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The death of Havelock Ellis brings to end a career of amazing and many-sided scholarship. In summing up the achievement of a man whose death occurs so long after he has ceased to be a novel contributor to the Zeitgeist, it is not difficult to find ready-made judgments which lie to hand in every quarter. In an age when the insights of psychoanalysis no longer mar the décor of the well furnished mind, Ellis the sexologist is characteristically patted off with something less than his due; or he is dismissed with a snobbism that holds as the distinguishing mark of the man his precocity as a pioneer or his courage in so laudably braving the arched eyebrows of his Victorian contemporaries. Worst of all is the invidious comparison with Freud.
Ellis was a scholar. If he claimed any originality it was in the direction he chose for his study. He penned no facile theories; he left no great idea to stir uneasily for a generation or two in the minds of men. But in a day when theories, systems and points of view begin to outnumber the facts from which they are derived it is chastening to look back upon the calm restraint of a man who was able to amass a colossal fortune in data without succumbing to the temptation to invest in one more fetching fiction. Perhaps the very range of his data forbade such recklessness. To read, much less to write, such a work as Love and Pain, for instance, should give pause to him who would encompass the facts of masochism in any simple theory. In a sense one has to earn the right to forego a theory.
It is too shallow a judgment which insists that Ellis did not see the forest for the trees. To few is it given to see trees at all. Too many possess the talent of conjuring forests out of arid deserts.