Views and Reviews

PREFACE

IN these volumes are brought together a collection of essays, reviews, and some minor writings, covering a period of forty-eight years, from 1884 to 1932. They are not to be regarded as merely the sweepings of a literary workshop, for they are carefully selected from a larger mass of writings as having some kind of interest, either in relation to the time when they were written or in relation to to-day. They are so various in character that they could not easily be classified, and the order in which they here appear is chronological. What they have in common is that it has never proved possible to fit any of them into my books, so that, for the most part, they have been reprinted for the first time.

They are reprinted as they were originally printed. A few slight and unimportant omissions have been made, but not a word has been added, nor has a word been changed (except by the correction of misprints), even when details are obviously far out of date. It is indeed because a document "dates" that it becomes interesting. I feel, for my own part, the less desire to make any changes since, so far as substance and spirit are concerned, I still find myself nearly always at one even with the earliest of the writings included in these series.

HAVELOCK ELUS.

CONTENTS

FIRST SERIES

FACE

I. WOMEN AND SOCIALISM . . 1

II. THE PRESENT POSITION OF ENGLISH

CRITICISM . . . .19

III. " TOWARDS DEMOCRACY " . .38

IV. A NOTE ON PAUL BOURGET . . 48

V. THE PLACE OF ANTHROPOLOGY IN

MEDICAL EDUCATION . . 61

VI. THE ANCESTRY OF GENIUS . . 68

VII. AN OPEN LETTER TO BIOGRAPHERS 86

VIII. THE MEN OF CORNWALL . . 100

I.. SŒUR JEANNE DES ANGES . . 124

X. " THE DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL

BIOGRAPHY " . . . . 135

XI. THE GENIUS OF NIETZSCHE . . 147
XII. A DUTCH TOLSTOY . . . 154

XIII. BROWNING'S PLACE IN LITERATURE 160

XIV. FICTION IN THE AUSTRALIAN BUSH. 171
XV. BOVARYISM. . . . .179

XVI. THE GENIUS OF FRANCE . . 187

XVII. THE PROPHET SHAW . . .194

XVIII. ANOTHER PROPHET : H. G. WELLS 204

XIX. FARE AND WELFARE , , .213

viii C O N T EN T S

PAGE

XX. FOREL ON THE SEXUAL QUESTION . 221

XXI. INSANITY AND THE LAW . . 226

XXII. LETTER TO A SUFFRAGETTE . . 233

XXIII. THE CARE OF THE UNBORN . . 235

XXIV. BLASCO IBANEZ . . . .247

XXV. "THE INTERMEDIATE TYPES

AMONG PRIMITIVE FOLK " . 258

XXVI. THE HISTORY OF THE PSYCHO-
ANALYTIC MOVEMENT . . 262

XXVII. GERMAN POLITICAL IDEALS . . 268

XXVIII. THE HUMAN GEOGRAPHY OF WEST-
ERN EUROPE .... 280

XXIX. THE BIOLOGY OF WAR . . 290

XXX. RELIGION AND SEX . . . 294

XXXI. UNLOCKING THE HEART OF GENIUS 300

XXXII. THE PROGRESS OF CRIMINOLOGY ." 308

WOMEN AND SOCIALISM

This article appeared in TO-DAY for October, 1884, as by H. Havelock Ellis. TO-DAY was then edited by H. H. Champion, Labour and Socialist leader, and in it Bernard Shaw's early novel, AN UNSOCIAL SOCIALIST, was then coming out as a serial. My paper here appears as originally printed, except that I have restored a phrase concerning "the charming naivete of a modern Isaiah," which Champion--whether out of consideration for Bebel or for Isaiah I now knotv not--had deleted.

AUGUST BEBEL, whom it is unnecessary to introduce to the readers of To-day, has lately written a book in which he endeavours to set forth the position which women will occupy when society shall have been "socialised." Die Frau in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft deals a little with the past, a very little with the future, much with the present. Beginning with a brief historical sketch, Bebel treats of the sexual instinct, of marriage as it at present exists, of the numerical proportion of the sexes, of prostitution as a necessary element in the present system, of the industrial position of women and their intellectual capacity as compared with men, of their legal position, and of their relation to politics. There are also some chapters of a purely Socialist character, with one on over-population. It will be

Views and Reviews

seen, therefore, that this book, succeeds in covering, however imperfectly, a very large field. In so far as it is a record of historical facts it shows to some extent the influence of that method which a German writer generally adopts when he comes in contact with facts, probably to escape from those tendencies which most easily beset him in thought. That is to say, he plunges them all into his book together, in a fit of fine careless rapture, trusting, apparently, that by some process of natural selection, the fittest will ultimately somehow float up to the surface. At the same time Bebel fails to adopt this method quite stringently ; perhaps he is scarcely at home as a recorder of scientific facts. An English critic has, however, little right to judge hypercritically a work on this subject, for we in England have produced scarcely any contributions of value to the scientific literature of woman. It may be that that charming prudery which has distinguished our nation during this century, but perhaps not before, and which has proved so delightful and so strange to French visitors, from Madame de Stael and De Stendhal down to Taine and Max O'Rell, has stood in the way of any frank and precise treatment of this subject. Certainly, even so grave an historian as W. E. H. Lecky, who at the end of his History of European Morals has inserted a chapter on the position of women, cannot speak of some of the most important questions that affect women without a wearisome and almost offensive iteration of

Women and Socialism

apologies. And in the English translation of so learned a work as Max Duncker's History of Antiquity--published in six large volumes at I am not certain how many guineas--it has been found advisable to omit passages which, it is assumed, are unsuited for the modest English student of civilisation. A similarly uncalled for process of excision was adopted in the editing of Buckle's Commonplace Book. Bebel's book may be found of value because it presents in a clear and outspoken, if rather rough and extreme form, what are, I conceive, certain distinct tendencies of modern feeling in regard to women; and an English translation would deserve a welcome.

The old question that moved men's minds was of religion. Now that "for the first time in the world," as Mill said, "men and women are really companions" there comes before us, with the larger issues of social reorganisation, a new and definite question, the "woman question" with all the economical, social and ethical problems that centre round that question. If we have not yet settled the religious question, we are at least on the way to its settlement; we have caught a glimpse of new ideals and the old crusade of mere destructive energy has been rendered unnecessary. It is true that, like a whale's teeth that have no longer any useful function to perform, a few enthusiasts still survive to raise the outworn warcries and tilt courageously against the corpses and ghosts of faith. But putting these aside, as

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well as those ardent young people who have not yet emerged from their Sturm und Drang period, and for whom orthodoxy is still a very real foe, there are no longer any signs worth heeding to show that the religious question is still attracting the energy which it formerly absorbed. There are other problems now which slowly but very surely approach us, and round the woman question in its largest sense one of the next great fights will centre. Bebel's fundamental assertion seems to be that the woman question can only be solved in the solution of the larger social question.

Now there are at present, as he tells us in his Introduction, two schools of thought regarding this question. According to the first there is no woman question; nature has called woman to be a mother and a wife and has made the home her peculiar sphere. For the champions on this side, the argument is a very simple one, and they appear to be little troubled when told that millions of women are not in a position to follow this so-called command of nature and bear children and look after households, and that other millions, to whom this avocation has been vouchsafed, have dragged wearily through lives that have been as the lives of slaves. But there is another school that cannot shut its eyes and ears to these facts. It admits the inferior position of women when the general development of the race is considered, and that it is necessary to improve the condition of those who, not having reached the haven of marriage,

Women and Socialism

are thrown upon their own resources. Those who belong to this school desire that all occupations for which woman's strength and capacity are adapted should be thrown open to her, so that she may enter into competition with man; that she should be permitted to follow art, science, medicine. A small minority also demand political rights. But Bebel points out that not only would this agitation, if successful, simply serve to make competition rage more fiercely and so lower the income of both sexes, but that it is partial, being, indeed, chiefly carried on by women of the higher classes, who only perceive the special needs of the women among whom they live. The dominion of one sex over another, the material dependence of the vast majority of women, and their consequent slavery either through our present marriage system or prostitution, would remain unchanged.

Into these two classes Bebel finds Germany divided on the woman question, and it is possible that even in England--the Paradise of women as it was called three hundred years ago--there are not wanting representatives of these views. It is in opposition to both schools that Bebel sets forth the individualist--or, as he prefers to call it, Socialist--proposition that "a Woman has the same right to develop her mental and physical capacities that a man has." This is not possible --and here we touch the central point of Bebel's book--in the present condition of society. "The full and complete solution of the woman question

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--by which must be understood not merely equality in the face of the law, but economic freedom and independence, and, so far as possible, equality in mental culture--is, under the present social and political arrangements, as impossible as the solution of the labour question."

Bebel endeavours to trace this out through several chapters of his book. Marriage and prostitution are the obverse and reverse of the sexual relations as at present constituted. And while marriage on the one hand oppresses the unmarried woman, it equally oppresses the married woman, prostitution affecting both. The married woman, Bebel considers, is regarded as, above all, a mere object of enjoyment; she is economically dependent; she is made to be a mother and an educator, the most difficult of all positions, when she has not been in the slightest degree prepared for so important a function, and is often placed under physically abnormal conditions. Alexandre Dumas says in Les Femmes qui tuent that a distinguished Roman Catholic priest told him that, out of one hundred women who married, eighty came to him afterwards and said that they regretted it. And this is scarcely strange.

It is even less necessary, Bebel proceeds, to point out the position of the ordinary unmarried woman under present conditions. She is shut out from what is considered a woman's career and other careers are only to a limited extent open to her. It is worthy of remark that Bebel is not

Women and Socialism

afraid to deal frankly with the question of chastity as it affects women. He quotes the opinions of various medical authorities in Germany as to the effects of celibacy on women and repeats approvingly the words of Luther: "A woman can no more dispense with a husband than with eating, drinking, sleeping, or other natural necessities. Nor can a man dispense with a wife. The sexual instinct is as deeply rooted in nature as eating and drinking." He would have those words carved over the doors of every Protestant Church.

Therefore both the women who marry and the women who do not marry are, under the present conditions of society, almost equally oppressed. The existing system, says Bebel, is neither "sacred" nor "moral." And against it he sets his own ideal. Marriage, he asserts, should be a private contract, not effected through the medium of any functionary. It should be "the contract of two persons of different sex who are attracted by mutual love and regard, and who together, according to the admirable saying of Kant, form the complete human being."

Further, argues Bebel, a necessary element in the present system is prostitution. It is the reverse of the medal. "Nothing shows more strikingly the dependence of women on men than the fundamental difference in the judgment regarding the satisfaction of the same natural impulse in the two sexes." He points out how prostitution with its one-sided way of regarding

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men and women, giving rights to one sex which it denies to the other, is in reality as fundamental a part of the existing state of society as the Church and standing armies. "Remove prostitution," as St. Augustine said, "and you render all life turbid with lust." There is, however, nothing that is fresh in Bebel's way of dealing with this subject. Poverty and the crushing of the natural life under existing conditions are, he repeats, the great causes of prostitution, and these can only be altered by a fundamental change in the social order.

The historical sketch at the beginning of the book is necessarily too brief and fragmentary to be of much value. Bebel, who is, however, always prejudiced when he has to speak of Christianity, points out how even the Church, which is generally said to have done so much for women, could scarcely attain even to a sense of the spiritual equality of the sexes. At the Council of Macon in the sixth century the question as to whether women have souls was discussed and only affirmed by a small majority. He also shows how the minnesingers of the feudal ages, who sang so extravagantly of women, were the representatives of an unreal and unnatural ideal, and he calls Luther the classical interpreter of the healthy sensuality of the Middle Ages. A very short and unimportant chapter is devoted to women in the future. Towards the end of the book several chapters are interpolated that are quite

Women and Socialism

unconnected with the general scheme, being a general exposition of that time when society shall be socialised. With the charming naivete of a modern Isaiah, Bebel sings of the coming days when there will be no immorality; children will not be unruly; the seeking after coarse pleasures which is called forth by the unrest of domestic life will be ended; there will be no demoralising books; no appeals to sensual desire. All these and many other evils will be avoided without compulsion and without tyranny. "The social atmosphere will make them impossible." Furthermore there shall be a central cooking establishment; a central washing establishment on a mechanico-chemical system; a central clothing manufactory; central heating and central lighting; central hot and cold baths. There shall be no more maid servants, and vegetarianism (it is not quite clearly explained why) shall be done away with.

At this point of jubilant exaltation it may be well to leave the general consideration of Die Frau in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart and Zukunft, and to touch briefly on two or three of the points which are intimately connected with the whole question and which must necessarily be more or less considered by everyone who undertakes to discuss the social functions of women. Whoever asserts the equality of the sexes has to face the arguments of those who bring forward what they consider the scientific" aspects of the case. One hears, for instance, allusions of a more or less vague character

B 9

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to a supposed difference in the brain-development of man and woman. Although our knowledge of cerebral organisation is at present too imperfect for very precise conclusions, Bebel brings forward a few of the facts relative to the size of the brain in the two sexes, as that men of most highly developed intellect have sometimes had brains not greater in weight than the average woman's brain, and that among savages, when men and women are placed under more equable conditions, the difference between the male and female brain is comparatively slight. As Vogt pointed out, the male European excels the female in cranial development more than the negro excels the negress. Bebel fails, however, to point out, as he might have done, that notwithstanding the absolute difference there is no such clearly defined relative difference. According to at least one series of investigations there is even a slight advantage on the side of women. It is a remarkable fact that not only is there less difference between the brains of a negro and negress and those of a civilised man and woman, but that the difference varies in civilised countries in a very significant way. The difference is greatest in Germany, least in France. Germany, it is scarcely necessary to say, is undoubtedly the country in which women are treated with least regard; it is the country which, it has been said, supplies half the world with prostitutes; and as regards the education of women it is behind every country in Europe, except Poland.

Women and Socialism

In France, on the other hand, women have played a larger part and possessed more influence than anywhere else. When we try to think of the names of great European women we think above all of French women. The inference is that if women were placed under conditions equally favourable to development they would in a few generations be at no point behind men. Bebel insists on this because it is related to the underlying and fundamental assertion of scientific Socialism. The individual is dependent firstly on the material conditions of his life, then on his social and economical circumstances, which again are influenced by climate and the fertility and physical conformation of the earth. It is this assertion which gives Karl Marx his scientific strength, and it is allied to the teaching of Buckle and to some extent, it is claimed, of Darwin. It is thus that, as the Socialists of Bebel's school urge, Darwinism leads to Socialism.

The element of truth in this fundamental assertion of scientific Socialism is intimately connected with the question of education. The general importance of education in relation to the position of women has long been recognised. But it may be doubted whether the great significance which it possesses in regard to the relations of the sexes has yet been adequately realised. A recent scientific writer has asserted that "man has advanced less in knowledge as to the proper mode of viewing the

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true principles that should regulate the ethical feelings existing between the sexes than in any other branch of knowledge." And such knowledge is not only rendered more difficult of attainment, it is made incapable of finding a practical outlet, so long as artificial barriers are placed between the sexes. Bebel therefore rightly insists on the education of the sexes together, and brings forward some of the evidence as to the satisfactory character of its results, from an intellectual and moral standpoint, which comes from America. He easily disposes of the arguments, of a still weaker nature, which are brought forward against the admission of women as medical students with men, and in Paris, as well as in Sweden, students of both sexes sit side by side in the medical schools with no ill results. Bebel refers to the healthy tone of feeling which existed in Greece when boys and girls were not carefully hidden from each other, and the physical conformation and special functions of the organs of one sex were not made a secret to the other sex; each could possess a delight in the other's beauty, and sensual feeling was not as with us artificially over-excited.

The position of women in Greece, putting aside the old Homeric pictures, was in many ways a degraded one, but though in England we may have little in general to learn concerning the physical education of boys, in this respect at all events they have something to teach us and it is worthy of remark that in Sparta, where women had a better

Women and Socialism

physical education than elsewhere, they also possessed greater honour and influence. It is possible that modern feeling in regard to the body will again develop a directness and simplicity somewhat akin to the Greek feeling. "All the superficial objections to the public activity of women," says Bebel, "would be impossible if the relations of the sexes were natural and not a relation of antagonism, of master and slave, involving separation even from childhood. It is an antagonism which we owe to Christianity which keeps them apart and maintains them in ignorance of each other, hindering free intercourse and mutual trust. It will be one of the first and weightiest tasks of society, when founded on a reasonable basis, to heal this division of the sexes and to restore to nature her violated rights, a violation which begins even in the school." Though here, as ever, a little unjust when Christianity is concerned, Bebel sees how the exaggerated influence of Christianity has tended to overthrow the balance of healthy feeling, to distort and render morbid a whole field of human life.

There are two ideals of the union of the sexes, one or other of which has always had its adherents. They may be conveniently called the Greek and the Christian ideal. The one demands the most complete freedom for the sensuous and passionate elements; it seeks after a sunny openness, the spontaneous play of impulse. The other ideal,

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which has been closely though not necessarily connected with Christian feeling, finds its satisfaction in the exclusive union of two individuals, for ever seeking new inner mysteries of joy, new bonds of union. Among modern poets Schiller and Mrs. Browning have sung the one ideal, while Goethe represents the other. Everyone according to his temperament is attached to the one or the other of these ideals, but whichever it may be that we are approaching one thing at least may be demanded: there must be no artificial hindrances in the way of human development; there must be complete freedom for man's deepest instincts to have free play. It is scarcely probable that either the Greek or the Christian ideal is sufficiently large to engage by itself all the complex emotional activities of modern men and women.

Bebel appears in this matter to tend towards the Christian ideal. I doubt, however, whether he clearly realises the ethical bearings of the questions he decides so courageously. The most striking point about all sexual questions is precisely the deep way in which they enter into such problems; and it is impossible to ignore the wide relations of any fundamental change to the moral feelings. From failing to insist sufficiently on the larger bearings of the marriage question it seems that Bebel's assertions, though true, are sometimes too partial. It is true that, as he maintains, "the satisfaction of the sexual desires is a thing that concerns the individual alone." But it must be

Women and Socialism

remembered that it is also a thing that concerns the race, that is bound up with the advance of human life; since it may be physiologically demonstrated that it is not possible for one-half of the race to be oppressed and undeveloped and the other not be dragged down too. The sexual relations of the individual, therefore, concern not only the individual himself in all his relations, but they concern more than the individual. And the chief ethical demand on the sexual relations to-day is that these larger bearings should be recognised; that the sexual relations should be finally rescued from the degradation into which they have fallen; that they should be treated with a full consciousness of their wide human bearings for the individual and for the race. "The power of a woman's body," it has been said, "is no more bodily than the power of music is a power of atmospherical vibrations." And when a man touches a woman he arouses that which is best or worst in her; it is not her body that he touches, it is her whole mental and emotional nature. When two human beings come near to each other, and one is little more than an ignorant and capricious child, it is scarcely surprising that the results should seldom be quite satisfactory. That is why the sexual relations cannot possibly be a matter of indifference. And that is why all social progress is hindered while these relations also are not recognised in their wider bearings on life.

An English writer, James Hinton, who in

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writings as yet unpublished has dealt more boldly and more earnestly with the questions of the sexual relations than any other recent English writer I know, considered that when the question of women was settled the whole social question would be settled. It would not be possible, he said, for women to be placed in a true and natural position without a correlated change in the whole social life. Bebel, as we have seen, asserts that the woman question cannot be settled except as an item of a general socialisation. Whichever solution we may be inclined to adopt we may be assured that the first thing necessary is to assert the equal freedom and independence of women with men. For it has been the fate of woman to suffer from those who wished to do her honour. Till the reign of George III women were burnt alive for all treasons, because, as Blackstone explained, it would be indelicate to expose their bodies. "One cannot avoid a smile," Buckle remarks, "at that sense of decency which burns a woman alive in order to avoid stripping her naked." But to those who have studied the history of woman through the past and who have seen how often women have been impaled on an ideal created for the most part by men, that explanation of Blackstone's has a certain pathos and significance.

Once upon a time, a monkish chronicle tells us, an eloquent and beautiful English girl appeared in Bohemia, declaring that the Holy Ghost was

Women and Socialism

revealed in her for the deliverance of women, and was eventually, as usual, decently burnt. That was six hundred years ago now, and though we do not know what "message" it was that that girl had to deliver, the same spirit that found a voice in her still speaks to-day; in literature and in life it is ever finding more adequate expression. In America, Walt Whitman, who has so magnificently set forth his modern ideal "Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power," has deeply realised the equality of men and women and the purity and dignity of the sexual relations. In England, struggling to regain its old position as the Paradise of women (and where the Towards Democracy of an enthusiastic friend and disciple of Whitman is too little known), greater progress has been made on the whole regarding women, says the American editor of a very interesting volume of essays on The Woman Question in Europe just published, than anywhere else in Europe. The ideal womanhood in England is ceasing to be, as it was once defined, "a sort of sentimental priesthood." And while in Germany Bebel has been exercising his vigorous and outspoken polemics, one of the foremost of European poets, Henrik Ibsen, has in the compass of a short play, Nora, thrown into a perfectly artistic form the whole (or almost the whole) question of the independence of women as it is presented to us to-day. There cannot be, Ibsen teaches us (although, as a true artist, he always anxiously disclaims any attempt to teach),

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a truly intimate and helpful relation except between a man and a woman who are equally developed, equally independent. He has wrought out Nora with a keenness of insight into the most subtle recesses of the soul that is almost marvellous, and in Ghosts, a work of still greater genius and audacity, which there is reason to hope may soon be translated, he has again illustrated his fresh and profound way of dealing with the almost untouched ethical problems of the modern world. He has realised that the day of mere external revolutions has passed, that the only revolution now possible is the most fundamental of all, the revolution of the human spirit. If it is true that there is still much progress to be made in all that concerns the most intimate and vital of human relationships, if even so original and bold an investigator as Mr. F. Galton becomes timid when he approaches that central problem of what he calls "eugenics," the question of the breeding of men and women, we may still trace, faintly but distinctly, the tendencies of thought and life. For it is now gradually beginning to be recognised that the new ideal of human life is only possible through the union of the old Hellenic and Christian ideals with a third which is the outcome of to-day and is bound up with the attainment of equal freedom, equal independence and equal culture for men and women. It is towards that ideal that our modern life, not without pain and seeming failure, is slowly but surely moving.

THE PRESENT POSITION OF
ENGLISH CRITICISM

The "Present" here means some forty-six years past. The paper was first sent to the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, accepted by the then editor, T. H. S. Escott, and almost immediately returned without explanation; the editor himself disappeared from the REVIEW soon after. The article was published in TIME in December, 1885. I never reprinted it as it soon ceased to express accurately my opinion; especially I felt I had placed Symonds too high and Pater too low, though with the low estimate many to-day will be content. The paper is here reprinted exactly as it appeared in TIME.

THERE is something so uncertain and so various in the methods and results of criticism, that a review of its present position would be best begun by asking: What is criticism? Such a question, however, would probably be considered a profitless and scholastic exercise, and the critic of criticism has to content himself with admitting that at present it is not quite certain what criticism is. Yet we are not entirely without definitions of criticism. A distinguished English critic and a distinguished French critic have each given us a definition of criticism. According to Matthew Arnold's well-known formula, criticism is "a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate

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the best that is known and thought in the world." Taine says: "The critic is the naturalist of the soul. He accepts its various forms; he condemns none and describes all." Neither of these definitions, one notes, can be said to err on the side of undue modesty, and Mr. Arnold's labours under the disadvantage of not being founded on any definite conception. It is clearly formulated for the benefit of that English middle class among whom he desires to be an evangelist. Taine's definition is that of a critic who is a philosopher first, and a critic afterwards. A clear and distinct scientific conception underlies it. He is the naturalist of the soul as it appears in literature and art; it is there that he finds his documents sig-nificatifs. For the individual as an individual, as a distinct personality with its own character and idiosyncrasy, he cares little. He is not satisfied unless he can refer the qualities of the individual back into his environment. The vitality and fruitfulness of this method have been attested by its results. Taine has had an influence which has ' reached throughout Europe. The naturalistic school has adopted his aesthetics; Zola prefaced to an early novel a characteristic utterance of the master: "Le vice et la virtu sont des produits comme le vitriol et comnie le sucre." In Italy his influence has been great; in Denmark he has, in great measure through the influence of his disciple, the well-known critic, Georg Brandes, profoundly awakened intellectual life. It is true, indeed, that,

The Present Position of English Criticism

as one of the best of the young French critics has said of him, he represents that religion of science which is peculiar to the second half of the nineteenth century. But notwithstanding that perfect honesty and devotion to principle which has enabled him to face unshrinkingly the disapprobation which the Origines de la France Contemporaine has aroused, he has himself exhibited, in the most startling manner, the imperfection of his own definition of criticism. The critic describes, he tells us; he does not condemn. But it would be difficult to find a more severe condemnation of the French Revolution than the Origines. The naturalist of the soul cannot avoid a moral judgment; he is dealing with the very stuff of morals. The fact is, that a purely objective method of criticism, founded on general principles, cannot be reached even by a Taine. So long as we ignore the individuality of the critic, the personal equation of criticism will never come out right. Perhaps every critic ought to prefix a criticism of himself to his writings. We need to know his mental history, all the influences he has come under; we need details of his parents, of the peculiarities of his race as exhibited in his brothers and sisters; we must have clearly stated his prejudices, his partialities, his limitations. When that is done, we possess the terms of our personal equation; we can attain a true critical appreciation; and the critic's merit is great in proportion as the deductions we have to make are small.

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How completely, for instance, we might by this method justify the idiosyncrasies of Matthew Arnold's judgments! Even so imperfect and partial a self-criticism as Renan's delightful volume of Souvenirs forms an introduction to Renan's work of the very highest value. Till this is done we are not in a position to define criticism, or to measure the success of the critic's work which is, practically, to find out what is really essential and significant in the artistic product before him, and to subordinate, or classify, that product in accordance with the largest number of its most significant characteristics, with most sureness and with least caprice. When Ruskin spoke of The Mill on the Floss as "a study of cutaneous disease" he illustrated admirably the nature of a false subordination in criticism. The more one attempts to justify this judgment by evidence, the more untenable it becomes. When Mr. J. A. Symonds spoke once of Walt Whitman as "more truly Greek than any other man of modern times," the classification was to most people perhaps as little obvious as the other, but we have only to bring forward the evidence, to reveal the caracteres essentiels of Whitman, and we find that it is justified.

While Taine, with an imperfect conception of criticism, has been influencing continental thought, Matthew Arnold, with an equally imperfect conception, has had a wide influence on English thought. If his definition of criticism is quite

The Present Position of English Criticism

untenable from a scientific point of view, he is yet one of the earliest and most popular of the modern English critical school, and he is largely responsible for its merits and its defects. English criticism is fairly catholic, fairly sympathetic, but a little too literary and too superficial; perhaps a little too bourgeois. If it is scarcely serious enough, it is inquisitive, appreciative, even subtle. Matthew Arnold's aim has been to fly from flower to flower, gathering sweets from each, never staying, so that he may bring to his middle-class countrymen the honey he has collected--" the best that is known and thought in the world." These flowers are, for the most part, exotics; in Essays in Criticism, his best and most popular critical volume, not one essay is concerned with an English writer. And that brings us at once to one of the defects of Mr. Arnold's critical work. He is a moralist. Macau-lay asserts grandiloquently that English literature is supreme. "I dare say this is so," observes Mr. Arnold wearily, "only, remembering Spinoza's maxim, that the two great banes of humanity are self-conceit, and the laziness that comes from self-conceit, I think it may do us good "to say that it is not so. That is scarcely the true critical temper. Mr. Arnold is constantly oppressed by his own contentious and rather awkward formula that "conduct is three-fourths of life." His delight in moralising is, indeed, one of his most marked psychological features. And everyone knows with what peculiar unction Mr. Arnold quotes the

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amiable platitudes of a certain Bishop Wilson. How characteristic is this passage for instance: "What an antidote to the perilous Methodist doctrine of instantaneous sanctification is this saying of Bishop Wilson: ' He who fancies that his mind may effectually be changed in a short time deceives himself'!"

The curious limitations of Matthew Arnold's power, as revealed in occasional calm and arbitrary failures of judgment--the note of provincialism, as he would himself call it--are so obvious, and to many people, so irritating, that they have frequently aroused ample discussion, and need not be alluded to here. Nor is it necessary to speak of his habit of inventing a catchword, and then repeating it in varying tones and inflexions of voice, as if endeavouring to impress some new meaning on the word, a trick which has been caught by some of those whom Mr. Arnold has influenced. Professor Seeley, for example, not long ago undertook to tell us that Goethe is a serious writer--a serious writer. Sainte-Beuve, from whom many of Matthew Arnold's best qualities derive, was singularly free from such peculiarities of method. In the preceding critical generation he was, as his English disciple said, "the prince of critics." One wishes sometimes that Mr. Arnold possessed something of Sainte-Beuve's freedom from prejudice. There is, however, another and more fundamental weakness in his critical work, a weakness which is, I think,

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connected with that impression of superficiality which he often gives. The literary qualities of style are not so widely diffused in England that we can well afford to quarrel with them when, as in Matthew Arnold's prose, we find them so exquisitely, so charmingly developed. It would be hard to overrate the marvellous qualities of this style--its delicacy, its lucidity, its irony, its vital and organic music--but it remains true that an intense preoccupation with style is almost invariably detrimental to the finest criticism. The critic's business is not to say beautiful things. It is his business to take hold of his subject with the largest and firmest grasp, to express from it its most characteristic essence. But it is part of Matthew Arnold's method, if method it may be called, "to approach truth on one side after another, not to strive or cry, nor to persist in pressing forward, on any one side, with violence and self-will." One of his best-known essays, that on Heine, is an admirable instance of what can and cannot be obtained by this method. At the time it was written Carlyle was accepted as an authority on German literature, and Carlyle is said to have referred to Heine as "that pig." Here, as usually Mr. Arnold was on the side of true criticism. He shows a delicate appreciation of the obvious aspects of things--especially the more un-English aspects--a sure sense of the artistic perfection of Heine's verse, though not of his prose, an adequate delight in his wit, a total failure

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to understand his humour, the usual irresistible tendency to moralise which prompts him to sum up by saying that Heine produced nothing but "a half result." But Heine is peculiarly difficult to criticise. How many books and essays have been written about him, and how little true criticism they contain! Perhaps, indeed, the time has not yet come for a really wide and deep appreciation of his marvellous individuality. At present the only fairly complete critical account of Heine that I know of in England is contained in a careful and rather dull paper which appeared in the Contemporary a few years ago, and which was written by a Mr. Charles Grant. Let us, then, look at Mr. Arnold's article on "Keats" in Ward's English Poets. Who has not heard of Keats' "natural magic"? Here, in the shortest compass, Mr. Arnold displays all the charm of his most exquisite literary style. And yet his unhappy tendency to moralise, his resolve "not to persist in pressing forward," but to enjoy merely the superficial aspect of things, make it impossible to say that these pages, delightful as they are, bear on them the stamp of true critical insight.

After all, we must never forget all that we owe to Matthew Arnold. M. Bourget says of Renan that he is "1'homme superieur." Matthew Arnold is the English "homme superieur," though not in quite the same sense. It is the superiority voulu of a pedagogue. If, however, he appears to possess the hereditary instincts of a schoolmaster,

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and in a stern yet half-encouraging manner deals out reproofs to Ruskin, Stopford Brooke, and others who have not yet learnt what measure is, what style is, what urbanity is, still it is true that the reproofs were called for, and Matthew Arnold himself seldom forgets what those things are. One would prefer, when charitably disposed, that one's contemporaries should fall into his hands rather than, let us say, be reached by Swinburne's reckless sledge-hammer. It is no mean distinction to have been one of the foremost poets of an age, one of its chief prose writers, and its most typical critic. This may console Mr. Arnold when he sometimes finds arrayed against him the weapons which he has himself forged. When a writer has become popular and influential it is profitable, Mr. Arnold would himself tell us, to meditate on his defects. The influence which Matthew Arnold has exercised on recent English critical work may be seen both in its better qualities and in its lack of thoroughness, its tendency to degenerate into the mere literature of style. Not long ago Mr. F. W. H Myers published two volumes of essays which were largely of a critical character. These well-written essays were received with all the applause which they deserved, an applause which was unanimous, and seems to indicate that they may fairly be accepted, both in their merits and defects, as an example of the popular conception of criticism. The influence of Matthew Arnold's method may, I think, be well traced in the essay on Renan.

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Mr. Myers is concerned not to get to the heart of his subject, but to give us charming and interesting passages, stimulating and profitable suggestions--"the best that is known and thought in the world." There are luminous points of criticism here and there, but they are not frequent. It is a pleasant essay, it is not criticism. It might be said that Mr. Myers is writing of a foreign author, not, like M. Bourget, of a native writer, with whom he could suppose his readers to be well acquainted, or, like Georg Brandes, who writes avowedly for all Europe. Let us turn, then, to his essay on "Rossetti and the Religion of Beauty." I have read this essay several times since it first appeared in the Cornhill; there is something so charming about it that it is by no means difficult to read; but I must confess that every time I reach the end of it no definite impression remains on my mind. It is witty sometimes; it is carefully written; I frequently feel that Mr. Myers is about to touch the heart of his subject; but he goes round and round, and never seems to get any nearer. He beats the bush with admirable dexterity, and the reader looks on expectantly, but nothing appears. There are certain flames in literature--Heine, Rossetti, Whitman--into which the critical moth in England loves to dash, and Mr. Myers, like the rest, appears to singe his wings with great satisfaction.

Another English critic, Mr. Theodore Watts,
has dealt with Rossetti much more successfully.

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Notwithstanding his fine sense for artistic form, his keen faculty for mere literary analysis, Mr. Watts sees clearly the nature of the critic's ultimate task. He is fully aware that the critic is concerned with criticism, not with the mere production of literature. In an article called, with some failure of good taste, "The Truth about Rossetti," which appeared in the Nineteenth Century about two years ago, he has produced a criticism of Rossetti which is likely to be final for some years to come. If we regard the present state of English criticism, it is difficult to praise such work too highly for its grasp of a very wonderful individuality, for its keen perception of the relations of that individuality to imaginative art generally. The accurate criticism of a great, and hitherto unappreciated personality (with which, also, the critic has come closely in contact), is a peculiarly difficult task. Swinburne's criticism of Rossetti was a lyrical rhapsody. Mr. William Sharp, with all his talent, with his devoted and laborious enthusiasm, has written a volume of some four hundred pages about Rossetti, which contains perhaps some dozen lines of genuine criticism. And when the enthusiasm and the laboriousness are both wanting, the result may be even more disastrous, as anyone may have observed who happened to witness a pathetic attempt at the criticism of Rossetti by the late Principal Shairp. Such criticism as that of Mr. Watts becomes, therefore, very precious, and it is a matter for regret that he has not more

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strenuously devoted himself to criticism of such
serious and enduring quality.

I have alluded to another writer who has been singularly fortunate or unfortunate in attracting the attention of critics. It would be difficult even to name the critics who have attempted to gauge the depth or shallowness of Whitman's genius, for the most part, not even excepting an interesting attempt of Professor Dowden's, in a somewhat ineffectual manner. Strange to say, it is in the prophet's own country, and from a writer who is not pre-eminently a critic, that the most adequate appreciation of Whitman has so far proceeded. In an essay, entitled too fancifully The Flight of the Eagle, John Burroughs shows very remarkable precision of judgment, and power of synthetic criticism. His range of criticism, though narrow, is true within its own limits. Narrowness of range marks some of our best critics. Mr. Pater, if he has nothing else in common with Burroughs, is a true critic within an almost equally narrow range, and with a similar synthetic method. Mr. Burroughs' range is that of large, virile, catholic, sweet-blooded things; he is half on the side of Emerson, but altogether on the side of Rabelais, of Shakespeare, of Whitman. Mr. Pater is not, indeed, on the side of "Zoroaster and the saints"; but there is no room in his heart for the things that Mr. Burroughs loves. For him there is nothing so good in the world as the soft, spiritual aroma--telling, as nothing else tells, of the very

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quintessence of the Renaissance itself--that exhales from Delia Robbia ware, or the long-lost impossible Platonism of Mirandola, or certain subtle and evanescent aspects of Botticelli's art. To find how the flavour of these things may be most exquisitely tasted, there is nothing so well worth seeking as that. Even in Marius the "new Cyrenaicism" in reality rules to the end. Joachim du Bellay is too fragile to bear the touch of analytic criticism, but certainly it would be impossible to do more for him than Mr. Pater has done by his synthetic method. For Mr. Pater the objects with which aesthetic criticism deals are "the receptacles of so many powers or forces" which he wishes to seize in the most complete manner; they are, as it were, plants from each of which he wishes to extract its own peculiar alkaloid or volatile oil. For him "the picture, the landscapes, the engaging personality in life or in a book, La Gioconda, the hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandola, are valuable for their virtues, as we say in speaking of a herb, a wine, a gem; for the property each has of affecting one with a special unique impression of pleasure." This was an ingenious and almost scientific theory of criticism, and had not Mr. Pater seemed to swoon by the way over the subtle perfumes he had evoked, he might, one thinks, have gone far.

If, however, the area which Mr. Pater occupies with his herbs, and gems, and wines is small, however choice, that is but saying that he is not

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a critic of the first order, and that critics of the first order are rare. With so definite, and apparently fruitful a method, one might have thought that all things were possible for Mr. Pater. But a fairly catholic critic like Sainte-Beuve--for with all his cynical caution Sainte-Beuve was catholic--rarely has a definite method, a method to which he adheres. However it may be in the future, the critic, in his largest development, hitherto has been a highly-evolved and complex personality, whose judgments have proceeded from the almost spontaneous reaction of his own nature with the things with which he has come in contact; and so long as that is the case, the main point is to ascertain the exact weight and quality of the factor which the critic himself brings. In that way, while we shall still be nothing less than infinitely removed from the realisation of so primitive a conception of the critic's function as Matthew Arnold's--"to see the thing as in itself it really is"--can we only at present truly attain a sound criticism. Mr. J. A. Symonds, among English critics, possesses, I think unquestionably, the most marked catholicity. He has not, like Mr. Pater, the advantage or disadvantage of a definite method. He lives and moves in "the free atmosphere of art, which is nature permeated by emotion." This allows him at once a large scope, both for analytic criticism and for mere description. Description, it is scarcely necessary to say, is not always criticism; and Mr. Symonds,

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especially in some volumes of magazine essays--the litter of his workshop--gathered together and published--it is not, from a critical point of view, quite easy to say why--is by no means sparing in this respect. His power of fluent description, his wealth of exact analogy from all domains of art, are sometimes almost oppressive. He can tell you how a particular poem is like a particular picture, or a particular picture like a particular fugue of Bach's. But a capacity for profuse and minute analogy, however rich and poetic--and Mr. Symonds' analogies often are rich and poetic; for instance, "the beautiful Greek life, as of leopards, and tiger-lilies, and eagles "--is not necessarily a surer guide in paths of criticism than in paths of philosophy. In his more solid and mature work Mr. Symonds has freed himself from these defects of his manner. In the chief subject with which he has dwelt--the Italian Renaissance--his method of uniting description with analytic criticism is seen at its best. Notwithstanding the emotional extravagance to which he is sometimes (though not at his best) inclined, Mr. Symonds' deepest quality is his keen and restless intellectual energy. This profoundly inquisitive temper of mind may be seen in his sonnets, with their subtle and searching dialectical power. To this wide-ranging intellectual force is united a certain calm breadth and sanity which marks all Mr. Symonds' best work. Taine, whose eager, inquisitive, intellectual force is greater still, fails to give any impression

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of underlying sanity and calm. One can always see the restless passion that throbs beneath the iron mail of his logic. Mr. Symonds, also, is free from the limitations of the specialist critic. His account of Shelley in the "Men of Letters" series is, on the whole, the best that has yet appeared; in Ward's English Poets he has written a short criticism of Byron which sums up admirably whatever makes Byron great and significant. It is rare to find a critic who is equally receptive to these two so diverse artistic individualities. Taine, with all his ostentation of scientific apparatus, has his well-marked proclivities. When one thinks of Taine one thinks of the things that are most exuberant, elemental, bitter, that burst forth from the lowest depth of the human consciousness--of Rubens, of Shakespeare, of Swift. We see his insatiable passion for all that is fiercest and most concentrated in the elemental manifestations of human hatred and revenge in his Revolution. Mr. Symonds, with a much less definite method, has less definite prejudices. But he also takes peculiar delight in a certain order of individuality. Like Taine, he is attracted by the manifestations of elemental passion; his intellectual energy is satisfied by the bold, strong, unemotional imagination of the Italian novellieri, or the same imagination with its profound moral and emotional reverberations in the Elizabethan dramatists.. Perhaps, however, it is the natural rather than the fiendish aspects of passion to which he is attracted,

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the aspects that are lovely and yet masculine. That wonderful Kermesse of Rubens in the Louvre is the perfect embodiment of all that most fascinates Taine. Mr. Symonds prefers Tintoretto's Bacchus and Ariadne. It is the broad, masculine, sympathetic personalities that he seems most to care about: Pontano, with his large, healthy sensuality, his tremulous tenderness for sorrow and childhood in the seventeenth century; Whitman, with his vast tolerance, his audacity in the presence of all things natural and human, in the nineteenth. What Mr. Symonds tells us more explicitly of his philosophy of life harmonises with this bias. The motto of the Studies of the Greek Poets is Goethe's famous saying:--

"Im Ganzen, Guten, Schoenen
Resolut zu leben."

And in the suggestive and characteristic essay at the end of the first series--"The Genius of Greek Art"--he declares that there is but one way to make the Hellenic tradition vital--to be natural. Science, he adds, will place the future man on a higher pinnacle than even the Greek; for it has given us the final discovery that there is no antagonism, but rather a most intimate connection between the elements of our being. It is largely because Mr. Symonds is so resolute to live in this conception of the whole, that his work is so sound and so stimulating, and that he represents to-day whatever is best in English criticism.

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It is doubtful whether Mr. Symonds possesses the dangerous gift of a keen intuition. A piercing and apparently instantaneous insight into the heart of his subject, sometimes uncertain, as in Coleridge, sometimes certain, as in Heine, frequently marks the discursive and catholic critic. Carlyle had a faculty as uncertain as Coleridge's, as keen as Heine's, for cutting into the core of a thing. It is possible that one of his main claims to remembrance will be found to lie in the portraits he has given us of his contemporaries. From this point of view the Reminiscences are peculiarly valuable. Carlyle was Aristophanic, it may be, and his portraits have sometimes even a faint gleam of the Greek's lyric loveliness on them; but for criticism of the piercing, heliocentric sort there is often nothing to be compared to them, although, wherever prejudice or partiality comes in, it is always liable to go hopelessly astray. In criticism of this kind Swinburne is now, without any rival, the chief English representative. More purely literary than Carlyle, his intuitions are also, on the whole, accompanied and held in check by a more exact knowledge. At the best they are keen, vital, audacious, springing from a free and genuine insight. But Swinburne also is not reliable where his sympathies or antipathies are too strongly called forth. He is better worth listening to when he speaks of Ford and the Elizabethan dramatists generally, than when he speaks of Hugo or De Musset. For all that is keen and intense his

The Present Position of English Criticism

perception is vivid; he criticises admirably what is great in the Brontes; his failure to appreciate George Eliot is almost complete. Swinburne has also another difficulty to contend with. Sometimes his prose style is a very flame of power and splendour. At other times it is singularly awkward, and clanks behind him in an altogether hopeless and helpless fashion. What way of describing things can be more stale, flat, and unprofitable than this discovered without much search--"the great company of witnesses, by right of articulate genius, and might of intelligent appeal against all tenets and all theories of sophists, and of saints which tend directly or indirectly to pamper or to stimulate, to fortify or to excuse, the tyrannous instinct or appetite," etc.? One scarcely recognises there the swift hand of the poet.

If a brief review of English criticism in its higher aspects reveals the fact that our critics are but a feeble folk--with exceptions, indeed, that are brilliant, though, even then, for the most part, erratic--it is still worth while to make that review. It is well to call them before us, and, for our own private guidance, try to define to ourselves what it is and what it is not that they have to give us; where we may follow them, and where we should forbear. Criticism is a complex development of psychological science, and if it is to reach any large and strong growth, it must be apprehended seriously in all its manifestations.

III

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY

This review of Edward Carpenter's TOWARDS DEMOCRACY was published, unsigned, in PAPERS FOR THE TIMES of February, 1886. Carpenter himself was interested, and seemed even a little surprised, to find himself here ranked among the mystics.

THE form of literary expression which has found its chief exponent in Walt Whitman has received an important adherent in Mr. Edward Carpenter, whose Towards Democracy, published two years ago, has just been re-published with many additions. Whether, as some enthusiasts loudly assert, this new form of art is to supersede the stricter metrical forms--a very unlikely result --or not, it has fully established its right to exist as a flexible and harmonious vehicle for imaginative conceptions which scarcely admit of adequate expression in the more orthodox forms. It is not, however, really correct to speak of this as a new form; it is one of the first in which the human imagination found voice, and it formed the medium for the relatively ancient Hebrew psalms and prophecies:--

"Come on, therefore: let us enjoy the good things that are present, and let us speedily use the creatures like as in youth.

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"Let us fill ourselves with costly wine and ointments, and let no flower of the spring pass by us. Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they be withered.

"Let none of us go without his part of our voluptuousness; let us leave tokens of our joyful-ness in every place. For this is our portion and our lot is this."

One might almost mistake these words of The Wisdom of Solomon for a passage from Leaves of Grass, and many parts of Isaiah and Ezekiel reach a much higher rhythmical level.

Let us, however, turn from the form to the substance of Mr. Carpenter's book. It must be said at once that the democracy towards which we are advancing, according to Mr. Carpenter (as it is needless to tell those who are acquainted with the admirable little tracts he has published from time to time, such as Desirable Mansions and England's Ideal), is far from having much resemblance to that huge beast whose advent Renan, Scherer and Maine contemplate with doleful emotions. "A black and horned Ethiopian," indeed, he calls it, but the freedom and equality he announces is that of the soul, "for which the heroes and lovers of all ages have laid down their lives," and of which political freedom and institutions are only the outward but necessary shadows. Democracy, he finely says, is that "which first expresses itself in the flower of the eye or the appearance of the skin."

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"I conceive a millennium on earth--a millennium not of riches, nor of mechanical facilities, nor of intellectual facilities, nor absolutely of immunity from disease, nor absolutely of immunity from pain; but a time when men and women all over the earth shall ascend and enter into relation with their bodies--shall attain freedom and joy."

It need scarcely be said that Mr. Carpenter is keenly sensitive to the contrast between such a millennium and the England of to-day. It is, indeed, as frequently happens, through his perception of the wrongness of our modern life that he rises to a perception of a coming righteousness; the optimism springs out of pessimism.

"O England, do I not know thee?--as in a nightmare strangled, tied and bound. Thy poverty, when through thy filthy courts, from tangles of matted hair, gaunt women with venomous faces look upon me;

"When I turn from this and consider throughout the length and breadth of the land, not less but more hateful, the insane greed of wealth--of which poverty and its evils are but the necessary obverse and counterpart;

"When I see deadly respectability sitting at its dinner-table, quaffing its wine, and discussing the rise and fall of stocks;

"When I see the struggle, the fear, the envy, the profound infidelity (so profound that it is almost unconscious of itself) in which the moneyed classes live;

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"When I see avenues of young girls and women, with sideway flopping heads, debarred from work, debarred from natural sexuality, weary to death with nothing to do (and this thy triumph, O deadly respectability discussing stocks!);

"When I look for help from the guides and see only a dead waste of aimless, abject, close-shaven, shabby, simpering, flat, pompous, pecked, punctilious faces:

"O England, whither--strangled, tied and bound--whither, whither art thou come? "

But from the contemplation of the England of to-day we are gradually led up to a vision of the higher Democracy, and the poem ends in a paean of joy that grows almost delirious:--

"Radiant health!

"O kisses of sun and wind, tall fir trees and moss-covered rocks! O boundless joy of Nature on the mountain tops, coming back at last to you!

"See! the Divine Mother goes forth with her babe (all creation circles round). God dwells once more in a woman's womb, friend goes with friend, flesh cleaves to flesh, the path that rounds the Universe.

"O every day sweet and delicious food! Kisses to the lips of sweet smelling fruit and bread, milk and green herbs. Strong, well-knit muscles, quick healing, glossy skin, body for kisses all over!

"Radiant health! to breathe, O joy! to sleep, ah! never enough to be expressed!

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"For the taste of fruit ripening warm in the sun, for the distant sight of the deep liquid sea; for the touch of the air on my face, or creeping over my unclothed body, for the rustling sound of it in the trees, and the sight of thin tall stems springing so lightly from the earth.

"Joy, joy, and thanks for ever! "

Like Walt Whitman, Mr. Carpenter has a profound sense of the mystery and significance of the body: he cannot see any salvation for man till he is able to enter into pure and frank relation with his own body, the latest and best gift of nature, so long concealed; it is by his body, he insists, that man ascends and knows himself and he cannot treat it too reverently. "The body is the root of the soul."

"Recurved and close lie the little feet and hands, close as in the attitude of sleep folds the head, the little lips are not yet parted;

"The living mother-flesh folds round in darkness, the mother's life is an unspoken prayer, her body a temple of the Holy One.

"I am amazed and troubled, my child, she whispers--at the thought of you; I hardly dare to speak of it, you are so sacred;

"When I feel you leap I do not know myself any more--I am filled with wonder and joy--Ah! if any injury should happen to you!

"I will keep my body pure, very pure; the sweet air will I breathe and pure water drink; I will stay out in the open, hours together, that my

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flesh may become pure and fragrant for your sake;

"Holy thoughts will I think; I will brood in the thought of mother-love. I will fill myself with beauty: trees and running brooks shall be my companions;

"And I will pray that I may become transparent --that the sun may shine and the moon, my beloved, upon you.

"Even before you are born."

Our first thought on opening this volume for the first time is that we have come across a weak imitation of Leaves of Grass; but on growing familiar with Towards Democracy we find that we have here a distinct individuality, with, indeed, points of contact with Whitman, and using the same mode of expression, but a new and genuine voice nevertheless, not a mere echo. Even the form is not quite the same; it is flowing and eloquent rather than with the massive Aveight of Whitman's interrupted elephantine steps. There is a strenuous vitality in Whitman; his voice is like a trumpet; he radiates life and energy from a vast centre of vital heat; he is the expression of an immense dilatation of the individual personality. But in this volume the bounds of personality are, as it were, loosened; and we have instead the soothing voice of an almost impersonal return to joy. Mr. Carpenter on the whole does not strive nor cry; he lifts up, rather, a tender voice of love and healing. It is the note of

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Consolation rather than the stimulating "barbaric yawp" that we hear.

"As long as you harbour motives, so long are you giving hostages to the enemy--while you are a slave (to this and that) you can only obey. It is not you who are acting at all.

"Brush it all aside.

"Pass disembodied out of yourself. Leave the husk, leave the long, long prepared and perfected envelope.

"Enter into the life which is eternal. Pass through the gate of indifference into the palace of mastery, through the door of love into the house of deliciousness.

"Give away all that you have, become poor and without possessions--and behold! you shall become lord and sovereign of all things." For this messenger of the new Democracy is a mystic; it is the bold and gentle spirit of St. Francis that we hear anew; and the modern man, too, as he looks at the horse and the cat, and the ant on the grass by the barn door asks: "Do you not know your mother and your sister and your brother are among them?" The human heart still cries out for consolation and the old oracles with ever new voices still utter their responses.

We have been looking rather at the democratic and religious aspects of Towards Democracy than at its artistic or poetic aspects. There are, however, many passages full of poetic charm, of large and gracious imagery, of tender and delicate

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observation of nature. Of the shorter poems which form the larger part of the book, "York Minster," "In the Drawing Room," "After Long Ages," are among the best. "High in my Chamber," and passages in "After Long Ages," reveal Mr. Carpenter's command of his form; there is a swift and sustained melody in them which is unlike anything that Whitman has done. "Squinancy Wort" is a brightly expressed fancy. "Have Faith "is a brief and pregnant compendium of mystical philosophy, such as found in Eckart one of its chief exponents; and like Eckart, Mr. Carpenter asserts the perilous doctrine that "whoever dwells among thoughts dwells in the region of delusion and disease." "On an Atlantic Steamship" is a true and vivid fragment of observation. This book--with its revolt against the overweighted civilisation of our lives, with its frank reverence for the human body, with the clinging tenderness of its view of religious emotion--must not be accepted, however startling its thesis may sometimes appear, as an isolated fact. On the one hand it represents in a modern dress one of the most ancient modes of human thought and feeling. On the other hand it is allied to some of the most characteristic features of the modern world. In America Emerson long since upheld in his own lofty and austere fashion a like conception of life and the soul. Walt Whitman has sought to represent such an ideal in action in the living world. Thoreau, the finest flower of the school of Antisthenes, felt

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an irresistible impulse to reduce life to its lowest terms, and he did so with a practical wisdom which saved him from approaching the tub of Diogenes. "Our life," he has well said, "is but the soul made known by its fruits the body. The whole duty of men may be expressed in one line: make to yourself a perfect body." In England, from many various and indeed opposite directions, the same cry is raised in the presence of the heavy burden of modern civilisation. Mr. William Morris, who has identified himself with the cause of Socialism, is never weary of proclaiming that for life's sake we have lost the reasons for living. Dr. Richardson, a vigorous opponent oT Socialism, tells us the same thing, that health of body and mind is the only standard of wealth, that the extreme wealth of the rich and the extreme poverty of the poor ultimately reduce richest and poorest to the same level--leaving them alike in physical and mental weakness, in selfish indifference to the suffering of others. And now Mr. Carpenter would have us consider whether men do well "to condemn themselves to pick oakum of the strands of real life for ever." Probably his chief distinguishing characteristic is that element of mystic religion to which reference has more than once been already made, and which is most distinctly marked in his latest work. The mystic element in Whitman is kept in check by his strong sense of external reality and multiplicity. Tired of the hopeless wretchedness of life, the mystic finds a

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door of deliverance within his own heart. It is idle to rebel, as some would have us do, against this impulse towards freedom and joy, although it has led to superstition, to unbridled licence, to long arrests of human progress. We are compelled to regard it--after the sexual passion which is the very life of the race itself--as man's strongest and most persistent instinct. So long as it is saved from fanaticism by a strenuous devotion to science, by a perpetual reference to the moral structure of society, it will always remain an integral portion of the whole man in his finest developments.

IV
A NOTE ON PAUL BOURGET

Published in the PIONEER for October, 1889, and signed H.E. At this period Paul Bourget had not yet become the champion of an anti-modern reactionism, but it would seem that I detected in his work the germs of later developments which for me were of little significance, and I read nothing of his after 1889. But at that time he was still, above all, the author of the ESSAIS DE PSYCHOLOGIE CONTEMPORAINE, a work, though in late editions he has toned down some of its- utterances, memorable and almost epoch-marking.

OF the younger generation of French writers Paul Bourget--successively poet, critic, novelist--is the most prominent and perhaps the most interesting. Even in England his name at all events is well known; it would not be safe to assume that his books are also well known; and yet they are marked by certain qualities which make them worth the study of anyone who desires to know the best that young France has to give, and also to understand a very important phase of the modern spirit.

Bourget first appeared as a poet; he has at intervals published several volumes of poems. In poetry he has been described as un lakiste Parisien, an expression which at all events indicates his peculiar complexity; but his poetic work also

A Note on Paul Bourget

reveals influences from Baudelaire, from Shelley, from Poe (whose love of mystery appeals strongly to the imagination of modern France), and from less known poets.

These poems, especially, perhaps, the volume called Aveux, clearly indicate Bourget's dominant tendency from the first to restless and unceasing self-analysis; they are full of the struggle between life and the ideal, of the immense thirst for life and the irresistible tendency towards the dreams of the ideal, the sense of the sterility of passion and the impotence of life--that pessimism, in short, which was very far from being the exclusive property of young Bourget. "This Satan," he wrote in his first volume, "takes my passions and kills them, and then exposes the mangled limbs of my ideal body--just as a surgeon does with a hospital corpse--and yet, as I see him do it, I feel a strange fascination, rather than anger."

This is youthful, undoubtedly; Bourget's poems are chiefly interesting because they help us to understand the man's personality. As a poet there is a certain ineffectual effort about him; even as a novelist, he fails to leave a feeling of complete satisfaction. It is as a critic--in the volumes of the Essais de Psychologic Contemporaine--that Bourget reaches his full development. He has ceased to talk openly of his "membres dechires" and to lament the sterility of life; his restless and sensitive spirit has at last found adequate occupation in, as he explains it, indicating the examples

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which "the distinguished writers of to-day offer to the imagination of the young people who seek to know themselves through books." So that in his sympathetic and searching examination of these writers, Bourget's Satan is still really analysing, in a more heightened form, the elements of his own nature: this gives a peculiar meaning and personal impress to his work.

In these two volumes, in which there is not a page without some keen critical insight, some fine suggestion for thought, Bourget deals, then, with the psychological physiognomy of certain leading literary figures, chiefly belonging to modern France, and with the psychological atmosphere which has made them possible--Renan, Baudelaire, Taine, Flaubert, Beyle, Tourgueneff, Dumas, Le-conte de Lisle, the De Goncourts, Amiel. His aim is thus explained in the Preface: "The reader will not find in these pages what may properly be termed criticism. Methods of art are only analysed in so far as they are signs, the personality of the authors is hardly indicated, there is not, I believe, a single anecdote. I have desired neither to discuss talent nor to paint character. My ambition has been to record some notes capable of serving the historian of the moral life during the second half of the nineteenth century in France." Each figure is treated with reference to the current influence which it represents; thus in writing of Taine, Bourget deals with the slowly penetrating spirit of science; Dumas, the dramatic moralist,

A Note on Paul Bourget

serves to introduce a subtle discussion of some of the modern problems connected with love; Flaubert, and that style of imperishable marble in which he slowly carved his great creations, is a text for some singularly keen observations on the profound significance of style. The essay on Renan is probably the finest; Renan is peculiarly amenable to Bourget's delicate feminine methods of analysis; the characteristics of Renan's spirit and manner are set down with insurpassable felicity. On the other hand the account of Taine is probably the least satisfactory; Taine's virile (perhaps extravagantly virile) methods, his strong, direct positive grip of things, does not easily lend itself to the sinuous sympathetic methods of Bourget's analysis.

There are at least two points, on which Bourget especially insists, which help to explain his attitude and also much in that contemporary "moral life" which he has set himself to analyse. The first of these (introduced in the essay on Baudelaire) is the theory of decadence. Bourget uses this word as it is generally used (but, as Gautier pointed out, rather unfortunately) to express the literary methods of a society which has reached its limits of expansion and maturity--"the state of society," in his own words, "which produces too large a number of individuals who are unsuited to the labours of the common life. A society should be like an organism. Like an organism, in fact, it may be resolved into a federation of smaller

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organisms, which may themselves be resolved into a federation of cells. The individual is the social cell. In order that the organism should perform its functions with energy it is necessary that the organisms composing it should perform their functions with energy, but with a subordinated energy, and in order that these lesser organisms should themselves perform their functions with energy, it is necessary that the cells comprising them should perform their functions with energy, but with a subordinated energy. If the energy of the cells becomes independent, the lesser organisms will likewise cease to subordinate their energy to the total energy and the anarchy which is established constitutes the decadence of the whole. The social organism does not escape this law and enters into decadence as soon as the individual life becomes exaggerated beneath the influence of acquired well-being, and of heredity. A similar law governs the development and decadence of that other organism which we call language. A style of decadence is one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to give place to the independence of the page, in which the page is decomposed to give place to the independence of the phrase, and the phrase to give place to the independence of the word." A decadent style, in short, is an anarchistic style in which everything is sacrificed to the development of the individual parts. Apuleius, Petronius, St. Augustine, Tertullian, are examples of this decadence in ancient literature;

A Note on Paul Bourget

Gautier and Baudelaire in French literature; Poe and especially Whitman (in so far as he can be said to have a style) in America; in English literature Sir Thomas Browne is probably the most conspicuous instance; later De Quincey, and, in part of their work, Coleridge and Rossetti. The second point (discussed in relation to Renan) is indicated by the word dilettantism. Like decadence this is not a fortunate word; it has been identified in our minds with those defects of frivolity and superficiality into which the dilettante spirit most easily falls, just as the style of decadence sometimes tends to represent what Baudelaire called "la phosphorescence de la pourriture." At the best it is marked by its universality of sympathy and by its striving after wholeness. The typical dilettante is Goethe. "Dilettantism is much less a doctrine," Bourget remarks, "than a disposition of the mind, at once very intelligent and very emotional, which inclines us in turn towards the various forms of life, and leads us to lend ourselves to all these forms without giving ourselves to any. It is quite certain that the ways of tasting happiness are very varied--according to epochs, climates, age, temperaments, according to days even, or hours. Usually a man makes his choice and disapproves of the choice of others, hardly understands it even. Sympathy is not sufficient; a refined scepticism is necessary, and the art of transforming this scepticism into an instrument of enjoyment. Dilettantism becomes

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then a delicate science of intellectual and emotional metamorphosis. ... It seems that humanity experiences a deep repugnance to dilettantism, doubtless because humanity understands instinctively that it lives by affirmations, and would die of uncertainty. Among the famous dilettantes » whose fame it has tolerated while marking it with visible disfavour, we may range that adorable Alcibiades who delighted to play such various parts, and that mysterious Caesar who embodied in himself so many persons. Dilettantism was the favourite condition of the great analysts of the . Renaissance, of which Leonardo da Vinci with his universal aptitudes, the incomplete complexity of his work, his strange dream of beauty, remains the enigmatic and delightful type. Montaigne also, and his pupil Shakespeare, have practised this curious art of exploiting their intellectual uncertainties for the profit of the caprices of their imaginations. But the creative sap still flows charged with energy in the veins of these children of a century of action. Only at a later period in the life of a race, when extreme civilisation has little by little abolished the faculty of creation, to substitute that of comprehension, does dilettantism reveal all that poetry of which the most modern of the ancients, Virgil, had a presentiment, if he really let fall that saying which tradition has transmitted to us: ' One grows tired of everything, except of comprehending.'" Bourget refers to the disfavour with which the dilettante spirit has

A Note on Paul Bourget

always been received. This disfavour is not without reason; it is true that just as the "decadent" style exhibits the most ardent and elaborate search for perfection, so the dilettante spirit is the realisation of those aspirations for which we are always striving, but from its very perfection, its breadth and universality, it has no to-morrow. It is the style of Raphael; when we have reached it there can be no further progress on those lines: a fresh start has to be made. These are two of the problems which Bourget develops in these fascinating Essais, finding, as he tells us, sometimes an answer of sorrow, sometimes one of faith and hope, most often the former, for his temperament is strongly tinged with pessimism; and for him the two great forces of the modern world, Science and Democracy, have dried up the old sources of the moral life, and furnished none that are fresh.

Bourget's novels are by no means the least interesting part of his work. In novel-writing his style is very simple, very delicate and precise: except for its almost scientific exactness it has nothing of the naturalistic school's burden of elaborate detail. His method, as we should expect, is above all psychological and very sincere. The range of characterisation is not wide; there is usually a man of fairly simple nature, and a background formed of several almost characterless persons. The chief personage is always a woman. In his treatment of these women--Noemie, Claire,

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Therese--lies the strength of Bourget's novels. When he turns to them he is at once at home; his own essentially feminine nature enables him to unravel with perfect insight and sympathy the complex and unharmonised natures with which he has endowed them.

Let us take Cruelle Enigme which Taine is said to have declared to be the best novel produced during recent years. The central figure is Therese de Sauve, a young married woman of twenty-five, whose face has the serene and gracious beauty, the mysterious smile, of Luini's Madonnas. Her husband is described as a coarse and sensual man who has failed to gain any influence over her heart, and who now leaves her to herself. She has had two lovers since her marriage, but in each case has been speedily disillusioned. She now meets and loves Hubert Liauran, three years younger than herself, who has spent all his life at home with his mother and grandmother. Of course he yields her all the fresh devotion of his young heart. He satisfies the purest and sweetest instincts of Therese's nature, and she yields him, not indeed, complete sincerity, but tender and almost maternal love. In response to the usual craving of lovers to be alone together in a foreign land, she crosses the Channel to Folkestone, where Hubert joins her for a couple of days, and they afterwards find a place of meeting in Paris. But there is another side to Therese's nature; there is a craving for strong sensuous impressions, an instinctive

A Note on Paul Bourget

fascination in the presence of great sensual vitality. She is staying at Trouville, away from her husband and Hubert, and there meets a man who is noted for his power over women. He is merely a fine animal, but Therese yields to him almost at once; in a few days, however, realising what she has done, she suddenly leaves Trouville and returns to Paris. After a time a rumour reaches Hubert; he will not believe it, but he repeats it to Therese, who still loves him and will not conceal what she has done. He rushes wildly away; for weeks he broods alone; at length he meets Therese to bid her a last farewell over the ruins of his dearest illusions; at the moment, however, of touching her hands, the old passion returns and he falls into her arms. But it is not the same love; he no longer has any right to reproach her.

This--crudely and briefly stated--is the story of the cruel enigma, if it is an enigma, which Bourget presents to us. One scarcely thinks of calling the story a work of art, it is told with such simplicity, such sincerity; the interest, which is always sustained, appears as much that attaching to a psychological "case" as to a novel; at every turn we find traces of a singularly fine and delicate observation. Bourget writes with full consciousness that the great novelists of his country--men like Beyle, Balzac, Flaubert--have never hesitated to analyse, keenly and boldly, all the mysteries of passion; he is aware that his own task is a modest one. But how unlike the average English novel!

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To realise this let us for a moment compare Cruelle Enigme with a typical English novel which appeared at the same time, and was received with great applause, a novel which deals with a situation superficially the same as that of Bourget's, but with an entirely different set of characters and from an entirely different standpoint. Colonel Enderby's Wife, written by a lady who calls herself "Lucas Malet," is a careful and powerfully told story of an unhappy marriage. Colonel Enderby comes of a race of commonplace country gentlemen of the type of the homme moyen sensuel, but he is, we are told, a "doubtfully successful exception to this general type," a true and simple-hearted man. Jessie, his young wife, is described as a faun-like survival from the old world; she has no human passion; she cannot love; she shrinks from the presence of pain and disease. When the Colonel discovers that he is suffering from heart-disease, which demands constant care and rest, if his life is to be preserved, he realises that he will be an object of dislike and contempt to his wife, and resolves, knowing all that it means, to lead his ordinary life and satisfy all the caprices of Jessie, who is indifferent and seems to be flirting with other men. This narrative is marked in the telling by a certain horror of being ridiculous, by an ostentation of cynical materialism--this is a curious characteristic of the English novel in general as compared to the French--combined with a profound sense of what conventionality

A Note on Paul Bourget

demands. Lucas Malet has an artistic conscience, but one feels that it is raised on a conventionally moral, not, as with the French novelist, on a psychological basis; she calls the novel "a moral dissecting-room." It is evident that Therese's relation to Hubert is regarded as scarcely less than ideal; M. de Sauve is practically non-existent; even Hubert, though he has been brought up religiously, has only a passing compunction at Therese's adultery. Again, Jessie's failure to love her husband is not, like Therese's failure to be true to Hubert, due to passion; it is described as due to the absence of passion. Jessie excites comment in her circle because she dances frequently with a young neighbour, but he dances well--that is all; for the rest she thinks him a bore. The ordinary English novelist would find it hard to paint Jessie as passionate without taking from her even that charm that she has; Therese never fails in womanliness; she is always lovable. We are not likely to see in England, at present, any successful union of the French and English novel, because our great English novelists have not touched the facts of life with the same frankness and boldness, and their conception of normal life is unduly restricted. Cruelle Enigme could not be written in England with Bourget's moderation and simplicity; it would be felt to be a little "outrageous," and the recent English novelists who have been touched by French influence constantly offend by their crude and vulgar

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extravagance. Few of them possess even the degree of artistic earnestness and consistency which marks the best work of Mr. George Moore, such as much of the Mummer's Wife. But Mr. Moore can scarcely be called English at all, except in the occasional exaggerations of his work. English novels are still for the most part what at one time French novels were, romantic; they are feebly struggling after a new ideal. We need, as it has been well said, a synthesis of naturalism and romanticism; we need to reconstitute the complete man, instead of studying him in separate pieces; to put a living soul in the clothed body. It is because they have to some extent done this that the great Russian novelists--Dostoieffsky, Tourgueneff and Tolstoi--are so significant; and Bourget, with his more limited means, seems to be striving towards the same ideal.

THE PLACE OF ANTHROPOLOGY
IN MEDICAL EDUCATION

This article appeared in THE LANCET for August 13th, 1892, and was followed up next week by a vigorous plea on the same lines from Charles Roberts, F.R.C.S., who at that period was actively promoting the study of anthropology. He pointed out that botany in its pure form had already disappeared from the medical curriculum and might well be followed by much anatomical, physiological, and especially microscopical work, to make room for the more directly human and practical study of anthropology, which, in addition to the claim I had made for it, would be of high value in public health work. But, so far, our arguments have been in vain.

VIRCHOW, who adds to his other claims to fame that of being the first of living anthropologists, has recently confessed that his attention was directed to the science of anthropology by the difficulties he encountered in the study of the insane. Charcot, again, frequently impresses on his pupils the importance of studying the healthy nude, and of an acquaintance with anthropometric canons, as an aid to the diagnosis of abnormal conditions. These utterances of two of the most honoured of our teachers in very different fields suggest that there is a defect in our medical courses, as they exist at present ill

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England, which demands, at the least, some consideration. As evidence of the close relationship between anthropology and medical practice, it is enough to mention that in spite of the difficulties we at present place in the way, with a few exceptions (in which zoology alone led up to anthropology), the chief anthropologists of the last half century have been medical men--in not a few cases very distinguished in the profession; at the least, they have started as students of medicine. It is sufficient to mention in France Broca, Topinard, Lacassagne, Manouvrier, Collignon, and Letour-neau; in Germany, around and below Virchow, Ranke, Schaeffhausen, Ploss, Bartels and many others; in Italy, Mantegazza, Lombroso, Sergi; in our own country, Galton, Beddoe, Sir Wm. Turner, Flower, and Garson, while to a somewhat earlier period belong the great names of Prichard and Thurnam. While every medical man would find a slight acquaintance with anthropology some help in practice, there are certain branches of practice in which some knowledge of anthropology is of especial assistance; for example, practice abroad and asylum practice. No country sends out so large a body of medical men into all parts of the world, but the amount of scientific work done among the races of our great empire by these men is so small that it is scarcely perceptible. French medical men have done far more for their few colonies, and the medico-legal and anthropological studies which have come from the Lyons

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school, under the inspiring influence of Lacassagne,
are especially worthy of honour.

What is true generally of the English medical man abroad is equally true of the English alienist at home, and must be so, since the study of anthropology is largely the study of the manifestations of the brain and nervous systems. In the practical treatment of the insane England stands before every other country; in the scientific study of the insane no leading country is so backward. Elsewhere the exact study of madness is making rapid progress; it is beginning to be recognised that the great truth that knowledge means measurement (scire est mensurare) fully applies to the brain and nervous system. But in this country the rule-of-thumb method still reigns nearly everywhere. In the hands of a master in psychiatry the rule-of-thumb method more often than not leads to perfectly reliable conclusions as to the mental status and condition of the subject before him, but it has two obvious disadvantages: it can only be trusted in the hands of a master; while even a master's mere impressions, however trustworthy, add nothing to the common stock of scientific knowledge. In actual practice, with our present knowledge of neurology, it is becoming a great advantage to the alienist to be able to demonstrate that his subject is twisted in anatomical structure and perverted in physiological action; while, so far as science is concerned, in the end it is only accurate observation that counts,

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All that can be said as to the state of psychiatry generally in England applies in even a stronger degree to that special branch of it which deals with the criminal. During a period of nearly twenty years no contribution to criminal anthropology of any value appeared in this country, and although of late there may be said to have been some revival of the science among us, it is still in an infantile stage. Of this a striking proof is furnished by the non-appearance of English representatives at the International Congresses of Criminal Anthropology which have been attended by delegates from all parts of the world. Maudsley and others have, indeed, preached concerning the desirability of an exact study of criminals; but while in Italy Lombroso, Marro, Ottolenghi and Rossi have alone examined according to modern scientific methods over 3,000 criminals, English alienists have been content to leave the first tentative practical efforts to a prison chaplain. It would, however, be unjust to put this down merely to apathy. It is largely due to ignorance. My own extensive correspondence with prison surgeons (as well as with medical officers of asylums) has shown that they often possess genuine scientific interest in the phenomena presented to them, but that they do not know how to observe rightly and record the facts that come before them, and would gladly receive hints that would enable them to bring forward results of value to scientific medicine. It should be part of the business of medical education to give these hints.

Anthropology in Medical Education

We are often told that the medical student of to-day is overburdened with study; and, although it must be remembered that the period of his studies is now being enlarged, there is no doubt truth in this statement. It becomes the more necessary, on the one hand, to place in a period antecedent to medical studies proper the preliminary scientific courses; and, on the other hand, to cut away without remorse those branches of knowledge which have ceased to possess any close connection with modern medicine. In certain directions it is probable that the studies of medical students might with advantage be abbreviated or rendered optional. The study of botany, however valuable and fascinating, no longer possesses any special advantage as a preparation for medical practice, now that the physician is very clearly differentiated from the herbalist and "medical botanist." An exact knowledge of the pharmacopoeia also, which once embraced almost the largest part of the doctor's work, may now safely be left to the medical antiquarian. If it is necessary to make room for anthropology by the omission or contraction of other preliminary courses, it is not difficult to put one's finger on studies which for the student of medicine have come to possess a value which is merely traditional.

The point at which anthropology comes into medical study is very clear. Human anatomy and comparative anatomy both lead directly up to it.

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The study of human anatomy we cannot afford to contract. The comparative anatomy course, however, might well be arranged so as to afford a general view of the province of anthropology, while passing lightly over those earlier stages of animal life which have less concern for the medical man. With these lectures should be associated a brief course of practical demonstrations. We can scarcely expect at present that individual medical schools should be at the expense of fitting up laboratories of physical anthropology. This point would be much simplified if the excellent suggestion of Sir Andrew Clark was adopted--namely, that there should be a common centre for the teaching of the non-medical branches of medical education. In the meanwhile there are existing centres which by arrangement might no doubt be utilised. There is Gallon's Anthropometric Laboratory in active operation; there is the Anthropological Institute, which might become a centre of work; and, above all, there is the Museum of the College of Surgeons, so rich in objects of anthropological interest, and which has not seldom been presided over by eminent anthropologists.

The time seems to have come when some small preliminary step in the direction here indicated should at length be taken. In Paris the anthropological Musee Broca, with its active laboratory and the Anthropological School, has long formed part, as it were, of the medical schools. It is not necessary for the medical man of to-day to know

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much of the lower animal forms; still less necessary is it that he should have any thorough knowledge of plants. But it is increasingly necessary that he should understand the science of man.

VI
THE ANCESTRY OF GENIUS

This appeared in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY for March, 1893.

MANY books have been written about genius. Usually they have been constructed by heaping up anecdotes of more or less dubious authenticity; or else by bringing to the front those unhappy subjects of genius who, like Tasso and Rousseau and Cowper, have been the victims of insanity. Within the last few months, under the inspiring influence of Lombroso, a new step has been taken, and an attempt made to measure accurately the physical capacities of genius. A dozen or more Italian scientists and artists obligingly lent themselves to minute ophthalmoscopic and other investigations, without startling results; and later on, no doubt, the man of genius, like the criminal and the lunatic, will be systematically examined and measured.

Little attention has, however, been given to the interesting study of the elements that go to the making of genius, to what we may call its etiology, and which must be sought for mainly before birth. How did the shiftless Stratford tradesman come to be Shakespeare's father, and Micawber the father of Dickens? To what extent can the facts of the

The Ancestry of Genius

parentage of genius be reduced to law? That this question has not yet been seriously considered is due in part, no doubt, to its complexity, in part to the extreme difficulty of obtaining reliable and precise information; insurmountable, indeed, in the case of an individual who lived several centuries ago. Even in fairly recent times, the most elementary facts regarding the mothers of many men of genius are quite unknown; and in estimating the race to which men of genius belong, it is not unusual to disregard the mother, although, it is scarcely necessary to say, modern investigations in heredity lead us to regard the mother's contribution of tendencies as of absolutely equal value with the father's. It is only by the patient collection of facts that we can hope to throw light on the causes that determine genius, and I propose to bring forward a portion of the results of investigations I have lately made into this subject. I select a small but interesting group of facts bearing upon a single aspect of the matter: the ancestry of some of the chief English poets and imaginative writers of recent years, with reference to the question of race.¹

Let us, first of all, take the five English poets whose supremacy during the last quarter of a century is universally acknowledged, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Rossetti, and Morris. What

¹ The information on which this article is founded has in most cases been obtained from the writers in question. I am indebted to them for the readiness with which they have answered my questions. Only in the case of Browning, among the English writers brought forward, have I been unable to add to the information already made public.

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is to be learned from an inquiry into the races, or combinations of races, that have gone to the making of these men?

Tennyson was one of the most English of English poets. He came of a family long established in the most Scandinavian county, and that contains the fairest-featured people to be found south of the Humber; and the name itself (Tonnesen) remains to-day purely Scandinavian.

"The Tennysons," writes Lord Tennyson, "come from a Danish part of England, and I have no doubt that you and others are right in giving them a Danish origin. An ancestor of my mother's, a M. Fauvel, or de Fauvel, one of the exiles at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, is French." He adds, "I have myself never made a study of my ancestry, but those who have tell me that through my great-grandmother, and through Jane Pitts, a still remoter grandmother, I am doubly descended from Plantagenets (Lionel, Duke of Clarence, and John of Lancaster), and this through branches of the Barons d'Eyncourt." These remoter interminglings are, however, of slight interest. Taken altogether, we see a predominantly Scandinavian stock of Tennysons mingling with the Fytches, Lincolnshire people, also, but with the foreign Huguenot strain.

Swinburne's ancestry, from the point of view of race, has, with some important differences, a general resemblance to Tennyson's. That is to say, the foundation is Scandinavian, but in this

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case the more emphatic and turbulent Scandinavian of the north country, modified by distinct foreign Celtic and other influences. As Swinburne himself clearly expresses it, "The original root, of course, is purely Scandinavian, modified (possibly) by repeated exile in the cause of the Stuarts, and consequent French alliances." His great-grandfather, for instance, married a wife from the family of the Auvergnat Princes of Polignac. It is to this alliance that there is allusion in the "Summer in Auvergne," in the second series of Poems and Ballads, when the poet gazes on the ruin

"Of the old wild princes' lair
Whose blood in mine hath share.

Dead all their sins and days;
Yet in this red crime's rays
Some fiery memory stays
That scars their land."

With William Morris we reach a totally different district of England, and a new combination. He belongs to the Welsh border; and a border country, it may be noted in passing, is as favourable to the production of genius as it is to the production of crime. Both on the father's and the mother's side he belongs to Worcestershire, the home of a varied and well-compounded race, perhaps predominantly Saxon,¹ though Mr. Morris is predominantly Welsh. The paternal grandmother,

¹ Dr. Beddoe says that the physical type in East Worcestershire
"seems to be a cross between the Saxon and the Iberian."

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however, came from the Anglo-Danish county of Nottingham. "My father's father was Welsh, I believe," Mr. Morris writes, "and my mother's mother, also. My name is very common all along the border. The name," he adds, "is undoubtedly Cymric." It is certainly remarkable that the poet who, of all English poets of the century, has most closely identified himself with the Scandinavian traditions of the race should have, apparently, so little blood relationship with the north.

It is equally remarkable that Rossetti, a poet whose imagination has appeared to many critics distinctly and intimately English in character, should be English only on the side of one grandparent; the English blood, that is, being numerically equivalent only to twenty-five per cent. Gabriele Rossetti, the father, came of a family which throughout the eighteenth century, at all events, had lived on the Abruzzi coast, at Vasto. When an exile in London, Rossetti married the daughter of Gaetano Polidori, a Tuscan, who had married Anna Maria Pierce, who seems to have been of unmixed English blood, and who belongs to a family some of whose members attained to a certain amount of distinction. Her mother's name is believed to have been Arrow. It is worthy of note that the name Rossetti seems to indicate a fair and ruddy northern race. Gabriele Rossetti used to say that the original name of his race was Delia Guardia (families of that name still live at Vasto), but that, ruddy hair and complexion

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having been brought into the family, the generation of Delia Guardia children on whom it became impressed came to be known as the Rossetti, a name which stuck to that branch of the race, and became its actual surname. Two of Gabriele's brothers (to say nothing of himself) were counted as local celebrities. His mother's surname was Pietrocola.¹

In Browning's case we are able to go back a considerable distance, and to ascertain his component races with fair precision. The Brownings belonged to Dorset, and the poet's great-grandfather, Thomas Browning, was, as his name shows, of West Saxon stock, modified considerably, no doubt, by the old dark British blood which is plentiful in that neighbourhood. Thomas Browning married a Morris. This union produced a Robert Browning, who came up to London, entered the Bank of England, and played a successful though not brilliant part in the world. He married Margaret Tittle, a Creole, born in the West Indies. The poet himself, it may be added, was in early life of "olive" complexion, and liable to be mistaken for an Italian. In after life he became lighter. Robert Browning, the poet's father, was a versatile and talented man, though not so able an official as his father. He was a good draughtsman and a clever verse-writer. He married Sarianna Wiedemann, of Dundee. This was

¹ For much of the information given above I am indebted to Mr, W. M. Rossetti.

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an entirely new departure, and united the dark southern stock to the fair northern race; for Sarianna Wiedemann's father was a German, said to belong to Hamburg, and her mother was Scotch. Browning's ancestry is very significant. If the Browning race had consciously conspired to make a cumulative series of trials in the effects of crossbreeding, they could not have chosen a more crucial series of experiments, and the final result certainly could not have been more successful. Browning himself was true to the instincts of his race when he carried the experiments one step farther, though on quite different lines, and married the chief English woman poet of his time.

When we turn from these five poets to contemporary writers whose claim to very high rank is not universally conceded, it is no longer easy to choose, and one is liable to the charge of admitting only those cases which seem to support a theory. I will bring forward a small but very varied group, containing the best-known living English imaginative writers (beyond those already mentioned) of whose ancestry I have detailed knowledge. There is, however, no reason to suppose that the addition of other names of equal rank would alter the character of the results. The list includes Mr. Coventry Patmore, Mr. Austin Dobson, the Hon. Roden Noel, Miss Olive Schreiner, Mr. Walter Pater, Mr. Baring Gould, and Mr. Thomas Hardy. It will be observed that there are here several writers of prose, but these are in their best work

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essentially poets. The most questionable figure is Mr. Thomas Hardy, whose poetic and yet delicately realistic work serves as a transition from the work of writers like the authors of Mehalah and The Story of an African Farm to that of essentially prosaic writers, like the authors of All Sorts and Conditions of Men and A Mummer's Wife. Mr. Coventry Patmore is English on the father's side, Scotch on the mother's, and one of his great-greatgrandfathers (Beckmann, the painter) was Prussian. Mr. Austin Dobson belongs to a Devonshire family on his mother's side, and his father was born in France, of a French mother. Mr. Roden Noel, who (as Lord Tennyson was also supposed to be) is descended from the Plantagenets, and who claims the Sidneys and Shakespeare's Earl of Southampton among his ancestors, inherits on both sides very various strains, recent and remote. These include an Irish (purely Celtic) element, Scotch Douglases, and Dutch Bentincks. Miss Schreiner is German, English, and Jewish. On her mother's side she belongs to an English family of Lyndalls, and on her father's to a Wurtemberg family in the neighbourhood of Stuttgart. The German paternal element (associated with dark brown hair and grey-blue eyes) by no means necessarily involves a marked Teutonic strain. Wurtemberg is the home of a brachycephalic race (very carefully studied from the anthropological standpoint by Von Holder), which is much more closely related to the typical Celts than to the

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typical Teutons; and Swabia, unlike the genuinely Teutonic regions of northern and eastern Germany, which have produced few or no poets, has always been a land of song, the birthplace of Schiller and Victor von Scheffel, and the richest nest of singing birds that Germany has to show. The maternal Lyndalls came from Scandinavian parts of England, and the name is Scandinavian. But the physical characteristics of the Lyndalls are not Scandinavian; they have very dark hair, and large dark eyes which impress strangers as Jewish. It is somewhat remarkable that this strongly marked element which has been so persistent is rather remote, and was introduced in the person of a Jewess, who was a great-great-grandmother to Miss Schreiner.

Mr. Pater, as the name indicates, comes of a family that on the father's side was originally French. Mr. Pater believes that the family is that to which the painter, J. B. Pater, belonged; not, however, descended from the painter, who had no children. The Paters certainly came from the same neighbourhood; that is, from Flanders, somewhere near Valenciennes. They were lace-makers and Catholics, and Mr. Pater's great-greatgrandfather settled in the very Anglo-Danish neighbourhood of Norwich. The family then took root in Buckinghamshire, where one branch of it, still Catholic, possesses considerable property. Watteau also belonged to Valenciennes, and it is curious to observe how faithfully Mr. Pater, with

The Ancestry of Genius

his subtle and delicate art, has preserved the
instincts of his Belgic race.

Mr. Baring Gould's interesting account of his ancestry I will give in his own words: "My family have held property in Devon for three hundred years and more, and have intermarried almost wholly in the Devon families, till the heiress married Charles Baring, son of John Baring of Exeter, son of Dr. Franz Baring of Bremen. But Charles Baring's mother was an Exeter woman. The Barings were pure Saxons. Before that, among the Goulds, the hair was dark and the eyes were hazel, judging from their pictures; after that, fair hair and blue eyes. My mother was a Bond, a Cornish family; my grandmother, a Sabine, and partly Irish; that is, in seventeenth century in Ireland, after that settled in Herts." One traces here very clearly the influence of race and its effects on one of the most singularly brilliant and versatile writers of our time. Mr. Thomas Hardy belongs to a Dorset family, which has not, apparently, encouraged foreign alliances, although the Hardys at a remote period are believed to have been a French family who emigrated from Jersey. Of Mr. Hardy's four grandparents, all belonged to Dorset except one, who came from Berkshire. His paternal great-grandmother, Mr. Hardy believes, was Irish. On the paternal side, also, a black-haired ancestor left very distinct traces, while on the mother's side the race was fairer, and closer to the ordinary Wessex-Saxon type.

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From the examination of these two groups of imaginative writers, chosen without reference to the question of heredity, the interesting fact emerges that, of the twelve persons cited, not one can be said to be of pure English race, while only four or five are even predominantly English. A more extended investigation would bring out the same result still more clearly. England is at the present time rich in poets. A general knowledge of a considerable number of them enables me to say that very few indeed are of even fairly pure English blood; the majority are, largely, or predominantly, of Irish, Gaelic, Welsh, or Cornish race, as a single glance, without any inquiry, is often enough to reveal.

If we turn to the rich and varied genius of France, we shall find similar results brought out in a way that is even more remarkable. In France, we meet with very various and distinct races, and we see the interaction of these races, as well as the commingling of remote foreign elements, from the negro blood which it is still easy to trace in the face of Alexandre Dumas, in certain aspects, to the Iroquois blood in Flaubert. French genius, from the point of view of race, is a large and attractive subject; but as I am dealing with it elsewhere, I will leave it untouched here. However, it is worthy of notice that the two imaginative French writers of this century who have attained widest fame, and have exercised the most revolutionary influence on literature, Victor Hugo and

The Ancestry of Genius

Zola, are both marked examples of the influence of cross-breeding. Hugo belonged, on the father's side, to the tall, fair, powerful Germanic race of Lorraine, where his ancestors cultivated the soil in the Vosges; on the mother's side, he belonged to the Breton race of the opposite end of France, a race with widely different physical and spiritual characteristics. Zola is the son of a distinguished Italian mathematician, born at Venice; his mother came from the central Beauce country of France: he has Italian, French, and Greek blood in his veins. The only living imaginative writer besides Zola who is exerting international revolutionary influence on literary art is Ibsen, another example of complex racial intermixture. His great-grandmother was Scotch, his paternal Scandinavian stock has received repeated infusions of German blood, and his mother was of German extraction.

In many of these complex combinations, we come upon the result not only of accretion of power due to cross-breeding, but of the fascination exerted by a startlingly new and unfamiliar personality. Ronsard, that brilliant child of the French Renaissance, whose name has scarcely yet lost its charm, though so few know his work, came of Hungarian or Bulgarian stock allied with the noblest families of France. St. Thomas, the one saint who for three hundred years charmed the cautious and sturdy English race, was the son of a French father, possibly also of a French mother. Pushkin,

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whose personality was as delightful to his contemporaries as his poetry, bore one of the proudest of Russian names, and in his veins ran the blood of an Abyssinian negro. A whole nation would never have gone joyfully to destruction under a leader they had themselves chosen, if that leader had not been Napoleon--the result of the mixture of two very distinct races, the Tuscan and the Corsican--who carried about him the charm of the unknown. Boulanger, who for a short time exerted an attraction that seemed so unaccountable, was the son of a Scotch lady, whom he was said to resemble, and to whom, doubtless, more than to his father, the Breton notary at Rennes, he owed his power of fascination.

The evidence I have brought forward as to the frequency of racial mingling in men of imaginative genius has been confined to a few particular groups; it could easily be increased, and I have made no use of the materials in my possession concerning Spanish, Italian, and Russian poets. It is clear that the proportion of mixed and foreign blood in the groups dealt with is much greater than would be found in a similar group of average persons. Anyone may test this by writing down at random the names of a like number of his acquaintance of average ability, and then investigating their race. In England, in such a group of seven ordinary persons, it is rare to find more than one of decidedly mixed race. But in the groups we have been considering the proportion of such individuals

The Ancestry of Genius

varies, at a moderate estimate, from fifty to seventy-five per cent., and the mingling is usually most distinct in the men of most distinguished genius.

I believe that if we take other groups of somewhat similar character, eminent painters, for example, we shall find the proportion smaller, though still marked. Among notable scientific men we should find the proportion of those with mixed blood lower still. Mr. Galton, who made a long list of contemporary British scientific men of ability, remarks that, "on an analysis of the scientific status of the men on my list, it appeared to me that their ability is higher, in proportion to their numbers, among those of pure race." The Border men come out exceedingly well, but the Anglo-Welsh and the Anglo-Irish would on the whole rank last. While we have found that among twelve eminent British imaginative writers no less than ten show more or less marked traces of foreign blood, and not one can be said to be pure English, Mr. Galton found that out of every ten distinguished British scientific men five were pure English, and only one had foreign blood. Among successful politicians, again, mixture of race appears to be still less common. It is worth while, however, in this connection, to quote an utterance of the most distinguished of living English politicians. "Now, you must know that I am a Scotchman," said Mr. Gladstone to an interviewer, "pure Scotch. In fact, no family can be purer than

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ours, which never mixed with extraneous blood except once in the seventeenth century." As a matter of fact, Mr. Gladstone unites, on his father's side, the Saxon Lowlander of the south of Scotland with, on his mother's side, the typical Highlander of the north, two utterly distinct races, although by accident confined within the same country. We always have to guard against these fallacies, but as a rule, no doubt, politicians of ability are of comparatively pure race. It has generally been believed by those who have concerned themselves with the philosophy of art that poetry is the highest and most complex form of human expression, and the result indicated by the evidence before us seems in accordance with that conclusion.

Looking at the matter somewhat broadly, and omitting minor variations, it may be said that two vigorous but somewhat widely divergent races (or groups of races) now occupy Europe and the lands that have been peopled from Europe. The one race is tall, fair, and usually long-headed; the other, short, dark, and usually broadheaded. Since the dawn of European history, at least, and with special vigour about a thousand years ago, the tall, fair, energetic race has been shed as a seminal principle from the north-east of Europe over a great part of the continent held by a darker and perhaps more civilised race. The physical characteristics of Europe have been very favourable to the spread and fusion of these fine races, and the

The Ancestry of Genius

outcome has been the strongest and most variously gifted breed of men that the world has seen. Wherever the races have remained comparatively pure we seldom find any high or energetic civilisation, and never any fine flowering of genius. Sweden, where the tall, fair, long-headed race exists in its purest form, has produced no imaginative genius. Auvergne, where the dark, broad-headed race may be found in great purity, has, in like manner, produced a vigorous but an undistinguished breed of men. Corsica and the Pyrenees-Orientales, where a fairly unmixed race of dark, long-headed men live, have, unlike Sicily or Gard, produced no poets. Wherever, on the other hand, we find a land where two unlike races, each of fine quality, have become intermingled and are in process of fusion, there we find a breed of men who have left their mark on the world, and have given birth to great poets and artists. Such are the men of Sicily, a race compounded of the most various elements from east and south and north, which has produced, and is to-day producing, so large a share of the genius of the Italian peninsula. Such are the fair and tall but broad-headed men of Lorraine, a cross between Celt and Teuton. Such are the Lowland Scotch, on the borderland between Gael and Saxon. Such well-tempered breeds have been yielded by Normandy and Tuscany and Swabia. We know little of the physical anthropology of the ancient Greek, but it is certain that one of his most characteristic types

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was the tall, fair man we know in the north; and the geographical and geological characteristics of Greece present in perfection the conditions which enable varying races to settle and develop in the closest proximity to one another.

Great Britain and Ireland were placed, by a happy chance, broadside on to the invasion of the fair race. The elongated islands thus presented the maximum of opportunity for intercourse between the two races. Even at the present time the process of fusion is still going on. The comparatively fair race extends along the east coasts of both islands, and the comparatively dark race along the west coasts. The islands form, therefore, a well-arranged pair of compact electric batteries for explosive fusion of the two elements. Both races are necessary for the production of imaginative genius, at all events, for it is a mistake to suppose that high imaginative genius is a characteristic of the unmixed dark races. In Dr. Beddoe's map of the British Isles, showing what he terms the index of nigrescence, one solitary islet of the dark race only may be seen in England, east of the Welsh border, and apparently at one time joined to it. This islet is in Warwickshire; that is, in the county of Shakespeare. Milton's family belonged to a neighbouring county, and Milton himself, we know, had Welsh blood in his veins. Out of the play of these two races has come all that is finest in English imaginative genius.

It need scarcely be said that this cross-breeding

The Ancestry of Genius

Is not the only factor in the causation of genius.
If that were so, genius would be much more com-
mon than it is, while it would be the rule, instead
of a rare exception, to find it shared by brothers
and sisters. There are other influences that tend
to produce genius, and various conditions that
promote its development. I have here simply
tried to indicate one of the factors in the determin-
ation of imaginative genius.

VII

AN OPEN LETTER TO
BIOGRAPHERS

I am uncertain of the exact date of this OPEN LETTER, though I believe it was 1896. It presents my impressions while completing the preparatory work for A STUDY OF BRITISH GENIUS, and I sent it to the editor of the NEW REVIEW, who returned it. Then I put it aside, and it has only been printed, many years later, as an appendix to Dr. Isaac Goldberg's book, HAVELOCK ELLIS, though it is now also issued by Mr. Joseph Ishill at his Oriole Press, Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, U.S.A.

DEAR SIRS:

DURING recent years I have spent many silent
hours in your company. These hours have
passed more or less pleasantly. It is because
I can only look back upon them with mingled
satisfaction that I venture to address you now.

Let me explain, in the first place, that I sought your society as a student of that rare and marvellous human variation which we vaguely call "genius"; I desire to collect, so far as this may be possible, the material which will enable me to state some fairly definite conclusions concerning the complex nature and causes of genius. You will observe that I may thus be described as your

An Open Letter to Biographers

ideal reader. I come to you, not to pass away my idle moments, nor because I look up to this religious leader or follow that politician or am the devotee of any musician or painter or poet; I come to you with the challenge to produce your finest revelation concerning a certain unique personality in whatsoever manner that personality may have been manifested. For you all profess that you are striving to set forth such unique personalities, and I have sought from you in vain the greatest revelation of all, "The Life of an Average Man." You undertake to tell me of these unique lives, and with my head full of questions I take up my pencil to note down or underline your answers.--I have often flung away that idle, superfluous pencil.

This is why I venture to approach you collectively now. I have long listened to you in respectful silence. The years have rendered my respect somewhat critical, and I trust you will pardon the remarks with which I now break my silence.

You do not, I have said, tell me a fair portion of the things I desire to know. That fact I shall try to drive home later. I wish first to point out that you do tell me a great many things that I have no desire to know. You will tell me the lives of the men your hero knew; you will tell me his common-place remarks concerning the common-place people he met, and the towns he sojourned in; you are seldom tired of telling me in fullest detail of the honours that were showered

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on his declining years. But all this is not biography. And there is a more subtle error of commission into which you frequently fall headlong. You assume the function of the historian. Now a biographer is not a historian. It is quite true that men make history. But we cannot study the individual man in the same way as we study the product of many men's activity. The method which is best fitted for investigating the Reformation is not best fitted for studying Luther's portrait; the adequate biographer of Laud will scarcely be the adequate historian of the English Revolution. The better equipped a writer may be for the one task, the more badly equipped he will be for the other. The whole tone and touch must be different, and much practice in the one medium will no more give skill in the other than practice on the organ will make a man an accomplished pianist. But it is by practice on the organ of history that the most conspicuous among you have usually come to the piano of biography. And you often forget that you are not at the organ still. Some of you are now engaged on the Dictionary of National Biography. It is a useful and fascinating task; when complete there will be no such delightful work of its size in the language. But, in any volume of it, I can turn from "biography" to "biography" which contains not one line of genuine biography to the page; instead you have given us slices of mis-placed history. Clearly you have seldom asked yourselves: WHAT IS

An Open Letter to Biographers

BIOGRAPHY? You have simply assumed that it is the part a man plays in the history of civilisation. But that is to stultify both biography and history. In history we can never see truly from the standpoint of a single actor, and biography is thus made mere bad history. Undoubtedly any great man bears with him the mat eriaux pour servir in the making of the history of civilisation--whether in his deeds or his discoveries or his art-products--but the cataloguing of these is something beside the purpose of biography, just as the description of the face of the earth is beside the astronomer's purpose, however intimately the earth may hang to the sun. True, it is not impossible to trace the life and soul of an artist in his work. But this is only done by a special keen precision of touch such as Leynardi has expended on the dissection of the Divina Commedia, and not by the methods of the commentator who tells me all about every person or place Dante has mentioned for no better reason than because Dante has mentioned it. To write history, whether of a nation or of civilisation, is to write a complex whole in which the products of many men's activities have fermented together to yield something which is as far from the minds and lives of the men who made it as Christianity is from the mind and life of Jesus. To describe the products of a single man's activity, whenever it is worth doing at all, is to write prolegomena to history. To describe the birth and growth of a great man as he was in his real nature, physical

G 89

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and psychical--as a grape-cluster on the tree of life and not as a drop of alcohol in the vat of civilisation--that is biography.

I have it against you, then, that you who are charged with this high task are perpetually seeking to merge it in a lower or at all events a different task. But I would content myself if, after all, you really enabled me to gain a picture of the man. I would gird up my loins, fling to right and to left the extraneous matter that you pile up around me and make straight for the vital facts. But they are not there! Many and many a voluminous so-called "biography" I can compress into a couple of pages, and likely enough even these pages will reveal less than the vivid laconic portraits that Carlyle set down as by lightning flash of the men he but passingly met. Thus the authorised and only life of Young, not published until many years after his death, so far as really salient and pregnant facts are concerned can be compressed into six lines; the one supremely illuminative fact in it is the reproduction of his portrait. Now here is one of the most brilliant and versatile heroes of science that this country ever produced, a man who ranks with Harvey and Newton and Darwin, and the best that you can do is to lose to us for ever the chance of knowing the manner of man that he was in body and spirit: there remains only the image of the beautiful childlike face, with the sweet mouth and the large eager eyes, as Lawrence painted it. In every man

An Open Letter to Biographers

of genius a new strange force is brought into the world. The biographer is the biologist of this new life. I come to you to learn the origins of this tremendous energy, the forces that gave it impetus and that drove it into one channel rather than into another. I will gladly recognise that nowadays you generally tell me of the hero's ancestors; formerly you told me nothing of the mothers of great men, seldom even the name, and that is one of the most hopeless lacunae in the right understanding of genius. How gladly would I know more definitely the race and nature of the mother of that saint who for so many centuries won the love of Englishmen and whose shrine is furrowed deep by the knees of Chaucer's pilgrims! And yet while race and family are certainly an enormous factor in the making of every man, I would wish to point out to you that they are not omnipotent --for then the hero's brothers and sisters would always be heroes too--so that you need not trouble yourselves or us with the trivial details of the lives of these ancestors. But it would be well if you could tell us something of the stars that shone in the making of the individual life. We desire to know the influences, physical and moral, which surrounded the period of his conception, the welfare of his pre-natal life, whether he was born naturally and in due season. All the facts were once known in the area of the hero's family circle; some at least among you could have told them to us and so have made many things plain which

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now remain obscure. Rarely indeed have you done so, rarely even have you recognised that such questions are a part of knowledge. Yet the fate of all of us is in large measure sealed at the moment we leave the womb. Next in importance comes the curve of life that has its summit at puberty and ends with the completion of adolescence; whatever else there is to make is made then. The machine has been created; during these years it is wound up to perform its work in the world. What follows after counts for something but always for less. You cannot tell us too much real biography--the description of life--concerning these youthful years. Even the detailed account of the games and amusements devised by the young hero, such as Nietzsche's sister and biographer has written down for us, are welcome when obtainable; for the after-life of the man is often little more than the same games played more tragically on a larger field. After the age of twenty your task becomes easier and more obvious; after thirty, if so far you have fulfilled that task, what is there further left to tell? The rest is but the liberation of a mighty spring, the slow running down of energy. The man recedes to give place to his deeds, whether such deeds be the assault of great fortresses or the escalade of mighty sentences. There is the same heroic effort and achievement, whether on the walls of Jerusalem when Godfrey scaled them or on Flaubert's sofa at Rouen.

But, as I have already tried to point out, mere

An Open Letter to Biographers

chatter about the deeds is not what we come for to you the biographers. If the deeds are real they will speak for themselves in history or verse or other shape that men will not let die. When I want to see Velasquez's pictures I go not to you but to Madrid. But if you could only tell me how he came to paint them! When you are dealing with the adult hero in the midst of his work the one great service you can do, and that which is your most proper function, is to tell us, not about this work, but about the conditions under which it was achieved. If you have so far done your task we know the nature of the force; now we need to know by what channels it was manifested. I have it against you here that--save incidentally, partially, often hypocritically--you seldom attempt this part of your task. You find it so much easier to ramble on about the work and its reception than to describe the man's method of doing it, and what hindered or helped him in the doing. Often enough you like to represent him as doing it in a coat of mail impervious to the shafts of human weaknesses. You are well content when you have taken some real man--let us say, old Abraham Lincoln, a real man if ever there was one--and in the course of a ponderous authorised biography bleached and starched and ironed him into a tailor's dummy. You seem to me like the proverbial valet for whom his master is no hero. The hero on the battlefield may be a coward to his dentist; the man who has faced a revolution of socialistic thought may be

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too timid to walk down Lisson Grove.¹ These things do not attenuate heroism; they are part of it. You cannot have force in two places at the same time; and you must know a man's weakness before you truly know his strength. It is often in the "weaknesses "--as the valet-moralist counts weakness--that the source of the hero's strength lies, the weakness which, as Hinton used to put it, was the path of least resistance through which the aboriginal energy of Nature passed into the man. The recital of the weaknesses in detail you can spare if you see good reason--and there is good reason why a biography should not be a chronique scandaleuse--but if you refuse to note them you are false to any intelligible conception of a biographer's function, and you have produced a lie which is as immoral as every untrue picture of life necessarily is. Michael Angelo's Platonic affection for men went to the chiselling of his sculpture, Victor Hugo's hollow domestic life was not unconnected with his ideals of celestial purity, literature is full of the unavowed confessions of opium-eaters and wine-bibbers, and so all along. It corrupts the tree of life at the core to deny such associations, to point only to the leaves and flowers that men call "moral," to ignore the roots which--through your hypocrisy, it may well be--they call dirty and "immoral." Nothing shall induce you to admit that your Achilles had a vulnerable heel?--And yet, if you rightly consider the matter, without

¹I had a real man in mind--a distinguished thinker.

An Open Letter to Biographers

that heel Achilles would have been no hero at all. I have referred once or twice to the "biographer's function." Sometimes I wonder how many of you have ever considered what a biographer's function is. With what equipment have you usually come to your task? Even the question I feel you may regard as an insult. Yet, consider. The novelist only attains skill in his work after failure, perhaps a long series of failures like Balzac or Zola, rarely indeed at a bound. The novelists whose force has developed in a night have perished in a night. In the matter of biographies we possess what we should possess in the matter of novels if few novelists produced more than the early bungles of their prentice hands. And yet a novelist has undertaken the incomparably easier task of recording the lives of the simple puppets of his own brain. Remember, again, that biography does not stand alone as a branch of research. Beside biography, the life of an individual, we have ethnography, the life of a community. To the making of a great ethnographer--an Adolf Bastian, let us say--there are needed preliminary training in biology and psychology, an immense knowledge of literature, laborious research during journeys among remote savage peoples, perpetual attention to petty details. But should a biographer willingly admit that the life of a community is better worth serious study than the life of its greatest man? Go to the British Museum or the Anthropological Institute and look at those admirable series of

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photographs in which Mr. Portman has reproduced every step in the processes of life among the Andamanese, for instance in the fashioning of a bow and arrow; or see, if you can, the delightful photographs in which Mr. Ini Thurn has caught the beautiful brown-skinned Indians of Guiana in every stage of their work and especially their play. Is not the fashioning of a lyric to pierce the hearts of men for ever as well worth study as the making of an arrow? The child of genius gathering shells on the shores of eternity as interesting as the games of savages? Yet few have thought it worth while to inquire how Burns achieved his songs or Newton his theories. It was enough to utter the blessed word "Inspiration!" and lean comfortably back. Not so have the physiologists solved the mystery of physical respiration.

Biography, then, is strictly analogous to ethnography, the one being the picture of the life of a race, the other the intimate picture of the life of a a man. Now both the one and the other are branches of applied psychology, a strict method of scientific research. There was a time not so long ago when psychology was not a strict method of research and when any arm-chair philosopher sat down to write the history of the general soul as light-heartedly as the biographer still sits down to write the history of the individual soul. So far as pure psychology at least is concerned, those days are past. With the establishment by Wundt some twenty years ago of the first psychological

An Open Letter to Biographers

laboratory, psychology for the first time became a science; and in Germany and the United States --the two countries to which we now look for light on this new science--the work of men like Munster-berg, Preyer, Stanley Hall, Jastrow, and Scripture has taught us how to obtain by exact methods a true insight into the processes of the average human mind. No man now ventures to call himself a psychologist unless he is familiar with the methods and results of these workers. A few psychologists in Italy and France have pushed such methods into the investigation of exceptional men, and like Ottolenghi have examined the visual field of certain complacent men of genius, or like Binet have traced out with remarkably interesting results the ways in which certain dramatists--Dumas, Goncourt, Sardou, Meilhac and especially De Curel--conceive and write their plays. But how often does any such attempt, on however imperfect material, to bring us near to the heart and brain of a great creative personality form part of what the biographer presumes to call "Life "? How many biographers so much as know that they are--may the real students forgive me!--psychologists, and that the rules of their art have in large part been laid down?

I am quite sure, my dear sirs, that you will instinctively feel that this is stuff and nonsense. You have your duty to the public who pay you handsomely for doing it speedily, for the public has an uneasy feeling that the great man's fame

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will turn sour if not consumed off-hand. And then you have your duty towards your hero's personal friends and relations who will only help you on condition that you produce a figure that is smooth, decorous, conventional, bien coiffe, above all, closely cut off below the bust, such a figure as we may gaze at without a blush in the hairdresser's window. And at bottom, you may admit at last, you distrust both yourself and your audience, and will not publicly dare to take any bull by the horns.

Well, there is no doubt truth in this; I must needs believe there is, since you so solemnly and constantly repeat it between the lines of your books. Yet, after all, there are a few men whose fame has not died in a night, and who remain alive after their friends and relations have turned to dust. It is in the case of such men that I question the wisdom of sacrificing the interests of the world to the interests of a fleeting generation. Is it not worth while to wait five years, or even fifty years, or for the matter of that five hundred years, and at the end to possess the everlastingly inspiring record of a master spirit? Is it not worth while to be accounted a fool for a century, like the man who wrote according to his means the best of biographies, and to become immortal at last? It is the man who is a valet at soul who shudders at the possibility of possessing Boswell's Life of Jesus, or Eckermann's Conversations with Homer or Froude's edition of Shakespeare's Reminiscences

An Open Letter to Biographers

and who creates an atmosphere which renders such achievements immensely difficult. At the same

time this atmosphere renders possible a kind of
hero so rare in the world, the Hero as Biographer.
That is the final point on which I bring this letter

to a conclusion. The writing of a biography is no facile task; it is the strenuous achievement of a lifetime, only to be accomplished in the face of endless obstacles and unspeakable prejudice. I beg you to consider it. Then the ideal reader of coming centuries will not sigh so wearily as I sigh when he hears that Mr. So-and-So is being engaged on a biography of our eminent poet, novelist, or philosopher, This, That, or The Other; that every endeavour will be made to bring out this biography while the sense of the loss we have sustained is still so strongly felt; and that it is confidently expected that the large first edition will be bought up before publication.--Not so was any great book born into the world.

HAVELOCK ELLIS.

VIII
THE MEN OF CORNWALL

After living during the greater part of seven years at Carbis Bay in Cornwall--a county which I had previously never visited--I resolved to set down my impressions of the people among whom I had settled. The result was the following essay, published in the NEW CENTURY REVIEW for April and May, 1897.

THE river Tarnar divides from the rest of Great Britain an ancient land, small in extent but strong in its individuality. The first impression which Cornwall makes on the traveller who enters it by rail is that of a semi-French country; he passes stations with names of totally foreign complexion, St. Germans, Menheniot, Doublebois; and when he reaches his destination the names of the streets confirm this suggestion--thus, Street-an-Pol indicates a French rather than an English method of denomination. The language the people speak also scarcely sounds English to the stranger. I know a lady who immediately after arriving in Cornwall was addressed by a Cornishwoman in words that were unintelligible, but in tones that sounded so French that before realising where she was she spoke in French, The

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inflection of the Cornish voice is very characteristic; it rises in a musical wave to a climax reached about the antepenultimate syllable. To the dweller in Cornwall who returns after an absence amid the level harshness of English voices, this soft inflection breaks as gratefully as the ripple of the Cornish summer sea on the rocks. In certain details the Cornish pronunciation is nearer to the French than the English; in Cornwall they avoid the English u (ew) sound, and they like to transform the English e; thus my own name, pronounced "Hellis" by the genteel Cornish person anxious to ape "up-along" folk, is "Alis" to the true old-school Cornishman, as it is to the Frenchman. In the general physical and mental characteristics of the race, as will be seen later on, there is much to remind the dweller in Cornwall that he is not very far from France.

There is good reason for the presence of this pervading impression. The Cornish, with the Welsh on one side of them and the Bretons on the other, constitute altogether a compact group of peoples, intimately related to each other, distantly related to the Irish and the Highlanders outside the group. On the whole, as we should expect, the Cornish seem more closely related to the Bretons than are the Welsh.

"By Tre, Ros, Pol, Lan, Ker and Pen,
You may know most Cornishmen,"

the saying runs. The evidence of language is not altogether conclusive, but we may find all these

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prefixes among the people and places of Brittany, where, indeed, we even find a region called Cor-nouaille. In Wales the names have deviated from the primitive shape to a much greater extent. The most marked resemblance in names between the Cornish and the Welsh is the prevalence among both alike of Richardses and Williamses and Thomases, and so on. The very numerous Cornish saints indicate the relationships of the people; the saints of the Lizard district belong to Brittany, those of North Cornwall to Wales, while West Cornwall was converted by the Irish, with whom the Cornish have a distinct, though more remote, affinity. In many details of custom, also, the Cornish who preserve ancient ways recall their various Keltic neighbours. Again, the Cornish-man is distinguished from the English by the spade which he uses everywhere, and for all purposes, and cannot be persuaded to abandon. The common Anglo-Saxon spade is well known; it is a short, powerful implement with a large oblong blade, and a cross-piece at the end of the handle, not an elegant instrument, but well adapted to obtain a maximum output of energy from arms and back and legs. The Cornish spade--also found in Wales and Ireland--is often as long as its owner, with a slender, slightly curved handle and a small heart-shaped blade; it is a graceful instrument, adapted to the shallow soil of Cornwall, adapted also to the lithe, slow, free movements of Cornish-men, who possess a characteristic which has been

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lovingly described by a child of the land as a "divine laziness." Such are a few of many traits which bring the Cornish much nearer to the Welsh and the Bretons, even to the Irish, than to the Anglo-Saxon English.

For the sake of convenience I have called the Cornish Kelts. There is no doubt whatever that the language was purely Keltic, but the modern ethnologist is inclined to demur when the race is called Keltic. He points out that there were people in Cornwall before the so-called Kelts came, and that there is no reason to suppose they were annihilated by the Kelts, while it is very certain there have been immigrations of other races since. There is no doubt about this; it is indeed because the Cornish are a race well compacted of various elements that they have been able to show such vigour and versatility in spite of the small home they occupy in the world. But while it cannot be said that the Cornish are pure Kelts, it must be remembered that the Kelts form a considerable element in the race, leaving more distinct traces here than in any other part of England. There is, therefore, little impropriety in continuing to speak of the Cornish as Kelts, provided we duly understand the limited sense in which the word must here be used.

The dweller in Cornwall comes in time to perceive the constant recurrence of various types of man. Of these, two at least are well marked, very common, and probably of great antiquity and

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significance. The man of the first type is slender, lithe, graceful, usually rather short; the face is smooth and delicately outlined, without bony prominences, the eyebrows finely pencilled. The character is on the whole charming, volatile, vivacious, but not always reliable, and while quickwitted, rarely capable of notable achievement or strenuous endeavour. It is a distinctly feminine type. The other type is large and solid, often with much crispy hair on the face and shaggy eyebrows. The arches over the eyes are well marked and the jaws massive; the bones generally are developed in these persons, though they would scarcely be described as raw-boned; in its extreme form a face of this type has a rugged prognathous character which seems to belong to a lower race. The women are solid and vigorous in appearance, with fully-developed breasts and hips, in marked contrast with the first type, but resembling the women met with in Central and Western France. Indeed, the people of this type generally recall a certain French type, grave, self-possessed, deliberate in movement, capable and reliable in character.

I mention these two types because they seem to me to represent the two oldest races of Cornwall, or, indeed, of England. The first corresponds to the British Neolithic man--as described by Garson and other cautious investigators of recent date--who held sway in England before the so-called Kelts arrived, and who probably belonged to the

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so-called Iberian race; in pictures of Spanish women of the best period, indeed, and in some parts of modern Spain we may still see the same type. The second corresponds to the more powerful, and also, as his remains show, more cultured and aesthetic Kelt, who came from France and Belgium, driving the Neolithic man into the fortified hill-dwellings which abound in West Cornwall as well as in some other parts of Southern England. Here the Neolithic people may have dwelt until they adopted the language and higher civilisation of the sturdier Kelts, or perhaps until they were reconciled in the face of common foes. When craniologists assert that Cornish heads sometimes show French affinities, sometimes Spanish, we must put this fact down, not, as is sometimes done, to recent accidental crossing, but to the survival of two aboriginal elements in the population. When these types of individual are well combined, the results are often very attractive. We then meet with what is practically a third type: large, dignified, handsome people, distinguished from the Anglo-Saxon not only by their prominent noses and well-formed chins, but also by their unaffected grace and refinement of manner. In many a little out-of-the-world Cornish farm I have met the men of this type, and admired the distinction of their appearance and bearing, their natural, instinctive courtesy, their kindly hospitality. It was surely of such men that Queen Elizabeth thought when she asserted that all Cornishmen are courtiers.

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I do not wish to insist too strongly on these types
which blend into one another, and may even be
found in the same family. The Anglo-Saxon
stranger, who has yet had no time to distinguish
them, and who comes, let us say, from a typically
English county like Lancashire, still finds much
that is unfamiliar in the people he meets. They
strike him as rather a dark race, lithe in movement,
after the manner of sailors and fishermen, and
their hands and feet are small. Their hair has a
tendency to curl, and their complexions, even
those of the men, are often incomparable. This
last character is due to the extremely moist
climate of Cornwall, swept on both sides by the
sea-laden winds of the Atlantic. In the same way
the traveller southwards through Provencal France,
when at length he reaches the Mediterranean, is
impressed by the fresh, fair cheeks of the Mar-
seillaises; and I have never anywhere in the
world so fully realised the loveliness of a fair
complexion as in the faces of Englishwomen
newly arrived among the dry, harsh skins one
sees in rainless Australia. More than by this,
however, the stranger accustomed to the heavy,
awkward ways of the Anglo-Saxon clodhopper
will be struck by the bright, independent intelli-
gence and the facility of speech which he finds
here. The work, as one finds later, may be ill
done, it will certainly be done with deliberation,
but the worker is quick-witted, and, rightly or
wrongly, he retains a certain superiority over his

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work. No disguise can cover the rusticity of the English rustic; on Cornish roads one may often meet a carman whose clear-cut face, bushy moustache, and general bearing might easily add distinction to Pall Mall.

A very marked trait of the Cornish is their independence. Far more innately than the inhabitants of any other part of England, these people are democrats. They may not hold more advanced political views, but they have a more instinctive dignity and self-respect, a more natural and matter-of-course sense of equality. It may be seen in little matters; the use of the obsequious "Sir" (a matter of inflection, be it noted, for we have the contemptuous "Sir" of Dr. Johnson, the American's non-committal "Sir," the Frenchman's purely courteous "Monsieur ") as well as the touching of caps, so widespread in England generally, are not prevalent in Cornwall. The Cornish-man, if possible, always addresses you by your name. Democracy in the Anglo-Saxon is often a mere blustering revolt against servility. He asserts his equality with the mere snobbish assertiveness of the man who has no sense of equality in his soul. The Cornishman's sense of equality is so deep-rooted that nothing can perturb his friendly courtesy to social superiors, and when the shocked middle-class Anglo-Saxon stiffly draws back, the Cornishman puts it down to the eccentric pride of "up-along" folk. It is noteworthy that the conception of democracy as

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a spiritual grace, not to be found by much seeking, has throughout inspired a distinguished Cornish-man of to-day, Edward Carpenter, in writing his Towards Democracy. This democratic instinct is a very ancient trait in the Cornish character. The American who visits England is impressed by the persistence of the feudal spirit. That spirit, undoubtedly, with the servile dependence and swaggering revolt from dependence which it engenders, is the great enemy of democracy. But feudalism with difficulty penetrated into Cornwall, never took root there, and faded away at an early period. The temper of the race, while not opposed to voluntary communistic co-operation, as we may still see among the fishermen, is distinctly averse to the subordination and unquestioning obedience of patriarchal feudalism.

The special characters of the race are often vividly shown in its women. I am not aware that they have ever played a large part in the world, whether in life or art. But they are memorable enough for their own qualities. Many years ago, as a student in a large London hospital, I had under my care a young girl who came from labour of the lowest and least skilled order. Yet there was an instinctive grace and charm in all her ways and speech which distinguished her utterly from the rough women of her class. I was puzzled then over that delightful anomaly. In after years, recalling her name and her appearance, I knew that she was Cornish, and I am puzzled no longer.

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I have since seen the same ways, the same soft, winning speech equally unimpaired by hard work and rude living. The Cornish woman possesses an adroitness and self-possession, a modulated readiness of speech, far removed from the awkward heartiness of the Anglo-Saxon woman, the emotional inexpressiveness of the Lancashire lass whose eyes wander around as she seeks for words,

perhaps completing her unfinished sentence by a snap of the fingers. The Cornish woman--at all

events while she is young and not submerged by the drudgery of life--exhibits a certain delightful volatility and effervescence. In this respect she has some affinity with the bewitching and distracting heroines of Thomas Hardy's novels--for instance, the little schoolmistress of Under the Greenwood Tree----doubtless because the Wessex folk of the same south coast are akin to the Cornish. The Cornish girl is inconsistent without hypocrisy; she is not ashamed of work, but she is very fond of jaunts, and on such occasions she dresses herself, it would perhaps be rash to say with more zeal than the Anglo-Saxon maiden, but usually with more success. She is an assiduous chapel-goer, equally assiduous in flirtation when chapel is over. The pretty Sunday-school teacher and leader of the local Band of Hope cheerfully confesses as she drinks off the glass of claret you offer her that she is but a poor teetotaler. The Cornish woman will sometimes have a baby before she is legally married; it is only an old custom of

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the country, though less deeply rooted than the corresponding custom in Wales. After she has married, her man perhaps leaves her to go to America or the Cape, and disappears; in a few years she may marry again. One sometimes wonders how far the volatile and mercurial element in the Cornish woman, the delightful inconsistency of the race generally, may not be associated with the climate of this land of sunshine and shower, with its perpetual rainbows hovering over the waters, and its heady Atlantic winds from the west. These mighty winds that rise up at night to howl, and whistle, and roar, have much to answer for in the physical conformation of the land; they have swept the soil until the rocks are bare, they have made the life of the woods impossible for all but the smallest and hardiest trees, they have piled up the sea-sand into dunes that have buried churches. The wind in Cornwall is a more powerful factor in life than elsewhere. Sudden changes in the wind here strangely stimulate and exhaust the nervous system, both in the natives and in strangers. The people themselves, realising this, regard the wind as a cause of disease; the wind has got into his head (they say), or his throat, or his belly, as the case may be.

Vivacious and intelligent as the Cornish people are, they seem to be, for the most part, inapt for strenuous intellectual effort. Cornwall has no famous thinkers to set against the Abelard, the Descartes, and many another only less famous,

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produced by an allied soil and allied race in
Brittany. Sir Humphry Davy was scarcely a
philosopher, but his name is the chief that comes
into the mind. With his impressive personality,
his eloquence, his brilliant and many-sided ver-
satility, Davy is typical of the Cornish spirit at its
finest, just as his contemporary, Dalton--rough,
simple, unaffected, untiringly patient and plodding
--represents the northern Anglo-Saxon. One other
name Cornwall has to show in the highest sphere of
science: Adams, the astronomer and mathemati-
cian, who is for ever associated with the stupendous
feat of discovering Neptune. In general literature,
on the other hand, especially what used to be called
belles lettres., the Cornish show very well. George
Borrow was only half a Cornishman, but the whole
temper of the man and his work--the brave and
cheerful adventurousness, the happy insight into
varied and morbid moods, even the unconscious
incongruity of the religious element--are very
Cornish indeed. Trelawney was a true Cornish-
man in every sense, and his Adventures constitute
the ideal history of the typical Cornishman.
"Peter Pindar," again, represents the Cornish
adventurer in literature under his least amiable
aspects, while Praed shows him under pleasanter
aspects. Among greater men Keats is sometimes
mentioned in connection with Cornwall; it is not,
indeed, definitely known whether the father of
Keats came from Cornwall or Devonshire, but if
not of Cornish he was evidently of allied race. The

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genius of the Bronte family is always associated with the eccentric Irish father; it must be added that the genius was not made manifest until the Irish was blended with Cornish stock. In our own day it seems to me that the characteristics of the Cornish spirit are well exemplified in a young poet and critic who is of purely Cornish race, Mr. Arthur Symons. Mention must also be made of the group of novelists--such as Mr. Quiller-Couch, Mr. Lowry, and Mr. Pearce--who have devoted themselves with delicate artistic fidelity to the delineation of their land and its people.

The Cornishman possesses various artistic aptitudes, but on the whole they are not of the plastic order. A certain amount of taste in trivial detail, a love of colour, may be noted, but no great painters come from Cornwall as from East Anglia and other more Scandinavian parts of Great Britain. Reynolds, indeed, belonged to Plymouth, just over the border, but Opie, the portrait painter, and Bone, the miniaturist, seem to be the only Cornish artists to be found until recent times. Brittany is similarly bare of great painters. Nor is there much to say for Cornish architecture. Now and again one meets with an old house that has its charm of fitness, but on the whole they are far less common than the old farmhouses of the North with their grave simplicity and harmony; nor is there anything to compare with the cheerful

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felicity which the art of domestic architecture reached in West Surrey and Hampshire. The cause of this lack lies doubtless in material. In the absence of stone, wood, and tiles, the Cornish have had to wrestle with the problems offered by so rebellious a substance as granite. There are not even many notable churches in this land of saints; Launceston church-tower is an exception. St. Buryan's, in its austere simplicity, impresses the traveller as he circles around it in his progress through the Land's End district. The noblest and most satisfying fragment of ecclesiastical architecture in Cornwall is, without doubt, the tower of Probus church, near Truro. The church itself is insignificant, but the tower, built in Elizabethan days though reminiscent of an earlier period of art, is admirable at every point. One vainly seeks to know how so insignificant a village acquired so stately a possession. I have many times spent weeks beneath its shadow, and from afar or near I have never failed to thrill with pleasure as I caught sight of its large and gracious proportions, its fitness of detail, the soft grey tones of its delicately diapered walls.

An aptitude for music and singing is the most characteristic artistic faculty of the Cornish, and there is even some reason for supposing that the greatest of English composers, Purcell, belonged to Cornwall. We must certainly connect this aptitude with the beautifully modulated speech of the people, the unconscious tendency to soften and

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broaden ordinary English, and their gift of
eloquence; for like the Welsh and the Irish--
though to a less extent than these latter--the
Cornish are speakers and preachers. Certain parts
of the county, like Zennor, have an ancient
reputation for beauty of voice; the fame of
Incledon lives to our own time, and various noted
singers of to-day are of Cornish race. This musical
endowment is radical in the race. Up to the
seventeenth century miracle-plays remained very
popular in Cornwall, as various open amphi-
theatres on the hillsides remain to testify. The
Cornish Mysteries are held to differ from those of
other parts chiefly by their superiority in form, in
accuracy of rhythm and rhyme, and in adaptability
for lyrical expression; so strong, indeed, is the
musical element that they are usually, it has been
said, the libretti of religious operas, while instead
of closing with a Te Deum, as is customary in
English and French Mysteries, they end by direct-
ing the minstrels to "pipe diligently that we may
go to dance." Musical antiquaries hold that the
modern carol--which is really a choral song some-
what less serious than a hymn, and accompanied
by a dance--is a relic of the choruses sung between
the acts of miracle-plays. In most English towns
the carol has degenerated into some vulgar modern
jingle, some "'Ark! the 'erald angels sing," hastily
yelled by small ragamuffins anxious for a copper.
In Cornwall it remains a more serious matter. The
young men of the village, for some time before

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Christinas, practise together the traditional part-songs, which are very quaint and delightful to listen to. When Christmas Eve conies they go round singing from house to house, and the poorest Cornish householder gladly pays his shilling--a considerable sum here--in return for this little concert outside his door.

The Cornish love of music, and also of dancing, appears in various old rites and customs that have not yet died out. Furry day, which is celebrated at Helston, in the Lizard district, during the first week of May, is perhaps the most remarkable of these festivals. On this day the inhabitants of the town, including the Mayor and "best families," dance along the open streets and in and out of a large number of the houses, all knocking at the door as they dance in. The dance is a sort of polka, and the accompanying town-band plays a very lively traditional air, which, it is said, may also be found in Brittany and Wales. For two hours this dance continues without intermission beneath the warm sun which is not unknown to a Cornish May. Watching the perspiring actors in this quaint survival from the antique world, I can well believe the statement I overheard one young lady among them make, that it was the hardest day's work she had ever done. It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that this now meaningless celebration is kept up from any sense of duty. It is the buoyant nervous excitability of the race which makes the people of Helston cling to a

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festival which is unparalleled in any English town.

The volatility of the Cornish, however exuberantly effervescent, rarely passes into the rowdyism and horseplay which are still so painfully common among the true-born English. Even the Cornish Mysteries, it appears, are singularly free from the coarse buffoonery which usually characterised those clerical productions. When Cornish lads to-day ramble abroad you will not find them engaged in creating the maximum of noisy mischief. And when you lie in your bed in the West End of London, and are awakened in the early hours of Sunday morning by ugly voices howling discordantly the noisiest music-hall song to the cackling accompaniment of reckless laughter, you may be fairly sure that these people were not born in Cornwall. This is one of the characters which bring the Cornish near to the French; it may merely indicate difference in nervous texture, but it adds to the amenity of life.

The genius of the race--its volatility and its power of speech--is well-fitted for the actor's profession. The tendency may be seen among village lads, who will sometimes organise a nigger-minstrel company, in elaborate costume, to go from house to house performing variety entertainment. Foote, a famous actor of old time, once called "the English Aristophanes," belonged to Cornwall, and the greatest English actor of our own day, Sir Henry Irving, though not actually born in Cornwall, belongs to the county, both by

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race (on the maternal side) and by the fact that he
spent his early youth there.

It would be a mistake to imagine that the favourite avocations and amusements of the Cornish are all effeminate. No one who is acquainted with Cornish wrestling will rush to that conclusion. Nowadays, indeed, wrestling in Cornwall is dying out, and I have not often had an opportunity of witnessing it, but it is by no means extinct. I know a village, far removed from railway stations and the currents of modern life, where it may be well studied. Behind the chief inn in the village is a large field. Here, on a certain day every year, several hundred people assemble and seat themselves on chairs and benches, forming a large ring left free for the wrestlers, who strive the whole day long in round after round to throw one another according to the rules of the art. They are practically naked above the waist, for the strong loose canvas jacket is easily lifted over the shoulders. It is a graceful and vigorous performance, not without a certain solemnity befitting a survival from the early world. No one is hurt, however decisive the falls, for there is nothing of the reckless barbarity of football, so dear to the hearts of the northern English countrymen. There are no women present, though a few may be seen flitting in the background and gazing on furtively. Beer is passed round from time to time to the onlookers, who sedately discuss the performance with the air

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of connoisseurs, applaud the victors, and quietly
disperse in the evening.

The stranger in Cornwall is quickly impressed by something wild and primitive in the land and the people. To a large extent this is a correct impression. The general contours of the country --huge fantastic rocks lashed by angry winter seas, gorse-covered moorlands with but rare luxuriant valleys--are savage and uncivilised. The prehistoric remains--the frequent monoliths, the "quoits" as cromlechs are here called, the mysterious circles of stones--confirm the impression and recall the grander relics of primitive rite and sepulture in Brittany, while the quaint wayside crosses scattered so profusely along western Cornish roads recall the simple piety of early days. The people themselves also often retain a certain element of savagery, as apt when irritated to break out in bursts of violent anger as their shallow soil to reveal the hard rock underneath, or their sudden gales to lash the sea into white fury. They have a primitive instinct for religion, though perhaps to a less extent than the Welsh or the Bretons; they were ardent Catholics in days of old, they never took kindly to a State Church as invented by Henry VIII, but when Wesley came among them and made a spiritual faith once more possible they became ardent Methodists. They have also been devoted wreckers, fervent smugglers. Even now it is possible to point to men who in their early days, it is said, lured vessels to

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destruction on the rocks. They carried their smuggling audacity so far as in one case at least to use a church for storing the smuggled spirits, carefully removing them on Saturday nights in preparation for the religious rites of the Sunday. Doubtless these things have died out, and nowadays the Cornish display their fervour in rescuing life at such times as the fierce winter gales turn the dangerous coasts around the Lizard and Land's End into seething cauldrons of death, in which the lifeboat cannot live and the rocket cannot pierce the wind to bring rescue to the sailors who drop one by one from the rigging to their death, within a few yards of land. The man who would once have been a wrecker is perhaps the man who now spends days and nights in searching for dead bodies along the coasts. To live on the Cornish coast breeds a certain familiarity with death, and also that terror of the devouring sea which is deeply rooted in the people, and a little surprising to the careless summer pleasure-seekers who bathe all day long in these clear sparkling waters and cool mysterious caves. But the natives see it differently, and in many districts there are few women who have not lost one of their men--a son, a father, a husband, sometimes drowned beneath their eyes. The life of the people, and perhaps their racial instincts, are primitive also in their attachment to superstitions. All sorts of pagan survivals may be found in Cornwall: holy wells are numerous; every district has its population of

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ghosts, and many are the natives who have seen or heard them. Witchcraft was of old strongly rooted in Cornwall, especially in particular spots, such as St. Ives. It is not yet extinct, and the witch-doctor still mutters her spells for the benefit of those who seek her advice. I know of a respectable citizen of a Cornish town who found his orthodox doctor's remedies too slow, and went off to a famous witch-doctor who uttered her spells over him; he was perfectly satisfied with the results. This man made no secret of the course he had adopted, apparently regarding his preference for the powers of darkness over the powers of potions as justified by more speedy results. There must certainly be a far larger number of persons who resort to these same powers in secret. While the Cornish are truly primitive in the sense that they still retain traditions, habits, arid customs now unknown to the rest of England, it must be added that they have little of the profound conservatism of the Welsh, which has kept the old Keltic tongue alive and vigorous within a few hundred miles of London, just as they lack also the intense moral fervour of the Breton. In the Cornish rustic there is even a certain eagerness for novelty; you may see his whole body astir with delight at some new spectacle at which the Anglo-Saxon would only gape in wonderment. What seems to us the primitiveness of the Cornish is largely, it appears to me, an organic character of the race which civilisation can scarcely be expected

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to efface, a radical matter of temperament. The Anglo-Saxon character comports a certain exterior awkwardness, a more or less genial ruffianism, beneath which you find on cutting into it--though this may not be easy to effect--a reliable depth of juicy beefiness. When you scratch the gentle surface of the Cornish soul you may, perchance, strike on some unexpected resonant resistance, even with ugly sparks of fire, just as when you penetrate the shallow soil of Cornish land you strike on hard metalliferous strata. I do not wish to insinuate that either of these tempers is of higher quality. The one is not quite so smooth as it looks, the other not quite so rough. In the world of character it is not so easy, as it is in the world of zoology, to assert that the creature which carries its skeleton inside is more highly organised than that which carries it outside. But the ready responsiveness of the Cornish temperament, its unexpected recoils and resistances, its apparent contradictions, are fascinating, and constitute a character which appeals to us as primitive.

In a last analysis, perhaps the most distinctive and interesting element in the Cornish character is its adventurousness. Here the restless, nervous energy in the race, and the underlying sturdiness --Cornish gales and Cornish granite--are combined and displayed in splendid achievement. It is a mistake to imagine that the Anglo-Saxon race is adventurous in a conspicuous degree. The Englishman is an excellent colonist, no doubt,

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solid and tenacious, but not quick to "trek" on into the unknown until well convinced that his present state is intolerable. The Scotch, the Irish, and the Cornish have been the chief pioneers, leading forlorn hopes to 'outposts which the more stolid English have afterwards held and maintained. The names of great travellers, adventurers, and pioneers are enough to indicate that we English, in the narrow sense of the word, do not greatly predominate among them, and the same fact is clear to anyone who has ever lived in any outpost of English-speaking civilisation. The Cornish seaports--Fowey, Falmouth, St. Ives, Padstow--have sent out numberless sailors and adventurers in Elizabethan days and after. During the last half-century these have been joined by the men who are cast adrift through the decay of Cornish mining. Cornishmen are found to-day in all parts of the world--in America, Australia, and Africa. South Africa is especially the resort of the Cornish, and the Cornishman at home pronounces with far more familiarity the name of Johannesburg than that of London, a remote city, mentioned, perhaps, with some condescension, and not bulking so largely in the Cornishman's eyes as Plymouth, the great seaport of emigration, which lies almost within his own boundaries. The Cornish often settle abroad, but they return more frequently than do the Anglo-Saxon English, who, if less keen to go, are also less keen to return. In every part of Cornwall you find men who have

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wandered through the world, and have come back, with or without a small competency, to end their days in their own land. The joy of adventure is dearer to the Cornish heart than the accumulation of wealth. It is this adventurousness which has given the Cornish the felicity of playing so large a part in the history of English civilisation. The Welsh have never reconciled themselves to conquest, the Irish have never even recognised their conquest, the Cornish have riot seldom put themselves at the head of their conquerors. There are many Cornish families, like the Killigrews and the Godolphins, who have attained distinguished preeminence in every department of practical affairs, statesmanship, diplomacy, divinity, law. Great soldiers and sailors Cornwall has produced in abundance. Sir Richard Grenville--whose exploits were celebrated by his like-minded kinsman, Sir Walter Raleigh, and in a later day by Tennyson --is one of the first among English heroes; the same exuberantly heroic family yielded Sir Bevill Grenville, "the Cornish Bayard." Sir John Eliot, the revolutionary patriot and orator, was also a Cornishman When times changed, Cornwall sent out missionary adventurers like Henry Martyn, and explorers like Richard Lander, while in still later days the daring of the Cornish has been chiefly shown in the creation of new ideals in literature and morals. The long list of Cornish worthies is little more than a series of pioneers into the physical and spiritual worlds.

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IX
SOEUR JEANNE DES ANGES

Published in 1899 in the UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE AND FREE REVIEW, edited and published by Dr. de Villiers who had taken the FREE REVIEW over from the (now) Right Hon. J. M. Robertson, and in the previous year had published the first volume of my STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX. De Villiers, the son of a German judge, was an extraordinary man who, it ultimately appeared, lived a life of mystification passing over into criminality, though by no means an ordinary criminal. Finally, to avoid arrest, he sought refuge in a concealed room of his house in Cambridge, and there committed suicide with the aid of poison he had long carried about in a ring he wore.

THERE is no form of literature so fascinating
and so instructive to the student of human
nature as autobiography. The confessions
left by Augustine, Bunyan, Cellini, Casanova,
Rousseau, can never lose either their interest or
their psychological value. Novels become un-
intelligible, histories need to be re-written, but
the intimate record of the soul's experiences is
always new.

La Possession de la Mere Jeanne des Anges, Superieure des Religieuses Ursulines de Loudun (known in the world as Mlle de Belcier) cannot be said to stand in the first rank of great autobiographies. Yet it is singularly interesting and

124

Soeur Jeanne des Anges

instructive. There is perhaps no other document in existence--not even the Life of Saint Theresa--which shows how large and tragic a part in human affairs may be played by hysteria. Since hysteria, in its myriad forms, is just as prevalent in the nineteenth as in the seventeenth century, and plays an equally prominent part in life, it may not be out of place to call the reader's attention to the existence of this autobiography, discovered a few years ago in the Communal Library at Tours, and admirably edited, under the superintendence of Charcot, by Drs. Legue and Gilles de la Tourette. Mile de Belcier was born in the Chateau of Cozes, in Saintonge, on February 2nd, 1602, being the daughter of a great seigneur, Messire Louis Belcier, Baron of Cozes. She was a puny child, ill-developed physically, of bizarre temper, and at the age of ten was sent to be educated at a convent where her aunt was prioress. But here her conduct was so unbearable, and her tastes so ill-regulated, that when she had reached the age of fifteen her aunt sent her home in despair. At home neither good advice nor severe punishment were spared on the rebellious daughter, and growing weary of both at last she resolved to take the veil. The lack of vocation appeared absolute, but no doubt the parents welcomed this caprice as a solution of their difficulties, and sent their daughter to the Ursulines, who had just established a house at Poitiers. Here the young novice showed somewhat excessive zeal. She was,

125



	VIEWS AND REVIEWS A Selection of Uncollected Articles 1884-1932

	BY

	HAVELOCK ELLIS

	FIRST AND SECOND SERIES

	Boston and New York HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 1932



	PREFACE IN these volumes are brought together a collection of essays, reviews, and some minor writings, covering a period of forty-eight years, from 1884 to 1932. They are not to be regarded as merely the sweepings of a literary workshop, for they are carefully selected from a larger mass of writings as having some kind of interest, either in relation to the time when they were written or in relation to to-day. They are so various in character that they could not easily be classified, and the order in which they here appear is chronological. What they have in common is that it has never proved possible to fit any of them into my books, so that, for the most part, they have been reprinted for the first time. They are reprinted as they were originally printed. A few slight and unimportant omissions have been made, but not a word has been added, nor has a word been changed (except by the correction of misprints), even when details are obviously far out of date. It is indeed because a document "dates" that it becomes interesting. I feel, for my own part, the less desire to make any changes since, so far as substance and spirit are concerned, I still find myself nearly always at one even with the earliest of the writings included in these series. HAVELOCK ELUS.



	CONTENTS FIRST SERIES FACE I. WOMEN AND SOCIALISM . . 1 II. THE PRESENT POSITION OF ENGLISH CRITICISM . . . .19 III. " TOWARDS DEMOCRACY " . .38 IV. A NOTE ON PAUL BOURGET . . 48 V. THE PLACE OF ANTHROPOLOGY IN MEDICAL EDUCATION . . 61 VI. THE ANCESTRY OF GENIUS . . 68 VII. AN OPEN LETTER TO BIOGRAPHERS 86 VIII. THE MEN OF CORNWALL . . 100 I.. SŒUR JEANNE DES ANGES . . 124 X. " THE DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY " . . . . 135 XI. THE GENIUS OF NIETZSCHE . . 147 XII. A DUTCH TOLSTOY . . . 154 XIII. BROWNING'S PLACE IN LITERATURE 160 XIV. FICTION IN THE AUSTRALIAN BUSH. 171 XV. BOVARYISM. . . . .179 XVI. THE GENIUS OF FRANCE . . 187 XVII. THE PROPHET SHAW . . .194 XVIII. ANOTHER PROPHET : H. G. WELLS 204 XIX. FARE AND WELFARE , , .213



	viii C O N T EN T S PAGE XX. FOREL ON THE SEXUAL QUESTION . 221 XXI. INSANITY AND THE LAW . . 226 XXII. LETTER TO A SUFFRAGETTE . . 233 XXIII. THE CARE OF THE UNBORN . . 235 XXIV. BLASCO IBANEZ . . . .247 XXV. "THE INTERMEDIATE TYPES AMONG PRIMITIVE FOLK " . 258 XXVI. THE HISTORY OF THE PSYCHO- ANALYTIC MOVEMENT . . 262 XXVII. GERMAN POLITICAL IDEALS . . 268 XXVIII. THE HUMAN GEOGRAPHY OF WEST- ERN EUROPE .... 280 XXIX. THE BIOLOGY OF WAR . . 290 XXX. RELIGION AND SEX . . . 294 XXXI. UNLOCKING THE HEART OF GENIUS 300 XXXII. THE PROGRESS OF CRIMINOLOGY ." 308



	I WOMEN AND SOCIALISM This article appeared in TO-DAY for October, 1884, as by H. Havelock Ellis. TO-DAY was then edited by H. H. Champion, Labour and Socialist leader, and in it Bernard Shaw's early novel, AN UNSOCIAL SOCIALIST, was then coming out as a serial. My paper here appears as originally printed, except that I have restored a phrase concerning "the charming naivete of a modern Isaiah," which Champion--whether out of consideration for Bebel or for Isaiah I now knotv not--had deleted. AUGUST BEBEL, whom it is unnecessary to introduce to the readers of To-day, has lately written a book in which he endeavours to set forth the position which women will occupy when society shall have been "socialised." Die Frau in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft deals a little with the past, a very little with the future, much with the present. Beginning with a brief historical sketch, Bebel treats of the sexual instinct, of marriage as it at present exists, of the numerical proportion of the sexes, of prostitution as a necessary element in the present system, of the industrial position of women and their intellectual capacity as compared with men, of their legal position, and of their relation to politics. There are also some chapters of a purely Socialist character, with one on over-population. It will be 1



	Views and Reviews seen, therefore, that this book, succeeds in covering, however imperfectly, a very large field. In so far as it is a record of historical facts it shows to some extent the influence of that method which a German writer generally adopts when he comes in contact with facts, probably to escape from those tendencies which most easily beset him in thought. That is to say, he plunges them all into his book together, in a fit of fine careless rapture, trusting, apparently, that by some process of natural selection, the fittest will ultimately somehow float up to the surface. At the same time Bebel fails to adopt this method quite stringently ; perhaps he is scarcely at home as a recorder of scientific facts. An English critic has, however, little right to judge hypercritically a work on this subject, for we in England have produced scarcely any contributions of value to the scientific literature of woman. It may be that that charming prudery which has distinguished our nation during this century, but perhaps not before, and which has proved so delightful and so strange to French visitors, from Madame de Stael and De Stendhal down to Taine and Max O'Rell, has stood in the way of any frank and precise treatment of this subject. Certainly, even so grave an historian as W. E. H. Lecky, who at the end of his History of European Morals has inserted a chapter on the position of women, cannot speak of some of the most important questions that affect women without a wearisome and almost offensive iteration of



	Women and Socialism apologies. And in the English translation of so learned a work as Max Duncker's History of Antiquity--published in six large volumes at I am not certain how many guineas--it has been found advisable to omit passages which, it is assumed, are unsuited for the modest English student of civilisation. A similarly uncalled for process of excision was adopted in the editing of Buckle's Commonplace Book. Bebel's book may be found of value because it presents in a clear and outspoken, if rather rough and extreme form, what are, I conceive, certain distinct tendencies of modern feeling in regard to women; and an English translation would deserve a welcome. The old question that moved men's minds was of religion. Now that "for the first time in the world," as Mill said, "men and women are really companions" there comes before us, with the larger issues of social reorganisation, a new and definite question, the "woman question" with all the economical, social and ethical problems that centre round that question. If we have not yet settled the religious question, we are at least on the way to its settlement; we have caught a glimpse of new ideals and the old crusade of mere destructive energy has been rendered unnecessary. It is true that, like a whale's teeth that have no longer any useful function to perform, a few enthusiasts still survive to raise the outworn warcries and tilt courageously against the corpses and ghosts of faith. But putting these aside, as 3



	Views and Reviews well as those ardent young people who have not yet emerged from their Sturm und Drang period, and for whom orthodoxy is still a very real foe, there are no longer any signs worth heeding to show that the religious question is still attracting the energy which it formerly absorbed. There are other problems now which slowly but very surely approach us, and round the woman question in its largest sense one of the next great fights will centre. Bebel's fundamental assertion seems to be that the woman question can only be solved in the solution of the larger social question. Now there are at present, as he tells us in his Introduction, two schools of thought regarding this question. According to the first there is no woman question; nature has called woman to be a mother and a wife and has made the home her peculiar sphere. For the champions on this side, the argument is a very simple one, and they appear to be little troubled when told that millions of women are not in a position to follow this so-called command of nature and bear children and look after households, and that other millions, to whom this avocation has been vouchsafed, have dragged wearily through lives that have been as the lives of slaves. But there is another school that cannot shut its eyes and ears to these facts. It admits the inferior position of women when the general development of the race is considered, and that it is necessary to improve the condition of those who, not having reached the haven of marriage,



	Women and Socialism are thrown upon their own resources. Those who belong to this school desire that all occupations for which woman's strength and capacity are adapted should be thrown open to her, so that she may enter into competition with man; that she should be permitted to follow art, science, medicine. A small minority also demand political rights. But Bebel points out that not only would this agitation, if successful, simply serve to make competition rage more fiercely and so lower the income of both sexes, but that it is partial, being, indeed, chiefly carried on by women of the higher classes, who only perceive the special needs of the women among whom they live. The dominion of one sex over another, the material dependence of the vast majority of women, and their consequent slavery either through our present marriage system or prostitution, would remain unchanged. Into these two classes Bebel finds Germany divided on the woman question, and it is possible that even in England--the Paradise of women as it was called three hundred years ago--there are not wanting representatives of these views. It is in opposition to both schools that Bebel sets forth the individualist--or, as he prefers to call it, Socialist--proposition that "a Woman has the same right to develop her mental and physical capacities that a man has." This is not possible --and here we touch the central point of Bebel's book--in the present condition of society. "The full and complete solution of the woman question



	Views and Reviews --by which must be understood not merely equality in the face of the law, but economic freedom and independence, and, so far as possible, equality in mental culture--is, under the present social and political arrangements, as impossible as the solution of the labour question." Bebel endeavours to trace this out through several chapters of his book. Marriage and prostitution are the obverse and reverse of the sexual relations as at present constituted. And while marriage on the one hand oppresses the unmarried woman, it equally oppresses the married woman, prostitution affecting both. The married woman, Bebel considers, is regarded as, above all, a mere object of enjoyment; she is economically dependent; she is made to be a mother and an educator, the most difficult of all positions, when she has not been in the slightest degree prepared for so important a function, and is often placed under physically abnormal conditions. Alexandre Dumas says in Les Femmes qui tuent that a distinguished Roman Catholic priest told him that, out of one hundred women who married, eighty came to him afterwards and said that they regretted it. And this is scarcely strange. It is even less necessary, Bebel proceeds, to point out the position of the ordinary unmarried woman under present conditions. She is shut out from what is considered a woman's career and other careers are only to a limited extent open to her. It is worthy of remark that Bebel is not 6



	Women and Socialism afraid to deal frankly with the question of chastity as it affects women. He quotes the opinions of various medical authorities in Germany as to the effects of celibacy on women and repeats approvingly the words of Luther: "A woman can no more dispense with a husband than with eating, drinking, sleeping, or other natural necessities. Nor can a man dispense with a wife. The sexual instinct is as deeply rooted in nature as eating and drinking." He would have those words carved over the doors of every Protestant Church. Therefore both the women who marry and the women who do not marry are, under the present conditions of society, almost equally oppressed. The existing system, says Bebel, is neither "sacred" nor "moral." And against it he sets his own ideal. Marriage, he asserts, should be a private contract, not effected through the medium of any functionary. It should be "the contract of two persons of different sex who are attracted by mutual love and regard, and who together, according to the admirable saying of Kant, form the complete human being." Further, argues Bebel, a necessary element in the present system is prostitution. It is the reverse of the medal. "Nothing shows more strikingly the dependence of women on men than the fundamental difference in the judgment regarding the satisfaction of the same natural impulse in the two sexes." He points out how prostitution with its one-sided way of regarding 7





	Hawkes Point, Carbis Bay, 1897



	Views and Reviews men and women, giving rights to one sex which it denies to the other, is in reality as fundamental a part of the existing state of society as the Church and standing armies. "Remove prostitution," as St. Augustine said, "and you render all life turbid with lust." There is, however, nothing that is fresh in Bebel's way of dealing with this subject. Poverty and the crushing of the natural life under existing conditions are, he repeats, the great causes of prostitution, and these can only be altered by a fundamental change in the social order. The historical sketch at the beginning of the book is necessarily too brief and fragmentary to be of much value. Bebel, who is, however, always prejudiced when he has to speak of Christianity, points out how even the Church, which is generally said to have done so much for women, could scarcely attain even to a sense of the spiritual equality of the sexes. At the Council of Macon in the sixth century the question as to whether women have souls was discussed and only affirmed by a small majority. He also shows how the minnesingers of the feudal ages, who sang so extravagantly of women, were the representatives of an unreal and unnatural ideal, and he calls Luther the classical interpreter of the healthy sensuality of the Middle Ages. A very short and unimportant chapter is devoted to women in the future. Towards the end of the book several chapters are interpolated that are quite 8



	Women and Socialism unconnected with the general scheme, being a general exposition of that time when society shall be socialised. With the charming naivete of a modern Isaiah, Bebel sings of the coming days when there will be no immorality; children will not be unruly; the seeking after coarse pleasures which is called forth by the unrest of domestic life will be ended; there will be no demoralising books; no appeals to sensual desire. All these and many other evils will be avoided without compulsion and without tyranny. "The social atmosphere will make them impossible." Furthermore there shall be a central cooking establishment; a central washing establishment on a mechanico-chemical system; a central clothing manufactory; central heating and central lighting; central hot and cold baths. There shall be no more maid servants, and vegetarianism (it is not quite clearly explained why) shall be done away with. At this point of jubilant exaltation it may be well to leave the general consideration of Die Frau in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart and Zukunft, and to touch briefly on two or three of the points which are intimately connected with the whole question and which must necessarily be more or less considered by everyone who undertakes to discuss the social functions of women. Whoever asserts the equality of the sexes has to face the arguments of those who bring forward what they consider the scientific" aspects of the case. One hears, for instance, allusions of a more or less vague character B 9



	Vieivs and Reviews to a supposed difference in the brain-development of man and woman. Although our knowledge of cerebral organisation is at present too imperfect for very precise conclusions, Bebel brings forward a few of the facts relative to the size of the brain in the two sexes, as that men of most highly developed intellect have sometimes had brains not greater in weight than the average woman's brain, and that among savages, when men and women are placed under more equable conditions, the difference between the male and female brain is comparatively slight. As Vogt pointed out, the male European excels the female in cranial development more than the negro excels the negress. Bebel fails, however, to point out, as he might have done, that notwithstanding the absolute difference there is no such clearly defined relative difference. According to at least one series of investigations there is even a slight advantage on the side of women. It is a remarkable fact that not only is there less difference between the brains of a negro and negress and those of a civilised man and woman, but that the difference varies in civilised countries in a very significant way. The difference is greatest in Germany, least in France. Germany, it is scarcely necessary to say, is undoubtedly the country in which women are treated with least regard; it is the country which, it has been said, supplies half the world with prostitutes; and as regards the education of women it is behind every country in Europe, except Poland. 10



	Women and Socialism In France, on the other hand, women have played a larger part and possessed more influence than anywhere else. When we try to think of the names of great European women we think above all of French women. The inference is that if women were placed under conditions equally favourable to development they would in a few generations be at no point behind men. Bebel insists on this because it is related to the underlying and fundamental assertion of scientific Socialism. The individual is dependent firstly on the material conditions of his life, then on his social and economical circumstances, which again are influenced by climate and the fertility and physical conformation of the earth. It is this assertion which gives Karl Marx his scientific strength, and it is allied to the teaching of Buckle and to some extent, it is claimed, of Darwin. It is thus that, as the Socialists of Bebel's school urge, Darwinism leads to Socialism. The element of truth in this fundamental assertion of scientific Socialism is intimately connected with the question of education. The general importance of education in relation to the position of women has long been recognised. But it may be doubted whether the great significance which it possesses in regard to the relations of the sexes has yet been adequately realised. A recent scientific writer has asserted that "man has advanced less in knowledge as to the proper mode of viewing the 11



	Views and Reviews true principles that should regulate the ethical feelings existing between the sexes than in any other branch of knowledge." And such knowledge is not only rendered more difficult of attainment, it is made incapable of finding a practical outlet, so long as artificial barriers are placed between the sexes. Bebel therefore rightly insists on the education of the sexes together, and brings forward some of the evidence as to the satisfactory character of its results, from an intellectual and moral standpoint, which comes from America. He easily disposes of the arguments, of a still weaker nature, which are brought forward against the admission of women as medical students with men, and in Paris, as well as in Sweden, students of both sexes sit side by side in the medical schools with no ill results. Bebel refers to the healthy tone of feeling which existed in Greece when boys and girls were not carefully hidden from each other, and the physical conformation and special functions of the organs of one sex were not made a secret to the other sex; each could possess a delight in the other's beauty, and sensual feeling was not as with us artificially over-excited. The position of women in Greece, putting aside the old Homeric pictures, was in many ways a degraded one, but though in England we may have little in general to learn concerning the physical education of boys, in this respect at all events they have something to teach us and it is worthy of remark that in Sparta, where women had a better 12



	Women and Socialism physical education than elsewhere, they also possessed greater honour and influence. It is possible that modern feeling in regard to the body will again develop a directness and simplicity somewhat akin to the Greek feeling. "All the superficial objections to the public activity of women," says Bebel, "would be impossible if the relations of the sexes were natural and not a relation of antagonism, of master and slave, involving separation even from childhood. It is an antagonism which we owe to Christianity which keeps them apart and maintains them in ignorance of each other, hindering free intercourse and mutual trust. It will be one of the first and weightiest tasks of society, when founded on a reasonable basis, to heal this division of the sexes and to restore to nature her violated rights, a violation which begins even in the school." Though here, as ever, a little unjust when Christianity is concerned, Bebel sees how the exaggerated influence of Christianity has tended to overthrow the balance of healthy feeling, to distort and render morbid a whole field of human life. There are two ideals of the union of the sexes, one or other of which has always had its adherents. They may be conveniently called the Greek and the Christian ideal. The one demands the most complete freedom for the sensuous and passionate elements; it seeks after a sunny openness, the spontaneous play of impulse. The other ideal, 13



	Views and Reviews which has been closely though not necessarily connected with Christian feeling, finds its satisfaction in the exclusive union of two individuals, for ever seeking new inner mysteries of joy, new bonds of union. Among modern poets Schiller and Mrs. Browning have sung the one ideal, while Goethe represents the other. Everyone according to his temperament is attached to the one or the other of these ideals, but whichever it may be that we are approaching one thing at least may be demanded: there must be no artificial hindrances in the way of human development; there must be complete freedom for man's deepest instincts to have free play. It is scarcely probable that either the Greek or the Christian ideal is sufficiently large to engage by itself all the complex emotional activities of modern men and women. Bebel appears in this matter to tend towards the Christian ideal. I doubt, however, whether he clearly realises the ethical bearings of the questions he decides so courageously. The most striking point about all sexual questions is precisely the deep way in which they enter into such problems; and it is impossible to ignore the wide relations of any fundamental change to the moral feelings. From failing to insist sufficiently on the larger bearings of the marriage question it seems that Bebel's assertions, though true, are sometimes too partial. It is true that, as he maintains, "the satisfaction of the sexual desires is a thing that concerns the individual alone." But it must be 14



	Women and Socialism remembered that it is also a thing that concerns the race, that is bound up with the advance of human life; since it may be physiologically demonstrated that it is not possible for one-half of the race to be oppressed and undeveloped and the other not be dragged down too. The sexual relations of the individual, therefore, concern not only the individual himself in all his relations, but they concern more than the individual. And the chief ethical demand on the sexual relations to-day is that these larger bearings should be recognised; that the sexual relations should be finally rescued from the degradation into which they have fallen; that they should be treated with a full consciousness of their wide human bearings for the individual and for the race. "The power of a woman's body," it has been said, "is no more bodily than the power of music is a power of atmospherical vibrations." And when a man touches a woman he arouses that which is best or worst in her; it is not her body that he touches, it is her whole mental and emotional nature. When two human beings come near to each other, and one is little more than an ignorant and capricious child, it is scarcely surprising that the results should seldom be quite satisfactory. That is why the sexual relations cannot possibly be a matter of indifference. And that is why all social progress is hindered while these relations also are not recognised in their wider bearings on life. An English writer, James Hinton, who in 15



	Views and Reviews writings as yet unpublished has dealt more boldly and more earnestly with the questions of the sexual relations than any other recent English writer I know, considered that when the question of women was settled the whole social question would be settled. It would not be possible, he said, for women to be placed in a true and natural position without a correlated change in the whole social life. Bebel, as we have seen, asserts that the woman question cannot be settled except as an item of a general socialisation. Whichever solution we may be inclined to adopt we may be assured that the first thing necessary is to assert the equal freedom and independence of women with men. For it has been the fate of woman to suffer from those who wished to do her honour. Till the reign of George III women were burnt alive for all treasons, because, as Blackstone explained, it would be indelicate to expose their bodies. "One cannot avoid a smile," Buckle remarks, "at that sense of decency which burns a woman alive in order to avoid stripping her naked." But to those who have studied the history of woman through the past and who have seen how often women have been impaled on an ideal created for the most part by men, that explanation of Blackstone's has a certain pathos and significance. Once upon a time, a monkish chronicle tells us, an eloquent and beautiful English girl appeared in Bohemia, declaring that the Holy Ghost was 16



	Women and Socialism revealed in her for the deliverance of women, and was eventually, as usual, decently burnt. That was six hundred years ago now, and though we do not know what "message" it was that that girl had to deliver, the same spirit that found a voice in her still speaks to-day; in literature and in life it is ever finding more adequate expression. In America, Walt Whitman, who has so magnificently set forth his modern ideal "Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power," has deeply realised the equality of men and women and the purity and dignity of the sexual relations. In England, struggling to regain its old position as the Paradise of women (and where the Towards Democracy of an enthusiastic friend and disciple of Whitman is too little known), greater progress has been made on the whole regarding women, says the American editor of a very interesting volume of essays on The Woman Question in Europe just published, than anywhere else in Europe. The ideal womanhood in England is ceasing to be, as it was once defined, "a sort of sentimental priesthood." And while in Germany Bebel has been exercising his vigorous and outspoken polemics, one of the foremost of European poets, Henrik Ibsen, has in the compass of a short play, Nora, thrown into a perfectly artistic form the whole (or almost the whole) question of the independence of women as it is presented to us to-day. There cannot be, Ibsen teaches us (although, as a true artist, he always anxiously disclaims any attempt to teach), 17



	Views and Reviews a truly intimate and helpful relation except between a man and a woman who are equally developed, equally independent. He has wrought out Nora with a keenness of insight into the most subtle recesses of the soul that is almost marvellous, and in Ghosts, a work of still greater genius and audacity, which there is reason to hope may soon be translated, he has again illustrated his fresh and profound way of dealing with the almost untouched ethical problems of the modern world. He has realised that the day of mere external revolutions has passed, that the only revolution now possible is the most fundamental of all, the revolution of the human spirit. If it is true that there is still much progress to be made in all that concerns the most intimate and vital of human relationships, if even so original and bold an investigator as Mr. F. Galton becomes timid when he approaches that central problem of what he calls "eugenics," the question of the breeding of men and women, we may still trace, faintly but distinctly, the tendencies of thought and life. For it is now gradually beginning to be recognised that the new ideal of human life is only possible through the union of the old Hellenic and Christian ideals with a third which is the outcome of to-day and is bound up with the attainment of equal freedom, equal independence and equal culture for men and women. It is towards that ideal that our modern life, not without pain and seeming failure, is slowly but surely moving. 18



	II THE PRESENT POSITION OF ENGLISH CRITICISM The "Present" here means some forty-six years past. The paper was first sent to the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, accepted by the then editor, T. H. S. Escott, and almost immediately returned without explanation; the editor himself disappeared from the REVIEW soon after. The article was published in TIME in December, 1885. I never reprinted it as it soon ceased to express accurately my opinion; especially I felt I had placed Symonds too high and Pater too low, though with the low estimate many to-day will be content. The paper is here reprinted exactly as it appeared in TIME. THERE is something so uncertain and so various in the methods and results of criticism, that a review of its present position would be best begun by asking: What is criticism? Such a question, however, would probably be considered a profitless and scholastic exercise, and the critic of criticism has to content himself with admitting that at present it is not quite certain what criticism is. Yet we are not entirely without definitions of criticism. A distinguished English critic and a distinguished French critic have each given us a definition of criticism. According to Matthew Arnold's well-known formula, criticism is "a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate 19



	Views and Reviews the best that is known and thought in the world." Taine says: "The critic is the naturalist of the soul. He accepts its various forms; he condemns none and describes all." Neither of these definitions, one notes, can be said to err on the side of undue modesty, and Mr. Arnold's labours under the disadvantage of not being founded on any definite conception. It is clearly formulated for the benefit of that English middle class among whom he desires to be an evangelist. Taine's definition is that of a critic who is a philosopher first, and a critic afterwards. A clear and distinct scientific conception underlies it. He is the naturalist of the soul as it appears in literature and art; it is there that he finds his documents sig-nificatifs. For the individual as an individual, as a distinct personality with its own character and idiosyncrasy, he cares little. He is not satisfied unless he can refer the qualities of the individual back into his environment. The vitality and fruitfulness of this method have been attested by its results. Taine has had an influence which has ' reached throughout Europe. The naturalistic school has adopted his aesthetics; Zola prefaced to an early novel a characteristic utterance of the master: "Le vice et la virtu sont des produits comme le vitriol et comnie le sucre." In Italy his influence has been great; in Denmark he has, in great measure through the influence of his disciple, the well-known critic, Georg Brandes, profoundly awakened intellectual life. It is true, indeed, that, 20



	Views and Reviews How completely, for instance, we might by this method justify the idiosyncrasies of Matthew Arnold's judgments! Even so imperfect and partial a self-criticism as Renan's delightful volume of Souvenirs forms an introduction to Renan's work of the very highest value. Till this is done we are not in a position to define criticism, or to measure the success of the critic's work which is, practically, to find out what is really essential and significant in the artistic product before him, and to subordinate, or classify, that product in accordance with the largest number of its most significant characteristics, with most sureness and with least caprice. When Ruskin spoke of The Mill on the Floss as "a study of cutaneous disease" he illustrated admirably the nature of a false subordination in criticism. The more one attempts to justify this judgment by evidence, the more untenable it becomes. When Mr. J. A. Symonds spoke once of Walt Whitman as "more truly Greek than any other man of modern times," the classification was to most people perhaps as little obvious as the other, but we have only to bring forward the evidence, to reveal the caracteres essentiels of Whitman, and we find that it is justified. While Taine, with an imperfect conception of criticism, has been influencing continental thought, Matthew Arnold, with an equally imperfect conception, has had a wide influence on English thought. If his definition of criticism is quite 22



	Views and Reviews amiable platitudes of a certain Bishop Wilson. How characteristic is this passage for instance: "What an antidote to the perilous Methodist doctrine of instantaneous sanctification is this saying of Bishop Wilson: ' He who fancies that his mind may effectually be changed in a short time deceives himself'!" The curious limitations of Matthew Arnold's power, as revealed in occasional calm and arbitrary failures of judgment--the note of provincialism, as he would himself call it--are so obvious, and to many people, so irritating, that they have frequently aroused ample discussion, and need not be alluded to here. Nor is it necessary to speak of his habit of inventing a catchword, and then repeating it in varying tones and inflexions of voice, as if endeavouring to impress some new meaning on the word, a trick which has been caught by some of those whom Mr. Arnold has influenced. Professor Seeley, for example, not long ago undertook to tell us that Goethe is a serious writer--a serious writer. Sainte-Beuve, from whom many of Matthew Arnold's best qualities derive, was singularly free from such peculiarities of method. In the preceding critical generation he was, as his English disciple said, "the prince of critics." One wishes sometimes that Mr. Arnold possessed something of Sainte-Beuve's freedom from prejudice. There is, however, another and more fundamental weakness in his critical work, a weakness which is, I think, 24



	Views and Reviews. to understand his humour, the usual irresistible tendency to moralise which prompts him to sum up by saying that Heine produced nothing but "a half result." But Heine is peculiarly difficult to criticise. How many books and essays have been written about him, and how little true criticism they contain! Perhaps, indeed, the time has not yet come for a really wide and deep appreciation of his marvellous individuality. At present the only fairly complete critical account of Heine that I know of in England is contained in a careful and rather dull paper which appeared in the Contemporary a few years ago, and which was written by a Mr. Charles Grant. Let us, then, look at Mr. Arnold's article on "Keats" in Ward's English Poets. Who has not heard of Keats' "natural magic"? Here, in the shortest compass, Mr. Arnold displays all the charm of his most exquisite literary style. And yet his unhappy tendency to moralise, his resolve "not to persist in pressing forward," but to enjoy merely the superficial aspect of things, make it impossible to say that these pages, delightful as they are, bear on them the stamp of true critical insight. After all, we must never forget all that we owe to Matthew Arnold. M. Bourget says of Renan that he is "1'homme superieur." Matthew Arnold is the English "homme superieur," though not in quite the same sense. It is the superiority voulu of a pedagogue. If, however, he appears to possess the hereditary instincts of a schoolmaster, 26



	Views and Reviews Mr. Myers is concerned not to get to the heart of his subject, but to give us charming and interesting passages, stimulating and profitable suggestions--"the best that is known and thought in the world." There are luminous points of criticism here and there, but they are not frequent. It is a pleasant essay, it is not criticism. It might be said that Mr. Myers is writing of a foreign author, not, like M. Bourget, of a native writer, with whom he could suppose his readers to be well acquainted, or, like Georg Brandes, who writes avowedly for all Europe. Let us turn, then, to his essay on "Rossetti and the Religion of Beauty." I have read this essay several times since it first appeared in the Cornhill; there is something so charming about it that it is by no means difficult to read; but I must confess that every time I reach the end of it no definite impression remains on my mind. It is witty sometimes; it is carefully written; I frequently feel that Mr. Myers is about to touch the heart of his subject; but he goes round and round, and never seems to get any nearer. He beats the bush with admirable dexterity, and the reader looks on expectantly, but nothing appears. There are certain flames in literature--Heine, Rossetti, Whitman--into which the critical moth in England loves to dash, and Mr. Myers, like the rest, appears to singe his wings with great satisfaction. Another English critic, Mr. Theodore Watts, has dealt with Rossetti much more successfully. 28



	Views and Reviews strenuously devoted himself to criticism of such serious and enduring quality. I have alluded to another writer who has been singularly fortunate or unfortunate in attracting the attention of critics. It would be difficult even to name the critics who have attempted to gauge the depth or shallowness of Whitman's genius, for the most part, not even excepting an interesting attempt of Professor Dowden's, in a somewhat ineffectual manner. Strange to say, it is in the prophet's own country, and from a writer who is not pre-eminently a critic, that the most adequate appreciation of Whitman has so far proceeded. In an essay, entitled too fancifully The Flight of the Eagle, John Burroughs shows very remarkable precision of judgment, and power of synthetic criticism. His range of criticism, though narrow, is true within its own limits. Narrowness of range marks some of our best critics. Mr. Pater, if he has nothing else in common with Burroughs, is a true critic within an almost equally narrow range, and with a similar synthetic method. Mr. Burroughs' range is that of large, virile, catholic, sweet-blooded things; he is half on the side of Emerson, but altogether on the side of Rabelais, of Shakespeare, of Whitman. Mr. Pater is not, indeed, on the side of "Zoroaster and the saints"; but there is no room in his heart for the things that Mr. Burroughs loves. For him there is nothing so good in the world as the soft, spiritual aroma--telling, as nothing else tells, of the very 30



	Views and Reviews a critic of the first order, and that critics of the first order are rare. With so definite, and apparently fruitful a method, one might have thought that all things were possible for Mr. Pater. But a fairly catholic critic like Sainte-Beuve--for with all his cynical caution Sainte-Beuve was catholic--rarely has a definite method, a method to which he adheres. However it may be in the future, the critic, in his largest development, hitherto has been a highly-evolved and complex personality, whose judgments have proceeded from the almost spontaneous reaction of his own nature with the things with which he has come in contact; and so long as that is the case, the main point is to ascertain the exact weight and quality of the factor which the critic himself brings. In that way, while we shall still be nothing less than infinitely removed from the realisation of so primitive a conception of the critic's function as Matthew Arnold's--"to see the thing as in itself it really is"--can we only at present truly attain a sound criticism. Mr. J. A. Symonds, among English critics, possesses, I think unquestionably, the most marked catholicity. He has not, like Mr. Pater, the advantage or disadvantage of a definite method. He lives and moves in "the free atmosphere of art, which is nature permeated by emotion." This allows him at once a large scope, both for analytic criticism and for mere description. Description, it is scarcely necessary to say, is not always criticism; and Mr. Symonds, 32



	Views and Reviews of underlying sanity and calm. One can always see the restless passion that throbs beneath the iron mail of his logic. Mr. Symonds, also, is free from the limitations of the specialist critic. His account of Shelley in the "Men of Letters" series is, on the whole, the best that has yet appeared; in Ward's English Poets he has written a short criticism of Byron which sums up admirably whatever makes Byron great and significant. It is rare to find a critic who is equally receptive to these two so diverse artistic individualities. Taine, with all his ostentation of scientific apparatus, has his well-marked proclivities. When one thinks of Taine one thinks of the things that are most exuberant, elemental, bitter, that burst forth from the lowest depth of the human consciousness--of Rubens, of Shakespeare, of Swift. We see his insatiable passion for all that is fiercest and most concentrated in the elemental manifestations of human hatred and revenge in his Revolution. Mr. Symonds, with a much less definite method, has less definite prejudices. But he also takes peculiar delight in a certain order of individuality. Like Taine, he is attracted by the manifestations of elemental passion; his intellectual energy is satisfied by the bold, strong, unemotional imagination of the Italian novellieri, or the same imagination with its profound moral and emotional reverberations in the Elizabethan dramatists.. Perhaps, however, it is the natural rather than the fiendish aspects of passion to which he is attracted, 34