The doctor looks at literature

About twenty years ago a brilliant, unbalanced, young Austrian Jew wrote a book, “Sex and Character,” whose purpose was to show that woman had played a greater rôle in the world than her possessions warranted, that she was inherently devoid of morality, and that men should cease to procreate. In the autumn of 1903 its author, Otto Weininger, then twenty-three years old, shot and killed himself in the house in Vienna in which Beethoven had died. The author's awful theme and his tragic end caused the book to be widely read and even more widely discussed. Amongst those impressed by it was a boy of humble but uncommon parents, bred in the coal-fields of mid-England where he had led a strenuous life struggling with the sex question, contending with the stream of consciousness as it became swollen with the tributaries of puberty—“Oh, stream of hell which undermined my adolescence.” While still a youth he felt the influence of another Austrian mystic of the same faith, Sigmund Freud, who maintains that the unconscious is the real man, that its energiser and director is the libido, and that the conscious is the artificed, the engendered man whose tenant and executive is the ego. By day and by night this exceptionally gifted and burdened boy took his grist to these two mystic millers. To comfort himself, to keep up his courage in the dark on his journeys to the mill and from it, he read the Bible, the poetry of Walt Whitman and Robert Browning, and the prose of Thomas Hardy. From the Old Testament he got an unsurpassed capacity for narrative and metaphor, while the “grey poet” whetted his appetite for worship and exaltation of the human body. Well might he say of Whitman, as Dante said of Virgil:

Thus D. H. Lawrence, like Jeshurun, waxed fat and kicked, forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his Salvation. And he began to pour forth his protest in a series of books, each a little more lawless than its predecessor, culminating in “The Rainbow.” The book was suppressed by the Government of his own country, but the censors of our “free country,” who pronounced “Jurgen” a book prejudicial to public morals, allowed “The Rainbow” to be published here. Perhaps that is the reason “Jurgen” has been published in England without molest. After that, when Mr. Lawrence wished to circulate his contributions to world-purification and progress, which many call pornography, he resorted to the camouflage of “published privately for subscribers only.”

My information is that Mr. Lawrence is not so widely read in the United States as are many of his contemporaries, Mr. Compton Mackenzie or Mr. Frank Swinnerton, for example. But there is a Lawrence cult here and it is growing, particularly amongst those who like to be called Greenwich Villagers, the breath of whose nostrils is antinomianism, especially sex antinomianism. Moreover, he has a way of interpolating between his salacious romances and erotic poetry books of imagination, observation, and experience, such as “Bay” and “Twilight in Italy,” that are couched in language whose swing and go few can withstand. These are replete with descriptions of sense-stirring scenery and analyses of sex-tortured souls, analyses which give lyric expression to the passions of the average man, who finds their lurid and ecstatic depiction diverting. Finally, Mr. Lawrence is striving to say something—something of sex and self which he believes the world should know; indeed, which is of paramount importance to it—and his manner of saying it has been so seductive that there are probably many who, like myself, have been clinging to him, as it were, buying his books and reading him with the hope that eventually he would succeed.

The time limit given him by one of his admirers and well-wishers has expired. In taking leave of him I purpose to set down my reasons for severing the emotional and intellectual thread that has kept us—even though so very loosely, and to him, quite unawaredly—together.

This renders unavoidable a line or two about criticism. I accept Matthew Arnold's estimate of the function of criticism, “to make known the best that is thought and known in the world,” providing that the critic also exposes the poor and meretricious which is being palmed off as “just as good,” or which is bidding for estimate, high or low. A guide should not only show the traveller upon whose eyes the scales still rest, or who has set out on a journey before the dawn, the right road, but he should also warn him of perilous roads and specify whether the peril is from bandits, broken bridges, or bellowing bulls. It is needless to say that the guide should have travelled the road and should know it and its environment well, and that his information should be recent.

The road that Mr. D. H. Lawrence has been travelling for the past decade and more, and making the basis for descriptions of his trips, is well known to me. I have worked upon it, laughed upon it, cried upon it for more than a quarter of a century. My information of it is recent, for there, even now, I earn my daily bread. It is the road leading from Original Sin to the street called Straight. All must travel it. Some make the journey quickly; some laboriously. Some, those who have morbid sex-consciousness in one form or another, inadequate or deviate genetic endowment, are unable to finish the journey at all.