POSTSCRIPT.
"The work that I was born to do is done," a great poet wrote when at last
he had completed his task. And although I am not entitled to sing any
Nunc dimittis, I am well aware that the task that has occupied the best
part of my life can have left few years and little strength for any work
that comes after. It is more than thirty years ago since the first resolve
to write the work now here concluded began to shape itself, still dimly
though insistently; the period of study and preparation occupied over
fifteen years, ending with the publication of Man and Woman, put forward
as a prolegomenon to the main work which, in the writing and publication,
has occupied the fifteen subsequent years.
It was perhaps fortunate for my peace that I failed at the outset to
foresee all the perils that beset my path. I knew indeed that those who
investigate severely and intimately any subject which men are accustomed
to pass by on the other side lay themselves open to misunderstanding and
even obloquy. But I supposed that a secluded student who approached vital
social problems with precaution, making no direct appeal to the general
public, but only to the public's teachers, and who wrapped up the results
of his inquiries in technically written volumes open to few, I supposed
that such a student was at all events secure from any gross form of attack
on the part of the police or the government under whose protection he
imagined that he lived. That proved to be a mistake. When only one volume
of these Studies had been written and published in England, a
prosecution, instigated by the government, put an end to the sale of that
volume in England, and led me to resolve that the subsequent volumes
should not be published in my own country. I do not complain. I am
grateful for the early and generous sympathy with which my work was
received in Germany and the United States, and I recognize that it has had
a wider circulation, both in English and the other chief languages of the
world, than would have been possible by the modest method of issue which
the government of my own country induced me to abandon. Nor has the effort
to crush my work resulted in any change in that work by so much as a
single word. With help, or without it, I have followed my own path to the
end.
For it so happens that I come on both sides of my house from stocks of
Englishmen who, nearly three hundred years ago, had encountered just these
same difficulties and dangers before. In the seventeenth century, indeed,
the battle was around the problem of religion, as to-day it is around the
problem of sex. Since I have of late years realized this analogy I have
often thought of certain admirable and obscure men who were driven out,
robbed, and persecuted, some by the Church because the spirit of
Puritanism moved within them, some by the Puritans because they clung to
the ideals of the Church, yet both alike quiet and unflinching, both alike
fighting for causes of freedom or of order in a field which has now for
ever been won. That victory has often seemed of good augury to the perhaps
degenerate child of these men who has to-day sought to maintain the causes
of freedom and of order in another field.
It sometimes seems, indeed, a hopeless task to move the pressure of inert
prejudices which are at no point so obstinate as this of sex. It may help
to restore the serenity of our optimism if we would more clearly realize
that in a very few generations all these prejudices will have perished and
be forgotten. He who follows in the steps of Nature after a law that was
not made by man, and is above and beyond man, has time as well as eternity
on his side, and can afford to be both patient and fearless. Men die, but
the ideas they seek to kill live. Our books may be thrown to the flames,
but in the next generation those flames become human souls. The
transformation is effected by the doctor in his consulting room, by the
teacher in the school, the preacher in the pulpit, the journalist in the
press. It is a transformation that is going on, slowly but surely, around
us.
I am well aware that many will not feel able to accept the estimate of the
sexual situation as here set forth, more especially in the final volume.
Some will consider that estimate too conservative, others too
revolutionary. For there are always some who passionately seek to hold
fast to the past; there are always others who passionately seek to snatch
at what they imagine to be the future. But the wise man, standing midway
between both parties and sympathizing with each, knows that we are ever in
the stage of transition. The present is in every age merely the shifting
point at which past and future meet, and we can have no quarrel with
either. There can be no world without traditions; neither can there be any
life without movement. As Heracleitus knew at the outset of modern
philosophy, we cannot bathe twice in the same stream, though, as we know
to-day, the stream still flows in an unending circle. There is never a
moment when the new dawn is not breaking over the earth, and never a
moment when the sunset ceases to die. It is well to greet serenely even
the first glimmer of the dawn when we see it, not hastening towards it
with undue speed, nor leaving the sunset without gratitude for the dying
light that once was dawn.
In the moral world we are ourselves the light-bearers, and the cosmic
process is in us made flesh. For a brief space it is granted to us, if we
will, to enlighten the darkness that surrounds our path. As in the ancient
torch-race, which seemed to Lucretius to be the symbol of all life, we
press forward torch in hand along the course. Soon from behind comes the
runner who will outpace us. All our skill lies in giving into his hand the
living torch, bright and unflickering, as we ourselves disappear in the
darkness.
HAVELOCK ELLIS.
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