Havelock Ellis

“ She was alone and studying Art. She asked of the women folk the meaning of marriage, and wanted to be chaperoned until she had made up her mind whether to take the big step or not. Not so long after her enlightenment, she announced her wedding, and with none other than the now well-known writer—Havelock Ellis. Ellis seems to me an example of a man who took up one subject, stuck to it, and absorbed it thoroughly—a procedure almost always destined for success when accompanied by brains. ”

“ As a first step towards bursting upon Humanity in the guise of Universal Healer, he had taken Havelock Ellis in large indigestible doses, concluding inflexibly that all trouble dated, not so much from Adam and Eve as from Lilith, who made of them Two, instead of One, like herself.
"Originally, we were in all probability One Perfect Sex," he told Ferlie. "Artificial experimenting caused the split, which, naturally, left one sex the complement of the other. We find the old allegory of Jupiter dividing by sword the race of gods which, having created, he had begun to fear. ”

“ 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. ”

“ STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX VOLUME I: The Evolution Of Modesty;
The Phenomena Of Sexual Periodicity; Auto-Erotism By Havelock Ellis 1927: Third Edition, Revised And Enlarged CONTENTS GENERAL PREFACE. PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
THE EVOLUTION OF MODESTY. I.
The Definition of Modesty—The Significance of Modesty—Difficulties in the Way of Its Analysis—The Varying Phenomena of Modesty Among Different Peoples and in Different Ages. ”

“ The author’s criticism of Havelock Ellis’s theory ‘that a condition of diffused minor abnormality in physical structure, consisting in approach to the feminine type, is the basis of congenital inversion; that inversion is bound up with a modification of the secondary sexual characters’ is that in my own case the attraction toward the male sex was powerful as early as the age of three, when there is probably no difference between the physical type of the normal and of the inverted male. ”

“ Nietzsche, as is well known, denies this emotional capacity of women, and considers them much more remarkable for their intelligence than for their sensitiveness and feeling. I believe, however, the view of Havelock Ellis to be the right one. Throughout Nature it would seem to be indispensable that the mother should have finer and quicker sensibility than the father. The female selects the male that she may use him for the race. Women, for the reasons we have seen, have, as I believe, lost much of the fineness of their selective sensitiveness. ”

“ In his work, although it reveals traces of the conventional admiration for the fair, there is a marked and unusual admiration for distinctly dark women, the women resembling the stock to which he himself belonged. See Havelock Ellis, "The Color Sense in Literature," Contemporary Review, May, 1896.
[176]
It is noteworthy that in the Round-About, already referred to, although no man expresses a desire to meet a short woman, when he refers to announcements by women as being such as would be likely to suit him, the persons thus pointed out are in a notable proportion short. ”

“ He remembers liking the caresses of his father's footmen when he was quite a little boy. He dreams indifferently about men and women, and has strong sexual feeling for women. Can copulate, but does not insist on this act; there is a tendency to refined, voluptuous pleasure. He has been married for many years, and there are several children by the marriage.
He is not particular about the class or age of the men he loves. He feels with regard to older men as a women does, and likes to be caressed by them. He is immensely vain of his physical beauty ”

“ Ellis and his wife are the most competent writers on this difficult and delicate subject, so beset by fraudulent theories and so much written upon by charlatans. Let me recommend to you Havelock Ellis’s slender book, Little Essays of Love and Virtue, for a sane, attractive and, at the same time, authoritative handling of sex problems.
iv
Little Essays of Love and Virtue, however, is, after all, only upon a special subject, even though of extreme importance. ”

“ My eyes are bistre-brown. I have been told that I look like a woman around the eyes, and when youthful have been complimented on their beauty, and my general appearance pronounced not unprepossessing. I have been pursued by women, and have received three proposals of marriage. In general the women who have seemed to be attracted toward me have been a few years older than myself. Havelock Ellis has said ("Sexual Inversion," page 140) that "women seem with special frequency to fall in love with disguised persons of their own sex." Your author is really a woman whom Nature disguised as a man. ”

“ In London, in 1912, a servant-girl of 23 was charged in the Acton Police Court with being "disorderly and masquerading," having assumed man's clothes and living with another girl, taller and more handsome than herself, as husband and wife. She had had slight brain trouble as a child, and was very intelligent, with a too active brain; in her spare time she had written stories for magazines. The two girls became attached through doing Christian social work together in their spare time, and resolved to live as husband and wife to prevent any young man from coming forward. ”

“ By means of such a book as Love and the Soul Maker it may be possible for even the ossifying brains of dogmatists to catch a glimmer of light on our present sex problems, while such dazzlingly and ruthlessly true books as Havelock Ellis writes may petrify several additional lobes. ”

“ He told me later that he enjoyed his life with her much more than his intercourse with boys. I asked him why he went with boys at all, and he replied: "'Cause there ain't women enough. If I can't get them I've got to have the other."
It is in gaols that one sees the worst side of this perversion. In the daytime the prisoners are let out into a long hall, and can do much as they please; at night they are shut up, two and even four in a cell. If there are any boys in the crowd, they are made use of by all who care to have them. If they refuse to submit, they are gagged and held down. ”

“ I persuaded A. to go to Melbourne and look out for an engagement. The day before she was to sail we went to Glenelg for a trip. The sea air, as often happened, precipitated A.'s fits. We had gone down to the pier and A. said she felt bad. I just managed to support her to the hotel before she became stiff, and I made some impatient remark (for she nearly dragged me down) which she heard, not being quite unconscious and said half incoherently and very pitiably: "Be kind, oh, be kind!" repeating it after consciousness left her. ”

“ Still to-day it stands at the mouth of the gloomy cavern of Nature, even of Human Nature, with bent back and shaded eyes, seeking intently to penetrate the gloom beyond, with the fear of that threatening darkness, with the desire of what redeeming miracle it yet perchance may hold. ”

“ Early left an orphan, on the death of her only brother she put on his clothes and went to Edinburgh, working as a man. Her secret was discovered during an illness, and she finally went to America, where she lived as a man for thirty years, making money, and becoming somewhat notorious as a Tammany politician, a rather riotous "man about town." ”

“ I greeted her politely, but was watching her, trying to puzzle out why A. did not look as she usually did after long absence from coition. Miss T. took another room in the same house and was soon joined by another ballet girl, young and very pretty, who soon began to have fits. A. was always crying until Miss T. went away with her pretty friend. I knew nothing, could hardly be said to suspect anything definite, and yet I pitied that pretty girl whose eyes looked so helpless and appealing. ”

“ Various as the color of the hair, the odor of the armpit is infinitely divisible; its gamut covers the whole keyboard of odors, reaching the obstinate scents of syringa and elder, and sometimes recalling the sweet perfume of the rubbed fingers that have held a cigarette. Audacious and sometimes fatiguing in the brunette and the black woman, sharp and fierce in the red woman, the armpit is heady as some sugared wines in the blondes. ”

“ He is much attached to his mother, and she gives him some sympathy. He has a brother who is normally attracted to women. He himself has never been attracted to women, and takes no interest in them nor in their society.
At the age of 4 he first became conscious of an attraction for older males. From the ages of 11 and 19, at a large grammar-school, he had relationships with about one hundred boys. Needless to add, he considers homosexuality extremely common in schools. ”

“ Of infinite gladness and of infinite woe.
Was I long since thrust forth from Heaven's door,
Where in that music I had borne my part?
Or had this symphony its birth before
The pulse of nature turned to laws of art? ”

“ A song is started, and with small, slow steps this ring of bodies, like a winding snake, moves sideways, backward, closes, opens again, the steps become heavier, the songs and drums louder, the girls enter the circle and with closed eyes grasp the girdle of their chosen youths, who clasp them by the hips and necks, the chain becomes longer and longer, the dance and song more ardent, until the dancers grow tired and disappear in the gloom of the forest. ”

“ Jules P., aged 22, of good heredity on father's side, but bad on that of mother, who is highly hysterical, while his grandmother was very impulsive and sometimes pursued other women with a knife. He has one brother and one sister, who are somewhat morbid and original. He is himself healthy, intelligent, good looking, and agreeable, though with slightly morbid peculiarities. ”

“ And sometimes the revelation of the new life, springing up from within, comes amid the crowd in the feverish atmosphere of artificial shrines, maybe soon to shrivel up, and sometimes the blossoming forth takes place, perhaps more favourably, in the open air and under the light of the sun and amid the flowers, as it were to a happy faun among the hills. But when all disguises have been stripped away, it is always and everywhere the same simple process, a spiritual function which is almost a physiological function, an art which Nature makes. ”

“ April 1.—When the boisterous winds of March are at last touched with a new softness and become strangely exhilarating, when one sees the dry hedges everywhere springing into points of delicate green and white blossoms shining in the bare trees, then, for those who live in England and know that summer is still far away, the impulse of migration arises within. ”

“ For days it will take place in these valleys where the sun will rise on a dream of passionate voices, of clinging human forms, of flowers and waters, and the purple and gold of the sunrise are reflected on hills illumined with pansies. ”

“ Later she again saw the nurse's son, but was agreeably surprised to find that, though a good-looking youth, he no longer caused her any emotion, and he disappeared from her mind, though the erotic dreams concerning an unknown sobbing man still occurred rather frequently. During the next ten years she suffered from various disorders of more or less hysterical character, and, although not disinclined to the idea of marriage, she refused all offers, for no man attracted her. ”

“ The portal to a glorious temple may be through a dark and dreary narthex, to be traversed painfully, it may be on one's knees, a passage only illuminated in its last stages by exhilarating bursts of light as the door ahead momentarily swings open. ”

“ In an age when savagery has passed and civilisation has not arrived, it is only by stealth, at rare moments, that the human form may emerge from the prison house of its garments, it is only from afar that the radiance of its beauty—if beauty is still left to it—may faintly flash before us. ”

“ Here as I lie on the towans by a cloud of daisies among the waving and glistening grass, while the sea recedes along the stretching sands, and the cloudless sky throbs with the song of larks, and no human thing is in sight, it is, after all, of Humanity that I am most conscious. I realise that there is no human function so exalted or so rare, none so simple or so humble, that it has not its symbol in Nature; that if all the Beauty of Nature is in Man, yet all the Beauty of Man is in Nature. ”

“ The sight of a beautiful youth awakens astonishment in the lover, and opens the door of his heart to the delight which the contemplation of this loveliness affords. Love takes possession of him so completely that all his thought and feeling goes out in it. If he finds himself in the presence of the beloved, he rests absorbed in gazing on him. Absent, he thinks of nought but him. If the beloved unexpectedly appears, he falls into confusion, changes color, turns alternately pale and red. ”

“ So the sight of the Cornish coast, the prospect of seeing it, the very thought of its existence, has the exhilaration of a rapturous prayer. There—sometimes, at all events—the earth is exquisitely clean, the bright sea bubbles like champagne, and its mere mists are rainbow-hued dreams; the sky has flung off its dingy robe and is naked, beautiful, alive. Profoundly alien to me as I always feel this land of Cornwall to be, it is much to feel there something of that elemental reality of which men count God the symbol. ”