a beautiful ball of lapis lazuli and bringing it crashing down upon his head. Except for a lively incident of this sort here and there, Women in Love must impress the ordinary novel-reader as intolerably dull, dreary, difficult, and mad: and anyone who declares that it makes sex attractive should be punished by being required to read it through.
Mr. Lawrence's interest in it is predominantly the interest of an exploring moralist who has specialized in sexual relations and is coming to conclusions which are important, if true. He is coming to the conclusion that—for men, at any rate—passional surrender is not the greatest thing in the world. He is coming to the conclusion that the romantic poets and the romantic novelists—including, perhaps, Mr. Wells and Mr. Galsworthy—have all been on the wrong tack in representing as the height of human experience that ecstasy in which one individuality is merged and absorbed in another. This he regards as in its essential nature an ideal of decadence. This is an aspiration toward death and disintegration, from which the inevitable reaction is disgust. The virtue of a man is to preserve his own integrity and resist the dissolution of union. "When
