Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 1091
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 realisation 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 it hit the vital imagination.
It is possible that the effects of syphilis and the conscious realisation of its consequences gave a great blow to the Spanish psyche, precisely at this period. And it is possible that Italian society, which was on the whole so untravelled, had no connection 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 imagination 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 to-day 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 changed 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.
I know nothing about medicine and very little about diseases, and my facts are such as I have picked up in casual reading. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the secret awareness of syphilis, and the utter secret terror and horror of it, has had an enormous and incalculable effect on the English consciousness, and on the American. Even when the fear has never been formulated there it has lain, potent and overmastering. I am convinced that some of Shakespeare’s horror and despair, in his tragedies, arose from the shock of his consciousness of syphilis. I don’t suggest for one moment Shakespeare ever contracted syphilis. I have never had syphilis myself. Yet I know and confess how profound is my fear of the disease, and more than fear, my horror. In fact, I don’t think I am so very much afraid of it. I am more horrified, inwardly and deeply, at the idea of its existence.
All this sounds very far from the art of painting. But it is not so far as it sounds. The appearance of syphilis in our midst gave a fearful blow to our sexual life. The real natural innocence of Chaucer was impossible after that. The very sexual act of procreation might bring as one of its consequences a foul disease, and the unborn might be tainted from the moment of conception. Fearful thought! It is truly a fearful thought, and all the centuries of getting used to it won’t help us. It remains a fearful thought, and to free ourselves from this fearful dread we should use all our wits and all our efforts, not stick our heads in the sand of some idiotic joke or still more idiotic don’t-mention-it. The fearful thought of the consequences of syphilis, or of any sexual disease, upon the unborn gives a shock to the impetus of fatherhood in any man, even the cleanest. Our consciousness is a strange thing, and the knowledge of a certain fact may wound it mortally, even if the fact does not touch us directly. And so I am certain that some of Shakespeare’s father-murder complex, some of Hamlet’s horror of his mother, of his uncle, of all old men came from the feeling that fathers may transmit syphilis, or syphilis-consequences, to children. I don’t know even whether Shakespeare was actually aware of the consequences to a child born of a syphilitic father or mother. He may not have been, though most probably he was. But he certainly was aware of the effects of syphilis itself, especially on men. And this awareness struck at his deep sex imagination, at his instinct for fatherhood, and brought in an element of terror and abhorrence there where man should feel anything but terror and abhorrence, into the procreative act.
The terror-horror element which had entered the imagination with regard to the sexual and procreative act was at least partly responsible for the rise of Puritanism, the beheading of the king-father Charles, and the establishment of the New England colonies. If America really sent us syphilis she got back the full recoil of the horror of it in her puritanism.
But deeper even than this, the terror-horror element led to the crippling of the consciousness of man. Very elementary in man is his sexual and procreative being, and on his sexual and procreative being depend many of his deepest instincts and the flow of his intuition. A deep instinct of kinship joins men together, and the kinship of flesh-and- blood keeps the warm flow of intuitional awareness streaming between human beings. Our true awareness of one another is intuitional, not mental. Attraction between people is really instinctive and intuitional, not an affair of judgment. And in mutual attraction lies perhaps the deepest pleasure in life, mutual attraction which mav make us ‘like’ our travelling companion for the two or three hours we are together, then no more, or mutual attraction that may deepen to powerful love, and last a life-time.
The terror-horror element struck a blow at our feeling of phvsical communion. In fact it almost killed it. We have become ideal beings, creatures that exist in idea, to one another, rather than flesh-and- blood kin. And with the collapse of the feeling of physical, flesh-and- blood kinship, and the substitution of an ideal, social or political oneness, came the failing of our intuitive awareness, and the great unease, the nervousness of mankind. We are afraid of the instincts. We are afraid of the intuition within us. We suppress the instincts, and we cut off our intuitional awareness from one another and from the world. The reason being some great shock to the procreative self. Now we know one another only as ideal or social or political entities, fleshless, bloodless, and cold, like Bernard Shaw’s creatures. Intuitively we are dead to one another, we have all gone cold.
But by intuition alone can man really be aware of man, or of the living, substantial world. By intuition alone can man love and know either woman or world, and by intuition alone can he bring forth again images of magic awareness which we call art. In the past men brought forth images of magic awareness, and now it is the convention to admire these images. The convention says, for example, we must admire Botticelli or Giorgione, so Baedeker stars the pictures, and we admire them. But it is all a fake. Even those that get a thrill, even when they call it ecstasy, from these old pictures, are only undergoing a cerebral excitation. Their deeper responses, down in the intuitive and instinctive body, are not touched. They cannot be, because they are dead. A dead intuitive body stands there and gazes at the corpse of beauty: and usually it is completely and honestly bored: sometimes it feels a mental coruscation which it calls an ecstasy or an aesthetic response.
Modern people, but particularly English and Americans, cannot feel anything with the whole imagination. They can see the living body of imagery as little as a blind man can see colour. The imaginative vision, which includes phvsical intuitional perception, they have not jjot. Poor things, it is dead in them. And they stand in front of a Botticelli Venus, which thev know is conventionally ‘beautiful,’ much as a blind man might stand in front of a bunch of roses and pinks and monkev-musk, saying: ‘Oh, do tell me which is red, let me feel red! Now let me feel white! Oh, let me feel it! What is this I am feeling? Monkey-musk? is it white? Oh, do you say it is yellow blotched with orange-brown? Oh, but I can’t feel it! What can it be? Is white velvety, or just silky?’ —
So the poor blind man! Yet he may have an acute perception of alive beauty. Merely by touch and scent, his intuitions being alive, the blind man may have a genuine and soul-satisfying experience of imagerv. But not pictorial images. These are forever beyond him.
So those poor English and Americans in front of the Botticelli Venus. They stare so hard, they do so want to see. And their eyesight is perfect. But all they can see is a sort of nude woman on a sort of shell on a sort of pretty greenish water. As a rule they rather dislike the ‘unnaturalness’ or ‘affectation’ of it. If they are high-brows they may get little self-conscious thrills of aesthetic excitement. But real imaginative awareness, which is so largely physical, is denied them. lis n’ont pas de qnoi, as the Frenchman said of the angels, when asked if they made love in heaven.
All, the dear high-brows who gaze in a sort of ecstasy and get a correct mental thrill! Their poor high-brow bodies stand there as dead as dust-bins, and can no more feel the sway of complete imagery upon them than thev can feel any other real swav. lis n’ont pas de qnoi. The instincts and the intuitions are so nearly dead in them, and they fear even the feeble remains. Their fear of the instincts and intuitions is even greater than that of the English Tommy who calls: ‘Eh, Jack! come an’ look at this girl standin’ wi’ no clothes on, an’ two blokes spittin’ at ‘er.’ - That is his vision of Botticelli’s Venus. It is, for him, complete, for he is void of image-seeing imagination. But at least he doesn’t have to work up a cerebral excitation, as the high-brow does, who is really just as void.
All alike, cultured and uncultured, they are still dominated by that unnamed, yet overmastering dread and hate of the instincts deep in the body, dread of the strange intuitional awareness of the body, dread of anything but ideas which can’t contain bacteria. And the dread all works back to a dread of the procreative bodv, and is partly traceable to the shock of the awareness of syphilis.
The dread of the instincts included the dread of intuitional awareness. ‘Beauty is a snare’ - ‘Beauty is but skin-deep’ - ‘Handsome is as handsome does’ - ‘Looks don’t count’ - ‘Don’t judge by appearances’ - if we only realised it, there are thousands of these vile proverbs which have been dinned into us for over two hundred years. Thev are all of them false. Beautv is not a snare, nor is it skin deep, since it always involves a certain loveliness of modelling, and handsome doers are often ugh’ and objectionable people, and if you ignore the look of the thing you plaster England with slums and produce at last a state of spiritual depression that is suicidal, and if you don’t judge by appearances, that is, if you can’t trust the impression which things make on you, you are a fool. But all these base-born proverbs, born in the cash-box, hit direct against the intuitional consciousness. Naturally, man gets a great deal of his life’s satisfaction from beauty, from a certain sensuous pleasure in the look of the thing. The old Englishman built his hut of a cottage with a childish joy in its appearance, purely intuitional and direct. The modern Englishman has a few borrowed ideas, simply doesn’t know what to feel, and makes a silly mess of it: though perhaps he is improving, hopefully, in this field of architecture and housebuilding. The intuitional faculty, which alone relates us in direct awareness to physical things and substantial presences, is atrophied and dead, and we don’t know what to feel. We know we ought to feel something, but what? - oh, tell us what! - And this is true of all nations, the French and Italians as much as the English. Look at new French suburbs! Go through the crockery and furniture departments in the Dames de France or any big shop. The blood in the body stands still, before such cretin ugliness. One has to decide that the modern bourgeois is a cretin.
This movement against the instincts and the intuition took on a moral tone in all countries. It started in hatred. Let us never forget that modern morality has its roots in hatred, a deep, evil hate of the instinctive, intuitional, procreative body. This hatred is made more virulent by fear, and an extra poison is added to the fear by unconscious horror of syphilis. And so we come to modern bourgeois consciousness, which turns upon the secret poles of fear and hate. That is the real pivot of all bourgeois consciousness in all countries: fear and hate of the instinctive, intuitional, procreative body in man or woman. But of course this fear and hate had to take on a righteous appearance, so it became moral, said that the instincts, intuitions and all the activities of the procreative body were evil, and promised a reward for their suppression. That is the great clue to bourgeois psychology: the reward business. It is screamingly obvious in Maria Edgeworth’s tales, which must have done unspeakable damage to ordinary people. - Be good, and you’ll have money. Be wicked, and you’ll be utterly penniless at last, and the good ones will have to offer you a little charity. - This is sound working morality in the world. And it makes one realise that, even to Milton, the true hero of Paradise Lost must be Satan. But by this baited morality the masses were caught and enslaved to industrialism before ever thev knew it; the good ones got hold of the goods, and our modern ‘civilisation’ 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 bodv, and fear and hate of every other man’s and every other woman’s warm, procreative body and imagination.
Now it is obvious what result this will have on the plastic arts, which depend entirely on the representation of substantial bodies, and on the intuitional perception of the reality of substantial bodies. The reality of substantial bodies can only be perceived by the imagination, and the imagination is a kindled state of consciousness in which intuitive awareness predominates. The plastic arts are all imagery, and imagery is the body of our imaginative life, and our imaginative life is a great joy and fulfilment to us, for the imagination is a more powerful and more comprehensive flow of consciousness than our ordinary flow. In the flow of true imagination we know in full, mentally and physically, at once, in a greater, enkindled awareness. At the maximum of our imagination we are religious. And if we deny our imagination, and have no imaginative life, we are poor worms who have never lived.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries we have the deliberate denial of intuitive awareness, and we see the results on the arts. Vision became more optical, less intuitive, and painting began to flourish. But what painting! Watteau, Ingres, Poussin, Chardin have some imaginative glow still. They are still somewhat free. The puritan and the intellectual has not yet struck them down with his fear and hate obsessions. But look at England! Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, they all are already bourgeois. The coat is really more important than the man. It is amazing how important clothes suddenly become, how they cover the subject. An old Reynolds colonel in a red uniform is much more a uniform than an individual, and as for Gainsborough, all vou can say is: What a lovely dress and hat! What really expensive Italian silk! - This painting of garments continued in vogue, till pictures like Sargent’s seem to be nothing but vards and yards of satin from the most expensive shops, having some pretty head popped on at the top. The imagination is quite dead. The optical vision, a sort of flashy coloured photography of the eye, is rampant.
