It's been ages since I have read D. H. Lawrence with any attention, but of late I keep discovering hidden gems not only in his poetry, but also in his less well-known criticism. Here is an extract from a thought-provoking piece on "maleness and femaleness in art":
The body it is which attaches us directly to the female. Sex, as we call it, is only the point where the dual stream begins to divide, where it is nearly together, almost one. An infant is of no very determinate sex: that is, it is of both. Only at adolescence is there a real differentiation, the one is singled out to predominate. In what we call happy natures, in the lazy, contented people, there is a fairly equable balance of sex. There is sufficient of the female in the body of such a man as to leave him fairly free. He does not suffer the torture of desire of a more male being. It is obvious even from the physique of such a man that in him there is a proper proportion between male and female, so that he can be easy, balanced and without excess. The Greek sculptors of the "best" period, Phidias and then Sophocles, Alcibiades, then Horace, must have been fairly well-balanced men, not passionate to any excess, tending to voluptousness rather than to passion. So also Victor Hugo and Schiller and Tennyson. The real voluptuary is a man who is female as well as male, and who lives according to the female side of his nature, like Lord Byron.
The pure male is himself almost an abstraction, almost bodiless, like Shelley or Edmund Spenser. But, as we know humanity, this condition comes of an ommission of some vital part. In the ordinary sense, Shelley never lived. He transcended life. But we do not want to transcend life, since we are of life. [. . .]
I can think of no being in the world so transcendentally male as Shelley. He is phenomenal. The rest of us have bodies which contain the male and the female. If we were so singled out as Shelley, we should not belong to life, as he did not belong to life. But it were impious to be like the angels. So long as mankind exists it must exist in the body, and so long must each body pertain both to the male and the female. [. . .]
A man who is well balanced between male and female, in his own nature, is, as a rule, happy, easy to mate, easy to satisfy, and content to exist. It is only a disproportion, or a dissatisfaction, which makes the man struggle into articulation. And the articulation is of two sorts, the cry of desire or the cry of realisation, the effort to prolong the sense of satisfaction, to prolong the moment of consummation.
D. H. Lawrence, from "Study of Thomas Hardy (Male and Femaleness in Art)" in Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (NY: Viking Press, 1956), pp. 70-71.
(But perhaps the happy, well-balanced, easy to satisfy, contented people are usually not that interesting. Well, they certainly don't tend to produce great art or great literature or great thoughts, which nearly always stem from excess and imbalance, from that struggle for articulation - that cry or desire for more, much more than life and "contented" people can give us.)
Image: Apollo Belvedere.
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