"senile dementia," or of Orestes by murmuring "paranoia." The critical attitude, commendable for young and old, is to recognize Mr. Lawrence's studies of excessive and perverse passion for what they are. Classify them, name them, see them clearly, and then these books may be as safe and useful on the shelf as a labeled bottle of carbolic acid.
To adult readers moderately acquainted with European literature, with Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, with Zola and Flaubert and the Goncourts, with Ibsen and Strindberg and with D'Annunzio, there is little that is novel in Mr. Lawrence's representation of the various erotic furies. In "The Triumph of Death," for example, D'Annunzio worked out for readers of a generation ago, the entire course of exactly such passions as rage through "Rainbow" and "Women in Love." D'Annunzio's sophisticated and megalomaniac poet-hero aspires through sexual excess to a state of the "soul" which shall "surpass carnal sensibility and communicate itself to an ultra-sensible element of the inner being." He is an aristocrat, his mistress is of the peasantry, and, through her lower animal nature, he hopes to enter into communication with every form of natural life. In a short time, however, he discovers that the central ingredient of his relation to his mistress is hatred—"the mortal hatred of the sexes which is at the bottom of love." He recites to himself the words of the Preacher: Non des muliert potestatem animae tuae—Give not power over thy soul into the hands of a woman. He begins to frame for himself a "male" ideal of physical force, robust health and savage joy. He struggles to assert himself against the woman, and has a premonition that he will never attain complete "self-realization" except by killing
