Chapter 44

Christianity's promoters and well-wishers realised, however, that the continuance of the race depended upon the gratification of these appetites, and so laws and conventions were made under whose operation they could be legitimately indulged, there being small hope that the wish expressed by Sir Thomas Browne, the author of “Religio Medici” and a flock of children, that man might procreate as do the trees, shouldever be gratified. In civilised lands the conquest of the lower self has been objective. Man has moved from a great impulse within himself, the unconscious. Once the conquest has been effected, the conscious mind turns, looks, and marvels:

“E come quei che con lena affannataUscito fuor del pelago alla riva,Si volge all'acqua perigliosa, e guata.”

This self-conscious mental provoking of sensation and reaction in the great affective centres is called sentimentalism or sensationalism. The mind returns upon the affective centres and sets up in them a deliberate reaction. These are passions exploited by the mind. Or the passional motive may act directly, and not from the mental provocation, and these reactions may be reflected by a secondary process down into the body. This is the final and most fatal effect of idealism, because it reduces everything to self-consciousness into spuriousness, and it is the madness of the world today. It is this madness that Mr. Lawrence has sworn to cure. He is going to do it by conquering what he calls the lower centres, by submitting the lowest plane to the highest. When this is done there will be nothing more to conquer. Then all is one, all is love, even hate is love, even flesh is spirit. The great oneness, the experience of infirmity, the triumph of the living spirit, which at last includes everything, is then accomplished. Man becomes whole, his knowledge becomes complete, he is united with everything. Mr. Lawrence has mapped out a plan of the sympathetic nervous system and has manipulated what biologists call the tropisms in such a way as to convince himself that he has laid the scientific foundation for his work, but as there is scarcely a page or paragraph in his little book that does not contain statements which are at variance with scientific facts, it is unnecessary to say that his science will not assist him in his propaganda nearly so much as his fiction. Like Weininger, he finally eliminates women. As he puts it:“Acting from the last and profoundest centres, man acts womanless.” It is no longer a question of race continuance. It is a question of sheer ultimate being, the perfection of life nearest to death and yet furthest away from it. Acting from these centres man is an extreme being, the unthinkable warrior, creator, mover, and maker. “And the polarity is between man and man.”

That sentence contains to him who can read it aright the whole truth of Mr. D. H. Lawrence. To some that brief statement has the luminousness and significance of the writing on the wall. Anyone who reads Mr. Lawrence's later books attentively—and I appreciate that it is some task to do it—will understand it; and those who, like myself, have devoted themselves to study of aberrations, genesic and mental, as they display themselves in geniuses, psychopaths, and neuropaths, as well as in ordinary men, will sense it correctly.

Mr. Lawrence thinks there are three stages in the life of man: the stage of sexless relations between individuals, families, clans, and nations; the stage of sex relations with an all-embracing passional acceptance, culminating in the eternal orbit of marriage; and finally, the love between comrades, the manly love which only can create a new era of life. One state does not annul the other; it fulfills the other. Such, in brief, is the strange venture in psychopathy Mr. Lawrence is making, and contributions to it up to date are “Women in Love,” “Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious,” and “Aaron's Rod.” “The Prussian Officer,” “The Rainbow,” “The Lost Girl,” “Look, We Have Come Through” were merely efforts to get his propaganda literature into shape.

The Adam and Eve of Mr. Lawrence's new creation are Tom Brangwen and his wife; and to understand their descendants (and no one, not even Mr. Lawrence, can understand them fully) one must study the parents. Tom, the youngest of the Brangwen family, as a boy is rather heavy and stupid intellectually, sensitive to the atmosphere around him, brutalperhaps, but at the same time delicate, very delicate. He does not get on in school, so he leaves precipitously when he is fifteen, after having laid open the master's head with a slate, but not before he has formed a masochistic friendship with a warm clever frail boy. Sex desire begins soon to torment him. His first experience causes his sensibilities to rebel, and the second is a failure because of his self-consciousness and the dominancy of a budding inferiority complex. He is on the way to anæsthetising desire by brandy drinking, to which he periodically gives himself, when one day he meets on the street a demure lady whose curious absorbed flitting motion arrests him and causes a joy of pain to run through him.

“She had felt Tom go by almost as if he had brushed her. She had tingled in body as she had gone up on the road. Her impulse was strong against him because he was not of her sort. But one blind instinct led her to take him, to have him, and then to relinquish herself to him. It would be safety. Also he was young and very fresh.”

Her passional reactions are not from the mind. They are spontaneous and know no inhibition. After a second quite casual meeting, Tom goes to the vicarage where she, a Polish lady, is housekeeper since her husband, a doctor obliged to leave his country for political reasons, had died and left her and her baby daughter in dire want. “Good evening,” says Tom, “I'll just come in a minute”; and having entered, he continues, “I came up to ask if you'd marry me.” He arouses an intensity of passion in her that she cannot, or wishes not, to withstand. But Tom is conventional and so they are married. The description of his marital lust is lurid to the last degree, and finally after one great debauch “he felt that God had passed through the married pair and made Himself known to them.” Tom is largely brawn and brute, though he has a vein of sentiment, and finally he yields to drink and meets a violent death, leaving two sons, a namesake who is attractedto his own sex, Fred who suffers the tortures of a mother-sapped spirit, and Anna, his stepdaughter.

Anna hates people who come too near her until she meets Will Brangwen, the son of Tom's brother who had flagrantly offended matrimonial convention. She is fascinated by this æsthetic serious self-satisfied youth with a high-pitched voice, who sings tenor and who is interested in church architecture and ritualism. Anna hurls herself at Will's head and tells him in no uncertain tones of her all-consuming love before he makes any protests. She arranges the wheat shocks in the moonlight so that they will propitiate her purpose, but only passionate caresses and a proposal of marriage result. This disappoints her, but the men of the Brangwen family, though consumed with elemental passion, are sex-slackers compared with the women. Will goes into states of ecstasy sitting motionless and timeless, contemplating stained-glass windows and other religious symbols, and she hates him violently.

“In the gloom and mystery of the church his soul lived and ran free, like some strange, underground thing, abstract. In this spirit he seemed to escape and run free of her.”

They are happy only when in the throes of conjugality. She is profoundly fecund and has periods of ecstasy when she thinks God has chosen her to prove the miracle of creation. In her exaltation, big with child as she is, she dances naked in her bedroom, to the Creator to Whom she belongs.

In order to develop the now widely disseminated Freudian ideas about the love of the eldest girl for the father, the antagonism between the mother and daughter, etc., Will falls in love with his oldest child, Ursula. “His heart grew red-hot with passionate feeling for the child” when she is about a year old. “Her father was the dawn wherein her consciousness woke up wide-eyed, unseeing, she was awakened too soon.” The writer, master as he is of the mysteries of perversion, uses this sympathy and Will's extrauxorial vagaries and wanderingsto cause, vicariously, a welling-up of passion in Anna. After a revolting scene with a grisette, Will goes home to his wife who immediately detects that there is a change in him, that he has had a new experience. She is excited to wild lubricity, and “he got an inkling of the vastness of the unknown sensual store of delight she was.” But this is the book of Ursula. The spontaneous passions of the grandmother and mother are incidental.

Ursula goes through with the son of the old Polish clergyman Baron the same sort of experience that her father went through with the flapper that he picked up at the movie, only not with suchslancio. The purpose of this episode is to point out the intensity of love in the female and her clamour for the dominant male. When Ursula finds that Skrebensky is a slacker,

“She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon. She wanted the moon to fill into her, she wanted more, more communion with the moon, consummation.”

Since Ursula has not met the one-hundred-per-cent male, and as “her sexual life flamed into a kind of disease within her,” Mr. Lawrence now brings her into relations with a finely portrayed Lesbian, Winifred Inger. The description of their first real contact in the bungalow at night and their night bath is willfully and purposely erotic. Ursula, tired of Winifred, plans to marry her to her uncle, Tom. When they meet “he detected in her a kinship with his own dark corruption. Immediately he knew they were akin.” One might safely say that Mr. Lawrence had before him, or in his mind's eye, when he penned the description of Tom, the photograph of one of his fellow-poets of a generation ago whom the English public found necessary to put in the Reading Gaol.

“His manner was polite, almost foreign, and rather cold. He still laughed in his curious, animal fashion, suddenly wrinklingup his wide nose, and showing his sharp teeth. The fine beauty of his skin and his complexion, some almost waxen quality, hid the strange, repellant grossness of him, the slight sense of putrescence, the commonness which revealed itself in his rather fat thighs and loins.”

It is in the chapter “The Bitterness of Ecstasy” that Mr. Lawrence takes off the brakes. In London, whither she has gone with Skrebensky, Ursula decides to solve the riddle of the Sphinx. She goes about it in the conventional Brangwen way by biting him, clawing him, and generally tearing him to pieces. It seems good to him and he likes her and wants to marry her. One day, after they have had some tall bouts of love at Richmond, she tells him that she won't marry him and he has a grand crisis of hysteria. She is sorry she has hurt him. She hails a cab and takes the sobbing wooer home, and the lecherous cabby is moved nearly to violence by the radiation of passion from Ursula. She senses danger and persuades Tony to walk. She knows then that he is but a simulacrum of man, and when she has gone home she decides that she will not marry. Finally, however, she gives in and the date is more or less arranged. Then comes thegrande finalewith the scene wonderfully set in the moonlight by the seashore. There she makes an onslaught on him that is tigress-like to the last degree, throws him on the sand, devours him, wrings him like a dirty rag, shows him that he is no good, and hurls him from her, a sucked lemon. He sneaks away and offers himself to his Colonel's daughter, is accepted, and is off to India, leaving “the need of a world of men for her.”

Then comes “The Rainbow,” a parody of Freud's exposition of the dream of being trampled upon by horses. Ursula finds after a time that the customary result has followed her experiences, so she writes a letter to Skrebensky saying she'll be good and go out and marry him. She goes for a walk in the mist and the rain, into the wood where the trees are all phallic symbols “thrust like stanchions upright between the roaring overheadand the sweeping of the circle underfoot.” She begins to hallucinate, to feel her subconsciousness take possession of her, and the sight of a group of horses fills her bestial soul with a hope that she might finally be possessed in such a way as would give her satisfaction, that she might get “some fantastic fulfilment in her life.” She goes into a state of delirium and several weeks later, when it has passed, she finds that she has miscarried. This is followed by a mild dementia; she thinks she is moral and will be good, but as she gets strong she sees the rainbow, which is Eros kindling the flames again.

“And she saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fragment of Truth, fitting to the overarching heaven.”

Mr. Lawrence, exhausted with the perpetration of these sensual delights and disappointed with the distrusts of the flesh, turned for a short time to nature to refresh his spirit and bathe his soul. He sensed frustration despite the unleashment of passion; he realised that sublimation had eluded him, and so he turned to primitive life and primitive people, the peasants of Italy. Soon his torments began to creep up again in “Twilight in Italy.” The roused physical sensations will not subside. They penetrate pastoral scenes and emanate from sylvan scenery.

After having refreshed himself, he gave the world “The Lost Girl,” whose genesic aberrations are comparatively mild, and whose antics with the half-gipsy, half-circus folk are rather amusing. Some of Mr. Lawrence's early admirers were encouraged to look for his reformation, especially after the appearance of a thin book of poems entitled “Bay.” Even in this, here and there, the inhibited and mother-sapped spirit crops out, as in the poem called “The Little Town in the Evening,” but for the most part the verses are founded on sane ideas, even ideals, truths, and morality. Most of them arepoems of the war, wonderful pen pictures and silhouettes, such as “Town,” a London transformed by the war as no picture or prose description could render it, ending,

“It is well,That London, lair of suddenMale and female darknessesHas broken her spell.”

In previous volumes of poems, particularly in “Amores” and in “Look, We Have Come Through,” he had published verse which was highly appraised by competent critics, and hailed by a small group steeped in preciosity, as epoch-making. However, if most of his poems have any central or dominant idea, he is unable to express it. They are the verbal manifestations of moods expressed symbolically, allegorically; of sensuous desires, satisfactions, and satieties “seeking polarity,” to borrow his favourite expression. Nearly everything is passion with Mr. Lawrence, or suggestive of passion. The pure lily is a phallic symbol, the bee sucking honey from a flower is a ravisher of innocence, the earth itself bursts asunder periodically in the throes of secret sensuality. Only the sea is free from the trammels of lust, and it is

“Sworn to a high and splendid purposelessnessOf brooding and delighting in the secret of life's going.”

“New Poems,” published in this country in 1920, did not fame or defame him, although “Piano,” “Intime,” “Sickness,” and “Twenty Years Ago” might well have done the former, and “Seven Seals” the latter.

The lull did not last long, and it was only a lull before a storm, a hurricane, a tornado which spent its force and destruction upon the author and made him the outlaw, if not the outcast, of English literature. “Women in Love” is the adventure of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, the Brangwens whose frightful passions we have now known forthree generations, and two men of breeding, wealth, and culture, Gerald Crich, a Sadist by inheritance and natural inclination, and Rupert Birkin, an intellectual, apparently male, but contradicted in this by his instinct and by his conduct, whose purpose and ambition is to fall into the long African process of purely sensual understanding.

The portrait of Rupert Birkin is superb. No excerpt could convey Mr. Lawrence's capacity for characterisation as well as the paragraph which describes him:

“He was thin, pale and ill-looking. His figure was narrow but nicely made. He went with a slight trail of one foot, which came only from self-consciousness. His nature was clever and separate. He did not fit at all in the conventional occasion. He affected to be quite ordinary, perfectly and marvellously commonplace. And he did it so well, taking the tone of his surroundings, adjusting himself quickly to his interlocutor and his circumstance, that he achieved a verisimilitude of ordinary commonplaceness that usually propitiated his onlookers for a moment, disarmed them from attacking his singleness. He did not believe in any standards of behaviour though they are necessary for the common ruck. Anyone who is anything can be just himself and do as he likes. One should act spontaneously on one's impulses—it's the only gentlemanly thing to do, provided you are fit to do it.”

Hermione Roddice, daughter of a Derbyshire baron, a tall slow reluctant woman, with a weight of fair hair and pale long face that she carries lifted up in the Rossetti fashion, and that seems almost drugged as if a strange mass of thoughts coil in the darkness within her allowing her no escape, is in love with him. “She needed conjunction with Rupert Birkin to make her whole and, she believed, happy. But the more she strove to bring him to her, the more he battled her back.”

Gerald Crich, whose gleaming beauty and maleness is like a young good-natured smiling wolf, flashes upon Gudrun Brangwen and she succumbs at once, just as the Polish lady did when Gudrun's grandfather got sight of her from the tail of hiseye. The first time Gerald and Rupert meet “There was a pause of strange enmity between the two men that was very near to love.” Going up in the train to London together, they have a talk about ideals, the object and aim of life. This gives Rupert time to formulate his thought that Humanity does not embody the utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment in a new way. Let humanity disappear as quickly as possible. They are introduced into bohemia; that is, the haunts of the semi-abandoned and the perverted. Birkin shares a flat with Halliday, a degenerate “with a moving beauty of his own,” and his friends. Just how far this group expresses Mr. Lawrence's own views of art and philosophy, in their discussion of wood carvings of the primitive negroes of West Africa, we need not attempt to estimate, but that need not deter us from saying that the description of a gathering around the fireplace in a state of complete nudity is indecent and disgusting, even though Mr. Lawrence thinks this kind of thing marks a milestone on the way to that which he calls “Allness.”

A large portion of the book is, in my judgment, obscene, deliberately, studiously, incessantly obscene. Obscenity, like everything else, has its gradations, its intensities, its variations, and the author of this book knows how to ring the changes upon obscenity in a way that would make Aretino green with envy. For instance, the so-called wrestling scene between Rupert and Gerald is the most obscene narrative that I have encountered in the English language—obscene in the etymological sense, for it is ill-omened, hence repulsive; and in the legal sense, for it tends to corrupt the mind and to subvert respect for decency and morality. The major part of Hermione's conduct with Rupert is in the realm of perversion, and Rupert in his speech to her conveys by innuendo what Mr. Lawrence knows the laws of his country would not permit him to say directly. The Marquis de Sade was a mere novice in depicting the transports of lust that result from inflictinginjury or causing humiliation compared with Mr. Lawrence; and as for Sacher-Masoch, who worked on the other side of the shield, he merely staked out the claim for a young Britisher to cultivate.

Hermione says that if we could only realise that in the spirit we are all one, all equal in spirit, all brothers there, the rest would not matter. There would then be no more struggle for power and prestige, the things which now destroy. This drives Rupert to violence. He denies it savagely. We are alike in everythingsavespirit. In the spirit he is as separate as one star from another; as different in quality and quantity. Establish a state on that. This destroys the last vestige of Hermione's restraint and facilitates the consummation of voluptuous ecstasy at last. With a beautiful ball of lapis lazuli, a paper weight, she smashes his skull while he is sitting in her boudoir.

A second blow would have broken his neck had he not shied it with a volume of Thucydides (a deft touch to make the immortal Greek save the prototype of the Superman that Mr. Lawrence is introducing while he buries Greek idealism).

“She must smash it, it must be smashed before her ecstasy was consummated, fulfilled forever. A thousand lives, a thousand deaths matters nothing now, only the fulfilment of this perfect ecstasy.”

But he gets away from her.

“Then she staggered to the couch, and lay down, and went heavily to sleep”; and he wanders into the wet hillside that is overgrown and obscure with bushes and flowers. Here Mr. Lawrence gives a classic description of masochistic lust.

“He took off his clothes and sat down naked among the primroses ... but they were too soft. He went through the long grass to a clump of young fir trees, that were no higher than a man. The soft-sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showersof drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles. There was a thistle which pricked him vividly, but not too much, because all his movements were discriminate and soft. To lie down and roll in the sticky young hyacinths, to lie on one's belly and cover one's back with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft as a breath, softer and more delicate and more beautiful than the touch of any woman; and then to sting one's thighs against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch trunk against one's breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges—this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying.”

And this is the man who Mr. Lawrence would have us believe was Inspector of Schools in England in the beginning of the Twentieth Century! The idea that he wants a woman is now absurd. This is his idea of bliss. He knows where to plant himself, his seed: along with the trees in the folds of the delicious fresh-growing leaves. This is his place, his marriage place.

It may interest Mr. Lawrence to know that this procreative idea of Birkin's is not original with him. Many years ago I encountered a man in the Kings Park State Hospital who was of the same belief and addicted to the same practice.

It would not be convincing if only æsthetes, intelligentsia, artists, and the like had revolutionary ideas. Gerald, a man of business, an executive, a coal baron, aggressive, capable, also had them, inherited from his mother, acquired from Birkin and “made in Germany” where he had been sent to school. He makes love to Ursula by expounding his theories of life:

“If only man was swept off the face of the earth, creation would go on so marvellously, with a new start, non-human. Man is one of the mistakes of creation—like the ichthyosauri. If only we were gone again, think what lovely things would come out of the liberated days; things straight out of the fire.”

He wants her without contract, understood or stated:

“There is a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I should want to meet you—not in the emotional, loving plane—but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures. I should want to approach you and you me.—And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman—so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever—because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. One can only follow the impulse, take that which lies in front, and responsible for nothing, asked for nothing, giving nothing, only each taking according to the primal desire.”

In other words, sheer savagery, and the worst African variety at that!

One of Mr. Lawrence's obsessions is that he can distinguish between the sexual writhings of his characters, depending upon the environment in which they writhe and the immediate exciting cause. This justifies him in describing the same writhe over and over with a different setting. Of the five hundred pages, at least one hundred are devoted to descriptions of the sensations that precede and accompany ecstasy provoked and induced by some form of unhealthy sexual awareness.

It is impossible to give even a brief synopsis of “Women in Love.” One chapter, however, must be mentioned, for in a way it is the crux of the book. For some time Birkin has been trying to state his case to Ursula and stave off her clamour for consummation. He wants sex to revert to the level of the other appetites, to be regarded as a functional process, not as fulfilment. He wants her to give him her spirit.

“He knew he did not want further sensual experience, he thought. His mind reverted to the African statues in Halliday's rooms. They displayed their thousand upon thousand of years of sensual knowledge, purely unspiritual. Thousands of years ago that which was imminent in himself must have taken place in these Africans. This is what was imminent inhim; the goodness, the holiness, the desire for creation and productive happiness must have lapsed, leaving the single impulse for knowledge in one sort, mindless, progressive knowledge through the senses, knowledge arrested and ending in the senses, mystic knowledge in disintegration and dissolution. Is the day of our creative life finished or are we not ready for the sensual understanding, the knowledge in the mystery of dissolution? The man Ursula would take must be quaffed to the dregs by her, he must render himself up to her. She believed that love surpassed the individual. She believed in an absolute surrender to love. He didn't.”

They then have a violent verbal altercation in which Ursula tells him what she thinks of his obscenity and perverseness in words that admit of no misunderstanding. She then leaves him in a state of wrath and resentment after having thrown the topaz engagement ring, bought from a second-hand dealer, in his face. But her ardour conquers her righteousness and she goes back to him, saying, “See what a flower I found you.” And then it is settled quietly and as if they were normal humans. They go to a hotel and there they have super-corporeal contact that beggars description. As far as can be made out, there is no consortion in the ordinary sense. It is neither love nor passion.

“She had established a rich new circuit, a new current of passional electric energy, between the two of them released from the darkest poles of the body and established in perfect circuit, and she had done this in some mysterious ways by tracing the back of his thighs with her sensitive fingertips, his mysterious loins and his thighs. Something more mystically-physically satisfying than anything she had imagined or known—though she had had some experience—was realised. She had thought that there was no source deeper than the phallic source, but now from the strange marvellous flanks and thighs came the flood of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches.”

They laughed and went to the meal provided. And this is what they had:

“There was a venison pasty, of all things, a large broad-faced cut ham, eggs and cresses, and red beet root, and medlars and apple tart, and tea.”

There is a deep, dark significance in this meal, which the Freudian will understand perfectly, but which to the uninitiated will seem quite meaningless, even after Ursula says, “Whatgoodthings. How noble it looks.”

There is a lot more about the full mystic knowledge that she gets from his suave loins of darkness, the strange, magical current of force in his back and his loins, that fills with nausea. They finish by driving to Sherwood Forest, taking all their clothes off and beginning anew their effort for fulfilment.

“She was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real utterance.”

I have neither the strength nor the inclination to follow Gudrun in her search for her amatoryGlückeritter, or to hear further exposition of thecredoof the strange freak of nature that Mr. Lawrence strives to apotheosise. Suffice it to say that the precious quartette go off to the Tyrol, Ursula and Birkin having gone through the formality of marriage; Gudrun and Gerald dispensing with it. And there Gudrun begins writhings which are designed to put all the others in the shade. And in a way they do, because Gerald's violent death is required to facilitate her supreme moment. They introduce a super-degenerate Loerke, a sculptor, who represents the rock bottom of all life to Gudrun.

“There was the look of a little wastrel about him that intrigued her, and an old man's look, that interested her, and then, besides this, an uncanny singleness, that marked out an artist to her. He had come up from a street Arab. He was twenty-six, had thieved, sounded every depth. He saw in Gudrun his soul-mate. He knew her with a subconscious, sinister knowledge, devoid of illusions and hopes. The degradation of his early life also attracted her. He seemed to bethe very stuff of the underworld of life. There was no going beyond him. Birkin understood why they should like him, the little obscene monster of the darkness that he is. He is a Jew who lives like a rat, in the river of corruption.”

Birkin and Ursula come back for Gerald's funeral. Birkin does some soliloquising, the burden of which is “He should have loved me. I offered him.” He is sure Gerald would have been happy if he had accepted. When Ursula wants to know if she is not enough for him, he says,

“No, to make life complete, really complete, I wanted eternal union with a man too, another kind of love.”“It is a perversity,” she said.“Well——,” he said.“You can't have two kinds of love. Why should you?” she said.“It seems as if I can't,” he said. “Yet I wanted it.”“You can't have it because it's wrong, impossible,” she said.“I don't believe that,” he answered.

“No, to make life complete, really complete, I wanted eternal union with a man too, another kind of love.”

“It is a perversity,” she said.

“Well——,” he said.

“You can't have two kinds of love. Why should you?” she said.

“It seems as if I can't,” he said. “Yet I wanted it.”

“You can't have it because it's wrong, impossible,” she said.

“I don't believe that,” he answered.

And that is the unvarying and final answer of the advocates of the enigmatic aberration whose doctrines Mr. Lawrence is trying to foist upon an unsuspecting English-reading public.

In “Aaron's Rod” Mr. Lawrence returns to the theme of “The Rainbow” and “Women in Love.” His ardour, fortunately, has cooled somewhat, but his psychology is more at variance with facts and his philosophy more mystic than in either of these. Aaron Sisson, a miner's checkweighman, with a talent for music, marries when twenty, an over-sexed young woman of better social position than himself. Though he soon betrays her, they manage to live, with their three children, an average family life for twelve years. He then determines that he will not be the instrument and furnisher of any woman. He rebels against the sacrament by which we live today; namely, that man is the giver, woman the receiver. He can not and will not tolerate the life centrality of woman. Man'scontact with woman should be for procreational purposes, but man should blend his spirit with man: “Born in him was a spirit which could not worship woman, and would not.”

So he sets up the Christmas tree for the children, goes out to buy candles for it, and never returns. Instead, he falls in with a family group of inverts which the little mining towns always seem to have—a man of perverted type; his fiancée, a Lesbian, the daughter of a promiscuous Hermione and her complaisant husband; and several others—and they proceed to have a mild orgy in the ugly midland mining town, “in which it is remarkable how many odd or extraordinary people there are to be found.” Aaron gets a position as flutist in an orchestra, and at the opera he meets Mr. Lilly, who, though married, is by nature of inverted genesic instinct. He is Aaron's downfall.

It is to be noted that there is a deep symbolism in the names that Mr. Lawrence selects for his heroes and heroines. Aaron is sure that he never wanted to surrender himself to his wife, nor to his mother, nor to anybody. But he falls ill, and Lilly cares for him and nurses him like a mother, and then goes off to Italy—Aaron after him like a hound after the scent. We are introduced to a choice lot of males in Florence, all portraits of exiled Britishers who find it suits their tastes, which their country calls their infirmities, to live there, and easily recognisable by anyone who has lived in Florence. We are regaled with their philosophy and with Mr. Lawrence's reflections on art and Sixteenth Century music. Finally, to show Aaron's charm and concupiscense, the author throws a modern brooding Cleopatra—Anthony-less—across his path. She is an American woman from the Southern States whose father was once Ambassador to France. Aaron capitulates at the second interview and then despises himself. But again he falls a few days later, and then he realises that there is nothing left for him but flight, flight to Lilly and abandonment of the love idea and the love motive. Life submission is his duty now, and when he looks up into Lilly's face, at the moment resemblinga Byzantine Eikon, and asks, “And to whom shall I submit?” the reply comes, “Your soul will tell you.”

And my soul tells me that he who submits himself to reading the doctrines promulgated by D. H. Lawrence deserves his punishment. Moreover, I maintain that, both from the artistic and the psychological standpoints, Mr. Lawrence's performances are those of a neophyte and a duffer. He can make words roar and sing and murmur, and by so doing he can make moral, poised, God-fearing, sentiment-valuing man creep and shudder, indeed, almost welcome the obscurity of the grave, so that he will not have to meet his fellow again in the flesh. He libels and he bears false witness against man. There are persons in the world such as Mr. Lawrence describes. So are there lepers and lunatics. We do not talk about them as if the whole world were made up of them; and we do not confidently look for world reformers or world orderers among them.

Mr. Lawrence is a self-appointed crusader who is going to destroy European civilisation and at the same time revivify that of six thousand and more years ago. He is the most shining avatar of mysticism the Twentieth Century has yet produced, and the most daring champion of atavism in twenty centuries. He is using a medium to facilitate his manifestations and embodiments of which he is a consummate master, viz., fiction. But his statements, both when he uses the language of science, and when he uses that of fiction, are at variance with truth and fact; and he has not furnished, nor can he furnish, a particle of evidence to substantiate his thesis: enhancement of the awareness and potency “of that other basic mind, the deepest physical mind” by sensuous satisfaction or through sexual ecstasy. His “broodings and delightings in the secret of life's goings” are anathema.

During the past decade biology has accumulated a convincing amount of evidence to show that sex intergrades, or imperfect sex separation and differentiation frequently exist, and furthermore it may be produced experimentally. Thesefacts justify the belief that individuals with the convictions and conduct of Birkin result from a definite developmental condition, which is the fundamental cause of the peculiar sex reactions. Such persons are actually different from fully expressed males or females, and their peculiar condition is permanent, present from childhood to old age, and uninfluenceable by any measures; pedagogy or punishment, mandate or medicine.

My experience as a psychologist and alienist has taught me that pornographic literature is created by individuals whose genesic endowment is subnormalab initio, or exhausted from one cause or another before nature intended that it should be, and that those who would aid God and nature in the ordering of creation are sterile, or approximately so. This is a dispensation for which we cannot be too grateful.

There are two ways of contemplating Mr. Lawrence's effort. Has he a fairly clear idea of what he is trying to say, of what he is trying to put over; or is he a poetic mystic groping in abysmal darkness? I am one of those who is convinced that he knows just what he wants to accomplish, and that he could make a statement of it in language that anyone could understand, did the censor permit him. Public opinion is adequate to deal with the infractions of taste and ethics that he has perpetrated, and it is quite safe to leave him finally to that judiciary.

Mr. Lawrence once wrote, “The Americans are not worthy of their Whitman. Miracle that they have not annihilated every word of him.” To which I would make rejoinder, “The Britishers have not deserved D. H. Lawrence. Pity it is that they do not annihilate every trace of him.”

Ten years have gone since Henry James, walking up and down the charming garden of his picturesque villa in Rye, discussing the most promising successors of Hardy, Meredith, and Conrad, said to me, “The world is sure to hear from a young man, D. H. Lawrence.” It has heard from him. He has sownin glory and raised in corruption. He has triumphed, and his triumph has stained English literature. He has debased an unusual talent and devoted his splendid endowment of artistry to spoking the wheel of evolutionary progress, even to spinning it in a reverse direction. He has arrived, and in arriving has brought with him a sweltering, suffocating South African atmosphere, difficult and dangerous for one of his former admirers to breathe, who as he withdraws from it ventures to call the attention of others to its noxiousness.

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