The Little Review, March 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 1)

by Various

Mrs. Ellis’s Gift to Chicago

Mary Adams Stearns

Love, eugenics, marriage, are not three questions, but merely different aspects of the one great sex problem, which, according to Mrs. Havelock Ellis, must be solved within the hearts and souls of men and women and not by the acts of any legislative body. Those who braved the wind and the rain to hear this well known writer and thinker talk about “Sex and Eugenics” were filled with sharp expectancy as she stepped forward to speak—a short woman about fifty years old, with iron gray hair cut close to her head, piercing blue eyes, eloquent hands and a low voice, wonderfully modulated and seemingly as tireless as her poised, vigorous body; yet expectation seldom fulfills the bright dreams it dangles before our eyes. We let ourselves be carried away with enthusiasm, and then are hurt because our visions lack fulfillment. Some expected too much.

Chicago has welcomed Mrs. Ellis warmly, yet within this cordiality there have been hidden germs of fear, unreasonable hopes, slavish admiration, mental indifference and misunderstanding—it is always so. She is without question in the foremost ranks of women thinkers, and behind her, trying more or less sincerely to gain an understanding of the great truths that she teaches and upholds, are hordes of women—curious, broad-minded, bigoted, desperate, frightened, sane thinkers, and sentimentalists; women who are economic slaves and others who are financially independent. What does Mrs. Ellis mean to each one of them? What message, if any, has she brought? Has she added anything vital and new to our store of sex and eugenic knowledge which is already burdened with much mediocre and even valueless information?

Nothing but death could have kept me away from her lecture in Orchestra Hall February 4th—to which after considerable unnecessary hesitation men were admitted. Although I knew that I was approaching a burning bush I felt it was doomed to be hidden in a cloud of misapprehension, disappointment, and disapproval, and I walked gingerly with my mind open and unprejudiced and alert. I was fully as eager to catch the atmosphere of the audience, to fathom the thoughts of the thousand odd brains that listened, as I was to see and hear Mrs. Ellis herself.

The lecture was an event. The dignity, the lack of sensationalism, the quiet earnestness of what was said revealed a force at work in the world as steady and inevitable as the glacier’s erosion of the Swiss hills. Yet this quality of Mrs. Ellis’s mind is shown in all she writes and is shared by all who read her pages. Her great gift to Chicago was her personality. It gleamed through every word she spoke and blazed into a pure white flame, that seemed by its very intensity to create a new heaven and a new earth where love shall rise Phoenix-like from the ashes of souls and bodies consumed by a misunderstood and misused passion.

There were well-known and influential women who stayed away from the lecture because they were afraid—afraid of the truth. Because in their blindness they could not see behind the cheap sensationalism of certain newspapers and understand the spiritual purity for which Mrs. Ellis has always stood. Yet their absence showed them not so much cowards as women incapable of reaching the great white lights of life.

Then there were women who came to the lecture expecting to be shocked; and they went away disappointed. There were women who came laughing and gossiping; and they went away still laughing and wondering what all the fuss was about anyway. They could not see anything extraordinary; it was all rather commonplace and not altogether new.

And a few came quietly, knowing that they were to contact a great earnest and wonderful personality; who above all her broad wisdom stands for the highest ideals that humanity knows—a little woman with a big mind. These went away thoughtfully, and were satisfied, for they understood.

They felt as well as did Mrs. Ellis herself what could and what could not be said on a public platform to a gathering of more than a thousand prejudiced and in some cases antagonistic listeners. They had in their minds, as of course she had also, knowledge of the many scientific volumes that her husband has written. Those familiar with Havelock Ellis were better prepared to listen than the others. They were grounded in the facts and science of sex which has never been disclosed as he has done it, and those who have read his pages know that in them he is the complete scientist, weighing, comparing, crediting, and discrediting the facts that have come to him. In no way are his sex studies propagandic—they are a tremendous reservoir of static power. It has been for his wife and co-worker, she of independent mind and high purpose, to take all this vast collection of scientific information in her small hands, crush out the sordidness, the misery, the heart-sickening perversions and distortions of human lives and holding up the bright ideals, fling them out to her listeners in phrases burning with hope for both men and women and faith that true love will make everything whole.

She did not pose as a righter of personal grievances or a solver of private woes. The individual was lost in the group; details were submerged in generalities; isolated examples made way for guiding principles. When Mrs. Ellis said “We must improve our knowledge if we would improve our morals” and that there can be no guide to right living except that which comes from within, she gave us the key to happiness.

If one might guess, she is a little impatient with laws and quite out of sympathy with those who, knowing but little themselves, try to bind others by rules and regulations which often defeat the very ends for which they were made. “What we want is more eugenics by education, and less eugenics by legislation” she cried; and what she implied many times was that when we come to regard sex love as one of the greatest manifestations of the soul—not one of the offensive expressions of the body—then and then only shall we have eugenic babies and happy men and women.

Mrs. Ellis referred to the sex function as a “great spiritual enterprise” and said that only through the conflict of ideals can progress be made. With “courage, sanity, and cleanliness” in our hearts we must “cease to regard sex as mere animalism,” and must “forge passion into power.” “The sex function is divine fire,” it is “as much an affair of the soul as of the body” and “it is no more disgraceful to function on the sex plane than on the hunger plane or on the thirst plane.” She sees that only in the economic independence of women can sex relations be righted—love and money must be completely divorced. Any form of barter, whether lawfully within marriage or unlawfully outside of marriage, is fatal to the free giving of love. Sex love must exist only where there is affinity—never where there is question of possession. Only by being economically free can a woman raise herself above the rank of a prostitute.

Mrs. Ellis spoke of our changing ideals; that what is normal for the ape is gross for the average man and woman, and that what has been accepted as inevitable by ordinary men and women will be utterly intolerable to the super men and women of the near future. “The woman of the future will be the high priestess of sense, not the victim of sensuality as she now is.” “She will learn to love beautifully and live joyfully.” She referred to the way our bodies have sunk into disrepute ever since Greek times until to the Puritans everything was impure and emphasized the fact that “our bodies and our souls are not enemies, but mates.”

Mrs. Ellis could not in a lecture of this sort have touched upon special sexual situations. She was raising the standards of purity, right living, and sanity; she was creating ideals, she was destroying sordidness, she was upholding the sanctity of knowledge and holiness of a love that is free to give or withhold. She was showing women their weakness and pointing out where men have been tyrannical; she was creating a divine dissatisfaction in every soul that heard her. She was the angel fearing to tread where legislative and police fools rush in and slash about with the sword of reform.

“Create in us clean hearts and our bodies will take care of themselves,” seemed to be her prayer. She showed the goals of happiness and right living; revealed that her own life had proved these things and found them good. Those who went away disappointed were those who expected her to lay down rules and say “This shall you do and that, but not the other thing.” But that is not Mrs. Ellis’s way. She shows us what it is possible to do, but she distinctly leaves it to every individual to find his or her own way, unhampered by law, and free to make mistakes if unavoidable. She points out that some of the world’s greatest geniuses have been neurotics, as Oscar Wilde, Michael Angelo, Chopin, Rosa Bonheur, Nietszche. We must make our own paths by looking within, not trusting to man-made laws and customs.

Those who found the lecture vague and unsatisfactory must increase their knowledge, not expect a woman to tell in thirty-five minutes all she has learned in thirty-five years. Was it not enough for her to confess that we must engage in the sex relation with a “fine passionateness and spiritual deviltry”? Was it not enough for her to set up the ideal that the sex function is the “great spiritual enterprise”? Was it not enough for her to set before men and women the highest ideals that the human mind had yet conceived? And was it not enough to look at and to listen to a woman who knows whereof she speaks and who has lived all that she teaches?

She has found her way through the same clouds of prejudice and prudery that surround us, and to us of Chicago she has given the great privilege of sharing with her what she called the proudest moment of her life and of listening to what, for the first time in her life, she could freely say. Those looking for cheap sensations will not find them in Mrs. Ellis. Those trying to limit human action by passing laws will receive no help from her words. Those hampered by conventions and shackled by fear of the truth must be born again into the beauty and holiness of every side of human life before they can even see the heights whereon Mrs. Ellis stands. Let those who would find happiness for themselves and a happy issue out of the sufferings of the men and women and children and unborn babes, look into their own hearts and bravely face what is there.

Women have always run away from anything sexual as unwomanly. She must face her own nature; she must learn that to most women “the sex impulse is the hunger of her soul”; she must study men and find a way to raise them from the errors into which they have fallen. She must cease to be a prude, and learn to be brave, patient, wise; she must study, read and think. Nothing is unwomanly save dishonesty, and until women are honest enough and fearless enough to face what is within themselves, neither Mrs. Ellis nor anyone else can help them. Mrs. Ellis is a leader, not a driver, and because she has found life good she is an inspiration which no woman can afford to disregard.

Mrs. Ellis’s Failure

Margaret C. Anderson

There was one great fault to be found with Mrs. Ellis’s lecture: it was not illuminating. It might have failed in any number of other ways and still have been a real contribution; but it should not have dared to fall short in that respect, because Mrs. Ellis came forward in the role of one who has a message and because she chose a subject upon which one must have a message or not talk at all. What Mrs. Ellis did is the kind of thing against which our generation has its deepest grudge, and it constitutes a very special case of what we mean when we talk so heatedly about Truth. We mean nothing startling by that:—simply that quality which some one has had the good sense to call “releasing.”

A few days before the lecture Mrs. Ellis said that she might as well call her talk anything except merely “Sex and Eugenics,” because she meant to discuss love, spiritually, sex abnormalities, and many other matters. “I have read all my husband’s manuscripts before they were published and I know he has never told anything but the truth about sex,” she said. “I have waited some thirty years to talk about these things, and I shall tell the truth as I know it, if I am sent to jail or put out of Chicago for it.” On another occasion she said that she meant to talk of those people who, through perverted or inverted sexual tendencies, faced the problem of having to turn their abnormality—perhaps their gift of genius, if we understood these things better—into creative channels. Because of all this it was only natural to expect a message from Mrs. Ellis.

But what actually happened was this: Dr. W. A. Evans opened the meeting by reading a short paper on Havelock Ellis—a paper full of pompous phrases and of real interest in its utter lack of thought. He gave some biographical data which everyone knew, told the dates of Mr. Ellis’s various publications, repeated the chapter titles of one of his less important works, and really said nothing at all. Then Mrs. Ellis read a paper which her husband had written especially for the occasion—the most uninteresting thing that wonderful man has ever written, I am sure. It had a lot of abstractions about masculinism and feminism, and really said nothing at all. (I use the word “nothing” on a basis of Ideas.) Then Mrs. Ellis read her own paper, which was beautifully written and charmingly delivered, and which said nothing at all. She said in brief that there should be no war between body and soul, and that Oscar Wilde should have been understood rather than sent to jail. These things are not ideas; they are common sense. They are all quite simply recognized by thinking people; and most of Mrs. Ellis’s audience was composed of thinking people who wanted her individual philosophy on these matters. They were not asking her for art but for thought—not for expression but for meaning. Her failure was of the sort of which prophets are never guilty.

Of course, Mrs. Ellis may not wish to be considered a prophet or a philosopher. Then there should not have been so much talk of offering a completely new view of sex. She may regard herself as a poet, an interpreter. Very well; then she should have given a substantial vision of a future state when love in all its aspects is valued and understood. Mrs. Ellis cannot be blamed for the sensational stories in the paper. Her suggestion that men be admitted to the lecture because they need education in this field as much as women need it, was made simply and without any thought of sensation. Everybody knows what the press will make of such material as that. And everybody knows how an organization managed exclusively by women is likely to be twisted into silly, sentimental, or malicious issues. But Mrs. Ellis can be blamed for that attitude which promises more than it has to give, and very seriously blamed for that spirit which hints that there may be cause for shame where there is no cause. There has been something altogether too suggestive of “Did my lecture shock you?” in Mrs. Ellis’s attitude. These things are not shocking; they are beautiful or terrible, according as they are understood or misrepresented, but so long as the truth about them is faced squarely they should carry no hint of shock. The only test of an “emerged personality” is its arrival at a point where it is not shocked by anything human beings may do or be. You may be deeply moved or terribly hurt, but you are not merely offended or embarrassed or startled. All that brings things down to such a little scale. I don’t know just why, but Mrs. Ellis’s attitude has reminded me of the man who advised me not to read Havelock Ellis’s volumes on the psychology of sex, because after such an experience I could never respect human beings again. If he had been ignorant or puritanical his remark wouldn’t have mattered; but he was a rather well-known sexologist and he believed those books to be very valuable! What he meant was that it is “so disillusioning” to know the truth. If Mrs. Ellis were that sort of person these things I object to wouldn’t matter in the least. As it is, they matter hugely. Her failure to assume that knowledge is too important a thing to concern itself with people’s pruderies is on a par with the man’s failure to recognize that truth is never disastrous.

Nearly all the people in Orchestra Hall that night had read Ellis and Carpenter and Weininger and other scientists, and they expected to hear how far Mrs. Ellis’s personal views coincided or disagreed with these authorities. But she had no intention of such elucidation, it seems. She didn’t say what she thought about free love, free divorce, social motherhood, birth-control, the sex “morality” of the future, or any of these things. On the other side of the question, in her reference to intermediate types, she didn’t mention homosexuality; she had nothing to say about the differences between perversion and inversion, nor did she even hint at Carpenter’s social efforts in behalf of the homosexualist. What does Mrs. Ellis think about Weininger’s statement that intermediate sexual forms are “normal, not pathological phenomena, in all classes of organisms, and their appearance is no proof of physical decadence?” Does she agree with him, in his reference to the idea that inversion is an acquired character and one that has superseded normal sexual impulses, when he says, “It might equally be sought to prove that the sexual inclination of a normal man for a normal woman was an unnatural, acquired habit. In the abstract there is no difference between the normal and the inverted type. In my view all organisms have both homosexuality and heterosexuality.... In spite of all present-day clamor about the existence of different rights for different individualities, there is only one law that governs mankind just as there is only one logic and not several logics. It is in opposition to that law as well as to the theory of punishment according to which the legal offense, not the moral offense, is punished, that we forbid the homosexualist to carry on his practices whilst we allow the heterosexualist full play, so long as both avoid open scandal. Speaking from the standpoint of a purer state of humanity and of a criminal law untainted by the pedagogic idea of punishment as a deterrent, the only logical and rational method of treatment for sexual inverts would be to allow them to seek and obtain what they require where they can, that is to say, among other inverts.” It is not enough to repeat that Shakespeare and Michael Angelo and Alexander The Great and Rosa Bonheur and Sappho were intermediates: how is this science of the future to meet these issues? They move into the realm of the world’s sublime tragedies when one reads the manifesto of a community of such people in Germany:—“The rays of sunshine in the night of our existence are so rare that we are responsive and deeply grateful for the least movement, for every single voice that speaks in our favor in the forum of mankind.” Mrs. Ellis may have thought her audience entirely too unsophisticated, too untutored in these matters, to admit of specific treatment. But that is all the greater reason to talk plainly. When you reflect how difficult it is for the mass to become educated about sex it becomes rather appalling. It is worth your life to get Havelock Ellis’s six volumes from a bookstore or a library. You can only do it with a doctor’s certificate or something of that sort. Even if you ask for Weininger you are taken behind locked doors, forced to swear that you want it out of no “morbid curiosity,” that you will keep it only a week, and above all that you won’t let anyone else read it. Of course, it is practically impossible to do work of this sort under the auspices of women’s medical leagues or similar organizations. But Mrs. Ellis had dared the impossible. I can’t help comparing her with another woman whose lecture on such a subject would be big, brave, beautiful.... I am criticised for having too much about this other woman in The Little Review; so “not to mention any names,” as the story goes, I will merely say that Emma Goldman could never fail in this way.

It is not a question of what could or could not be said on a public platform; it is a question of what should be said. If the findings of science are not to be made accessible, we must all find ourselves in the position of Rousseau when he said that the renascence of the arts and sciences had not ennobled morals. Isn’t that almost as true now as then? A week ago, as I write, a young man named Roswell Smith was hanged in Chicago for having strangled a four-year-old girl. He had no recollection of the murder, and his father’s testimony brought out the fact that the boy had always been epileptic. Since he must die for his “crime”—oh, the heart-breaking tragedy of his quiet acceptance of that hellish law!—Smith begged that he be allowed to die under the knife, so that at least humanity might benefit by an examination of his brain. But, no—he must be hanged: Justice must be done, the public wrath appeased, the penalty held up to other criminals, prevention enforced again by methods which don’t prevent! The governor, unwilling to risk public indignation, salved his conscience by the testimony of one alienist who pronounced Smith “sane.” And so the boy paid the penalty, to the accompaniment of Psalms and readings from the Word—the “Light of the world!” ... And sixty people watched the murder and not a voice was raised in protest. Think of it!—or rather don’t think of it unless you are willing to lose your mind with horror and shame.

How far have we advanced when things like this can still happen among us? With us love is just as punishable as murder or robbery. Mrs. Ellis knows the workings of our courts; she knows of boys and girls, men and women, tortured or crucified every day for their love—because it is not expressed according to conventional morality. All this was part of her responsibility on February 4th; and this is why I say she failed.

The Acrobat

Eloise Briton

Poised like a panther on a bough

He swings and leaps.

His taut body flashes clear,

And in a long blue arc cuts the hushed air

Tense as a cry.

The keen, sharp wind of Death

Blows after like his shadow, and I feel

A strange beast stir in me.

I almost wish

That which I cannot think,

A scream, a falling body ...

A new thrill!

But he shoots onward, arms outstretched

To clutch at life as it speeds past.

His hands grip vise-like;

With a wrench

That half uproots his fingers, he has caught,

And airily

He twists about the bar

And comes to rest.

Sidewise he sits, and carelessly

High up among the winds,

His taut body

Grown lax and restful.

He smiles—

As a vain child, pleased with himself, he smiles,

While our applause comes up

Like incense.

He breathes a moment deeply.

Then again the supple form grows tense,

All wire, all vibrant,

Poised for one tingling breath

Before another flight.

I watch him

And a quick desire comes over me

Of those slim hips,

Those long! clean! slender limbs

That stand for health, and for the sheer

Keen beauty of the body.

I desire him.

And I desire the spirit of the man,

The bodily fearlessness,

The reckless courage in a swaddled age.

I desire him.

How lithe and firm would be the child

Of such a man....

A Young American Poet

Richard Aldington

It is the defect of English, and in a lesser degree of American, criticism that such criticisms as are not merely commercial are doctrinaire. The critic, that is to say, comes to judge a work of art not with an open mind but with a whole horde of prejudices, ignorances, and eruditions which he terms “critical standards.” “A work of art,” you can hear him say, “must be this, must be that, must be the other,” when indeed a work of art may well be no such thing. Just now the cry is all for “modernity,” for lyrical outbursts in praise of machinery, of locomotion, and of violence. And the “critics” obediently fill their minds with these prejudices until at length you discover them solemnly declaring that a work of art has no value except it treat of machinery, of locomotion or of kindred subjects! I have yet to find the critic who approaches his job in the right spirit; who asks himself first, What has the artist attempted to do?, and then, Has he succeeded? The commercial critic is of course the more reprehensible; the doctrinaire critic is nevertheless a serious menace to that liberty of the arts of which one cannot be too jealous. In England especially the doctrinaire critic reigns. Yesterday it was all Nietzsche; then Bergson; now there is a wild fight between a dozen “isms,” combats between traditional imbeciles and revolutionary imbeciles. So that one spends half one’s time becoming an “ist” and the rest of the time in getting rid of the title.

The neglect of the poems of the young American poet—H. D.—who is the subject of this article, is due, I think to the following facts. The author, who apparently possesses a great degree of self-criticism, produces a very small bulk of work and most of it is lost in magazines; such work as attained publicity was judged, before being read, from its surroundings; the work being original, seemed obscure and wantonly destructive of classic English models (you must remember that there are very, very few people in England who have the faintest idea of what is meant by vers libre); the use of initials rather frightened people; and the author had no friends among the professional critics.

Now America has this advantage over most European countries that its inhabitants are mostly willing to accept a fresh view of things. The lack of a “tradition” has advantages as well as disadvantages. An American author, then, is less likely to see things in a conventional way, and is less likely to be deterred from any novel and personal method of expression. (For in 1911, when H. D. began to write the poems I am considering, vers libre was practically unheard of outside France.)

If I were asked to define the chief quality of H. D.’s work I should say: “I can only explain it by a paradox; it is a kind of accurate mystery.” And I should go on to quote the ballad of Sir Patric Spens in which from a cloudy, vague, obscure atmosphere, where nothing is precise, where there is no “story,” no obvious relation between the ideas, certain objects stand out very sharply and clearly with a very keen effect, objects like “the bluid-red wine,” “the braid letter,” the young moon in the old moon’s arms, and the ladies with “their fans intil their hands.” And then I should go on to say that this “accurate mystery” came from the author’s brooding over—not locomotives and machinery—but little corners of gardens, a bit of a stream in some Pennsylvanian meadow, from memories of afternoons along the New Jersey coast, or of a bowl of flowers. Curious, mysterious, rather obscure sort of broodings with startling and very accurate renderings of detail. And then I should explain the author’s use of Hellenic terms and of the rough unaccented metres of Attic choruses and Melic lyrics—like those fragments of Alcaeus and Ibycus and Erinna—by pointing out that it is in those poems—the choruses in the Bacchae, for example—that this particular kind of brooding over nature found its best expression.

Let me quote a portion of a poem to illustrate these qualities: the quality which I have called “accurate mystery,” the quality of brooding over nature and the quality of spontaneous kinship with certain aspects of Hellenic poetry. I take it that, if one liked to be specifically modern the poem could be called “Wind on the New Jersey Coast.” But the author’s innate sense of mystery, of aloofness, just like that of the anonymous author of Sir Patric Spens, makes her place the action in some vague, distant place and time. Though it be contrary to current opinion I hold that the poem gains by this.