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 his eye. 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 inflicting injury 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 everything save spirit. 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.