Little Essays of Love and Virtue
Havelock Ellis, 1922
Why does a loving home sometimes hold tighter than any cage? Havelock Ellis, one of the first researchers of sexuality, wrote essays for young readers about parents and children, purity, marriage and the right to joy. His central idea: love and virtue are not enemies, but two sides of one art of living.
Who it is for
For those who want to love without losing themselves: in the parental home, in marriage and in intimacy.
When love is suppressed, hatred takes its place.
Two Arts That Turned Out to Be One
Imagine twenty-year-old Anya, who still asks her mum for permission to go away with friends for the weekend. She is loved, she is looked after, and that is exactly why leaving is so hard: any attempt to live her own way looks like ingratitude. Havelock Ellis, an English doctor and researcher of love, knew such homes well.
In 1921 he gathered short essays on what people usually discuss in whispers: how to grow out of the parental home, what purity really means, why people marry, and why at home a man and a woman so often become not the people they were in public. He wrote first of all for young men and women, because, in his conviction, the questions of mature life are settled in youth or not settled at all.
The central idea of the book sounds bold even today. The art of loving and the art of being virtuous, Ellis says, do not argue with each other. They turn out to be two sides of one great art of living. Each age needs only small corrections to it, and the book is written about exactly those.
This is a book from 1922, and it contains pages that time has refuted; we will say so plainly about one of them. But much in Ellis sounds as if it were written about our kitchens and our bedrooms. If it matters to you how to love honestly and still remain yourself, you are already asking questions that many people spend their whole lives turning away from.
The Loving Home Can Also Be a Cage
Swedish writer Ellen Key divided parents into two groups. Some behave as if the children exist for their sake: they press down, break character, and shape a copy of themselves. Others live only for the children: they indulge every whim and shield them from consequences, so that instead of freedom the child learns self-will. The first group tyrannises children, and the second, in her words, raises them into tyrants.
Ellis looks deeper, into history. Five hundred years ago in England, sons and even daughters were sent early to live and serve in other people's houses: there they learned not from books but from life itself. A letter survives from Margaret Paston, a fifteenth-century mother, about a daughter who would have to be brought home: “with me she will only waste her time”. A harsh school, but it prepared people for freedom.
Then the family closed in. External compulsion gave way to an inner one, which acts more strongly: unspoken debts and guilt. Sons broke away, while daughters stayed, and Ellis speaks of invisible cages. The poet Elizabeth Barrett lay ill for years under the watch of a father who loved her and dominated her, until she secretly eloped with the poet Robert Browning and found freedom, health and a voice. How many others never found their Browning, one can only guess.
Ellis explains the way out through the umbilical cord. First the bodily tie is cut, and in youth the spiritual bond must be broken. If a fledgling lacks the strength to spread its wings, a loving parent nudges it to the edge of the nest. The risks are real, but the worst of them are born from refusing to take any.
There is a second half to this thought. Parents must educate not only their children but themselves: every new stage of life needs a new education. Ellis especially pities mothers who, once they have raised their children, spend their freed-up strength on hindering grown children from living, when they could have put it into a shared cause. There was time to sow values while the children were small. After that, what remains is trust.
About the author
Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), an English doctor and writer, author of the multi-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex. He is considered one of the founders of the scientific study of sexuality.
All books by this author: Havelock Ellis
Terms from the book
- Freud
- eugenics
- Barrett
- Roosevelt
- Key: Ellen Key (1849-1926), Swedish writer and educator, author of The Century of the Child (1900).
- Paston: The Pastons, a family of English landowners from Norfolk. Their fifteenth-century correspondence, The Paston Letters, is one of the main sources on everyday life in medieval England.
- Browning: Robert Browning (1812-1889), English poet. In 1846 he secretly married Elizabeth Barrett and took her to Italy.
- Meirowsky: Emil Meirowsky, a German doctor of the early twentieth century. Ellis cites his survey of doctors on how they had personally treated abstinence.
- Hormones: Substances that glands release directly into the blood and that control the work of the organs. The word itself appeared in 1905, so for Ellis this was a fresh discovery.
- Sublimation: In chemistry, the change of a substance straight from solid to gas. In psychology, the redirecting of the energy of desire toward other aims: creativity, work, tenderness.
- Palladius: Palladius of Helenopolis (around 363 to around 431), bishop, author of the Lausiac History, a collection of stories about the hermit monks of Egypt.
- Theognis: Theognis of Megara, an ancient Greek poet of the sixth century BC.
- Rolland: Romain Rolland (1866-1944), French writer, Nobel Prize laureate in Literature in 1915.
- Southwark: A district of London on the south bank of the Thames. Since 1905 it has been the seat of an Anglican diocese, whose head is called the Bishop of Southwark.
- Contraception: Ways of preventing an unwanted pregnancy.
- Forel: Auguste Forel (1848-1931), Swiss psychiatrist and brain researcher, author of The Sexual Question.
- Brews: Margery Brews, the daughter of an English knight, married John Paston in 1477. Her letter to her groom is considered one of the oldest surviving valentines in English.
- Parasitism: In biology, one organism living at the expense of another. For Ellis it is an image, not a diagnosis: a husband who uses his wife's domestic labour without knowing how to do it himself.
- Acton: William Acton (1813-1875), English doctor, author of books on sexual life that were popular in the Victorian era.
- Play function: Ellis's own concept, not a scientific term: play in intimacy that develops the body and soul of both partners and is not reduced to conception.
- Ottawa: The capital of Canada, a city in the province of Ontario.
- Survival coefficient: Ellis's word for the difference between the birth rate and the death rate, that is, for natural population growth.
All terms
Similar books
- Love and Marriage, Ellen Key
- Love Yourself, No Matter Who You're With, Eva-Maria Tsurkur
- Love's Coming-of-Age, Edward Carpenter
- Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic, Esther Perel
- Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, John Gray
- Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, Susan Forward, Joan Torres
- Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
- Lost Connections: Why You're Depressed and How to Find Hope, Johann Hari
Read in Livria
