T H E S I S

69
built of rusticated sandstone and had a steeple, but not
a very high one.
• • *
Tevershall! That was Tevershall! Merrie England! Shakespeare*s
England! No, but the England of today, as Connie
had realized since she had come to live in it. It was producing
a new race of mankindf over-conscious in the money
and social and political side, on the spontaneous, intuitive
side dead, but dead«
« © •
This is history. One England blots out another» The mines
had made the halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out,
as they had already blotted out the cottages. The industrial
England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning
blots out another. The new England blots out the old England.’And
the continuity is not organic, but mechanical.
a © »
Eastwood was gone.” (LCL 158-163)
It is not the wind that is booming anymore, it is the car
that is ploughing. The primitive Eastwood (the idyllic Nether-
mere) of Lawrence's youth is gone. Vie find no more a background
of pastoral scenes but rather industrial squalor. The "new race"
has no "organic connection" because the men are "highly-mental"
and "relegate sex to the status of a merely primitive or mechanical
act". (LCL XI) So it is George's case in The White Peacock
- Lettie says he is a. "primitive" man, in this sense. Sir
Clifford and some of his habitual guestss Hammond and Michaelis,
also are "highly-mental" and sex for them became a "brutish activity"
,1
Mellors is against industrial squalor and the horror of
mechanical sex, products of the mental life. On the contrary,
he believes on the harmony of body and life, "sexual act in harmony
with sexual thought", and for Connie he becomes the first