Then, somehow, came acquaintance, first of the world, then of literature and its parasites; came teas at Golder's Green and Hampstead, and queerly serious discussions about sub-consciousness; "rags" at Chelsea, and "dalliance with grubbiness," and women. Through this early maze of ribaldry and discussion, the first of which bored me because of its self-consciousness, and because I do not like lying on the dirty floors of studios with candle grease dripping on me, and the latter which affected my years miserably and almost entirely perverted my natural amiability into a morbid distaste for living (which still breaks out at odd moments, and has branded me among many people as a depressing and damnably superior young person); through this maze of smoke and talk I can only still see the occasional personality of Mr. D. H. Lawrence, as his clear, grey eyes--there is no equivalent to _spirituel_ in English--flashed from face to face, smiling sometimes, often but a vehicle for those bitter thoughts (and thoughts are so often conclusions with men of arrogant genius like Lawrence) which find such strange and emphatic expression in his books. I would need the pen of a De Quincey to describe my impression of that man, and I am candid enough to admit that I lack the ability, rather than the malice, which caused the little opium-eater to be so justly hated by such a man as Bob Southey. There is a bitterness which can find no expression, is inarticulate, and from that we turn away as from a very pitiful thing; and there is that bitterness which is as clear-cut as a diamond, shining with definitions, hardened with the use of a subtle reasoning which is impenetrable but penetrating, "the outcome of a fecund imagination," as Lawrence himself might describe it; a bitterness so concisely and philosophically articulate, that, under the guise of "truth," it will penetrate into the receptive mind, and leave there some indelible impressions of a strange and dominating mind. I have found that in the books and person of Mr. D. H. Lawrence. He seems to lack humility definitely, as a man would lack bread to eat, and a note of arrogance, as splendid as it is shameless, runs through his written words; and the very words seem conscious that they are pearls flung before swine. He will pile them one on top of the other, as though to impregnate each with his own egotism, to describe the sexual passions of this man or that woman, words so full of _his_ meaning, so pregnant with _his_ passions, that at the end of such a page you feel that a much greater and more human Ruskin is hurling his dogmas at your teeth, that there is nothing you can say or think outside that pile of feeling which is massed before you, that you must accept and swallow without cavil and without chewing. With what relief one turns over a page and finds that here is no touch of the flesh, but that Mr. Lawrence is writing of earth! Let him sink into earth as deep as he may,