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The wide circle to whom inspiration has flowed from Dr. Havelock Ellis will be grateful for such a thorough and illuminating biography as this, and Dr. Ellis himself may be congratulated on his latest biographer. The work is extraordinarily well done. Thanks to the accessibility of the material and the writer's tireless pursuit of it, we have here a much fuller and more detailed account of a human being's life than is at all customary in any biography. The mental struggles of the child, adolescent and man, are portrayed in unsparing intimacy, but with the most sympathetic insight. There can be few men living whose life is more worth studying and presenting to the public than Dr. Havelock Ellis's; as a thinker, a man of feeling and of culture, a scholar—in short, a philosopher in the best sense of the word—Dr. Ellis is pre-eminent among his contemporaries. His highly developed sense of serenity and gentleness have ensured for him the rare fate of never having made an enemy, and the number of those who regard him with devoted affection and respect is one of the encouraging features of our society.
This is not the place for us to attempt any estimate of Dr. Ellis's own achievements or personality; we are concerned only with this particular book, and more especially with its references to psycho-analysis. Even here we are hampered by the thought that this is not the most fitting occasion to descant on the connection between these two themes, the more so because a good deal was said on them in a recent review of Dr. Ellis's last book in this JOURNAL, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. VII (Vol. IX, 1928, p. 480). The matter is in several ways a delicate one, and we could have wished that the author of this book, whatever may have been his personal opinion about Ellis and Freud, had taken the trouble to get at least the objective facts approximately correct. A common misrepresentation of Freud's relation to Charcot is in this connection particularly striking.