D. H. LAWRENCE has been rushing through an evolution. When he first faced the public, he was open-faced, clean-shaven and looked at one squarely from big glowing eyes. Now he resembles a moujik, now he makes himself up to resemble a moujik as much as the heir of all the ages can—a shag of hair across the forehead, eyes alert, defiant, glinting like a squirrel's, snubby nose sniffing the air, and a big bush of a beard.
The beard is sacred. It is worn out of respect for the impulses from our "lower" natures, out of reverence for the Dark Gods which inhabit the Dark Forest of one's own being. As Mr. Lawrence wears the beard, it is intended also to suggest and symbolize his isolate and inviolable "otherness," "separateness," "maleness." He does not insist upon an exclusively male aristocracy. He respects also the isolate "otherness" of women who attain that form of self-realization. But for himself, he is a conscientious barbarian, a revolutionist in favor of a cultivated, individualistic, aristocratic barbarism. He wants to bring back the beard, and to rebuild the ancient barriers between the naturally and the artificially smooth-faced sexes. I am not sure when he first restored the beard to fiction, but there is a sacred beard in "Kangaroo" and a still more sacred beard in "St. Mawr"—a rather fasci-
