His second novel, “The Trespassers,” shows the author to have, in addition to a sensitive and impassioned apprehension of nature, great capacity for describing the feelings of commonplace people. Helena, headstrong, determined, emancipated, self-sufficient, falls in love with her music teacher, Sigmund, a man of forty who had married when seventeen a matter-of-fact young woman who gave him many children which he ill-supported while she slaved and became sour and slatternly. Helena notices that Sigmund is tired and suggests that they spend a few days together in the Isle of Wight. She makes the plans, finds a nice motherly person who will take them into her cottage more for company than money, and, though this seems to be her first adventure, she acts with the certainty which attends experience. The scenery and tools that Mr. Lawrence uses so skilfully are all here: moonlight and its effect to produce ecstasy; bathing and lying naked on the sand or the grass and gazing approvingly at the body; lovely flowers and plants; and above all, a knowledge of the effects of baffled eroticism, of collision between primitive simple passion and artificial fantasying aberrant passion. Like Hermione Roddice of “Women in Love,” Helena's genetic instincts are abnormal. She has her Louisa, ten years her senior, whom she treats with indifference, cruelty, or affection, as it pleases her. Early in the history of man the prototype of Helena and Hermione was known. Shuah's second son, it is alleged, was the first example. The Lord slew Onan as soon as he deliberately violated the first and most essential principle of nature, but this drastic measure did not eradicate the biologic aberration, for it has displayed itself in the human species from that day to this, and even today gives more concern to parents and pedagogues than any other instinct deviation. Fortunately novelists, until the advent of Mr. Lawrence, have not featured this infirmity.
Even in these juvenile days, Mr. Lawrence left very little to the imagination. Helena and Sigmund, lying on the cold wet beach in the twilight, enveloped in the Scotch mist (parenthetically it may be said that his heroes and heroines are wholly insensitive to bodily discomfort when they are in the throes of concupiscence) were practising the “Overture to Love,”
“and when Helena drew her lips away she was much exhausted. She belonged to that class of dreaming women with whom passion exhausts itself at the mouth. Her desire was accomplished in a real kiss. She then wanted to go to sleep. She sank away from his caresses, passively, subtly drew back from him.”
The next morning Sigmund goes into the sea, and this gives the author opportunity to display the burning passion which the sight and contemplation of the male human body seems to cause in him.
“He glanced at his wholesome maturity, the firm plaiting of his breasts, the full thighs, creatures proud in themselves, and said 'She ought to be rejoiced at me, but she is not. She rejects me as if I were a baboon under my clothing.'”
When Mr. Lawrence convinced himself that he could write a more panoplied description of erotic ecstasy than that with which he afflicted Helena, he wrote the description of Ursula's encounter with the moon in “The Rainbow.” Indeed the real motive of “The Trespassers” is a trial portrait of Ursula; and while making up his mind as to the size of the canvas and the colours that he would use in painting that modern Messalina, Mr. Lawrence gave the world “Sons and Lovers,” which more than any other of his books, gave him a reputation for an understanding of the strange blood bonds that unite families and human beings, and for having an unusual, almost exquisite discrimination in the use of language.
From boyhood Mr. Lawrence seems to have been possessed of a demon who whispered to him by day and shrieked to him by night, “Be articulate, say it with words,” and the agony of his impotence is heartrending, as frustration after frustration attends his efforts. He tries it in prose, then in verse. Gradually, from taking thought, from sex experience and from hasty perusal of scientific and mystic literature, there formulated in his mind a concrete thought, which in time engendered a conviction, finally an obsession. A brief exposition of the mental elaboration and the Laocoon grip that it took on him follows:
The Greeks, fanning the embers of Egyptian civilisation and getting no fire for their torch, said,
“Let there be an ideal to which all mankind shall bow the knee. Let consciousness and all its manifestations be expressed in terms of ideals and ideas or in conduct that expresses them, and finally let everything that tends to hinder such expression, such as the sensual and animal in man be subdued and repressed.”
Christianity went a step further and said,