Dancing Master

Dancing Master* We are now confronted by a biographico-critical survey of "the most civilized Englishman of his generation." It is a truly impressive cloud of incense, but a cloud which need not obscure the author's general notion that, for accuracy's sake, a man's life should be recorded while he is still enjoying it.

Life. A good place for a small boy with four younger sisters is away from home. The small boy of this book--shown solemnly erect in his Sunday clothes, clutching a prayer book, over the pompous legend,"Henry Havelock Ellis at the Age of Four"--circled the globe with his seafaring father before he was eight. The schools he later attended had no deep influence on his broadened young nature, though he became thoroughly grounded in French, German and Italian, and was not hindered in developing his taste for literature. At 15 he substituted Shelley for the Bible. Goethe, Heine, Swinburne, Whitman were major prophets. He was shipped to Australia at 16--a shotgun cure for chronic appendicitis --and while teaching school in the desolate bush was "converted," by reading the pragmatic philosophers, the evolutionists and a religiously-minded biologist (James Hinton), to a rational mysticism that found no God but much joy in the mechanistic universe. This joy was an artist's joy, "a many-sided and active delight in the wholeness of things"--body, sense, emotion, intellect in harmony.

He determined and proceeded to study medicine in London. That great wen upon the globe was stirring with the germs of Socialism when young Ellis, preceded by a burst of beard which he never later relinquished, returned to it (1881) robust and whole in mind, body and spirit. He looked in at some meetings of the Progressive Association (forerunner of the Fabians); even compiled a Socialist hymnal omitting God's name; but lost active interest when an economic emphasis was put upon the movement. The young doctor-artist's concern was to become tactually, factually, acquainted with the physical side of the world whose spiritual side he had so deeply experienced.

He had a most intimate friendship with sweetly vehement Olive Schreiner, but married before she did. His wife was Edith Lees, an able, ubiquitous worker for feminism and the proletariat. They exchanged a single vow--never to deceive--and insured their love against familiarity by living apart six months of the year. Ellis made his headquarters in a Brixton flat, where he abides today, aged 67, in the shy philosophical detachment that he has preserved for 30 years to speculate upon how to make life a whole thing--an art.

It is unnecessary and inappropriate--for Havelock Ellis is neither sensational nor combative--to suggest, as does his flamboyant biographer, that he is another Leonardo, a Professor, a Nietzschean superman, an Anglo-Saxon Tagore, a full-blooded Shaw, a Carlyle without dyspepsia, "a less unkempt Walt Whitman," "a less distracted Tolstoi" and "the complete anti-Kipling." It appears, simply, that if life is a dance, as Ellis has suggested, then he is one of the greatest, gravest dancing masters, a sane anarchist with a cosmic sense of humor.

Works. British officialdom chanced to elect Ellis' second book (Sexual Inversion) as the point of attack for a long-contemplated descent upon some people who were trying to better the lot of illegitimates. These people had put the book--a technical monograph--on their stall of sex literature for no better reason than that their publisher and Ellis' had sent it along. Nevertheless, Ellis' name was dragged through the sewer so efficiently that only lately has he been mentionable in polite districts of the tight little isle.

But just as England had welcomed the barbarous Whitman, so the U. S. welcomed the "wicked, lewd, scandalous and obscene" Ellis. His six sturdy Studies in the Psychology of Sex have been published in Philadelphia (F. A. Davis & Co.) for the benefit of the legal and medical professions, since 1900. They are technical books by an artist who acquired his technique because he conceived sex to be, not the sole, but the central factor of life. They are the scientific basis for his doctrine of "radiant carnality" In later work (The World of Dreams) Ellis anticipated the Freudian discovery that spiritual energy is as indestructible as material.

Apart from sexology, Ellis has done many translations; has reviewed the 19th Century; studied British genius; analyzed Spain; tried to nationalize health; philosophized on the War, in sad passivity. His latest prose work, The Dance of Life (1923), was a most remarkable symphonic synthesis of the component parts into which a careful analytical mind had reduced common existence for re-creation into a rounder, richer thing.

The Author. Isaac Goldberg is an American Jew in his late thirties. He was educated in Boston public schools and at Harvard, where his interests were divided between music and literature. He has "written reams of music since his twelfth year"--is now working on a comic opera in the manner of Gilbert and Sullivan. His degrees of M.A. and Ph.D. are for research in romance philology. He constitutes something of a pundit on Yiddish and Latin-American literatures, having served the Haldeman-Julius Co. ("Little Blue Books"--Girard, Kan.) in that capacity. Last year he published an exhaustive book on Editor H. L. Mencken of the American Mercury, for whom he has great admiration.

Sane Manual

HYGIENE OF SEX--Max von Gruber, M. D.--Williams & Wilkins ($1.50). The publishers set forth two excellent reasons for bringing this German monograph before the U. S. public: the strong recommendation of eminent U. S. health authorities, and the reception of the book in Europe by scientific men and a public of 300,000. Family physicians testify to the need for a simple, direct, complete presentation of knowledge that they wish all their patients might possess. They pronounce Dr. von Gruber's work the best they have yet seen, especially for its lack of "moral poultice." "Certain portions" of the original are omitted--doubtless descriptive discussion of contraception--but the major portions stand unaltered--a sane, graphic, unequivocal manual of humanity's most vital mechanism.

Gusto

THE ROMANY STAIN--Christopher Morley -- Doubleday, Page ($2.50). Discriminating thousands will swarm for this book even when they learn that its title (lifted from a wine-list) does not herald another bewitched web of significant impalpabilities like Where the Blue Begins and Thunder on the Left. It contains, besides much of the author's best deliveries down his "Bowling Green" in the Saturday Review, dozens of fresh essays written in and about England, France and the ships that go there, the people that live and lie there, the disturbing beauty of small moments and homely things, touched, seen, translated there. When Morley writes "out in the open" like this, you perceive the voluble gusto that sleeps during his delicate imaginative work. You see a big-boned man with quick eyes and a strong stomach starting up from his dreams to use his muscles, quaff wine, pound a friend's back, shake with laughter, boil over with sentiment, booklore and puns--and then subside suddenly, beholding a sea gull poised at his porthole, hearing a skylark's "wiry tinkle" high up in a summer afternoon.

*HAVELOCK ELLIS--Isaac Goldberg--Simon & Schuster ($4).