her. And the book ends with the appropriate mortal consummation of sex-antagonism: the two of them, locked in a last embrace, roll fighting over a precipice.
Mr. Lawrence's "Women in Love" is, psychologically, identical in most important respects. He introduces this variation of his Alpine scene: Gerald Crich releases the throat of Gudrun, when he has her nearly choked, with this reflection: "As if he cared about her enough to kill her, to have her life on his hands."
The story of violent and egotistical loves faithfully, remorselessly told is always, I am inclined to believe, as "moral" as hell fire or Holy Writ—"Her guests are in the depths of hell." And Mr. Lawrence impresses me as a far more austere "moralist" than D'Annunzio. As I have said elsewhere, my abiding impression from these books of his middle period is a sense of his "studious, remorseless revelation of what a horrible, devouring mania sexual passion may be: how involved with mortal fear, and with cold, probing curiosity, and with murderous hatred. . . . He is coming to the conclusion that—for men, at any rate—passional surrender is not the greatest thing in the world . . . and that the romanticists have all been on the wrong track in representing as the height of human experience that ecstasy in which one individuality is merged and absorbed in another. This is an aspiration toward death and disintegration, from which the inevitable reaction is disgust. The virtue of a man is to preserve his own integrity and to resist the dissolution of union. 'When he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his secret soul,' says Mr. Lawrence in his 'Fantasia of the Unconscious,' 'he falls into the beginnings of despair.'"
"St. Mawr" carries on, from there, Mr. Lawrence's
