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.

    48/364 page 28
    That is why it is only to-day that we in the west have reached the point of nervous susceptibility which enables us in some degree to comprehend the aesthetic supremacy which the Chinese reached more than a thousand years ago. Thus during its extremely long history—for the other great civilisations with which it was once contemporary have passed away or been disintegrated and transformed —Chinese civilisation has borne witness to the great fact that all human life is art. It may be because they have realised this so thoroughly that the Chinese have been able to preserve their civilisation so long, through all the violent shocks to which it has been subjected. There can be no doubt, however, that during the greater part of the last thousand years there has been, however slow and gradual, a decline in the vitality of Chinese civilisation, largely due, it may well be, to the crushing pressure of an excessive population. For, however remarkable the admir¬ ation which China arouses even to-day, its finest flowering periods in the special arts he far in the past, while in the art of living itself the Chinese have long grown languid. The different reports of ancient and modem travellers regarding one definite social manifestation, the prevalence of beggary, cannot fail to tell us something regarding the significant form of their social life. Modem travellers complain of the plague constituted by the prevalence of beggars in China ; they are even a fixed and permanent institution on a trades-union basis. But in the sixteenth eentury, Galeotto Perera noticed with surprise in China the absence of beggars, as Marco Polo had before him, and
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