Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence, page 1011
Now look here! said I. Do you mean to say you only feel quite yourself when you’re dancing? — Not always then, she retorted. — And never any other time? — Never! The word fell on top of us with a smack, and left us flat. Oh, go on! cried Jimmy. What abodt the other day at Cromer? — What about it? said she. — Ah! What were the wild waves saying! cried he knowingly. — You may ask me, she replied. They hummed and hawed, but they never got a word out, as far as I’m concerned. — Do you mean to say you weren’t happy! cried he, mortified. — I certainly never forgot myself, not for a moment, she replied. He made a gesture of despair.
But what do you mean? said I. Do you mean you were never all there, or that you were too much there? Which? She became suddenly attentive, and Jimmy looked at her mockingly, with a sort of got-her-on-toast look. — Why? she drawled languidly. I suppose when you can’t forget yourself, it’s because some of you’s left out, and you feel it. — So you are only painfully aware of yourself when you’re not altogether yourself — like a one-legged man trying to rub his missing toes, because they ache? said I. She pondered a moment. — I suppose that’s about the size of it, she admitted. — And nothing of you is left out in jazz? Jimmy demanded. — Not in good jazz, if the boy can dance, she replied. — Well, I think you’ll grant me that, said Jim. To which she did not reply.
So it takes a jazz band to get you all there? I asked. — Apparently, she replied. — Then why aren’t you content to be only half there, till the band toots up? — Oh, I am. It’s only friend James gets the wind up about the missing sections. — Hang it all! cried James — But I held up my hand like a high-church clergyman, and hushed him off. — Then why don’t you marry a boy who will prefer you only half there? I demanded of her. — What! marry one of those coat- hangers? You see me! she said, with cool contempt.
Then the point, said I, is that Jimmy leaves some of you out, and so he never sweeps you off your feet. And so you can’t forget yourself, because part of you isn’t embraced by Jimmy, and that part stands aside and gibbers. — Gibbers is the right word, like a lucky monkey! said Jim spitefully. — Better a whole monkey than half a man! said she. — So what’s to be done about it? said I. Why not think about it? Which bit of the woman does Jimmy leave out of his manly embrace? — Oh, about nine-tenths of her! said she. — Nine- tenths of her being too conceited for nuts! said Jimmy.
Look here! said I. This is vulgar altercation. — What do you expect, with a whipper-snapper like Jimmy? said she. — My stars! if that two-stepping Trissie says another word — ! cried Jim.
Peace! said I. And give the last word to me, for I am the latter- day Aristotle, who has more to say even than a woman. Next time, O James, when you have your arms, both of them, around Cecilia —
Which will be never! said Cecilia- — then, I continued, you must say to yourself, I have here but one-tenth of my dear Ciss, the remaining nine-tenths being mysteriously elsewhere. Yet this one-tenth is a pretty good armful, not to say handful, and will do me very nicely; so forward the light brigade! And you, Cecilia, under the same circumstance, will say to yourself: Alas so little of me is concerned, that why should I concern myself? Jimmy gets his tenth. Let’s see him make the most of it.
MAKING LOVE TO MUSIC
“To me, dancing,” said Romeo, “is just making love to music.”
“That’s why you never will dance with me, I suppose.” replied Juliet.
“Well, you know, you are a bit too much of an individual.”
It is a curious thing, but the ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next. We are all of us, largely, the embodied ideas of our grandmothers, and, without knowing it, we behave as such. It is odd that the grafting works so quickly, but it seems to. Let the ideas change rapidly, and there follows a correspondingly rapid change in humanity. We become what we think. Worse still, we have become what our grandmothers thought. And our children’s children will become the lamentable things that we are thinking. Which is the psychological visiting of the sins of the fathers upon the children. For we do not become just the lofty or beautiful thoughts of our grandmothers. Alas no! We are the embodiment of the most potent ideas of our progenitors, and these ideas are mostly private ones, not to be admitted in public, but to be transmitted as instincts and as the dynamics of behaviour to the third and fourth generation. Alas for the thing that our grandmothers brooded over in secret, and willed in private. That thing are we.
What did they wish and will? One thing is certain: they wished to be made love to, to music. They wished man were not a coarse creature, jumping to his goal, and finished. They wanted heavenly strains to resound, while he held their hand, and a new musical movement to burst forth, as he put his arm round their waist. With infinite variations the music was to soar on, from level to level of love-making, in a delicious dance, the two things inextricable, the two persons likewise.
To end, of course, before the so-called consummation of love- making, which, to our grandmothers in their dream, and therefore to us in actuality, is the grand anti-climax. Not a consummation, but a humiliating anti-climax.
This is the so-called act of love itself, the actual knuckle of the whole bone of contention: a humiliating anti-climax. The bone of contention, of course, is sex. Sex is very charming and very delightful, so long as you make love to music, and you tread the clouds with Shelley, in a two-step. But to come at last to the grotesque bathos of capitulation: no, sir! Nay-nay!
Even a man like Maupassant, an apparent devotee of sex, says the same thing: and Maupassant is grandfather, or great-grandfather, to very many of us. Surely, he says, the act of copulation is the Creator’s cynical joke against us. To have created in us all these beautiful and noble sentiments of love, to set the nightingale and all the heavenly spheres singing, merely to throw us into this grotesque posture, to perform this humiliating act, is a piece of cynicism worthy, not of a benevolent Creator, but of a mocking demon.
Poor Maupassant, there is the clue to his own catastrophe! He wanted to make love to music. And he realized, with rage, that copulate to music you cannot. So he divided himself against himself, and damned his eyes in disgust, then copulated all the more.
We, however, his grandchildren, are shrewder. Man must make love to music, and woman must be made love to, to a string and saxophone accompaniment. It is our inner necessity. Because our grandfathers, and especially our great-grandfathers, left the music most severely out of their copulations. So now we leave the copulation most severely out of our musical love-making. We must make love to music: it is our grandmothers’ dream, become an inward necessity in us, an unconscious motive force. Copulate you cannot, to music. So cut out that part, and solve the problem.
The popular modern dances, far from being “sexual,” are distinctly anti-sexual. But there, again, we must make a distinction. We should say, the modern jazz and tango and Charleston, far from being an incitement to copulation, are in direct antagonism to copulation. Therefore it is all nonsense for the churches to raise their voice against dancing, against “making love to music.” Because the Church, and society at large, has no particular antagonism to sex. It would be ridiculous, for sex is so large and all-embracing that the religious passion itself is largely sexual. But, as they say, “sublimated.” This is the great recipe for sex: only sublimate it! Imagine the quicksilver heated and passing off in weird, slightly poisonous vapour, instead of heavily rolling together and fusing: and there you have the process: sublimation: making love to music! Morality has really no quarrel at all with “sublimated” sex. Most “nice” things are,”sublimated sex.” What morality hates, what the Church hates, what modern mankind hates — for what, after all, is “morality” except the instinctive revulsion of the majority? — is just copulation. The modern youth especially just have an instinctive aversion from copulation. They love sex. But they inwardly loathe copulation, even when they play at it. As for playing at it, what else are they to do, given the toys? But they don’t like it. They do it in a sort of self-spite. And they turn away, with disgust and relief, from this bed-ridden act, to make love once more to music.
And really, surely this is all to the good. If the young don’t really like copulation, then they are safe. As for marriage, they will marry, according to their grandmothers’ dream, for quite other reasons. Our grandfathers, or great-grandfathers, married crudely and unmusically, for copulation. That was the actuality. So the dream was all of music. The dream was the mating of two souls, to the faint chiming of the Seraphim. We, the third and fourth generation, we are the dream made flesh. They dreamed of a marriage with all things gross — meaning especially copulation — left out, and only the pure harmony of equality and intimate companionship remaining. And the young live out the dream. They marry: they copulate in a perfunctory and half-disgusted fashion, merely to show they can do it. And so they have children. But the marriage is made to music, the gramophone and the wireless orchestrate each small domestic act, and keep up the jazzing jig of connubial felicity, a felicity of companionship, equality, forbearance, and mutual sharing of everything the married couple have in common. Marriage set to music! The worn-out old serpent in this musical Eden of domesticity is the last, feeble instinct for copulation, which drives the married couple to clash upon the boring organic differences in one another, and prevents them from being twin souls in almost identical bodies. But we are wise, and soon learn to leave the humiliating act out altogether. It is the only wisdom.
We are such stuff as our grandmothers’ dreams were made on, and our little life is rounded by a band.
The thing you wonder, as you watch the modern dancers making love to music, in a dance-hall, is what kind of dances will our children’s children dance? Our mothers’ mothers danced quadrilles and sets of Lancers, and the waltz was almost an indecent thing to them. Our mothers’ mothers’ mothers danced minuets and Roger de Cov- erleys, and smart and bouncing country-dances which worked up the blood and danced a man nearer and nearer to copulation.
But lo! even while she was being whirled round in the dance, our great-grandmother was dreaming of soft and throbbing music, and the arms of “one person,” and the throbbing and sliding unison of this one more elevated person, who would never coarsely bounce her towards bed and copulation, but would slide on with her for ever, down the dim and sonorous vistas, making love without end to music without end, and leaving out entirely that disastrous, music-less full-stop of copulation, the end of ends.
So she dreamed, our great-grandmother, as she crossed hands and was flung around, and buffeted and busked towards bed, and the bouncing of the bete a deux dos. She dreamed of men that were only embodied souls, not tiresome and gross males, lords and masters. She dreamed of “one person” who was all men in one, universal, and beyond narrow individualism.
So that now, the great-granddaughter is made love to by all men — to music — as if it were one man. To music, all men, as if it were one man, make love to her, and she sways in the arms, not of an individual, but of the modern species. It is wonderful. And the modern man makes love, to music, to all women, as if she were one woman. All woman, as if she were one woman! It is almost like Baudelaire making love to the vast thighs of Dame Nature herself, except that that dream of our great-grandfather is still too copulative, though all-embracing.
But what is the dream that is simmering at the bottom of the soul of the modern young woman as she slides to music across the floor, in the arms of the species, or as she waggles opposite the species, in the Charleston? If she is content, there is no dream. But woman is never content. If she were content, the Charleston and the Black Bottom would not oust the tango.
She is not content. She is even less content, in the morning after the night before, than was her great-grandmother, who had been bounced by copulatory attentions. She is even less content; therefore her dream, though not risen yet to consciousness, is even more devouring and more rapidly subversive.
What is her dream, this slender, tender lady just out of her teens, who is varying the two-step with the Black Bottom? What can her dream be? Because what her dream is, that her children, and my children, or children’s children, will become. It is the very ovum of the future soul, as my dream is the sperm.
There is not much left for her to dream of, because whatever she wants she can have. All men, or no men, this man or that, she has the choice, for she has no lord and master. Sliding down the endless avenues of music, having an endless love endlessly made to her, she has this too. If she wants to be bounced into copulation, at a dead end, she can have that too: just to prove how monkeyish it is, and what a fumbling in the cul-de-sac.
Nothing is denied her, so there is nothing to want. And without desire, even dreams are lame. Lame dreams! Perhaps she has lame dreams, and wishes, last wish of all, she had no dreams at all.
But while life lasts, and is an affair of sleeping and waking, this is the one wish that will never be granted. From dreams no man escapeth, no woman either. Even the little blonde who is preferred by gentlemen has a dream somewhere, if she, and we, and he, did but know it. Even a dream beyond emeralds and dollars.
What is it? What is the lame and smothered dream of the lady? Whatever it is, she will never know: not till somebody has told it her, and then gradually, and after a great deal of spiteful repudiation, she will recognize it, and it will pass into her womb.
Myself, I do not know what the frail lady’s dream may be. But depend upon one thing, it will be something very different from the present business. The dream and the business! — an eternal antipathy. So the dream, whatever it may be, will not be “making love to music.” It will be something else.
Perhaps it will be the re-capturing of a dream that started in mankind, and never finished, was never fully unfolded. The thought occurred to me suddenly when I was looking at the remains of paintings on the walls of Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia. There the painted women dance, in their transparent linen with heavier, coloured borders, opposite the naked-limbed men, in a splendour and an abandon which is not at all abandoned. There is a great beauty in them, as of life which has not finished. The dance is Greek, if you like, but not finished off like the Greek dancing. The beauty is not so pure, if you will, as the Greek beauty; but also it is more ample, not so narrowed. And there is not the slight element of abstraction, of inhumanity, which underlies all Greek expression, the tragic will.
The Etruscans, at least before the Romans smashed them, do not seem to have been tangled up with tragedy, as the Greeks were from the first. There seems to have been a peculiar large carelessness about them, very human and non-moral. As far as one can judge, they never said: certain acts are immoral, just because we say so! They seem to have had a strong feeling for taking life sincerely as a pleasant thing. Even death was a gay and lively affair.
Moralists will say: Divine law wiped them out. The answer to that is, divine law wipes everything out in time, even itself. And if the smashing power of the all-trampling Roman is to be identified with divine law, then all I can do is to look up another divinity.
No, I do believe that the unborn dream at the bottom of the soul of the shingled, modern young lady is this Etruscan young woman of mine, dancing with such abandon opposite her naked-limbed, strongly dancing young man, to the sound of the double flute. They are wild with a dance that is heavy and light at the same time, and not a bit anti-copulative, yet not bouncingly copulative either.
That was another nice thing about the Etruscans: there was a phallic symbol everywhere, so everybody was used to it, and they no doubt all offered it small offerings, as the source of inspiration. Being part of the everyday life, there was no need to get it on the brain, as we tend to do.
And apparently the men, the men slaves at least, went gaily and jauntily round with no clothes on at all, and being therefore of a good brown colour, wore their skin for livery. And the Etruscan ladies thought nothing of it. Why should they? We think nothing of a naked cow, and we still refrain from putting our pet-dogs into pants or petticoats: marvellous to relate: but then, our ideal is Liberty, after all! So if the slave was stark-naked, who gaily piped to the lady as she danced, and if her partner was three-parts naked, and herself nothing but a transparency, well, nobody thought anything about it; there was nothing to shy off from, and all the fun was in thu dance.
There it is, the delightful quality of the Etruscan dance. They are neither making love to music, to avoid copulation, nor are they bouncing towards copulation with a brass band accompaniment. They are just dancing a dance with the elixir of life. And if they have made a little offering to the stone phallus at the door, it is because when one is full of life one is full of possibilities, and the phallus gives life. And if they have made an offering also to the queer ark of the female symbol, at the door of a woman’s tomb, it is because the womb too is the source of life, and a great fountain of dance-movements.
It is we who have narrowed the dance down to two movements: either bouncing towards copulation, or sliding and shaking and waggling, to elude it. Surely it is ridiculous to make love to music, and to music to be made love to! Surely the music is to dance to! And surely the modern young woman feels this, somewhere deep inside.
To the music one should dance, and dancing, dance. The Etruscan young woman is going gaily at it, after two-thousand-five- hundred years. She is not making love to music, nor is the dark- limbed youth, her partner. She is just dancing her very soul into existence, having made an offering on one hand to the lively phallus of man, on the other hand, to the shut womb-symbol of woman, and put herself on real good terms with both of them. So she is quite serene, and dancing herself as a very fountain of motion and of life, the young man opposite her dancing himself the same, in contrast and balance, with just the double flute to whistle round their naked heels.
