In A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley's Lover’, the bodies of both men and women are described as having become like trained dogs, with everything reflected downwards from the mind. This means that ‘love is a counterfeit feeling today’ and sex, however much more widely indulged, counterfeit also. With rare exceptions, everyone is like Clifford in being ‘out of touch’, or like Yvette in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Connie in Lady Chatterley's Lover, both of whom are initially described in terms of the Lady of Shallot whose contacts with reality are through reflections in a mirror. How to know that one was dealing with a real world was a question which had preoccupied Lawrence from early in his career, and he took it up again when he had to write an introduction for a book in which many of his paintings were being reproduced. Wondering then how the division between mental and intuitive consciousness came about, he notes the difference between Chaucer and Shakespeare, and conjectures that the morbid fear of the body, which he claims is so prevalent in the writings of the latter, might have been due to the sudden impact of syphilis on the Western mind generally. This would have spread a fear which he believes has never gone away, one that has a particularly devastating effect on the pictorial arts because they depend so much ‘on the intuitional perception of the reality of substantial bodies’. In English eighteenth-century portrait painting, he suggests, all the concentration is on the clothes the subjects wear rather than the people in them, and the ne plus ultra of the escape from reality comes in French Impressionism ‘when the body was at last dissolved of its substance, and made part and parcel of the sunlight-and-shadow scheme’. This is what, in Lawrence's view, makes Cézanne such an important figure. Roger Fry had claimed that when Cézanne retired from Paris back to his native Provence, it was so that he could give himself up entirely to a ‘desperate search for the reality hidden beneath the veil’, and he had stressed the painter's interest in the geometry of composition: that aspect of his work which helped to give rise to Cubism.