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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    ment from life, and so possesses as it were a virginal fresh¬ ness in seeing, hearing, or thinking. That is “ intuition/’ an instinct that has become disinterested. “ Art has no other object but to remove the practically useful symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, so as to bring us face to face with reality itself/’1 Art would thus be fulfilling its function the more completely the further it removed us from ordinary life, or, more strictly, from any personal interest in life. That was also Remy de Gourmont’s opinion, though I do not know how far he directly derived it from Schopenhauer. “ If we give to art a moral aim,” he wrote, “ it ceases to exist, for it ceases to be useless. Art is incompatible with a moral or re¬ ligious aim. It is unintelligible to the crowd because the crowd is not disinterested and knows only the principle of utility.” But the difficulty of making definite affir¬ mation in this field, the perpetual need to allow for nuances which often on the surface involve contradictions, is seen when we find that so great an artist as Einstein—for so we may here fairly call him—and one so little of a formal aesthetician, agrees with Schopenhauer. “ I agree with Schopenhauer,” he said to Moszkowski, “ that one of the most powerful motives that attract people to science and art is the longing to escape from everyday life, with its painful coarseness and unconsoling barrenness, and to break the fetters of their own ever-changing desires. Man 1 H. Bergson, Le Rire. For a clear, concise, and sympathetic ex¬ position of Bergson’s standpoint, though without special reference to art, see Karin Stephen, The Misuse of Mind. Bergson’s conception of “intuition,” according to Bertrand, was derived from one of his masters, Ravaisson, who learnt it from Cousin, who derived it from Schilling, who had brought it into new credit in the Romantic period.