Christianity confirmed Platonism; and now, in its turn, what I may call Fordism, or the philosophy of industrialism, confirms, though with important modifications, the spiritualizing doctrines of Christianity. Fordism demands that we should sacrifice the animal man (and along with the animal large portions of the thinking, spiritual man) not indeed to God, but to the Machine. There is no place in the factory, or in that larger factory which is the modern industrialized world, for animals on the one hand, or for artists, mystics, or even, finally, individuals on the other. Of all the ascetic religions Fordism is that which demands the cruellest mutilations of the human psyche—demands the cruellest mutilations and offers the smallest spiritual returns. Rigorously practised for a few generations, this dreadful religion of the machine will end by destroying the human race.
If humanity is to be saved there must be reforms, not merely in the social and economic spheres, but also within the individual psyche. Lawrence concerned himself primarily with these psychological reforms. The problem, for him, was to bring the animal and the thinker together again, was to make them co-operate in the building up of consummate manhood. In order to effect this bringing together certain barriers must be broken down. They are strong barriers; for the conscious mind has taken extraordinary precautions to keep itself out of contact with the body and its instincts. The spirit refuses to be livingly aware of the animal man. Very significant in this context are the tabooed words which describe in the directest possible manner the characteristic functions of bodily life.
Early training has so conditioned the reflexes of the normal bourgeois and his wife that they shudder whenever one of these words is pronounced. For these words bring the mind into direct contact with the physical reality which it is so desperately anxious to ignore. The circumlocutions and the scientific polysyllables do not bring the mind into this direct contact. They are mere algebraical symbols, almost empty of living, physical significance—a fact which must somewhat diminish the hope for the future which I expressed just now. Brought up in a world that is learning to treat sexual matters only too scientifically, the future Jixes and Sumners will be quite undisturbed by literary references to micturition phantasies, auto-erotism, and the like. But if the same phenomena are described in plain Saxon words, they will probably be just as painfully shocked as the present inquisitors. For when these Saxon words are pronounced, the mind suddenly finds itself in actual touch with that physical reality which Platonism, Christianity, and Fordism have one after another insisted on its ignoring. It shrinks with horror.
But it ought not to shrink with horror. Lawrence set out to overcome this shrinking. The methods he used were drastic—too drastic for many even of those who, in principle, were on his side. ‘More tact, more circumspection!’ they implored. But the use of forbidden words, the describing and portraying of things ordinarily veiled were absolutely essential tactics in the crusade. The mind had to be made conscious of the physical reality from which it was accustomed to shrink. This was the only way of doing it. The fact that people are shocked is the best proof that they need shocking. Their reflexes have been wrongly conditioned; they should be given a course of shocks until the conditioning is undone. The theory, I am sure, is psychologically sound. But to put it into practice is difficult. At every ringing of their familiar ‘pornographic’ bell, the right-thinkingly conditioned smut-hounds foam at the mouth. And unfortunately they are in a position to do more than foam; they are in a position to open our letters, confiscate our books and burn our pictures. What’s to be done about it? Perhaps Professor Pavlov might be able to tell us.
Document
From the reports of a Debate on the censorship of obscene literature in the United States Senate, March 1930. Senator Smoot of Utah: ‘I did not believe there were such books printed in the world.’ (Senator Smoot had brought, as exhibits, Robert Burns’s Poems (unexpurgated edition), Balzac’s Contes Drolatiques, Casanova’s Memoirs, George Moore’s Story Teller’s Holiday, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, My Life and Loves, by Frank Harris, and that Mrs Beeton’s cookery book of love-making, the Kama Sutra.) ‘They are lower than the beasts . . . If I were a Customs Inspector, this obscene literature would only be admitted over my dead body . . . I’d rather have a child of mine use opium than read these books.’ (Compare with this the yet more heroic declaration of our own Mr James Douglas. Mr Douglas would rather give a child prussic acid than allow it to read The Well of Loneliness. In an article written at the time I offered to provide Mr Douglas with a child, a bottle of prussic acid, a copy of The Well of Loneliness, and (if he kept his word and chose to administer the acid) a handsome memorial in marble to be erected wherever he might appoint, after his execution. The offer, I regret to say, was not accepted.)
Senator Blease of South Carolina was more eloquent even than Senator Smoot. True, he was not prepared to give children opium and prussic acid in preference to improper literature, but he was quite ready to ‘see the democratic and republican form of government for ever destroyed, if necessary to protect the virtue of the womanhood of America . . . The virtue of one little sixteen-year-old girl is worth more to America than every book that ever came into it from any other country . . . I love womanhood. Take from a government the purity of its womanhood and that government will be destroyed.’
Points of View
Ancelin, Bishop of Belley, ‘was wont to say: “I for my part can look indifferently upon any woman whatsoever; but I forthwith flay them all.” Whereby he meant that he mentally withdrew their skin and contemplated the foul corruption that lurked within.’
Swift’s celebrated remark about the woman he had seen flayed in a dissecting room belongs to the same family of ideas—a most respectable family, which can trace its descent at least as far back as Boethius. The Dean of St Patrick’s had a genuine Father of the Church in him. One side of him was own brother to that formidable Odo of Cluny, whose comments on the fair sex are so justly famous. The following translation emits but the faintest tinkling echo of those prodigious thunders of the Latin original. ‘If men,’ writes Odo, ‘could see beneath the skin, as the lynxes of Boeotia are said to see into the inward parts, then the sight of a woman would be nauseous unto them. All that beauty consists but in phlegm and blood and humours and gall. If a man consider that which is hidden within the nose, the throat, and the belly, he will find filth everywhere; and if we cannot bring ourselves, even with the tips of our fingers, to touch such phlegm or dung, wherefore do we desire to embrace this bag of filth itself?’
Listen now to Michelet. I make no effort to render the almost hysterical lyricism of the original, but translate quite literally.
‘An incomparable illustration from Coste and Gerbe’s handbook’ (Coste was a professor of embryology, Gerbe an anatomical draughtsman) ‘shows the same organ (the matrix) under a less frightful aspect, which yet moves the beholder to tears . . .
‘Gerbe’s few plates (for the most part unsigned)—this unique and astonishing atlas—are a temple of the future which, later on, in a better age, will fill all hearts with religion. One must fall on one’s knees before daring to look at them.
‘The great mystery of generation had never before appeared in art with all its charm, its true sanctity. I do not know the astonishing artist. I thank him none the less. Every man who has had a mother will thank him.
‘He has given us the form, the colour, nay, much more, he has given us the morbidezza, the tragic grace of these things, the profound emotion of them. Is it by dint of sheer accuracy? or did he feel all this? I know not, but such the effect is.
‘Oh sanctuary of grace, made to purify all hearts, how many things you reveal to us!
‘We learn, to begin with, that Nature, prodigal as she is of outward beauties, has placed the greatest within. The most thrilling are hidden, as though engulfed, in the depths of life itself.
‘One learns, moreover, that love is something visible. The tenderness lavished upon us by our mothers, their dear caresses and the sweetness of their milk—all this can be recognized, felt, divined (and adored!) in this ineffable sanctuary of love and pain.’[A]
Well, well, well . . .
[A]
From Michelet’s L’Amour.
Ethics in Andalusia
Two newspapers are published at Granada, one Catholic, one liberal and anti-clerical. Their inky warfare rivals that of Mr Potts and his detested colleague in
