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 resembling a 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. These facts 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 subnormal ab 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 sown in 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.