The Dance of Life by Havelock Ellis - HTML preview

Footnotes

1.  See, for instance, Turner’s Samoa, chap. 1. Usually, however, in the Pacific, creation was accomplished, in a more genuinely evolutionary manner, by a long series of progressive generations.

2.  Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, vol. I, book III, chap. VI.

3.  I have here mainly followed Gomperz (Greek Thinkers, vol. I, pp. 430-34); there is not now, however, much controversy over the position of Hippias, which there is now, indeed, rather a tendency to exaggerate, considering how small is the basis of knowledge we possess. Thus Dupréel (La Légende Socratique, p. 432), regarding him as the most misunderstood of the great Sophists, declares that Hippias is “the thinker who conceived the universality of science, just as Prodicus caught glimpses of the synthesis of the social sciences. Hippias is the philosopher of science, the Great Logician, just as Prodicus is the Great Moralist.” He compares him to Pico della Mirandola as a Humanist and to Leibnitz in power of wide synthesis.

4.  Strictly speaking, in the technical sense of that much-abused word, this is “decadence.” (I refer to the sense in which I defined “decadence” many years ago in Affirmations, pp. 175-87.) So that while the minor arts have sometimes been classic and sometimes decadent, the major art of living during the last two thousand years, although one can think of great men who have maintained the larger classic ideal, has mainly been decadent.

5.  Emma Hadfield, Among the Natives of the Loyalty Group. 1920. It would no doubt have been more satisfactory to select a people like the Fijians rather than the Lifuans, for they represented a more robust and accomplished form of a rather similar culture, but their culture has receded into the past,—and the same may be said of the Marquesans of whom Melville left, in Typee, a famous and delightful picture which other records confirm,—while that of the Lifuans is still recent.

6.  G. Lowes Dickinson, An Essay on the Civilisations of India, China, and Japan (1914), p. 47. No doubt there are shades to be added to this picture. They may be found in a book, published two years earlier, China as it Really Is, by “a Resident in Peking” who claims to have been born in China. Chinese culture has receded, in part swamped by over-population, and concerning a land where to-day, it has lately been said, “magnificence, crudity, delicacy, fetidity, and fragrance are blended,” it is easy for Westerners to show violent difference of opinion.

7.  See, for instance, the chapter on games in Professor E. H. Parker’s China: Past and Present. Reference may be made to the same author’s important and impartial larger work, China: Its History, with a discriminating chapter on Chinese personal characteristics. Perhaps, the most penetrating study of Chinese psychology is, however, Arthur H. Smith’s Chinese Characteristics.

8.  His ideas have been studied by Madame Alexandra David, Le Philosophe Meh-ti et l’Idée de Solidarité. London, 1907.

9.  Eugène Simon, La Cité Chinoise.

10.  E. Hovelaque, La Chine (Paris, 1920), p. 47.

11.  This point has not escaped the more acute students of Chinese civilisation. Thus Dr. John Steele, in his edition of the I-Li, remarks that “ceremonial was far from being a series of observances, empty and unprofitable, such as it degenerated into in later time. It was meant to inculcate that habit of self-control and ordered action which was the expression of a mind fully instructed in the inner meaning of things, and sensitive to every impression.” Still more clearly, Reginald Farrer wrote, in On the Eaves of the World, that “the philosophic calm that the Chinese deliberately cultivate is their necessary armour to protect the excessive susceptibility to emotion. The Chinese would be for ever the victims of their nerves had they not for four thousand years pursued reason and self-control with self-protective enthusiasm.”

12.  It is even possible that, in earlier than human times, dancing and architecture may have been the result of the same impulse. The nest of birds is the chief early form of building, and Edmund Selous has suggested (Zoölogist, December, 1901) that the nest may first have arisen as an accidental result of the ecstatic sexual dance of birds.

13.  “Not the epic song, but the dance,” Wundt says (Völkerpsychologie, 3d ed. 1911, Bd. 1, Teil 1, p. 277), “accompanied by a monotonous and often meaningless song, constitutes everywhere the most primitive, and, in spite of that primitiveness, the most highly developed art. Whether as a ritual dance, or as a pure emotional expression of the joy in rhythmic bodily movement, it rules the life of primitive men to such a degree that all other forms of art are subordinate to it.”

14.  See an interesting essay in The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian Essays, by Ananda Coomaraswamy. New York, 1918.

15.  This view was clearly put forward, long ago, by W. W. Newell at the International Congress of Anthropology at Chicago in 1893. It has become almost a commonplace since.

16.  See a charming paper by Marcella Azra Hincks, “The Art of Dancing in Japan,” Fortnightly Review, July, 1906. Pantomimic dancing, which has played a highly important part in Japan, was introduced into religion from China, it is said, in the earliest time, and was not adapted to secular purposes until the sixteenth century.

17.  I owe some of these facts to an interesting article by G. R. Mead, “The Sacred Dance of Jesus,” The Quest, October, 1910.

18.  The dance of the Seises in Seville Cathedral is evidently of great antiquity, though it was so much a matter of course that we do not hear of it until 1690, when the Archbishop of the day, in opposition to the Chapter, wished to suppress it. A decree of the King was finally obtained permitting it, provided it was performed only by men, so that evidently, before that date, girls as well as boys took part in it. Rev. John Morris, “Dancing in Churches,” The Month, December, 1892; also a valuable article on the Seises by J. B. Trend, in Music and Letters, January, 1921.

19.  See, for references, Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. III; Analysis of the Sexual Impulse, pp. 29, etc.; and Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, vol. I, chap. XIII, p. 470.

20.  At an earlier period, however, the dance of Salome was understood much more freely and often more accurately. As Enlart has pointed out, on a capital in the twelfth-century cloister of Moissac, Salome holds a kind of castanets in her raised hands as she dances; on one of the western portals of Rouen Cathedral, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, she is dancing on her hands; while at Hemelverdeghem she is really executing the morisco, the “danse du ventre.”

21.  For an excellent account of dancing in India, now being degraded by modern civilisation, see Otto Rothfeld, Women of India, chap. VII, “The Dancing Girl,” 1922.

22.  I may hazard the suggestion that the gypsies may possibly have acquired their rather unaccountable name of Egyptians, not so much because they had passed through Egypt, the reason which is generally suggested,—for they must have passed through many countries,—but because of their proficiency in dances of the recognised Egyptian type.

23.  It is interesting to observe that Egypt still retains, almost unchanged through fifty centuries, its traditions, technique, and skill in dancing, while, as in ancient Egyptian dancing, the garment forms an almost or quite negligible element in the art. Loret remarks that a charming Egyptian dancer of the Eighteenth Dynasty, whose picture in her transparent gauze he reproduces, is an exact portrait of a charming Almeh of to-day whom he has seen dancing in Thebes with the same figure, the same dressing of the hair, the same jewels. I hear from a physician, a gynæcologist now practising in Egypt, that a dancing-girl can lie on her back, and with a full glass of water standing on one side of her abdomen and an empty glass on the other, can by the contraction of the muscles on the side supporting the full glass, project the water from it, so as to fill the empty glass. This, of course, is not strictly dancing, but it is part of the technique which underlies classic dancing and it witnesses to the thoroughness with which the technical side of Egyptian dancing is still cultivated.

24.  “We must learn to regard the form of the Greek drama as a dance form,” says G. Warre Cornish in an interesting article on “Greek Drama and the Dance” (Fortnightly Review, February, 1913), “a musical symphonic dance-vision, through which the history of Greece and the soul of man are portrayed.”

25.  It should perhaps be remarked that in recent times it has been denied that the old ballads were built up on dance songs. Miss Pound, for instance, in a book on the subject, argues that they were of aristocratic and not communal origin, which may well be, though the absence of the dance element does not seem to follow.

26.  It would not appear that the pioneers of the Mathematical Renaissance of the twentieth century are inclined to imitate Descartes in this matter. Einstein would certainly not, and many apostles of physical science to-day (see, e.g., Professor Smithells, From a Modern University: Some Aims and Aspirations of Science) insist on the æsthetic, imaginative, and other “art” qualities of science.

27.  C. Singer. “What is Science?” British Medical Journal, 25th June, 1921. Singer refuses the name of “science” in the strict sense to fields of completely organised knowledge which have ceased growing, like human anatomy (though, of course, the anatomist still remains a man of science by working outwards into adjoining related fields), preferring to term any such field of completed knowledge a discipline. This seems convenient and I should like to regard it as sound. It is not, however, compatible with the old doctrine of Mill and Colvin and Ray Lankester, for it excludes from the field of science exactly what they regarded as most typically science, and some one might possibly ask whether in other departments, like Hellenic sculpture or Sung pottery, a completed art ceases to be art.

28.  It has often been pointed out that the imaginative application of science—artistic ideas like that of the steam locomotive, the flying-machine heavier than air, the telegraph, the telephone, and many others—were even at the moment of their being achieved, elaborately shown to be “impossible” by men who had been too hastily hoisted up to positions of “scientific” eminence.

29.  J. B. Baillie, Studies in Human Nature (1921), p. 221. This point has become familiar ever since F. A. Lange published his almost epoch-marking work, The History of Materialism, which has made so deep an impress on many modern thinkers from Nietzsche to Vaihinger; it is indeed a book which can never be forgotten (I speak from experience) by any one who read it in youth.

30.  G. Wallas, The Great Society, p. 107.

31.  Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, vol. I, chap. III, where will be found an attractive account of Pythagoras’ career and position.

32.  Always, it may perhaps be noted in passing, it seems to have been difficult for the sober and solemn Northerner, especially of England, to enter into the Greek spirit, all the more since that spirit was only the spirit of a sprinkling of people amid a hostile mass about as unlike anything we conventionally call “Greek” as could well be imagined, so that, as Élie Faure, the historian of art, has lately remarked, Greek art is a biological “monstrosity.” (Yet, I would ask, might we not say the same of France or of England?) That is why it is usually so irritating to read books written about the Greeks by barbarians; they slur over or ignore what they do not like and, one suspects, they instinctively misinterpret what they think they do like. Better even the most imperfect knowledge of a few original texts, better even only a few days on the Acropolis, than the second-hand opinions of other people. And if we must have a book about the Greeks, there is always Athenæus, much nearer to them in time and in spirit, with all his gossip, than any Northern barbarian, and an everlasting delight.

33.  Along another line it should have been clear that the dialogues of the philosophers were drama and not history. It would appear (Croiset, Littérature Grecque, vol. III, pp. 448 et seq.) that with Epicharmus of Cos, who was settled in Megara at the beginning of the fifth century, philosophic comedy flourished brilliantly at Syracuse, and indeed fragments of his formal philosophic dialogue survive. Thus it is suggested that Athenian comedy and sophistic prose dialogues may be regarded as two branches drawn from the ancient prototype of such Syracusan comedy, itself ultimately derived from Ionian philosophy. It is worth noting, I might add, that when we first hear of the Platonic dialogues they were being grouped in trilogies and tetralogies like the Greek dramas; that indicates, at all events, what their earliest editors thought about them. It is also interesting to note that the writer of, at the present moment, the latest handbook to Plato, Professor A. E. Taylor (Plato, 1922, pp. 32-33), regards the “Socrates” of Plato as no historical figure, not even a mask of Plato himself, but simply “the hero of the Platonic drama,” of which we have to approach in much the same way as the work of “a great dramatist or novelist.”

34.  He had often been bidden in dreams to make music, said the Platonic Socrates in Phædo, and he had imagined that that was meant to encourage him in the pursuit of philosophy, “which is the noblest and best of music.”

35.  In discussing Socrates I have made some use of Professor Dupréel’s remarkable book, La Légende Socratique (1922). Dupréel himself, with a little touch of irony, recommends a careful perusal of the beautiful and monumental works erected by Zeller and Grote and Gomperz to the honour of Socrates.

36.  Count Hermann Keyserling, Philosophie als Kunst (1920), p. 2. He associates this with the need for a philosophy to possess a subjective personal character, without which it can have no value, indeed no content at all.

37.  Croce, Problemi d’ Estetica, p. 15. I have to admit, for myself, that, while admiring the calm breadth of Croce’s wide outlook, it is sometimes my misfortune, in spite of myself, when I go to his works, to play the part of a Balaam à rebours. I go forth to bless: and, somehow, I curse.

38.  James Hinton, a pioneer in so many fields, clearly saw that thinking is really an art fifty years ago. “Thinking is no mere mechanical process,” he wrote (Chapters on the Art of Thinking, pp. 43 et seq.), “it is a great Art, the chief of all the Arts.... Those only can be called thinkers who have a native gift, a special endowment for the work, and have been trained, besides, by assiduous culture. And though we continually assume that every one is capable of thinking, do we not all feel that there is somehow a fallacy in this assumption? Do we not feel that what people set up as their ‘reasons’ for disbelieving or believing are often nothing of the sort?... The Art faculty is Imagination, the power of seeing the unseen, the power also of putting ourselves out of the centre, of reducing ourselves to our true proportions, of truly using our own impressions. And is not this in reality the chief element in the work of the thinker?... Science is poetry.”

39.  So far, indeed, as I am aware, I was responsible for the first English account of his work (outside philosophical journals); it appeared in the London Nation and Athenæum a few years ago, and is partly embodied in the present chapter.

40.  I have based this sketch on an attractive and illuminating account of his own development written by Professor Vaihinger for Dr. Raymund Schmidt’s highly valuable series, Die Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen (1921), vol. II.

41.  “Most workers on the problem of atomic constitution,” remarks Sir Ernest Rutherford (Nature, 5th August, 1922), “take as a working hypothesis that the atoms of matter are purely electrical structures, and that ultimately it is hoped to explain all the properties of atoms as a result of certain combinations of the two fundamental units of positive and negative electricity, the proton and electron.”

42.  Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. I.

43.  Otto Rank, Der Künstler: Ansätze zu einer Sexual Psychologie.

44.  The sexual strain in the symbolism of language is touched on in my Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. V, and similar traits in primitive legends have been emphasised—many would say over-emphasised—by Freud and Jung.

45.  Einstein, in conversation with Moszkowski, expressed doubt as to the reality of Leonardo’s previsions of modern science. But it scarcely appeared that he had investigated the matter, while the definite testimony of the experts in many fields who have done so cannot be put aside.

46.  For the Italian reader of Leonardo the fat little volume of Frammenti, edited by Dr. Solmi and published by Barbèra, is a precious and inexhaustible pocket companion. For the English reader Mr. MacCurdy’s larger but much less extensive volume of extracts from the Note-Books, or the still further abridged Thoughts, must suffice. Herbert Horne’s annotated version of Vasari’s Life is excellent for Leonardo’s personality and career.

47.  Morley Roberts, who might be regarded as a pupil in the school of Leonardo and trained like him in the field of art, has in various places of his suggestive book, Warfare in the Human Body, sprinkled irony over the examples he has come across of ignorant specialists claiming to be men of “science.”

48.  Needless to say, I do not mention this to belittle Galton. A careful attention to words, which in its extreme form becomes pedantry, is by no means necessarily associated with a careful attention to things. Until recent times English writers, even the greatest, were always negligent in spelling; it would be foolish to suppose they were therefore negligent in thinking.

49.  Darwin even overestimated the æsthetic element in his theory of sexual selection, and (I have had occasion elsewhere to point out) unnecessarily prejudiced that theory by sometimes unwarily assuming a conscious æsthetic element.

50.  It is probable that the reason why it is often difficult to trace the imaginative artist in great men of supposedly abstract science is the paucity of intimate information about them. Even their scientific friends have rarely had the patience, or even perhaps the intelligence, to observe them reverently and to record their observations. We know almost nothing that is intimately personal about Newton. As regards Einstein, we are fortunate in possessing the book of Moszkowski, Einstein (translated into English under the title of Einstein the Searcher), which contains many instructive conversations and observations by a highly intelligent and appreciative admirer, who has set them down in a Boswellian spirit that faintly recalls Eckermann’s book on Goethe (which, indeed, Moszkowski had in mind), though falling far short of that supreme achievement. The statements in the text are mainly gleaned from Moszkowski.

51.  Spengler holds (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, vol. X, p. 329) that the development of music throughout its various stages in our European culture really has been closely related with the stages of the development of mathematics.

52.  I would here refer to a searching investigation, “Goethe und die mathematische Physik: Eine Erkenntnistheoretische Studie,” in Ernst Cassirer’s Idee und Gestalt (1921). It is here shown that in some respects Goethe pointed the way along which mathematical physics, by following its own paths, has since travelled, and that even when most non-mathematical Goethe’s scientific attitude was justifiable.

53.  See the remarkable essay, “De la Cinéplastique,” in Élie Faure’s L’Arbre d’Éden (1922). It is, however, a future and regenerated cinema for which Élie Faure looks, “to become the art of the crowd, the powerful centre of communion in which new symphonic forms will be born in the tumult of passions and utilized for fine and elevating æsthetic ends.”

54.  O. Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, vol. I, p. 576.

55.  It may be as well to point that it is the amateur literary grammarian and not the expert who is at fault in these matters. The attitude of the expert (as in C. T. Onions, Advanced English Syntax) is entirely reasonable.

56.  It is interesting to note that another aristocratic master of speech had also made just the same observation. Landor puts into the mouth of Horne Tooke the words: “No expression can become a vulgarism which has not a broad foundation. The language of the vulgar hath its source in physics: in known, comprehended, and operative things.” At the same time Landor was as stern a judge as Baudelaire of the random use of clichés.

57.  Speaking as a writer who has been much quoted,—it ought to be a satisfaction, but I have had my doubts,—I may say that I have observed that those who quote belong mostly to two classes, one consisting of good, or at all events indifferent, writers, and the other of bad writers. Those of the first class quote with fair precision and due acknowledgement, those of the second with no precision, and only the vaguest intimation, or none at all, that they are quoting. This would seem to indicate that the good writer is more honest than the bad writer, but that conclusion may be unjust to the bad writer. The fact is that, having little thought or knowledge of his own, he is not fully conscious of what he is doing. He is like a greedy child who, seeing food in front of him, snatches it at random, without being able to recognise whether or not it is his own. There is, however, a third class of those who cannot resist the temptation of deliberately putting forth the painfully achieved thought or knowledge of others as their own, sometimes, perhaps, seeking to gloss over the lapse with: “As every one knows—”

58.  Croce, who is no doubt the most instructive literary critic of our time, has, in his own way, insisted on this essential fact. As he would put it, there are no objective standards of judgment; we cannot approach a work of art with our laws and categories. We have to comprehend the artist’s own values, and only then are we fit to pronounce any judgment on his work. The task of the literary critic is thus immensely more difficult than it is vulgarly supposed to be. The same holds good, I would add, of criticism in the fields of art, not excluding the art of love and the arts of living in general.

59.  “This search is the art of all great thinkers, of all great artists, indeed of all those who, even without attaining expression, desire to live deeply. If the dance brings us so near to God, it is, I believe, because it symbolizes for us the movement of this gesture.” (Élie Faure, L’Arbre d’Éden, p. 318.)

60.  This is that “divine malice” which Nietzsche, in Ecce Homo, speaking of Heine (“one day Heine and I will be regarded as by far the greatest artists of the German language,” he says rather egotistically, but perhaps truly) considered essential to perfection. “I estimate the value of men and of races,” he added, “by their need to identify their God with a satyr,” a hard saying, no doubt, to the modern man, but it has its meaning.

61.  Since this was written I have found that Laycock, whose subtle observation pioneered so many later ideas, long ago noted (“Some Organic Laws of Memory,” Journal of Mental Science, July, 1875) reversion to ancestral modes of handwriting.

62.  This was written fifteen years ago, and as Carlyle has of late been unduly depreciated I would add that, while strictly to the present point, it is not put forward as an estimate of Carlyle’s genius. That I seem to have attempted twenty-five years earlier in a private letter (to my friend the late Reverend Angus Mackay) I may here perhaps be allowed to quote. It was in 1883, soon after the publication of Carlyle’s Reminiscences: “This is not Carlylese, but it is finer. The popular judgment is hopelessly wrong. We can never understand Carlyle till we get rid of the ‘great prophet’ notion. Carlyle is not (as we were once taught) a ‘great moral teacher,’ but, in the high sense, a great comedian. His books are wonderful comedies. He is the Scotch Aristophanes, as Rabelais is the French and Heine the German Aristophanes—of course, with the intense northern imagination, more clumsy, more imperfect, more profound than the Greek. But, at a long distance, there is a close resemblance to Aristophanes with the same mixture of audacity in method and conservatism in spirit. Carlyle’s account of Lamb seems in the true sense Aristophanic. His humour is, too, as broad as he dares (some curious resemblances there, too). In his lyrical outbursts, again, he follows Aristophanes, and again at a distance. Of course he cannot be compared as an artist. He has not, like Rabelais, created a world to play with, but, like Aristophanes generally, he sports with the things that are.” That youthful estimate was alien to popular opinion then because Carlyle was idolised; it is now, no doubt, equally alien for an opposite reason. It is only on extremes that the indolent popular mind can rest.

63.  J. Beddoe, The Races of Britain, p. 254.

64.  I once studied, as an example, colour-words in various writers, finding that every poet has his own colour formula. Variations in length of sentence and peculiarities of usage in metre have often been studied. Reference is made to some of these studies by A. Niceforo, “Metodo Statistico e Documenti Litterari,” Revista d’Italia, August, 1917.

65.  “The Muses are the daughters of Memory,” Paul Morand tells us that Proust would say; “there is no art without recollection,” and certainly it is supremely true of Proust’s art. It is that element of art which imparts at once both atmosphere and poignant intimacy, external farness with internal nearness. The lyrics of Thomas Hardy owe their intimacy of appeal to the dominance in them of recollection (in Late Lyrics and Earlier one might say it is never absent), and that is why they can scarcely be fully appreciated save by those who are no longer very young.

66.  The Oxford University Press publishes a little volume of Rules for Compositors and Readers in which this uniform is set forth. It is a useful and interesting manual, but one wonders how many unnecessary and even undesirab