Stream of Influence

FROM ROUSSEAU TO PROUST--Havelock Ellis--Houghton Mifflin ($3.50). Before the Nobel Prize Committee announced that no award for literature would be given this year, the magazine Books Abroad conducted a symposium to test the opinion of U. S. critics on likely candidates. Maxim Gorki received five votes, Theodore Dreiser three, Willa Cather, Andre Gide, Eugene O'Neill and Franz Werfel two, while a number of others, ranging from Havelock Ellis to Christopher Morley, received one apiece. If consistency of purpose, unremitting productivity, a distinguished career, were sole criteria, few critics could object to the choice of Havelock Ellis. Now almost 77, he has been actively writing and editing for 50 years, has practised medicine, translated from Spanish and French, written poetry and fiction, taught school, made a special study of sex psychology. Born in Surrey of a seafaring family, he traveled to Chile at the age of 6, was in charge of a government school in New South Wales by the time he was 19. Deciding that he needed a knowledge of biology in order to understand himself and others, he studied medicine in London, began applying a scientific attitude to literary criticism, was editor of the famed Mermaid Series that first made Elizabethan drama available to the general public. Marrying in 1891, he began the first volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which was promptly suppressed as obscene. Ellis then went into voluntary exile in Morocco, wrote Affirmations and A Study of British Genius. His wife died in 1916, and he now lives in semi-retirement in London. His most recent book has a nostalgic flavor. It begins with a chapter on his first impressions of Paris, the result of an exploration he made 45 years ago with Arthur Symons into that remarkable artistic world inhabited by such figures as Mallarme, Rodin, Verlaine, Huysmans, Edmond de Goncourt. Taine and Renan were then still alive, Zola and Anatole France were prominent figures, but the young Englishmen were most inspired by Verlaine, who greeted them jovially, talked poetry to them, and spent his last two francs to buy them a drink of rum. Readers of From Rousseau to Proust can determine how stimulating these international contacts were from the occasional reminiscences that figure in other essays in the book. Although it is in general an attempt to trace the tradition that Rousseau started through French literature, it is primarily of value for its incidental insights, since the essays, written at different periods, tend to become repetitious, and since Ellis' underlying argument is not convincingly proved. Ellis considers Rousseau one of the most influential men in history. He carefully recapitulates the arguments that hold this influence has been pernicious, admits that ''it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that . . . Rousseau has represented a backward movement in civilisation." Rousseau's influence "tended to depreciate the value of the mighty instrument of reason." By casting off restraints on emotion, it has led to an "unwholesome divorce between the extravagancies of feeling and the limitations of life." Most importantly, it has "consecrated prejudice under the sacred names of Nature and instinct." Yet, unlike the Humanists, who have held Rousseau responsible for most of the evils of the modern world, Ellis does not stop his analysis at this point. He studies Rousseau's influence on modern concepts of beauty, on modern ideals of human love, modern political theories, eventually concludes: "Rousseau stood, in opposition to our artificial and inharmonious civilisation, for the worth of life as a whole, the simple undivided rights of life, the rights of instinct, the rights of emotion. . . . This was the way in which he renovated life, and effected a spiritual revolution which no mere man of letters has ever effected. ... He is the supreme individualist, and yet his doctrines furnish the foundations for socialism, even in its oppressive forms. He is the champion of the rights of passion, and yet he was the leader in a movement ... of return to domesticity and the felicities of family life." Rousseau was the first great teacher to see the beauty in mountains and wild landscapes that previous ages had considered only horrible or terrifying. The man who has exercised this tremendous influence was nervous, sentimental, irresponsible, ill. Finding Rousseau's Confessions unreliable, Ellis gains more enlightenment from the 20 volumes of his correspondence, discovers the secret of his genius in the "swiftness and sincerity" of his actions and reactions. Rousseau was like "an exquisite instrument, giving forth a music which responds to the varying emotions of the hand that strikes it." Thus the intellectual conflicts of his time moved him as other men are moved by pain or fear, compelled him to state simple, fundamental truths, although he suffered the torments of the damned in doing so. Remaining ten essays in the volume trace the Rousseau tradition through the careers of Restif de la Bretonne, Alexandre de Tilly, Hugo and others to its modern representative in Marcel Proust. Restif, "the gutter Rousseau," wrote the 18th Century equivalent of True Confession stories, carried Rousseau's ideas to the logical absurdity of idealizing prostitution. A more impressive figure, Tilly was a minor Casanova in the period after the Revolution, left a volume of memoirs that have only recently been translated. Tilly fled to Philadelphia, where he ingratiated himself with the wealthy Bingham and Baring families, married a 15-year-old Bingham heiress, received -L-5,000 cash and -L-500 yearly to divorce her. With more modern figures, Ellis is less successful. Obviously disliking Proust, obviously repelled by Proust's mysterious masterpiece, he makes a stubborn attempt to evaluate the work and analyze its author, does not seem to grasp their significance in terms of contemporary literature and thought. Yet the note of benign humor that runs through all Ellis' work is also evident in From Rousseau to Proust. Quoting a line from Restif de la Bretonne's licentious memoirs: "How pretty the girls are at Auxerre!" the aged philosopher observed, "I have found myself independently making precisely the same remark . . . though with none of the results that followed in the case of that impressionable boy."

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