oppression, we may enhance and expand the forces of individualism." The essays on France and Germany and Spain do not seem to date quite so much as this. But, even in the days before the shop-girls and bus-conductors called us all dears, the genius of the cockney was surely not without its voice.
The longest of the essays included in this book, and by far the most interesting, is that on the genius of Russia. Ellis re-wrote it in the summer of 1917 immediately after the Kerensky Revolution.; it was based upon his own, as well as many other people's, expen- ence. The primitive, tile colossal, the fanatical, the incalculable forces of Russia are admirably indicated, the raw material of the second revolution at which Havelock Ellis did not seem to guess. Hewas most familiar perhaps with the Russian aesthetic perform- ance up to his day. He is also entertaining and illuminating with regard to social custom, and particularly about Russian women. In a footnote he quotes Casanova as saying: "Russia is a land where the sexes are confused : women govern: women preside aver
learned societies . . . They do not ride at the head of the troops, but that is the only privilege these Tartar beauties seem to lack." To this Ellis adds the fact that-in the 1914-18 war Russian women enlisted and gained distinction as soldiers After the Kerensky revolution there were women's contingents on a grand scale ; "we also hear of a naval guard of si-x-foot. women,' Thus the women in the Communist armies are by no means an innovation.
Ellis as aware that ' the only rival of Russia as a great world- power was the United States." He was aware that Russia might drag Europe along with her towards—in the words of a moderate Russian revolutionary whom he quotes—" a change of all institu- tions, of all relations, of all life, of everything." But of the shape of things to come he was, it seems, completely unaware.
ELIZABETH WISKEMANN.
Previous page
