Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence is taking a swing at the whole proscenium arrangement of culture: the safe distance where an “actor” performs and an “audience” consumes, applauding on cue, leaving unchanged. His irritation isn’t just aesthetic; it’s moral. The stage divides people into the pure and the passive, into those licensed to speak and those trained to sit still. For a writer obsessed with vitality, sex, class friction, and the body’s inconvenient truths, that division smells like modernity’s favorite lie: that experience can be packaged without consequence.

The line’s energy comes from its deliberate crudity. “Kicking their shins” is comic, petty, physical - an anti-literary image that refuses the author’s halo. Lawrence is arguing for art as contact sport: not uplift, not “messages,” but provocation. He wants the writer embedded in the scrum, stirring trouble, egging people into “mischief or merriment,” basically sabotaging respectable behavior. That pairing matters: mischief suggests social disobedience; merriment suggests communal release. Together, they sketch art as a kind of embodied conspiracy.

Context sharpens the edge. Lawrence wrote against the grain of early 20th-century British respectability, watching mass culture and industrial life flatten people into roles - worker, consumer, spectator. He’s suspicious of any art that turns human beings into an audience: a crowd reduced to eyes. His ideal author doesn’t perform above the people; he jostles among them, making them feel their own pulse again, even if it stings.