“The result of taboo is insanity. And insanity, especially mob insanity, is the fearful danger that threatens our civilization. There are certain persons with a sort of rabies, who live only to infect the mass. If the young do not watch out, they will find themselves, before so very many years are past, engulfed in a howling manifestation of mob-insanity, truly terrifying to think of……………We shall have to fight the mob, in order to keep sane, and to keep society sane.”

D H Lawrence wrote this as a closing paragraph to his introduction of ‘Pansies’ (a collection of poetry) in 1929. He has since been labelled a prophet and this paragraph could be interpreted as a prediction of the rise of the Nazis. A little far fetched I think as earlier on in his essay Lawrence had been talking about taboos in connection with what was considered obscene. This short collection of essays written near the end of his life is concerned very much with obscenity and pornography. Lady Chatterley's Lover his last novel could not be published in England or America and the police had recently raided an exhibition of his paintings and taken several away with a view to prosecution, however although this was very much in Lawrence’s mind these final essays range far and wide and are a continual delight: full of interest, of passion and of humour.

His essay “Introduction to His Paintings” also written in 1929 starts with him asserting that the fear of syphilis gave a fearful blow to sexual life. This fear and horror is reflected in much art, particularly in English painting, which has a fear of the human body. The English, he says; are good at landscapes, but when they get to the human form they wrap it up in so much clothing it becomes almost invisible. He detects a hatred of the human form brought about by an unconscious fear of syphilis. This leads him on to talk about morality and the insistence by the ruling classes that man is basically wicked, which had the effect of the great and the good enslaving the common man to industry, He says:

“the good got hold of the goods, and our modern ‘civilization’ of money machines and wage-slaves was inaugurated. The very pivot of it, let us never forget, being fear and hate, the most intimate fear and hate, fear and hate of one’s own instinctive, intuitive body, and fear and hate of every other man’s and every other woman’s warm, procreative body and imagination.”

Lawrence then launches into a critique of European painters who tackled the human form; none to Mr Lawrence’s satisfaction until he gets to Cezanne, where he talks about the artists battle with the cliché and his attempts to go further than seeking the perfect form which seems so important to art critics. This leads him back to a discussion about the future of English painting, but he is not very hopeful.

“The law is a dreary thing and its judgements have nothing to do with life”

Says Lawrence near the start of his essay on Pornography and Obscenity,.he goes on to try and define pornography and concludes by saying that “you can recognise it by the insult it offers, invariably to sex, and to the human spirit” He opines that sex had become a ‘dirty little secret’ a view that seems to encapsulate Victorian Britain’s attitude to sex. The way to get out from under this attitude is simply to do away with the secret. No more secrecy he thunders and then discusses modern attitudes to sex. He has a rant about the dangers of masturbation, not so much physical dangers as a mental burden that serves to check the flow of life. If the attitude of the dirty little secret prevails then Lawrence believes that the public will be in a state of general idiocy. It is the general public that is responsible for public opinion and Lawrence describes how the dainty police removed all the pictures from his exhibition that showed a fragment of human pudenda. This was the test for obscenity.

The final essay by Lawrence “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, early on states that:

“And this is the real point of the book. I want men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly” ………..and later; “Far be it from me to suggest that all women should go running after gamekeepers for lovers”

Their follows a vigorous defence of the institution of marriage, but a marriage freely entered into where the partner’s sex life is compatible. He says marriage is the clue to human life, but it must be in tune with the wheeling sun and the nodding earth. Lawrence is aiming no less than for a marriage that is in tune with nature and the cosmos. There is much insight here along with some typical Lawrentian themes that take the reader into his realms of blood consciousness, but Lawrence here is in control and much of his wilder notions are reigned in. He gets back to talking about the book itself and whether Clifford Chatterley's paralysis and impotency is symbolic. He reveals that the story just came to him as it did and he left it alone. There is also a discussion about the difficulties he had of getting it printed and the pirate versions that appeared at the time.

This is a very good essay and will be of interest to all readers of Lady Chatterley’s lover and Lawrence finishes with a little joke against himself:

“Well one of them was a brainy vamp, and the other was a sexual moron, said an American woman, referring to the two men in the book - so I am afraid that Connie (Lady Chatterley) had a poor choice - as usual.”.

T S Eliot the influential author and critic claimed that Lawrence had no sense of humour. There is much evidence to the contrary in these essays that sparkle with wit and life, even more remarkable when one is made aware that they were written by a man dying of tuberculosis.

My penguin edition of these essays finishes with an essay by Mark Schorer titled Introduction to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. This takes up 30 pages of the total of 160 and so you don’t get a full measure of D H Lawrence. The Schorer essay is good enough, but pales into insignificance when compared to those written by Lawrence, perhaps that was the point of including it. ( )