Reflections on the death of a porcupine and other essays

REFLECTIONS ON THE DEATH OF A PORCUPINE
By D. H. LAWRENCE
THE CENTAUR PRESS PHILADELPHIA 1925 COPYRIGHT, 1925 THE CENTAUR PRESS
NOTE TO THE CROWN
The Crown was written in 1915, when the war was already twelve months old, and had gone pretty deep. John Middleton Murry said to me: “Let us do something.”
The doing consisted in starting a tiny monthly paper, which Murry called The Signature, and in having weekly meetings somewhere in London—I have now no idea where it was—up a narrow stair-case over a green-grocer’s shop: or a cobbler’s shop. The only thing that made any impression on me was the room over the shop, in some old Dickensey part of London, and the old man downstairs.
We scrubbed the room and colour-washed the walls and got a long table and some windsor chairs from the Caledonian market. And we used to make a good warm fire: it was dark autumn, in that unknown bit of London. Then on Thursday nights we had meetings of about a dozen people. We talked, but there was absolutely nothing in it. And the meetings didn’t last two months.
The Signature was printed by some little Jewish printer away in the east end. We sold it by subscription, half-a-crown for six copies. I don’t know how many subscriptions there were: perhaps fifty. The helpless little brown magazine appeared three times, then we dropped it. The last three of the Crown essays were never printed.
To me the venture meant nothing real: a little escapade. I can t believe in “doing things” like that. In a great issue like the war, there was nothing to be “done”, in Murry’s sense. There is still nothing to be “done”. Probably not for many, many years will men start to “do” something. And even then, only after they have changed gradually, and deeply.
I knew then, and I know now, it is no use trying to do anything—I speak only for myself—publicly. It is no use trying merely to modify present forms. The whole great form of our era will have to go. And nothing will really send it down but the new shoots of life springing up and slowly bursting the foundations. And one can do nothing, but fight tooth and nail to defend the new shoots of life from being crushed out, and let them grow. We can’t make life. We can but fight for the life that grows in us.