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.

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    mains necessary to point out that it is only the threshold. However intimately the elements of the aesthetic sense may be blended with primitive human existence, we know too well that as the conditions of human existence are modified art’ seems to contract and degenerate, so we can hardly expect the aesthetic sense to develop in the reverse direction. At present, in the existing state of civilisation, with the decay of the controlling power of the old morality, the aesthetic sense often seems to be also decreasing, rather than increasing, in the masses of the population.1 One need not be troubled to find examples. They occur on every hand and whenever we take up a newspaper. One notes, for instance, in England, that the most widespread spectacularly attractive things outside cities may be said to be the private parks and the churches. (Cities lie out¬ side the present argument, for their inhabitants are care¬ fully watched whenever they approach anything that appeals to the possessive instinct.) Formerly the parks and churches were freely open all day long for those Avho desired to enjoy the spectacle of their beauty and not to possess it. The owners of parks and the guardians of churches have found it increasingly necessary to close them because of the alarmingly destructive or predatory impulses of a section of the public. So the many have to suffer for the sins of what may only be the few. It is 1 Thus it has often been pointed out that the Papuans are artists in design of the first rank, with a finer taste in some matters than the most highly civilised races of Europe. Professor R. Semon, who has some remarks to this effect (Correspondenz-blatt of the German Anthropo¬ logical Society, March 1902), adds that their unfailing artistic sense is pread throughout the whole population and shown in every object of daily use.
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