“Not only shall ideals be exalted, but pure spirituality and perfection—man's goal—can only be obtained by the annihilation of what are called Animal Instincts.”
D. H. LAWRENCE
From a drawing by Jan Juta.
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, should ever 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 affannata
Uscito 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, brutal perhaps, 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.