Little Essays on Love and Virtue

By Havelock Ellis

First published in 1922, this book contains a collection of fascinating essays on the subject of love and sexuality, written by Havelock Ellis. Henry Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) was an English physician, writer, eugenicist and social reformer who studied human sexuality. Ellis was also an early researcher into the effects of psychedelics and wrote one of the first reports on a mescaline experience in 1896. Originally aimed at adolescents, these essays explore such topics as the moral value of sexual pleasure, reasons for marriage, and the advantages of understanding sexuality from a scientific perspective. A fascinating collection not to be missed by those with an interest in sexuality and the history and development of related ideas. Contents include: “Children and Parents”, “The Meaning of Purity”, “The Objects of Marriage”, “Husbands and Wives”, “The Love-Rights of Women”, “The Play-Function of Sex”, and “The Individual and the Race”. Other notable works by this author include: “A Study of British Genius” (1904), “The Dance of Life” (1923), and “Psychology of Sex” (1933). Read & Co. Great Essays is republishing this collection of classic essays now in a new edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Feb 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781473370616

Book preview

1.png

LITTLE ESSAYS OF

LOVE AND VIRTUE

By

HAVELOCK ELLIS

First published in 1922

Copyright © 2020 Read & Co. Great Essays

This edition is published by Read & Co. Great Essays,

an imprint of Read & Co. 

This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any

way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd.

For more information visit

www.readandcobooks.co.uk

Contents

Havelock Ellis

PREFACE

CHAPTER I CHILDREN AND PARENTS

CHAPTER II THE MEANING OF PURITY

CHAPTER III THE OBJECTS OF MARRIAGE

CHAPTER IV HUSBANDS AND WIVES

CHAPTER V THE LOVE-RIGHTS OF WOMEN

CHAPTER VI THE PLAY-FUNCTION OF SEX

CHAPTER VII THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE

Havelock Ellis

Henry Havelock Ellis was born in Croydon, London, England, February 2, 1859. He was a physician, writer and social reformer whose primary interest was in human sexuality and orientation.

The son of Edward Peppen Ellis and Susannah Mary Wheatley, Havelock spent much of his early childhood travelling with his father, who was a sea captain. During one journey Havelock would visit Sydney, Callao and Antwerp. After returning to the United Kingdom, Havelock was educated at French and German College near Wimbledon, as well as at a school in Mitcham.

Upon leaving school, Havelock would continue his travels and sailed on his father’s ship to Australia. He arrived in Sydney, taking a position as a master in a private school, a position for which he had no training. The school, on discovering this fact, fired him and he took a job working for a family as a private tutor.

His career was stop-start, but eventually he found a position in charge of two elementary schools in New South Wales, where he would settle and write an autobiography. It was during this time that he engaged in profound reflection on his career and was inspired, in part by the solitude of the mountains in New South Wales, to begin a new career as a writer, studying sexuality.

After returning to England in 1879 he started on his path to studying human sexuality, and qualified as a physician. He studied first at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, now Kings College, London, which he paid for through his work as an editor of the Mermaid Series of Jacobean drama.

It wasn’t long before Havelock entered into the social circles of prominent English reformers. He would become a close associate of George Bernard Shaw and Edward Carpenter, among others. It was at this time that he published his first work, Sexual Inversion (1897), the first medical textbook on homosexuality, and one penned alongside prominent historian and social critic John Addignton Symonds.

The text was noted for its objective analysis of homosexuality, treating it neither as disease, immoral choice or crime and described the details of homosexual relationships in London, England at the time. Many of the studies included in his book were between men and young boys, scenes, which many today would consider child abuse.

It is difficult to overstate the effect that Ellis’ work had on later studies of sexuality both in the form of psychoanalysis and as a social phenomenon worthy of study itself. He coined the phrases narcissism and autoerotism, themes that would be placed centre stage in the works of Sigmund Freud.

Ellis was first among his contemporaries to describe in detail the lives and relationships of transgendered people, a typology he called eonism. Ellis attributed the characteristic to a transference of identity from subject to object and described it in terms that would not seem alien to psychoanalysts today. To Ellis, transgendered identities were one’s in limbo between two stages of sexual development: heterosexuality and homosexuality.

Ellis was a prominent eugenicist and served as vice president of the Eugenics Education Society. He married the prominent women’s rights activist, Edith Lees, who lived openly as a lesbian in separate accommodation to Ellis and whose relationship would become the central theme of his later autobiography, My Life (1939). By his death on July 8, 1939 Ellis had written over 45 texts on sex, philosophy, social theory and literature, making him one of the most prolific social commentators of the early Twentieth Century.

PREFACE

In these Essays—little, indeed, as I know them to be, compared to the magnitude of their subjects—I have tried to set forth, as clearly as I can, certain fundamental principles, together with their practical application to the life of our time. Some of these principles were stated, more briefly and technically, in my larger Studies of sex; others were therein implied but only to be read between the lines. Here I have expressed them in simple language and with some detail. It is my hope that in this way they may more surely come into the hands of young people, youths and girls at the period of adolescence, who have been present to my thoughts in all the studies I have written of sex because I was myself of that age when I first vaguely planned them. I would prefer to leave to their judgment the question as to whether this book is suitable to be placed in the hands of older people. It might only give them pain. It is in youth that the questions of mature age can alone be settled, if they ever are to be settled, and unless we begin to think about adult problems when we are young all our thinking is likely to be in vain. There are but few people who are able when youth is over either on the one hand to re-mould themselves nearer to those facts of Nature and of Society they failed to perceive, or had not the courage to accept, when they were young, or, on the other hand, to mould the facts of the exterior world nearer to those of their own true interior world. One hesitates to bring home to them too keenly what they have missed in life. Yet, let us remember, even for those who have missed most, there always remains the fortifying and consoling thought that they may at least help to make the world better for those who come after them, and the possibilities of human adjustment easier for others than it has been for themselves. They must still remain true to their own traditions. We could not wish it to be otherwise.

The art of making love and the art of being virtuous;—two aspects of the great art of living that are, rightly regarded, harmonious and not at variance—remain, indeed, when we cease to misunderstand them, essentially the same in all ages and among all peoples. Yet, always and everywhere, little modifications become necessary, little, yet, like so many little things, immense in their significance and results. In this way, if we are really alive, we flexibly adjust ourselves to the world in which we find ourselves, and in so doing simultaneously adjust to ourselves that ever-changing world, ever-changing, though its changes are within such narrow limits that it yet remains substantially the same. It is with such modification that we are concerned in these Little Essays.

H. E.

London, 1921

LITTLE ESSAYS

OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

CHAPTER I

CHILDREN AND PARENTS

The twentieth century, as we know, has frequently been called the century of the child. When, however, we turn to the books of Ellen Key, who has most largely and sympathetically taken this point of view, one asks oneself whether, after all, the child's century has brought much to the child. Ellen Key points out, with truth, that, even in our century, parents may for the most part be divided into two classes: those who act as if their children existed only for their benefit, and those who act as if they existed only for their children's benefit, the results, she adds being alike deplorable. For the first group of parents tyrannise over the child, seek to destroy its individuality, exercise an arbitrary discipline too spasmodic to have any of the good effects of discipline and would model him into a copy of themselves, though really, she adds, it ought to pain them very much to see themselves exactly copied. The second group of parents may wish to model their children not after themselves but after their ideals, yet they differ chiefly from the first class by their over-indulgence, by their anxiety to pamper the child by yielding to all his caprices and artificially protecting him from the natural results of those caprices, so that instead of learning freedom, he has merely acquired self-will. These parents do not indeed tyrannise over their children but they do worse; they train their children to be tyrants. Against these two tendencies of our century Ellen Key declares her own Alpha and Omega of the art of education. Try to leave the child in peace; live your own life beautifully, nobly, temperately, and in so living you will sufficiently teach your children to live.

It is not my purpose here to consider how far this conception of the duty of parents towards children is justified, and whether or not peace is the best preparation for a world in which struggle dominates. All these questions about education are rather idle. There are endless theories of education but no agreement concerning the value of any of them, and the whole question of education remains open. I am here concerned less with the duty of parents in relation to their children than with the duty of children in relation to their parents, and that means that I am not concerned with young children, to whom, that duty still presents no serious problems, since they have not yet developed a personality with self-conscious individual needs. Certainly the one attitude must condition the other attitude. The reaction of children against their parents is the necessary result of the parents' action. So that we have to pay some attention to the character of parental action.

We cannot expect to find any coherent or uniform action on the part of parents. But there have been at different historical periods different general tendencies in the attitude of parents towards their children. Thus if we go back four or five centuries in English social history we seem to find a general attitude which scarcely corresponds exactly to either of Ellen Key's two groups. It seems usually to have been compounded of severity and independence; children were first strictly compelled to go their parents' way and then thrust off to their own way. There seems a certain hardness in this method, yet it is doubtful whether it can fairly be regarded as more unreasonable than either of the two modern methods deplored by Ellen Key. On the contrary it had points for admiration. It was primarily a discipline, but it was regarded, as any fortifying discipline should be regarded, as a preparation for freedom, and it is precisely there that the more timid and clinging modern way seems to fail.

We clearly see the old method at work in the chief source of knowledge concerning old English domestic life, the Paston Letters. Here we find that at an early age the sons of knights and gentlemen were sent to serve in the houses of other gentlemen: it was here that their education really took place, an education not in book knowledge, but in knowledge of life. Such education was considered so necessary for a youth that a father who kept his sons at home was regarded as negligent of his duty to his family. A knowledge of the world was a necessary part, indeed the chief part, of a youth's training for life. The remarkable thing is that this applied also to a large extent to the daughters. They realised in those days, what is only beginning to be realised in ours,[1] that, after all, women live in the world just as much, though differently, as men live in the world, and that it

Reviews for Little Essays on Love and Virtue

[bezoar44 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Published relatively late in his career, this collection of essays hits on some of the same themes of his longer, earlier works: the positive moral value of sexual pleasure; the social and biological reasons for marriage; the benefits of understanding human sexuality from a modern, scientific perspective. Some of the most compelling passages in the essays occur in Ellis' discussion of marriage; these combine a romantic Victorian conception of the moral uplift resulting from marriage with an appreciation for sexual satisfaction.The last of the essays in this collection addresses eugenics. This makes for uncomfortable reading now, knowing the 20th century horrors to which doctrines of eugenics gave rise (genocide, forced sterilization). He certainly suggests support for the latter: 'A regard to nurture has ...wisely suggested to us the desirability of segregating or even of sterilising the unfit' (p.132). If you can see past (without excusing) that discussion, Ellis has some interesting and prescient things to say about the relationship between birth control and lifting people out of poverty. In particular, he offers the insight that in the most developed societies, the decline in the birthrate has been offset with a decline in the death rate, leading to an overall population growth, even as couples began reproducing later or chose to have fewer children.