their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as
weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from
the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism
of a language many-coloured and richly storied than from the
contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored
perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?
From the fading splendor of an evening beautifully described, he
tumbles into the sordid day of a house rich in pawn tickets. That is
life. "Welcome, O life!" he bids farewell to his young manhood. "I go
to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to
forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead."
The sketches in "Dubliners" are perfect, each in its own way, and all
in one way: they imply a vast deal that is not said. They are small as
the eye-glass of a telescope is small; you look through them to depths
and distances. They are a kind of short story almost unknown to the
American magazine if not to the American writer. An American editor
might read them for his private pleasure, but from his professional
point of view he would not see that there was any story there at all.
The American short story is explicit and thin as a moving-picture
film; it takes nothing for granted; it knows nothing of the art of the
hintful, the suggestive, the selected single detail which lodges
fertilely in the reader's mind, begetting ideas and emotions. America
is not the only offender (for patriotism is the fashion and bids
criticism relent); there is much professional Irish humor which is
funny enough but no more subtle than a shillalah. And English short
stories, such at least as we see in magazines, are obvious and
"express" rather than expressive. Joyce's power to disentangle a
single thread from the confusion of life and let you run briefly back
upon it until you encounter the confusion and are left to think about
it yourself--that is a power rare enough in any literature.
Except one story, "A Painful Case," I could not tell the plot of any
of these sketches. Because there is no plot going from beginning to
end. The plot goes from the surface inward, from a near view away into
a background. A person appears for a moment--a priest, or a girl, or a
small boy, or a street-corner tough, or a drunken salesman--and does
and says things not extraordinary in themselves; and somehow you know
all about these people and feel that you could think out their entire
lives. Some are stupid, some are pathetic, some are funny in an
unhilarious way. The dominant mood is irony. The last story in the
book, "The Dead," is a masterpiece which will never be popular,
because it is all about living people; there is only one dead person
in it and he is not mentioned until near the end. That's the kind of
trick an Irishman like Synge or Joyce would play on us, and perhaps a
Frenchman or a Russian would do it; but we would not stand it from one
of our own writers.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Mr. Lawrence is a poet in prose and in verse. No writer of his
generation is more singular, more unmistakably individual, and no
other that I know is endowed with his great variety of gifts. He is as
dangerous to public morals as Meredith or Hardy. Readers who cannot
understand the tragedy of "Richard Feverel" or of "Jude the Obscure,"
will not understand Mr. Lawrence or be interested to read a third of
the way through one of his books. The stupidity of the multitude is
sure protection against his insidious loveliness and essential
sadness. He and his admirers will, I hope, regard it as honorable to
him that he reminds this critic oftener of Meredith and Hardy than of
any of his contemporaries. I am not so fatuous as to suggest that his
independent and original work is in any unfavorable sense derivative.
It must be true that every young novelist learns his lessons from the
older novelists; but I cannot see that Mr. Lawrence is clearly the
disciple of any one master. I do feel simply that he is of the elder
stature of Meredith and Hardy, and I will suggest, in praise of him,
some resemblances that have struck me, without trying to analyze or
quote chapter and verse in tedious parallels.
Mr. Lawrence is a lyric as well as a tragic poet. In this he is like
Meredith and Hardy, and I can think of no other young novelist who is
quite worthy of the company. Young people in love, or some other
difficulty, become entangled with stars and mountains and seas; they
are baffled and lost, seldom consoled, in cosmic immensities.
Novelists who happen also to be poets are enamoured of those
immensities.
This is the end of "Sons and Lovers":
"Where was he?--one tiny upright speck of flesh, less than an ear
of wheat lost in the field. He could not bear it. On every side
the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a spark,
into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct.
Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond
stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning
round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in the
darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted.
So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core nothingness, and
yet not nothing."
The concluding scenes of "Women in Love" are the Alps, "a silence of
dim, unrealized snow, of the invisible intervening between her and the
visible, between her and the flashing stars." I am reminded, by the
beauty of the phrasing and by the sense of the pathetic little human
being adrift in space, of the flight of the two young people through
the Alps, in "The Amazing Marriage," and of farmer Gabriel Oak
watching the westward flow of the stars.
Sometimes, like Meredith, rather than like Hardy, whose style is
colder and more austere, Mr. Lawrence is almost too lyric and his
phrases threaten to overflow the rigid dikes of prose. I could pick
out a dozen rhapsodical passages which with little change might well
appear in his books of verse.
But young people in love do not spend all their days and nights in
ecstatic flights to the clouds. And their flights are followed by
pathetic Icarian disasters. From luminous moments they plunge into
what Mr. Lawrence calls "the bitterness of ecstacy," and their pain
outweighs their joy many times over, as in Hardy, and as in the more
genial Meredith, whose rapturous digression played on a penny whistle
is a cruelly beautiful preparation for the agonies that ensue. It may
be that the emotional transports of Mr. Lawrence's young people are
more frequent and violent than the ordinary human soul can enjoy and
endure. The nervous tension is high and would break into hysteria if
Mr. Lawrence were not a philosopher as well as a poet, if he did not
know so accurately what goes on inside the human head, if he had not
an artist's ability to keep his balance at the very moment when a less
certain workman would lose it.
There is firm ground under his feet and under the feet of his lovers;
it is the everyday life which consists of keeping shop and keeping
school and other commonplace activities in street, kitchen, and coal
mine. These diurnal details he studies with a fidelity not surpassed
by Mr. Bennett or any other of his contemporaries. The talk of his
people is always alive, both the dialect of the villagers and the
discussions of the more intellectual. Sometimes he puts into the
speech of his characters a little more of his own poetic fancy than
they might reasonably be supposed to be capable of. But if this is a
fault, from a realistic point of view, it is a merit from the point of
view of readability, and it makes for vivacity. At times--and is not
this like Meredith?--he seems to be less interested in the sheer
dramatic value of a situation he has created than in the opportunity
it offers of writing beautiful things around it. Not that his
situations fail to carry themselves or have not their proper place and
proportion. Mr. Lawrence knows how to handle his narrative and he has
an abundant invention and dramatic ingenuity. But he is above those
elementary things that any competent novelist knows. He has the
something else that makes the story teller the first rate literary
artist--style may be the word for it, but poetic imagination seems to
be the better and more inclusive term. Open "The Lost Girl" at page 57
and read two pages. Without knowing what has preceded or whither the
story is bound, anybody who knows what literature is will feel at once
that that is it.
"Women in Love" is a sequel to "The Rainbow," in that it carries on
the story of Ursula of the family of Brangwen. "The Rainbow" is the
stronger book; it has more of the tragic power, the deep social
implications of Mr. Lawrence's masterpiece, "Sons and Lovers". In
"Women in Love" are four young people, two men and two women, whose
chief interest, for them and for us, is in amatory relations. This is
indicated by the title of the story, one of those obvious titles which
only a man of imagination could hit upon, so simple that you wonder
why no novelist ever thought of it before. Now the erotic relations of
people, though a tremendous part of life, as all the great tragic
romances prove, are still only part of life. Nobody knows this better
than Mr. Lawrence. The first story of the Brangwen family is richer
than the second, not because of the proverbial falling off of sequels,
not because Mr. Lawrence's power declined--far from it!--but because
the first novel embraces a larger number of the manifold interests
that compose the fever called living. In it are not only young lovers,
but old people, old failures, the land, the town, the succession of
the generations rooted yet restless. Ursula emerges from immemorial
centuries of English life, touched with foreign blood out of Poland
(when an English novelist wishes to introduce variety and strangeness
into the dull solidity of an English town he imports a Pole, or an
Italian, or a Frenchman, somebody not English).
Ursula's background is thus richer than all her emotional experience.
Her father, her grandfather, the family, the muddled tragicomedy of
little affairs and ambitions, the grim, gray colliery district, the
entire social situation, are the foundations and walls of the story,
and she is the slender spire that surmounts it all--and is struck by
lightning. In "The Rainbow" she goes to ashes, and in "Women in Love"
she revives, burns again, and finds in her new love new
dissatisfaction.
It is impossible to write of Mr. Lawrence without discoursing in
symbols and reflecting, somewhat pallidly, his metaphors. For like all
genuine poets he is a symbolist. In "Aaron's Rod" he redoubles and
compounds symbolism in a manner baffling to readers and to critics who
like to have their prose prosaic and their poetry in lines and whose
sound stomachs refuse a mixed drink. I enjoy the mixture--in the
Bible, in Meredith, in Ruskin, in James, in Lawrence.
It is stupid to explain symbols. Yet after all that is the dull
function of criticism, to explain something--as if the creator of a
work of art had not given all the necessary explanation in the very
act of creation. Whoever does not understand Lawrence on immediate
contact will not understand him better after the intervention of a
critic. But it is the pleasure and the privilege of a critic to have
his secondary imagination set on fire by the primary imagination of a
man of genius, to spread the fire if he can by the cold fluid of
critical exposition--as water carries burning oil.
Well, then, Aaron's rod is doubly symbolic. His rod which, in the
Biblical phrase, bloomed, blossomed and yielded almonds, is a flute.
And the symbol is also phallic, as, indeed, it is in the Bible.
Aaron's flute, the musical instrument, is smashed in an accident which
is as irrational as life itself. The instrument in its other aspect is
broken by the supreme and only rationality--that of human character.
In all his books, beginning with "Sons and Lovers," Mr. Lawrence has
shown relatively little interest in those mere sequences of external
events which novelists artificially pattern into plots. He throws some
matter-of-fact probabilities to the winds, as in "Aaron's Rod," when
he makes a man from the English collieries a master flautist and
alleges that he got a hearing in Italy, where there are more good
flautists to the square inch than in England to the square mile.
But Aaron is an unusual person. "It is remarkable," says his creator,
"how many odd or extraordinary people there are in England." Mr.
Lawrence has always been interested in slightly eccentric characters,
and so he stands apart from his contemporaries who call themselves
realists or naturalists because they deal with the commonplace or the
recognizably normal.
After all, extraordinary persons in fiction, as in life, are better
worth knowing than ordinary persons. Mr. Lawrence does not make his
people so widely different from the general run of human beings as to
put a strain on credulity, and he studies them with a subtle and firm
understanding. Their talk sounds real. Their emotions are alive in his
bold and delicate prose. He has made amateurish excursions into
psychoanalysis, which may or may not be a fruitful subject for a
novelist to study. The real novelist has always been a psychologist in
an untechnical sense.
Mr. Lawrence is too fine an artist to import into his art the dubious
lingo of psycho-analysis; he remains the poet, the dramatist, his
symbols and images uncorrupted by pseudo-science. Aaron's dream in the
last chapter--no modern novel is complete without at least one
dream--is easily "freuded" (cave, corridor, and water symbols), but
Mr. Lawrence refrains from analysis.
Aaron's whole life, or as much as the author gives us of it, is a
dream, a dream unfulfilled in love or friendship or music. To what he
wakes, if he wakes at all, the conclusion leaves us guessing. That
will puzzle readers who demand that a story shall finish with a bang
or come to a definite point of rest. But life does not conclude; it
persists.
When Aaron related his history and experiences to some friends, he
"told all his tale as if it was a comedy. A comedy it seemed, too, at
that hour. And a comedy no doubt it was. But mixed, like most things
in this life. Mixed." Though Aaron is a strange man, an individual,
yet the conflict that goes on in him, between his rebellion and his
indecision, his desire and his impotence, is not freakish; it is so
much like the struggle that every man knows, with special variations,
that it is true to universal human nature. Behind the symbolism are
the plain facts, solidly conceived.
The other characters in the book are well drawn, notably Aaron's odd,
philosophic friend, Lilly, whose ideas are at once clear and cryptic.
There is a pitifully accurate portrait of a captain whose soul and
nerves had not recovered from the war. In a single chapter through one
man Mr. Lawrence suggests the disillusionment, the mental disaster,
that followed the armistice. "None of the glamour of returned heroes,
none of the romance of war ... the hot, seared burn of unbearable
experience, which did not heal nor cool, and whose irritation was not
to be relieved."
In "The Lost Girl" and "Women in Love" the men are subordinate to the
women. In "Aaron's Rod" the women are of secondary interest; Aaron's
wife is rather indistinct and shadowy, and the Marchesa, the Cleopatra
whom he tried to love and couldn't, never quite comes alive, either
for Aaron or for the reader. Probably these women are just what Mr.
Lawrence intended them to be, as seen through Aaron's temperament. But
I do not feel that Mr. Lawrence has here made a very striking
contribution to the history of the everlasting warfare between the
sexes. Did Aaron miss because he happened not to meet the right woman?
Or was he the sort of man whom no woman could capture and satisfy?
Evidently Mr. Lawrence means to leave the eternal question unsettled
even for the man whom he has created.
Like many other English poets, Mr. Lawrence is a lover of Italy, and
he takes his hero there, one suspects, for the sheer joy of the scene
and the atmosphere, which he realizes with vivid beauty. He is a
master of description, a master of words. His command ranges from the
baldest sort of every day conversation to prose harmonies that are as
near to verse as prose can go without breaking over. This is not
merely a command of style; it is more than that--it is a command of
ideas. Mr. Lawrence can pass with equal sureness from colliery to
cathedral and find the right word for every thing and person met on
the way, the right word, though often a perplexed and perplexing word.
Because life is like that. It is "mixed."