Monthly Archives: May 2019

Hermitage, Berks.
Thursday, April, 1917

My dear Lady Cynthia, –

I didn’t ring you up, because on Sunday, suddenly, I collapsed with sickness and diarrhoea, and was quite seedy. Then just as suddenly on Tuesday, my soul inspired itself and I got well. So, yesterday I came on here. Tomorrow I am going back to Cornwall, thank God.

It was the evil influence of aggregate London that made me ill: suddenly I start to be sick. It is all very vile.

It is much best for you to go down to Stanway. The spring is here, the cuckoo is heard, primroses and daffodils are out in the woods, it is very lovely. I feel that the buds as they unfold, and the primroses come out, are really stronger than all the armies and all the War. I feel as if the young grass growing would upset all the cannons on the face of the earth, and that man with his evil stupidity is after all nothing, the leaves just brush him aside. The principle of life is after all stronger than the principle of death, and I spit on your London and your government and your armies.

Come and see us whenever you are near enough and feel like it. The state of your desperation is really a thing to be ashamed of. It all comes of submitting and acquiescing in things one does not vitally believe in. If you learned flatly to reject things which are false to you, you wouldn’t sell yourself to such deadness. One should stick by one’s own soul, and by nothing else. In one’s soul, one knows the truth from the untruth, and life from death. And if one betrays one’s own soul-knowledge one is the worst of traitors. I am out of all patience with the submitting to the things that be, however foul they are, just because they happen to be. But there will fall a big fire on the city before long, as on Sodom and Gomorrah, and will burn us clean of a few politicians, etc., and of some of our own flunkeying to mere current baseness. I feel angry with you, the way you have betrayed everything that is real, by admitting the superiority of that which is merely temporal and foul and external upon us. If all the aristocrats have sold the vital principle of life to the mere current of foul affairs, what good are the aristocrats? As for the people, they will serve to make a real bust-up, quite purposeless and aimless. But when the bust-up is made and the place more or less destroyed we can have a new start.

It is a very lovely day. Hope you are well.

D.H. Lawrence