No doubt some of the more naïvely enthusiastic crusaders really believed that as soon as man was freed from the more grossly stupid restrictions from without and from the artificially cultivated inhibitions within, love would become simple and idyllic, but one needs look only at the books of D. H. Lawrence or Aldous Huxley to be relieved of this stupid delusion. The characters of both of these authors have long ago ceased to care what law or society thinks and they are surely untroubled by traditional asceticism, but their problems are not less acute. Indeed it is just because these novelists are so completely concerned with love as a personal matter that they are the freshest of those contemporary writers with whom sex is the dominant interest. Each is concerned with something fundamental--the one with the problem of the adjustment of personalities and the other with the evaluation of sexual love. If by “immoral” is meant “tending to excite lubricity,” then nothing could be more absurd than the opinion, apparently held by some, that the books of these men are immoral. They are so completely unable to lose themselves carelessly in passion and so insistent upon the need of adjusting it somehow to the other interests of life that they strike one as more like saints than like gallants, and their books are far more chilling than inflammatory. Huxley and Joyce try to laugh sex away, but their scorn of the flesh suggests Erasmus more than Rabelais, and, as for Lawrence, his novels constitute so solemn a warning that one imagines him as thoroughly bored with the exigencies of passion and more likely to make his disciples celibates than debauchés. In Lawrence’s morbidly sensitive and exaggeratedly individualistic characters one sees as through a magnifying-glass the thousand impingements of personality upon personality which make love more and more difficult as it becomes more intimate and personal. His people, like Schopenhauer’s porcupines, are continually coming together for warmth only to find themselves pricked by one another’s quills and to part snarling, so that his perpetual prayer is a “Lord deliver us from this need which can be neither stilled nor satisfied.” And abnormal though he is, his abnormality is one of degree only, for when sexual love is developed beyond the impulse of the animal and desires the contact of spirit as well as body that contact is bound to be both incomplete and painful.