Wit & Attitude Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Mountains, for Lawrence, are less sublime nature than bad manners: hulking, immobile presences that refuse to take a hint. The jab is funny because it flips the Romantic script. Where poets usually treat mountains as spiritual elevators, Lawrence treats them like louts at a crowded party - always “in the way,” always “obtrud[ing]” their mass into your field of vision. Calling them “stupid” is deliberate anthropomorphism, a comic insult aimed at the very idea that grandeur equals meaning.

The intent is partly aesthetic, partly psychological. Lawrence distrusts anything that sits there claiming authority simply by being large. His work is obsessed with living energies - sex, instinct, blood-knowledge, the volatile currents between bodies. A mountain “never moving and never doing anything” becomes a kind of anti-life, a monument to stasis. At close quarters, it blocks rather than reveals: the landscape stops being a horizon and becomes a wall. That “close quarters” matters; distance allows awe, proximity breeds irritation. He’s puncturing the tourist’s reverence and insisting on a more intimate scale of experience.

Contextually, this fits a modernist impatience with inherited pieties. Lawrence was forever at war with respectable sentimentality, including the respectable sentimentality of “nature appreciation.” The subtext is a critique of cultural posturing: we’re trained to kneel before certain objects (mountains, institutions, big ideas) and call it depth. Lawrence’s line refuses that reflex. If something can’t respond, change, or meet you back, why worship it?