Art & Creativity Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence is picking a fight with the polite museum habit of “appreciation” as a kind of safe, slow consumption. “Art that you can walk round and admire” conjures sculpture-on-a-plinth culture: the spectator strolling, hands behind back, morally untouched. His disgust is less about form than about posture. If art lets you keep your distance - if it offers you tasteful angles and no stakes - it has failed.

Then he yanks the novel off the shelf and throws it into the street. A book, for Lawrence, shouldn’t behave like an object; it should behave like a person under pressure: “a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.” That’s a deliberately unstable trio. The bandit breaks the law, the rebel breaks consensus, the man in the crowd disappears into the mass and infects it from within. Together they sketch Lawrence’s ideal: fiction as intrusion, not ornament - a force that disrupts private comfort and public scripts.

The subtext is his broader war with genteel modernity: the Edwardian/Victorian impulse to domesticate art into improvement, refinement, “culture.” Lawrence wants books that steal something from you (bandit), provoke you into change (rebel), or implicate you in collective life (man in the crowd). It’s also a swipe at aestheticism: art-for-art’s-sake becomes art-for-looking’s-sake, a spectator sport.

Context matters: writing in an era of industrial churn, class conflict, and sexual hypocrisy, Lawrence treats the novel as a live wire. Not escapism, not decor - an encounter you can’t simply walk around.