'LET THEM FIGHT AND FALL ROUND THEIR IDOLS, MY FELLOW-MEN'

LAWRENCE (DAVID HERBERT, 1885-1930, novelist and poet) REMARKABLY REVEALING AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED ('D.H. Lawrence'), TO OTTOLINE MORRELL, demonstrating his extraordinary misanthropy and contempt for the First World War which he calls the 'seething scrummage of mankind in Europe' ('...You might as well try to prevent the spring from coming on. This world of ours has got to collapse now, in violence and injustice and destruction, nothing will stop it...There is a greater truth than the truth of the present, there is a God beyond these Gods of today. Let them fight and fall round their idols, my fellow-men: it is their affair. As for me, as far as I can, I will save myself. For I believe, that the highest virtue is to be happy, living in the greatest truth, not submitting to the falsehood of these present times...'), stating his beliefs about living as 'a castaway' ('...The only thing now to be done, is either to go down with the ship, sink with the ship, or...leave the ship, and like a castaway, live a life apart. As for me, I do not belong to the ship, I will not, if I can help it, sink with it. I will not live any more in this time. I know what it is. I reject it. As far as I possibly can, I will stand outside this time, I will live my life, and, if possible, be happy, though the whole world slides in horrors down into the bottomless pit...'), displaying his indifference to 'death in the individual' ('...The world is very big, and the course of mankind is stupendous. What does a crashing down of nations and empires matter, here and there!...I don't care if sixty million individuals die. The seed is not in the masses, it is elsewhere...'), and relating his mood to his surroundings in Cornwall ('...these Cornish seas somehow relieve one's soul of mankind...'); Lawrence also criticises Bertrand Russell's pacifism ('...Bertie deludes himself about his lectures. There will come a bitter disillusion. I have a friend who says that they are unimportant, nothing vital...'), describing his reactions to Moby Dick, 'a very odd, interesting book') and The History of the East ('...a very bad little book. But something in me lights up and understands these old, dead peoples, and I love it...I cannot tell you the joy of ranging far back there seeing the hordes surge out of Arabia, or over the edge of the Iranian plateau. It is like looking at the morning star...'); and requests 'a history of early Egypt, before the Greeks...a book not too big, because I like to fill it in myself, and the contentions of learned men are so irritating...', expresses a desire to go 'on a long voyage, far into the Pacific', and mentions the dedication of his Amores to Ottoline Morrell ('...I can alter the adjectives in the dedication when the proofs come, if still we don't like them. But I like them. I do not believe in this democratic spirit of stripping away nobility...'), 4 pages, quarto, some light water stains, Porthcothan, St. Merryn, North Cornwall, 7 February 1916

Lawrence's words support Ottoline Morrell's opinion that Lawrence was 'unable to tolerate the differences and idiosyncracies of human beings...How he as a novelist, whom one would have thought would have studied human beings as they are - not as he wanted them to be - could be so wanting in judgement I could never understand.' She also explains Lawrence's revulsion from the War: 'His prophetic instincts urged him on to denounce this great disaster, but he found...that he was powerless to turn aside the avalanche that was sweeping all good life before it.' (Ottoline at Garsington, Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1915-1918, edited by Robert Gathorne-Hardy, 1974, pp. 65 and 141).

Lawrence's criticisms of Russell's lectures echo his earlier devastating attacks on Principles of Social Reconstruction and point to the deterioration of his friendship with 'the philosophy-mathematics man', as Lawrence called him, reflected in several letters to Russell and Ottoline Morrell during this time. '[Bertie's] lectures are all right in themselves, but their effect is negligible...He lives only for fussy trivialities, and for nothing else' (to Ottoline Morrell, 15 February 1916); 'I don't believe your lectures are good. They are nearly over, aren't they? What's the good of sticking in the damned ship and haranguing the merchant-pilgrims in their own language. Why don't you drop overboard?...Do clear out of the whole social ship' (to Russell, 19 February 1916).

Russell retaliated in his autobiography, where he devoted several pages to an analysis of Lawrence: '...There were in Lawrence at that time two attitudes to the war: on the one hand, he could not be whole- heartedly patriotic, because his wife was German; but on the other hand, he had such a hatred of mankind that he tended to think both sides must be right in so far as they hated each other...he had no real wish to make the world better, but only to indulge in eloquent soliloquy about how bad it was.'

£2,850