Modern Aesthete

HAVELOCK ELLIS--PHILOSOPHER OF LOVE--Houston Peterson--Houghton Mifflin ($4.50).

A middle-aged Pan with monkey glands--such was the hazy impression, if any, of Havelock Ellis, until his Dance of Life expounded to thoughtful English and U. S. youth a philosophy of love and joy founded upon sound medico-psychological principles. The present biography condones the popular success of Dance of Life since that work displays neither the gamut of Ellis' scientific knowledge nor the depth of his philosophy of beauty as reflected in his Affirmations, Sex in Relation to Society, Little Essays of Love and Virtue, Impressions and Comments. Nineteen-year-old Ellis, distressed by his own patchy understanding of the complicated sex impulse, vowed he would save other youth from similar distress, and devoted his life to elucidation. With this end always in mind, his studies ranged from ten years' medical practice to wide reading of philosophy, history, and fiction, recorded in his six volumes of annotated quotations--Taine, Swinburne, Flaubert, Strauss, Voltaire, Boccaccio, Whitman.

Enthusiastic, Biographer Peterson is nevertheless restrained and scholarly in his valuable analysis of Ellis' life and writings.