However, he chose to sentimentalize and glorify the most doggy sort of sex. Setting out to satirize the Forsytes, he glorifies the anti, who is one worse. While the individual remains real and unfallen, sex remains a vital and supremely important thing. But once you have the fall into social beings, sex becomes disgusting, like dogs on the heat. Dogs are social beings, with no true canine individuality. Wolves and foxes don’t copulate on the pavement. Their sex is wild and in act utterly private. Howls you may hear, but you will never see anything. But the dog is tame — and he makes excrement and he copulates on the pavement, as if to spite you. He is the Forsyte anti.
The same with human beings. Once they become tame they become, in a measure, exhibitionists, as if to spite everything. They have no real feelings of their own. Unless somebody “catches them at it” they don’t really feel they’ve felt anything at all. And this is how the mob is today. It is Forsyte anti. It is the social being spiting society.
Oh, if only Mr. Galsworthy had satirized this side of Forsytism, the anti-Forsyte posturing of the “rebel,” the narcissus and the exhibitionist, the dogs copulating on the pavement! Instead of that, he glorified it, to the eternal shame of English literature.
The satire, which in The Man of Property really had a certain noble touch, soon fizzles out, and we get that series of Galsworthian “rebels” who are, like all the rest of the modern middle-class rebels, not in rebellion at all. They are merely social beings behaving in an anti-social manner. They worship their own class, but they pretend to go one better and sneer at it. They are Forsyte antis, feeling snobbish about snobbery. Nevertheless, they want to attract attention and make money. That’s why they are anti. It is the vicious circle of Forsytism. Money means more to them than it does to a Soames Forsyte, so they pretend to go one better, and despise it, but they will do anything to have it — things which Soames Forsyte would not have done.
If there is one thing more repulsive than the social being positive, it is the social being negative, the mere anti. In the great debacle of decency this gentleman is the most indecent. In a subtle way Bosinney and Irene are more dishonest and more indecent than Soames and Winifred, but they are anti, so they are glorified. It is pretty sickening.
The introduction to The Island Pharisees explains the whole show: “Each man born into the world is born to go a journey, and for the most part he is born on the high road. ... As soon as he can toddle, he moves, by the queer instinct we call the love of life, along this road: ... his fathers went this way before him, they made this road for him to tread, and, when they bred him, passed into his fibre the love of doing things as they themselves had done them. So he walks on and on. . . . Suddenly, one day, without intending to, he notices a path or opening in the hedge, leading to right or left, and he stands looking at the undiscovered. After that he stops at all the openings in the hedge; one day, with a beating heart, he tries one. And this is where the fun begins.” — Nine out of ten get back to the broad road again, and sidetrack no more. They snuggle down comfortably in the next inn, and think where they might have been. “But the poor silly tenth is faring on. Nine times out of ten he goes down in a bog; the undiscovered has engulfed him.” But the tenth time he gets across, and a new road is opened to mankind.
It is a class-bound consciousness, or at least a hopeless social consciousness which sees life as a high road between two hedges. And the only way out is gaps in the hedge and excursions into naughtiness! These little anti excursions, from which the wayfarer slinks back to solid comfort nine times out of ten; an odd one goes down in a bog; and a very rare one finds a way across and opens out a new road.
In Mr. Galsworthy’s novels we see the nine, the ninety-nine, the nine hundred and ninety-nine slinking back to solid comfort; we see an odd Bosinney go under a bus, because he hadn’t guts enough to do something else, the poor anti! but that rare figure sidetracking into the unknown we do not see. Because, as a matter of fact, the whole figure is faulty at that point. If life is a great highway, then it must forge on ahead into the unknown. Sidetracking gets nowhere. That is mere anti. The tip of the road is always unfinished, in the wilderness. If it comes to a precipice and a canon — well, then, there is need for some exploring. But we see Mr. Galsworthy, after The Country House, very safe on the old highway, very secure in comfort, wealth, and renown. He at least has gone down in no bog, nor lost himself striking new paths. The hedges nowadays are ragged with gaps, anybody who likes strays out on the little trips of “unconventions.” But the Forsyte road has not moved on at all. It has only become dishevelled and sordid with excursionists doing the anti tricks and being “unconventional,” and leaving tin cans behind.
In the three early novels, The Island Pharisees, The Man of Property, Fraternity, it looked as if Mr. Galsworthy might break through the blind end of the highway with the dynamite of satire, and help us out on to a new lap. But the sex ingredient of his dynamite was damp and muzzy, the explosion gradually fizzled off in sentimentality, and we are left in a worse state than before.
The later novels are purely commercial, and, if it had not been for the early novels, of no importance. They are popular, they sell well, and there’s the end of them. They contain the explosive powder of the first books in minute quantities, fizzling as silly squibs. When you arrive at To Let, and the end, at least the promised end, of the Forsytes, what have you? Just money! Money, money, money and a certain snobbish silliness, and many more anti tricks and poses. Nothing else. The story is feeble, the characters have no blood and bones, the emotions are faked, faked, faked. It is one great fake. Not necessarily of Mr. Galsworthy. The characters fake their own emotions. But that doesn’t help us. And if you look closely at the characters, the meanness and low-level vulgarity are very distasteful. You have all the Forsyte meanness, with none of the energy. Jolyon and Irene are meaner and more treacherous to their son than the older Forsytes were to theirs. The young ones are of a limited, mechanical, vulgar egoism far surpassing that of Swithin or James, their ancestors. There is in it all a vulgar sense of being rich, and therefore we do as we like: an utter incapacity for anything like true feeling, especially in the women, Fleur, Irene, Annette, June: a glib crassness, a youthful spontaneity which is just impertinence and lack of feeling; and all the time, a creeping, “having’’ sort of vulgarity of money and self-will, money and self-will, so that we wonder sometimes if Mr. Galsworthy is not treating his public in real bad faith, and being cynical and rancorous under his rainbow sentimentalism.
Fleur he destroys in one word: she is “having.” It is perfectly true. We don’t blame the young Jon for clearing out. Irene he destroys in a phrase out of Fleur’s mouth to June: “Didn’t she spoil your life too?”-and it is precisely what she did. Sneaking and mean, Irene prevented June from getting her lover. Sneaking and mean, she prevents Fleur. She is the bitch in the manger. She is the sneaking anti. Irene, the most beautiful woman on earth! And Mr. Galsworthy, with the cynicism of a successful old sentimentalist, turns it off by making June say: “Nobody can spoil a life, my dear. That’s nonsense. Things happen, but we bob up.”
This is the final philosophy of it all. “Things happen, but we bob up.” Very well, then, write the book in that key, the keynote of a frank old cynic. There’s no point in sentimentalizing it and being a sneaking old cynic. Why pour out masses of feelings that pretend to be genuine and then turn it all off with: “Things happen, but we bob up”?
It is quite true, things happen, and we bob up. If we are vulgar sentimentalists, we bob up just the same, so nothing has happened and nothing can happen. All is vulgarity. But it pays. There is money in it.
Vulgarity pays, and cheap cynicism smothered in sentimentalism pays better than anything else. Because nothing can happen to the degraded social being. So let’s pretend it does, and then bob up!
It is time somebody began to spit out the jam of sentimentalism, at least, which smothers the “bobbing-up” philosophy. It is time we turned a straight light on this
horde of rats, these younger Forsyte sentimentalists whose name is legion. It is sentimentalism which is stifling us. Let the social beings keep on bobbing up while ever they can. But it is time an effort was made to turn a hosepipe on the sentimentalism they ooze over everything. The world is one sticky mess, in which the little Forsytes indeed may keep on bobbing still, but in which an honest feeling can’t breathe.
But if the sticky mess gets much deeper, even the little Forsytes won’t be able to bob up any more. They’ll be smothered in their own slime along with everything else. Which is a comfort.
INTRODUCTION TO THESE PAINTINGS
The reason the English produce so few painters is not that they are, as a nation, devoid of a genuine feeling for visual art: though to look at their productions, and to look at the mess which has been made of actual English landscape, one might really conclude that they were, and leave it at that. But it is not the fault of the God that made them. They are made with aesthetic sensibilities the same as anybody else. The fault lies in the English attitude to life.
The English, and the Americans following them, are paralysed by fear. That is what thwarts and distorts the Anglo-Saxon existence, this paralysis of fear. It thwarts life, it distorts vision, and it strangles impulse: this overmastering fear. And fear of what, in heaven’s name? What is the Anglo-Saxon stock today so petrified with fear about? We have to answer that before we can understand the English failure in the visual arts: for, on the whole, it is a failure.
It is an old fear, which seemed to dig in to the English soul at the time of the Renaissance. Nothing could be more lovely and fearless than Chaucer. But already Shakespeare is morbid with fear, fear of consequences. That is the strange phenomenon of the English Renaissance: this mystic terror of the consequences, the consequences of action. Italy, too, had her reaction, at the end of the sixteenth century, and showed a similar fear. But not so profound, so overmastering. Aretino was anything but timorous: he was bold as any Renaissance novelist, and went one better.
What appeared to take full grip on the northern consciousness at the end of the sixteenth century was a terror, almost a horror of sexual life. The Elizabethans, grand as we think them, started it. The real “mortal coil” in Hamlet is all sexual; the young man’s horror of his mother’s incest, sex carrying with it a wild and nameless terror which, it seems to me, it had never carried before. Oedipus and Hamlet are very different in this respect. In CEdipus there is no recoil in horror from sex itself: Greek drama never shows us that. The horror, when it is present in Greek tragedy, is against destiny, man caught in the toils of destiny. But with the Renaissance itself, particularly in England, the horror is sexual. Orestes is dogged by destiny and driven mad by the Eumenides. But Hamlet is overpowered by horrible revulsion from his physical connexion with his mother, which makes him recoil in similar revulsion from Ophelia, and almost from his father, even as a ghost. He is horrified at the merest suggestion of physical connexion, as if it were an unspeakable taint.
This, no doubt, is all in the course of the growth of the “spiritual- mental” consciousness, at the expense of the instinctive-intuitive consciousness. Man came to have his own body in horror, especially in its sexual implications: and so he began to suppress with all his might his instinctive-intuitive consciousness, which is so radical, so physical, so sexual. Cavalier poetry, love poetry, is already devoid of body. Donne, after the exacerbated revulsion-attraction excitement of his earlier poetry, becomes a divine. “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” sings the cavalier: an expression incredible in Chaucer’s poetry. “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more,” sings the Cavalier lover. In Chaucer the “dear” and the “honour” would have been more or less identical.
But with the Elizabethans the grand rupture had started in the human consciousness, the mental consciousness recoiling in violence away from the physical, instinctive-intuitive. To the Restoration dramatist sex is, on the whole, a dirty business, but they more or less glory in the dirt. Fielding tries in vain to defend the Old Adam. Richardson with his calico purity and his underclothing excitements sweeps all before him. Swift goes mad with sex and excrement revulsion. Sterne flings a bit of the same excrement humorously around. And physical consciousness gives a last song in Burns, then is dead. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, the Brontes, all are post-mortem poets. The essential instinctive-intuitive body is dead, and worshipped in death — all very unhealthy. Till Swinburne and Oscar Wilde try to start a revival from the mental field. Swinburne’s “white thighs” are purely mental.
Now, in England — and following, in America — the physical self was not just fig-leafed over or suppressed in public, as was the case in Italy and on most of the Continent. In England it excited a strange horror and terror. And this extra morbidity came, I believe, from the great shock of syphilis and the realization of the consequences of the disease. Wherever syphilis, or “pox,” came from, it was fairly new in England at the end of the fifteenth century. But by the end of the sixteenth, its ravages were obvious, and the shock of them had just penetrated the thoughtful and the imaginative consciousness. The royal families of England and Scotland were syphilitic; Edward VI and Elizabeth born with the inherited consequences of the disease. Edward VI died of it, while still a boy. Mary died childless and in utter depression. Elizabeth had no eyebrows, her teeth went rotten; she must have felt herself, somewhere, utterly unfit for marriage, poor thing. That was the grisly horror that lay behind the glory of Queen Bess. And so the Tudors died out: and another syphilitic-born unfortunate came to the throne, in the person of James I. Mary Queen of Scots had no more luck than the Tudors, apparently. Apparently Darnley was reeking with the pox, though probably at first she did not know it. But when the Archbishop of St. Andrews was christening her baby James, afterwards James I of England, the old clergyman was so dripping with pox that she was terrified lest he should give it to the infant. And she need not have troubled, for the wretched infant had brought it into the world with him, from that fool Darnley. So James I of England slobbered and shambled, and was the wisest fool in Christendom, and the Stuarts likewise died out, the stock enfeebled by the disease.
With the royal families of England and Scotland in this condition, we can judge what the noble houses, the nobility of both nations, given to free living and promiscuous pleasure, must have been like. England traded with the East and with America; England, unknowing, had opened her doors to the disease. The English aristocracy travelled and had curious taste in loves. And pox entered the blood of the nation, particularly of the upper classes, who had more chance of infection. And after it had entered the blood, it entered the consciousness, and hit the vital imagination.
It is possible that the effects of syphilis and the conscious realization of its consequences gave a great blow also to the Spanish psyche, precisely at this period. And it is possible that Italian society, which was on the whole so untravelled, had no connexion with America, and was so privately self-contained, suffered less from the disease. Someone ought to make a thorough study of the effects of “pox” on the minds and the emotions and imaginations of the various nations of Europe, at about the time of our Elizabethans.
The apparent effect on the Elizabethans and the Restoration wits is curious. They appear to take the whole thing as a joke. The common oath, “Pox on you!” was almost funny. But how common the oath was! How the word “pox” was in every mind and in every mouth. It is one of the words that haunt Elizabethan speech. Taken very manly, with a great deal of Falstaffian bluff, treated as a huge joke! Pox! Why, he’s got the pox! Ha-ha! What’s he been after?
There is just the same attitude among the common run of men today with regard to the minor sexual diseases. Syphilis is no longer regarded as a joke, according to my experience. The very word itself frightens men. You could joke with the word “pox.” You can’t joke with the word “syphilis.” The change of word has killed the joke. But men still joke about clap! which is a minor sexual disease. They pretend
to think it manly, even, to have the disease, or to have had it. “What! never had a shot of clap!” cries one gentleman to another. “Why, where have you been all your life?” If we change the word and insisted on “gonorrhoea,” or whatever it is, in place of “clap,” the joke would die. And anyhow I have had young men come to me green and quaking, afraid they’ve caught a “shot of clap.”
Now, in spite of all the Elizabethan jokes about pox, pox was no joke to them. A joke may be a very brave way of meeting a calamity, or it may be a very cowardly way. Myself, I consider the Elizabethan pox joke a purely cowardly attitude. They didn’t think it funny, for by God it wasn’t funny. Even poor Elizabeth’s lack of eyebrows and her rotten teeth were not funny. And they all knew it. They may not have known it was the direct result of pox: though probably they did. This fact remains, that no man can contract syphilis, or any deadly sexual disease, without feeling the most shattering and profound terror go through him, through the very roots of his being. And no man can look without a sort of horror on the effects of a sexual disease in another person. We are so constituted that we are all at once horrified and terrified. The fear and dread has been so great that the pox joke was invented as an evasion, and following that, the great hush! hush! was imposed. Man was too frightened: that’s the top and bottom of it.
But now, with remedies discovered, we need no longer be too frightened. We can begin, after all these years, to face the matter. After the most fearful damage has been done.
For an overmastering fear is poison to the human psyche. And this overmastering fear, like some horrible secret tumour, has been poisoning our consciousness ever since the Elizabethans, who first woke up with dread to the entry of the original syphilitic poison into the blood.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1043
