The dance of life / Havelock Ellis.

  • Havelock Ellis
Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

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

    28/364 page 8
    It is interesting to observe, I may note in passing, how totally new an aspect a phenomenon may take on when transformed from some other channel into that of art. We may take, for instance, that remarkable phenomenon called Napoleon, as impressive an individual¬ istic manifestation as we could well find in human history during recent centuries, and consider two contemporary almost simultaneous estimates of it. A distinguished English writer, Mr. H. G. Wells, in a notable and even famous book, his Outline of History, sets down a judgment of Napoleon throughout a whole chapter. Now, Mr. Wells moves in the ethico-religious channel. He wakes up every morning, it is said, with a rule for the guidance of life ; some of his critics say that it is every morning a new rule, and others that the rule is neither ethical nor religious, but we are here concerned only with the channel and not with the direction of the stream. In the Outline Mr. Wells pronounces his ethico-religious anathema of Napoleon, “ this dark little archaic personage, hard, compact, capable, unscrupulous, imitative, and neatly vulgar.” The “ archaic ”—-the old-fashioned out-worn— element attributed to Napoleon is accentuated again later, for Mr. Wells has an extremely low opinion (hardly justifiable, one may remark in passing) of primitive man. Napoleon was “ a reminder of ancient evils, a thing like the bacterium of some pestilence ” ; “ the figure he makes in history is one of almost incredible self-conceit, of vanity, greed, and cunning, of callous contempt and dis¬ regard of all who trusted him.” There is no figure., Mr. Wells asserts, “so completely antithetical to the figure of
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