Dance Dance Dance

The Dance of Life – Havelock Ellis

This book was a best-seller in 1923. It is a collection of essays on the arts of dancing, thinking, writing, religion, and morals. The point of view is not quite philosophy, but instead an orientation, a general outlook, or approach to thinking about these big issues. The intended audience is intelligent people, shocked and demoralized by the capacity of so-called civilized peoples to slaughter its young men in the carnage of World War I. In the introduction, Ellis says, optimistically, he writes for people who are already on his side, i.e. people who realize all of us together somehow create the spirit of the age in which we live.

… Vaihinger's philosophy* is not only of interest because it presents so clearly and vigorously a prevailing tendency in modern thought. Rightly understood, it supplies a fortifying influence to those who may have seen their cherished spiritual edifice, whatever it may be, fall around them and are tempted to a mood of disillusionment.  We make our own world; when we have made it awry, we can remake it, approximately truer, though it cannot be absolutely true, to the facts. It will never be finally made; we are always stretching forth to larger and better fictions which answer more truly to our growing knowledge and experience.

British physician and paragon of Edwardian progressive thought, Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) became famous - notorious, in many quarters - for his seven volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1928). He was a boy genius that read everything from a young age, having vast amounts of time when he lived in the Australian bush. He was thus deeply read in the visual and performing arts, literature, the natural sciences and medicine, world history, and travel narratives that doubled as early anthropology. Faced with reviewing yet another of Ellis’ 41 books, H.L. Mencken, American magazine editor and critic, said, “The extent of his knowledge is appalling.”

The problem with the book is the problem with many scholars in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. He is rather an armchair culture maven, depending on secondary sources and the conclusions of those who were more observers than experts (e.g. Livingston as ethnologist). Also, Ellis uses terms loosely, even for me, not too rigorous a reader much less a demanding pedant. For example, I get the feeling that like a lot liberal social reformers in the Teens and Twenties, he doesn’t think through eugenics and see what the right and other vicious elements in our society would happily do to vulnerable people they thought “unfit.”

But for all the looseness of terms and not knowing what we know now, Ellis’ simple and sincere style is persuasive for those readers who read to affirm forward movement (progress, improvement, little sadness and fretting, a little serenity) in their own lives. Like I said, this book is not about dogma or philosophy or mysticism but a general orientation toward life.

* We willingly accept falsehoods or fictions in order to live peacefully in an irrational world.