Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/54

 him, a great believer in experience for experience's sake, and he passes in many quarters for a dangerous immoralist. To the conventional sense, indeed, he may easily appear to write his novels as if the world of conventional morals had no existence. Even in Sons and Lovers, his heroes and heroines explore their sexual good where they find it with barbaric or übermenschlich indifference to legality—or, should one say, with the indifference to legality prevalent among a coal-mining population? In his more recently published Women in Love, his seekers of experience and self-realization are men and women who have exhausted the possibilities of gratification through any ordinary intimacy of relationship. The book has offended pudency by a few intelligible paragraphs of plain speech where we were formerly accustomed to silence. But its really shocking aspect is its 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. One of the characteristic high spots in the story is that in which Hermione expresses the kind of intimacy that she desires with Birkin, and consummates her "voluptuous ecstasy" by seizing