The dance of life / Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The dance of life / Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    writer is not always or often merely preparing a Catalogue Raisonne of things ; he is an artist and his pigments are words. Often he only takes his suggestions from the things of the world and makes his own pictures without any real resemblance to the scene it is supposed to depict. Dujardin tells us that he once took Huysmans to a Wagner concert ; he scarcely listened to the music, but he was fascinated by the programme the attendant handed to him ; he went home to write a brilliant page on Tann- hauser. Mallarme, on the other hand, was soaked in music ; to him music was the voice of the world, and it was the aim of poetry to express the world by itself becoming music ; he stood on a height like a pioneer and looked towards the Promised Land, trying to catch intuitions of a new sensibility and a future art, but a great master of language, like Huysmans, he never was. Huys¬ mans has written superb pages about Gustave Moreau and Felicien Rops, thinking, no doubt, that he was revealing supreme artists (though we need not follow too closely the fashion of depreciating either of these artists), but he was really only attracted to their programmes, and therein experiencing a stimulus that chanced to be peculiarly fitted for drawing out his own special art. Baudelaire would have written less gorgeously, but he would have produced a more final critical estimate. Yet even the greatest writers are affected by the in¬ toxication of mere words in the artistry of language. Shakespeare is, constantly, and not content with “ making the green one red ” he must needs at the same time “ the multitudinous seas incarnadine/' It is conspicuous in