The dance of life / Havelock Ellis.

  • Havelock Ellis
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

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    Jesus of Nazareth.” He was “a scoundrel, bright and complete.” There is no occasion to question this condemnation when we place ourselves in the channel along which Mr. Wells moves; it is probably inevitable ; we may even accept it heartily. Yet, however right along that line, that is not the only line in which we may move. More¬ over—and this is the point which concerns us—it is possible to enter a sphere in which no such merely negative, condemnatory, and dissatisfying a conclusion need be reached. For obviously it is dissatisfying. It is not finally acceptable that so supreme a protagonist of humanity, acclaimed by millions, of whom many gladly died for him, and still occupying so large and glorious a place in the human imagination, should be dismissed in the end as merely an unmitigated scoundrel. For so to condemn him is to condemn Man who made him what he was. He must have answered some lyric cry in the human heart. That other sphere in which Napoleon wears a different aspect is the sphere of art in the larger and fundamental sense. Elie Faure, a French critic, an excellent historian of art in the ordinary sense, is able also to grasp art in the larger sense because he is not only a man of letters but of science, a man with medical training and experience, who has lived in the open world, not, as the critic of literature and art so often appears to be, a man living in a damp cellar. Just after Wells issued his Outline, Elie Faure published a book on Napoleon which some may consider the most remarkable book on that subject they have ever
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