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